by Rob Rogers
“Okay,” Kate said. She began to walk closer to the building.
“Hey!” the man called out. “You t’ink there’s anything good in deah?”
Kate stopped and stared at the destruction. Plaster dust floated in the air. A banana tree twenty feet from the building had been cut in half from a flying chunk of concrete. She heard sirens approaching. “I don’t know,” she said.
Samuel’s voice came over her communicator. “Hey, Kate, you seeing this?”
“Seeing what?” she asked. Her voice only transmitted through the armor when she wanted it to. Samuel could hear her, but the man standing near her couldn’t.
“This infrared display. It’s on one of your monitors.”
She brought the readout up as her primary display. The infrared picked up temperature differentials. The building itself was a hodgepodge mess. It had been a hot day, and the building had been without power for months, meaning no air conditioning. So most of the building would have been very warm. And the collapse would have driven the hot against the cooler, stirring up the temperatures of the debris. Friction was another factor. But as she stared at the display, adjusting it slightly to bring variances into clearer focus, she noticed something of interest. There was a “blue spot”—something relatively cool—much cooler than the ambient temperatures. It piqued her curiosity. A block of ice? An air conditioning unit? But then she noticed something that made her forget about the blue spot altogether. In the middle of the collapsed building, in what her analysis program told her was one of the least stable areas, were two “red spots”—areas that were warmer than the surrounding temperatures. They were just over 98 degrees Fahrenheit. And human-shaped.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
* * * * *
Cain’s eyes stared around the enclosed space. At first, he hadn’t been able to see anything at all, but now he was adjusting to the darkness and could make out the shadows of structures—a jutting piece of concrete here, a tangle of rebars there. He smelled decay and dust and blood.
He could dimly make out Argonaut’s form, about fifteen feet away. The man’s breathing was ragged and blood still trickled from the wound in his side.
Cain had decided to trust Argonaut for the time being. The man was obviously hiding something, something about Scion, but he seemed sincere. He’d been tense when Cain had accused him of being Scion, but his heart rate had actually begun to subside as he assured Cain that Scion was a different person. He wasn’t lying.
Which meant that Cain had attacked an innocent man and brought a building down on top of him.
“Look,” he said. He moistened his dry, dusty lips and then winced as he felt one of his needle-sharp teeth slice into his tongue. He’d have to get used to that. “I tackled you. I brought you into this.”
Argonaut’s voice was amused. “So give me a bouquet of flowers afterward.”
“You’ve got a better chance if—”
“Look, Ducett,” Argonaut said. “My chances aren’t too different one way or the other. You concentrate on getting yourself out of this first, and I’ll tough it out. I’ve been shot in the face with a .38 special, and it didn’t kill me. I’ll take my chances.” His voice was one-third bravado, two-thirds bravery.
“Okay,” Cain said. “On three. One, two . . . three.”
There was no sense taking half measures, he thought. It was like pulling off a band-aid. Best done quickly and without hesitation. He yanked his trapped arm free, twisting his body and thrusting backward with his legs to try to free his tail.
Pieces of broken concrete shook free of him, cascaded down, tumbling into each other, heading toward Argonaut.
Argonaut was moving as well, thrusting his arms out, forcing his trapped legs out of the rubble. Cain heard him gasp once as the metal was forced deeper into his side, and then the caped man pushed himself free of it.
Cain was pressing against a collapsed wall. It leaned over them at a diagonal angle, barely holding together, probably what had protected them from most of the debris. If he could get around it, he thought, he could probably make his way to the surface. He thought he could see a little bit of light penetrating from outside now, and he caught a hint of fresh air. He heard sirens. Argonaut, below him, was shoving heavy chunks of concrete out of his way. “Up here,” Cain said. “If we can make it around this wall and the rubble on top of it . . .” He set his shoulder against it, pressing hard.
Argonaut floated up to him, cape stretched out in back of him, jaw set, confident. “Then we move the wall,” he said. He felt his way along it, set his own shoulder against it. “Now,” he said.
The two men pushed in concert, Cain using some sort of reinforced pillar as support for his feet, Argonaut simply floating in the air, flying against the wall.
They lifted and pushed, muscles straining, their strength incredible, trying to break free.
They almost made it.
But the wall they were lifting, already damaged, was holding much more weight than it was ever meant to. The rubble over them and around them had fallen together like a house of cards. Very, very heavy cards. They’d been trapped in one pocket of air, with most of the mass of the building hanging over them, protected to some extent by a girder here, a strut there, a huge chunk of concrete flooring there. And the wall they were pushing against suddenly fractured, letting the mass of the building descend on them.
* * * * *
“Well, that could have gone better,” Argonaut muttered, pinned once again, his mouth full of blood. He’d been unconscious—he wasn’t sure how long. “Ducett? You . . . alive?”
He heard nothing from Ducett, just the sounds of the rubble settling.
“Ducett?”
And then he did hear something new.
“Don’t move,” said a woman’s voice, somewhere in the darkness, distorted by the debris.
He almost laughed. “Don’t worry.”
“Hang on. I’ve almost got you.”
He raised his eyebrows under his mask. He heard a soft hiss, like a hose, and then light broke through as a large chunk of concrete was pulled away over his head.
A figure advanced cautiously, leaning down over him. It was a woman enclosed in some kind of armor. Much of it was covered with dust, but the rest gleamed in the dim light. “Can you tell me the extent of your injuries?” she asked. She had a faint British accent. Her face was covered with smoked glass, but she seemed to be peering intently at him.
“I think I can stand up now,” he said.
She put up a hand. “Hold on,” she said urgently. She leaned forward, pointing her arm at some of the debris, and some kind of liquid streamed out, coating part of it. The liquid smelled sharp and antiseptic. She repeated this in a few other places.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“This is an astringent, a fast-bonding polymer.” She shrugged. “Goop. It’s helping to provide increased structural integrity.” She looked at him. “You’re Argonaut, I take it.”
He nodded. “Can I move now?”
“Be my guest,” she said. “You don’t have any broken bones, although two of your ribs are cracked. The increased density of your skin likely helped to protect you from the worst of the damage.”
He blinked behind his mask. “You just X-rayed me?”
“That’s right.” She reached down. “You need a hand?”
For some reason, he felt mildly indignant. “Shouldn’t you have asked permission before doing that?”
Her hand remained in front of him. “Probably,” she said. “You’ll also be relieved to know that you’re not pregnant.”
He took her hand and let her pull him up from the hole he was in. His side still hurt from the wound there, but it felt good to be able to move again. “Thanks,” he said. As he looked around, he saw that an incredible amount of rubble had been cleared. Perhaps a dozen emergency vehicles—ambulances, fire engines, squad cars—were stretched around the area, several of them with spotlights pointed in their
direction. He spotted a WTDC truck, recognized the cameraman Dexter Koo, filming a tight shot of him and the woman in the armor. He smiled slightly, then turned so as to keep from giving the cameras too good of a look at his face. The whole area around the ruined building was cordoned off, but the emergency workers were all on the other side of the barriers. He looked at the cleared rubble. “You did all this yourself?”
“I helped a bit toward the end,” said a deep, rumbling voice. It was Ducett, red fur, tail, claws, horns, and all. Jason nodded in relief. The man was cut in several places, but none of the injuries seemed particularly serious. Ducett smiled back at him, the flash of red over the sharp teeth looking unintentionally menacing. It was the first time Jason had really seen the man up close when they weren’t fighting. Ducett stretched out a clawed hand, leaning in, his blood-red eyes intent. “We didn’t have much of a chance to talk down there,” he said, looking Jason in the eye. “You can call me Bedlam.”
Bedlam. An appropriate name, Jason thought, reflecting not just chaos, but an asylum.
“And I’m Doctor Camelot,” the woman said.
He nodded at her. “I always liked that name,” he said. Then he looked at the crowds again.
“I asked them to stay back,” Doctor Camelot said.
“And they listened?”
“I asked them very nicely,” she said. “And e-mailed their bosses diagrams showing just how dangerous this entire ruin was to anyone approaching.”
He stared from her to Ducett—Bedlam. “How long between the second collapse and when you freed me?”
“About a half-hour,” Bedlam said.
“Scion?” he asked.
Bedlam shook his head. “No sign of him,” he said. His lip turned down in frustration. “Or the other one.”
Doctor Camelot’s face turned from Argonaut to Bedlam and back again. “Something I should know here?”
Jason looked at her. Her armor gleamed like chrome in the bright lights. A vibrant purple cape hung from her shoulders. Judging by the piles of rubble, she’d moved several tons of debris in a very short time. Most of it by herself. He was grateful to her, but he wasn’t sure how much to trust her.
People were moving past the cordons now. A police captain. A reporter Jason knew slightly. A fire marshal. He wasn’t ready to be caught up in all of this. And besides, he needed to talk to his brother.
“Another time,” he said. He looked at Bedlam, who nodded. “We should talk,” Jason said. “Tomorrow night, nine o’clock, at the Gray Fog statue.”
The others nodded. Then, as the authorities and reporters began to approach more quickly, the three of them flew away in separate directions.
“Wait, damn it!” the police captain shouted, his face florid.
But they had slipped into the night sky.
So the newest angel to protect the twisted streets of Pirate Town has horns and a forked tail? He’ll fit right in.
— Excerpted from “New capes in Devil’s Cape,” by Ed Clugston, Devil’s Cape Daily Courier, editorial section, the morning after the warehouse collapse
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
8:45 p.m.
Cain flew.
Stretching his arms and the tight flaps of skin that spread out beneath them, Cain cut through the dark Devil’s Cape sky. The dank air bristled against the short fur covering his body. Argonaut and Doctor Camelot had headed in their own directions, and he found himself alone in the air, nothing but a few bats nearby.
He flew.
Cain had flickered tonight from the cool-headed psychiatrist to the cold-hearted street fighter he’d been, then to a wild animal driven solely by impulse, then back again. But right now, there was no cold analysis, no criminal checking the angles, no beast burning to rip itself free. There was just a sense of release, of the wind fluttering around him, of weightlessness.
He flew.
He soared out of the warehouse district, arcing over the series of canals that led to Lake Pontchartrain and the scattering of homes around them. Keeping himself high in the sky and out of sight, he steered himself over the haunted streets of Crabb’s Lament, the neighborhood where he’d grown up. He passed his old apartment building, then slowed and hovered over the spot where he’d shoved Jazz onto the concrete. The air seemed thick. He smelled gunpowder and wondered if anyone had died in his old neighborhood that night. And then he flew to the shotgun house where Jazz now lived. He circled a few times, wings outstretched, ears cocked to be sure that no one was near, then landed beside an old lacebark elm.
A hand-painted sign propped against the curling metal fleurs-de-lis of her front gallery read, Palm-Reading, Tarot Reading, Voodoo Cursing, and All That Jazz. He stepped forward quickly, his clawed feet scratching at the gravel. The sound of it made him look down at himself, at his distorted body, the vicious hands, the thin, red fur. She is nothing to me, he lied to himself, the image of the thin girl flying back against the concrete filling his mind. Whatever I owe her, I don’t owe her this.
And then he stepped forward. He felt too rushed to knock, but the door was locked. Feeling the knob seize up in his hand, he suddenly thought of gloves, fingerprints, evidence, and Detective Cynthia Daigle. He hadn’t done anything legally or morally wrong by coming here, but there were worms crawling through his gut. Jazz was scared of something, Argonaut had said. If she was powerful enough to turn him into this, powerful enough to reach into his mind, to break glass around him, to twist his dreams away from him—not to mention Argonaut’s—then what in the name of hell would leave her sounding so worried? He had a dark ride in front of him.
His fingers were different in this form, his prints obscured by their elongated shape, by the stiff, bristly hair that seemed to cover him. Even so, he reached his long fingers into his pocket, pulling out the tie he had stuffed there ages ago before his fight with Scion, and wiped the knob. Then, gripping the knob with the tie, he twisted hard and pushed on the door with his shoulder, enjoying for a brief second the strength his new form gave him. When he was inside, he turned and closed the door behind him.
“You could have knocked.” Jazz stood leaning in a doorway across the room, looking at him. She wore cut-off blue jeans and an oversized black T-shirt with a sketch of Lady Danger on the front. Her long, blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail and her skin was pale. She looked little different than she had at fourteen, though her eyes were sadder. The room was decorated with the types of artifacts she might sell to her customers. Incense filled the air. The sight of her shook him, like the years were washing away. He felt guilt and grief and anger.
He gestured at himself. “I didn’t feel like terrifying your neighbors.”
She shook her head. “I could run naked out the front door, screaming, my entrails strung behind me like a row of sausages, and my neighbors wouldn’t bat an eye.”
Now close to seven feet tall, Cain filled the room. He stared at her, trying to force himself not to relive the memory of shoving her back. “What have you done to me, Jazz?”
She shook her head. “Don’t ask stupid questions, Cain.”
He spread his arms, the elongated fingers stretching from one wall to another, the claws flexing. “Look at me,” he said.
She nodded. “And you mocked my white voodoo,” she said, the hint of a smile on her lips.
He blinked. “I’m sorry for that,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
“You’re paying for that doorknob.”
He breathed hard, staring back at her. “That’s not what I meant.”
She shook her head. “What do you want from me, Cain? I know what you meant. I know that you have tortured yourself for years over what you did to me that afternoon. And I don’t care. I’m glad you’ve suffered over it. You deserved to suffer over it.” Her eyes were hard.
“I’m not denying that,” he said. “But this—” He raised a hand to his head,
felt the thickened jaw, the jutting teeth, the elongated ears, the horns.
“I cursed you that day,” she said. “I cursed you, and that fact hasn’t changed in all the years since.”
“The first time this happened to me, I snapped,” he said. “I nearly killed my mother and our next-door-neighbor, Mr. Marcus. A detective named Salazar Lorca talked me out if it. He told me it was a hallucination. He offered me the salvation of reality, of intellect, of reason.”
Jazz said nothing, just stared back at him.
“I built my life around that,” he said, “around using reason, understanding the forces that drive our minds. I built my life around the understanding that what happened to me that night was a trick of my mind.”
“Surprise,” she said with another mocking smile.
His fists clenched. “The hell with this,” he said. He turned to open her broken door.
“Wait,” she said, her voice soft. “Sit down and talk to me.”
He let go of the door, but remained standing. “I’m not even sure how to sit with this,” he said, gesturing helplessly at his tail.
She laughed outright then, great cascading laughter that washed over the room until even dour, angry Cain chuckled a little bit. “I imagine,” she said, “that you could figure out a way around that little problem, but you could just as easily turn back into your other form.”
He stared at her. “I can do that?”
She snorted. “You did it years ago when you changed for the first time. What makes you think you can’t do it now?”
And it turned out to be easy. He closed his eyes, concentrating, and the monstrous form just slipped away from him. He was normal Cain Ducett once more, although still dressed in nothing but a pair of pants split at the legs, with a hole near the base of his spine where his tail had pushed through.
Jazz reached up and touched his face with a sort of wonder. “You look old.”
Unconsciously, he clutched the hand that she’d touched to his face, squeezing it almost tenderly in his own. Then he let go, staring at her. “What do you need from me, Jazz?”
