Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Back at Midtown HQ,” he said. “Where we need to be. Shaw's on his way in, and the president wants a status report.” He looked at Madison Square Garden, all lit up and not looking at all trashed from this angle, down here on the street.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I guess there's no point in hanging around. Friday?”

  He looked over at me. “Whaaaat?”

  “You on tour?” I asked. “Or are you looking for some old-school work here?”

  His eyes darted behind the mask. “I'm supposed to put in some time in the studio in the next couple weeks, but if you need help bringing down the baddies...I'm in.”

  I looked at Jamie Barton, and she held her composure for a full five seconds before cringing. “Yeah,” she said, “I'll help. If you need it.” I got the feeling the Jersey near-meltdown might have been weighing on her mind.

  “Let's go, then,” I said, but stopped myself. A tingle in the back of my head drew my attention toward the corner of 8th and 33rd, where I found my eyes drawn by a glittering display of ice formed into a slide.

  “Is that...?” Reed asked, frowning.

  “Captain Frost,” I said, vaulting up onto a cop car. Sure enough, there he was, the arrogant pud, talking to a crowd of reporters just beyond the police perimeter. I strained to hear him over all the commotion around us.

  “...am always wanting to help people,” Frost said, clad in his yoga pants and sparkly, off-the-rack shirt, his beanie cap really out of place in the vaguely warm summer night. “But events like this – this entire rash of events, really – show that there are greater callings than just stopping muggers on the street, and halting a bank robbery cold.” Reed flinched at the pun. “Our entire planet hangs in the balance,” Frost went on. “The lives of generations to come are like, totally at stake. And while I don't condone the methods used by the attacker tonight...I absolutely understand them.”

  “There's the headline,” I said, dismounting from the car. “Captain Frost is giving aid and comfort to a terrorist who just tried to kill a whole arena full of people. Making her excuses for her.”

  “This thing is going sideways fast,” Reed agreed, casting a look over his shoulder as we hustled toward the FBI SUV. “Did she really try and kill everyone in the place?”

  “She did,” I said. “She would have – if not for Friday.”

  “Thank Goodness It's Friday,” someone said behind us. Reed and I turned, expecting that dash of lameness to come from, well...Friday.

  It hadn't. Jamie Barton stood there, blushing like we'd just caught her doing something illicit. Friday was pointing at her, shaking his head. “Sorry,” she said, a little choked up. “I couldn't help myself.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

  “Kat and Eilish are holding position in the middle of the country,” Reed said, reading straight off his phone as we waited for Shaw and Li to arrive. I wasn't holding out much hope that either would be here anytime soon. The concert event had locked up traffic in the Big Apple as people tried to escape to the burbs, paralyzing everything and leaving transit a hopeless mess.

  “They're better positioned to deal with anything from the Dakotas west, then,” I said, feet up on the conference table, listening along as I tried to think my way through this mess. “Jamal?” I looked at the older Mr. Coleman. “How's social media looking?”

  “Not as vicious as a few days ago,” Jamal said, “but not as warm and fuzzy as you might like. Predictably, the Madison Square Garden attack is polarizing the support for your bad lady. Some people who were on board with her up to now are jumping off her train, others – exactly the kind you might expect – are all in on killing their fellow human beings to protect the Earth.”

  “It's the internet,” Friday said softly, “people always give in to their worst, most callous instincts on there.”

  I was not the only one caught completely unprepared for the quiet, philosophical, almost-wise part of Friday. “Is that really you under the mask?” Augustus asked, giving voice to the thoughts of us all, “Or did somebody just rip one off a gimp and start impersonating Friday?”

  “It's him,” I said. “He's smart when he's not huge.”

  Jamie Barton looked like she wanted to ask the question, but was too embarrassed.

  Lethe said it for her. “Yes, he's like a human penis metaphor. There's only enough blood to run the muscles or the brain.”

  “Thanks,” Friday said. “You were always so sweet to me, Mo–”

  “Don't finish that sentence,” Lethe said, more dangerous than I was used to hearing from her. “We're not related, you and I.”

  “Why does she hate him so much?” Olivia asked Angel, not particularly quietly.

  “It's Friday,” Angel replied. “He probably groped her or something.”

  “I am the bastard child of her cheating husband,” Friday said. “And she has tried to have me killed on several occasions.”

  “I tried it once,” she said, “and I didn't even try myself, as you can tell by the fact you're still breathing.”

  “Is it my imagination or has everything gotten more dramatic since you got back?” Scott asked, looking right at me.

  I sighed. “It's...probably not your imagination.”

  Reed smirked in triumph.

  “Ma'am,” a tech opened the door and stuck his head into the conference room, looking right at me. “We have an ID on the dead suspect left on the roof of Madison Square Garden.”

  I sat upright in my chair, pulling my feet off the table. “What? Great. Can we get that...?”

  “It's coming up on the screen in a minute,” he said, and disappeared back behind the door, closing it.

  “Anyone want to take bets on a name?” Augustus asked. “I've got 'Queenie.'”

  “I want...what's a good millennial name?” Jamal asked, phone in his hand. “Oh! Madison. But with a 'y.' And an 'e.'”

  “Emma,” Jamie said. “But the vanilla way.”

  “Ashley with an 'ei,'” Reed said.

  “Olivia is a great name for a millennial villain,” Scott said, then flushed red when he caught a look from Olivia Brackett. “Uhhh...I mean...whoops.”

  The name flashed up on the screen, along with a prison record – and sure enough, there was the gal I not-so-affectionately called Punk Rock Chick.

  “Francine Irene Howard,” Reed said, reading it right off the screen. “Who gives their damned kid a rhyming first and middle name?”

  “Someone blissfully ignorant of the reality of elementary age bullying,” Augustus said.

  “You were literally the bully in our elementary school,” Jamal said.

  “Which is how I know it, duh,” Augustus said.

  “Did a stint in San Quentin,” I said, reading off her record. “Two years for felony assault. She's a Californian.”

  “I am just stunned,” Augustus said, “that no one picked 'Francine' in the pool. Oh, and also that an eco-terrorist could possibly have come from California.”

  “Last known address is in Santa Barbara,” Reed said. “We should get some local FBI to go talk to whoever's there.”

  “Procedure dictates they do so,” I said. “I'm sure they're on their way. The bigger question is who's home, and what they can learn from them? Francine here struck me as a cog in the wheel. Isaac was the leader, but clearly he's dead.”

  “How do you figure that happened?” Reed asked.

  I took a long, slow breath. “Well, we know he was probably betraying them with his brokerage account, since I don't think they were all in on the scam. Francine here was capable of reading his email, so I'm guessing she probably found out and they killed him. Or absorbed him, rather, since Scout is now zipping around the friendly skies like she owns them.”

  “That's my guess, too,” Reed said. “It was a kind of sorting – true believers and not. They purged the non-believer, and now they – well, she – is free to follow the dictates of her twisted heart rather than just attack the petroleum industry.”

/>   “So they've moved to just randomly killing people?” Scott asked.

  “In large quantities,” Augustus said. “Because people can't spew carbon if they ain't breathing.”

  “How many people can she kill en masse?” Jamie asked.

  “With lightning?” I tried to calculate in my head. “She's beholden to how much juice she can soak up and conduct. For the plasma the key constraint is how many people she can get packed in a tight enough space.”

  Another knock at the door, followed by it opening, stopped any reply to my comment. “Ma'am,” that same agent said, sticking his head into the room, “we just got a tip from a fishing trawler off the coast of New England. Said they saw a human silhouette streak over the moon. Headed east.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You get a bearing other than that?”

  He shook his head. “We're checking with the military, trying to get them to use their coastal search radars, see if we can get a return, but as you probably know–”

  “It's really tough to get a return off a human-sized object,” I said. “Which is how I avoided capture for all those years. Thank you.” The agent ducked back out, and the screen changed to show a dot just off the coast of New England.

  “What's she doing off New England?” Reed asked, peering at the screen, deep in thought. “There's nothing to the east but ocean and then–”

  “Oh, shit,” Lethe said, getting there just before the rest of us.

  “And then Europe,” I said, closing my eyes and bowing my head. “You know, that continental landmass of three hundred million people...where they outlawed metahumans and don't have a single one to protect themselves from what's heading their way.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

  “Someone needs to warn Europe what's coming,” Olivia Brackett said. She was sitting up in her chair, looking vaguely like a prairie dog sticking its head out of its burrow.

  “Not it,” Reed said, more than a little surly. He was, after all, the reason why the European Union had outlawed metahumans in their borders.

  “So they don't have a single meta?” Jamie Barton asked, looking at the map on the screen like it would reveal...something. “Not one?”

  “Oh, there are a great many metas still in Europe,” Lethe said. “But not one is going to risk arrest in order to get out in front of this...mess. Can you imagine the EU authorities asking for volunteers to come forward to try and stop this woman from making landfall?”

  “That'd sound an awful lot like a trap,” Augustus said, “not to steal Reed's favorite quote.”

  “It's a trap all right,” Reed said, staring at the tabletop. “If any of us set foot in the EU, they'll arrest us.” He looked over at me, and there was a hint of accusation there.

  “You wanted to see if I could live within the boundaries,” I said. “What do you think about how far I'll go?”

  Reed made a face. “Not like that, Moana.”

  “You are just Disney's bitch in every way, aren't you? Star Wars, Marvel, animated musicals,” I said. “But what say you? Do we leave Europe to its cruel fate and let her just run riot over there?”

  My brother's look was just spiteful. His tone was worse. “No.”

  “What if she's not going for Europe proper, though?” Olivia asked, peering at the map. “I mean...if she's just heading east, she could be going to Africa...the Mediterranean...”

  “Or if she wanted to go a little north,” Augustus said, “she could be headed for–”

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered. Of course everyone heard me. And looked. Oh, boy, did they look. “In my dreamwalk with her last night...I may have mentioned the last time I tangled with a succubus.”

  Augustus's reaction was particularly noteworthy, given that his eyebrows soared up his forehead. “Uh, Sienna...that whole Scotland thing, where you got your ass kicked, your powers stolen, and damned near died? A lot of that's a mystery to the general public, and probably not the sort of thing you want to go telling your current enemy.”

  I cringed. “Yeah. Not to go Gob Bluth but...I may have made a huge mistake there.”

  “I don't...see the mistake,” Jamal said. “Unless I'm just thick.”

  “Pffft, you scrawny,” Augustus said.

  “I don't know how...uh...thick...you are,” Olivia said, blushing. “But if I were seeking out ways to kick Sienna's ass, and got directed toward that succubus we all banded together to kill? I'd be asking myself what was so special about her that let her run roughshod over Sienna like she did.”

  I cringed again; the answer was known to all in attendance, of course.

  “The serum,” Angel said. “The serum and all the souls she absorbed.”

  “Rose created an unleashed-succubus-powers industrial assembly line,” Reed agreed. “She killed...thousands in order to get that damned ascendant. Maybe tens of thousands. I mean, she tracked–”

  “Hundreds of bloodlines,” Jamal said. “She took over the Scottish government, keep in mind. Had deep tendrils buried in London – the entire UK government, really, ready to take over the whole damned island. She didn't just create an industrial human sacrifice machine to power herself up. Whatever she spouted about revenge, she was looking to go beyond, and when she died–”

  “When we killed her, you mean,” I said.

  “–That all didn't just vanish,” Jamal said. “UK authorities are still cleaning up that mess. Serum stashes. Dead bodies–”

  “Wait,” Friday said, “did you say 'serum stashes?'”

  “Shiiiiiiiiiit,” Lethe said.

  “What?” Scott asked. “I mean, when I hear the Valkyrie of legend say that, the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.”

  “For which reason?” Augustus asked. Scott shot him a look.

  “You said 'serums.'” I looked right at Jamal. “Rose had them all, right? The basic one, that unlocks powers,” he nodded, “and the booster, which made it possible for her to become a stronger succubus than me,” and he nodded again, “and...the other one, too?”

  He nodded a third time. “We call it the 'Skill Tree Unlocker.' The one that opens up powers genetically related to yours.”

  “Which in the case of a succubus,” Lethe said, “include the root powers of my parents – Persephone...and...”

  “Hades,” I said, in cold dread. “Which means if she gets ahold of that thing...”

  “She'll be able to kill people in a radius of dozens of miles around her at a time,” Lethe said. “She'll have the power to destroy entire cities – without anyone even seeing it coming.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

  Reed was on his phone a second later, as the conference room erupted.

  “She could devastate a whole city?” Augustus asked. “Hiding in a building where no one can see her? Man, that's game over right there.”

  “This is bad,” Olivia said.

  “Wow,” Angel whispered.

  “I don't see how you fight that,” Jamie Barton said.

  “We fight it by stopping her before she gets the serum,” I said.

  “But we're not even allowed in the EU,” Friday said. “You know how careful and quiet I had to be during my last EU tour? I was afraid to even change size at all.”

  “So are we doing this, then?” Jamal asked. “Charging over the ocean and into the belly of the no-meta beast?”

  “Of course we are,” Scott said. “We can't just stand back and let Europe's cities get completely annihilated.”

  “Well, we could,” Augustus said. “And it'd almost be fitting in a way, given they banned us all. But we'd be really shitty heroes if we did.”

  “All right,” Reed said, hanging up from whatever phone call he was on. “Here's the deal – we're going.”

  “Did you just get permission?” I asked, frowning.

  “No,” he said, “that's going to be your job. You need to brief the president, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “We are going,” Reed said. “Laws be damned.�
�� He had a fierce look in his eyes, and he settled his gaze on each of us in turn. “I am not letting European cities get wiped out, if it comes to that, but I'd really rather keep that skinny little murderer from getting her hands on the serum to begin with.”

  “And in terms of lawful consequences?” I asked. Not because I cared, but because it was kind of fun to twist my brother's tail.

  “You're going to call your contacts in the UK,” he said, “and find a way to get us permission to land and do our thing.”

  “Ahhh,” I said, “my contacts in the UK are down to a lone Scottish lord.”

  “You know a Scottish Lord?” Olivia asked. “That's...so fancy. You're so fancy.”

  “It's not as cool as it sounds,” I said. “I don't think he's left the castle in a decade or more.”

  “He has a castle, though,” Olivia muttered. “None of my friends have castles. If I had a castle, I would never leave, either.”

  “We're splitting into two teams,” Reed said, just steamrolling over all that, apparently done with giving me my marching orders about obtaining permission.

  “A and B?” Augustus asked sarcastically.

  “I really prefer 'Blue' and 'Gold,'” Reed said.

  “Niiiiiiice,” Augustus said.

  “Choice reference, chief,” Jamal said. The rest of us, presumably, were left in the dark. Or at least I was.

  “It's an X-Men thing,” Friday said, apparently noting my lack of comprehension. Lethe rolled her eyes. At Reed, at Friday? Who knew. Probably both.

  “We break – Gold team is going East,” Reed said. “That's most of us, sans Angel, Friday and Gravity.” He looked to each of them. “No offense, but if she doubles back, someone's gotta be watching the domestic front. Jamie, your powers are incredible, and you alone could anchor a hell of a defense. Angel, in a fight like this you're better with a gun in your hand, and they'll be in short supply in Europe. Friday...your powers just aren't ideally suited to taking her on at all at this point.”