by A A Woods
Moose snorted, imagining blind Tero and deaf Daisy playing video games together. Deciding it was time to be nice, he asked
That was the reason it had taken him so long to leave in the first place. Ian Eckelson, their adopted father, had still been recovering from the gunshot wound he’d received last October from that insane woman and her posse of commandos. Daisy had been shot too, but Daisy was young and tough and covered in scales. The bullet had been slowed enough by his skin that it hadn’t done too much internal damage. But Ian’s body was older, frailer, and took much longer to recover.
Moose wasn’t as much of a jerk as people thought he was. He’d stuck around, helping care for his Dad in the ways he could.
Until he’d realized that he’d be doing that forever, if Aquila had any say about it.
Moose ran a hand through his hair, sighing. He wanted to write back for Daisy to tell everyone, see? It wasn’t my fault that our family fell apart. We were already fracturing when I left. We were already screwed.
But the guilt was still there, stalking the corners of his mind.
Moose refreshed Reddit, even though he knew nothing was there. He’d been excited to find the board at first. But, like everything else, it had become just another dead-end disappointment. A bunch of whining nobodies with insignificant problems. Nothing that really deserved his attention.
To his surprise, there was a new message, sent to his personal LightningFighting inbox.
He opened it.
We’ve been following your efforts closely. You must be ready to graduate from small-town altruism and join the real players by now. Respond if you’re ready to be a true hero.
Another message followed beneath it.
Or would you rather be a glorified relationship therapist?
Moose’s mouth fell open at the last line. He would have dismissed the random message as spam, or maybe a joke from Daisy. But he hadn’t told anyone about what had happened with the couple that afternoon. Maybe they’d talked about it, but who would have thought to find him on Reddit? Who would know his alias?
And his grand ambitions…
Daisy sent back a shrugging emoji.
Moose nodded. Daisy was right. The media had worked assiduously to pretend that the insane events last fall were nothing but a big hoax. A cry for attention from some immature, attention-seeking teenagers. Maybe there were others out there who understood this, who used it to their advantage.
What if Moose didn’t live in a Marvel world?
What if this city was full of Batmans instead?
Moose typed out three words and sent them before he could think better of it.
When and where?
Chapter Seven: Evasive Action
Keep your shit together. Dammit Eliza, keep your shit together.
But every pair of eyes on them felt like twin laser beams, every whisper a coded threat, every clicking pair of heels the shower of bullets on concrete. Eliza felt like she might close her eyes and be transported back to October, staring down the barrel of a gun pointed right at her face, lights flashing around her, death breathing down her neck.
She shook herself.
Aquila looked at her, his own face pinched with the strain of the attention they were getting. “You know, I’m not for underage drinking but maybe it’s good we’re going to a place with alcohol.”
Eliza curled her mouth in a rictus grin. “Can I start punching people yet?”
He laughed, but his hand took hers and dragged her through the park and toward their destination. “Tero says the pub should be coming up.”
“What was Moose doing in a pub?” Eliza asked to distract herself from the toddler pointing at Aquila and asking loudly, “Mommy, is he real?”
“According to the woman’s Instagram account, Moose didn’t go inside. He just, er, interfered with a disagreement out back.”
Eliza lifted an eyebrow.
“In her own words, Moose ‘got in the way of her husband getting walloped.’”
“Sounds like a healthy relationship.”
Aquila bent his knees to avoid a low-hanging branch that would have hit his wings. “Maybe he deserved it?”
“How feminist of you.”
He grinned at her. “Oh, I’ve been trained. I always deserve it when you yell at me.”
Eliza burst out in a laugh, linking her arm through his. “Poor you.”
“Wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said, kissing the top of her hair.
Eliza wished that the world could be nothing but this, just the two of them walking through the snowy park, salt crackling under their boots, cocooned by each other and ignorant of the world. If only life could be that simple. Maybe then, she’d be able to get herself under control again. She could re-build the armor that had been cracked.
But of course, that wasn’t the world they lived in.
“Looks like the place,” Eliza said as Aquila’s grip on her arm loosened and they both tilted their heads up to see the sign. Emblazoned in big gold letters was the name of the bar, The Irishwoman, along with the cartoonish depiction of a figure in heavy skirts with a big axe over one shoulder.
“You know, under different circumstances, I might actually like this place,” Eliza said thoughtfully as Aquila pushed open the door.
“Color me shocked.”
“Hey, I—”
“Who the fuck are you?”
They both looked up to find a woman watching them, short and black-haired with dark makeup smudged around her eyes. She reminded Eliza of who Eliza used to be: confident, scary, strong. Someone not to be messed with.
Aquila cleared his throat. “Sorry to barge in on you, ma’am, but we’re looking for my brother. We saw online that he, er, bothered you earlier today?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You one of them freaks too?”
Aquila’s polite smile chilled. “He’s my brother, yes.”
“Then you should make like him and scram. I don’t serve attention whores in my pub.”
“If you could just tell us where he went, or if there were any details—”
“I thought you five were nutjobs from the start. Get out before I throw you out.”
Eliza couldn’t take it anymore. Yanking her hand free of Aquila’s grip, she moved up to the bar and gripped it. “Look lady, we’re not asking for much. All we want to know is where he went and what he said, and since you seem perfectly happy to share that information with strangers on the Internet, I don’t see the problem with—”
Suddenly, a noise filled the bar, taken right out of Eliza’s nightmares.
The cocking of a shotgun.
“I thought she told you,” said a deeper, masculine voice closer to the kitchens, “to get the fuck out.”
From a vague distance, Eliza could feel Aquila turning, Aquila moving. The woman smirkin
g. She could sense, as if in a dream, the burly redheaded man pointing a gun at her. But Eliza had frozen. Every muscle in her body had pulled as taut as wire cables and she was useless, vulnerable, a prey animal ready for the taking. She began to shake violently, even as Aquila said something placating and shifted toward her.
He put a hand on her shoulder.
She jumped, spun around.
The man with the gun brandished the weapon as if he was ready to fire. “What the hell is wrong with her?”
“We were just leaving,” Aquila said coldly.
And then a strong arm was hitting Eliza’s knees, sweeping her into the air and out of the pub. Before she could even register what had happened, she was pressed securely to Aquila’s chest as the cold February air hit them, chilled them, woke her up. She gasped an inhale as the pedestrians in front of the pub gasped in surprise. Aquila’s wings swept out, completely obscuring the front of the bar for a moment, and Eliza could see his magnificent impossibility reflected in the crowd’s wide eyes.
Even through the haze of her fear and embarrassment, she understood. She’d felt that openmouthed shock too, the first time she’d seen his iridescent feathers and sheer size.
With a whomp of air and a jerk in her navel, they were airborne, leaving the suddenly wild masses behind.
“That was… dramatic,” Eliza said as dryly as she could manage with her heart still hammering and her limbs still feeling like someone dunked them in liquid nitrogen. “I’m fairly sure the police aren’t going to take kindly to you flying around their city without a license.”
Aquila looked down at her, face full of concern. “What happened back there?”
Eliza grimaced. No luck distracting him then.
“Nothing,” she said, fidgeting with her coat as it tried to blow open in the wind. “I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.”
Her temper bubbled up without warning, like a volcano that had been waiting to explode. “What do you know? You aren’t in my head. You don’t know what’s going on there, what’s been going on there for years.”
Aquila banked without looking away from her, sweeping them over a jagged skyline toward a flat stretch of roof. “Then tell me. Let me help.”
“I have it under control.”
“Clearly,” he said sarcastically.
“Look, I’m fine. Things are fine.”
And you’ve got enough on your plate without trying to save me too.
He sighed, backwinging so that they could touch down lightly on the edge of an industrial-looking building, mercifully far away from prying eyes and windows. Eliza squirmed, forcing him to put her down and then forcing herself not to balk at the lethal drop to her left. She stood straight and tall, pretending she was braver than she was these days. “I’m sorry about what happened back there. He just… surprised me. That’s all.”
Aquila rubbed his neck. “Yeah, me too.” He chuckled. “New Yorkers are mean.”
“Stereotypes exist for a reason.”
He tilted his head at her. “Like defensive teenagers?”
She folded her arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Suuure,” he said, drawing out the word. “You know, you’re more stubborn than any of my brothers.”
“I do my best.”
She shifted so that her toes were hanging over the drop, reminding herself sternly that Aquila would never let her fall. He’d catch her if she slipped; he’d be there to rescue her if she screwed up something as simple as moving her feet.
Which didn’t make her feel any better.
“I feel like we’re modern-day gargoyles,” Eliza said, crouching down a bit and hunching her shoulders. “The monsters of the modern world.”
Laughing, Aquila spread his wings and imitated her posture. “Here to terrorize the city.”
“Clutch your pearls and keep your kids inside, the Vagabonds are coming!”
“Ghosts of the new age, swept under the rug by media giants.”
“It’s a conspiracy!” Eliza crowed.
“The Illuminati must be involved.”
“Tero would know.”
“Maybe he’s one of them.”
Eliza gasped. “Oh my God, you’re right! He planned this all along so he wouldn’t have to deal with people.”
Aquila shook his head, fighting not to smile. “What a jerk.”
“Hey, you’d hate all that media-circuit nonsense.”
Aquila stretched, rolling his shoulders and pulling his wings back in. “I would. But I still think it’d be better than this.”
Eliza’s smile fell for a moment before she punched his arm. “At least you know those people are going to have a hard believing that your wings are just elaborate prosthetics.”
He snorted. “Yeah, all twenty of them.” But he sounded a bit better. “Tell me, what are the stereotypes about modern-day gargoyles?”
“That they’re badass and awesome and kick Irishwoman butt?”
He threw an arm around her. “I’ll take it.”
She leaned into him, letting his deep voice vibrate along her spine, comforting even as the words set her teeth on edge.
“I’m not going to let this go, Eliza. You’re the only thing that’s keeping me grounded in all this, and I won’t let anyone hurt you. Including yourself.”
“I’m fine,” Eliza said, hating how, no matter how many times she said the words, she couldn’t make them the truth.
Chapter Eight: Party Time
Joe loathed these big media events.
It was bad enough to spend the daytime hours tagging along uselessly as his parents did the interview circuit and met with their investors. But now he’d been in a tuxedo for almost six hours already and the night was barely getting started.
Glaring out the window of the limo his parents had scheduled for their transport, he felt dangerously close to sulking. It had never been in his nature to sulk, not when bullies had shoved his head in toilets, not when his parents had spent more of his childhood in top-story offices than in playrooms with him, and not when the girl of his dreams had fallen for a hunky, winged idiot.
But even Joe had to admit that the last few months had been… trying.
“Remember to smile, champ,” his dad said, clapping a hand on Joe’s arm.
Joe spread his lips.
“More Hollywood, less axe-murderer.”
“It looks like Hans is already here,” Joe’s mom said, as if no one else had spoken.
“Don’t worry, honey, we’re not late.”
Joe noticed that his mother was twisting her hands. She’d been doing that a lot lately. It was as if the events in October had triggered the protective instinct his parents had never had before, making them hover over him, drag him along to every event, and keep him locked up in their guarded penthouse rather than let him go back to Meru Academy. Not that he would have wanted to, since Eliza had been forced to do classes at home because her presence had become too ‘disruptive.’ But Joe had grown accustomed to the freedoms that came with ambitious, absent parents.
He didn’t like having those freedoms vanish so suddenly.
“Alright,” his mom said, like a commander leading her troops into battle. “Remember, everything’s fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. And Joe, do not mention those Scottstown boys no matter what. You understand?”
“Who would I mention them to,” Joe asked. “I hardly know anyone here.”
“Joseph.”
“Yeah, yeah, ok. No Vagabonds.”
His mother flinched at the name, but Joe ignored it and turned back to the flashing cameras and red-carpet chaos. There were two cars in front of them, releasing high-profile celebrities and media personalities. The scene was a frothing display of wealth, a frenzy of showmanship. Excitement seemed to leech into everything.
Except him.
Joe didn’t really care about HNN. Before last October, he’d been content knowing that the business made his parents happy, not to menti
on provided the family with enough success that money wasn’t an issue. But how could Joe overlook what his parents had done to the Vagabonds, to Eliza. They, along with every other network, had lied, over and over, for months, desperate to pretend there was nothing going on. That the world was as normal as ever, nothing to see here.
At first, Joe had confronted them about it. He’d demanded to understand why they were erasing the brothers, erasing him by extension. After all, he’d been infected with the Superman Virus. He’d been given powers too, although ones that were mercifully easy to hide. The only response he’d managed to get, after much wheedling and prodding, was that his parents were doing it to protect him. That they loved him and wanted to keep him safe.
As if that was any kind of answer.
“Ready boys?” his mother asked when the limo drifted to a stop.
Horatio squeezed Joe’s shoulder. “As ever, darling.”
Joe only hitched that fake smile back on.
The door was opened for them.
Together they stepped into the blinding assault of the press.
Of course, the photographers weren’t really there for the Fagans. Joe’s family was the kind of famous that lingered behind the spotlights, pulling strings and arranging deals. So Joe felt fairly comfortable knowing that all those pictures being snapped of him wouldn’t spread too far on the Internet. Besides, it wasn’t like he had any friends these days to tease him. He drifted behind his parents, waving distractedly and doing his best to look cool and aloof, knowing he probably succeeded at neither.
Eliza would have been rolling on the floor laughing.
Following his parents toward the stairs of the art museum, Joe heard someone call their family name. For some reason, the voice penetrated the assaulting noise, snagging his attention.
“Mr. Fagan! Mrs. Fagan! What do you have to say about the cover-up job last fall?”
He turned, hunting for the source.
“Mr. Fagan, how do you explain what you did?”
It was a young woman, pretty and short with a gymnast’s body and a determined face. She had blonde hair that curled at the bottom and pale skin that seemed to glow in the spotlights. When Joe paused, she brandished her phone in his direction.
