Heroes of Corvus (Book 3): Two Good Reasons

by Gilliam, Patricia

  He gave an uneasy nod. “Why, though? Hailstorm killed my mom and dad…and Tori—and he would have killed Daniel and me if you hadn’t gotten him first.” Deep pain hit his expression, and some of his six-year-old innocence waned. I had seen this before in childhood friends…and in the mirror. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m happy that he’s dead, Icarus—that he can’t hurt anybody else ever again. Is that bad?”

  I shook my head. “Feeling relief isn’t bad…” I started to continue when Beth looked over at me, her expression concerned with the direction the conversation was taking. I didn’t think she would end the call, but I wasn’t going to push my luck. “That’s not the same thing as happiness, Cameron. Killing should be always be a real hero’s last option, and there’s still a price in what it does to you on the inside. That’s why Daniel and I are different. I wish I was more like him, but it’s much harder for me now. Showing restraint and control when you’re powerful doesn’t make you weak. I really wish I had learned that when I was your age.”

  He went quiet for a moment. “You’re not bad, Icarus—not like Hailstorm.” He shuddered and looked down. “Before you saved me, I saw him near the front of our car. Mom and Dad did, too. They were okay after the airbags popped—just scared. He went invisible and pulled the car deeper, and the water came in faster. That’s when Tori and I yelled for help. We saw you on the bridge, but your suit looked scary at the time...” He shook his head, confused by something else. “It was someone else pretending to be Daniel—like you did later at the hospital. That Red Bolt was trying to fight you. That’s why I thought you were a bad guy, too.”

  Cameron hadn’t spoken about the crash or his family with anyone for weeks—not any of the hospital or fed counselors. Not even Beth. Since he was unconscious by the time I had gotten to him, I assumed he hadn’t seen much or just couldn’t recall anything.

  Nathan Spires abandoning Tori to move to the front of the Wilsons’s car now made actual sense. He was attempting to stop Hailstorm from pulling all of them to the bottom—probably intending to get Tori and her parents free once he’d succeeded. It had just gone wrong for him.

  “That Red Bolt was Daniel’s son, but he’s a good guy,” I explained, but that seemed to make Cameron more confused. “We just had a misunderstanding on the bridge. If things work out, you may get to meet him, too.” I forced a smile. “I have to go for now, Cameron. You take care of yourself, okay?”

  He nodded, but he still looked anxious…and sad. As hard as I was trying, I couldn’t do anything to fix that either.

  “Be careful, Icarus. Don’t get hurt anymore…” He hesitated, as if he wanted to say more but suddenly found it childish.

  “I love you, kid.” I said it instead, and he beamed a smile and relaxed his shoulders. I almost slipped and told him a story about my daughters, but I caught myself in time. At the very least, the feds were monitoring us. “I know I don’t look it, but I am very old—much older than Daniel old. I never had any kids, though—far too dangerous and would have been unfair to them. If I ever could, I’d hope they’d be like you—future heroes.”

  “I hope you do someday.” A more innocent—almost mischievous—grin returned to his face. His voice dropped to a too-loud whisper. “Ms. Beth likes you, and you’ll be a good dad. Love you, Icarus. Bye.”

  “Goodbye, Cameron.”

  The display went dark, and I saw my drained reflection in it. Everyone else in the SUV gave me enough time to get a grip and not slide into the floorboard in a broken heap.

  “So, you do like me?” I finally asked Beth. Her face reddened almost to the color of her hair. “I’ll tell you the secret cure for all of those glittery immortal romance movies.” I gestured to Fisher and the driver, who were both in their mid-forties “I own socks older than them—and I’ve worn them with sandals when my apartment got cold. Even if I wasn’t dying, that alone should hinder any feelings of—”

  “What if you weren’t?” Beth blurted out. Fisher turned around in his seat with a horrified expression. Whatever it was, Beth had crossed a line. “He deserves the choice, Jim! This isn’t right, and you know it!”

  “There is no miracle cure for this, Beth—trust me,” I said, and I pinched the bridge of my nose. Their Atlanta office had been sent a package along with the video messages. Around the same time, I had done contract fights in the same area—trying to make myself easier to find on purpose. “Did the man who claimed to be my father even look like me?” For all the feds knew, one of Minos’s sons or their allies could have sent them some legitimate intel—along with enough poison to finish me off.

  “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was your older brother,” Fisher replied. “He looked early thirties—dark hair and features close to yours. You can watch the videos yourself once you’re settled.” He looked at Beth. “I was going to tell him once we got there. Those treatments have been sitting in cold storage for five years, and I didn’t want to get his hopes up.”

  The physical description of Dad sounded accurate, but that didn’t eliminate the videos being faked. Another part of me was more concerned that they were real.

  “I shouldn’t take them,” I said. Beth and Fisher’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Dad may have seemed sane in those videos, and they might even work—temporarily. Guess where I’d have to return once I ran out?”

  “Back to him,” Beth replied, and I nodded. “He’s that bad—to the point you’d rather die?”

  “On my own terms—not as some game piece in a war even I don’t fully understand,” I replied. “Minos murdered my mother, and he was a sick evil bastard who deserved what he got. I’m just not a hundred percent sure that he was the source of everything—considering nothing major changed even after he was dead. I was a kid at the time, and Dad was my hero—and publicly a superhero in modern terms—until he was manipulated by Minos’s allies and pushed too far. It’s all messy to me now—too much brain damage over the centuries, I guess.”

  “If you’re like this with brain damage, what were you like before?” Fisher asked.

  I laughed and shook my head. “Probably worse.”

  INSTEAD OF A DOWNTOWN SKYSCRAPER, OUR SUV’S FINAL DESTINTATION TURNED out to be a high-security facility several miles outside of Chicago. A heads-up that we were staying with the statues would have been nice, but I likely wouldn’t have left with them if I had known. This center was where the three-armed giant captured in Corvus had been taken—and where Ponytail and his friends would soon join it in permanent cryogenic stasis. It was a party I did not want to attend.

  I knew I wasn’t a prisoner, but with each checkpoint I began to feel more and more like one. This place was massive, with seventeen underground levels marked on the elevator system. Armed guards were stationed near almost every entry and exit, and every one of them reacted as if I was a threat until they saw Beth and Fisher beside me. Exploring on my own would be out of the question.

  Fisher left with the driver to help with the unloading of the armored trucks, leaving Beth to give me the grand tour alone.

  “I know you don’t like this, but we can’t risk someone from your era attacking a major population center,” she finally explained. “We’re trying to protect you, too.”

  “That makes sense.” I glanced at my cell phone—no signal—which meant I was cut off from Daniel’s team and Eli until I got online access. At least they knew where I was—until someone located the tracker in my Red Bolt suit and deactivated it. “Do you work here when there isn’t a situation like Cameron’s?”

  “Sometimes,” she replied. I had been too honest too fast, and I could tell a difference in her tone and how she looked at me. There was no way to backpedal without making things worse. “We have regional briefings here, and I have to submit reports in person if it’s a major case. I’m in the field about ninety percent of the time.”

  “I would ask to see your containment level, but I’m a little worried I’ll see someone I know—a fri
end, I mean. I understand why you have to do it, and it will likely start happening more and more soon. It’s just—”

  “You’re afraid of us, too?” she asked, and she broke eye contact when I nodded. “It’s not as if we’ve been capturing and freezing random people without evidence. The larger creatures are a more recent development, but our options are limited until we find a better solution.”

  “For at least the past decade, someone has been leveraging superpowered people with the lives of their children,” I said. Her eyebrows furrowed. “You wouldn’t freeze Daniel or Miranda, would you?”

  “Of course not!” She shook her head in disgust. “We didn’t know about the kidnappings until Daniel sent us Nathan’s map. We’ll sort things out, but that will be a lot easier if we rescue the children first. Any leveraged hero or villain would no longer be a threat, and we can process their release.”

  “What about the clawed woman in containment in Corvus?” I asked. Eli and his team were still trying to process what to do with her, considering she was a blackmail victim but still involved in the deaths of the Wilsons and an attempt to kidnap Cameron. Possibly Nathan Spires’s death, too—though I wanted to assume he was still alive. “She tried to attack me to save her daughter, and without all the facts I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had pulled her from local custody. It’s just sometimes things aren’t what they seem on the surface level.”

  She nodded. “Hailstorm didn’t have any children. I checked when we found out about the map.” If he had, any woman wouldn’t have been a willing participant. Anger that I’d buried during the fight started to resurface.

  “I didn’t think so, but great to know that bastard never procreated. As a father, some of the shit he said…” Damn it. Beth’s eyebrows furrowed—like she believed I could be one of the compromised parents. “I had two daughters about four centuries ago, but they and their mother didn’t have powers and died of natural causes. There’s been no one else since—too dangerous, like I told Cameron. I still have a few distant descendants out in the world, but they don’t know about me. It’s safer for them if I keep it that way.”

  “Cameron?” she guessed. I shook my head. So many generations had passed that there was a small possibility, but I wouldn’t know without a genetic test. It wasn’t important. If anything, it would have put him in more danger if she was right. “You just care about him.”

  “That started off as guilt.” We entered another area, this one containing office cubicles. I started getting notifications on my phone again and began checking through them. “I suppose part of it is having an innocent see the best parts of me—that they’re still in there somewhere. Kids are honest, and Cameron is gifted. I hope he’s surrounded by good people for the rest of his life. I meant it when I told him he’d be a great hero. He just needs some help working through what happened.”

  “We’ll all look out for him, Icarus—I promise.” Beth replied. For the first time since we had gotten there, I found myself relax. The nurse I’d met at the hospital and the agent beside me weren’t as far apart as I feared. She’d met me as a hero—or at least my best impersonation of one—and maybe some of that was real, too. It would have to be enough for us to trust each other. “Any word from your villain friends?”

  “It’s like herding a thousand ferrets.” I let her look over my shoulder. By appearances alone, more than half of my contacts looked as if they needed to be in containment. “Most of them do care—and some of them have friends with children who are missing. Tiros and I are trying to keep everyone coordinated on who is and isn’t compromised. The last thing we need is a war between modern heroes and villains. It makes me wonder if that’s what the people behind this wanted—leveraging people to fight their own side along with the opposing one. It would be chaos.”

  “Talk about a major distraction…” she said in stunned tone. We walked by a table of snack foods. I grabbed two chocolate chip cookies and handed her one. “While everyone is focused on rescuing all the kids, what’s their main play?”

  “Still working that one out,” I said. She led me into an empty conference room. On one wall, an 80-inch display had a photo gallery screensaver—of Ancient Rome. I started laughing, and Beth rushed to a terminal to change it. “No, leave that up. I have to meet who did this later—let them know I feel so at home.”

  A phone beeped—hers this time.

  “I need to meet with Fisher and our superiors, and we’ll join you here once everything else is settled. Give me your phone, and I’ll give you both our numbers in case you hear something.”

  I almost dropped it handing it to her. “I’ll need a large tablet with a holding strap eventually—or maybe one of those touch screen walls like Eli put in their containment rooms. I can get by with this for now. Hopefully, this won’t take that long.”

  She started to say something but then hesitated. “Are you in any pain? We can get you something.”

  I shook my head. “It’s more an annoyance than anything right now. My back and legs sometimes cramp up, but that’s an unrelated issue. I’m fine right now. I need my head clear, too. Thanks, though.”

  She left. I used the terminal to pull up a copy of Nathan’s map to the display. In between messages and relaying updates to Tiros, I started reading what I could of all the case files—attempting to find anything else the children and their parents had in common that we may have missed before. For the most part, they all reminded me of the Spireses—and probably the Wilsons, if Cameron was an indication of the rest of his family.

  It made all of those little red dots a lot more personal, but I needed that for fuel. The villains like me needed that, too, and the ones I couldn’t influence with passion and fury could still be swayed with enough money.

  I had wanted my final stand to send a message to my family’s enemies—and it still would. Just not in the way I had originally planned.

  Guess I am my father’s son.

  MEMORY AND THE SUBJECTIVE PASSAGE OF TIME FOR PEOPLE from my era is difficult to explain. I’ve had discussions with Eli, and he finds it interesting I’m hyper focused on minor details but dismissive of others that should be important. He was my contract agent for three weeks before I even bothered to learn his name—designating him as Doughnut Delivery Agent because he’d offered me dozens in attempts to convince me to sign with him. His networking skills turned out to be useful, and he handled the registration hoops that had kept me out of some mid-tier matches before I’d met him.

  In retrospect, the whole undercover cop thing shouldn’t have surprised me. I just thought he was smart, considering other villain agents didn’t understand how I negotiated my matches and dismissed me as a lost cause. Eli now had a four-million-dollar retirement account for his decision. That’s a lot of cookies if you’re still keeping track, heroes.

  The amount of my advance the night of the bridge in Corvus had been thirty grand—triple my typical rate but not significant compared to my overall account. Daniel had accepted my excuse that I had taken the deal based on greed—and that wasn’t entirely a lie. The completed job was supposed to be half a million, but I didn’t tell him that part. Hailstorm had been right that I knew the situation wasn’t—as he had put it—one of my patty-cake matches.

  I had expected a challenge, possibly someone who knew my full potential and wanted to test themselves without me holding back. I wouldn’t have killed a hero and would have respected the opportunity—and their money. When Nathan Spires showed up late and then attacked me without warning, I realized my mistake. Had my father’s enemies wanted me to kill him—even by accident? Maybe to spark a conflict between me and Daniel’s team? And why Corvus City of all the places I’d been in the past seven years? Those parts still weren’t adding up, but I was exhausted and hungry. And my damn hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

  Fisher knocked on the doorway before he entered. “How’s it going?”

  I stood and stretched. “We’ve eliminated a few places where the kids aren’t loc
ated, so that’s progress. I know you probably think I run on ancient mythical magic, but pizza works, too. I could also use a bathroom break without getting shot.”

  He gave me an odd look but led me down a set of hallways. Then he followed me into the bathroom—just like Beth had followed me into the hospital elevator. There were a half-dozen locking stalls, but still. What is it with feds and personal space?

  “Thank you for the offer, Agent Fisher, but I do not require assistance in this arena!” I shouted it loud enough for his friends in the hallway to hear. He turned and exited without a word but then entered again as I was washing my hands. “We are eight levels underground, Fisher! Where the hell am I going to go? I can’t teleport!” Maybe this had been a legitimate issue in the past because he looked about as irritated with me as I was with him.

  “We don’t keep any microphones or cameras in here.” He was blocking the exit. I glared at him, but it was a complete bluff. Cameron could probably have taken me out at that point. “Off the record, I think this is a terrible idea. My superiors want me to convince you otherwise, but I won’t bullshit you. I just don’t know what else we can do for you once things get worse. Beth was right in that you should have the choice.”

  He held out something that looked like an EpiPen. I didn’t take it.

  “You know what I am, and so do they,” I said, furious that his bosses would order him to distract me from saving those kids. This was cruelty—like holding out cocaine or heroin to a recovering addict. “If I inject that, you could end up with something worse than my father and his enemies combined. Do you understand? I am wounded and broken right now, but I’m in full control after centuries of having to work at it. Don’t take that away from me, Fisher, and you will regret it. I would, too—if I could even still think the same way I do now.”

  His eyes widened as I grabbed the pen from his hand, but I pitched it into the trash can. I also flipped off a hidden camera in the ceiling. Based on Fisher’s stunned reaction, he hadn’t known about it. He let me exit, and I returned to the conference room. Fisher followed a few minutes later, this time carrying a plate of pizza slices and some paperwork.