Squad Goals

by Kate Karyus Quinn

  “But then you got to know her better and you became friends,” I say. “I think the same will be true of us.”

  Tina shakes her head at me. “Don’t put words in my mouth, cat. I thought your sister was an idiot… and then I got to know you.”

  With that she flings the door open and makes her exit.

  I give into the impulse to shoot double middle fingers at her back, but it doesn’t really help.

  With a sigh, I call after her, “Hey, wait up. You don’t even know where you’re going.”

  10

  “You strike me out and I’ll shove that baseball straight up your ass!” Shauna declares, pointing the bat at one of the harpy guards who was assigned to play the role of “human” today.

  “All right, Shauna,” Greg says, stepping forward. “Let’s pause there. You’re once again crossing the line between spirited competitiveness and threatening someone’s life and/or well-being.”

  With Cassie gone, Greg has tried to step into her shoes. All things considered, he’s not doing a horrible job. But he’s not doing a great one either.

  Tina must agree, because she stands and strides toward Greg. We’ve been sitting on the sidelines watching as Greg tried to stumble through a lesson on baseball, which is pretty difficult when no one knows the rules and we’re indoors.

  Cassie thought it would be a good idea to introduce the supes to an all-American gathering…but apparently she didn’t know baseball is an outdoor sport. It’s really hard to play baseball when your entire facility is underground. Greg had moved the class to the gymnasium, but he’s still in a panic, mostly due to the fact that Cassie’s notes for the class are complete crap.

  She wrote:

  Baseball. Who’s on First? Take Me Out To The Ballgame? Everyone kisses on first base? Take your shirt off at second? This sport is so racy! Bring crackers and Jack-o-lanterns to give everyone when the song starts.

  In the bag of stuff she brought to go with the lesson was a single winter glove, a box of wheat crackers, and little plastic jack-o-lanterns that she must’ve had to really search for since they’re way out of season.

  Sometimes the depths of Cassie’s cluelessness and ingenuity actually impress me.

  Greg decided to start things off by teaching everyone “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” I could’ve told him getting this crowd to join in a sing-along was a losing task, but bless his heart, he gave it his all.

  When Tamika suggest they just play the dumb game, I think Greg was too worn out to resist. He just shrugged and said, “Okay, fine, whatever.”

  Tina approaches him and he looks at her like she’s an angel come to save him. “Hey, want me to work with Shauna one-on-one?” she asks. “Vampires are naturally competitive, so I have some tips to help her keep her edge without, you know, losing her temper.”

  “Um, sure.” Greg nods and waves Shauna Tina’s way. “Just have Mavis oversee, since you’re not an official employee.”

  We move into the locker room. Tina closes the door while Shauna glares.

  Deciding not to waste any time, I just say it. “So are you in or not?”

  She glowers at me. “How do I know you’ll do what you say and help Kit get out of here?”

  I’m ready to swear on my father’s life (and really, really mean it) but Tina steps in. “Why are you so dense? Without Mavis, your brother is dead. D-E-A-D dead. If you want him to have a chance you’d better ovary up and get on board.”

  Shauna studies her. She’s just under five feet tall, but she has a presence that fills the room. “You a fae?” she asks Tina.

  “I’m a…” Tina sighs. “I’m a Moggy. Half vamp, half all of the things.” She flashes her fangs. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Not at all,” Shauna says. “Unless you were human…”

  “Gross. No. Humans suck,” Tina says.

  Shauna laughs. “Damn straight.”

  “Look, I hate to interrupt this bad bitch bonding experience, but we can’t stay huddled up forever—”

  “I’d love to show you what I can do,” Shauna tells Tina suggestively, totally ignoring every word out of my mouth.

  “If you’re quite done eye-shagging each other,” a new voice says, “perhaps we should get on with it....”

  “Trevor!” I snap, spinning to look for his ghostly figure. I find him floating in the corner behind me.

  He wafts into the light, sheepishly. He’s supposed to stay in his own cell, but he’s a ghost so he travels between the walls. He can’t leave UWR though, not with his collar on. “I was just passing by...”

  “You mean spying,” I say.

  He tilts his head. “Tomato, tamato,” he says in his British accent.

  He’s cute in a ferrety kind of way. He’s also a total dirtbag. I’ve heard tons of stories from his time trying to win the god contest at Amazon Academy. He actually backed Zeus and then tried to help Hades turn Earth into a hellscape.

  “Can I join your little team?” he asks eagerly.

  “And why would I…?” I begin, but he interrupts me.

  “Look, I can walk through walls. You need me.” As he talks he fades in and out of focus. “Also, this place is sooooo boring. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I can’t wank. I want to do something.”

  “This isn’t a field trip,” I tell him.

  “Let him come,” Shauna says suddenly. “He can be helpful, and my brother’s life is on the line. We might need him.”

  I nod. He has a point. Having someone who is incorporeal on the team might come in super-useful at some point “Okay. But Trevor, I’ve read your file. Double-crossing teammates is kinda your thing. If you try it with me, though, you won’t be a ghost cooling your heels here. You’ll be totally dead and gone—all the way down to Elysium. Got it?”

  “Anything for a moment away from this place,” he tells me.

  “And I can’t just let your brother go, either,” I tell Shauna. “But I can fight for him. Get him somewhere long-term. Get him help. Keep him alive.”

  “Fine,” she nods. “I’ll do it. For Kit. Now what’s the plan?”

  Two minutes later we rejoin the rest of the group. Shauna is giving me the evil eye because I refused to give her any details other than, “We’re gonna get you out. We’ll tell you everything else as you need to know it.”

  At least Tina backed me up on keeping our prisoners in the dark about the escape plan. My thinking was that if they decide to rat us out it’ll be easier to say they’re making it up if they don’t have exact details. Tina, on the other hand, said, “It’s so half-assed, it’s not exactly going to inspire confidence.”

  We settle back into our seats to watch as Greg tries to teach them the wave.

  Griff the bear sits in his chair refusing to move. Shauna gets into it, her pink hair bouncing with her each time she jumps from her seat and flings her hands into the air.

  Tamika raises her hand. “I don’t get this. Why is this a thing?”

  Greg frowns. “Baseball? Or the wave? Or…”

  “All of it!” Tamika throws her hands up. She turns to look at me, right on cue. “Mavis, I want to talk to you about being reassigned to a different reform class. This one is useless.”

  “Of course,” I say smoothly. I gesture toward Tina. “Why don’t you come along?”

  “I will help you defeat Hermes,” Tamika immediately tells us when we’re out of earshot.

  “Mavis didn’t have to twist your arm too hard,” Tina says, eyeing the witch. “You do know this will be dangerous, right? What are you getting out of this?”

  Tamika tugs at her collar. “Anything to get this thing off my neck. I can’t do anything. All my powers are gone. It’s like I’m a human, how disgusting.” She wrinkles her nose at the thought.

  I feel like I should defend humans, but I don’t have it in me right now.

  “And yes,” she informs Tina archly, “I do know this will be dangerous.

  Those harpies take their jobs very seriously. Th
ey’re not going to let us go without a fight.”

  Tamika was killing humans and performing blood magic, making bank off of rich ladies who wanted to look younger. I marked her as no parole during intake because she lacked even a drop of remorse.

  “Does that mean you’re in?” I ask. She said she was, but now... “Or out?”

  Her lip curls in disgust. “In. I simply can’t go through life as a human. Though to be honest, I think you’re biting off way more than you can chew with this whole break out of prison idea.”

  “That’s why she has me,” Tina interrupts. She smiles, showing off her fangs. “I’ve got a big bite.”

  The witch rolls her eyes in response. “How charming. Just don’t be surprised when you end up with knives in your back. Especially with that one out there.” She once again wrinkles her nose as if she smelled something bad. “Shauna, that bitchy little pixie. I wouldn’t trust a fae any farther than I can throw them.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing she’s so small then, isn’t it?” I ask.

  It’s easy to get alone time with Griff. We come back out to find him throwing baseballs straight into the walls. They sink into the cement like it’s still wet.

  “Mavis,” Greg says in his ‘help me’ voice.

  I jerk a finger at Griff. “Come on, big boy. Locker room talk.”

  Griff follows us and leans against the lockers with his arms crossed.

  The dude is big even when he’s in human form. He’s at least two hundred and fifty pounds, all muscle. His wild hair nearly brushes the stained ceiling tiles.

  Tina sniffs. “Ugh. You definitely have the smell of a bear shifter.” She throws a glance my way. “We can get him scheduled for his yearly bath before we break out?”

  “Play nice, Tina,” I mutter. But Griff doesn’t seem bothered. He just grunts and continues watching us with steely eyes.

  “So Griff,” I say. “The last time I trusted you, you attacked Aphrodite and ruined your chances of ever getting out of here. Not a smart move, but as it turns out, that could work to your advantage. I could use someone big enough to rough up a god.”

  “Hermes,” he interrupts, which for him is the equivalent of giving a full speech. He usually only communicates with grunts.

  “Right,” I agree. “We’re going after Hermes. “We saw...White Tail,” I add and Griff grimaces, but something in his eyes softens. “I don’t know what she is to you…”

  I wait for him to fill in that leading sentence, but he just continues to stare at me.

  I try again. “I got the feeling the two of you were once close. Romantically…” Still nothing. I sigh and give it one last shot. “And now she’s under Hermes control. That must be difficult.” He stares at me with dead eyes. Finally, desperate, I say the one thing I’m pretty sure he can’t resist. “That’s gotta be hard. Real hard. You’re locked away for a long time. It’s a stiff sentence. Long, hard, and stiff.”

  It is a truth universally known men cannot resist a dick joke.

  And Griff is no exception. “Stiff,” he chuckles in a low voice.

  “Okay, that’s enough of that,” Tina cuts in. “You’re locked away and it sucks bear balls. Are you with us or not?”

  He grunts in a way that I assume means yes.

  “So you’re in?” Tina asks. Griff starts to grunt, but she interrupts. “How about a yes or no in actual words. I don’t speak bear and I don’t plan to learn anytime ever.”

  There’s a long silence and then finally Griff nods. “Yes.”

  It seems like he might say more...but nope—that’s it.

  And it’s good enough for me. Tina too, apparently, because she gives me a thumbs up.

  Looks like we’ve assembled our team.

  11

  “This is so not going to work,” Tina says, for the fiftieth time.

  We’re making our way through the abandoned subway tunnels that surround UWR. When New York City put in their subway, the uber-rich people like the Rockefellers didn’t want to use the same cars as the general population, so they built their own subway underneath the normal one, with stops directly under their own mansions and their most used destinations, like The Met. They’ve all been abandoned for a hundred years or more, and we’re surrounded by rotting opulence as Tina and I mark the path for our unlikely band of future escaped convicts.

  What that really means is that I’m splashing sugar-laced blood all over fraying brocade and shattered crystals from fallen chandeliers.

  “Are we done yet?” Tina asks, her hand covering her nose and mouth.

  “We?” I ask, putting down my bucket of blood. “You say that like you’re actually helping. Can you not be around the blood, or what?”

  She pulls her hand down, fast. “Um, excuse me, no. I have extreme self-control. I could swim through an Olympic-sized pool filled with blood and not lose my cool. I was born this way, not turned. But I can’t stand the smell of…that.” She eyes my bucket with contempt. “You polluted it.”

  I sigh, picking it back up as we make our way down the tunnel to the next platform. “I told you, Griff and Tamika will be able to smell the blood and find the rendezvous without a light to give away their location.”

  “And the sugar is for the pixie, yeah, I know,” Tina says, covering her mouth again. “But that’s not the only thing in there.”

  I feel a little blush rising in my cheeks. “It’s pheromones, for Mac.”

  “Pheromones!” Tina shrieks. “Oh my gods, Mavis, did you break into the sex closet?”

  “It is not a sex closet,” I explain patiently. Although it did get the reputation honestly. We have to keep a supply of pheromones on hand for the incubus and succubus prisoners, or else they slowly dwindle away. Unfortunately, every now and then one of the bottles gets broken and whoever has to clean it up ends their shift as a panting, over-sexed, lust-driven lunatic.

  Once a First Brood accidentally knocked a bottle over with one of her wings. They produce asexually, and she laid twenty-five eggs in there before someone found her.

  “Disgusting,” Tina says, still eyeing my bucket as I dump the last of the blood into a puddle on our extraction point under Central Park. “And I mean this probably isn’t going to work, anyway.”

  “So you said,” I sigh, and we turn back to retrace our steps.

  “Oh good, Mavis, you’re here!” Greg says as soon as I walk into his office. This is pretty much the first thing Greg always says to me, which should make me feel good, but instead somehow makes me feel needed in a way that exhausts me.

  Speaking of a bottomless pit of neediness, Greg does not look good. There are dark circles under his eyes and his nails are bitten to the quick.

  “The harpies are all ready for their celebration of ----” he makes an attempt at saying the name of the harpy high holiday, and since he’s a winged creature, he’s able to do about half of it. I still wince.

  “Right, harpy Christmas, I know,” I say.

  “Well, it’s more like harpy New Year,” Greg begins but I cut him off with a hand in the air.

  “I don’t care,” I say. “Just tell me what we’re doing for security while they all go celebrate.”

  “Not all of them are celebrating,” Greg says, unrolling a map of the subway tunnels surrounding UWR so that I can follow along. “All the clutches up to fifty-two are excused from duty and will be at their gathering. Any of Zahara’s children born after clutch fifty-three are still on duty.”

  “Baby harpies?” I ask.

  “Yeah, and they’re not happy about it,” Greg says. “Most of them are teenagers in harpy years, so I actually put a Cerberus in charge of the pheromone closet, just in case.”

  “Right,” I say, musing.

  That’s a good thing. There are only so many of the three-headed dogs. Hades had attempted a breeding program a few years ago and only managed to produce a handful of three-headed dogs. The rest only had two heads, and in one weird mutation, an extremely affectionate Scottish terrier.
>
  “How many Cerberus are currently on guard?” I ask.

  “Three,” Greg answers, pointing to the map. “I’ve got one on the pheromone closet, and Deuce is guarding the main exit to the tunnels. Totality is the free-roamer on duty tonight.”

  Deuce is one of Hades’ two-headed Cerberus creations. Totality is the Scottish terrier. My hopes soar. If we’re lucky, this just might work.

  “The harpies are leaving for their ceremony in ten minutes,” Greg says. “So we’ll need to be on high alert after that.”

  “Great,” I say. “And where is that being held?”

  “Central Park,” Greg says.

  I smile around clenched teeth and power walk back to my office. Busting in, I find Tina coaxing one of my succulents back from half-death.

  “I can’t change it,” I tell Tina, panic spiking my voice. “I dumped blood all over the place down there in the tunnels. Our squad is going to come out of the subway right into the largest gathering of UWR guards the world has ever seen.”

  “Not to mention the Human First rally,” Tina says, one finger on the plant.

  “What?!??!” I screech. “What the Hades are you talking about?”

  “I thought you knew,” Tina says. “Geez, you need to get aboveground more. That rally that was planned down in Florida has caught on like wildfire. Every major city is having one tonight. Like, complete with torches and pitchforks.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?” I seethe.

  “You seemed so confident,” Tina shrugs. “Every time I told you this wasn’t going to work, you said it was. I assumed you were just going to have Edie swoop down and pick us all up, maybe drop some dragon turds on their parade.”

  “Edie?” I ask, crossing my arms. “Edie who is missing?”

  Tina’s complacent mask slips for a second.

  “You forgot, didn’t you?” I ask. “You forgot that my sister is also MIA?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, okay? I did. I’m mostly just thinking about Val. Siblings are very loyal to each other.”

  “Edie is my sibling,” I mutter, but there isn’t a lot of sting in my tone. I can’t muster much feeling at all, actually. I’m about to break out some of the most difficult prisoners in UWR, right into a swarm of harpies and rioting humans that are primed for their blood. Absently, I reach into my bra, pulling out some of the pills from Themis.