by Lexie Dunne
The door slid open, and I blinked up at Cooper’s massive frame. “Hey,” he said. The phantom fist, I realized. He’d been the one behind the door.
“How on earth did you beat us here?” I asked, gawking at him.
“Took a shortcut.” He gave me a quick grin. “Angélica, need anything else?”
“I can handle it from here, Coop. Thanks.”
Cooper tapped two fingers to his temple in a salute and sauntered off.
“So, you passed the doorway test,” Angélica said, and gestured once more for me to precede her.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “After you. I insist.”
“Suit yourself.” She slung the satchel off of her shoulder and moved into the room.
I stepped forward on high alert, waiting for another attack. If they were willing to try to punch me for walking through a door, what could possibly be next? I had no idea what to make of Davenport, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that they employed some rather sadistic people.
Angélica, it turned out, was a lot faster than Cooper. I didn’t even sense movement this time before she had both fists clenched in the front of my shirt. She picked me up off the ground as though I weighed little more than a sack of potatoes.
I held very, very still.
“Now,” she said, holding me up effortlessly, “time to find out some of your bad habits. What’s your fighting experience?”
“Besides shoving somebody at the coffee shop when he got between me and caffeine? Geez, nothing. Let go.”
To my surprise, she laughed and dropped me. Instincts I had absolutely no control over kept me from landing flat on my ass.
“I can already see this is going to be fun,” she noted.
I straightened my shirt. “Fun for whom?”
Angélica just smiled and raised her voice. She reeled off the date and her last name—Rocha—and a string of numbers that meant little to me. She ended the whole spiel with, “Subject, Gail Godwin, Day One.”
“Who’re you talking to?” I asked, even as the screen on the inside of the room, right next to the door, flashed and beeped once. Oh. Some sort of recording device. Great. They were going to be taping the humiliation I was about to endure.
“And now,” Angélica said with a gleam in her eye that I was beginning to understand boded ill for me, “we begin.”
And she rushed at me.
Chapter Twelve
“OWWW.”
Every muscle, every tendon, every sinew, every bone, every molecule in my body ached. Not a constant ache, either, but a dull, throbbing pain that ebbed and flowed into my consciousness. In one moment, my body might be completely fine. The next, I would find myself contemplating simply lying down on the mats and quietly dying.
Davenport Industries did not believe in regular physical therapy and training, evidently. Their idea of teaching me how to deal with my new abilities and the fact that I had cancer was to beat the bloody daylights out of me.
Angélica had come at me, forcing me to dodge and fight back. Against Chelsea’s henchmen, I hadn’t had a problem, but I was starting to realize that Chelsea’s henchmen were idiots with no martial skills. Neither of these things applied to Angélica, which was why my body felt like one gigantic bruise.
She’d wanted to see what I knew how to do already, fighting-wise, and that apparently meant letting me rush her over and over, trying to take her down. She either blocked or hit back, depending on whatever move I tried. By the end of the day—a day filled with breaks every two hours so that I could replenish my fuel supply—I’d begun to anticipate some of her moves, but by that point, the damage had been done. She was sneaky, and more than a little mean, and while I enjoyed her sense of humor, I also hated her deeply.
“All right,” she said a few hours later, while we both chugged water like shipwreck victims, “I’ve got a firm grip on your fighting style now. What we’ll need to change and tighten up, and outright get rid of. You’ve already developed habits.”
“How?” I said, shoving my hair out of my face. “I’m not a fighter, I haven’t fought anybody. The line about the guy in the coffee shop was a joke.”
“Movies, television, even books if they were descriptive enough. Don’t worry, though, we’ll fix all of that.”
“Great,” I said.
Angélica laughed. “Oh, come now. Get excited. Hostage Girl is learning to fight back.”
“But why?” I asked. The use of my nickname made me want to flinch, and it all came rushing down on at me at once. Because I was Hostage Girl, I’d been kidnapped again, and now I had the isotope in my bloodstream. “Why are you teaching me this? Why start with fighting? I have—I have cancer.”
“Technically, you do. But unlike most people, you’re not going to have to worry about chemo treatments unless something goes wrong.”
I stared at my hands. Leukemia. There was a cancerous . . . actually, I didn’t know anything about how cancer worked. It was the big C-word that loomed as a constant threat on the horizon, the one you secretly hoped happened to somebody else. But I had it, and it wasn’t something I was supposed to worry about because the thing in my bloodstream would just magically keep curing me, apparently.
Maybe I was a little slow for not having arrived at the conclusion sooner, but it had been a stressful few days. I’d faced and sort of held my own for the first time against a villain, I’d been essentially dosed by accident with super-steroids, I’d seen Blaze without his mask and solved the biggest mystery in my life, and I had cancer. I lowered the water bottle slowly. “They can’t take it out, can they.”
Angélica shook her head. “I was wondering when you were going to figure that out.”
“I’m stuck with it, whatever it is.”
“This is your life now, Gail Godwin.” She jumped to her feet and pulled me to mine. There wasn’t an ounce of pity on her face. “Welcome to Davenport.”
This time, when she rushed me, I at least knew it was coming.
After she declared that I’d had enough for one day, she walked me back to my suite. “We’ll do more orientation tomorrow,” she said, handing over a bag of crap-cakes. “Right now, focus on getting some rest, read over the stuff Coop gave you. If you have any questions, I’ll be by in the morning.”
An hour later, I’d showered off the sweat and slid, boneless, onto my new couch. Hunger gnawed semi-insistently at my belly, but I didn’t have any food in my suite, and there was no way I was reaching for one of the crap-cakes Angélica had sent with me unless it was life or death. Which, I remembered, it might be. Until we knew more about the thing in my bloodstream, it was safer to eat when I was hungry, rest when I was exhausted, and do everything I could to prevent the isotope from going into overdrive, as that might make the leukemia worse.
Since I really didn’t want to think about having leukemia, I looked toward the door. Did I care enough to haul myself down to Vicki’s suite? She’d have food. But since the alternative was a crap-cake . . .
I tensed; a second later, somebody knocked on the door. I didn’t move. I just listened. The heartbeat, the breathing. The scent.
Guy was at my door.
I was tempted, after last night’s intense session, to remain where I was, to let Guy just keep walking. It had yet to settle that somebody who had once been a coworker was the one to beat down doors, to retrieve antidotes whenever I was poisoned, to save my life time and again without wanting any gratitude for it. Those actions spoke of love. When I’d been pretty sure Blaze was Jeremy Collins, I’d been okay with that. We’d been together. The L-word had even been tossed around a couple of times.
But all of those feelings from Guy, whom I barely knew? Emotional overload.
“Gail?” Guy asked when I remained silent. “It’s me. Um, Guy.”
Another scent hit me just as he announc
ed, “I brought food.”
Instantly, I was on my feet and across the suite, tapping the panel to open the door. “You officially have my interest.”
“Yes, Angélica said that you get hungry. So I brought this.” He held up the brown grocery sack he carried. “Still hot. There are some advantages to being as fast as the wind.”
“I bet.” I stepped aside to let him in. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, so he was closer to the Guy I remembered. Khaki shorts and flip-flops with leather straps, and a designer tee that accentuated his assets almost as well as his uniform did. “You talked to Angélica?”
“Yeah, we’re good friends. She trained me, once upon a time.” He smiled indulgently, almost fondly. “Has she shown you her powers yet?”
“Besides a freight train of a right hook?”
“Her left hook’s worse.” Guy set the bag on my kitchen counter and began to unload it.
“Well, if the right hook’s not a listed power, it should be,” I said, deciding I was too tired to try to play hostess. When Guy gestured at one of the stools at my kitchenette island, I didn’t hesitate to take him up on it, and sat. “It gave me this, after all.” I touched my left cheekbone, where my eye had been throbbing all day—
And felt nothing.
Guy finished unloading the sack and folded it up. “The reason you’re burning through food so fast right now is because you’re healing yourself,” he said. “Cooper should have explained that to you.”
“He, ah, gave me some information to read. I was going to do that.”
“Well, et voilà.” Guy pulled out a full rotisserie chicken and presented it with a flourish. He leaned over to open a cabinet and pull out a couple of plates.
“How do you know where everything is?” I asked him. I’d poked through them, so I knew there were plates in there, but I was pretty sure X-ray vision wasn’t part of Guy’s listed powers. Unless he’d been keeping that a secret from the public and been checking out what was underneath my clothing for years.
The thought made me just a little uncomfortable.
But he quelled my doubts with another one of his smiles, a lazy one this time. “All the apartments are set up the same way.”
“Ah. Do you live here, too, then?”
“No.” Guy began to dish food onto the plates quickly and efficiently, which lessened my guilt about not playing hostess. “I live topside, in Miami, but we keep an apartment at headquarters. My brother and I do, I mean. It’s on the other end of the complex, though. Quieter. Fewer of the new folks around, discovering their powers day and night.”
“Discovering their powers?”
“Yeah. You know. We all get our powers differently, and it can get loud.” Guy prepped a second plate, and I found myself watching his hands. There was the grace I recognized from Blaze, who’d always fought a little bit like a dancer. Jeremy was good with his hands, too, but it had seemed different. Not as tightly controlled, I thought. “Especially if they’re pyro. Things tend to melt around pyros, especially at first.”
“Am I going to get to meet any superheroes, other than the trainers?” I asked, wondering if I’d have to avoid the pyros. I’d never been a fan of my eyebrows, but I kind of liked having them.
“You will,” Guy promised. “They’re around. There’s a community, I guess is how you’d put it. We go topside to live our alter-ego lives, but down here, it’s nothing but the truth.”
“And the truth about you is . . .” I prompted, suddenly avidly curious about this man. After all, he’d rescued me from countless situations, so he’d seen every side of me there was—and, after the Trouble Twins ambushed me in a satin negligee, quite a bit more than he’d expected. It turns out satin doesn’t stand up well to flying at high speeds, running through the woods at night, or class-three rapids. Looking back at that night, I remembered practically getting a sunburn from the force of Blaze’s blush, even through the mask.
Now, he smiled, the blush nowhere in evidence. “Rain check? You’ve had a long day if I remember my own training with Angélica right.”
I sat back, slightly disappointed that he wasn’t willing to share. He placed a plate in front of me. His own held a lot less, I noticed right away, but I was too busy trying not to attack the food like a starved wolf to be bothered about that. I managed not to slurp, but Emily Post would still not have approved.
Guy didn’t comment. “So, I wanted to apologize.”
“For what?” I asked warily. We weren’t going to have a repeat of last night, were we? Even buoyed by the meal as I was, I didn’t think I could handle another punch of Guy’s emotions, strong as they were.
“For last night. I, ah, I came on a little strong.”
I side-eyed him. “A little?”
He flushed. “Okay, more than a little. I was just so surprised to see you, and it threw me off. I didn’t even think about what kind of day you must have had. You were just there. And I probably should have tried harder to contain myself.”
“It’s no big deal,” I decided, helping myself to more corn. “We’ll forget it.”
“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” he went on, “because I was pretty sure I’d freaked you out, and now you were going to run away or hate me and—”
“It was a crap day all around,” I said as I began piling round two of dinner on my plate. “I think all actions are forgivable. I fact, I’m calling an umbrella forgiveness on everything that happened yesterday.”
Guy rose to rinse his plate off. “Is Jeremy included in that umbrella forgiveness? He was pretty much being an ass to you.”
“It’s rough on him,” I said, slowly. “Being here. Isn’t it?”
“It’s not a picnic,” Guy said. “He always has the option of reconstructive surgery.”
“Surgery?” I actually stopped eating. “Plastic surgery? Jeremy would never do that. He’s way too vain about his looks.”
“Probably. I’m sorry he dumped you while you were in the hospital.”
“I kind of pushed him into it. Not that that makes it okay, but either way, I’m mostly over it.” Apart from a little lingering flame of resentment, but really who had time to stir the fire when these people enjoyed making my life so confusing? And pounding the crap out of me?
“You didn’t—” Guy began, but stopped himself. “Okay.”
Silence fell as Guy stared at the table, and I continued to load food in. I began to wonder if this was why he’d never talked directly to me as Blaze. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to say. The quick looks he kept sneaking at me, however, told me it probably wasn’t like that.
“You eat a lot,” he finally said, smiling across the island at me.
I grunted. “Well, I’m eating for two now.”
Guy’s smile vanished. “W-what?”
“Me and the isotope. What did you think I meant to—oh, for the love of—I’m not pregnant. Though god, would that put a cap on this crapper of a week or what?”
“Amen,” Guy said.
“Pass the chicken, will you?”
ONCE WE’D FINISHED dinner (well, really, once I’d finished dinner), Guy considerately helped me with the dishes and hunted down containers that let me stow the food in my otherwise-empty fridge. He bade me a polite good-night, and left.
I remained sitting at my kitchen island and watched the door for a good ten minutes after he was gone, trying to puzzle it all out. I’d spent a lot of time wondering who Blaze was, under that mask. Waiting in the elaborate traps the villains liked to build around me had led to more downtime than most would think. After a while, you stop seeing your life flash before your eyes, and your mind wanders to silly little questions. Like, was green his favorite color, or had he picked his costume because of his eyes? Who designed the uniforms?
Now that I knew there was a secret superhero society with a
hierarchy and everything, I guess that answered some of my old questions.
When I’d wasted enough time thinking about Guy and his cute blushing, I dragged myself back to the couch and curled up with the glossy packet of materials Cooper had given me. It included the same charts I’d seen on his computer screen when he’d been explaining things to me, as well as detailed breakdowns of what they meant. Side-by-side graphs of what my body could endure versus what a normal body could endure. It was detailed enough to include words like “mitochondria,” which I vaguely recalled from biology in high school, but it beat me what it actually meant. And my room didn’t come with a computer or a way to access the internet, so I couldn’t check Wikipedia.
It looked like I was cut off from everything. At least there wasn’t anybody out there to worry about me. Mom and I had run out of things to say to each other before I’d turned fifteen, Dad had never been in the picture, and I had more than enough evidence my coworkers, the people I spent the most time around, would barely realize I was gone. Davenport could keep me for years, and the only one who would notice was probably Naomi Gunn whenever the next big anniversary of my not being kidnapped came around.
It was a little depressing to think about.
There was also a printout of a few pages, stuck in the back, on the types of leukemia. Curious, I flipped through, seeking “Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia,” and began to read.
I fell asleep reading what was probably the scariest information of my life.
Even in sleep I was apparently healing, for I woke abruptly in the middle of the night with a growling stomach. I eyed the fridge and decided instead just to bite the bullet. After I choked down another crap-cake (what would become one of many, I feared) and washed it down with two glasses of water, I stumbled back to the bedroom and collapsed into the bed.
Angélica woke me up this time.
She poked me in the shoulder. Awake before I was even aware of it, I scrambled away from her. I opened my eyes to find myself across my bed and staring into the smiling face of the woman who had beaten me to shreds the day before.
