by H. D. Gordon
“Try to keep up, Nerdgirl,” Raven said, but there was no malice in the name-calling, as there always had been before. I wondered if my two friends were finally bonding.
Raven waved a hand for all of us to follow as she led us outside. Sirens wailed in the distance in multiple directions, screams and gunshots, shouts and the crackling of flames added together to make a cacophony of sound. The night was shadows atop shadows, the stars starkly visible in the sky for the lack of light.
Just when I was about to ask Raven what in the world she was talking about, she grabbed my shoulders and turned me around. She pointed to the east and upward, and my eyes followed her finger. When I saw it, my breath caught in my throat, my mouth falling open for what felt the hundredth time today.
Among the stars and the quarter moon, a spotlight was floating in the dark sky. It broke through the clouds and reflected on their surfaces. Over the spotlight, someone had placed a symbol that could not be mistaken. It was two M’s—one stacked right on top of the other.
“Oh, my God,” Matt mumbled. “You’re like friggin’ Batman! That’s your symbol, dude. That’s the Masked Maiden’s friggin’ symbol. That’s totally going on the suit.”
Raven placed a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Your fanboy is showing. Again.”
“You’re damn right it is!” Matt exclaimed.
All of our eyes were still cast skyward, glued to the two M’s floating in the air.
“It could be a trap,” Sam said. “A way to lure in the Maiden and arrest her when she shows up.”
“Seems like a silly thing to do. An unlikely possibility with all the crap going on in the city right now,” Matt observed.
“Maybe unlikely, but a possibility, nonetheless,” Sam maintained.
Raven shrugged. “Whatever their intentions, they’re reaching out to the Masked Maiden. So the real question is, whether or not she’s going to answer.”
All three of my friends turned and looked at me, question marks mirrored on their faces. I looked back at the spotlight symbol in the sky and sighed.
“I guess I better answer,” I said, and turned back toward the entrance to the lair.
It was time to suit up and head out into the night that was dark and full of terrors, myself among them.
***
I perched on the roof’s edge of the Grant City Commerce building, peering down at the place where the spotlight with the double M’s was located. The area was quiet, too quiet maybe, and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t a SWAT team waiting in the wings to snatch me up as soon as I poked my head out.
“Be careful,” Sam told me through the communication device nestled in my ear. “Use your aura-thingy to make sure this isn’t a trick.”
I whispered a ten-four and used my aura-thingy to confirm that there were only two people on the rooftop containing the spotlight. Leaning out further over the edge, I focused my attention on my sixth sense and realized I recognized the auras of the two men. Unless I was mistaken, one of them was Officer Calvin Cleary, whom I’d visited just the other day to suggest an alliance between the Maiden and the GCPD, and had been gently denied. The other was Robert Townsend, the Chief of Police, and if Cleary hadn’t been mistaken, not exactly my biggest fan.
Hesitating, I studied my surroundings and finally came to the conclusion that there was a reasonable chance of me making an escape should this meeting turn out to be a trap. Saying a silent here goes nothing, I leapt over the edge of the Commerce building and landed in a crouch beside the spotlight with the grace of an ascending angel. Both Cleary and Townsend jumped visibly at my abrupt appearance, and I used their momentary shock to stand to my full height, my body prepared to bolt at the slightest infraction.
“You came,” said Chief Townsend, in a tone that said he had not been holding his breath.
“I told you she would,” replied Cleary, who looked cowed after a sharp glance from his Chief, and added a mumbled, “Sir.”
My guard was still high, and I continued visually sweeping the perimeter in anticipation of a trap. “I like the signal,” I said, nodding toward the spotlight in an attempt to break the ice that seemed to be freezing between us. “Clever.”
“My idea,” Officer Cleary proclaimed proudly, and when Chief Townsend cleared his throat, Cleary snapped his mouth shut again.
“We’re considering forming a temporary alliance,” Townsend said. Both his tone and his aura revealed that he was not in the least pleased with this prospect. But as the sirens and screams and terror continued to ring through the night all around us, it was also clear that he was resigned to the idea. For the time being, anyway.
So this wasn’t a trap. The GCPD genuinely wanted my help. You’d think I’d feel a bit of smug satisfaction about this, but all it did was serve to drive home the fact that the state of things in our shared city was perilous at best.
There was no hesitation on my part. I nodded, stepped forward, and held my hand out to the Chief in an ancient offering of alliance.
“This isn’t a free pass,” said the Chief, his eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “You’re still a criminal in my book, and when this is all over, I intend to get back to the matter of arresting you.”
To this, I shrugged. Because what, exactly, did one say to that?
After a sigh that was almost a huff, Chief Townsend grasped my outstretched hand in his and gave a firm shake.
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”
CHAPTER 24
The night flashed brightly for a few heartbeats, the shadows scattering like insects from a fresh hole, and leaving an impression behind my eyelids like the flicker of a camera. The lightning tearing across the sky resembled something out of an old horror movie, as if there was a white-haired man on a rooftop somewhere trying to raise a monstrous creation to terrorize the townspeople.
It was such an unnatural sight, as there was no rain and no clouds, no resulting boom of thunder. All over Grant City people were standing out on their porches and balconies, stopping their cars and halting in their commutes to stare up at the impossible sights in the sky. It had been a total of five days and six nights since the citizens had access to electricity, and the collective fear they produced rolled toward me in powerful waves, turning my aptitude for aura-reading into a veritable curse.
Despite this, I felt better than I had the day before, though that wasn’t saying much. The Sorceress Queen had healed my physical body, and the chat with my mother had eased my mind, but the Demon’s Curse was still upon me, and now it was not just my dreams that were haunted with ghosts from my past.
Now they were walking alongside me in the waking world. People I’d watched come and go, both supernatural and non. I was seeing ghosts, remnants of another time, souls who’d shot across the sky of my life like dying stars. It was kind of like seeing my life pass before me, only the event markers being shown were of all the occasions I’d encountered death. What astonished me most—though logically it should not have—was how much death surrounds all of us, from the very moment we set foot upon this earth.
I was not completely healed of my depression, and I suspected that I would never truly be, but my mother’s words had helped me to manage myself. For now, that would have to be enough.
My right fist struck out and caught the man I was currently fighting hard across the jaw. His head jerked to the side, a spray of scarlet spittle flying from his mouth. The force of my punch sent him back onto his butt. I was using my fists a lot tonight, and doing so felt too good for comfort.
Before the man could regain his feet, I was on him, securing his wrists with the zip-ties Officer Cleary had provided. I pressed the send button on the radio I’d likewise received from Cleary and relayed the location of my most recent catch.
And so it went. I wrangled the misbehaving occupants of the city—the escapees of Grant City’s correctional facility taking top priority, of course—and the police came and retrieved them after they’d been subdued. As agreed, it was a g
roup effort, and by the time the sun was getting ready to rise on the sixth day of darkness, every facility built to contain people within a fifty-mile radius of the city was chock-full of opportunist buttheads.
Meanwhile, I was exhausted. I’d fought more people in a single evening than I could ever remember doing in my life. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d set a new world record, in fact, but it had come at a price. I was bleeding from various wounds and aching from absorbing strikes from men twice my size. My suit was clinging to me with sweat, and my hair was damp beneath my hood.
As I strolled down a side alley, I reached into my jacket and pulled out the remaining zip-ties Cleary had given me, and saw that there was only three left. He’d given me fifty of them when we’d started this evening. That meant I’d put a total of forty-seven zip-ties around the wrists of lawbreakers.
With this, I decided it was time to call it a night. Whether all of this was really my fault or not, I figured forty-seven captures had earned me at least a break. Maybe some sleep and some food.
As it turned out, fate had a different plan.
I rounded the corner, exiting the alleyway between 12th and Vine, and standing before me was none other than Leonard Boyce, the man who’d traded his soul to a Demon just for a shot at torturing me.
***
“I don’t suppose you’d consider putting this whole thing on hold so I could go have a nap and some nachos?” I asked, realizing this was probably the wrong audience for that joke only as Boyce’s aura flashed and rumbled like the sky overhead.
“You’re almost out of time, and still it’s all a joke to you,” Boyce replied, in a voice so low that if I’d had plain human ears I would not have heard it. He was no longer bothering with a voice modulator, but he wore a dark hoodie and sunglasses, like the master of disguise he was. Beneath the bravado, however, I sensed the fracturing of his aura, the slow degeneration of his soul.
“You should just drop this fool, like, right now,” Sam’s voice said in my ear, and I knew she was glued to her computer screen on her end.
I ignored this. To Boyce, I said, “None of this is a joke to me. It never has been. People are getting hurt. You need to stop this, stop what you’re doing.” I held my hands up and out, my stance cautiously still. “Come with me and we can talk about everything. I’m the one you want, right?”
For a few long heartbeats, Boyce didn’t move or respond, and I began to hope beyond hope that he was considering my suggestion. Then he barked out a laugh that was so maniacal I shifted uncomfortably on my feet. He laughed and laughed some more, bending double and clutching at his midsection. Tears sprang from his eyes, his line of white teeth gleaming in the darkness.
“This can’t be stopped,” he said, flinging his arms out as if to encompass everything. “The deal is done, the papers signed, the sentence struck!” His head tilted to the side and he took two steps toward me. I watched in fascination as sparks of electricity appeared from his fingertips, as if he were holding tiny bolts of lightning in his hand.
“I can’t give this back,” he said, staring down at the power in his hands with the same look of wonderment that was likely on my face. “I paid for it, and I intend to get my money’s worth.” He looked back up at me again, and his eyes narrowed. “I still hate you. Whether you want to admit it or not, I know that if not for you, my Gina and Ginny would still be alive, but I think I might understand you a little better.” He brought his hands up, the sparks between his fingers multiplying and growing larger now. “The power comes with a profound sense of entitlement, much like the one you must feel.”
I shook my head and held his gaze. “You got me all wrong,” I said, but later I would wonder if that were entirely true, if—mad as he was—Leonard Boyce had a point to what he was saying.
“And you’ve got less than two days,” he said, practically spitting the words at me. Now the miniature lightning was not just sparking from his fingertips, but in his eyes as well, flashing over the irises and through the whites like reflections in a mirror. The overall effect was eerie, and that’s coming from a person whose line of work deals in the supernatural.
My body was tense and ready to bolt out of the way should he try to launch some of that electric energy toward me.
As if reading my mind, Sam spoke again through my earpiece. “I’m calling in Thomas for backup. What are you doing? You think you can move faster than a bolt of lightning?”
“Not helpful,” I mumbled. To Boyce, I said, “I’m sorry about your family.”
I put as much of my natural Fae persuasion into the words as I could, but suspected these charms were useless against the poison this guy was drinking. Also, I really was sorry about the loss of his wife and daughter. I could relate to loss in the same way that I could relate to breathing. In truth, loss is a shared experience that humans have historically mistaken for solely being a human experience. This notion could not be more inaccurate. Loss is not a characteristic of humanity, but rather a characteristic of life.
Boyce gave his head a single shake—once to the left, then to the right. “Not yet,” he told me. “Not yet you’re not.”
As lightning flew from his fingertips directly toward my chest, I had to admit that Sam had been right about the whole ‘dodging a lightning bolt’ thing. The next thing I knew was the shock of a lifetime, a jolt that traveled as if by way of my veins. The pain was abrupt enough to elicit a scream, though I didn’t hear a thing.
Then, darkness. A deeper, fuller, longer darkness than I’d ever known in all my life.
CHAPTER 25
The whole being struck by lightning thing? It was getting old. Another thing that was becoming tedious? Seeing dead people. Specifically, dead people that were related to my existence somehow.
Of course, Thomas had told me that the visions and nightmares were not the actual spirits of the people I was seeing. He’d proved it to me, in fact, by taking me to visit my mother on the Other Side, and thereby highlighting the differences between the real her and the her manufactured by the Demon’s Curse. But this knowledge meant little when I found myself smack in the middle of another vision, as I was now.
Slowly, the world began to materialize before me, like a reality made of liquid, swirling cohesively together drop by drop. I was standing on thick, green grass. There was warm sunlight on my skin and trees at various intervals around me. A dog barked, someone laughed, and cicadas sang a song in the background.
I moved forward as if on a casual stroll, observing the scene in its entirety. To my left, a father and son were throwing around a football while a small child and her mother flew a kite in the distance behind them. To my right was a lake, complete with lily pads and wooden docks. Dragonflies skimmed the water’s surface and two majestic white swans floated near the center. It was pleasantly warm and the air was perfumed by the various floral landscapes that adorned the area.
To state the obvious, I was in a park. Where, I didn’t know. When, likewise. However, I knew enough of the Curse I was under to know that there were specific subjects I was meant to see, and could not leave this place until I did.
I spotted the couple only a few moments later, as I continued down the concrete path that cut through the park. It took me a moment to recognize the man, as he looked so very different than the other times I’d seen him, right down to his aura.
Beneath the shade of a large oak tree, atop a blanket that had been spread out and accompanied by a picnic basket and food, was a young Leonard Boyce and a young woman.
I stared, trying to equate the madman I knew with the happy, calm man before me. The comparison of auras was most significant, like night and day. My gaze flipped to the young woman beside him, and down to the large swell of her belly, where an entirely separate aura was beginning to glow.
The two took no notice of me, because this was merely a memory—or a warped version of one, anyway. They looked like any other young couple; happy, full of hope and in love. A small diamond gleamed on her ring fin
ger, bits of light catching in her thick auburn hair. She was lovely, Mrs. Boyce, both in the physical sense and the kind that is only possible with the presence of a beautiful soul.
Leonard himself appeared as harmless as the mailman, wearing pressed khaki slacks and a short-sleeved button up shirt that he’d fastened all the way to the collar. His hair was dark and thick, parted neatly on one side and combed over. He wore black-rimmed glasses, but their lenses could not stifle the love that radiated from his gaze as he looked at his young bride. He leaned in and kissed her cheek gently. He placed his hand on the bump of her belly.
I understood now what was happening, even while my throat was growing thick and my eyes pricking with coming tears.
Before I could catch my breath, the scene melted away like spring snow, and I found myself standing in a nursery. The top half of the walls was painted a light pink, and a wallpaper strip of dancing elephants separated it from a darker pink on the bottom. White, flowery curtains filtered the fading light of day through the single window in the room. There was an ornate crib with a carousel of matching elephants that hung above, and a white dresser topped with an elephant piggy bank and an ornament of silver baby shoes.
The sound of soft singing drew my attention to a white rocking chair, where Mrs. Boyce sat with a little bundle wrapped in a pink blanket cradled in her arms. Her face was flushed with joy as she looked down at the child. A tiny hand, no larger than a walnut, came up and clutched at her auburn hair, pulling gently with affection.
Mrs. Boyce, her voice heartbreakingly sweet and low, sang: Pretty baby of mine… close your pretty eyes… pretty baby of mine… sleep tight… pretty baby of mine… I love you so… pretty baby of mine… I’ll keep you close…
My eyes were drawn to the doorway, where Leonard stood with his shoulder against the frame, his hands resting in his pockets, and a daddy’s smile on his face. It seemed to me there was more love in the little pink room than air, and the knot that was bunching up in my throat continued to expand.
