The letter read:
Merciless,
I have watched your activities with great interest. Not many people can make a fool out of Tom Terror, destroy a team of superheroes, and eliminate three of Falconcrest City's worst criminals in their first week of activity.
There can be only one Boss of Bosses, however, so I challenge you to a gentleman's contest. Come alone to the Falconcrest City Opera House and we shall see who is the superior criminal mastermind.
You have my word of honor no harm shall befall her until your arrival. However, if you try and double cross me I shall be forced to do something unmentionable to her.
Sincerely yours,
Angel Eyes.
“Just when I thought the criminals in this town couldn't get any stranger,” I muttered. “Who calls themselves a criminal mastermind?”
“You’ve done so several dozen times in the week I’ve known you.”
I didn't bother responding to Cloak, looking between my two henchmen. “When did this letter arrive?”
“I am fairly sure it's new,” Diabloman said.
“I'm one-hundred-percent sure that it was within the last twenty-four hours,” Cindy said.
“You have no idea, do you?” I asked.
“She only vanished a few nights ago,” Diabloman said. “Nighthuntress worked us ragged protecting the city in your absence.”
“She was very mad, though,” Cindy said. “Mandy was getting really frustrated waiting for you to get back from your teleportation whatchamacallit.”
I tried to remember what I knew about this Angel Eyes character. I didn't remember much about the guy. Falconcrest City had over four hundred supervillains alone and even an amateur enthusiast like myself couldn't remember them all. I did recall, however, he was one of the Nightwalker's more powerful foes and one of his occult rather than street crime villains.
“He was both, actually,” Cloak corrected.
I have to ask Cloak for more information in a minute. “Okay. We need to form a posse to take this Angel Eyes guy down.”
“You're not going alone?” Diabloman asked.
“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “The very fact the guy said I should come alone is a good reason I should come with a small army.”
“Occasionally, you surprise me with a bit of cleverness.”
“Thank you, Cloak,” I said. “Okay, everyone, what do we know about this Angel Eyes guy?”
Cindy raised her hand as if she were in grade school. “Oooh! Pick me, I know all about him.”
“I know much as well,” Diabloman said.
“I’ll fill in any blanks they miss,” Cloak said.
“I’ll go to the greatest resource in the world first.” I went to the Night Computer and pulled up Angel Eyes’ Superpedia page. Most of it consisted of listing his crimes, which were considerable. Angel Eyes a pretty heavy hitter, which surprised me because I only recalled a few facts about him. Memorizing everything I could, I decided to let the others speak anyway. “Go ahead, Cindy, I'm all ears.”
“I used to hench for him.” Cindy sighed dreamily. “He's gorgeous. Like the most beautiful supervillain in the world.”
“That... doesn't help.” I wrinkled my nose.
Diabloman had more information. “He was once an actor, stage as opposed to screen. Supposedly named Thomas Star, no one knows where he came from. Star was disfigured by an obsessive fan after rebuffing her advances. He started wearing elaborate masks to cover his scarring. Later, he started adopting the persona of the roles he used to play. In the end, his obsessions turned to murder.”
“Wow, that’s…incredibly unoriginal. It’s a half-dozen literary and movie clichés strung together. All you need is a dead girlfriend.” It was, unfortunately, more or less what his webpage said along with the fact he was a really powerful wizard who ran an upscale criminal organization in Uptown.
“All of that is misinformation,” Cloak said. “You shouldn’t trust everything you read on the internet. Supervillains change their pages all the time.”
“Those fiends!” I said, in mock horror, trying to distract myself from the fact my wife had been taken. I wasn’t succeeding. Even so, I checked out my Superpedia page to see what it said about me. Much to my disgust, I found out I was still a stub entry.
“Angel Eyes is just sort of disfigured. You know, like the Phantom of the Opera in the musical,” Cindy said, defensively. “He's wonderful.”
I snapped my fingers in front of her face. “Stop admiring the guy I'm going to kill.”
“Sorry.” Cindy looked down at the ground in shame.
“Angel Eyes is the mortal avatar of the Greek god Adonis. Aphrodite him restored him to life after his first death and fed him ambrosia only to cast him away due to damage sustained to his face from Hephaestus' hammer. Blessed with her favor despite his minor disfigurement, Adonis has spent the past few thousand years engaged in self-improvement. He's a staggeringly powerful magician, hedonistic and amoral, limited only by his melancholy. I suggest caution since he's as likely to destroy a man as give him a present and vice versa.”
Great. I was going to have to fight another god. Worse, a Greek god. I hated the Olympians. It was a Jewish thing. “Is he dangerous to Mandy?”
“No. He doesn’t harm beautiful things and, for all of her skill and foul temperament, Mrs. Karkofsky is a very beautiful woman.”
“That’s good news.” I breathed a sigh of relief.
“The problem is he's probably not working alone.”
“What?” I asked.
“Don't you hate it when he talks to his cape like that?” Cindy said. “I always worry it's talking about me.”
Diabloman made a 'shh' gesture.
“Angel Eyes does not like to work alone. He demands an audience and routinely teams up with other archcriminals. If any of the city’s other supervillains are involved, I do not know if we can guarantee your wife's safety.”
“Well, crap,” I said, breathing in. I had to trust in Mandy’s ability to protect herself. She’d been trained to be an agent of the Foundation for World Harmony by her father since near-birth and was the original candidate chosen by Sunlight to replace the then-recently-deceased Nightwalker. While I didn’t give her even odds against a demigod since she didn’t have any powers, I didn’t think she was the helpless damsel-in-distress either. As much as it went against my every instinct, I needed to handle this cautiously and not go off half-cocked.
Aw, who was I kidding?
“Get in your uniforms and get the car,” I said, looking between them. “We’re getting my wife back.”
Chapter Three
Where I Go to Confront Angel Eyes
Time had called the Nightcar the most advanced car ever made. It could move like a jet and possessed an arsenal equal to a military helicopter. It was the perfect vehicle to get me to Angel Eyes as fast as possible. Only one small problem: I had no idea how to drive it. Thirty minutes after taking it out I'd smashed into three cars, nearly sideswiped a still-human grandmother, and set fire to an abandoned building trying to turn on the radio. Thankfully, no one was hurt…too badly.
“Are you sure you want to drive? I can do it just fine.” Cindy asked, reading Esoterrorism in the back. She’d changed out of her previous outfit to her sultry Red Riding Hood costume with corset, scarlet hood, fishnets, and all-too-short skirt. I doubted it was very good for fighting but it certainly was an attention grabber. Too bad I couldn’t appreciate it in my concern for Mandy.
“Everything I'm doing is intentional,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road and hoping I didn’t accidentally kill us all.
“Even the stupid stuff?” Cindy asked.
“Especially the stupid stuff,” I said, slowing down to a more reasonable speed. The streets were hazards of abandoned cars, dead bodies, debris, and worse.
Falconcrest City's downtown was like no other city in the world. Whereas the rest of the world's architecture had moved on, Falconcrest had kept to a 194
0s art deco style which seemed designed to emphasize the city's power and majesty. There were huge towering buildings with statues of Atlas holding up the world, faceless figures holding swords, and gargoyles aplenty. There were a few modern buildings but they were the exception rather than the rule.
The damage from the recent events, not just the zombies but the rise in superhuman violence following the Nightwalker's death, had left many of these buildings damaged. Some were burnt out remnants of their former selves and others had whole sections blown up by forces unknown. Others had been decorated in Satanic graffiti or bodies chained to the side by the Brotherhood. Large banners proclaimed Zul-Barabas' imminent return and a few had cheesy slogans written in red paint. At least, I hoped it was red paint. One of the most effective was a simple one: “Where are your heroes now?”
It hurt me to see Falconcrest City this way. While I'd grown up in New Angeles for most of my formative years, I'd moved to this city in my late adolescence. Life had come down hard on my family and, for better or worse, Falconcrest City had taught me how to be mean enough to survive. Despite all the problems the city had with poverty, supercriminals, and corruption, there were good people here. People who were being abused by individuals who had the exact same sort of powers I did.
I wanted to help them.
I just didn’t know now.
“Anyway, let’s focus on figuring out how we’re going to take out Angel Eyes. He’s vastly stronger than anything you guys are used to facing. Well, maybe not your earlier career, D, but recently.”
“Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die,” Diabloman quoted Tennyson.
“Let's avoid the dying part.”
“Agreed,” Cindy said. “Also, let’s avoid anything too hard or dangerous too. What’s the point if you have to work to be a criminal?”
“I like your philosophy.” I slowed down the car in hopes of getting better control over it. “But we’re saving Mandy first.”
“Agreed,” Cindy said. “I like her and you’d be insufferable if she died.”
Sometimes I wondered why we were friends.
“So tell me about these 'zombie outbreaks' affecting the city. I'm not going to have flesh-eating undead as the sole occupant of my city soon, am I?” I asked, hating what had happened to my home. I needed more information, though, if I was going to resolve this. What I’d learned from the Backwoodsman was a drop in the bucket to a month’s worth of being in the thick of things.
“People didn't panic immediately when the zombies arrived,” Diabloman said. “After all, this is Falconcrest City. The dead rising is just another Thursday.”
“Oh yes,” Cindy said, smiling. “Remember Halloween 2008?”
“Ah yes.” I remembered I’d been attending a party at the university. “The Nightwalker versus Dracula. Six vampires came in to the frat looking for victims. We ended up serving them pizza with garlic. Old Drac didn’t look for brains in his followers, did he?”
“For an elder vampire, Vlad III was never very bright,” Cloak said.
“So are people panicking now?” I asked.
“Most people are gone,” Diabloman said. “Spooked or driven from this land by the cult’s reign of terror.”
“What happened?” I said. “Assuming the ever-rising tide of the dead didn’t spook them like lesser, sane, mortals.”
“The Mayor was killed by the cult along with a lot of other people,” Cindy said, looking up from her book. “That’s when people started evacuating the city. Almost two thirds of the population is gone now. The rest are riding it out to see if things get worse before they get better. They’re gathered in places like the sports stadiums, hospitals, subway stations, and more in hopes things will get better. Sadly, the Brotherhood is targeting these places in hopes of getting at the survivors.”
“I... see,” I said, trying to picture that. I was unable to comprehend people who would do such a thing.
“Perhaps, then, supervillainy may be not be your calling,” Cloak said.
“You shut up,” I muttered. I didn’t need his moralizing when the city was falling apart.
Diabloman continued his discussion of Falconcrest’s sorry state. “Your wife did her best to work with Amanda Douglas, Sunlight, and the other survivors who chose to resist. As Nighthuntress, she turned the unarmed civilians of this land into a force capable of resisting the slaughter. Many thousands of zombies were sent back to the grave and it seemed the Brotherhood of Infamy would fall beneath her and Ultragoddess' efforts.”
“Mandy and she, uh, met did they?” I asked, hesitantly.
“No,” Diabloman said. “For some reason, they seemed to be avoiding each other.”
I couldn't imagine why that would be the case.
“Mandy did, however, work with several supervillains who weren't of the, 'kill all humans' variety,” Cindy said. “Starting with us but also including the Puzzle Family, Jigsaw Jones, the Ice Screamers, the Raincoat Man, and the Flower Power Guru. She did a lot of coordinating with the Black Witch who served as an intermediary between Mandy and Ultragoddess.”
I grimaced, trying not to feel jealous. The Black Witch had been Mandy's girlfriend, the woman she loved if I was honest, during college. As much as I felt for Mandy and she for me, we'd joined together after bad breakups. The Black Witch had been hers the same way that Gabrielle had been mine.
“We'll put a stop to these bastards after I rescue Mandy. No one menaces my town but me.”
“Freeing this city from the curse of the undead may be easier said than done,” Diabloman said, leaning in over my shoulder. “In addition to the zombies and various undead supervillains running around, the Brotherhood of Infamy has begun working all sorts of perverse magical rituals across town. There are many threats here which did not exist before and will be far harder to remove than the zombies.”
“How bad could they be?”
We hit a hellhound. It was eight-feet-long, made of stone with cracks leading to a hellfire core, and possessed glowing red eyes. It landed against the windshield and was cracked in several places from the Night Car’s armor.
“You did that on purpose!” Cindy shouted.
“No, I didn't! It was just very appropriate timing.” I turned on the windshield wipers. They banged the hellhound in the face repeatedly. “How did the Nightwalker ever drive this thing?”
“I took lessons before driving around in a fusion-powered jet on wheels.”
The windshield wipers were just annoying our hellish hood ornament so I hit the brakes, sending the monster flying off onto the back of a car in front of us. The injured demon got up as I saw the damaged car held a family of four. It was minivan filled with supplies and two of the people inside were children under the age of twelve.
Letting children die due to negligence was in poor taste for a criminal genius, so I snapped my fingers and caused the monster to become trapped in a block of ice a foot larger than itself. It took much of my remaining energy reserves, which were running low now, but was worth it. The family drove off, hopefully not getting a good look at me. The last thing I needed was the police knowing I was back in town.
“Case in point. There are over twenty-five thousand zombies within the downtown area alone,” Diabloman said. “That is not counting the cultists, their hellhounds, tentacle beasts, mercenaries, and intelligent super-powered servants. We’ve had worse times in the city but not by much.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll take care of this.” I reassured them, not at all confident about our chances. “Okay, we should be seeing the Falconcrest City Opera House any time now. I followed the internet’s instructions to the letter. I thought it was on Central and Sixth.”
Cindy said, leaning up into the driver's seat. “No, that was the North Falconcrest City Opera House. We're looking for the Falconcrest City Opera House proper. As opposed to the South Falconcrest City Opera House or the Uptown Falconcrest City Opera House.”
This city liked opera way too much. “Right, righ
t, I knew that.”
“Perhaps I should drive,” Diabloman offered.
“No,” I replied, raising a hand. “I need to learn how to do this. You'd think there'd be a Night-GPS onboard with all the fancy doohickeys the Nightwalker installed on this thing.”
“Third button on the right.”
I pressed it. A holographic map appeared over the dashboard, giving directions to the opera house.
“Oh,” I muttered. “Okay.”
“The car also has autopilot designed to avoid innocent bystanders and road obstacles.”
“Uh, take me to the Falconcrest City Opera House?” I asked, hoping this worked.
“Affirmative,” the car dashboard said in a feminine voice.
“I meant to do that.” I then said to Cloak, “Why didn’t you tell me about that?”
“I needed you to calm down. You were panicked when you first heard your wife was threatened. If you’re going to face Angel Eyes, it should be after you’ve had some time to cool down.”
“Devious. I’m rubbing off on you.”
“I hope not.”
“So, Cloak, does Angel Eyes have any weaknesses?” I asked, hoping I could figure a way around the wizard demigod should things get dicey.
“None you'd be able to readily exploit. Adonis is more powerful than any Reaper's Cloak wielder and immune to most of your abilities. Bluntly, fire and cold won't affect him nor will you be able to turn him intangible. He, by contrast, will be able to do any number of sorcerous effects. He could turn you to snow, music, dust, or erase you from existence with little more than a few words. Worse, I can’t teach you the defenses I learned through years of studying magic to prevent it.”
“In short, I'm probably screwed.”
“Yes,” Cloak said, honestly. “However, he is possessed of a weak mental core. Like all incredibly vain people, he longs for validation and approval from his peers. Present yourself as a peer or superior and you might be able to charm him over to your side.”
The Games of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 2) Page 3
