I held up a hand to silence Reid. “Benjamin, at the library you were starting to tell me something, before Captain Drummond came over. What was it?”
Benjamin fidgeted, his unruffled exterior finally cracking a bit under the intensity of four superheroes staring at him. “Basically…I want to join the team.”
There was complete silence for a second, and then Reid burst out laughing.
Marco kicked Reid’s shin, causing him to wince.
Benjamin’s cheeks turned a vibrant shade of pink. “I’m serious.”
“Yes, I know you’re serious. Tell me what your thought process is right now. Why do you want to join the team after everything I told you today? You didn’t seem terribly impressed with us, honestly.”
Reid’s mouth fell open. “You can’t really be—”
He stopped talking and spun around to stare at Ember, who was still seething in the corner. They traded almost imperceptible facial expressions for a few seconds before Reid huffed and leaned against the wall. “Please, tell us why you want to be a superhero,” he said dully.
I would’ve given my right arm to know what Ember had said to Reid.
Benjamin scratched the back of his head and looked away from us. “When I saw my brother almost kill Jillian, I knew things had gotten out of hand. Not just at the fight, but in a bigger sense, too. I don’t want to do this anymore. Mom and Dad are getting more reckless during jobs, like they don’t care who gets killed, and now Beau’s following their example. It never used to be that way.”
"I wanna know why you didn't heal Jillian right away in the warehouse." Marco's tone brooked no argument. Though I trusted Benjamin, I was also curious about his defense. He'd offered to call me an ambulance that night, so why not just heal me?
"I didn’t know it was Jillian. I would've been healing a superhero who could've possibly put my brother in the slammer. Not my noblest moment, but I had to choose between a stranger and my brother. But I couldn't just leave you to die.” He sighed. “So I compromised by trying to call an ambulance. I figured you'd have a chance that way."
Reid and Ember listened with little emotion, but Marco snickered. "It must've been a nasty shock when you found out."
Benjamin's face hardened and he stared at the wall. "Yes, it was."
I had to be delicate. “It’s really admirable that you want to trade crime for crime fighting.”
Benjamin looked up at me. “But?”
“But you don’t care for our ways. You made that clear today in the reading room.”
“Neither do you.”
“What I don’t care for is Patrick’s leadership. Yes, some of our rules are…confining, but they keep us safe. They give us structure. And you know what? They produce excellent superheroes.” I gestured to my team. “All of us are products of the rules.”
Benjamin rolled his eyes, though there was a hardness in his expression that hinted at more than mere sarcasm. “Why are you defending the system that you’ve worked so hard to get out of?”
That wasn’t right. I’d simply broken away from Patrick’s leadership, not the entire culture in which I’d been raised.
Or had I?
After all, I was a superheroine who not only had beaten up her leader, but had taken over leadership of his team. At this very moment I was entertaining the idea of taking in a member of the forbidden families, one with a checkered past, and telling him our most closely-guarded secrets. Did all of that add up to a full abandonment of my upbringing?
Jillian!
Ember’s impatient tone snapped me back to inside the conference room and I realized that I had drifted off into my own thoughts. My eyes itched with fatigue.
I planted a hand on the wall, bowing my head and rubbing my forehead while I thought. Sluggish bits of ideas churned in my mind while my team waited for a decision; their palpable impatience with me didn’t help my thought process.
Patrick was a poor and ineffective leader, that much was obvious. He’d never bothered to employ the qualities of leadership that he should have. A change was warranted—but was my leadership warranted?
Yes. My automatic reply was fierce. You left first, you made the decisions that led everyone here, and you’re going to lead them against Patrick.
…No. You’re overemotional and you have no idea how to lead people in combat. Let Reid do it.
Yes. You can lead.
I was being ripped apart by my own brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and called on my training, imagining I was twelve years old and standing beside other children destined for public service.
Principle three: decisiveness. I will choose a course of action when required and see it through. Principle twenty-eight: determination. I will defend my city no matter the obstacles.
The age-old principles and definitions washed over me like balm, soothing my fractured mind. The principles were fundamentally good and right—they were worth supporting. They guided me when I didn’t know where to go or how to act.
In a moment of perfect clarity, I saw the solution to the quagmire we were in.
I looked around at my team. “Okay, you know what? The problem here isn’t with ‘the system.’ The problem is with Patrick and the situation we’re in. Right now we’ve found ourselves in a tight spot, and we’re making the best of it. We aren’t the first team to encounter uncharted territory, and we won’t be the last.”
“What’s your point, Jill?” Ember asked before yawning again.
Annoyance, likely born of tiredness, rose up in me. “My point is that the world isn’t going to end if I’m the leader, nor will it end if Benjamin joins the team.”
“No.” Reid’s defiant answer rang around the little room.
I was prepared for him. I looked Reid in the eyes. “This is my final judgment. Benjamin has proved time and time again that he possesses the qualities that, need I remind you, Patrick never did. He’ll be a valuable asset to the team.”
“I will not serve alongside a criminal,” Reid hissed. “That’s a mockery of everything we stand for. Marco is in the St. James line, but I’m actually of age, and I—I’m letting you lead because I didn’t take responsibility when I should have. But I am drawing the line here.”
Oh, he did not just say that to me.
“You’re ‘letting’ me? Reid Fischer, let me make something perfectly clear.”
His jaw tensed, and I geared up for a full rant about how he wasn’t my father, elder, or anyone else with authority over me. I had an entire speech about how I was the leader now and that meant submitting to me, whether he liked it or not. That is what leadership is.
Then I saw our reflection in the mirror.
Four haggard people were positioned around the dark-haired woman in the center. She carried herself with quiet strength, and the gleam in her eye dared anyone to challenge her.
That woman was the great-great-granddaughter of the first and greatest superhero who had ever lived.
That woman was the granddaughter of the first Battlecry, who’d led her team until the bitter end.
That woman was me.
I was in a line of women far greater than I could ever hope to be, but I was living proof that those other women had existed. They’d led men and women into battle, Christina against literal armies. My grandmother Battlecry had given her life to protect other people, and her love for her team was so apparent that her enemies had killed them before her, knowing it would be the best way to torture her. I didn’t know how to be a leader, but I supposed that their examples embodied some aspect of it.
I was going to lead my team and stop Patrick, and the whole world—every superhero, criminal, and civilian—was going to watch us. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care when. But we would, because we were born to defend Saint Catherine. Nothing was going to stop us—not elders, not rules, and certainly not infighting.
“Yes?” Reid said, ending my reverie.
“Do you believe in the principles?”
His indignation turned to co
nfusion. “What?”
“Do you believe in them? All twenty-nine?”
“Uh, yeah. Why?”
“I do, too.”
He studied me, working through what I was saying. “Okay. So?”
I closed the distance between us and put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m not trying to destroy our way of life, I promise. I’m trying to defend it.” Reid stared at my hand, but he didn’t shrug it off. “I’m your sister-in-arms. Please trust me.” I was belatedly surprised by the amount of emotion I was able to put into my soft words.
“Jill, this is too much.” He was barely audible. “Heroes are born, not made.”
“Then what was Patrick? He’s an elder’s son and he chose evil. Benjamin is a supervillain’s son and he’s chosen good. If we can acknowledge that Patrick isn’t a hero anymore, we can respect Benjamin’s defection to our side.”
“We don’t know him, though. We don’t know if he’s truly chosen good. What if he just wants to find out our secrets and exploit them?”
“Ember can listen to his thoughts.”
Benjamin made a face. “Does ‘he’ get a say in his defense?”
Everyone turned to him. Reid held out a hand as if to say, we’re listening.
“Like Jillian said, Ember can hear my thoughts. All of you can beat the crap out of me. So if you’re worried about me somehow overpowering you guys, or getting the drop on you, don’t flatter me. As for whether I’m trustworthy, I’ll just have to earn your trust. But I’d like to remind you that I’ve been in a position to hurt you all before and I didn’t. I could’ve let Jillian die in the warehouse and killed Marco while he was unconscious. I could’ve let Ember die at the store, but I healed her at the risk of exposing myself as a Super. I could’ve told Patrick the truth about the wire. Say what you want about my criminal past, but the point stands that I’ve had plenty of chances to do harm to your team, once in self-defense, and I didn’t.”
Reid mulled over Benjamin’s words. “Okay, you’re not evil. But why do you want to be a superhero? Why now? Why not just leave your family behind and start over somewhere as a civilian?”
Reid’s question was fair. Benjamin’s request to join the team was unexpected, and I wanted to know why he was ready and willing to abandon his family for people who were, essentially, strangers.
Benjamin pointed to his sling. “I’m not positive, but I’ll bet you anything there are rumors going around that we’re dead. Patrick destroyed the library and there is already a body count. When Ember and Reid were laid out on the ground, I thought they were dead for a few minutes. That got me thinking that if I could get on the list of the dead, I could slip away unnoticed and never have to explain to my family why.”
He gazed at me. “If you think you had backlash leaving your team, you’ve got another thing coming. We ‘supervillains’ aren’t as unified as you guys are, but we have a few common beliefs. One of them is that family comes before everything. Everything. I can’t overstate this.”
“You need protection,” Marco said flatly. “We get it.”
“But why would you want to risk retribution by joining up with a public team?” Ember asked. “You wouldn’t stay secret long.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You guys wear masks, or you used to. But I wanted to join the team because…because…I’ve always admired superheroes.” He stared at a spot on the table, his face scarlet. “I might be the kid of supervillains, but I’m a healer. It’s hard to parlay that into criminal enterprise. Whenever I’d hang out with the Rowe or Peery kids, they’d tease me because I was different. They played kill-the-hero, while I stayed on the sideline ready to heal the scrapes and cuts because I couldn’t stand the violence. They called me Bleeding Heart Benjamin.”
He looked up, but his eyes were distant and unfocused, a thousand miles away and years back. “In high school I joined up with JROTC, and even got myself an ROTC scholarship to Old Dominion University’s nursing program up in Norfolk. I’d been born on the wrong side of the divide to be a superhero, so I figured the Army was the next best thing. They were eager to have me.”
I was impressed, and a little fluttery at the idea of Benjamin in a soldier’s uniform. The old sleepy warmth in my stomach returned. “The Army? What happened?”
“My dad happened.” There was a lifetime of bitterness in his words. “He said no son of his would ever be the government’s stooge, and a nurse on top of it. He made me refuse the scholarship and join the rest of the Trents in our little ‘human resources consulting’ business. I’d helped out before, but it became my job after high school. That was two years ago.”
“You’ve been studying for nursing school, though. You’ve been planning to leave.”
“Yeah. I was going to float some story about using my position as a nurse to, I don’t know, steal pharmaceuticals or something. I hadn’t picked a story yet when I met you at Café Stella last month.”
“And then today you realized you had an unexpected chance to become a superhero?”
“Yes.”
I turned to the rest of the team. “So now that you’ve heard his story, what do you say?”
I was convinced. I knew there’d be problems because our ways were alien to him—but he wanted to learn, and I wanted to teach him.
Marco shrugged. “I like him. A real medic would be a huge perk, plus he can tell us about the forbidden families.”
I hadn’t even thought of that, but now that Marco mentioned it, I imagined that Benjamin would be an unprecedented wealth of information on our superpowered foes.
Instead of answering, Ember placed a hand on Reid’s cheek, gently turning his face to look at her. They gazed at each other for several seconds, until Reid closed his eyes and covered her thin hand with his.
“I know,” he whispered.
“He won’t,” Ember said. “He’s not like Patrick.”
Reid brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, a terrible sadness lingering between them.
I had to look away.
Finally, Reid turned his attention back to Benjamin, who was examining his fingernails. “I know it’s not up to just me, but I’ll work with you if you swear to abide by our laws, as much as we do, anyway.” He glanced at me. “We’ll teach you the principles, the traits, everything. But you came to us, not the other way around. You’re doing this our way.”
“That’s fine,” Benjamin said. “Your way.”
Reid turned to me. “Jill, are you sure your judgment hasn’t been compromised by emotions?”
“I’m sure. I trust Benjamin with my life.”
“Thank you,” Benjamin said, smiling at me. “You know, we should make this all official. I’m a new member of the team, and Jillian is the new leader. Since those were democratic decisions, there should be a democratic swearing in.”
“A what?” I asked. I didn’t know what “democratic” or “swearing in” meant.
“What’s a democratic?” Ember asked.
Benjamin let out a low whistle. “Wow. Um, it means voting. Never took a civics class, huh?”
I rubbed the back of my head, suddenly unsure. “Nobody voted for me. I just kinda assumed leadership.”
Benjamin’s infectious grin returned. “All in favor of Jillian being the leader of this team, say aye.”
Four ayes echoed around the small room.
I bit my lip to contain my happiness. “Now what’s this swearing in thing?”
“It’s an official promise you make in front of an audience. You typically raise your right hand and take an oath to do whatever it is that you stand for.”
The concept had appeal, but what would I say? “I promise to not be like Patrick”? I hoped that was implicit in my every word and deed up to that point. Marco echoed my thoughts. “What would go in this oath? The principles?”
“Please, not all of them,” Ember said, shaking her head. “How about just the sixth, twenty-second, and twenty-third? Those right there are where Patrick screwed up the most.”
“I like that,” Marco said, a crooked grin lighting up his face.
Reid looked thoughtful, then turned to Benjamin. “You said you raise your right hand?”
“Yeah, and then usually you repeat after someone. I, so-and-so, will or won’t do this and that.”
Reid considered that. “Before we swear you in, we need to pick a codename for you. It’s traditional for teammates to do it, but the leader gets the final word.”
Only leaders could pick their own codenames.
“Mercury,” I said without hesitation.
“Mercury,” Benjamin repeated. “Why that?”
Camp education was thin at best, but we all knew the old myths, with their tales of heroes and mighty deeds. The enormous cast of characters found in myths had provided an almost endless list of codenames over the years. Most teams had at least one codename from mythology.
I pointed to Benjamin’s feet. “Mercury had winged shoes that enabled him to run at superhuman speed. His winged stick, the caduceus, is also the emblem of the Army Medical Corps, I believe.” Another part of my education: knowing all about the military.
“Plus, he was the god of thieves,” Marco said with a snicker.
I tugged on his ear and he winced.
“I like it because it’s one mythological name replacing another,” Ember said. “I vote for Mercury.”
The others echoed her vote.
I faced Benjamin. “If you don’t have any objections, raise your, er, left hand, please.” His right hand was in a sling, but I figured it didn’t matter.
He straightened and raised his left hand, his face somber. I picked the words for his oath, which would be different than mine.
“I, Mercury, promise to defend the citizens of Saint Catherine against any and all who would do them harm, even at the cost of my own life.”
Benjamin’s eyes shone with an intensity that took my breath away while he repeated his oath. When he finished speaking, the other three patted him on the shoulder and back, murmuring words of welcome and appreciation.
Reid touched my elbow. “I’ll give you your oath, if you want. Raise your right hand, please. I, Battlecry.”
Battlecry Page 21
