Death Blows

by DD Barant

  It was an absurd image, but there was something there. The killer had exhibited two patterns of behavior, leading me to believe there might be multiple suspects—but what if there were just multiple personalities? Could lem personas fracture, dividing their animal essence from their civilized one?

  When I suggest the idea to Cassius, he’s dubious. “I’ve never heard of anything like that—but you’re the expert in these sorts of matters. If you think it’s a possibility, we’ll look into it.” I rub my temples with the heels of my palms. “Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t know what is or isn’t possible. Throw me an easy pitch like time travel and I get all discombobulated. Give me a full- fledged schizophrenic any day.”

  “Well, it’s not completely random, is it? There are patterns we can analyze, facts we can study. It’s not hopeless.” I shake my head. “No, of course not. I—”

  My phone chimes. “Hello?”

  “Jace.” I recognize Neil’s voice. “Sorry to disturb you like this, but I was reading through some back issues and an image caught my eye. It might be nothing, but I thought you’d like to know.”

  “An image? Of what?”

  “Your first victim. I’m looking at a panel depicting a skeletal version of the Flash right now.” Suddenly I don’t seem quite so tired. “What’s the context?”

  “His death. Chronicled in a maxi-series called Crisis on Infinite Earths.”

  “Parallel realities again.”

  “Very much so. Neither Grant Morrison nor Alan Moore was directly involved in this particular series, but it does chronicle the death of several major characters.”

  “So this was the last appearance of the Flash?”

  He chuckles. “Oh, no. Death in the comic book realm is at best a temporary setback; it’s often used to relaunch the character in a different direction, or simply to boost sales. This particular version of the Flash did remain dead for quite a long time, but even he eventually returned—at the hands of Grant Morrison, in fact.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Racing backward through time to avert a catastrophe.”

  Backward through time. I sigh. “Thanks, Neil. I appreciate the call—I may not be getting any sleep for a while.”

  “My pleasure, Jace.”

  After he hangs up, I tell Cassius what I’ve just learned. “Too bad my time-travel theory sucks,” I say.

  Cassius looks distracted. “Still, any information might eventually prove useful…”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Hmm? I’m sorry—I was thinking about Gretchen, actually.”

  I get up and stretch. “Maybe we should take a break. Go see how she and Dr. Pete are doing.”

  He frowns. “Jace Valchek, suggesting a social visit over casework? I may have to ask to see your ID.”

  I’m already heading to the bedroom to put on some street clothes. “Only human, Caligula. Even I need the occasional breather—besides, it’s a good way to reset your brain. Let your subconscious chew on the situation for a while, see what it spits out.”

  We take Galahad with us. He’s been asleep in the bedroom since Xandra brought him back, but he’s more than happy to go for a walk. I’m kind of getting used to having him around, though with him and Cassius both crashing here it’s starting to feel a little crowded. I’m sure Dr. Pete will be happy to see him, anyway.

  “Wow,” I say. It turns out that a lack of visitors is the least of Dr. Pete’s worries.

  His room is almost unrecognizable. Tapestries embroidered in arcane symbols hang on the walls, incense burns on a shrine in the corner, and there’s a little old lady stirring a large pot of something on a hot plate beside that. Wolf cubs dart out from under the bed, between my legs and out into the hall, where they sniff at Galahad’s bare feet curiously. A dozen or so of Pete’s family form a circle around his bed, all of them in human form and chatting like they’re clustered around a punch bowl instead of an invalid. There’s violin music playing, and it’s not recorded.

  In the midst of all this is the same tall, imposing nurse who read me the Riot Act last time. She looks considerably more frazzled, though not defeated. I wish her well; I’ve dealt with Pete’s family before, and they are formidable.

  Except they’re not really his family. They’re a fiction, created by the NSA to provide him with a cover. Not completely made up, of course—I have no doubt they’re actually related to one another, just not to Dr. Pete. I wonder what happened to his actual relatives.

  Cassius and I push our way inside, Galahad right behind us. The nurse spots us, gives us a grim look, and says, “Visiting hours will be over in twenty minutes. At that point, I will clear the room, if I have to use a flame-thrower.”

  “So noted,” I say. “Good luck with that.”

  She stalks out of the room, clipboard under her arm. I feel sorry for her next patient.

  Dr. Pete is looking better—his eye hasn’t fully regenerated yet, but his teeth seem to have grown back in. He’s still in splints and half-were form, but his one eye is open and focused on me.

  “Hi,” I say. He nods, weakly. Can’t talk, of course, or use sign language yet. That’s as far as I get anyway, because now the family has noticed me. I’ve only been to Dr. Pete’s once, but you’d think I was some sort of long-lost relative from the way I’m treated; within a few seconds I’m the one that’s surrounded and being inundated with sympathy. Lots of hugging and squeezing of shoulders, arms, hands. “Thank you, I’m fine,” I say over and over. “Really. I’m okay. Thanks. That’s very sweet.”

  Leo makes his way over from the opposite side of the bed. He was introduced to me as Pete’s father, and he’s definitely the head of the Adams pack. He’s got two pointy gray tufts of hair that stick up from head, but they always remind me more of Bozo the Clown than anything wolfy.

  “Jace,” he says, and gives me a big hug. “We need to talk,” he whispers in my ear, then lets go and stands back. “Such a terrible thing that’s happened to our boy.” His eyes are filled with pain.

  “He’ll be okay. I, uh—”

  “I was wondering if you could pick up some things for him from his office,” Leo says. “Let’s step outside for a minute, I’ll get you a list.”

  Cassius glances my way as we exit, but doesn’t follow.

  Leo leads me down the hall and to a waiting area, almost identical to the one outside the maternity ward. He sits, and motions me to do the same.

  “So,” I say. “What would you like me to bring?”

  He studies me for a second before answering. “That was a lie. What I need from you is your understanding.”

  “About what?”

  “Do you know how hard it is to sign with broken fingers? Not to mention painful? But when we came here to see Peter, he insisted. It took him a long time, but he finally got his message across. Do you know what it was?”

  “I—no. I have no idea.”

  “Tell Jace the truth. About himself, his past. He wants you to know what he did, for whatever reason.”

  “That’s not necessary. People who think they’re about to die will say things they regret later—”

  He shakes his head. “No. Peter is a doctor, a good one, and he knows that his body will heal. He wants this done because he’s had what thropes call a tearaway experience—an injury so painful it lays bare what is and isn’t important to the one that suffers it. This is what’s important to him, and I’m going to honor that.”

  He hesitates, gathering his thoughts before he speaks. “The Adams pack may seem like a close-knit clan, but that is not because of shared blood. It is because of shared pain. We are, in truth, a ragtag bunch of misfits, outcasts from larger and stronger packs—or at least our ancestors were. Mongrels and half-breeds are our heritage, and none of us care. Many of us fled from the purges of the war, and still carry those scars with us.

  “We take in those that need it. Your employer, David Cassius, he knows this. He was the one who asked us to
take in Peter.”

  “Did he tell you what Peter did?”

  “Yes. We would not have accepted him otherwise. I will not excuse his actions—what he did was terrible. But many of us have done terrible things, Jace.” He meets my eyes, unblinking. I don’t know about him, but I can’t deny the truth of that statement when it comes to myself.

  “He has tried to atone for his deeds,” Leo continues. “To act, not apologize. The dead, after all, do not care about apologies.”

  “No,” I say. “They don’t.”

  “He respects you a great deal. What you think is important to him. Listen to his story with an open heart, that’s all I ask of you.”

  I keep my voice neutral. “Go ahead.”

  “The study of human medicine is not a terribly profitable one. And it requires a great deal more study—human beings are prone to so many conditions, aren’t they? Despite this, Peter persevered. Over the course of several years, he acquired a number of debts. One of these was to a criminal organization called La Lupo Grigorio.”

  “The Gray Wolves.” This world’s equivalent of the Mafia. “I know who they are.”

  “Then you know what they are capable of. They required a shaman versed in biothaumaturgy—golem activation. Peter had been moonlighting in that field to make some extra money, and they pressured him to work for them. He was young and broke and most of all naive—after all, he was simply helping to create life, wasn’t he? What could be the harm?”

  Leo sighs. “I know, I know. He was a fool. He thought he was simply bending the rules, adding laborers that would exist off the books—but still, he reasoned, at least they would exist.”

  “For a while.”

  “Yes. He did not learn until later how brief and brutal that existence often was. When he did, he planned to turn himself in.”

  “Planned?”

  “I wish Peter’s story was unique, but it is not. The Gray Wolves are old and cunning, and they always need people with Peter’s skills. Over time, they have evolved a strategy to ensure the continued cooperation of their employees.”

  He pauses again, begins to speak, then stops. “They,” he says softly, “know about… breaking things. Objects, structures. People. I don’t know if you truly understand how important a pack is to a lycanthrope, but it is more than family—that is simply flesh and blood. The pack is part of your soul.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I keep quiet. After a moment he continues.

  “You can always turn to your pack when you are in trouble. No matter what kind, no matter what you have done. Peter knew this, as all thropes do. Even more than a thrope’s strength or ability to heal, it is this knowledge that gives us the most security. A thrope that belongs to a pack is never alone.

  “Unless,” he says, his voice bleak, “the pack itself is destroyed.”

  It takes me a second. “My God. How many?”

  “Eleven. Not a large clan, by most standards—it’s one of the reasons he was chosen. Slaughtered in their beds in what seemed a botched robbery, with the Gray Wolves ready to accept him as one of their own while he was still in shock. You’d be surprised how many such victims accept, even if they suspect the truth. Even if they know for sure.”

  I shake my head. “No, I wouldn’t. The desire to belong is one of the strongest drives the human psyche has—and primal urges always come to the fore during grief. He wouldn’t have been the first victim to identify with his attacker—or the first to grab a dubious lifeline when it was offered.”

  “That is true—but that is not what he did. He went to the authorities instead. And that is how he came to be with us.”

  “Witness relocation. I get it.”

  “I don’t think you do.” He leans forward, eyes intent under shaggy brows. “He is a member, of our family and our pack. He is a decent, honorable man who was the victim of his own bad judgment and has devoted the rest of his life to making amends. I speak to you not as someone who harbors such fugitives professionally—though I certainly do that—but as a man who considers himself Peter’s father.”

  “What do you want from me, Leo?”

  “Just give him another chance. Let him heal, then talk to him. He’s worth your friendship, I promise you.”

  I rub my forehead. “All right, I will. But I have a question for you, first.”

  “Anything.”

  “Do you know a thrope named Tair?”

  No recognition in his eyes, no change in his body language. “No, Jace. I do not.” If he’s lying, he’s too good for me—maybe not in an interrogation room, but right here and now.

  “He’s the thrope responsible for what happened to Peter,” I say. “He could be working for the Gray Wolves, but his motivations seem personal. I haven’t been able to find out anything about him, and Peter claims he doesn’t know who he is, either.”

  The look on Leo’s face darkens. “Whoever he is,” he growls, “he will regret the day he was whelped.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He will.”

  Leo returns to the hospital room, but I stay in the waiting area—I suddenly feel drained, just not up to the crush of people and the sight of Dr. Pete all bandaged up.

  Sometimes, the worst thing about a case is the sense of loss—not just the loss of a life, but the emotional gravity that the death generates, a swirling pit dragging down everything near it: careers, relationships, hopes. Sal Aquitaine’s child would never know her father. Lucy Barbarossa’s mysterious lover would never hold her in his arms again. All John Dark’s plans and schemes would, in the end, have to rise or fall without him.

  It’s always the survivors who bear the scars. Catharine Great Shaka, robbed first of her country and now of her legacy. Silverado, AKA the Quicksilver Kid, a loner now even more alone. Brother Stone, toiling endlessly in his self-created tomb, his only companion his guilt. Even Cassius had been diminished by the loss of the Solar Centurion’s armor; if nothing else, it was a link to his past, the symbol of a simpler, more romantic heroism that the head of the NSA could no longer afford to indulge in.

  But maybe that heroism had always been an illusion. Maybe the Bravo Brigade had never been anything but soldiers doing a job, an extension of the Hexagon’s will. Maybe the only one who still thought of them as heroes was my comic-book-obsessed killer—and he was crazy.

  “You know, that almost makes sense,” a familiar voice says.

  Familiar in a very weird and unexpected way; it’s Jerry Seinfeld. A television is on in the waiting room, bolted to one corner of the ceiling, and an old rerun is showing. It’s the one where Elaine meets a group of friends who are the exact opposite of Jerry, George, and Kramer. This episode is considerably different from the one I’ve seen, of course; by “opposite,” they mean that Jerry’s counterpart is a thrope and Kramer’s is a pire, as opposed to the other way around. Jerry refers to them as being from “Bizarro-world,” where everything is backward from normal reality. Jerry’s counterpart even has a little figure of Bizarro in his mirror-image apartment, in the same spot where Jerry keeps a statue of Superman. Bizarro looks exactly like Superman, except the S on his chest is backward and—

  It’s only on screen for a second, but it’s enough to start the cascade of facts that’s been building in the back of my brain.

  The Flash, running backward through time.

  The Seduction of the Innocent murders, with their metaphysical reversal of punishing the blameless.

  “That’s it,” I say softly. “That’s the pattern I couldn’t see. Makes perfect sense, now—perfect nonsense, to be exact.”

  I meet Cassius halfway down the hall, which is good; I don’t have time for awkward socializing. “I think I may have broken the case,” I say. “But I’ll need Eisfanger’s help to be sure.”

  “What have you learned?”

  “That I’ve been approaching this case from the wrong direction. Literally.”

  NINETEEN

  Cassius arranges for Eisfanger to meet us on the roof of th
e building in an NSA chopper. I hate talking over the roar of helicopter blades, but I do my best to explain my theory while we’re in the air.

  “It’s all backward,” I say. “Saladin Aquitaine’s body was the beginning, but the staging of the scene referenced both the beginning and the end of the Flash’s life. Taken on its own, as a singular image, it doesn’t mean anything—but comic books aren’t singular images; they’re panels. Images in sequence. I couldn’t see that until I had more than one image to work with, and even then it took me a while to see that the images were reversed.”

  “I thought we’d established that Barbarossa was the first victim,” Eisfanger says.

  “I’ll get to that. Here’s the way your average superhero career goes: It usually starts with the acquisition of an archfoe, someone he battles on a regular basis. If the superhero sticks around long enough, he eventually joins a team of other superheroes. If he lasts a really long time and starts to get stale, he gets a reboot in the ass—usually highlighted by some sort of epic sacrifice, like dying to save the world—before being relaunched in a different direction.

  “Which is where our killer started: at the very end, where the hero has been reimagined. That’s why Barbarossa was first, and why her death referenced Morrison’s Doom Patrol. It was a comic that symbolized the reimagining of a Silver Age character—which is exactly what our killer is. After that came Aquitaine, the reverse of a noble sacrifice—it was a selfish act that makes things worse for Gretchen, literally stealing life away from her. Then the Solar Centurion’s armor and African Queen’s shield were stolen—the team-up aspect, only reversed. Finally, there was John Dark’s murder; the acquiring of a superhero’s nemesis is turned into the disposal of one.”

  “All right,” Cassius says. “I’ll defer to your expertise. But that doesn’t explain how you arrived at the identity of our killer.”

  “Bizarro,” I say. “He’s an old Superman villain. He does everything backward—including thinking. I didn’t know who he was until Seinfeld explained it to me for the second time.”