Hope used one of Chakra’s controlled breathing techniques until she didn’t feel like she was going to float away anymore, made a mental note to never use Ozma’s mirror-travel magic that Grendel had told her about. And yawned. And made another mental note to tell the DSA case-team to look for an abandoned mirror and glass warehouse in Portland when she got home. If she got home.
Vel scooted back from the table. “And that’s it for tonight. Let’s get you to the couch.” Hope nodded like a marionette and followed her, still holding Beartler. And there was a couch.
In the cold spring night outside Vel’s kitchen window a deeper shadow detached from the darkness lying across the yard, flowing silently until it reached the dark of the neighboring address. There it thrust up and grew three-dimensional and then human. Diffuse, the best sneak-and-peek superhuman in The Super Patriots Inc.’s security department, pulled her cellphone from her cloak and speed-dialed.
“Sir?” she said to the voice that answered. “Diffuse, assigned to Rabbit Watch. I need to report an opportunity.”
Vel’s bedroom mirror frosted over and stopped reflecting her room just before dawn, and Jackie Frost stepped out of it. “What?” she said at Vel’s look. “You knew I was coming.”
Vel shrugged. “Just thinking about what else can come out of mirrors.”
“Hey, at least I’m not Alice. So, is she still here?”
“Where would she go? I asked if she wanted to check on analogue family here—she’s from Chicago—and she looked like I’d suggested mailing them a bomb. After what I told her about The Super Patriots, I can’t blame her.”
“So what is the law about alternate superheroes dropping by?”
Vel laughed. “About what you’d expect. They’re illegal aliens, of course. The Super Patriots takes them into protective custody when they’re discovered.”
“Well, I’ve got the clothes. So what’s your plan?”
“Celia.”
“The Iron Lady? Yeah, good plan.”
Jackie didn’t seem to faze Hope at all. She accepted the bag of clothes from the white-haired girl with the pastel blue skin with a polite “Thank you,” and went upstairs to change. After a breakfast provided by Vel’s house toys, they climbed into Vel’s compact car and hit the road. Both Vel and Jackie were in their hero uniforms—Vel in her most formal and Jackie in one of her less abbreviated blue-and-white “skating costumes.”
Hope wasn’t. Jackie’s choices made her Christmas-themed—white shorts with snowflake fringe, blue sparkly t-shirt, and matching white sneakers—but she still looked like a fresh-faced teen ready to hang for the weekend. She was also a lot steadier this morning; Vel explained the plan on the way, and she nodded solemn approval.
“Yes, please. The thing to do when lost is to wait to be found, so if you don’t know someone who can just twinkle me home then the best thing would be to leave a message and contact number back at the warehouse, and not leave the area.”
She didn’t sound like she was whistling in the dark, giving Vel hope that she really did know people who could come looking for her.
Since Vel’s house sat in Portland’s southern suburbs, the drive to Salem didn’t take long. This early, Salem traffic was light and they made it to the Capitol Building with only a brief stop at a Starbucks for a jolt. Vel showed her official superhero ID to capitol security and got visitors tags for them all, then left Hope to admire the rotunda’s architecture while she and Jackie went upstairs to see the Governor of Oregon.
And talk fast.
Celia Morgan met her guests in the formal office. It wasn’t her normal practice when meeting with Velveteen, Oregon’s official state superhero, but the young woman’s text had indicated she was bringing Jacqueline Frost, the daughter of Jack Frost and the Snow Queen and an official representative of Winter.
While not Alaska, Oregon was far north enough that keeping on the good side of that particular Season was good politics.
Her appointment secretary showed them in, and Celia didn’t stand on ceremony with Velveteen. She’d given the young hero refuge in Oregon to piss off The Super Patriots, but the girl had proven an able protector of Portland—sometimes with the help of Jackie Frost and The Princess, true, but the governor was beginning to suspect that her toy-wielding hero was stronger than her old Super Patriot tests and evaluations had reported. Which didn’t surprise Celia, since The Super Patriots Inc. would lie if asked the direction of sunrise. Or recuse itself.
“So what can I do for you, Velveteen? You’re not ready to renegotiate your contract already, I hope?”
“No, ma’am. Actually, have you heard about last night?”
Celia frowned, smoothed her face. “No.” And if she should have, somebody was going to learn their boss was seriously displeased. Velveteen filled her in, and Celia found herself sitting although habit kept her from leaning into the high-backed chair. “A multiverse traveler? And a superhero?”
“You can see the problem?” Velveteen’s question was utterly rhetorical; Celia knew her state’s laws well, and the federal laws that constrained them—especially regarding superheroes.
“So what do you suggest?”
Velveteen took a deep breath. “The first thing is to quietly make her a legal resident, even if we have to send her to Vancouver while we do it. Once that’s done, the state can issue a superhero license and make her fully legal for as long as she stays.”
This time Celia didn’t frown, not with her face, but she tapped a knee.
“I understand why you want to help, Velveteen. Hell, so do I and we can probably swing the residency. But as for a job, we took a chance with you because, before you dropped out, you’d been fully vetted and trained by The Super Patriots even if they trashed your reputation after—and as little as I like to say anything good about them, they turn out competent heroes. You’ve known her for one day. Can you vouch for her character?”
“Benny likes her,” Velveteen answered. When Celia raised an eyebrow she explained. “He’s my teddy bear butler. He glued himself to her like her personal bear, and he’s my toy.”
“Mmm. An interesting recommendation. Anything else?”
Jacqueline Frost spoke up for the first time since introductions. “She appeared on the big guy’s Nice List. I don’t know how good she is, but you can trust her.”
Celia nodded, both in respect of the source and confirmation of why Winter’s representative was here.
“Well, let’s see her.”
It took only a minute for Celia’s secretary to call down and retrieve the girl from the rotunda. A perfunctory knock on the door by the guard, and then it opened to admit her.
Oh, hell no. There was no way that Celia Morgan was going to let this young woman fall into the clutches of The Super Patriots. The tiny blonde who advanced across the carpet with a hopeful smile looked like she should be here on a school fieldtrip instead of seeking asylum, and Celia’s fingers itched to start signing legal documents. She was going to wrap this girl in every legal protection her position allowed.
“So, Astra?”
The girl nodded. “I guess I’ve got a real live secret identity again. I don’t want any family I have here involved in any way.” The look she gave Celia said that was non-negotiable, but since Celia knew The Super Patriots wouldn’t think twice about using any analogues of the girl’s family as leverage, she wasn’t about to negotiate that point.
“That will not be a problem. Here’s what we’re going to—” The thump that shook the floor cut her off.
The scene outside the room’s floor-to ceiling windows ended the meeting.
“What is that?” The question came from Astra, remarkably the first of the four able to vocalize although Celia would later wonder if she’d heard Velveteen mutter Faked up times tin bullion. The early morning sun shown on the Capitol Mall, and on the utterly fake looking Tyrannosaurus Rex—at least twice the size of any actual T-Rex that had ever roamed the Earth—lumbering towards them across the
road at the open mall’s end. On either side, cars veered to crunching stops before crossing its path and pedestrians scattered.
“It’s flickering,” Astra added, as if that was the only problem she had with the impossible thing. “Can you tell me anything about it?”
“Flickering?” Velveteen blinked. “Shit! Someone let Cinemaniac get his hands on decent projection equipment!”
Astra glared at her. “Okay, what does that mean?”
“It means that thing’s unkillable! We’ve got to find the projector and shut it down!”
Celia grabbed her cell and hit speed dial, but Astra was already in motion.
“Then find it! I’ll hold it in place until you do! Clear the building!” She opened the window with a sharp pop of the security lock and pushed out the screen before stepping to the window ledge and heading out and up.
“Wait!” Celia cried, grabbing for her. But she was too late—the girl was gone.
This was where Shell was normally feeding her aggregate pictures of the situation, from street-cams, police radio, whatever source was useful, and Hope forced herself to pay more attention to her environment than to the target. The thing hadn’t crushed anybody crossing the busy street, but even at its slow speed it wouldn’t take long to hit the Capitol Building behind her. It ignored her popping up to fly above it, focused on its obvious goal.
From the window Hope had exited, Jackie Frost threw out an ice ramp and skated down it to begin turning the mall grounds closer to the building into a very uneven ice-rink. A swarm of what Hope’s super-duper vision showed her were tiny plastic fairies fanned out from the open window to scatter in every direction.
Recon was being handled, obstacles created, so it was time to be direct.
With no idea how dense the T-Rex really was, Hope picked a joint—the knee of one of its hind limbs—as her target and dove, ignoring the laughing screaming man standing on the thing’s head. It didn’t look like he was directing it at all.
Hitting the joint was like hitting dense rubber and Hope took the shock of the foot-first impact in her knees, felt the joint bend. And then it wasn’t. Between one flicker and the next, the joint was undamaged. The T-Rex wobbled and roared, but stayed upright and took another crunching step.
“What do you think you’re doing!” the man perched above her screamed. Screaming seemed to be his natural volume.
“Stopping you!” Hope circled high, came down on the T-Rex’s nose. It bent, pushing its head down and nearly unseating the man, but flickered back to its pre-hit shape.
“You can’t! Ha ha ha! Finally the world will know the wrath of the Cinemaniac! First Salem, then Portland! Then the world! Ha ha ha ha!”
“You’re monologuing? This place is insane!”
And it was getting to her—why hadn’t she thought to take him down first? He was just a wild-eyed bald guy in mechanic’s clothes who hadn’t shaved in a week. Hope swung around, sweeping low over the T-Rex’s head to gather him up—and did, until he flickered and was back on his perch.
“Ha ha ha! You are fools! Do you think I would expose myself? Risk my genius? I’m being taped and projected with my beautiful creation!” The T-Rex took its first step onto Jackie’s ice-rink, slipped—and then didn’t. It lumbered on.
They weren’t going to evacuate the Capitol Building fast enough. Astra hit it again, in front to at least stagger the thing back a half-step—again the flicker kept it upright.
She landed beside Jackie. “Ice isn’t going to stop it. Freezing?” Frozen rubber was brittle.
Jackie shook her head. “It goes back to its original condition, even if I could freeze more than a foot that fast. Nice hits though, kid.” The blue and white girl’s fingers twitched like she was going to try it anyway.
Hope forced herself to be still and think. “The Cinemaniac talked about his projection like it’s an ongoing process. Velveteen is after the source?” Jackie nodded and watched the thing lurch closer. Really, the thing kept moving so far off its center of gravity that it should be toppling on its own, kept upright by movie-magic. The power of the cinema—
“Wait, projections—it’s a movie projection!”
“Say something not obvious.”
“I don’t know how it’s using the air as a projection screen, but it has to have an unobstructed range to the source! Maybe we can’t find it fast enough, but can you—” She didn’t need to say more.
“Snow globe! Yessss!” Jackie lifted her hands and the world went white. The T-Rex flickered and disappeared a second before the rising vortex of snow got too thick to see more than ten feet from Hope’s face.
Velveteen started swearing nonstop when Astra went out the window, but kept control of her Disney-fairy scouts. Beside her Celia talked intensely into her phone, directing the capitol police to evacuate and then search. She didn’t move from the window even as she sent her secretary and guard away.
“Can they stop it?” she asked Vel once she’d given all the orders she could.
“This is so— I don’t know, they’re slowing it down a little.” Her little scouts zoomed over the landscape, excited to be hunting and communicating their glee through that part of Velveteen’s power that touched and animated them. “The Cinemaniac is crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He won’t have the projector set up in plain sight on a roof somewhere.” If he had, she could send Astra a fairy-guide and the girl could take it out before you could yell Cut! That’s a wrap!
Celia nodded, eyes on the action as they watched Astra and Jackie fail to really slow the thing. Vel tried once more to catch it with her mind; it should have been hers, except that it wasn’t there. There was nothing real for her animus’ gift to hold onto.
Then the girl landed beside Jackie and the two put their heads together for a long moment, stepping apart as Jackie raised her hands.
Jackie Frost wasn’t the Queen of Winter, not yet, but as the daughter of the Snow Queen and Jack Frost she had a double-helping of mythic juju flowing blue through her veins. Winter was a memory in Salem, but not yet a distant one and the earth and air remembered the last freeze. More, Jackie had primed the pump when she laid down her rink; now she called to the wet and cold that returned year after year and was already half there.
Vel had the foresight to grab Celia before the arctic wind hit, knocking them off their feet as it filled the room. It was less gentle outside, and as the world beyond the window disappeared in a wall of white she felt her fairies still in the now-emptied mall freeze and crack. The fairies beyond the mall and the great globe of white fluttered, righted themselves, and kept to their mission.
“Yes!” Beside her, Jackie did a dance on the ice that should have planted her on her face. “Suck it, you nut-job! That’s it—you’ve been owned!” She slapped Hope on the shoulder. “Get up there!” Hope headed straight up.
Jackie hadn’t been kidding about the snow globe; her winter storm covered the mall in a radius centered on the frost girl, but that was it—it ended about twenty feet up, about where the T-Rex’s head had been, and didn’t reach the city street.
And, crucially, the T-Rex hadn’t reformed at the edge of the obscuring storm; it was trying too—Hope could see flickering green light at the white vortex’s edge, but the swirling snow kept breaking it up. Now if only…
She caught the convergence of darting fairies across the street, and dove. The swarm of Tinkerbell merchandizing beat her to the high office window, but not by much as they darted vengefully through the open window to open a toy box of plastic-pinching torment on the room’s occupants. Hope ignored the screams and wild shooting to unplug the big movie projection machine and snap off its points. Smashing things was for amateurs.
Cinemaniac was shorter in person.
She stayed in the wrecked office space until the police cuffed Cinemaniac and the last of his moaning minions. Covered in angry red spots, they looked like they’d been attacked by army ants. Shaking hands with the arresting officers, she flew back to the governor�
�s office over a now flooded mall; a localized and quickly draining flood—they’d managed to save the day with minimal property damage.
She found Velveteen toweling off while the governor talked loudly into her phone. The woman obviously didn’t like what she was hearing. Vel looked like she knew what it was about and agreed with the governor.
The woman closed her phone and looked at her, eyes full of rage and despair, and Hope realized that as much as this was about her it was also personal. “That was the US Attorney General’s office,” the governor said. “A friend owed me a favor. The Super Patriots have a warrant, and they’re coming.”
Hope blinked. “How— Too many cellphone cameras, right? Someone posted it to ViewTube and there I am? Big as day in front of the Oregon State Capitol Building?”
“That’s right. And now we have no time.”
Hope nodded slowly. “So they get me. Will they be able to do anything to me, with everything out in the open now?”
“You’re not going anywhere.” The woman practically bit off the words. “I won’t let them—” Her phone rang and she put it to her ear. “What!”
A hand on Hope’s elbow made her jump. Jackie Frost had come back upstairs and slipped in the door behind her. “C’mon kid, let’s go freshen up.” Beside the governor, Velveteen nodded.
“Okay…” Hope let Jackie drag her out into the empty hallway. The frost girl stepped up to one of the ranked hall mirrors and touched it, frosting it over. “This is our exit.”
Hope stood rooted to the floor. “But—”
“Trust me kid, this mirror isn’t going to get nasty on you. And this is why Vel brought me, really. Look. If you stay, Vel and Celia are going to fight for you. And Governor Morgan is probably going to lose her office and then Vel will lose her nice new home. Don’t let them do that.”
That was enough to move Hope forward and she took Jackie’s hand. The frost girl pulled her into the mirror and they were gone, leaving an empty hallway and a faint scent of peppermint and pine needles.
Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers Page 8
