She resolved to ask him anyway and told her aunt she would. Claire smiled and left Rachel alone while she finished getting ready. Rachel took another look at the tickets before she returned to her drawing of the lake she and Vladimir passed on their way to Seattle.
---*---
7:33 PM
London, England
“I feel like an idiot Audrey.”
“That’s the price of fashion dear,” she told him with a sly smirk on her face.
Jason stood on a small stool while Audrey took measurements for his legs. He finally agreed on a costume design and asked her to make it for him. She didn’t ask any questions as to what made him have the change of heart. Audrey only thanked him, told him how great it was going to be, and started in on it right away. In fact, all she had left to do was make his pants and cape.
This is embarrassing. I mean, I’m grateful to her for making the outfit, but I wish there was an easier way…or a way that didn’t involve me standing up on a pedestal like an idiot.
“So when am I going to see this costume in action?” she asked him.
As soon as it’s done.
“Once it’s finished.”
She smiled and told him she couldn’t wait to see it. Audrey measured his thigh, quickly scribbled down a number, and moved on to measure his waist. “So, can I ask what made you change your mind?”
“About becoming a hero?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he took a breath and told her that he could fly.
“What?” she nearly shouted. “You can fly? Jason! That’s, that’s amazing!”
This is the reaction I was afraid of.
Jason said it wasn’t anything special. “Besides, once I was airborne I fell.”
“You fell?”
He cleared his throat and told her he did.
“How far down was it?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe one or two kilometers at most.”
“And you didn’t die?”
He shook his head. Obviously not. If I had you and I wouldn’t be talking now. “No. I crashed and was perfectly fine.”
“Then does that mean you have another power you didn’t realize you had?”
He nodded. A few actually. “Yeah, actually…” Jason went on to tell her about the situation he faced when he climbed back to his feet. He told her about being shot, watching the bullets fly past him in slow motion, his ability to run faster than bullets, and how he destroyed the gun in his bare hand. “Then the girl thanked me, asked what my name was, and I told her it was Ilion.”
Audrey was nearly speechless. “Jason! You’re a hero! Oh my word, I mean, it’s terrible that someone nearly mugged that girl, but you saved her! That’s–”
“I know, amazing.”
“It is Jason,” she told him. “Don’t act like it isn’t.”
It’s not though, and that’s the problem. I saved someone, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It isn’t heroic; it’s just what should be expected. And if those two pricks who call themselves heroes actually did what they claim to do then I wouldn’t have needed to save that girl at all. I’m only picking up after adolescents who don’t know how to live properly in this world.
He stepped off of the footstool and took a seat on the bed. Jason set his head in his hands and told her he didn’t want to be a hero. “I really wish this world didn’t need someone like me to save the day. I wish everyone was capable of taking care of themselves and were willing to look out for one another.”
“They aren’t though, Jason.”
“And that’s why I hate the fact that I need to be a hero,” he told her. “All I’m doing is babysitting these people who are incapable of governing themselves within the confines of their own lives. They prey on one another, they’re inconsiderate, and they conspire against one another, and I detest it.”
“We all do.”
“But you aren’t going to be the one out there, stopping it all on a daily basis.” He glared at the floor and muttered, “They shouldn’t need me.”
Audrey took a seat next to him and asked if he’d rather leave London in the hands of the Human Titan and Captain Density. “They aren’t going anywhere, even though they’re out in London for different reasons.”
The idea only made Jason cringe and feel worse about his role as a protector of London. “Those two buffoons are only going to exacerbate matters if they’re left alone.”
“Exactly.” Audrey turned his head toward her and looked him in the eyes and told him, “You’re going to change the world and influence billions of people, so don’t think that you aren’t making the world a better place.”
She’s right. The world is filled with bad people, filled with laziness and deceit, but maybe it can change. I mean, if it can become corrupt, can’t it cleanse itself too? Audrey, you know what I need to hear. Thank you.
Jason kissed and thanked her. “So what else do you need from me so you can finish this outfit?”
---*---
9:15 PM
Baltimore, Maryland
Mia stood in her kitchen and glanced through a list of fifteen possible targets Cladis could attempt to kill in two days. Her contact from the park gave her a clue that cut her workload severely though, as the next victim would need to have AB negative blood. Unfortunately none of the fifteen people she originally believed to be at risk had the blood type. She hadn’t told anyone about the blood pattern. Her ragged friend never said a word about the small taskforce devoted to stopping Cladis and as such she waited to say anything to her team before consulting him.
Their group hadn’t made any progress since Detective Sage’s death, but the stranger Mia met already knew more than their group did and worked off of less as well. It wasn’t as if Mia didn’t trust the others, it was only that her contact proved to be more efficient than the four in her squad combined, and she didn’t want to betray that trust her contact held with her.
“Do you ever intend on cleaning this place up?”
Mia swore and instinctively went for her gun, though she left it with her badge on a small end table next to her front door. She looked up and found the tattered man who acted as her contact in the middle of her living room with his eyes on her mess of an apartment.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she barked.
He didn’t say. “Have you found the next target?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not working with very much to begin with,” she reminded him.
He nodded and told her he was sorry about that. “If there was anything else I could give you I would, but there isn’t, not right now at least.”
“Is there anything else?”
He nodded. “How well do you know everyone you work with?”
“What are you asking me?”
“Do you trust them?”
“Yes.”
He nodded again and walked over to her wall and examined her updated pages of information on each victim from the detailed reports that he gave her at their first meeting. The man asked where she came up with the method of laying out all of her information.
“The detective who headed up the case before me did this,” she reported. “It seemed effective enough for him–”
“Wasn’t he killed by Cladis?”
“Yes,” she mumbled.
“Then why do you want to travel down the same avenue he did?”
She shrugged and asked why the man cared.
The stranger stepped away from the wall and told her he didn’t like watching people throw their lives away. “You know what you’re doing and I admire that,” he told her. “As such I don’t want you to simply discard yourself in a useless manner.”
“Detective Sage didn’t die for nothing,” she snapped.
He only looked at her solemnly and asked what he provided the group through his death. Mia couldn’t answer. “There isn’t any sense in dying just yet,” he said. “There’s still work that needs to be com
pleted here before you can even begin to think about sacrificing yourself.”
Mia scowled and asked him who he was. “You’ve been breaking in my home for weeks to examine what I know about Cladis, you took one of my hunches and dug up five graves, you found a pattern no one else managed to notice, you’re aware of the small task force under Chief Johnson, and you seem to possess your own abilities,” Mia fixed her eyes on him and asked who he was.
Her contact let out a sigh and said she could call him Twelve.
“Twelve?”
“Yes.”
“Why Twelve?”
“Why does it matter?” He looked at her and said it wouldn’t matter what he called himself. “Call me whatever you’d like, you will still question me no matter what name I gave you, so it doesn’t matter what I call myself.”
“Who are you really?”
“I am Twelve.”
“Seriously.”
He told her to figure it out on her own. “You’re avidly playing detective, so piece it together yourself.”
“Alright fine,” she glared at him, “How do you know so much about Cladis and this investigation?”
Twelve walked silently past Mia and into her kitchen. He looked over her notes and the fifteen brief biographies of fifteen people she had previously suspected of being the next target. Twelve frowned and said she was looking at the investigation the wrong way. “I’ve already told you about the blood pattern, so why aren’t you focusing on that?”
“Are you nuts?” Mia took a sheet of paper off of the wall next to Red Iron’s bio and handed it to her ragged partner. “I ran the averages for the city and there are somewhere around sixteen-thousand two-hundred people who have AB negative blood.”
“Yes, but only a fraction of those sixteen-thousand two-hundred people ever met Danielle McMinn.”
“And I can’t find any of them.”
Twelve handed the slip of paper back to her and walked over to her window, “Then I guess number sixteen dies as well.”
“You aren’t going to do anything to stop it?” she mumbled.
Twelve told her there wasn’t anything they could do until they picked the trail up again. “You all lost it after Sage died. In fact, you shouldn’t have lost it at all, but now you and I and your friends are all playing catch up while Cladis rakes up a greater body count.” He opened the window and let a cold wind in before he added, “You and I are going to stop this monster, believe me.” He climbed out the window and told her to keep their meetings a secret until further notice before he shut the window and flew off.
Mia sighed, pinned her note back on the wall, and tried to figure out who the sixteenth victim would be.
---*---
9:39 PM
Bothell, Washington
Nick planned on talking to Mizuno about training less so he could spend more time with Amy, though Nick hadn’t spoken to Mizuno since the end of his class that past Friday. He tried calling him but never managed to speak to him. Nick suspected Mizuno already knew what he wanted to say and this was his way of saying no without needing to say a word.
Nick worked with Bruce from morning until late in the afternoon and spent the rest of his Sunday with Amy. They went out for dinner, talked, and he drove her home around nine-thirty, as her mother wanted her home early.
Nick pulled into an open parking space in front of the hotel he stayed in, parked his motorcycle, and headed into the building. He walked past the clerk at the entrance without so much as a word and took the elevator up to his room. Nick hardly managed to step into the room before Mizuno greeted him.
Mizuno and Strom waited for him; Strom continued to read The Sun Also Rises while he reclined on Nick’s bed and Mizuno sat in a chair in the corner of the room. Mizuno only looked up at him when Nick entered and asked how his day was.
Nick didn’t answer. He looked from Mizuno over to Strom and asked why they were there.
Strom didn’t say a word. He simply turned a page and continued to read as if nothing changed. Mizuno was hesitant to answer though, even Nick could tell, considering how Mizuno asked a simple question that hardly pertained to his project.
“Something’s come up Nick,” he started. “I looked into the murder of Crystal Valentine and after scanning each witness to the assassination as well as crosschecking my notes with Strom, I’ve realized that this entire situation with your brother’s murder is far more complex than I originally anticipated.”
“What do you mean?”
He was apprehensive, but stated that the individual who murdered Crystal Valentine wasn’t the same as the charlatan who murdered Nick’s brother and Drake’s father.
“Then who was it?”
“A man named Jeremy Dalton,” Strom muttered, “A man also known as the MP3 Assassin.”
Nick felt an icy tendril run down his spine. “Th-That was…That was really him?”
Mizuno nodded and said it was. “You’re missing something bigger though Nick. Jeremy Dalton was employed at Winchester Enterprises and worked alongside Drake Winchester.”
Strom chimed in and assured Nick that Dalton hadn’t been seen at his office since Drake’s father’s assassination. “I’m working on tracking him but Dalton and I have a propensity to avoid one another at all costs, not that he’s aware I’m personally tailing him, but my guess is that he is aware of something nonetheless.”
“In any case,” Mizuno continued, “I’m certain that your brother’s murderer is in league with Jeremy Dalton.”
A delivery man from a nearby teriyaki restaurant knocked on Nick’s door. Mizuno got up, paid for it, and set the three plastic containers wrapped in a plastic bag on the bed near Strom. None of them touched the food though.
Mizuno reclaimed his seat, folded his arms across his chest, and told Nick, “I went over the events at Crystal’s once more and found more irregularities. Firstly, I originally assumed, like you, that the charlatan who killed your brother used the credit card he stole from your brother at the restaurant before he killed Crystal, though I couldn’t understand why he would make such an obvious mistake. However it turns out that the killer was actually Dalton, which I could only confirm after seeing the security feed from the night Tony Winchester was killed. It appears that our shape shifter is unable to alter the serpent tattoo he has on his arm. Now, you might not recall this, but Dalton’s sleeves were rolled up the day he killed Crystal and there was no tattoo. I could only assume the rule about the tattoo was true until I managed to lift a single matching fingerprint from the stolen card, which I managed to borrow from the local authorities who have the card held as evidence.” Mizuno continued, “The fingerprint matched Dalton’s. But this only begged additional questions, the first of which is why would Jeremy Dalton work with a partner? Why would they intentionally use a piece of stolen property and leave it at their next murder scene? And why would Dalton be so sloppy as to leave a fully identifiable fingerprint on the card as well?”
“You think they left it intentionally?” Strom asked.
Mizuno nodded. “But I don’t know why. This should have been cut and dry in terms of a murder. Normally, in Dalton’s case, he would have executed her in a private manner and there wouldn’t be any trail and possibly not even a way to link the crime to him. This is especially true since Crystal Valentine was not a high profile target, which begs the question, why would Jeremy Dalton murder someone as unknown as Crystal Valentine?”
“I think you need to ask who would have the means to contact Dalton and the motive to kill Crystal,” Strom said.
“And that’s what’s confounding me. Who would want Crystal Marie Valentine dead?” Mizuno asked rhetorically. “I’ve delved into who could profit from her death in terms of successor to her store, which was no one. She didn’t have life insurance or a family member who could have benefited from her death…None of this adds up.”
“But they also killed my brother and Drake’s dad,” Nick reminded them.
“As well as a man nam
ed Mark Ross who also worked alongside your brother and Tony Winchester,” Mizuno added. “All of whom worked on the same project called Regenesis.”
“So this is all tied into that?”
“It would seem so, but Crystal’s murder doesn’t add up.”
“Could it have been a side job Dalton picked up?” Strom suggested.
“I doubt it, only because of the card they used in the slaying,” Mizuno explained.
“Then maybe it’s nothing more than a diversion?”
“Which would mean whoever hired them for the assassinations knows someone’s trying to figure this out…” Mizuno paused and stared off while he gave the matter his full attention.
He didn’t say a word for a whole minute before Strom set his book aside and opened the plastic bag to get to his meal. Strom gave Nick a chicken katsu meal while he took a chicken teriyaki and gyoza meal and left the prawn yakisoba aside for Mizuno. Nick ate with a plastic fork while Strom utilized chopsticks without any difficulty.
He took a few bites before he suggested to Mizuno, “What if they left the card behind as a message?”
“To whom?”
“Maybe to you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know why they would do that and I highly doubt they know about my existence in the first place. Plus I wasn’t investigating Victor’s death, or Crystal’s for that matter, until after Nick joined my group. There shouldn’t have been any reason to leave a clue.”
Mizuno remained silent again and in deep thought while Strom and Nick continued with their meals. Strom ate nearly half of his dinner before he took a napkin, wiped his lips, and told them he was going out to get something to drink. He briefly asked Nick if he wanted anything, but Nick declined.
Mizuno looked up at Nick once Strom left and told him he didn’t know what it meant. “This should be cut and dry, yet this bit about your brother’s credit card doesn’t make sense. I can’t think of any reason for anyone to do something like this. It doesn’t make sense.”
Impact (Book 1): Regenesis Page 45
