by Ramy Vance
Cassy started to cry again. Boggie, weak as he was, pulled her in for a hug. “Shuush, shuush … you did your best.”
“But I didn’t save you. I hurt you, and not just you. The others, too.”
“You did, but as my mother always said, ‘Accidents happen and we can only do our best.’ Of course, she’d say that with a ladle in hand as she prepared to spank my brother and me for breaking a vase or something.” Boggie giggled, and so did Cassy.
They sat together for a long moment, not speaking, just being together before Boggie, being Boggie, said, “So you’re the Prophetess of Doom, eh? I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this before, but that’s one kickass superhero name.”
↔
“So now what?” Boggie asked.
“Now we try to figure out what the curse is about and save the day. That would be difficult enough, but one of the people you’re trying to save has turned out to be a homicidal maniac.”
“No problem, Cherub,” Boggie said. “You kicked his ass once. You can do it again.”
“I didn’t kick his ass. Believe me—I barely escaped with my life.”
“But you did,” Cassy said.
“Actually, it was this guy who saved me.”
“Boggie?” Cassy asked.
“Yeah,” I said, taking Underdawg’s aged hand in mine. “I remembered what you told me about your powers and how they were activated by … you know ...” I held a forefinger and thumb to my lips.
Boggie did the same with a giggle.
“So I figured a crusader—a holier-than-thou type—would never partake in the stuff. I also figured that Underdawg’s powers and the more enlightened state of mind one achieves when high go hand in hand. That was my gamble, and I was right.
“The higher we went, the more he giggled and sang along to my stupid song. And I needed to buy myself as much time as I could, because—”
“You needed the other heroes to show up,” Cassy said.
“Exactly. That was my second gamble: that they would turn up to protect the campus. And just when I was about to do a swan dive into The Three Bares … well, that’s when he showed up.” I pointed at Comet Boy, who lay asleep on his hospital bed.
“Yes,” Cassy said, nodding, “very wise. When I designed the curse, I did so because I needed—”
But before she could say anything else, Boggie and Comet Boy’s EKGs flatlined with that screech of death. For a moment I thought the two were actually suffering from cardiac arrest, but neither clutched his chest or showed any pain. Boggie’s face just showed confusion.
It seemed Cassy still couldn’t tell everything she needed to.
Two nurses ran into the room, sighing in relief when they, too, realized it was a machine malfunction. Resetting the machines, the elder of the two pointed at her watch. “Five more minutes, guys. Your grandfather needs to rest.”
I winced at the word “grandfather,” and Cassy let loose a tear down her perfect cheek.
Boggie, on the other hand, chuckled. “ ‘Grandfather.’ Never thought I’d live long enough for anyone to call me that.”
↔
We left Boggie to his hospital bed and cable television, leaving the hospital in silence. As we did I mulled over what was going on. Cassy gave those kids superpowers to protect them from some great evil that was coming after them. Whatever was coming was going to kill them and Cassy did the only thing she could think of to save them. She gave them superpowers.
We went outside where I turned to Cassy and said, “We have to warn them. The superheroes … we have to tell them something is coming after them.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I would if I could. Hell, I wouldn’t have—”
“Maybe you can’t, but I can … I know I don’t know the specifics, but I know enough to give them a heads up, a fighting chance. I suspect their deaths will come at the hands of the Crusader.”
I let my thought hang there to see if Cassy would … could … give me a sign to see if I was right.
Cassy said nothing.
“Fine … regardless of whether or not the Crusader is the big bad, we need to at least tell them about his ability to steal powers. They’ll need them for whatever is coming.”
Cassy nodded in understanding and then in agreement.
“I don’t suppose you have a list?”
Cassy shook her head. “No, but I have a song.”
Presidential Fights Aren’t Very Presidential
Leaving Cassy and Boggie and the other aged superheroes in the ward, I made my way home. I had a lot to plan and not much time to get it done. All we needed now was for a superhero skirmish to break out and Wizard Crusader to suck up all their powers in one go.
Time is of the essence, I thought (probably out loud, but since I was alone, I had no idea) and then cringed at the cliché. You’d think the inner workings of my mind would be wittier. Guess not.
But time was of the essence. We had the superhero problem, the aging issue and lifting the curse. Then there was that weird thing Wizard Crusader had said in the bookstore. “He told me about you.”
Who was “he?” And what did Wizard Crusader know about me? That I was the Cherub or an ex-vampire? That I often wore platform shoes to appear taller or that even though I was a natural blonde, not this shade of blonde?
What?
I needed to figure that out as well. I’d amassed many enemies in my lifetime, and if one of them was rearing their ugly head, it meant—beyond the issue of twenty-two superheroes trying to squash me like a bug—another player was out to get me.
The trouble with out-to-get-you type players … they often use your friends as leverage. If Justin got kidnapped one more time because of me, I was sure he’d dump me.
I shook my head, trying to break loose the myriad of problems swimming in my head. I figured I had a few phone calls to make, some plans to sort out, then I’d have a few hours—the calm before the superhero monsoon—in which to watch a movie and chill. Since I was in an epically bad mood, I needed something to lift me out of it.
And I knew just the remedy: Legally Blonde 1 and 2.
I was climbing the final stairs up to Gardner where a very impatient and frustrated Andrew stood waiting for me. As soon as I made it to the landing, he lifted his phone. “What is the point of having one of these if you’re never going to answer it?”
“What are you—?”
“I must have called you a hundred times. We have a debate. Well, had a debate. In the end, it was just Harold, some fool named Michael who kept talking about beer and a girl named Aimee who spoke so softly we could barely hear her.”
“Aimee? Mousy girl. Kind of cute. Real shy,” I said, pushing my way past him. “I know her from—” I stopped myself. The truth was, I knew her because she had been friends with a gargoyle I’d also known who was killed during my first day on campus. Long, sad story. “I had no idea she was running. Good for her.”
“ ‘Good for her?’ Good for her!” Andrew cried out. “Give me a break. Do you know what essentially happened? An idiot, a shy girl and a bigot. And the voice of reason, our heroine—who in this scenario is you—wasn’t there. Do you know what people are saying about you?”
“Not a clue,” I said, unlocking Gardner Hall’s front door.
“You haven’t been checking Twitter.”
“I don’t have Twitter.”
“A presidential candidate without Twitter?” he said in an exasperated voice. “Well, I do. And here’s what they’re saying: ‘Kat Darling too scared to debate.’ ‘Another pretty girl who thinks she can get by on her looks alone.’ ”
“Ahh, they think I’m pretty.”
“That’s not the point—”
“I get the point. I’m being judged one tweet at a time. Message received.”
“And?”
“And what?” We stood in the foyer of Gardner Hall. My room was one floor below. His five above. And yet here we were, fighting on ground zero.
“And wh
ere were you?” He crossed his arms as he waited for my answer.
I was exhausted and had a million things to do. As much as kicking Harold’s ass was something I would relish doing, I had bigger events than worrying about a rez election. But Andrew deserved an answer. Or at the very least, an apology.
That would be the mature thing to do.
But as always, Katrina Darling, a.k.a. The Ex-Vampire, a.k.a. The Girl Trying To Be Human Again, a.k.a. The Cherub, came rushing to the fore to do what she always did … she made things worse.
“I was getting my nails done.” I held up my hands to show him ten very not done nails.
“Oh, ha-ha,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Look, we can still get ahead of this thing. We have to release a statement telling everyone you were somewhere else … somewhere more important. That’s why I want to know where you were. Maybe we can use that. If not, we can always—”
“I wasn’t anywhere. I forgot,” I lied. The sad thing about this whole fight was that I was somewhere more important. And even though I couldn’t mention the fight or Wizard Crusader, I could say I was in a hospital visiting a friend.
The truth. It will set you free.
More clichés and more truth I wasn’t going to share with Andrew or anyone else. I might have had a good excuse, but if I was honest with him, I would say that I didn’t have time to do my own homework, let alone run for Gardner Hall’s president.
But instead I looked into his hurt, disappointed eyes and said, “Look, I don’t know what you expected from me. I don’t know who you thought I was—”
“I thought you were different,” he said in a curt tone. Except to call his tone curt would be like saying a lion “meows.” It just doesn’t do it justice. It was as if a switch had been turned off in his mind and I, the switch’s recipient, went from being someone in Andrew’s life to being dead to him.
No, worse than dead—it was as if he erased me from himself.
That feeling was eerie, annoying and enraged me even more. “Well, I’m not. I’m just like everyone else: selfish, entitled and not about to waste my time on anything I don’t believe in.”
“I see that now,” he said with a voice so robotic and devoid of emotion, it would make the Terminator proud.
“Good,” I said back. “Because the sooner you and everyone else sees it, the sooner I’ll be left alone.”
I walked to the stairwell and started down to the basement.
“You know,” Andrew said coolly after me, “we could have made a difference, you and I.”
“Maybe,” I said with an exhausted sigh. “The trouble with making a difference is that different isn’t always better.”
And with that, I continued my descent.
Plans, Legally Blondes, Sleep and Reversions
I knew I should have felt bad about letting Andrew down, but I didn’t. There was something about the way he’d switched from being my friend to a venomous snake.
Don’t get me wrong—I deserved it. But when most people are let down, they argue, plead, storm off … and then you find an angry letter in your inbox or slipped under your door. That’s followed by the cold shoulder.
Andrew wasn’t like that. He just went cold. Like as soon as I let him down, I became a non-entity in his mind. Weird, but it did give me a wee bit of insight as to why Cassy didn’t like him. Someone who can turn on a dime like that tends to be the kind of person you avoid.
Whatever his problem was, I couldn’t worry about that now. I picked up my phone and thought about who to call. Egya and Deirdre, of course, but there was someone else that could prove more useful than either of them.
Someone who had experience organizing things.
Someone who knew how to mobilize and motivate large groups of people in a short period of time.
I dialed the number and he answered on the first ring. “Hey there, lover,” I said. “Remember when you said you wanted to be part of the team? Well, I have just the job for you.”
“Hell yeah,” Justin said, and I could only imagine him lifting an incredibly sexy arm in triumph.
↔
After I’d worked through the particulars with Justin, I called Egya and laid out the plan to him as well. The Ghanaian cackled as I told him what the stakes were and how we were going to deal with them.
After hearing his role in the whole thing, he didn’t just cackle. He guffawed. For a full minute.
You know what it’s like to be on the phone listening to someone laugh uncontrollably? I did now, and it was something I could have lived another three hundred years happily never knowing.
↔
With the plans set, all I had left to do was wait. Good—I’d planned for that, too. I needed a distraction from the superheroes, from the guy lurking in the shadows, from my crazy life in general.
There was so much I had no control over and only so much I could take. I was only human, after all. If I were a vampire again, all of this would have been so much easier to handle. But I wasn’t, so I focused on what I did have control over … Legally Blonde. I turned on the movie for the umpteenth time and just about made it to the point where Warner Huntington III breaks up with Ella before I fell into a deep sleep.
I guess fighting superheroes all day takes it out of you.
That afternoon I dreamt … but it wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory with a very strange twist.
After a long day of battling superheroes and dealing with prophetesses of doom, I wandered into the Other Studies Library to … well, I don’t know why I went. Dreams rarely make sense. All I knew was that I needed to be in the library.
I wandered to the back area where the public part of the library’s museum was housed. There, I found the display cases normally filled with artifacts donated by Others, sorcerers and witches completely empty.
Panic grew in me as I rushed between the cases, looking for some evidence of where the goods were and who could have stolen them. Some of these items were quite powerful, and in the wrong hands could do a lot of harm.
But there was no evidence of a break-in, no indication that the locks were forced. The artifacts were just gone.
The library had security cameras, I thought. Perhaps they had some footage—
“Still talking out loud, Peculiar Girl,” said an old and familiar voice.
I turned to see a very old man dressed in a tweed blazer, giving me a knowing look.
“Dr. Dewey—”
“Ah, ah, ah.” He raised a scolding finger. “I thought we had a deal. No names, remember?”
“Yes,” I said, fighting against the growing lump in my throat. “I remember, Old Librarian. No names.”
“Good,” he said, smiling as I called him by his name.
“You’re dead,” I said.
“I am.”
“And this is a dream?”
“I suppose so, but this is a dream that can only happen because of two very important reasons. Care to guess what they are, Peculiar Girl?”
“Not another riddle. I’ve had just about as much of riddles and prophesies that I can stand and—”
“Indulge an old man, will you?” he said with very serious, caring eyes. It had been months since I’d seen this man alive and even though I had hardly known him, he had been the first friend I’d made at university. I hadn’t realized it—or probably more accurately, I hadn’t allowed myself to realize it—but I missed the Old Librarian. Very much.
“OK,” I said. “Anything for an old friend. What are the clues?”
“I already gave them to you,” he said, gesturing to the room. “You have everything I can tell you.”
“All right,” I said, drawing out the word. I knew this was a dream and I truly did hate riddles, but somehow I felt compelled to play his game.
“Compelled,” I thought. That’s an interesting way to have phrased it.
I tried to recall everything I knew about dreams. For one, everything came from you, so if I had used the word “compel,” that meant som
ething.
And given everything going on—the curses and everyone being compelled to do things they wouldn’t normally do—it could be because I’m cursed, too.
“You are so smart,” the Old Librarian said. “So, so smart.”
“But I’m not a superhero.”
“No, you are something else. And you are not cursed the way you will think you are. Remember that.”
“I am not cursed the way I will think I am … as in future tense?”
“Indeed,” he said, nodding as a sadness crept into his eyes. “There are forces at play that are playing you. Using you. Tread carefully, Peculiar Girl.”
“Forces? What kinds of forces?”
“Some will say Destiny, others Fate. I say that these are lofty terms used by little people who understand neither Destiny nor Fate. The universe is vast and full of mystery—even more so now that the gods are gone, for we can no longer point to them as explanations for all that we do not understand.”
“And what are you? The anthropomorphization of my subconscious, warning me about something that my conscious mind doesn’t quite see?”
The Old Librarian laughed and wagged a finger. “So smart. Perhaps too smart for your own good. No, I am not your subconscious. I am, in as real a way as possible given that I’m dead, the Old Librarian.”
“So you’re real? I mean, real even though this is a dream?”
“I am as real as the confines and rules of this universe allow me to be.”
“Because that clears things up,” I said, not hiding my sarcasm.
He chuckled and took off his tweed jacket so he could undo the top two buttons of his shirt.
“This isn’t going to turn into one of those kinds of dreams? Because if so, show me the exit.”
“You are so smart, Peculiar Girl, but sadly, not so witty.” He took off his glasses in a very purposeful way, folded them and set them on one of the empty display cases. “I have one more clue I can give you before I go. Not so much a clue, I suppose, but rather a question that you must ask yourself in order to understand why and how I sought you out this day.”
