by Ramy Vance
You also had He-Man, Sheera, G.I. Joes, Street Fighters and one enterprising young man dressed in an assortment of cardboard boxes that made him look like Optimus Prime. Fairly typical stuff. Then seven ninjas with what looked like plastic swords entered, and had they been dwarves I would have had a Snow White joke somewhere. But alas, from the way they moved under their black outfits, they were clearly human.
It was when people started entering dressed like Mangi from Blade of the Immortal or Rick Hunter from Robotech that I started to think: My kind of party. I might have enjoyed this night if I wasn’t on duty.
Perhaps a hundred dressed-up kids entered and not one of them was an actual superhero. Barring the elderly heroes, I had expected to see the Green Guy, Rhino Boy and the Jessica Jones girl at least, but not one of them showed up, which meant our plan was working.
“Excellent,” I muttered to myself, still crouched in position. “So far, so good.”
Then Andrew Garner entered in a long trench coat, his blond hair caught in its collar. Typical that he would be the one guy not dressed like a hero. But then again, given his black fingernails, dog collar and leather jacket, he kind of looked like a blond Neo from The Matrix—if Neo wasn’t trying.
Seeing Andrew was disconcerting. Not because I felt guilty or angry at him, but because I felt nothing one way or another. If anything, I just felt hungry looking at the tall goth. This was the vampire in me acting up … the apathy of the beast to anything but its own needs. And I knew that if I didn’t break the curse soon and become human again, it would be harder and harder to fend off my old ways.
This plan had better work.
Another thirty minutes passed as more and more kids dressed as heroes entered the once-upon-a-time cinema, and still no Wizard Crusader.
Given he was one of Cassy’s cursed, he must have heard her song. And since there was no way for him to know how many heroes there were and who was who, the confusion of the situation should have drawn him out.
But Wizard Crusader was, so far, a no-show. I was just about to give up hope when a thought occurred to me. He had stolen the powers of so many heroes, there was no telling what he could do. Also, he might have ditched his old outfit for something less … geeky.
Batman was cool. A guy dressed in a knight’s uniform wasn’t.
He could be here, waiting for us to do something …
OK, I thought, since I’m supposed to be the bait …
I stepped out from the shadows dressed in my own superhero outfit … a kilt with my family tartan, a black turtleneck, my cherub mask and dirk.
Grabbing the mic, I said, “Welcome, welcome!” The mic screeched in my hand, which made everyone jump. At least I had their attention.
“As I was saying: Welcome.”
There was some clapping and cheering.
“As I’m sure everyone is aware, the campus is closed because of a—how shall I phrase this?—a superhero fight. Forget snow days—we’re having a superhero day.”
I chuckled at my own joke. No one else did. OK, time to retire that one.
I cleared my throat. “But on a more serious note, the superhero fight did some major damage to the campus, so we’ll probably be closed for a while. And since none of us have any classes tomorrow, we thought we’d throw this party!”
The crowd cheered.
“So one last thing before we turn on the music again. I think there is one among you that wasn’t invited. A certain LARPing reject with an inflated ego. Let me ask you this, Wizard Crusader, what mask are you wearing now? I know you’re probably a sniveling little geek who was never invited to a party before you had superpowers, and you’re still a sniveling—”
The mic cut as three kids dressed like ninjas jumped on stage. They pulled out their katanas, which, upon closer examination looked very, very real. One of them grabbed the mic out of my hand and tossed it to a fourth ninja on the dance floor.
“Testing, testing,” he said. “Ahh, Master—just as you predicted, she’s here.”
In a flash, the front door burst open and in walked Wizard Crusader.
Oh, so that wasn’t something we had taken into consideration … Wizard Crusader had minions.
Ninja Minions and Darting Villains
Minions. I should have known. Every villain has a couple and it seems Wizard Crusader has a dozen. Great. But where could someone like him enlist recruits for a mini-army? As someone who has had minions herself, I can guess.
Anywhere.
All you need to do is walk into a place where a group of like-minded individuals have gathered around a common fear or ideal, display your power, promise you’ll help them achieve their goals, and presto! A mini-army at your disposal.
The more vile their goals, the more gruesome the promise, the easier it is to recruit them. A couple fireballs and they’d be sold—
Wizard Crusader laughed. “I also flew around a bit. Oh, and I dropped their last leader off in the Laurentians. Naked. It’ll take him three days to get home, and during that whole trip he’ll be thinking about how I’m the boss now.”
“And your promise?”
The lead ninja took off his hood, revealing a shaved head covered in tattoos of religious symbols. The Christian cross, the Muslim crescent, the Daoist bagua and taijitu, the Hindu Aum and the Zoroastrian Faravahar. A HuMan … I had heard about this new gang rising up in the cities where Others lived. They were dedicated to the eradication of Others. Think Neo-Nazis, except their hate wasn’t aimed at immigrants or Jews, but rather the new refugee class comprised entirely of Others.
And because there was no international organization aimed at protecting Other rights yet, the group had yet to be summarily condemned. Humans and their need to officially condemn someone or something. Despite being one now (well, with the exception of my sudden vampiric transformation), I’d never understand this part of being human.
Two HuMan ninjas grabbed my arms, and the other ninjas used swords and threats to keep the party-goers still.
“Shall we?” Wizard Crusader said, taking off his armor but leaving his helmet on. Then putting his feet together, he stretched out his arms like some sadistic Jesus.
Little tentacles of flesh poured out of his arms, stretching away from him and toward every kid dressed as a superhero. There were too many to count and these strange, algae-like growths touched everyone but the ninjas and myself.
I guessed he was going big now—planning to steal everyone’s powers. And since he didn’t know who had powers and who didn’t (save myself and his minions), he was going to tap into every person there.
“You know,” I said, as his growths whisked through the air toward their targets, “I get what you’re doing. Stealing all their powers and becoming a supreme being yourself. Ever heard of Icarus? The guy who flew too close to the sun?”
Wizard Crusader, who was concentrating on making sure his tentacles flew true, broke his concentration long enough to nod.
“So the legend is, the closer he got to the sun, the more the wax he used to bind his wings started to melt. Well, you know the story … it eventually melted and he crashed to the ground. But that’s not what really happened. I know, because a cyclops buddy of mine was actually there when Icarus fell and he told me the story.
“The truth was, he didn’t make his wings out of feathers and wax, and the sun didn’t melt anything. But he did have wings … wings he tortured a poor valkyrie into crafting for him. And he used those wings he hadn’t made or earned—but rather stole—to fly. For a while he flew quite well. But only for a while. Then air current and wings and resistance and just about every other principle of physics came crashing down on him and he lost control and flew into a cliff face at such an incredible speed that there are probably bits of him still there.”
I watched as his tentacles grew, waiting. The first of them were almost on the closest kids.
“He crashed, and why? Because power that is unearned—and worse, unpracticed—is also ineffective.” I
waited until his little suckers were about to attach … and the split second before, I cried out, “Now!”
Appearing out of seemingly nowhere, a dozen heroes formed a circle around Wizard Crusader. At the center were my invisible boyfriend and Cassy. Wizard Crusader barely had a second to say, “Holy mythology, Batman!” before Rhino charged, hitting him hard in the chest.
A girl who must have been made out of elastic flattened herself so she looked like a net and bounced Wizard Crusader back against Rhino. As Wizard Crusader rocked back and forth between those two, his helmet fell off to reveal one very scared … oh shit … Harold Cheer?
I didn’t have time to register who the villain was because a kid in a monk’s outfit with an arrow tattooed on his head started doing something that looked like a martial arts kata. A hand made of rock came out of the ground and clasped itself around Wizard Crusader.
And while all that was going on, I vamped out. Well, not blood-drinking vamped out, but using my familiar strength and speed, I grabbed the two ninjas that had been holding me back and threw their racist … ahh, I mean Otherist asses into their fellow misguided friends. Six of them tumbled down and I jumped off the stage.
I grabbed two more and said, “The name’s Cherub and I’m crazy.” I made sure I had the other ninjas’ attention before I added my final, harrowing blow. Summoning the vampire’s roar—which sounds like a lion growling through an elephant charge—I cried out, “Run!”
The thing about the vampire’s roar: it’s savage. Not only did the ninjas run … so did practically everyone else who wasn’t a superhero.
↔
“Harold Cheer,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Not bad, Ka—”
With speed he didn’t know I had, I covered his mouth and whispered, “Tut, tut, tut. There are rules to this. I only get to say your name because your mask fell off. Mine is still very much on. Break the rules and I break you. Got it?”
Despite all his powers, Harold was caught and he knew it. He nodded and as he did, the mesh chainmail acting as his helmet’s wig cap shook free and fell off. It was then I noticed an earpiece typically used by security operations to stay in touch.
“What’s this?” I asked, pulling it off. Putting the earpiece in, I said, “Mayday, mayday—Captain Wizard Crusader is down. I repeat, Captain Wizard Crusader is down.” I waited a few seconds for a response and got nothing. “Seems your minion doesn’t want to chat.”
He smirked at this. “Not a surprise,” he said, “since you scared all my minions off. But the guy at the other end of the receiver is not my minion, Cherub.” If a word could be poisonous, the way he said Cherub was absolutely toxic. “And he knows all about you.”
“Really?” I said, lifting an alluring, curious eyebrow—not that anyone saw, since my mask hid all my cuteness away.
And Harold didn’t care either way; he wasn’t even looking at me. Instead, he scanned the surrounding superheroes and Cassy one by one, as if shooting them with his eyes.
I turned around to see all the heroes standing in a circle looking at Harold. Most of them didn’t know who this dweeb was, but I could tell a couple did. Their surprise shone with particular brightness as they realized the kid they had dismissed as harmless was actually the most violent of the bunch.
They were surprisingly restrained, partly because while they were invisible, Cassy and Justin had told them as much as they could about what was going on. But their restraint wasn’t just because they heard Cassy and believed her. We were off campus, so they weren’t being compelled by the conditions of the curse to act in one way or another. And uncompelled, these superheroes revealed themselves for who they truly were … kids who were scared and no more interested in having superpowers than a monkey desires to go to outer space.
“You know, my whole life I’ve been made fun of for being smaller, weaker, more passionate,” Harold said, shaking his head. “Also for being smart, and none of their mockery ever bothered me.”
Since he didn’t know most of these kids, I assumed he meant the royal their.
“The only thing that ever really got me mad,” Harold continued, “was when they made fun of me for playing Dungeons and Dragons. ‘Ohh, Harold the Wizard,’ they’d say. ‘Where’s your dragon?’ ‘Done playing in the dungeon?’ But in all their taunts and mockery, they never got two things: One, Dungeons and Dragons is a complex game that, despite its name, really doesn’t have that many dragons in it. And two, the spells in that game were absolutely inspiring.”
As he uttered the word “inspiring,” his eyes glowed yellow. Three giant, disembodied hands appeared behind the kid dressed as a monk, Rhino and—gulp—Justin.
Invisible Hands Are the Devil’s Playthings
The hands grabbed each of the heroes and the three kids started aging immediately. This wasn’t my first battle with a wizard, so I did what worked in the past with those blowhards: I punched Harold. Square in the nose. I was trying to break his spell and wound up breaking his nose as well. Bonus points: me.
His head rocked back, but looking over my shoulder, I saw that his spell held. This might not have been my first fight with a wizard, but it was my first fight with a wizard imbued with the powers of a half-dozen superheroes.
I punched him again, this time not holding back any of my vampiric strength. My fist connected with a sonic boom and I justified the very real possibility that my punch could kill him with thoughts of saving Justin.
His head snapped back and for a second I thought I had punched it clean off.
But he lifted it again, smiling as the blood from his nose ran down to his lips and painted his teeth crimson. I had just drawn my fist back for a third strike when Harold said, “Uh, uh, uh. Two is all I need.”
“For what—?” I started, but when I saw the purple currents running through him I knew what he was about to do.
How could I have been so stupid? was my last thought before Harold unleashed the kinetic energy I’d put in him with those punches. Using the power he had stolen from Justin, he sent pieces of the stone hand that had been holding him in every direction.
I was thrown across the room, but because of my vampiric agility—and staying true to my name—I managed to land on my feet.
Harold, freed, used Rhino’s power to charge, though not at me or any of the other heroes, but rather the back stage and brick wall behind him.
I chased after him, only sparing a second to watch my once young boyfriend curl over with arthritis and the pockmarks of age.
↔
Harold might have had superpowers and the ability to fly, but I was a vampire, which meant that not only was I fast, but I was also an incredible climber.
Outside, Harold took to the air, but from the awkward way he lifted off the ground I could tell he was hurt. No, more than hurt—he was using Underdawg’s flight ability, not Comet Boy’s, and the only reason I could think of for him to be doing that was because Underdawg’s powers came with the pain-numbing effects of marijuana.
I guess my punches got to him after all.
Jumping onto the wall of the adjacent building, I scampered up until I was on its rooftop. Then charging forward with agility and speed that would make any parkour enthusiast positively die with envy, I managed to latch onto Harold’s leg before I got onto his back and rode him like an angry Swedish masseuse with a chip on her shoulder.
He tried to buck me off, but I dug my nails into his plate and mail armor. He’d need to strip naked to get me off, and even then, I was determined to latch onto whatever dangling appendages he had under all this armor.
Bucking, dipping up and down, he flailed mid-air, and I used his distraction and panic to steer his flight toward Montreal’s mountain … and more specifically, right over Mont Royal’s Cemetery. Once we were headed in the right direction, I bent over and whispered into Harold’s ear, “You’re going to have to go much faster than this to rid yourself of me.”
Then I unleashed my inner demon and bit down
hard on Harold’s neck.
↔
In Islam, comets, meteors and shooting stars are not space rocks entering our atmosphere and burning up on entry—they are angels being kicked out of the Emerald City of Qa, the home of jinn.
Whereas I believe most streaks in the night sky are probably debris entering our atmosphere, not all of them are. Some are indeed angels getting the boot from one of God’s heavenly bouncers.
And the thing about getting the boot: your punishment doesn’t just stop at entry denied. That would be too easy and thus, God and his smokeless jinn created Earth-bound beings that would wait below to continue the torturous festivities.
Ghouls.
They were to jinn what orcs were to elves. In other words, the jinn’s ugly cousins. But unlike orcs, who were simply agents of chaos, ghouls were the second part of the kick ’em out, punish ’em below cycle.
How did they do that? Well, it started with the ghouls capturing these poor, hapless falling angels and then imprisoning them until they got a sign from up above that their captives were to be set free.
And it just so happened that there was a comet-catching family of ghouls below who owed me a favor.
Giant grappling hooks shot to the sky and embedded themselves into Harold’s armor and flesh, and with a mighty yank, they pulled his golden, glowing ass down to Earth.
Harold fought against their hooks, and in his enormous efforts to break free managed to dislodge me. I came tumbling down to Earth ahead of him, and this time there was no one to leap up and save me.
Vampires can die. I know—I’ve killed a couple myself. It takes a lot and you really have to come after them, but if you’re able to deliver enough damage to their bodies, they will cease to be.
As I fell, I didn’t know if a fall from this height was enough to kill me. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see, I thought as I fell.
