by Jay Phillips
He looked up at the camera in the corner and wondered if The Agent was just sitting around and watching everything that was happening. He wouldn’t have doubted it. It had been said that Rogers had a camera on every corner and inside every building, and the man hadn’t been seen in person in several years, using lackeys like Grant as his mouthpiece and relying on them to spread his orders and commands throughout the nation.
“It’s going to be okay,” he heard the brunette, Fire’s little sister Emily, say. At first he thought she was talking to him, but he took a second look and watched her speak in a soft voice to the two babies, twins barely six months old. She sat in a chair against the far wall and rocked the babies back and forth, a hand on each of their matching strollers.
Emily appeared no older than twenty-five, with just longer than shoulder length dark hair that seemed to continually fall in front of her eyes. She had a petite figure that was complimented by the short, white sundress she wore. She almost looked like a younger, raven haired doppelganger of her sister, but with big brown eyes, a small button shaped nose, and a small patch of freckles across both of her cheeks, but Emily, in her own way, was slightly prettier than Fire, maybe even bordering on beautiful. And she smelled like honey.
Despite the fact she hadn’t been talking to him, he knew the words she spoke were correct; Fire was going to be okay. In the car on the way there, Fire had briefly woke up, and he had tried to keep her talking, a vain attempt to obtain some kind of information from her. It hadn’t worked, not that he had really thought it would. Clutching at straws had become his new favorite hobby.
As soon as he had pulled the car into the hospital, with The Ice Queen barely seconds behind him, the doctors rushed Fire Maiden straight to surgery. Ice waited by the operating room and continually brought reports whenever she received them. All of the initial information was promising. No major organs hit, no major arteries damaged, it was as if a bullet had been fired into Fire’s body from someone who was trying not to kill her. He assumed the guy in the armor wanted to hurt her but didn’t want her to die. A personal connection? The killer has some kind of feelings for her? There was something important he continued to miss here, and more people were going to die until he figured out exactly what that was.
“It’s going to be okay,” he heard Emily say again, her voice soft and sweet like the purr of a kitten. “Did you hear me?” she asked.
He stopped pacing and turned towards her. “I’m sorry,” he said, an awkward smile on his face. “Were you talking to me?”
“Yes, Mr. Detective,” she answered with a large smile on her face, “I’m talking to you. And I’m trying to tell you it’s going to be okay.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “your sister is going to be fine.”
“I’m not talking about her, though I do appreciate your vote of confidence. It helps right now; it really does. No, right now, I’m talking about you. You are worried, stressed, trying to find answers to a question you’re not sure you completely understand, and you’re feeling trapped by this room.”
A look of confusion covered his tired face. “And you got all of that from me…how?”
“Oh,” she said in return, suddenly looking the slightest bit embarrassed. “Didn’t Pam or Gabby tell you about me?”
He shook his head from side-to-side.
“I’m an empath,” she said with a self-conscious smile. “I can tell what emotions other people are feeling, and I can sometimes control their emotions and make them feel what I want them to. That’s what I’m doing to these two---” she nodded at the twins she continued to rock back and forth. “---right now. I’m mentally telling them to be happy.”
He smiled. “I was wondering how two little ones were behaving so well in public. That’s a handy trick.”
“It can be.”
“So, I’m feeling all of that?” he asked. “ I wasn’t sure I had that many emotions left. I’d hoped I would have abandoned most of them all by now.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s not all you’re feeling; there’s more, if you’re interested.”
He suddenly felt like the unwilling victim of a party game, but he went along with it. “Sure, let’s see what you’ve got.”
She closed her eyes. “At the moment, you feel like the unwilling victim of a party game, but you’re being nice and going along with it.”
He felt his face slightly flush.
“You like Gabby,” she continued. “And you really enjoyed your time together last night, but you’re not sure if you can trust her on any level. You are concerned about my sister, but deep down, you need her alive for information. And you think I’m pretty, but the word beautiful keeps popping up in your thoughts.”
“And you got all of that from my emotions?” he asked, suddenly feeling quite uncomfortable.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Yep.”
“That really is a good trick,” he said as he sat down next to her and looked at the twins. A boy sucking his thumb, a girl wrapped in a pink blanket with a pacifier hanging loosely from her mouth, they were quite adorable as they slept. “The way you do it, it’s almost like telepathy, or maybe you’re just really good at it.”
“Proximity,” she said quickly as she turned to look at him. “It’s all about how physically close I am to the other person. The closer I am, the more I read.”
Sitting next to her, he suddenly felt the need to not think or feel anything. Best to keep the rest of his feelings to himself. “What about the guy who attacked your sister? Did you get anything from him?”
“What I felt was very faint,” she said with a sigh. “It was just the vaguest of feelings.”
“Anything at this point would help.”
She looked up at him and smiled, a sweet and kind expression that made him feel almost special that someone so nice and pretty would smile at him like that. “I’m not overly enthusiastic when it comes to remembering anything about today,” she said.
“I know,” he said, trying his best to be sympathetic, another act which didn’t come natural to him. “Anything at all would help.”
She leaned back and closed her eyes like she did when she read him. “When we first saw him, I felt hatred, pain, a desire for vengeance. But then, for a split-second, he looked into the car at me, and I felt a sadness, a longing, a hopelessness.” She opened her eyes and looked at The Detective. “Does that help?”
“Somewhat.” He stood up and walked over to the other side of the room and looked out a window. “Who’s Adam?” he asked, fishing for information and trying to keep his emotions on the subject as closed as he could, lest she find out something that wasn’t his to tell.
“He’s my best friend, almost like my brother,” she said with another sigh as a frown covered her face. “Or at least he was. Why? Have you seen him?”
“Ice mentioned him in passing,” he lied. Lying had always been, of course, an act which did come natural. “Why do you say ‘was?’”
Emily leaned back against her chair. “I haven’t heard from him in almost three weeks. He won’t answer my calls or my texts. I went to his place last week, and he wouldn’t open the door. But I knew he was there. I could feel him.”
“How did he feel?”
“Angry,” she answered. “Very angry. And it kind of pissed me off that he would just sit there and not open the door, so I left in a bit of a huff myself. And then, out of nowhere, I got a message on my phone from him yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday?” The Detective asked, trying not to think too hard about how a corpse could use a cell phone. “What did it say?”
She reached down to a bag by her feet and fumbled around for something. She pulled out a cell phone, flipped it open, and thumbed through her list of messages. She found the one she wanted and handed the phone to him. “Here,” she said, “read it.”
He read the message out loud. “Emily, look above my bed for the answers. I’m sorry, and I love you.” He handed the phone back to her. “
What’s above his bed?”
“Nothing but ceiling,” she answered, her voice filled with frustration. “Now what the hell does he expect me to do with that?”
The Detective shrugged his shoulders and looked back out the window.
She placed the phone back in her bag. “Men suck,” she said. “Present company excluded, of course.”
He turned back towards her and smiled. “You don’t have to exclude me. I agree with you one hundred percent. Men suck, myself included. If I was a woman, I would totally be a lesbian.”
She smiled and laughed, covering her mouth to muffle the sound and not wake the babies.
“That’s good,” he said with a slight grin of his own. “You’re very pretty when you smile; I was hoping I could get you to do it again.”
She blushed slightly and started to turn away, and then her phone emitted a beep. The Detective turned away to give her privacy as she bent down and took the phone from the bag. He looked out the window and noticed how the early morning sun was giving way to noon, when Emily tapped him on the shoulder.
“It’s for you,” she said, handing him the phone.
“Me?” he asked. “If it’s that heavy breather guy again, I told him to stop calling me here.”
She laughed under her breath. He couldn’t help but notice she had a cute laugh. “No,” she said. “It’s from Gabby.”
“Ice? She’s down the hall. Couldn’t she just walk down here and tell us?”
“Just read it,” she said, the frown returning to her face.
He looked at the screen and read the message: “Emily, Fire is out of surgery, and the doctor said she is going to be fine. Thank God. 616, by the time I send this, I’ll already be gone. I’m heading upstate to where Psychosis lives. I know it’s where this bastard is going. I’m going to meet him there, and I’m going to kill him. Don’t follow me. I want you to take my car and leave. Go home to Canada, go to Mexico, find a boat to Europe. I don’t care, just get the hell out of the country as fast as you can. Leave, and don’t look back. I’m only telling you this because, for some stupid reason, I like you, and I owe you for what you’ve done for both me and Fire. The assault team, the one The Agent is sending, is for you in case you decided to run. They’re not coming for the fucker in Barren’s armor. And it won’t be long before they find you there. I wish I could explain, but there isn’t time. Just know, I’m sorry. -Ice”
The Detective handed Emily’s phone back. “Well,” he said, not sure whether to find the whole thing amusing or be pissed off. “Isn’t that just a kick in the ass.”
“If I was you,” she said, “I’d go with pissed off. But that’s just me.”
“You really have to stop doing that.”
“Habit. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he said as he smiled at her. “I guess I have to go now.” He held his hand out to shake hers. “It’s been a pleasure.”
She bypassed his hand and gripped him in a tight hug. He assumed it was a family tradition. “Please take care of yourself. Whether you know it or not, you are a good man. I can feel it from you. And there’s just not enough of your kind left in the world.”
“There’s Adam,” he said as he let her go, and she stepped back.
She looked up at him and smiled her sweet delicate smile. The scent of honey flooded his senses. “Yeah,” she said softly, “there’s always Adam.”
And he knew without actually knowing it, that at some point in their close proximity, he had given away the truth about her best friend. He leaned over and planted a small kiss on her forehead. “I’m sorry, beautiful. It wasn’t mine to tell.” He bent down to retrieve his hat and coat from the back of the chair. “I really have to go. Just take care of yourself and those babies.” And without looking back, he walked as fast as he could towards the nearest exit, trying his best to not draw any unwarranted attention to himself.
_______________________________________________
Emily watched The Detective walked in a hurried pace down the hallway. She actually found that she couldn’t take her eyes off of him; he was handsome; he was nice; he had called her beautiful. He was also a felon that Ice had taken out of The Hole, but these day, such things didn’t really matter. Not everyone in prison was there because they had done something wrong. Most were there simply because they had pissed The Agent off.
“What the hell was that?” she asked herself out loud as The Detective turned the corner and faded from her view. So much had happened over the past few hours; her sister, Adam, some asshole in The Iron Knight suit trying to kill The Seven, it was almost too much to take in. Her thoughts shifted to Adam, and she did her best to block them out. She had loved him like the brother she’d never had, and she knew he had felt the same about her. They had been best friends since they’d met all those years ago.
He had been the kid from the war, the orphan The Agent had taken in and adopted as his own. Adam had never really talked to her about his parents or how they had died, and she had never pried, never really wanting to bring it up. She knew it was a painful topic, something he didn’t want to discuss, so she left it at that.
She remembered the first time she’d met him. He seemed shell-shocked, just removed from his participation in the war, too skinny, somewhat broken from everything he had just seen. Her sister had brought him over every day for a month, using the opportunity to feed him, to try and repair some of the damage he had incurred. And for the most part, it had worked. He gained weight; he talked and laughed; he shared his secrets, telling her about every little crush he developed over the years.
Over the years, it seemed as if most of the damage had been wiped away, or at least, she thought most of it had been. She knew the nightmares had remained, occurring almost every night. They were always the same, not that she could get him to talk about them, and she would have never used her powers to see what he had woken up screaming about. But as was prone to happen when she was in close proximity to someone, bits and pieces were bound to leak through, and she had unfortunately seen enough of his nightmares to know how bad they were.
She looked down at the babies, so precious, so sweet, each of them completely clueless as to how close they were to being motherless. She thought about Adam; she thought about her sister, and she thought about the bastard in Barren’s damn suit. She felt like she should have been surprised that all of this was happening, but in actuality, she wasn’t. She knew how many sins The Seven had committed to achieve their version of peace, and she knew eventually all of those wrongs would have to be paid for. And people like Adam, like the babies, even herself to a certain degree, innocents when it was all said and done, would probably be the ones having to pay for the crimes of their elders.
She looked up at the corner of the waiting room, directly into the camera that sat there, occasionally swaying back and forth, panning across the room. She wondered if The Agent was watching her right now; she doubted it; after all, who was she? But she had this feeling, this suspicion, this ounce of paranoia that someone was on the other end of the camera watching her every move. She thought about making an obscene gesture in the camera’s general direction, but she didn’t think it would go over too well.
She looked away from the camera as a doctor in a white coat walked into the room. He held a clipboard in his hand and glanced down at it before he spoke.
“Are you Mrs. Blaze’s sister?” he asked.
“Yes, doctor. How is she?”
“Your sister is going to be fine. The bullet managed to miss all of the major organs and arteries. She was very lucky. It’s as if the shooter intentionally wanted her to live.”
As she stood up and shook the doctor’s hand, thanking him for everything he had done for Pammy, a strange sensation flooded her thoughts. Despite everything that had taken place, despite her sister, despite Adam, a momentary sense of happiness flooded over her, and she realized her thoughts had strayed to The Detective. He had been so handsome, so nice, and he had called her beautiful. L
ike a little girl in the schoolyard, she suddenly realized that she had a crush.
And then, as the doctor handed her various pieces of paper to sign, the happiness she felt turned to a sort of melancholy. Whether he decided to run or The Agent had him killed, she knew The Detective was probably not coming back through those doors, and in that moment, she realized she was most likely never going to see him ever again.
_______________________________________________
Ice had betrayed him. He had always been prepared for the eventuality, but he never honestly believed it would happen, not her, not the one who had always been his most faithful. And for him? For the golden retriever with the over sized adrenal gland, the dog who pretended to be a man, she would betray him for that?
It didn’t matter. She would be punished for her betrayal, either by him or through sheer circumstance. It was bound to happen. All that mattered now was making sure the pieces were in place, that all the players in the game were where they should be. And if The Detective did what she had asked him to do, if he did try to escape the country, well things wouldn’t be in place, and he couldn’t have that.
He looked at his wall of monitors, each of which showed him every angle he could possible need. Fire lay unconscious in her hospital bed; her sister sat quietly in the waiting room, rocking Fire’s children back and forth in their stroller; Ice was leaving the hospital on her giant frozen slide, completely unaware that he knew everything she had just done. And a man in a trench coat and a black fedora walked briskly down the hospital’s hallways, trying to make his way to Ice’s car, which was parked on the very top level of the parking lot.
He picked up a phone from a cradle on the button covered console, placing it against his ear.
“Yes, Chancellor,” a man’s voice said through the earpiece.
“Send the assault team, and make sure they have a teleporter, preferably one of the paper pushers. Be sure he is expendable.” He started to return the phone to its resting place before he remembered one last thing. “Have the team pick her up and bring her to me.”
