God, I hated how she said those two words. “Your sister.” The message was all too clear. Claire was my responsibility and I wasn’t doing enough to take care of her. I could see flashes of light emerging at the corner of my eye, starting with the big crack in the floor.
Shit. Not good.
“—is suspended from this school, effective immediately,” the woman continued. “The issue of whether or not she will be expelled is currently on the vice principal’s desk.”
“What? Expelled? But this is Claire’s senior year. She’s passing all her classes. If we can just get her to June—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gage, but those are the rules. We can’t make exceptions, not even for your sister—”
My fist made contact with the closest locker. The metallic crash thundered around the empty locker room.
“—despite her difficulties. You know that.”
“Fine,” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. “Mariah will be right over to pick her up.”
And before Fiona Hardscrabble could let loose another one of her ridiculously long sighs, I hung up the phone.
The flashes of light were still on the edge of my vision as I texted Mariah. Her classes only went until noon on Friday, and she had the car, so she would need to be the one to pick up Claire. I tried to keep the information to the pertinent stuff—what Claire had done, the fact that she was now suspended—when all I wanted to do was bitch about the lack of compassion from the school.
I was well aware of how difficult and frustrating Claire could be. It just seemed strange that while the school was so willing to mention Claire’s “difficulties,” they didn’t seem to comprehend them. I mean, the girl had lost her mother. At sixteen. It had been hard enough for me at twenty-three. I could only imagine dealing with that on top of teenage angst. And Dad…well, he had never really been in the picture, up and leaving back when Claire was just six.
So, trust me. I was the first person to snap at her when she got under my skin, and I didn’t think she should ever be given any special treatment, but I never forgot why she was the way she was. If she deserved to be suspended, suspend her. But treat her like a human being, not an inconvenience.
Shit. We’d have to bring in Claire’s case manager for this. Yet another person trying to tell us what to do with our lives.
I glanced up and looked around the locker room, at the glowing cracks in the floor, around the ceiling’s support beam, and at the door frame. All points of weaknesses that would likely cause issues for the Grand Bailey, but not today.
That is, if I could keep my big fists away from them.
Once I had received Mariah’s “okay,” I put my phone back in the locker and left the room, the glow of the fault lines around me starting to give me a headache. I tried to focus on breathing, on putting it away. If Calypso was going to hold me responsible for the body armor, I had to be prepared to enter that conversation with a clear head.
And then I heard the shouts coming from the parking garage.
I couldn’t make out the words at first. The echo of the garage did a pretty good job of distorting the voices. So I didn’t know what to expect when I jogged inside to discover a large group of people gathered in a circle, watching two guys grapple in the middle. To their credit, they weren’t cheering them on or anything. In fact, they looked kind of uncomfortable about the whole thing. But that didn’t change the fact that they weren’t doing anything about it.
It was impossible not to recognize the fighters: Marty Tong and Noel White.
“—said I could never go back,” Noel said, struggling against Marty’s grip. “She said—”
“Shut up,” Marty said between clenched teeth as he gripped Noel tighter in a headlock. “I can’t believe you would say that. The Mistress—”
He was cut off as Noel began delivering punches right to his gut. There wasn’t much to the blows, but they still caught the shorter guy off guard.
Oh Christ, of all the moronic things to get caught up in. The fault lines around me seemed to intensify, and before I knew what I was doing, I had stomped one of my feet on the concrete floor. A large snapping noise filled the room as a crack formed beneath me, snaking its way into the crowd and ending up right beneath Noel and Marty. The two were thrown off-balance and stumbled apart, Noel ending up half on the floor. They immediately turned and looked at me, as did everyone else in the circle.
“What’s going on here!” My voice echoed around the garage.
“This fucker has cold feet,” Marty said, giving Noel a hard shove. The skinny kid hit the floor.
“Marty.” My voice was low. “Are you trying to start something with me?”
“Ah…no. I…” He pointed toward Noel. “He disrespected the Mistress.”
“And I’ll take care of that. Seriously, you’re acting like a couple of brats.”
Marty’s face went red at the insult. Then I saw his eyes drop down to the crack at his feet and he clamped his mouth shut. Without a word, he turned and walked away. It wasn’t until then that I realized how quiet the garage had gotten.
“Don’t you all have something to do?” I snapped at the crowd. They immediately drew back.
There were some benefits to being the only Empowered person around.
I crossed the garage and stretched out a hand. Noel looked up and accepted it, keeping his other hand cradled to his chest. I caught sight of a bandage over his thumb, a mark from his encounter with the Red and Black Woman.
“He injure something?” I asked.
“No, just sore.” Noel didn’t meet my eyes.
“Come with me.”
We walked over to a large, old gray van parked off to the side. Someone had left the back doors open so we just stepped in. Once inside, I flicked on the dome light and pulled the doors shut. Neither of us was exactly short, and the roof was pretty low, so we sat on a couple of boxes. I nodded toward the bandage.
“How’s that healing?” I asked.
“Fine,” Noel said, tucking it beside him. “Susan took care of it after you left on Wednesday.”
I nodded. Susan, a nurse, was also one of Calypso’s drones.
“So, you wanna tell me what was going on out there?” I asked.
“No,” he said sulkily, sounding even younger than the college kid he was.
“Well, too bad, you don’t have much of a choice.” I leaned back, crossing my arms across my chest. His eyes flickered to my hands. Then he began to speak again.
“When…on Wednesday, when we went to get Mr. Hamilton, I…well I had to distract Red and Black for a bit.”
I nodded.
“She said some things and well…she recognized me and Marty. She said there were cameras, and after what happened with that old guy…the security guard…”
“Ah, you’re worried about getting caught? Calypso has people inside the police department, you know. It’s how Marty managed to get off after bungling that Peterson job. I’m sure they—”
“That Red and Black Woman…she said I could never go back,” Noel said, his voice distant and lost.
I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it firmly.
Oh. Oh hell.
I was hoping that this would be easy. Noel would tell me that Marty had said something stupid, and I’d go and smack the guy and tell him to cool his jets. But this…this went deeper. How the hell was I supposed to tell Noel to shut up and be a happy, brainwashed drone?
“Do you want to go back?” I finally asked.
“Well…not completely,” Noel said with a frown. “I mean…the Mistress…” His eyes glossed over. “Before her, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Not really. And now…” He gave a slow, almost sleepy smile. “I have purpose.”
I couldn’t smile back.
“But you don’t like all of it,” I said. “Like hurting that security guard.”
Noel nodded before speaking.
“It just…well, it wasn’t necessary. The Mistress told us to bring her the law
yer, not to…kill.” He paused to shudder. “Anyone.”
I nodded. He was right, on multiple levels. A dead body complicated things, probably more than Calypso had intended. Marty was impulsive, but he was almost always sent out on these jobs because he would do absolutely anything for the Mistress.
In theory, all the drones would do that. But the longer I spent time around them, the more I realized that it was more complicated. Becoming a drone made you 100 percent loyal to Calypso, it was true, above and beyond everything else in your life. But it didn’t completely erase who you were—your sense of morality, your likes and dislikes.
At least, not for a little while.
And Noel, still being new, was an example of that.
“I’ve missed classes.” His voice snapped me back to attention. “And I called out of work last night. I know…it sounds small—”
“But it’s not,” I replied. “Listen, I’ll talk to Calypso about her contacts with the police. We’ll see what we can do about getting you back in as soon as possible.”
Noel shook his head.
“But Miss Red and Black knew who I was. What’s to stop her from coming after me?”
“Well, dropping her out of a window helped.” I tried to keep my voice light. “And we could always bring her up to the top floor next time.”
Noel let out a chuckle.
“Oh, and by the way, the next time Marty tries to start something, you’re not going to get far with those puny moves.”
I delivered a soft punch to his right shoulder. Noel winced, clearly more out of embarrassment than pain.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve never been in a fight before.”
“And you’ll probably find yourself in one again. You understand?”
He nodded.
“Why don’t you come down here tomorrow at nine?” I continued. “I don’t have to work and could show you some moves.”
“The types of moves that can break apart concrete floors?”
“That part isn’t…teachable. But I wouldn’t be able to do the things I do if I had never been taught how to throw a proper punch.”
“Oh?”
“I got in a bunch of trouble as a kid.” I shrugged. “Guy at my church taught me how to box, hoped it would give me an outlet to keep those emotions in check.”
“Did it work?”
“Not how he intended.”
We finalized things before heading out of the van. As I walked toward the elevator, I was happy to see not a single flash of light.
Good. I would need to be sharp for what came next.
Before the Grand Bailey had gone under, the owners had tried to revitalize the hotel as a place for business conferences. After all, they had the space, but not the oceanfront views that tourists demanded. And they could have pulled it off too, had they not driven themselves so far into debt that the renovations were never completed. It was why, if you happened to walk around the place, you would come across things like a half-finished pool and huge event rooms with no carpet or light fixtures.
But some of the renovations had been finished, such as my destination: Conference Room B.
I walked into the room at 12:30 PM sharp. As you’d expect, the room was dominated by a large table. It was usually covered in plastic to keep off the dust, but someone had shoved that in a corner to prepare for the day’s meeting. Four mismatched chairs surrounded the large table. Someone had wheeled in Calypso’s Smart Board to the front, but it was in sleep mode. The room was empty, so I took one of the seats. The chair creaked beneath me.
“Alex, glad that you could make it.”
I looked up to see, not Calypso, but the one person who could make my skin crawl just at the sight of her. She stood about five-foot-four, with straight, dark-brown hair that was longer on one side than the other for some reason. Her attire was high class like Calypso’s, but while my boss tended to favor outfits with a little more slink, Amity was always 100 percent business. This could be seen by her tailored maroon blazer and matching skirt, which she wore with a white shirt and tan scarf. She held a tablet in her arms, but her attention wasn’t on that. Instead, her eyes were pointed directly at me.
When she smiled, the tanned skin around her eyes crinkled. I had a hard time guessing her age but she looked to be in her mid-thirties. Not that it was easy to focus on that. There was just something…creepily all-knowing about that smile.
She made her way across the room, hand outstretched for a shake. I ignored it.
Calypso’s abilities were terrifying, but at least you stayed you until the insanity took over. Amity wasn’t so compassionate.
All it took was a single brush of her hand, and she could erase you. I had first seen it months ago. A couple of guys in their twenties had wandered into the Grand Bailey with hopes of doing some urban exploring. When they had come across what appeared to be a terrorist cell, they were pretty concerned. But before they could pull out their phones to call the FBI, Amity had arrived and searched through their memories, picking out the damaging ones and replacing them with a relatively dull afternoon. That had left me feeling pretty disturbed. I had known Amity for weeks, after all. Who’s to say she hadn’t been looking into my memories, tampering with my brain without me realizing it?
And there was the fact that she had implied she could do more—erase not just an afternoon, but years of your life, just like that.
And I’m pretty sure that, unlike Calypso, her powers worked just fine on me
“How was your weekend?” Amity asked. “Is school going well for Mariah?”
“Everything’s fine.” My voice stiffened at the mention of my sister.
“Our friends down at the police department mentioned that it’s been weeks since they’ve seen your baby sister Claire. Looks like that girl is finally on the straight and narrow—either that or she’s gotten better at covering her tracks.”
She let out a laugh that showed off her white teeth.
“Hmmm,” I said as we both took seats.
“Oh, so serious still?” She raised an eyebrow in my direction. “I swear, you and Callie are cut from the same cloth. Neither of you seems to know how to have a normal conversation.”
As she spoke, she rested a hand on my shoulder. I jerked away from her, even though I knew her powers needed skin-on-skin contact. Picking up on my response, her grin spread wider, and my frustration began to turn to anger.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
We both looked up to see Calypso at the door, dressed from head to toe in emerald green. Her gaze lingered on Amity’s hand on my shoulder, then flickered up to me.
“Well?” she said.
“We were just waiting for you, Callie.” Amity removed her hand, then turned in her direction. “How are—”
“Fine,” Calypso said distantly before Amity could finish. The dark-haired woman’s mouth snapped shut, some of the humor leaving her gaze.
Calypso turned to the Smart Board and switched it on.
“Faultline, we are putting in an order to replace the broken pieces of your armor,” Calypso said.
I straightened up in response.
“Since they need to be custom-made to your measurements, there will be a delay before we will receive them,” she continued. “As a result, we will attempt to keep you out of the field until that time.”
“Wouldn’t want you to get caught up in our new player’s crosshairs.” Amity grinned.
I was pretty sure I understood who she meant by “new player.”
“So we think the Red and Black Woman survived the fall?” I asked.
“The lack of a corpse would indicate so.” Amity rolled her eyes toward me. “Unfortunately, the introduction of another Empowered figure has complicated things, turning relatively simplistic jobs into complex affairs.”
I frowned.
“I’m not sure if I would call toting off a high-powered lawyer with a helicopter simplistic,” I said.
“Oh no, that was pla
n B,” Amity said, voice cheerful. “Plan A was to use his daughter, a charming woman oh-so-devoted to our dear Callie here, to draw him into a secure location. It would have been far less public.” She paused to chuckle. “But less profitable for you.”
“So…why didn’t we just do that?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two.
“Oooh, I’m sure Martha Hamilton would have liked to help out, but given that she’s spent the past few days cooling her Jimmy Choos in a holding cell—”
“Martha Hamilton was the one arrested at the Dana Peterson job,” Calypso said, hitting a few buttons on the screen.
“Ah,” I said. “Well, I can see what you mean about this Actual complicating things.”
“The correct term is ‘Costume.’” Amity raised a single finger. “At least until she gets called out by Mr. Davies. Although ‘Empowered’ works fine for anyone with enhanced abilities, regardless. You should probably know the rules if you want to play the game, Ally.”
I jerked slightly at Amity’s mention of my old nickname. Did she know that was something Mariah called me? Had she pulled that memory out of my brain without me even realizing it? Or was it simply her habit of giving people unwanted nicknames?
Before I could reply, Amity let out a long sigh that immediately reminded me of Fiona Hardscrabble.
“Plan A was so easy,” she said. “Find the target. Recruit those nearest and dearest to the target. Use those recruits to quietly pull in the target, and cover our tracks. Unfortunately, Dana Peterson proved to be difficult, so we decided just to snatch him and move on to the rest. And then that fell through, and we’ve found ourselves in quite a mess. We have an Empowered Costume showing up at every site, and for some odd reason, the police aren’t as easily distracted as they used to be.”
As she spoke, Amity’s cheerful demeanor soured. By the end, her lips had twisted into a scowl.
“Then, if you don’t mind me asking.” I turned back to Calypso. “Why did we need to use Martha Hamilton? Why not grab someone else close to him? Maybe even a client. If the police aren’t distracted anymore, why make so much noise?”
“Complications,” Calypso answered in a breathy tone as she pulled up a folder on the screen.
Red and Black Page 8
