I stood up straight from the tree I had been leaning against.
“At the risk of being accused of being a goody-goody by Shadow, let me say this about training to become a Hero. The training will teach you how to use your powers, to act within the confines of the law, and a bunch of other things. But, the most important thing the training will teach you is the essence of what a Hero is. A Hero is someone who does what needs to be done, even if that thing is not easy or he does not want to do it,” I said. “On second thought, make that especially if that thing is not easy and the Hero doesn’t want to do it. A true Hero does what’s right even when what’s right is hard.”
I clapped my hands together.
“Okay, that’s enough talking for now. Let’s get back to work. Try not to singe my eyebrows off when you explode this time,” I said.
Later that day, we all ate dinner together as had become our habit. Shadow had cooked the meal. The main dish was a seafood and vegetable stir-fry over brown rice. Though the food was good, I was a slightly better cook than Shadow. I knew better than to suggest that to her, though.
“I’ve been thinking about what we were talking about earlier,” Clara suddenly said. “I think I want to try to become a licensed Hero when I get older.” Clara looked at me. “And, I want you to be my Sponsor.”
I put my fork down, my food immediately forgotten. I was shocked by her request. Being someone’s Hero Sponsor was, in some ways, like adopting a child. You were responsible for taking care of an Apprentice, for her Hero education, and for making sure she did not hurt herself or others. In other ways, it was even more significant than adopting a child. If your Apprentice hurt or—God forbid—killed someone, the Hero was as much responsible for it as if he committed the act himself. Even after the Apprenticeship was over and the Apprentice became a Hero herself, what she did as a Hero reflected, for good or ill, on the sponsoring Hero. Committing to be someone’s Hero Sponsor was as significant as saying marriage vows. It was a sacred trust and obligation, and not something to be taken lightly.
All that flashed through my mind in an instant. I had grown quite fond of Clara.
“Sure,” I said.
“You cannot do any better than Truman as a Sponsor,” Shadow said to Clara. “Though he’s always making jokes and being goofy, that’s mostly a facade. He is just like that because it’s a dangerous world out there, and Truman has to face it day in and day out. If he did not make light of the world and himself, he’d go crazy. Underneath it all, Truman is strong, tough, smart, resourceful, loyal, and brave. I’m proud to have him as a friend. He is a good man and a great Hero. You’re already a good person. If you listen to Truman, he will help you become a great Hero too.”
The room fell silent. If Shadow had stood up on the table and announced she was the Virgin Mary, I would have been less surprised and taken aback.
“Shadow,” I said, “I know you don’t like to shake hands, but what would happen if I got up and hugged you right now?”
Shadow speared some green beans with her fork, put them into her mouth, and chewed thoroughly and thoughtfully. Then she swallowed, and spoke.
“Well, I would do one of two things. I would either break one of your bones—one of the major ones, you know, to make sure it took a long time to heal—or I would slap you into next month. It would all just depend on my mood at the time.”
“I see,” I said. I supposed I should have known Shadow would not remain warm and fuzzy for long.
Clara was looking at Shadow with wide eyes.
“What would you do if I hugged you?” she asked.
“I don’t like to be touched,” Shadow said firmly. “By anyone.”
Later that night, Clara and I both fell asleep in the living room reading. Clara dozed off lying on the couch; I fell asleep in Shadow’s leather recliner with the footrest extended. I became semi-conscious when Shadow entered the room. Through half-closed eyes, I saw Shadow approach Clara quietly. Shadow bent over her and gently moved a few errant strands of hair off of her face. Then she kissed Clara on the forehead. She carefully picked Clara up, and carried her into Clara’s bedroom.
A few minutes later, Shadow came back into the room. My eyes were shut, but I was only feigning sleep at that point. The tenderness Shadow had shown Clara had shocked me into full wakefulness. Shadow came up to me, put a blanket over me, and gently tucked it in around me. She did not kiss me on the forehead as she had Clara. If she had, I might have had a heart attack.
Shadow was not as hard as she pretended to be. Almost, but not quite.
It took me a while to go back to sleep. I thought for a long while about how we all wear masks, even those of us who did not have masks in the traditional sense of the word. Maybe we who did not wear conventional masks were more thoroughly masked than anyone else.
All of my biological family had died when I was quite young. But, when I finally did go back to sleep, I dreamed vague but comforting dreams of friends and family.
It was nice.
CHAPTER 27
About three weeks after Shadow and I had rescued Clara, we were at Shadow’s dining room table having lunch. I had broached the subject of Metahuman training school with both Shadow and Clara, and they both thought it was a good idea. Clara’s parents would need to sign off on the idea, of course. I had little doubt Mrs. Barton would do so. As for Mr. Barton, I would make sure he agreed to it. If he did not agree, making his life a living hell until he changed his mind would be my new pet project.
The only remaining issue was that of money to pay for tuition as the schools were private. Expecting the Bartons to pay the tuition seemed to be more than could be expected, regardless of how much of a hell I made Mr. Barton’s life. Besides, the Bartons could hardly afford the tuition on Mr. Barton’s salary alone. I was willing to help defray some of the expense myself. Shadow had said she would help as well, which, frankly, had not surprised me the way it might have weeks before. Nothing Shadow did surprised me anymore.
To fill the gap between what we could raise on our own and what I thought the total expense would wind up being, I had contacted some wealthy people I knew, both in and out of the Hero world, who might be willing to donate to a worthy cause. I was waiting to hear back from all of them. I was planning to go to town later that day to see if there were any messages from them awaiting me. I was optimistic things would work out and I would be able to enroll Clara in a Metahuman school shortly.
As we ate, I looked at Shadow and Clara. Though I was looking forward to getting back to my normal life, I would miss moments like these. It made me wonder if I should find some nice girl—Ginny Southland perhaps—and settle down. I had been a bachelor all my life and never had children. Though I had a couple of close calls in the past, marriage and parenthood always seemed like things I would do in the future, when I was older. I’ll settle down once I stop fighting, I had thought at one point in my life. I’ll settle down once I pass the Trials, I thought at another point. When my detective business makes a certain level of income, that is when I’ll consider marriage, I thought later. There was always something, always a reason to postpone marriage and family until some point in the future. But, I was no spring chicken any longer. The future was now.
“You wanna get married Shadow?” I asked. “Just think of the pretty mocha superbabies we could have.”
“Sure,” she said. “You’ll have to take my last name, though. Plus, I’ll expect you to have dinner on the table and waiting for me when I get back from my assignments.”
Shadow carefully looked me up and down appraisingly.
“I’m not sure how you’ll look in a skirt and heels, though,” she finally said. “You might have to go for the barefoot and pregnant look instead. Speaking of which, you’ll need to talk to a doctor about what you’ll need to do in order to get pregnant. At a minimum, I expect you’ll need several surgeries and hormone treatments.”
Clara continued to eat as she listened to our exchange. She was used to hea
ring me and Shadow joust.
“Are you trying to imply you would have to be the dominant one in our marriage?” I asked.
“Yes,” Shadow said.
“Hmmm,” I said, pretending to think things over. “I withdraw my proposal then.”
“I thought you might,” Shadow said.
I suddenly felt a tingling sensation at the base of my skull. My powers were making me aware of the presence of someone—no, make that a number of someones—outside the cabin. I put my fork down and stood.
“There are people outside,” I said quietly. Shadow stood as well. Clara’s eyes got wide with anxiety and a touch of fear. I drew my gun from my hip holster. I kept a gun on me at all times. We had not had any issues since we had come to Shadow’s cabin, but it pays to be prepared.
There was a knock on the door. The sound rang through the cabin like a gunshot.
“Stay here with Clara,” I murmured to Shadow. “I’ll see who it is.”
Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps some of Shadow’s neighbors decided to pay us an unexpected visit. But, they had never done so before. Besides, Shadow’s closest neighbor was many acres away, and there were multiple people outside. I was guessing this was not a surprise neighborly visit.
I went to the front door. A rectangular pane of glass was in the top half of it, covered by a curtain. I lifted a corner of it and peeked out. Nothing. Then, I looked down. There were two children in front of the door, with a smaller, younger boy standing in front of a taller, older girl. The boy was maybe five-years-old, and the girl maybe eleven. The left arm of the girl was around the neck of the boy. The faces of both were expressionless.
I did a double-take at what I saw in the older child’s hand. I blinked in disbelief. But, what I had seen was not my imagination: the older one held a pistol to the head of the younger one.
As I watched, the boy knocked on the door again.
“If you don’t open up, the brains of this little boy will get splattered all over the front door,” the girl said. “That would be a shame. It is quite a nice door. Maple is it? Besides, the boy’s brains aren’t even fully developed yet. It seems a waste to spoil them before he and his parents get to find out how he turns out.”
The voice was high and girlish, but the words were anything but girlish. The words were those of someone I had hoped to never encounter again.
The Pied Piper had found us.
I wondered how he had located us. But, that was a question for another time. I needed to deal with the problem at hand first.
I opened the door. Two young blank faces looked up at me. The boy had brown freckles on his pale nose and a pink smear on the side of his mouth, as if he had been sloppily eating ice cream not long before. The girl was blonde, and had a pink ribbon in her hair. Her blue eyes had flecks of gold in them. It’s funny the little details you picked up in moments like that.
I held my gun down at my side. Mine was a nine millimeter. The one in the girl’s hand appeared to be a .25, or maybe a .22. Though it was a small gun holding small caliber bullets, it looked big in the girl’s hand. With her holding the gun right up to the little boy’s head, even with a small caliber bullet, it would be big enough to get the job done.
The thought flew through my mind to bat the gun away from the boy’s head, but I discarded it as soon as I thought it. The girl’s finger was on the trigger, and she would be able to get the shot off before I was halfway to her hand. Then, I thought of using my powers to knock both of them out. I was summoning my will to do so when other people—no, other children—caught my eye.
The two children in front of the door stood on a flat laminated wooden platform with stairs extending from either end. The stairs to my right led up the hill and towards my and Shadow’s parked vehicles. The stairs to my left led down the hill and towards the stream. Directly beyond the railing of the stairs was a cleared ribbon of land, and then woods. Two other children stood on the steps leading up. Another pair of children stood on the steps leading down. Lined up outside of the stairs on the cleared land were three other pairs of children. Twelve children total. They were all of various races and sexes, and they ranged in age from maybe four at the youngest to twelve at the oldest.
The children all had three things in common, though. The first was the bigger of each pair had his or her arm around the neck of the smaller child. The second thing in common was the bigger child either held a gun to the head of the smaller child, or a knife to the throat of the smaller child. The third thing in common was each child’s face was as blank as an empty canvas.
There were too many of them for me to incapacitate them all at once, not without seriously hurting or killing them. I did not want to hurt children. They were but marionettes. It was the man pulling their strings I wanted to hurt.
The children were all turned towards me. They looked at me unblinkingly. It was creepy. It was like stepping into the scene of a horror movie. But, this was no movie. This was real.
“Why don’t you come out and face me Pied Piper,” I said loudly, “instead of hiding behind children?”
“I considered that,” spoke the girl standing in front of me. Though her lips moved, the rest of her face was as still as newly fallen snow. “My colleague Bonebreaker wanted to come in, kill you and Shadow, and simply take Clara. Since we brought along with us a couple of our MLF brethren, we probably could do it.”
The girl paused.
“But, perhaps I underestimated you before,” the girl said. Though the girl’s expression did not change, I caught a hint of a smile in her tone. Or, I should have said, the Pied Piper’s tone. “I think it is possible I have grown too accustomed to dealing with Unevolveds and their limitations and impotence. You and Shadow have proven yourselves to be formidable adversaries. Perhaps you would not be as easy to kill as Bonebreaker thinks. Perhaps I or my men would be injured or killed ourselves if we took Clara by force. And, though you have caused me and my organization a great deal of trouble, I have a weak spot for Metas. You are my people after all. I hate to kill a Meta when other means to accomplish my goals are available.”
The girl’s lips twisted into a travesty of a smile. With the rest of her face immobile, the parting of her lips looked more like a baring of teeth than a smile.
“Which is why my colleagues and I stopped off in town to gather these children before paying you a visit,” the girl said. “The beauty of small towns like Lexington is that parents do not watch their children as carefully as they would if they were in a big city. Borrowing these children was child’s play, if you will pardon the turn of phrase.”
“What do you want?” I asked. I already knew the answer.
“Oh don’t be coy, Mr. Lord,” the girl said. “I am here to reclaim Clara, of course. The MLF has expended a great deal of time and money augmenting her developing powers, and we are not about to let that investment go to waste.”
“What makes you think Clara is here?” I said.
“You are in danger of going from being coy to insulting my intelligence,” the girl said. “The great thing about an organization like the MLF is the wealth of Metahuman talents we can draw on. Radiowave, one of our members, can monitor cellular transmissions with his powers. After you took Clara, I had him stay close to Mrs. Barton. I thought if you or Clara contacted anyone about Clara’s whereabouts, it would be Mrs. Barton. And sure enough, two days ago Mrs. Barton received a call from Clara. Clara refused to tell her where she was, and said she only called to assure her mother she was all right and that she was with you. That brief call was enough for Radiowave to determine Clara’s location and lead us here to you.”
I had specifically told Clara to not contact her mother or anyone else. She must have used one of Shadow’s burner cell phones to do so anyway. Well, what was done, was done. There was no point in crying over spilled milk. The horse had already been stolen. I wished there was a cliché that could get us out of this fix, but I was coming up empty.
“All right,” I said. �
�Let’s say Clara is here. What makes you think I will turn her over to you?”
“The reason why I think so is standing in front of you. Twelve such reasons stand in front of you, actually. If you do not hand Clara over, six young lives will be ended before they even get properly started. Then their young killers will turn their weapons on themselves.” Though I knew she was being controlled, to hear those cold-blooded words come from a child chilled my bones.
“So, how about it, Mr. Lord?” the girl asked. “Twelve children in exchange for one teenager. If you ask me, you are getting the better end of the bargain.”
I was between a rock and a hard place. I could almost certainly act quickly enough to stop some of the children from killing each other. I would not be able to stop all of them, though.
I did not want to put Clara in the Pied Piper’s hands again. I was afraid of what he might do using her powers. Plus, I had come to care for Clara. She had trusted me enough to ask me to be her Hero Sponsor. How could I betray that trust by handing her over to the man who had forced her to kill? On the other hand, how could I let twelve innocent children die to save one? That was a betrayal of the Hero oath I had taken years before, not to mention something that would fly in the face of my own conscience.
“If I give you Clara, do I have your word you will not harm these children? Will you let them all go unharmed?” I asked.
“You do and I will,” the girl said.
What choice did I have?
“Come here Clara,” I said with my voice raised. I felt sick.
After a moment or two, Clara came up beside me. Her face was ashen. She was shaking.
“Did you hear what we were saying?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“I’m going to have to ask you to go with him,” I said. “If you don’t, all these children will die. We can’t let that happen.”
Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Page 17
