by Dan Jolley
A dozen yards ahead of her, on her right, was the door to a certain janitorial supply closet, and for several days now she’d watched it suspiciously whenever she passed it. The image of the two black eyes staring out at her was a lasting one. Even though the shopkeeper, Rico Ruiz, swore the vigilante had saved his life, the Gray Widow still made Gates’ skin crawl. Hero or not.
She’d thought a few times about propping the door open permanently, maybe leaving the light on inside. Tonight, for some reason she couldn’t put a finger on, that seemed like an excellent decision, and she wondered why she hadn’t made it before.
Gates stopped directly opposite the door and started to glance around for a chair to prop it with when something slammed into it from the inside.
Carla Gates dropped her charts and gasped.
Another impact and the door burst open, torn halfway off its hinges. The Gray Widow came out of the darkness with a young man cradled in her arms. At a glance Gates could tell the man had been beaten severely. The Widow’s head turned, and black eyes tracked across the ER. Activity ground to a halt with her arrival, and everyone from attendings to clerks stared at her openly.
The black eyes settled on Carla Gates. The Widow came toward her.
Gates thought the woman must have been at least seven feet tall.
“This man needs help, right now,” she said, and Gates recognized panic in her voice. An empty gurney stood nearby, and the Widow lowered the man gently onto it. “His name is Tim Kapoor, he’s twenty-five, he’s suffered blunt head trauma, and...”
The vigilante’s composure slipped further, and Gates realized she was crying.
“ ...And there might be...broken bones, maybe his collarbone...” She turned to Gates again and took a step toward her. “You can help him, right now, right? No waiting, no bullshit about insurance, right?”
Two security guards rounded the corner at the far end of the hall, and the black eyes lifted to them. Gates stammered a little before she got the right words out. “Yes, yes, of course.” She glanced over her shoulder at the guards. They both had guns drawn. “But we can do that best if we don’t have any other conflicts here.”
The Gray Widow nodded. Before she turned to go, in a voice thick with pain, she said, “Make him better. Help him. Please.” She spun and bolted through an exit.
Gates barked orders, and two nurses moved to wheel the injured young man into a trauma room as the two guards rushed past.
* * *
Starting at the roof of the apartment building next to the LaCroix and moving in concentric circles outward, a searing wind blew through Atlanta. At its head was a woman in gray with acid tears in her eyes.
Janey had never used the flickering the way she did now. She never fully entered it, but skimmed along its edge, shadow to shadow, neither in one place nor the other. With grinding teeth and tear-blurred vision Janey became shadow, and tore through the city with a speed close to flight.
She searched. As she searched, from time to time she repeated words to herself, and the pain grew worse with each repetition.
Not again. Not again. Not like Adam.
Twice she came upon people in the commission of crimes, and both times she acted swiftly and harshly before flickering away.
The first was a young man with a bandanna pulled down over his eyebrows, using a sheath knife to threaten a middle-aged woman behind a rundown clapboard house. It looked as if she’d come outside to empty her garbage. The woman might have heard a sigh, might have seen the hint of movement, before the man with the knife wrenched away from her and did a twisted, frenzied dance as Janey’s baton worked him over. The man collapsed to the grass-covered dirt like a marionette with its strings cut, both legs and one arm folded the wrong way. The grass around him scorched and died as Janey vanished. The woman, screaming now, ran back inside her house and slammed and locked the door.
The second was a blonde, tanned, muscular frat boy trying to force himself on a teenage girl in his car, which was parked out of sight in a drainage canal below a freeway overpass. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, screamed and thrashed as he pawed at her breasts and tried to jam one hand between her legs.
The girl had managed to get her door open and put one foot on the ground when the frat boy balled up his fist and punched her in the jaw. She screamed louder and tried to kick him—and stopped dead still when she looked over his shoulder and saw a looming gray shape outside the car.
The driver’s side door jerked open and the frat boy vanished through it. A number of sharp, violent impacts rang out as the girl clambered out of the car. She looked over the roof in time to see the gray shape deliver four devastating kicks to the frat boy’s crotch. The boy thudded to the ground, landing partly in and partly out of the car, his eyelashes and eyebrows singed off.
The girl stared into the darkness for a few seconds, straightened her clothes, fished her phone out of her purse, and dialed 911. The frat boy groaned loudly and threw up his dinner.
For over forty minutes Janey’s search continued, and storm clouds had begun to gather overhead when she saw a glimmer of something white disappear through a metal door at the side of a low brick building. With a tiny rush of recognition, Janey realized she was at the television studio where she’d made her unannounced guest appearance on the Good Morning Sheree show.
Somewhat familiar with the building’s layout, she flickered into the lobby and pressed against one wall, deep in the shadows.
From the lobby, the building split into two hallways which ran its length, one on the north side and one on the south. Between the corridors, studios took up most of the building’s floor space, while small offices lined the outer edges. The door she’d seen something disappear through was halfway down the southern hall, between two offices, and let out onto the parking lot. Janey flickered into the shadows and emerged on the other side of the locked glass doors separating the lobby from the hallways.
She identified the steady background hum as air conditioning, which ran even though the temperature outside couldn’t have been more than sixty. The building’s interior felt like a freezer, still and morgue-silent. Janey soundlessly edged her way to the corner of the southern hallway, started to peer around it, and paused.
Reaching into a shadow, Janey carefully pulled a small dentist’s mirror to her from the basement. Moving slowly so as not to create any sudden flashes that might register on Simon Grove’s peripheral vision, she extended the mirror past the corner’s edge and got a full view of the corridor.
A studio door gracefully clicked shut.
Something flashed in the opening just before the lock engaged; something that might have been the hem of a long gray coat. Janey was surprised to find a trace of indignation piled on top of everything else. Can’t believe the bastard went through my closet.
In a series of flickers, Janey moved down the hallway until she stood outside the door. She opened another small portal to the basement and replaced the mirror, and put her hand cautiously on the doorknob.
She knew it was some kind of trap. It had to be. Simon was playing with her, leading her on. But he was here, now, and Janey couldn’t let him escape, trap or not.
She turned the knob. All she needed was the tiniest of openings, just a glimpse into the studio, and she could flicker inside, reach a point of safety.
The knob worked smoothly, and the latch slowly disengaged. Janey pulled, gently, gently, and the door left the frame, millimeter by millimeter. She only needed one crack, just a hair wide, and her night vision would take care of the rest. She could take the room.
Another millimeter. And another—
— and the door exploded outward. The knob tore out of her hand, and Simon crouched there with a needle-toothed grin that nearly split his head in half. A long, forked tongue flicked out at Janey, and Simon’s finger-tendrils rushed forward, snaked around her li
ke demonic worms. The tendrils entangled both her arms immediately. Simon swiveled at his hips and hauled Janey completely off her feet.
Simon let out an ungodly hiss next to Janey’s ear as he heaved. Her arms still trapped, Janey tried to twist away, but Simon’s strength was immense. He whipped Janey over his head as if she were a rag doll and hammered her into the concrete floor.
Janey felt her left leg snap halfway between her foot and knee. All the air slammed out of her lungs as she screamed, and she jerked and pulled at her mask and got it off her face less than a second before she vomited, her stomach spasming painfully. She kept control of her bladder, but only just.
Silence. The tendrils had withdrawn at some point.
It took her a few seconds to realize Simon had moved away. Gasping at the pain, Janey tried to orient herself. She lay in the middle of the concrete floor of Studio 2, according to the sign above the exit. No lamps burned, and her night vision still worked, though brilliant red flashes filled the edges of it. The pain in her leg overwhelmed her. She vomited again, and wondered if what she felt swiftly approaching was shock. She tried to concentrate, tried to flicker away—
—and the room flooded with blinding white light. The flickering shut off with a painful shearing sensation, and her night vision fled in ragged neon tatters. Janey shielded her eyes and squinted. A dozen spotlights on portable stands ringed the roughly circular area where she lay.
Simon Grove stepped into her field of vision, hands and face normal, wearing an expression of smug contempt. “Bet you weren’t expecting this.” He sounded very young.
Janey tried to steady her breathing as she lay on the cold concrete. The flickering, the teleportation, had never been cut off like that before, and she felt as if the outer layer of her brain had been roughly peeled away. She tried to get her good leg under her, but the room wouldn’t stop spinning, and she collapsed again.
Simon said, “I’m not stupid. It only took so many times watching you jump in one shadow and out another.” He cracked his knuckles and slowly walked forward. Janey searched around her for the baton but couldn’t see it. When she looked back up, Simon stood over her, and his grin began to widen again. “By the way, I really like this coat.”
“Simon,” Janey said, and tried to lock her gauntlets’ steel knuckles into place, but before she could get the first one set Simon kicked her viciously in the ribs.
Everything went black for a moment. Janey drew a stabbing breath. “Simon, listen to me.”
“Screw that. You have been a severe pain in the ass, honey.”
He circled Janey, and kicked her in the ribs again. “Brenda didn’t want you hurt, y’know. Not at first, anyway. She just wanted to use you. Take possession of you before Vessler and his goons got to you. She thought you were too powerful and dangerous not to be on her side.”
Needle teeth began to grow out of Simon’s gums.
“But I don’t think you’re so powerful, and I sure as hell don’t think you’re so dangerous. What I do think...is you really piss me off.” He straddled her chest and reached down with his right hand, the fingers extended and writhing. The intense light rendered a network of fine blue veins visible in each one.
The tendrils encircled Janey’s head, flicked her mask the rest of the way off, and Janey knew she was about to die. One tendril mashed her eyes closed, and she saw...
Her father, blasted and dead in the kitchen chair.
Adam in his hospital bed, head swathed in white and tubes snaking out of his nose and mouth.
Tim, torn and broken, bleeding in her arms.
“This is going to hurt,” Simon breathed in her ear, and began draining her.
Janey felt the blood leave her body through the skin of her face and neck and scalp, and tried to scream, but Simon’s tendrils held her mouth shut. Janey squirmed and thrashed, but the movements grew weaker with each heartbeat. Every rhythmic pump channeled her blood into Simon Grove’s body. Every contraction brought the end closer.
I never had a chance at this. Connections felt as if they were shorting out and dying in her brain. I couldn’t have planned for it. I couldn’t prepare. She thought fleetingly of what her father would look like when she met him again.
The tendril over Janey’s eyes slipped a fraction of an inch, and Janey’s right eye opened. Simon had his head thrown back, and at that moment the blood emerged from the pores of his skin and rained down on Janey in a hot, sticky shower. The coat hung loosely on Simon, soon to be soaked through and ruined, a slick gray death shroud.
Janey’s eye widened, and one of the vessels in it burst as Simon drank deeply.
There, in the folds of the coat just beneath Simon’s armpit, lay a deep, inviting pool of darkness.
And Janey’s right arm remained free.
Janey reached into the darkness through a rapidly dimming burgundy haze.
* * *
Simon Grove realized something had gone wrong when an intense burst of heat blossomed against his left side. He would have slapped at it, but to do that he would’ve had to let go of Janey Sinclair, and he didn’t want to, so he simply looked down...
…as a blinding pain speared through him so intense it made his vision flare red…
...and saw the hilt of a Japanese katana protruding from the left side of his ribcage.
* * *
The dead-white tendrils whipped loose of Janey as Simon pitched over backward and scuttled away from her in a hitching, crab-like motion. Janey took a deep breath and tried to open her left eye, but it was gummed shut by Simon’s blood—her blood—and she had to pull it open with her fingers.
Simon screamed. It hurt Janey’s ears, and might have gotten even louder, but the sound cut off with a strangling gurgle. Janey figured the katana she had brought from the basement—her father’s katana, whose blade had solidified inside Simon’s torso—had at least skewered one of his lungs. She wasn’t sure about the angle. Maybe it had touched the heart, or the spine, too.
Janey fought her way up to her one good knee, crying out from the pain in her shattered leg. Black waves rolled across her vision. She didn’t think it would have hurt any worse if her leg had been ripped completely off.
Simon flopped on the floor, spastically wrenching at the katana. He tore off the gray coat. Janey saw the blade tenting the back of his shirt, and as she watched, the tip pierced the fabric, revealing the blood-coated steel. Simon screamed again. “What have you done to me what have you done to me you bitch I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill you!”
Simon’s finger-tendrils wrapped around the katana’s hilt. With an inhuman bellow that blew out one of the Klieg lights, he began pulling the sword out of himself.
Janey locked the second set of steel knuckles into place and threw herself on top of him.
The impact and weight of her body shoved the katana’s blade sideways inside him, and he screamed again and drummed his hands and feet on the floor, and Janey smashed a steel-reinforced, gauntleted fist into his face. The impact stunned him, but only for a second, and the tendrils sprang up, writhing and waving all around her. One brushed across her face, and suddenly they locked around her throat.
The pain in her leg shrieked at her, but what felt like an oil tanker’s worth of adrenaline flooded her bloodstream, and before Simon could choke her or snap her neck she pulled herself up to a full mount.
He seemed to realize what was coming, and through the haze of pain in his eyes she saw what might have been fear, and he said, “Don’t—”
Janey rained punches down on Simon Grove. Every bit of fight training she’d ever had, every bit of augmented strength in her bones and muscles, every bit of savage, brutal advantage the steel knuckles gave her, she poured into this display of ferocity. Simon’s tendrils never had the chance to tighten around her neck. Janey landed blow after blow, breaking off spine-like teeth and lodging them
into the flesh of Simon’s mouth. Blow after blow, until she felt the bones of his jaw break and grind against each other. Blow after blow after blow, until his eye sockets gave way and his nose collapsed and his face became unrecognizable as anything but a wet, red, pulp-filled crater in the front of his skull.
When the tendrils went limp and Simon’s arms smacked down, lifeless, on the concrete floor, Janey pitched over to one side and rolled away from him. She lay there and gasped, and panted, and fought off a wave of rolling darkness that threatened to overtake her. With a monumental effort of will she turned her head to look at Simon’s corpse.
As Janey watched, Simon’s skin began to take on a lizard-like, scaly texture, and small, hooked barbs emerged all over it, but Simon remained motionless, and blood spread out from him in a puddle across the floor.
Janey held still, stared and bit her lip as the pain in her leg redoubled. She took the time to crawl over to one of the spotlights, which she turned off, allowing her to open another portal to the basement.
Behind her, Simon twitched. Janey heard the sound and turned to look.
The pool of blood halted its advance, shimmered and pulsed, and began oozing its way back across the floor. Simon’s fingers writhed out, found the blood, and thirstily reabsorbed it.
Janey’s insides went sort of loose, and tears started from her eyes.
Convulsively Simon began flailing his way across the floor toward Janey, pulling with his extended fingers. Janey watched, horrified.
She thought Simon tried to speak, but the younger man’s ruined mouth yawed grotesquely and couldn’t form words. His eyes, though…Simon’s eyes emerged from the carnage of his broken sockets. They had turned solid white, and light poured out of them, and they left faint trails in the air when he moved. As Simon drew closer, Janey saw that the finger-tendrils had hardened to points, each one with a razor-sharp, back-swept blade at the end. Blood burst from Simon again, not just from the wounds but from his skin itself, and he seemed to be covered in wet red lacquer as he squirmed closer and closer.
