by Dunne, Lexie
“And do they know I’m safe?” I asked, a tight feeling my chest. “I need to get to them right now. If they think Cooper has me, they might try to take him on, and I just saw that man blink off a faceful of Lazarus acid. They need to stay far away.”
“Your friends have been notified that you are safe with the Raptor. As for now, Miss Davenport left instructions that we should maintain radio silence,” Audra said, opening a small door off to the side. The lights came on automatically, and I followed her into what looked like some kind of armory. Shelves and cabinets filled the place, all neatly labeled with each type of weapon. I saw throwing darts, several types of guns, and even a small cannon. An RPG rested carefully on a custom-built shelf. Audra ignored all of these and instead strolled on as I followed her. She stopped in front of an alcove that held several Raptor suits, neatly, on hangers. Ignoring those, she collected a shirt and a set of pants with cargo pockets. “What is your shoe size?”
Dazed, gazing at the Raptor suits, I told her.
“You’re in luck. Miss Davenport’s youngest wears that size.”
Great, I had the same size foot as a ten-year-old. The realization that Raptor kept gear in her secret base for her kids was a little disconcerting, as well, but I accepted the boots that Audra passed me with a grateful nod.
Twenty minutes later, I was clean, my midsection had been bandaged, and even better, I had a shirt on again. It was long-sleeved and dark gray, which would be miserable if I had to go outside into the August weather. But in Raptor’s superchilled underground base, it was perfect. Audra had handed me a dark green package, one of those meals that they gave people in the military when they were deployed places. The food tasted a little bit like cardboard, and it took me three tries to figure out the food warmer, but it was sustenance. I ate it all as I sat on the corner of the boxing ring.
In truth, it was nice to be left alone. I’d come so close to a shallow grave that I would probably shake for days. A chance to sit and digest my near-death experience was almost a luxury at this point. I stayed where I was, resting one side of my back against the post at the corner of the boxing ring so as not to jar the injuries from the surgeries.
When I heard the approaching click of an altered gait, accompanied by the tap of a cane, I turned and raised an eyebrow at Jessica Davenport. “So you do heal faster than average.”
She snorted. “Keep telling yourself that. You okay?”
“I’ve been better, but that’s not saying much.” My hands had finally stopped shaking, at least. “Why did you use me as bait? You couldn’t have known he wasn’t going to kill me on the spot.”
“I had a listening device on you.” Grimacing and keeping her injured leg straight, she lowered herself to sit on the edge of the ring, outside the ropes. She held her hand up and only because I looked closely did I see the thin piece of hair dangling from between her fingers. “I attached it to you before I handed you over. I will say this for you: you don’t flinch in the face of danger. If he’d made any move to kill you, I had a backup plan in place.” She coughed a little. Her skin was so waxy pale that it made her blonde hair look dark by comparison. “Always have redundancies. First rule of this game.”
“That must be nice. Plan A never works, and I never have a Plan B.”
“You’ll need to change that if you want to survive. Though you seem to be doing a pretty good job of it so far.”
“No thanks to your mother,” I said, since everything that had happened in the last two months was definitely Rita Detmer’s fault.
“How did you get mixed up in her plans?” Jessica looked me up and down. Unlike Audra’s clinical interest earlier, it felt more like a threat assessment. “Did you cross one of the few people she calls a friend?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s because I’m too famous to kill.” Though it hurt my sore midsection and stretched the bandage across my back, I hugged my knees to my chest. “So yay for my infamous celebrity status, I guess. So you know the truth, then? I didn’t kill Angélica. She’s alive. And your family didn’t even give me a trial.”
“I know.”
“That’s not right,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’re not going to apologize?”
“There are reasons we do what we do. They’re not perfect, but there’s past precedent.” There wasn’t an ounce of apology in Jessica’s face when I glared at her. She looked as though she’d made her peace with the way the superhero world worked a long time before. I could sense an undercurrent of pity that I hated.
“It’s wrong,” I said.
“Then fix it.” Jessica said it like it was that easy, like the entire world hadn’t been built to keep people in the dark and away from the knowledge they needed.
Fury tried to bubble up in my midsection. I swallowed until I could control it. “I don’t want to fix it. I want . . .”
“You want what?”
“I want this to be over,” I said, my voice breaking. I could feel the imminent threat of tears, but I closed my eyes and willed them away. I’d cried enough. “I want to be in the know again, not to have to question everything and be lied to all the time. I want to know where I stand with people and with whatever it is I am now. I want Lemuel Cooper gone and away from where he can hurt anybody ever again. And I want to see Guy.”
“That last one, I can help with,” Jessica said, and I looked over at her in surprise. The contrition I longed for had never appeared, but she looked a bit sardonic now. She tapped her leg under the injury. “I’m out of the fight against Cooper. So I can’t help you with that. But I can help you with other things.”
“Why would you?”
“Honor system. Your friends are all holed up in a place where they hope you’ll return next.”
“Where’s that?”
Jessica smiled without showing her teeth. “Audra will take you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Audra pulled the perfectly plain and serviceable SUV up in front of the building, I gaped. “Really? They’re here?”
“According to Miss Davenport. I’ve very rarely known her to be wrong.” Before I could climb out of the car, she held out a business card. “Just in case.”
“In case of what?” I asked, but Audra only gave me a tight-lipped smile. I sighed at her and climbed out of the car. “Thank you for the ride. I think I’ll be able to find my way from here.”
“I figured,” she said, and pulled away from the curb in front of my building.
I stayed on the sidewalk for a minute, pushing my shirtsleeves up against the heat. I hadn’t seen my apartment since the morning I’d left it to go find Naomi and been attacked by Chelsea, née Brooklyn, nearly two months ago. Vicki had told me that Davenport would keep up the payments for me, but I’d kind of figured being sent to prison meant that had lapsed. Evidently, it hadn’t.
I took the outside steps up to my place two at a time, the way I always had. Everything felt familiar and foreign at the same time, like my skin didn’t quite fit. On my doorstep, I paused. It felt absurd to knock on my own door, but I did it anyway.
It was wrenched open less than three seconds later. “Gail!”
“No, don’t—” I said, but not in time, since Guy scooped me up and squeezed me. It made my vision go temporarily hazy since I hadn’t completely healed from the surgeries. “Oof.”
“Sorry!” Guy, apparently realizing his mistake, all but dropped me back on my feet, his eyes wide in horror. “Are you okay? You’re hurt!”
“I’m getting better.” I breathed through my teeth until the sharpest pain had subsided. “Been kind of a crazy morning. How are you? Are you okay?”
“Of course. Nothing’s happened to me. All I did was get back to the house to find you gone.” He shook his head in confusion as he stepped back to let me into my own apartment. I could tell right away that the air-cond
itioning had only been kicked on less than an hour before. I wanted to sink to the ground there inside the doorway and just look around. I hadn’t really had an attachment to any of my stuff—my apartment had been wrecked too many times for me to have nice things—but I didn’t realize until that moment just how much I missed what little I did have. “I’ve been worried sick. Are you okay?”
“That’s . . . a difficult question to answer at the moment,” I said as honestly as I could. “Raptor handed me over to Cooper and used me as bait. So far today, I’ve been treated like a lab rat, nearly ended up in a shallow grave, I’ve burned Cooper with acid, and I have discovered more than I ever really thought I would know about the Raptor.”
“So a regular day for you?” Angélica called from my living room.
“Or thereabouts.” I squeezed Guy’s arm and headed into my living room. Naomi was on the floor with my old laptop, frowning intently at something on the screen, and Angélica lay on the couch, looking a little less like death than the last time I’d seen her. I let out a breath. They were both okay. They hadn’t been hurt during Raptor’s siege on the house. “Hi,” I said. “I’d say welcome to my apartment, but it looks like you guys have already made yourselves at home. Sorry about the mess.”
“We weren’t sure where else to go,” Guy said, sounding apologetic. “We really need to set up some fail-safes for this sort of situation in the future.”
“If Cooper doesn’t kill us all,” I said. I dropped into the battered old recliner I’d picked up at a yard sale and made Jeremy muscle into my apartment a long time ago. “Sorry. It’s just been that kind of a day.”
“I’ll go make some tea,” Guy said.
Angélica pushed herself so that she was standing. She lifted her foot.
Naomi looked up. “No, not again!”
But it was already too late. Angélica took a step, and an instant later, there was a crashing sound from behind my chair. I leapt to my feet, fists up, but it was only Angélica, shaking her head in a daze. There was now a dent in the drywall.
“What?” I asked, looking back at the couch like I fully expected to see another Angélica standing there.
“We think it’s the Mobium,” Naomi said, setting the laptop aside.
Angélica muttered something in Portuguese.
“Is she okay?” Guy called from the kitchen.
I dragged Angélica back to the couch. “For a fixed value of okay,” I called back. When Angélica was safely back to where she wouldn’t slingshot herself around the room and cause any more property damage, I raised my eyebrows. “That looked fun.”
She groaned. “Shut up,” she said. “I’m supposed to be helping you, not the other way around.”
“I think you get a pass when you die and come back to life thanks to a miracle isotope.” I looked over at Naomi, asking a wordless question.
“It’s been happening all day,” she said, understanding me perfectly. “And no, we can’t get her to stop getting up and down. We’ve tried.”
“Angélica,” I said.
She muttered something else that I heard perfectly but chose to ignore.
“So what happened?” Naomi asked, looking up from the laptop. “You look like death warmed over, and you have new clothes, so I’m assuming there’s a story there.”
“And it’s a doozy.” When Guy came back with the tea, I filled all of them in on my morning.
“So Davenport knows I’m alive after all, huh,” Angélica said. “It’s nice that you won’t be going back to prison for that.”
If Cooper found us again, wrongful imprisonment was going to be the least my worries. He’d been planning to dissolve me in acid, after all.
“Yeah,” I said, meeting Guy’s gaze across the room. I could see that he was clearly furious, but his color looked so much better. The burns from Chelsea’s powers were just faint red marks on his arms and neck. “That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”
“Just a thousand others we have to deal with,” Naomi said, still typing away at my laptop. “So Raptor’s injured?”
I gave her a look.
“What? I’m still a journalist at heart. These things are important to know.”
Angélica shook her head. “I’m going to have a long talk with Jessie.”
Jessie. Guy and Angélica both called the most famous superhero “Jessie.”
“Her ethics do seem to leave a bit to be desired,” Naomi said, “leaving you to undergo that kind of torture, Gail.”
“Tell me about it.” I was pretty much done with all Davenports, Kiki included. It wasn’t her fault, and she’d done the best she could under the circumstances. I could begrudgingly admit that, but from where I was sitting, I was a little tired of all of them. Speaking of which . . . “Where’s Kiki? Somewhere safe?”
“She’s been checking in regularly.” Guy held up his phone. “And Vicki and Sam have, too. They’re out looking for Cooper.”
“Like we should be.” Angélica closed her eyes and rose unsteadily to her feet again. When all three of us moved to stop her, she glowered us into silence. “It’s not going to get better if I don’t learn to control it. Stop hovering, you nags.”
“Stop damaging my apartment, then,” I said. “Obviously, I’ll never get my security deposit back, but the dents don’t exactly go with the decor.”
“Bite me,” she said, laughing, as she carefully put her foot down. “And stop watching me, you freaks. I just have to go to the bathroom.”
She took another step and blurred back into existence down the hallway, right in front of the bathroom door.
“Was that on purpose?” I called.
“We’ll go with yes.”
I immediately turned to Naomi. “What do you have?”
“Pretty much nada. There’s really nothing on this Cooper guy online. There was a news report about a gas leak and a fire about a building a few miles over—”
“Raptor,” I said.
“And it looks like there’s some roadwork nearby that due to a chemical leak—”
“Me,” I said.
“And the typical minor villains are up to their usual antics. The official press office for superheroes—which I’m guessing is secretly run by Davenport—put out a release that there’s a villain at large and local law enforcement should not approach him.” She turned my laptop screen so I could see a company shot of Cooper. The Davenport Industries logo on his polo shirt had been cropped out. “Doesn’t exactly look like the mad-scientist type. But—oh shit.”
“What?” Guy and I both asked.
“I’m sorry—you’ve still got your e-mail program open on this, and it came up, and, well, look.” She turned the laptop around to show us, and my abdominal muscles clenched so hard it made the incision ache all over again. The sight on the screen was a very familiar one to me: nondescript room with no identifying features, bad lighting, and an unconscious hostage. A smug, superior hostage taker.
I was used to being the hostage. And so was Brooklyn Gianelli. By all appearances, she was unconscious at the moment, head lolling forward. Cooper had one hand wrapped around her neck. The other held the camera over his head, maximizing the angle for his completely macabre selfie. A patch of disfigured and red skin ran up the side of his neck and covered most of his face, but his eyes were clear and malevolent.
“Hi, Gail,” he said to the camera. “I figured this would be familiar to you, so we don’t need to go through all of the bells and whistles. Not with you. We both know I’m done, as far as Davenport is concerned. No use pretending I was ever going to keep that job. But it’s not over yet, and I know Mobius had notebooks he kept from us.” His smile turned surprisingly brittle. “So here’s how it’s going to be: you’ve got two hours. Get Mobius’s notebooks and bring them to me, or I kill this woman. Come alone if you don’t want her or anybody else to di
e.”
I half expected him to say something ridiculous like “Peace!” Instead, the screen just cut to black.
“Is he serious? Like I’m going to drop everything to save the woman who almost killed Guy?” I said. A second later, I ran my hand over my face. It did nothing to stop the sudden tension headache. I might hate Brook and everything she’d done to people I loved, but she was a hostage. “Of course I’m going to, and he knows that. Ugh.”
“Gail,” Guy said, a warning note in his voice. “You’re not thinking about—”
“I hate her,” I said, glaring at the black screen. Fear and panic wanted to well up and overpower me, but, honestly, I was so done with being scared at this point. I hadn’t lied when I’d told Jessica I just wanted it over. I wanted Cooper gone, blasted into orbit preferably. Maybe he could survive up there, maybe he couldn’t. I didn’t care. “But she’s been through enough, and if there’s anybody on the planet that gets that, it’s me. Where are the notebooks?”
“Kiki has them,” Naomi said.
Angélica stepped out of the bathroom, tripped over her own feet, and grunted as she phased herself to the couch. “Guy’s face tells me I missed something,” she said.
“Cooper’s holding Chelsea hostage. He wants the Mobium notebooks, and he wants Gail to bring them. Alone,” Naomi said.
Angélica’s look told me all I needed to know about where she stood on that issue: no way in hell was any of that happening.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m not just going to go waltzing up and hand everything over. But how do you take down a man like that?” I wanted to shudder. Everything he’d done to me was so fresh in my mind, and it would take weeks—weeks I probably didn’t have, with Cooper after me—to unpack all of it. He’d been so merciless. It hadn’t bothered him in the slightest to torture me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I wanted to be as small as possible, which was pretty easy to do for somebody my size. “He’s the next best thing to indestructible. You saw his face in that video. That’s all the Lazarus acid did to him.”
