by Pab Sungenis
I got up, showered, and changed into some sweats and a t-shirt. After checking to see if she had woken up yet, I headed off to the kitchen to make breakfast. Again, I know it’s a cliché, but I can’t help it. I’m a traditional sort of guy—almost old-fashioned when it comes to these things, actually.
The smell of bacon must have woken her, because I’ve never known anyone to be awakened by the smell of pancakes, and the coffee hadn’t had a chance to brew up properly yet. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen dressed almost exactly the same as me, obviously having felt free to raid my clothes after her shower. For the record, there is nothing hotter than a beautiful woman wearing your clothes.
“Good morning. Do you always make such a big affair out of breakfast?” I couldn’t tell whether there was an unspoken “ … after sex” at the end of that sentence, so I gave her, and my self-esteem, the benefit of the doubt and assumed there wasn’t.
“Come on, gotta carbo-load. We growing superheroes need all the nutrients we can get. Can’t fight evil on an empty stomach.”
She chuckled. I’d heard that chuckle thousands of times over the years, but this morning I was able to appreciate nuances in it I’d never recognized before. Hell, I found myself appreciating all kinds of nuances about her this morning and loved them all.
“Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever completely understand you, Bobby. Yesterday you were ready to crawl under a rock and die. This morning … ” She let the sentence dangle, leaving it to my all-too fertile imagination to fill in the blank.
“Well, sometimes it helps to have something to want to live for.”
The wry smile on her face faded away. Had I gone too far? Pushed the wrong buttons? Did she think I was putting too much emphasis on what had happened between us? My usual self-doubt kicked in again, and I clammed up. That didn’t matter. I didn’t have to speak to tell her what I’d meant; she could see it in my beet-red complexion.
“How long have you wanted to … ”
“Years,” I said as sweetly as I could. “Practically since I met you. It took me ages to realize it, but … ”
Her lack-of-smile became a full-fledged frown. Yes, I had said the wrong thing, or at least she had taken the wrong meaning away from it.
“You’ve wanted to sleep with me for—”
“No, not that!” Yes, we were certainly talking at cross-purposes, which meant I had a chance to salvage the situation. “No, to tell you how I felt. For years I’ve wanted to tell you I love you. I’ve loved you since I met you. I’d be tempted to say even before I met you. Ever heard of love at first sight? This may have been love at foresight.”
Her jaw dropped like the blade of a guillotine on our prospective relationship. Great. No quicker way to scare off the love of your short life than letting her know she’s The One. “Love me? You—”
“Remember that sign I flashed you before I did that amazingly stupid move that should by all rights have killed me? It’s the sign language for ‘I love you.’ That’s what I’d wanted to do for years, and last night, I finally did it. The rest? Everything that followed? Well, that was unexpected, but not unwanted.”
“Bobby, I … I mean, I had a few suspicions, but I never realized you … ” Again, she left the sentence unfinished, allowing my brain to write in the worst possible answer, like some sadistic, romantic Mad-Lib.
“Regrets?” A simple one-word question, but only one word was necessary. All my hopes, dreams, and fears invested in two simple syllables.
Her grin didn’t return, but her frown retreated to lack-of smile. Her face looked like one of those pictures of cats you see on the Internet. I are serious superhero. This are serious discussion. “None. Not a single one.” She looked me dead in the eyes. “You?”
“Never. My only regret would be if it wound up driving a wedge between us. Because I really do love you, Sarah. Not some stupid teen-boy crush, either. If this isn’t the real thing, then I don’t know what is.”
She didn’t smile, but I got the impression she wanted to. She looked like she was fighting back tears, which brought me to the same state. She ran straight for me, and I took her in my arms. She started bawling like a baby into my chest, and I held her as tight as I possibly could. Of course, being too stupid to leave a tender moment alone, I spoke up.
“Remember what I said about something to live for? You know that old saying about how a guy is willing to die for his girl? Well, I want to live for you, and somehow I think that means something.”
She looked up. Her smile had returned, and she planted one firmly on my lips.
Phew. For once I didn’t screw it up.
***
The rest of breakfast was uneventful. Neither of us said much, both content to quietly enjoy each other’s company. There was plenty we still needed to say, plenty of issues to work out and questions to answer, but those were matters for another day. This was The Morning After and possibly the First Day of the Rest of Our Lives, and we both deserved at least a little time together unburdened by the bigger issues. The universe owed us a couple of hours of quiet enjoyment.
Of course, this being a universe with me in it, and the propensity of said universe to like to screw with me, we were not going to get those few hours. We barely got one. After we’d both eaten as much as we cared to (a morning-after breakfast is much more of a gesture than a viable first meal of the day, after all), Sarah helped me tackle the dishes. I was scrubbing the frying pan like a mad man, trying to loosen a piece of burned I-don’t-know-what, which didn’t resemble anything we’d had on either of our plates, when the doorbell rang.
One benefit of living in a place like Uncle Jack’s mansion was you didn’t usually have to deal with the doorbell. If you weren’t expecting someone, then chances were the doorbell was not going to ring. If you were expecting someone, you’d usually meet them at the door after having seen them on the security monitors. And the other sidekicks had developed the habit of barging in, assuming a perpetually open invitation (which, to be fair, they all enjoyed), so odds were that if the doorbell rang and you weren’t expecting someone, then you were not going to like what came next.
I dropped the pan into the sink, put down my scrubber, and dried my hands as I made my way to the door. Sarah, perhaps sensing something was wrong, followed. I pulled the door open without bothering to look at the security monitor or through the peephole. Why drag out the inevitable bad news?
Standing there, looking right at me as if about to cry, was a face I’d known so well, both with and without its disguising glasses.
“Uncle Hank?” If Uncle Hank had shown up on my doorstep as himself, not contacted me through the communications network as Paragon, then I knew we were in some deep shit. And the fact he’d shown up at my door, in person, like he had on that college visit, could only mean one thing in light of recent circumstances. I swallowed hard.
“Who?”
He blinked back his tears. “Prism.”
The Trouble with Normal
I was so freaking tired of keeping myself from crying. And I hated that I’d gotten so good at it. Three death scenes I’d been dragged to in the past seven weeks. Three people who had not been so much my mentors as my family, taken from me. Part of me wanted to be the detective I’d been trained to be and find the patterns to track down the killer. Another part just wanted to kick and scream and throw shit around as hard as superhumanly possible. The rest wanted to crawl back into my base, but that was no longer an option.
The really creepy thing about Phoebe’s death scene was how completely different it was from the other two. No one was there in costume except Clytemnestra, who didn’t feel the need to keep a secret identity, and Morgaine, who always seemed more comfortable in costume than out. Oddly enough, even the corpse wasn’t in her costume. Phoebe lay in bed, wearing a discreet pair of pajamas and looking as peaceful as could be. It was so at odds with Uncle Jack’s and Mr. Zip’s deaths, which had obviously been horribly violent. Looking at Phoebe, I could
almost believe she’d died peacefully in her sleep—probably of what they used to call “a broken heart,” if I’d wanted to be romantic about it. It all looked so, well, normal. And as some poet once wrote, the trouble with normal is that it always gets worse.
Dr. McBride (even in street clothes it was hard not to see him as Mister Mystery) was giving her as thorough a once-over as the other two dead heroes, but seemed somehow more tender in his work.
“Hard to say for sure without a proper autopsy, but it looks like a stroke.” He then pointed out five or six things he said pointed to cerebral hemorrhage or some other brain attack, but I was way too far gone to take it in. He said some more words that passed through my ears en route to the black hole that had set itself up in my skull. I went and found a chair at Phoebe’s dressing table and collapsed into it. Sarah came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. You should have seen the looks Clytemnestra and Morgaine had given her when she’d shown up with me: one prudish and one proud. I’ll let you figure out which was which for yourself.
I watched the doctor wrap Phoebe’s body up in the bed sheets, still being very careful, then pick her up in his arms and cradle her like a very large child. He somehow managed to push a button on the pager he wore on his belt, and a split second later both of them dissolved, teleported off someplace where a proper autopsy could be done.
Uncle Hank picked that moment to excuse himself. Something about legal documents he was going to have to get in order with her death. I didn’t really care. He took the more traditional route and headed out through the front door, leaving me alone with the ladies.
“Is there anyone we’ll need to contact?” Morgaine asked of no one in particular. “Any family? Good friends?”
“The bunch of us were the only friends she had,” I said through the worsening cracks in my voice. “And I think the only family, too.” She’d never mentioned anyone else to me. She never talked about her parents, but that wasn’t unusual since most heroes wound up in this job after being orphaned. It was practically a job requirement. Brothers and sisters had never come up in discussion, and the only man she’d loved (as far as I could tell) had gone before her.
I thought about our last conversation, flying back from the mess that had been made of Mr. Zip. I remembered the look on her face after I’d told her I considered her my foster mom and how warm it had made me feel inside, despite the tragedy we’d both just been subjected to.
And then I remembered how I’d crawled under my rock and cut myself off from contact with her and the rest of the world. I thought about how my last words to her were “watch your back,” not “I love you.”
And then I lost it.
When you lose your first parent, you cry. Your second, you cry a little less. Your third, hardly at all. But your fourth parent? Then you lose your shit, totally and completely.
Sarah guided me to my feet and held me close as I wept with no concern at all for my dignity, and the warmth and softness of her body promised to keep me safe and secure, making me cry even harder. Every single drop of despair I’d choked back over the years was forced out through my tear ducts. I cried the tears I hadn’t shed for Uncle Jack. I cried for my pop. I cried all over again for my mother. My frustration over school? I cried it out. My anger at all the misfortune that had befallen not only me but all these people I cared for more than myself? Cried that out, too. I cried long, hard, and violently, to the point I couldn’t catch my breath. I hyperventilated, which made me cry even harder in some horrible kind of vicious circle. I no longer cared who saw me cry or what they thought about me for crying; I cried because there was absolutely nothing else I could do.
The ladies joined in a weird kind of group hug with Sarah and me, trying their best to console me. All of the heroes had seemed emotionally invested in us sidekicks; even those who didn’t have sidekicks of their own felt very protective of the four of us. Like Morgaine said the day they had asked me to take on Uncle Jack’s legacy: no mother or father but tons of aunts and uncles. Of course, that wasn’t completely true. I did have a father and mother among the heroes, and now I’d lost them both.
Eventually I managed to cry myself out, catch my breath, and find myself seated on the bed. Clytemnestra and Morgaine seemed to know enough to be quiet and let me work things out; I always hated when people would dump platitudes on top of me when I was that far down in the dumps, and I appreciated their discretion.
As for Sarah, she knew to just be there for me, and I loved her all the more for it.
Once my mind started working again, I thought about everything Phoebe and the others had said to me when they’d talked me into taking Uncle Jack’s place and the days that followed. The need to continue a legacy, to keep a dream alive, to honor a fallen comrade by picking up his burden as my own. And I thought more and more about what Phoebe had said in that final talk of ours, about how she thought the sidekicks were all ready to sit at the big table, even if she didn’t think it was safe to do so at that time. Well, safe or not, she was right about us being ready, and she was right that day when they offered me the Scarlet Knight job. I may have lost my Aunt Phoebe, but just maybe …
“Clytemnestra? Morgaine? We can’t allow Prism to die.”
They looked at me like I was the poor deluded soul they had to be convinced I was. “Bobby, dear,” Morgaine said in that sweet voice of hers that could literally bend reality. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do—”
“No, you don’t understand. Yes, Phoebe Penobscot is dead. There’s nothing we can do about that. However, that doesn’t mean Prism needs to die.”
The two ladies stared at me some more, but their looks started to melt into understanding.
“Are you suggesting—”
“Yes, Clytemnestra, I am. Jack Horner died, but the Scarlet Knight lived on. Phoebe Penobscot died, but Prism can live on. And I think there’s an obvious candidate.”
All eyes turned to Sarah, who hadn’t quite been following what we were talking about, but once she put the pieces together, she started to squirm.
“Wait, are you talking about me?” she asked.
“It does seem logical. She’s more than up to the job,” Clytemnestra said. Considering her high standards, especially when it came to Sarah, that was the highest of high praise.
“Wait a minute. What about the conversation we had about it not being safe for sidekicks to step up?” I could tell Morgaine was wavering, not entirely against the idea but would still need a little convincing. “If I understand correctly, Bobby, even you seemed to agree with that.”
“I did at the time, but right now we are woefully underpowered. If the guy who killed Zip and Uncle Jack comes after us, we need every possible hand. And her necklace made Prism one of the most powerful of all of us. We need that when, not if, we go into battle with whomever it is we’re up against.”
“But it made sense for you to become the Knight. You’d trained under him. You were his sidekick. Prism—”
“Prism didn’t have a sidekick. She had no one to will her legacy to. I’m the closest thing she had to a family member, and I think I should have some say in the matter. Any further objections?”
“We’ll have to take it up with Paragon and Mister Mystery, of course.” That was Clytemnestra. Always official, making sure things were just so. I had no doubt I’d be able to convince Paragon and Mystery, though. They’d see the logic in my argument. And once I’d won them over, I’d make the case for Tommy and Rick to join us at the big table. Like I said, we were woefully underpowered.
“Of course. But for the time being … ” I went to get Prism’s necklace. Sarah would need as much time as she could to practice and get used to it and learn as many of its capabilities as she could. The sooner I got it into her hands …
The pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. Actually, they fell the same way bags of wet cement fall, and they made the same kind of thudding, squishy noise when they hit my brain.
“Ladie
s, we have a problem. A very, very, big, life-and-death scale problem. However she died, Phoebe didn’t have a stroke. Our killer has struck again.”
The necklace was gone. There was no sign of it on the dressing table, the nightstand, or any other obvious place.
At first I thought Phoebe might have worn it to bed, which would have been the logical (if somewhat paranoid) thing to do. After all, if some villain smashes into your house in the middle of the night you don’t want to have to reach for your talisman of power and hope you can get it before your head gets bashed in. But I’d gotten a good look at the body and hadn’t seen the necklace around Phoebe’s neck. Clytemnestra and Morgaine confirmed they hadn’t seen it on her either.
We practically tore the room apart, and Morgaine even chanted a spell commanding the necklace to show its location, but there was no joy in Mudville. Prism’s necklace was nowhere to be found, and that led to only one logical conclusion.
“I don’t get it,” Sarah protested. “So the necklace is gone. Why does that mean the killer took it? Or that Prism was killed to get it?”
“Think about it. The killer took Uncle Jack’s weapon with him. Probably took his breastplate, too.”
“But he didn’t take anything from Mr. Zip, did he?”
“He took Zip’s files,” Clytemnestra explained. “He took the hard drive with the incriminating evidence on it. Who knows what else he copied off of Zip’s computer.”
“And now he’s made off with Prism’s necklace … ” Morgaine trailed off, as if she didn’t want to finish the thought.
“Which in the right hands,” I finished for her, “is one of the most powerful weapons in the world.”
You might not have been able to cut the tension in the room with a knife, but you wouldn’t have needed a chainsaw to do it, either. If the killer knew what he was doing, and everything suggested he did, then we were all up euphemism creek without a proverbial.
“Wait a minute.” Another bag of cement landed on my brain. “Think about the circumstances around the deaths. The killer knew to get Uncle Jack’s breastplate off, because otherwise there was no way he’d be able to nail him right through the heart. You saw what he did to Zip, and that’s not easy to do to a speedster unless you somehow neutralize their power. And with Prism, he knew to sneak up on her in her sleep and separate her from her necklace before he did … well, whatever he did.”
