Hero Blues

by Michelle L. Levigne

  "Sure. If this is social, then come on up. Have you had dinner yet? I have lots of pizza and salad in the fridge." Jane laughed at herself. This could not be a social call. Not after all she and Kurt had discussed and argued about over the last few days. The rest of the team of Neighborlee's defenders had come to see her. While they might enjoy getting to know each other, this evening would be full of seriousness and work.

  At least she wouldn't be alone, vulnerable if the Voice decided to make contact again. The presence of others seemed to be protection against contact. She shuddered as she realized she had turned a corner, albeit a small one, subconsciously admitting she might just need protection.

  "Maybe you should hear us out before you let us into your sanctum," Lanie said.

  "Ooookay." She stepped around behind the big glass display case and hooked the tall stool over, hitching one hip up on it, and sitting down with her elbows on the case. "What's up?"

  "We know you're the Ghost," Felicity said.

  "Ghost?" For a few seconds, Jane felt lost. Then she grinned. Kurt had told them everything. "How hard is he to work with? Honestly? Do you know he referred to you as his sisters a few times? What's with this guy?"

  "Whose sisters?" Felicity looked at Lanie.

  "Kurt actually called us his sisters?" Lanie blurted, laughing. "Okay, when all this is cleared up, he owes us big-time."

  "Who hung the moniker of Handyman on him, anyway?" Jane asked.

  "The whole town did, seeing as that's what he is."

  "What do they call you?"

  "Lanie, of course. Oh, you mean my superhero name?" Lanie laughed and Jane just grinned. "Kurt calls me Snoop, because I can get into people's heads once in a while, if I touch them. I used to be able to fly, until I broke my back."

  "Ouch. Isn't there anybody out there who can bounce bullets off their chest?"

  "You're not invulnerable, either?" Felicity groaned in exaggerated disappointment, and dragged over two more stools for her and Angela.

  "When my Ghost field is on, I'm phased out of synch with everything else, so bullets and whatever pass right through me—or I pass through them. But when it's turned off... I get hurt just as easily as everybody else. So, what do you do?"

  "Sometimes they get away with calling me Zap. Usually because I couldn't control my EM bursts. Until recently. And that's what we want to talk to you about. Our little New Year's Eve party was what brought you to town, right?"

  "Among other things, but those three morons going after Lanie would have been the first trigger." Jane studied their faces for a few moments. Angela just perched on her stool with her slightly bemused smile blessing them. "This is going to take a while, I suspect. We'd better make ourselves comfortable. I'm going to need a lot of chocolate before this is through."

  Once they were upstairs, Jane threw together some refreshments, whatever was handy. Felicity and Lanie jumped in immediately, relating how Lanie and Kurt had met as very young children in the Neighborlee Children's Home, discovered their slowly blooming talents, and then met up with Felicity as she was discovering what she could do. They developed their ground rules from comic books and learned early to hide what they could do from grownups or anyone who might try to separate them and put them in a lab.

  Jane covered her low coffee table with cups and plates, cookies, hot chocolate and hot cider, cheese and crackers, and listened. She felt some flickers of envy mixed in with some sympathy for the trio who had managed to stay in Neighborlee. They had more fun than she and her fellow students, while at the same time Kurt, Lanie and Felicity had had to figure things out by trial-and-error. They didn't have the theories and lessons and rules Demetrius and Reginald had developed over the decades. At the same time, they had Angela as an advisor and confidante. Jane suspected Angela was worth the entire Council, cubed.

  About the time she decided they were going to be there all night, she excused herself and put two big gourmet self-rising pizzas in her oven.

  When they related how they had started searching for other children who had vanished from Neighborlee, using Mrs. Silvestri's records, specifically looking through information that somehow never made it into the computers, Jane felt a little irritation. Demetrius and Reginald should have caught on years ago how special Neighborlee was. They shouldn't have worked so hard to make their students vanish and to intimidate them into staying away from Neighborlee. If they had all worked together, if they had made alliance with Angela years ago, so many holes wouldn't be gaping open now, leaving them all vulnerable.

  "The Old Poops have a lot to answer for," she said, nodding, caught between irritation and amusement.

  "That would be the owners or managers or whatever you want to call them at Hoax, Inc.?" Felicity said.

  Through all the talking and comparing notes and theories, Angela just sat there, quietly sipping her milk with a dollop of gingerbread flavored syrup in it, watching them with that serene, slightly amused, bemused, thoughtful smile Jane decided was her standard expression. She would have to live here in Neighborlee a long time and spend more time working with Angela before she could even approach a theory of what the woman's talents and duties were. Kurt had said they were all guardians of the town, the magic and general weirdness that it contained. Guardians, in that they protected the world from Neighborlee and protected Neighborlee from the world. Angela was in the middle of it all, the reason as well as the grand protector.

  "Okay, here's the scoop from my angle." Jane stopped short, caught between a groan and a giggle when the timer went off on her oven. "Hold that thought," she said, jumping up to answer the summons. She would have been irritated at the interruption, but her stomach ached from hunger, despite all the nibbling she had been doing.

  "What thought?" Felicity said, and leaped up to follow her. She snatched more dishes off shelves, and utensils and the pizza cutter wheel. She rearranged the coffee table to make room for the hot pads as Jane slid the pans of pizza from the oven and took care of cutting them.

  "Okay, where were we?" Jane said, as she deposited the pizzas onto the low round table within everyone's easy reach. It amused her to see Lanie lift two pieces onto a plate without touching them. What really intrigued her were the little streaks of light swirling out from Lanie's forehead and temples and fingertips, wrapping around the plate and sliding under the slices of pizza.

  "What do you see when she does that?" Felicity asked. "Do you see any energy at work? When we fought the oil slick after New Year's, with all the warping of fields and dimensions and whatever that was going on, Gordon could see the power going out of Lanie when she lifted the chairs into the vortex or whirlpool or event horizon or whatever you want to call it."

  "Yeah, streamers of energy going out from her head, and ghost arms reaching and lifting the pizza and the dish," Jane said, her thoughts spinning. "And I definitely need more details than the little Kurt told me, about New Year's and the fight right afterward. Not that I'm going to tell Demetrius and Reginald squat until I get some more answers from them. You think you've been kept in the dark? There's a lot they haven't been telling us kids, either." She nodded decisively.

  "Okay, as I was starting to say before nature called." She took a tiny bite of pizza, chewed three times, and swallowed. "The Old Poops have a pattern they rely on to help them figure out what kids to watch, to wait for powers to start developing. You three fell through the cracks somehow."

  "Four. Jason is one of us."

  "Yeah, how did they miss him?" Felicity said, nodding. "Umm, there's a kid who came back from the military just before Christmas, a little bonkers, who decided Lanie had to die because she infected him with superpowers."

  "Problem," Lanie said, cutting off Jane when she opened her mouth to tell them she knew about the three boys. "Whoever his handlers were in the military, they got hold of him, snatched him right out of police custody before the psychologists and whoever could get to work on him." She frowned. "Or did your teachers intervene and grab him?"

&
nbsp; "Got it in one—or is that two?" Jane mused.

  The others grinned.

  "All three boys are safe. Okay, to rewind. They've been keeping watch on things here, targeting kids as potential superheroes, preparing to sweep them away at the first sign of power. There are six potential focal spots around the planet. Neighborlee is the strongest one. Those of us with the really strong, weird talents come from Neighborlee. You three weren't snatched when you started developing your powers...

  "Because you weren't flashy." She slowed down and frowned for a few seconds. "Anyway. Demetrius has connections all over the world. Other kids who they've trained up and sent all over, keeping watch. We get posted to potential power leak spots, trouble spots, where other kids might start appearing. And to keep watch on dimensional doorways. In case things like what happened here at New Year's start happening." She took another bite of pizza, a big one, giving herself time to think for a few seconds, organize her thoughts.

  "Anyway, the thing is, the old farts have made it an unspoken rule that we stay away from Neighborlee. Nobody has ever been posted here. It's like sacred ground. We leave it alone. I'm thinking they figured it was guarded well enough with Divine's Emporium. They about freaked when I mentioned meeting you," she said with a grin, nodding to Angela.

  Who, as always, responded to that remark with her usual serene smile, and continued nibbling delicately on her pizza.

  "The town I was assigned to turned out to be a dud. Nothing weird happened, other than the expected incidents that could be blamed on inbreeding and a bunch of idiots who inherited stills their grandfathers set up back during Prohibition. People got really lazy, depending on the Ghost to take care of all their problems. I got fed up, the Old Poops supported me in wanting to retire from that place. Then things got weird here, and I was already planning on moving here and... When you think about it, it feels kind of arranged. Like somebody else is manipulating all of this. And here I am."

  "With the Voice asking you to help him or it or them escape, and sucking you dry worse than all of Buffy's vampires," Lanie added. "Not so sure Kurt's right, that it's the dimensional monster trying a new tactic, but I do agree that we shouldn't make the mistake of taking him at his word, that he's friendly."

  "I need to know more about what happened at New Year's, and everything you guys have been figuring out." Jane scooched down further in her chair and took a big bite of her pizza. Her talking time was definitely over, and it was their turn again.

  Lanie and Felicity filled in all the gaps in the things Kurt had mentioned or glossed over, such as attempting to create maps of the locations where the lost children appeared. She asked questions about Lanie's parents, Charlie and Rainbow Zephyr, and what they could add to the search for answers. Jane shivered and fought down the sensation that there was more than coincidence going on when she learned that the Zephyrs were missing, lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle. The shiver slid deeper down in her core when Lanie and Felicity described in greater detail the battle at Eden II that they thought had effectively closed down the dimensional invader and whatever doorway it had tried to open.

  "So if it's waking up..." Jane chewed on one end of the crust. "What are the chances it's located specifically underground, specifically underneath Eden II? I can analyze better with my Ghost field turned on, but you can't exactly go invisible in the middle of a crowd. Especially when you're trying to drum up business for your business," she added with a grin.

  "It's nice to know that the comic books got that aspect of a superhero's life right, too," Felicity said airily.

  "And part of a superhero's lot is doing the job with as little disruption of normal life as possible," Lanie said, with a glance at her watch. "If you agree that something is building up again, maybe we should see how well we work together, and do something about the warp or vortex or event horizon... Are we ever going to come up with a name for that thing?"

  "Probably when it's closed up for good or we can get control of it," Jane said. She put her now-empty plate down on the table and jumped to her feet. "How late is Eden open?"

  Felicity and Lanie exchanged satisfied looks. Angela just laughed. To save time using the little elevator, Jane grabbed hold of Lanie's wheelchair and turned on the Ghost field, leaving Felicity and Angela to come down the stairs. She and Lanie were laughing about the sensation of energy wrapped around her, and waiting in the Jeep by the time the other two caught up with them. Felicity insisted that she got to fly with Jane soon, and reported that she had called Kurt and he would meet them at Eden II. Angela wouldn't come with them to Eden, saying her work was done. Lanie could drop her off back at Divine's before going out to Eden.

  Kurt caught up with them when they were a block away from Eden. He flashed his truck headlights to let them know that was him tailing them. Jane laughed, as expected, when Felicity explained that he had to do that, because she would have been nervous about how he was taking micro-second pauses at stop signs.

  Now that the battle with the oil slick monster had yanked her talent into a semblance of control, she was able to send out her EM bursts in blasts that could be aimed and wouldn't destroy all the sensitive electronics without a twenty-foot radius. Felicity was practicing with her aim, and fully intended to use her EM power for defense, now that she could do so. Thanks to the trio's run-in with the three boys just before Christmas, they were all a little touchy about being followed and watched.

  At this time of night, with less than an hour left until Eden closed down, there was enough traffic to keep the staff from noticing the four had come in, so no one came to see what the newcomers wanted or needed. Yet because the community center was closing up for the night, traffic thinned out enough that within ten minutes, they felt like they had to watch every step to keep from being noticed. Lanie led the way as they walked Jane through the building, giving her the behind-the-scenes tour. So it was just the four going through the main gym, the room where a game called Murder had been set up—Jane made a note to find out what that entailed, because it sounded like fun—the locker rooms and bathrooms where various people had been found, even going into the furnace room, so Kurt could point out the control panel of the HVAC that had vanished and reappeared.

  "Yeah, some echoes of warping," Jane said. She gestured at the HVAC unit.

  "Got it. It's like the molecules haven't quite shifted back to where they were before, and they don't like it. They're disturbed because they can't finish settling back where they belong," Kurt said. He caught Lanie and Felicity staring at him. "Oh, sorry. The Ghost field. Jane's using it enough to let her see...I'm riding the slipstream, so to speak."

  "Uh huh." Felicity raised an eyebrow at Lanie. Jane could read that look enough to know the two of them were going to get together later and compare notes.

  "Hey, do you guys get uniforms?" Felicity said, when they had returned to the lobby where the duel with the oil slick monster had taken place. "You know, like the X-Men movie uniforms, or the Fantastic Four?"

  "No." Jane made a face. "What good is a fancy costume when your power means going invisible every time you use it?"

  "Hey, guys," Gina, the director sang out as she scurried from her office, heading for the main gym. "Need anything? I'll be right back," she added, before waving and disappearing around the corner a second later.

  "Whatever we do..." Jane turned up her Ghost field in reaction to ripples of black light sweeping through the walls and floor, half a second before she was conscious of what was happening. "Uh oh, here it comes," she said, her voice softening.

  "Can you enclose all of us in your field, make us all invisible, and let us see what you're doing?" Lanie asked.

  "Yeah, I think... Oh. Sure." Jane looked around the lobby. "It would make it easier if nobody saw us stand here and stare at something nobody else can see or feel, wouldn't it?"

  "Can you still fight it, covering us?" Felicity said.

  "I'll cover us." Kurt stepped around so he stood on Felicity's rig
ht, while Jane automatically moved to the left to put Lanie and Felicity between them. "That should leave you free to do whatever you have to."

  Jane focused, mentally drawing a bubble around all of them. The air surrounding them turned hazy. Gina hurried through the lobby, looking all around, and obviously not seeing any of them. She walked right through Kurt's arm and didn't react. Lanie flinched. Kurt gave Jane a queasy grin. It was kind of reassuring to know he wasn't quite used to all the aspects of borrowing her power.

  Two seconds after Gina went into her office and picked up a ringing phone, a swirling whirlpool of energy appeared in the open area of the lobby, right where Lanie and Felicity had described the fight taking place the day after New Year's. It was a maelstrom of colors that made Jane feel nauseous and on the verge of falling off her feet. She yanked her gaze off of it and regained her sense of equilibrium. So, it was a mental attack. She strengthened the Ghost field.

  "Hit it right between the eyes," Felicity said.

  Her EM energy built up in a sizzling electric blue cocoon spinning around her. Her eyes went hollow—just openings into her skull that showed a spinning, blinding bright core of the same electric blue power. Then bolts of energy shot out of her eyes and mouth and fingertips and hit the phenomenon dead center.

  "And stay out," Kurt said between gritted teeth, as the maelstrom flared, then collapsed in on itself and vanished. A squealing sound made them all flinch and clamp their hands over their ears.

  Felicity staggered sideways. Lanie grabbed hold of her, holding her up.

  "I'm okay," Felicity insisted, as they hurried outside, through the closed doors.

  Jane kept the Ghost field up, so nobody innocently passing through at the wrong moment saw them suddenly materialize from nowhere.

  "I just... I'm just getting used to having control, and that was about the strongest burst I've ever used. It took something out of me." She giggled and sank down into the passenger seat of Lanie's Jeep, guided by Kurt. "That was incredible! I feel kind of dizzy, but good."