Even Villains Have Interns (13 page)

“That’s the secret,” he whispered, giving her
hand a squeeze. “You don’t have to fix everything.”

Delilah laughed, light and airy and winsome.
“You are definitely not a Smith.”

“Your surname is Samson.”

“Because I legally changed it at eighteen. I was
born Delilah Minerva Sorsha Smith, which is an unholy mouthful with
more geek references than any sane person deserves.”

“Could be worse,” Alan said with a shrug. “I was
named after one of Robin’s merry men because the nurse on duty that
night happened to be watching some old BBC show and thought it was
cute. Cute it may be, but it’s definitely not modern or
stylish.”

“Were you teased?”

“Horribly!”

“You would have been teased worse if you were
Robin.” She flashed him a smile that erased the old pain before
turning to the front. “Freddie, how close are we?”

“Another block, ma’am,” said the warty thing
driving the car.

“Is that what the Teodora is going to hatch
into?” Alan murmured.

“Maybe. Possibly.” Delilah grimaced. “Honestly,
I haven’t a clue. Daddy likes to tinker with things. You never know
exactly what you’re going to get.”

The car slowed outside a gated community. “I
believe the young gentleman is inside, ma’am. Would you like to go
through the gate?”

“No, circle the neighborhood once and we’ll find
a place to get out. Why a gated community? I was expecting an
abandoned warehouse or a brickyard. Something a little more
traditional.”

Alan frowned at the cookie-cutter houses, all
neatly lined up behind shoveled sidewalks. “Maybe he’s meeting a
friend.”

“Maybe he’s doing some after-hours snooping.
Freddie, stop by those bushes,” Delilah ordered. “And get a team
working on those gates. I want electricity cut in five minutes.”
She picked up her phone. “Let’s go hunting.”

SOS - D

Delilah cursed the snow under her breath. They
were going to leave a trail a blind hamster could follow.

“Where are we going?” Alan whispered in her ear.
In his shadow form there wasn’t even a hint of warmth behind
her.

“See the pretty blue dot on my phone? I’m trying
to figure out where the pretty blue dot is in relation to all these
over-priced homes. Tacky, turn-of-the-century cookie-cutter homes
in a gated community. It makes me weep for humanity. Ugly, ugly
architecture.”

“Do you always critique your surroundings like
this?”

“Yes, it’s one of my many failings.”

Gentle arms wrapped around her. “Hold on, I
think I know where your pretty blue dot is.”

Shadows swallowed her as the air turned frigid.
Her heartbeat echoed in her ears, and then they were standing
beside a house with plastic siding. “Why didn’t we go inside?”

“They don’t have any shadows. That’s why I
picked it. Who else would light up every corner of their home?”

She glared up at the windows covered by
curtains. “I don’t see any light.”

“The windows don’t go inside the house, they’re
built into a layer of the wall, like a safe house.”

“Charming. For the record, I don’t approve.” She
tapped a fingertip against her chin.

“I didn’t think you would.”

They stalked around the corner, quietly opening
a chain link fence to sneak into the backyard. “It looks so
normal.” Snow, dead branches sticking up like the skeletons of
spring, the winter perfume of wood smoke and... Delilah inhaled
deeply. “Do you smell lotus flowers?”

“I don’t even know what they smell like.”

She inhaled again. Under the scent of wood smoke
was a hint of rain forest, sweet and a little fruity with the
promise of jungles and exotic locales. It was definitely not the
usual scent associated with Chicago suburbs in the dead of winter.
“It’s a little like orange blossom. You don’t smell it?”

Alan shook his shadowy head.

“I hope I’m wrong. The Company hasn’t started
using chemicals to control their super-slaves, have they?”

“And I would know that how, exactly?” he
whispered as she approached the back door.

She took off her glove and gripped the cold
metal as she tried to reach the lock. But like Kalydon’s apartment,
there was nothing there.

“Problems?”

“Too many to count. This isn’t an entrance.”

“Probably fake like the windows.”

“And there are no shadows inside?”

“Not unless you want to appear inside someone’s
clothing.”

“How many people are in there?”

He closed his glowing green eyes and his lips
moved. “Six? Maybe seven. Counting the shadows inside clothes is
not an exact science.”

“None of them are on this end of the house, are
they?”

“All the small shadows are in the basement.”

“Fine.” She released her power. The metal
doorknob shook under hand, burning and melting before the door
exploded with a sound that made her eardrums sore. “Knock,
knock?”

She stepped into a stripped room with bright
photography lights hanging every few feet, planted in the walls,
strapped to every corner. “I guess they knew you might be in
town.”

“Looks like.”

Voices filtered through the house’s cold air.
Delilah followed them, anger growing as the smell of lotus blossoms
became ever more distinct. Damn them all to the seventh hell. If
they’d poisoned Travys the way the Rainbow Dane had poisoned her
mother, she’d see them all burn. The basement door exploded before
she even touched it.

“Calm down,” Alan whispered in her ear. “You
can’t kill them.”

“Yes, I can,” she bit off as the stairs
shuddered under her steps.

“Okay, but you
shouldn’t
kill them.”

The door at the bottom of the stairs was heavy
and metallic. “That has yet to be determined.” The door
disintegrated. “Travys?” she called, amazed her voice wasn’t
shaking. Tears filled her eyes. That smell! That horrible, horrible
smell! The one her mother had puked all over the car when they’d
driven away from Colorado, and the superheroes who’d wanted her
family dead. It was etched in her brain with the worst form of
emotional acid. “Travys, you find the kinkiest hide outs.” She
stepped into the basement and saw Travys strapped to a chair and
stripped to his tighty-whities. An IV tube hung from his arm,
dripping blood onto the floor. “
Travys
!”

Alan reached him first, removing the IV needle
and covering the wound with his solid hand. “Shh,” he said. “Do you
have a first aid kit?”

She took a shaky breath and nodded.

“Take care of him. There’s a tunnel. I’m going
to follow them,” Alan said.

“Don’t get caught.”

He turned to a curl of smoke in answer.

She stepped to Travys’s side, holding his
injured arm with one hand as she dug through her bag. On cue, the
lights died. “Control? Do you have me?”

Nothing.

“Travys? Travys, come on. I need you to wake up
now.” She flicked her flashlight on, put it between her teeth, and
bandaged his arm. Travys groaned. “That’s a good boy,” she said
indistinctly around the flashlight, saliva trailing out of her
mouth as she tried to talk. “Come on.” She held the ropes, letting
them unlock in her hands before dropping them in evidence bags.
Detective Morrow was going to kill her. This case was one serious
SNAFU after another. A known killer, but not enough evidence.
Evidence in the form of a kidnapped college student, but she’d
ruined it.

Travys’s head lolled to the side.

“Hey, hey, come on. I need you to wake up.” She
checked his pulse; it was slow but steady. Why the
hell
would anyone want his blood? “Kid, if this is some weird initiation
rite for a frat that you forgot to tell me about, you will never
hear the end of it. Didn’t you ever watch the classics growing up?”
she asked the unconscious Travys as she slung him over her
shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Stumbling through the dark, she
found her way to the stairs. “If you’d seen even one episode of
Buffy you’d know what a bad idea wandering around town alone is. Or
Veronica Mars. I’ll make you watch that,” she huffed. “You can
learn all about the dangers of not communicating with people. Was
one phone call too much to ask?”

She sank to her knees half way up the dark
stairs. “Hey, Delilah, I’m going to this place. Can you do a
background check? And I would have said, ‘Why, yes, Travys!’ And,
‘Don’t go, Travys, it’s full of vampiric suburbanites.’”

“You talk too much,” Travys muttered.

Delilah forced herself up, climbed the last few
steps, and rolled him off her shoulders to the floor.

His teeth chattered, but his eyes opened. “Why’s
it so cold?”

“No one thought to install a heater.” She took
her coat off and laid it over him. “Stay right there, I’m going to
see if I can find anything else upstairs.”

Travys lifted his head off the floor.
“’Lilah?”

“It’s okay. I’ll be right back.” With a forced
smile she headed upstairs, hitting her comms unit. “Hello?
Control?”

“Ma’am?”

“Freddie! Lock on to me and get the car here
now. Make a scene. I want the cops crawling all over this place by
dawn.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The upstairs was much like the downstairs,
heavily lit and stripped of everything that might make it homey. No
paint on the sheet rock walls, no windows, nothing to indicate that
someone had once lived here, although they obviously had. The
outside was too tidy to be an abandoned home. Details from the
outside filtered back in her mind. She’d seen curtains like that
before, a hot cranberry color that was an offense to Mother Nature.
Sadly, it was popular this year. So, new curtains and a cut lawn,
but a stripped interior. Chicago Tribune’s front-page headline for
tomorrow was already written.

None of the rooms held anything; even the
bathroom was torn down to a faucet and yellowing toilet. On
impulse, she went to the attic. There probably wasn’t anything but
insulation up there, but she’d feel better having checked
everywhere.

“Almost to your location, ma’am,” Freddie said
over her comm. “We’ll need to leave in a hurry. The gate guard was
less than polite.”

“I can’t imagine why.” She found the attic door
and watched it drop to the floor as her powers eased the locks
open. “Travys is in the kitchen, go around back and load him into
the car. I’m checking the attic. There’s a heavy lotus smell.” And
the dusty attic door reeked of the potent flower. It took two tries
for her to jump high enough to grab the rim of the attic opening
and pull herself up.

As she’d expected, the attic was lit with the
same heavy-duty lamps found throughout the house. It seemed like a
huge investment just to keep the Spirit of Chicago at bay. Why not
pick a smaller house to use if you were going to light it up like
this? Why do it at all? There had to be better things to do with
your life. Delilah walked the perimeter of the attic, stopping
where the window should have been. Nothing. Time to go, then.

A bulge in the insulation caught her attention
as she turned. From any other angle it was virtually unnoticeable,
but from that spot... lucky find. She put her gloves back on and
pulled the pink insulation away, mindful of the fiberglass spines,
and pulled out an ornate box with drawings carved on it. No, she
amended, tracing her gloved fingers over the box, not drawings.
Hieroglyphs. Something she could translate with enough time.

“Ma’am, the police have arrived at the gate,”
Freddie reported. “We need to leave.”

She needed to leave the box. Detective Morrow
needed the evidence. Her fingers clenched it tightly. “Gimme three
minutes.” She pulled a camera out of her bag and began
photographing every angle. She was still there when the police
pulled up outside.

Dear Maria,

Hypothetically speaking, if I needed bail
money and a place to hide for a few years until the statute of
limitations expired, I could stay at your place... Right?

Delilah

P.S. Can I borrow some cash?

“How could you do this to me?” Detective Morrow
demanded.

Delilah sat in the uncomfortable interrogation
chair, resolutely silent. They’d found Travys, handcuffed her, and
now the lunch hour was toiling past with nothing to show for a
hungry morning.

“Damn it, Delilah. How many times have I looked
the other way? How many times? All you needed to do was call us.
That’s what the police get paid for, you know that, right? You know
I earn my bread and butter chasing down criminals? While you earn
your paycheck installing security cameras. Which is not what you
did last night.”

She closed her eyes, ready to relent, when there
was a knock at the door.

“Hello?”

Delilah twisted in her seat, wide-eyed and
furious.

The man in the doorway wore a tailored
three-piece Dior suit. There was a touch of silver at his temples,
and a charmingly smug smile on his face. “Detective Morrow?” Her
father held out his hand. “I’m Miss Samson’s legal counsel.”

Morrow crossed his arms. “Really? Here I thought
she’d done nothing more than tamper with evidence and interfere
with the scene of a crime.”

“She didn’t do that,” Doctor Charm said with
easy reassurance.

Morrow’s bulldog face wrinkled in confusion, but
he started nodding.

“Miss Samson went to rescue her intern only
moments before the police. She has no ulterior motive.”

“No ulterior motive,” Morrow murmured. He shook
his head, trying to shake the effects of Daddy’s Agree-With-Me-Ray.
Since it had never worked on Delilah, she couldn’t say she
sympathized, but it had a similar effect on the boys she’d used it
on in high school. Daddy had read her the riot act after that
little stunt.