Even Villains Have Interns (15 page)

Alan sipped his water. “Difficult to do, erasing
nearly eighteen months of memory. The gaps would be
noticeable.”

“You haven’t been close to Delilah that
long.”

“Not that you know of.”

“My daughter keeps me apprised of what’s
happening in her life.”

“Somehow I doubt she’s always truthful. Delilah
likes her secrets.”

The doctor pursed his lips as the waiters
delivered a terrarium of salad greens, accented with mushrooms
houses and some unidentifiable food shaped into a red gnome hat.
Frowning, he poked at the greens. “We should have flown to Paris.
They know how to make a decent lunch there.”

“But the customs wait would be too long,” Alan
quipped.

“Indeed, although there are numerous ways around
that.” He sighed and set his fork aside. “You seem like a very nice
young man. But you don’t realize how much trouble a woman can get
you into. You think it will be all flowers, and cupcakes, and sex,
and the next thing you know you’re changing the oil in cars and
rocking colicky babies to sleep at three in the morning. Liking her
long legs isn’t enough to build a relationship on.”

“You think the only reason I care about Delilah
is how attractive she is?”

Doctor Charm shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the
first.”

“I’m not like those men.”

“In that case, you’re going to need a better
arsenal. Tell me, do you have a bulletproof vest?”

***

Raw earth, cement, old brickwork... Delilah ran
her hand along the tunnel wall deep under Chicago proper. It was
like a dark fantasyland. The ghost of jazz music flitted through
her mind, a memory of a simpler time.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps superheroes were only
the next evolution to it all. Kalydon was the new Al Capone, the
shady business baron dealing magic elixirs in the dark. And she was
Elliot Ness, the untouchable, incorruptible dealer of justice.

The thought made her grin in the darkness as her
flashlight panned ahead of her, looking for security cameras and
doors into the Wacker building overhead. Something rat-sized moved
in the shadows ahead, shuffling and digging, but not moving away.
It twitched, then fell still as she walked closer. The toe of a
heavy work boot pointed upward; the edge of a leg of denim pants
was barely visible through a layer of heavy mud.

For a moment her mind couldn’t quite grasp what
she was seeing. And then it all clicked. Someone was buried alive
under the muddy floor. Or, at least, they had been alive when she’d
started walking toward them.

Stretching her hand over the packed dirt, she
tried to loosen everything. But the dirt wasn’t locked per se, it
was just there, and she hadn’t thought to bring a shovel for
breaking and entering.

A hand clawed through the mud. Delilah grabbed
it, pulling the hapless victim out of the grave. The mud-covered
face was barely recognizable as Ivan with a broken nose. “You?”

“Me.” Delilah squatted down and looked him in
the eye. “What happened?”

“They decided I was expendable.”

Focusing on Ivan, Delilah loosened her grip on
her talent. His pupils dilated even wider than before. He stared at
her with a glazed expression.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

“The Mégisti formula gives normal people
superpowers. Flight. Strength. Health. The seller proved it to us.
Shot one of his men, gave him the formula and healed him in front
of us. Said he needed money and a volunteer.”

“And you got volun-told?” Delilah guessed.

“Seller said I was wrong. His guy punched me. It
was like being hit by a car. I woke up choking on dirt.” He paused,
reaching for his still buried legs. “I think I broke a bone.”

Delilah blew a stray hair out of her eye.
“Where’s the entrance?”

“Don’t know. Wasn’t conscious when they brought
me in.” Ivan rocked back as his eyes returned to normal. “I
hurt.”

“Can you wait twenty minutes, or should I call
the police?”

He stared out into the darkness. “Got an extra
flashlight?”

She took her phone out, turned on the GPS, and
put a lock on it. “Here.”

Ivan turned it over in his muddy hand and
grinned. “You’re going to leave your phone here for me to
hack?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly it.” Delilah rolled her
eyes. “You unlock that and I’ll buy you dinner.” The Pentagon
couldn’t unlock her phone and she’d sold the prototype for the lock
to them when she was in college. Good educations weren’t cheap.
When people asked about her sudden surge of wealth, she told them a
rich uncle had left her money in his will.

It made you despair, it really did. Her entire
life’s history had been available if anyone had wanted to look, but
they never had. Not a single person had considered her worth a full
background check. Yet they’d given her the keys to every room on
campus because she did work-study as an early morning janitor. The
minions had done the cleaning, but still, they’d handed over the
keys! Humanity.

Walking along the broken wall, intensely aware
of Ivan watching her, she wondered why she thought the keys had
mattered anyway. Doors were just bigger keyholes.

A flutter of warm air caressed her hand through
the chipped mortar. Somewhere on the other side was a heat source.
She focused, and the wall crumpled to dust under her fingers. With
a quick smile at Ivan, she stepped through the hole and into a
section of the Chicago pedway illuminated only by emergency
lighting.

Odd, for this time of day. The pedway closed at
five but there were lights on down here, homeless people, and all
the other little joys of subterranean Chicago life. She sniffed the
air, inhaling dust and bleach.

Taking the handheld GPS out of her pocket, she
pinged the satellite quickly and confirmed her suspicions; she was
under 77 Wacker Drive. Someone had boarded up this area to use as a
private entrance to the mostly-abandoned building.

Turning the GPS off so it didn’t attract
unwanted electronic attention, she found the signs for the exit and
followed the concrete stairs upwards. Three flights up, the stairs
changed, wooden doors dividing the bare concrete from padded floors
covered in a rich tapestry carpet with maroon and gold accents.
There was a lock on the door. Relying on the tech gadgets she’d
borrowed from her father to handle any unseen security, she swept
past it.

The hall didn’t feel lived in. It smelled like a
mausoleum, all death and dust and forgotten dreams. Maybe in some
ways it was. If Kalydon was behind this—and she had no reason to
believe he wasn’t—then he was running out of time. Money couldn’t
buy him immortality. She wasn’t even sure why someone would want to
buy immortality. Death wasn’t frightening. It was simply there—like
the night sky, or the ocean, or a mountain.

An old man bent and broken by the indelicacies
of age should embrace death. It was a release of pain, a final
farewell to every sorrow. But maybe that was only a young person’s
point of view. Perhaps, after a few more decades, life would become
such a terrible addiction that she too would view death with
fear.

If she died today her mother’s fury would bring
her back to life long enough for a harangue that never ended.

Two more flights of stairs and Delilah found
herself looking at a row of basic conference rooms with windows in
the doors and a few computers—old boxy machines that were new when
her parents married, but computers nonetheless. At the very end of
the corridor was a different door, white with the black number nine
hanging in the center, like one would find hanging on the front of
house in any urbanized area. Like Atlanta, to pick a
not-so-totally-random example.

Delilah quirked her lips in a smile, tugged her
black leather gloves on, and opened the door.

She waited for a minute, watching the interior
gloom to see if anything moved. No sirens screamed. No lights
flashed a warning. Everything was deadly quiet.

Stepping inside as she closed the door behind
her, she flicked on her flashlight. The carpet continued here and
pictures hung on the wall, none of them spectacular. Hunting prints
for the most part. Cheap posters of green tractors, bird hunters,
and deer standing under autumn leaves, all in expensive frames.
Dusty bookcases with leather-bound books, covers dusty and cracking
from age, lined the wall.

A deer head hung on one wall next to an
overstuffed red chair. In another corner she saw a stuffed grizzly
bear. Kalydon liked trophies, but she suspected those were from his
younger days. The rooms flowed together to another set of stairs,
another lock she snapped open, and another set of lavishly
appointed rooms in the same dark red plush and velvet.

There was an air of opulence here, but not of
cultivated taste. It was as if Kalydon had seen a picture of a
wealthy home and bought everything out of a catalog. Or maybe she
was biased because red velvet was so very 1970-something.

It was an interior apartment with no obvious
windows, but even in bright sunshine this room would be gloomy. The
furniture was all heavy wood stained black. The fabric on the rugs,
bed, and the curtains framing a black-and-white image of the New
York skyline pre-9/11 were all deep red, almost crimson. Bookcases
covered a wall in here too, but a cursory glance told her these
weren’t normal books. These were in shades of sand and earth, mixed
with an eclectic choice of statuary. The bust of a woman carved out
of a black stone with a gold skull erupting from her face was the
focal point.

Delilah leaned forward and sniffed at the books.
Without a lab it was impossible to tell, but they looked
suspiciously like examples she’d seen of autoanthropodermic
bibliopegy from the seventeenth century: books bound in human skin.
The grotesque practice had fallen out of favor fairly quickly, but
these didn’t appear to be all that ancient.

Shivers of apprehension crawled up her back like
an icy spider walking on her spine.

There was another door, this one with a
combination lock, and for most lock picks it would have presented
an interesting diversion for several hours. Delilah opened it with
a glance and stepped into the room she’d been dreading, but knew
all along she would find. It was no bigger than a jail cell on
death row, ten feet by ten feet perhaps. There was one chair, a
match to the one downstairs, a fake fireplace that was turned off,
and a rug of pale leather. Bare skin... Human, unless she missed
her guess completely, although the hair and fingers rather gave it
away.

Revulsion and bile filled her mouth. She
wondered which of the faces on the wall once belonged to the rug.
She recognized several of them. The Wooden Wonder and Mayor
Arámbula were on one wall with clippings from the newspaper taped
next to their pictures. On another wall she saw street photos, men
and women Kalydon had stalked perhaps… But no. Up at the top was a
row of smiling faces.

The Hunt.

The Golden Hunt of Atlanta was pictured with
their victims tallied below them like some sick scavenger hunt. She
pulled out her micro-camera and started snapping pictures. As she
zoomed in on a familiar face, something else tore her attention
downward.

Travys’s mother. Thinner than when she’d left
New York. Haggard. But unmistakably Travys’s mother, walking
through the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta. Up above was the late
mayor’s toady, Chasten Huntley. Even his name fit.

She took a few more pictures and then stepped
out, fusing the door shut behind her by unlocking all the molecules
and letting them melt together. Kalydon didn’t seem like the sort
of man who understood subtle gestures. That was fine. What she had
in mind was about as subtle as a jackhammer.

There was only one last place she wanted to
search: Kalydon’s bedroom. People of his ilk kept what they loved
close. The kill room was a toy room, really. Some people had places
to watch TV, and sociopaths kept rooms full of tokens stolen off
their victims. It probably balanced out in the scheme of things.
But Kalydon had been raised in the Deep South and in deep poverty,
which meant money in the mattress and a gun safe in the
bedroom.

After several false starts she found the
bedroom. It wasn’t hard to see how deep Kalydon’s roots were. Under
the expensive coverlet was a set of plaid flannel sheets. It seemed
like a waste. All that wealth and ambition wrapped up in the brains
of a chicken. She pulled a hunting print to the side and glared at
the gun safe. It swung open, revealing an array of guns that would
keep a small dictatorship in power for at least a year, and a row
of test tubes with a glowing blue liquid. Bingo.

Delilah scooped the test tubes up, wrapped them
in a pillowcase stripped from the bed, and put them in her bag.
Now, how to let Kalydon know what she wanted? Maybe something
written in red...

Noah,

You better get your butt back safe and sound
or you will never hear the end of it. If you make my baby sister
cry I will move Heaven, Earth, and Hell to make sure you pay. There
is nowhere on this planet or in near orbit that you can hide from
me. And you know you can’t fight me because your mother will ground
you if you hit a girl. She won’t care how old you are. So keep that
in mind. Merry Christmas.

Come home safe,

Delilah

A surly Ivan waited for her in the depths of
Chicago’s tunnels. “About bloody time you got back. I thought you
were gone for good.”

“I ran out of lipstick and had to go buy
more.”

His face contorted into a horrified grimace.
“What would happen to me if you died?”

“You’d be motivated to unlock my phone,” Delilah
said as she squatted beside him. “Figure out the code yet?”