Heroine Addiction (16 page)

He pulls up to the desk and begins to tap at the keyboard in deft knowing combinations. When nothing happens, his typing grows more frustrated and impatient, and he grumbles under his breath.

I stifle a sigh of relief, and thank Morris – wherever he might be – for constructing an AI just as temperamental and stubborn as he can be.

Dad finally leans away from the desk and lazily spins the chair with one foot tipping back and forth on the heel. He reaches out with one gloved hand and raises it above a pen on the desk. His fingers dance in mid-air, tugging invisible strings that pull the pen up, up, around and around in a trembling pinwheel.

A moment later, it drops with a clatter.

It suddenly strikes me just how heavily Dad's breathing from that simple elementary parlor trick, with all of the ragged road-roughened exhales of a man who's just run a marathon. Whoever this is, he hasn't quite gotten the hang of Dad's telekinetic abilities yet. Which I presume explains when he doesn't appear to know I'm here. On the list of his strengths, Dad's telepathy remained a struggle, while his telekinesis took years of practice and his mind control came to him so easily he'd been able to do it as soon as he'd grown a brain in the womb.

It's a terrifying thought, that Dad's impersonator might have mastered his ability to control minds already. I press my lips together in a dark frown, trying not to dwell on it.

My gaze darts around the bedroom, desperate for more clues, more help. Whoever this is can't possibly have slept in the neatly made twin bed, too small for anyone over the age of twelve to comfortably occupy and decorated in an incongruous pairing of Transformers sheets and a She-Ra comforter. It doesn't fit with the rest of the place in an oddly charming sort of way, as if Morris gave the trailer a villainous overhaul only to suppose at the last minute that sleeping arrangements, however pitiful, might come in handy eventually, and perhaps he should keep the bed meant for the child of the previous inhabitant, along with the faded garage-sale linens.

The rest of the room is decorated in paranoia chic, the walls papered with surveillance photographs and SLB shipping invoices annotated with Morris's delicate handwriting. I wonder with more than a little sarcasm if perhaps Morris has gone legit and sold his considerable secrets to the feds, but I don't get much of a chance to ponder just how ridiculous a notion that might be.

If the suspicious behavior of Morris's AI is anything to go by, he knows full well who the person inhabiting Dad's body might be. Morris is a thorough villain who likes to know his enemies. He would have done his research when setting up this hidden lair, especially if he were worried about some ambitious hero coming after himself, my dad, or – grudgingly, I must admit – me.

Morris didn't get to be one of the most notorious villains on the planet by not being thorough when it comes to paperwork.

Paperwork. Hard copies.

If Morris expected me to come here, he would have saved copies of anything he thought might be significant, and not just on the hard drive of his advanced database. My grasp on computers is not quite as broad as Morris's. I'm lucky if I can handle searching for plus-sized silk stockings and finding the occasional bit of erotic fanfiction without making my hard drive explode.

Morris would save me a file. As much as it shames me to admit so, I know him well enough to expect to find something in this room meant solely for me.

I give the bedroom a cursory glance, spotting a short wooden chest of drawers at the end of the bed. It's a cheap chipboard bureau small enough for a child and covered in peeling brown wood-print paper. Anyone else would dismiss it as just another left-behind hunk of junk, probably picked up for free off the same curbside as the rest of the furniture.

But Morris's AI knew me.

Correction. Morris's AI
expected
me.

I glance around the room again, and an unseen weight sinks in my stomach. A bed, a chest, an inexpensive bookshelf bought at some big-box store and crammed with secondhand copies of classic novels. Graham didn't read, and he didn't live near here. He wouldn't be stopping by, and he certainly wouldn't need a place to sleep, much less on a twin bed too short for his enormous frame.

Morris made me a spare room.

In his villain's lair.

Well, this isn't awkward,
I think wryly.

That said, the overstuffed bookshelves would be a good place to start looking, but if Morris wanted me to stay, the bureau would be even better. Whatever Morris hoped for when he carted this hideous furniture inside, it more than likely involved making me pancakes after I stayed the night and watched terrible horror movies with him and Dad like at some odd Halloween party.

Teleporting to the bureau so as not to draw attention with the clack of my heels on the floor, I crouch down and gently pull out the top drawer. No, nothing there. Nothing in the middle drawer, either. But the bottom drawer holds exactly what I expected to find, a thin manila folder with only a few sheets of paper inside.

I rise up again out of that uncomfortable crouch and rifle quickly through the papers in the folder. Each is a list of superheroes and villains – Dad's closest associates, the family's former employees, even a few distant cousins I've only met once or twice. They're all possible suspects, Morris's tight scrawl noting those with more to gain than others.

The last list is of simple geography, heroes and villains who live the closest to not only the Noble family penthouse and Dad and Morris's condo, but the lair as well. What doesn't surprise me about the list is that my name is first, no exceptions made no matter how much Morris may like or trust me.

What does surprise me is that directly under my name, the words
Lampwick, Troy
stare out at me in silent greeting.

My jaw drops open, and I make a small soft sigh I don't stifle quite quickly enough.

I'm sure I just imagine the audible snap of Dad's head jerking towards the sound of me, startled out of complacency by the muted rustling of a hidden someone in the bedroom. What I'm not sure of is what happens next. The frenetic noise of him rushing towards the bedroom and tumbling chairs in his wake fades from my ears as I teleport home on a jolt of pure instinct, the folder still clutched tightly in my hand.

I'm still teetering on my heels in the center of my living room when I finally realize that I'm safe, or as safe as can be expected with my father only a few short miles away. I should be more afraid that he may show up here, that he'll have the intestinal fortitude to attempt to confront me in my own damn apartment, but if whoever has taken hold of his body couldn't sense me when I was a mere ten feet away, I can't imagine they have a firm enough grasp on his powers to attempt confronting me at all right now.

I should be safe. For now, at least.

Unfortunately, that still leaves me one major problem to worry about.

“Troy's a superhero?” I whisper.

Well, I'll be damned.

15.

A few hours of stewing in my own juices later, I'm mad enough to spit nails and piss acid, as Nate would so eloquently put it.

I thought that distracting myself with my notes on this whole confusing affair would help me simmer down after the swell of grating annoyance I felt upon leaving the lair. Somewhere between Morris and Troy both lying to me, I reappeared in my apartment horribly tempted to head straight for the kitchen and throw every piece of dishware I owned at the nearest wall.

Instead, I popped directly into the middle of the living room in front of my scattershot notes like some sort of sign.

First thing that comes to mind,
I thought to myself.
Write it down, worry about the details later.

I stared at the wall for what felt like forever, the words blurring together. Finally, my jaw set in a stubborn line, I snatched a black Sharpie from the side table and crossed out the 'WHO IS DAD?' list with a large deliberate X. Then I scribbled one word underneath it all and tossed the pen aside before I could even think about blacking it out.

BODYSWAPPING glared out at me in silent accusation.

Now that I've had some time to let the possibility sink in, it makes a painfully obvious sort of sense. So obvious, in fact, that my rage boiled right back up again as though I'd never even attempted to stifle it.

I can't decide if the low sound I can't seem to stop myself from making is the result of the stresses of the last couple of days or the aggravations I can already see unfurling before me in my near future.

The fact is I have absolutely no evidence that somebody swapped bodies with my father. I can't take my spontaneous guess to the officials at the Superhero Licensing Bureau and get them to investigate instead. They prefer hard evidence for obvious reasons, and even if whoever is currently occupying my dad's body has even a minimal grasp of his powers, it's still more than enough to keep anyone who might go rifling through his brain in a search for an unwanted squatter from finding them all that easily. The SLB has dozens of powerful mentalists on their payroll, but none of them come close to approaching Dad's level of power. I've seen them in the same room with my dad. Most of them can't stop fawning over him or asking for his autograph long enough to take peeks behind his mental curtain.

That leaves me with only a hunch. It won't exactly hold up in a court of law.

Well, unless you're precognitive, which I most certainly am not.

And you know what?  I can't very well keep my family at arm's length the way I have and figure out what in heaven's name is going on. I feel like I've been waiting for the answer to who killed Morris and what's wrong with my father to tumble into my lap. At the rate I'm going, I might as well just make some tea, curl up on my couch, and watch reruns of Animal Channel documentaries until I trip over all of the answers I need, presumably during a trip to the bathroom. I sure as hell feel like that's what I've been subconsciously wishing would happen.

I huff out an angry breath and flop down on the couch, my arms crossing in preparation for a good old-fashioned sulk.

It's not that I hate my family. I love them, I do. I just don't particularly
like
any of them that much. Fate sticks you with people it expects you to happily tolerate until you drop dead, and if you're lucky they might even turn out to be enjoyable company. Nobody in my family considers themselves all that lucky. The theory is that we get along a lot better when none of us live in the same house, city, state, galaxy, and possibly not even the same dimension of reality as one another, and by God, we're going to keep living apart and not speaking to one another as long as that theory pans out.

I always compare the way I feel about my mom and dad to the way Hazel feels about her parents, simply out of a lack of other families in my everyday hemisphere to go by. Go ahead and ask Hazel about the day her mom ran out on her and her dad, trailing after some professional gambler and never looking back. Even better, ask her about the day a few years later when her dad hauled off and sucker-punched his girlfriend in full view of everyone at Hazel's middle school. Hazel turned fifteen in a foster home where the uncle sneaked into her room at night and spent her sweet sixteen in juvie. Her grandmother showed up not long after, her last bout of cancer in remission, her next round a few years down the line.

Hazel still hurts, sometimes for the obvious reasons, sometimes because even the obvious reasons don't stop her from wishing her mother would come back or her dad would get paroled.

Family. It's a goddamn crap shoot, is what it is.

I silently seethe, the lingering effects of the baconyl swirling through my mind in an impenetrable fog that's hard to miss now that I know it's there. It's just one more irritation that's not helping me restore my calm. It's a blatant neon sign that John Camden knows more than he's telling. Granted, the sum total of his interactions with me since this whole mess started has involved sneaking around behind my back, polite greetings that were probably lies, and slipping me spiked drinks. So really, at this point he's honestly given off more of an impression that he secretly wants to date-rape me rather than that he's trying to be the least bit helpful.

“All right, that's just disgusting,” I say, then shove away from the couch as I head off to the bathroom to splash some water on my face.

The problem, I realize as I'm halfway through drying my face with a hand towel, is that it's me. It's just
me
.

Nobody cares but me.

I could leave this alone. I could let my mother wallow in whatever blissful Stepford life she wants, and I could continue to ignore the hell out of Graham. I could even let Morris rot away in the SLB's sterile solitary morgue without anybody to give a damn about him. If I really try, I'm sure I could just handwave the sneaking suspicion that someone else has taken over my father's life, and I can return to work and pretend that the smug beaming face gracing the evening news reports above the neckline of the familiar dark blue leather uniform belongs to my father.

If I push and struggle and grit my teeth, maybe I could even pretend that I'm not the only one who ever gave a damn that for the first time in his life, my father was honestly happy with Morris, even with all of the secrets wearing him down.

Thinking about Morris just makes me think about the lair, and about that damn list.

Troy lied to me.

He
lied
to
me.

I keep repeating the statement in a deranged daze, clearly as a distraction from the fact that Troy neither lied to me about having superpowers nor possessed the sort of relationship with me where he had ever been obligated to tell me. His powers, whatever they may be, are his own damn business. And for heaven's sake, it took a sudden family implosion for me to reveal my powers to him, making my irritation over his unnecessary secrecy more than a little hypocritical. It's not as if I tripped over my own two feet to spill rosy anecdotes of my superhero past to him.

Of course, that doesn't mean I don't reserve the right to be bitter and resentful about it when the tables turn to my own disadvantage.

“You're sulking,” Dixie accuses as she swerves around me into the kitchen of the cafe.

Huffing out an irritated breath, I shoot an annoyed glare her way. “I have to sulk somewhere,” I say, even though we both know that statement's categorically false for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that there are much more important things I could be pitching a fit over. Troy keeping his true identity a secret doesn't even make the list, in all honesty.

She slides one of the precarious stacks of dishes in her hand, all of them crumb-covered casualties of the lunch rush, into the freshly filled sink. “And this is the somewhere you chose?” she drawls.

I can't resist a childish pout. “I have to go talk to my mom. I can't do it in the mood I'm in now. I'm liable to snap her head off over the stupidest little thing.”

Dixie mutters a few choice words to herself before raising her voice to say, “You know, whatever Troy's done, I can't imagine what it could be to drive you to the point of foot-stomping and breathing fire like you are.”

Telling her exactly why I'm angry with Troy doesn't feel like something I'm quite ready to divulge to everyone and their sister, especially since I still haven't confronted him about the whole affair yet. It's not my secret to tell, quite frankly, so when I stormed into Tea and Strumpets a short while ago, I blustered something about lying liars who lie and giant lawnmowers. Sometimes I just don't make much sense when I'm angry.

I suppose I should give Troy the benefit of the doubt considering the source, but the trouble is that I
am
considering the source. Morris would never get something as important as potential threats to himself or his plans for world domination wrong. As pathetic as it may sound, if Morris says Troy has superhuman abilities, I believe him.

“I just can't believe you were willing to trust someone with a name like a Harry Potter character anyway,” Dixie says.

Giggles bubble up inside me before I can stop them, a white-hot thread of guilt trailing after them. Dixie made a similar crack about him the first time he introduced himself as Troy Lampwick, and the jokes got even worse once she discovered his middle name is Neville. He'd said something about it being a much-reviled family name and changed the subject, but the Harry Potter jokes still live on.

The bell over the door rings out a greeting, and the two of us peer out into the dining room to spot Troy himself tumbling into the place, saddled with his usual stack of battered cheap notebooks, dropping pens behind him as if he's leaving a trail so he can find his way home later. I wonder for just a brief moment if he ever plans on joining this century and hauling along a laptop one of these days, but watching him dump his belongings onto the couch in the front of the cafe like he owns the place reminds me that I'm still stupidly, irrationally mad at him.

Dixie frowns as she sidles up beside me. “Speak of the devil and he shall arrive,” she says.

“It's not like he has anything better to do,” I reply.

She tilts her head in agreement. If Troy has a social or professional life elsewhere, we've yet to see any evidence of it.

I silently remind myself that I am absolutely not allowed to teleport him to the middle of Death Valley and leave him there. I head out into the dining room and ignore the curious looks of the one or two lunch-rush stragglers, striding straight up to Troy and ordering, “You. With me. Now.”

Breaking the bounds of politeness, I latch onto his wrist and teleport before he can turn me down.

I don't take us far, just to the shaded porch behind the cafe, littered with Dixie's old but comfortable lawn furniture and Tara's overgrown flower arrangements. It feels more like a misplaced jungle than anything else. It's quiet and solitary, hidden from prying eyes and ears just as long as the back door of Tea and Strumpets is firmly shut as it is now.

The second Troy realizes we're not in the cafe anymore, his expression darkens. “Vera, was that really –”  

“Why didn't you tell me you have superpowers?”

You would think from the stunned look on his face that I just slapped him hard across the cheek. His shock is short-lived, quickly shuttered behind an irritated mask. “Because I don't tell anyone. No offense, Vera, but that includes you.”

“You can't have done it for very long. Do you still have your SLB clearance?”

“I always have my SLB clearance whether I want it or not,” he grumbles, more to himself than to me. His eyes flash a silent warning as he gives an aggravated scratch to the tangled mane of his hair. “Look, I don't want to talk about this. If I didn't want to talk costumes and code names when they asked me to cram into spandex underwear every day of the goddamn year, I sure as hell don't want to have a nice involved chat about it now.”

“What can you do?” I ask, unable to stop myself.

He narrows his eyes, and for a moment I wonder if he's doing something to me I don't know about and definitely wouldn't enjoy. “Apparently I cause hysterical deafness when I ask for privacy,” he grinds out past gritted teeth.

“Troy, please.”  I reach out without conscious thought to place a calming hand on his forearm, but he shifts away from me before my fingers connect. “I don't want to ask you to help. Not like that. Whatever
that
may be.”

“Why not? You don't seem to have a problem asking me for help in every other regard.”

“That's an entirely different level of help. 'Look at this and tell me what I'm not seeing' is nowhere near 'use your superpowers to help me make all of this go away.'”

“Oh, please. I can already see where your train of thought is going and my brain already feels like it's melted.”

I frown, more than a little hurt that he'd think I of all people would stoop to using someone for their abilities. If anybody knows better than that, it's me and my progressively growing list of ex-friends and ex-significant others who broke it off for no other reason than my refusal to eliminate their need for international air fare. “You know, I'll have a little trouble steering the conversation down these crystal-clear train tracks you're imagining if I don't even know what model engine I'm driving.”