Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (11 page)

Her smile stretched ear to ear, and I sighed, relieved. I’d occasionally worried that the Department of Superhuman Affairs would conspire with the Center for Disease Control to lock her up as the potential vector for a vampire-plague. After all that’s what her maker had planned. I sipped the coffee and settled back with a deeper, blissful sigh.

“But the whole Atlas-scandal has been going on awhile,” Artemis said. “Why is Shelly worried now?”

So I told her.

“
Are you brain-dead
?”

I’d only ever seen Artemis this mad once, the night I’d tracked her down in her hideout under her old family home. She’d shot me in the eye to make the point. It had stung

“Blackstone is going to get pureed and you didn’t tell
me
?”

“I’m sorry!”

I forced my hands down, wrapping them around my cup. A mistake; I squeezed too hard and it shattered, splashing coffee across the kitchen. Déjà-vu. I leaped up and grabbed a dish towel.

“I told you, Shelly and I thought we could find his killer first!”

“Of all the blonde— Look, you can’t just catch the guy who’s going to do it! You said the police think this guy’s a contract killer! You catch
this
guy, whoever would have paid for the hit is just going to hire somebody else! So Blackstone doesn’t end up in a box—he’ll still be dead!”

“Oh.”

I dropped the towel and sat on the floor, felt a crunch. “
Dammit
!” Reaching under me I pulled pieces of cup out of the seat of my shorts, stuck my finger in the hole. I tried to laugh, and realized I was shaking.

“Hope,” Artemis said, but I couldn’t stop.

No
no
no
no
.

“Hope!”

Minuteman. Killed by a gang-banger. Impact. Died in Israel. Ajax. Nimbus.
Atlas
. All gone down together in LA. Now Blackstone.

“Shit!” Artemis isn’t nearly as strong as me, but she took an iron grip on my chin and pulled my head around.

“Look into my freaking eyes!”

And I fell into cool pools of blue.

“Better?” She pulled back and I nodded limply, the screaming panic only an echo, back to the shadow of fear of the past few days.

“That’s amazing.”

“It’s a benefit past donors get. Panic attacks? You need a better therapist.”

I opened my hand and ground bits of coffee cup dribbled down to the floor.

“Or I could grind your beans myself,” I giggled wetly.

She relaxed. “Done?”

I thought about it, and nodded.

“Good.” She pulled me to my feet and kicked a chair under me, the big-sister again.

But she still looked dark and dangerous, waiting for a target. It was like having a dragon sitting in my kitchen.

“And I’m sorry,” she said. “Your idea is a good one—it’s just not big enough.”

“It’s not?”

“Not even close. Look, this isn’t your kind of job.
I’m
Blackstone’s apprentice; threat-analysis is what we do. Just to be clear, all you’ve got is that, in the timeline before the Big One changed everything, this banker was killed? And later Blackstone, both by the same method?”

I nodded again.

“And no discovered connection between them?”

“No.”

“So there are four possibilities.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “It’s completely personal; the killer’s an Outfit hitter; he’s an independent contractor to the Outfit; or he’s an independent contracted by someone else. If it’s the first, great; we catch him and we save Blackstone. If it’s the second, we catch him we
might
be able to tie him to the Outfit and save Blackstone. If it’s the third or the fourth, the Outfit, or whoever else is going to hire him, will just get someone else. You follow?”

“But—”

“So we
have
to find the killer, you bet. But we don’t assume it ends there. Not by a long ways.”

She made some calls—one of them to Seven, sketching the problem and ordering him to climb inside Blackstone’s tux and stick close until the danger was past. His superhuman luck would have to protect the both of them. Then she went to bed. The windowless basement was perfect (I realized I’d been tense the entire time she’d been upstairs), and Artemis had explored the racks and piles of camping gear and made a nice little nook before I’d woken up. She threw herself down on an open cot, and looked up at me.

“Take the light bulb with you?”

“Okay.” I unscrewed the single bare bulb that lit the cellar and went upstairs, softly closing the door.

Decibel, an A-class
audiokinetic
, is suing the State of California for violation of his civil rights in the wake of passage of Proposition 12, the special initiative which includes both the Watch List Act and the Public Security Act. As a superhuman with “powers of mass-destruction” and a criminal record, Decibel is banned by the Public Security Act from entering public buildings, including government offices and schools, without submitting to restraint. Since Decibel’s criminal record consists of convictions for extreme vandalism from his time as an eco-terrorist with the Green Knights—crimes nearly a decade old and for which he served time before joining the LA Guardians—legal experts have called his case the perfect test of the new law’s constitutionality.

The Wall Street Journal

I thawed and cooked up a breakfast of hash browns, pancakes and syrup, and reconstituted and seasoned eggs to keep my hands busy, then wandered the little valley like I’d planned. I found the doe and her fawn, and around noon I called Shelly and asked her to commit a serious felony for me. Sunset painted the sky with spilled oranges and violets, and, knowing what to listen for, I heard the drone when it returned to circle high above the cabin. When Artemis came back upstairs I was changed and ready to go. Before she could ask, I hugged her.

“Thanks Jacky,” I said. “Fly safe? I’m going back to LA.”

She smiled a predator’s smile. “Don’t do anything I would do.”

I flew to catch the sunset, hitting the coast as the last rays faded over water, and stopped first at
Restormel
, where their Willis waited for me with a stuffed book-bag and an improbably bored look. One of Platoon’s duplicates,
Restormel’s
Willis knew me as well as our Willis did, and had been happy to pull everything together for me no questions asked—not that there’d been anything illegal about this part of it. After I changed back into civvies, he brought a car around. An old sedan, it looked like it belonged where we were going, but it was probably armored and tech-pimped in every possible way.

Shelly had found me an address, a name, and, hacking the LAPD database, an arrest file. I tied my hair up while Bob drove, put on the baseball cap and sunglasses he’d stuffed in the bag on top of the money, and went over my notes. He parked us in front of an old apartment tower, one of the survivors of the quake. Nine Ninety-Nine Cypress Road.

“Thanks Willis. I shouldn’t be long.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Good. I’d hate to get ticketed while we’re in there.”

“Can’t you stay with the car?”

“It’ll tell me if anybody tries to mess with it. I’m more concerned someone will try and mess with you and you’ll have to go all Astra on them.”

I looked out the window. Half the streetlights were dark, and probably had been before the quake. Boards still covered a lot of storefront windows, and the few pedestrians on the street hurried, on their way somewhere else.
 
The address next to the tower was an empty lot, like a missing tooth, with a clap-board construction wall around the cleared space. If I wasn’t what I was, there was no way I’d get out of the car. Willis looked… prohibitive. Plain dark suit, short dark hair, narrow face. A face that said
I’m a nice guy
.
Don’t mess with me, and I’ll stay nice
. I was back in cargo shorts and cotton
cami
; together we’d look like a child-star and her bodyguard, but at least random strangers with evil intentions would be cautious.

I sighed and nodded, then bit on a nasty thought.

“Willis? Blackstone told me you’ve got duplicates everywhere. CIA, NSA, DSA. What will they say about tonight?”

He smiled. “Nothing. My right hand never talks about what my left hand is doing, unless the bodies begin piling up.”

“That’s…okay then.” I shivered and hoped he wasn’t being literal.

We got out and went in. Shelly had found the place by hacking Orb’s agency computer and going over her bank statements. The apartment, far from her own home and unconnected to her business, practically jumped up and down and whistled
look at me
! A raid on the apartment management’s files found several resident complaints about the occupant, a Rafael Jones; apparently he liked to get high and play really loud concert music—Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony being his favorite—at wall-rattling decibels. The mug-shot from the police report on one of the public disturbance arrests belonged to our Dr. Cornelius.

The old elevator took us to the top floor, where he lived in apartment 909.
Uhuh
.

Shelly had done some research based on the numbers and what he’d said at Lunette’s. In hermetic magical theory the ninth
decan
,
Kurtael
, was the
decan
of death, decay, fear, and disorder, personified by a corpse in armor, a black horse, and a skeletal, black-cloaked figure.

The door was painted black, and I smelled myrrh. Willis snorted, unimpressed.

I took a deep breath. I was best-friends with a vampire, for goodness sake.

Then somebody inside screamed. Willis swore and suddenly had a gun. I dropped the bag, grabbed the doorknob, and pushed. The doorframe broke with a sharp
snap
.

The small apartment was way too crowded.

Mr. Jones hung suspended in the grip of a guy in a suit who looked like carved obsidian. Two obvious minions flanked him, one with a hand full of Orb’s hair, gun to her face, as I came through the door. She looked more mad than scared.

“Drop him!” Willis shouted behind me. Amazingly, obsidian-guy did.

“Shelly?” I whispered, and just like that she was there through my
earbug
.

“Wow! Blacktop,”
she said.
“A-class Ajax type, suspected transformer. General warrant issued.”

General warrant—open arrest warrant, extremely dangerous, need not be brought in alive. I froze, but only for a second. Last year Ajax had spent three months training me to fight; it had been like stepping into a fight-club ring every day, and he’d taught me just how much I could take and still give it back. Atlas had taught me the tactical side.

Dangerous subject, hostile, engaged, surrounded by potential victims? Remove to safer surroundings.

Open palmed, I launched myself at Blacktop’s center of mass and kept going. Jones’ apartment overlooked the empty lot, and his window didn’t even slow us down. I put speed into it so we hit the ground before the bits of window and frame did.