Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (16 page)

We advanced into the room together, Seven and Artemis reversing to cover the door. Bringing the whole team had been starting to feel like ridiculous overkill, but this was more like it.

Candle stands stood between the bookshelves lining the walls that didn’t hold Tiffany windows, and the peaked ceiling was capped in glass so outside light could shine in on the center of the circular room. All the furniture had been pulled back to the walls, and a huge Persian carpet had been rolled up to expose an eye-wateringly intricate series of circles and symbols on the slate floor.

“Ritual circle,” Dr. Cornelius said quietly. “Note the pentacle—the inverted star oriented south—and the isolated triangle containing its own circle. It’s designed for
geotic
magic, summoning. The magician stands inside the pentagram and summons whatever he is invoking to appear in the triangle, where he bargains with it or binds it.”

“Is it… active?” Lei
Zi
asked. He shook his head.

“Without Dr.
Millibrand
to power it with her gift, it’s just fancy chalk-art.”

I silently agreed; I didn’t feel any of the weird distortion we’d experienced at Mr.
Moffat’s
place. If Lei
Zi
had been there, she wouldn’t be asking now. While she studied it, angling to make sure her head-cam got good pictures of the circle, I walked around the room, looking for anything that seemed out of place. With the doctor’s dramatic taste in architecture and interior design, I couldn’t put it past her to have a secret room somewhere. A safe-room or emergency exit, at the very least.

Everything looked right, but something bothered me. “Artemis—”

I nearly shrieked when the cat hissed at me. He’d come in one of the open windows while my back was turned, and obviously didn’t like us. A crackling whine peaked and died, telling me Lei
Zi
had almost turned the yellow-eyed monster into disassociating bits of scorched black fur. Artemis lowered her gun, and I started giggling.

Lei
Zi
turned back to Dr. Cornelius.

“Do you think you can do something similar to what you did at Mr.
Moffat’s
residence? Without the excitement?”

He nodded. “I can tell you what she did here, and when…”

And suddenly I knew what had been bugging me—a smell that shouldn’t have been there, under the candles and chalk and cat, something I’d smelled before in a forensics lab. C4. Lots of it.

“Hot zone!” I yelled. “
Bugout
!” Artemis vanished into mist, Rush grabbed Lei
Zi
and Dr. Cornelius and disappeared over the wall into
Hypertime
, and Seven bolted from the room. I grabbed for the spitting cat.

And my world blew up.

The explosion blew me through the Tiffany windows in a cloud of glass, and I pushed myself along instead of fighting the burning blast-front. Tumbled so bad I didn’t know which way was up, I tucked into a ball and let gravity sort it out.

Sitting up on the lawn as bits of house fell around me, I couldn’t see anybody else.
“Astra! Report!”
Lei
Zi
demanded.
“Are you safe?”

“Sorry! Astra secure! The cat!” I looked around frantically. I’d just touched its fur…

“Focus! Determine the blast-zone and begin
evac
on your side!”
A cloud of white smoke erupted from the shattered
McMansion
as Riptide hit it with all the water he could pull from the air.

Right. Deep breaths. I stopped searching the lawn and lifted off.

Two neighboring yards shared the
Millibrand
property’s back wall, but though bits of burning wood frame and roof tiles still fell, neither home was close enough to be compromised by the blast. One home stayed dark but lights came on in the second, so I flew over the house and dropped to the front porch. The man who opened the door on the third ring had that wild look of someone dealing with stuff with a half-asleep brain spiking on adrenaline, but at least he’d thrown on a robe.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” I said softly. “But there’s been an incident and we need to evacuate you until the situation is secure. Family?”

He stared, then turned as
evacuate
sank in. I gently grabbed his arm. “Family?”

“Stop—! Fran, the kids.”

“Two?” He nodded.

“Then get Fran, grab some clothes, your wallet, cell phone, and your car keys, and I’ll meet you outside with the children.” I kept my voice soft and spoke slowly, and he calmed down a bit.

“Down the hall,” he said. “Tom and Annie.”

I knocked on the first door, opening it to find Tom already up, staring out the window at the bonfire over the wall. He spun around, eyes wide: ten, maybe eleven, head an untidy mop of bedtime-hair.

“Hi Tom,” I said, using the same voice as I’d used with his dad. “Sorry we woke you up, but now you need to grab some shoes and socks and come with me.” I found a wrinkled t-shirt and pair of pants on the floor and tucked them under my arm.

“You’re—”

“Yes I am, and if you’re very good I’ll give you my autograph later. But now we need to get your sister.”

A cute little moppet maybe half her brother’s age, Annie wasn’t even completely awake; her sleepy brain had probably heard the explosion and tucked it into her dreams. I grabbed a jumper off her chair, found her sock-drawer on the second try, pulled a pair of
Tigger
sneakers from under the bed, and draped her over my shoulder while Tom watched silently.

“Let’s go find your parents,” I said, and we did. Crowded into the front hall, they all followed me outside. While their dad pulled the car out of the garage I listened to Dispatch; no warnings for me, but the sirens splitting the night were multiplying.

“Is your neighbor home?” I asked Fran as I helped her dress little Annie, who offered all the resistance of a rag-doll. Tom got the idea and pulled his own clothes on. There’s something about being
dressed
that helps in an emergency.

“They—they’re on vacation,” she said. We’re collecting their mail.”

“Good.” I herded them over to the car, Fran carrying Annie. “
Mr
….”

“Scott Talbot,” he said as his family piled in.

“Mr. Talbot. Go find a hotel. What’s your phone number?” He gave it to me and I repeated it. “I’m sure everything will be fine, and I’ll call you personally when it’s okay to come back.” He nodded without protest. Not a time for questions, smart man. As the family suburban pulled away, I did a pop-up inspection of their home and then headed for the next house over. After doing a quick circuit using
infravision
to look for hot-spots, I dropped back down by the floater, still parked in front of the blown-up property.

Hands in his pockets, Seven stood talking to Fisher and a police sergeant. His sport-coat had gotten scorched, but it looked like thick interior walls had channeled most of the blast out the windows and through the roof.

“Damn, Astra!” he said, getting a look at me. “Did you roll in it?” Fisher raised an eyebrow.

Looking down at myself, I groaned; Andrew reinforced my costumes as much as he could, but tonight I’d exceeded specs by an epic margin. Burn holes marched across the skirt and costume front. Pulling my cape around, I found it had been blown half off and dangled in tatters. I reached up for my mask, and Seven shook his head.

“The mask is still one piece, but you look like somebody dumped live coals in your hair. You didn’t notice?”

I was amazed Mr. Talbot had let me in. “What happened?” I asked Fisher.

He shook his head. “We still don’t know. We’ve got an all-points bulletin out on her and are getting a court order to track her bank account and cards; if she tries to catch a plane, train, or even bus we’ve got her, but since we don’t even know how she got out of the neighborhood…”

He shrugged. “I’m more concerned with her attempting to rub out your entire team.”

“What?”

He started another cig. “Think about it.”

I did while Seven watched.

“Oh. Oh no.”

“No, what?” Seven asked, obviously not getting it.

“The
timing
. Oh God.” I realized I was hugging myself, and dropped my arms. “If she knew we were coming, and just wanted to get rid of the evidence, she could have blown the place when she left. Or left it on a timer.”

“Didn’t she?”

I gave him a twisty smile. “I assumed it was your luck—you wouldn’t have survived, so
your
crazy luck made me notice the C4 in time.” I looked at Fisher. “It wasn’t, was it?”

“Nope. One of our electronics boys recorded a wireless signal from the house, but didn’t break the encryption in time. She’d wired the place for sound, and tripped the C4 the moment she realized you’d noticed it. My guess? She’d been waiting for the entire team to go in, not just your lead element.”

Riptide got the fire out before the first fire-truck arrived, but five neighboring homes got singed a bit by flaming debris and the police units waiting in the wings evacuated the rest of the close neighbors, just in case. Once the danger was past and the street clear again, I called the Talbots and let them know their home was fine and it was safe to return. Scott thanked me, and let me know they’d gone to Scott’s sister’s house to stay the night.

The police cordon kept the media out till after we left, which wasn’t going to help but at least meant we didn’t have to talk to them before getting cleaned up. Two costumes ruined in two nights; Andrew was going to
kill
me. Lei
Zi
announced a morning debriefing for 8:00 am, and sent everyone to bed for what few hours we had left. I tumbled into mine and was out in seconds.

“How can we tolerate these…people, who set themselves up as idols in our society? Who inspire our children to acts that maim or kill them in hopes of becoming idols as well? Who think nothing of bringing destruction into our neighborhoods, into our homes, into the places where our children play? Scratch a “superhero” and you’ll find a self-serving, vain, egotistical, monomaniacal, tin-plated god with feet of clay and bloody hands.”

Mal
Shankman
 
campaign speech.

What kind of wicked witch uses C4? I mean, really? Did she run out of flying monkeys? Last night’s explosion hit the morning news, and you’d have thought we’d gone after
Millibrand
in the middle of Macy’s. On a Saturday. Footage of the burning
McMansion
filled the morning news, along with sound-bite interviews of neighbors (and only Mrs. Talbot seemed to have anything good to say). Second-guessing pundits offered armchair analysis (Lei
Zi’s
phrase); apparently we should have set up surveillance and jumped
Millibrand
when she got in her car to go to work—never mind that, after Dr. Cornelius took down her pet demon,
she’d obviously known we were coming for her
.

Dr Cornelius suggested that she’d only had time for one Major Working, which she used to bug out before we got there. Good thing, too; if we’d had to face another demon instead of C4…

At least nobody died. Besides the cat.

The morning debriefing was thankfully brief—mainly a warning of the media firestorm from Al. Al attended by video-conference call from his offices, and he looked like he’d gotten up when we went to bed. I’d always thought he’d been a hanger-on, milking his brother’s fame for professional gain, and maybe he had been, but Atlas’ dying hit him hard. He didn’t come around the Dome anymore, and mostly only worked with
Quin
.