Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (36 page)

“And Mr. Miyamoto?”

“Disappeared three years ago. He had no other family, and it took us awhile to get his information from Osaka Prefecture in Japan.” Fisher brought up a picture of a grandfatherly Japanese gentleman.

“Right,” Rush laughed. “And what are the odds it’s coincidence?”

“None at all,” Fisher said. “Jenny gave us this.” The push of a button de-aged the face and I stared at the
Yoshi
I met in the club. “We are proceeding on the assumption that
Kitsune
is in fact
Yoshi
Miyamoto, aged 78, of Osaka Japan. And the ten million was never his objective; he’s here to collect on his debts.”

When the briefing broke up, Chakra and
Quin
stopped to welcome me back. Artemis waved and then disappeared, but Fisher took me aside before I could follow her.

“Got a few minutes, kid? And a place?” He held up his pack of cigs and I grinned.

“Blackstone? Can we have the room?”

Chakra took Blackstone’s arm and gave us a wink. “Play nice,” she said as they left. I picked up an empty coffee cup and slid its saucer over to Fisher. “Instant ashtray.”

“Thanks.” He lit up, sighed. “Glad to see you’re alright. Nice look.”

“My ribs approve. What have I missed?”

“Five more hits, two in public—hard to say which side hit which. Garfield is ready to take the investigation from me and hand it all to Organized Crime. Has
Kitsune
been in touch with you again?”

I shook my head. “Why would he?”

“No idea. But why did he reach out to you the second time?” He shrugged, obviously not expecting an answer.

I thought about Saturday night’s
Kitsune
-dream. It hadn’t faded like dreams normally do. “There is one thing…” I said. And I told him.

He took a long drag when I finished, stubbed out the cig.

“Burning hounds, huh? And she kills them?”

“That’s what the fox said.”

“Then there’s something I want you to see.”

Only a decade into the superhero era, we are already seeing recycled names. Possibly this is because there are only so many cool superhero codenames. Certainly in the case of Watchman, Chicago’s new Sentinel, it’s not a legacy-name; its previous owner was a B Class
aerokinetic
who worked for Night Patrol in San Francisco. The Sentinels paid Watchman’s estate an undisclosed sum to acquire all copyright and trademark rights to the name, just so their newest Atlas-type recruit wouldn’t be called Awesome Man.

From Terry Reinhold’s
City Watch
Column

When Fisher said he wanted to show me something, it was usually a body. He never
said
it was, but I was getting good at anticipating the need to disassociate from the next thing I saw. I didn’t have anything scheduled till the afternoon training sessions and I’d been ordered to take it easy anyway, so I checked out with Dispatch while Fisher called ahead. Dispatch listed me as Active, allowing Watchman (who’d stood up for me since Sunday) to fly out to Washington. Since Fisher wanted to talk
enroute
, he drove me down to the Cook County Morgue.

To my surprise, the Chief Medical Examiner took time for us herself. Dr. Abigail Sinclair had a warm Southern drawl and a laugh that dripped like honey. She smelled like vanilla, wore pearls with her suit, and liked to touch whoever she talked to—which was mostly Fisher. She took us up two floors to a smaller examination room where she’d laid out two bodies.

“Here we are, sugar,” she said. “I kept our last two; we couldn’t keep the family from claiming victim number one.”

Fisher shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Doc. Can you tell Astra what you told me?”

Snapping on some gloves, she twitched aside the cover over the first body to bare the head and torso. I swallowed.

“The medical term for this is
cooked
,” Dr. Sinclair “Call me Abby” said.
 
“Which is impossible.”

The body hadn’t been burned, even I could see that. It—
he
—still had his dark shock of hair and thick eyebrows.

“The victim’s clothes were intact,” she said to me. “Not even singed, and he collapsed in the middle of a crowd. Until then nobody noticed him. The first reading of his core temperature was ridiculous; he couldn’t have been alive, let alone walking down a street, and the degree of…baking…indicated he’d been that hot for hours.”

Fisher watched me, and I forced myself to think about what I was looking at. There was something wrong about it, and not just the condition of the body.

I opened my mouth, and a different question spilled out. “Was it… did it hurt?”

“No way to tell, kid,” Fisher said softly. “But I don’t think so. Witnesses said he was just walking slowly, and dropped without a sound. Like he’d passed out. The others were the same.”

That helped, but he didn’t offer anything else, which wasn’t like him. Even Abby looked puzzled.

When I took a step closer, the
wrongness
grew. I spun to look at Fisher.

“This is—”

“This is what?”

“Magic.” The body didn’t have the same too-real feeling of the special room in the Dome, but it was close—like a lingering smell or fading after-image.

Fisher didn’t blink. “And the other one?” I stepped around to the second table, shaking my head when Abby offered to uncover the body. “This one, too. But… not as much.”

He snorted. “That one is the second victim, found on Tuesday. Our man here died last night. Dr. Cornelius told me about your ‘sensitivity’ before he skipped town, and that it might last awhile. Good to know he was right.”

Abby looked interested. “You can sense supernatural effects, honey? That would be very useful. We get a few ‘cause unknown’ cases every year, and we’ve got no magic breakthroughs on staff to sniff out curses.”

I must have let my panic show, because Fisher shook his head. “We can talk about that later, Doc.” He took my elbow. “We really need to be going.”

“But—”

“I’ll call. Promise.” He got me out of there quick, leaving the doctor with her mouth open, and didn’t say anything else until we were back in the car.

“Wow,” I said when I could trust my voice. “You’d better apologize with wine and candles.”

He glanced at me. “You’re laughing.”

“Yes,” I giggled. “And thanks for the save.
Ugh
!” Shuddering, I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to get the image of the dead man out of my head. What a wonderful first day back…
Think of kitties
. “Those were some of the hits you talked about?”

“Actually, no. The first case didn’t even cross my desk—Garfield gave it to Phelps. I caught the second. He’s a John Doe, but his face came up in our image recognition software.”

“Huh? How?”

“After you told me Mr. Miyamoto was probably
Kitsune
, I pulled the security footage from The Fortress. Nemesis found his target because victim number two pointed him out. The weird bit is that, looking at all the tapes, number two got plenty of room—like everybody could smell him and gave him lots of space, but nobody even looked at him. He had to grab Nemesis to get his attention. You can watch the files if you want.”

“But you couldn’t ID him.”

“Nope. But his picture went in our database, and two days later he popped up dead on the street.”

“So, what—”

The curbside mailbox shattered the windshield into a million tiny flying slivers and hammered Fisher through his seat and into the back of the car. I stared at the blue box steel beside me, and then reflexively ducked and covered my head as we swerved, slid, caught something and rolled end over end. The
crunch
as we met the tree and wrapped around it ended our trip. I found myself upside down and pinned against the shredded bark, my window gone.

No. No. No. He’s dead. He’s dead. God, please let us have missed everybody
.

“Are you
commuting
now, Astra?”

Villain-X waited in the air above me, back in his black costume minus the hooded facemask. He flared in my infrared vision while my inner
woogyness
told me there was more to him than there should have been. Like the bodies on the slabs.

I
pushed
, pealing us away from the stricken oak tree, and pulled free of the wreck.
 
“Dispatch! I screamed. “Code-red, A, two, Rush delivery!” And I launched.

Back arched, fists together, true form, I hit him above his center-of-mass and kept accelerating as we headed back down. He
oofed
, the air knocked out of him, and then we cratered in the intersection. Chunks of concrete flew into the air. Around us bystanders abandoned their cars and ran. The man under me tried to fly, flipping me as I fought to hold us down, and swung me through the corner gas station and into the brick side of its garage.

I pushed off and flew us through a gas-pump and into the road, digging a trench as I angled us
down
. My armor-reinforced knee caught him in the gut as he pulled us up, and I spun us again as he wheezed. A round back-hand to my temple rang my ears and I let go.

Kicking me away, he laughed as I smacked down into the street.

“I’m going to eat your eyes!” His voice rasped inhumanly and his own eyes flared red. Sweat dripped down his face and he shook his head. “Nice armor,” he added, sounding normal. “Trying to level-up?”

An eye-twisting blur flashed by me and with a solid
smack
, Ajax’ huge titanium-headed maul filled my hand. His backup maul; his original weapon lay in pieces on display in the Dome museum.

“
Delivered,
RushCrashSprintsSifu
evacuatingzonenow
,” Rush informed me as fleeing bystanders began disappearing around us. Villain-X saw the motion and dove, and I launched to meet him, swung the maul with a scream. The
shock
of impact almost made me drop it, but he spun away, decapitating a lamp-post and bouncing parked cars aside as their alarms wailed.

“
Yes!
” I screamed. “You are
waxed
!” I dropped on him, bringing the maul down to shatter the sidewalk as he desperately rolled away. He kicked again, but I twisted to take it on my cuirass, swung, and the maul rang again as he flew backwards and into an abandoned van. Pulling himself out of the wreck, he took off straight up—burning brighter in my infrared sight.

“
Astra!
” Lei
Zi
shouted in my ear. I could barely hear her over the roaring in my head. “
The zone is clear—keep him there, help is incoming
!”

I launched myself after him, but he didn’t flee; instead he looped around again to dive. Swinging the hundred-pound maul, I took him in the side with a hit that could have dented main battle-tank armor. He screamed, voice inhuman again, and grabbed my weapon hand, crushing my fingers around the
maul’s
haft. Instead of letting go, I pulled him into knee range and hit the same spot with a
crunch
. He let go and I back-swung, a ringing strike to his head.

He shook it off. And smiled.