I bolt up off the couch, already blushing with shame.
Oh,
hell.
I teleport back to the lobby of my parents' building, hoping that Hazel's actually listened to me for a change rather than done something both of us would regret, like returning to the penthouse or heading into the city or falling into an open well just because she can.
But she hasn't. I reappear in the lobby to find her sitting on the artfully uncomfortable steel and leather bench next to the elevator, leaning forward with her head down and her joined hands resting between her splayed knees. She's already frayed at the seams a bit in my absence, her thick blond hair losing its body, her pale skin pallid under the fluorescent lobby lighting.
She lifts her head, pinning me down with her gaze, and I feel like I'm sinking into the floor.
“Hey,” I say, feeling awkward and stiff.
Hazel says nothing at first, just stares me down with a far too serious expression that doesn't sit well paired with her pert little nose and definitive dash of freckles. It's a bit like Shirley Temple attempting to intimidate you, if Shirley Temple were carved out of stone and bone, hard and jagged around the edges and getting more ragged by the second.
“Take me home,” she orders, her voice a raw bitter nerve.
13.
I reek of smoke, I haven't eaten in hours, and my head still buzzes from the baconyl's lingering effects. All I want right now is to go upstairs and fall asleep sprawled across my couch with nature documentaries on my television and a pint of half-finished cherry chocolate ice cream slowly melting in my lap.
Unfortunately, I might as well wish for a pony and a million dollars, as long as I'm requesting things I won't get.
I land outside of my apartment, fully expecting Hazel to make a run for it. I should have known better. She stalks toward my front door as soon as I release her hand.
All right, I guess we're hashing this out right now then.
When I follow, I half-expect to find the curtains still shuddering from Hazel's ill treatment of the door as she slammed it behind her. She could have gone home, but instead she fled upstairs with a bolt of energy spurred on by aggravation. She'll be raiding my fridge, of course, probably searching for whichever food I might have left around the house to be devoured without my permission. So much for the last of the fruit I have left in the house.
I open the door and head up the stairs, unable to resist thinking that if I were genuinely seeking out a fight, I could have simply teleported upstairs and really riled Hazel up.
I reach the top of the stairs to find Hazel tearing her way through an apple with sharp deliberate bites as she paces back and forth in the living room. She stiffens as soon as she spots me, her blue eyes narrowing in a calculating way that only for a moment makes me contemplate turning on my heel and heading back down to Tea and Strumpets to hide in the kitchen.
I slip off my shoes with a sigh before I pull out a kitchen chair and sit down. “All right, go ahead,” I say.
She scowls. “Go ahead with what?”
“We dated for a year and a half, Hazel. I know when you need to get something off your chest.”
“Oh, for fuck's sake, Vera.” She tosses the half-eaten apple into the sink, pitching it hard enough for tiny bits of apple to spray into the air when it hits. “I'm not enough of a bitch to yell at you now.”
I lean forward, rest my arms on my knees. “I can take it.”
“Do you even understand why I want to yell? Or do you seriously think I like to hear my own voice that much?”
“Look, I know you have a problem with my parents being who they are, but –“
“I don't give a rat's ass if your parents are the king and queen of the marshmallow people. What's freaking me right the hell out is you throwing yourself into the path of danger the way you just did.”
“So, what? I should have just let whoever set off that smoke bomb get away with it and left all those people there to fend for themselves?”
“You quit that life, Vera. You torched your damn costume, for crying out loud.”
Actually, I threw it into the burning crater left in the Rafters by a badly-aimed atomic rocket in front of a slobbering phalanx of reporters, but I wasn't in the mood to quibble over that particular detail. “I can't just stop having superpowers, Hazel. Well, not without the use of a high-powered laser beam and a very determined supervillain, in any event.”
“You were at a party full of goddamn superheroes! It's their job to take care of that sort of thing, not yours. You didn't have to do anything but finish your drink and watch a parade. That's it.”
“I wouldn't have watched that fucking parade if you'd wired a million dollars into my bank account.”
Hazel startles in response to my cursing, as unused to hearing four-letter words from me as I am to saying them. But I stand by my statement. I'd rather swallow acid than catch a glimpse of any more of that nauseating parade than I already have.
“I worry about you,” she says, and for a moment her voice sounds very small, curled up and trembling like a frightened mouse. “I worried about you so much when we were dating, and now we're broken up and I can't stop. And this is what I worry about, all the time. Even now.”
“I'm trained to do this,” I point out, barely restraining the urge to throw my arms up in the air in frustration. “I've got a degree in this from the best college for superheroes in the country, for heaven's sake. I was the valedictorian.”
She sniffs dismissively. “Yeah, I noticed. I also noticed why the hell you moved here of all places.”
A jagged chill races down my spine.
“That's a cheap shot,” I murmur.
Her cheeks burn with color, the only sign she's the least bit taken aback by what she threw out onto the table. When I left the city, I started driving in my rarely-used pickup without any particular destination in mind and somehow ended up at a simple marble memorial in the woods just outside of town. I leaned up against it for hours and soaked in the sun under the two marble golems made up to look like costumed heroes, both of them staring down at me in dark disappointment. After I'd had enough of the silent persecution, I got back into town and put a down payment on the first building I spotted with a “For Rent” sign in the window.
I have a life here – a job, a home, a new family I built from scratch – but as much as I try to pretend that I've severed my ties with the superhero community, there's still an enormous marble reminder that I'm never free from tucked away in the woods behind the high school.
She rumples her hair with vicious intent, a sad excuse for a scalp massage. “Vera, your grandfathers couldn't catch a comet and they were indestructible. You've given yourself a second-degree burn baking cookies, for fuck's sake. I just –” She sighs heavily, and her entire body appears to sag. “I worry. That's all.”
“You don't have to worry about me.”
“Well, somebody has to,” she says, her voice dripping with exasperation. “Finding somebody in your family who can find time in their busy schedules to give a shit about you is probably about as hard as I'm thinking it is.”
It's hard not to literally handwave her concern. It's possible I had the desire for a cookie-cutter family life drummed out of me long ago by too many years of Take Your Daughter To Work Day involving alien laser beams from outer space and teleporting supervillains into jail cells. “There are more important things in the world to them than worrying about me when I'm perfectly fine,” I say.
“Oh, yeah? Which things, dropping giant boulders into active volcanoes to keep them from exploding or presenting at the Oscars?”
All right, I'll admit skipping my twenty-fifth birthday party so they could present the Best Special Effects Oscar had disappointed me a little bit.
Hazel slouches against the wall, bony shoulders hitting the wall with a thump. “Sharona and Kate warned me I shouldn't date a superhero,” she grumbles.
I doubt I'm supposed to hear that, but it's hard to miss, and it manages to hit a nerve I never seem to recall is raw and frayed until it's too damn late. “No, Sharona and Kate told you you shouldn't date a bisexual. There's a difference.”
“That wasn't what they said,” Hazel says. From the tone of it, she knows she's said the wrong thing.
I can't help but get to my feet. “Oh, right. They called me the indecisive slut, if I recall correctly. Just out of curiosity, did they ever get back to you on that advice I requested in regards to what steps they took when they decided to be lesbians? You know, to help me make up my mind and all?”
She sighs, her gaze darting away from me with thinly veiled guilt, and for a brief moment I feel awful about going there. Hazel only has a handful of lesbian friends – this town is so small Hazel and I pretty much
are
the gay community – and most of them have no problem with me even now. Some of them even like me. But Sharona and Kate don't like me any more than a lot of the straight folks in town do. The moment the word “bisexual” dropped from my lips, both of them wrote me off. You have no idea how much it stings to be necking with your girlfriend in the cozy back corner of some bar only to have two of her best friends interrupt to inform her of all of the ways I'll inevitably break it off with her for someone with a penis.
“I don't want to fight anymore,” she says.
“Then why did you come up here rather than going home to your grandmother's?”
“Fuck, hell if I know.”
There's a reason I enjoyed our arguments a lot more when we were dating. Back then, it was practically foreplay. Now it's just an exercise in winding up the both of us and leaving us unsatisfied. It's a bad state to be in when I just wish I could snuggle into the depths of my bed linen with a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a questionably edited young-adult vampire novel and slip into a comforting coma.
Unfortunately, I can't. Not just yet.
“I have to go,” I say.
Hazel flashes me a dark scowl. “Then why haven't you gone already?”
I give her a pointed look, one that makes her roll her eyes in response. She doesn't bother with saying goodbye after that, stomping past me on her way to the stairs.
She can lock the door on her way out. She always does.
14.
One of the few advantages as I have due to the strength of my bloodline is a more flawless sense of global positioning than most other teleporters. I might not be able to throw a car at someone or cause runaway trains to brake with the power of my mind, but I've never been saddled with the need to verify the exact location where I'm going to land before my departure. Lots of teleporters aren't so lucky.
At least I've never had to stoop so low as to cart around a GPS tracker with me everywhere I go, I think with a disgusted shudder as I arrive at my destination.
It's not quite what I expected.
After a quick check of precisely which unpaved country road aligns with the address on Morris's key, I land with only a minimum of stumbling on the dirt road which aligns Morris's makeshift lair. The toes of my shoes rest mere inches from the unkempt edge of the lawn when I land, my aim still commendable. The grass here grows wild and untamed, a tangled waist-high crush of ferns and weeds and brambles. It subtly deters anyone from investigating further, warding off inquisitive strangers just as much as the rusted carcass of a '97 Chevy splayed catty-corner to the road. Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't desire a visit to the unwashed trailer home tucked into the rambling jungle surrounding it, but then again there's always one wayward adventurer in every lot.
I take a cautious step forward, only to hear a low insistent hiss from the depths of the gardener's nightmare before me. My hands slip to my waist as I give the lawn a dark warning look. I don't doubt that the hisses are simply Morris's conniving way of keeping away anyone not already frightened off by the dilapidated trailer and lush overgrowth. If I dig deep enough under the greenery, I'll bet I find mechanical snakes more likely to shock than bite.
Not that I'm about to test that particular theory by wading into that disaster area, of course.
“All right,” I say aloud to myself, “I'm Morris, and there's a nasty intruder encroaching on my lair. What do I do to keep them out?”
I take in my surroundings with sharp eyes, noting the distance between the crumbling trailer and the neighbors, the depth and thickness of the grass, just how realistic the deteriorating state of the trailer home may be. The Duffy farm peers down at the lot from a picturesque hillside a crystal-clear country mile away, a perfect view of Morris's lair on their hands if not for the unkempt flora guarding it in an impenetrable wall. The trailer sheds dirty gray siding and peeling maroon paint flecks, but the foundation itself holds solid, hinting at the dangerous reality behind the depressing illusion.
I only wish it were simply a pathetic excuse for a mobile home.
My frown twists my lips into a grim caricature as I crouch down to pluck a few rocks from the road's surface. Morris wouldn't set up a shiny new lair without the most sensitive and up-to-date security system he could whip up. I may not be able to spot the specifically bred killer squirrels in the shadows or the robot bees just waiting to strike, but there's always something, and I'm not dumb enough to teleport any deeper into its orbit and just hope for the best.
Standing back up again, I eye the compact open-air porch for distance, judging just how well tossing one of the pebbles in my hand in that general direction will turn out. My aim's never been all that brilliant when it comes to throwing anything. Sure enough, the first stone I pitch at the porch goes wide by about ten feet, plunging into the dense greenery.
A moment later a series of enormous rotating blades swipe through the lawn, felling the overgrown grass in one dramatic wave and disappearing into the ground as though they'd never been there at all.
I stand there for a long moment, silently blinking.
Well, that's certainly overkill.
It would be easy for me to simply pop over to the porch and try the key, but I know Morris better than I'd like. I toss the next rock casually from one hand to the other, assessing just how far off I was the first time. The blades would have been a blaring neon sign to stay away. I imagine he programmed them not to dice any possible offenders so much as give them the impression Morris wasn't above slicing them thinner than potato chips.
“It's that sort of intimidation technique that generates parades in honor of your horrible death, you know,” I say quietly to Morris, wherever he may be.
The next stone hits home, skittering across the dusty floor of the porch and triggering exactly what I expect. A ripple in the air rebounds outward from the building as soon as the stone strikes. The wave cascades across the lawn, invisible to the human eye except for the way it rumples the newly cut grass. It moves through the air like rising heat off concrete, rolling outward from the trailer like steam from a hot paved road in summer. I somehow restrain my instinct to teleport to safety and allow the unseen wave to engulf me.
Doing so requires a certain level of trust out of Morris. I have to believe, at least for this one moment in time, that Morris wouldn't do anything to make this more difficult for me than it already is.
Considering I'm trying to break into his highly illegal lair by not actually breaking in at all, he'd better deliver, that's all I've got to say.
Morris likes to know his adversaries, and the genetic pulse thrums outward for what feels like forever, the barely-there bone-deep hum it gives off fading after a minute or so. I freeze in place, a sudden teleport at this juncture probably an awful gamble. The concussive blast originating from the trailer would have registered my genetic signature, identified the proper containment course to keep me from moving any closer, and possibly whipped up a quick platter of my favorite foods while it's at it. Morris always did like his guests comfortable and well-fed, even if they were officially kidnapped for short but inconvenient periods of time.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, waiting as patiently as I can manage.
A moment later, the light beside the door clicks on, a dazzling if perhaps not very welcoming shade of red.
“Here we go,” I say, and leap.
In the next instant I'm standing, albeit anxiously and ready to leap again at the slightest provocation, on the small squat porch to Morris's lair. A quick bit of rummaging in my cleavage removes the key from its hiding place, and after a fast and dirty mental debate on the merits of simply walking into a confirmed supervillain's lair using the key to the front door, I throw caution to the wind, jam the key in the lock, and turn it before I can change my mind.
It opens just as easily as my own front door would have.
My mood brightens considerably when an arrow doesn't immediately fly directly at my head. Once bitten, a few dozen times shy, even after a long sabbatical.
The exterior of the building fools me, just for a moment. Even knowing what this place must be, it's difficult not to imagine due to its shoddy outward appearance that I'll be walking into a backwoods mansion of wood paneling and orange linoleum, something nearly retro enough for my own tastes if the outside of the trailer didn't hint that the inside would look like a minor disaster area. Luckily, my brain jerks to a start before I can kick myself, presumably hauled awake by the familiar punch-bright glow of computer screens and the greeting hum of white noise emanating from inside the opened door.
Sure enough, I cautiously enter to discover walls of advanced holographic computer displays and a multitude of shelves crammed with scientific laboratory equipment. However he managed to accomplish it all by his lonesome – and it would have been a solitary endeavor, no doubt; Morris prefers to work alone in every aspect of his villainy – Morris found a way to clear out the contents of the trailer and scrub away any evidence it might have once been contained patchy plaid furniture and elderly taupe kitchen appliances. He painted the walls an austere dark blue, set up an impressive mosaic of computer monitors on the front of the trailer, and replaced the kitchen with a fully-equipped (if rather cramped) laboratory. Everything in the place suffers under the grating harshness of fluorescent lighting, save the perfectly normal bedroom that still appears to be tucked behind the door at the far end.
I frown as I shut the door securely behind me. Morris had done one hell of a job building the place, I have to grudgingly admit, even if the compact interior gives it the air of some amateur mad scientist's haphazard basement set-up.
The other villains won't let him join in any of their reindeer games anymore if they ever see this place,
I think to myself.
I rifle through a cluttered stack of schematics on a table and try not to remind myself that the other villains won't be inviting him to do much of anything anymore.
“How wonderful of you to visit, my dear.”
I flinch and nearly drop the crumpled blueprint in my hand at the drawling voice, so achingly familiar I swear I'm mistaking it. I whirl towards the wall of monitors only to confront a paneled composite of Morris's face, scar-free but his just the same. I would know that smug smile anywhere. It's a shame it's not really a recording of Morris, or him broadcasting from some far-off place. No matter how rusty I may be, I'm still good at spotting an avatar for an artificial intelligence, it turns out.
“Pity it isn't for a social call, is it?” he says. He almost sounds sad.
I cross my arms. “There's something astoundingly creepy about creating your AI in your own image.”
He shrugs onscreen, his answering smile completely unapologetic. “Some people enjoy talking to themselves.”
“Some people enjoy invading Guam with mutated sharks in their spare time,” I point out. Morris's adorable little foibles aren't quite as adorable as he believes they are, even in digital form.
“My, aren't we feisty today? Someone's corset pulled a little too tight?”
“I can't imagine why I might be in a mood when I'm standing in a highly illegal lair that shouldn't even exist.”
“You needn't worry yourself, Vera. Although I suspect the fact that you've finally shown your pretty face here doesn't bode well for my creator's current state of health. You're not going to teleport me into the ocean and gleefully watch this entire trailer sink to the ocean floor, are you? Because you should know just how many nuclear devices I'm hiding in my bathroom –”
“I'm not going to destroy your stupid lair,” I say, sounding far more petty and childish than I intended. I toy with the black casing of a disassembled device I can't identify lying on a nearby lab station, something that appears in its current state frighteningly like a pile of smashed syringes. The metal alloy casing is the only part left intact. I put it back down again, avoiding the jagged pieces.
You know what? I don't want to know.
The AI watches me with suspicious eyes, his gaze following my every movement. I'd like to say he looks intimidated by my very presence, but I must be doing something wrong, because if I had to guess his expression wavers between relief and pride. Leave it to Morris to create artificial intelligence that knows just how amazing it is.
He clasps his hands together onscreen and asks, “So what exactly are you planning to do on this little excursion, if I might ask?”
Good question. “I'm thinking,” I say, stating the obvious after a long moment of contemplation where nothing comes to mind.
“Your thinking doesn't include anything explosive, does it?”
I shoot the monitors a wry look. “You're awfully antsy for someone made in Morris's image.”
“You'll forgive me if I have my reasons for paranoia.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
A loud whump echoes from outside, and the image of Morris on the computer monitors skips and jags, the digital version of a flinch.
“Bedroom,” he orders.
I don't even give myself a chance to question him. I vanish into thin air just as something pounds an insistent thump against the front door.
I reappear in the dimly lit bedroom of the trailer right behind the barely cracked door, a slim sliver of the outer room visible through the available opening. It's tempting to pull it open a bit wider, but my hands don't even touch the dark wood before the front door slams open. It smacks against the wall with a loud bang, making me flinch even though I'd been expecting it.
Dad glares at it as he stomps inside, knocking freshly cut grass from the boots of his uniform.
I only have a second to contemplate how he must have dodged Morris's security and why he hasn't already started destroying the place from the moment he walked inside. As soon as I jump, Morris's AI doppleganger vanishes from the monitors, and the room is dim by the time Dad fully enters, as casual as a hunter coming home after a long day in winter, toeing off his boots, removing his mask with an annoyed rub of his face with the back of his hand.
I hold my breath.
He's been here before. Whoever this is – not my father, it can't possibly be – has been here before, and he's gotten comfortable.
He's not Morris, that's for damn sure. He's far too inelegant for that.
Is that what he left the party for? To come here?
He settles in, pulls up a rolling desk chair, makes sure to tuck his cape under him just so the wheels won't roll over it and leave dark wheel scuffs on the material. It's a well-practiced move, a little habit heroes and villains alike develop not long out of school. I file the information away for safekeeping. Whoever he is, he's either a hero in his own right or spent a lot of time around superheroes and paid very close attention to their habits.