“Oh, for heaven's sake, Mom,” I mutter.
“I didn't know any better until I finally got in touch with your father,” she says. It must be sinking in, the aggravated looks on her children's faces, Dad's tired eyes and the way Dr. Hale is trying desperately not to rubberneck, because Mom's voice softens to a more respectable level as she goes on. “John wouldn't have let me get away with getting in touch with you as myself, and it's a miracle I kept my visit to you as Morris a secret as long as I did. If I hadn't come, it wouldn't have mattered if your father upended the family all over again or that Morris was dead. You wouldn't have returned otherwise, and you were the only hope we had.”
I'm stunned into silence with that particular admission. It's a compliment whether Mom likes it or not, that when things went south they saved me for last rather than not thinking of me at all. They could have easily left me to lunch specials and caramel lattes, that boring everyday life they imagine I have with its pedestrian problems and decided lack of radioactive exposure or evil robots. The fact that they still consider me a hero, even in the singular blunt way you usually find hidden behind a glass pane you break in case of emergency, is a sign of a higher level of respect than I would have expected out of any of them, especially my mother.
“What about me?” Graham asks.
Mom shoots him a pointed look. “Your sister doesn't have a small child to worry about.”
He pales, and his voice cracks when he asks, “You knew about Sam?”
Mom's laugh grates, a harsh bruised sound. “Please, Graham. I know you don't think much of me, but I'm not completely without a brain.”
My blood chills at the thought of my mother sitting at her desk with her perfect posture and glossy brown hair, occasionally peering out of her office door at my temperamental brother and thinking of his tiny son and reminding herself just what's at stake if she makes the wrong move around John. I don't envy her a bit.
“Can you all please stop arguing?”
All eyes turn to Dad, all three of us stunned to hear him speak up. Dad's normally not one to engage in the sort of histrionics the rest of us can't help but slip into on occasion, so hearing his voice raised – even if it isn't precisely his at the moment – makes it the sort of rarity that demands respect.
He glares at us all. “We're a family, damn it. We can save this for Christmas.”
For a moment we all go silent. I suppose with any other family we might be having a good laugh at that one, but we haven't spent a Christmas together since before I left the city, before my parents' marriage fell apart, somewhere in between the Christmas where the potent insanity gas infected the water supply and the Christmas where the enormous tsunami took out the eastern end of the shopping district.
We could easily be the sort of family who bicker over ham and mashed potatoes if we could ever manage to get to the dinner table in the first place.
“So what now?”
Graham's question hangs in the air. It's a good one, judging from the looks on everyone's faces. I'm not the only one who stormed into this situation blind, it seems, the four of us exchanging awkward glances as we mentally dance around what we know and don't know. We'll come up with something eventually, of course –
“Sierra can swap them back.”
… or Dr. Hale will do it for us. Either or, I suppose.
She crouches beside Sierra and murmurs the question I'd sure as hell like to know, if she's even ready to try another swap after everything that's happened to her. She's almost free to go home and sleep curled up toasty and warm in her own bed. As much as all of us would be a lot better off if she'd swap Dad and John back to their respective bodies, a discomforting tension settles at the back of my neck. I wonder for a moment if we're using her just as surely as John did, with only the setting and the status of the door lock changed.
I'm not as consoled as I'd like when she nods solemnly.
Mom doesn't seem to be quite as bothered. “I'll call John and convince him to come here so he'll be on his way,” she says, reaching into the utility belt of her skintight green and gold costume for her cell phone.
“He doesn't need to be here to get swapped.” Dr. Hale shoots me a sideways look, a silent understanding. She wants this over just as much as I do, I'll wager. “Sierra's stronger than she looks.”
Her hands rest on Sierra's shoulders, an encouraging gesture, but it's hard not to focus on how very little she is.
Mom considers that for a moment, studies Sierra with calculating eyes before saying, “He'll have to be here anyway.” Her gaze drifts Dad's way, looking for all of the world like the legendary superhero she's always been. “We're going to need you here in mind and body for this.”
The two of them share an inscrutable look, a thousand silent conversations occurring that not even Graham or I can decipher. Dad stands there, reedy and pale and balding, barely filling out someone else's department-store suit, baggy-eyed and exhausted under flickering fluorescent lights, but when he throws a familiar smile my mother's way it's hard to see the rest of it. “Don't worry, Ivy,” he says. “Wherever I am, I'll get here.”
“It's just John,” I can't help but blurt out.
I feel like a fool for doing so, after everything that's happened. No one is ever 'just' someone to a superhero, former or otherwise. A hero can lose their way and take over an international space station in order to manipulate the SLB into providing his dying wife with immortal blood for a cancer treatment. A charity worker can get frustrated with the system and steal alien gold from the Intergalactic History Museum to fund her soup kitchen. A civilian's innocuous talent can twist and darken and tear apart the world with the right motivation. If there's one thing we learn our very first semester at Lord and Cape, it's how stereotyping can turn around and bite you right in the hind parts.
Still, it's John Camden, of all people.
Mom's lips tug into a wry frown. ”Vera, if you've learned anything the past few days, it should be never to underestimate that man.”
She turns to make her call, cupping her hand around it to keep us from being overheard. It gives me a moment to notice Dad's attention, drawn away from all of us in Dr. Hale's office to the sweet siren call of the morgue hallway. It shouldn't look like a lure, not to anyone in the right frame of mind, but Dad's got something here most people don't, and it makes it difficult to conceal his quiet pining.
I move up beside him, keeping my voice low. “Dad?”
He clears his throat, startled out of his reverie. “Are we ready?”
“He's in the fifth cell on the right.”
His cheeks flush. “That wasn't what I was looking for.”
I cross my arms and flash him a steady look that brooks none of his lies, not even a little white one like this.
“Vera,” he chokes out. I'm terrified for a second that he's about to cry. “There's so many things I've wanted to say to you in the past five years –“
“Dad, if you're honestly going to tell me that me coming out of the closet as a teenager helped inspire you to leave Mom for a notorious male supervillain, I'll leave you all here and go home to have waffles with my ex-girlfriend instead.”
I don't mean to say it, but once it's out, it's out.
His breath hitches before he gives me a sharp nod. “Right, then. We'll just have that talk later.”
We won't, but I'm certainly not going to tell him that now.
Mom finishes with her phone call, sweetly requesting that John come down to the SLB morgue so that she can give him a little surprise. I can only imagine where his mind must run to with that much information, delivered in such a pliant tone from my tough-as-nails mother. If he were smart, he'd know the gig is up and bolt in an attempt to place Dad's body as far away from the morgue as possible.
I sincerely hope he chooses now not to be smart.
As soon as Mom closes up her cell phone, Dad says, “Someone has to tie me up.”
“We should put you in one of the empty crypts,” Dr. Hale suggests. “Just in case.”
He pales at that, but gives her a determined nod. She heads off into the hallway to secure one of the crypts as Mom removes a pair of heavy-duty Borellian handcuffs from her utility belt. Borellian handcuffs are one of the more interesting items ransacked from the alien craft which crash-landed into the top floor of the Platt Building twenty years ago. They're meant to paralyze all of the flesh below the neck save the most vital of internal processes. You get hauled off to jail when you're captured with your hands stuck together at the small of your back and your entire body on pins and needles. But at least you don't ruin your underwear in the process.
Dr. Hale reemerges in the office carrying a solid steel chair which makes up in durability what it completely lacks in comfort. Behind her, the eerie hiss of the sterile breached air escaping into the hall from an open crypt gives off an unsettling soundtrack. She beckons us with a wave of her hand towards the crypt in a silent cue for us to follow.
She plops the chair down in the center of the empty crypt when we approach, and ducks around Dad as she exits. He gives the chair a long cold glare, then glances over at Graham, who hovers at the back of the group looking confused and out of place and angry about both.
“You do it,” he says. “You won't leave any give because I'm in here, will you?”
Graham's sole response is a disgusted grunt. He doesn't hesitate as he navigates around the rest of us to pluck the handcuffs from Mom's grasp and follow Dad into the crypt.
Dad sits in the chair, hissing at the stark sudden cold pressing against his back, and Graham crouches beside the chair, his eyes narrowed as Dad places his closed fists through the slats in the chair's back. Graham secures the handcuffs around Dad's wrists with barely a hair's breadth of give, leaving Dad to strain against the bonds due more to a lack of comfort than a desire to escape.
The two of them shoot icy glares at one another. Dad stifles a wince as the handcuffs lock shut.
Graham doesn't look back as he leaves the crypt, and as soon as he steps out into the hallway Dr. Hale slams the door shut behind him. Words can't express how distressing it is to stand outside a ten-by-ten crypt with most of your family and stare inside at your restrained father, waiting for him to turn into a psychotic monster before your eyes.
With her subject locked securely behind glass, Dr. Hale slips into professional clinician mode with practiced ease. “You'll be weak for a while after the switch,” she says after flicking a button on the touchscreen beside the door to turn on the speaker. “I wouldn't make any plans to operate any heavy machinery for the next few hours, and unfortunately that includes your brain when you get back into your own body. No powers.”
“No powers,” he confirms, nodding in understanding. “If I can.”
She narrows her eyes at him through the glass. “It's not a suggestion, Mr. Noble. Bodyswaps drain powers for a while.”
The muscle in his jaw tenses, a faint flicker from this distance. “I'll be useless if there's a fight to be had,” he warns.
“Better here and useless than not here at all,” Mom murmurs.
I'm not sure it's meant for Dad to hear. He catches it nonetheless, and the two of them share another one of those secretive looks through the glass.
Dr. Hale reaches down and gives Sierra a boost, resting the little girl on her hip so they can both peer through the glass at my father. Dad leans forward and smiles at Sierra through the glass window, warm and grandfatherly. “I'm going to be very mean in a moment,” he gently warns.
“I know,” she says in her small sweet voice.
I grimace, not really wanting to recognize just how she would know that.
Her eyes flicker a bright unreal shade of blue, the vivid color gone once again in a flash, and that's all it takes. Dad slumps in the chair with a pained groan, his secured wrists the only thing keeping him from collapsing to the floor. A brief instant passes where I expect his head to lift once again and everything to have stayed the same, Dad still locked behind John's ill-fitting facade.
When his head raises once again, we all take a subconscious step back, even with the safety of the door separating us.
We don't need a neon sign to tell us what's blatantly apparent, what screams out at us from behind a face pulled by unseen wires that tug and rearrange it into an eerie mask.
That's not Everett Noble.
“Well, well, well,” John says, turning the full weight of his chilling gaze towards me. His words drip like melting ice down my back. “Look who rolled back into town.”
25.
It's absurdly easy to dismiss John Camden.
What I remember of him from before I left the city in a costume-tossing huff is of a man who hovered just out of the corner of our collective eye at the Rafters. He washed and mended your costume and fixed your jetpack, kept all of your food cravings supplied and whipped up whichever frothy drink might relax you after a long day of rescuing civilians tied to train tracks or dangled over bonfires. If you asked me before today, I would have claimed he was harmless. He might be somewhere on the list of dangerous creatures between sleepy kittens and animated panda bears.
The hand-knitted sweater vest, the black-and-white checked ascot and delicate reading glasses … his attire always has done the talking for him, politely declining to be noticed. He embodies the consummate professional, the sort of highly trained servant who disappears into the décor as though that were his job, like some home furnishings ninja.
On that count, Dad's successfully played the part to the hilt for days now.
But now that Dad's been swapped out, replaced by this body's more psychologically questionable owner, invisible strings alter the landscape of John's normally kind face. Maniacal glee tugs his facial muscles into sinister angles.
I maintain my position in front of the door, but just barely.
“You're back, I see.”
John gives me a deferential nod at that, a mocking show of respect. “I could say the same for you. Pity about that. I would have thought you'd get stuck in that irritating hayseed.”
I stifle the urge to defend Nate, dismissing it as a waste of time. “What can I say? I didn't like the dress code.”
“And you found my toy, as well,” he says.
He can't see Sierra from where he sits, of course, still and frozen like a statue in that weighted steel chair. But his mere presence back in his own body is enough to alert him to her escape. “She's not a toy, John,” I say. My voice trembles with the thought of dark possibilities I'd rather not entertain.
Laughter rumbles up from deep inside his chest, a rich roasted sound like some charmer's endearments raked over hot coals. “The look on your face right now is absolutely priceless, Vera. You know that? I hope you don't think I did something … untoward to the child. I was more preoccupied texting photos of the two of you to her at just the right time to make sure she put you both where I wanted you, at least for a little while. No offense. I simply had more important things on my mind.”
My breath shudders out of me in hesitant relief. While he's done more than enough damage to prove himself untrustworthy, this much I believe from him. He's too far gone to care enough to lie about something like this.
The more important things he mentions, however, weigh on my mind like crushing stones. “Like stealing my father's life out from under him?”
“You say that as if he were using it,” John sneers, the hatred in his words tempered by the tinny echo rebounding off the enclosed walls. “I wonder, did he bother to look around at everything he had – power, money, a good name, a beautiful wife – before he started screwing the bad guy?”
He's not the only one who's wondered that, but I'm certainly not going to encourage him by backing him up.
Graham, however, seems to have no compunction about egging on a maniac. “Well, he did have to pack,” he mutters behind me.
Mom levels a warning look his way, but keeps blessedly quiet.
I grit my teeth as I stare in at John, at eerily focused eyes leveled at me from a downward angle only appropriate for unsettling threats. What would you do, I wonder, if you spent your entire life cooking elaborate snacks or fetching just the right entertainment magazine for whichever self-centered superpowered do-gooder required it, and in the end you ended up alone in a sub-basement apartment at the Rafters eating tuna out of a can during your meager off-hours?
Probably get frustrated and steal someone else's life, I imagine.
I lean close to the glass, near enough that I could easily kiss the window and leave a teasing pair of bright red lips printed there. “You've had one hell of a good time lately, haven't you?”
John's laugh bristles along my spine like it's been wrapped in barbed wire and soaked in hot sauce for good measure. “Not yet, I haven't.”
“Not yet? Oh, honey, jail isn't half the jamboree you seem to think it is.”
His lips curl, like a hissing snake poised to strike.
“Jail? I think I'll pass,” he says.
The handcuffs clatter to the floor just as Dad bursts through the fire door leading to the stairs, trailed by a belligerent crowd of howling citizens.
John stands, his unsteady gaze locked with mine the entire time. He fiddles with something on his wrist, adjusts it as he would a troublesome cufflink, and the door's lock audibly clicks open.
I step back out of reflex, fear flooding my stomach.
Something here is absolutely not right, I realize, right before I'm grabbed from behind.
My abuela once told me Dad could control the minds of those around him long before he could do anything else. She knew she was pregnant not because of a too-powerful kick or the supernatural movement of untouched items around her, but because people kept bringing her food. She would find herself craving pickles and peanut butter only to turn and find some confused random citizen bringing them both to her. He wasn't even born yet, but he
wanted
, and that was all it took.
Dad can force anyone to do anything, whether they want to or not. But he chooses not to, thanks to my abuela's firm training. The same cannot be said for John.
These aren't minions. These are slaves.
Worse, Dad's powers are so strong, his control won't wear off in spite of John's loss of possession of his body. They'll fight us for hours, until the command wears off or Dad changes their mind.
With Dad's powers on the fritz thanks to the switch, we'll be minion-wrangling for a good long time.
A muscular biker locks an arm around my neck with tightening brute force and I teleport before he can let go, dragging him along with me. I only release him from the grip of my powers once we reach our destination. When I teleport back, I abandon him to his own devices.
The SLB can retrieve him from the Australian outback later if I don't get around to it myself.
I pop out a few more unwilling minions with the same casual ease to varied but equally remote locations – the Alaskan wilderness, the Amazon River basin, the Himalayas. They may not have volunteered to be John's lackeys, but they can't be allowed to remain close to the morgue. They'll still try to get back even if I drop them off a mere four states away.
The moment I burst through the air back into the morgue hallway, my mind tumbles and swims, an odd sort of vertigo striking like a hard slap across the face.
I reach out and grab for the wall, tilting sideways on the precarious support of my heels, a sorry attempt to keep myself upright. It takes a moment for me to locate everyone else – my mother, sagging down to the floor with an arm wrapped around her midsection; Dad, his hands clutching his head; Dr. Hale, her teeth clenched as she smooths a cool hand across Sierra's sweat-dampened forehead, the little girl's pallor sickly and green.
John lurks at the head of the hallway, his vengeful glee barely restrained. His lips curl as he reaches for his right wrist. It's only then that I notice the small surreal door open in the skin there, revealing an intricate mass of cybernetic switches built into his arm.
The lunatic installed a damn power dampener into his body.
Each flick of the switches in his arm sends a sickening jolt through us all. It may be a dampener, a device everyone in the hallway is intimately familiar with. But it's more powerful than most, would have to be just to take down heroes as strong as my parents, would need to be beyond the pale for my father never to have discovered its hidden existence beneath the skin of his borrowed body. John would have added in the cybernetics, looked at Everett and Ivy Noble and done the math, and added in more and more and
more
.
I can't imagine where he could have gotten them. The black market is rife with them, of course, and the right blackmail with the right supervillain will get you far. It's just a matter of infinite patience paired with a sharp mind, and John's always had both in his own quiet way.
He must have been planning this for years.
Correction … he must have known about Dad and Morris for years.
And instead of doing what anyone else in his place might have done – keep his tongue out of loyalty or sell his secrets to the tabloid most willing to pay – John stared at my mother, my gorgeous strong sharp-tongued mother, and seethed in silence.
The urge to teleport away from danger screams inside of me, demands I make a run for it and save my sorry hide before anyone else's. Instinct cries out, a teleporter's mind more flight than fight even in the best of scenarios.
The fact that the door to that option is firmly shut in my mind, locked by unseen hands, is not helping at all.
More mind-controlled minions bleed into the hallway from God only knows where, surging towards us like an army of rats charging away from disaster. All of us tense up, too confused by our sudden lack of powers to think straight at the moment. Dampeners don't usually affect the Noble family so strongly, at least not anything as compact as John's sporting, but whoever assembled the complex machinery built into his arm, if not his whole body, knew John's purposes well enough to install the robotic equivalent of a rocket launcher where others would have simply added a scalpel.
“Over here,” Dr. Hale calls, tapping out a practiced dance with her fingertips on the computer panel beside the crypt door she and Sierra crouch in front of.
Without powers, we bolt en masse to the enclosed safety of the open crypt, unconcerned with how we must look or what its current occupant must think of us, wherever he may be now. I'm the last one in, unused to running in or out of high heels. Dr. Hale herds the rest of the dizzy stumbling lot of us into the back of the crypt, away from the familiar body I'd rather not acknowledge, leaving me near the door to deal with the slowly stalking form of John following us down the hall.
Without worrying about the consequences, I slam the door shut and enable the locks.
The instant the others realize what I've done, all hell breaks loose.
A cluttered cacophony of angry voices drowns out the discordant chorus of subservient passersby deferring to John's orders in the hallway. “Shut up, every damn one of you,” I snap.
“The crypt locks from the outside, Vera,” my mother states, as though I didn't already know that.
“Good,” Dr. Hale says. “Some of us would rather stay safely out of the line of fire, but thanks for asking.”
“Yeah, well, the rest of us like the line of fire.” Graham throws a smug glare her way but Dr. Hale gives as good as she gets, tucking Sierra behind her as she narrows her eyes and dares him to try anything. It almost makes me wonder if she's indestructible or simply rash.
When he aims his irritation at me, I refuse to back down, blocking the door with my arms spread wide. “You don't have your powers. Or maybe you've forgotten in the twenty seconds we've been in this crypt.”
Mom throws her shoulders back and presses forward, intent on going out there regardless. “We can handle ourselves without our abilities –“
“Oh, really? When did this start? Because I don't recall any of you being particularly good at handling yourselves as everyday pedestrians. Remember that time you caught peacock flu and whined at me for the entire week each of you lost your powers? Unless something's drastically changed in the last five years, all three of you wimp out at the first sign that your powers are weakening. I can only presume that's why John got those shiny new upgrades of his. I bet he knew full well that every remaining Noble in the city couldn't rescue a kitten from a tree on a sunny day given a ladder and an entire fire brigade if their powers konked out.”
Mom and Graham reluctantly pull back at that, unable to deny just how petulant they can be whether weak or strong. Even at their worst, at least Graham and Mom have the mental fortitude to recognize that they can be temperamental and spoiled, their egos overflowing into the empty space left behind by their ultra-slim senses of self-preservation.
Dad, on the other hand, charges forward anyway and pounds on the door with fists just as human and normal as they always are.
“Dad,” I say, my voice soft.
“I have to get out of here, goddamn it.”
“And do what? Pummel his bionic arm with your terribly angry thoughts?”
“Vera, he used me to kill Morris.”
“Dad, now is not the time.”
“He was in me when he killed Morris,” he snaps. “Damn straight, now is the time.”
He's not angry with me, of course. He's angry about the body on the slab that none of us can bring ourselves to fully recognize by name, laid out under a precisely draped towel as though he's fallen asleep on the massage table at a day spa.
If he were alive right now, Morris would never stop lamenting being seen like this.
But even without his powers, Dad's discomfort bleeds through the room like a potent drug at the bruises in the shapes of his knuckles marring the body's skin. Dr. Hale hugs her niece and stares up at my father with faint pity peeking out from behind her eyes. Graham leans his head back against the wall where he's propped himself, his body wracked with trembles I get the impression none of us are supposed to notice. Even my mother shoots Dad a look full of dismay and need, offering a shoulder to rest his weary head on, knowing full well he'll turn her down once again.