Love for the Cold-Blooded (18 page)

Sure enough, Bart was the security lieutenant waiting to greet Pat at the gatehouse. He held up a fist with a grin and a waggle of his bushy brows, and Pat grinned as he bumped it with his own. Static sparked between them when they touched, zapping Pat with enough force to be near-painful.

“Heya, Bart. Everything quiet around here?”

“Quiet enough to hear your grandma whistle,” Bart confirmed.

Pat was startled into a laugh. He was more than half convinced Bart made up these strange sayings to mess with people, and usually, he’d have bantered with him a little about the proverbial (or non-proverbial) whistling grandma and why she only achieved such low volume. Right now he was a little preoccupied, though. “You haven’t noticed anything strange? Nothing at all?”

Bart gave him a questioning look, but it wasn’t as though Pat could elaborate.
The river is invisibly glowing
wasn’t something he felt comfortable saying out loud.

“Not a thing. Why do you ask?”

“I just… thought I saw something weird, but never mind. Must have been my imagination.”

“Uh-huh.” Bart seemed unconvinced, but had the grace not to keep digging. “You read too many thrillers, kid.”

Inside the guard station, his partner sighed loudly. Pat had no idea what that was about, but he took it as his cue to sign the arrivals’ log with a thumbprint and wheel his bike up the estate’s expanse of classical garden architecture. Privately, Pat thought this particular garden design was a bit bland. He preferred a more modern, less symmetrical approach. But he could see how someone as freakishly obsessive as Nick might go for straight lines and clear views without even thinking about it.

The handover from the day staff was uneventful, the only unusual thing being that a sous-chef had stayed late specifically to instruct Pat on the use of several prepared foods she’d just put into stasis, and to forbid him (on pain of gruesome but unnamed horrors) to heat up the gazpacho verde.

As soon as he was alone with the AI, he called Hell — or rather Hell’s voicemail. “Hell, call me when you get this, okay? Something weird is going on with the river. Do you know if anyone’s planning special activities?”

Once he’d put everything in order for the night, Pat puttered around the kitchen for a bit, rearranging things that were plenty arranged already and poking through the contents of the stasis freshers. The AI flashed contented green lights at him no matter how often Patrick prompted the thing. There wasn’t even any paperwork.

Pat wished Nick would call him up. But it was way too early for that — the earliest Nick ever called for company was 2 in the morning.

After failing dismally to read the next chapter in his assigned urban ecology textbook, Pat went to make the rounds of the mansion. Usually he gave it several hours before his first walk-through, which was only good sense given that the day manager checked everything was in order before leaving. Right now, though, Pat was so keyed up he just wanted to move, to do something.

Everything was in excellent order all through the mansion, of course. Pat hadn’t ever actually encountered the kind of problem Suze had mentioned might arise (open windows or doors, water running in one of the bathrooms, AI sensor malfunctions, missing artwork or inventory, that kind of thing). In any other household, Pat suspected he’d have been checking for the principal’s snooping and/or larcenous friends, drinking companions or hook-ups, too. In Nick’s mansion, of course, the only visitors were employees and the occasional hoagie coming to consult Silver Paladin.

Pat sighed, and pushed through a sliding glass door into the mansion’s smaller courtyard. The competition-sized pool was filled and heated, lit with pleasantly indirect underwater light. The pool didn’t glow with anything more out of the ordinary than its energy-saving stasis cover. Thanks to the cover, Pat couldn’t even dangle a hand in the water, or fill his nose with the familiar, oddly reassuring scent of chlorine.

He felt like he was going to jitter out of his skin. Instead of settling down in the quiet dusk, Pat was getting more and more wound up. Something was wrong. He knew it. He had gooseflesh all over, his skin was all but crawling, and his curls were plastered to his face and neck. They actually crackled with discharging static electricity when he tried to push them back.

Yoga was good for calming and clearing the mind, right? Cea and Zen were always nagging at him to come to their yoga studio with them, claiming it would make him a new man. So, yoga it was. The fact that Pat had never done yoga before was no more than a speed bump on the road of his glorious plan. It was all about a bunch of bendy stretches and weird strenuous positions that had you stick random body parts in the air, right? Pat could do that, easy.

Thanks to this laudable resolution, Pat was mostly upside down, limbs entwined in a brezel shape with his head hanging low, when everything froze.

For an eternal moment, Pat couldn’t breathe. His heart thumped in his chest as though it was trying to burst out of his ribcage; he collapsed in an inelegant heap, barely managing to catch himself enough not to brain himself on the tiles.

He forced a breath into his lungs, another. When he sorted himself out and turned over, the darkening sky had turned into a hazy expanse of virulent, glowing green.

“Huh,” he said. How about that — an energy shield. Rather old-school, but still effective. There was something to be said for the classics — at least that’s what Hell always said.

Alarms were going off everywhere, now. The mansion’s security system was howling, the AI loudly proclaiming various things that Pat didn’t listen to; slightly more distantly, the city’s emergency siren was whooping in the most penetrating frequency imaginable. Pat felt much better; the strange oppression had lifted from the night, and Pat felt more himself than he had all evening.

Something burst into Pat’s field of vision from the left, blazing across the green-backed sky like a silvery comet. Silver Paladin, gaining height as he arched away towards the city center. Pat squinted after him until he was entirely out of sight, and then went inside to find out what — or rather who — was going on.

Bitterfly was broadcasting her ultimatum on all radio and TV stations, gloating over entrapping the entire city beneath her shield (she called it the “Dome of Terror”, which was so over the top it made Pat cringe with second-hand embarrassment). She’d clearly gotten a tech upgrade, but her costume was still the same: all glittery, slinky ballgown-esque silhouette enhanced by iridescent dragonfly wings and a shitload of gauzy, trailing scarves and sleeves.

“This city now answers to me, and me alone,” shrilled Bitterfly’s wild-eyed miniature on the AI’s media screen. “I will have vengeance on all who have mocked my fashions. I will cast down all overrated designers and crush their vile creations into dust beneath my exquisitely shod foot. I will bring taste and style back to my beleaguered, downtrodden people. For you all are now my people, and my solemn promise to you is that you will never have to wear polyester, flannel or paisley ever again!”

“Now that’s just crazy,” Pat told the image. He could have gotten behind the ban on paisley, and he couldn’t say he had strong feelings about polyester either way. But flannel? When he thought about how well Nick had worn Pat’s shirt the other night… no way.

“There will be no more soy lattes!” Bitterfly screamed.

Pat heaved a sigh and closed down the channel.

Pat would miss Nick a lot more than soy lattes (he’d never actually had one, though he made a mental note that this had to change as soon as possible). But then, Bitterfly had never held her own for longer than a few days. Both Nick and soy lattes — not to mention flannel shirts that brought out the gorgeous strong muscles in people’s arms — would be back fairly soon.

~~~~~

F
our days — that’s how long the dome stayed up. Pat was impressed; Bitterfly had never pulled off anything this big before. She’d really stepped up her game, and could be genuinely proud of herself. All the more so because she’d never been a physical challenger, but nevertheless managed to deliver such a solid roundhouse kick in the final battle that Captain Cool crashed dramatically through a wall and lost his helmet.

The only thing that would have improved the highlight reel was a greater presence of Nick, particularly during the showdown. The glow of his force fields would have looked awesome against the backdrop of the dusky riverside park, with the old castle rising craggily against the green-tinged sunset. But Nick had been busy wrangling civilians, making sure nobody was flung into the river or crushed by uncoordinated combatants (though — since Star Knight had been caught outside the dome — that was a relatively minor issue). The news programs mostly stuck to replaying a single clip of him, bundled with a brief sound-byte of an exhilarated young woman describing how Silver Paladin had cut through the roof of her trapped car to airlift her to safety. Pat watched the entire thing so often he ended up making retching sounds at the screen and sticking out his tongue at ‘Marigold, Financial Analyst’ whenever she appeared.

How did hoagies decide on who got to be in the limelight? Did they take turns taking top billing? Or maybe Nick simply volunteered to take care of bystanders, flying off without a word to do what needed to be done. He wasn’t a glory hound the way so many superheroes (and, okay, challengers) seemed to be. He just wanted to make sure everyone came out safe, sound and with BadMadRad albums in hand.

Anyway. The important thing was that now that Bitterfly was vanquished, Nick once again had time to spare, which in turn meant that the AI pinged Pat in the middle of the night to play a recording of Nick’s quiet “uhm, send up Pat. The blond one. Patrick West.”

Fifteen minutes was a damn unlikely response time for anyone who wasn’t already inside the mansion, but Pat was willing to bet this was another thing Nick would never realize unless it was pointed out to him. So there was no reason for Pat to wait around in the kitchen, was there?

Nah. No reason at all.

~~~~~

P
at didn’t see Nick right away when the AI let him into the lab. It was only when he’d ventured deeper into the room that he spotted the lab’s owner, sprawled on the huge couch towards the back of the lab, next to a rack of lances and armor parts.

“Hey.” Nick greeted Pat with the dorkiest wave in the history of the world. He’d set up the screens taking up the entire back and right-hand walls with a peaceful vista of ocean waves lapping at a sun-drenched tropical beach, and was evidently chilling out in front of the view.

Pat grinned helplessly, sticking his hands in his pockets in an attempt to look casual as he sauntered over. “Hey.”

A moment passed in expectant silence. Nick was in his usual lab-time civvies — a faded pair of jeans and an ancient sweatshirt that might have been red at one point and was now a grayish shade of rose. The logo splashed across the chest was so faint that Pat couldn’t even make it out anymore.

He looked really good. Exhausted, yes; hair sticking up oddly like he’d taken a nap just before, all pale and bleary with too little sleep and too much flying around saving Marigold the financial analyst and others like her. But still really good even so.

After another moment, Pat realized Nick wasn’t going to provide a conversation starter. The man seemed content with watching Pat, wearing a faint, tired smile.

It was… weird. Not that he’d been looking forward to the dude’s freaky ways and lame questions, except — well. Actually, he had been, Pat found. It was part of the Nick experience, and Pat had gotten so used to starting off with a wildly offbeat segue that now that it wasn’t happening, it felt like the conversation had gone off schedule before even starting.

Fine, then; there was an easy fix for that. “So,” Pat said resolutely, grin widening as the superhero on the couch sat up a bit, attention sharpening. “Which ch- villain would you be, if you were a villain?”

The glare that gained him might have set a lesser man on fire, but Pat shrugged it off with raised eyebrows, shimmying his shoulders a little as though shaking raindrops from a non-existent coat.

“That is a nonsensical question,” Nick said at last, flatly. “I would not be a villain. Why would you even —”

“But if you were.”

“I would not ever —”

“Yeah, yeah.” Pat waved Nick’s irrelevant objections away. “Everyone and their grandmother got it, fine. Noted and acknowledged, moving on. If you
were
a supervillain, Nicholas Andersen, which one would you be?”

Nick huffed and puffed for a minute longer, but then settled back with his arms crossed over his chest, scowling faintly. It was a thinking pose, and it wasn’t long before he shot another dark glare Pat’s way. “Battleram.”

It came out so baldly Pat blinked for a second, thrown by Nick’s sudden surrender. Another second and the actual reply hit him, and he snorted out a laugh.

Immediately, Nick froze, shoulders firming into a defensive line, mouth thinning.

“No, no!” Pat waved both hands frantically and jumped forward, hopping on the sofa next to Nick to bump his shoulder with a friendly fist. “That’s cool, man. Battleram was awesome. Old school, you know? No fancy stuff, just a real solid grasp of the basics.”

“I… suppose,” Nick said slowly. He was radiating skepticism, but his posture had once again relaxed into comfortable looseness, and Pat gave him a blinding smile in reward. Nick blinked, seeming slightly stunned.

Battleram had been Pat’s mom’s mentor, the closest thing Pat had had to a grandfather — a gruff, taciturn old guy with the bushiest eyebrows Pat had ever seen, and a face as craggy as the side of a cliff. He’d moved to the seaside after he retired. Pat and his sisters had visited him over the summer several times, back when they’d all been kids. The man’s lair had been full of medieval siege equipment Pat wasn’t allowed to climb on, and the cookies he’d baked had been tooth-breakingly hard, but absolutely delicious when dipped in milk.

“Do you bake, then?” Okay, that had probably sounded weird. Pat hurriedly talked on, steamrolling right over Nick’s half-formed response. “What am I saying, of course you don’t. But you like cookies, right? I’ll bring you some one of these days. I bake a mean double chocolate shortbread.”