Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (25 page)

Dr. Beth re-examined my aching ribs before he released me back into the wild. The other CAIs could have covered for us but, more than ever, Blackstone considered it important that patrols continue and right now that was just me. The news crews got plenty of footage of me taking off on my evening flight; dusk-patrol, Atlas called it.

But once night settled in, I broke procedure and went home.

Shelly had slipped me some info earlier about my new costume: it held up so well because Andrew made it out of a polymorphic-molecule weave spun up by Vulcan at Blackstone’s suggestion. The stuff was almost as tough as I was, but more importantly, Vulcan gave it chameleon-suit capability; even the mask had been coated to change, and if I wrapped my cape around my head, the heavy silver snaps on the bodysuit were the only parts that didn’t blend right into the environment with the click of a hidden tab. I had mixed feelings about it; Vulcan gave me the
wiggins
, but we owed him more and more.

With all the old-world streetlamps and huge oak trees, our Oak Park neighborhood was as dark as I could want. Switching on the chameleon setting, I came in high and dropped hard into the shadowed back yard.

“
Hope, what are you doing
?” Shelly whispered in my ear as I hit the grass.

I swallowed around the hard block in my throat. “Breaking Def-1. Not one
word
, Shell.”

A hurt silence, then “
Both Platoons are still on duty. One’s in the garage watching the property and internals, the other is down the street monitoring the neighborhood. They caught you coming in, but I cleared you with them
.”

I winced. “Shelly, I’m sorry—”

“
S’okay
, really. I’ll see you tomorrow
.”

“I—yeah. Goodnight.” I switched the
earbug
to vibrate, sighing.
Great, Hope—way to treat your best friend.

Floating up, I switched off the security on my bedroom window and climbed over the sill. College Bear watched me from the bed, obviously surprised to see me. Peeling off my gloves, I dropped my boots beside the bed, unsnapped my cape, and set my mask on the bedside table. Much as I wanted to strip down and throw my whole Astra costume into the back of my wardrobe where I couldn’t see it, I didn’t. Damn Def-1.

Curling up, I wiggled a bit—still uncomfortable with the new uniform—and held onto College Bear. The collar of his letterman’s jacket scraped my cheek as I closed my eyes. He didn’t complain, but a few minutes later the hallway floor creaked and heavy knuckles rapped on my bedroom door.

“Sweetheart?” Dad asked through the door. “Can I come in?”

I sat up and wiped my eyes. “Sure.”

He opened the door, turning the light on, and I blinked. He wore sweats and, sitting on the edge of the bed, he smiled at College Bear. “I think I can do better than a stuffed animal,” he said. “
C’mere
.” Opening his arms, he changed. The heavy oak bed protested as he transformed into the tough, living steel of Iron Jack.

My breath caught. “Oh,
Daddy
…” He wrapped his arms around me and I held on tight and closed my eyes and didn’t think. Humming quietly into my hair, he rocked me slowly until I sighed and relaxed.

“Better?” he asked, and I nodded.

“So,” I giggled wetly. “Who tipped you?”

“To quote a red-headed juvenile delinquent, ‘well, duh.’ She keeps us in the loop—she called us about the Dome attack before it even hit the news, to let us know you and Jacky were alright.”

“I’ll bet she didn’t tell you that today I choked someone and threatened to squeeze till they passed out, or that I wanted to kill a man.”

“No, she left those bits out.”

“Dad? Was I wrong?”

He knew I wasn’t asking about today, and his arms tightened for a moment.

“No sweetheart, you weren’t wrong. But if you’ll listen to your old father’s advice—” I snorted, giggling, and he chuckled. “Anyone who says with age comes wisdom is full of it, but experience does give you perspective. I think you knew what you were going to have to give up, but you didn’t
understand
. Not just college with your friends, but peace, and safety, and even childhood. You never had it easy, and you’ve had to finish growing up fast.”

I sniffed. “I’m so
scared
,” I whispered to his shoulder. “Not for me—well, except occasionally. For everyone else.”

“Hah.” Dad chuckled drily. “I wish you would be more scared for yourself. I can’t tell you how often you’ve scared the life out of your mother and me. Do you want to talk about it?” I nodded again, moving around to rest my head on his broad shoulder, and told him everything as he held me. Blackstone, Dr. Cornelius and the demon and what came of it. Mr.
Shankman’s
media attacks. Everything.

He sighed when I finished. “Ah, the glamorous life of a superhero.” I laughed again and he gave me a last squeeze. “Your mother is downstairs heating up every leftover in the fridge. Are you going to come down?”

I nodded and he kissed my forehead. “Good. I think we can make it a game night.”

It’s easy to mistake Verne-science for the real deal, until you realize that it’s only as real as a Merlin-type’s magic. There’s no difference between a talisman that protects you from possession and a psychic shield that runs on triple-A batteries, or between a fireball-throwing wizard and a guy in powered armor firing an impulse-cannon. I still prefer Verne-tech; magic is
weird
.

Astra,
The Chicago Interviews.

I wasn’t very gentle, but my first priority was to make the idiots stop shooting. Flipping the stolen Lexus over worked nicely—they lost their guns as the windshield shattered, and I pulled the stunned gang-bangers out through the windows before they recovered enough to try and scramble, cuffing all four with nylon zips.

Dad had driven me back to the Dome in the morning, my costume in a gym bag, and sent me in through the secret parking-garage entrance. Blackstone said nothing at the morning briefing about my night off the reservation, but I’d still felt like the time at Lake
Willahoo
that Shelly and I had snuck across the lake to the boy’s camp. The morning got eventful when Dispatch sent me after a carload of gun-happy gang-bangers; we don’t often get called in for lawbreaking
normals
, but when bank robbers shoot a guard and then go on a high speed chase shooting wildly at any patrol car that gets close, the police like to involve us.

“Bitch!” One of them complained as I propped them up against the car. “It’s not fair!”

“Karma hurts,” I said. According to Shelly, they’d announced their intentions by shooting the unsuspecting guard first, then terrorized and pistol-whipped patrons while they cleaned out the tellers. Wailing sirens drowned out his swearing, and in moments Chicago’s finest arrived to manhandle them into the backs of their police cars. Patrolman Jobs tipped his hat.

“Thanks, Astra,” he said with a grin, changed to a scowl as he watched one of the
perps
smack his head squeezing into the backseat. “High-speed chases suck. Forget the guns—the cars are lethal weapons.”

“No problem, officer. I’m always glad to help.”

“We know, but you handle yours, we’ll handle ours. You’ve got enough to do.” We shook hands and he turned away as I took off. He was nice, but I found myself frowning. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of
theirs and ours
. Lots of
supervillains
could be handled by a trained officer with the right weapons and gear; crazies with guns could be handled by any Atlas-type and lots of other breakthroughs. Maybe the New York police had the right idea.

Shelly and I talked, and everything was right—a good thing, since she told me Vulcan had a blank neural-mimetic matrix ready for her transfer
now
; she’d be in the process of moving house for the next few days. I ruthlessly squashed every
are you sure you want to do this
response and promised to come down to the Pit to check on her.

That afternoon, Blackstone announced that Orb and Dr. Cornelius would be returning to LA—but before they left, we needed to know what Dr. Cornelius had been working on. Truth, I’d been too wigged by Monday night’s little adventure to ask. He took us all downstairs to the maintenance and security level where Platoon kept his armory and the staff kept everything else.

The secured armory had been expanded to include a new room and, stepping across the threshold, I felt the world balloon into the same infinite space stuffed inside four walls that I’d felt when Dr. Cornelius cast his spell at Mr.
Moffat’s
apartment. Nobody else seemed to notice, as, crowding into the room, we found ourselves looking at the Dome.

Someone had helped Dr. Cornelius make the kind of high-detail model the most expensive architectural firms did up when they wanted to impress clients. Enclosed in banker’s glass, the diorama took up the whole center of the room. It even included the surrounding walks and cherry trees, and around it and through it, with a draftsman’s precision, Dr. Cornelius had traced the kinds of circles and symbols we’d seen at the Wicked Witch’s house. To me, the lines looked more solid than the surface they’d been drawn on. Beyond the diorama and opposite the door, a solid display cabinet of the same thick banker’s glass was even more disturbing; it held dolls of
us
.

The Sentinels were contracted with
Adrai’s
Figures, a company that produced porcelain celebrity dolls, and each of us had a run of a few hundred. The eighteen-inch dolls were individually hand painted and outfitted in hand-stitched reproductions of our costumes, but as high quality as those were, I’d heard of artists who bought these expensive collector’s dolls and
repainted
them so realistically that enlarged photos could almost be mistaken for studio-shots of the real hero. They re-dressed the figures in just as much detail, and could resell the artistically enhanced dolls for ten to fifty times their original price. We were looking at a full lineup of the redone dolls, each standing inside its own magic circle of realer-than-real lines.

“Our biggest fan’s figure-collection doesn’t look this good,”
Quin
said.

She didn’t seem at all bothered by it, but looking close at my doll made me feel like I’d wandered into a funhouse’s mirror-room, and when I looked back at the model of the Dome I got the dizzying conviction that I was looking at the real thing from high over Grant Park. Laying a hand on the glass, I caught Dr. Cornelius watching me out of the corner of his eye.

“Each figure has been ceremonially named,” he said as we stared at the displays. “And I’ve tucked twists of hair with threads from your costumes into their outfits. Sympathetic magic is crude, but effective. These are essentially sophisticated
poppets
; they’re warded against magical attack, so you are too. The same with the Dome; I had them use scrapings of paint and concrete from the actual Dome in the model.”

Riptide crossed himself. “
Dios
. You cast a
spell
on us?”

“Yes, and before you decide to burn me at the stake, I conferred with Father Nolan—the magic tradition I use is not
geotic
, and therefore falls under the category of accepted magic traditions recognized in the Pope’s encyclical on breakthroughs and the supernatural.” He smiled drily. “If you’re Baptist, you might have a problem.”

That settled Riptide, but he didn’t look happy. Chakra simply smiled; she’d probably
felt
the enchantment happening, though I was sure it wasn’t the same as her psychic-tantric magic.