Ghosts of Christmas Past (5 page)

Yeah, that's not going to happen, Noir thought. She put her hands in front of her and channeled all her anger into her other ability, the flashy one, the one people remembered.

Noir unleashed a blinding burst of light that filled the small office.

Her telepathic mentor, Beth, was less certain where the light burst came from. It needed further study, she'd said, and it was even possible Noir was bending light waves with her mind.

Noir didn't care why she had the light show. She just cared that it worked.

Schneider dropped her radio and shrieked, covering her face. The man stumbled over Salvatore's office chair and went down, shielding his eyes.

Noir sent another burst to keep them disoriented, backed out of the room and ran for the stairwell. She heard Schneider calling for help. Good. A distraction that drew other guards away from the two trying to arrest Cassandra could only help.

Noir practically flew down the steps. She missed the sound of her cape flapping behind her but Al had probably been right. Capes were too showy and since she could turn her clothes invisible now, she didn't need it.

But it had looked so cool…

She burst from the stairwell and onto the main floor.

No guards. Damn. They were after Cassandra already. Noir leaped over the guard's desk at the entrance, burst through the front door and rushed down the main steps.

She was almost too late. In the parking lot, next to the car, the two guards had Cassandra by the arms. Noir had to give the older woman credit—she was kicking and screaming like a banshee.

“Fucking pigs!” Cassandra yelled.

Go hippies!

Noir rushed up behind the big guy and slammed a fist into his kidney. Burly Guard dropped Cassandra's arm and stumbled forward into the car. Noir elbowed him in the back again, the same spot as the kidney punch, and then slammed him, facedown, into the doorframe.

A tooth skittered down the side of the car. Burly Guard swore and went down to his knees, searching for that tooth.

Bully, Noir thought.

Zev, the elderly guard, dropped his hold on Cassandra and backed off, eyes wide. “What the hell?”

“Get away,” Noir said, using her scary voice. It tended to freak people out when they heard it coming from thin air. Zev was no exception.

Cassandra abruptly stopped screaming and started looking around, confused.

Noir opened the driver's side door, pushed her friend inside and whispered, “C'mon, are you going to waste this chance?”

Cassandra practically fell into the seat and started her car. Noir slammed the door shut on Cassandra, ran around to the passenger side and climbed in before her friend took off without her. But Cassandra seemed frozen.

“Drive!” Noir yelled.

Cassandra hit reverse first, surprising Noir and almost throwing her into the dashboard. She just had enough time to click in the seat belt when Cassandra hit the brakes, shifted to drive, and squealed her tires while pulling out into the city streets.

Cassandra squealed the tires around the first turn too. Noir clutched the armrest. They'd been inches from being squashed by a truck.

“Jesus, Cassandra, don't kill us.”

“Who the hell said that? Where are you? What are you?” Cassandra looked around, eyes wide.

Oh. Right. Lucy closed her eyes and consciously relaxed her mental command so Cassandra could see her.

“It's just me. Lucy.”

“Holy fucking Mother of God,” Cassandra said. She zipped through the next set of lights, took another right and pulled over into a vacant lot, hiding the car behind an old trash bin.

“Nice driving,” Lucy said. And she thought
Al
drove like a crazy person.

“Lucy, what the hell is going on? Is that really you? How did you disappear and reappear?” Cassandra ran her hands over her face. “I'm on an acid trip, right? I must have taken some last night or something and now it's all blooey. I'll just close my eyes and I'll wake up in bed with Salvatore next to me.”

Lucy took a deep breath and winced. Al had accepted her invisibility without being freaked. So had Beth Nakamora and her bodyguard, Daz Montoya.

Of course, they'd had warning. They knew psychics with weird and strange abilities were real. Beth's lover was a firestarter, for God's sake. An invisible person? No worries.

But Cassandra knew nothing about any of that.

Lucy reached over and put a hand on Cassandra's arm. “It's me. Just Lucy. It's not an acid trip. I can do some…things. Things that can help us find Salvatore.”

Cassandra stared at her, blinking furiously.

“You're real? That just happened? I'm not tripping?”

“You're not tripping. But you're one of the few people to ever see me do what I just did, to go from invisible to visible. I'm told it's a bit freaky.”

Cassandra framed Lucy's face with her hands. “You are real but…you appeared out of thin air.”

Cassandra had a Vise-Grip on her face.

“No, it just seemed that way. Like I said, I was invisible,” Lucy said. Her powers were more complicated than that, but now wasn't a good time to explain. “Um, could you let go of my face? Your nails are digging into my cheek.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Cassandra released her. “So, you were invisible? That's how you snuck up on the big guy?”

“Yep.”

“You whacked him good.”

Lucy smiled. “I sure as hell hope so, with the way they were grabbing you.”

“How— I mean, what happened? How did you get this way? Are you a mutant? Radioactive spider? Are you from outer space?” Cassandra's eyes grew wide again. “You're not some sort of hologram?”

Lucy laughed. “If I were a hologram, I wouldn't have been able to smack the big guy.”

“Okay. Right.”

“It's a long story. Look, do you mind if we go somewhere else to talk? I don't know if Salvatore's bosses are going to sic the cops on us or not but they know who you are and they know this car, so the sooner we hide and regroup, the better.”

“Do you know why they tried to arrest me?”

“They think Salvatore knows something he shouldn't know, and they were going to grab you to get him out of hiding. I'm not sure what it was. They mentioned a murder and stealing city property.”

“Murder?”

“I've no idea what that meant. The good news is that if they don't know where he is, there's a chance we can find him first.” And, hopefully, alive.

“What? Why? Where do we look next?” Cassandra restarted the car.

“Let's go to a safe place so we can go over the stuff I found in Salvatore's office.”

“Where the heck is safe around here?”

“Al and I have a hideaway, for when it's better to be out of sight. You might have noticed, it's not always good to trust the cops.”

Cassandra snorted. “Okay, I still think I'm tripping, but let's go talk. If I'm actually sober, I really need a drink.”

No sirens sounded, there was no pursuit, and they made it across town to the warehouse without incident. Lucy almost called Al a few times during the drive but decided against it until she could text him with the untraceable burner cell phone at the warehouse.

This involved a murder and corrupt city employees. This was bad.

They really needed a name for their unofficial secret hideout. Maybe she should officially call it the Batcave. Al used that name when making fun of what had been his own idea. But it made perfect sense. Al was up against corruption in his department, and Lucy needed to keep her abilities a secret. They needed a sanctuary.

“Pull around to the back,” Lucy said as Cassandra drove into the warehouse's parking lot.

Lucy reached into her pocket and pressed a remote as they turned the corner to the section that backed up against a hill.

A large part of the wall slid away. “Drive right in,” Lucy said. “It's big enough to fit the car.”

Cassandra looked at her sideways. “You can't fool me. You're really Batgirl, right?”

“'Fraid not. More like the Shadow.”

“‘Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows!'” Cassandra actually smiled as she drove in. Motion lights flicked on. Cassandra took her keys out of the ignition and stepped out of the car.

“Wow,” she said. “I could get to like this acid trip if Salvatore were part of it and not missing.”

Lucy smiled. Cassandra wasn't freaked. It was going to be
okay
.

“It's a little bare yet,” Lucy said. “This is where they used to store tires, I think.” She gestured to the steel cages that still dotted the concrete floors. The ceiling was at least thirty feet over their heads. It had been a bitch to get some of those lights to work. “Come this way, it's more homey.”

Lucy led Cassandra down a short passageway that opened to a section of the warehouse that was basically a living room, complete with couch, chairs and massive throw rug. Off to the side was a bare-bones kitchen area with some steel cabinets, a small table, a tiny stove and an industrial-size fridge, a leftover from the previous tenants. Al had bitched about getting the plumbing to work right on that fridge and the sink.

Nothing matched, of course, but the couch was comfy, there was food and, more important, Internet at the desk/office area to the side of the kitchen. That was courtesy of Daz, who'd set up an off-the-grid system with a firewall for them. He'd also paid cash for the cell phones so the calls couldn't be traced.

Lucy grabbed one of the cells from the kitchen counter and texted Al. All she said was “Hey, how's it going? Noir”, but that was code for “Call me, it's urgent but not an emergency”. She should hear back from him soon.

They could work together again. He'd like that. So would she, if only because that would push all their issues to the side, at least for the holidays.

And because as good as being Noir felt today, it would have felt better with Al as her partner.

She pulled two sodas from the fridge, hoping Cassandra stayed mellow about all this.

As she sat down on the couch, Lucy realized she felt more at home here than anywhere else in the Double C, more even than Al's apartment or the artists' colony. This was
safe
.

And this was her place, as much as it was Al's place. They'd built this. But it had been over a month since they'd been here together.

Cassandra took the soda. “Okay, now tell me the long version of your story, Ms. Invisible.”

“Um, yeah, okay.” Where to start? She'd only told the full story to Al. Her parents got most of it but she'd left out the invisibility part. The reunion had been so emotionally intense Lucy hadn't wanted to rock the boat.

She took a deep breath and started at the beginning, talking with how she ran away from home because her parents refused to pay for an art college and instead insisted she major in business at a state school.

Cassandra wrinkled her nose. “I thought you were going to tell me they were abusive. They sound very normal, if clueless.”

Lucy sighed. “I know. I was a stupid idiot. They only wanted what was best and I could have gone to college and taken art courses as electives. But I was so pissed and we argued about it all the time. I realized after about three weeks on my own that I should go home.” She stared off into space. “But then I cut my hand and went to this off-the-books clinic for treatment.”

The rest was harder to tell, especially as her memories were still somewhat fragmented. But the doctor running the clinic had kidnapped her. Lucy had become a lab specimen to the woman she'd come to know as Doctor Jill. Doctor Jill was insane, trying all sorts of human experiments that might cure her monstrously misshapen brother, Jack.

Other runaways had been specimens too but Lucy couldn't remember their names, their faces or even if they survived. Beth claimed that was due to the electric shocks that Doctor Jill had sent through her brain.

But Lucy knew she'd been one of the ones to last the longest, almost six years. Until she'd cracked, her telepathic ability had clicked into place and she'd become invisible.

“So I escaped, but it took time for me to get my head straight. By that time, Doctor Jill was gone from that clinic. I tracked her to the Double C because I wanted to stop her from hurting anyone else. It was all I could think about.”

Cassandra's eyes were wide, her jaw slack. “Damn, I just… God, Lucy.”

Lucy narrowed her eyes. “I won, they lost. Anyway, when I tracked them here, I ran into Al, who was investigating the murders during a bank robbery. I knew it was Jack, the monster, who'd done it. Al wanted to rescue a teller Jack had grabbed from the back. I was sure the teller was going to be Jill's next lab rat.” She stood up and began pacing. “I wanted to just flat out get them. We teamed up and found them together.” Al had accepted her invisibility. He'd even been
attracted
to someone he couldn't see. Dammit, they had to work things out.

“Anyway, me and Al found Jack and Jill in this very warehouse. We confronted them, there was a big fight, and Jill and her pet monster died. Oh, and we rescued the bank teller.”

“Holy fuck,” Cassandra said. “I read that in the papers, how the teller was rescued. That was you and your cop?”

“Yep.”

“And yet you set up shop here after?”

“I know, sounds crazy, but the electricity was set up already, and off the grid too, so we used it. And dismantling every last part of the lab was freeing.”

Cassandra came over and hugged her. “You're something else, Lucy.”

“Thanks.”

“By the way, do you realize you pace in a perfect square? About nine feet by nine feet, I'm guessing.”

“I do?” Fuck. That was the size of the room where she'd been held captive. Every time she thought she'd purged that captivity from her system, she found another remainder.