Legacy (13 page)

He stood up, deciding that the best thing he could do was to have some breakfast and feed his nanites. Then maybe he could start that tutorial on supervillains his father had left for him.

He put his hands into his pockets as he padded toward the door, and found the paper Katie had given him.

Again, he read the nine names. They still meant nothing to him.

He left the bedroom and went down to the kitchen for something to eat, already knowing what he would do after that.

* * *

Four bowls of cereal and two large glasses of juice later, Lucas found himself down in the lower levels of the manor, in the Raptor’s nest.

He still felt uneasy down there, as if he didn’t belong.

His costume had been laid out on a worktable, and it looked as though his father had already made some repairs to it. Lucas picked up the black mask; the cracked lenses had been replaced.

He’d be back to training again in no time.

Crossing the lab, he approached one of the smaller computer setups and booted it up. He’d surfed the Web a few times on these computers while waiting for his father to finish his own work, so he knew there was Internet access along with all the crime-fighting functions.

He sat down in the chair and took the list of names from his pocket, typing the first into a search engine.

Thomas Stanley
.

He hit Enter and waited. There were a lot of Thomas Stanleys out there, involved with all sorts of things. He found one who had given a speech about advances in water purification, and another who had just been accepted into a high-profile California legal firm. Nothing out of the ordinary that he could see.

Bored with Mr. Stanley, he tried the next name.

Sheila Walker
.

It was pretty much the same—multiple Sheila Walkers doing multiple things across the country. Hooray for Sheila Walker.

Lucas scrolled down the list, reading the descriptions of the various Sheila Walker Web sites. He found a Sheila
Walker who had been killed in a motor vehicle accident not too long ago.
That sucks
, he thought, and a morbid curiosity made him click on the story. It really did suck; she was a year younger than him.

Lucas punched in the next name.

Scott Wallace
.

Lucas sighed. All kinds of people floating around out there named Scott Wallace. But then something caught his eye.

Leaning closer, he scrolled down to see that a Scott Wallace had died as well. The story was from another newspaper archive, and this particular Scott Wallace had died in a mysterious house fire.

He’d been right around the same age as Lucas.

The boy’s heartbeat did a little jump. He quickly went to the next name.

Marc DiPietro
.

Marc DiPietro the Elvis impersonator; Marc DiPietro with a blog about his love for pirate films. And strangely enough, Marc DiPietro who died while hiking late last summer.

Lucas’s heart began to race even faster as a picture began to come into focus. A nasty picture.

He went back to Thomas Stanley and scrolled through page after page until he found it.

Death
.

On page seven of twelve, Thomas Stanley, only twenty-one years old, had passed away quite suddenly of heart failure.

He went to the next name on the list.

Tyler Devin
.

A Tyler Devin had died while vacationing in Florida. Although he’d been captain of the swim team in high school, he appeared to have drowned.

And that was how it went for the remaining four names—all of them dead, all of them only a few years older or younger than Lucas. Was this what Katie and Putnam had wanted him to discover? And if so, for what reason?

Lucas’s thoughts raced, and then his mouth went dry.

What if this has something to do with my father?

Lucas quickly erased his Web history before signing off and shutting down the computer.

He picked up the crumpled piece of paper and read the names again. It wasn’t a list of strangers anymore; the names had gained an ominous new meaning.

Lucas didn’t know what to do. The supervillain tutorial was what he should have been doing, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. He stood up and began to pace.

Thomas Stanley. Sheila Walker. Scott Wallace …

Lucas wanted to shut his brain off, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Lucas Moore.” A tiny voice suddenly interrupted his troubled thoughts.

Now he was really beginning to think he was losing his mind. He listened for the sound of his name again.

“Lucas Moore, can you hear me?”

“Hello?” he asked, walking in a circle, trying to pinpoint the location of the voice. He knew that all his senses had been enhanced by the nanites in his bloodstream, and that included his hearing.

“Lucas Moore … calling Lucas Moore.”

The voice was coming from somewhere across the room. He moved in that direction.

“Hello?” he called out again.

“Lucas?” the tiny voice squeaked. “Is that you?”

It was coming from the vicinity of the workstation where his father had been making the repairs to his costume.

“Are you here?” Lucas asked, approaching the table.

“Lucas, it’s me … Putnam,” said the voice, and finally Lucas realized it was coming from the communications system built into his mask. His father must have repaired that as well.

“Putnam?” he asked, picking up the mask and speaking into it.

“Yes, hello, can you hear me all right?”

“Took a minute to find where your voice was coming from,” Lucas said. “How are you doing this? I thought this system was exclusive to Hartwell.”

Lucas put the cowl on over his head. In his ears he heard the man laugh.

“I got a chance to study the system in your mask while you were unconscious,” he explained. “Figured it might come in handy if I needed to get in touch with you.”

“Does this have anything to do with the list?” Lucas asked.

“The list?”

“The names Katie gave to me,” Lucas answered.

He could hear Putman speaking to someone in the background. His voice sounded tense, suddenly upset.

“Hey!” Lucas called out. “Where’d you go?”

“Lucas, have you done anything with that list?”

“I did a search online,” he answered. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I found something sort of scary. Each of the names … they all died in accidents.”

There was a deathly silence on the other end, and a cold finger of dread ran up his spine.

“Was that it?” Lucas asked. “Was that what you were hoping I’d find? What does it mean? Because right now—”

“You need to get out of there,” Putnam said firmly.

“What are you talking about?” Lucas asked, trying to keep calm.

“You need to come to me,” Putnam stated. “You need to come to me, and I will explain everything.”

“No,” Lucas answered, anger growing from his frustration. “No, I will not come to you.” He started to pace, his voice growing louder. “I don’t even know who you people are, for God’s sake.”

“And you know who Hartwell is?” Putnam asked bluntly. “A man suddenly walks into your life, says ‘Hey, I’m your father—and oh yeah, by the way, I’m a superhero,’ and that’s perfectly easy for you to accept? Come on, Lucas.”

“He’s proven to me who he is,” Lucas said, wanting desperately to remove the cowl and throw it across the room so he wouldn’t have to listen anymore.

But he didn’t.

“And who’s that? The Raptor? The hero of Seraph City?” Putnam asked.

“Yes, he’s a hero,” Lucas argued. “I’ve been hearing about him for as long as I can remember. … They build statues to him and everything.”

“We saw what he did to that gang member last night,” Putnam said.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Somebody in one of the apartments filmed it with their cell phone. He looked as though he wanted to kill him,” Putnam went on. “But you stopped him.”

“He was just trying to scare him,” Lucas said, remembering how frightened he had been.

“Do you really believe that, Lucas?” Putnam asked. “If you do, we can end this here. You’ll never hear from me again.”

“He’s a superhero,” Lucas replied, certain what he was saying was true.

But is it?
He remembered the horrific dream, and the reality that had spawned it.

“He would never—”

“Goodbye, Lucas,” Putnam said.

“Wait,” Lucas said suddenly. “Tell me about the list.”

“For that, you have to come to me.”

Lucas didn’t know what to say. He felt himself being sucked down into the darkness, deeper and deeper. But what if that was where the answers were?

“Will you do that, Lucas? Will you come to me and let me tell you everything?” Putnam asked.

Lucas had to know the truth.

He stopped fighting and allowed himself to be drawn into the depths.

“How do I find you?”

* * *

Lucas had actually learned to hotwire a car before he could even drive.

His mom had always said that hanging around with the wrong crowd would bring him nothing but trouble, but if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to do what he was doing now in the front seat of his father’s vintage Ford Mustang.

The man seems to love his Mustangs
.

Lying across the seat, head bent beneath the steering column, he managed to get at the ignition wires and twist them together. The car’s powerful engine turned over with a roar and then idled to a purr.

“Sorry, Mom,” Lucas said beneath his breath, knowing how horrified she would have been.

He backed out, careful not to scratch any of the other fifty vehicles parked in the underground garage. He drove up a winding concrete ramp, but he was forced to stop before a closed metal door.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he said, flipping down the sun visor. “Yes!” he exclaimed when he found the garage door opener clipped to the visor. He pushed the button, and the heavy door began to slowly rise.

This is it
, he thought, waiting for the door.
My last chance to forget about Putnam and the names on that list
.

The garage door was fully open, but Lucas sat behind the wheel for a moment, listening to the engine hum and thinking about his options. Part of him wanted to call it all off, to go back inside and begin the supervillain tutorial; but there was another part of him, one that was starving for answers, hungrier even than the nanites flowing through his blood.

Lucas stepped on the gas, the tires squealing as he peeled out of the garage on his way to answers.

There was no turning back now.

He was surprised that Putnam had just given him an address.

Lucas had half expected to be picked up in an unmarked car, blindfolded, and driven to some supersecret location.

He was to find a place called Seraphim Way. Using the car’s GPS system, he punched in the address and followed the directions that appeared on the small computer screen attached to the dashboard.

The Mustang felt very different from his pickup truck. The closest he had ever come to driving anything this fast was when he had needed to pull a vehicle into the garage for work or park it when he was done.

This car was something else. He was amazed by its response, a tap of the gas taking him from the speed limit to over in the blink of an eye. Lucas reminded himself to be careful; he didn’t need to be pulled over for speeding in a car he had pretty much stolen. He slowed down, still managing to enjoy the experience of driving the fine vehicle. He wanted to get to Putnam’s as soon as possible, but he knew not to risk it.

The answers would still be there.

From a winding two-lane road, he was directed to an exit that would bring him onto the highway going north, and he stepped on the gas, merging with the oncoming traffic.

As he drove, Lucas studied the city around him. There was something both thrilling and frightening about the
place. It was a strange mixture of old and new architecture, buildings of brick, concrete, and wood mingling with towering structures of steel and glass.

It was as if two cities—one from the past and another from the future—had been crammed together to form a single place.

He could see why his mother had been sad about leaving here, and why his father had chosen to protect it so fiercely.

He wanted to know the Angel City better. To learn all her secrets.

The highway eventually took him to the outskirts of Seraph, to a lonely country road that wound its way through a heavily wooded area.

Eventually he passed a sign that read
EDEN STATE PARK
, and he realized he was getting close.

At a barely visible entrance, he banged a sharp right and carefully drove the sports car down an uneven dirt road. According to the GPS, Seraphim Way would be at the end of this rocky stretch.

The car bumped along. Lucas tried to steer around the most obvious dips and craters, but he found it impossible to avoid them completely. If Hartwell was going to be pissed at him for taking one of his cars, he would have a stroke for sure after seeing what the vehicle’s frame looked like after this excursion.

After a sharp bend, the road got a little bit better, and Lucas suddenly found himself coming to a stop in front of a high metal gate.

“Great,” he muttered, getting out of the car to see if he would be able to pass.

The double wrought-iron gate wasn’t locked or chained, so he was able to push it open.

Getting back into the car, he drove through the passage, up the roadway, and around a bend, which was where he saw it.

Lucas knew he had arrived.

It looked as though at one time it had been a house, or an old mansion really. Not quite as big as Hartwell Manor, but still plenty huge to Lucas.

He drove up to the front of the building and stopped. The place looked like hell. A small island of overgrown weeds punctuated the circular drive, and in the midst of it, Lucas saw something. He left the car and went to it. It was a rotting wooden sign.

Reaching down, he hauled it up, and brushing away the dirt and bugs, he read what it said.