Superheroes Anonymous (10 page)

“They are. That's the front, though.” We made a left turn. “Do you know Raptor?”

Everybody knew Raptor. He was one of the very first superheroes to show up on the scene though it was never actually proven he had powers. He was, simply put, legend. “What about him?”

“Now, you'll have to keep this quiet when you're not in DI, but Raptor? Kurt Davenport.”

I stopped to gape at her. I'd had the weirdest day possible. Nothing should be able to floor me now. But this did. “Kurt Davenport is Raptor?”

“Crazy, I know.” Vicki grinned.

“Kurt Davenport's dead,” I said. The playboy and founder of Davenport Industries had passed away nearly three years ago. “But Raptor's still around. I saw him on the news just—­well, before I was kidnapped, however long ago that was.”

“It's complicated. Like most of us with our origin stories. You'll pick them up as time goes on. Maybe I'll even tell you mine someday. It'll be fun. I've never had a mentee before.”

“Mentee?” I said, still marveling at the fact that Kurt Davenport, whom everybody in my parents' generation adored, was the skulking superhero who kept New York City free of criminal dirt. Or had been, before he'd died. But the Raptor was still around, wasn't he?

“Yup. I'm your mentor. I'm supposed to show you the ropes.” Vicki flicked her fingers. “I'm not supposed to get a mentee for a ­couple of more years, but since I brought you in, they did me a favor. Exciting, right? You get the one and only Plain Jane as your mentor!”

This time I didn't stop to stare. I was learning to take things in stride, apparently. “You're Plain Jane?” I asked.

“Yup.” She trailed a hand through her dark locks.

“Um, hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're not plain.”

“I know. I think it's called irony.” She grinned, her face lighting up with a side that very few cameras got to see.

And on that statement, we burst from the maze of moss green corridors and into an area as white and minimalist as Medical had been. The hallway widened, brightening as the light changed. Doors on either side of us were now a royal blue color and they, unlike the doors we'd been passing, had regular doorknobs. The screens displayed different names. I eyed a few surreptitiously.

“And this, my new mentee, is the main compound of the Davenport Industries Superpowers Complex,” Vicki said, as we sauntered along. “Medical and Support are all located in the secondary compound, which is where we just were. In a while, I'll get you acquainted with a map. They tell me you've got some sensory talent, so I can just show it to you, and you can memorize it. Saves time, I've gotta tell you.”

I blinked at that. I'd never had an eidetic memory before. Sensory talent? Just because I'd sensed pheromones between Cooper and Kiki? And . . . heartbeats, I realized. And changes in the air, like the strange-­yet-­familiar smell in my apartment.

Okay, so I had sensory talent.

“I'm jealous,” Vicki said, leading me into some sort of indoor courtyard that teemed with greenery. A man-­made pond gurgled close to the opposite wall. Overhead, giant lamps simulated sunlight, but I got the feeling we were still underground. My companion didn't seem to notice the indoor forest; we strolled through it, Vicki occasionally nodding to those we passed on the path. Like Vicki, they were dressed casually. “I can't remember directions to save my life. Which is why I'm glad I ran into Raymond when we did. We'd probably still be looking for Medical.”

“Uh-­huh.” This was Plain Jane, ranked something like seventh in the world as far as super powers went. Jealous of me. What?

“Now,” and Vicki launched into lecture mode once more as we skirted the pond on a little brick path, “we have the Indoor Arboretum. I think it's pretty much a getaway for those of us who don't want to go topside. Especially those still getting used to powers. It's not far from your new room, which is right down the hall from mine, actually. We're going to be neighbors. Isn't that exciting?” She shoulder-­bumped me.

“Um, yay.” I was going to be staying here? For how long? I mean, it was a relief, what with no longer being able to afford my apartment until I could find a new job, but I was a little creeped out by just how quickly everything was happening.

“Yay is right,” Vicki said. “It's this way.”

We made a left out of the Inner Arboretum into yet another hallway. White walls, gray carpets, though this hallway was wider and a great deal more populated. A few ­people gave me curious looks, but they didn't say anything.

“So, back to the story. You remember the Feared Five, right?” Vicki asked.

“Raptor, Phantom Fuel, Invisible Victor, The Cheetah, and Gail Garson? My mom named me after GG. I think a lot of drugs went into that, though, because I'm nobody's hero.”

“You held this Chelsea person off, and she was strong. One of the strongest I've faced, certainly,” Vicki said.

“Really?” I asked.

We headed up a set of carpeted stairs. “I wouldn't have gotten to your friend Nicole—­”

“Naomi.”

“—­in time if you hadn't held Chelsea off the way you did. So chalk that one up on the saves list.”

“Okay.” Warmth spread through my midsection. Pride, I realized. I was proud of something I'd done.

That was a first in a long, long time.

“But anyway,” I said, clearing my throat, “what about them? The Feared Five?”

“They started this place. And Detmer, too, while I'm thinking about it.”

“No, that can't be right.” I hadn't actually paid attention in history, but I did remember some things. “Everybody knows the Alliance of Ten set Detmer up.”

“Nope. History tells it wrong, but I don't think Davenport really wants ­people knowing that, so they let it slide. Because, you see, Kurt Davenport was married to Fearless, whose alter-­ego was Rita Detmer.”

I gaped. “Davenport named the prison after his wife?”

“And his mortal enemy, though history books gloss over that part. See, Rita—­Fearless—­had VS.”

“VS?”

“Villain Syndrome.” When I gave her a blank look, Vicki squinted back at me. “Have you been living under a rock? It's a pretty common form of the sociopath. Villains who can't help themselves. They want to save the world, but it means burning it down first? You know?”

“Oh, that type of psychopath. Yeah, I've met one or two of those before.”

“Where on earth would you—­never mind, we'll get to life stories later. Anyway, Davenport set up a really nice wing at Detmer for VS rehabilitation.”

Our rooms were apparently quite a distance from Medical. A month before, I would never have remembered the route, but now it was like I could memorize it by a series of distances—­how many steps from one doorway to the next, how many feet between the wall and me, how high the ceilings reached. As we walked, Vicki divulged more than the history books had ever recounted about the Feared Five. Kurt Davenport, in addition to being a shrewd business mogul and a masked crusader for justice, had possessed quite a bleeding heart. He'd sympathized with his less conventional superhero friends' struggle to adjust to everyday life.

“So he started this facility,” Vicki said in conclusion, “as a sanctuary. Water-­breathers get their own wing underwater, the deeply messed-­up-­in-­the-­head have the underground bunkers, and for those of us who choose to keep up appearances with our alter egos, this is just a crashing pad every once in a while. I live here when I'm not on location. It's easier. I like to avoid the stalkarazzi.”

“Not all the time, apparently,” I said under my breath, thinking of all the shots I'd seen of Jeremy grinning, his arm around Vicki's waist.

Vicki gave me a strange look for that one.

“So what happens now?” I asked to change the subject, as I was really too tired to get into it.

“Well, they haven't given you a schedule for your adjustment period yet, but I imagine tomorrow you'll be put with a trainer. If you want to stay, I mean. You could go back to your life and sort out your adjustment period on the outside.” Vicki looked doubtful. “But a lot of ­people, even Class Cs, have trouble with it.”

As would I, I realized. With my luck and my changing abilities, I'd likely run into every supervillain in Chicago by accident.

“After your adjustment, you can stay here as long as you contribute something,” Vicki said. “You know, being on call for other heroes if you don't want to be one of the headliners. Some of them are looking for partners right now. So that's something to look into. Since you're a Class C.”

“By partners, you mean sidekicks, right?”

“We call them partners.” Vicki grinned. “C'mon, our rooms are up this way.”

We headed down yet another hallway. How big was this place? I pushed that thought aside to ponder over later and aimed a sideways look at Vicki. “You're not looking for a sidekick, are you?”

“Darling, I work alone. But I appreciate the thought.”

“That's probably a good thing. I think you got the short end of the stick if you were waiting to get a mentee.” I stuck my hands into the pockets of the pants they'd given me. “I'll probably be dead in a ­couple of months if they don't find Dr. Mobius.”

“Huh. Fatalistic much?” Vicki said, surprised.

“He turned me into an addict for a solution only he can make apparently. I've got an expiration date.”

“Nonsense, Medical will figure out what it is. If they can't make the exact stuff, they'll give you enough of a substitute to get by.”

“Really?”

“Outside, you might be considered special now, but here at Davenport, you've got nothing they haven't seen twice over,” Vicki said. “You're not dying on Davenport's watch.”

It seemed absurd to feel hope, but the entire day had been so weird. I felt my spirits pick up. They'd drawn a sample of my blood. Maybe they could reverse engineer something.

“Right.” Though doubt still ruled, hope edged its way in.

“Oh, here we are,” Vicki said. For the first time since we started walking, we reached an actual door, and Vicki pressed her hand against the panel beside it. The hallway on the other side, for once, looked like one you might find in an actual apartment building. “We'll take the elevator instead of the stairs. It's just around the corner, and it practically leads right up to your room. How's that for awesome?”

“Awesome,” I agreed, inwardly marveling. This woman was Plain Jane, protector of Miami. She regularly flew around buildings, and when she was in a hurry, through them (though I heard the building owners always received checks for the damages). She fought bad guys in one of the best superhero uniforms out there, with a creepy white mask. And she was excited about the fact that the elevator was right outside my new room. It takes all kinds.

We rounded the corner, and, as predicted, the elevator lay ahead. Its doors were already open, and two ­people were climbing on. Two tall, well-­built ­people. One of whom wore a skintight green shirt and black pants with black, scuffed boots. There was a small cartoon of a flame on his shirt.

“Hold the elevator?” Vicki called.

The two men turned, and I saw, quite clearly, my ex-­boyfriend Jeremy.

And standing next to him, wearing Blaze's uniform, was none other than my old coworker, Guy Bookman.

They both looked as stunned as I felt. The elevator doors slid closed.

“Well, that was rude,” Vicki said.

I couldn't think of anything to say to that besides the obvious: “What the
hell
?”

 

Chapter Ten

I
T TOOK
V
ICKI
a few seconds to catch on. She looked back and forth between the closed elevator doors and me quickly a few times. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You're that Gail? You're Jeremy and Guy's Girl?”

“How many Girls do you know?” I asked, and cursed when I realized how it sounded.

But Vicki didn't seem to notice. “Wow,” she breathed, really looking at me now. “Wow. It's such—­it's such an honor to meet you. Wow.”

I blinked at her. “Why's it an honor to meet me?”

“You're a legend.”

I opened my mouth to demand what was so legendary about a workaholic with a tendency to stumble into bank holdups, but a
ding
stopped me. Looking up, I saw that the elevator had stopped one floor up. “What's so—­?”

The door beside the elevator, the one that apparently led to stairs, flew open. I only had time to register a green blur before I found myself locked into a crushing hug. The arms around me were familiar, and the smell—­

“You're okay!” Abruptly, I was pushed backward and craned my neck to stare up into Guy Bookman's handsome face. “You're not hurt! I was worried—­”

“You were in my apartment,” I said, as I realized why the smell had been so familiar. “You went through my apartment.”

Immediately, Guy looked abashed. “I called to talk to Angus, and Portia mentioned you hadn't been at work. I was worried, so I thought I'd check—­”

“You're Blaze,” I said. “You. You're Blaze. You're not Jeremy. Jeremy is not Blaze. You are—­what?”

“Um.” He went still and suddenly looked sheepish. “Yes, yes I am.”

“You didn't know?” asked a voice behind him, and I saw Jeremy leaning against the doorjamb of the stairwell. He looked, as always, confident and a little bit dangerous even though I now knew he wasn't Blaze. “Figures.”

“Hey.” Guy reared up to his full height, which was, as expected, exactly the same as Jeremy's. Standing next to each other, they could have been twins in everything but coloring. Jeremy wore a white muscle tee and blue jeans. But he was much darker in complexion than Guy's bronze hair and green eyes. “It wasn't like I was giving her a lot of clues to go off of.”

I ignored him for a second because I had a feeling that if I tried to wrap just one more surprise into my expanding brain, it might very well explode. Jeremy was safe. Jeremy was a known quantity. “What are you doing
here
?” I asked. “You're—­you're not War Hammer, are you?”

When Vicki began to laugh, genuinely, like that was the funniest joke she'd heard in a long time, I suspected otherwise. Jeremy shook his head and sketched a little bow. “Class D. Just like you.”

“Oh. Uh, about that . . . never mind.” I turned on Guy, who took a step back as if he had just realized he was violating my personal space. Since the guy had rescued me countless times, I wasn't inclined to care about that. But the rest of it . . . “You're Blaze.
You're
Blaze.”

But Guy frowned at me. “What are you doing here? Did Eddie bring you here?”

“Eddie?” I said, confused.

Vicki stepped between us. “As fun as this little reunion is, the walls around these parts have ears.” She pointed down the hall at several doors. “Let's take this inside somewhere.”

“Right.” Guy actually sounded strangled as he backed up. He couldn't seem to decide what to do with his hands. He rubbed his hips like he was hoping the Blaze uniform would have pockets. “Let's, um, do that, then. My place—­”

“Way too far,” Vicki said. “Mine's fine. So, boys, Gail here will be just down the hall from me. Isn't that lucky?”

Jeremy had a frown on his face, and I realized he was checking me out under the shapeless Davenport clothes. “How'd you net a room on the powered floors?” he asked.

“I don't want to talk about it here,” I said, which was about all I felt comfortable disclosing. For some reason, Vicki's statement about the walls having ears stuck in my head. It couldn't be literal, right? I was beginning to accept that there was a secret world of superheroes, and, oh, right, that my coworker who I had barely spoken to
regularly donned a mask and saved my life,
but the walls with actual ears? No thanks.

Silently, we climbed onto the elevator, and Vicki pressed the button for the seventh floor. I stood back from both Jeremy and Guy. Vicki seemed like the safer choice. If she noticed what I was doing, she didn't remark on it. When we disembarked, she jerked her head to say that we should follow her. I wondered briefly if our rooms, since they were on the same floor, were at all alike.

Probably not. For one thing, I don't own nearly as much S&M equipment as Vicki does.

“I collect it as a joke,” she said when I stared, dumbfounded, at the leather crops and whips artfully arranged on one of the stark white walls of her apartment. The black leather couches with the bright red pillows made me do a double take, but it was the white bust wearing a full leather mask on the coffee table that really made me goggle. “Designers send me the weirdest things, so I collect some of them. That's Peaches Franklin.”

“You named your S&M mannequin head?” I asked.

“You'll get used to it,” Jeremy said as he dropped onto the couch.

Guy waited until I'd seated myself on the couch opposite from Jeremy and Vicki before he sat down. Next to me. Tension coiled through every line of him, from the way he sat straight up without touching the back of the couch to the way his hands fisted on the black knees of his uniform.

“So . . .” Vicki shrugged. “Who wants to start?”

“I say Gail goes first.” Jeremy tilted his head slightly in challenge, and I narrowed my eyes right back at him. I remembered this plan of attack well. He was hiding something—­that much should be obvious since we were literally in a secret superhero compound—­and was planning to antagonize me until I forgot about it.

“We're all dying to hear how you got hot,” he said. “I mean, not that you weren't hot before. But now—­took a few steps up the babe scale. How'd that happen? Did you burn off your sadness for me on the treadmill?”

I gave him a tired look. “Do you have to be a pig right now? Seriously?”

“Old habits die hard.” He leaned back and spread his arms on the back of the couch, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. Jeremy in repose.

“It's not a habit, you're doing it on purpose. Quit being an ass.”

“Ohh-­kay,” Vicki said, holding her hands up in a time-­out position. “Clearly there's some history here.”

“Yeah, he's my ex, who dumped me while I was in the hospital,” I said. I looked between them. “That didn't come up on one of your dates? Usually a discussion of the exes is par for the course.”

“One of our . . . oh, huh. Does she not know?” Vicki asked Guy and Jeremy.

“Well, considering the ruse was to fool the entire world, and not just her, I'm going to guess no,” Jeremy said, and why he glared at Guy as he said that, I had no idea.

“What is everybody talking about?” I asked.

From beside me, Guy spoke quietly. “I'd rather hear what happened to you first, if that's okay, Gail. We can explain everything else since it's all tied together.”

I wanted to know more about the ruse, actually. “You have to promise me you'll tell me what's going on.
Everything
that's going on. I've been in the dark for far too long.”

Guy nodded. “That's fair. You go first?”

“Okay.” For the second time that day, I ran through the entire tale of my time with Dr. Mobius, from beginning to end, stopping only when Vicki or Jeremy asked a question. Guy remained deathly quiet. The tension never faded from his shoulders; nor did he look at me. He stared at a point on Vicki's black coffee table, never looking up. The look on his face grew grimmer the longer the story went on.

“Wow, quite an adventure,” Jeremy said when I finished my rundown. “Trust you to stumble into a bank holdup on your first day awake, though.”

I cracked a small smile at that. It was either laugh or cry at this point. “Well, you know. Habit.”

Next to me, Guy was nearly vibrating like a plucked string. Though it seemed glaringly obvious to me, neither Vicki nor Jeremy seemed to notice. “I left,” he finally said, “so that you would be safe.”

Jeremy levered himself off the couch and crossed into the kitchenette area of Vicki's apartment, obviously very at home. “Well,” he said over his shoulder, “that didn't work now, did it?”

“Jeremy,” I said.

Jeremy shot an “Ain't I a stinker?” smirk over his shoulder.

“So what about you three?” I asked, mostly hoping to put Guy more at ease. His tension was making
me
tense.

“Witness Protection,” Jeremy said, grinning.

“That's just what he calls it.” Vicki folded her yards of leg beneath her. “We were tired of staking out his apartment when the villains decided once and for all that he was Blaze. So we moved him here and inducted him into Davenport society.”

I remembered something Vicki had said in the hallway. “So how do you contribute?” I asked him, suspicious. What on earth could a Class D add to Davenport Industries, which was obviously lousy with superheroes?

“Superior gaming skills.” Jeremy returned with a bottle of Pellegrino. “I run the simulators.”

“The slower ones,” Guy said, earning a laugh from Vicki and a scowl from Jeremy. For a second, the corner of his lips pushed upward in something close to a smile, like he was pleased with himself for the burn. But he schooled his features back into the regular Guy face I remembered from the office. “Sorry, Jer.”

Jeremy grunted at him. “Slower ones, my ass.”

I knew so little about the man who sat next to me, which felt incredibly unfair, given the number of times he'd swooped in to save the day. So I turned an expectant look on him. “And you? I think you owe me your story now that you know what happened to me.”

“I'm not going to start at the beginning,” Guy said. “We'll be here all night, and . . .” He cast a look at Jeremy.

My ex twisted the cap to the water bottle. “They don't share origin stories,” he said. “Not with Class D freaks like me. Can't have the plebes wandering around with all of their big secrets. Bunch of whiny babies.”

“
Anyway,
” Guy said, “when it was obvious to me that the villains weren't going to leave you alone, I hatched a plan. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you about it, but for it to work, you had to seem fully broken up with Jeremy and with Blaze.”

And he launched into a story, the most I had ever heard him talk. Jeremy and Vicki interjected a few details, but the story unfolded about how Guy had used his Bookman influence to convince Jeremy's job to move him to Miami. How he'd enlisted Vicki to stage a meet cute at a bar down the street from Jeremy's new pad so that that public would know that Jeremy Collins and Gail Godwin were no longer a thing. And once the two of them—­Jeremy, it appeared, had been in the dark—­were sure that everybody knew about the newest It ­Couple, they'd arranged a very public rescue of Vicki, cementing it for everybody that Jeremy Collins was truly and forever Blaze.

“Of course, the villains started going for him,” Vicki said, grinning. She ruffled Jeremy's hair when his scowl deepened. “So it became a full-­time job for both Guy and me to keep him safe. We had to tell him. Eventually, we decided just to move him here.”

“So, that's it. That's the story.” Guy wouldn't look up from his hands.

“How did you know that the villains were going to leave me alone?” I asked.

“Eddie,” Guy said.

“Who?”

“Eddie Davenport. He came to visit me that day in the office—­when he met you—­because he wanted to get a look at you. At the, uh, the girl I was giving Chicago up for.”

I could think of absolutely nothing to say to that. My feelings were all still a jumbled knot in my stomach. I needed a sandwich and about twelve hours of sleep to begin processing any of it, so I just stared. “Eddie Davenport was there to meet me?”

“Yes.” Guy finally looked up and met my gaze. “And he pulled some strings, so supervillains would really believe that you and Blaze were through. Until . . . Mobius.”

“Meanwhile, others got to pay the price,” Jeremy said, and the bitterness in his voice made me look at him fully. So that was what he'd been trying to hide. His fingers fidgeted with the cap of the Pellegrino bottle.

“I'm sorry,” I said, since there wasn't anything else I could really say. Sorry for what, though? None of this had exactly been my fault.

For a moment, I didn't think Jeremy was going to say anything. But he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It's water under the bridge,” he said in a way that sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Can't do anything about it now.”

“Kids,” Vicki said, and all three of us looked over at her. I'd kind of forgotten she was even there, which was a bit surprising, given that we were surrounded by her collection of kinky sex gear. “I hate to be the buzzkill, but I've got an early-­morning photo shoot, and if I show up with bags under my eyes, Denise will simply murder me.”

“Denise?” I asked.

“My makeup artist. She's a genius, but she likes an untouched canvas.” Firmly, Vicki ejected us from her suite, promising that she'd take me to Testing in the morning before she left, if she could. I began to see why they hadn't let her have a mentee before. Right before she closed the door, she turned to the guys, “Will one of you take her to her new room? Suite 704.”

“I'll do it,” Guy said before Jeremy could pipe up.