Superheroes Anonymous (24 page)

Meeting up with Naomi Gunn was indeed very bad for my health.

After the lobby, the museum was a warren, probably not meant to accommodate groups larger than five or ten at a time. Narrow corridors twisted and wound through exhibits that were mostly dark, save for spotlights on the costumes and knickknacks that belonged in old-­time superhero lore. It felt like a gimmicky tourist attraction, which was why I'd never been there. They seemed to pride themselves on having real superhero artifacts, though knowing what I did about Davenport Industries, I figured they hadn't gotten anything close to the full story.

I raced past Gail Garson's first uniform, its garish reds and pinks dulled by age, and nearly tripped onto Hatchiko's motorcycle. Couldn't Chelsea and Naomi have picked a nice, open space that lacked valuable obstacles?

Up ahead, I heard voices, but I wasn't close enough to discern words. Still, it was a toss-­up as to who was more surprised when I rounded the corner and stumbled into the 1950s exhibit on the Superhuman Registration Act: Chelsea, Naomi, or me. Chelsea had lifted Naomi over her head by the lapels of her jacket, and Naomi looked more than a touch worried.

“What the hell?” I asked. I charged forward.

Chelsea switched to a one-­handed grip, freeing her other hand. Sparks tickled at the edge of her palm, inches away from Naomi's face. “Ah-­ah-­ah, don't take another step.”

Naomi wouldn't survive a close blast like that. “Let her go,” I said again.

“Or you'll what? Ski mask tells me you're not exactly super-­powered, little girl, so why should I listen to you again?”

“Maybe it's part of my look,” I said.

“It's a bad look.”

“When I care about what villains think, I'll ask a better one than you. Put her down.”

“When she tells me where she hid her research, I will.”

I froze. Naomi slid a single, guilty glance toward me, which was all I needed. “Research?” I asked, ripping off my face mask. “You told me this was over a story she didn't like.”

“Ah, Hostage Girl.” Chelsea rolled her eyes behind the mask. “I should have known.”

“Technically, I wasn't lying. She
isn't
happy about a story I wrote about her.” Naomi's feet were still kicking a ­couple of feet off the ground, and she wasn't that short. “So I didn't actually lie to you, but I . . .”

Chelsea evidently tired of the pleasantries. “Where is it?” she said, shaking Naomi like a dog.

The reporter's teeth clicked together. “I destroyed it,” she said. I used their distraction to ease back a step, resting my hand on baseball from the 1957 World Series, which had famously socked good old Invisible Victor in the gut while he'd been trying to sneak a close-­up look from behind second base.

“Lies. You journalists always back up your work. Tell me where it is!”

I had to hand it to Naomi: she might be a lying pain in the butt, but she had a backbone. She glared at Chelsea, who had the swirling, stinging ray of death inches from her face, and shook her head. “I won't help you,” she said. “The research is gone.”

“Liar!” Chelsea started to move her hand. My grip tightened on the baseball.

And everything erupted into chaos as the floor underneath us started to shake.

Exhibits toppled like dominos, alarms shrilled, and Chelsea dropped Naomi in surprise. The reporter hit the ground and immediately threw herself off to the side so that Chelsea's stinging ray bounced uselessly off a placard.

I shoved away from the wall with my free hand, ducking out of the way as a second ray caught the outer edge of my arm. It sent a burst of agony straight to my brain. Naomi scrambled to her feet and took off running. Swearing, I ran across the heaving ground after her. Chunks of plaster began to rain around us. I saw Chelsea duck under a doorway as I stumbled on.

Hands grabbed me when I rounded the corner, pulling me to safety under an overhang. “What the hell is going on? Shakin' Dave is dead!” Naomi said.

The earthquake villain who'd terrorized Chicago for nearly two months had been taken out by War Hammer, and Chicago wasn't exactly a hotbed for natural earthquakes. So I thought back to the confrontation with Chelsea and her minions. There must have been a reason that Vicki had singled out one of them, and I suspected we were being treated to it right now. “If I had to guess, I'm going to say a guy named Konrad is doing this,” I said. “We need to get out of here before Chelsea comes and finds us.”

“Or the building takes us down with it.” Naomi crouched, her knuckles bright against her dark skin as she grabbed the corner to keep from being knocked over. I had to balance without any help. “Girl, she's trying to kill War Hammer and Blaze.”

“
What
?” I whipped around to look at her. “Why?”

“I don't know! She paid me to research them, and I took the money because I thought it was for a paper or something. That was why I first approached you last month.”

At that point, I didn't much care why she'd done it. If somebody was trying to kill Sam and Guy, specifically, that was definitely a bigger concern. “Did you find out how to do it?”

Naomi nodded, and I cursed roundly. “She doesn't know right now, right?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because I'm 95 percent sure Blaze is on his way, and I don't want my—­I don't want him flying into a trap.” The shaking abruptly stopped. All around us, things groaned ominously, and I could already smell smoke. Great. This was just getting better and better. “We have to go. We have to go now.”

“Good id—­”

Naomi broke off midsentence as Chelsea rounded the corner and let loose. I shoved Naomi out of the way so that the full force of the blast hit me, knocking me back. My entire world sucked itself into one searing point on my chest, and I was consumed by thousands of invisible bees, all of them biting and tearing away at my skin. I let out a scream, falling to the ground.

And then I heard a
thwack.

The stinging halted abruptly. Freed, I rolled away. Chelsea staggered, holding her forehead while the baseball I'd dropped during the earthquake bounced to the ground at Chelsea's feet.

My nemesis looked at Naomi, who stood her ground and glared her back. “You're going to regret that,” she said, and raised her palm.

“No!” I shouted, already running forward.

The blast struck Naomi on the forehead, and she collapsed. I made a running leap and catapulted off some rubble, intending to finish Chelsea with one punch. Her palm came up in slow motion, aiming right for me. A green blur to my left was the only warning either of us had.

Blaze hit Chelsea like a very annoyed freight train.

The two superhumans plowed through the Commodore of Corruption's old penny-­farthing bicycle and into a wall, and the fighting truly began. Since neither really had to worry about healing, and they were both super-­strong, it was like watching two gladiators go at each other, all deadly grace and brutality. I gawked for a second, transfixed, before I came to my senses and started running for Naomi.

Two steps later, the shaking started again, this time much harder. I flew back, tossed like a rag doll against a glass case. The support structure of the building let out an almighty groan. Whoever this Konrad was, he was about to bring the place down around our ears. I heard a
crunch
above me and rolled out of the way of a falling piece of cement just in time.

“Naomi!” She was in even more danger out there in the open like that. I couldn't get to her, not with the ground heaving. “G—­Blaze! Naomi!”

He and Chelsea fought on without hearing me.

“Crap,” I said. When I tried to soldier forward, the floor
opened up around me
like the pits of hell, provided hell could be found in the Baby Gap two floors below. I stared at the gaping hole and the cute baby clothing below in horror. “Oh, this is not good. This is so not good.”

Well, if I was going to die in a baby-­clothing store, at least it would probably still be considered a noble death. The second the quaking died down to tremors, I backed up as far as I could amid the debris, took a deep breath, and made a running start.

Something snatched me out of the air.

“What are you
doing
?” Guy set me back on my feet. Evidently, Chelsea had been vanquished, or at least knocked out, because I could see her lying facedown about twenty feet away. “That would have killed you!”

“Naomi!” I pointed around him.

“I'll get her. You stay here and try not to fall to your death.”

“Fine. You save her,” I said, “but I have to go. Angélica might need me.”

I could see that he really didn't like the idea, even with the mask hiding his face. “You have to save the hostage,” I said. “That's what you do. If there's anybody that knows that, it's me. I can take care of myself.”

“You always could,” he said, and before I could so much as blink, he'd whipped the mask up and kissed me fiercely. He yanked the mask back down. “I have wanted to do that for a long time. Stay safe.”

“You, too!” I somehow managed to stammer that out though I had no idea how. We were definitely, I thought, going to explore that one again later when the building wasn't falling down around our ears. For now, I cast an uncertain look at Chelsea—­was it right to just leave her like that?—­and decided helping Angélica was my bigger concern.

I had to double back to find a way out of the museum. Tremors continued to rock the floor as I ran on, clearing priceless artifacts like they were hurdles. Alarms wailed left and right, making my ears hurt, and the power flickered, giving the entire place an air of some forgotten, post-­apocalyptic society.

Chelsea had gone a long way just to get to one reporter.

I made it back onto the third-­floor concourse right as Angélica delivered the final punch to take out the spindly woman. She raced to me, looking panicked. “Oh, thank god, you're okay,” she said, grabbing me for a quick hug. “
Are
you okay? Where's Chelsea?”

“She got me a bit, but I'm fine. Guy showed. I left her back th—­”

Angélica grabbed the front of my shirt and threw me to the side. I hit the ground, sliding toward the railing, as she was briefly enveloped in a cloud of green and yellow.

“
No!
”

A scream of pain wrenched out of Angélica as Chelsea zapped her. She'd come out of nowhere. I lunged to my feet, but one of Chelsea's thugs was suddenly in front of me. I didn't see the fist until it was too late.

His punch drove me back and over the railing. Though my heart dropped to my stomach, I grabbed a support beam and hauled myself up. I leapt back over the railing, twisting in midair to smash his nose with my elbow and his balls with my knee.

Angélica's scream cut off. She hit the ground the same time my opponent did.

“No!” I said again, already racing for her.

Chelsea shot a blast at my feet, making me trip to the side. “That was a stupid thing your friend did,” she said, as I rose in a crouch, breathing hard. Her smirk deepened. “Think you can take me, little girl? You survived it before.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“She had to play the martyr, didn't she? Too bad I pumped her so full her heart stopped.”

I'd seen Angélica heal from a broken nose, right in front of my eyes.

“Not likely it'll get started again, either.” Chelsea looked down at where Angélica sprawled, pale and still. “Not with the voltage I hit her with. Pity.”

The sound that ripped itself from my throat wasn't human, wasn't even of this world. It was indefinable, it was eerie, and it was somehow coming out of me. I charged forward, kicking out.

Chelsea and Guy had been pretty evenly matched. But neither of them had had the rage, the all-­consuming, driving force of it, pushing them forward. I set in on Chelsea like a rabid dog, kicking and punching and using everything Angélica had taught me without abandon. My instincts took over. Every time Chelsea raised her palm to unleash her power, I slapped it away. Every time she got back up, I knocked her down.

If this had been a boxing match, I had her on the damn ropes.

Or so I thought.

When I moved in for a right cross to finish the job, Chelsea pretended to fall, feinted, and twisted. She shoved both hands into my midsection and let loose.

The first time she'd hit me, it had been like bees crawling around my skull, stinging away at every inch of flesh. Now the bees were biting and tearing at me, and there were thousands more, consuming me whole. I screamed and writhed, Chelsea's laughter burning my ears as the pain went on and on for an eternity.

And
finally
, it stopped. My vision had tunneled to the point where all I could see was her gleeful face behind her mask, her eyes promising death and pain. Something closed over my windpipe and I was hauled up, to my feet, off my feet, dangling in the air.

Every system in my body went haywire. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't
breathe
! I clawed and scrabbled with my fingernails, trying to kick, trying to do anything to get away, but Chelsea had a grip like iron. The stinging torture had sapped all of my energy, so the best I could do was slap feebly at her.

Chelsea laughed. “Not so tough now, are you?”

“Let. Me. Go,” I managed to wheeze.

“Sure. No problem.”

Bad wording, I saw right away. Chelsea wasn't just dangling me in the air. She was dangling me over the ledge, right above the mall fountain.

Oh, damn, was all I had time to think when she released her grip. I hadn't kept my promise to Guy not to fall to my death.

 

Chapter Twenty-­Two

I
WOKE UP
on a stretcher. While it wasn't a first for me, it was unusual enough to make me pause. Blaze usually flew me straight to the hospital since he was faster than any ambulance.

Then everything
hurt,
and I stopped thinking about Blaze. Sirens wailed in my ears, and the early-­evening sky arched over everything, just beginning to turn pink around the edges. I could see the underside of a paramedic's chin, and she definitely didn't look familiar.

All at once, it rushed back to me: Naomi. Guy. Chelsea. Angélica. I tried to sit up. Angélica. Where was Angélica? She needed my help—­she couldn't be dead, she couldn't be.

“Easy there,” the paramedic said. “You're at the Central City Mall. There was an accident, but we've got you, you're going to be okay. Can you tell me your name?”

“My friend,” I tried to say, though my throat screamed with fire and refused to cooperate.

“I need you to tell me your name.”

“It's Gail, and I need to know—­my friend Angélica. Angélica Rocha, she was hurt, she needs help, is she okay?”

“I'll find out in a minute, but my priority is you right now. Can you tell me if you're hurt anywhere?”

Before I could reply to that, I heard somebody running up to the stretcher. “She's one of mine,” said a voice I recognized.

The paramedic gave me a wide-­eyed look. “
Oh,
” she said. “I didn't realize. She looks so normal.”

“It's fine. Your discretion is appreciated.” Just like that, the paramedic vanished, and Kiki took her place. She wore a polo shirt and had her hair tucked into a green ball cap that said
DALLOWAY INTERNATIONAL
on the front. Her assessing gaze was critical as it swept over me. “You okay?”

“Not really.” I gritted my teeth when she helped me sit up. My rib cage felt like it was on fire. I kept my breaths shallow to avoid feeling like I'd swallowed hot coals. “I think I got thrown into a fountain. My ribs hurt some.”

“That would explain why you smell like a swimming pool. Can you walk? I don't have room for a second stretcher.”

“Yeah, but not well. I—­I'm running on empty. Angélica? Vicki? Guy?”

Kiki handed me a crap-­cake, but my hands shook too badly for me to unwrap it, so she did that for me. We were in some sort of emergency-­ser­vices site that had been set up outside the mall. “Vicki's fine,” she said as she hustled me through the parking lot, among the emergency teams. “I sent her back to headquarters, and Guy's dropping off your pet reporter. He's okay, too.”

“Angélica?” I asked with a horrible sense of dread.

Kiki paused, and my world threatened to collapse. “She's not good,” she said. “Eat that. You're trying to heal on no reserves, you'll only make yourself worse.”

But all I could do was wonder exactly what
not good
meant. “Is she going to die?”

“I don't know, Gail. Eat.”

It hurt my jaw to chew, but I managed to swallow the crap-­cake by the time Kiki had pulled me to an ambulance with the same Dalloway International logo on the side. When she opened the back door, my breath clogged up in my lungs. Angélica lay on the stretcher, strapped in. Never very big to begin with, she seemed impossibly little and frail. Just the day before, I'd driven the blade of my foot into her chin. She'd laughed (and returned the favor). Now it looked like if I so much as pressed a fingertip to that glassy skin, she might crumble into a thousand pieces.

But she was breathing. Her chest was moving, slightly.

She was alive.

“I can tell you more once we get back to headquarters. Put these on.” Kiki handed me a bag of clothes. I fumbled, my hands unsteady, but I managed to get the shirt on. My ribs sang with pain. And when I bent to get the pants, they let out one short scream that had me doubling forward and swearing.

“Uh, Kiki?” I asked, my voice a hoarse whisper as I tried to breathe past the agony. “The pants. I can't—­my ribs—­”

“Someday we're going to have a talk about your definition of ‘my ribs hurt some,' ” Kiki said, her voice gentle as she helped me out of my pants and into the new ones. My clothes now matched hers, a Dalloway International paramedic's uniform. “Hold still, and try not to scream.”

“Why? What are you—­oh—­sh—­” My eyes rolled back into my head as Kiki's fingers probed my rib cage, but somehow, somehow I fought off the gray that descended over my vision.

“Two broken, two cracked,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

“I hate you,” I said, gripping the side of the ambulance to stay upright.

“Sorry,” Kiki said again, and directed me to get in the passenger seat. “Buckle up.” With an ease that said she'd done this before, she flipped on the siren, and we roared out of the parking lot. I stayed braced in my seat and breathed shallowly, praying that the pain would stop. When Kiki held out another crap-­cake, I only moaned.

“It'll make the pain go away faster,” she said, and I took the unwrapped crap-­cake, chewing despite the awful flavor. “How do you feel? Honest assessment.”

“Like Chelsea grabbed me by the throat and threw me into a mall fountain. Did she get away?”

“I think so.”

“I hate her more than I hate you at the moment.”

“Noted. Any other pain besides your ribs?”

“Throat, knee, head, all over, but not as bad as the ribs. I'll survive it. Worst is the fact that I'm clammy from the damn fountain water, and who the hell knows what's in that?”

“Hopefully, a lot of chlorine.” Kiki muscled her way between two sedans with a thin coat of paint to spare.

“What happened to Naomi?”

“Guy's bringing her to the hospital in New York. Daven­port's dealing with her now.”

I groaned. “Hopefully she has a better time of it than Jeremy is.”

Kiki didn't have a reply to that. When we finally pulled into Dalloway, she cut the sirens and hustled into the back to pull Angélica's stretcher free. I followed more slowly since moving too fast meant my entire field of vision started to go dark. Though two men in scrubs rushed up to help, Kiki flashed some sort of badge at them that had them scurrying away. She posted herself at the end of the stretcher and nudged me up to the guiding spot, gesturing that I should just keep up. Once we were out of earshot of the others, she said to me, “Keep your head down.”

Abruptly, the smell of disinfectant made me want to throw up. I started to bend over to gather my breath, but that only made everything hurt more.

“Gail? Gail, focus on my voice. Shut down whatever open senses you've got going on. I know Angélica taught you how to do that.”

It took every bit of strength I had left, and I rankled at Kiki's businesslike voice, but I managed to close out the overwhelming smell by breathing shallowly through my mouth. “You okay?” she asked again.

“I need morphine and a nap,” I said, as we climbed into an elevator.

“Oh, you poor thing!”

I reared back, ready for an attack, but only felt sheepish when I met the gaze of an on-­duty nurse in the elevator with us. She was eyeing my neck, which must have been bright red and bruised from Chelsea's grip. “It's fine,” I said, looking down and away. “Barely hurts.”

“We had a bad run yesterday,” Kiki said. “The guy came out of nowhere, but Kristy's tough. She handled it.”

Kristy? I looked like a Kristy?

“Has somebody checked that out? That looks painful, honey,” the nurse said.

Since the ache in my neck was now nothing compared to the cesspool of pain that my rib cage had become, I said nothing.

“Last night,” Kiki said. “I sat with her the whole time. She'll be fine. If you'll excuse us?”

As she started to push the stretcher forward, the nurse narrowed her eyes. “I think you're going the wrong way, ladies.”

Kiki sighed and lifted her shirt, just a little, to show off the ID badge clipped to her waist.

I watched the nurse's eyes widen, cut from Kiki to Angélica on the stretcher. “Oh,” she said. “I had heard about this, but . . .”

“Nothing to see here, I promise.”

But that clearly wasn't the case. Whatever the badge meant—­and I had my suspicions—­it definitely doubled the nurse's interest in me. I felt her eyes studying me with renewed interest. When I looked up, she glanced away quickly, and I wondered if somebody was going to have a superhero-­sighting story to tell over dinner when she got home.

It made me feel kind of sick and dizzy. Actually, I was beginning to realize that the two crap-­cakes I'd swallowed were making me feel sick and dizzy.

“You've gone white,” Kiki said, when the nurse found other things to do, and we were on our way again.

I swallowed, a gargantuan effort. “I'm okay.”

Though I clearly wasn't. White began to sparkle at the very corners of my vision. I battled it back, and I had to grip the sides of the gurney when the world wavered in and out. Even that didn't prove to be enough, though. I stepped on the outside of my foot, my ankle twisting, and hit the floor with a groan of pain.

Instantly, Kiki was next to me, looking worried. She felt my forehead with her palm, and I nearly threw up when that only exacerbated the agony singing up my rib cage and spine. Dizziness made the world tilt on its axis. “Gail,” she said, and I blinked away afterimages of the lights overhead. “There's a room not far ahead. We can rest there. Do you think you can make it? Can you do that for me?”

Clammy sweat sprouted on my forehead underneath the cap. “I—­don't know—­”

Kiki grabbed my chin, turned me to face her. “Gail. You can do this.”

“If you say so.”

It took me a good solid minute of breathing hard before I could push myself back to my feet. Kiki helped, guiding me so that I was gripping the bar alongside the stretcher. “Hold on tight. Don't let go. Just hold on.” She released me and moved to the back of the stretcher.

My legs jerked forward of their own volition, propelling me onward. I staggered like a drunk, but I moved. “Good,” Kiki said in a low and soothing voice. “Just keep walking. One foot in front of the other, right?”

My fingers spasmed on the rails. “How far?”

“Keep walking.”

Every breath drowned me deeper into an angry sea of red heat. Every step siphoned oxygen out of my lungs, drained the blood out of my head. I pushed forward, head down, vision closing in like a narrowing tunnel, until: “We're here,” Kiki said.

Something beeped like one of the panels at the Davenport complex, and Kiki took me by the elbow, pulling me forward. I looked around hazily, long enough to realize we were now in a room indistinguishable from the rest of the hospital except that there was a heavy-­duty lock on the door and far too much fancy equipment crowded inside.

“What is this place?” I asked, tilting a little.

Kiki moved around the stretcher to take me by the elbows again. I whimpered as she leaned me up against the wall. “I need to put Angélica in the bed,” she said, “and then you can lie down on the stretcher. Okay?”

“Just be quick.”

Even though I knew she hurried, transferring Angélica's limp body to the bed with ease, it still felt like hours before Kiki helped me climb onto the stretcher. I sagged against it even though the movement sent little aftershocks of agony all through my torso and neck.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“We wait for backup,” Kiki said. “I can't transport both stretchers at once.”

“And Angélica? She's going to be okay,” I said. “Right?”

Kiki fitted an oxygen mask over my trainer's face. “She's faced longer odds, and she's tough. I wouldn't count her out just yet.”

“She's going to be okay,” I said, and this time I made sure it wasn't a question.

Kiki moved between the stretcher and the bed, stepping deliberately into my line of view. “I'm going to give you some morphine,” she said.

“You can't knock me out. What if she—­I mean, I need to—­”

“Just to ease the pain, I promise.” She removed a wicked-­looking needle from the cabinet. When I offered her the crook of my elbow, she shook her head and moved my shirtsleeve up farther, running a cold wipe on the outside of my arm. “Hold still.”

I did my best not to flinch, though it didn't hurt that much. When she drew the needle out, she gave me an assessing look and dug her phone out of her pocket.

“Backup?” I asked.

“In a way.” She hit a number in her contacts and handed me the phone. “It's Guy. Why don't you talk to him while I see if I can help Angélica?”

It was a classic distraction technique before the morphine set in, I knew, but I didn't care because Guy's voice was asking, “Kiki? Is something wrong? Is it Gail?”

“Hi,” I said.

I heard him exhale in relief. “Gail. You're all right.”

I looked down at the paramedic's uniform and my screaming rib cage. “I'm . . . in one piece.”

He paused. “How bad?”

For a second, I was tempted to lie and downplay it. “Chelsea threw me into the fountain,” I said. “Don't laugh.”

“I wasn't going to. Where are you?”

“Where else? The hospital, though Kiki says we're just waiting for backup. My ribs are a little messed up.” My hand was shaking, which made it difficult to hold the phone steady, and I could feel my gorge rising once more. It appeared my body wasn't really holding down the crap-­cakes too well. I bit down on the inside of my cheek. “Kind of surprised you weren't waiting here with my rose, actually.”

“Sorry. I'm in New York with Naomi. She's not awake yet.” He sounded frustrated. “But I will get you that rose ASAP, I mean it.”