Superheroes Anonymous (25 page)

“Good. It's not a real hospital trip without it.” Was I making any sense? I doubted it. Everything felt weird and disconnected. I stared at Angélica, and at Kiki, who was inserting an IV into Angélica's wrist. “Guy, something happened. Angélica, she got hit bad.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

“I . . . don't know,” I said, and the words stuck in my throat a little. Angélica might not be okay. This wasn't like one of the hundreds of times Blaze had rescued Hostage Girl. Somebody might actually die, and that somebody might be my friend. “I'm worried.”

“She's a fighter,” he said right away. There wasn't any hesitation in his voice; he sincerely believed that Angélica wasn't in any danger. “Trust me, she'll be back to mopping the floor with you in no time.”

“Hey,” I said weakly. “I'm starting to hold my own.”

“I know you are, and—­Gail, hold on a minute, something's happening.” I heard him cover the phone with his palm, but his voice still leaked through. “I don't recognize you—­where's your ID? You don't have the clearance for this floor.”

I didn't hear the reply. In the room with me, Kiki looked at the monitor, eyebrows low over her eyes. Her frown deepened.

“Gail?” Guy asked. “I have to go. I'll see you soon, okay?”

“See you soon,” I said.

He hung up just as every monitor in the room started shrilling. Angélica's body began to shake and seize, her limbs jerking while her head lolled. Kiki cursed and slapped a red button on the wall.

“What the hell?” I asked, starting to scramble off of the stretcher. The morphine hadn't kicked in yet, so moving that abruptly made the world go temporarily dark. I clutched the edge of the stretcher and tried not to be sick everywhere. “What's going on?”

“She's seizing,” Kiki said, rolling Angélica onto her side. ­“People are on their way—­stay there.”

Terror made me want to disobey. Angélica twitched violently as Kiki threw blankets over the railing on the bed. I'd seen seizures before, thanks to some truly noxious gas that Demon X had used once, but this seemed more severe. Angélica's eyes rolled in her head, and it was
wrong.

And then the frantic beeping turned into one long note, and I looked at the monitor to see a flat line.

My stomach dropped.

The door flew open, and nurses raced in, bringing both a sense of order and chaos with them. Kiki went from a worried friend to the doctor in charge, issuing orders with an urgent calmness. I couldn't take my eyes off Angélica's face, now slack and empty.

Kiki's voice faded in and out like I was listening to her underwater. “—­Asystole—­prep for intubation—­” Nurses in their identical scrubs moved in some kind of choreographed dance I didn't understand, wheeling machines around the bed.

The EKG monitor continued to let out that low tone, never pausing, never ending. “No!” I shouted. “Angélica—­no—­”

“Somebody get her into the hallway,” Kiki said, not looking at me.

I tried again to get off the stretcher—­why had her heart stopped? Why wasn't she healing?—­but again, the world spun and flickered. Nausea forced me back against the stretcher with a moan, so all I could do was lie there as a nurse wheeled me out into the hallway.

The last glimpse I had of Angélica was her deathly pale face as Kiki and the nurses gathered around, trying to save her life.

“You have to let me back in there,” I told the nurse. “That's Angélica—­she's my friend. She can't die. She
can't.
”

The nurse just shook her head. “I'm sorry. They're doing everything they can.”

I wanted to break down and cry. I'd never been much of a crier, not even when I'd faced down villains, but everything hurt so much, and Angélica was in there dying. She was my friend. She was supposed to meet me in the mornings and beat the crap out of me and give out real hugs and condescending nicknames. She wasn't supposed to be having seizures because she'd taken a hit that was meant for me.

“What's your name?” the nurse asked.

“Gail.”

“Gail, I'm Jenna. I'm going to wait with you while they work on your friend, okay? Tell me, are you in any pain?”

“Kiki—­she gave me morphine, but it's, I mean, I don't know how it affects me now that I'm—­” I broke off and swiped my hand under my nose, which had started to drip snot everywhere from the unshed tears. The hospital room must have been soundproofed because I couldn't hear anything through the wall. I had no idea if Angélica's heart had started beating again.

“Okay. We'll get it squared away, no matter what it is,” Jenna said. “Where does it hurt?”

I opened my mouth to tell her, but something else entirely came up. I leaned forward and spewed without warning, right there on Jenna's shoes. Mortification skyrocketed. I moaned and tried to babble an apology, but she only shook her head and helped me clean my face. “I've had worse.”

“Your shoes,” I said.

She barely spared them a glance. “Happens all the time. I've got another pair in my locker.”

I nodded miserably. “Angélica wanted new shoes. S'why she came, and now she's—­”

“Shh. It's okay. I'm going to call and get this cleaned up, no worries.”

She moved the stretcher a little way down the hall and set up a little
CAUTION! WET FLOOR!
triangle next to the pile of sick. Too dizzy to move, I watched the door, waiting for Kiki to come out and announce that everything was fine, that it had all been a bad fever dream from the morphine.

When the door opened, though, Kiki's face looked absolutely grim.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

But Kiki just looked tired, her face drawn and pale. “Gail . . .”

“No, don't say it. Don't tell me she's dead, don't you
dare.
She's fine, she's going to be fine, she heals like
that.
”

Kiki opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, we all heard a throat clear.

A voice said, “Gail Godwin?”

Jenna, Kiki, and I all turned as one. The morphine had finally begun to make me feel floaty and disconnected, but I was still cognizant of the fact that there were several men standing in the hospital corridor. And they were bad news, even if I recognized the one in the middle, wearing the well-­tailored Italian suit.

The first time I'd met him, Eddie Davenport had smiled at me. He wasn't smiling now. His face was like something carved from stone—­cold, immobile, hard. And he was frowning at me, somberly, his hands folded together in front of him.

“What?” I asked, my tongue feeling thick.

“Really?” Kiki asked, stepping between Eddie Davenport and me. “You guys couldn't have waited until we got back to headquarters?”

Eddie barely glanced at her. “You know the rules, Kiki.”

“But she's sick. There's time for this later, after I've had time to look her over.”

“Wh-­what's going on?” I asked. Thanks to the morphine, I managed to push myself to my feet though I stumbled a little. Immediately, the two men who flanked Eddie Davenport stepped forward and grabbed my arms. “Why are you doing that? Stop!”

Kiki stepped forward. “Please don't do this,” she said. “She could be innocent.”

“That's not our call to make,” Eddie said, as I tried harder to pull free of the men holding me. The nurses were crowding the doorway of Angélica's hospital room, watching us worriedly. At Eddie's annoyed look, two of his men began to shuffle them out of the hallway so that it was just Kiki, Eddie, and the two men holding me up by the arms left in the hallway.

Sweat broke out all over my skin. First they'd shoved me out of Angélica's room, and then I was being manhandled. Everything began to swim unpleasantly, but I kept my head held high. “Will somebody please tell me what the
hell
is going on!” I said.

“What's happening is that they're being really stupid,” Kiki said, scowling as two men disappeared into Angélica's hospital room. “And—­oh my god, you're bleeding.”

Belatedly, I felt something wet leaking over my lips. Oh. It was coming from my nose. I had a bloody nose. Perfect.

“Let me—­” Kiki began, but the man on my left held up a hand. “You're being ridiculous. She's
injured
, and I took an oath—­”

“And there are rules.” Any trace of the geniality I'd once seen on Eddie Davenport's face was gone as he stepped forward to face off against Kiki. “You know the rules are for our own protection, Kiki. Gail Godwin—­”

I stopped listening. The door to Angélica's room opened, and the men reappeared, pushing a sheet-­covered gurney. I didn't need super-­senses to know what lay under the sheet.

“No!” I shouted. My knees buckled. I went forward, whimpering when my ribs burst into hellfire, but I didn't care. The men tightened their grip; I struggled against them, trying to get to that gurney. This had to be a joke. This couldn't be real. Where was Guy? He was supposed to swoop in and save the day. This wasn't supposed to happen. “No!
Angélica!
No!
”

“Kiki, sedate her!”

The gurney was pushed around the corner and out of sight. I lunged with all of my strength and actually broke free, stumbling away. If I could just get to Angélica, maybe this cosmic joke would be over, and she would be okay—­

Something pricked my shoulder. Instantly, everything went from wobbly and unpleasant to downright hazy. I started to go backward, only to feel Kiki's arms catch me. “I'm so sorry,” I thought I heard her say, but everything felt surreal. “Gail, I'm so sorry.”

The fog threatened to overwhelm me, but at least it made the pain go away. I felt something soft under my back, and opened my eyes to see Eddie Davenport standing over me, frowning. “Gail Godwin,” he said, and I blinked sluggishly. “By order of Davenport Industries, on the charges of conspiring with a known villain and on the murder of Angélica Rocha, I am hereby placing you under arrest.”

I replied the only way I could: I rolled over and threw up all over his shoes, too. I might have heard him sigh, but that hardly mattered, as I was too busy passing out to care.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

 

About the Author

LEXIE DUNNE is a woman of many masks, all of them stored neatly in a box under her bed. By day a mild-­mannered technical writer and by night an adventuress and novelist, she keeps life interesting by ignoring it and writing instead. She hails from St. Louis, home of the world's largest croquet game piece, and
Superheroes Anonymous
is her professional debut into the world of caped crusaders, a journey that started when her father took her and her brother to see
The Rocketeer.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SUPERHEROES ANONYMOU
S
. Copyright © 2014 by Lexie Dunne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-­American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-­book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-­engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of Harper­Collins e-­books.

EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780062369116

Print Edition ISBN: 9780062369123

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