Wonder Guy (36 page)

“Don’t worry, Mom.” Greg moved in close beside Aggie’s chair as the red and blue police lights cycled across the scene, painting their faces, the neighborhood houses and street all with the same lurid colors. The rising wind and scent of coming rain only added to his sense of urgency, but he put a hand on her shoulder. “It will be all right. I’m sure Wonder Guy will come through.” He said the words, and she nodded as if reassured, but he wasn’t as sure as he’d sounded. How could he save Gloria when he had no idea how to find her?

“I hope you’re right.” Aggie kept her eyes on the officers next door. They stopped banging on the door and turned to face the new arrival, Ike Torkenson, emerging from a battered SUV pulled up at the curb.

“I hope you’re right, but how can we even tell Wonder Guy he’s supposed to follow the creek if we can’t find him?”

“What creek?”

“That’s all the kidnapper said. Just,
tell him to follow the creek
.” Aggie looked as confused and helpless as he felt.

He needed to talk to Serafina. If anyone knew how to find Gloria, she should. Why hadn’t he heard from her already? She’d warned him about other situations where Wonder Guy was needed.

Ike strode up his sidewalk to the house, already in full righteous-indignation mode, shouting, “What are you people doing there? Get off my stoop. I’m a law-abiding citizen! You’ve got no business with me! And you gawkers–” He turned on Aggie and Greg and the Nelsons who’d stepped out of their house on the other side of the Torkenson’s property. “This is no circus. You people mind your own business.”

Greg couldn’t leave Aggie alone in the midst of this awful sideshow. She started to wheel forward into the heat of battle, but he held her back.

“Sir.” The taller, gray-haired officer turned to Ike. “Are you the property owner?”

“Damn right, I am.” Ike thrust his stubbled jaw forward.

“We’re here about your daughter,” the officer continued, one thumb stuck in his utility belt, near the oversized flashlight hanging there like a billy club.

“Gloria?” Ike’s shoulders slumped and his voice lost its bluster. “What about Gloria? She’s a good girl, she wouldn’t do anything wrong.”

At her insistence, Greg went with Aggie then, helping move her chair across the bit of lawn between walks.

“Your neighbor here called it in.” The other policeman, younger and shorter, gestured to Aggie.

“I tried calling her, Ike.” Aggie drew up near the Torkenson stoop. “Some strange woman answered, saying she has Gloria, saying she’s in danger.”

“No.” Ike dropped to sit on one of the steps as if he’d suddenly lost use of his legs.

“Sir, can you let us into the house to check for signs of violence or forced entry?”

Ike looked up, shaking his head.

“Give them your keys, Ike.” Aggie moved up beside him.

Greg hung back. Staying here did no good. Aggie would reassure Ike. The police would do their part. He backed off, into the deeper dark between the houses.

“Serafina?” Greg called softly from near the garage, in the darkened back yard.

“Yes, dear?” He started at her voice. She stood at his elbow.

“Someone’s got Gloria.”

“I’m so sorry, dear. We couldn’t interfere directly.” She laid a hand lightly on his wrist, and he felt her sympathy flow into him like hot cocoa on a winter’s day.

“Why didn’t you call me? Let me know she was in danger?”

“You wouldn’t have been able to do anything, either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Tsk. Language, dear.”

“I’m sorry, but why couldn’t I have helped her?”

“The enemy has a weapon, something taken from your birthplace. You could never have approached her in time.”

“So where is Gloria now? How can I find her?”

“I’m sorry, but she’s been taken by our enemy Elysha. We can’t see into the creature’s areas of power. You’ll have to find Gloria on your own. When you do so, we can come to your aid and deal with Elysha. I know you can do it, dear. You’re not alone in this, as much as it may seem like it right now.”

* * * *

Aggie maneuvered her chair to the side of the stoop where Ike sat bent over, head in hands, apparently oblivious to the uniformed strangers going in and coming back out through his front door.

“You okay, Ike?” She put a hand on his shoulder, half afraid he’d shrug it off and more concerned than ever when he didn’t. It seemed he wouldn’t respond at all. She gave his shoulder a squeeze to offer comfort if he cared to take it.

“I’m a selfish bastard,” he said no louder than if talking to himself.

“From time to time.” She kept her tone light and conversational. “But you have your moments. Karen would never have married you otherwise.”

He grunted. “The best part of me died with her.”

“This is no time to wallow, Ike. Gloria needs us to be strong.”

He sat upright, throwing off her hand. “My girl’s in trouble and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m useless and now I’ll be alone after all. I should have let her go a long time ago for all the difference it makes now. She could have been happier, but she was my baby girl. She was all I had left.”

He slumped forward again. The scent of cheap beer overwhelmed her when she stopped close beside him, but this wasn’t the time to remind him of his other problems.

“Ike. Stop that right now. Stop talking like Gloria’s dead and in the ground. The least you can do is keep hope alive for her. Don’t give up on her.”

It’s what she kept telling herself. Everyone had limitations. She had to focus on possibilities.

“I know you’re not a religious man, Ike, but believe this much, we’re connected to the people we care about. Our love and faith in them can make a difference, even if we can’t explain how or why.”

“I don’t know,” Ike muttered. “Karen used to talk like that.” He drew a deep breath, straightened his shoulders. “Glory’s not dead. I’d know it. I’d know it if she wasn’t in the world.”

“That’s right,” Aggie told him. “And so would I. Now let’s talk to the police again. I want to make sure we tell them everything we possibly can about the situation.”

* * * *

Gloria struggled against the grip of her restraints. No one had the power to make roots and brambles grow and move at command. It was impossible. Could it be magic? She couldn’t fight magic. She liked to imagine she had something special about her, but she was an ordinary human being, not some magic-wielding wonder woman or demon slayer.

She had never been this miserable in her life. Even after her mother died, she’d had people around her, offering warmth and comfort. She’d never been so cold and wet and afraid as now, alone in the blind woods at night. Especially now, while rain streamed down out of a heavy sky, undeterred by the thin canopy of spring leaves. Clothing adequate for a sunny afternoon now clung, soaked, to her goose-fleshed skin, no help at all. The muddy earth packed around her buried legs only added to her chill.

Worst, she lay helpless in the power of people–speaking loosely–who didn’t give a damn for her. They had some use for her now as some kind of bait, but she’d heard the part where she wouldn’t live past her usefulness.

They weren’t human. Inhuman monsters for their murderous intent alone, but also literally. She’d caught glimpses. She had no idea what to call them. From time to time one would come up to her, skittering like a huge insect or silent, with no warning of approach. They’d poke or pinch her, or stroke her bare arm or cheek with sticky, prickly or slimy fingers. Apparently for no better reason than to make her squirm or wince in pain.

The woman in charge looked most nearly human. She could pass, but her preternatural beauty seemed like the rainbow sheen across an oil-slicked puddle, just as superficial, with nothing wholesome about it.

Gloria had never dreamed the world held such horrors. She’d done a good job of keeping life’s known horrors at bay, managing to keep a bubble of light and warmth and comfort around her daily existence. Her nice quiet life had been primarily concerned with simple things, friends, family, work, home and making useful and pretty things.

Bad stuff–evil–existed out there in the world, but she’d always kept it at a distance. Lacking the powers to cure poverty, death, disease, war, or natural disasters, she focused her energies on the small things within her reach. She gave to as many worthy causes as possible on her budget, but giving constituted just another way of keeping the bad things at a distance.

Now, all Gloria’s efforts at evading life’s evils had come to nothing. The bad stuff had swallowed her whole. It held her alone in the dark, cold and wet, helpless in the clutches of enemies who meant to use and destroy her. Bound helplessly in place, it looked like all the choices had been taken from her. The bad stuff had her now. In tomorrow’s news she’d probably be just another statistic. She should be a whimpering mess, but her mind worked overtime, soothing her panic.

A few tears had come to her eyes, and her arms prickled with goose flesh coming from fear as much as from the cold. Her jaw ached from clenching it against more silent screams, but mostly Gloria’s thoughts seemed oddly abstracted from her reality. She strove for an analytic, objective perspective to help her find a way out of this fix. She might, literally, be rooted in the muck right now, but like even the tiniest seeds, something in her still fought toward the light.

Kathleen wanted her dead. Silenced. The strange, evil-sorceress person wanted to use her as bait. Who was this other female? Kathleen hadn’t addressed her by name when turning Gloria over to her. When her odd servants addressed her it sounded like the shushing sound made even now by the rain in its descent through the canopy of leaves above.

But her name made no difference. Gloria had to stop the witch. She meant to use Gloria as bait to draw in her hero. That had to mean Wonder Guy.

The same Wonder Guy who had revealed himself to be Greg. Gloria, however upset by his keeping his identity secret from her, couldn’t let herself be used to hurt anyone, whether masked stranger or the friend she’d known all her life. Greg was her friend, her dear friend, who’d been on her side forever. Wonder Guy had become her hero, and something more.

The best thing might be to end her life before her captor used her against those she loved. But how, with her movements so constrained? The sorceress held all the power. Maybe she could find a way to provoke the nasty creature. Without so much as a voice to taunt with, even that prospect seemed hopeless.

* * * *

Staying below the storm clouds Wonder Guy shot high above his home neighborhood and angled south. Follow the creek? That must mean Minnehaha, the creek winding from Lake Minnetonka in the west metro all the way across South Minneapolis to Minnehaha Park and the falls before it finally joined the Mississippi river in the Southeast quadrant of the city. Miles of parkland. Most of it might be trimmed back and tamed, but the park included steep hillsides with tangled undergrowth and stretches of wooded and marshy land. What was he looking for? Where did he start?

The night may have turned rainy and overcast, but the added gloom constituted no impediment to Wonder Guy’s penetrating night vision. Scanning below, Greg soon spotted the dark swath of the parklands stretching like spilled ink among neighborhood lights. He’d do this right. He’d start at the source in the west metro and scour its course from headwaters to the falls and on to the river. He’d do the whole route over again if he had to, as many times as it took. Greg would tear the woods apart stick by stick if that’s what it took to find Gloria.

His heat vision showed him the sparks of living things, stray dogs, plenty of rabbits, birds, squirrels, even wild turkey, fox and deer. Not many human forms emerged in the darkness. The falling rain deterred all but the most determined dog walkers, joggers, bikers and runners. This near midnight, there’d be few enough of those even at the best of weather. The cars taking the scenic route along Minnehaha Parkway blinded him when he glanced aside from the darkness of the woods.

Within the hour, he’d scouted the creek’s course past Bloomington Avenue without spotting anything out of the ordinary. Time and again he focused his telescopic vision on one of the few people out and about–just to be sure–only to be disappointed. No Gloria.

He followed the whole length of the creek, until he circled above the parkland where the woods grew thickest, between the falls and the confluence of the creek with the Mississippi. He must have missed something. Maybe if he flew lower? He angled into a descent, starting back along the path of the winding waterway.