Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (25 page)

“Of course.”

“How old are you, really?”

“Sixteen. But I have been sixteen for a very long time.”

“And what did you promise Brian?”

Her clear diamond eyes were dark. “A small and a great thing. Only justice for his murdered family.”

Although superheroes are popularly portrayed in the media as crime-fighters and even vigilantes, they are more often engaged in rescue work. For example, the charters used by Crisis Aid and Intervention teams (CAIs) list their mission as 1.) Civilian rescue, 2.) Disaster prevention/mitigation, and, 3.) Superhuman containment and safety. Note that none of these three missions covers non-superhuman law enforcement.

Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans.

Not that we don’t mind nailing bad guys when we catch them in the act.

Hope Corrigan, aka Astra.

Shouldn’t there have been some kind of, I don’t know, welcome ceremony? Maybe the Dance Dance Revolution face-off was it. Reese came in last, and was a good sport about it. Shelly won on points, but Brian was the surprise winner on style — he dropped at least fifty pounds of muscle to get streamlined and took the mat to display locks and pops that could have gone into a hip-hop music video.

The boy had serious skills.

I left the common room to Shelly, Jamal, and Reese. Astra — Hope — and Ozma had cut out fairly early and Brian had disappeared not long after his win. Shelly was a blast when she wasn’t pushing, and Jamal was cool (since he lived and trained somewhere else I hadn’t had much chance to get to know him, but just by hanging he seemed to calm Shelly down). Reese was a player, but not nasty about it. I knew guys like him on the team.
Had known
, past tense. Not my team anymore.

Maybe that’s why I was done: these guys weren’t my crowd yet and it sucked remembering impromptu road-parties crammed into connected hotel rooms or weekend jams in a teammate’s basement. Or not. I stared at my cellphone for maybe the hundredth time today. I’d thought,
maybe
, after my big debut today, after half of the Green Man Attack coverage seemed to be about the new kids, after I’d helped
save the freaking day
...

The door chimed.

“Come in.”

Shelly bounced in. The kid had missed out on fighting the Green Man in person today, but being able to order me around had kept her from being too disappointed. Her artificial eyes lit up at the sight of my cellphone and I winced. She was still flying high on her mom being back — convinced, despite everything I’d told her about
my
parents, that one phone call, a face-to-face, and all would be well.

“So, are you going to?”

Screw it. I owe Astra the dare anyway
. My thumb hit “1.”

Four rings and it picked up. “
Mal?
” Sydney’s breathless voice. She was old enough to read the caller ID.

“Hey, Squirt. How you doing?”

“
Great!
” I could practically hear her wide gap-toothed grin. “
Where are you? When are you coming home? Why are Mom and Dad
— ” I heard a faint “
Hey!
” as someone took the phone away from her.

“
Hello?
” It was Mom.

“Hey Mom, it’s Mal.” Dumb opening, and now I had too many words to start again. She didn’t start at all for way too many breaths.

“
Mal — I’m sorry, your father — I can’t talk to you
.” Click.

That was it. Shelly’s eyes got big — obviously she’d dialed up her hearing — but I kept the phone to my ear in case the dead silence was a transient reception break. If I didn’t hit “End,” it wasn’t over.

“Did she just — ”

“Yup.” I closed the phone. Shelly’s face cycled through expressions and settled on
pissed
. Not that I cared. “Out. Now.”

“But — ”

“Now!” She went. I put my phone down and found my helmet. Jamming it on, I got out, down the hall to the emergency shaft up to the launch bay, and lit off hard as soon as the bay doors cracked wide enough to let me through without scraping any leather off.

Clear of the Dome, I banked left and poured on the speed. Sound-baffling helmet or not, all I heard was the roar as I lit out over Lake Michigan and
away
.

Grendel

“Brian?” Nix’s soft call woke me up faster than an alarm clock. I pulled my pillow over my head. “Brian?” Getting a growl back that time, she giggled. Nix doesn’t take me seriously.

Tossing the pillow aside, I glared at the shadows. “I know there aren’t any loose vents in here, and the locks are personalized. How did you get in?”

“The mirror in your bathroom, silly.”

I jerked up so fast my dreads whipped me in the face.

“Mirror — she can’t... arrrghhhh!” Yeah, like Ozma would play peeping Tom.
Nix
might — the little doll had a thing for me I couldn’t understand — but the full-body flush the darkness hid was really flashback to the impromptu welcoming party.

I’d been used to girls liking what they saw, before the day of the stadium attack and my breakthrough.
Really
liking; my thing for high-impact dance had given me seriously ripped muscles and female appreciation had given me a wink and a smile that said it all and then some. At Hillwood, being a toothy, clawed manimal hadn’t really had a downside; there were students a lot freakier and nobody stronger. I’d been too busy training to be as bad as I could be, and all the girls loved the hair.

So why do you care if the blonde doesn’t like your teeth? Get a grip.

“What does Her Highness want tonight?”

Nix flew over to perch on my knee. “She’s located a treasure and wants us to fetch it.”

“Which one?”

“The Wishing Pill.”

Okay...
She had to have a serious need if she was going after that one; in the stories, the Wishing Pills had been handy and harmless — in her telling, not so much. More handy, less harmless. Lots less. What does it tell you that a pill guaranteed to grant you one immediate and present wish still hasn’t been used after one hundred years? And now she wanted the Army of Oz to collect it.

Ours not to reason why... I flipped Nix laughing into the air with a twitch of my knee and rolled out of bed. Five minutes later I was all ninja’d up except for the hood. Ninja Beast; you’ve got to love it.

Seeing me ready, Nix landed on my shoulder, opened her bag of Travel Dust, counted “Three, two, one!” and dumped it on us. The tornado grabbed us up, tossed us, spun us, generally had its fun, and dropped us into a dark back-alley where I nearly tossed my cookies. I
hate
Travel Dust. (Someday I’m going to ask Glinda how that convenient tornado really got Dorothy to Oz, but
I
think the fix was in.)

So, where were we? Since it was still night, we couldn’t be halfway round the world. The alley smelled like an alley, old oil and piss, and was crowded by a couple of big trash bins and an ancient car that looked like the only way it would ever move again was on top of a truck. The bin beside us didn’t reek of spoiled food, so not a restaurant, but I smelled
something
that made me think of Mom’s kitchen before everything had happened. I carefully opened a pocket and the carry case inside, extracting the Seeing Specs. Slipping the gold-rimmed bifocals on, I whispered “Magic.”

Not a glimmer. The building had no magic protections, always good to know — a couple of items we’d retrieved had already been found by Merlin-types. Those trips had been interesting.

“It’s inside,” Nix whispered.

“You’re sure?”

She nodded and darted upward, to come back down hugging the wall. A camera covered the steel alley door, and she dusted it with Thieves’ Powder. I sometimes teased the princess about the names she gave the stuff she made — no more imagination than Gleg — but she was a firm believer in Truth In Advertising. Nix did the same to the lock, and through the specs the camera and lock sparkled. She waited only long enough for me to pad up to the door and crack it open with a single hard snap before darting inside.

I stayed outside and sweated. No, it wasn’t a warm night.

The existence of superhumans gave security specialists fits, but technology adapted. Someone can teleport into any locked room? Use a sensor to detect sudden changes in air pressure. A thief can ghost through walls? Build in sensors that react to fast temperature drops. Invisible intruders? Pressure plates in the floor, and of course motion sensors still work for just about anybody. These days, a lot of those options are pretty low cost and standard for businesses with high-value inventory, but they’re all vulnerable to Nix’s direct attack on the security systems. Her soft call came minutes later and I went through the door.

And just about gagged. A single breath started the sneezing fit, finally killed by holding my nose. My eyes watered.

The place was a
spice shop
.

Carved wooden shelves and cabinets full of tiny drawers lined the walls. Boxes, fancy labeled bags, tins, even little cloth sacks, filled every nook and cranny. The place also sold tea and oils. How the hell were we going to find a little silver pill in all this? Nix turned helplessly in the air. I breathed shallowly and tried to think.

Ozma’s royal treasures always looked weird enough before she got them and fully re-infused them with the magic of Oz, but they always found themselves in settings that echoed their stories — they couldn’t simply be buried or lost at sea or something. So, why here? A pill wasn’t a spice. The Three Wishing Pills had shown up in Baum’s second book,
The Marvelous Land of Oz
. I was pretty sure that only one had been used then, the others lost, but obviously Ozma had sent an expedition to recover them. Pills came in boxes, bottles —

“Nix. We’re looking for a spice tin. It’ll be tube-shaped with a screw top. It’s got a false bottom that screws off, too.”

She looked around and almost wailed. There were hundreds of tins of all shapes and sizes, lots of them tubular, and we didn’t have all night.
But Ozma scattered her royal treasures years ago — if the Wishing Pill had been hidden in something intended for sale, it wouldn’t still be here.

“Look in the high shelves, the stuff meant for decoration.”