Free Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. by Marion G. Harmon Page B

just going to hire somebody else! So Blackstone doesn’t end up in a box—he’ll still be dead!”
     
    “Oh.”
     
    I dropped the towel and sat on the floor, felt a crunch. “ Dammit !” Reaching under me I pulled pieces of cup out of the seat of my shorts, stuck my finger in the hole. I tried to laugh, and realized I was shaking.
     
    “Hope,” Artemis said, but I couldn’t stop.
     
    No no no no .
     
    “Hope!”
     
    Minuteman. Killed by a gang-banger. Impact. Died in Israel. Ajax. Nimbus. Atlas . All gone down together in LA. Now Blackstone.
     
    “Shit!” Artemis isn’t nearly as strong as me, but she took an iron grip on my chin and pulled my head around.
     
    “Look into my freaking eyes!”
     
    And I fell into cool pools of blue.
     
    “Better?” She pulled back and I nodded limply, the screaming panic only an echo, back to the shadow of fear of the past few days.
     
    “That’s amazing.”
     
    “It’s a benefit past donors get. Panic attacks? You need a better therapist.”
     
    I opened my hand and ground bits of coffee cup dribbled down to the floor.
     
    “Or I could grind your beans myself,” I giggled wetly.
     
    She relaxed. “Done?”
     
    I thought about it, and nodded.
     
    “Good.” She pulled me to my feet and kicked a chair under me, the big-sister again.
     
    But she still looked dark and dangerous, waiting for a target. It was like having a dragon sitting in my kitchen.
     
    “And I’m sorry,” she said. “Your idea is a good one—it’s just not big enough.”
     
    “It’s not?”
     
    “Not even close. Look, this isn’t your kind of job. I’m Blackstone’s apprentice; threat-analysis is what we do. Just to be clear, all you’ve got is that, in the timeline before the Big One changed everything, this banker was killed? And later Blackstone, both by the same method?”
     
    I nodded again.
     
    “And no discovered connection between them?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “So there are four possibilities.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “It’s completely personal; the killer’s an Outfit hitter; he’s an independent contractor to the Outfit; or he’s an independent contracted by someone else. If it’s the first, great; we catch him and we save Blackstone. If it’s the second, we catch him we might be able to tie him to the Outfit and save Blackstone. If it’s the third or the fourth, the Outfit, or whoever else is going to hire him, will just get someone else. You follow?”
     
    “But—”
     
    “So we have to find the killer, you bet. But we don’t assume it ends there. Not by a long ways.”
     
    She made some calls—one of them to Seven, sketching the problem and ordering him to climb inside Blackstone’s tux and stick close until the danger was past. His superhuman luck would have to protect the both of them. Then she went to bed. The windowless basement was perfect (I realized I’d been tense the entire time she’d been upstairs), and Artemis had explored the racks and piles of camping gear and made a nice little nook before I’d woken up. She threw herself down on an open cot, and looked up at me.
     
    “Take the light bulb with you?”
     
    “Okay.” I unscrewed the single bare bulb that lit the cellar and went upstairs, softly closing the door.
     

 

     
Chapter Ten
    Decibel, an A-class audiokinetic , is suing the State of California for violation of his civil rights in the wake of passage of Proposition 12, the special initiative which includes both the Watch List Act and the Public Security Act. As a superhuman with “powers of mass-destruction” and a criminal record, Decibel is banned by the Public Security Act from entering public buildings, including government offices and schools, without submitting to restraint. Since Decibel’s criminal record consists of convictions for extreme vandalism from his time as an eco-terrorist with the Green Knights—crimes nearly a decade old and for which he served time before joining the