Ryan Kennedy wasn’t the kind of man who wanted to be found easily, especially not by Olympia. Every single dive bar and backalley I went to dressed as myself got one reaction: swearing, then screaming, and inevitably, a fight. With the city on partial lockdown, the criminals had taken it upon themselves to show everyone they weren’t afraid of neither Damage Control nor the police who were circulating through the empty streets. Didn’t really matter to me, and frankly, after seeing Lucas, my head wasn’t fully in it. Tonight wasn’t about wanting to kill these filthy little roaches, no matter how many rounds they dumped against my chest, or the flashes of red fire they shot at me.
It was about the bigger threat, the thing I could smell in the air—the stink of dead Kaiju. It was in homes and it spewed out from the sewers and gushed out of boarded up apartments. It was getting so bad that a part of me barely wanted to be down here to inhale it. Any other day and I would have been able to pinpoint where the stink was coming from, but the gusty winds of fall were churning the air and making the stench worse and worse with each passing minute. For all I knew, the entire city smelt like this, like the monsters Cassie had kept, and the one I accidentally killed, were congregating just beneath the asphalt deep in the sewer systems, brewing for an attack.
And Ryan Kennedy would know something about the Kaiju Society, because I needed to have a little bit of a word with them. It was a shame that nobody seemed to want to tell me where he was. Something to do with being afraid of what he knows, and what that would mean for them. Ryan, judging by the thugs who so willingly threw themselves at me, wasn’t too popular amongst the rats and the garbage of Lower Olympus. That just made me want to find out more about him.
“If you’re done lowering property prices, you can put those guns down and talk to me.”
I had spent three hours searching by now, and every single minute had been more than felt ever since I had left home. For the first time that I could remember, I felt…weird, almost distracted. I kept scanning the faces of the criminals I met, the shadows I passed, waiting for Lucas to slip out from the darkness like some creature out of a hellish nightmare, and then… I didn’t know what, really. An apology would be heard, but it would not be accepted. That bridge had been burnt, and stomaching it was harder than I thought it would be. Even now, as I sat inside whichever bar I had found myself in right now, my rear on the counter and my boots dripping blood after I kicked some guy’s chest in by accident, I couldn’t get the look in Lucas’ eyes out of my head. The judgment, the hate, this anger so primal and disgusting that it made my stomach tighten and blood a lot colder.
Lucas knew where Bianca lived. He knew where Emelia, Grant, and Michael lived. My mom might have been a piece of work, but losing her to him would be the straw that broke a city.
As for the man whose chest was now protruding out of his back, I was kinda sorry, because I was usually a lot more accurate and meaningful with my killing, but if he was still alive to listen, I would tell him to take that spinal problem up with Lucas for distracting me tonight. I couldn’t really remember if I had kicked him or stepped on him or simply lost track of where my foot was when I burst through the air and used him as a platform, and I didn’t care. Poor guy was dead, anyway.
The rest of them weren’t in great shape either. Most were on the floor groaning, and maybe it was because I had bigger things on my mind, but only two of them were dead. The man whose chest I had stepped through, and the bar keeper who just pointed a shotgun at my back a second ago and sent shrapnel burrowing through his face. I straightened and rolled my shoulders, sighed and glanced down at his sprawled body, his skewered arms and legs and the meat of his face. I warned you and you didn’t listen. What the hell did you think was gonna happen? I turned back around to look at the five or so guys who were still rearing for a fight, maybe for glory, maybe because I had killed one of their buddies before, but they were all hurting, hobbling, trying to hold their guns steady but couldn’t even if they tried. So I watched as they all collapsed or passed out, either from exertion, pain, or their willpower giving up on them after missing every single shot.
“Finally,” I muttered. “Now, I’m gonna repeat myself: does anyone know where he is?”
A collective groan. A couple of them swearing as they curled up into balls that rocked a little, as if they really were terrified of me being here. Maybe it’s a waste of time. Onto the next.
If there was a next. I’d gotten through a couple bars, maybe ten, possibly more. I left a message in each of them with people who I’d forced into doing what I said with a kind suggestion lest I dismantled their spinal column. Ryan Kennedy, Olympia’s looking for you, and that was the message. Simple and effective, but my burner phone hadn’t rang yet, so it had turned out useless.
Information gathering wasn’t my strongest suit, but without Lucas, it had to be. He had taught Ben how to search, to learn—to hide and to listen. He just taught me how to pull out a heart.
And now I was slowly getting why he stopped spending so much time training me.
He didn’t want someone as strong as me becoming as smart as him. Lucas had seen me as one thing, just like everyone else tended to do, and that had been a machine—the hammer that struck hardest, and the blow that would not miss. Not a glorified sniffer dog with key information.
But it was also my fault for not figuring out sooner that being able to put my knuckles through a stomach cavity as easily as you would a wet piece of paper wouldn’t get me far in life.
I hovered off the bar counter and landed on the worn wooden floor. The lockdown had meant that most bars were just storage rooms full of alcohol somewhere underneath an apartment or grocery store or some kind of foreign restaurant that reeked of grease and boiled meat. This one wasn’t any different, and the single weak orange bulb swaying above me as I walked through the bar could only flicker on the bodies I left on the floor. These guys were just criminals. Thieves and the occasional thugs, but that was boring and kinda not useful to me right now. Better just leave them for the roof-leaping vigilantes who wanted to grab some easy information. Look at me, helping my local community. I stepped over one guy who’d drunkenly passed out on the stairs.
“Wait,” a weak voice said, and so I waited, glancing over my shoulder to see a guy whose arm I might have broken clean in two slumped against the bar. He was bald, had a snake tattoo around that pale dome of his, and looked just as wiry as the thing. “You ain’t gonna do us in?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Don’t really have the time, or care that much to dirty my suit.”
“I thought…” Another man, this one partially face-down on the floor, groaned and looked up at me. “I thought the Golden Girl killed criminals. What the fuck… What happened to you?”
“You’re a thug, why the hell do you care?”
The man with the head tattoos chuckled, then winced audibly as he clutched his arm. “Shit, ain’t this our lucky day, boys. Here I was thinking you’d shower us in blood and guts, Olympia.”
“Mikey’s got his ribs stickin’ out of his back, Jahn,” one man said.
“Fucker owed me five bucks, too,” Tattoos (Jahn) muttered. “Lucky prick.”
I turned back around and started up the stairs again, not really wanting to listen to these guys mutter and grumble and wake up from their enforced naps. I knew from the previous bar that it was kind of a thing for some of these guys to see how long they could last (if they ever survived to tell the tale) against me, if at all. It was like a rite of passage for some of these lower-level street gangs, some kind of initiation, too, if you really were that crazy on trying your luck. I, for one, would have gushed over feeling good about myself months ago. Criminals lining up just to see if they could last against me, someone who could turn them into a burst of red before they could even finish their sentences. But I couldn’t find it in myself to give a shit. Ryan Kennedy knew about Lower Olympus, maybe just as much as Lucas did, maybe more, from what Johnson and Harvey had told me before I started digging through the bars. He would know a thing or two about Kaiju, and that was leagues more important to me than sitting around chatting to some bleeding thugs.
At least, I hoped he did. The SDU were currently going through a difficult time right now, and hell, until they found out if any of the little vigilantes they had on their not-payroll had been influenced by Lucas or not, I would be keeping an arm’s length away from them for the time being.
So I was on my own, and the night wasn’t getting any younger, and more people would just keep dying. Damned city’s bigger than I thought. I had almost reached the top when I heard the bottom stair creak. I turned around, and Jahn was leaning on the wall, panting and sweaty and pale.
“What do you want?” I asked. “‘Cause I’m not wasting more time down here.”
“I know what you need, hero,” he said, smiling. His teeth were stained by cigarettes and chewed down by poor dental hygiene. I could smell his hot, vile breath from here. “The Hitman.”
“I need Ryan Kennedy, a private investigator. You’re telling me nobody knows this guy?”
Another step upward, shaky, but he still made it without collapsing. “Exactly my point, that’s his name around these parts. Ryan ‘The Hitman’ Kennedy. He’s a bounty hunter, kid.”
I guess if his job is to investigate criminals, of course he’ll seem like that to you.
I hovered down toward him and said, “So where can I find him?” I put my hand up before he could speak. “And if you lie to me, you’re gonna miss just having one broken arm, Jahn.”
“Of course I know where he is,” he said, those vile little nub-like teeth still on full display. Jahn lifted his chin and looked me straight in the eyes. “But first, you gotta do something for me—”
“Let me stop you there before I put your skull through the bannister,” I said. “We’re not doing that. You either tell me where he is, or I hurt you, and then you tell me where he is. ‘kay?”
He’d tensed up, but his friends slowly picking themselves up off the floor were watching, and with a quick glance over his shoulder, he knew that. Great, he wants to act tough. I put my hand on his shoulder and helped him make the decision of what was more important to him: being alive to tell everyone he faced off with me, or being known as the guy with brain damage and pieces of his skull stuck somewhere deep in his head. He stalled, tried to find his words, and would have stepped away from me if my hand wasn’t so close to his throat. I pressed my fingers into his arm, and he winced—so I did it more, and he swore and begged, and Gods, the looks on all their faces as they shook their heads behind him and waved the guy off. I let him go, and Jahn fell.
On his knees and cradling his shoulder, Jahn muttered, “He’s got an office above a music store two blocks from here. He ain’t always in, but he’s got an assistant who always keeps note.”
I smiled and crouched to pat his good shoulder. “There we go. You did a good thing today, Jahn, and you might just have saved the city. Next time, don’t be so difficult, for your own sake.”
But when I stood to leave, he whispered, “You shoulda just killed me, you know.”
“Why bother?” I asked. “I can’t get that information when you’re dead.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Jahn looked up at me, the fading light going up the stairwell painting his face in strokes of black. “People are gonna know I ain’t trustworthy. I’ll talk easy.”
“It was either that or get killed. I’m sure whoever wants to hire you would understand.”
“With normal Supes, sure. But you…there’s a code, you know, about dealing with you, and if anyone spills their guts to you, then we’re fucked. That’s why none of us ever talk to you, kid.”
Now that made a lot more sense. Sure, most times I was looking for a fight, but with a few thugs, I only ever wanted information out of them and nothing else. And in some cruel twist of irony, they almost worked like the police, these guys, with their code of conduct in giving me the silent treatment and treating me like a hostile. Looking over Jahn’s shoulder and at everyone else in the room, now entirely silent, I figured that it was almost a death warrant for all of them, as well as all the people I’d left alive. Some of their bosses weren’t all too smart, and killing a guy because they thought I had gotten information out of them was something they would be happy to do.
I almost couldn’t give a damn, considering they were criminals. Some of them murderers, but most of them were thugs for hire, like freelancing, gun-shooting idiots looking for quick cash.
Because, and here’s some news, a supervillain would rarely ever hire Normals. Why bother with some flesh bag when you could get a flesh bag that could lift a hundred tonnes with one hand?
Tough break, I guess.
“I-I could work for you,” he said, grabbing my ankle. “I could gather whatever information you need! You just gotta make sure I don’t get capped some day, yeah? Me and the boys, we—”
“Don’t get us wrapped up in this shit, Jahn.”
“You’re on your own, stupid bastard, thinking that way.”
“Please,” he begged, and it was getting pathetic, what with his blood smattered face and the glassy look in his eyes, but I wasn’t going to budge. A man who had driven me to school for the first time here on this planet, roughed my hair and punched my shoulder and told me I’d be a natural had turned out to be nothing but a lie. Why, in the Gods’ names, would I trust a thug?
Maybe it was his groveling, the sniveling, the pleading and the looks in the eyes of the men behind him that asked the question of if I would let him live that was making my blood run hot and my heartbeat that little bit faster. It was vile and it was annoying, and tonight hadn’t been a good night to begin with, and he was getting his fucking saliva and mucus all over my boots, all because his bravado had vanished within a wink of an eye when reality had settled in that fragile little head of his. Does he think that’s who I am, some kind of glorified vigilante who was changing her ways? Bullshit. I should have kicked him back down the stairs and left him dead. I should have told him to stop pissing me off. Instead, I yanked my foot away from him and raised it over his sweaty dome.
Jahn stared up at me, his face covered in the blood dripping off the sole of my boot. The room had fallen silent, and so had the entire world. My heart hammered away in my chest so loudy I couldn’t hear what he was saying, what he was begging for and mumbling about as saliva and drool flew from his mouth and onto the stairs and down his chin. The other criminals watched silently, their faces cast in the same shadow as the man underneath me. Then I smelt the stink of urine mix with the stench of fear, and Gods, what the fuck am I doing? The city was bleeding right now, and here I was getting distracted and wasting time because a part of me didn’t want to find the Kaiju. Yeah, fine, I said it. I could have searched online. Could have asked Johnson and Harvey for directions. Instead, I had searched dozens of bars, dug through cramped apartment after cramped apartment, terrorizing these piss poor pathetic little grunts, all for what? Satisfaction. That's it, Ry? Feel good yet? Couldn’t kill Lucas, but sure, make yourself feel better by crushing a man’s skull.
“Gods, you’re fucking pathetic,” I murmured. Louder, I said, “Stand up.”
Jahn blinked, still staring and still not moving until I barked at him to face me. He shook as he stood, having to grab hold of the wall to make sure he didn’t collapse again. Gods, he stank of piss and alcohol and blood, and that look on his face was what I hated the most: vulnerability.
Like some school yard bully terrorizing smaller kids. Like an admiral punishing a child.
Pick yourself up and square your shoulders and at least pretend you’re sentient enough to be proud of being alive, is what I wanted to say to him. To say so loudly that his ear drums would bleed and it would be damned near the last thing he would ever hear. Half of these freaking humans wouldn’t have made it too far from where I came from—they would have gone on and on about what’s right and what empathy was and my Gods did I hate that a grown man was busy swallowing his own vomit as he tried to hide the growing wet patch around his crotch…but that wasn’t fair on their part either, because most of the people who raised me wouldn’t have fit in here all too well either. The humans would have gotten to them, just like they had with dad, and just like they were with me, however slowly. It was the only thought that stopped me from killing him. It was the only string of words, however loose, that kept me from splashing him down the stairwell right now.
“At least pretend you’ve got a spine,” I said. Jahn straightened and opened his mouth, but I continued. “Now go back down there and clean up the broken glass you littered the floor with, and then you’re gonna mop up the blood and bury your buddies, and then you’ll find something useful to do because so help me Zeus, if I ever catch so much as a whiff of any of you, I’ll make you wish that death was something you’d get to experience one day. Am I clear? And that’s not rhetorical.”
I had expected silence and stubbornness, and that’s what I got—only that most of them, the ones that could stand, struggled onto their feet and began helping their less fortunate friends off the floor. I didn’t let Jahn go anywhere. I made him watch as they slowly—and very grudgingly—all started figuring out what they should do with the most injured of the bunch and the blood all over the floor. When the arguments started, I let them keep talking before at least one of them looked at me, and however angry they were, it didn’t fucking matter, because death wasn’t something they wanted, and so that anger was swallowed, right along with every other word of revolt they had.
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So they worked in muttered silence until the anger faded and the quietness intensified. It became so loud that it was impossible not to think that they were mulling over if this was what their lives amounted to. Cleaning blood off the floor of some dingy basement, without a plan for tomorrow unless some gangster flashed a handful of dull bronze coins and worn notes their way.
I leaned toward Jahn and whispered, “Still feeling like working for me, genius?”
Jahn turned to look at me, his eyes almost glazed over, as if he was in some kind of trance. “I thought, you know, you would kill me. Why would you want me to after nearly killing me?”
I patted his back. He flinched. “Because you’ve got an arm and two legs, and that’s good enough to be useful. If you want to work for me, find something better to do with your life, because you’re not worth the clothes on your back right now, and that’s a shame, because you probably wouldn’t be worth the money I would have to spend on dry cleaning my suit either. If you want to be useful, Jahn—don’t be fucking pathetic. Now go down there and help them clean, because you’re no better than them or worse than them. You suck just as much. If you don’t want to be lobbed in with the rest of them, then it’s as simple as just being better than your rock-bottom self.”
“I…” He swallowed again and shook his head slowly. “I’ve been doin’ this so long that—”
“I don’t give a shit about your backstory. Go and be useful. I have other things to do.”
Jahn peeled his eyes off his feet and stared at me. “This is almost worse than being killed.”
“No, Jahn, it’s not, because being killed means…that’s it. No more do-overs. No more shots. What you did when you were alive is how you’ll be remembered when you’re gone, and what you’re getting is one more chance.” I could still feel the anger in my gut, the warmth in my blood and the itch to do something terrible down here, but I swallowed those emotions, and told myself that I had much better things to do tonight. Much better. “Don’t fuck it up, or I’ll kill you.”
It was just plain common sense: nobody ever wants to die, no matter what they said or how they acted, especially in this business and the machismo of every single superhuman you come across, because when death comes knocking, it comes with a purpose and a plan and cold hands.
Jahn—and everyone else—was just lucky that mine tended to get a little warm sometimes.
I turned around before I could see something snap behind those eyes of his. Something deep down in his psyche that spat tears into them when he realized I wasn’t bluffing about keeping him alive just this once. I didn’t care. I did not care about the hope in him. I walked up the stairs and through the tiny Thai restaurant, leaving behind a trail of blood until it all came off on the floor, leaving faint prints and bloody freckles. I passed the old man clutching onto a mop and left the store, but not without doing him a favor by flipping the open sign hanging on the door to closed.
I couldn’t tell you why exactly I left them alive even if I thought about it. It was something that bugged me, something that gnawed at my psyche the longer I was forced to wait in this dingy little office. A few months ago, that entire basement would be flooded with dead bodies. And yet my hands were the driest they’d been for as long as I could remember in this suit so late at night. I sat there on those rickety plastic seats, my foot bouncing and chewing my thumbnail, staring off into space as I wondered why I had left them there to lick their wounds and gather themselves up again.
I had briefly thought about going back and finishing the job, but I hadn’t moved. Why bother going back there, the message was clear: you beat them, Rylee. Congratulations. Did you think a couple of humans would actually give you some kind of challenge? A reward? Was that what I was feeling right now, pity for a couple of bad apples? Since when did I ever feel this way about criminals? But, on the other hand, how much time did I need to waste feeling good about myself because I could knock someone’s head clean off their shoulders when people were still dying a few blocks away. Even now, here in this hallway, I could smell it—that Kaiju and its rot and its stench of innards and tentacles. It was like some kind of nightmare, something that wouldn’t let me forget that it would have killed me if Lucas hadn’t been there to save my life and pull me out.
Maybe that's why I didn’t bother with those criminals. They couldn’t kill me even if they banded together and tried their best. It would be ten minutes for me if I took my sweet time with it.
That thing, that man, however, could kill me.
Except Lucas had saved me, and being saved by a man who’d spun me around and told me to do whatever it is that he wanted without me even realizing it stuck with me. A dog on a leash.
I would have to kill that thing on my own eventually, maybe soon.
And nobody would be there to save me if I failed this time, because if I won, he would be dead at my feet, and his blood would be on my hands—and then it would be the Kaiju, and dead men can’t save me from what might just be certain death. I told myself that Lucas would be gone if I saw him right this second, but if I saw the Kaiju right now, I didn’t exactly know what I would do.
This is how he gets to you, Ry. He makes you need him. And you don’t need him.
You do not need anyone saving you.
I was Zeus’ daughter, and a human who wanted me dead had saved my life before I could die in that hellish basement. That was the thing about this business: you never knew when was when. The final time you might ever see the sun, the stars, or even your own bed. You left home one day and your body would never be found. People would remember you for a while, but hey, you died like the rest of them, so you weren’t so special after all. Burn her flags and spread her ashes and update her hero page as deceased, because the Golden Girl is dead, gone, lost to time and fucking memory, and nobody even knows where her body was buried either. I had come very close to death this summer. So close, in fact, that I’d had to sell my own soul to tell her to come back later with a better offer for my life on this planet. But realizing it now, without Lucas there…
“Olympia?” the woman in the corner said. I perked up. “Mr. Kennedy will see you now.”
I stood and said my thanks. Get your head in the game. It was only by the universe’s graces that I had actually found Ryan in his office. He’d made me wait as he finished with some other client, who I was partly sure was a new up-and-coming vigilante who had some kind of revenge thing going on with his dead girlfriend. Usually, I would have argued my case and said I was more important, but hell, the kid was younger than I was, so I let him finish bartering for the information he needed so badly. Even now, there were a couple of other people in the hallway waiting for Ryan so they could also get something out of him. I had to admit, it felt weird listening to people’s stories as I had waited, about how they all wanted different things, different crime bosses, and what they would do to make them pay for whatever it is that they had done to them. Some were teenagers, most were around my age. Very few were older, somewhere in their forties. The one that stuck out to me the most was a woman in a red summer dress wearing leather gloves and red sunglasses.
When I had asked what her deal was, she had only said, “Murder, my dear.”
All whilst the city itself could be submerged with death in just a few days, maybe even hours if I didn’t find the Kaiju, life was still going on outside the claustrophobic little sphere that always surrounded me. I never took the underground train, and I rarely ever took the bus either. Normal conversations with normal people were things I hadn’t done in almost two years by now, and having to awkwardly hand an angry (and very vengeful) fourteen-year old a box of tissues as she broke down explaining what some villain called Meltdown had done to her mother was like trying to learn how to speak another language again. The weirdest part about this? They didn’t need my help. They only told me their problems because, well, I was the person with the golden eyes.
All they really wanted was someone to listen to their problems that wasn’t a teacher or a depressed single parent or several friends who didn’t know what they were doing throughout the night. The only solace I could give them was that, if they needed me, all they had to do was ask.
Saving the city might be one thing, and getting my statue another.
But bashing heads in for the cathartic sake of it all was dearly missed.
The guy before me shut the office door behind him, leaving me sitting in a well-worn padded chair on the other side of a rickety desk. Ryan’s office was little more than a glorified room, with barely a window looking into an alleyway, and all illuminated by a single lamp on his table. He was busy filing through a cabinet on the wall, several of them spanning across the entire space. On the opposite wall, a map of the entire city was tagged with red pins, some connected with red string, others with black thread, and more often than not, golden lines interconnected most. To my surprise, Ryan himself was a lot slimmer, more muscular, and with a lot more hair on his head than I had been expecting. It was messy and black, tousled by sleepless nights and greasy from several showerless power naps. With his eyes ringed by the kind of exhaustion that wasn’t going to be dealt with through one good night of sleep, the guy looked like a walking corpse. As he sat, he poured most of an energy drink into a cup that already had coffee in it, and downed it before he spoke.
But not before a quick light of a cigarette and a shot of something dark brown.
“Sue tells me you’ve got a Kaiju problem,” he said to me, tossing the plastic cup into the overflowing trash can beside his desk. “What kind of Kaiju, for how long, and how bad is it, kid?”
“I think the entire city has a Kaiju problem, and it’s bad enough for a partial lockdown.”
He nodded, his intense brown eyes staring deep into my soul right now. They seemed to flit over my face and body, then fuzz for just a few moments before focusing again. “And what’s your connection to this Kaiju? Have you had problems in the past? Who attacked who first, I wonder?”
“Technically, she attacked me first, but I don’t really consider that the first attack. But then things got a little messy, and then they all attacked me, which nearly killed me a few weeks ago.”
Ryan hummed in thought a little, then said, “You’re Olympia.”
I nodded, wondering if this guy’s rapidly beating heart was going to suddenly stop or pop in the next few seconds. Did he finally figure out who was sitting across from him just now?
“And I’m guessing if you can’t defeat that Kaiju, nobody else will be able to.”
I shifted in the seat, getting a little uncomfortable. “I guess so, yeah.”
“Yeah, that’s certainly a problem,” he muttered. Ryan leaned back on the stool he had probably stolen from somewhere, folding his arms across his chest as he worked the cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the next, spewing smoke from the tiny stub. “Spoken to the Society?”
“That’s kinda why I’m here right now. I need to know where they’re currently hiding.”
“I’m honored that you came here to ask for that kind of information,” he said, and he might have been playing it cool, but the pride was clear in his voice. “Unfortunately, I don’t really know.”
Great. Thank you, Universe, for making me think I’d gotten a lucky break.
Just as I had stood to leave, however, Ryan said, “But I know someone who might.”
I was getting tired of going on these fetch quests, but here goes. “Name?”
“Are you good at keeping secrets?”
I spread my arms. “Do you even know what my real name is?”
Ryan shrugged. “Supes with good ears out there. Wouldn’t want to do that to you.”
I blinked, taken just a little aback. “Hold on a minute, you know who—”
He slapped down a sticky note that he’d gotten from…somewhere, and scribbled a name on it, an address (or was it some kind of symbol?), and slipped it across the desk before he got out the mystery bottle and drank from it again quickly. I wanted to ask my question, wanted to know if some guy working above an ancient music store and out of an office smelling of sweat, socks, and noodles knew who I really was, but he tapped the sticky note again and cleared his throat harshly when the foul brown liquid burnt his throat. Another dose of coffee and he was good to go again.
I grudgingly glanced down at the piece of paper, and couldn’t believe my fucking luck.
Caitlyn Rivera. Ava’s older sister, and apparently not as dead as the rumors say, was the woman I had to go and see to save the city. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself as I leaned against his desk. I pinched the bridge of my nose and wondered if the universe secretly had it out for me for something I didn’t even know I had done. As far as I knew, Ava was the last one still running around with her father’s name trailing behind her own. Now Ryan was telling me that this girl, this person that was the oldest sibling, was meant to help me? Me, the superhero, and her, the supposed supervillain, even though she was meant to be six feet deep in some unmarked grave according to the forums you subscribed to and the Lower Olympus gossip practically everyone else listened to.
I had to admit that I was forced to do my own digging ever since Ava told me that she was the one in charge. Something didn’t sit right with me, because why would Lucian leave his empire in the hands of the child that was never exposed that much to the public eye? Why the youngest?
I’d thought that it was because Ava was smart enough to take the reins when daddy wasn’t there to tell her no. Without that much of a public face, then she would be perfect for keeping the business working under wraps. Then she had done such a terrible job of it all that I couldn’t help but wonder what had actually happened for Ava, of all of the siblings, to end up in the red seat.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I muttered. “Her? The Devi’s First Daughter?”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “She shouldn’t ask for anything in return, but don’t tell her that Ryan sent you, because I don’t want my throat slit. I prefer to have my blood inside my body, thank you.”
“She’s supposed to be dead.”
“Can you speak to spirits?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then why would I give you a dead woman’s name?”
I pushed a hand through my hair and sighed toward the ceiling. “Why always a Rivera?”
He tilted his head at me. “Seems like you’ve had a hard time with ‘em too.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me, Goldie. I’ve lived a million lives, some a lot worse than this.”
“For starters, they’re a pain in the ass when it comes to getting things done.”
He shrugged and drank the rest of the energy drink, dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, then stashed the empty can inside one of his many desk drawers. “Good for lonely nights when the old bed gets cold and the heater doesn’t seem to be working like it used to. Horrible for anything that involves you wanting to get to where you want to be in life without having to do something so heinous until you one day slip the happy end of a gun into your mouth, or a crime so scandalous it should, by all technicalities, land you in San Quentin forever. Which one did you get the lovely chance of meeting? Not Lucian or Caldur, they’re both still missing. Must be the girl.”
“Yeah, Ava,” I said. “She’s a piece of work, but a stupid one at that. The Triad died under her watch, and you know what? I’m kind of glad it’s a fire that burned itself out before I had to deal with it. Don’t know where she is right now, though, and that’s worse than knowing where, right?”
Ryan nodded a little. “Surprised she won in a fight against you.”
I laughed. “Won? I pulled her apart the first time we met.”
“And she lived long enough to be a pain in the ass for you?”
“Supervillains are like roaches. She just turned out to be a better cockroach.”
“So that’s who he gave the book to,” Ryan mumbled, then made another note that he quickly put inside his shirt pocket. He looked up at me and stuck out his hand. “You’ve been very interesting, but I have eighteen more clients due for the next few hours before I close shop, so please stop by some other time and we can have something more substantial to talk about. Also, please do save the city. If you do, there will be more heroes for me to work with, and that means I can afford to keep myself fed and warm at night, too. But if you don’t…Sue will send you the invoice. I hope to be seeing you more, Olympia. Now, if you step through that door, you’ll be taken to where it is that you need to go. Good luck, and I wish you a lovely evening of monster slaying.”
It dawned on me as I opened the door why Ryan had probably been let go from the force. First of all, the doorway had led me directly into a dingy and very old subway station, and secondly, the guy had probably slept with Lucian’s daughter—probably not even for information, but just for the thrill of having done the deed with a villain. Not to mention he was a Supe, and those were never welcome on the police force (legally, at least). He was probably something like Bianca, a very low-tier superhuman whose abilities were just about able to discern certain situations. He was probably able to see my pupils dilate or the sweat on my brow, hear my heart and see me tense.
A slightly better human with a faster brain and faster metabolism, but the kind of powers you couldn’t really train or switch off, because they were more a part of you than an extension. You could almost call it a mutation. Summon a ball of fire, sure, but you can’t tell your brain to shrink or your more than sensitive ears and eyes to relax for a second as you catch your breath.
I wondered if Bianca would eventually be able to do the same, because that was the first time I had ever met someone with that kind of focus with those same abilities that wasn’t, well, entirely crazy or more content with being alone in a dark cell. But if the price she had to pay was never sleeping and keeping herself locked in a dark room with low lighting because her mind couldn’t process things any brighter or louder than what he was used to, then I kind of selfishly didn’t want her becoming anything like him. The further from this world I lived in, the better, because I now had to contend with another one of Lucian’s daughters after the last time had been just so spectacular, and Gods forbid she ever had to meet any of them. The universe had given me a lead and had led me back into the dark. I just had to hope that it wouldn’t do the same for her.
I knew Ben’s death still haunted her and kept her awake, but I didn’t need her meeting the people I had met to try to piece together what happened to him. Bianca didn’t deserve that pain.
Lucas, however, did.
Later, I thought grudgingly. The other monster for now.
As I walked onto the weak concrete, I didn’t bother questioning where the doorway had vanished to on the grimy bricks. I glanced around the empty platform, the only one standing here under a flickering fluorescent set of lights hanging from the ceiling. Must be one of the older stations. One of the many that had been blocked with so much rubble and debris after dad’s fight that the city could only afford to close it off to the general public. Nobody had been down here in ten years. The graffiti was old and the posters advertised movies that had long since been turned into discount CDs in every corner store. It was like walking through a time capsule, except the shadows of the tunnel were so dark that my eyes couldn’t see through them, and the silence was goading me into thinking that something was watching me. The scars from that fight were still all over the place, from the cracked stone above me, to the foundation of the twisted train tracks.
Dad’s fight had hurt New Olympus, but the city had just kept growing, and those scars had been buried deep under the asphalt and lost to memory. The smashed boarding schedules and the shoes left scattered across the ground. A dusty little teddy bear and a scarf underneath a chunk of stone. Phones and magazines, ghosts and whispers. I raised my hand and made electricity crackle around my fingers, something I couldn’t do to this effect a few weeks ago. It brightened the dark that little bit more, which was good, because Ryan had drawn a symbol on the sticky note too. A symbol I was meant to find somewhere in this sprawling, interconnected labyrinth of a train tunnel.
So into the darkness I went, searching for a dead supervillain.