I was sorely tempted to jump out the door as Melanie quickly turned our car into the Bayside’s parking garage, but I knew she’d rip me a new one if I did. Fortunately for my waning patience, we found an empty spot within a minute of ascending the levels, and the tires squealed in complaint as Melanie made a sharp turn into it. I was out the door in a flash, my power the only reason the door I flung open didn’t smash into the car next to us, and I had already made it to the elevator before Melanie and Spitfire had even made it halfway.
“Huh-ree up! L-et-s go!” I forced myself to sound out, as I jabbed the elevator button repeatedly. The sound grated on my ears, even after days of practicing, but as much as I hated it, my hate of Victor and the thought of letting him win was greater.
“She’s stable,” Melanie reminded me, her words gentler than normal.
My teeth ground together unconsciously, and I settled for remaining silent instead of replying. It took more restraint than I dared admit to not rip the elevators open faster when it finally arrived and the doors slowly crept open, likely worn down from a lifetime of bare minimum repairs. The trip down to the ground floor dragged on just as much, and unwilling to wait for the doors to open entirely, I slipped through sideways when they began to crack apart.
My eyes immediately landed on the entrance to the emergency room a small distance away, and for a brief moment, I was brought up short by memories of my disastrous last visit here. My ravaged arm. The confrontation with the PRT. Amy changing my biology. Aisha…
I swallowed thickly, the urge to let the fugue take over suddenly overwhelming.
A hand landed on my shoulder, and my body felt distant as I turned to look. Melanie gently squeezed. “We’re here with you.”
“Of cuh-or-ss you are,” I mumbled, poking first her belly then my own in a daze. “Ruh-eye-t there. Ruh-eye-t here.”
Her hand ghosted towards where I kept my coin then paused before diverting to take her hand in mine. “We’ll wait until we’re inside.”
Melanie led me inside, and fire girl trailed behind us quietly. It was much warmer inside, but everyone around us looked very unhappy about it. Why were they so sad about the cold going away? Did they like it?
“Who lie-kuh-s coal-duh?” I pondered while Melanie talked to the lady in a patterned outfit behind a desk. I gasped as it all suddenly made sense. “S-no-men! And weh-men too…”
Fire girl coughed then mumbled, “Maybe just ‘snowpeople?’”
I opened my talker to tell fire girl to close hers but paused. “S-no puh-ee-puh-l…?” I nodded to myself. It did sound fitting. I silently gave fire girl her second Meteor point.
“Snow puh-ee-puh-l,” I repeated, pushing myself to do better with the words. I wanted to talk better, and that meant practice, practice, practice. “Snow puh-ee-pull. Snow pee-pull.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s a limit of two visitors at a time,” the patterned desk lady said.
“Not sorry,” I blurted, drawing both her attention and Melanie’s to me. “You said sorry but not.”
Desk lady’s face got all upset and open for talking, but Melanie spoke first. “Sweetie, mom needs to talk to the nice lady alone, okay? Can you be a big girl and be patient like your sister?”
Melanie’s eyes flicked to fire girl, and I got con-fuzzed because fire girl wasn’t my sister, and Melanie wasn’t—
Oooooh. We were not-truthing! Like desk lady, but better! I grabbed fire girl’s hand, and her eyebrow did a funny jump dance. “Okay! Sis, I huuunger.”
Fire girl got another Meteor point when she immediately looked to Melanie and said, “I’ll get her a snack.”
Melanie pulled her wallet from the pocket of her dark slacks and handed fire girl a few bills. “Get something for you too while I take care of this, okay?”
“I don’t want to leave either of them alone in the waiting room,” I heard Melanie begin to say as fire girl led me down the hall towards the snack machines.
“You ha-vuh thuh-ree Meteor puh-oi-tuh-s.” I frowned. That last one was tougher and didn’t sound right.
“Three what now?”
My eyes widened when I saw the snack machine. They had Rice Krispies Treats! I thrust my finger at them, my hand vibrating with excitement. “That! Wanna!”
A small huff escaped fire girl, but she slipped a dollar bill into the machine and dutifully pressed the button combination to signal which snack to drop. The coil twisted, but my delicious treat got caught and didn’t fall. Without missing a beat, fire girl tried to shake the machine to get it to drop.
When it still didn’t drop, she said, “Hang on, I can buy another and get it to drop,” as she moved to insert another bill.
After a brief moment of confusion where I realized I was still holding fire girl’s hand, I let it go to reach forward and snatch the bill before she could put it in. She shot me a confused look, but I just hummed while quickly checking if anybody was looking. No one was, so I made the metal vibrate until my treat dropped.
“That works too,” fire girl said, a hint of a smile on her face. “You want a coke to drink, right?”
I tilted my head, staring at her curiously. Had she been paying attention to my tastes? “Please.”
She set about getting a bottled coke, which went much smoother this time. She handed them over, and as she turned back to the machine to get something for herself, I spoke up. “Four Meteor pu-oi-en-tuh-s.” Accurate that time, but I repeated anyway, forcing out, “Poi-en-tss.”
“What’s a Meteor point?” she asked as she reached into the slot to retrieve the doritos that had dropped down.
“Poi-en-tss for be-ing good,” I explained. Obvious, really. Silly fire girl. “Get more, and I wuh-ill lie-kuh you more.”
“I see.” She hooked her drink laden hand around my own equally tied up hand, and she started us back towards Melanie. “So if I’m good to you, I get Meteor points. The more points I have, they more you’ll like me. Am I understanding right?”
“Mhm,” I agreed. “More poi-en-tss, bet-ter sis-ter!”
Whatever fire girl had to say to that I wasn’t sure, since Melanie beckoned us over and desk lady stood. “We can go back now. Come along.”
Desk lady led us through the back hallways of the ER, and we passed a lot of people in outfits like desk lady’s and lots of medical equipment. Melanie was right—Elle definitely wouldn’t have liked it here. Before long, desk lady stopped in front of a room with a clear glass door and surrounding wall and a drawn curtain behind them.
She rapped her knuckles on the door, and slid it open while saying, “Visitors for you, Masuyo.”
I stepped past her and through the curtain, leaving her sputtering in my wake, and I gasped at the sight of bandages wrapped around her. “Masuyo!”
“Hey,” my cousin weakly replied as I rushed forward to her side and Melanie and fire girl stepped in behind me. “How’re you doing?”
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I whined as I looked her over, words failing me. Her neck was wrapped in bandages that extended up partially over her cheek and crept down under her hospital gown, and a bag of clear liquid was dripping into a hose that ran into her arm. “Who?”
Masuyo grimaced and looked away. “I asked first?” she hesitantly replied.
“Tuh-ell me,” I demanded, feeling strange. I was tense all over, and my head felt light. “Tuh-ell me now.”
“Masuyo, I can have them leave if you want?” desk lady said from the door, poking her head in with a vaguely constipated look. I abruptly recognized her from our last visit here, as my thoughts began to feel less ephemeral, even as they rushed through my head. I had to quell the sudden urge to slam the door by manipulating its track. “They older lady insisted you’d want to see them.”
“I’m fine, Nancy. Honestly,” Masuyo firmly answered. She shifted to the side a bit, and her grimace grew worse. “I called them because I didn’t want them to worry.”
That was apparently not the answer the lady wanted. “But you never had a moment to call me,” she said, her words bitter. “I guess my worries don’t matter.”
“Wait, I didn’t mean—” Masuyo called out to Nancy, but her head had already retreated through the curtain. “Shit… I really screwed that up.”
“Your coin,” Melanie ordered as she slid the door shut and pulled a small device from her pocket, setting it on the counter with the sink, where it popped open to reveal a bright, glowing red light.
I tucked my snack in my pocket and pulled my yen out in its place, beginning to roll it over my knuckles. What haze still lingered over me retreated as my thoughts slowed down to a more manageable pace.
“Here,” I remarked, letting her know I was focused.
Melanie stepped up to Masuyo’s side, and after a moment’s hesitation, Spitfire sidled up next to me. I blinked in confusion, but let it go as Melanie quietly asked, “Keeping our location in mind, what can you tell us about what happened?”
“Who?” I softly demanded, the hand my coin was dancing over flexing with tension. “Tuh-ell us who.”
Masuyo sighed, a deep, heavy thing that didn’t seem to relieve her stress so much as add to it. “Sabah.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Suh-ba…?”
“We… we made plans to meet up at a café on the Boardwalk. I wanted to see her while we were in town, you know? I miss… missed her.” Her fists clenched, bunching up some of the blanket covering her legs. “We got into an argument about what we do and why I do it. She wanted the truth, and she… well, she didn’t like it. Bought a fresh coffee and threw it at me.”
“The… truth?” Spitfire tentatively asked.
She turned her attention fully to me, an intense expression on her face that made me uneasy. “You didn’t want to know, but you should know. You need to know.”
Didn’t want to know? “What are you tuh-all-key-ng a-buh-out?”
“Your father. You said you didn’t want to know who he was, but he—”
“Masuyo, this can wait until we get you out of here,” Melanie firmly interjected, her tone hushed but her objection still clear.
Masuyo grit her teeth, a low moan coming out of her before she quietly blurted, “The Butcher. Your father was the seventh Butcher.”
My heart stopped, the coke and coin falling from my hands to the floor with a dull thud and a clink. Spitfire gasped, but I couldn’t turn to see hers or Melanie’s expressions. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. “What.”
Masuyo moved to open her mouth, but Melanie cut in. “No, stop. Say nothing else on that topic. We will discuss this when we leave. When did the staff say you would be discharged?”
Masuyo responded to her, but I was falling into my thoughts, unable to process what was being said as my thoughts were set awhirl again. The Butcher… was my father? This was a cruel joke… It had to be. Actually, it was one no matter how you looked at it. Either she was lying for who knows what reason, or else the guy who’d fucked my mom was once the quasi-immortal leader of the Teeth, a band of psychopaths whose idea of fun is murder and torture for fun.
The Butcher wasn’t just dangerous—they were Dangerous with a capital ‘D.’ Their power set was bad enough, but far, far worse was the risk of madness. Anyone who killed the Butcher would be infected with all the previous Butchers powers but also all their voices. An unsilenceable cacophony of people shouting in your head would drive anyone to insanity, as the third ‘Butcher’ had proved when he ended up doing a suicide run on the Teeth, resulting in Rotlimb becoming the fourth Butcher.
I stood there, lost in my thoughts, until someone eventually laid a hand on my shoulder, causing me to instinctively flinch away from the touch.
“Sorry,” I mumbled when I noticed it was Melanie.
“It’s okay,” she replied. Sympathetic without being overbearing. I was grateful as ever she was at the wheel. She held out her hand, my coin resting on her palm. “We’re ready to go.”
Spitfire stood nearby with a troubled expression and her hands laden with my coke and her own drink. Masuyo was sitting in a hospital provided wheelchair in the change of clothes we had brought with us, and she appeared to be equally troubled, but where Spitfire’s eyes were on the floor, hers were on me.
I placed my coin in my pocket and moved to Masuyo’s wheelchair and silently began steering her towards the exit, using my power to make the task trivial. The desk lady—Nancy—wasn’t at the desk when we passed through the waiting room, which was probably for the best. The tension between the four of us was thick enough it could be cut. The last thing we needed was to add more on top of that.
“I’ll bring the car down,” Melanie told us when we slipped out the doors. “Wait here.”
She headed off towards the parking garage, leaving me alone with Masuyo, Spitfire, and an awkward, impenetrable silence. None of us said a word for a solid thirty seconds, only the noise of the city and the hospital behind us filling the void. Without the wheelchair or my coin occupying me, I could feel myself beginning to slip, and a second later, I found a coke bottle in my face.
I blinked at it in confusion for a moment before looking to the Latina holding it.
“What? You look like you could use a drink,” she awkwardly mumbled, her eyes fixed on the ground.
“What is happening back there?” Masuyo asked, a hint of worry in her voice. “Are you offering her alcohol?”
“Uh, no?” Spitfire remarked with a raised eyebrow. “There’s nothing wrong with— You know what? Never mind. It’s just her coke. I, uh… One set of foster parents from a while back were crazy conservative—like, the church they went to was basically a cult. Fucking hated them, and they were addicted to coke, so whenever they drank some, I joked I had driven them to drinking.”
She paused, her lips twisting into a smirk. “They hated it.”
I accepted the coke, twisted off the top, and took a few sips as I lost myself in the fugue.
Everyone was quiet for another minute, but when Melanie emerged from the garage, Masuyo abruptly said, “All my fosters were awful too. Sorry you had to go through that.”
“Assholes will be assholes,” she replied as Melanie pulled up. “At least now I can set them on fire by spitting on them.”
Masuyo sputtered, and I giggled. “Druh-nk the hah-erd stuh-ff. They get ‘H,’ ‘E,’ duh-bull hah-kee-stuh-ick-s!”
If Melanie was confused by my mad giggling and Spitfire’s satisfied grin, then she didn’t show it as she climbed out and helped the exasperated Masuyo into the vehicle.
Five Meteor points.
----------------------------------------
“Wait, are you being serious?” Newter blurted, his tail flicking back in forth in agitation as Masuyo repeated the revelation from the hospital. “Meteor’s dad was a Butcher. You do mean the cape Butcher, right? Not some dude at a deli?”
“The seventh,” she quietly confirmed, her fists clenched on the table. Even with the tense topic, she looked more relieved than she had at the hospital. The bastards had sent her home with a script for fucking Tylenol of all things, but thankfully we had better stocked here at Palanquin.
“What does this mean for Meteor?” Elle asked from her seat next to me, obviously worried. “Will the Teeth come looking for her?”
I squeezed her hand under the table as I scowled at the coin I had set to spinning on the table. She squeezed back, shooting me a look I couldn’t make out in the corner of my eye.
“They shouldn’t, but shouldn’t isn’t the same as won’t. Meteor’s mom, she went to the PRT, and they put you both in witness protection.”
“Witness protection?” Gregor said, his expression pinching a bit as he looked to Masuyo in the seat next to him. “Then her identity…”
The coin wobbled for a second before continuing to spin. My eyes shot up to Masuyo, and she grimaced. “Is a lie they made up.”
“So, what is her name?” I glared at Newter, and he quickly backtracked. “Whoa, hang on, not your first name or whatever! You’re—” His eyes flicked to Spitfire, who still wasn’t in the know. “—still you. It’s all good. I was just curious, that’s all!”
“Not your puh-la-ay-ss,” I told him, continuing to give him a baleful look. Masuyo grit her teeth and looked to me. Keeping this secret has obviously been eating away at her… “Tuh-ell me lay-tuh-er.”
She visibly relaxed, nodding in acknowledgment. Nobody had anything else to say about that, clearly lost in their own thoughts and after a bit, Melanie interrupted the silence.
“This has obviously been a tumultuous day, but unfortunately, we have more to discuss. We have a job.”
All of us except Masuyo sat up straighter at that. Spitfire fidgeted in the corner of my eye, but I kept my focus on Melanie.
“Our client is Frederick Mullins, who, for those of you who are unaware, is the mayor of New York. We’ve been contracted to discreetly recover sensitive documentation that was stolen from his office sometime between yesterday evening and this morning. Failing to recover the documents is a failure, as is any confrontation that can be linked back to the office of the mayor.
“Fortunately for us, we have a lead: A ransom note was left in place of the documents that leaves instructions for a considerable payoff to a gang known as the Blinds. This could mean the Blinds the culprits, but it could also mean the true culprit want to frame the Blinds or something else altogether. To that end, we have four objectives: Establish an alibi for why we are in the city. Determine whether the Blinds have the documents and, if not, who does. Retrieve the documents without alerting the thief, or failing that, retrieve them by force. And finally, arrange an exchange of the documents.”
“Time is of the essence, so we will leave for New York tonight and brief along the way.” She looked at each of us, her expression intense as it always was before a job. When her eyes landed on Masuyo, she added, “With your injuries, you’ll need to stay here in the Bay and recover.”
“But—”
Melanie smoothly interrupted, speaking over her. “With the sudden nature of this job, we’re working with less information than I’m comfortable with. We’ll be depending on your assistance from here. Is that understood?”
Masuyo’s lips pressed together in a thin line, her eyes quickly flicking to me before returning to Melanie. “I… understand.”
Melanie’s gaze moved to Spitfire. “This isn’t how I intended matters to play out, but I must unfortunately ask for a decision. Will you be joining us, or will you sit this job out? Payment would be as you and I discussed previously, and I’m willing to raise your signing bonus as an apology for the necessary abruptness.”
Spitfire looked down, fiddling with her hands. “A month ago, I was worrying about what college I’d be going to in the Fall. This… isn’t where I expected to be, y’know?”
“I understand. We can help you get back on your feet somewhere else. I’ll need to ask you to be patient until we return, as my attention will be elsewhere.”
“Hang on, hang on,” she said, waving her hands in a frantic ‘stop’ motion. “I’m doing a bad job of this, sorry! I’m— what I’m trying to say is my life’s fallen apart, and I don’t know where I’d be right now if it wasn’t for you. You’ve all been so good to me this past week.”
My eyes narrowed a bit at that, and I forced the coin to keep spinning at the same speed. She had said ‘all,’ but I’d more than kept her at arm’s length, so that obviously wasn’t true. Was she just sucking up? Was she trying to put me in a position where I had to be nice or risk looking like the bad guy? Something else?
“I have literally no idea what half this cape stuff is about, but if you honestly think I’ll be helpful…” Spitfire said, ignorant of my thoughts.
Melanie gave her a firm nod. “I do.”
Spitfire raised her chin and stuck out her hand. “Emily Torres.”
Melanie took her hand and shook it firmly, nodding. “Melanie Fitts.”
Oh no.
“Newter and Gregor,” Newter continuing the introductions, pointing first to himself then to Gregor with a shit eating grin. “But I imagine you figured that out already.”
I did not like this. Not at all. Something about Spitfire—Emily had gotten under my skin when we met, and while she maybe wasn’t as bad as I’d expected her to be, that didn’t mean I was ready to give up my identity to her!
Elle opened her mouth, but Masuyo, bless her, must have seen something in my expression, since she immediately jumped in with, “I’m Masuyo, but I’m sure you got that at the hospital. And while introductions are good and all, I thought time was of the essence? Does Emily even have a costume ready to go yet? Surely introductions can wait until that’s done and you’re all on the road.”
Melanie’s eyes flicked to mine. “Yes, I’m afraid we do have a lot to do and little time to do it in.” Okay, definitely something in my expression. “Everyone check your mission bags and load the van. Emily, you’re with me for now.”
A stay of execution. Excellent. Now I just needed to sort through why the fuck I was panicking over this and get over it. Totally easy.
I’m so fucking boned.