***DREAM***

“Tom! Cops are here to talk to you!”

Tom sat up out of bed with a sharp intake of breath. Carol was there, as always, peering down at him.

He ignored her, tugging on his pants and shirt before heading for the closet. The aluminum bat from his brief baseball career in middle school was finally going to get some airtime.

“What are you doing?” Carol asked, head tilted.

“This is a dream,” Tom said, sliding his palm along the aluminum. “The cop took Ellie. We’re going to find out where he was planning on going. I know you hate me, but if you could prevent me from getting shot and ending the dream early, that would be great.”

“Deal,” Carol said, her eyes narrowing. She nodded and left the room, heading for the living room ahead of him.

“THOMAS ARRAN GRAVES!”

“Coming!” Tom shouted, hefting the bat.

Okay, we can do this. Let’s see. The dude’s right-handed, so…I should lead with a left swing to cripple the gun-arm.

Tom slammed the door open, his heart pounding in his chest as he charged down the hall. It was only a handful of short steps to the living room, but it felt like he was struggling through a thick syrup of adrenaline, so potent that it actually weakened his muscles.

Tom charged forward with a strangled yell, feeling like his legs were going to give out beneath him. Left swing. Left swing, cripple the right arm.

The cop stared at him with wide eyes, flinching away as Tom brought the aluminum bat down towards his right arm.

The bat hit the side of the chair, cracking the wood under the upholstery and accomplishing nothing. Shit!

“What the—”

“Thomas!”

“Jesus, fuck!” the cop shouted, the most eloquent of the three flabbergasted onlookers.

Tom tried pulling the bat back again, but the cop was already reaching for his gun, and his face was so fucking close to Tom’s. All of Tom’s psyching himself up melted away in front of the evidence his opponent was a living, breathing human. He tried to wind back for another strike, but his muscles were weak and unresponsive.

A lifetime of human nature and conditioning poured down on his head.

The cop’s hand clamped down on his gun and started to pull it from his holster.

Fuck. I’m screwed. A flash of thought about Ellie relit Tom’s fire, and he was able to unfreeze his muscles, starting another swing.

It might not be fast enough, but he’d be damned if he let this asshole get away scot-free.

A skeletal hand clamped down on the cop’s gun-hand long enough for Tom’s bat to hit his arm with a sickening crunch.

“AAAHH!”

Tom felt like throwing up, but he shoved the guilt aside and did the other side.

“Tom what the hell are you doing!?” Grampa demanded.

“This is a dream!” Tom shouted, pointing at Grampa. “This guy did some real bad shit to us, and I need to know where he went.”

“What?”

“He kidnapped Ellie.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Tom said, nodding.

“Oh. Well, then.” Grampa pulled his thirty-eight out of the cabinet and sat back in his recliner, holding the stubby gun on the cop.

“This is ridiculous,” Gramma said, shaking her head. “I know we agreed to let Thomas do whatever he wants in his dreams, but this…” She retreated into the kitchen, shaking her head and cleaning with a frantic rhythm.

“How did you find out about Lily?” Tom asked as Carol disassembled the cop’s gun and tossed it aside.

“Go fuck yourself.”

“One second,” Carol said, glancing out the window at the cop’s partner, who was limbering up a pistol and opening the door.

Carol bounced like a fucking Superball out the window and landed beside the car door, slamming it back shut. Her gnarled knuckles punched through the glass and impacted against the unfortunate partner’s skull.

Whistling, Carol tromped back through the front door, the cop slung like game over a hunter’s shoulders. She dropped the partner unceremoniously onto the floor while tom’s grandparents watched, horrified.

“Go on,” she said, taking apart the man’s gun.

Tom glanced back at the cop and caught him staring at Carol, with a mixture of fear and…envy? That’s weird.

“Hey,” Tom said, nudging the cop’s face with his bat.

“What?” the cop snapped.

“Why are you here?”

“Lily’s grave was—”

“Bullshit!” Tom interrupted. “I think we’re past that point by now. I know what your excuse is. Why the hell do you care?” If Tom could figure out what the cop knew, he might be able to get an idea of why he kidnapped Ellie, which in turn would lead to more questions, such as when and where.

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“In the interest of teaching you proper interrogation procedure,” Carol said, coming to stand behind the broken-limbed cop. “The first thing you do is search your targets,” she said, leaning over the chair and reaching into the cop’s pockets.

“Stop!” he yelped, trying to stop her hands. Carol brushed his broken arms away with dismissive ease.

“You wanna make sure they don’t have any tools to escape with, and you’d be surprised at how often they carry incriminating…evidence.” She pulled out a gold disk with a tiny gold cylinder in the center, and pale streaks of some kind of non-gold layered into the disk section. There was a line of runes stamped into the outer edge of the ring, making a complete circle.

Carol stared at it for a moment, her eyes widening.

“That’s mine!” the cop shouted, his entire demeanor changing, turning almost feral as he tried to stand and claw the gold out of Carol’s hands.

“Where did you get this?” Carol whispered.

“Give it back, you fucking supervillain piece of shit!”

Tom raised a brow. Supervillain? What…the hell does that mean?

“Tom. The lesson is over,” Carol said, her face distorting dangerously.

“The lesson?” Tom frowned.

“When you wake up, I want you to tell me about this in detail,” she said, brandishing the gold bauble. “It’s very important to the survival of your daughter. Understood?”

“I don’t understand, but I’ll tell you, if it’s for Ellie.”

“Good kid,” Carol said, before returning her attention to the cop. Her body began to demonify, gaining height and breadth as she lifted the broken-limbed police officer off of the ground by the neck.

“Where did you get this? Tell me now or I’ll tear your soul out of your body and eat it.”

“Oh god, oh god, ohgodohgod,” the cop said, the blood draining from his face.

“Soul-eating it is,” Carol said, putting the points of her claws against the man’s rib cage and sinking them in a half-inch.

“It was in her car!” the cop shouted, making Carol pause. “It was in Lily’s car, along with a ton of other shit!”

“The night she crashed?” Carol clarified.

“Yes!”

“A ton of other shit? Just like this?” she asked, holding up the gold disk.

“Yes!”

“Lily, you… Where is it?”

The cop grew quiet.

There was a pop as Carol’s claws penetrated Kevlar.

“Agh! It’s in Evidence!” He screamed, his broken arms trying futilely to push her talons out of his chest.

“Why is it in Evidence instead of her heir’s hands?” Carol asked.

“Because it’s forty kilos of gold, why do you fucking think!?” the cop shouted. “You guys didn’t know about it!”

“So you were sniffing around us for scraps, is that it?” Tom chimed in. It seemed like Grampa had been right the morning before.

“No, this one is looking to be special,” Carol said, brandishing the gold disk. “This crypt is inscribed with Ghostwalk. You caught that ‘supervillain’ slip earlier?”

“Yeah?”

“This fool found a magical toy, and it gave him delusions of grandeur…until it ran dry. Is that it?”

Carol tossed the cop back down onto the chair, glancing off to the side, where Grampa was watching her with wide eyes, hyperventilating, his snubnosed gun shaking in his hand.

She collapsed back down into typical Carol.

“What was your plan?” she asked, walking around the chair and leaning over the cop. “What would you have done if you got out of here okay? Made plans to steal Lily’s ring from the people who didn’t deserve it, in the hopes that it would recharge your…newfound power…like, em…”

She glanced over her shoulder at Tom. “Is there a superhero from the books of comic who recharges?”

“Green Lantern,” Tom said.

“Right, that one.

“What would you have done to get that power back?” she asked, her grin widening.

“I would have fucking killed every single one of you evil scumbags,” the cop said, meeting her eyes.

***Kenneth***

Smells like puke, Ken thought, wrinkling his nose. And piss. Did he piss himself? They didn’t tell you about the smell in basic. Scumbags have a smell.

He was standing over Chris Stentson, an underground weapons dealer, and someone Ken had passing familiarity with as an occasional informant.

Ken was pushing the danger-envelope, but between his reputation and his status as a cop, nobody had put a bullet in him yet. That was a level of heat nobody wanted.

“Ah uh a aau,” Stentson said.

“What was that?” Ken asked, pulling the barrel out of the dealer’s mouth.

“I said we don’t have any to spare.”

Ken pistol-whipped the sickly-looking scumbag.

“To spare. Implying you have some. Do I look like I’m gonna take ‘no’ for an answer?”

“Gah!” Stetson said, grasping his eyebrow. “Armor-piercing bullets are in short supply, pig! Ever since that demon-bitch started going around taking all our scratch. Business is good. Too good, honestly. I don’t have any to spare.”

Ken blinked.

“‘Demon bitch’?” Ken asked with a scowl. “Meth-skinny, about five-ten, grey eyes, bulletproof?”

“Yeah, you pigs finally taking us seriously now? That bitch is basically the grim-fucking-reaper of the underworld right now.”

Ken scoffed. Of course they weren’t taking the scumbags seriously.

“She look like this?” he asked, pulling up the picture of ‘Carol’ on his phone.

“That’s her!” Stetson said, pointing like a chimp, his voice rising. “Holy shit, you seen her!? You know where she lives!?”

The gun dealer dropped his voice and glanced side to side. “There’s a bit of an informal bounty for a tip on where she lives. Five thousand dollars, man. If you tell me, we can split it.”

Ken ignored him. “You said big guns and armor-piercing bullets for them are tough to come by because everyone’s stocking up on them? So they can kill her?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Unlock your phone and give it to me,” Ken said, holding his hand out.

Stetson hesitated, earning himself another pistol-whipping.

When the bleeding dealer finally came back to his senses, he handed Ken his phone with a shaking hand.

“Coulda saved yourself the fucked-up face,” Ken muttered, glancing at the dealer’s bodyguards. The scumbags were itching to reach for their weapons, but with Ken’s gun in their employer’s face, it didn’t make any sense to escalate things.

Yet.

“Call your friends up,” Ken said, thumbing through the contact list. There were no names, but there were random pictures in the contact info, sort of a mnemonic device for the dealer to remember who was who.

“Call everyone you know. Tell them you know where the demon-bitch is.”

“…Really?”

“Yep. And tell you what: I’ll give you the ‘bounty’ for that.” Ken pointed at the fuckoff-big rifle above their heads on the rack.

Stentson dialed the picture of Scrooge McDuck. A wealthy buyer. Possibly Scottish.

“Hey man—”

Ken snatched the phone out of the dealer’s hand.

“You want to kill that bitch that’s stealing from you? I’ve got a time and a place, if you’ve got the people to spare.”

It turned Ken’s stomach working with people like this, but supervillains don’t exactly play by the rules, either, and Ken wanted as many scrubs between himself and Carol as possible, in case the whole thing went south.

They could have their grim reaper, and he could have that ring that recharged his powers.

Win-win.

Silence reigned over the line for an uncomfortable amount of time, until finally, an older man’s voice came across the line.

“…Go on.”