Sterling Evans’s life was about balance and control. It always had been, from the time he had been a young teenager who liked math, yet hated school and everything associated with it. He did the bare minimum work he needed to do to graduate, despite technically being smart enough to perform at a much higher level. He simply had no desire to. He balanced his desire to do no work against his desire to graduate and performed barely adequately. Besides, he had learned very early on that if the teachers knew you were smart, they heaped more pressure onto you. Someone who was barely capable managing to reach minimum expectation was left alone, but someone they saw as promising could never do enough to satisfy. He allowed his teachers to see him as someone on the lower end of average. It had given him far more freedom.
And yet, he had needed money to do anything with that freedom. So, while still in high school, Sterling had begun helping students in other schools with their homework in exchange for cash. That had escalated to helping them cheat, and one of the students he helped cheat had been the godson of Jacopo Russo himself, head of the local mob. That boy had said something about Sterling to his mother, who spoke to Jacopo, and before long the barely-average high school graduate was working for the Russos as an accountant. It was more money than he ever knew what to do with, but more importantly, had led to him meeting Elena. They met, fell in love, and his life became about balancing his secret life with her against his life working for her father, who would have killed him rather than allow Sterling to date his daughter.
From there, they took over Jacopo’s business and turned it into their own. They created the identity of Silversmith and the Ministry. More balance. More control. They balanced and controlled crime within the city, pushed tourism up, brought in more Touched, turned Detroit from a failing, fallen city into one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the country.
All of which had brought Sterling to this moment. Or rather, Silversmith. That’s who he was right now. Blackjack--Eric was on the warpath to get back the vials that would save his daughter’s life. Not something Silversmith would ever blame him for. Now, apparently they were within his grasp, or had been. But a couple of the vials had disappeared, taken by Cuélebre or something while Eric was busy with the rest of his gang and the Minority chasing down Grandstand after she used her power to draw their attention.
But the vials were still with Cuélebre. And apparently he wasn’t alone. From what Silversmith had been able to piece together from reports, that new hero, Paintball, was chasing him.
Paintball was chasing Cuélebre. That was a disaster waiting to happen. Smith had to get there quick. He didn’t particularly want to let some new hotshot young hero get himself murdered when Cuélebre didn’t pull his punches enough, and he owed Eric. Besides, he and Elena both loved Melissa almost as much as if she was truly their niece. There was no way he would stand aside and allow her to die. Not if he could help it.
All of which prompted the man to fly faster, high above the city streets. His silver armor was technically what was moving, guided through the air by his own power, with Smith simply pulled along within it. He scanned the streets ahead, searching for any sign of--
There. A lightning bolt erupted into view, so close Silversmith was almost startled. Cuélebre could be very fast and very quiet when he wanted to be, for such a big guy. As the man’s gaze snapped that way, he stopped on a dime in the air. The big demon-figure had just come into view from around the edge of a tall building, landing on a lower roof while a much-smaller figure slammed into the opposite building, then plummeted toward the ground.
Fuck. Having absolutely no desire to let Paintball die like that, or at all really, Silversmith extended his hand. Before the boy, who had clearly been struck or at least very narrowly missed by Cuélebre’s lightning bolt, could fall over a hundred feet to the ground, a silver platform appeared under him. The ‘metal’ rippled a bit as the boy’s limp form landed on it, absorbing the impact and dissipating the force automatically, similar to the way Smith’s armor absorbed the impact of bullets before allowing them to drop harmlessly to the ground rather than ricocheting off. Paintball would be left… not unharmed, but at least no more harmed than he already was. Especially once walls rose around the silver platform to encase him in a dome.
Cuélebre was already looking around for the new target, when Silversmith summoned a fist half the size of Cuélebre himself. It slammed into the man from the side, smacking him with just enough force to knock him out of the air and into one of the nearby alleys. Smith would let him wrestle with that hand for a few moments while he checked on Paintball, then he would get the vials for Eric.
The dome keeping the idiot Star-Touched kid safe was already floating up toward him. Silversmith glanced that way while lowering the walls. He could sense Cuélebre struggling against the hand, and knew it wouldn’t take the demon-like man long to break it. But he could at least take the time to make sure this kid wasn’t… wasn’t…
When Sterling had first touched that glowing orb, all those years ago, the universe had stopped around him. He was taken to a new place, a shadowy, fog-filled place. He saw things, his life projected around him. And when he came back to himself, no time had passed. The world had been frozen.
Now, it was frozen again, but instead of a grand, inconceivable gift, this particular moment came with terror the likes of which he had never truly known. He had come close, five years earlier upon hearing that Jacopo’s people had attacked Anthony’s birthday party, and that the man himself might already have Cassidy. He’d come even closer when he’d arrived at the party himself and found his father-in-law right there in front of a terrified Cassidy as she cowered in the back of the car. He had come so close to losing her that day.
And yet, none of those feelings were so much as a candle against what he felt in this moment. Floating there next to his summoned platform, he saw… his daughter. Cassidy was lying there. Most of the simple jumpsuit costume she wore had been burned off, leaving just enough for some form of modesty. The helmet and mask were shattered and torn, exposing her burned face. Her gloved hand was open, revealing the vial she had been clutching when Cuélebre struck her. By some miracle, the vial was still intact. Damaged, but intact.
Paintball was Cassidy. His daughter. She was--the whole time it had been… and now... now…
Terror had taken hold of Sterling. It seized his heart and clutched it as tightly as it could in its pitiless grasp. His hand moved, the armor surrounding it melting away to expose his bare skin as his fingers found their way to his daughter’s sweaty, burned, traumatized face, then to her throat.
Breathing. She was breathing. He saw her chest rise just as his fingers found the pulse in her neck. The very worst had not yet happened. Cassidy was alive. Terrifyingly hurt, but alive.
Without wasting another moment, without even thinking at all, Sterling shifted the platform into a stretcher, using summoned silver straps to keep his daughter safe against it while diving toward the ground. The stretcher followed, as he landed next to one of the building exit doors. His voice, cracking only slightly, snapped the words, “Call Yellowbrick now.”
Through the earbud, he heard two rings before the call connected. Immediately, he ordered, “Track my location and send a bridge from here to our primary medical facility.”
Disconnecting that call, he made another one to his wife, telling her where to go and what she would find in as few words as possible. By that point, the doorway was open, and he went through the void, across the bridge, with Cassidy floating behind him on the silver stretcher. Through the next doorway, and they were in the hospital. A literal hospital, actually. The Ministry simply maintained a couple secret floors deep underground, further down than anyone believed that particular hospital actually went. Doctors and nurses worked there just as they would in any normal hospital, though these carried out their duties in secret.
With just a couple words, Sterling told the two emergency nurses who arrived at the receiving area what had happened. After carefully removing the precious vial from her limp hand so he could tuck it away, he let them take Cassidy off his summoned stretcher, warned them to be careful with her while doing his best not to let them know just how much the girl he was entrusting to their care meant to him. As they began to take her away, toward the examination room, he followed. But before he had gone more than two steps, one of the doctors stepped in his way.
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“Smith,” he started, “I know you’re worried about the kid. But trust me, we’ve got this. We’ve got her. Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.”
That man had no idea how close he came to being a smear on the wall. Sterling very nearly summoned a silver hammer to remove the obstacle between him and his injured daughter. But, at the last second, he saw Cassidy’s burned face as the nurses wheeled her into the first available room, and stopped short. Seeing her like that, knowing how hurt she was, how much pain she would have been if she had even been conscious, it reminded him of just how dangerous this whole situation was.
As far as these people knew, Silversmith worked for the Ministry, just as they did. They didn’t know he was the leader of it, and they certainly didn’t know that the girl on that stretcher was his daughter. Even now, even in this moment, he had to be careful. He had to maintain that balance. No matter how terrified he was, he couldn’t let that show in front of them. No matter how much he wanted to scream, throw his armor off, fall to his knees and beg his unconscious daughter for forgiveness for leading her to that situation, and forget everything else, it wouldn’t help. It would only hurt. He could do nothing for Cassidy by exposing his identity and connection to her now. Elena would be here soon. She would take care of things here. He couldn’t help with this. Elena could handle the secrets and the doctors could handle saving Cassidy’s life.
There was… however… one thing that he could handle.
Without a word of argument with the doctor who had been brave enough to stand in his path (even if he didn’t know who Cassidy was to him, willingly blocking someone like Silversmith had to take some very deep courage and conviction), Sterling pivoted and walked back the way he had come. The door he’d brought Cassidy through normally led to the stairwell, but the bridge was still there, as he had known it would be. Yellowbrick knew him well enough not to dismiss it just yet.
A moment later, Sterling was back on the street. The silver hand had vanished when he’d gone through Yellowbrick’s void, so Cuélebre was free. The demon man was already out of the alley, his fifteen-foot tall form massive as he stood in the middle of the road, gaze snapping one way, then the other. “Heeeey Smith!” He shout-snarled the words. “I know you’re out there somewhere, probably hiding with that little dumbshit who thought he could fuck with--”
In mid-sentence, the man was interrupted as a silver hand, large enough to fit even his massive form in its palm, materialized behind him. Before he could react, the hand hoisted him off the ground, swung forward, and slammed him into the brick wall of the building. No, not into, through. The wall shattered as Cuélebre was sent crashing through it and into the building beyond, where he went through several more interior walls. Then the hand hauled him back through a different exterior wall, rose high into the air, and brought him down so hard into the sidewalk that the concrete shattered under the impact to create a twenty-foot wide, six-foot deep hole.
There was no more control. There was no more balance. Sterling had held onto that for as long as he could. He had clung to it until Cassidy was being taken care of by the people who could help her far better than he could. Now that control had shattered, and left behind only rage, and a single desire: to deal with the man who almost killed his daughter. He didn’t want to arrest Cuélebre. He didn’t want Cuélebre to pay a Ministry fine, or be cast out, or be arrested, or… any of that.
He wanted Cuélebre to hurt.
Even as those thoughts were running through Sterling’s head, the demonic figure had torn his way back up out of the hole. His tail lashed out, crashing into the side of the building to do even more damage to it, while he spun to face the man who had ambushed him. “Okay!” he bellowed deafeningly as his tail rose, electricity sparking off of it, “That’s eno--”
A silver hammer, the head as large as an SUV, crashed down from above. But just before he would have flattened Cuélebre, the man’s arms snapped up to catch hold of it. He caught the hammer, snarling, “You wanna play now?!”
“No,” Sterling replied flatly. The solid metal of the hammer turned more fluid, allowing Cuélebre’s hands, as he pushed hard up against it to stop the thing from crushing him, to disappear inside before instantly hardening once more. Now his hands were trapped within, arms held high.
That single word was the only one Sterling spoke aloud. But he said so much more in other ways. Before Cuélebre could break his hands free, the man was there. He brought his arm back before lashing out with a single punch.
From an outside perspective, it almost might have looked comical. Sterling, after all, stood only about six feet tall, far less than Cuélebre’s fifteen. Between the demonic-figure’s simple height, sheer mass, muscular shape, wings, and tail, Sterling was probably less than a third of his size.
And yet, when his much-smaller fist collided with the larger man’s stomach, Cuélebre doubled over as much as the hammer holding his arms up would allow. Because Sterling didn’t hit him simply with the force he could summon by himself. He hit him with all the force his power could muster. He always used his power to put enough force into his constructs to tear apart walls, to blow through trucks, to rip guns, chains, and even metal barriers in half. He could make his constructs hit someone with the force of a speeding car. And the thing people often forgot was that his armor was one of those constructs.
Cuélebre’s tail lashed out while he was still doubled over from that single blow. As strong as Sterling’s armor was, it still likely would have broken under that blade, which had itself punched through the side of a tank in the past. But the man didn’t let the tail get that far. Even as it started to snap down like a scorpion, Sterling made the hammer spin in the air before flying off. With Cuélebre’s hands still trapped within it, he was dragged sideways, his tail flailing behind him just before he was thrown headlong into the building across the street. The windows shattered as the hammer yanked him along, before he sent a blast of lightning down into it with another terrifying scream of rage. The blast freed his hands, and the demon man instantly threw himself back out through another set of windows, launching his considerably-larger form at the still-motionless Silversmith.
In mid-leap, however, something slammed into the man from behind. The silver hammer had reformed itself and crashed back out of the building, slamming into Cuélebre’s back to send him toward his opponent far faster than he had been moving on his own. Before the man could recover, Sterling lunged forward to meet him. His fist collided with Cuélebre’s chin, striking him so hard his head was snapped to the side with a dangerous-sounding crack as several bones in his face shattered. The far-larger man’s forward momentum was halted entirely, as he crashed to the ground on his back with Sterling on top of him.
“What th--” Once again, his protest was interrupted as Sterling’s silver fist slammed into his face again, this time up near his eye. Perched on the demon’s chest, Sterling drew his fist back and punched him in the cheek, then the chin, then up near his forehead in a series of hammering blows. When Cuélebre’s right arm came up to grab him, a silver hook and chain latched onto it and yanked the arm down. The same soon happened to the left, while Sterling kept punching that face over and over.
He didn’t see the man, he only saw his daughter, lying in that crumpled heap. He heard her terribly shallow breaths, rather than Cuélebre’s bellows. He saw her burned skin, her closed eyes, the way her body was so… so small and fragile.
He saw all of that and worse as he continued to rain blows down onto the man who had put her in that condition. He saw himself, lying there under his own fists. He was the one who had not told her the truth, the one who had created this situation. Over and over again, Sterling hammered his own imagined face.
Cuélebre’s tail came up to smack into the crazed man from behind, but before it could, a twelve foot long silver broadsword appeared in the air and lashed out to literally cut the tail off at the base, passing through the armored scales, muscle, and bone like they were all made of butter. The demon man screamed in rage and pain, using his wings to push under himself to get up. But that too failed, as the silver broadsword duplicated itself and spun up and under the two men, slicing through the wings as well. They fell away as Cuélebre dropped back down with a scream that was more pain than rage by that point.
Finally, Sterling’s phone rang. It was from his wife. He stopped, staring down at his opponent while speaking the voice command to answer the call. “Tell me.” His voice only cracked a little. Then he listened as Elena informed him that Cassidy would be okay. She would survive. The news made him let out a long, low breath, thanking her before disconnecting.
“I couldn’t just kill you,” Sterling snarled then. A silver box appeared around Cuélebre’s head, locking it in position so he was forced to stare at him. Tail and wings cut away, arms held by silver chains and hooks, head locked in place, the man lay helpless like that, barely able to see through the damage that had been done to his eyes through those repeated blows. “Not until I knew if she survived. If she’d died… then… then I would’ve wanted a lot worse for you than a quick death. You would have deserved worse.”
“Wha--what the fuck are you--who?!” Cuélebre managed, clearly completely lost.
“Who?” Sterling echoed, as the front of his helmet peeled away to reveal his face. A face that was famous enough for Cuélebre to immediately recognize him, a pained gasp escaping the pinned giant before Sterling continued in a low, dangerous voice. “Paintball. She… she’s my daughter.”
“Wha… what?” Cuélebre’s confusion was palpable. “I don’t… what. I--I didn’t know.”
“Yeah,” Sterling murmured. “Well, now you do.” He rose, stepping off the trapped demon man’s chest before straightening up. “And she’s going to live.” He cracked his neck to one side, then pivoted on his heel to walk away, the silver mask reappearing to cover his face once more. “Lucky for you.”
He didn’t even look that way as a new, fifteen foot long, three foot wide broadsword appeared in the air and fell to separate Cuélebre’s head from his body.