Denise frowned as I got back in the car, carrying an extra burger for Lydia.
“That demon tether is brighter and thicker, every time I look at you,” she said. “Tim, you are gonna lose yourself in her.”
“It’s fine,” I assured her. “She’s not corrupting me; I’m just letting her do her job.”
“Her job is to make you fall in love with her, and it’s working.”
“It’s fine,” I repeated. “I’m not hurting anybody and she’s not asking me to hurt anybody. I’m just finally letting somebody take care of me.”
Denise was still frowning, so I kept going. “I know it’s weird, okay? I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be in that stupid magic program, pretending I’m back in college, sitting through boring lectures, letting Evan set me up on dates, turning myself into the most respectable, most boring version of myself, until I can find another witch willing to take a chance on me.
“But I didn’t choose that life. I wanted to be a superhero, and as long as I’m doing this job, flying around the city fighting zombies and pulling dead people out of car wrecks, as long as I’m doing that, I need all the help I can get.
“I keep thinking back to all those years after Judy, watching everybody around me grow up and fall in love, jealous and angry all the time, with no idea how they did it. Lydia is not what I wanted, but Lydia is what I got. And I would appreciate it if you could get off my ass about it.”
Denise didn’t speak again until we got back to my apartment, and I climbed out of the car.
“Tim, there’s a whole world of human beings out there who would fall in love with you. Just try to remember that, okay? No matter how good she makes you feel.”
I didn’t answer back. I just watched her fly away and went back to Lydia.
* * *
We had dinner at my old, cracked table, chatted about how police used to handle crime before the corps took over, and laughed a little, imagining what a super strong ten-year-old was going to do to his DMA trainers.
I took a shower and found Lydia standing in the door of my bedroom like always, waiting for me to take her hand.
But this time I walked past her and stopped before I crawled in bed. “Lydia, what do you want? You’ve been living here all this time, and I’ve never asked you what you want.”
She seemed surprised by the question. “I wanted you to kill my Master, but you did that quite efficiently, years ahead of schedule, so I decided you needed me to do a new version of my old job, especially now that you’re giving so much of yourself to this city.”
“That’s not an answer. I mean, what do you want now that you’re living here on Earth?”
“I told you exactly what I want. I want you to get married, have children, build a castle, and live happily ever after. I don’t know why you keep expecting that answer to change.”
“No, that’s what you want for me. I’m asking, what do you want for yourself?”
Lydia sighed and crossed her arms before she answered me, annoyed that I still wasn’t accepting her answer.
“A hundred years from now, when you’re dead and gone, I want to be able to look back and say your life was better because of me.”
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“But that’s still what you want for me!” I said. “You are not the family servant anymore! You need to have some goals for yourself, goals that don’t revolve around me.”
“Timothy, we won’t always be like this. Very soon, much sooner than I would like, you will give your heart to a mortal woman, and I’ll have to step back. But now, these first years? These years are mine! This time you’re in, this is when I can be of most use to you. Please don’t reject me, just because you’re afraid to be happy.”
“I feel like I’m using you.”
“Timothy, you are not my Master, and I am not treating you like one. I am not doing anything extraordinary for you, and I am not suffering in your service. I am like any other human woman who loves her job.
“Surely, you’ve met humans like me, doctors and nurses and public servants who define themselves in terms of their service to others? My methods are just a bit more intimate.”
“So, it really doesn’t bother you? Spoiling me like this?”
“It does not.”
I sat down and patted the bed beside me. “Then maybe you should come over here and do it a little more.”
* * *
Turns out, the night shift wasn’t all neon and breakfast burritos. A lot of bad wrecks still happened at night, and we ended up in the middle of a lot of fights called in from a dozen different bars where metahumans liked to drink.
No big names, nobody with big powers, but full of people just strong enough or weird enough to warrant a Bluestar response when they got out of hand.
Denise was able to wrap most of them up with vines and calm them down on her own, as most of the men who got violent didn’t want to hit a woman, but I still had to step between a lot of guys with super strength and try to keep them apart.
I remember being terrified of the first half dozen calls, as the spectacle of these huge, super strong drunk guys triggered all my old memories of Dad, all those times he came home drunk, and alternated between crying and screaming while I tried to calm him down.
But it turns out my experience with Dad had made me pretty good with drunks, and I was able to handle most of them without having to punch or grab anybody. I took a few punches, but most guys calmed down when they realized they couldn’t hurt me, although some of them had to break their hands on me first.
My rational brain knew I had powers now, but something in the back of my mind was still twelve years old, desperate to run away from the angry drunk men.
* * *
The worst thing about night shifts was that everybody still scheduled mandatory meetings during the day. A couple weeks into our duty rotation, Denise and I had worked all night after being up all day, and we still had to show up for a 10 a.m. meeting the next morning, so we decided to take a nap in one of the bunk rooms after our shift.
The room was a set of four bunk beds with Army surplus footlockers at the end and stand-up lockers on the wall, all painted in this terrible olive green.
“Where did they even get this stuff?” I asked Denise. “This looks like a bomb shelter from World War 2.”
“Probably was. But right now, a bed’s a bed.”
Denise rolled into a bottom bunk, and I climbed up top, chatting with her as I looked at the ceiling. “So, you think people come in these rooms to have sex? I’m surprised they let us close the door.”
“Tim, people have had sex in every room of this building, including in the atrium and on the front desk.”
I laughed. “Are you speaking from personal experience?”
“No,” she said. “But Jade and I were friends until we weren’t.”
The only good thing about sleeping in a concrete cell is no windows, so it gets really dark. I set an alarm, turned the lights off, and tried to sleep.
I was awakened by a weird flickering light beneath me, like an old desk lamp was going out. Then I realized what it was and jumped down.
Denise was thrashing and moaning in her sleep, with her aura flashing amber in the visible spectrum as she surged.
I tried to just gently whisper “Hey” to wake her up, but it wasn’t working, and those surges were getting worse. I had never seen Denise surge before. I had never even seen her afraid before. Not really, even in the graveyard.
I grabbed her shoulders and held her to me, absorbing her power as I said, “Hey, it’s okay! You’re okay!” a little louder.
Denise was half awake now, still flailing and crying in her sleep. I looked at her face and realized what this was. Whatever nightmare she was having, she was back in the fire.
“Hey!” I shouted, shaking her a little. “Denise, it’s okay! I’m here and you’re okay!” Her eyes came open and she was crying, still shaking and surging a little.
“Hey,” I repeated softly, still holding her to me. I squared her shoulders and looked in her eyes. “Nothing can hurt you when you’re with me. We proved that, remember?”
Denise rested her head on my shoulder, and I climbed in the narrow little bed with her. I stayed in that bed and held her for an hour, then we got up and went to the meeting, like nothing happened at all.