“Denise, if we’re both certified magic superheroes now, shouldn’t we try and track down this necromancer?”
Denise shook her head. “No. Tim, please let it go.”
“Let it go? This is the most dangerous thing to hit Boston since Nergal and you want me to let it go? We just barely contained this thing the first time! I can’t even imagine what he’s gonna do next, and you want to give him more time to prep?”
“Tim, please,” she insisted. “Let it go.”
“You can’t just shut me down like this. You’ve got to tell me why.”
“People keep telling you to let this go because Mom’s on it. Mom is not an official Bluestar anything anymore, but she’s Mom, so when she says she’s got something, everybody else knows to stay away.
“Mom does not want some Bluestar hotshot fucking up her investigation or tipping this guy off, especially not an overconfident newbie superhero or her ditzy daughter. So please, just let it go. Mom will tell us when she has this guy, and we’ll likely need a whole team to take him down. Might even need to bring Arthur out of retirement.”
“This is big enough to bring in Arthur? Do you actually know him?”
Denise nodded. “Mom and I used to hang out at the tower with him and Jodie, back when she was still with us. Arthur was incredible. Brilliant, handsome, arrogant, and funny. God, he used to be so funny. Everybody forgets that. That was my fantasy of marriage when I was a girl – Arthur and Jodie working out of that tower all day, saving the world, and making each other laugh.
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“He was still the Archmage then. I thought he could do anything, until Jodie got cancer – and healing magic doesn’t work on cancer.
“Nobody knew that better than Arthur, so he turned to technology. Tracked down this supervillain who used nanites to cure his own cancer in prison. Was totally cancer-free by the time he got shanked. Nanites were still trying to heal him while he bled out.
“Arthur exhausted all the conventional options and finally gave Jodie the injection. The nanites were programmed to eat cancer, and that’s what they did. For a week or two, it looked like a miracle.
“Jodie was bouncing around playing with her dogs, making videos, and inviting Mom over for tea. Then the cancer came back, way worse this time, and the nanites just kept doing their thing. Every morning, Arthur would wake up and parts of her would just be gone.
“Ate through her limbs and her breasts and her organs. Then it ate through her cheek and spread to her brain.
“The nanites were eating her alive, but he couldn’t turn them off. They were designed to be run by an AI, and that AI was dead, so they were just swarming through her system, blindly doing the last thing they were told to do.
“Arthur buried her, and the guy he used to be, the guy who deflected asteroids and killed gods was just gone. He doesn’t even come out anymore. I think he still sees architecture students and trains graduate students from the tower, but they have to come to him, and most of them only stay a few days.
“I’m not saying Arthur would let the city burn, but he doesn’t seem to give a fuck about river monsters, and he’s left Nergal’s miasma in place for fifteen years.”