If anyone reading this is still living in Boston, I wish to file a complaint with the Boston Metro Emergency Management office.
I wrote a hundred emails and went to dozens of meetings about this, and no one ever listened to me.
There is a serious flaw in your emergency protocol for flying car autopilots. As soon as central control or the individual vehicle detects an airborne threat, it lands the car – immediately. As in, the car goes straight down and lands wherever it might be, no matter how dumb or how dangerous that landing spot is.
And this protocol is even dumber now that the demons have developed a strategy for it. It annoys them when a flying car gets away, so now before they do a ground assault, they send in a squad of flying demons to create a distraction and force all the flying cars to land.
I have seen cars try to land on trees, water, busy highways, and on this particular day, I saw a dozen flying cars set down in a perfect line on the Mystic River Bridge.
The attack started when a dozen Vulture demons appeared in the sky over Mystic River, forcing every car in the area to head straight down for an emergency landing. The Vultures had been run off by a squad of DMA defense drones and everything seemed fine for a minute.
Then a portal to Hell opened on the South Lawn of Admirals Hill and disgorged a herd of what I will colloquially call “Hell Cows.” That’s when central dispatch called us.
Just imagine them as giant cows, maybe twice the size of normal ones, equipped with spikes and razor tails, painted in all the usual demonic colors. I presume these were the spirits of cows who hurt people, but I would have to look that up.
In any case, it’s not the Hell Cows you have to worry about. The real problem is, for every five cows you get, you also get a Hell Bull.
Hell Bulls are exactly what you’d expect from the name, and they are incredibly aggressive. A herd of Hell Cows on the South Lawn would not normally be a big deal. They would just mill around eating grass, trees, garbage, and slow tourists until everybody cleared the area.
But by the time I got there all the easy food was gone and the little herd was drifting toward the bridge, casually eating trees and smashing houses that had hopefully been evacuated by the DMA.
Hell Cows were not varsity athletes, but they were so big, they could easily step up onto the bridge or smash their way through it from the ground. Randy told me to stand by the bridge and not provoke them until the rest of the team could get there and back me up.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on in Hell since I got back, but this didn’t even look like an attack. This looked like a mistake; like somebody had opened a random portal in the wrong place and these cows were just coming through to graze.
The aerial assault that happened before I got there sounded like a planned attack, but I think the portal that was supposed to open in front of an army of Hunter demons opened in the middle of a herd of cows instead.
I stood there like an idiot for a while, then I decided there was enough space on the bridge for people to get out of their cars and just walk away. I got on the radio to the normal cops and had them issue a warning for everyone to abandon their vehicles and evacuate the area.
And here’s where it gets really stupid. Part of the autopilot threat response is to force the doors closed and lock people in. Ground vehicles and older flying models still had manual controls that could let people out, but the newest flying ones put up force field bubbles that kept the occupants trapped, ostensibly protecting them from external threats, even though they were stuck on the ground.
Of the twenty people I had stuck on that bridge, maybe ten got out, escaping from their vehicles while ten more were locked in.
None of the herd looked aggressive yet, but they were getting closer, and I was getting nervous. I cast my strength and ward spells, and two of the bulls immediately jerked their heads up, snorted, and looked at me.
“They can smell the magic,” I said out loud, casually admitting to a huge fuckup. “Oh fuck, I just got their attention.”
And then the bulls charged me. I braced myself for the impact and was able to stop the first one, but the second one knocked me into the first stranded car on the bridge. The hood crumpled, leaving a perfect dent in the shape of my body as the impact knocked it back into the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, until I had created my own little pileup on the bridge.
Their emergency force fields seemed to protect them well enough, but a bunch of people screamed and got knocked around inside their cars.
Both bulls surged forward and tried to gore me, forcing me to jump back on top of the first, thankfully empty, car in line. I punched and kicked and tried to push them back, until the other three bulls noticed their buddies were in trouble and started strolling over to back them up.
“I’ve still got people trapped in these vehicles behind me!” I shouted into my radio. “I’ve got to engage.”
“We’re a good five minutes out,” Randy said. “Do what you gotta do.”
I did not like killing animals, I did not even like killing things that look like animals, but these bulls were definitely assholes, and if I didn’t deal with these first two fast, I would quickly be fighting five of them.
I cranked all my spells up to full power and started tenderizing beef. And yes, it was terrifying, and painful, and they kept pushing me back over the tops of other cars, but on another level, it was really fun.
The bulls thrashed their heads from side to side, sending two empty cars flying off into the water. But now I had a real problem. That third car in line had a woman in it, and she was freaking out.
One of the bulls forced me back against her hood. I felt it crumple and I heard her scream as she suffered some kind of injury and tried to scramble into the back seats.
My actions had put an innocent person in danger, and I had no more time to fuck around. I charged up Anson’s artillery spell and hit those two bulls with everything I had.
My ancestor, Anson Kovach, had been an English mercenary working for France during the American Revolution. He was a trained soldier and the closest thing to a hero my bloodline had produced to date.
My whole repertoire of spells had come from him: fortitude for strength and endurance, wards to protect me from physical damage, and finally, he had left me the only ranged attack I knew – a magical artillery spell that took an incredible amount of power to cast but hit like a cannonball in a rough cone shape in front of me.
I unloaded on the bulls and blasted one of them apart. That one flew away in two pieces and made the sky rain demon guts, while I punched the second one in the head until it lay still.
I ended up crunched against the hood of this screaming woman’s car, with a dead, headless bull at my feet.
The other three bulls must have seen these first two as competition rather than friends, because they just turned around and resumed mounting cows.
Priorities.
I gave myself one second to take a deep breath, then turned around to rip the windshield of the car off. “Okay, miss, let’s get you out of… Judy?”
* * *
Judy was my ex-girlfriend, and as you might expect, she was not my biggest fan. We met in high school and had a textbook teenage romance, then we went to college together. After a couple months of playing video games instead of going to class, I dropped out to take a programming job.
I disappointed a lot of people with that move, including Judy and my father, who both hated my choice of occupation, and the fact that I was blowing off an incredibly generous scholarship because I couldn’t be bothered to go to class.
I pacified Judy by promising I would use my first check to get us an apartment and help us start a life together, with plans to eventually get married and have kids.
Well, I had planned to use my first check for the apartment, but Dad cut off my housing allowance and the dorm decided to kick me out early. I couldn’t live with Judy’s parents, and my own father hated me for dropping out, so we had to borrow money from a dozen friends, just so I didn’t end up homeless, sleeping in the Innovex break room. That first month, I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of an empty apartment. A borrowed sleeping bag.
I eventually started making good money, handing all my bonus checks over to Judy so she could pay bills and buy furniture for us while she finished school, but I was working terrible hours at a job she hated, pursuing a career that she thought was beneath me; so we broke up, and I eventually ended up back in school, living alone in a different shitty apartment on the edge of the Reclamation Zone, while Judy went on to get prestigious jobs at art galleries and the university museum, casually dating somewhere between twelve and twenty guys who were all more successful than me, while I slid into a delightful spiral of loneliness and self-hate.
Then Lydia appeared in my bedroom and offered to fill my days with power, magic, and weirdly accommodating sex, as long as I agreed to learn my ancestors’ spellbook and become a hired killer for her Master in Hell.
I said no and decided I wanted to be a superhero instead, but the last time I saw Judy, I was still pretending to be a normal guy, pretending Lydia was just a normal woman, confident that I would never have to explain myself.
Lydia’s Master knew all about Judy somehow, and threatened her with death, and worse, if I didn’t get with the program and start doing missions for him. I defied my contract and sent Judy through a portal to a place where magic didn’t work, hoping to protect her from the demons who wanted to use her against me.
That had been less than a year ago. Now, here she was, seemingly at random, in the middle of a demon attack that I had just thwarted with powers she didn’t know I had.
* * *
Judy was staring at me like she thought she was trapped in some kind of dream or nightmare, but in a few seconds, she would get over that feeling, and she would start asking a lot of questions that I did not have time to answer, asking about events that I was not even prepared to lie about.
“Tim?” She whispered, like she was really hoping I would turn out to be someone else. “How did you—”
I just said, “Long story,” and climbed over her ruined front seats, forcing them out of the way with two hard shoves so I could get right up next to her.
My aura flared with my strength as I forced the front of the car open, causing Judy’s eyes to get even wider as I climbed in.
I ordered a hovering police drone to alert me if any of the bulls came back and cast a quick medical divination thing on her.
Then I leaned over and tried to keep my voice as gentle as I could. “Okay, Judy, this arm is broken. I’m gonna have to heal it before I get you out of here.”
“You’re going to…?”
“Heal it, with magic, yeah. Long story, and I promise I will tell you all about everything, once we’re both safe back at the station.”
I took her hand and said, “Judy, this is gonna hurt like hell, but only for a second. My hands are gonna light up, then your arm is gonna light up and it’s gonna hurt real bad, but I know you, and I know you can take it. I remember how tough you are. Ready?”
Judy nodded.
“Okay, three, two, one.”
Judy yelped as her arm made a sick wet crackling sound and straightened back out, good as new.
I had her move it around to make sure everything was working and said, “Nice job. Hard part’s over. Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
And here’s the part I didn’t see, the part I was blissfully unaware of until I saw it in Purgatory, playing like a movie on Azael’s mirror, while I watched with my head in my hands.
The other members of Bluestar 7 had quietly landed on Admirals Hill and were gently herding the cows back through the portal. Paul was using some kind of mental thing to keep them calm and nudge them in the right direction, trusting the bulls to follow wherever the cows went.
I’ll let you write your own joke here.
I was oblivious to everything happening outside Judy’s car, and I was oblivious to the fact that I had left my mic open, much to the amusement of my teammates.
They were able to get the herd back through the portal in record time, summoning a DMA vehicle to project a force field around it, until Denise could finish some kind of animal rescue and get there to close it.
While I was still in the car fixing Judy’s arm, Jade Katt was out front, listening to every word I said. Randy was on the phone arguing with the DMA while Phil and Paul were still hanging out in front of the bridge.
Jade came up to them with a huge smile on her face and said, “I’ve just been texting with Hardy, trying to figure out why Tim is taking so long with that civilian. She says this girl is Timothy’s ex! She dumped him five years ago and she doesn’t know he got powers!”
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At that exact moment, I was holding Judy’s hand, helping her keep her balance as she tried to climb over a pile of dead demon cow.
Paul glanced over and said, “I think she knows now.”
* * *
Jade turned her head so I couldn’t see her laugh and mumbled, “Mute us for Tim and Randy, and turn his mic up!”
“Jade, we should not be listening to this,” Phil said.
“Oh, fuck you,” Jade said, delighted by the drama. “I live for this. Turn it up!”
So, the whole team listened as I hustled Judy into a squad car and took us both back to Berkeley Street HQ. They listened as I took her to the infirmary and had the medical tube thing check her out, confirming that she was in distress, with elevated heart rate and blood pressure, but my spell had healed some minor injuries, and her arm was fine.
I sat her down on the edge of an exam table and started cleaning her arm with a towel I produced from the pocket of my Bluestar jacket, the ratty white one that still said TRAINEE on it.
That was the first thing that made her smile. “You carry alcohol wipes in your pocket?”
I nodded, casually swabbing dirt and dried blood off her arm. “I clean up so much blood in this job.” I took the packet of wet wipes out of my pocket and gestured with it. “I went through like ten of these last week.”
I started to reach up to wipe the grime off her face, then realized that would be wildly inappropriate and stopped myself. I handed her the pack of wet wipes and let her do the rest herself.
She cleaned up a little more at the sink and started to fix her hair. Then she gave up and sat back down in front of me, before she finally asked the question in her eyes.
“Tim, what happened to you?”
“I got powers.”
“Obviously, but how? Have you always been this person? Have you been lying to me this whole time?”
“I didn’t know until my birthday. I learned about the magic the night I turned twenty-five, the night of that demon attack.”
“So, that thing attacked us because of you? To try and kill you before you got powers?”
I bit my tongue, trying really hard not to lie. “Not exactly. Turns out I was supposed to be a bad guy, the latest in a long line of bad guys. But I decided not to. I decided I was going to turn myself into a hero or die trying. I had to learn magic real fast and get in a bunch of really stupid fights, but I won, and I actually did it.” I reached up and wiggled my TRAINEE badge. “Even if I am just getting started.”
Judy was not stupid. And women have a remarkable ability to detect when they’ve been lied to.
“So, if you learned about magic the night of your birthday, you knew about your powers all that time, that’s the reason you forced that weird confrontation on my lawn, and then the night you went to Brian’s play, that’s why you were dating that witch. You were dating a witch because you’re one of them, but you didn’t tell me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you would hate me, just like you hate everybody with powers.”
That one seemed to hurt. “I could never hate you,” she said.
Notice which part of that she didn’t deny?
Then she asked, “Do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you today,” I said, accidentally revealing way more bitterness than I intended.
“So, what’s it like?” Judy asked. “What’s it like to be more than human?”
“Oh, it’s great. I finally see myself for what I am, and I’ve finally confirmed that humans are just a bunch of cattle put on Earth to serve me. That’s why I go out every day to get my ass beat and clean up their blood.”
And somewhere in a tower across town, Jade Katt was flat on her back on a table in the VBC breakroom, laughing her ass off while she kicked her feet in the air.
“What are you even doing here?” I asked Judy. “What are you even doing here on Earth? You’re supposed to be in Elysium. You’re supposed to be safe.”
“My dad died,” she said. “I was running errands after the funeral and got stuck on that bridge. I was on my way back to Mom’s house.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like an asshole. “Your dad was a great guy. He was even nice to me. I know how much you loved him.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was a heart thing. Could you—could you have healed him, if…”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t try to second-guess fate, or magic. Every time I try to predict if the magic will work, it fails somehow. Sometimes the stuff that’s supposed to work doesn’t, and sometimes the stuff that’s not supposed to work works anyway. Magical healing, it’s not science, and it may not even be luck. It might even be angels, interfering with the spells, when it’s somebody’s time to go.”
“And no,” I interrupted, before she could ask. “Magic can’t bring people back from the dead. The only ones who come back come back as demons.”
Judy nodded sadly, so I went on. “Are you at least happy over there? Through the portal? Are you and Brian happy? Are the people good to you?”
“The job is great, the people are great, but Brian didn’t come with me.”
“Brian didn’t come with you? Man, I thought Brian would love it over there.”
“He broke up with me when I got the job and went back to his ex. I guess he was too hot for me.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, I think he was too hot for everybody.”
Judy and I shared a smile, then she said, “What about you? Are you happy? Do you have someone?”
“Kind of,” I admitted, “but it’s weird. Like, magic stuff weird, but I guess I can say I have a friend. Denise, she was my trainer, she was my partner, and we got really close.”
“Do you mean Denise Hardy?” Judy asked, with this baffling note of excitement in her voice.
“Yeah. How do you even know who that is?”
“My mom knew her mom, and she got me all those books. That’s the first thing I saw when I came home and had to sleep in my old bedroom. All my old stuffed animals, and a hundred of those Hardy Witch books. Mom used to read me those, every night when she put me to bed.
“Mom said they were just stories, but Denise is a real person? Like a real grown woman now, and you know her? You’re actually friends with her?”
“Yeah, I even made out with her at a party once,” I said, without a single thought for Judy’s feelings.
“Do you… Could you… Could you get her to sign something for me, before I have to go back?”
I laughed so hard I crossed the line into rudeness again, then I saw the look on her face and realized how much this meant to her.
I had never seen Judy give one single fuck about a celebrity who wasn’t an obscure artist or an indie rock star, and I never imagined she could care about a superhero.
I stopped laughing and said, “Actually, I think I can do better than that.”
* * *
A DMA escort got Judy to a real hospital, and I called Denise the next day.
“Denise, I need a favor. Not a work favor, a personal one. Kind of a weird personal one. You remember Judy, the ex-girlfriend I talked about?”
“The one you just pulled out of a car on the Mystic River Bridge?”
“Yeah. Please tell me that was coincidence.”
Denise shrugged so hard I could even see it in her thumbnail. “We live in a world of demons, angels, and gods, Tim. We’ve got so many forces pulling us in so many directions all the time, even the accidents aren’t accidents anymore.”
“Well, however it happened, Judy is a fan. Her mother bought her all the Hardy Witch books and…”
“Oh no,” Denise said, groaning in advance.
“I was wondering if…”
“Oh, no,” she said again. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”
“I was wondering if you could go by and see her today or tomorrow, before she goes back through the portal. Her dad just died and she’s staying with her mom, and it would mean a lot to both of them if…”
Denise slumped in her chair and clutched her face like she suddenly had a terrible headache. Then she sighed and said, “How many times have you saved my life?”
“Four or five.”
“Shit,” she said. “If it had only been three times, I would tell you to fuck off, but I think it’s been more like six, so I have to do this. But you owe me, Tim. You have no idea how much I hate these. They’re going to expect me to be sweet and cute and plucky and they’re gonna make me say my catch phrase and…”
“Wait!” I stopped her. “You have a catch phrase? Oh my god, I have to know what your catch phrase is!”
“You will never know what my catch phrase is, and if you cheat by reading the books, if you ever say it in front of me, I will kill you and make sure you are eaten by your least favorite animal when I’m done.”
“You’re going to have me eaten by worms? I’m pretty sure that was going to happen to me anyway. But seriously, will you do it?”
“Yes, I’ll do it. For you. Once. And never again.”
“Denise, you say you want people to love heroes again, and this girl hates us. I mean, hates us so much, she thinks Captain Cobalt was a CIA hitman.”
“Captain Cobalt was a CIA hitman.”
“Oh god, not you, too. But seriously, I was with her for years, and I have never seen her talk about anyone the way she talks about you. I promise, if we can convince this woman to love heroes, we can convince anybody.”
Denise said, “You don’t have to keep selling me on it, I already said yes.”
“And next time you see your mom, tell her I said she’s a genius. I didn’t get it until just now, but those books, what she did with those books, that was smart. Long game supervillain smart. I had no idea.”
“Please don’t ever praise my mother in front of her. She’ll start making you tea and baking you cookies, and then she’ll like you, and I’ll never be able to kiss you again.”
“My bad. Forget I said anything.”
* * *
I delivered Denise to Judy’s mom’s house and insisted that I stay in the car. “This isn’t about me! God, please don’t make this about me. Please don’t say my name, and please don’t listen to anything she says about me!”
Judy and her mom appeared on her porch and Denise leaned forward like she was whispering a joke in my ear.
She was actually whispering, “Fuck you for making me do this, you will pay,” but she made it look really sweet.
Denise walked up to the porch, and I got my first close-up look at celebrity Denise, the amazing thousand-watt smile that got her on a hundred magazine covers from the day she turned twelve, when her mother introduced her to the world.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Denise was gracious, and charming, and I swear she had a kind of glow around her that had nothing to do with magic.
Her transformation was so amazing, so different from the woman I had been working with, I was dazzled for a second, like I was just a fan, who didn’t really know her at all.
Then the three of them disappeared inside the house, leaving me anxious and alone in the car.
* * *
I didn’t want to watch the conversation between Denise and Judy in Azael’s mirror, but the angel insisted, like he was setting up some kind of moral lesson for me.
I really did not want to see this, not because I thought it would be flattering or embarrassing, but because I felt like it should be a private moment, that had nothing to do with me.
I had broken up with Judy in my life and in my heart, and now she was trying to relate to Denise, not as Timothy’s ex-girlfriend, but as a fan and a person, and that was none of my business.
But he made me watch as Judy’s mom welcomed her celebrity guest. This house had looked like a palace to me when I first saw it in high school, a suburban slice of paradise compared to the trailers and shelters and prefab shitboxes I grew up in.
But looking at it again, as an adult, I saw how small it was, how cramped it was, how old the construction was, and how hard Judy’s mom had to work to keep it looking decent, while the paint and the wallpaper tried to peel off the walls.
Her husband’s health had obviously been declining for a long time, and Judy’s mom had aged so much in the years since I had seen her last, she looked like a whole different person.
This woman had terrified me as a young man, smart and arrogant and cutting like a blade. But now she looked gray and soft and feeble somehow, as if the world had beaten the arrogance out of her, as it slowly sapped her strength and took her husband away.
I was haunted by Judy’s question. Could I have healed him? If I had known? Could I have given him a few more years with his family, or given him just a little more strength to do things around the house?
No. I couldn’t think like that. If I tried to take that burden on myself, for every person I ever met, I would go insane. This was a modern man with access to the best of modern medicine, and if an army of doctors and tiny robots couldn’t save him, then surely neither could I.
Judy’s mom escorted them to Judy’s bedroom and left them alone. Judy sat on the edge of her tiny, frilly childhood bed and picked up a stuffed toy, a tattered pink kitty kat that had been washed and dried and sewed up so many times, it couldn’t have just been hers.
This toy was a family heirloom, and I could suddenly see Judy’s mom holding it as a little girl, exactly like her daughter was holding it now. Would Judy eventually have a daughter of her own who could hold this same toy just like this? A little girl who could love it as much as the previous two generations had loved it?
Surely Judy deserved that. For all the hostility and bad blood between us, I suddenly wanted Judy to have a daughter of her own, to be the mother she had always wanted to be, with her own mother finally ready to play the part of wise, gentle grandma, and leave all her old bitterness behind.
And that’s why Azael wanted me to see this, to see if I had really grown up, to see if I could forgive all the nasty things Judy had said and done, and honestly wish her well, while she kept on living, even if my own soul sank into Hell.
* * *
Denise was so wonderful relating to Judy and her mother, telling little stories about each book that was forced into her hand.
I didn’t really listen to what they were saying, but I could see the sweetness shining through both of them; the reluctant admiration Denise had for her own mother. The childlike wonder rising up in Judy’s eyes, as she started to understand this mythical little girl who had turned into a strong young woman, just as real and flawed as she was.
Watching how much Judy and Denise liked each other, watching Judy on her best behavior while Denise slowly taught her to see heroes as human beings, I realized I was watching them from outside myself now, watching them as if I didn’t know them at all, loving them in a gentle way, disconnected from my personal feelings of desire and guilt.
And watching Judy like that, watching how humbled and human she had become, I guess I forgave her for all the things she did to me, and finally forgave myself, for all the ways I let her down.
And then, after all the fangirl gushing was done, I watched Judy say, “Did you really kiss Tim Kovak at a party?”
Fuck.
“Yeah, I did,” Denise said, not batting an eye. “Were you really gonna marry him?”
“I wanted to,” Judy said. “I thought I wanted to, for a long time, but I was trying so hard to be a grownup, while Timmy was trying to have all the things he missed from never having a childhood, we were pushing each other in opposite directions. If we’d been older, maybe we could have met in the middle, but we were both so young, everything just fell apart.
“I shouldn’t say this in front of you, but he said you were his friend, and I don’t know how to talk to him and now he’s this weird glowing thing trying to be a superhero, and he’s pulling people out of cars, and he thinks he’s going to be Captain Cobalt and he hates me so much he won’t even pick up the phone when I call.”
Denise reached out and gripped Judy’s hand as she continued.
“He says I have to go back through that portal, no matter what. He says it’s not safe for me here because of what he is now, and because of all the demons who want to hurt him. It sounds so crazy, but he says it like it’s perfectly normal. You live in this world with him, can you just tell me, is it real? Is all this crazy stuff real? Is Tim really in trouble? Would he be in more trouble if I stayed here with Mom?”
“It’s real,” Denise said. “I wish it wasn’t, but it’s all real and you need to worry. You need to get back through that portal, and you need to take your mother with you. You don’t have to tell her everything. Tell her part of the truth. Tell her you don’t want her to be alone here, tell her it’s just a little vacation for now. Tell her you want to show her your new life. But whatever you have to say, get yourself and everyone you care about through that portal and surrounded by people you trust, before these demons try to use you against him again.”
“Wait,” Judy said, rubbing her eyes. “Again? What do you mean, again?”
Denise looked away for a minute, blowing a big puff of air through her cheeks. She had just let something slip, something I had told her not to say, and now she had to tell Judy the hard part.
“This demon, this bad guy who tried to turn Tim into a bad guy, they penetrated the defenses around the museum and threatened you. Directly threatened to hurt you, unless Tim did as he was told.”
Judy went pale. “A demon was looking at me? A demon wanted to hurt me?”
“Judy, these things are real, and they want Tim bad. The sweet, simple guy you knew is turning into a whole new person, with magical potential so enormous, the bad guys would do anything to control him and use him against their enemies.
“He’s still the guy you knew, but he’s got something else inside him now, something incredibly valuable, something that a whole universe of angels, demons, and gods would kill for. If Tim knew just how valuable he is, he’d try to run away and hide, just to keep the rest of us safe.
“But I can’t let him run. I can’t let him hide. My city needs him. The whole damn world needs him, so I have to help him learn this power, and use it the right way, or somebody’s gonna get their claws in him, and turn him into a monster.
“Tim wants me to hide it from you, but I’m going to treat you like a big girl and tell you the truth. Right now, you are one of the biggest weaknesses he has, and you have got to get away from him. You have got to get away from this whole damn world, before somebody tries to use you against him.”
Judy sniffled. “If it’s all real, and he’s in so much danger, what can he possibly do? This… whoever they are, you really think he can handle it? Can you protect him somehow? You and your mom, with all the things you can do?”
“Judy don’t make me lie to you,” Denise said. “Because the truth is, no, we can’t. I am not strong enough to protect him, and the things Mom makes deals with won’t help us fight demons.
“Our only chance is to teach Tim to protect himself and hope he can become what he needs to be before the bad guys take another shot at him. I can’t save him, so I have to help him save himself.
“But Judy, this thing he is now. The things he’s already done. I’ve already seen him do the impossible so many times, just in the short time I’ve known him, I will never bet against Tim Kovak, and neither should you.”
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[GU1]For a second I thought this was an in story actual letter or message and I was confused