I didn’t sink all the way down that night, staring at my empty closet, wondering how long I could pay rent with no job, effectively blacklisted from the life I thought I had been destined for.
I didn’t sink all the way down, but I got pretty low; low enough for Lydia to sit beside me on the edge of our bed and stroke my cheek.
“Timothy, please - all you lost yesterday was a piece of plastic. You are exactly the same hero you have always been, and you still have the blood of great men surging in those veins.”
“Oh god, not another Lydia speech,” I said, pulling away from her. “Magic, power, greatness - I cannot handle this bullshit right now.”
But Lydia continued. “Can I make you see this? These people are not punishing you; they’ve set you free! You can go anywhere now! You can be anything!”
“Anything like a wizard assassin in Belize?”
“No,” Lydia said, refusing the bait. “All those obligations died with my old Master. There are a thousand ways you could make your way in the world, a thousand ways to help people and even save lives, without raising one hand in anger or shedding a drop of blood.
“Timothy, please! You didn’t lose anything worth keeping today, but your mind is still trapped in the box they made for you. This is how they do it, this is how governments enslave Kovachs. I’ve seen it over and over. Your ancestors fell for it just like you did. They fill your head with stories about duty and honor, then they send you out to bleed and die for some fairytale vision of freedom or justice or for the greed of some syphilitic king!
“It’s all worthless; it’s all just an excuse. You don’t need to wear some symbol to be a man. You don’t need a badge to command respect. And you don’t need to sacrifice one more minute of your life, before you allow yourself to be happy.
“They caught you in their trap, but now you’re free. Please think about it. I know you can’t hear anything I say right now, but think back on this, ask me to repeat it in a day or a week or a month when you’re finally ready to hear me. For now, all I ask is, don’t throw yourself into another box, when you’ve just escaped from this one.”
* * *
I didn’t get Bluestar alerts anymore, but I was still close enough to the Charles to get alerts for the general public, so when a new monster crawled out of the river the next day, the emergency warning tone woke me up.
The city was still bruised and bleeding from what the demons had done to it, and there were no heroes left in Boston to answer the call. Bluestar 7 was dead. It would take months to replace them, and there were no other teams close enough to respond in time.
The National Guard had set up conventional military forces along the river - machine guns, flamethrowers, and rocket emplacements that could have reduced any conventional threat to ashes, but it was all on the wrong dimensional frequency, so most of those bullets would just bounce off.
They needed a hero for this job, but I would have to do.
Lydia tried to stop me as I headed for the door, dressed in torn jeans, distro sneakers, and my favorite white shirt - the same one my soul conjured for me in Hell.
“Timothy, these people humiliated you!” she said, indignant on my behalf. “They mocked you and scorned you and stripped you of any obligation you had to them! Let them burn!”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said. “The DMA are assholes, but the people in the path of that monster are innocent, and they’ve got no one else to stand for them.”
I couldn’t call a Bluestar shuttle anymore, so I skipped across the rooftops, remembering how good it felt to use my power like this. There was something pure about it, with the wind in my hair and weathered concrete under my feet. The trip took me back to my first days training to fight demons: wobbling, slipping, and falling over and over as I tried to master levitation.
It all came so easily now, leaping and soaring between buildings, knowing exactly how to land and exactly how to time my next jump. I really had become a superhero doing this job, and it was time for my final exam.
* * *
It’s kind of funny, how far you can get into a secure area, when you just walk at a normal pace and look like you belong there, even when you’re not dressed for it. I got most of the way through the National Guard outpost, strolling past the giant MLRS launcher and a bank of autoguns, before somebody stopped me.
“Hey!” Some beefy lieutenant said. “No civilians allowed! Get back behind the line!”
“It’s cool,” I said, allowing my aura to flare in the visible spectrum. “I’m here to fight this thing.”
“You’re not on my reserve list and I do not see a Bluestar badge. You are not authorized to fight this monster!”
I just kept walking. “Yeah, whatever. Arrest me if I live.”
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The lieutenant might have pressed the issue, but one of the younger soldiers leaned in and whispered something. It would have been too faint to hear, but my filaments picked it up, and Jeeves projected subtitles to show me what he said: “That’s the guy! That’s the guy who got Bluestar 7 killed. He’s pulling an Oleg, just let him go.”
“And if you guys could hold your fire for a minute?” I yelled over my shoulder. “It’s not gonna hurt the monster, all you’re gonna do is shoot me in the back.”
The monster was a thirty-foot reptile with twelve legs propelling a long, skinny body - like a giant, stretched-out alligator, with scales painted a rich, dark blue. It snapped its jaws at me as I approached, and reared up, ready to use its first two legs as crude grasping arms.
Yet another monster that looked like a dragon but wasn’t quite a dragon.
It was a little embarrassing to realize, without a team dispatch link or a Bluestar database, I had no idea what this monster was called, or what its powers might be. I probably should have looked this thing up, before I squared off with it in the middle of the damn highway.
I was trying to guess what its powers might be when the fucking thing opened its mouth and shot a bolt of lightning at me! Since when did river monsters spit lightning?
I couldn’t even remember how my wards handled electricity until the bolt splashed across my chest, knocking me back twenty feet, bouncing me off a National Guard barrier.
I heard half a dozen Guard guys groan in sympathy for me as I picked myself up off the ground. Great. No partner, no backup, but I had an audience to watch this thing kick my ass.
I ran forward and charged it, hoping it would need a minute to prepare another lightning strike. I ran at it in a straight line, setting myself up perfectly to be swatted by its tail. The monster timed it just right and sent me spinning off at a weird angle like a foul ball.
A sick, skinny tree broke my fall, and I ran back toward the monster, just in time for him to launch another lightning strike.
I improvised on the spot and tried a trick that had almost worked against Erebus, when I was trying to hold off that torrent of Olympian fire. I concentrated on my wards and moved all the protection in front of me, pulling power from my back and sides to intercept the bolt that was coming head on, pretending I was a spaceship, routing power to my forward shields.
It worked. The lightning bounced off at some crazy angle and set a tree on fire. Oops. Probably shouldn’t use that trick around bystanders.
The monster swiped at me with its tail again, but I was moving too fast, and it didn’t have time to wind up. I caught him by the tail and yanked as hard as I could.
My Bluestar boots would have dug into the asphalt and given me enough traction to control him, but I was trying to do this in shitty distro sneakers with no socks, so I ended up slipping and sliding while he dragged me around, like his body was a boat, and I was trying to waterski behind him.
When the monster realized how I was holding on, it suddenly flicked its tail up, sending me flying through another line of trees until I caught myself with levitation and landed on the grass.
But my acrobatics had given the monster enough time to charge lightning again. I took the bolt on my right side and angled my wards again, deflecting it neatly over the water.
“Yeah, fuck you!” I shouted at a monster who could not possibly understand me. “That’s not gonna work twice!”
I ended up back in the showdown position facing this thing, as I watched it growl and consider me, putting some actual thought into its attack this time.
I got that weird, dizzy feeling in the back of my head again, just like I felt with Donna, and when I got that vision from Evelyn. Suddenly, I could see myself standing on the highway like I was floating outside my body, watching my own fight from a police drone or a floating camera.
Is that really what I looked like? Dwarfed by this giant thing, in my torn jeans and filthy white shirt, trying to look like a tough guy while it started swinging its tail around.
I saw myself standing perfectly still, braced like I was going to catch it, or maybe not even try to catch it, like I was just gonna take the hit. I watched the monster hit me with his tail at full strength, pinwheeling my body over the water until I landed on the riverbank, broken and dead.
Then the vision clicked off and I was back in real time again, with the monster charging toward me. I wasn’t dead. He hadn’t even swung his tail yet. And now I knew, absolutely, if I just stood there and took it, that tail swipe would be enough to kill me.
Time froze while I thought about it. Suddenly, I was just so tired. Tired of fighting, tired of losing. Tired of smug demon speeches and that permanent look of disappointment on my father’s face, haunting me from beyond his grave. I could rest now. I could rest forever if I wanted to. All I had to do was stand still.
The monster swiped its tail at me, and I just couldn’t do it. I jumped back at the last second, then ran in and yanked its jaws open with my left hand, while ramming my right hand down its throat. I fired a full-strength artillery spell down the length of its body from the inside, lighting him up like a big blue lampshade before he exploded, drenching me in… scraps of paper? What the fuck were these things?
The monster’s remains were coming down on me like blue confetti as I strolled back to the National Guard. The lieutenant jumped off his gunner seat and started to wave a datapad at me. “You were not authorized to do that!” he shouted. “What am I supposed to put in my report?”
“Why the hell would I care about your report?” I shrugged. “Tell ‘em it fell down the stairs.”
* * *
Lydia was crying when I got back. She couldn’t see what happened by the river, but she could feel everything I felt, and she knew how close I had come to never coming home.
“It’s all right,” I said, holding her and stroking her hair. “I couldn’t do it. And if I couldn’t do it today, I won’t do it tomorrow, either. I’m sorry I scared you.” I reached up and dried her eyes with the tail of my shirt.
Lydia watched me walk around behind my desk. “I took the long way home and had a little family meeting on the way back. I talked to Mom for a while, and realized, I didn’t just ‘lose’ my team. They were taken from me, by a demon lord who has a name and a face and a home address.
“I’m not ready to fight him tomorrow, but it just so happens, I’ve got some free time. Turns out there is one upside to losing my job. This hero thing has kept me so busy, ever since I put on that jacket I’ve been reacting, improvising, scrambling around, narrowing my whole world to a handful of spells - so tired and worn down every day I never had time to think, never had time to analyze or plan or come up with a smarter way to be what I am.
“I need to develop more efficient versions of the spells I use, so I’m not wasting a thousand watts of magic to throw a sixty-watt punch. Then I need to spend some quality time with my ancestors and see if they left me anything that could fuck up a demon lord.
“I’m gonna need a day job pretty soon, but first, I’m gonna take a month off, and do a little homework.”