Mr. Hill hung up, and I dialed Miss Roman back. “Right, I’m hearing sirens, but none coming my way. I’m off 70th and maybe a hundred yards in off the hill. You should be able to see eleven men sprawled about along the hill, plus me. Two are just shocked, the rest managed to shoot one another up pretty effectively.”
“Are you okay? I’ve got a team on the way,” Miss Roman informed me calmly.
“Just pushing out the bullets now. That’s ten... eleven. Y’know, if I didn’t heal so easily, I’d be real pissed about all the holes in my skin.”
“We have access to some very good cosmetic surgeons here, for just that reason. Psi-healers can’t do everything,” she noted for me.
“Truth there. Twelve... Oh, hey, captive audience me. Is the Director coming?”
“She might have decided there was something interesting to do and left me some extra paperwork.” Miss Roman’s voice did not indicate approval, and yet did, at the same time.
“I take it SHIELD deals with a lot more ‘concerned citizen’ cases than the blues do?”
“That is correct. We wouldn’t interfere with anything if a certain someone wasn’t involved. Local crime drama is afternoon entertainment, not our job.”
“Well, it allows them to keep some face, so I suppose it’s not all bad. Thirteen...”
“You should be hearing sirens close by.” I cocked my ear and nodded. “They should be up on your position within a couple of minutes, Dynamo.”
“Thanks for the help. Sorry to keep bugging you like this.”
“I think you saved a few lives, and allowed us to do the same. I say book it as a win for both of us,” she replied astutely. “Take care.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Beating the ground crew that had zipped over here from the local base near Stark Tower was a familiar hoverbike, landing nearby with great precision and control. Peggy Carter walked up to me with a concerned face, which only got harder when she saw just how many holes were in my shirt and jeans, and the amount of red flowering on them.
The holes on my hands were kind of disturbing, too, but they weren’t bleeding anymore.
“How many shots did you block?” she asked rhetorically, staring at me. “Do you need help with that?”
“You’re going to get a lot of red on you unless you’ve got some tweezers, Director.”
To which she went back to her bike, opened up the side saddle, and drew out an emergency medical kit.
“Tweezers it is. If I whine, moan, and complain as you draw the deformed metal off the mounting bruises below, just consider it me being a girlie-girl who can’t take the pain.”
She smiled slightly as she knelt down next to me, noting the little pile of bloody bullets in the grass in front of me, counting the holes at a glance and sucking in a breath. “At least sixty...” she murmured despite herself, lifting up the large tweezers and using the holes in my shirt to guide her to the right spots. “Should actually be stripping you for this. Bits of the shirt might get into the wounds.”
“Sixty-seven. The one on my cheek didn’t stick, nor the one off my right elbow. Contagion will be forced out, I’m not worried about it, but for some reason I didn’t feel like shrugging out of my blouse right now.”
She deftly took out the scalpel in there, and sliced my blouse off in three sharp moves. My deep crimson undershirt actually had a bunch of dimples in it from the bullets.
She started on the bullet-pulling as the SHIELD team came trotting up. “Two closest should still be alive. If they fell and broke their necks, I have to admit that right now I wouldn’t feel guilty about it,” I grunted to them.
Miss Carter shook her head as she continued pulling out bullets and dropping them into a sterile bag there. They’d just match them up to the guns, of course. “Interesting material,” she judged my costume. “Do I need to cut that off as well?”
“Actually, it mends itself if I apply some voltage to it, but that’s kind of difficult with the bullets sticking through it.” Alchemicals for the win!... and Mending spells.
She called out orders deftly, not interfering with her work at all, and when a medic offered to take over, she waved him off and had him join the forensic team, which was soon swarming over the place, taking photos, confiscating guns, and the like.
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“Any particular reason you were here?” she asked fatalistically.
“I thought I was taking a walk on a nice day to a place that didn’t smell like the rest of the city.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’ve not smelled London at its ripest.”
“A good lungful of smog in the morning, eh? Are they competing on hacking coughs and stuff?”
“There are some ordnances going into effect. It seems the wealthiest New Yorkers really do want their home to look and smell better than it does, and since it will only inconvenience the poor, they are starting to put some muscle behind it. Getting people to stop using coal in England is taking a bit longer.”
“Wonderful.”
“What was that with the Marine?”
“The real reason I was probably here. I think he’s under a Fate Curse or something. Whatever it was, it pulled me in and I didn’t even know it.”
She gave me an odd look. “You can feel a Curse?”
“Yeah, pretty sensitive to them, actually.” Surviving one does that to you. “Got here just in time to save him and his family. Lucky me.”
“And he didn’t stick around to help?” Her voice was disapproving.
“I told him to take his family and run. The Maggia won’t want any eyewitnesses or survivors. Officially, he was never here.”
“Verbal-only?” She looked around quietly. “I don’t see any traces of them...”
“And it’s probably best to keep it that way.”
------------
I was chatting with her about the kids she wanted me to teach, and what I could do with them, and what SHIELD might be interested in alchemy, when my phone rang.
I picked it up. “Yes?” I asked curiously, the word letting him know others were listening.
“Sumthin’ is going on, girl,” his gruff voice. “The train he and his folks were on didn’t stop at the crossing. I had to latch onto it and cut the third rail, drag it to a stop. I found him and his family, and we’re standing in a corner of the station. I don’t want to take them outside unless I have to.”
“Huh. You know that guy I told you about in Greenwich Village?”
“Him? Yeah, I remember.” We’d walked right by it, and I’d pointed it and its famous window out to him. He had remarked that he could feel the Wards around it hooked into the ley lines through the ground.
“Think you can make it to him?”
“Gotta find me some open ground, to that park nearby... gonna be a quarter-mile in the open.”
“Eww. Carry them,” I suggested.
“Haw! Good idea. Got it. Be there in a few minutes.” He hung up abruptly.
I glanced at Director Carter. “Would you happen to have Dr. Strange’s phone number?”
She blinked at me in surprise. “You know the Sorcerer Supreme?” she asked, amazed.
“No, which is why I need his phone number.”
She rattled it off after a moment’s hesitation, and I punched it in without hesitation.
The phone rang three times before it was answered in a voice with a faint Oriental accent. “This is Wong.”
“Do I have the Greenwich Sanctum Sanctorum of the Mystic Arts?” I asked calmly, in a very reasonable tone.
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Promise, by the Fangs of Farallah!
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“Yes?” was the somewhat slower response.
“Excellent. Master Wong, in about two minutes, you are going to have a family of four showing up on your doorstep. They are under the effect of a Fate Curse of some sort, source unknown, whose aim is to kill the family. The center of the Curse is the father. There is nowhere else in the city with Wards strong enough that I know of that they can take shelter in. If you could arrange some chairs in the foyer when they arrive, that would be wonderful. They’ve had a tough day.
“Oh, and don’t worry about the big guy escorting them. He’ll be fine.”
“Who is this?” he asked politely.
“Dynamo. You may have read about me in the papers recently. I’ve Director Carter of SHIELD here if you wish to talk with someone you know.”
“If you could put her on for a moment?”
I handed the phone over. “Master Wong? This is Peggy,” she said respectfully. “Yes, she’s serious. I’m picking bullets out of her that she took for the family.” Only nine to go! “Thank you for your help in this matter. If you could have the Doctor take a look at their problem, that would probably be helpful. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.” She flipped the phone shut and handed it back to me to drop into the Vest next to me.
“Magic is annoying to deal with,” she muttered, as she got back to work. “Any idea why he’s Cursed?”
“I always have ideas, but no proof, and sensing a Curse is not the same as deciphering what Vampiric Bloodline or Were-pack someone belongs to.”
Her withdrawal of a bullet paused again as she looked at me sharply. “How much do you know?” she asked coolly.
“At least three Packs and two Master Vampires are here in Manhattan. Fucking idiots...” I muttered.
“Moving directly against them might start a Vampiric Cascade, or a Moon Hunt. The number of infected citizens who could result from that is a damn political nightmare,” she muttered as she resumed the ouchie-work.
“So you have to let them slowly grow their power and get ever more untouchable.” She grimaced harder than I did as she pulled out another bullet. “You know, I know some Tribal mercenaries who aren’t worried about politics who’d be perfectly happy to clear out some vampires and weres. You give them some black money for basic supplies and allow them to loot the dead for profit, and they’ll start taking care of this problem.”
She hesitated. “Can the werewolves be saved?” she had to ask.
“If they were born Moontouched, no. If they were infected, yes, but if they’ve embraced the Curse, they’ll reject the cure, and at best would just try to get re-infected.
“Those who can be healed are the people who are the most savage under the full moon, too, because they’ve rejected the bestial spirit of the wolf, and so are complete animals then.
“But if they’re living lives in a city and not rural, they’ve embraced the Curse. There’s no way a bestial werewolf wouldn’t be noticed in the city and put down.”
“You’re aware that they can just flee and infect someplace else?” she asked quietly.
“They have to have coffins to do so, and packs are funny about territory. The best choice is just to have some magic to be able to Scry and follow them. Funny thing about the Tribes...”