Super

Mari L. Stroud

Acknowledgements

To Audrey and Ty, whose input has been valuable beyond measure, and everyone who has alternately held or smacked (sometimes on the same day) throughout this process. I cannot mention every person on my Twitter feed or in the self-publishing business by name without taking up an entirely new book unto itself, but a warmer and more welcoming group of people I could not hope to find. Also to Audrey; yeah, kid, you're worth listing twice. There is no way I could have done this without you.

Copyright © 2011 Mari L. Stroud

Cover art by Audrey and Tanner Breen

Edited by Sue Bird

Super is a work of fiction. All names, dates, and events contained herein are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to real persons and events is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, with the exception of short excerpts used in interviews or reviews.

Chapter One

Previously:

Ophelia coughed into her hand, taking pains to keep it no louder than the twitterings of the birds above her, the leaves rustling back and forth. Failure of the immune system did not rank as sufficient reason for distraction so far as Evelyn was concerned.

She listened carefully to the woods around her, heard nothing to indicate another human presence. A breeze ruffled at her hair and brought a faint smell of burning wood with her. Evelyn was burning brush again somewhere else on the compound. Ophelia wasn't sure why she expended the effort, as fresh growth would spring up again as soon as the cinders had cooled.

Ophelia snapped her head in the direction of a warning rustle, too large to be one of the small animals moving about their business through the undergrowth. She shifted her weight in the branches of the maple that she had found. The heels of her boots scuffed a few scars into the soft bark. Damn; she would have to hope that Evelyn wasn't looking up.

There. Again. About thirty yards to the west, and much too large to be anything that should have been running around Evelyn's property. Not unless she had taken to raising her own meat, anyway.

Hardly daring to breathe for fear of the noise, Ophelia lowered herself from the tree by her arms. The narrow heels of her boots sank deeply into the needles, leaves, and moss that covered the forest floor. Most people would say that it wasn't the most practical set of footwear that Ophelia could have chosen, either here or back in Los Angeles. If she had been in any kind of position to give interviews about her real day job, she would have answered that this was what separated her from the amateurs.

Ophelia made no noise as she padded across the moss and leaves, designer boots or no. She was getting good at this. Ophelia approached the noise on smooth, gliding feet, dark spots dancing in front of her eyes as she nearly forgot to breathe. If she could get the drop on Evelyn, just once, then there would be no further need for these weekends and she could stay in Los Angeles full time.

There was a flash of black through the trees. Ophelia didn't waste time smiling and focused on the tug behind her eyes, faint, like a fish testing its line. She let out a long breath that bordered on a sigh. She pushed.

The black object rocked backwards obediently. Too late, Ophelia realized that the fluttering object she had mistaken for Evelyn was in fact her jacket, removed and hung from a low-hanging branch. A flash of lightning rocked through her body, bringing her teeth together so hard that she nearly bit the tip off of her own tongue and dropped her to the ground as surely as if her hamstrings had been cut. Ophelia had never received a legal rebuke larger than a parking ticket, but if this was what being tasered felt like, then she would have to find room in her schedule to lobby against it.

The flow of electricity stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Ophelia did not recover so quickly. She continued to jerk against the leaves for several more seconds, grinding her teeth together so that she would not make a sound. Being laid out by a junkie who had turned his brain into scrambled eggs might have been less humiliating.

Just as Ophelia's limbs were starting to come under her control again, a tall white woman stepped out from behind a tree. Ophelia didn't know how she had missed her. Evelyn was wearing black slacks and a black silk top that left her pale, un-freckled arms and shoulders bare. Her long, dark hair was twisted up into a French knot, and she didn't even have the grace to look sweaty or flushed. If Ophelia hadn't spent the last three nights sleeping in the spare bedroom, she would have said that Evelyn's house was the woods itself, and her bed a nest balanced between two forking branches.

Evelyn paused a few steps away from Ophelia and did not offer her hand to help her up. She had a few additional lines around her eyes and mouth that had not been there on Ophelia's last visit. Beyond that, she looked no different than she had when Ophelia had met her years before. She could have been immortal.

"It took me three minutes to get the drop on you this time," Evelyn announced, speaking as if she were addressing a class even though it was only the two of them. A nearby bird squawked at the disturbance and took flight with a rustle and a flutter. "But I was hoping we could reach at least five before you went back to Los Angeles."

Evelyn was much too controlled for disappointment to show in her face or voice, but Ophelia still scowled. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and shook the dry leaves out of her hair. Something was definitely crawling under the collar of her tank top, but she would be setting herself up for another shock from Evelyn if she stopped paying attention and slapped at it. One of these days…

"Three's still a personal record, though," Ophelia pointed out.

One corner of Evelyn's mouth twitched up, and Ophelia was not surprised when Evelyn extended her hand to help Ophelia back to her feet. There was a brief crack and spark of static electricity as their hands touched. Ophelia let go and leaned against the nearest tree trunk until her legs stopped shaking.

"There is that," Evelyn allowed. "But don't forget that there is no such animal as a half-victory." She blended in with the generic West Coast crowd when she was in Los Angeles with Ophelia, but here, on her own land, a faint British lilt shaped her words. Though she often wondered, Ophelia had never asked how long Evelyn had been away from home. "Being attacked from the front and while you're expecting it is also a luxury that most of us cannot boast."

"I'll remember," Ophelia said. She rubbed at her chest and winced. Her heart was beating in a funny little rhythm, several regular beats followed by the little jolt of one that didn't quite make it before things settled down again. She would be doing that for the next couple of hours.

True to her nature, Evelyn smiled again. "Good. There very well may come a day when you won't be facing someone who will extend their hand to help you up again." She pushed a few imaginary strands of hair back into their knot and scooped up her shoes from their hidden place behind a tree. Her bare feet across the ground made even less noise than Ophelia's had. "I trust that you can find your way back to the house?"

Ophelia tested her legs and then immediately leaned back against the tree again. "I'm not that much of a city girl," she said. "And I'll have you know that Georgia is full of national parks and walking trails. There are plenty of parks around Los Angeles, too."

Evelyn made a sniffing noise that said all she cared to on the subject of tame walking paths where the biggest danger was a jogger not paying attention to where they were going. She picked up her jacket from where Ophelia had knocked it and started off through the trees with it slung over her shoulder, her shoes still dangling easily from her other hand. Ophelia waited until Evelyn was almost out of sight before she stuck her tongue out at her back. She waited for a few more minutes for her legs to stop trembling and set off. It was muggy this deep in the trees where the breeze could not reach, and mosquitoes were soon swarming over every patch of available flesh. Ophelia cursed and slapped at them before she realized what she was doing, then looked around a little guiltily. The ghosts of her parents did not rise up from the moss and leaves in order to scold her for not being a lady. Ophelia only felt a slight pang at the thought. Fair enough; it had been nearly a decade, and they had gone quietly. Heart disease and cancer, respectively, didn’t make for tragic tales of woe. She knew a lot of people who had had it worse.

Evelyn's house was smaller than most people would have expected upon seeing it for the first time. It had been built of stone flown in from Evelyn's native Lincolnshire, at an expense that would have made even Ophelia's bank account cringe. And that was before Marcus had started modifying it. Several cameras whirred to life as Ophelia approached, none of them making a sound as their green eyes took note of her presence. There had been even more of them in the woods, and making even less noise. Dirt tracks served for roads on Evelyn's isolated compound, but the technology she used to monitor and defend her land would have made crusty Army generals and sci-fi geeks alike drool with envy. A faint warning charge thrummed under Ophelia's hand as she put it against the back door, dissipating a second later as she was recognized. Ophelia walked through a kitchen that could have entertained Martha Stewart, through the dining room and towards the stairs. Even against the stone floors, Ophelia's boots made virtually no noise. Training to be silent in the woods carried over to less wild haunts, too.

Ophelia passed a mirror on her way and grimaced when she caught sight of herself. Her deep brown skin was smudged with dirt and the occasional grass stain where she hadn't been able to control a fall, and there was a red line running down her collarbone from an unfortunate encounter with one of the bramble patches that Evelyn never quite managed to eradicate. Her long black hair, pulled back into a ponytail rather than her usual long waves, was coming loose and speckled with leaves and twigs. Her large, dark eyes didn't look as tired as they could have after a full weekend of getting her ass handed to her broken up by a few precious instances of handing Evelyn's to her in return, but Ophelia was still looking forward to a long, hot soak before she and Marcus went out that night.

Coming to a runway near you, Ophelia thought as she pulled the worst of the debris from her hair and continued on her way. The sun was already sinking low behind the trees. Maybe it would have to be a shower instead of a soak.

Ophelia took off her boots when she reached the stairs so that she would not track mud as the marble floors gave way to wood. Evelyn didn't keep carpets in her house. Too much static electricity, and she could power all of her appliances without being on the grid as it was. The net result of going barefoot was that Ophelia switched from making little noise to making no noise as she moved upstairs and towards the guest room where she had been flopping out exhausted at the conclusion of each day. She could hear Evelyn speaking with someone as she came nearer, but paid it little mind. Ophelia wasn't the only person who took advantage of training with one of the first people known to start throwing powers a little outside of what the ordinary civilian could do and then start using them to fight the bad guys in ways the cops couldn't. For all that she was supposed to be retired, Evelyn did more business than a bed and breakfast.

Evelyn slammed her phone back into the receiver, hard, as Ophelia was passing the master bedroom's open door. She paused. Now that was out of the ordinary. Ophelia hadn't even known that Evelyn had a temper to lose; she was the one who was always pressing on Ophelia the importance of control when she was wielding the kind of power usually achieved through big budgets and lots of CGI.

"Everything all right?" Ophelia asked, remaining in the doorway rather than crossing the threshold. Evelyn was staring hard at the phone's cradle as if it was withholding information from her, and her hands were clenched into hard fists by her sides. She did not appear to have heard Ophelia's voice, which was alarming, but not nearly so alarming as the way that Evelyn's hair was writhing around her shoulders and the curtains were reaching out to her from the window. The inside of the room smelled like ozone. Ophelia stayed back, uncertain of what she could do to get Evelyn's attention that would not result in her spinning about on Ophelia out of reflex. Ophelia threw up a "just in case" telekinetic shield and let it extend past the threshold.

As the edge of the shield touched against the outermost fringe of Evelyn's energy field, there was a cracking noise, and the smell of ozone grew even stronger. Ophelia half-expected a thundercloud to form along the ceiling and shower them both. Evelyn jumped and turned towards Ophelia, blinking several times as if she had not realized that Ophelia was there until that point, but her hair fell and, more importantly, stayed down.

"That didn't look like a 'oh, no, my stocks aren't doing well' conversation," Ophelia said. She lowered her shield now that Evelyn seemed more herself again.

Evelyn let out a rueful laugh and pressed the backs of her hands against her cheeks, where twin spots of red were burning. "I'm actually doing rather well," she said. "I'm thinking of putting in a new edition next year." Stocks in granite and jet fuel could expect a fantastic quarter, then, Ophelia thought, eyeing the walls. "You've told me that your sister knows about your abilities, correct?"

Ophelia shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Yes," she allowed. It hadn't made easy holiday dinners since then. "When I was twelve, we were having a fight on the front porch, and I accidentally pushed a flowerpot over the railing without touching it."

Evelyn's lips turned up very slightly, not finding the nostalgia of sibling discord as charming as Ophelia did. "And what did your sister do?"

"Ran away." Ophelia tilted her head to one side and listened to the whine of an aircraft passing over the house. Damn it, Marcus had decided to pick her up early. They were still working the kinks out of their date nights. "In her defense, though, she came right back."

Evelyn made a noncommittal noise from the back of her throat and continued staring at the telephone. Wisps of smoke were curling out from the base, as if Evelyn had sent a fatal power surge through the wiring before she had managed to get herself under control again. Ophelia hoped that she didn't have any important voicemails stored on it.

"I believe that's your ride," Evelyn said finally, not taking her eyes from the machine. She was great when Ophelia wanted to train herself against someone a little more challenging than a mugger or low-level drug dealer, not so much when it came to heart to hearts.

"I'm already packed." Ophelia ducked into the guest room long enough to get her bag and smooth a last few wrinkles out of the bed that she had made earlier—Mama had been adamant that her daughters never forget their manners or how to leave things neater than they had found them when the family made the move from Atlanta to Los Angeles so long before—and then stuck her head back into Evelyn's room. "I have too many things brewing back in LA to make it back next weekend, sorry."

Evelyn waved at her dismissively. Ophelia wasn't even certain that she had been understood until Evelyn went on, "I'll be training a new girl for the next several weeks. She'll require all my attention." Her mouth made a shape that could almost be considered a smile. "You've progressed so far that you hardly require more than a polish, anyway. Something that you are more than equipped to obtain on your own."

Ophelia flapped a hand, though being able to get the drop on Evelyn for three minutes had still taken her nearly a year to pull off, and headed for the door. Evelyn did not follow her in order to greet Marcus, even though he had designed the security systems on the house. Ophelia hadn't expected her to, and knew that Marcus didn't, either. For all that they liked and respected one another, Marcus and Evelyn had the social graces of water-doused cats.

There was a black helicopter on Evelyn's front lawn. It had made next to no sound as it had landed and the blades had wound down; Ophelia was willing to bet that there had been a deposit made to Marcus's bank account with several zeroes after an already ambitious number in exchange for sharing that little bit of R&D. She made a note to pay especial attention to US activities in the Middle East for the next couple of months to see if she could spot a clone in action. Other girlfriends clipped out newspaper articles, she played games of Clue with top-secret military equipment.

"Hey," Ophelia called as she walked across the lawn. Marcus was just getting down from the pilot's seat and removing his headset. He was dressed in an expensive suit slightly wrinkled from hours of wear, and there were lines of fatigue around his eyes. None of that stopped him from looking damned good. Marcus was a tall, fit black man in his early thirties, with a face that wasn't built to smile often but could devastate a room when it did. Ophelia could feel her own mouth starting to twitch already, and she reminded herself sternly that she was several years past the age of skipping across the lawn. That didn't mean that she couldn't throw her arms about Marcus's neck and make sure with a long, lingering kiss that he knew how much she had missed him. "What, no jet? Don't I warrant the classy car?" It was only then that Ophelia realized that Marcus had kissed her far more chastely than she had kissed him, and that his hands about her waist were subtly pushing her back. The corners of his mouth were lifting just slightly.

"Ophelia," Marcus said. There was movement from within the helicopter, and then a curious face peered out the door at Ophelia. She was not only white but uncommonly pale at that, with long blonde hair the color of champagne and eyes almost as dark as Ophelia's own. They startled in a face so otherwise devoid of contrasts, even before Ophelia took in the small constellation of rhinestones that the woman had clued around her eyes. Not that Ophelia harbored any bad feelings towards wearing masks—they kept her out of the tabloids any more than she wanted to be there, after all—but it wasn't even dark yet. Not to mention that Ophelia had no idea what the new woman had done to earn entrance into Evelyn's space, not an invitation that Evelyn granted lightly.

"Hello," Ophelia said. The woman had been studying Evelyn's house; upon hearing Ophelia speak, she pivoted her head on her neck and blinked at Ophelia several times without speaking. The gesture was oddly birdlike. Considering the things that she and Evelyn could do, a lack of social skills wasn't all that odd, but Ophelia still found herself blinking back in bemusement as the silence stretched.

"This is Naomi," Marcus said. His voice had the amber undercurrent that was as good as a smile, even if his face wasn't moving to match it. "She's going to try herself against Evelyn for the first time this week. Naomi, this is Ophelia. She's one of the toughest women you'll ever meet."

Naomi leaned a little further out of the helicopter, far enough for Ophelia to see that her outfit appeared constructed out of pieces of silver dental floss. She could feel her eyebrows struggling to rise even as all of her Southern-bred instincts ordered her to keep her face neutral. Naomi looked Ophelia over, and Ophelia could not read the story there. After a pause just long enough to grow awkward, Naomi stepped down from the helicopter. Her shoes were the most substantial things on her body.

"Pleased to meet you," Naomi murmured in a curiously small voice, taking Ophelia briefly by the hand as she passed. Ophelia felt a charge nothing like the one that Evelyn could lay down. She pulled free quickly and got into the helicopter before Marcus could notice, her cheeks flaming.

Chapter Two

Now:

Sometimes she crouched on the sign for a laugh. Not often, as there was rarely any action happening up in the hills except for a few kids sneaking up to drink or do drugs, the occasional lost hiker. Every now and again, though, when the city had been quiet for several nights in a row and she and Naomi had their blood up and thought that they deserved a treat, they would creep up there to be alone for an hour or two. It was a good place for an impromptu lover’s tryst, as the lack of proximity to human kind meant that Naomi’s voice would bounce harmlessly against rock and scrub, and the few who did hear her would attribute the sound to that of a mountain lion and made a note to be careful on their morning jog. Most of the time, though, they stayed among the buildings and alleys. Ophelia would not have believed, once upon a time, that she would ever go days, even weeks, without thinking of Atlanta, or that she could grow to be comforted by the lack of stars almost as much as she had been by their presence fifteen years before. This was her city now, both sides of its mirror. She looked at herself in one with a leather mask covering the upper half of her face and her hair pulled back into a dark bun, with heavy black leggings on to keep her from losing skin if she had to leap across a rooftop or scramble down a fire escape and heeled boots made for supporting ankles. On the other side of the mirror, she wore bright, fashionable colors and stiletto heels, and she giggled constantly and twirled her hair around the tips of her fingers while Naomi flirted shamelessly with anyone who happened to be nearby. The only thing that connected the two mirrors was that the heels and boots were always Gucci, and Naomi was always there.

Speaking of. Ophelia adjusted the small plastic-and-metal buds that she had clipped into each ear, and the traffic roar briefly became deafening before she was able to adjust the sonic filters. She wanted to be able to hear her surroundings without getting her eardrums blown out by Naomi doing what Naomi did best. Someone was arguing with a lover on a fire escape up above; a few more clicks dialed the volume down to give them some privacy while Ophelia turned towards the mouth of the alley and her own lover. It wasn’t hard to pick her out. When Ophelia was working, everything might still have a high-fashion label, but she still went for dark colors: black leggings, black boots, black tank top with a jacket of the same color thrown over the top. Not something she could wear if she wanted to blend in on a crowded street quickly, but it kept the casual viewer’s eye moving along without paying too close an attention to the shadows. Naomi, on the other hand, took the “less is more” ethos as a sign of personal failure. The most subdued outfit she owned still would have made her a target for indecent exposure laws back in Georgia. She currently had so many rhinestones glued to her face that she didn’t need a traditional mask, and her normally fine and slightly limp flaxen hair was teased up until it nearly doubled the size of her head. If Ophelia hadn’t watched her styling it before they had gone out that night, she would have sworn that Naomi had snuck wires and lattice supports in there, the way that Marie Antoinette had been rumored to do when she wanted her hair to come as close to touching the ceiling as possible. Naomi’s outfit was a one-piece silver bodysuit. It fit so snugly that she might have painted it on rather than worn it. Ophelia was more than a little surprised that they got away with doing their night work without the constant descent of paparazzi upon them, frankly. When she had first started working with Naomi, she had pointed out that aggressive, light-catching silver wasn't the best way to slide through shadows without being seen, while quietly thanking her lucky stars that at least Naomi was no longer going nearly nude. Naomi had pointed out right back that Ophelia might be right there, but it certainly kept people from paying too much attention to Naomi's face, a fact that Ophelia had no other choice but to concede. Nor could she deny that Naomi was hard to look at in a get-up that might have been a second skin, yet Naomi still insisted on ruining the lines by wearing flats. Sometimes Ophelia just didn’t know which side she was on.

Naomi caught Ophelia’s eye at the far enough of the alley and made a quick “come here” gesture. Her body language was as purposeful as a divining rod, and Ophelia sped up. Her boots made no sound against the cement. All that training hadn’t been for nothing.

As Ophelia gave her earpiece a final twist, Naomi lounged back against the brick wall that held up one quarter of a pawnshop and crooked up the side of her mouth. The smile was already a little wild, a little looking for some ass to kick and giddy in the realization that she had found it. One of these days, Ophelia was going to take the time to wonder at how much her girl loved mayhem, but it wasn’t going to be tonight. They strolled into the alleyway side by side towards the blossoming trouble that Naomi had spotted, Ophelia's hands in the pockets of her jacket and Naomi's dangling lightly by thighs. Their target was a big man written all over with bad news to deliver and a smaller, younger one who looked as if he wished that he had just stayed in the house rather than coming out to sign for it.

"Hey, now," Ophelia said, stopping a few paces off from the pair. She kept her hands in her pockets. Naomi went to lounge against a wall again, her posture loose and self-satisfied. Easy to miss that she was choosing her position for maximum echo effect. The younger man—the boy, really—was already bleeding from his nose and a cut just beneath his eye. Ophelia wondered idly if he was even old enough to be in college, and where the hell his parents were at if he wasn’t. They weren’t in a part of town where it a good idea to wander around at night alone and on foot. "Unless you two have some kind of fight club going on down here, I don’t think that you’re a very nice person."

"Are boys the only ones allowed to fight?" Naomi chimed in, just a little too eagerly for the casual ear. The tough let go of the front of the kid's shirt in order to face them more clearly. The victim tumbled right back down to the cement, barely remembering to catch himself on his elbows before he cracked his head. He looked dazed; Ophelia made a mental note to make sure that it wasn’t cracked already once she and Naomi had handled a few more pressing matters.

The tough scanned Naomi from the gemstones on her face down to her silver flats, then flicked a stare toward Ophelia a few steps beyond. Naomi's rhinestones made her look more than a little like an insect. Ophelia was wearing a mask. He still didn't appear to realize that there was a little more happening here than a check-in from the neighborhood watch, which so far as Ophelia was concerned just proved that most criminals were not terribly bright.

"Look, ladies," the thug said, putting just a hint of a sneer into the supposed title of respect that had Ophelia coming forward a step before she caught herself. "I'm a little short on cash right now, so why don't you two just beat it, all right? Three blocks over, there's a motel that don't charge but by the hour. Gift from me to you."

"Is he implying that we're prostitutes, babe?" Ophelia said to Naomi, widening her eyes in mock shock.

Naomi's smile widened and she cocked one of her legs up higher against the wall, suddenly a little more sexy and a lot more dangerous. Ophelia could see the edges of Naomi's teeth against her lower lip. "No, I don't think that that's what he's doing, O," she replied. The bruised and bleeding kid at least had the good sense to look nervous. The thug, not so much. "I think that he's outright calling us prostitutes."

"Honey," Ophelia told the tough, "being with you would be an insult to the many fine prostitutes that I've met in my life, don't flatter yourself." She watched the thug's eyes, and said, "Kid, stay down on the ground." The kid knew that he was the one being addressed this time, and did as he was told. The thug went for the gun that he had been keeping tucked into the waistband of his pants, beneath his jacket where it was hard to see on a casual once-over but still easily within reach if he wanted to hurt someone.

Ophelia opened up her mind and flexed the muscle that was always there, harder than she would throw any punch.

She saw the crackling, the pulsing, that made up the streams of electrons tying together the whole of the world in one long unbroken flow, from the thug's hand to the gun to her, all of it responding to her will. Ophelia reached out with her, grabbed for the gun without laying a hand upon the thug or moving so much as an inch from where she stood, and jerked it out of his grasp so hard that he would have broken a finger if he hadn’t developed half a brain at the last possible second. As soon as the weapon was out of the thug’s grip and in Ophelia's, Naomi opened her mouth and screamed.

Ophelia had told the kid to get down and stay there for a reason. Even on the pavement and thus relatively out of the line of fire, he yelled and clapped his hands over his ears. Ophelia only knew it because she saw his mouth move; Naomi overwhelmed everything else. The thug reeled back against the wall opposite Naomi, maybe just starting to realize that Naomi had chosen her position specifically so that she could take full advantage of the echo. Lights started going off on the cars nearest the alleyway, signaling that their alarms had been triggered, and Ophelia saw a flash of glass from the corner of her eye and realized that it was a discarded bottle breaking. Had her earpieces not been in to offer her some measure of protection, Ophelia would have felt as if someone was trying to pull her brain straight out of her skull using her eardrums as an entry point. Even with them, Naomi had the most disruptive banshee wail that Ophelia had ever heard. She didn’t even sound human.

Wincing slightly as she stepped into the stream of sound, Ophelia drove a hard right hook directly into the thug’s jaw. He was too busy yelping and trying to cringe out of Naomi’s line of fire to block or even duck. The thug’s head slammed back against the brick, and he dropped with blood trickling from his ears. Naomi probably hadn’t been going long or loud enough to pop his eardrums, but he was still going to have a fun time healing up at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ophelia thought. She dropped into a cautious crouch to check the thug’s pulse. Naomi cut off her scream as abruptly as she had begun, letting the wailing car alarms become the loudest noise around, and helped the kid up to his feet. He was rubbing at his ears and wincing, but other than that appeared to have suffered no injury.

"Um, thanks," the kid said, awkward and shy, as Naomi released him. He was speaking a shade too loudly, as if he was in the parking lot of a recently ended rock concert rather than a none-too-clean alley in a none-too-safe neighborhood. Ophelia hid a smile behind her hand and straightened. Naomi tended to have both of those effects on people who weren’t accustomed to her, and a few who were.

Ophelia unloaded the thug’s gun and, turning crisply with the easy, athletic grace that Evelyn had instilled in her, rotated in ten different ways so that she could throw the bullets in ten different directions. She had a good feeling that their friend already had previous felony convictions that made it a violation for him to own a firearm in the first place. He had the look.

"You really shouldn't be in this part of town alone at night," Ophelia told him when she was done. "Why aren't you at home studying, anyway?" She leaned down to pick up the kid's discarded backpack for him just as his expression began to turn sheepish. A small bag fell down to the pavement.

"Oh!" Naomi sounded downright triumphant. "The mystery is solved. He's taking a cooking class, sugar." She shook the pot. "How much spaghetti are you guys making if you need this much oregano, anyway?"

"Okay, okay." The kid hunched down inside of his jacket and blushed furiously. His expression was a little defiant as he reached out to snatch his backpack from Ophelia, and then a lot surprised when she let him have it without a fight.

"The convenience store on the corner is open twenty-four hours a day," Ophelia told him. "The owner's a good man, you can trust him. Call the cops, and then call your parents." She leaned in close. "And I'll know if you don't. I'm psychic, too, not just—" She made the lid of a trash can pry itself up and then spin in the air like a perched plate at a magic show. The kid went pale. Good for him; he didn’t have the look, and Ophelia had enough regulars as it was. "If any of that sank in, then go.” The kid didn’t waste any time running off towards the convenience store so that Ophelia could let the lid go. She didn’t quite make her mark in setting it back down. It clanged loudly enough to briefly overwhelm the car alarms as it bounced off of the pavement, and sent a ginger-colored cat scurrying out from behind it. It skulked back a few seconds later, threw Ophelia a disdainful look, and bolted again with a kitten almost too large to be carried dangling from its mouth. Ophelia tried to catch her breath and flexed her muscles, the physical and the telekinetic both. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

"You are not psychic," Naomi reproved her as they made for the fence at the back of the alley. Ophelia scrambled up the chain link with ease in spite of her boots and made a playfully disapproving tsking noise when Naomi couldn’t keep up with her. She extended her hand down, and the pair hopped to the other side of the fence to continue their patrol just as flashes of red and blue began to paint the alley walls. “Naughty, naughty, you told a lie. We’re supposed to be setting good examples.”

"I could be," Ophelia answered. "I don't tell you everything about me, you know." If she were psychic, maybe Naomi wouldn’t be such a mystery to her, simultaneously deeper under her skin than anyone that Ophelia had ever met before and as much of a cipher as she had been on the day she had climbed down from Marcus's helicopter, her outfit in severe danger of slipping off of the essentials at any moment.

Naomi's dark eyes turned wicked from inside their glittering mask. Ophelia took a quick glance back the way that they had came to make sure that the cops weren’t following and, receiving the negative, pushed Naomi back against the brick and kissed her until all of the gloss was gone from her mouth. It was something sweeter and more girlish than Ophelia had expected, and she wondered if Naomi didn’t wear such a maddeningly uncooperative outfit while they were on patrol for a reason. It was probably better than a bucket of cold water and a disapproving stare from Grandma for keeping hands to themselves.

"Maybe I'm the one who's psychic," Naomi whispered to her. She tickled at Ophelia’s calf with her foot, ventured up to the back of Ophelia's knee. Definitely time to focus on Grandma.

"Then what am I thinking?" Ophelia murmured back. Naomi flicked her tongue along Ophelia's lower lip. "What am I thinking besides that?"

"That you really want to cut patrol short right now."

Ophelia snorted and, when Naomi giggled in response, held up her finger. "I'll deny it to my dying day." A brief flash lit up the opposite end of the alley, and they both spun. Ophelia cursed with feeling as a car peeled out of reach a few seconds later. It wasn’t as if people didn’t take snapshots via any camera they could find on a nightly basis, and every now and again someone hoping to make a name for themselves would write up a column on the "The Los Angeles Archangels" or some other stupid nickname that they were desperately hoping would stick, but Ophelia hated it more than anything else when someone caught she and Naomi having a little private affection and turned it public. She stepped away and straightened her jacket, dabbed at her smudged lipstick.

Naomi pushed at her hair where it had been flattened by the wall. Not that much; if Naomi didn’t have alien DNA, then she at least had some damned good styling products that she was refusing to share. "Mood killer." Her tone begged to differ.

Ophelia rolled her eyes and tried to shake off the tension that wanted to settle into her shoulders. "That turned you on."

"Of course it did. I'm saying that it was a mood killer for you." Ophelia met her halfway by holding out her hand so that Naomi could take it. Naomi kissed the tips of Ophelia's fingers and then bit at the tip of one of them very lightly. "At least if we’re going to be in the tabloids, we get to look fabulous at the same time."

The rest of the night was spent breaking up two attempted car thefts and three muggings, one of which also involved a kid out of her depth thinking that she was bad and trying to score some drugs. Ophelia made a mental note to sweep the area more carefully for the next few weeks and see if she and Naomi couldn’t trace them back to a supplier. With dawn approaching, she was tired, lacking in bruises, and willing to call the night a job well done just as they were circling back around to the same neighborhood where the mugging had taken place a few hours before.

Naomi grabbed Ophelia's arm. She was frowning. "Do you smell smoke?"

"I smell a lot of things." She was going to spend at least an hour in the shower once she made it home. The reek of piss had a way of making it into her very clothing.

"No, there's—" Naomi pivoted like a soldier towards a noise that Ophelia had to strain very hard to hear: that of a smoke alarm going off, and the crackling of flames. Banshee wails weren't Naomi's only talent. "There."

Ophelia glanced towards the sky. Dawn wasn't going to pop up with a vengeance for another hour yet, and she couldn't hear fire sirens going off amidst the sound of the fire itself. "Let's do it," she said.

The flames and the smoke led them to a liquor store burning merrily only a few blocks away, the orange glow not lifting high enough just yet to be seen around the larger buildings that stood to either side of it. The sale of alcohol had been prohibited from two a.m. onwards, and it was unlikely that the shopkeeper had arrived yet to get the store ready for a six a.m. opening. There wasn't likely to be anyone inside. She and Naomi had gotten lucky.

As the darkened neon sign overheated and three shards of glass tubing out across the parking lot and street, Ophelia said a shadow pass behind the window, too solid to be smoke, and remembered that luck rarely had anything to do with their work. She swore and darted for the back, since the fire looked for the moment to be concentrated amongst the flammable bottles up front. The back door was sturdy metal with no handle on the outside, made for stubborn drunks to hammer at it hard without ever giving way. Ophelia spit on the metal and watched it sizzle; she was going to be doing this the hands-optional way, then. She stepped back, closed her eyes, and concentrated. The metal creaked. She focused harder, until sweat gathered against her temples and she thought something in her brain was about to give way, and heard the lock snap and the door fly open.

Naomi shouted Ophelia's name in her glass-shattering register, making the ear buds whine. A second later she was tackling Ophelia hard to the ground without particular care for manners or comfort. Ophelia felt her jacket tear at the elbows; a lick of flame larger than a man shot out into the alleyway before disappearing back inside, eating up the fresh oxygen. Through the doorway, Ophelia watched as flames that had mostly been concentrated in the front of the store crawled along the ceiling and walls towards the back.

"Firefighting 101, O," Naomi said a little breathlessly. Behind her gemstone mask, her dark eyes were large and genuinely frightened. "Don’t feed them."

Ophelia was about to concede Naomi the point when the windows exploded at once, and the fire inside became a roar. She smiled sweetly. "Looks like it was going to find its own food one way or another without my help." Ophelia reached for Naomi's hand and gave it a quick squeeze before leaping back up to her feet and darting inside. The heat was immediately suffocating, even as Ophelia threw up a hasty barrier around herself to keep the worst of the fire at bay. It did an indifferent job at best against the smoke, and Ophelia was choking and ducking into a crouch in order to suck up as much clean air as she could within a matter of seconds. There was no way that she was going to be able to search the front of the store and make it back out again alive, broken windows or no. Ophelia wouldn't wager that she had more than ninety seconds in the back before the fire forced her to retreat.

But I swore, Ophelia thought, spinning in a circle and listening to drops of sweat sizzle as they were flung away from her body and into the fire. There was a wetness above her lip that wasn't sweat. She heard sirens approaching at long last, and her heart began to beat faster in spite of herself. Professionals were arriving—at least, a different kind of professional than Naomi and herself. They could handle this better than Ophelia could. But she had just been so sure—

Hours later, Ophelia would honestly not be able to say whether she actually heard the boy cough, or whether it was Naomi trilling a warning from outside that she was about to come in and get Ophelia whether Ophelia liked it or not. She spun, forcing through the pain in her head and making the smoke and flame part before her like theater curtains sweeping back. The same teenaged idiot that Ophelia had already dragged out of harm's way once that evening was crouched back against one of the supply racks with his sweatshirt collar pulled up to cover his nose and mouth. His eyes were red, and very wide.

Ophelia spit out a handful of words that would have gotten a grounding from her father and the rare use of her full name from her mother if either of them had been around to hear her. She lunged forward, grabbed the kid by the back of his sweatshirt without particularly caring whether or not she was gentle about it, and dragged him for the back door. A part of the roof behind her collapsed in with a roar that rattled Ophelia's teeth in their sockets. A hand of solid heat pushed behind her as hungrily as the big bad wolf in every child's bedtime story. One of the shelves flipped over, throwing sparks and nearly hitting her. She could barely see the door through the smoke and sparks. She couldn't remember which way she had come.

Naomi appeared out of the smoke, her silver bodysuit looking bronze in the light from the fire, and grabbed for Ophelia's hand. Ophelia held on as a grim lifeline and yanked the kid along in her wake, enlarging her shield to protect all three of them from the heat. Three steps later, they were out again in the clear night air. She could have suffocated or burned to death less than two yards away from freedom. They staggered to the other end of the alley to avoid baking in their own skins and to find a clearer patch of air.

Ophelia turned her head long enough to spit out a blackened wad of phlegm and then socked Naomi in the arm. "You shouldn't have come after me. One of us is supposed to stay outside so that—"

"So that she'll be available if the other one falls into trouble," Naomi finished. "You want to tell me that you weren't?"

Ophelia made a face and spit again. The boy was doubled over with his hands braced against his knees, coughing hard. The fire engines sounded only minutes away. Good thing; the kid was going to need at least a few hits of oxygen before he would be able to explain what he had been doing in a closed shop in the first place.

"You have to be the biggest idiot that I've ever met, do you know that?" Ophelia asked the boy, angrier than she had intended as the hit of adrenaline that had taken her through the fire kept going without anything else to distract it. The boy raised his eyes and tried to glare at her, which just proved that he was a bigger idiot. "You can buy bootleg alcohol without breaking in and setting fires, dumbass."

The boy glared harder. He didn't seem deterred by how little Ophelia was impressed by it. "I didn't break in," he insisted. "I saw someone inside, in the fire." Ophelia's stomach clenched. The front of the store was an inferno that even the firefighters wouldn't be able to enter, and the back had been turning into the same even as she had been darting in. There was nothing that she could do, and odds were high that the kid was lying to avoid the smack-down he was going to get as soon as his parents discovered what he had been up to. Still.

"And you thought that jumping in to play firefighter was better than telling your parents you were buying pot?" Naomi asked. The kid immediately dropped his eyes. All the way down to his feet, too, rather than playing contrite as a way to stealthily study Naomi's chest. "You have to be smoking a lot to reach the point of permanent frying, but I'm advising you to back off for your own good."

"I'm not high!" the kid exclaimed. He fumbled for his backpack, which had miraculously managed to remain looped over one arm throughout the entire rescue. "I think my pot burned up, anyway."

"How lucky for the firefighters that they can put out the blaze without worrying about their next drug test," Ophelia said dryly. Something within the building crashed with a tremendous noise and a flare of sparks that drove them all back and put the buildings on either side in danger. Ophelia wanted to throw a shield around the entire building, but knew at the same time that a solid year of eating all her veggies still wouldn't make her strong enough to pull it off. There was an ache behind her eyes from having used her powers so heavily over the course of the night as it was, and the sirens were mere moments away, but she still wished. There is so much that I need to do and can't.

"You're not Atlas, O, it's not your job to hold up the world," Naomi said, raising her eyebrows when Ophelia looked at her. Ophelia was starting to wonder if Naomi wasn’t kidding about that psychic thing. Naomi shrugged without appearing particularly repentant and then pointed towards the roof of one of the adjacent buildings. "Your ex is stalking you."

Ophelia turned, saw a male figure standing on the edge of one of the adjoining rooftops. Even though he was too far away to be sure, she could feel the two of them making eye contact. "Marcus isn't the stalking type," Ophelia answered evenly. Nor was he the type to hover behind her and provide unasked-for protection; he knew that she didn't need it. "I'll be back in a minute. Make sure Chong here doesn't go anywhere."

Naomi nodded and fisted her hand through the bag of the kid's sweatshirt. His gaze trailed upwards towards her breasts, and Naomi put out an ember on his shoulder harder than she had to. Ophelia climbed up the side of the building where he waited via its fire escape. It would have been a feat for a normal person, but Ophelia already put in four or five nights a week running up and down ill-kept streets in these stilettos, not to mention the hours that she and Naomi put in at various clubs around town to keep up appearances as the debauched socialite and her opportunistic hanger-on. She had the lung capacity of a Navy Seal and the legs of an ice dancer.

Marcus squatted down a bit to make eye contact with Ophelia after she reached the top and was pulling herself over the ledge, but did not offer her his hand. Same as Ophelia knew that he wasn't standing up on a rooftop watching her and Naomi work because he thought that she needed help protecting her city, he knew that she didn't need help scaling a little safety barrier, either. Slightly out of breath from the exertion after she had already gotten her cardio in through running and operating her powers earlier in the night, Ophelia pushed some stray hair back into her bun and surveyed the man who had not so long ago been her man. Marcus looked good; they had been broken up for too long for Ophelia to resent him for it. He was wearing a Kevlar suit of his own making, lighter than police issue and jointed at his shoulders, elbows, and wrists so that he could do all of the body-flexing gymnastics up and down the sides of buildings that he needed with ease. He wore a pack on his back that contained everything from lock-picking tools to coagulants to anti-venoms, and Ophelia wouldn’t have been surprised if Marcus had told her that there was an ounce or two of carefully shielded uranium hiding in a special compartment somewhere. He wore a mask very similar to Ophelia’s own, save that it was larger. It shielded much of his eyes, which was a shame. Ophelia had always thought that Marcus had such lovely, expressive eyes.

"There was no one else in the building," Marcus said. Ophelia both hated and loved that he knew what was on her mind even with half of her face obscured by a mask.

Once Ophelia had her feet under her again in every since of the word, she said, "Every time you go this long without saying hello, I think that you've gone back to the East Coast."

Marcus's mask was as necessary as Ophelia's, but she still hated it. It kept her from seeing what the fine muscles around his eyes were doing, and she was forced to read the set of his mouth alone as he said, "I ought to. They could use me." He first shrugged and then rolled his shoulders, saving either one of them from having to point out that Los Angeles needed him, too, and had gotten used to having him around. "Not a social call, Ophelia. I came to give you a message."

"All right." Ophelia had suspected as much. She glanced down over the edge of the building to where Naomi was stalking in circles and watching the kid, who was alternating between watching the fire and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet as if he were thinking of trying something. If he was stupid enough to think that tangling with one was any wiser than tangling with two, then at least Ophelia had a good seat for the entertainment. The first fire engine screeched to a stop in front of the shop, and the yellow-clad firefighters scrambled out. A warm wind blew heat into Ophelia's face. She and Marcus both held their breath until the sparks flitted out without igniting.

"Roberts screwed up stopping a bank robbery yesterday. She almost got a civilian killed and barely got away herself," Marcus said solemnly. He was always soft-spoken, but a certain note entered his voice and carriage, a gravitas, whenever he was discussing other people who felt the need to step up in ways that were not always strictly sanctioned by the their jurisdictional authorities. "And it's not the first time. She's been slipping lately."

So maybe Mindy was having a bad month, Ophelia started to say, only to swallow it back as she realized that didn't make any sense. Mindy, like Marcus, didn't have superpowers. However, also like Marcus, that didn't make her worse at her job. She was more careful as a result, less prone to mistakes rather than more.

"Why are you telling me this?" Ophelia asked. She didn’t ask Marcus if he had spoken to Evelyn or any of the others, scattered in their own cities around the country. He would have attempted contact with them well before he would have brought the problem to her, and would have said something if the attempts had been fruitful.

Marcus raised his hand, and for a moment Ophelia thought that he was going to touch her face before he remembered and dropped his hand back to his side. She had never liked the feel of his gloves, anyway. "I'm saying that something is going on here," he said. "I just don't know what it is yet. I'm telling you and Naomi to be careful."

Down below, the first streams of water hit the liquor store. Naomi let out a short trill to pull some of the firemen around to the back. Marcus flinched.

"You still have a pair of the ear buds, right?" Ophelia asked.

"I don't work with the two of you often enough anymore to make them practical," Marcus answered. "Just remember what I told you, Ophelia, and be careful. I don't want to see you getting hurt."

"All right," Ophelia acquiesced, and then added, "Marcus—"

Naomi trilled again. Ophelia glanced quickly over the edge of the building to make sure everything was all right and saw her girl trading custody of their little pothead over to one of the firemen with a flourishing curtsy. By the time that Ophelia turned around again, Marcus was gone.

Chapter Three

Dawn was creeping between the buildings by the time that Ophelia and Naomi called it good and went back to Ophelia's loft for the day. They retrieved Ophelia’s gleaming Lexus from the storage unit where she paid cash and used a fake name and changed into short, tight dresses and suicidal heels in the backseat, smoothed their hair out with their fingers. The work clothes went into a bag, and they made sure to account for every rhinestone before they zipped it up. Ophelia had turned one of her ankles wrong during the night. She rotated it as she pulled her car into her building’s garage. There weren't any photographers waiting for them. That was a plus. Ophelia wasn’t worried that there would be any hoping to ambush her on the property: money was good at smoothing out those little issues.

Ophelia’s loft was on the building’s uppermost floor. The doorman standing at the garage entrance bowed ever so slightly to her and Naomi as they walked past him, giggling and leaning on each other with just a hint of clumsiness to their steps. They didn’t stop when they reached the whisper-quiet elevator, as the beauty of a building expensive enough to boot any paparazzi right off of the property without worrying about the hospital bills or lawsuits that might ensue was that it took the security of its tenants very, very seriously. They wouldn’t be out of a camera’s line of sight until Ophelia’s door had shut behind them. Naomi leaned up against Ophelia’s side in the elevator while Ophelia threw her arm around Naomi’s waist and felt how warm her skin was through only a few layers of silk, but it wasn’t easy and natural the way that it had been earlier in the night. Not for fear that someone in the building would leak the camera footage and give some lucky tabloid a headline to trumpet after years of speculation; that would be a fast way to losing all of the rich and badly-behaved tenants who paid a premium for discretion. With her rhinestones picked off one by one and tucked away, the only mask that Naomi was wearing came in the form of a pair of sunglasses large enough to make her look like the space alien that Ophelia sometimes wondered if she wasn’t, really. Naomi wouldn’t be entirely at ease in her skin again until they were out and working again.

The loft door beeped softly as Ophelia pushed it open, a tiny light set into the wall switching from red to green as a computer hidden behind the plaster ran Ophelia’s and Naomi’s particular bio-signals through a database and approved them. The security system had been a present from Marcus three years previously. It was easier to give back CDs. The loft had a short entryway—Ophelia had chosen it because it kept guests corralled into a narrow area without a lot of maneuverability for at least a few seconds if they should prove to be hostile—and then opened up into a living room large enough to house a family of three by itself without anyone elbowing each other. The floors were darkly polished hardwood that felt delightfully cool against the soles of Ophelia’s feet when she padded across them barefoot after getting out of bed in the early evening. The couch was white and fashionably angular, positioned to face a large plasma television set into brick above a fireplace that Ophelia had only used once or twice. Full-length windows offered a stunning view of the city as the dawn crept over it from the inside and were smoked so that no one could see what the occupants were doing from the outside, and the television could be connected into the building’s security system via a few keystrokes that Ophelia didn’t think the building managers would approve of. It had been Marcus’s idea. Ophelia had laughed when he had toured the apartment with her shortly after she had exited Evelyn’s tutelage. She was interested in fighting petty thugs and the occasional drug dealer, there didn’t seem to be a need to prepare for assault by an army even if someone did figure out who she was. Marcus had only squirmed beneath the kitchen sink to see if it could be modified to shoot acid or something and answered, “Things have a way of getting bigger than you plan for.”

Once the two were inside and the door locked behind them, Naomi headed straight for the shower with a little moue of anticipated pleasure, unzipping the back of her dress and dropping it in a pile about her feet as she went. Ophelia made a tsking noise in spite of the view and Naomi swung back around for the garment, grinning wickedly beneath her shades. Those wouldn’t come off until she was nearly beneath the water. Naomi was never truly comfortable with people seeing her looking like a real girl rather than a space alien; after the years of first working together and then being together, Ophelia doubted that she was any closer to knowing why than she had been on the day that they had met.

Ophelia listened to the water begin running in the bedroom and then headed for one of the loft’s other secrets. It had been sold to her as a three-bedroom, but after moving in Ophelia had promptly knocked out the wall between the two smaller bedrooms to form one massive workout space. The floor was tile, easy to sweep and hard to scratch. That was for Ophelia. The walls and the interior portion of the door were covered with the kind of foam generally used to soundproof recording studios. That was for Naomi. The treadmill, punching bag, and assorted martial arts gear was for the both of them, though Ophelia thought that she had done enough running around tonight to count as a satisfactory workout. She just needed to stretch out another muscle a little further before she let it rest for the night.

Still favoring her sore ankle slightly, Ophelia stopped in the doorway long enough to strip off her heeled boots and swap them for a pair of slippers that she kept near the door. There was a pedestal standing in the center of the room. It had originally been placed in a corner of the room relatively out of the way, only for Ophelia to discover quickly that proximity to the wall increased shrapnel rather than the opposite. No one understands how glamorous this life really is, Ophelia mused as she rummaged through a trunk by the door and came up with an ugly ceramic dog missing an ear that she and Naomi had found in a flea market a few weekends before. Ophelia backed up several paces, focused on the dog's pale blue eyes, and let her mind go blank until she began to feel the first tingling brushes of the electrons that made up her and everything else in the room. She began to push, moving much more slowly than she had against the jackass in the alley earlier that night, controlling the effort just as she would control a series of curls with the room’s free weights. The dog floated up from the pedestal first by inches and then by feet, not stopping until Ophelia had it spinning in slow circles only a few feet below the ceiling. Ophelia took deliberate breaths in and out through her nose and continued applying focus until she was holding the dog up with no more strain than a player spinning a basketball on the tip of his finger. She was focusing on control rather than power for now, and pushed away the part of her mind that wanted to see if she could lift all of the exercise equipment in the room just as high.

"Now that's what I'm talking about," Ophelia whispered, feeling one corner of her mouth crooking into a smile. The dog had pale blue eyes painted on inexpertly, one slightly higher than the other, and it seemed to be looking at her in reproach as she grew bored with the spinning and began to make it dance in a parade around the room. Ophelia laughed.

That was a mistake. She felt the surge of energy flying out of her mind grow stronger, like lightning striking the top of the building and making all of the lights in the loft flare brighter for a handful of seconds as a result, before she could call it back. The dog began racing in a wide circuit around the room, ridiculous glazed curls turning into a blur. Ophelia saw where this was headed and ducked less than a second before the dog exploded into splinters of ceramic. A few bounced off of her hair and the back of her neck, luckily avoiding cutting her. And this was why she wore the slippers. Ophelia winced before straightening and using second, extremely cautious, burst of power to scoop up the shrapnel and deposit it into a wastebasket next to the junk trunk. She had every other muscle in her body honed into its greatest potential for combat, but the one that could do the most damage and the greatest good was the almost as likely to dump her on her ass as a pair of cheap heels.

With the training room cleaned up and the rest of her exercise needs handled by the running around that she had already done, Ophelia took a quick shower and then slid into bed. Naomi was still awake, and she was quick to draw her arm around Ophelia’s waist as Ophelia slipped beneath the sheets with her. "Why do we always shower first when we know that we're just gonna get sweaty again?" Naomi murmured, running her fingers up and down Ophelia’s spine. Their faces were close enough together to make Naomi’s eyes seem out of focus and overlarge, simultaneously more alien and less so.

"Because six hours of sweat marinating in skintight leather is no one's idea of sexy," Ophelia answered, and then leaned in to cover Naomi’s mouth with a kiss.

*

Ophelia didn’t sleep deeply or well as a result of what Marcus had told her and overslept as a consequence, not rising until the sun was started to set and let shadows take its place. She would have slept longer than that if the chirping of the bedside phone had not finally forced her eyes open. Ophelia muttered something unladylike under her breath as she rolled over and batted for it.

"Hello?" She asked, pushing her sleep-unruly hair out of her eyes.

"Ophelia?" Ophelia recognized Miranda’s voice and sat up in the bed, blinking the remaining sleep out of her eyes and mind and drawing the sheet higher up to cover her breasts even though she was alone in the bedroom. "Are you just waking up?" It wasn't right that a younger sibling should be able to sound reproving when speaking to the older one. That had to be written down somewhere.

Ophelia smothered a yawn against the back of her hand and answered, "I had a long night."

"Oh." Miranda was silent for a long moment, during which Ophelia could hear the sounds of a television running and a man’s voice answering it. That had to be Miranda’s husband, Josh, and Ophelia was a little surprised that Miranda was talking to her rather than taking advantage of the opportunity for quality time with him. Mama and Daddy had built first a small and then a large software empire before their deaths, and even though nothing had actually been said out loud, it had always been assumed while they were still alive that Ophelia and Miranda would take over the running of it together when their parents were gone. Being one of the handful in on the secret, Miranda had said that she understood Ophelia’s decision to live off of her inheritance and put most of her energy into the night work rather than taking an active role in Simmons Technologies while Miranda moved the business to New York to be closer to the money, but Ophelia wondered, sometimes, especially when Miranda came onto the line sounding tired.

Miranda cleared her throat and went on, forcedly cheerful, "Did you catch anyone interesting?"

Ophelia shrugged before she remembered that her sister couldn't see it. "The usual. A couple of muggings, a couple of drug deals, a fire started by a kid who didn't realize that he was too dumb to be involved in drug deals. Criminals aren't as flashy or smart as they like to think." She rotated her neck until it cracked and started to get out of the bed. "Naomi and I probably scared him off drugs for life, though, that was pretty funny."

"I'll, um, bet." Miranda’s voice said she was either smiling or trying hard. "Sorry that my life isn't quite as interesting as yours. One of these days, one of y'all is going to flip their lid and give the rest of you a real challenge." She seemed to realize what she had said and added quickly, "I don't mean you or Marcus or Naomi—" at the same time that Ophelia said, "Miranda, you know I don't think what you do is dull—" They cut each other off and fell into an uneasy silence by mutual and unspoken rule.

Ophelia was the first to break it, after nearly a minute in which Josh in the background was the only thing to let her know that Miranda hadn't panicked and hung up the phone altogether. "Well, let's hope that day doesn't happen any time soon," she said. "Regular workaday evil is keeping me busy enough."

"Baby, can you turn that down? I can’t hear,” Miranda said, coming back to the line a second later. “Sorry, playoffs. I’m temporarily single again.”

“Feels like you two were still newlyweds the last time I saw you.”

"We're trying to keep the good parts and skip the getting old and settled and fat, don’t worry."

Now Ophelia could hear a real smile in Miranda’s words. In spite of her desire to stay on the line, she could hear Naomi moving around in the living room and was very aware of the darkness settling in outside on the balcony: time to work. "Listen, Miranda, why don't I fly out next week for a few days? We can go to dinner, see a concert. Catch up."

Sounding briefly startled, Miranda said, "I'd like that. Tell you what, I'll call you again tomorrow, we'll set it up."

"Good." Ophelia hung up the phone and studied the growing shadows growing across the bedroom floor for a few minutes before she got up to dress. She emerged from the bedroom in costume to find Naomi sitting cross-legged on the arm of the couch, watching an evening gossip show and eating a bowl of cereal. Ophelia would have considered catching her lover doing something so terribly mundane to be the most startling sight she had walked across in the past forty-eight hours, if not for the fact that Naomi was doing it while wearing her rhinestones perfectly applied and yet not a stitch of clothing.

"We're famous for being famous again," Naomi said lightly, while Ophelia leaned over the back of the couch to embrace her. Ophelia turned up the volume on the remote with her free hand while a video of she and Naomi stumbling out of a club rolled across the screen. Ophelia was wearing a green dress cut to the uppermost bounds of still being a slinky dress and not a slinky blouse. Naomi was nearly identically dressed, save for that she was in pink. Neither of them, Ophelia remembered, had had more than a single drink inside, much less enough to bring on the kind of giddy, stumbling drunkenness that they had been pretending. Ophelia had thrown back her head and laughed as Naomi had grabbed one of the intrusive paparazzi and given him a long kiss while flashes went off all around them; somehow, their attention never seemed as unwelcome and intrusive when she and Naomi were playing pretend.

"Isn't that a joke?" Naomi finished, tilting her head back. "Hey," she said, sounding pleased and surprised, when she saw that Ophelia was already wearing her mask. She took Ophelia’s hand and kissed at the tips of her fingers. There were nights when Ophelia absolutely hated her work ethic.

"Being famous for being famous, or the fact that you make more people blush with your work clothes than you do when we’re at the clubs?” Ophelia kissed the underside of Naomi's ear and straightened before she could change her mind.

"All of the above and bonus points for answering the essay," Naomi responded. On the television screen, Ophelia broke her heel and went down in a giggling pile directly in front of the car that was waiting for them. Though one of the paparazzi acted like a gentleman and extended his hand down to help her up, no one commented on how neat a coincidence it was that she had managed to fall so as not to twist an ankle or skin a knee. The very first thing that she had learned, how to fall.

"The real question remains," the host continued, while the video of Ophelia and Naomi staggering into a car and being driven away shrunk down to one quarter of the screen, "how long will it be before Ophelia Simmons grows up, and what would William and Sandra Simmons think if they could see her now?"

Ophelia had to let go of Naomi so that she would not inadvertently bruise her and gripped hard at the back of the couch instead. "They same thing that they told me when I was little, that we ought to worry about what we do, not what people think," she told the television. Naomi put her hand on Ophelia's arm. Ophelia waited three seconds and then exhaled the anger out so that she could take Naomi's gesture for what it was. "You, now, they would probably still disapprove of."

"Parents have to hate me before they love me," Naomi said, and Ophelia tilted her head to one side while wondering if Naomi meant parents in her home planet. "It's part of the ritual." On the television, the host was now returning to a topic that had been covered many times before, the mysterious blonde who accompanied Ophelia everywhere and whose origins had defied the efforts of all Internet detectives so far. The breathless speculations also covered the nature of Ophelia and Naomi’s relationship, a topic that never seemed to grow stale with the gossipmongers. Ophelia would have been fine with laying one on Naomi for all the world to see, but Naomi was always reticent, pointing out that the two of them macking in their street clothes while there was also a blonde and a black woman macking on any rooftop that would hold them was going to make the math a little too easy. Ophelia doubted that that was the full story and always fought back the urge to push further.

Naomi frowned at the television before turning it off and adjusting a rhinestone near her eye. "I want to hit a bad guy," she said as she rose from the couch, leaving Ophelia to wonder for a few seconds if this was not going to be the night when Naomi finally decided to fight crime in the nude before she disappeared in the direction of the bedroom. She might not have any idea how the interior math of Naomi's brain worked or even precisely what her species was, but at the end of the day they still made a hell of a pair.

Chapter Four

By two in the morning, in addition to the usual clusters of car thefts, assaults, and drug deals, Ophelia and Naomi had also intervened in a jewelry store robbery where Naomi shattered every single one of the display cases with her wail and Ophelia turned the espresso machine used to woo discerning clients into a mind-guided missile against the brains of the operation, such as any criminal could be called, just in time to spare the security guard being shot in the face.

"Guns," Ophelia said in disgust while she floated several jagged pieces of the display cases in the air as silent reminders to the thieves that they would be best staying put. The security guard was helping by pointing his own weapon at the robbers while Naomi investigated a large sapphire cocktail ring and stayed well within echo range. "I can't think of anything less original. No offense," she added to the guard, who looked and behaved as if he had been a police officer himself, and had been useful once things had started getting wild.

"None taken," the man said mildly. He wasn't trying to point his gun at her, which was good. Sometimes law enforcement got just a bit tetchy at the whole idea of vigilantes running around, and Ophelia hated having to fight people who were trying to do the same work as she. When the sirens finally got close enough that they had no other choice but to go, Naomi tipped an imaginary hat at the guard, and Ophelia concentrated on holding up the glass for the longest distance she could possibly manage once they were racing out of sight.

"A shame about the ring," Naomi said while they crouched on a nearby rooftop and watched police officers shepherding the thieves into squad cars. "The guard will recognize me even after it comes out of evidence."

Ophelia would have thought it much too mundane for Naomi's tastes, anyway. "You could always go in in a tee shirt and jeans," she said. Naomi took a few steps back as if she meant to push Ophelia over the edge of the roof. Ophelia laughed and danced out of range, but her arms and legs were quivering slightly as she and Naomi climbed down again, and she had an ache behind her eyes which made her glad that dawn and the end of their workday was only a few hours off. The glass hadn't been heavy, but holding it up at that kind of distance had been more of a strain than she had anticipated. Jane Fonda never made a workout video for telekinetics, Ophelia told herself ruefully once her boots were on solid ground again.

They had another quiet hour, and Ophelia was just starting to think that the jewelry store had been the night’s big finish when she heard the tinkling of glass breaking and then the indignant, klaxon noise of someone's car alarm going off. She and Naomi split up without needing to speak, Naomi running in front of a Chinese grocery that was shuttered and dark for the night and Ophelia taking the alley behind, hearing only the sound of her own boots against the pavement and the startled squalling of feral cats as they leapt out of her way.

"You bitch!" Ophelia lucky that her attacker was good at a lot of things, but patience and subtlety were never going to be counted among them. She didn't pause long enough to chase the tickle saying that she knew that voice, just dropped her shoulder and rolled. A burst of heat brushed against her spine and made the fine hairs on the back of her neck sizzle.

J? Ophelia put voice and superpower to face just as she hit the ground. Rolling back up to her feet, she followed it with, Did she just tried to set me on fire? The last time that she had seen the smart-mouthed blonde had been after a job, and they had parted on professional terms.

The heat that Ophelia had felt along her spine had been born out of the tips of J’s fingers, and it kept racing through the air after Ophelia had hit the pavement. Its endpoint was a trashcan at the far side of the alley, which it knocked over. The refuse falling out of it caught flame within seconds, and the acrid combination of melting plastic and burning food scraps made Ophelia's eyes water. She dropped into a crouch and pushed, creating a solid barrier in front of herself that J could not run or scorch her way through any more than she could a pane of bulletproof glass. J on the other side didn’t show any physical mark that would have let Ophelia know why she had gone completely insane and looked the same as she always did: a white woman hovering around Ophelia’s age, with short white-blond hair that stuck up in tufts all over her head, the athletic build made from tackling muggers on a nightly basis, and a snug white body suit that left a little more to the imagination than did Naomi’s, but was cut out in a diamond pattern across the midriff so that whole world could tell that J was capable of crushing soda cans with her abs. It would be a long way from the craziest thing that she had ever done in Ophelia’s presence. She wore no mask. So far as Ophelia knew, J had stopped trying to maintain a civilian identity on the day that she discovered her powers and had never looked back.

"What the fuck is your problem?" Ophelia yelled, never mind that ladies didn't swear and she was still very much a lady, thank you very much, even if she was a lady who spent her nights dealing with people who were constantly spitting new and exotic obscenities at her.

J had to know that there was no way that she was going to get through the barrier that Ophelia had thrown before her, at least not until Ophelia had worn herself out further. She still made a primal noise and drew back her hand like a pitcher winding up, anger turning her pretty face ugly. Ophelia watched tiny gouts of flame leap up from each of J’s fingertips, swirl together until they formed a mass roughly the size of a softball, and then waited hovering in the air until J hurled her new toy forward. It struck Ophelia's barrier and then fanned out, licking at the edges and throwing sparks over the top from which she had to duck or else risk them landing in her hair.

There was no way that she was going to be able to hold his barrier up all night, and if J really wanted to play rough... Ophelia let the invisible wall fall away. J bared her teeth in an unpleasant smile and threw fire from her fingers in one solid stream like water rushing from a hydrant, aiming directly for Ophelia. Ophelia lashed out to block it and hurled J back against the Chinese grocery’s dumpster at the same time with enough force to give J’s head a good gonging. With a little luck, maybe that would knock some sense back into J before this fight really had to get ugly. Unfortunately, the telekinetic wave that Ophelia sent forth picked up the flames as well as J, and she had to act quickly in order to stop them before J wound up a bad-tempered and scantily clad briquette. Ignoring the warning strain, Ophelia split the flames in two to create a horseshoe shape, one half striking the metal to either side of J’s head. J flinched back from the heat. From the snarl fixed on her face, it didn’t seem that Ophelia’s being in a position to take her life and choosing to save it instead was quite sinking in.

"What’s wrong with me?" J finally answered Ophelia's question. She set fire to a wooden pallet leaning up against the wall directly to Ophelia's right, making flaming splinters fly in all directions and giving Ophelia no other choice but to throw up her arm and let her concentration slip. "What’s wrong with me? You're the one who came after me, you fucking traitor!"

That was a dramatically different interpretation of the events of the past few minutes from Ophelia’s own. She leapt backwards from the next fireball that J let loose her way and answered by throwing J up against the wall again, for all the good it did in taking the fighting rage out of her face. J went down to one knee on the pavement before she could catch herself, and Ophelia saw that she had ripped both her bodysuit and the skin on her shoulder when she had rebounded against the brick. Ophelia herself had a pain that was beginning as an ache but would soon be a railroad spike starting behind her eyes. Time to take this to the more mundane world of a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking instead, then.

Ophelia whirled up onto one foot like a dancer and lashed out with the other one before J could entirely get her balance under her again, catching J directly in the clavicle with the hard edge of her boot. J made a garbled noise that was half-yelp and half-obscenity. Going to be a few nights before you're pitching no-hitters again, Ophelia thought with satisfaction for approximately half a second before J caught her retreating leg by the calf and jerked hard. Ophelia's remaining leg went out from under her; she took the dirty cement hard on her back and felt all of the air running out of her lungs with a whoosh. J leapt onto her without any pretense of finesse, caught in a solid punch to the jaw that Ophelia's mouth go tingling and then numb before Ophelia drew both of her legs up tight against her midsection and then delivered them in a brutal dual kick directly into J's abdomen. Stiletto heels. They were good for so much more than turning workaday legs into ego-crushing gams. J gagged and staggered back far enough for Ophelia to sweep her behind her ankles and put her down onto her own ass.

"I," Ophelia growled as she loomed over J and struggled to grab the other woman's hands so that another fireball would not come zooming her way, "have absolutely no idea what you are talking about."

Something flickered in J's eyes, a flash of uncertainty that made Ophelia think they might just be actually getting somewhere, before it disappeared again just like one of those sparks that J was so fond of. "Liar," J spit back up at her with such force that Ophelia actually felt a drop of saliva land on her cheek. "I saw you."

That wasn't possible, it had been over four months since Ophelia and Naomi had worked with J last, and that encounter hadn't involved anything more heated than a few half-hearted squabbles about strategy, namely in the fact that Ophelia believed in it while J was more a fan of leaping off of cliffs and learning to fly on the way down. Before Ophelia could point out to J that there was something obviously deeply, truly wrong with this situation beyond the fact that they were rolling around in filth that neither of them probably wanted to identify, J caught Ophelia in a lucky roundhouse that sent stars flashing behind her eyes. She let go of J's hands and staggered backwards, straight into that same damned dumpster, and felt her head striking at the corner hard enough to make her vision go briefly gray. Without bothering to aim, Ophelia lashed out with her mind in the broadest way that she could, hearing someone grunt as they were shoved back. Naomi screamed from behind her so loudly that Ophelia's earpieces let out a dangerous whine. She slid down to one knee and put her hand against the back of her head. Ophelia’s fingers were sticky with blood when she pulled them away. Her nose was bleeding, too, though that was from an entirely different strain.

Naomi popped up in Ophelia's line of vision. Threaded as high she could go on adrenaline, Ophelia nearly punched her before she was able to catch herself. "O" Naomi said, her face scared behind the rhinestones, and took Ophelia's chin so that she could tilt it up into the light. Ophelia took her wrist and gently guided it back down.

"I'm all right," Ophelia rasped. She looked over Naomi's shoulder at the empty alley. "Where'd J go?"

"Chased her off," Naomi said shortly. She hovered by Ophelia’s side, her arm already around Ophelia’s waist to help her stand. "The car was a distraction."

"I got that feeling when she started throwing fireballs at me," Ophelia said. She used the dumpster as a support and managed to pull herself back up to her feet.

Naomi made a huffing noise. Ophelia wasn't used to seeing her worried. "And random violence is her new form of performance art? There can only be so much peroxide on the West Coast?"

Ophelia was pretty sure that J kept her base of operations in San Antonio, actually, but that wasn't the point. She frowned. "She accused me of attacking her," Ophelia said slowly. "Before I ever laid a hand on her." The warning that Marcus had given her about Mindy’s odd behavior popped back up and refused to go away.

Chapter Five

If Mindy was the first person that Marcus had noticed acting out of character, then Mindy was the first person that Ophelia needed to check off her list in the search for their Patient Zero of people going crazy—crazier than it took to run around at night in tights, anyway. She and Naomi cut the night short after J's attack so that Ophelia could return to the loft and book a last-minute red-eye to Austin the next morning. Naomi sat cross-legged on the back of the couch until Ophelia was off the phone with the airline, her eyes narrowed into slits and her posture displeased. She had taken off her bodysuit and put on a tank top and a pair of cheerleading shorts. She still had gemstones glued to her face. Somehow, none of this seemed odd.

"You're an idiot, O," she said Ophelia put the receiver back into the cradle and headed into the kitchen, unfolding her legs so that she could leave the couch and follow. It hadn't been the first time that Ophelia had gone a night without sleep because duty was calling louder than anything else. However, this was why espresso machines and Italian roast had been invented. Naomi behind her sounded much more worried than she did irritated, far less glib than was her usual wont, and Ophelia couldn't look her in the eye right away. She adjusted the knobs on the espresso machine instead until the smells of sweet lady caffeine started to fill the kitchen. "She comes after you again, she gets in a lucky fireball—" Naomi made a gesture that looked a little like jazz hands, not quite as amusing when it meant what would happen to Ophelia's body if she took a direct hit. None of them were immortal.

Ophelia replayed the fight in her mind, thought about punching the countertop, and stopped herself. "She's not going to get lucky again," Ophelia said, turning. Naomi's mouth turned up just a little. "I don't know what's going on here, and I'll try like hell not to hurt her if she comes at me again, but--" In spite of the aches in her body and her head, Ophelia had no doubt of one thing. "It's not going to be like tonight." She turned back to the machine. "And besides, LA needs someone staying here and keeping an eye out if I have to be gone longer than a day."

Naomi made a displeased noise. "I don't do well when I'm the only kid in the sandbox." She was trying to sound annoyed; she wasn't entirely pulling it off.

Ophelia turned and kissed Naomi on the mouth. "Throw some hijinks in front of a camera crew, then, you attention whore," she said, knowing full well what Naomi was really trying to tell her: Be careful. Come back. "That way lots of people can still tell you you're pretty." Naomi bit Ophelia's lower lip just a bit petulantly before Ophelia pushed her away.

"Besides," Ophelia went on, "J said that I was the one who attacked her, and that was before we started trying to make fajitas out of me. That means she's in danger, too, from someone. She might need you looking out for her from the shadows." Naomi's eyebrow arched towards her hairline. "Okay, so maybe you can let her get bounced off a wall a few times first."

"All that I need is to have a little fun." Naomi still looked more humanly upset than Ophelia thought she had seen her before. Ophelia tried to send a message of her own in their good-bye kiss. I know. I will. Don't worry about me.

Ophelia drove to the airport herself rather than taking a cab against the odds that J really would come after her again and involve a civilian in their crossfire. Waiting until Ophelia was distracted and vulnerable would involve more in the way of underhandedness and stealth than J normally practiced, though Ophelia would have said twenty-four hours before that J wasn't the type to attack another crime-fighter, either. She tended to run hot, yeah, and Ophelia very carefully never asked her where she got the money to run her operation when she didn't have a self-made fortune like Marcus or an inherited one like Ophelia, but they had always been on the same side during the big moments.

But according to J, it was self-defense. Even with sunglasses on, Ophelia still caught glimpse of a few camera phones angled in her direction as she walked into the airport, trying to get a rare shot of the celebutante outside of her natural habitat: walking around in daylight without appearing to be intoxicated. Ophelia where she was and relaxed her face until she didn’t look as if she had anything bigger on her mind than the horrible injustice of having to wait in line like a commoner, not without difficulty. She only put half of her usual effort into getting snippy with the clerk who was responsible for issuing her ticket.

“What?” Ophelia asked with the clerk when the woman continued staring at her after the transaction had concluded. It came out more sharply than she intended; okay, so maybe she only putting in half the effort because that was all that was necessary after the night she had had.

The clerk flushed, but raised her hand to her own cheek. Ophelia mimicked the gesture, expecting that her makeup was smudged, and found a hot, sore spot on her cheek instead. Damn it, she had rushed through applying her foundation before leaving the loft, and no one had ever said that J lacked a good right hook.

“Slipped in my kitchen,” Ophelia said, and turned to go quickly. A little girl in braids tugged at her mother’s hand excitedly as Ophelia passed, and she gave a waggle of her fingers and the most genuine smile that she had in response.

Ophelia was so tired even with two cups of coffee at the loft and two more on the plane that she expected to fall asleep immediately in her large, squashy first class seat. She stared out the window for the duration of the flight instead, chin propped up in her hand and checking her cell phone for messages every few minutes after they had finished climbing. She landed in Austin shortly after one in the afternoon, Texas time, and rented a car rather than taking a taxi to Mindy's home. She didn't know how long she was going to be there, or what was going to greet her when she arrived. It was for the same reason that she didn't call ahead and let Mindy know that she was going to be paying her a visit.

Don't let paranoia infect everything that you do, Ophelia instructed herself as she pulled the car to a stop in front of Mindy's expansive old colonial in one of Austin's better outlying communities. That'll put you on your ass every bit as quickly as being careless will. Ophelia thought that she saw a figure in one of Mindy's upper windows looking down at her while she exited the car, the curtain twitching shut a moment later. All right, so that didn't exactly help with the whole "don't be paranoid" rule that she was trying to follow here.

The door opened almost immediately upon her knock, making Ophelia wonder if Mindy had been the figure in the window upstairs, and if she had actually raced down as fast as she could in order to make the greeting. It was possible that Mindy had a guest, but....Ophelia tried to think of the last time that she had allowed anyone into her home who wasn't aware of the little secret of her actual employment, and couldn't. To say nothing of the fact of how short that list had to be if she wanted to have a reasonable chance of keeping everyone on it safe.

"Ophelia, hi!" Mindy had her dark hair thrown back into a ponytail and was wearing low-slung pajama pants and a tee shirt proclaiming her loyalty to the Dallas Cowboys. Her round face was eaten up almost entirely with a smile, and there was not the faintest trace of makeup on her skin. In short, she looked like every single other time that Ophelia had seen her when they weren't specifically in costume and more generally looking for some ass to kick, and Ophelia felt herself relaxing immediately as she accepted and returned the boisterous hug that Mindy gave her. J had lost her mind—Ophelia could not honestly say that the potential hadn’t always been there—and Marcus had gone paranoid. It was a danger of the job that they did. "I didn't expect you to drop by, come on, come in!"

"I was already in the neighborhood," Ophelia lied. So Marcus and I are both paranoid. There had to be some reason that we got along so well for so long. "I thought that maybe you could help me out on this other thing I have going on in Los Angeles right now, instead of just calling and wasting cellphone minutes."

"So you wasted airline miles?" Mindy settled herself down onto her couch and waved at Ophelia to do the same in one of the opposite chairs. Ophelia gave Mindy the best once-over that she possibly could without tipping her hand as she made herself comfortable, looking for—she didn't know what she was looking for. Anything out of the ordinary, but Mindy looked and sounded like Mindy, right down to her drawl and the complete inability to do anything reasonable with her. It was a constant battle for Ophelia not to get up and fix it herself.

"Like I said, already in the neighborhood." Ophelia waved her hand and tried to look airy. "Miranda is over-scheduled, and since I do live off my share of the company profits...."

"Yeah, yeah." Mindy hopped up again, even though she had barely been settled down long enough to make herself comfortable. "Can I get you something? Diet soda, coffee?"

"I'm fine." Ophelia watched as Mindy made a short trip around the living room and then sat down again without getting anything for herself. "I actually wanted to get your opinion about someone else. J cornered me in LA last night, going completely nuts. I was hoping that you might be able to shed some light on the situation."

"She did?" Mindy's widened eyes seemed genuine, as did the way that she leaned forward with her hands braced against her knees. "Why?"

"I have no idea, hence my problem," Ophelia said. "The two of you work together a lot, right?"

Mindy made a seesawing gesture through the air with her hand. "Yeah, I guess so. I mean, J kind of makes herself hard to get to know, you know." She started twirling a few strands of hair around her fingers. Mindy had a full playlist of exuberant fidgets, but this one had a nervous air that Ophelia had never seen before.

"I know." Ophelia shook her head. "It was the damnedest thing, the entire time that she was coming at me, she kept screaming that I was the one who had attacked her."

Mindy's hand stilled, fell down to her knee again. "You're fucking kidding me."

"Nope. I barely got out of the way before she fried me." Ophelia studied every inch of Mindy while she kept her face neutral and open, but Mindy's expression didn't show anything other than the concern that Ophelia would have expected to see in someone who had just been informed that a fairly close ally might have gone permanently nuts. "I thought that I was going to have no choice but to kill her for a few seconds there."

Mindy's hand tightened against her leg so hard that Ophelia wondered that she didn't hurt herself. "Oh?"

"It's a good thing that Naomi and I work as a team," Ophelia went on. "We were able to subdue her without hurting her too much, though she hit her head pretty hard on the way down. She should be up to explaining just what the hell all that was about soon."

"Good. I mean, she had to have her reasons, right?" Mindy asked, and Ophelia once again wondered if this whole thing wasn't one long exercise in insanity. "J's got a temper, but she would never attack one of us without a really good reason."

"You're probably the last person she worked with, right? You got any insights?" There was a blonde hair against the arm of Ophelia's chair. She went still as she caught Mindy looking in that direction, not knowing if Mindy had seen it. Damn it, and she couldn’t pick it up with Mindy in the room, either. Turning down that drink was starting to look like a mistake. "Has she been acting strangely or stressed around you lately?"

Her expression gone curiously taut and her smile coming just a shade too slow, as if there was someone behind the muscles making them move, Mindy stood. "Man, Ophelia, you know I would help you if I could, but I haven't worked with J in months. Haven't even talked to her."

It could be an old hair. It might not even be J’s; it had looked longer to Ophelia's eye, and more gold than white. She still felt a little colder as she stood herself, a little more certain that rocking her weight forward and onto the balls of her feet in preparation for a fight was the way to go. Mindy was sizing her up from the corner of her eye even as she turned partway away to mess with one of the pillows of the couch—perfect position if she wants to kick your ribs straight out your back, there was a part of Ophelia's brain that was now always going to be working—and Ophelia was glad that it had been well over ten hours since she had last had to use her powers. Battery fully charged up again and ready for whatever Mindy wanted to throw at her.

Ophelia had been playing pretend for a very long time now, and she knew how to let people see exactly as much of her as she wanted the to see and not one iota more. She smiled as if she had no idea what was wrong here, with the situation or with Mindy. At least you're only half a liar. Her phone chirped at her. Ophelia would have ignored it, had a quick glance down not informed her that Naomi was the caller. Mindy didn't take the moment of distraction as an opportunity to attack, though her body language was still—off, in a way that Ophelia couldn’t nail down. It was making her more tense with every second. She still wasn’t positive that she wasn’t the one losing her mind here.

"Yeah, baby?" Ophelia said, faintest hint of poison lying beneath the sweet. Naomi on the other end paused for the barest of seconds to acknowledge it before she moved forward. Mindy was also still.

"O, I just—“ Naomi paused and blew out a long breath. "I think I just saw me."

Ophelia barely halted herself from betraying a reaction in her face. "Is that so?" she asked. "Where?"

"Breaking up a carjacking," Naomi replied. "From the corner of my eye, I—" She sighed again, more frustrated than Ophelia had ever heard of her before. She could picture Naomi dragging her fingers through her hair, which meant that she must be back at the loft and out of costume, which meant that she had been rattled badly enough to cut her patrol short. Since she had been wound up tight enough to go out working in the daylight to begin with, that was saying something. "Am I completely insane, or is it starting to look more and more like J might be on to something?"

"Same page, Naomi," Ophelia replied, flashing Mindy a small smile and hoping like hell that Naomi was smart enough to read the peculiar note in her voice. "I'll talk to you when I get back to LA, all right?" She hung up and smiled more widely at Mindy. Fully charged and ready to go, hoping that she wouldn’t have to. Not until she had a better idea of what was going on, anyway, or at least who she was going to be concussing. "Gotta go, Mindy, Marcus's waiting for me. You'll let me know if you can think of anything, all right?"

"You're here with Marcus?" Mindy shifted her weight back onto her heels. The tension in the room shifted again, and Mindy stopped smiling at Ophelia the way that Ophelia had seen girls smiling in clubs right before they took their earrings off.

"Of course." Ophelia pushed her hair back over her shoulder. "We still work together all the time, and his jet's faster than anything else in the air. Staying on good terms with your exes pays off." She started towards the door even as it made her skin thrum to turn her back on Mindy, surreptitiously casting a barrier behind her of the same kind that she had used against J the night before.

"I'll, uh, call you if I can think of anything," Mindy said, pushing a few messy strands back into her ponytail with a slight frown on her face. "I can't imagine why J would be doing something like this, it's so unlike her."

I'd almost think that she's a different person, Ophelia thought, but she kept it to herself. As she was crossing back over into the afternoon sunshine, Mindy suddenly made an excited noise and jerked in Ophelia's direction. It was all that Ophelia could do not to telekinetically smack her back against the doorframe on reflex.

"Oh, I love your boots!" Mindy exclaimed. "It's so hard to find real fashion in Texas."

Ophelia looked down at her Jimmy Choos and then at Mindy's feet, noted that Roberts had a pedicure that was a day or two old at most, and said, "Next time you're in LA, I'll show you around, okay? We'll make it a date." She slid her sunglasses back over her eyes quickly, before Mindy could see the look in them.

Chapter Six

Three people on the plane back to Los Angeles recognized her; Ophelia pretended not to notice them. Neither did she bother with her usual public game of ditziness, save for ordering a glass of champagne and hoping that the flight attendants would not think it just a touch odd that she exited the plane giggling in spite of having barely touched it. She was the only one seated in her row in first class, so there were few people around to realize that she stared out the window at the wing cutting through the clouds and cracked her knuckles for a good hour while her brain whirred along. There were several pieces coming together, reluctantly. Ophelia thought that she would have liked it much more if she could just attribute the past handful of days to Mindy having a lot on her mind and J being cranky, but she didn't think that they were going to be quite that lucky. After checking with Naomi briefly upon landing, she broke at least seven different traffic laws on her way back to the loft and nearly dared someone to pull her over.

Naomi was perched on the side of their couch with her legs folded under her and her laptop balanced on top of her knees when Ophelia came through the door. The first thing Ophelia noticed, outside of taking a moment to wonder if her girlfriend wasn’t part praying mantis with the talent she had for perching in improbable poses, was that there were still spots of glue dotting her forehead and cheeks and making it look almost as if she had a skin disease. Naomi was religious about her skin; she hadn't been faking the distress in her voice when she had called Ophelia earlier. The second thing that Ophelia noticed was the first beginnings of a bruise darkening from red into purple on Naomi's cheek.

"You are a damned liar," Ophelia told Naomi as she tossed her purse onto a chair and stomped into the kitchen to get Naomi an ice pack.

Naomi flicked her gaze up briefly to meet Ophelia's as she accepted the ice and held it in her hands rather than placing it against her face, a slow smile curving her mouth as though being attacked was something funny. "This is from the carjacker," she said sweetly as she set her computer to the side and unfolded herself down from the couch. "But you are really endearing when you're being protective. Is Mindy still alive?"

Even though Ophelia knew that Naomi meant whether or not Mindy had lived through Ophelia's encounter with her—so she had picked up on the signals that Ophelia had been trying to send about something hinky happening while she had been on the phone—Ophelia still hesitated. "I don't know," she said, and then filled Naomi in as rapidly as possible on all of the details that she had noticed while inside Mindy's house.

"She also had a fresh pedicure, and she complimented me on my boots," Ophelia finished, turning her foot so that Naomi could see she was wearing her Jimmy Choos, and a stiletto pair at that. "Mindy Roberts can't tell Jimmy Choo from Jimmy Stewart, and doesn't care about shoes any more than she cares about the exchange rate in Azerbaijan, anyhow. She has never noticed my clothing before."

"And suddenly J's not looking so crazy when she says that you attacked her," Naomi slid all of Ophelia's puzzle pieces into place. She opened up her laptop again; Ophelia could not see what she was typing into the screen.

"She's been crazy for a long time," Ophelia said, lifting her eyebrow, "but she's loyal, and she's always been one of the good guys. It doesn't make any sense that she would attack me unless she was telling the truth—or the only truth that she could see at the time." Ophelia rolled her shoulders and then started towards the bedroom to shed her traveling clothes. She would be going forth in a different costume than her usual tights and jacket tonight; she and J needed to straighten a few things out before J decided to give Ophelia the sunburn of a lifetime again. And after that, they could figure out just what they were going up against, because the list of people who could do things like breaking glass vases with a chirp or floating the remote across the room was small, and Ophelia knew them all. There wasn’t even one master of disguise on the list, let alone two.

"Don't you want to know where someone who has a short temper and a fondness for greasy bars would go to brood?" Naomi called after Ophelia. Ophelia stopped in the doorway to the bedroom and saw that Naomi was still carrying her laptop.

"What have you got?" Ophelia asked. She didn't want to smile as she realized that Naomi had been working along the same path as she this entire time, but she couldn't quite help herself.

"Three different bars in East LA reported brawls over the past two nights," Naomi said. "While she was never arrested, several witnesses are claiming that a white woman matching J’s description was the one provoking the ruckuses. Not great neighborhoods." Naomi finished and snapped her laptop shut finally, set it back down on the couch so that she could put her hands on her hips. "So I wouldn't recommend sticking with the Jimmy Choos."

Ophelia arched a brow. "I" she said, putting a delicate stress upon the syllable, "am capable of dressing outside of a designer label when circumstances call for it, thank you very much. Are you?"

Naomi pouted at her prettily and still took the opportunity to brush her lips over Ophelia's as she was making her own way into the bedroom. "Stop being grouchy, you know that you wanted to do that as soon as I figured out where J is," she said. Ophelia swatted her behind as she walked past. "You wanted to do that, too." Naomi caught Ophelia by the arm and pulled her along with into the bedroom so that they could have a real kiss, long and sweet, and didn't end it until Ophelia was ghosting her fingers very lightly across the outlines of the bruise on Naomi's cheek. She was being gentle enough that she knew her touch didn’t hurt; Naomi still sighed softly.

"Consequences of the job, O," Naomi said as she finally turned away and towards the closet. "None of us get to avoid 'em till we retire."

Ophelia pulled her blouse up over her head and decided not to mention to Naomi that they didn't exactly know how many people in their line of work had made it to a ripe old age, except for maybe Evelyn. She knew that Naomi was already chasing the same thoughts, even if she was keeping it clear from her expression. Everyone wore a mask from time to time, whether it was one that they actually put on their face or not.

*

It took four dive bars and two different wiseasses who thought it would be a good plan to grab for Ophelia’s and Naomi’s rear ends, resulting one broken finger (Naomi) and one instep that was probably never going to be the same (Ophelia) in order to find J. By that point it was near two in the morning. According to Naomi’s police reports, that had been right about the time that J liked to get rowdy each night. Ophelia walked into the next bar on their list wearing a dark leather jacket, skinny jeans, and the same Jimmy Choo boots that she had insisted upon pulling on again just for the hell of it. Naomi behind her had on a bustier top and a miniskirt that was about as conservative as her dress ever got, her hair brushed out like corn silk across her shoulders rather than teased into four more inches of height. The fourth bar was a near twin to the previous three, cheap Formica tables scarred with cigarette burns, public ordinances be damned, a smell of stale beer and sweat hanging in the air, and music playing through speakers so old and ill-cared for that Ophelia wasn’t sure what genre she was hearing. Blue-collar men and women marked one half of the establishment, troublemakers with nowhere else to go the other, and an invisible line down the middle as a no-man’s land that even the harried waitress with two much eye makeup stepped quickly in crossing. J was seated on the troublemaker’s side. Of course she was.

Maybe it was because Ophelia and Naomi were both tired and looked as if they wouldn’t find dealing swiftly with any trouble coming their way or maybe it was because there was already one clearly dangerous woman sitting at the bar, but a path opened up for them immediately. Ophelia saw the platinum head bent down over her drink and led the way with Naomi staying just far back enough to make for effective cover. Even in street clothes and with her head tucked down so that no one could see her face clearly, J radiated trouble.

"Ophelia," J straightened in her seat and addressed Ophelia behind her without turning around. The only acknowledgement she gave that Ophelia was a threat was in uncurling her feet around the lower rung of her barstool and setting them flat against the floor. J rattled around the melting remains of her drink before raising the glass to her mouth. Ophelia noticed that J’s other hand was occupied in playing with a cheap plastic lighter, flicking it on and off, on and off. The light in the bar was dim, but Ophelia still noticed that the lighter held no butane. She looked around on instinct to see if anyone else had noticed. Most of the bar’s patrons were keeping an eye on them and trying to pretend as if they weren’t, but none of them were watching the lighter. "Your head's already stopped ringing from Round One?" J turned her head slightly, saw Naomi standing at a ready distance and already working her jaw. "Oh, so it's going to be like two against one, is it?"

"Seems about as fair as the ambush that you tried to lay down on me." Ophelia stepped way up close and into J's personal space and grabbed for her elbow with one hand when it would have found its way into her face otherwise, the hand holding the lighter with the other. She could feel heat radiating up as she kept J steadied against the pitted bar surface. Her face close against J's ear, Ophelia whispered, "Lots of civilians to get caught in the crossfire if we decide to start shit in here." J looked around accordingly, a deep line of displeasure drawing down between her eyes. Ophelia had yet to get the same feeling of incredible wrongness rolling off of her that she had experienced while standing inside Mindy's house. That didn’t mean that J was going to turn down an ass-kicking if Ophelia wanted one badly enough.

The bartender, until that point watching silently from a far end of the bar, said, "Look, ladies, I don't want to be on the news like them other places." He threw a look towards J that made it abundantly clear that he had been paying attention when the description of the instigator had been given. J narrowed her eyes back at him, and her arm grew warmer beneath Ophelia’s hand. "I don't care if you beat each other black and blue outside, but you hang onto it until you’re out those doors."

J turned her head so that she and Ophelia were eye to eye. Ophelia was practically sitting in J’s lap as it was in order to keep her pinned to the bar; she was surprised that Naomi hadn’t gotten jealous yet.

"Out back?" J asked sweetly.

Ophelia threw back a smile with even more sugar in it. When she had first decided to use her telekinesis for truth and justice rather than fun and profit, she had never stopped to consider how much of her time was going to be spent in filthy alleyways. "Don't step in unless you really see me in trouble," she murmured to Naomi as J walked ahead of them and still kept flicking away at that lighter, her shoulders taut.

Naomi murmured back. "You're not going to let me have even a little fun?"

"We're close enough to the street that you'll bust every single one of those car windows." The alley was clear except for a drunk man relieving himself against the wall. He zipped up quickly at their appearance and hurried back inside, slurring under his breath about their lack of manners. Ophelia ignored him so that she could keep watching the lighter. The door had barely shut behind him before J lashed out with her unoccupied hand instead, obliging Ophelia to leap backwards quickly to avoid being burned. The metal zippers on her jacket became hot as the fire licked at them and then drew back.

"You're still playing for keeps," Ophelia said. She regained her balance and settled into a defensive stance in front of a pile of garbage bags. J's scowl deepened even further, and she lashed out again, the arc of fire curling through the air and then snapping back into her hand as crisply as if she were cracking a bullwhip. It missed Ophelia by inches. The trash bag spilled open like a gutted animal, its contents pouring out across the cement, and the reek of burning plastic was strong enough to make something sour rise up in the back of Ophelia’s throat.

"Why not?" J taunted back at her. Ophelia saw her eyes cutting towards Naomi, clearly wondering why the other woman was standing at the mouth of the alley with her arms folded over her chest and not so much actually stepping in to help Ophelia out. "You did the same with me."

Ophelia leaped around another stream of fire, thought about using her powers, and decided that her bruised ego demanded a more physical approach. She punched J in the mouth. J’s head snapped back; Ophelia wrapped her leg around the back of J’s knees and pulled her down hard onto her ass. J still managed to drive her elbow into Ophelia’s gut and shoot a line of fire towards her face that Ophelia barely managed to dodge. It fanned out into nothing just over the tops of the adjoining buildings instead.

"O--" Naomi started in warning. The fire was going to pull people to them soon, and while J might not give a shit about who knew what she was or what she did, neither Ophelia nor Naomi were wearing their masks. "Just kick her ass, already." Rarely did Naomi sound so savage; she must have been even more worried for Ophelia the night before than she had let on. Had they the time for it, Ophelia was pretty certain that her heart would have gone pitter-pat.

"My girl's trying to tell me that we might have company soon," Ophelia told J. She danced back a few steps further as J managed to throw fire out of her middle finger, deciding that she had kept her half of the fight in the realm of the physical for long enough. The telekinetic blast caught J as she was only halfway back to her feet and slammed her hard against the opposite wall. Ophelia kept up the pressure even as she felt something wet on her lip that she doubted was rain. J’s feet rose above the ground by several inches. Ophelia cast a shield like plastic wrap around J before she could launch another fireball, guaranteeing that anything else J tried to do would only bounce back on her.

"I wouldn't," Ophelia warned her, breathing hard. J’s expression turned belligerent. Ophelia wondered if she had time to drop the shield and get out of the way before one or both of them wound up dead if J decided to call her bluff. "When was the last time that you saw Mindy?"

Ophelia’s question was clearly the last thing that J had expected. She stopped struggling and hung against the wall. "Why?" J demanded. "Are you going to go after her, too?" Her voice was strained, she was breathing in pants.

Ophelia loosened her grip so that J was no longer in danger of choking, watching J’s eyes first widen and then narrow as she made note of the difference. About time she figured out that Ophelia wasn’t actually trying to kill her. "When?" Ophelia repeated.

J finally stopped squirming and hung in her ludicrous position, her fingers flexing as if she was still not quite certain whether she wanted to play nice with the other girls or not. "About three weeks ago," she answered finally. "Human trafficking case."

Mindy had lied to her. Ophelia ran through a list of potential reasons why and couldn’t find a good one. She eased J back to the ground, but didn’t release her telekinetic grip quite yet. J in a mood was like holding onto a stray dog at the end of an Animal Control noose. "I didn't attack you, J," Ophelia told her. "I believe that you saw me, or something like me, but I didn't lay a single hand on you until you came after me first." The push that Ophelia was using to keep J against the wall didn't so much dissolve as it collapsed; Ophelia hoped like hell that she could pull it up again if J decided that round two of their cat fight was in order.

J studied Ophelia for a long, long moment while Naomi stepped up behind her protectively, and finally said, "If it wasn't you, then what the fuck is going on?" She eased herself up from the wall and made a pretense of straightening out her jacket that was really about sizing Ophelia up from under her lashes, trying to get the measure of her.

"A big problem, that's what," Ophelia said. The answer waited back in Austin, though, and this time she was going to go get it armed with a plan and backup. Ophelia pulled her cell phone from her pocket, holding her hand out in a warding-off gesture when the sudden movement made J twitch.

"Neither one of us needs to pull a knife on you," Naomi said, and J answered, "Until three days ago I didn't think that Ophelia would attack me at all, weaponry is kind of secondary."

Ophelia ignored them both except to turn her back on J and feel Naomi's disapproving stare at letting her guard down even that much. She swiped at the skin beneath her nose and wasn't shocked to see that there was fresh blood on her fingertips as she hit Marcus's speed dial with the other hand. There wasn't a cardio regimen for the sort of workouts that she did.

"I think that we're gonna need your jet for a little field trip," Ophelia said without waiting for an answer as soon as someone picked up on the other end. "You were right about something being wrong with Mindy."

Marcus let out a long sigh, as if he was wishing that he had been wrong. "That will have to wait,” he said. “I have a guest."

Chapter Seven

Marcus had a big estate high up in the Hollywood hills, surrounded by enough land to keep his neighbors from becoming curious. There was an heiress living on one side and a social media billionaire on the other, and Ophelia had yet to see either of them. Better to be paranoid than to be in a tabloid. Marcus liked to keep private things private even when he wasn't wearing a mask and his pack, a trait that he shared with Ophelia. She couldn't imagine that he was going to be too thrilled with her when he learned that she was bringing two guests along with her as she drove her car up the winding road to his gate. The sun was just starting to peek up over the eastern horizon, and for the next hour everything that it touched would be cotton candy pink and chick-down gold. Ophelia had always loved the view from up here.

Ophelia didn’t try her luck by seeing if her gate code still worked, but pressed the intercom instead and waited for one of Marcus’s ever-revolving staff members to buzz her in. She had seen them only slightly more often than she had seen Marcus’s neighbors.

"Ms. Simmons," a woman with a Princeton-proper accent said, sounding surprised but not sleepy. Ophelia winced; it would have to be Esmé, the only member of Marcus’s staff so far who was either discreet or obtuse enough to stay employed for longer than six months. Personally, Ophelia wasn’t going to put down money on density. The woman was seventy if she was a day, had impeccably dressed, riotous red hair that fought back gray with chemical help, and a stare that could spot uncomfortable secrets and spots on the silver with equal skill. "It's been some time."

"I need to speak with Marcus," Ophelia said. There was a pause over the line that said plenty without Esmé or Ophelia needing to see one another. "He knows that I'm coming." Even if he had been damned reticent about releasing any actual useful details to her over the phone. Well, she hadn't informed him that she was going to be bringing along any guests, so she guessed that it would all just have to keep on being fair even though it was no longer about love and war.

“One moment.” The intercom whispered out static as Esmé left to confer with someone. Ophelia rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling of her car and wondered if the old woman didn't play at being much dottier than she actually was just because she knew that she could get away with it. After a period of time long enough to make J start shifting restlessly in the back seat and Ophelia start considering ramming the gate with her car just to see what would happen, Esmé returned and said, "The cook will have a breakfast ready in twenty minutes." The gates started to pull open.

"Does she know that she's cooking for a crowd?" Temper aside, sometimes J just saw way too much for her own good.

"She will in a moment," Ophelia murmured back. They traveled the winding path to the house and exited, Naomi tilting her head slightly to one side to listen with interest to the chirrups and cries of dawn-rising birds. "Do you think Esmé ever liked me?" she asked.

Ophelia paused. She and Naomi had been inside Marcus's home plenty of times, when it had been she, Naomi, and Marcus, as well as when it was she and Marcus and then Naomi, but the situation was a little different this time. Esmé was loyal to Marcus. The rest of them were judged by their relationship to him. "If she doesn't immediately shut the door in my face when she sees the two of you, then we'll find out how much she likes me," she finally replied.

Esmé went still in the suspicious way of a servant disapproving with all of her might and putting an equal amount of effort into making sure that it didn't show when she saw the two blondes standing behind Ophelia on the porch. J raised her hand and waggled her fingers. At least they were all still in their street clothes.

"Marcus is expecting me," Ophelia repeated, "and he called us here on an emergency."

"Of course." Esmé dipped into a very slight curtsy and stepped aside to allow the three of them entrance. "He’s in the study, he's expecting you." She shut the door without offering to show them the way and disappeared down a hallway again, presumably to supervise the cook. Her hair remained visible long after the rest of her had faded off into the shadows.

"Nice lady," J remarked, staring after her. She turned back towards Ophelia with her eyebrows raised. "I'm hungry, but not if she's going to spit in it."

Ophelia set her lips into a thin line, but Naomi was the one who answered. "You can't help but take sides if you only read one half of the history book," she said, pushing past the both of them and towards the study where Marcus was supposed to be. Ophelia looked at the decor as she walked past, noting a new painting that had not been there when she had last stepped through these halls, a sculpture that had disappeared. The house was California-new and looked in from the outside, but the décor inside was old, incongruous against the sunlight that spilled in. Ophelia had wondered but never asked while she and Marcus had still been together how much of the furnishings had been chosen to remind him of New York.

Marcus stepped out to meet them before they could reach the study proper, pausing for a moment when he saw that Ophelia had not come alone. He was wearing jeans and a dark cardigan, and he did not look as if he had slept. Going into her second day with nothing more than a catnap snatched here and there, Ophelia thought that maybe they had found some common ground again. Marcus's gaze sharpened onto her.

"I like that new painting," Ophelia said, pointing further back down the hallway. Marcus didn't look appeased.

"When you told me that you were coming, I heard you say 'I' and figured that you meant you were coming alone," Marcus told her flatly, though he did nod over her shoulder and say with a total gentleman's politeness, "Naomi."

"Marcus," she answered in tones so sweet that Ophelia would not have been surprised to turn around and see her curtsy, and the hell of it was that they both sounded completely genuine. Behind Ophelia and slightly to her left, she could feel J bristling slightly at the lack of acknowledgement and threw back a warning hand. Marcus's eyebrow crept up slightly, as if he was asking Ophelia if he really thought that he needed the protection. Even though he didn’t appear to be carrying any of his customary gadgets, Ophelia had to admit that he probably had a point.

"No time to drop her off anywhere, no way to know that she wouldn't light the building on fire as soon as she was there," Ophelia answered crisply, "and she already knows who you really are, anyway."

"That's not the point and you know it," Marcus told her. He didn't let people into his home lightly. Bringing J here unannounced might just have gotten Ophelia knocked off of the list of people who were allowed entrance.

When they wound up to a fight, they wound up to a fight, no holds barred and no one giving any quarter. That had always been their way. "She's as much a part of this as anyone is, and we're going to need her help," she snapped back. "I'm not going back out to see Mindy without backup—"

Naomi had worked with both Marcus and Ophelia long enough to know that it was best to just lean back against the wall and examine her nails until they worked their business out. She proceeded to do so, while J exploded, "You were with Mindy earlier and you didn't do anything?"

Ophelia barely spared J a glance. "I was alone and didn't have a plan," she replied coolly. "Maybe I could have won that fight, but if that's still the real Mindy, I very well might have had to seriously hurt or killed her in the process. Hence, backup."

Something finally seemed to go off behind J's eyes. "'The real Mindy,'" she repeated. "Oh, my God, so you didn’t attack me?"

"Really? The rest of us are at least four chapters ahead by now," Naomi remarked without looking up from her nails.

"I can set you on fire," J shot back.

"Not if you ever want to set foot in this house again," Marcus told J with more politeness than was likely warranted, given that he had not invited her into it in the first place, and then added, "And keep your voices down, you'll scare her."

Right. His guest. Ophelia looked sideways at Marcus, not entirely certain that the "her" to which he was about to introduce them all didn't have tentacles, given how damned secretive he was being about her. He gestured her ahead of him into the study without another word.

Marcus's study was exactly that in the best sense of the word, a large room ringed with bookshelves on three and a half walls and the largest fireplace that Ophelia had seen in her life taking up whatever the books didn't, with furniture stuffed until it looked as if it could pop and a constant smell of aged leather. When she had still been a regular visitor to this house, overnight or otherwise, Ophelia had always sworn that she could feel herself getting smarter just by stepping through the doors. Currently there was a fire blazing even though it was early summer, and a girl sitting on the couch directly across from the fireplace swaddled in a robe much too large for her that Ophelia thought was probably one of Marcus's. She was black, looked as if she would be tall once she stood, and appeared to be younger than Ophelia by several years, probably not old enough to drink. Her dark hair was cut into a jagged and asymmetrical bob, currently damp and falling down to obscure one eye. The remaining one was hazel-green, and it trained onto Ophelia immediately. The girl drew herself up tighter when she realized that Marcus had brought company back inside the room with him even though her posture had been ramrod-straight already. She was being very careful not to turn her back towards the door. If there had been windows in the room, her body language suggested, she might have had a nervous breakdown right then and there.

"Hello," Ophelia said softly to Marcus's guest, slowing to approach. She started to hold her hands out to her sides in a non-threatening gesture until she saw the girl tense up that much harder and then dropped them back against her thighs. No one ever managed to look truly benign while they were doing something like that, anyway, as opposed to as if they were trying to soothe an animal long enough to grab it by the scruff without being bitten.

J started to come forward right along with Ophelia, until Naomi grabbed her elbow and pulled her back sharply with a, "Less is more." For once, J didn't argue, and remained by the door. Marcus still came with Ophelia.

Ophelia knelt on the floor in front of the girl, far enough away so that she could avoid a good kick to the face if the girl spooked, close enough that they were still friendly. "My name is Ophelia."

The girl considered Ophelia for a long moment before she finally returned, "Bonnie" and extended her hand so that they could shake. Her accent marked her as being from the South, possibly Tennessee or Kentucky. Once Ophelia was close, she discovered that Bonnie smelled like soap and clean water, and the skin of her wrists where the sleeves of the robe slid back were slightly raw, as if she had been rubbing at them before the group had entered the room.

"Bonnie," Ophelia said, smiling. "Nice to meet you. Let me guess…Louisville?"

"Nashville." Bonnie turned her head slightly to look at Ophelia from the other eye. Ophelia could not read her expression.

"I'm from Atlanta," Ophelia went on. "Been away fifteen years, but I still love hearing another Southern accent."

"I found her while I was doing a sweep of the waterfront in the jet," Marcus said. "Just floating on the ocean. I thought that she was dead. She had bullet wounds, and marks were fish had been at her—" Bonnie shuddered hard, but her expression did not change. Ophelia decided to attribute it to a nonexistent chill in the room and did not comment. When she glanced at Bonnie’s wrists again, the red marks were gone. "But they all healed up again within a couple of seconds once she was out of the waves and the water ran out of her lungs. And then she punched me in the mouth." Ophelia tilted her head up and saw that Marcus's lower lip was slightly swollen, though he sounded more proud than affronted.

"I don't remember that," Bonnie said. She paused, then went on, "The...the fish, I was gone by then. I remember punching you." And she, if anything, sounded even more proud than Marcus. Ophelia caught him turning away quickly to hide a smile in the curve of his hand, though Bonnie herself was in no state to notice. She went on with words tumbling uncontrolled from her mouth like pebbles, "But if you're going to take me back because of what I can do, or if you work with them—" Bonnie's voice turned savage, and Ophelia was suddenly very aware that it had been a good idea to settle herself down out of easy kicking range.

"Bonnie," Ophelia interrupted softly, and then used a gentle push to lift a globe off of a nearby table and turn it over so that the stand was now pointing towards the ceiling. At the door, Naomi made a chirruping noise that still sent a warning chime through Ophelia's head while she wasn't wearing the ear buds, and J followed both of their leads by making a chain of sparks leap from one finger to the other until they had passed along all ten, like a crowd doing the wave. Bonnie's mouth fell open slightly, and she looked towards Marcus.

"You've already seen the jet," he said easily, as if that should have been demonstration enough.

"No one here is going to take you anywhere that you do not want to go," Ophelia told Bonnie. Bonnie still looked scared enough that Ophelia wanted to lean forward and take her hands, and yet defiant enough that Ophelia was fairly certain that he would get a sock to the face when she did. Atta girl. "But if you tell us who had you in the first place, we can make damned sure that they don't take anyone else, either." The first whisperings of a theory as to what had happened to the real Mindy began construction in the back of Ophelia's mind.

Bonnie paused in mid-breath and leaned back, regarding Ophelia for a long and solemn moment from the single eye left visible by her hair. She finally reached up to push her forelock back to show another eye every bit as green and sharp; Ophelia couldn't help but smile, no matter that it probably wasn't the time. All right, so it wasn't a fluke, the mouse really did have some teeth. Ophelia was always glad to see it.

"I was ambushed," Bonnie told Ophelia flatly. "About—" She cut herself off hard enough to make a clicking noise and looked away. Ophelia glanced up at Marcus, who was solemn and imposing leaning back against the fireplace. By a mutual agreement made with their eyes, they didn't speak until Bonnie had gathered herself up again. She finally flicked her hair back from her face, looked Ophelia directly in the eye, and said, "I don't know how long ago they took me. I was inside, and they never turned the lights off. But they kept me locked up whenever they weren't sticking giant-ass needles into me. I spent most of my time drugged." Her hands shaking very slightly, Bonnie pushed the sleeve of the robe up so that Ophelia could see the crook of her elbow. The skin was smooth and unblemished; Ophelia raised an eyebrow. Bonnie said, "The only reason I don't have scars is because of what I can do. You wouldn't be so lucky."

"How did you get out?" Marcus asked her.

Bonnie waved her hand and scrunched her face a little, making Ophelia think that she wasn't quite sure what the appropriate emotion was in this situation. "There was this guard who had a soft spot for me. I don't know, guess he thought he was going to make up for some of it, but he left my door unlocked one night. I ran like hell and dove over a cliff into the water. They shot me on the way down, and I don't remember anything after that." Looking vaguely horrified, Bonnie pulled her legs underneath her as if she could protect her extremities better by keeping them tucked as close to her as she could possibly manage.

Cliffs and water. Ophelia frowned. Not a mugger or even a jewelry-store robber, this one. That spoke of cash. "Can you remember anything specific about where you were?" she asked.

Bonnie shook her head and rubbed at the back of her neck. "There was a lab, trees, roads," she said. "But I never saw anyone other than the guards." Ophelia amended her earlier thought to a lot of cash. Coastal property wasn't cheap to begin with, let alone in the amount needed to guarantee solitude. "I was unconscious when they brought me in, I was unconscious when I left. I have no idea where I was." The last sentence was spoken with force, as if Bonnie mostly didn't want to think about it any further. She rocked back onto her heels and stood, while Marcus put his hand lightly on Bonnie's shoulder. He had such a protective streak; most people only got to see one side of it, because they were criminals and he was in the middle of kicking their asses. Bonnie startled very slightly at Marcus's touch, but didn't push his hand away. Ophelia wasn't going to go so far as to say that Bonnie trusted them, just yet. Bonnie's hair had fallen forward over her eye again, and the remaining visible one seemed to be watching all of them at once.

"I'm running a computer model on the tidal currents right now. I'll lay that against property records and see what I find out," Marcus said. "It's taking some time, since we can't know how long you were actually in the water, but we'll get there. Try to relax for now."

"Meanwhile, we have one hell of a coincidence if someone's attacking Bonnie here, she turns out to have powers, someone else also goes after J, who just happens to have powers, and Mindy's telling me lies for no good reason at all," Ophelia said, her hands on her hips. "How long will it take for that computer program of yours to do its thing?"

Marcus looked sideways at Bonnie and finally said reluctantly, "She might have been in the water for days." Bonnie went green and attempted to pull her feet even more firmly underneath her. "Mindy's faster." When Marcus glanced back at her, there was a trace of the old humor in his face and voice as he said, "You just want to borrow the jet."

"It's a really nice jet," Ophelia stressed. "Have I ever mentioned before how nice a jet it is? And how you were the first one to realize that something's wrong with Mindy, so it's really your baby."

"Mindy, is she a part of the people who took me?" Bonnie asked immediately.

"I doubt it, but for her sake she'd better not be," Ophelia answered darkly.

Marcus smiled a grim little smile and pressed a button on the wall intercom. "Sir?" Esmé said on the other end.

"Our guest will be spending the day here, as well," Marcus said into the speaker. "See to it that she gets some breakfast before you show her to one of the guest rooms, all right? No need to involve the rest of the staff, either."

"I had a feeling that you would be making it an early morning, sir," Esmé said, and disconnected.

Ophelia looked at Marcus. "How much does she know?" she asked.

Marcus looked right back, his face carefully blank. "How much do you think she knows?"

Bonnie had spent most of the previous several minutes looking back and forth between Ophelia and Marcus like a spectator at a tennis match, with stray breaks to glance at J and Naomi by the door as if she could not quite bring herself to believe that they were staying back in order to give her space rather than to block her escape. "Who are you people?" she finally exploded.

Smiling a little even though that whirring in the back of her head of being able to almost, but not quite, place why Bonnie's description of where she had been seemed so familiar was going to drive her nuts if it went on for too much longer, Ophelia extended her hand down to Bonnie to help her to her feet. "We're the good guys," she told her. "And we're the ones who are going to make this right."

Chapter Eight

While Marcus technically did own a jet in a private hangar about fifteen minutes from his house, referring to it by that alone was a little like calling a Maserati a car: yeah, it might be true, but it was still pretty insulting. Marcus's plane was a long, sleek machine of dark metal that barely had room for four passengers inside and would be appalled to be associated with anything as mundane as a public runway even if Marcus wouldn't have been blowing his cover wide open in order to do so. If it had to idle alongside the pretty, ostentatious toys of people with too much money and not enough inclination to do something worthy with it, Ophelia was fairly certain that it would spontaneously develop sentience, yank the controls from Marcus's hands, and take itself back to the manor until he could show it something approaching good sense again. It had broken the speed of sound the first time that she and Marcus had gone on a date. It could cloak itself from radar and human sight, a technology that Marcus had developed himself as a part of the mechanical genius that paid his bills and made it possible for him to do the reverse nine-to-five from night until morning. It could shoot down anything that came at it in the sky if it had to, make a directly vertical takeoff and landing, and still sounded no louder than a car in need of a tune-up when someone was standing directly beside it.

And most importantly of all, it was fast.

Two days without sleep was two days too many; seated behind the driver and with Naomi beside her while J took a nearly childlike relish in riding shotgun and the first to see the clouds being whisked away against the craft's windshield, Ophelia dropped her head down onto her girlfriend's shoulder without particularly giving a damn if there were certain rules about currents and exes and what to do when the twain had to meet. She smelled Naomi's shampoo and felt Naomi shift so that she could put her arm about Ophelia's shoulders. Naomi started braiding the ends of Ophelia's hair together until Ophelia felt it and swatted at her, and then still said, "You'll never hear the end of if you drool on me."

Ophelia swatted Naomi again, this time just because she deserved it, and said without opening her eyes, "Sometimes you sing in your sleep. Be nice to me or I'll recording it." She kept her voice low, because any kind of lover-talk was something that needed to stay between lovers even if it was rated G, and not because she could feel Marcus's and J's attention from a few feet away even with her eyes closed. She and Naomi had nothing to hide, damn it.

The jet was fast, and Ophelia was exhausted; she expected to be woken from her doze by the very slight gravitational shift of the craft setting down, not J and Marcus swearing together in eerie tandem from the front seats. Ophelia had been in this game for way too long to do anything other than go from out-cold sleeping to full wakefulness in two seconds or less. She lurched up so fast that she nearly hit Naomi in the jaw with the crown of her head. Naomi tilted herself gracefully out of the way without appearing startled, and said, "Jesus, O, what did you and Mindy talk about?"

It was a few hours past sunrise in Texas, the sky already a healthy, cheerful robin's egg blue with only a few reluctant wisps of cloud cover embellishing it. Since the sun was already arcing its way a fair distance up from the eastern horizon, Ophelia would have known that there was something very wrong the orange-red glow even if it weren't for the thick, angry fingers of dark smoke reaching up towards the sky.

Ophelia leaned forward, putting one hand against the shoulder of Marcus's seat, the other against J's, and topped it all off by essentially having to sit in Naomi's lap in order to keep her balance. She swore with more feeling than she thought she had ever sworn before in her life and felt Marcus throwing her a startled look, either because he wasn't used to hearing that kind of language coming out of her mouth or because he hadn't expected her to break the carefully-drawn rules about personal bubbles that the two of them had been obeying ever since the breakup.

"We talked about shoes," Ophelia said flatly as they got close enough for the glow to resolve itself into flames that had turned Mindy's house into a vaguely abode-shaped inferno. Mindy's neighbors were damned lucky that the lots were big. So far, a breeze was claiming a few trees as casualties, but no nearby structures and, thank somebody residing in the sky along with them, no civilians that Ophelia could see. Her stomach dipped slightly along with the plane's gravitational compensators as Marcus banked them away from Mindy's house and towards what looked to be a small park area with the bright blue gleam of a man-made pond. Marcus had been engaging the plane's cloaking system throughout the entire flight, or else the firefighters and assorted lookers-on cluttering the ground below would have seen the sleek machine wheeling as gracefully as a bird of prey changing direction.

"You must have insulted the hell out of hers," Marcus said as he brought the jet to the ground with a faint whooshing noise and nary a bump. The air was smoky and the park was deserted, so that four people scrambling down from what appeared to be thin air were able to go unnoticed. Marcus still frowned as he looked around at the surroundings that would allow any unlucky person to walk face-first while trying to walk their dog or spend the day with their kids. "This is a lot easier on rooftops."

"I'll have to bring it up with the real Mindy when we find her again," Ophelia said, while Naomi added, "You had to have tipped her off, or else she's working for someone else who got pissed and decided that a pink slip was better than a severance package."

"Why people want to be minions, I'll never know," Ophelia agreed. "Have you ever seen a minion venting spleen on a super villain, or a super villain being the first to go down? No." She reached for Naomi's hand. "Come on, we got to get close if we're going to find out what's up."

Naomi, laughing a little but still not managing to look as if she was happy about it, tugged her fingers free from Ophelia's grasp. "O, do you realize that we're in Texas?"

Oh, for fu-- "Naomi, do you realize that we're in Austin?"

"Upscale Austin," Naomi corrected her. "Old money. Not really big on embracing new and exciting progressive ideals."

That left only one hetero option on the table if she wanted to see what the pseudo-Mindy had gone and done, and he looked about as thrilled over it as she felt. "Come on, Marcus, let's do this," Ophelia said, sliding her arm through his. They had done it dozens of times before, pretending to be a couple out of costume so that they could mingle among civilians and get a closer look at a crime scene. The problem was that then they had actually been a couple.

"I'm going to assume that you're leaning away from me like I'm going to give you cancer because your girlfriend's watching," Marcus said as the two of them walked out of the park and down the street towards the crowd of onlookers who were resisting the efforts of the police to keep them at a safe distance.

Ophelia smiled a little thinly and decided not to say what she was thinking. "Why are you doing it?" she asked.

"We didn't break up all that long ago, Ophelia." Marcus put his arm around Ophelia's shoulders and tugged her closer as they entered the throng of onlookers watching the house burn. It was patently obvious that the structure wasn't going to be saved; Ophelia just hoped that the Mindy-bot had kept up on the real deal's homeowner's insurance, if the real deal was still alive somewhere to appreciate it.

"I know." Ophelia put her hand over Marcus's and they relaxed into the role like it was nothing, like they were just another upscale couple out strolling the neighborhood and wanting to see what the enormous, blisteringly hot fuss was all about.

"Oh, my gosh, what happened here?" Ophelia exclaimed to an older woman who had the kind of immaculately set and vaguely gravity-defying hair that only happened in Texas, and to Naomi after she had been reading The Second Sex. The woman was wearing a tennis outfit, but the sweat beading at her shoulders and along her upper lip was not from the court. Even with the police forcing them to stay a safe distance back, Ophelia could feel herself starting to sweat inside her jacket. She deliberately dialed up the last remains of a good Georgia girl in her accent, one local to another, and felt Marcus stiffening with what might have been an attempt to hold back a laugh. Whatever, it always worked, even if Daddy had always told her that Texans were less Southerners and more a species unto themselves.

It wasn't yet noon, and there was still enough smoke from the burning house and the trees planted too close to escape to make the air thick and sooty, and the lights from the fire trucks were casting eerie patterns onto the tennis woman's face as they flashed. She was also blinking rapidly. The thick soot in the air had Ophelia knuckling back tears of her own within seconds.

"I will say this one more time and then the cuffs are coming out, get back!" a police officer yelled at them. Marcus, Ophelia, and the tennis woman idled back a few yards accordingly, Ophelia thinking as they went that she had never seen anyone looking quite so frustrated as the firemen standing in mostly useless clusters or else wetting down the grass and trees that hadn't gone up yet, just trying to keep the inferno from spreading. It was obvious that there was nothing else they could do.

"No one knows yet," the tennis woman said when she was finally able to focus on Ophelia and Marcus again. Her white uniform was already the color of angry clouds; Ophelia looked down at her tee shirt and saw that it wasn't any different. She hoped that Marcus wasn't too attached to his sweater. "I called the fire department when I saw the smoke, but I live a quarter of a mile away, and I had been gone at doubles all morning—" The woman put her hand up against her mouth. Her fingers were shaking, and it was obvious that once she had now found someone that she could talk to it was going to be difficult for her to stop. "I heard one of the firemen saying that there was a body inside, but it was too hot and he got driven back—" The trembling spread from her fingers throughout her entire body. "Oh, I didn't know the girl well, but she seemed to come from such a nice family, you know, old newspaper family—" Ophelia raised her eyebrows as discreetly as she could at Marcus. It would be very nice to be this woman's counselor, but they still didn't know if that was actually Mindy that had been found in the house.

"Did you see anyone leaving the house earlier today?" Marcus asked the woman. "Before or after the fire started, or maybe a houseguest that you hadn't noticed before?" His voice had deepened. From there he could just as easily talk a junkie down off of a ledge or make a criminal pee themselves, and on a couple of memorable occasions both at once. Ophelia was pretty certain that it was due to the smoke, but it still made her shiver with remembrance, even if he didn't have on his mask. Damn, once upon a time and several fairy tales back, he, Naomi, and herself had been an amazing team.

The woman cut off and blinked at Marcus rapidly with eyes rimmed red from a combination of smoke and upset. "Are you a cop?" she asked him, seeming to take in for the first time the combination of cardigan sweater, jeans, and sneakers. Maybe if he had included a pair of dark sunglasses in spite of the near-twilight conditions and a tendency towards faintly ridiculous bon mots he would have been more able to pull it off.

Ophelia smiled widely and snuggled herself deeper into Marcus's side. He tightened his grip about her, and the strangeness was in how once it hadn't been strange at all. "You'll have to forgive Marcus here," she said. "He's a huge crime buff, I just can't get him off A&E. We were, ah, looking at a house in the neighborhood."

"Oh, the Heathrows'?" the woman asked immediately.

"Yes," Ophelia answered. She could feel Marcus widening his eyes at her in warning, but what the hell else was she supposed to do?

"You know, I thought that they were going to be putting it up on the market soon, being a stockbroker these days is like admitting that you're a pirate or something ridiculous like that—" The woman flapped her hand as if it was a bygone conclusion that Marcus and Ophelia would agree. "But really, a few bad apples. And what do the two of you do?" She was facing primarily Ophelia, so that Marcus could watch the abrupt zig-zag over from grief for an acquaintance into social niceties with faint amusement and not more than a little disbelief without needing to guard his expression. Maybe Texas wasn't all that different from the rest of the South proper: above all else, you were polite, right up until the point where you weren't.

"I was in research and development for a long time," Marcus told her. "Now I'm kind of, ah, an entrepreneur."

"Oh, how lovely, I've always wanted to be a business owner," the woman said. She looked back towards Ophelia for her answer next without assuming that she was simply the significant other of a significant person, which raised her several notches in Ophelia's estimation without her even having to say a word.

"I'm in the same business as Marcus," Ophelia said, hoping that the tennis woman wouldn't notice that Marcus had not actually specified what his current business was outside of assumedly no longer tinkering with technology. It was close enough to the truth, since Ophelia was pretty sure that Marcus designed his machines more for pleasure than for business these days.

"You get to work together, that must be so nice." The woman leaned forward and touched them both briefly on the arms. "Now, how did you like the Heathrows' house? They've redone their kitchen, you know, just a few months ago."

"Ah." Ophelia coughed and then grimaced when it made an unladylike sound. She, Marcus, and every other spectator could do with getting out of this air, and pretty quickly. "I liked the colors?" she finished.

The tennis woman tilted her head to one side, though lower-state standards of behavior clearly kept her from outright disagreeing. Ophelia dearly hoped that she had not just praised fuchsia wallpaper with pineapple accents or something. "It's very much a statement kitchen," the tennis woman finally said, Goddamnit. At that instant, one of the few remaining windows in the upper story of the house exploded with a pop that Ophelia could hear even from how far back the police and firefighting forces were urging them, and saw the glass hanging in the air like diamonds for half a second before the backdraft forced it out and across the lawn. The chance of any even minute slivers reaching them her were slim, but Ophelia still turned and ducked her head. It wasn't until she had straightened again that she realized that Marcus had grabbing tennis woman instinctively as he turned himself and shoved her body in front of him so that they were both being sheltered by his back.

"Oh," the tennis woman said as the crowd quieted and she straightened her clothes. There were pink points standing out on her cheeks. "How, ah, noble. Maybe you really ought to be a police officer."

"I tell him that at least twice a week," Ophelia said. She bit the inside of her cheek hard.

"If only my current job were less fulfilling," Marcus answered. He suppressed a cough of his own and shook the tennis woman's hand briefly. "Thank you for helping us out, ma'am."

That seemed to remind the tennis woman of the actual reason that they were all standing out here, and she looked back towards the house again. "That poor, poor girl—" she started, which was when several more windows went with banging noises, making the crowd scream and dart back. Ophelia and Marcus took that as their opportunity to slide back and towards the park again.

"That could have been more useful," Marcus sighed. "Even if you did have her eating out of the palm of your hand."

"She is an ambassador from my culture," Ophelia said. For a few seconds, it was easy again. "And I had her eating out of my hand? She started cursing the fact that you were with me as soon as you did that superhero move." And just like that, awkward again. Marcus looked at her. Ophelia cursed herself and looked up towards the sky, which looked as if it was considering rain up above all of the smoke. Good. This neighborhood was going to need a good washing when it was all said and done. "Sorry."

"Ophelia, don't apologize to me when unless you got something that you ought to be sorry for," Marcus said, voice a little tauter than normal but still without anger. He sighed, pinched at the bridge of his nose. Even though Ophelia didn't have to assume that it was because the air quality was giving him a headache, she decided that that was the way that she was going to read it. "All right, let's just figure what we can figure."

"Do you think that the body in the house is really Mindy?" Ophelia asked softly. She and Mindy weren't any closer than a celebratory shared drink or two when a job brought them together, but there were so few people doing this work as it was, every death was a loss even if they didn't stay in much contact outside of jobs.

"I wouldn't put season tickets on it," Marcus said shortly. Up ahead, Naomi and J appeared to be leaning against thin air. Marcus swore in a tone somehow suggesting that he didn't know why he had expected anything else. "Whatever it is that we're dealing with, somehow you tipped it off that you were onto it, and now it's covering it's tracks."

"It?" Ophelia repeated softly.

"Space aliens don't seem so weird when you hang with people who can break crystal with the right note or thought." Marcus frowned. "Or when one of the people who can break crystal might be an alien herself. There's a bench right there." This last part directed at Naomi and J, who appeared otherwise completely unrepentant for their general lack of stealth.

Naomi gave Marcus her very sweetest smile and then raised her eyebrow at Ophelia, while her gaze roamed critically from head to foot. "If I give you a kiss right now, are you going to taste like a cigarette?"

"The ashtray special," Ophelia confirmed. "Try blending in with a crowd that probably would have climbed inside the house for a better look if police hadn't been there to keep them back."

"Whatever it was in there impersonating Mindy, it's long gone," Marcus said, and rubbed his hand over his face. "So we're back to square one." He looked deeply unhappy, and Ophelia knew what he was thinking about.

"Unless we count the deeply traumatized coincidence that you pulled out of the water last night?" she asked.

"Yeah," Marcus confirmed. "Unless you count her."

"Bonnie made it sound like they went after her for her powers, though," J said, leaning up against the jet again and ignoring the irritable noise that Marcus made at her. "Same as I thought that Ophelia was coming after me." She made a growling sound of her own when three people stared at her. "Look, I can put pieces together, too, okay, not just set things on fire. Try playing chess against me sometime. Point being, if they went after me, and they went after Bonnie, then we got a big, fat problem with Mindy, 'cause she couldn't do shit." She held up a finger at Marcus. "And don't go getting all defensive, I know I'm leaning on your jet."

A kid yelled from somewhere nearby. Marcus reached out and yanked J away by her arm so that she at least appeared to be standing on solid ground again. "Maybe they went after her because she's like us," he said, ignoring the short burst of colorful language that J directed at him, "in that she's a crime-fighter rather than a genetic anomaly."

"That girl you have at your place is barely more than a child," Naomi said. She put her arm about Ophelia's waist, though her sniff at the current smell of Ophelia's hair was less than appreciative. "And didn't seem all that thrilled with the idea that she's special, besides. You never are at that age."

"That age" wasn't more than a handful of years younger than Naomi and Ophelia themselves, but Ophelia still knew what Naomi meant. Ophelia had been old enough to drink before she had really settled down and started to realize that she had a powerful tool in her belt rather than a neon sign branding her a freak.

"She's still the best lead that we have left," Ophelia said, reluctantly, and untangled herself from around Naomi again so that she could board the jet to go back. Civilians weren't supposed to get caught in the crossfire like that. That wasn't the way that it was supposed to be.

Chapter Nine

Esmé paused visibly when the four of them reentered Marcus's house, staying several yards away. Her face twitched. Ophelia could see her desperately trying to figure out which one of them stank the most before her training took over for her again. "A less than successful venture, I gather?" she asked.

Marcus gave Esmé one of the most eloquently sarcastic looks that Ophelia had seen in her life before he answered, "Plane didn't fall out of the sky. Let's call that a win."

"Ah." Esmé could say a great deal with what she allowed to remain unspoken. "I'll lay out fresh clothes for you, sir." She started to pass Ophelia and made a soft coughing noise as she realized that the heavy odor of smoke was coming from at least two people. "Perhaps Ms. Simmons still has a few things in residence, as well."

"I can clean up at my own place, later," Ophelia answered smoothly.

"Very well." Esmé dipped her head and told Marcus, "Your guest is resting in the second spare room. She's been very quiet." She disappeared down the hallway again.

Naomi had the very faintest of smiles framing her mouth as she watched Esmé leave. "Would you tell us if she was borrowing the car to go install new brakes on the jet right now?" she asked Marcus.

The corners of Marcus's eyes crinkled very slightly before he answered, "I'll tell you the same thing that I told Ophelia: how much do you think she knows?"

Bonnie might have been quiet in their absence, but she was hardly resting. When Marcus first knocked and then eased the door open so that they could enter, she was pacing back and forth across the carpet, her arms folded across her chest. Her gaze had been fixed on the grounds outside her window, but the sound of the door opening made her whirl around with her hand raised into a fist. There was a breakfast plate sitting on the nightstand. It looked much more as if she had been fighting enemies in her pancakes than attempting to eat. Bonnie shifted first forward and then back until Naomi moved aside so that there was no longer anyone blocking the door, and then she relaxed slightly.

"How many locked doors do you have in this place?" Bonnie demanded of Marcus. Esmé had found her a pair of sweatpants and a tee shirt from somewhere, and she had brushed her hair and pushed it back from her face. She still looked half-wild and ready to bolt at any second, without particularly caring how many people she had to run over in order to do it.

"None of them are the ones leading out," Marcus answered her calmly. "And as long as you stay here, I promise you that they never will be."

Bonnie rocked back on her heels and regarded Marcus with her eyebrows drawn close together before she repeated, "Who are you people?" Ophelia took a seat on the edge of the bed even though Bonnie herself seemed determined to keep pacing around as if she were still in an actual cage. "You float things, he has a damned lair or something—"

"I said that the doors leading out wouldn't be locked," Marcus interrupted her. "I never said anything about my personal rooms."

Bonnie stopped long enough to look him up and down and blow back a few strands of hair that were trying to fall into her eyes again. "Either way, you're all some kind of freak or another," she went on. Everyone within the room had been called freak at one point or another too many times to take offense to it now. Bonnie rubbed at her arms and then looked down at Ophelia. "And why do you reek like smoke?"

"The lead we were chasing went extremely sour," Ophelia said. "So right now it's looking like you're the best chance that we have of figuring out what's going on. Are you certain that there's nothing else you can tell us?"

Bonnie resumed her pacing with such ferocity that Ophelia hoped Marcus's carpets had a warranty. "I can't tell you what I don't know," she snapped. "I can't tell you what I don't remember." Or didn't want to remember, Ophelia thought was a much more likely candidate, since bringing up her capture in even the vaguest terms was making Bonnie eyeball the window as if she was considering skipping the door altogether in favor of a swan-dive. If she healed again even half as fast as Marcus had asserted that she did before, Humpty Dumpty could put herself back together again and be off the grounds before any of them even made it to the front door in order to follow. "It was near the ocean. There was water, and the air always smelled like either medicine or salt. No one was wearing masks, but that doesn't do me any good, because I didn't recognize any of them."

And you weren't ever supposed to leave, either. Ophelia, Naomi, Marcus, and J managed to defy physics by sharing a simultaneous four-way glance. Bonnie was becoming too worked up to notice, and was giving the window a look that made it clear the swan-dive thoughts were not hypothetical. Ophelia seriously did not want to see the mechanics of a broken neck repairing itself. She patted at the space beside her on the bed and pretended not to notice Bonnie's snort.

"Hey, hey," Ophelia said. "All right. You don't have to remember anything until you're ready." Bonnie threw her an incredulous look, whether at the fact that Ophelia wasn't going to push her until she was willing to throw herself through a third story window or at the implication that Bonnie would ever be willing to process what had been done to her Ophelia could not tell. "What about before you were taken, then? Have you ever used your powers to help people? To—" Ophelia waved her hand around and made a face as she realized that she was about to leap over the edge of a cliff into pure ridiculousness. "To be a super hero?"

Bonnie stared at Ophelia for a long time before she let out a sound that was alarmingly close to a giggle. Frankly, it meant that Bonnie could still laugh at all, so Ophelia was going to take it. "With what?" Bonnie finally asked her. "My ability to get shot a whole bunch?"

"Anyone in this room could have really appreciated the ability to get shot a whole bunch at one time or another, we're just not going to strip and show you the scars," Marcus told her. "You have the power to do a lot more good in the world than you realize right now."

"Please." Bonnie held up her hand, and the ragged desperation in her voice did not sound feigned. "I already halfway think that you guys are running a cult, okay?" Marcus held up his hands and took a step back, but there was a curve playing about the edges of his mouth saying that the conversation was only tabled, not finished.

"What about your family?" Ophelia attempted to gently guide Bonnie's attention back onto her, even though Bonnie's sudden flinch let her know that there were going to be plenty of land mines in attempting to walk across that stretch of ground, too. "Do they know about your abilities?"

"Why, does yours?" Bonnie shot back.

"Yes, she does," Ophelia answered evenly, without breaking eye contact.

Bonnie rocked back onto her heels for a moment. "They know," she finally answered shortly. "Which is why I haven't spoken to any of them in years."

Ophelia eyed Bonnie up and down, guessed her to be twenty-one or twenty-two at most, and did the math in her head. When she and Miranda made it to that dinner, the very first thing that Ophelia was going to say to her was how grateful she was that Miranda had only run off of the porch a little bit when Ophelia had come back from the mall and lifted her first flowerpot with her mind, and then had come right back again only a few minutes later.

"Hospital records?" Ophelia tried, when Bonnie seemed in danger of falling into a brood and losing the thread altogether. "Maybe a neighbor saw you when you didn't realize?"

"I always pay attention to who's around me," Bonnie answered immediately, fiercely. She hesitated. "But there were some hospital visits, when I was in middle school and my powers were first starting to show. I would....I would deliberately hurt myself to see how fast I could heal, and sometimes it went too far. My parents would take me all the way to the hospital before they realized that I wasn't hurt any longer."

"Then you probably first showed up on someone's radar through hospital records," Ophelia said calmly, keeping to herself the disquieting thought that someone out there was combing through private information specifically for red flags like little girls leaving their home with broken bones and then being fine once they arrived at a hospital, and also that Bonnie's family might have had a hand in pointing those lookers in the right direction once they had caught their first glimpse. "It's a good start, anyway." She glanced out the bedroom window and was startled to see how high the sun was getting in the sky.

Reading her mind, Naomi said, "If we're going to have a busy night, we had better go home first and pick up some gear."

Not to mention a hot shower--if I don't fall asleep in the tub--and the biggest mug of coffee that she could make. Ophelia didn't think that she had ever been this tired before in her life. "Is Esmé going to shoot me when we come back?" she asked Marcus.

Marcus lifted one of his eyebrows a bit and seemed to be genuinely weighing the odds of that outcome. Ophelia thought that they had finally found a bet on which he was willing to wager court side seats before he said, "Not if I actually know that you're coming back with guests this time." He shot her a look. Ophelia winced. You can't drift in and out of here as you please any longer, girlie. And that ought to have been the easiest lesson to pick up, God help the two of you when you have to tackle the hard stuff.

"I need to go by my hotel room and hose off, too," J said. "I think I picked up the smoke from you guys." She looked down at her decidedly normal clothing and sniffed. "And I feel like I'm wearing a burqa."

Ophelia tilted her head to one side, looked J up and down, and decided for at least the dozenth time since the two of them had become allies, of a sort, that she didn't want to know how J obtained her money or what she did with her spare time when she wasn't making the world a better place through the liberal application of kicking ass. She hadn't heard any stories about a white-clad bank robber with violent impulses running about, anyway.

"See you in an hour and a half?" Ophelia asked Marcus. She was standing against Naomi and had her hand around Naomi's waist, because they hadn't done anything wrong and she knew that Marcus wasn't the kind of man who would want them to act as if they had, but awkward as a pubescent girl in her first pair of heels all the same. Ophelia didn't know that there was any way around that. That hard stuff? Congratulations, you just met it. She spent enough time debating whether it would be better or worse to touch Marcus lightly on the arm so that it was just going to be weird either way, and then decided that there was a certain freedom in that. Marcus didn't flinch, anyway.

"Esmé will have a couple of pots of coffee on when you get back," Marcus said. He waited a gentlemanly span of seconds before he removed Ophelia's hand from his arm.  Proof that there was hope for them yet. Ophelia flashed him a brief smile and then left with Naomi and J, passing Esmé in the hallway as they did so. Esmé was carrying a mug of tea that smelled strongly of lemon and sugar. Ophelia was willing to bet that Bonnie was going to find herself mother-smothered like no one had been mother-smothered before in a few moments until she finally succumbed and drank it.

They were pulling past Marcus's gate when J leaned forward suddenly in the seat behind Ophelia. Ophelia, remembering the way that J had come after her with every apparent intention of killing her a scarce day before, tensed automatically. J's expression turned rueful.

"Yeah, about that," she said. "I wanted to apologize for the way I ambushed you. I should have settled down and realized that you wouldn't go attacking one of your own and that something had to be up."

"Accepted," Ophelia said, and reached one of her hands behind her so that she and J could shake. "It probably would have fooled me, too." The primary difference between them being that Ophelia ran in a pack while J was strictly solo, so there was an even greater chance that someone could have been badly hurt. Ophelia forced back a shiver and set her lips into a hard line as J gave her directions to the hotel where she was staying. Someone was going to be facing a reckoning.

Naomi couldn't manage to mask her small sound of disbelief when they pulled up in front of J's motel, which looked one step above charging by the hour and keeping its own shotgun under the front desk for when the cops were too slow in breaking up problems. J lifted an eyebrow as she scrambled out the back. "What?" she asked, leaning back through the open window. "You think I fund my work robbing banks or something?" Ophelia tried very hard to keep her thoughts on that matter to herself, but she was obviously not meant to be an actress. J rolled her eyes.

"Liquor stores are easier," were her last words before she trotted up the stairs to her room.

Naomi looked at Ophelia. Ophelia looked at Naomi. Ultimately, Naomi said, "So long as neither one of us is telepathic, we can just assume that she's joking and don't have to do anything about it."

"I like that plan. Remind me to make sure that kid isn't actually being charged with arson, all right?" Ophelia settled down a little further in her seat, keeping a general eye on the parking lot for trouble while they waited for J to gather her things and come back out again. Two children were chasing a puppy back and forth while a teenager watched indulgently from nearby; the puppy appeared to be enjoying itself. There might be a sex exchange taking place three doors down from J's room. There was no sign that it was anything but consensual and no drugs or doppelgangers in sight, though, so Ophelia stayed in the car.

It wasn't more than a few minutes before Naomi started to fidget and asked, "Did she say that she was going to take a shower while we waited or something?"

It never could be that easy. "No," Ophelia said, leaning forward abruptly in her seat and peering at J's window. No shadows could be seen moving around beyond it. She and Naomi looked at each other, and then Ophelia lunged for the spare set of ear buds that she kept in her glove compartment, just in case, while Naomi leapt out of the passenger door and started sprinting up the stairs. The children and their puppy stopped and goggled.

Ophelia slammed each bud into her ear hard enough to hurt and pressed on the miniscule switch that activated them, hearing a faint whine before they started filtering normal frequencies in to her and warming up for the moment when they would have to nullify Naomi's own. "Get out of here, there's going to be broken glass!" Ophelia yelled over the balcony railing at the children as she darted up the stairs. The teenager grabbed each of them by a hand while the smallest grabbed for the puppy, children and dog both starting to cry, and hustled them inside. Ophelia barely remembered to throw a push over her shoulder to rip her license plate off and hurl it through the cracked-open window of her car so that no one could take it down. She was really going to be venting some spleen once she tracked down whomever it was who clearly knew who they were and was using that against them. In all of the years that she had been working, she hadn't put her identity in jeopardy as many times as she had in the last forty-eight hours alone.

Ophelia was nearly up her second set of stairs when she heard Naomi give her first banshee wail, and every window in the motel shattered accordingly. Ophelia ducked and swore as the earpieces struggled to keep up, dearly hoping that the kids from below had followed her advice and stayed out of range of the glass. She put her hand against the railing and vaulted over the final three steps, shards crunching under her boots as she landed. The man that she had seen entering the motel room not far down from J's and the lady friend whose company he may or may not have been compensating for with cash gaped at her with bed sheets wrapped around themselves as she elbowed her way past. Sunglasses weren't what she normally had in mind as a winning and foolproof disguise, but it was going to have to do.

Naomi screamed again, a real and garbled sound of human astonishment rather than her typical weapon, just as Ophelia was reaching the motel room door. Someone from within kicked Naomi back hard against the railing, her spine bending back at an angle that all of the aspirin in the world was not going to be able to entirely wash away when the morning came and still falling too fast to catch herself. Ophelia had to lash out quickly with her mind to stop Naomi from flipping all the way over and landing hard on the pavement below. She hadn't come across any of their kind who could fly just yet.

Ophelia ducked down low, nearly cutting her fingers on the glass that glittered everywhere as she put the pads down against the walk to steady herself, and barely avoided being hit with an identical kick to the one that had taken Naomi over backwards. From the corner of her eye, Ophelia noticed that the leg looked awfully familiar. She braced her hands more firmly against the walk, splinters be damned, and swept out her own leg to bring Little Miss Kangaroo down to a much-deserved meeting on her ass. The owner of the legs leapt back nimbly, avoiding Ophelia's attack with only a little stumbling, and Ophelia rocked back onto her heels to get a good look at one person who was causing all of this trouble.

"Oh, you bitch," Ophelia blurted out before she remembered that ladies didn't swear, even if they were ladies who spent most of their nights surrounded by violence, blood, and the occasional splash of vomit. She guessed that she couldn't hold it against J any longer for seeing this person coming at her and thinking that it was the real deal. The mask that pseudo-her was wearing was identical, and so were the boots, but she had eschewed the leggings that Ophelia normally wore for warmth and to protect her skin while she was running across rooftops and springing tackles in favor of bare skin. The rest of the outfit was also different, a solid bottom paired with a top that was mostly ribbon. Ophelia spent several hours a night running back and forth across rooftops, and she was never going to understand trying to do it without proper support. Things moved. A long black trench coat was draped around the woman's body and would have made the whole thing street-presentable with nothing more than belting it closed, provided that she took off the mask.

The woman took a step back deeper into the motel room, looked Ophelia up and down, and said, "Ain't a bad likeness, even when you're up close." She drew back her fist.

Ophelia wasn't about to wait to see if this...person, thing, whatever the hell, had Ophelia's powers as well as her looks. She threw her entire mind behind one of the fastest and hardest pushes that she was capable of just as Naomi behind her got her breath back enough to scream again, long and loud. Ophelia's ears popped; she didn't know whether that was due to the scream, or her own doing. The woman wearing her face flew backwards into the room, yelping, and in the doing so cleared the way so that Ophelia could see J lying still on the floor. There was a spot of blood on her temple. Ophelia could not tell if her chest was still rising and falling or not. While the woman who thought that she was going to be all slick and wear Ophelia's face was still recovering, Ophelia charged into the room.

And promptly received a punch to the throat that left her gagging for air and staggering back, looking up again to see the thing that wanted to be Mindy staring back. She had the good sense to look a tiny bit nervous when she saw the way that Ophelia was looking at her. First good sense she had ever had in her whole life, probably.

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me--" Ophelia started to croak. The woman wearing her face, meanwhile, was standing up from the dresser, which she had slammed into hard enough to break the mirror and drive a long shard of metal into her arm. While Ophelia watched, the woman, wincing, pulled the mirror out and threw it to the side. The wound on her arm closed up so quickly that there was scarcely any blood. Oh. Ophelia thought that she understood now why someone was hunting them, and it made her stomach turn. What made it turn a hell of a lot worse, though, was that when she gathered her breath back to leap into the room, a recovered Naomi right behind her, the thing wearing her face reached back around behind her, lifted up the dresser itself as if it were nothing, and hurled it at them both. Naomi grabbed Ophelia by the back of her shirt and bodily hurled her back, as if Ophelia needed any reminding that a big damned dresser was not something that she needed catching her square. It clipped Ophelia's shoulder all the same, making her whole arm go tingling and numb, but she was still able to duck underneath it, get back into the room to help J and end this if she wanted.

Except that Naomi was hit square, Naomi was falling back through the doorway and over the railing for real this time with the chipped and cigarette-burned dresser going along with her.

Superheroes weren't supposed to play favorites, Ophelia thought in the half-second she had for herself and not for sheer muscle memory. She was pretty sure that wasn't how it was supposed to go.

Fuck it. Superheroes probably weren't supposed to date, either, but that was her girl, and at the end of the day--

Ophelia hurled herself over the railing after Naomi.

It was only two stories up, she shouldn't have had time to think, When the fuck did you think that you were gonna learn how to fly, and Remember how that damned ceramic dog was almost enough to give you an aneurysm? Ophelia pushed for all that she was worth and prayed that the pavement would be kind, heard Naomi let out a shriek of pure defiance that made every car alarm within a three block radius start wailing, felt something pop behind her eyes. The air turned thick and still.

Ophelia landed, hard, but not hard enough to break bones. She heard Naomi doing the same thing only a few feet away. Naomi couldn't be hurt too bad, not with the way that she was swearing. Ophelia lay still until she was certain that her brain wasn't leaking out and that she could actually move, no more than a few seconds, but she still heard a vehicle peeling out of the parking lot.

"Shit! Motherfucking shit!" Ophelia yelled without caring that she had used up her entire ration of obscenities until she was at least thirty in the span of a single day. She leapt up to her feet and tried to throw a push at the retreating van's back doors before it could get too far away. The spike of pain nearly drove her to her knees instead. Like pulling a muscle; she just hoped like hell that she hadn't outright torn it. Motherfucking shit.

"Naomi, you had better be okay," Ophelia said in a voice that sounded as if she was about to cry, and maybe she was. Fail that badly, watch someone else get taken, and if it turned out that her girl was hurt, too--

"I'll live, O," Naomi answered in a tiny voice, her face pale. She didn't look as if she could stand just yet any more than Ophelia could, but they got close enough to each other to push their foreheads close and share breath for a moment. Ophelia kissed Naomi on the mouth quick and hard several times before she realized that her fingers were stinging with splinters of glass that she was just now getting around to noticing. Bringing together enough power to force the slivers out made black spots dance in front of her eyes. Ophelia pushed herself slowly up to her feet and pulled her phone out of her pocket, discovering that by some miracle Naomi's scream hadn't cracked the screen. She put in quick messages to Evelyn, Dante, and every other super-powered person that she had contact info for, letting them know that something big was going down and to watch themselves. She just hoped that her warning wasn't coming too late. It took Ophelia several more seconds to realize that her sunglasses had fallen off of her face sometime during the fight and fall, and that the smallest child who had been playing with the puppy had ventured out into the parking lot again to stare at her.

"You did that," the child said, pointing back over her shoulder to where the dresser resting in broken pieces all over the lot. That made Ophelia feel slightly better about her head hurting so badly that it was making her nauseous.

"Yeah, I guess I did," Ophelia said slowly.

The girl leaned forward, scrutinized Ophelia up and down. "I've seen you on the news," she announced.

Oh, please God let her have seen Ophelia when she was in costume, not when she was being the debutante. Ophelia picked her sunglasses up from the pavement and slid them back onto her face, leaning close to the little girl. "If you want to help me a whole, whole lot," she said softly, "you won't tell anyone that, okay? 'Cause I have to go find some bad people, and I can't do that if the good people want to find me, too. Will you help me find the bad guys?" The little girl looked confused until Ophelia solemnly held out her pinky to be linked, and then the rituals of childhood took over. "Atta girl. Now go back inside where it's safe, okay?" As soon as the child turned away, Ophelia stripped off her leather jacket to lay down against the driver's seat and protect her from the glass, leapt into the car with Naomi, and roared out of the parking lot so fast that she was certain she was breaking several city ordinances. The only reason that she didn't get to call Marcus was that he was calling her first.

"They got J," Ophelia started, that pissed-off feeling that wanted to become tears riding up behind her eyes again.

Marcus let out the longest stream of obscenity that Ophelia had heard from him since they had met, and that was saying a lot. "Ophelia," he finally broke off long to inform her. "They got the manor. Bonnie and I are on the run."

Ophelia hung up the phone. "Motherfucking shit," she repeated, staring into the rearview mirror where police cars were just starting to spin into the motel parking lot.

Chapter Ten

A cherry-colored BMW with all of its windows broken out and two pissed-off women sitting in the front seat had the strangest way of making people remember them after they had gone. Ophelia weighed where she could put the car until this was over that wouldn't lead to someone finding it and then reasoning their way through the glue that held a whole lot of funny coincidences together. She was drawing nothing but a blank when Naomi announced, "I have a storage unit, we can put it there."

Ophelia turned her head slowly to stare at her girlfriend. They each had their sunglasses back on, best disguise they could come up with when Ophelia wasn't certain that they could go back to their place, and she might as well have been looking into the eyes of a beetle. The lower half of Naomi's face was too still, obviously working overtime at giving nothing away. "Do you now," she said flatly, and Naomi shrugged and looked away.

"I did have a life before I met you, O," she said, just a little bit testier than the situation warranted.

You mean not on Krypton? Ophelia wondered, but followed Naomi's directions without further comment all the way to the storage lot, telling herself that sideways glances didn't count. When Naomi hopped out of the car and rolled up the orange door of a unit just like any other that looked much too mundane to hold anything belonging to the Naomi that Ophelia had been fighting alongside for the past five years, Ophelia got her second shock. Sitting quietly in the unit and covered over with a layer of silty dust was a Toyota Turcel that had once been dark blue but was now oxidizing into a piebald robin's egg and resembled in its muck the vehicular version of a sleepy dog. Ophelia looked at Naomi, doubting that her raised eyebrow was going to be enough to convey everything that was running through her mind. Naomi shrugged, looking away, while the first hint of a flush crawled up the sides of her neck.

"Like I said, life before you," Naomi said, opening the driver's door so that she could fish about for something underneath the seat. She emerged triumphantly with a set of keys a few moments later. "Just hope she still purrs."

The Toyota didn't purr nearly so much as she stuttered and whined, but a car was a car, and more to the point it was a car that didn't look as if it had just been through its own war zone. "Yeah," Ophelia returned to her point once the BMW had been stowed away in the Turcel's old space and the door pulled down again to hide it from view. "I had a life before I met you, too. The difference being that you know about most of it." Naomi stared stubbornly out the windshield with a set to her mouth saying that Ophelia could keep digging if she wanted to, but Naomi sure as hell wasn't going to let her find any gold. Ophelia sighed.

"Come on, we can't attract attention dressed the way that we are." Bloodstained and torn, their clothes were still clearly designer and much too expensive to belong to a pair of women driving a car that only remained on the road through the aid of strenuous and well-timed prayers. "Find the nearest Target or something, we got to match our environment."

Naomi made a sound that was very near pain as she drove her car past the lot gate. "Just call me a bitch if you're mad at me," she said. "There's no need to be all passive-aggressive and bring clothes into it."

"I'm not mad," Ophelia said, and meant it. Kind of wondering what else Naomi was hiding, maybe, but not mad. She still stared at her girl hard as they drove down the street.

*

Marcus texted Ophelia the address of a rendezvous point while she and Naomi were buying clothes that would help them blend in a little more. Ophelia dearly hoped that the info was safe, and they weren't going to find an army of doppelgangers with attitudes waiting for them when they got there. None of the people that she had called to warn had sent her a return message. Ophelia also really hoped that this was just because they were busy with the crime-fighting and ever so often world-saving business, not because they were captured or dead themselves, or else—she didn't want to go there, but her mind refused to turn away from the possibility.

Marcus's rendezvous point was a coffee shop on Figueroa that was crowded with people even though it was late at night by then. Ophelia's skin itched at the prospect of being around so many civilians if things should go bad, but she had to admit that they had a much better chance of staying hidden in plain sight if they managed to cling to a crowd. She tugged at the pale blue hoodie that she had chosen in honor of Naomi's car and because the light, pretty color was probably the only thing that was going to keep people from calling the police when they saw her striding into a crowded place with it pulled up over her hair and her expensive sunglasses hiding half her face. Screw giving up the sunglasses. They were Balenciaga, damn it.

Naomi followed Ophelia close behind, fussing under her breath about the black three-quarter sleeved top and jeans that Ophelia had finally snapped and thrown at her. Ophelia didn't need to look back over her shoulder to know that Naomi was probably picking at the hem in irritation. She hadn't been that much happier about her hair, swept back into a simple and unassuming ponytail. They were each wearing only enough makeup to cover the new bruises. Naomi in particular looked as if she might choke on the normalcy.

Marcus had a cup of coffee between his hands when Ophelia spotted him with Bonnie and started making her way over. He was spinning it between his hands so quickly that it would have sloshed and scalded him if it had been just a little bit fuller, and even though he was also wearing his sunglasses indoors Ophelia could see that he was glaring down at the tabletop as if it was a recalcitrant criminal. Bonnie was beside him, her own cup of coffee and a plate with the remaining quarter of a muffin sitting in front of her. She was still wearing the tee shirt and pants that she had had on when Ophelia had seen her last. There was a small spot of blood on the collar, not visible until one got close.

"Where's Esmé?" Ophelia asked as she slid into a seat across from Marcus. A waitress hovered close, clearly torn between taking Ophelia's order and coming back into the orbit of Marcus's barely-restrained rage. Ophelia pointed at Marcus's coffee cup and held up two fingers, and then after a moment's consideration repeated the gesture with Bonnie's muffin.

Marcus's fingers tightened about his coffee cup until the knuckles went pale and Ophelia wondered uneasily if she wasn't about to see ceramic go flying. Still glaring down at the table, a gaze that she could feel even when he was still wearing the sunglasses and which was making Bonnie look at him with her head tilted slightly to the side, Marcus said, "She has a son in Oregon. I strongly suggested to her that she go visit him, and not come back until I gave her the all-clear. The rest of the staff saw fit to tender their resignations on the spot." Marcus's voice was deeper to go along with the change in his demeanor, nearly a growl, and a complete departure from the soft-spoken, nearly mellow gentleman that Ophelia had known for years and Bonnie for hours. The difference between them, and the reason that Bonnie was giving him that quizzical stare like she thought that some kind of bait and switch had been perpetuated on her but did not yet know how it had been accomplished, was that Ophelia at least knew where this new Marcus was coming from. This was Marcus at work, Marcus on the scent. This was Marcus pissed.

The coffee and food arrived. Ophelia downed nearly half her cup at once without caring that she had to scald her mouth in order to do it and watched as Bonnie didn't so much eat the last of her muffin as she unhinged her jaw and made it vanish. Bonnie shrugged unconcernedly when she saw Ophelia looking.

"I got hurt a few times," she said, and licked a crumb away from the side of her thumb. "I'm always hungry after I have to heal myself, like it turbocharges my metabolism or something."

"Bonnie, you got shot at least four times," Marcus corrected her. In his working voice, it was nearly a threat, and Bonnie startled away from him before she could stop herself. She didn't seem soothed when Naomi daintily broke her muffin in half and placed one of the portions onto Bonnie's plate. Still looking sideways at Marcus as if she wondered if he was one of the people that she had to protect herself from now, too, Bonnie hardly noticed the gift at all until Naomi nudged at her fingers with the plate. That seemed to startle her, too, but she mumbled out a thank you and tore in.

"Marcus--" Ophelia started, keeping her tone low in mind of the crowded space.

"No." He didn't raise his voice, but he did slam his fist down against the table, hard enough to make the coffee cups rattle against their saucers and heads turn in their direction. Bonnie went very still, and Ophelia couldn't help her flash of irritation. The girl was one step away from bolting away from even them in her good moments, and Marcus had to go and let his temper take the lead now of all the possible times.

Ophelia started to lean forward, but Marcus got there first. "They were in my house, Ophelia," he snarled at her, and Ophelia was so startled to hear her name coming from his mouth in that tone that she was shocked into a momentary silence. "They managed to bypass all of my security systems and come into my home, where they shot at me, knocked an old woman to the ground and terrorized the rest of my staff, and would have killed Bonnie altogether if she didn't have her powers. That doesn't fly." He was growling in so low and dangerous a tone that Ophelia was surprised when she wasn't able to put her fingers against the tabletop and feel his words vibrating through the Formica, too.

"We're looking for someone who knows us," Naomi interrupted, laser-focused instead of using the usual slightly dreamy tone that hid how much she actually saw. Marcus blinked at her a few times as if he had forgotten that she was there until she made him look again. Naomi put a piece of muffin into her mouth and offered more to Bonnie, who shook her head. Bonnie was still staring at all of them sitting there in civilian clothes and madder than hell as if she didn't have any previous category for what they were, but that she was making one, and that she liked it.

"That's what we're all dancing around, isn't it?" Naomi put her elbows on the table, tugging fussily at the sleeves of her cheap top again, and finished off the last dregs of her coffee. The waitress was studiously hovering nearby, but with Marcus throwing off rage like a solar flare she was keeping her distance. Ophelia glanced down when she realized how badly her fingers had started to ache, realized that she was gripping her cup so tightly that she was in danger of breaking it. The packets of sweetener at the table were trembling even though no one was touching them. Ophelia took several deep breaths through her nose in order to relax. The waitress came close long enough to top off all four cups and then rabbited off again. "We're looking for a traitor. One of us."

Having it voiced out loud didn't do anything to quell any of them. Ophelia could feel it in her belly, see it Marcus's jaw, hear it in the way that Naomi's voice was one octave shy of letting loose, ready to make a tuning fork sing. Marcus threw himself backwards in his chair and made a noise that was far more hiss than sigh.

"Yeah, that's what we're looking for, all right," he said. "A turncoat." Even though she felt sick to her stomach, Ophelia made herself start to eat, recognizing that she was going to need the fuel. "Virtually everyone who does our kind of work knows my identity, but they don't know how to get into the manor. They don't know how to get into my house."

Ophelia felt an urge to put her hand over Marcus's, repressed it, and gestured back and forth between Naomi and herself, and said, "Same here. Wouldn't be hard to imitate me, for someone who can shift shapes and knows the right people to talk to." She thought back to Mindy, and how long that thing might have been imitating her before any of them caught on that there was something wrong at all. "We have all of this information about how to hurt each other, but we're not even organized enough to tell when someone's in trouble," she murmured, half to herself, and shook her head. The muffin became heavy in her stomach.

"But they tried to kill me when they came into Marcus's house," Bonnie said. She leaned forward, her posture unconsciously mimicking that of the other three, turning them into a pack. "They went to...they went to extraordinary measures to keep me alive, when I was a prisoner. That could be a good thing, right? That could mean that you're getting close and making them scared?"

Ophelia looked at Bonnie for a long time while she debated which would be more beneficial, the comforting lie, or the truth so that Bonnie would at least have some idea of what could be coming and be able to brace herself accordingly. "It could be that," she said at last. "I hope that it's that. But it could also be that whatever it was that these people had going on as a work in progress, it's finished now, and they don't need you alive any more than they need Mindy's impostor to keep lying so that we think everything's okay." Bonnie paled and looked down at the remaining crumbs on her plate.

Marcus swore underneath his breath with enough force that a few nearby heads still turned. "We have to assume that nothing is safe," he said, and then reached into his jacket pockets. When four pre-paid and thus nearly untraceable cellular phones appeared on the table, Ophelia was not surprised. "Make your calls off of your old lines now, and then toss them. If they managed to crack the security on my house, they damn sure could have hacked a phone line."

Miranda. "Motherfuckers," Ophelia blurted out, loudly enough that the waitress said, "Ah, ma'am," in a tone that nearly begged Ophelia not to become a problem. Ophelia waved her hand at her without looking around and said, "We'll be leaving in a minute." She pulled out her cellular phone and hit Miranda's speed dial. Angling her body away from the other three slightly--the other two, as Naomi was getting up from the table and pulling her own phone from her pocket as she did so--didn't stop her from feeling them watching her, but Ophelia was so seriously not in a mood to care.

It took Miranda four rings to answer the phone. Had she made it to five, Ophelia swore that she would have thrown her phone against the cafe wall, told this mission crap about where it could shove itself, and caught the next flight out to Miranda's penthouse in New York City. Anything that had hurt her sister in the meanwhile would only think that it knew the meaning of "reckoning" before Ophelia hunted it down.

"Ophelia?" Miranda sounded half-asleep. Ophelia heard a scuffing noise that sound like someone rubbing her hand over her face. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"My working hours, sorry." Ophelia plunged on before Miranda could say anything else. "Listen to me, I don't know how much time I have. You and Josh need to get up, pack a bag, and get out of town."

Miranda didn't sound sleepy any longer. "Why?" she demanded.

"Because someone is after us spec--us different folks who knows way the hell too much about us," Ophelia answered. "And you and Josh, Miranda, if anything happens to you--" She could bedclothes being thrown back and Miranda's low murmur as she shook her husband awake, his answering question. Though Ophelia couldn't quite make out the words, Josh already sounded sharp and focused, as if he had been waiting for this moment. "Good girl."

"Okay." Miranda sounded remarkably calm, all things considered. "Josh and I have a few places we can go."

"Don't tell me about any of them," Ophelia cut her off. "I don't even know if this phone is safe. Just pack light, plan to pay in cash, and go. I'll get in contact with you again when it's safe."

"I know, I don't know. Not if it wasn't important." Miranda finished speaking to her husband and returned her attention to Ophelia. "How are you going to get in contact with me if this line isn't safe and you don't want to know where I am?"

Ophelia laughed even though she didn't feel like it and rubbed her hand over her eyes when they suddenly started to burn. "Because you're my baby sister, doofus," she said. "Do you really think that there's anywhere on this planet where I won't be able to find you if we need each other?"

Her voice sounding curiously thick, Miranda answered, "I guess there's that. You be careful, okay, Ophelia?"

"You, too, Mare." Ophelia hadn't called Miranda by the pet name since they had been children, and she heard Miranda suck in her breath on her end of the line. She plowed forward before she could become trapped in it. "God, be so careful. I love you." Ophelia was about to hang up the phone when she heard Miranda saying her name. "Yeah?"

"I love you, too. And just so you know? Mama and Daddy would be proud as hell of you right now."

Ophelia closed her eyes and said very carefully, "I'm going to get in contact with you again in time for us to keep that dinner reservation." She hung up and held up her finger for Bonnie and Marcus to give her a minute before she very carefully snapped her phone in half, pulled out the SIM card, and then deposited each piece into a separate trash can before coming back to the table. She growled to Marcus, "Don't you even think about holding me back when it's time to go at them, either."

"Ophelia, I've never been able to hold you back even when I wanted to." Marcus jerked his chin in the direction of Naomi, who was still talking on her phone at an empty table a few yards away. Bonnie was watching her with rapt attention, brow furrowed and fingers twisting her coffee cup unhappily back and forth. Naomi, for her part, didn't look much happier, finally snapping the phone closed and then hurling it down to the table before she picked it up again and repeated the destruction that Ophelia had wrought on her own.

"You really think she's worried about the traitors reaching her at her family at the home planet?" Marcus asked.

"Be nice," Ophelia said, a little crankily, as Naomi came back to the table. Naomi was fidgeting with her shirt yet again, but this time Ophelia had a feeling that she would have been picking at the rhinestones that she usually glued to her face if she had been wearing them. Ophelia slid her arm around Naomi's waist without saying anything and thought that Naomi might have put her face into Ophelia's hair if they had been alone.

"I don't want to be here any longer," Naomi said shortly. She raised her eyes at Marcus. "Am I being too hopeful when I ask if you just happen to have a spare manor lying around that no one else knows about?"

Marcus threw down bills for his and Bonnie's portions of the food and coffee and said, "You're being way too hopeful."

Chapter Eleven

It reminded Ophelia much too much of the motel where she and Naomi had essentially gotten their asses handed to them, though she pried at the dresser of this room experimentally and discovered that the management had thought ahead and bolted it down to the floor. There were two beds, though, and with two of their four staying awake to keep watch at all times that just about cleared the air of any awkwardness that could arise.

Just about. Naomi had gone into the bathroom to wash her face, though Ophelia rather thought that she still needed some time to compose herself after whatever had transpired during her secret phone conversation and also to brace herself for the fact that Bonnie and Marcus were both going to see her without her weaponry and costume. Marcus was outside and, Ophelia highly suspected, up on the roof, making absolutely certain that there were no weak points that they hadn't already considered. That left, for the moment, just Ophelia and Bonnie.

Bonnie sat down at a chipped and scarred table that had probably seen the wildest excesses of the disco era. She was twirling a cheap plastic ashtray back and forth between her hands. Since Bonnie had yet to request a cigarette even once, Ophelia gathered that it was more for something to do than anything else and took the seat on the opposite side of the table without speaking. Her whole body ached; Ophelia tallied up the number of hours since the last time that she had slept and decided that not even impending attack and death were going to be able to keep her from passing out just as soon as she had the chance.

"If I could remember more, I would," Bonnie blurted out suddenly. Ophelia, who had been dividing her attention between listening to the water running in the bathroom and Marcus walking about above them, startled just slightly. "I swear, it's not because I want anyone getting hurt on my account, I just can't."

"Bonnie," Ophelia said in her calmest voice, and waited for Bonnie to stop fiddling with the ashtray before she reached across the table and covered the other woman's hand with her own. "Don't you for one solitary second think that any of this is your fault, all right? Even if these bitches, sons of, whatever, were after you and you alone, not a single second of this would be your fault."

Bonnie waited a beat before she removed her hand from underneath Ophelia's and resumed playing with her ashtray. "I don't think that any of this is the fault of anyone other than the bastards who did it to me," she addressed the plastic. Ophelia watched her knuckles tighten and thought that maybe she was about to see one of them dislocate and then Bonnie having to pop it back into place so it could super-heal. "If I could do more to help stop those bastards, though, that's my fault."

Ophelia smiled before she could stop herself and then hid it behind her hand so that Bonnie would not see. "A ridiculously overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility," she answered. "Hang out with us a little bit longer, girl, and we'll have you in a pair of primary-colored tights in no time."

The water in the bathroom shut off. Suddenly wary, as if she sensed that her opportunity was slipping away from her, Bonnie leaned forward across the table at Ophelia. "What do you know about Naomi, really?" she asked.

This was not sounding like a conversation that Ophelia wanted to be having at all, let alone in the thirty seconds before her lover came back out into the main room. "What are you talking about?" she asked flatly, and if there was a slight warning in her voice that Bonnie chose not to heed, well, that wasn't Ophelia's problem.

"Marcus says that she might not be human," Bonnie said in a rush. "And if the person causing all of this has to be someone who knows all of you really, really well—"

Ophelia held up her hand without saying anything, the expression on her face enough to make Bonnie go silent. "I know enough about her," she said. "I know the stuff that matters. Don't forget, kid, they found you and Naomi and I didn't know you from anything before you turned up at Marcus's house. Do this job long enough, and you'll figure out that regular old human beings are capable of just as much evil in the world as the oogie-boogies that we can't quite figure out yet."

Naomi came out of the bathroom and stopped, picking up the tension in the room. Ophelia often wondered at her hearing and just how far that ultra-sensitivity of hers stretched, but Naomi's face was giving nothing away as she crossed over to one of the beds and started pulling the covers back. "Don't look at me like I'm some kind of freak," she said, putting one hand up to cover her makeup-free face.

"I'm looking at you like you're you," Ophelia said, letting Naomi be too distracted by the mechanics of giving her the finger for a moment to notice the warning look that Ophelia was still shooting Bonnie. Bonnie was silent and contemplative, but she got up from her seat at the table as Marcus came back into the room.

"Marcus and I can take first shift," Ophelia said, lifting her eyebrows at Marcus and waiting for his nod of agreement. "Bonnie, you're not a part of this, don't worry about taking a turn."

"The hell I'm not a part of this," Bonnie groused even as she was pulling the covers back on the other bed. She hesitated, looking at Marcus and Ophelia each in turn, before she finally said, "And besides, if I'm ever going to wear those primary-colored tights, I got to start pulling my weight, don't I?"

It was the widest smile that Ophelia had seen out of Marcus in days.

*

Hours later when she was certain that her--her shared charge? Her potential protégé?--and her girlfriend were sleeping, Ophelia said to Marcus very softly, "You don't need to be talking about Naomi to Bonnie, all right?" She was sitting on the edge of the table, wary and waiting, and Marcus was standing at the window so that he could look down at the lot below. That was a big space for them to be talking across if they wanted to keep a conversation private. Ophelia wasn't sure that she wanted to be any nearer to him right now.

Marcus turned away from the window, blinking and looking genuinely confused. "Talking to Bonnie about Naomi doing what?" he asked.

Ophelia felt blood rising up in her face. Marcus had never lied to her. Not even at the end, when screaming at each other until their throats hurt had seemed to be just about the only way that they could communicate, Marcus had never lied to her before. "Bonnie," Ophelia said, enunciating carefully, "has gotten it into her head that Naomi is the one who sold us all out. And she knows that Naomi might not be human." Marcus started to scowl. If they were going to have to throw down over this bullshit, then fine, but Ophelia was going to say her piece first. If Marcus could run his mouth behind her back, then Ophelia could run hers to his front.

"I didn't cheat on you with Naomi," Ophelia said, somewhere between a hiss and a snarl, too loud. Bonnie turned over in her bed, while Naomi was way too still. Marcus left his parking lot vigil to come towards her. He was keeping it private. He was always mindful of things like that, more so than even Ophelia herself was, Goddamnit. "I didn't break up with you for Naomi. It was me and you, then it was me, and then it became me and Naomi, end of story. There's nothing for you to hold against her."

Marcus was very close now, and his face was clouding over. Not like it had back at the cafe, but, oh, yeah, she had touched a nerve. Ophelia folded her arms over her chest and watched him with narrowed eyes.

"When did I ever say that you had, Ophelia?" he snapped at her. "When have I ever been that petty to you?"

"You want to tell me why Bonnie is accusing Naomi of being the traitor, then?" Ophelia asked, feeling that same flush of protective anger that had driven her to leap over a balcony and risk her own neck in an effort to keep Naomi from breaking hers.

"Maybe she's doing it because she's traumatized out of her fucking mind, can't trust anyone, likes the two of us marginally better than she does Naomi, and is choosing the odd man out so that two and two add up to make four again." When Marcus put it that way, he made way too much sense, and Ophelia felt a flush that had nothing to do with anger crawling up her neck. "And maybe I did tell her that we're not sure that Naomi's human, because we aren't, but I also told her that Naomi has terrible taste in clothing, and that blonde isn't J's natural hair color. They all have about the same amount of weight to me."

Shit. "I'm sorry," Ophelia said softly. Marcus flapped his hand at her and returned to his post at the window, watching the parking lot down below. After a long moment of silence, Ophelia asked, "Do you ever think about going back to New York?"

Marcus sighed from somewhere down deep where it sounded like it hurt before he answered. "I don't know which city is mine any longer." He glanced Ophelia's way. "Your shift is up, you should probably get some sleep."

"You're not going to," Ophelia pointed out.

"I've slept at some point over the past three days. You're a damned liar if you try to tell me that you've done the same, and a liar is the one thing that you've never been, Ophelia. Hell of a time to start."

"But I handle bitch just fine, huh?"

Marcus lifted his eyebrow at her. "Like that's ever not been the case."

Ophelia said again, "I'm sorry," and meant it, before she went over to the bed where Naomi was supposedly sleeping. "Your turn," she said, shaking Naomi's shoulder lightly.

Naomi opened her eyes immediately rather than easing out of sleep. Ophelia might have known. "She had a point, you know," she whispered to Ophelia. "You don't know much about me."

Ophelia had had a point, too, and knew it. "I know enough," she insisted before she slid into the warm spot that Naomi was vacating for her.

Chapter Twelve

Morning came much too soon. Ophelia pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she colors pinwheeled behind the lids and muttered words that her mother would have been appalled to hear. The way that she had been going over the past couple of days, she might as well declare a moratorium on the "ladies don't swear" rule until this was over, anyway.

"Can we go back to that coffee shop?" Ophelia asked plaintively to no one in particular as she rolled the kinks out of her shoulders. She still felt like someone had taken a baseball to all of the most sensitive nerves of her body and could have slept another week without being satisfied, but the ache behind her eyes of pushing too hard and too fast had faded from a shout into a mere echo. Ophelia could function, she just wouldn't be happy about it.

"I think we made too much of a scene for that," Bonnie said helpfully. She was sitting on the edge of the other bed, her shoes already on and her hair finger-combed into about as much order as any of them were going to get. Ophelia briefly envied Marcus his short hair until she remembered that she always carried a few elastics on her, perfect for pulling her hair back into a messy bun. That accomplished, Ophelia brushed the rest of the cobwebs from he brain and realized that Marcus and Naomi were having a conversation on the other side of the room, their voices pitched too low for Ophelia to quite make what they were saying. The oh,crap reaction was instinctive; Ophelia had to struggle to refocus herself on the doubts that had been following her around for the past day. Mindy had no powers that someone could exploit to make her do as they wished. Why would someone take her and yet try to kill Marcus and then eventually Bonnie rather than using their lives as leverage? Mindy had money, but then so did most of them: running around on rooftops didn't lend itself well to a desk job and 401K. Even if cold, hard cash was a factor, there were much easier ways to get rich than tangling with a woman who had once knife-fought a drug lord naked, to say nothing of the smack-down that their villain had to have known was coming as soon as Mindy's allies and friends found out that she was missing. Ophelia's mind lit onto revenge next, only to dismiss it nearly as quickly. Their kind of work made a lot of enemies, yes, but it was as simple as all that Mindy should have been killed immediately. Any bad guy bent on vengeance would surely realize that they were putting themselves at greater risk with a lengthy game of pretend than they were by just slitting Mindy's throat and getting gone. Ophelia turned again, but ran into the same wall every time: Mindy had been needed for something that had to stay a secret at first, but the person behind the curtain no longer cared and was simply killing anyone who got in their way.

"Morning, sunshine," Naomi practically sang at Ophelia as she and Marcus wrapped up their discussion and realized that Ophelia was awake. Ophelia wondered if it would be better to throw a pillow at Naomi via her arm or her mind.

"Battle plan?" she asked testily instead.

"We need equipment," Marcus said. His expression was just a bit too blank as he looked her over, but there was nothing that Ophelia could do about that now other than apologize again and hope that it had more effect than the first two times. "I have a unit, Naomi and I can go and pick up what we need."

Concerned in spite of herself, and not just because her current and her ex were going to be alone together, Ophelia leaned forward on the bed and hooked her arms around the tops of her knees. "Is that a good plan?" she asked. "If they got into your manor, they probably know where all of your little hidey-holes are."

"If they found out about this one, then they deserve to win," Marcus said flatly. He tried to smile. "Didn't you always accuse me of being too paranoid?"

"It's a Pod in the Valley," Naomi announced. Marcus glared at her and pressed his lips into a line.

Ophelia considered all of the high-tech equipment that she had seen in Marcus's house since meeting him, some of which he had designed for military applications and some of which he had made strictly for himself, and said, "Actually, that's kind of brilliant. I take it back, you're still paranoid as hell, but you're a genius."

Somber again, Marcus responded, "We already know that there are people after us, Ophelia, don't make me break out of the cliché. While we're gone, you ladies—"

"Will be going back to my loft," Ophelia said firmly. Naomi and Marcus looked appalled in unison, which was a bit eerier than Ophelia knew how to handle this early in the morning. She held up her hands in a bid for silence. "I know. It's risky, but I don't have caches hidden all over the state, and I'm not going to be able to fight in discount jeans and irregular sneakers. I need my gear." She smiled herself, not needing a mirror to know that it was brittle and bright. "And I'm mad as hell. I dare them to try to attack me in my own space." Bonnie was watching her closely, head tilted slightly to the side, so Ophelia asked her, "How about you, do you still have some rage to burn?"

Bonnie pointed down at her shoes, already laced, and said nothing. Naomi flipped the keys to the Toyota at Ophelia and said unrepentantly, "We'll be taking Marcus's car."

Marcus and Naomi left first. Ophelia watched them go and said, only partly under her breath, "Why do I not foresee that ending well?"

Bonnie had grown impatient and was already out the door and leaning over the walkway railing. She stared at Naomi's car. "She shows that thing in public?" Bonnie asked.

"No," Ophelia said shortly, hoping that Bonnie would take the hint. The other woman slipped a glance Ophelia's way from beneath her arm, but said nothing. "Sentimental value, I guess. Come on."

The Turcel made a noise equally horrified and horrifying when Ophelia turned the key in the ignition, as if it had only give them a modicum of good behavior the day before because it had recognized its true mistress behind the wheel. Ophelia didn't let out the breath that she had been holding until they successfully made it out of the lot without blowing up. "Anyone who could figure out Marcus's security system is going to be able to figure out where I live," Ophelia told Bonnie as they navigated the morning traffic. "So maybe we'll get lucky, but I got to figure that maybe we won't, either. If it starts getting wild, you just stay back and let me handle it, all right? I don't want you getting hurt."

"Getting hurt doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to you." Bonnie took advantage of a red light and rolled down the window so that she could stick her face out into the sun. "And haven't you people been pushing me to do something with my...gift, or whatever?"

"I was hoping that we had been more subtle than that," Ophelia admitted. "And, yeah, powers like you have, you can do great things. You could do great things even if you didn't have that little genetic bonus. That doesn't mean that you fully understand it, though, or that you can't still get hurt if you aren't trained."

Bonnie still had her head out the window, eyes closed and face tilted up to catch as much of the morning glow as possible. Her shoulders had become tight enough that Ophelia thought Bonnie was mostly fishing for an excuse not to look at her. "You and Marcus, are you going to be the ones to throw some training behind it?"

Ophelia hesitated, thinking of the way that Marcus had said he didn't know which city was his any longer and the new boundaries that still managed to snag her every time she forgot about them. "I don't speak for Marcus directly," she finally said. "But I can tell you that he's been looking for a protege for a long time. And regardless of what happens there, if you still want me to and we get out of this, I'll teach you every single thing I know."

Bonnie pulled her head back inside the car as the light changed they started to move again. When she smiled, really smiled, she was transformed. "Cool," she said.

The doorman at her building nearly stopped Ophelia when she strode through with Bonnie in tow, clearly having trouble recognizing her in the inexpensive clothing, sans makeup, and with her hair a mess. Ophelia gave him a sunny smile and trusted on her reputation as an unpredictable tabloid debutante to smooth over any questions that he might ask.

"Stay behind me," Ophelia ordered Bonnie as she fit her key into the door and listened to the lock snick. Marcus's security program chirruped obediently when Ophelia typed in a sequence to let it know that she had a guest with her. So far, so good. She still couldn't afford to forget that the security system in Marcus's home had been circumvented, too. Ophelia held her hand out slightly in front of her and ordered the air thicker, the pads of her fingers feeling as if she were pushing against a barrier of cling wrap.

"I'll just heal it up," Bonnie said, but she didn't resist when Ophelia used her other hand to nudge Bonnie more firmly behind her.

"That's not the point." Ophelia stood in the entryway for a long moment, head tilted slightly to one side and listening hard. Nothing in the loft appeared to have been disturbed. She took a few steps further in, closed the door behind Bonnie, and then shooed her quickly towards the bedroom. "Come on, let's move fast and get out."

Bonnie looked around at the furnishings as Ophelia hurried her past, appearing disappointed when no one popped up at her from behind the couch. In spite of Ophelia's admonishment to stay behind her, Bonnie darted around her and into the bedroom and then let out a frustrated sigh when there was no one, either.

"Why?" Bonnie demanded. "Don't you want to find out who these people are?"

Ophelia made an impatient noise and caught Bonnie by the elbow so that she could shove her back into safety again. "I do," she told her. "Believe me, I'm going to throw a reckoning down on them like they've never even dreamed of before. But there's a time and a place, and in my house where a neighbor could get caught in the crossfire if someone gets thrown through a wall? That's neither." Bonnie looked stubborn, and was still scanning out the corners of the bedroom as if she hoped the shadows were hiding something. Ophelia tugged at Bonnie's arm until Bonnie looked at her. "We'll get them, all right?" Bonnie shook her off and didn't speak, so Ophelia sighed. "I only need a few things." Other people kept nail files and Bibles in their nightstand drawers, Ophelia kept spare earpieces. She gathered up enough to keep all of them safe from Naomi's screams and turned to see Bonnie looking into the closet.

"You guys actually go out in this stuff?" Bonnie asked she noticed Ophelia's attention.

"Naomi would wear it even when she wasn't working if she could get away with it," Ophelia answered. She reached past Bonnie for her black leather jacket and bodysuit. "You're skinnier than me and taller than Naomi, so I don't think that any of this will fit you." Bonnie, reaching out to touch at Naomi's silver bodysuit, pulled her hand back as if she had done something wrong. "However." Ophelia grabbed her mask and then reached past it for one of the spares so that she could set it gently into Bonnie's hands. "These are pretty much one size fits all."

Lifting her eyebrow slightly, Bonnie said, "They already know what I look like."

"That's true. But it's funny sometimes how you manage to feel more yourself when you're wearing a mask." Ophelia folded the leather jacket over her arm and looked about the room. "I think that's all that we need, come on." When Bonnie looked reluctant, Ophelia said, "You will get your chance."

The front door chirped once and then went abruptly silent. Ophelia and Bonnie froze simultaneously, staring at one another. Ophelia counted to three until she was certain that she could breathe again and then said, "I think that you might wind up getting your chance right now. Stay in here." She whirled away before Bonnie could answer, sliding her mask down and over her face in one smooth movement. She hadn't been lying to Bonnie: even if the person out in her living room knew every single thing about her down to her social security number and the whirls on her left thumb, Ophelia wasn't going to settle into herself until she was in her gear.

She made it to her living room and said, "Really, this is just getting sad." Mindy vaulted over the top of the couch and towards her. Ophelia lashed out with a push immediately, knocking the Mindy off of her feet and over the back. Ophelia had picked the couch out herself, and she was going to be pissed if she had to replace it.

Mindy regained control of her fall in midair, at least enough to stop her from bouncing off of the fireplace or the television. She rolled instead and came back up to her feet just in time for Ophelia to notice that her clothing was too big for her and that she was holding a gun in one hand. Mindy stepped on the hem of her too-long pants coming forward, nearly tripped herself, and sent a shot wild above Ophelia's head. The Mindy-thing looked down at her own feet as if she were disgusted by them and immediately aimed again, faster than Ophelia could draw her powers together. Ophelia ducked and twisted just in time to see the bullet that had barely missed her take Bonnie square in the upper chest. Threads of bright red blood whipped out of the wound like octopus tentacles and made Rorschach patterns against Ophelia's walls. Bonnie was going to pop right back up again in a few seconds. That didn't make it any easier to watch her go down.

"All right, then," Ophelia muttered to herself. She dropped the costume that she still had draped over one arm down to the floor, took a running start, and used the back of the couch as her springboard to leap up, into the air, and into a kick so perfect that she almost wished she could have done it in front of a news crew just so that it could be preserved for all eternity, privacy be damned. Her foot in the sturdiest and most stylish sneakers that could be found in the fine aisles of Target the day before caught Mindy right in the jaw just as she was trying to rise for another attack. The gun flew out of her hand and into Ophelia's fireplace while Mindy herself dropped heavily into the coffee table, sending glass and wood flying everywhere.

I said it wasn't going to be like last time, didn't I? Ophelia thought with a grim satisfaction. She raced forward to press her advantage as Mindy leapt back up to her feet, her button-like features set into a stolid expression that Ophelia had seen the real deal wear more than once. There was a long piece of glass sticking out of her back. Mindy pulled it free with a sucking noise and tossed it to the side.

That caught her in the kidney, I'm sure of it, Ophelia thought. The slurping continued. Mindy turned to find her gun, and Ophelia saw that the wound in her back was already gone with nothing more than a tear in her clothing and a spot of blood to mark that it had ever been. Mindy spotted her gun a few yards away on the hardwood and darted for it, only to be stopped by Ophelia hurling one of the largest shards of glass from the coffee table at her and not stopping it until it was a quarter-inch from Mindy's throat. She followed with the rest of the shrapnel a few seconds later and arranged it into a head-to-toe cage around Mindy's body that barely left Mindy enough room to breathe without cutting herself.

"You and me," Ophelia told her, "I think that it's about time we sat down and had a talk."

Mindy smiled, and it was strange. Still Mindy's mouth, but formed into a vicious shape that Ophelia had never seen there before. "Oh, sweet thing," Mindy said in all the wrong cadences, "we're not interested in what you have to say." The tips of Mindy's fingers sprouted flames. Ophelia had seen J do that very same thing many times before. She leapt hard to the side. From the corner of her eye, she saw Bonnie pulling herself up by using the doorframe for support. Ophelia didn't have time to shout a warning or otherwise do anything other than brace herself for seeing Bonnie wrapped into an inferno. Bonnie saw the flames headed her way and dropped into a crouch at the very last second, her eyes focused and hard. The flames barely missed setting her hair afire before they arced into the bedroom. They ended against the paint, turning it black and bubbling, but by a minor miracle didn't fall low enough to set the bed linens on fire. Bonnie raised herself up high enough to race towards Ophelia in a crab-like scuttle. Ophelia hurled Mindy through her glass cage and bounced her off of the wall hard as Mindy hurled off another fireball that did not belong to her. It evaporated in the center of the living room, but not without leaving a black smear against the ceiling and triggering the smoke alarm's strident wail.

Bonnie darted around Ophelia and snatched up one of the fallen pieces of glass before Ophelia could call to her or form a thought much more complex than, No. Mindy pushed herself away from the wall, a bloody smear left behind to mark where she had been. Her wounds made sucking noises as they ejected shards of glass out onto the carpet in the process of healing. Mindy cracked Bonnie across the jaw with a strength that Ophelia had only seen once before. Bonnie flipped through the air and didn't stop until she hit the television and brought it down from the wall with her on a rain of glass and a few blue-white sparks. Between the blood, the smoke, and the glass gouging deep scars into the hardwood, Ophelia's living room was never going to be the same. The focus she had been maintaining since coming back slipped, and Ophelia knew exactly how angry Marcus had been the night before. They were in her space. They were attacking some of the closest things to family that she had left.

Ophelia picked Mindy off of her feet and slammed her against the fireplace brick hard enough to crack the skull of a normal person. Bonnie barely managed to roll out of the way before Mindy landed on top of her. Mindy staggered back up to her feet and jerked her misaligned jaw back into place with a sound that made Ophelia feel sick. The two of them were swaying like prizefighters, and Ophelia wasn't sure how much juice she had left. Mindy's fingers were already sparking. Her eyes were becoming unfocused, and Ophelia didn't think that it was going to matter all that much if Mindy passed out if she managed to light Ophelia aflame on the way down. Smiling grimly around the jaw that didn't appear to be healing as fast as her other wounds had, Mindy raised her hands. Bonnie darted beneath her arm and stabbed Mindy under the ribcage with her makeshift weapon before either Ophelia or Mindy had time to react. The flames that Mindy had been about to hurl at Ophelia's face dwindled down into sparks that burned circular holes in the carpet where they fell.

Mindy gaped down at the bloody wound in her side while Ophelia took a step back and tugged Bonnie with her, unsure of what was going to happen next. The edges of the wound quivered, started to knit back together the way that Bonnie's bullet wound had, and then didn't make it. Blood poured out and down to the carpet. Mindy slid down against the fireplace and would have fallen in if she had not managed to catch herself, weakly, on one elbow against the screen. While Ophelia stared, her features ran together like melting wax and her body and grew taller with a number of different sounds ensuring that Ophelia was never going to eat again, until her clothes were no longer too big for her. Within thirty seconds, what had once been a petite brunette woman was now a large man with a face not built for kindness.

Bonnie startled hard and then lunged forward so quickly that Ophelia barely managed to snag her about the waist and pull her back. "He was one of my guards!" Bonnie snarled at her.

"He's dying, there's nothing else that you need to do." Ophelia turned her attention back to the man. She didn't dare release Bonnie, not while she could still feel Bonnie shivering like a highly-strung racehorse. "Who are you?" Ophelia demanded. "Who are you working for?"

The man gasped and wheezed instead of answering. A small red bubble appeared on one corner of his mouth and then popped; Ophelia wasn't sure that Bonnie hadn't punctured one of his lungs, in which case his talking days were done even if he did manage to live for a few more minutes. The man raised shaking hands to probe at the wound in his side and whispered, in the death rattle that Ophelia associated with nursing homes and hospitals, "She said it wasn't going to last. At least I got to feel it for a little while." The man's face went slack, and his elbow slipped down from the fireplace screen. His head made a thunking noise as it struck the floor.

Ophelia swore violently and forgot about Bonnie for the moment. Bonnie lunged forward and kicked the corpse hard enough to lift its midsection off of the floor, would have kicked it again if Ophelia had not grabbed her about the waist and pulled her back. "Hey, settle down!"

"I got blood drawn from my arm over and over again," Bonnie gritted. "He's one of the sons of bitches who held me down while they did it."

"Okay," Ophelia soothed her, "but we don't have time for that right now, we have to get back to Marcus and Naomi."

Bonnie took several deep breaths and closed her eyes before finally nodding. Her expression wasn't any less tense when she opened them again to resume glaring at the body. Bonnie rubbed at her chest where she had been shot and asked, "Are your neighbors going to be calling the cops?"

Ophelia rapped lightly on the wall. "Soundproofed," she said. "Pretty handy when you're dating someone who can break crystal by singing along to commercials on TV. The body will be secure here for a little while. If we're not back by the time that someone notices him smelling, then we're not coming back." Ophelia leaned forward and took Bonnie by the shoulders. She didn't speak until Bonnie stopped looking at the corpse and looked at her instead. "I know it hurts and I know that you don't want to do it, but that was probably our last chance to find out more about these guys. They would not want you dead unless you were the key to this. You have to know more than you realize."

"Yeah, but that doesn't do any good if I don't know what I know, does it?" Bonnie sniffed the air and then gagged, turning away from the body. Covering her mouth with one hand, she whispered, "He even smells like that place."

"What do you mean?" Ophelia answered tiredly, not really listening. She knelt beside the body in order to closer contemplate yet another dead end, unfortunate pun and all. A quick rifling of his pockets turned up nothing in the way of identification. Ophelia couldn't say that she was surprised.

"Perfume," Bonnie said, her voice slightly muffled by the hand that she still had over her mouth. "And smoke, like someone was burning wood nearby. There were times I could smell that even more than I could smell the rubbing alcohol. It's in his clothes."

Something in the back of Ophelia's brain lit up, and she didn't like it at all. She leaned in closer to the body, trying to ignore the way its skin was already starting to go waxen, and inhaled deeply. Bonnie was right. Under the gunpowder and sweat, there was a woman's perfume and a touch of smoke.

Scent was supposed to be one of the most powerful evokers of memory. Ophelia was cold all over. She went back to the last time that she had felt this way, when she had been trying not to shiver inside of her nice wool suit. Mama's funeral, a scant year after Daddy's. She hadn't been able to get away from that by pretending that it wasn't happening, either. "Did your hair ever stand on end and you didn't know why?" she demanded.

Bonnie's eyes widened. She wavered for a moment as if she wanted to take a step back, only to stand her ground in the end. "Yes," Bonnie whispered. "How did you know that?"

Ophelia straightened and then stood without moving or speaking until she was certain that she wasn't going to kick the corpse herself. It took a long time. "Help me get him into the bathtub," she said shortly. "And then we got to go."

Bonnie grabbed the man's ankles and lifted while Ophelia took his shoulders, but her obedience stopped there. "You know who took me, don't you? You just figured it out."

Ophelia should have figured it out sooner. There were only so many places near the sea secluded enough to keep someone captive for a long period of time, only a few people who had the money to pull it off, and only one who knew enough of their secrets to think that she could get away with it. "I smelled that perfume every day for nearly a year after my parents died, and then every weekend for another two," Ophelia said shortly, kicking the bathroom door open so hard that it bounced against the wall and came back at her. "Yeah, I know who took you."

Chapter Thirteen

Marcus and Naomi had given Bonnie the rendezvous point before Ophelia had woken up. They were late. Ophelia didn't see this math adding up to anything good.

The Turcel was parked in an empty lot across the street from a strip mall. Ophelia sat on the hood and stared hard at people coming in and out of a liquor store and discount outlet while Bonnie paced to and fro a few feet away and muttered to herself. An elderly woman gave the both of them startled looks and then hurried a little faster on her way to the bus stop, but neither of them paid her any mind.

"So you know the person behind all of this," Bonnie said, essentially the same thing that she had been repeating over and over again on loop for the past half-hour.

"Yes," Ophelia said. "I know her." She struggled not to sound testy. Bonnie was hardly the only who ought to be feeling betrayed. She had a whiff of smoke and expensive perfume. Ophelia had a name, a place, a history. She realized how tightly she was gripping the tops of her knees and let go before she could bruise herself.

"And you're friends with her?" Bonnie had her arms folded across her chest and was rocking her weight from the balls of her feet to the heels and then back again. Ophelia saw her glance towards the nearby bus stop more than once.

"Not friends," she said. Bonnie relaxed slightly. It didn't last long. "More like a protege. She was one of the first of us that anybody knows about, and she was one of the best. Evelyn snagged me up when I was barely even beginning to wrap my head around the idea of using my powers to do something real and big in the world, taught me how to use them more efficiently. She has a private island several hours off of the coast. That's why we couldn't figure out who could be doing this on the mainland, she was never on the suspect list." Bonnie looked as if she might be sick. Ophelia didn't think that she would be far behind if that were to happen. "I know her. I didn't know that she was doing this." Ophelia hopped down from the hood of the car, and Bonnie looked at her warily. "I would have been on the first boat out to that island of hers fighting mad if I had." She didn't think that it was going to be enough to convince Bonnie for several moments, until Bonnie finally sighed and sagged against the car with her head in her hands.

"You told me that you were the good guys," she whispered.

"As I recall, the person who kidnapped you was not in the room with me when I made that statement. I'm not calling her one of the good guys anymore." Ophelia rubbed at her eyes as if that was going to make the burning behind them go away, or the hollow feeling in her gut. She sensed rather than saw Bonnie fidgeting.

"About what I said last night, about Naomi maybe being the traitor," Bonnie started.

"Don't worry about it," Ophelia said. She hoped that Bonnie knew her well enough by now to realize that the anger in her tone wasn't directed at her. Ophelia folded her arms over her chest and glared hard at a group of kids slinking into the liquor store. They had to be carrying fake IDs if she had ever seen them. One of them, a boy, looked back over his shoulder and matched Ophelia stare for stare as the glass door swung shut behind him. Without her mask on her face, she was just another woman sitting on the hood of a crappy car in last season's discount sneakers.

"How were you so sure that Naomi wasn't the traitor if you only figured out today that this Evelyn person is the one doing everything?" Bonnie asked. She held her ground when Ophelia flicked her a warning look, Ophelia had to give her that.

"Because I have faith in Naomi's decency the same way that I have faith in the sun rising and water running downhill," Ophelia said. "The only way that Naomi ever could have been the one behind all of this is if someone had taken and replaced her, the way that they did Mindy, and I would have been able to sense that right away. For that matter, if we all spent a little more time checking up with each other, maybe I would have been able to see that Mindy was in trouble before it got this far." Ophelia pulled her knees up against her chest and rested her chin on them, frowning. There was another idea just starting to tickle at the edges of her brain. She wasn't boasting a great resume when it came to her deductive skills, though, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to chase this one too far yet. "You might have noticed that there's a certain tension between me, Naomi, and Marcus," she said.

Bonnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other and couldn't get her face under control before Ophelia saw "duh" written all over it. "I might have picked up on it."

Ophelia sighed and rolled her neck until it cracked to release some of the tension building there. Just as soon as this was over, the tabloids could report the truth for once and record every detail of a spare-no-expense spa day. "About five years, after Evelyn had turned me loose and I was just starting to fight the bad guys for real, it was me and Marcus," she said. "And then after awhile it became me and Marcus, and also Naomi. A few years after that, it stopped being me and Marcus. The last stop in our game of musical chairs has been me and Naomi, and also Marcus." Ophelia stretched her legs over the hood of the car and then hopped to her feet as a black SUV that she didn't recognize pulled into the lot and alongside the Toyota. The windows were tinted several shades too dark for Ophelia to see inside. She motioned for Bonnie to get behind her. "If I didn't know that Naomi and Marcus aren't each other's type, I would be worried about this delay."

"Guess I can see why." Bonnie stubbornly failed to get behind Ophelia as she was directed. Ophelia couldn't help but think that Marcus was going to have his hands full once they made it to the other side of this.

The SUV finally rolled down its windows to reveal Marcus in the driver's seat and Naomi riding shotgun. While Marcus was still in civilian gear, Naomi had switched into her bodysuit, and she looked much happier for it. Ophelia decided not to ask why her current was keeping a spare costume in one of her ex's caches. For all she knew, Marcus had stolen it solely so that he would be prepared for Number Eighty-Seven-X in his big book of contingency plans.

Marcus looked Ophelia up and down. She realized belatedly that she was holding her hand out in front of her as if she were a crossing guard, and lowered it back down to her side. "Thought that I was the one that was supposed to be all paranoid and shit."

"You just happen to keep spare vehicles and costumes in storage places in case you ever need to go off the grid?"

"Plan for everything, Ophelia, and that way you're surprised by nothing." Marcus and Naomi weren't nearly as tense in each other's presence as they had been before. Ophelia decided that she didn't want to know which of her most embarrassing stories they had told each other as icebreakers. Marcus gestured for her and Bonnie to get into the backseat, but Ophelia held her ground.

"Evelyn's the traitor," she said. Marcus kept his face schooled into impassivity, letting Naomi doing the reacting for the both of them with a mouth so wide-open that it was almost funny. Marcus was older than Ophelia. Evelyn had been a coworker to him and perhaps a casual friend. Evelyn hadn't shown him how to be the same way that she had with Ophelia, Naomi, and so many others. As Naomi blinked several more times and finally managed to close her mouth, Ophelia thought, Right there with you, sweetie.

"Are you sure?" Naomi asked. Her dark eyes appeared even larger than normal, as much as she was widening them.

Marcus looked down at the instruments on his dash. Ophelia only read the depth of his feeling in a muscle jerking hard in his jaw, as steadily as if he were keeping time to music only he could hear.

"Bonnie remembers a cliff and water. Stupid us, we just assumed that it meant coastal property on the mainland." Ophelia said. She held up a finger. "One, Evelyn has an island estate where she could pretty much be doing whatever the hell she wants for months without anyone catching wind of it. Bonnie remembers static electricity that didn't appear to have a source." Another finger. "Evelyn has more juice in her than a small sub-station. She probably thought that they were far enough out to sea that Bonnie would never be found, healing abilities or not. And Bonnie smelled wood smoke on the guards several times." Final finger, the one that Ophelia had wanted to flash all along, but it wasn't quite the same when it came with accompaniment. "Evelyn had a nettles problem, she was constantly having to set off controlled burns to keep it in check. I could always smell the smoke on her." Naomi looked out the window of the SUV and put her fingers against her mouth.

"Son of a bitch," Marcus muttered. He lifted his eyes from the instruments in his dash so that he could watch the kids exit the liquor store in a nervous scurry. Ophelia didn't bothering reminding him that Evelyn had no known children at all, let alone a boy. After a second, he turned back and said, "Then it's a good thing that I have a boat, isn't it?"

"Okay, wait," Bonnie said as she and Ophelia boarded the backseat of the SUV, finally. Naomi turned about in her seat to give Ophelia a long, nearly inscrutable look, and then reached out and grabbed for her hand hard. Ophelia returned the squeeze until her fingers ached. "You a hidden SUV, a hidden boat, and a jet?"

"The jet's not hidden nearly as carefully as the boat," Marcus said as he pulled them out of the lot. Ophelia looked over her shoulder at the Toyota and wondered if anyone would even bother to steal it while they were gone, as she still didn't know what kind of sentimental value it must have to Naomi in order for her to have kept it all this time. Turning slightly bitter, he said, "Evelyn would have found and disabled it by now. Hell if I know what kind of shape it's in."

"Marcus is the most paranoid man you will ever meet in your life," Ophelia said to Bonnie. Marcus met her eyes in the rearview mirror. "Not paranoia if there are really people out to get you, I know. The defenses that you saw when the manor was attacked? Are nothing compared to some of the other things he's designed. I'm a little surprised that he doesn't have another house complete with staff tucked away somewhere, too."

"Will I get to see any of the other stuff?" Bonnie asked. Marcus's gaze in the rearview shifted to her.

"If we get through this?" he asked. "Sure. Then we'll talk about it."

Ophelia was in no mood for chitchat on the way to the boat. Naomi reached back a few more times to grip Ophelia's hand and otherwise left her to her thoughts. Evelyn had taught her how to use her powers as expertly as she would another hand when Ophelia could still accidentally explode a lamp by having a bad day. The list of people with superpowers who looked up to her was long, the list of people without superpowers only slightly shorter. Ophelia knew for a fact that Mindy had trained with her a time or two.

And Evelyn had gathered up all of their secrets and made them into weapons to be used against the very people who had been inspired by her. Ophelia made a fist and brought it down hard against her armrest as Marcus guided the SUV past the gate of a private harbor that had someone else's name on the deed. Ophelia was willing to bet that it wouldn't show up anywhere in a casual inspection of his financial records, and neither would the sleek black boat, designed to be halfway between a yacht and a science-fiction fantasy. It started to hum slightly as they approached, and Ophelia felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck standing up for reasons that couldn't be explained away by nerves. Marcus pulled a fob from his pocket and hit several buttons. The boat became a boat again, albeit one so smooth and pointed that it could have dated the jet and made beautiful, scary children.

"A little something you've been working on for the Department of Defense?" Ophelia asked. From where she was standing, it was either that or a gift from Naomi's home planet.

"I cannot legally answer that question for another fifteen years," Marcus said as he led them aboard the ship. The interior was black, too, though in accommodations it was straddled partway between an aircraft career and a well-furnished luxury vessel. I could accommodate eight, leaving them with plenty of room to give the past space. Ophelia settled down into a seat upholstered in butter-soft black leather--she was willing to bet that it was not an option included in the military package--and watched as about a dozen different dials and screens lit up when Marcus took his place behind the controls. It didn't seem to matter that he hadn't actually touched anything yet. There was a duffle bag beside Marcus's pilot chair, incongruous in its normalcy. Ophelia saw the edge of a mask where the zipper gapped, and smiled. She didn't ask if they were actually visible to human eyes as they shot out into the open ocean at a shocking speed, having a feeling that she already knew the answer. Couldn't answer for fifteen more years. Right.

Evelyn had chosen her island to be over twelve hours out from the mainland if someone was approaching in a normal vessel. Upon Ophelia's first visit, Evelyn had told her that she had spent so much time seeing the ugliness in the world that there was nothing she craved more than at least one place where she didn't have to see anything unless she wanted it. Even in Marcus's boat, that left them with plenty of time for both planning and brooding.

Naomi took the seat beside Ophelia and was silent for a long time. She propped her chin up in her hand and stared at thoughts existing far beyond the boat, her arm brushing against Ophelia's now and again by accident. Ophelia assumed that she was thinking about Evelyn and didn't try to interrupt, just leaned up against Naomi a little more firmly and let her own thoughts wander where they would. She almost startled when Naomi asked without warning, "Are you worried about Miranda and Josh?" Naomi's eyes were even darker than normal, and her thumbnail crept within millimeters of her mouth before she realized and lowered it back down to her lap.

"Desperately," Ophelia said after a long pause. "But Miranda is smart enough to run a whole corporation by herself and tough enough to make the boys' club turn tail and run, she can handle herself. Besides, she knows the score. She'll do what I told her to."

The thumbnail did find its way into Naomi's mouth, just for a second, before Naomi pulled it away and looked slightly disgusted with herself. "It's hard to get your family to do what you ask if you can't tell them why they're in danger, though." Ophelia looked at her sharply, and the corners of Naomi's mouth turned up, though the smile didn't reach her eyes. "No, my cell phone doesn't reach into space. I was calling Brooklyn from the café. That's where my parents live."

"How long have we known each other, and you're just now telling me this?" Hiding planet of origin was a much bigger deal than eating cereal on the couch or having a terrible habit of leaving wet towels in the bathroom floor.

Naomi looked down. In anyone else, Ophelia would have seen a blush. "It's hard to introduce you to my parents when they know that I like girls, but I can't tell them how we met because they don't know that I can break all of the windows in the house by singing along with the radio." She looked at Ophelia sideways. "Does it make it better or worse for you that I'm not actually a space alien, just a weirdo?"

Ophelia leaned over the edge of her seat and kissed Naomi hard on the mouth, cupping the back of her head. "I already knew that you were a weirdo, you weirdo." Naomi relaxed against Ophelia, their foreheads resting together. Her eyes looked even larger when she was up that close, and her rhinestones were rubbing against Ophelia's cheek when she moved. Ophelia tasted the weight in the air and said, "This feels like we're saying goodbye to each other. No way, Naomi. Absolutely no way, all right?"

"You're damned right we're not." Naomi tugged at the ends of Ophelia's hair and leaned back. "You'd better put on your duds, O. You know you don't want to go meet Her Highness without looking your best."

"We're spending next Thanksgiving with your parents." Ophelia ignored Naomi's middle finger as she got out of her seat with her costume thrown over her arm. She headed back until she found a closet-sized space that Ophelia guessed was a bathroom, even though there were several buttons that she wasn't going to press unless Bonnie loaned her some of that healing ability. Ophelia pulled off the hoodie and jeans and drew on her leggings, jacket, and boots in their place. She snugged her hair back into a ponytail and waited until the very last second to settle her mask into place. The woman watching her from the mirror immediately looked more determined and powerful. Ophelia adjusted her boots and left the bathroom.

"Coming up fast," Marcus announced from the pilot's seat. He had changed into his own costume sometime while Ophelia had still been fiddling with hers. She had only thought that he looked calm and collected when she had first seen him in his business suit all those years ago. "Hang on." The boat hummed for a few seconds. Marcus stared down at the instruments with a line between his eyes, only to ultimately sigh and nod to himself.

"You know Evelyn's codes?"

"Don't need to," Marcus answered. "Designed the system for her." His invisible ship glided up to a pier every bit as state of the art and formidable of his own, and Ophelia held her breath for the sonic boom that was going to blow them all to atoms. When that didn't happen, she held out a pair of ear buds for Bonnie to take.

Bonnie looked confused. "She can't hurt me permanently," she said, making a vague gesture in Naomi's direction. If there was a touch of a glare in it, no one in the boat was going to take it personally, not after the past forty-eight hours.

Ophelia took Bonnie's hand and waited for Bonnie to uncurl her fingers. When she did, Ophelia put the ear buds into the center of her palm and closed her hand around them again. "That's not the point."

Bonnie didn't move for a long moment before she drew her hand back towards her chest. "You, uh, don't happen to have a spare set of those tights around here anywhere, do you?" she asked, and made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a suspicious clearing of the throat.

"Not yet," Ophelia answered. Bonnie slipped the protective buds into her ears without comment.

The boat slipped into the harbor without a sound, its screens and dials blinking to each other in signals that Ophelia could not decipher. They seemed to make perfect sense to Marcus, though, which was the important thing. She could smell sea salt and a faint tinge of burning underbrush from within the ship, much stronger once Marcus engaged the hatch that let them all out onto the dock. Bonnie tensed, eyes going wide like those of a skittish horse. Ophelia reached briefly for her hand. "You are stronger than you know," she murmured to her.

"I know exactly how strong I am," Bonnie murmured back. She still didn't release Ophelia's hand right away.

There was a guard on the far end of the dock. He was dressed from head to foot in black, right down to the gun that he pulled from his belt as soon as he saw Ophelia. Ophelia ducked under the path of the muzzle and cracked his head hard against one of the harbor posts before she eased him back down to the dock and checked his pulse. He hadn't thrown any powers at her. Ophelia hadn't recognized the man in her apartment, either. There was no way of predicting who was going to pop up with powers and who was not, and it was certainly possible that Evelyn had recruited a great many newbies in private, but all the same...she frowned. "Something's not right, he—" Ophelia started, backing up.

A rogue wave threw a crescent of water across the dock, soaking Ophelia's boots. For one second, every nerve in her body was alive and wishing that it wasn't, and then there was nothing.

Chapter Fourteen

Even before Ophelia opened her eyes, she could feel every hair on her head standing on end and dancing to an invisible breeze. The air felt thick and smelled of ozone and rubbing alcohol, and Ophelia tasted plastic whenever she swallowed. Realizing that someone had put a breathing tube down her throat sparked enough outrage in Ophelia to force her eyes open and drew her to lift her head. There was a beeping noise nearby that Ophelia could not immediately place, as there were no machines attached to her body.

Ophelia was on a bed--a gurney, really--with heavy metal railings on either side to keep rambunctious patients from rolling out and onto the floor. No worries there, as Ophelia was also restrained to the bed using the same kind of heavy, padded leather straps at the wrists and ankles sometimes used to control mental patients. She stared at them very hard and thought, Do these people really not know me at all? Ophelia focused on unbuckling the restraints and then discovered to her horror that she couldn't do it. Her head felt unnaturally heavy and thick, and she was exhausted after only a few minutes of keeping it lifted up from the gurney. Pillows had not been deemed a necessary comfort, apparently, and neither had bed linens. Ophelia was lying on a thin gray mattress in a room with nothing and no one else in save for her, all four walls the same color as her gurney. The door was dull steel that looked as if it could take a lot of damage without giving in. Ophelia swallowed again in an effort to get the taste of the breathing tube out of her mouth. The door beeped, creaked, and ultimately opened to admit a tall brunette in a sleek power suit. Not the same one that she had worn when she had met Ophelia. The irony would be too great, and Ophelia had never known Evelyn to wear anything but this year's fashions.

Evelyn stepped away from the door as soon as she had entered, allowing two women around Ophelia's age or perhaps slightly younger to trail in after her. Both were white and the kind of perfectly golden blonde that Los Angeles sold by the pound. One of them jerked her hand away from the doorframe with a gasp as static electricity stung her palm. The other fixed Ophelia with such an unwavering stare that Ophelia wondered if she wasn't going to be challenged to a fight right there on the gurney. At a soft sound of disapproval from Evelyn, the more aggressive of the blondes appeared to drop her eyes, though Ophelia could still feel herself being watched from underneath the fringe of lashes. Ophelia looked to Evelyn instead. It wasn't hard; Evelyn had always had a talent for commanding every eye in the room onto her regardless of anything else that might be taking place. She crackled with an energy that had nothing to do with her powers, and Ophelia had promised after her first day of training that she was going to master that trick someday, too. For all that Evelyn had kicked her ass, worn her out, and made her learn all over again every fighting move that Ophelia had smugly believed she could do in her sleep, she had never struck Ophelia as cold. Looking at her now, Ophelia wondered how she could have gone so long without seeing it. There was nothing warm about the energy radiating out of Evelyn's body, and her face belonged to a stranger even without being half-covered by a mask.

"Where are my friends?" Ophelia croaked out when she had worked up enough spit. As she did so, she gave the two blondes arranging themselves to either side of Evelyn another look. The same one who had shocked her hand against the door was short and curvaceous, and wearing the same outfit donned by the pseudo-Mindy back at J's motel. She only managed to meet Ophelia's eyes for a second or two before closed her coat about her body, leaned back against her hands, and became engrossed in the toes of her boots. The second woman wasn't more than an inch or so taller, but she was lean and made of angles sharp enough to cut if they weren't filled out or filed down first. She bounced repeatedly onto the toes of her feet before falling back again, throwing off energy that made her the light bulb to Evelyn's battery and staring at Ophelia with a wrinkled-lip smile better suited to an animal. The second blonde made a fist and blew off some of her excess agitation by drumming out a quick solo against the wall, leaving a deep dent behind. Ah. At least the motel dresser could stop being a mystery.

Evelyn tilted her head to one side and looked Ophelia up and down. Ophelia realized belatedly that her own mask was off and felt naked without it even though the rest of her clothing had been left alone right down to her still-laced boots. There was an empty gurney to either side of hers. An ominous feeling threw down seed in Ophelia's gut and found fertile ground in which to grow.

"I had to kill them," Evelyn said as lightly as she would have explained that the new puppy had to live outside from now on because he just wouldn't stop piddling in the floor. Ophelia sucked in her breath hard enough to make her abused throat ache and lunged up against her restraints. The restraints held with barely more than a creak of strain, and Ophelia had to fall back, dizzy and panting, after only a few seconds of trying. She noticed for the first time that there was an IV puncturing the back of her left hand, pumping her body full of God only knew what.

Evelyn waited with a barely-arched eyebrow until Ophelia had finished struggling. Several male guards slipped into the room, as anonymous and cold as the one that Ophelia had fought in her loft. The more petite of the blondes leaned forward and began to look excited.

"If it eases your grief any, Ophelia," Evelyn said, looking sincere, "it was not my first or even my last wish for them to die. They forced me into a necessary choice."

Something inside of Ophelia's mind buzzed and then snapped. "What the hell is wrong with you?" she exploded, hurling herself against the restraints again. The gurney began to tilt over, but the prospect of a black eye or a few broken teeth was hardly enough to make Ophelia stop. One of the nameless guards came over and pushed it back down flat again. Since she couldn't punch him the way that she wanted to, Ophelia didn't bother glaring. When the time came, she wanted sugar, not artificial sweetener. "Why are you doing this? How could you do this? Do you know how many of us looked up to you?"

"Ophelia," Evelyn said evenly, cutting Ophelia off with a raised hand. "Though you may not believe it, I am doing this to protect you and all of us."

The lingering taste of the breathing tube meant that she had been in respiratory trouble at some point. Ophelia wondered if she hadn't gotten a concussion at the same time. Two of the guards left at a silent signal from Evelyn and returned a few minutes later with a machine so heavy that it took the both of them to push it even though it was on a cart. Ophelia lifted her head off of the gurney as high as she could to watch them approach. It looked as if someone had managed to breed together an ancient coffeemaker, a '64 mustang, and an alien computer, and Ophelia didn't realize why it looked so familiar until she remembered the mad-scientist comics that her father had collected as a child and then kept in a box up in the attic as an adult. It would have stood as high as Ophelia's hip if it had been setting on the floor. The overhead lights gleamed off of a dull metal carapace with a domed top, off of several clear tubes running out from the body and then looping back under to join it again. Ophelia kept her head up long after her neck had begun to scream, not willing to let that thing out of her sight.

"Protecting me," Ophelia said. For the first time, her voice sounded shaky to her own ears as her dizziness and nausea mounted. The drugs finally got the better of her and forced her head back down to the gurney so that she could stare at the ceiling. It was easier that way, she realized a few seconds later. Bonnie was dead. Marcus was dead. Naomi was dead, and Ophelia didn't even have the benefit of her mask to hide how she felt about that. "Did you ever think of getting me a puppy, or maybe a taser?"

Evelyn sighed and came up to the side of Ophelia's gurney. She laid her hand against Ophelia's arm so that Ophelia could feel the warmth of her skin. Ophelia could feel the tingle of electricity even through her jacket. "You are so young," Evelyn told Ophelia, sounding genuinely sad. "And so good." Ophelia turned her head slowly to look at her, because there was something about that sentence that just didn't parse when Ophelia was strapped down to a bed and had been pumped out of her powers with hell only knew what. "And so very, very naive."

"What?" She spent her nights dealing with people who beat each other and raped each other, who killed each other and filled each other with poison, and sometimes she wound up saving those people, too. Blame it on the sedatives, but Evelyn was going to have to explain a little more if she wanted Ophelia to understand where naiveté fit into that picture.

"Do you think that any of you are anonymous, really?" Evelyn continued. She rubbed her hand up and down Ophelia's arm. It was probably meant to be comforting, but Ophelia could not stop herself from shivering like a fly-stung horse. "You're not. The whole United States government knows about you, and about me, and, sweetheart, I would not have trained you or any of the others half as hard as I did when you first showed up on my radar if I didn't know that someday something awful was going to come of that knowledge. Do you think that I'm retired out here?"

"Everyone has to sooner or later," Ophelia said slowly, almost on autopilot. Evelyn was still in fine ass-kicking shape and had been plenty tough the handful of times that Ophelia had sparred with her without either of them using their powers. Under different circumstances, Ophelia would have been worried about fighting her. With Naomi dead, it was one of the only things that Ophelia still knew how to want.

Partially shielded from view by Evelyn's body, the leaner of the blondes climbed onto one of the gurneys and stretched out, humming a little song to herself. No restraints were placed upon her. Evelyn ignored her and went on.

"I do eighteen and twenty-hour days, sometimes, bargaining with politicians about why we're worth more doing good out on our own than we are in a laboratory taking us apart to find out why we tick." It was spoken in a confessional whisper, as if this were something that Evelyn had been waiting to unburden from herself for a very long time. Ophelia past her and up at the ceiling with dry eyes, thinking over and over again, Naomi is dead, Naomi is dead. She wondered if Evelyn had tried to absolve herself to everyone else she had kidnapped, too, or if Ophelia was supposed to think she was special. "And when the bargaining doesn't work, I threaten, and when the threatening doesn't work, I beg, but that is not going to work forever. They are going to come for us someday, and as long as we're scattered across the country and barely talking to one another, they're going to take us apart."

It was similar enough to what Ophelia had been thinking herself over the past couple of days that she could not restrain a little shiver. She realized how closely Evelyn was leaning over her and tried to scoot away. The restraints stopped her from going far.

"The more of us there are and the more powers that each of us can claim, the more we're able to protect ourselves," Evelyn said. "It's better than being picked off one by one."

A sour-tasting laugh bubbled up Ophelia's throat. She couldn't stop thinking, Naomi's dead, Naomi's dead, Naomi's dead, and barely noticed that a commotion was approaching from the hallway. "And you didn't think of just asking us?" she said. And then, looking over Evelyn's shoulder at the guards, she realized, "None of them had powers before you gave them some. You built a machine, and they're your canon fodder."

"Some of them are bound to make it through to the end," Evelyn said. "I'm paying them enough to play the odds. And I couldn't have done it with the machine alone."

The commotion from the hallway grew louder and louder until it had no other choice but to burst into the room, composed of two guards and a spitting, cursing woman clad in a grey shift that Ophelia nearly didn't recognize. Mindy had lost weight, and her hair was even more of a mess than when she was left to her own devices. There was a fresh bruise darkening the corner of her mouth into puffy purple, and older ones on her arms and legs. Ophelia could make out the shapes of fingers on Mindy's sun-starved skin.

Mindy froze and forgot to fight for a few seconds when she saw who was strapped down to the middle gurney. "Ophelia," Mindy whispered, shock shading quickly over into shame. She whipped her head around and bit suddenly at the nearest guard's hand. Ophelia had never known Mindy to play games when it came to an actual fight, and it took a hard yank and an equally hard yell before he was able to free himself and backhand her across the mouth, right against the rising bruise. Mindy spit a mouthful of blood back at him as she was wrestled down onto the gurney and secured. She nearly kicked a guard in the face as he tried to grab at her flailing leg. He elbowed her viciously in the midsection to make her lie still so that he could get a grip on her. A strange feeling rose in the room as Mindy gagged and subsided, like the air just before a thunderstorm. The guard staggered back from the gurney with a gray cast to his skin. Mindy went briefly ashen, too, and hesitated for the half-second more that it took to get her down. The guard leaned against the wall with his palm pressed against his chest for several moments before the color rose back into his face.

"Mindy," Ophelia said. She had a only a vague idea of what she had just seen, but paired up with Evelyn's words it added up to nothing good. Mindy would look her in the eye no more than the blonde still standing against the wall would.

"Thank your friend, Ophelia," Evelyn said crisply. She had no problem staring any of them down. "None of this would be possible if she hadn't lied to you about her real abilities. Luckily for us all, she trusted in me." Mindy raised her eyes long enough to cast Evelyn a vicious glare that didn't seem to trouble Evelyn in the slightest. "Catherine, are you ready?"

Catherine, the smaller of the Evelyn's matched pair, grabbed at the railing of her own gurney so hard that Ophelia watched the metal start to bend inward under her grip. "Ready," Catherine replied after pausing and taking several deep breaths. She had stopped bouncing and bubbling over with malicious hyperactivity for the first time since Ophelia had laid eyes on her.

"Ophelia, I'm sorry," Mindy whispered. One of the guards ignored Ophelia's IV and pushed up the sleeve of her leather jacket instead to expose her inner elbow. While he swabbed at her skin with rubbing alcohol, another pulled one of the tubes free from the machine to expose a long, straight needle. The machine made a chirping noise almost identical to Ophelia's security system and began to hum softly. The needle was a hell of a lot bigger than the one sticking out of the back of Ophelia's hand. She cursed and jerked against her restraints as hard as she could, reaching deep down inside herself for any scrap of telekinesis that she could find. The needle shivered in the guard's hands and made a tuning-fork sound that briefly overwhelmed the purring of Evelyn's machine.

"Whoa," the guard said, eyes going slightly wide. He drifted from side to side a few feet away from Ophelia's gurney without having the nerve to actually touch her. The man disinfecting her skin with rubbing alcohol didn't seem all that eager to be near her, either, and was stilled from moving back only by a lightning-crack glare from Evelyn.

"She's safe for several more hours," Evelyn gritted. "Do it." Whereas she had been tired and even sad while talking to Ophelia, the guard got a smile that was all teeth and no mirth. "I'm already paying you enough, it's your folly if you didn't think to purchase health insurance."

Ophelia threw a wild glance Mindy's way, hoping that she was wrong in her conclusions. The sleeve of Mindy's overlarge shift had ridden up, exposing an ugly, bruised cluster of needle marks in various stages of healing. Mindy stopped kicking and fighting for the first time since she had been dragged into the room. She stared up at the ceiling instead with her fists clenched, a muscle jerking in her jaw. Evelyn cleared her throat pointedly at the guard who had touched Mindy last until he came away from the wall and swabbed rubbing alcohol across the old wounds. Mindy's feet jerked spasmodically in their restraints, but other than that she did not move, especially not to look Ophelia in the eye and explain. The guard pulled a needle from the machine just as Ophelia's own had done, grabbed Mindy's arm and appeared to be fighting back a wave of nausea, and shoved the needle into her arm. Mindy's spine bowed up from the gurney. The machine began to make a teakettle noise, and the temperature in the room shot up ten degrees in the span of three seconds.

The needle was so broad that Ophelia could see its outline beneath the skin in Mindy's arm. She couldn't look away from it, not even as she felt her own guard grabbing her elbow hard. There was no way for Ophelia to pull herself out of reach and stop whatever was about to happen. She clenched her teeth, steadied her breathing, and told herself that she was not going to give them one sound, not even a whimper. The needle made a dull sound as it pierced through Ophelia's skin; it felt like being punched with a branding iron.

The guard left Ophelia and pushed the sleeve of Catherine's shirt up. She had a cluster of puncture wounds nestled into the crook of her elbow, too, though not so many as Mindy. The guard cleaned her skin with rubbing alcohol and administered the needle, stepping away quickly. Catherine yelped and yanked at the railing on her gurney until she had bent it in towards herself at close to a ninety-degree angle.

Not one single sound, Ophelia repeated to herself. She kept her promise until Evelyn stepped up to her machine and opened a small panel that Ophelia had not noticed before, punching in a series of codes in the keypad that unfolded. The teakettle became a jet engine whine that settled into her molars and radiated all the way down to the tips of her toes. Ophelia clenched her teeth together until she felt her jaw pop. The machine grew louder still. Evelyn stepped back like someone escaping a blast radius, shooing the guards away with a few impatient flicks of her wrist.

Mindy screamed first, and Ophelia a few seconds later. She couldn't help it. The machine grew loud enough to rival Naomi at its highest point, and with it came a horrible sucking feeling in the center of Ophelia's chest. If people really did have souls beyond the electrical signals cracking back and forth across their brains, then hers was being forcibly removed, and Mindy's too, all of it flowing inexorably towards Catherine. Ophelia screamed again, bucked up from the gurney. A full-body sweat broke out and soaked her within seconds; her wrists and ankles slipped in her restraints. Catherine was screaming along with Mindy and Ophelia, barely audible over the whine of the machine. She ripped the guardrail off of her gurney altogether and hurled it across the room. The second blonde barely managed to duck away before she was struck.

Ophelia begged her body to let her pass out and lost all track of time between the experiment beginning and the machine finally winding down and going silent. The loudest sound in the room was that of Mindy, Ophelia, and Catherine breathing. Ophelia felt as if she had been hollowed out inside, and she didn't have the strength of jerk away when Evelyn had the audacity to step up close and put her hand against Ophelia's forehead.

"You might never forgive me for this," Evelyn murmured, "but at least enough of you will be alive to understand why I had to do it."

Still gasping so hard that she sounded on the verge of sobs, Catherine slowly pushed herself up on her elbows. She was sweating as hard as Ophelia and Mindy, wet tendrils of hair clinging to her face and neck. Evelyn gave her an expectant look. Catherine nodded and stared hard at the hurled guardrail, a line of concentration appearing between her eyes. The guards were quick to step out of the way. The guardrail first trembled, and then rose slowly into the air until it was levitating several feet above the floor.

Ophelia blacked out.

Chapter Fifteen

Her throat hurt again. Damn, this was getting old. Ophelia leapt up to her feet rather than lying still and quiet in order to assess, and stumbled as the world twisted around her like the inside view of a tornado. She put her hand up against a gray—of course it was gray—wall in order to steady herself and tried to ignore the lurching in her gut. She had been awake for under a minute, and there was already sweat on her palms and along the back of her neck. Ophelia couldn't remember feeling like this before, never. She closed her eyes and still felt brightness from the room's only light, a fluorescent bulb recessed high and out of reach in the ceiling, beating against her lids. No windows. The only way out was a heavy steel door. Evelyn had been very busy lately, as Ophelia didn't remember any structures that could have doubled as high-tech torture chambers the last time that she had been on Evelyn's island.

Naomi is dead, Naomi is dead, Naomi is dead. The sweat evaporated and left her cold again. Ophelia leaned over, not daring to take her hand away from the wall just yet while the world was still jumping and jiving without her, and spit several times. Her mouth tasted foul. For all that she knew, she might have vomited while she had been unconscious.

A person cleared their throat on the far side of the cell. Ophelia spun towards the sound with her hand held out in front of her, the same posture that she adopted when she was about to teach someone the joys of flying. Her balance wasn't so quick to follow, and Ophelia had to sag back against the wall to keep from falling. Her expression was enough: the man stayed where he was.

"It's all right," he said, holding his hands out to either side of his body in a placating gesture. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Ophelia tried for a few seconds to use her powers, nearly threw up, and realized that any defense she managed was going to have to be of the physical variety. She said carefully, "In my experience, people who tell you they're not there to hurt you are the ones you need to watch the most."

"Fair enough," the man said, backing away and easing himself down until he was sitting against the wall. He was white and around her age, with skin that would have been crooned over as "alabaster" if he had been a woman. His hair was dark brown, and he had large hazel eyes that were easily the most startling thing in an otherwise unremarkable face. "Just thought, you know, in this place maybe I needed to tack on a few more disclaimers than I would if we met in a library." The man rubbed idly at his arm, pushing his shirt up to show the same collection of half-healed needle tracks that had marked Catherine and Mindy. He was dressed in the male version of the shift that Mindy had been wearing, meaning that the lucky bastard got pants. If not for the bruise in his arm, it would have been easy to mistake him for a surgeon.

Ophelia had been stripped of her jacket and boots before being thrown into the cell. She didn't guess that it mattered that much, as the only things of value she had been carrying were her ear buds. With Naomi dead, they were little more than mementos. She had better ways of remembering her girl than that, but Ophelia still found herself shivering. The floor was cement cold enough to make her toes go numb and seep through the thin fabric of her leggings within minutes.

Struggling to keep her mind away from Naomi, Marcus, and where their bodies might be right now, Ophelia examined the blackening bruise on her arm and the puncture wound like an eye in the center of it and asked, "What's your name?"

The man's face brightened even as he respected Ophelia's space and stayed where he was against the wall. Ophelia wondered how long it had been since he had received any human contact. Maybe all of the cells were full. Maybe something else entirely. Evelyn had undone so much of what Ophelia had thought she knew already, she didn't want to spend too much time speculating on the woman's motives.

"Daniel," the man said. "Daniel Marshall." He ran his hand over his hair, looked Ophelia up and down, and bit at his lower lip before he said, almost bashfully, "I think that I already know your name."

"I'm in the gossip magazines a lot," Ophelia admitted. She touched at her face where there should have been a mask and felt only skin instead. Ophelia took a breath, closed her eyes, and told herself that meltdowns were not allowed until she was in a four-star hotel room with a hot shower and room service on the way.

"Why are you here, Daniel?" Ophelia asked when she was certain that she could open her eyes again without trading in sanity for sight. "What can you do?"

"I...can do long division in my head," Daniel said slowly, looking at her as if he didn't understand. "And I play guitar when I'm drunk enough. I'm told I make a mean omelet. I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about—"

"I mean, what can you do," Ophelia interrupted him, putting the special stress upon the syllable that all of their kind recognized immediately. "What's your power?"

"Power…like those people in New York City or Texas? I don't have one," Daniel insisted. He went suddenly still as he looked Ophelia over again and appeared to realize that black leggings and a one-piece bodysuit weren't the latest in trendy club outfits. "Oh, fuck me, you're one of those women who runs around LA doing..." He waved his hand. "Superhero stuff. You really don't act in person like you do in the gossip magazines."

"You're not the first one to tell me that," Ophelia said. She didn't see any way of putting the revelation back into the bottle. Ophelia tried to tell herself that she should have greater faith in the ability of a grown map to keep a secret than she did in an awestruck little girl, but it was difficult. For one thing, everyone that she had discovered had been lying to her over the past twenty-four hours had been very much a grown-up.

"Fuck me," Daniel repeated. He didn't seem eager to move away from the wall and closer to her. Ophelia took the risk of turning her back on him so that she could examine the door, still keeping one hand against the wall for support as her knees debated holding her. She heard Daniel getting to his feet behind her and reflexively attempted to gather her telekinesis to her, muttered obscenities under her breath when she couldn’t even make the air move.

"What are they drugging me with to keep my powers down?" Ophelia demanded over her shoulder.

"The hell should I know? I just told you, I have no idea why I'm here, I can't do your thing." Daniel rubbed at his arm and hissed when he hit the needle tracks. "They hook me up to that damned machine every few days, though, and I feel dizzy for hours afterwards. I don't know if that helps you any."

Ophelia rubbed her hands along the door, hinges and all, but couldn't find a weak place to exploit even if she weren't on the fritz. "The last person who told me that they didn't have any powers was the battery that made that machine work," she said over her shoulder. "Sorry if I don't take your word for it."

Daniel took a few steps towards her. "Are you all right?" he asked. "Because you look really pale."

The closest thing to a plan that Ophelia had been able to come up with yet leapt into her mind, but there was no reason for Daniel to know that. It was going to be a long while before Ophelia trusted any new person without subjecting them to a background check that Marcus would be proud of if he had been alive to see it. "The woman who runs this place killed two of the most important people in the world to me," Ophelia told Daniel flatly. "And then tortured me so that she could take my powers and give them away to a probable sociopath and, I don't know? Foment revolution? She also used someone that I considered a friend to do it, so I'm not really at the top of my game right now."

Daniel came closer still and hesitated for several moments before putting his hand lightly on her arm. "I am really, really sorry about your friends," he said, sounding so sincere that Ophelia bit the inside of her mouth to the point of blood as a distraction from the endless Naomi is dead, Naomi is dead, Naomi is dead. As long as Evelyn appeared to have been planning this, it wouldn't be much longer before she had to amend it to They're all dead. "I mean it, I am. I swear that I would tell you if I had anything at all that could help—the hell!"

Ophelia dropped like a stone without making any attempt to control the fall the way that she did when there were cameras flashing. She didn't stiffen or react even when she cracked her head against the cement floor; surely Evelyn would be pleased to learn that one of her protégés had learned so much. Ophelia stayed very still as Daniel flipped her hurriedly onto her back. He checked her pulse, held his hand over her nose and mouth to see that she was still breathing, and then lunged for the doorway, allowing her to roll back over onto her stomach. Ophelia heard the distinctive sound of a fist beating against metal.

"Hey!" Daniel yelled. "Hey, hey, hey, someone get in here, there's something wrong with her!" Another metallic noise, down lower; Daniel was kicking the door. "Motherfucking assholes, get in here!" He sounded genuinely scared, and Ophelia hoped that she hadn't thrown away her money in betting on him being a decent human being.

The door clanged open. Someone shoved Daniel back hard enough to make him grunt and nearly fall. Ophelia kept her eyes closed. All of her energy went into keeping her breathing low and deep, and not reacting when she was flipped over so roughly that her head cracked against the floor again. Another set of fingers was forced into the crook of her neck, not nearly so gentle or concerned as Daniel had been. The guard at least managed to avoid giving her a third goose egg as he turned her back onto her stomach. Ophelia felt and heard the metallic snick of cuffs locking her hands behind her back. Damn. She had been hoping that urgency would throw a little luck her way.

Ophelia let her head loll bonelessly as she felt herself being moved until she was lying on her restrained wrists. Fingers materialized at her pulse point again. Sounding as if he was being forcibly head back, Daniel yelled, "What, you sons of bitches can't figure out how to do anything other than drug people?"

Warm air moved across her face as the guard leaned down to check Ophelia's breathing the same way that Daniel had done. The difference was that, while Ophelia was not entirely sure that she trusted Daniel just yet, he still ranked miles above any and all of Evelyn's men. Should have brought more than one set of restraints, Ophelia thought as she drew her legs up to her chest and kicked out as viciously as she could. She hadn't trained with Evelyn for more than a week before she knew better than to make such a rookie mistake.

Ophelia had been aiming for the guard's abdomen, but she wasn't feeling sorry for herself when she wound up kicking something a little lower instead. Ophelia swung one of her legs back around and caught the guard in the head, bearing him down to the floor with a heavy thunking noise, before she settled into a crouch. From there it was only a matter of half a second before she had pulled her legs through the circle made by her imprisoned arms so that she at least had her hands locked in front of her rather than behind. A good thing, as she needed them almost immediately. A second guard reached Ophelia with a taser in hand while the first was still bounding back up. His eyes weren't certain that he wanted to be there after his companion had been knocked to the floor so easily, leaving Ophelia feeling smug, and the split-second's worth of hesitation cost him. Ophelia ducked out of the way of crackling electricity and slammed her handcuffed fists into the guard's face, greatly enjoying the sound they made. Ophelia grabbed the taser from him and held onto it only long enough to drive it into his chest until he collapsed—little taste of what it feels like, asshole—before tossing it to the side. The second guard was back on his feet by then.

"Daniel!" Ophelia yelled, ducking a punch and diving for the fallen guard's gun. Daniel had been standing frozen to the side during the brief melee; he twitched and rushed towards the taser on the floor. Ophelia snatched the gun from the first guard's belt, swept her leg around, and knocked the second one straight down onto his ass in spite of his managing to get in one lucky kick to her ribcage. She leapt to straddle him and shove the gun beneath his chin while Daniel stood guard over the semiconscious man on the floor. The weapon felt greasy in her hand and made her feel dirty, but until she had processed more of the sedatives out of her system it seemed like the best she was going to do.

"Uncuff me," Ophelia ordered the guard. Her voice didn't betray how badly her head was still swimming. She was glad of that. It did vibrate with how close to outright rage she was. That part, Ophelia had to admit, did not suck. "I hate guns more than I hate just about anything else, asshole, except for the people on this island, so do not test me. Cuffs. Now." The guard hesitated for only a second more before he appeared to come to the conclusion that whatever Evelyn was offering in the way of health insurance probably wasn't going to be enough to cover a bullet wound to the head. Ophelia scooted a little ways down his legs so that he could sit up and fumble for the keys, and only the keys, at his belt. When her hands were free, Ophelia fisted her hand through the front of the guard's black shirt and said, "And now you're going to help us." He threw a punch at her face. Ophelia reversed the gun in her hands and brought it down hard against his ribs. The air exploded out of his lungs on a loud gasp and obliged them to stay there for a few moments while he got it back again. Ophelia ran the seconds through her mind. Not good, not good. The lack of backup was already suspicious. And now the guard knew that she was as unwilling to use lethal force against him as he had been to use it against her. Ophelia had chalked his hesitancy to really come at her up to having been around Evelyn long enough to know that her being a woman didn't mean she had any problem handing his ass to him, but now she wondered.

The guard wheezed for a second or so longer before he got his breath back. "Why?" he asked her.

Ophelia looked him up and down and said, "Because I have a feeling that this is not the first time that you've helped a prisoner here." The guard's eyes dropped. Question answered. Still sitting on the guard's legs, Ophelia twisted around just far enough to address Daniel without losing sight of her primary concern. "Are you all right?"

There was a red rivulet running down Daniel's chin, souvenir from his split and rapidly swelling lower lip. Minor injuries aside, he appeared to have come through the fight with everything important still attached. "You know, you're very different in person than you are on TV," he said. The guard at Daniel's feet recovered himself to lunge upwards, and Ophelia was too busy with her own prisoner to leap to Daniel's defense in time. Daniel slammed the taser against the front of the guard's chest and held it there until the man slumped back down to the floor, unconscious. Daniel looked a bit shell-shocked by the whole affair, but not regretful in the slightest.

"Everyone's got their secrets," Ophelia said. She tossed the handcuffs that had recently been around her own wrists to Daniel and motioned that he should put them on the unconscious guard. She was almost hoping that her own would try to fight her a little more, but he was docile as Ophelia got off of his legs and hauled him up to his feet. "Come on, someone must have realized that something is wrong by now." She couldn't hear any alarms sounding. That didn't necessarily mean anything, they could be silent, but Ophelia still felt the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck standing up. She had too much adrenaline running through her system to tell if the sensation arose from battle-readiness or from Evelyn charging her batteries in preparation to bring a lightning bolt out of the sky and onto their heads.

Ophelia gestured for Daniel to stay behind her as she reached the door of the cell and peeked cautiously out into a hallway that had the bright lights and antiseptic aftertaste of a hospital corridor. He didn't have any trouble obeying her. Pretty refreshing to be around someone who actually listens to me, Ophelia remarked wryly to herself. Better be careful that I don't get spoiled on it. She pushed the guard in front to take the brunt of whatever came their way, and so that he couldn't see her lowering the gun just as soon as his back was turned towards it. The feel of her own sweat on the handle was making her want to scrub her hands against her leggings and then take a long, hot shower.

"I want to see Evelyn," Ophelia ordered the guard. "Does she keep quarters here in the Mayo Clinic?"

The guard turned his head slightly, saw that the gun was no longer pointed directly at him. "Yeah, she stays near," he said. "She was worried that you would turn up sooner or later."

"You have no idea how proud that makes me, I always was the teacher's pet." Ophelia peered over the guard's shoulder and saw a stretch of hallway stretching out almost a hundred yards before it made a T-junction, the turn barely visible against white walls, white floor, white ceiling. It was the same story in the other direction. The tile chilling the bottoms of Ophelia's feet didn't even have a pattern to it, and was fitted together so tightly that Ophelia could barely see the seams between pieces. The guard's black clothing was the only break against the monotony. Ophelia thought back to Bonnie's edgy, nearly feral nervousness when they had first met and saw how it could happen, painfully easily, in a personal world made up of nothing but monotony and while everything that Bonnie did to hurt herself in an attempt to wrest control back lasted for a handful of seconds, a minute at most.

"Do you, ah, have a plan for this?" Daniel asked softly from behind her. Ophelia shivered hard at the reminder that there were others with her, and he was polite enough not to mention it. She hadn't asked him how long he had been here; she was surprised that he wasn't twitching much harder than she.

"The tall brunette woman?" Ophelia called over her shoulder after she had gathered herself. "We're going to have words, and then we're going to have fists. You like that plan?"

"Can't find any fault with it." Daniel was quiet afterwards from behind her, the only noises he made being his breathing and the light fall of his feet. There was a weight to the silence, so Ophelia left him to it while she studied the guard a step and a half ahead of her. His shoulders were tense, the tips of his ears turning pink as if he could feel her staring at him and was bothered by it. Probably ought to have looked into a different line of work, then. A tickle began to run up Ophelia's spine. She dismissed it as nerves for only a second, as long as it took for a high mosquito whine to fill the air and settle into the fillings in her molars.

"Hey, do you feel that?" Daniel asked.

Ophelia stared at the back of the guard's neck. The red blush had grown from his ears to span over the back of his neck, meeting in the middle to make a blotchy patch the color of strawberries. "Don't touch anything metal," Ophelia called over her shoulder to Daniel. He hurriedly shoved his hands into the pockets of his surgical pants. Ophelia clenched her hand through the back of the guard's shirt and said, "That includes you, too."

"You really care whether I live or die?" the guard asked her.

"Not really," Ophelia said calmly. "But you're not the first horrible person that I've saved, so don't go thinking that you're all special." She waited for a second, then went on, "What was it that made Bonnie special?" She knew that her guess had been right when the guard flinched, hard. "Never mind. If you're not infatuated with her, I can keep pretending that you had an attack of conscience." Just around the corner, someone started screaming, and there were the sounds of a hard struggle. The screamer was a woman. From the way that the guard jerked so hard that Ophelia had trouble keeping her hold on him, Ophelia knew that he recognized the woman's voice, too. Ophelia's hands started to tremble, and she had to work to keep her knees from unhinging. If Evelyn had been lying about one…

"You stay in front of me," she said to the guard, and to Daniel, "And you stay behind." They both did as they were told as Ophelia sidled up to the edge of the T-junction and peeked around the corner to find Bonnie being restrained—just barely—by two men. She was wearing the same kind of gray shift that Mindy had been dressed in, and her elbow was unmarked. Didn't matter, Ophelia still knew.

But she was alive. Ophelia sucked in a breath so deep that it hurt and jerked the guard more tightly in front of her, putting the gun against the strawberry patch. He was too busy staring at Bonnie to resist her, though she was too busy with her impending meltdown to give him more than a glance.

"Let her go," Ophelia commanded as two different guns were suddenly trained on them, and Daniel behind her muttered, "Fuck, fuck, fuck." He still tried to step out from around the protection of her body, though, and Ophelia had to release her grip on the back of the guard's shirt in order to shove Daniel back. The guard himself didn't move.

One of Bonnie's guards was swift to act, grabbing her about the waist and putting his own gun to her head. "You don't have your powers right now," he said. "So I guess you know that neither does she. You move, she dies."

Ophelia swore under her breath and weighed her options. The guard's life versus Bonnie's worth as a continuing experiment would be nothing to Evelyn, or to her many tentacles. "You're not going to be able to keep mining her if she dies before her powers come back," she called. "Or me if you kill me." Hopefully. Maybe. Ophelia didn't want to know how long Evelyn's machines stored its copies.

"No," the guard that Ophelia was keeping prisoner said suddenly. "Bonnie was always special, she never...she never needed to recharge like the rest did." He jerked himself out of Ophelia's grasp before she could react, leaving her in the position of going after him versus protecting herself and Daniel. She swore violently and whirled, grabbing Daniel and throwing the both of them back against the wall. Bullets flew by faster than anyone save for maybe that kid Dante kept talking about to see. Ophelia peeked around the wall just long enough to see the guard tackle both Bonnie and the man holding her, twisting them both to the side and forcing the bullets meant Ophelia and Daniel into his own body. Ophelia fired her own weapon, aiming to wound, and caught each of them in the leg. She didn't have to like them in order to know how to use them. Ophelia hoped that Evelyn was appreciating the irony, wherever she was, since she was the one who had insisted that Ophelia learn in the first place. When the shots were echoing away, she rushed forward and brought the butt of the gun into each guard's head, knocking him into unconsciousness, before she twisted around and asked of Bonnie, "Are you okay?"

Bonnie pushed herself slowly back up to her feet, rolling the body of the man that, Ophelia highly suspected, had been the one to let her out of her cage. "I'm okay," she said, breathing hard even though she was clearly lying. Bonnie looked down at the bloody stain that crossed her midsection. "That's not mine," she whispered. Ophelia watched a bullet push its way out of Bonnie's clavicle like a maggot escaping a piece of meat and fall to the floor with a plinking noise that echoed farther than it should have.

Daniel pushed past them both and knelt by the guard who had helped Bonnie escape. He slid his fingers into the crook of the man's neck, jerked, and then whispered, "He's already dead."

"That's going to happen when you get shot a whole bunch," Ophelia said, but Daniel shivered again and looked away with an expression that was too blank to be real.

Bonnie looked down at the guard, nudged him a few times with her foot, and then bent so that she could brush his eyelids closed. Her expression was the same as Daniel's when she rose, swirling with a dozen different things under the surface and maintaining a hard calm so no one else could tell. "He's the one who let me out," she said finally, and rolled her shoulders. "Guess that has to count for something."

Naomi's dead? It was only a whisper now, and not the near-wail that it had been before. "Bonnie," Ophelia said urgently, grabbing the girl by the elbow and not caring how hard she startled. "Naomi and Marcus, where are they? What did Evelyn do with them?"

Bonnie blinked at Ophelia several times from someplace far away before she came back enough to say, "I don't know what happened to Naomi, I lost track of her when everything went to hell so fast. Marcus was shot—"

The chanting nearly came back. Ophelia pushed her lips together hard and said, "Where?"

"On the pier, when we were caught—"

"No, where did the bullets hit him?"

"Oh—ah. In the chest. He fell into the water, I don't know what happened to him after that." Bonnie scrubbed her hand over her face, looked down at her smooth and unmarked inner elbow. "Jesus, you would think that it had never happened."

Ophelia let out one breath, and then another, until the ringing in her ears finally stopped. "Marcus wears a vest," she said. "He'll be all right." If he hadn't drowned, if no other bullets had hit him after he had entered the water, if—there were too many variables at work for Ophelia to possibly keep track of them all without losing her mind. She breathed in the new energy that hope had given her and said, "Okay, come on, let's go."

The whole building was quivering to the point that Ophelia wasn't sure it was a good idea for her to keep holding the gun. She tested her powers, felt the weapon quiver so slightly that it would have fallen to the ground immediately if she had let go of it, and resigned herself to having to put her principles on hold for a little while longer. In the meantime, they traveled in a pack that grew more nervous with every step they went unchallenged, looking for one of the heavy steel doors that meant someone was being kept prisoner behind it. The whine in the air was making her teeth ache by the time that they found one, and she repeated again, sharply, "No one touches anything metallic, you got it?" Only a small thing to ask when the door was quivering like a tuning fork, surely.

Daniel, looking pale but calm, said, "It's all right, I have it," and started to reach forward. Bonnie grabbed for his wrist millimeters before he would have made contact with the metal.

"It'll kill you," she said. "Won't do much to me after it's all said and done." She grabbed for the handle before Ophelia could point out that they weren't going to do much more than shock themselves for nothing if the cell was real, twisted. Sparks crackled. Bonnie's spine bowed, and her hand clenched around the handle so tightly that Ophelia didn't think she would have been able to let go if she had wanted to. The smell of burning flesh grew so heavy that Ophelia was about to bodily yank Bonnie away from the door, never mind that the electricity would go straight through her, too. The keypad that controlled all entry and exit from the room finally shorted out in a brilliant shower that obliged Ophelia and Daniel to throw their arms up over their eyes. The door swung open so sharply that Bonnie was nearly hit in the face with it. She staggered back, and Daniel caught her by the hand just in time to watch the burned flesh over her palm knitting back together to become smooth again.

"What...the hell?" he asked as Bonnie roughly pulled herself away again.

"You don't get taken for no reason," Ophelia said as she pushed into the cell. She helped Mindy, or...the Mindy, because the cluster of bruises in her elbow didn't look quite right when matched up against Ophelia's memory-video, back up to her feet again from where she had been crouched against the wall.

"I was hoping that you would be able to get out," Mindy gasped, leaning against Ophelia for a moment. Ophelia wasn't carrying any weapons other than the gun in her hand, and without her jacket on there was no place for her to hide one. She still felt Mindy's fingers ghosting along her waist in search of more. Ophelia had been hoping that the two of them would meet again.

"Hey, Mindy," she started in a conversational tone, "what do you think of my boots?" When Mindy flinched, Ophelia threw her back against the wall, hard. The ends of Mindy's hair lifted and waved for a second or two before falling back flat again. Ophelia came closer to smiling than she had in hours.

Mindy's dark head cracked against the wall, and she slumped for a moment before she was able to catch herself. Her features ran together, and by the time that she had straightened again she was the curvy blonde who hadn't seemed to like what she was seeing earlier. Not that she had actually been bothered enough to stop it, though. Ophelia put her hand around the blonde's throat and tightened in warning.

"Wait, wait!" the blonde said, throwing up her hands. "I can help you."

"I know you can. You're going to take me to your boss's quarters," Ophelia said. Another warning squeeze. "And you're going to do it right now."

Chapter Sixteen

The blonde said that her name was Jane. "Like, you know, 'Plain Jane', you get it?" she asked with an ingratiating little smile that reminded Ophelia of a dog rolling over to show its belly.

Ophelia flexed her fingers, concentrated, and thought that she felt the answering shiver in the air, her own mini-storm to match the pregnant lightning that Evelyn was holding back for now. Close. She was close. "Call yourself whatever you want," she told Jane shortly. "It's your business if you want to be mistaken for a cartoon."

Jane quailed backwards and tucked her chin, as if her feelings had been hurt. Ophelia didn't know why they were bothering to have a conversation at all, what Jane possibly thought she could say to justify all that she had done. "You don't understand," Jane said as Ophelia hustled her along with her hand splayed against the small of Jane's back. She wasn't certain that she could throw a hard push again quite yet, but Jane didn't know that, and Ophelia wasn't about to enlighten her out of the goodness of her heart. "See, there's trouble coming and Evelyn is just trying to get us all ready for it. She knew that she couldn't get enough of you together if she just went to you—"

Ophelia tightened her grip on Jane's shirt before she could stop herself, bringing them to a halt. She had only the barest idea of where they were in the labyrinth that Evelyn had constructed and couldn’t stop herself from thinking that she could have stopped all of this, somehow, if only she had paid a little more attention to what her old mentor was doing. Jane saw part of that in Ophelia's face, mistook its meaning, and tucked her chin even more tightly against her chest. Standing slightly to the side, Bonnie looked as if she wouldn't mind giving Jane a good kick on general principle alone. Even Daniel had a hard cast to his eyes.

"Maybe that ought to have been your first clue," Ophelia said. Jane pulled her lip between her teeth and looked down at her feet. Ophelia reminded herself that it was easy to pretend to be remorseful, and a lot harder to actually do something about it. She asked, "Where's Naomi?"

Jane lifted her eyes. "Who?" she asked, sounding genuinely confused, and more than a touch worried. They hadn't been attacked since Ophelia had knocked Bonnie's guards unconscious; Jane was probably starting to realize that no one was coming for. Even when she had been one of the good guys, Evelyn hadn't wasted resources on fool's errands.

"Tiny blonde thing. Tends to make glass and eardrums break when she screams. Don't tell me that you haven't heard of her." Ophelia flexed her fingers, watched one of the fluorescent bulbs above their heads rattle in its wire cage. Not quite yet, but she was close. Ophelia made a mental note to come back and unhinge every door, remove every screw, and break every bulb when they had the time.

"Oh. Catherine was going after her, I don't know if she caught up to her or not. We don't exactly--" Jane lifted one of her shoulders and looked forlorn. "Girl talk." Ophelia decided to ignore Jane's attempt at garnering sympathy for her sad existence as the outcast among the villainous cool kids and tried to focus on the timeline instead, since Catherine had been present while Ophelia was being strip-mined. Did it mean that Naomi was alive, but captured, or that she was free and preparing to make her move, or—Ophelia was going to lose her mind if she couldn't block out her worry for awhile. She flexed her hand against Jane's arm hard enough to make the other woman wince before she realized what she was doing.

"Look," Jane went on a desperate voice, "I'm not like the guards that Evelyn hired, okay, Catherine and I are legit. I've been able to change my shape since I was in junior high, and Catherine--I don't know how long she's been able to do it, but you saw how strong she was, she was like that when she showed up, Evelyn didn't give that to her."

Ophelia, painfully aware that she should have gotten some sign from Naomi or Marcus by now if they were truly alive and safe, forgot herself for a moment. She hurled Jane back against the wall so hard that Jane yelped, so hard that Daniel startled back and that Bonnie leaned forward. The whole building was still throbbing like the air right before an electrical storm, and Jane's arm nearly brushed against a metal fixture in the wall before she flinched and drew it back.

"Do you honestly think that that makes it better?" Ophelia asked, leaning up into Jane's space. She had at least three or four inches on Jane to begin with, and more than that as Jane hunched her shoulders and tucked her chin down towards her chest. She was having trouble meeting Ophelia's eyes again. "The guards did it for money and temporary power. That, I can understand. I see that every single night when Naomi and I are patrolling and protecting--" Ophelia laid a deliberate stress upon the word, making it clear that she was talking about something very different from the bullshit that Evelyn was attempting to lay down. "Protecting innocent people from them. It's disgusting, but it's honest. They don't pretend that they're someone else so that they can sneak around and stab you anywhere but the front. What you're doing here, though? It is so much worse." Jane flinched back, probably would have liked to outright hide if not for the fact that she had nowhere to go. Poor little thing, apparently Evelyn hadn't gotten around to kidnapping a teleporter yet. "We have gifts. The bare minimum that we have to do with those gifts, even if you can't find it within yourself to actually rise to the damned occasion and do something good with them, is not use them to harm others. It would be better if you were just one of Evelyn's hired goons, because them I couldn't expect you to know better than that. What she did was so much worse than the criminals I deal with every night; they stab me in the front, but I didn't dream that Evelyn would ever stab me at all."

Ophelia was breathing harder by the end of her speech than she had been at the beginning. There was a tingle behind her eyes and in the tips of her fingers, and the light bulbs made buzzing noises as they rattled back and forth. Bonnie was leaning further up onto the balls of her feet, and even Daniel looked slightly impressed. He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck and said, "The not having powers thing? When you put it that way, I kind of wish that I did."

Jane flinched back even further as Ophelia continued to glare at her and muttered, "I don't even know why I should keep helping you." She soon found that there was nowhere else behind her but the wall to go when Ophelia leaned up into her space again, close enough so that they had to share breath.

"You're going to keep helping us because," Ophelia responded in a much calmer voice than she felt, and pointed towards the metal that Jane had only barely managed to avoid touching when Ophelia had thrown her backwards. "I am not about to let you go until this is over, and you know good and well that Evelyn will not hesitate for one second to do to you what would happen if you dropped a toaster into a bathtub if that's what it takes to get to us." Jane's eyes were still stubborn and hooded. Ophelia made a disgusted noise from the back of her throat. "Never mind. Where's a control room, someplace where we can find out where Evelyn's at? And where the hell is my jacket?"

"It's this way, and it's not a control room," Jane said finally. She pushed past Ophelia. Ophelia only tolerated the shoulder-bump for a moment before she reclaimed her grip, one hand in the small of Jane's back and the other on her arm. It wasn't more than a few seconds before they came across one of the cells again, the metal at the bottom of the door glowing red with the heat that was being applied to it. Ophelia jerked Jane up short, pointed to the keypad, and said, "Open it," in tones that brooked no argument, hoping that the person behind the door hadn't managed to fry the circuitry. Jane did as she was told, wincing as she punched in the code. The plastic was so hot that she left the impressions of her fingerprints behind. The door burst open so quickly that they had to leap out or else be charred. Jane stumbled. Ophelia grabbed her by the collar and bodily hurled her out of the way. She stumbled herself a few seconds later and landed hard on her rear. The blinking red light in one of the corner cameras appeared faintly amused. Ophelia waved her hand at it, and the camera jerked around to face the wall on a handful of sparks.

J darted out of her cell in a dingy shift identical to Mindy's and Bonnie's and looked almost disappointed to find no one there worth turning into a human bonfire, at least not until she noticed Jane. She narrowed her eyes far enough to make Ophelia wonder if she shouldn't get between the two of them.

"You know she ain't one of the victims, right?" J said to Ophelia by way of greeting after she had thrown her gaze across first Bonnie and then for a beat longer over Daniel as well. J was trembling all over. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides; a glow emanated from the back of her hands like a kid putting a flashlight against their palm. For Daniel's sake, Ophelia was glad that he was wearing scrub pants whether than the all-black unofficial uniform of Evelyn's hired goons.

"I know," Ophelia said, getting back up to her feet. She dusted off her rear and gave J a reproachful look. J shrugged unapologetically and exchanged a nod of greeting with Bonnie. "She's helping us."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to drop her into the ocean if she doesn't."

The answer, while it didn't stop J from rocking back and forth on her heels, at least seemed to partway satisfy her. The bruise in her arm was darker and older than Ophelia's own, and there was a trickle of dried blood wrapping around her forearm that no one had bothered to clean away. Jane certainly didn't seem to appreciate that Ophelia had just saved her twice in as many minutes, but Ophelia couldn't say that she had expected much better. She hauled Jane back up to her feet again and said, "Control room. Now."

The door that Jane led them to was the first wooden one that Ophelia had seen yet, save for the metal doorknob. Copper. Of course. There was a keypad set into the wall next to it. "I don't know the code," Jane said, sounding much too sulky to be telling anything but the truth. Bonnie shivered and reached for the doorknob until Ophelia grabbed for her arm.

"Let me," she said. Ophelia dropped into a crouch in front of the keypad and studied it closely. So far as she could tell, it was identical to the one that guarded her own apartment. She could feel the electricity pulsing through it as she let her fingers hover over the stainless steel buttons. That was fine; Ophelia didn't intend to touch it physically. She drew up as much as she could remember of watching Marcus install her own security system. She had told him that she would not have any defenses in her house that she didn't understand. He had seemed pleased to hear it. Ophelia had barely been back from training with Evelyn for a month, she and Marcus were barely past the stage of flirting and going on long, romantic walks down the beach that also included stopping muggings. Naomi had been nowhere in the picture yet, yet alone making Ophelia shiver with something that she could not name.

The tips of Ophelia's fingers stopped tingling with the electricity. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and visualized the keypad's internal mechanisms as she pushed. Steady, steady, she just wanted to trip a few wires—the first time that Ophelia had invited Naomi into the loft, they had been making out too hard to notice right away that the alarm was beeping, and in her lust-impatience Ophelia had pulled it from the wall with her mind rather than engaging the fail safes. It had only been the third time that she had heard Naomi laugh.

The keypad shorted out on a shower of sparks, and the door swung open so quickly that Ophelia had to leap back or else be knocked into the wall.

"Fuck me running, Ophelia," J said with a certain amount of appreciation. She rubbed at the puncture wound in her elbow and winced. "And here the rest of us tend to have the opposite reaction after that bitch gives us the grand tour."

"I have a lot of motivation right now." Ophelia shoved Jane into the room ahead of her said to Bonnie and J, "Watch her."

"No problem," J muttered, glaring in Jane's direction. "Hair goes up quick."

Evelyn's makeshift quarters were a reprieve to Ophelia's eyes, if only because they were painted in gray and shadow rather than the stark, unforgiving white that she had been dealing with thus far. It wasn't much cheerier than Ophelia's own cell had been, though at least Evelyn had seen fit to give herself a small cot shoved into one corner and did away with the bucket. The cot was covered in a thin green blanket and had a grayish pillow resting at the head, but it didn't look as if it had been slept in recently. There was a scarred mahogany desk against the opposite wall; Ophelia guessed she knew where most of Evelyn's attention was going when she was in this room. She could remember the desk from its former place of honor in the little house tucked away on the far corner of the island. Ophelia had no idea how long it had been in Evelyn's family before that. Whatever its former use had been, it was now nearly collapsing under the weight of a desktop computer and three different monitors. The monitor screens themselves were divided into fourths, each one showing the goings-on in a different section of Evelyn's sanctuary. The images only stayed put for five seconds or so before they changed locations to a different space. The pictures painted the world an eerie, glowing green: night vision. The room was cramped and squalid and didn't smell as if it got aired out all that often, so different from Evelyn's house that Ophelia wondered if it was even still standing.

Ophelia hadn't really been expecting Evelyn to docilely remain seated on her uncomfortable-looking cot and wait for them, but she still found room to be disappointed. She stepped cautiously into the room, waiting for a force-field to zap her right back into the hall again, and then cast Jane an ugly look over her shoulder. "You knew that she wasn't going to be here." Jane shrugged and managed up about a teaspoon of defiance, enough so that she was at least able to meet Ophelia's eyes. Ophelia made a disgusted noise and strode towards the computer. It also ran on one of Marcus's systems, and Ophelia was past the anemic (well, by Marcus's standards, anyway) security protocols within five minutes. She had soon found the program controlling the electrical surges that had made them think that Evelyn was still on the premises, giving Jane another ugly look. It only took a few more moments after that for her to locate a folder named "MLP." This one gave Ophelia more trouble, nearly ten minutes wasted. Once she thought that she was getting close, she called back over her shoulder, "What's the MLP?"

"Missing Link Protocol," Jane answered sullenly. "That's what the government goons keeping track of all of us like to call themselves." She snorted when Ophelia stared at her, cocky enough to be contemptuous. "Did you think that Evelyn was lying about everything?"

"It seemed like a good horse to bet on." Ophelia turned back towards the computer. The other four were crowding at the doorway, none of them eager to come in any further. Even though the computer and monitors spoke of obsession strong enough to keep Evelyn in here for hours, maybe days, the air still had a flat and slightly stale feel to it, as if Ophelia were standing in the middle of a particularly large and well-maintained tomb. She allowed herself the luxury of a shiver and then redoubled her focus, muttering to herself, "Am I the only one who doesn't want a stupid nickname?"

"Jesus, Ophelia," J complained from the doorway. "Evelyn could be halfway to Hawaii by the time that you finish going through her tax records."

One of the things that Ophelia had stumbled across before the MLP folder had caught her attention actually had been Evelyn's tax records. Unsurprisingly, the address she listed on the forms was not the island. Ophelia ignored J and continued going through the files, stopping only when she heard Jane yelp.

"She was shifting," Bonnie said remorselessly. Jane was rubbing at her upper arm where Bonnie had apparently punched her.

"I can't help it," she said, her tone more sullen than ever. "I do it when I'm nervous."

"Learn to help it," Ophelia said. She turned back to the computer. The MLP folder was by far the largest collection of files on the computer's hard drive. It contained the names of lawmakers and military officials who could be counted on to be friendly or at least to listen, the names of those who would do the opposite, and a few tentative plans to take members of the second group out if the situation should become bad enough. If Evelyn was even remotely sane and not just making this up as she went along, then several times over the past couple of years had the situation come close to being deemed "bad enough." A few more clicks through the files led Ophelia to a cache of pictures, most of them in color and looking as bright and fresh as if they had been shot at high noon. Only the streetlights glowing in the background of several let Ophelia know that it was night. And then she got her confirmation when she came across a picture of her and Naomi from a few nights before, when they had taken a break during patrol to neck in the alleyway. The camera work was so good that Ophelia could count the individual rhinestones on Naomi's face, see the dark wisps where her hair was starting to work its way out of the bun.

She felt very cold. Ophelia took a seat in the chair before the computer before she fell. Nor was she or Naomi the only ones whose privacy had been violated. There were pictures of everyone in there. In several, they weren't even wearing disguises.

"I hate to interrupt you ladies doing your thing," Daniel said, sounding nervous. Part of that could have been the way that Bonnie was eyeballing Jane with her eyebrow arched up and her fist already drawn back, and J looking like a proud parent as she observed. Not all of it, though. "And don't go thinking that I think I know about mortal peril than you do. But, um, shouldn't we be caught by now?"

He almost had a point. Almost. Ophelia said heavily, "Evelyn wanted me to find this information. That's why she's been backing off and leaving us alone."

"You're still at the head of the class," J muttered without any particular rancor. Ophelia doubted that any of them would ever want to trade places with her as Evelyn's favorite again.

Ophelia sighed and told herself that it changed nothing, started to push herself away from the desk. Her bare foot struck up against something hard and nearly pulled a yelp out of her before she could stop herself. It would be just perfect if she survived electrocution, medical experimentation, and nervous fatigue from trying to keep J and Bonnie from murdering Jane only to succumb to a stubbed toe.

Leaning down to peer under the desk, Ophelia saw that it had a hidden compartment set into the side. Age and the sea air had warped the door until it no longer closed all the way, leaving Ophelia with something to knock her foot against as she rolled back; had it been new, she doubted that she would have noticed anything. Ophelia dug her fingers around the little door and yanked until it came loose with an indignant squawk that reminded her of an angry grandmother. She hoped that she wasn't about to be eaten up by spiders as she stuck her hand inside.

Ophelia's fingers brushed against leather, then wood and a dozen other small trinkets. She closed her hand around her jacket and pulled it out. A ruby ring fell out with it, and then a man's watch.

"Hey, that's mine!" Bonnie exclaimed. She rushed forward to claim the ring. It was too large for her, and she wound up sliding it onto her thumb so that it wouldn't fall. "My grandmother gave it to me," she said, noticing the way that they were all staring at her. "She was the only one who—well, I never outright told her what I could do, but she still knew, and she never treated me any differently."

"This thing doesn't have any kind of heartwarming story behind it, but it's still mine," Daniel said, stooping to pick up the watch. He shook it next to his ear and made a face. "Broke when I got zapped, though."

There were more trinkets in the hidden compartment, maybe dozens. Ophelia felt cold again. When this was over and she had time to go back through Evelyn's woods, would she find graves there, she wondered? And had some of them been there without her being the wiser even while she had been training here?

Ophelia pulled her jacket on before she could shiver. The ear buds were still in her pocket; she told herself that this was Evelyn's memento of Naomi, proof that she had been pulled out of the water alive. Ophelia held them out to Daniel. "Put these in. When my girl gets going, she can shatter every piece of glass in a four-block radius. You don't want to be standing next to that without protection."

Daniel didn't move to take the buds from her palm right away. "But then how will you protect yourself?" he asked her.

"You're the civilian. I'm not." Ophelia fluttered her fingers impatiently until Daniel finally took the buds and slipped them into his own ears, making a face as he adjusted to the whine and the way that they subtly distorted ordinary sound. On the monitors, a truck shot down one of the gravel tracks that crisscrossed the island like scars, moving so fast that it was a wonder it didn't flip over into the trees. Lightning cracked across the sky, briefly turning the screen the color of limes.

"That's the road that leads to--" Jane started.

"I know where it leads," Ophelia cut her off. The place where the desk belonged.

"You knew that she wasn't here from the beginning, didn't you?" Bonnie asked Jane, face hard. Jane shrugged and looked at her feet.

"It doesn't matter," Ophelia said. She took Bonnie's hand before Jane found herself being punched in the face with it. "We go down, she goes down, too." She flashed Jane a thin smile. "And you don't strike me as enough of a true believe to take that risk, no offense. If Evelyn wants to do this on her own ground, then that's fine. She did teach me to respect my elders, after all."

Chapter Seventeen

Ophelia skipped the roads and led them into the thick woods instead as the sky shook above them. The thunder was louder than that of the waves, and the mossy rush of oncoming rain strong enough to overwhelm the sea salt. While Daniel eyed the road that led towards the pier, he didn't take the opportunity to peel away and make his escape. No one tried to dissuade him.

"Evelyn's house is that way," Jane said, pointing towards the nearest gravel road.

"I know where it is," Ophelia said, stomping into underbrush and tree growth so thick that it blocked out the moody sky above them within seconds. Cool, damp air rolled in off of the ocean and seeped into the leaves under Ophelia's still-bare feet, so that her footsteps were nearly silent. She cringed and managed not to curse too loudly when something that she was absolutely not going to look down and risk identifying wriggled across her ankle. Ophelia appreciated the silence even as she knew that there wasn't much point in trying to be stealthy, that Evelyn must surely know that they were coming and probably knew Ophelia well enough to anticipate the direction. It was the damp that she was more concerned about than anything, and the ominous rumbling of the sky overhead.

"Here," Ophelia said, passing the gun off to Daniel. It felt good to get rid of it. She gestured for him to toss the taser off into the underbrush. "That thing's going to be like a zephyr trying to do battle with a hurricane."

Daniel grimaced and hesitated before he accepted the weapon. "I hate these things."

"I'm not any more fond of them, but if you want to come along and really don't have any powers, then you have to do what you have to do." Ophelia shrugged and looked to Bonnie. "I won't hold it against you if you want to double back and grab one for yourself."

Bonnie shook her head and looked back through the trees at the building that they had just exited. From the outside, it looked like middle school, or maybe a modest office park. She shivered as she turned back. "I don't need a weapon," Bonnie said. "The rest of you were pretty impressed by my ability to get shot a lot and not fall down."

"A lot's changed since then," Ophelia said. "I hadn't realized who we were going up against."

"Then I guess that you had better be stronger than you know, too." Bonnie offered Ophelia a smile that tried very hard to be mischievous and nearly managed it, around the corners.

"She can listen to orders, she just can't follow them." Ophelia stared at the sky, but between the trees and cloud cover she couldn't see anything. She was going to have to take it on faith that if Naomi was still alive and kicking, then Marcus had to be floating around mad as hell and ready to do something about it, too. She just had to hope that the rain would hold off. The sky rumbled, a gust of wind shook the branches above Ophelia's head, and a heavy, cold splat of water struck Ophelia in the forehead. She froze. Oh, please, please have fallen from a leaf. Ophelia was even willing to accept bird poop. Two more splats followed, one against her forearm. Definitely rain.

"Move," Ophelia breathed, and started running. The damp ground beneath her feet had started to hum. J swore and snapped her fingers, surrounding them with steam. Ophelia nearly ran into a tree trunk before she could catch herself, and heard a yelp through the fog as Jane was not so lucky. She could feel her hair starting to stand on end.

"No!" Ophelia yelled. "It doesn't do us any good if we can't see where we're going!"

J was a dim white shape in the fog to Ophelia's left. She swore and snapped her fingers again. Flames shot up to a height of six inches and then sputtered out. "I'm trying to evaporate it," she said.

"There's too much." The sky punctuated Ophelia's words with another rumble, and then the downpour really began. The tree branches above their heads barely served to slow it down; Ophelia was soaked to her skin within seconds. J started swearing that much harder when she discovered that she couldn't so much as hold a spark, and Ophelia could barely even see the outlines of the other three between the dark and the downpour. She thought that she heard a ratcheting noise of a camera turning on its mechanical neck somewhere above her head, but could not be sure. Whether Evelyn was actually watching them or not, there was no denying that it was bad. Ophelia didn't even have the rubber on the bottoms of her boots to insulate her.

"Trees!" Ophelia yelled, and scrambled for the nearest trunk that looked sturdy enough to hold her without waiting to see if the others would obey. Rain had turned the bark slick, and Ophelia slid halfway down the trunk before she was able to right herself. She made it to the lowest branch mere seconds before a blue light arced through the leaves she had just left behind. Ophelia could feel her hair standing on end where it had slid loose from the bun, and Jane directly behind her looked like a dandelion ready to be blown. The blonde yelped as a spark caught her, but hurled herself into the body of the tree all the same.

"She must know that I'm with you…" Jane started, staring at her foot. She was as barefoot as Ophelia, and there were already blisters rising up on two of her toes.

"And you thought that she would care?" Ophelia grunted. The wave of electricity passed beneath them, far more interested in grounding than in climbing a tree. That wasn't going to do them the slightest bit of good if they were trapped while Evelyn was able to wander at will and pick them off at her leisure. While Ophelia was pondering this, she noticed a blinking green light above and slightly behind her head. Reaching up, her fingers met metal and plastic: a camera.

"Is everyone all right?" Ophelia called out without looking away from the machine, imagining she could feel Evelyn watching her from the other side. Three choruses came from a big old oak a few yards away. Ophelia wrenched the camera out of the tree, wires and all, and yelled, "Hey, J! Catch!" She hurled it through the air in the direction of J's voice.

J, bless her, had never needed much in the way of warning before she was willing to join in the fun. A tongue of fire shot out of the oak tree, the weakening rainfall be damned, and got the camera before it could hit the ground. Ophelia smelled plastic and dimly saw a black lump that wasn't going to be used to spy on anyone ever again. One down, who knew how many more to go. Stretching out telekinetic fingers through the trees to yank them down herself wasn't going to do her any good unless she could actually see what she was aiming for, and she would be worn out and useless long before she managed to find them all.

"What now?" Daniel asked from the oak. The rain lessened further, until Ophelia could dimly make out his face as a pale blur in the darkness. She swallowed without answering right away. Better visibility for them also meant better visibility for Evelyn.

"Yeah," J said. "What are you going to do now, Ophelia, waltz right up and ring her bell?"

"Oh, I'm definitely going to ring her bell," Ophelia snapped back, but J had a point and they both knew it. Evelyn didn't have to worry about them breaching her house so long as she kept them treed until morning. She wouldn't need cameras capable of seeing in the dark to pick them off then. Ophelia wondered if she shouldn't have retreated as soon as she had gotten Bonnie and herself free, waited until she was running at full strength again and then come back so that she could hit Evelyn with everything that she had.

And she'll have picked up and started the operation over again with Naomi and Mindy, and maybe Marcus, somewhere you won't ever be able to track down. Ophelia took a breath and dug her nails into the soft bark until one of them peeled back, a trickle of blood running down her cuticle. Jane's hair was starting to dance about her face again. It would have made her resemble Medusa if not for her comically wide eyes.

"She's getting ready to do it again," Jane whispered. Ophelia didn't have time to thank her for the observation before Bonnie said abruptly, "I see something." Her arm extended out from the shelter of her tree, pointing. The rain had weakened into a drizzle as quickly as it had become strong, and the moon was starting to come back out. Bonnie's arm gleamed and appeared jeweled in the places where the water had beaded.

Ophelia looked in the direction Bonnie was indicating and saw a small hut of cement, with a tin roof and several matte black rectangles resting across the top. The trees had been chopped well away to form a small clearing so that as little shade as possible could reach them. Solar panels. They were closer to Evelyn's house than Ophelia had realized.

"Great work, Bonnie," Ophelia said. She extended a tentative push and thought that she saw the water beading across the top of the nearest panel shift, but could not be sure. They were still talking about a distance of at least twenty yards, probably a couple hundred pounds, and with Ophelia still feeling dizzy from the last of the drugs. "I have a plan."

Bonnie turned her head. A shaft of moonlight managed to come down just so in order for Ophelia to see her expression. It was calm. "Bullshit," Bonnie said, and leapt from the tree as a second line of blue-white went crackling through the wet leaves. Ophelia screamed out a warning, too late. Bonnie sailed from the tree in a graceful arc, landed, and immediately went rigid. The electricity lit her up; Ophelia could see the cords standing out in her neck and smelled burning flesh. Jane made a desperate noise and leaned over her branch in order to be sick. That burned when it hit the ground, too.

Unbelievably, Bonnie only stood still for a second or two before she began to run. There was enough light for Ophelia to make out her progress as she bobbed through the trees in the direction of the shed, not stumbling even once in spite of the roots and underbrush that should have been snaring her. Ophelia wondered if it was the same path that Bonnie had taken upon her escape.

Bonnie reached the door of the shed, screeched when her hand made contact with the metal of the door, and disappeared inside. A second later, there was a flash of light so bright that Ophelia had to throw her arm up in front of her eyes and nearly tumbled from the tree, especially when pops and green flashes made several of the trees seem alive. A smell of hot metal filled the air. Ophelia thought that it was safe and started to lower her arm, only for a second, even brighter flash to echo above the trees. She didn't think that it was her imagination when she heard a woman scream.

Ophelia leapt down from the tree without thinking and raced towards the hut. Damp, half-rotted leaves squelched under her feet, but there was no surge of electricity through her body. She could hear the others, Jane excluded, jumping down to follow her, Daniel grunting slightly as he landed off-balance and corrected himself.

Bonnie emerged from the hut a mere second before Ophelia could grab for the door. Her hair was sticking straight up, her bangs in particular pointing up towards the trees and making her look like nothing so much as a half-finished unicorn. She was holding her hands out in front of her like a supplicant. Ophelia saw that Bonnie's palms were burned nearly black. Blisters extended as far up as her elbows before they faded. As Ophelia watched, the process ran itself in reverse down Bonnie's arms, ending with her blackened palms and then swirling in tighter and tighter circles towards the middle until only healthy flesh remained. A few pieces of charred skin broke away and drifted towards the ground. Bonnie made a feral sound and scrubbed them out with her foot.

"That bitch is not getting any more of my DNA," she said.

Ophelia released the breath that she had been holding and reached out so that she could comb Bonnie's bangs down. Static electricity sparked from Bonnie's hair to Ophelia's fingers. "How many times do I have to tell you," she said, "that it doesn't matter if you can heal yourself, you shouldn't have to do crap like that?" There were several places beyond the shed where the earth was faintly mounded over, the leaves not quite as thick. Ophelia hoped to keep Bonnie's attention fixed on her so that the girl would not notice them. She had a feeling that she knew where the owners of Evelyn's collection of mementos had come to rest after Evelyn had no further use for them.

Bonnie shrugged away from Ophelia, took a turn at trying to tame her hair for herself, and gave up within seconds as she apparently realized that it was a lost cause. Her grin was a little wild around the edges. "Same way you don't have to pick things up with your mind, but sometimes you just need to pitch a fit," she said. "Am I crazy, or did I hear Evelyn scream?"

"You and I," J said, sidling up to Bonnie and claiming her arm, "are going to be the very best of friends, I can tell."

"You're definitely crazy," Ophelia said. "But you weren't hearing things." She could feel her mouth forming and unfriendly smile. "I think you might have blown her fuses, the biological and the mechanical." She pointed in the direction of the second and larger flash. "House is that way. You took out the cameras, too, so she can't see us coming. I want the two of you to stay in the trees while I approach the house and flush Evelyn out. If she used Marcus's designs in her lab, then she probably won't have thought to change things up on her house." There was a whisper overhead that Ophelia swore was the jet, but she looked up and saw nothing but sky.

There's still a lot of cloud cover, Ophelia told herself, refusing to lose hope.

J sniffed. "Why do you get to have all of the fun?" she asked.

"Because I'm the one who came up with the plan." When J started to look sulky, Ophelia went on sweetly, "Hey, I don't tell you how to knock over liquor stores."

J flipped Ophelia off without heat. "Who said I planned those?" she asked, and then gave Ophelia back a smile every bit as demure and fake. "Allegedly."

"Starting to think I should have taken my chances with a boat," Daniel said.

"You can still leave," Ophelia told him seriously. "It would probably be safer for you, to wait down near the shore until this is over."

As pale as Daniel was, the moonlight that managed to come down through the tree branches washed him silver. His teeth glowed for a moment as he smiled. "And miss the excitement?" he asked. "Not a chance. How can I help?"

"Watch her," Ophelia said. She pointed towards Jane, just now coming down from the tree after assuring herself that it was safe. "I don't want her warning them."

Daniel nodded, and J and Bonnie seemed ready. Ophelia slipped off in the direction of the house. Her eyes had been adjusting to the dark before the flash had put her back at square one. She listened carefully to make up for it, startling at ever whisper of movement caused by wind or small animals going about their nocturnal business. Evelyn is as blind as you are, Ophelia reminded herself. Whether that was a good thing or a bad remained to be seen: cornered people were hard to predict. A dull black gleam across a hulking shape greeted Ophelia as she slipped to the edge of the clearing that made up Evelyn's house, the immaculately groomed lawn that could have belonged in Beverly Hills if the house hadn't ruined everything by being a practical size. Evelyn didn't like ostentation. The house was two stories of stone, built with materials designed to withstand the constant corrosive influence of the salt air. There were flowerpots ringing the porch, nearly identical to the one that Ophelia had knocked off her family's porch so many years ago.

The dark shape resolved itself into a helicopter once Ophelia's eyes recovered, and she risked a short run across the damp grass to crouch beneath the tail. The air was sweet with mingled scents of rain and the green blades being crushed beneath the chopper's weight. No lights were on in the house. Ophelia still thought she saw a shadow move across one of the windows. She slunk around the side of the helicopter, using it to shield herself from sight. The blades whined to life just as she reached the door; Ophelia swore violently. She hadn't realized that the pilot was already waiting. He was dressed all in black like the others to eat up the light rather than reflect it back.

Perhaps hearing Ophelia's unladylike language even over the buffeting of the blades, the pilot leaned out the open helicopter door. He had a gun in his hand. A flash of yellow light burst to life at the very edge of the woods, illuminating J as she juggled the flames with a butter-wouldn't-melt smile. Ophelia didn't know if the pilot had time to realize or appreciate that J was also flipping him off as she played with the fire. The pilot jerked his gun around in her direction and fired. Ophelia didn't know if he hit what he was aiming for or not, as a shadow—Bonnie—whipped in front of J and bore the both of them out of sight. Ophelia grabbed for the pilot's arm, wrenched his wrist to the side until she heard something crack, and yanked him down from the aircraft. A solid whack to the head courtesy of the side of the helicopter put him down for the count. Ophelia checked his pulse and then pulled the gun from his hand so that she could unload it and throw the bullets in many directions.

"Playing by my rules now," Ophelia whispered, though she couldn’t hear herself speak over the thwock-thwock-thwock of the rotating blades. She decided not to shut the helicopter down on the off chance that Evelyn had not heard the gunshot over them and skirted across the remainder of the lawn to the back door. She had been right, Evelyn had not changed her security system from Marcus's design, and it was under a minute before Ophelia had it yielding to her hand. She slipped into the darkened house feeling as though the moon was casting a silvery spotlight onto her back.

Chapter Eighteen

The difference between the crisp, damp smell of the woods washed clean outside, marred only slightly by the taint of helicopter fuel, and the silent, still house was immediate. Ophelia paused just inside the door and listened hard, nothing but her own heartbeat echoing back at her. The curtains were drawn over the kitchen windows, and in the windows of all the rooms beyond as well if the thick, nearly tangible darkness was anything to go by. The air smelled stale and as if it didn't get moved by human activity often any longer; it cast a sour tang onto the back of Ophelia's throat that she thought might be human sweat or spoiling food. She remembered that she still had her hand against the metal doorknob and pulled it away quickly.

Bonnie's stunt must have fried the electricity in the house. Ophelia took a breath and reminded herself that she knew the layout of this place as well as she knew Marcus's house and her own and took a gliding step forward. Her damp, grass-covered feet made barely a sound on the kitchen tile. If I was a deranged former superhero, where would I go? More importantly, where would I put any prisoners that I wanted to take with me? Ophelia refused to entertain the possibility that Evelyn might have simply killed Naomi or Marcus and moved on. Not with the files that Ophelia had seen on her computer. Not with how important Evelyn had thought this project to be.

The kitchen opened into a spacious dining room floored in marble tile, chosen for its low electrical conductivity. Ophelia's feet made a faint noise as mud made them want to stick to the floor. A pencil-thin ray of light between the dining room curtains was suddenly eaten by shadow. Ophelia threw herself backwards to avoid the invisible blow without thinking.

Not fast enough. Catherine's fist still brushed against her jaw. Even that was enough to send constellations spiraling in front of her eyes and lift her off of her feet entirely. Ophelia landed on her back against the marble and slid until she was stopped by the wall. It wasn't until her mouth filled with blood that she realized she had bitten her tongue; her thoughts were slow and taffy-thick.

Ophelia's eyes adjusted to the dark enough to pick out Catherine looming over her, her teeth picking up more than its fair share of the room's scant light. She was grinning like a chimpanzee.

"Oh, bitch, you got no idea the hurt I'm going to put on you," Catherine whispered, nearly crooning. She fisted her hand through the collar of Ophelia's bodysuit and lifted her from the floor with one hand. Ophelia was taller than Catherine and probably outweighed her by at least twenty pounds of muscle, but she still found herself with her toes unable to scrape the floor. "I'm gonna ruin that manicure by breaking every last one of your expensive fingers--" Ophelia kicked out at Catherine's midsection with as much force as she could muster while her thoughts were lazing about the inside of her head like the wax of a lava lamp and a few of her back teeth were rattling loose in their sockets. Her foot slipped off harmlessly, and Catherine made a soft cooing sound before shaking her so hard that Ophelia thought she might have to spit out those loose teeth.

"Catherine." Even now, there was something in Ophelia that wanted to straighten at that tone in Evelyn's voice. She turned her head as much as she could with Catherine fisting her bodysuit so tightly against her throat that breathing was a painful struggle, watched Evelyn enter the room from the staircase. Her clothes were dark, her face pale. Ophelia could see a trickle of blood running down from one nostril. Atta girl, Bonnie. "Take her to the other two. We can still use her."

Catherine frowned, and her grip on Ophelia tightened to the point that Ophelia started seeing white at the edges of her vision. "We already took her DNA," she said. Her lower lip pooched out. "I can do everything that she does." To demonstrate, Catherine tugged the curtains back from the dining room window without ever going near them. Ophelia saw two shadows flit by too quickly to be branches swaying in the post-rain breeze.

Evelyn snarled and lunged forward to close the drapes. The moonlight fell upon her as she did so, and Ophelia realized something: Evelyn was getting old. "It will wear off," she said. "And then what will you be?" Evelyn's gaze flitted up to Ophelia. Her expression softened in much the same way that it had at the lab. Ophelia kicked her feet back and forth at nothing. "I truly am sorry for this, Ophelia," Evelyn told her. "I hope that there will be a day when you understand why it was necessary and forgive me."

"You're better off killing me now," Ophelia managed to rasp, "and just freezing some of my blood."

"Now there's an idea," Catherine murmured. She began to squeeze. Evelyn made an alarmed sound and rushed forward.

Several things happened at once.

An orange glow lit up the edges of the drapes covering the window. Ophelia threw up her arm to shield her eyes and kicked Catherine again. Catherine shouted and hurled Ophelia across the room, not because Ophelia had managed to hurt her this time when she had failed before, but because the dining room window was exploding inwards on a torrent of flame and glass. Evelyn shouted; she and Catherine both threw up their hands and ducked. The drapes lit up from floor to ceiling within seconds. Ophelia scooted backwards on her rear and concentrated. The kitchen cabinets flew open. Plates came sailing out like boomerangs, shattering against the far walls where Ophelia missed and slamming up against Evelyn and Catherine both where she didn't. The edge of one caught Catherine directly in the mouth; she spit out blood with teeth in it and made an animal noise. Bleeding from her temple, Evelyn raised her hands and pointed them at Ophelia. Oh, fu--

Not trusting her legs yet, Ophelia rolled to the side. White and blue lightning shot through the air and struck the floor where she had been. Her hair stood up from the impact; she could feel a faint charge even through the marble. Ophelia got her feet under her and leapt away less than a second before Evelyn struck again. The barest edge hit Ophelia's heel, and suddenly it was as if she didn't have a left leg any longer. Ophelia tumbled to the ground and barely avoided biting off the tip of her tongue when her chin hit the stone. The lightning arced from Evelyn's hands to the television, blowing out the screen and sending glass flying about the room. Ophelia barely managed to get a shield up in time to prevent permanent disfigurement. Catherine wasn't so lucky—she howled and clawed at the glittering points that now arrayed her forehead, her cheeks—but Evelyn didn't appear to hear her. She advanced on Ophelia, the clicking sound her heels would have ordinarily made across the marble eaten up by the loudest boom of thunder that Ophelia had ever heard. It felt as if it were coming from inside her head.

Evelyn's hair had come undone from its pins and would have tumbled down around her shoulders if not for the electricity in the air. She had a head full of snakes and, in the cold white glow of her lightning bolts, the most frightening eyes that Ophelia had ever seen.

"I'm sorry to have to do this, Ophelia," Evelyn said below her lying eyes. "But I think that I've given you quite enough chances to come around, don't you?" Ophelia's shield dipped inward under the voltage when Evelyn struck, the blue-white shock ultimately diverting and striking the wall to either side of Ophelia's body. Trapping her there. Evelyn held those bolts with one hand as she would the leash of a pair of rowdy dogs and raised the other high into the air. The flame in the dining room was growing quickly, finding good fodder in the table and the walls when it could not burn the floor, and was licking its way eagerly across the walls. Ophelia could smell the paint melting.

Ophelia lifted an armchair with her mind and hurled it at Evelyn. Evelyn turned the bolt meant for Ophelia onto the furniture instead. The stuffing exploded in a snow-like spray (a few bits reaching the fire, which gobbled them up, found them good, and hurriedly raced inward for more), but Evelyn was still hit hard by the frame. She tumbled to the floor; the arcs of electricity to either side of Ophelia's body disappeared.

There was a thump from one of the upper stories. Ophelia barely heard it over the ringing in her ears. She scrambled up to her feet and sprinted for the stairs, feeling a warm trickle down her face that could have been blood or sweat, it tasted salty either way when it reached her mouth. The fire was roaring higher than ever before; Ophelia wasn't certain that she was going to be able to get back down again. But if Naomi was up there…

The front door buckled inward in its frame, glowing brilliant orange in the center and the control panel to the side melting and trickling down the wall in runny fingers, and then burst inward on a long tongue of flame. Ophelia barely managed to leap away before sparks landed in her hair. "Not helping, J!" she twisted around and screamed. Ophelia put her hand upon the banister as the world softened and tilted on her suddenly, used it to pull herself up the stairs and would have willed the drugs out of her body if she could. She noticed at the last of possible seconds that the banister was brass, and thus she was only knocked into the opposite wall rather than killed. The plaster behind her shoulders was growing hot, and the air was harsh with smoke. She could barely see Evelyn standing at the foot of the stairs. Ophelia focused her attention on the fire and gathered it up with difficulty to hurl Evelyn's way. More sweat/blood poured from her nose and the edge of her hairline to fill her mouth. It was always harder when trying to lift many small objects rather than one big one, so many things to keep track of at once.

Ophelia had only just reached the top of the stairs when Catherine leaped from the smoke and caught her hard in the center of her back. Ophelia twisted and punched her in the kidneys, seeking to break her hold before Catherine managed to break her spine. The blonde had to have leaped straight up from the foot of the stairs to get on her that fast. What, you thought that her legs weren't going to have super-strength like the rest of her? The glass shards were still sticking out of Catherine's face like a bloodied version of Naomi's sequins, and her teeth were broken and jagged when she smiled.

"It hadenth worn oth yeth, bith," Catherine spit down at Ophelia, getting blood and a chip or two of tooth on Ophelia's cheek in the process. The smoke behind her started to glitter. Catherine had used Ophelia's stolen powers to drag the broken crockery and glass from below up the stairs with her. Not expertly, though, as there was a tic beneath her eye that had little to do with madness and a steady stream of blood out of her nose and across her mouth and chin.

Ophelia smiled. "You could break my spine," she said.

Catherine frowned. One of the half-teeth that she had left, broken into a jagged point befitting a shark, cut into her lower lip. She licked the blood away without appearing to notice. "Not yeth," she grunted. Catherine pushed down on Ophelia's collarbone so hard that she was afraid it was going to crack, and it was hard to breathe until Catherine had leaned her weight back again. "Hath to breakth your fingerth firth. Promithed."

Ophelia went on as if Catherine hadn't spoken even though her chest hurt and she was very aware of the power in Catherine's short, knobby body. "Evelyn's not going to care, though. She likes elegance and stylishness, which you are so clearly not." Catherine probably didn't realize, but the smoke twisting up the stairwell pulsed to and fro as her face reddened and her eyes narrowed. Ophelia leaned as close to Catherine's face as she could. "And that's why you want to hang onto my powers as long as you can, isn't it? So she'll appreciate you?" Ophelia let out a soft laugh. "Give it up, sweetheart, you're only embarrassing yourself. You're just a cheap knock-off. I'm the original."

Catherine froze for perhaps half a second. Ophelia waited for a broken neck, and hoped that Catherine would be violent enough to kill her instantly rather than leaving her paralyzed to suffocate and burn. The smoke behind Catherine swelled up in a glittering column, spreading out to encompass the entire landing. The floor beneath Ophelia's hands was growing hot to the touch and, stone or not, the entire house was beginning to creak and sway.

"I'll thow your cheapth, you thupid whore!" Catherine screamed at her. Ophelia closed her eyes and threw up the strongest shield that she could, feeling it peppered with glass a few seconds later. It hurt almost as if her skin was still being hit. Catherine let go of Ophelia and kept screaming. Ophelia opened her eyes and watched Catherine stagger backwards with even more glass peppering her face where it had rebounded, blood gushing out of her ears. The smoke-filled glass was swirling around her and drawing blood from every inch of her exposed skin, as if she were being eaten alive by a swarm of insects. She reached the stairs again, hovered for a second with her foot hanging almost comically over the empty air, and then tumbled down and out of sight amidst the smoke. Ophelia waited until she couldn't hear her screaming any longer before she got back to her feet.

"Don't borrow something you don’t know how to use," she muttered. "You didn't see me trying to bench-press the couch, did you?" Her knees knocked together and spilled her sideways into the much-too-hot wall. Ophelia righted herself and wobbled as quickly as she could down the hallway. Her eyes were burning, and her lungs felt as if she had inhaled snips of wire. She staggered in the direction of the thump, praying that she hadn't gotten disoriented. There wasn't going to be time to double back if she had.

Ophelia reached the master suite and nearly grabbed the brass doorknob before she remembered herself and kicked the wood directly below it instead. As paranoid as Evelyn had become, Ophelia was slightly surprised that the interior doors hadn't been replaced with steel to match the exterior ones. Though the cost was a foot that immediately went tingling and numb, the door swung open to reveal the darkness beyond.

Even when she had stayed in this house, Ophelia had rarely entered Evelyn's bedroom. She had passed it with the door open often enough to remember that there had been furniture there, the same desk that Evelyn had installed in the lab when she had started spending most of her time there. It was all gone now. There were two lab tables set up in the center of the room instead, and the floor was littered with reports and equations printed on white paper and half-finished thoughts marked out on legal pads. File cabinets lined the walls that had once contained a dresser and pictures, their drawers pulled out to hang so crazily that they looked like drooping lips. Three attaches sat on the nearest table, stuffed with papers. Ophelia craned her head and saw the logo of the Department of Defense. It did nothing to chase from the room a sour scent that Ophelia could pick up even over the billowing smoke: it smelled like a trapped animal had been in here. Or a woman who had gone completely out of her mind a long time ago without any of them noticing.

There was a great roaring from the hallway as the stairwell finally gave in and collapsed. Ophelia dropped to her knees, choking on the thick black smoke. She heard a faint noise from the window over the roar of the flames and crawled towards it. Ophelia ran across the bodies by touch as much as she did sight, and recoiled when her hand began to tingle and her head to swim.

"It's me!" Ophelia leaned forward and yelled against Mindy's ear. Mindy nodded, her eyes wide and red and tears cutting trails through the soot on her face. She was cuffed at hand and foot, and so was Naomi beside her. Naomi was also gagged, her lashes fluttering down against her cheeks as she just started to come around. Packing them up like spare snacks for a long trip, Ophelia thought to herself.

"I have a faster metabolism than normal because of--" Mindy tried to yell and then trailed off on a series of wet, broken coughs as smoke flooded her lungs. Ophelia was glad that they were swinging around to telling the truth now, but there wasn't time for heart to hearts. She put her hand over the lock on Mindy's handcuffs, which were by a pure damned miracle standard police issue and not something that Marcus had designed to stump Houdini himself, and concentrated until she heard the click. She released Mindy's ankles next. The cuffs had never been designed for such a use and had pressed heavy, raw weals into Mindy's flesh. She winced as she leaned over to start rubbing the circulation back.

Ophelia yanked the gag from Naomi's mouth and hurled it in the direction of the door. The whole house was shuddering; the floor beneath was almost too hot to continue kneeling upon. Ophelia made short work of Naomi's restraints and shook her as hard as she dared, whispering against her ear, "Baby, baby, come on, you have to wake up."

Naomi stirred and made a muffled sound against Ophelia's cheek. Ophelia thought that she felt Naomi's eyelashes fluttering, but that could have been the smoke. "O?" Naomi breathed. She sounded drunk.

At least she was breathing. "Watch the door," Ophelia ordered Mindy. Mindy rose and nodded into a half-crouch, the highest that she could go without choking on the smoke. She wavered and put her hand against Ophelia's shoulder to steady herself. Ophelia flinched slightly before she turned back to Naomi. "Wake up, sweetheart. We have to go out the window. I'm going to need you to sing."

Naomi's eyes fluttered open a little further, and she put her hand against Ophelia's arm. She felt cold even against the approaching fire. "No fucking way, O," Naomi slurred. "You don't have your 'buds."

"Hill of beans, blah, blah, blah." Ophelia put her mouth right up against Naomi's ear. "If you love me, you'll do this." Someone shrieked outside. "Actually scratch that. You'll do it because you know it's the right thing and that's just who you are."

"You crazy bitch, you know I do," Naomi said. She drew in the deepest breath that she could.

"Not yet." Ophelia grabbed Naomi's hand hard and reached for Mindy with her other one. A tingle passed between them and then faded away. "I need everything I have," Ophelia warned Mindy, who nodded. She took a deep breath, gathered up everything inside of her that made her real, and unleashed a greater wave than she had ever managed before in her life. The room's window shattered outward. The flames just sampling the edge of the door lunged forward in a twisting funnel that seemed alive, seeking the oxygen. Ophelia managed to fight out a large enough bubble of air around the three of them so that they weren't burned alive, but the flames still licked close enough to turn the three of them a fresh lobster red. "Now!" she screamed at Naomi. Eyes wide and clearly reluctant, Naomi still whipped around and unleashed her wail. The fire shot up to the ceiling as if being shoved by a physical hand. Mindy ducked, blood immediately rushing from the ear that she could not shield, while Ophelia was not so lucky. She felt something pop, and then there was hot blood running down her face and no sound at all from the fire. She ground her teeth together and motioned for Naomi and Mindy to follow her out the window. She didn't have to land them gently, she just had to manage to bring them down softly enough so that nobody died. Naomi went first, then Mindy, and Ophelia brought up the rear so that she could hold the flames back from as long as possible. It wasn't until Naomi turned back, balancing woozily against the roof, and the fire reacted that Ophelia realized she was still screaming. Ophelia felt the air move, but she couldn't hear a damned thing.

With Naomi and Mindy safe, Ophelia scrambled over the ledge herself. Shards of glass cut into her palms. She grit her teeth. So long as everyone makes it to the ground alive.

A charred hand darted over the window ledge, grabbing Ophelia by the arm. She thought that she probably screamed at the face that grinned at her, but could not be sure. Evelyn's lips were gone, burned away by the flames. So was most of her hair, and her clothing. Her skin was blackened in most places and bubbling in the few where it wasn't, and parts of her flesh rubbed away against Ophelia's arm as Ophelia tried to jerk free. She could feel ozone gathering in the air like a still, hot plain just before the lightning came down.

Afterwards, Ophelia would be almost certain that Evelyn was the one to get her legs back under her for one final, desperate leap, that Mindy didn't actually yank her out and onto the roof with them. The hand that she still had on Mindy began to tingle again. The firelight lit up Mindy's eyes and revealed that they had gone almost entirely over into pupil. Evelyn hooked a hand that was more like a claw at their faces, the sour reek of insanity rising up even stronger than the smoke. There was a great popping that Ophelia could feel even if she could not hear it. The house began to collapse, and they fell with it.

Just get everyone down to the ground. Worry about if it's pretty later. Ophelia pictured the air underneath the three of them becoming solid, a gently sloping slide that would take them from the edge of the room and safely down to the edge of the lawn without so much as a bruise. She closed her eyes tight and pictured the details the same way that Evelyn had taught her years before. Hot air blasted the back of her neck. Something inside of her gave way, covering her lower face and neck with blood as it went. She couldn't tell if she was screaming or not. A few seconds later, she landed on the lawn with a thump that rattled her teeth in their sockets. Naomi pulled her down to the ground and shielded them both with her own body as burning debris from the house blew out in an arc as wide as the shrapnel thrown from a bomb.

Mindy rose to her feet first, her pupils still impossibly wide and making her look like a Kewpie doll, or maybe a silent-movie coquette. She held her hands out in front of her carefully. Mindy's mouth moved, and though Ophelia could not hear the words, she parsed out the meaning well enough. I've got to get rid of this. Ophelia nodded and watched Mindy walk on stiff legs over to the helicopter that had managed to keep running through all of this. Mindy ducked into the cockpit and laid her hands upon the control panels. They flared white and threw out a shower of sparks that made Ophelia jump even though she had been expecting it. The still-wet grass beneath Ophelia's thighs and backside tingled like clothes just out of the dryer when she had forgotten to throw in the anti-static sheet, and then just as abruptly the feeling was gone again. Mindy still had a peculiar, stiff-legged walk as she came back to them. J and Bonnie ran from the edge of the woods. J started to rush towards Mindy and then stopped and regarded her solemnly with an expression that Ophelia could not read. Both sets of lips were moving, but of course Ophelia could not hear what was being said. Bonnie went to her knees in front of Ophelia and grabbed for the hand that Naomi wasn't occupying.

Ophelia took several deep breaths and did her best to put on a reassuring expression for Bonnie's sake. She only then realized how much blood was covering her, and how it was a good idea not to try to stand just yet. Naomi probably realized how frightened was, as Ophelia was squeezing her hand tightly enough to make her knuckles hurt, and Naomi was clutching back every bit as hard; Ophelia made certain that her grasp on Bonnie remained confident and reassuring.

Daniel rushed from the woods towards them, only pausing for a moment when the heat from the burning rubble that had once been the house hit him. A new bruise was purpling upon one cheekbone. Ophelia didn't need to hear what he was saying to get the gist: Jane had seen an opportunity to escape and taken it. As nothing about the woman had spoken to her having the wherewithal to plan and execute anything on the level of Evelyn, Ophelia didn't see any fruit in pursuing her yet.

Daniel knelt in front of Ophelia. His arm brushed against hers, and something tingled. He jerked away. When Naomi said something that Ophelia could only see to him, he reluctantly put his hand back against Ophelia's arm, his expression dubious. A different kind of shock rolled through her.

It lasted less than three seconds, but it felt warm. The sound drifted back into the world by degrees, and the numerous bruises and burns that she had sustained in the house faded away. The first noise she heard over the crackling of the flames was Naomi whispering, "Love you, love you, love you" against her ear. Ophelia breathed out a sob and pulled Naomi against her so hard that Naomi's words burst out of her lungs on a wheeze. Bonnie and J let out identical joyous whoops and began twirling each other in circles, singing a profane chorus that they seemed to be making up on the fly. They cheered even more loudly when Marcus's jet whined overhead, discharging a load of hundreds of gallons of salt water on the burning remains of Evelyn's house.

Daniel sank back onto his heels, face gray and hands shaking. About a dozen different emotions flashed over his face, sorrow and wonder being the last ones to fight it out for space. "I didn't," he started, and then swallowed. "I didn't know that I could do that."

"Told you," Ophelia said. "They didn't take people for nothing." She felt Naomi tense up beside her and jerked around, suddenly wary, as Mindy nearly collapsed onto the steaming grass. It took her a long moment to meet Ophelia's eyes.

"Your feet are all sooty." Ophelia finally said the first thing that she could think of.

Mindy let out a faint chuckle and pushed at her tangled hair, even though it was no more of a mess than it ever was. "Your everything is all bloody."

"You could have told us, Mindy," Ophelia said. She tried to keep the sharpness out of her voice, but it was hard. "What is the worst thing that you thought would happen?"

Mindy's look said enough. "If your power was that you could destroy everyone most important to you, would ya'll really be spreading that info around?" She chewed at the edge of her thumbnail and threw a disgusted look towards the smoldering remains of the house. Marcus set his jet down, clipping the dead helicopter out of the way in the process. "Bad enough that I let her know."

Ophelia snaked her arm around Naomi's waist; as heavily as they were leaning against each other, it was going to be pure hell when the two of them actually had to stand up. Ophelia felt her girlfriend's skin touching hers, thought of Marcus and Miranda and now Bonnie, and answered, "I would trust that everyone most important to me would have my back so that that didn't happen."

Marcus exited his jet and walked across the steaming remains of the grass. He smelled like salt water and looked pissed. Ophelia found that she could get up to her feet, after all, when it came to wrapping him into a hug the likes of which she hadn't dared to give him since they had broken up. Marcus's hands spanned Ophelia's back, and said quietly, "I know," even though Ophelia had yet to speak. "It's all right."

Ophelia stepped back and reclaimed her space at Naomi's side. Her eyes were pricking; she told herself it was the smoke in the air. "Come on," she said to them all. J and Bonnie reluctantly stopped dancing. Daniel and Mindy tilted their heads to the side and looked surprised at being addressed, but for very different reasons. "We're not done yet."

Chapter Nineteen

"Look," Ophelia said, "the point is that I told you that I would keep our dinner reservation. I kept it. Why are you complaining?" Naples was a beautiful city at night. Ophelia had spent six hours earlier that day half-napping in a luxury spa and had a luscious and undeniably fattening meal resting in her belly. She was already doing calculations in her head to see if they could get everyone in there, and maybe their families, too. It was long past time they started talking to each other and knocking off this lone-wolf nonsense that left them all vulnerable.

"I'm complaining," Miranda said in aggrieved tones, pausing a moment so that she could adjust one of the straps on her heeled sandal. "Because I thought that I would get, you know, a phone call. 'I'm not dead, the world didn't end, you don't have to cash out all of your stocks and run like hell.'"

"I had already told you to run like hell, for one," Ophelia said, holding up a finger to illustrate. She was wearing her favorite Giuseppe Canetti heels and a new Roberto Cavalli dress, she had her hair down and was caught up on her sleep, and she felt good. Good enough to poke her sister into playing with her whether said sister wanted to play or not. "And for two, if you stopped long enough to cash out stocks then clearly I did not impress upon you the seriousness of the situation."

Miranda made a face at her. "Point being," she insisted, "the next time that I have to flee the country so that you can go be a hero, I would appreciate a little more notice that you're okay. Like, more notice than you showing up in a private jet." Her eyes widened slightly. "That wasn't the jet, was it?"

Ophelia threw her head back and laughed, she couldn't help it. "Oh, please," she said. "Like Marcus is ever going to let anyone else behind the wheel of that thing. I think he would cry if I even touched the controls." She nudged her sister in the ribs. "I have to say, I'm impressed. Who would have thought that you'd be able to get out of the country to fast without raising any flags?"

Miranda grinned, and Ophelia was struck by how much she resembled their mother, especially when she was wearing a light, summery dress rather than her usual business suit. Ophelia hoped Josh told Miranda often how pretty she was. "Do you really think that you are the only one in this family who can make things happen?" she asked.

Ophelia put her elbow playfully into her sister's side again, froze when a figure darted away through the shadows between street lamps, just far enough away that Ophelia could not get them with her telekinesis. Not on her old limits, anyway, as Ophelia had been working hard at improving what she could do since they had taken apart what was left of Evelyn's island and tried to put the bodies to rest. None of them had identification, and their kind didn't usually make Missing Persons. Ophelia was still trying to reconcile the Evelyn that she had known against the one who could do something so monstrous, and that was before they touched on the machinations of this MLP.

Miranda said irritably, "Oh, my God, The Sun did not seriously follow you all the way to Italy, did they?"

"No," Ophelia said, "they sure didn't. Stay here, Miranda." She didn't wait for an answer. Ophelia started stalking off towards the alleyway, heels on her feet and lack of a mask on her face be damned, because if there was one thing that she knew how to do by now, it was how to fight in one and without the other.

There were two figures dressed in black attempting to slip over the fence at the back of the alley. Ophelia stood at the mouth and let them get almost to the point of safety before her power flowed out of her and rattled the trashcans. For a few seconds she thought that they were going to ignore her altogether before they wisely decided to hop down and face her. Each of them had a gun slung into a shoulder holster made of leather so matte black that it was difficult to pick it out from their clothes. Ophelia narrowed her eyes and told herself that she wouldn't make a move until they did. It was so much easier now that it had been, and her reach was so much farther.

"Hello, boys," Ophelia said in a conversational tone that had just the slightest hint of glitter lying underneath. Her heels made a clicking sound across the pavement as she strode forward. "And which tabloid cuts your paycheck?"

"Miss Simmons," one of them said, stepping towards her. "I think that we have a misunderstanding here."

"It's Ms. Simmons, thank you," Ophelia informed him crisply. He was holding a camera in his hands. Rather than bothering to get close enough so that she could yank it from his reach by hand, Ophelia unfurled a lazy push and dashed it against the brick wall. When that didn't do sufficient damage to it for Ophelia's taste, she threw it again, and again, until there was nothing left to the machine but plastic and metal shards that even the most optimistic tech would not be able to piece back together again. The man gaped at her. "Oh, look at that. I'm just so very clumsy."

"Do you realize what you just did?" the man asked her.

"Destroying government property?" Ophelia shot back. "Put in on your expense account. I know that the other thing wasn't any big shock to you." The pair traded a nervous glance, and then another when Ophelia leaned forward and all up into their space. "Yeah, the other woman that you were dealing with? She's not in charge anymore, and I'm not going to negotiate with you, let alone beg. From now on, all of those people that you're watching? We're looking out for one another." She leaned closer still until, expensive dress and heels or not, there was no mistaking her for anything but a threat. "From now on, we're in it for the long fight." Ophelia tilted her head to the side and smiled pretty, because she was sure that the camera she had just destroyed was not the only one pointed at her. "Now, you boys be sure to enjoy the sights before you go home," she all but cooed before turning and walking away to rejoin her sister. There would be work to do in the morning, but for now she was only going to enjoy the night.

End

Coming Spring 2012: Fire With Fire, the second book in the Super series!

Chapter One

It was muggy out. J's hair, short as it was and not terribly prone to behaving in the first place, stuck up in tufts like corn stubble all over her head. The humidity made her skin feel greasy and unwashed. It was nine pm, but the day was making sure to stomp its feet and have a good pout before it gave way to night. San Antonio summers were always at their worst just before the summer broke in favor of the fall.

J scrubbed her fingers through her hair, doing little to coax it into good behavior. She had rolled the car windows down less than a mile out of the car lot, after the air conditioning had made a horrible squawking noise and then let out a whiff of smoke that smelled like burning chemicals. If the tangle of wires wrapped together under the dash to keep it running crapped out on her, J would have to turn to prayer. And the damned thing would have been sold to some poor single mother at twice Blue Book and with twenty-three percent interest. See, she was the good guy here. Anyone could see it.

J drummed her fingers against the steering wheel in time to the song playing in her head, not daring to turn on the radio while the windows were down. She checked the time on her watch, drummed a little more. The liquor store across the street, the kind whose proprietors never hesitated to let you know that they specialized in wine and fine spirits, thank you, for connoisseurs and not just your workaday drunks. Its lights were still on. A cream-colored Lexus was the only vehicle in the lot. J checked her watch again. It was now 9:04 p.m. The presumable owner of the Lexus, a blonde woman wearing a suit the same color as her vehicle, took her purchases to the register.

"Naughty, naughty," she murmured to herself. By Texas law, the store was forbidden to sell alcohol past nine in the evening. Not that J had really expected the letter of the law to be adhered to in a neighborhood so conspicuously filled with both money and bullshit, but, much like discovering that the car was a piece of crap, it salved her conscience. She hunched down lower in her seat and continued watching.

The woman left the store and walked towards her car. As soon as she was out of the lot, the neon sign that had probably caused fits with the zoning committee went dark. J grinned left the car, drifting back into the shadows so that she could shove a long brunette wig over her hair and pull a pair of black leather gloves from her pocket. She detested the things—as hot as it was, sliding her hands into them made a disgusting sound similar to that of a condom being put to use—but it was time to go to work.

J took advantage of a broken streetlight in order to slip across the road and into the alley behind the liquor store, counting herself lucky for it. She could already hear the angry letters being written to the city council.

Pretty façade out front or not, in the back the alley was just like any other in the city. Maybe the alley cats were slightly plumper, as there was a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant a few blocks down that had recently been written up in the Express-News a few weeks back, but the differences ended there. The liquor store's back door was heavy steel with no handle on the outside. There was a camera solemnly monitoring the alley and four parking spaces marked out by hand with spray paint for employees. Altogether, it was a long way from the immaculate front lot and storefront, but the single car parked in one of the spaces was still an Audi. J's last-minute misgivings melted away, just like they always did.

J sank down onto her heels just outside of the camera's visual range and considered. The owner of the joint wouldn't take more than twenty minutes to balance the register and then secure the cash in a safe under the counter or, more likely, back in the office. The detailed paperwork and cleaning would wait until morning, since he wouldn't be allowed to open for business until 10 a.m. Luckily for J, she didn't see this taking more than five, even if she stopped to peruse the bottles on the way out.

She was nearly unrecognizable with the wig on, but J still cast the camera a wary eye before she stepped into its line of sight. J steeled herself, then dragged a trashcan underneath the camera and pulled off one of her clothes. The crevices between her fingers were already sweaty. The humidity, J told herself. Certainly not nerves.

Just as J the tips of J's fingers were brushing against the camera, one of the fusion-fattened cats broke from behind the dumpster where it had been hiding. It collided into the trashcan, hissed at J as if it were her fault, and left her flailing for balance—with her ungloved hand. J caught herself by grabbing the neck of the security camera, just barely managing to turn it down towards her scuffed boots before it got a good look at her face.

J stood very still, hardly daring to breathe, and glared in the direction of the disappearing cat. It was lucky that she was an animal lover. She then turned to glare at the camera, the neck of which now had her fingerprints smeared all over it. Oh, sure, a fire or two was pretty much a given, but now she was doing it because she had to.

J closed her eyes and concentrated. The tips of her fingers and the back of her neck became hot and prickly, almost like the last warning before puking. The discomfort lasted no more than a second or two before the heat became warmth, comfort, snuggling on the couch with Gran when she was small or the first time that a boy touched her just so. Felt right.

J waited until the fire was a delicious whiskey-burn and then turned it loose, straight out of the tips of her fingers and into the camera. The rubber coating on the wires dripped like butter down to the asphalt with a godawful reek. Sparks flashed white-blue for a second at most; J ducked her head and kept her focus on the flame. Plastic didn't burn easy. J had to stay right on top of it, muttering curse words under her breath. Before she had screwed up and rubbed her prints all over everything, the plan had been to simply cut the wires. Now she had to cover her tracks in a more flamboyant way and hope she didn't draw the eye of those suits that Ophelia was running around with onto her.

J didn't let up until the security camera was a sizzling, stinking fireball that dripped congealing plastic onto the pavement. Then she jumped from the trashcan back to the ground, hardly throwing up so much as a puff of dust even in her heavy boots. Oh, yeah. I should have an action figure. J straightened and slunk up to the back door. Strong deadbolt lock and no handle on the outside, as J had thought. She might have been able to wedge something between frame and door and pry her way in before anyone inside had time to react—J had never been one to come up with an elaborate, lacy plan just so that she could give a good monologue—if she hadn't been forced to go so pick with the camera. The lardass cat might have been such a regular klutz that commotions in the alley were common, but it would be a week before J could get the stench of burning plastic out of her hair. J was willing to bet money that her leisurely job had been cut down to four minutes, the amount of time it would take cops to respond to a call in one of San Antonio's most expensive business neighborhoods.

J swore some more, since it seemed like the night for it, and settled down into a catcher's pose in front of the door, holding her hand out for the curve ball. Her palm began to glow. While the rest of her skin wasn't nearly as immune, her hands never burned.

J waited until she had a fiery orb roughly the size of a golf ball floating in front of her palm and then pressed it against the reinforced panel where the lock would be on the other side. She concentrated harder. J could count her bones through the back of her hand. The alley started to smell like melting paint, and then there was a faint popping sound as the heat warped the door. It swung open towards her. J grinned and pulled her glove back on with a little flourish before she stepped through the door.

And straight into the barrel of a shotgun. "Get your hands in the air," the holder of the gun ordered her, his hands trembling and making the barrel jerk. Twitchy fingers around guns rarely ended well. Unless you're Bonnie, anyway. But that would probably give the man a heart attack, and J would feel at least a little bad about that.

"In. The. Air!" the man repeated when J sighed and stared at him. He was in his forties, his midsection just starting to fall into an indulged softness. An expensive-looking sweater that only lacked a nice tweed jacket with leather elbow patches tamed most of the gut, anyway, and he likewise masked the start of a receding hairline by pulling his graying locks back into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck. Gold-rimmed glasses caught the line and reflected it back. J had only brought up college once, and the guidance counselor's startled laugh had left her scowling for days, but he still fit the stereotype of every lecherous English professor ever.

J sighed again and half-heartedly raised her hands up to the level of her shoulders. She wouldn't mind giving the guy a good scorching for pulling a gun on her, but there was no way she was getting her glove off without getting shot. At least the light was dim enough to throw most of her face into shadow.

"Don't hold the gun that way," J said finally. The man was bracing the butt of the shotgun against his clavicle, he going to have a bruise like a mother if he fired on her.

The man blinked at her a few times, as if trying to figure out the trick. "I've already called the police," he said to J. "Go out into the front and--"

"Wait for them around all of those nice, thick bottles waiting to be used as weapons?" J inquired sweetly. More blinking. She almost felt bad for ruining his big moment. "And all of that glass and spilled liquor if the cops start shooting? That'll take a chunk out of your bottom line."

"The office, then," the man said after a long moment of calculating his lost profits. It was all that J could do not to smile. She pivoted and followed the yellow glow of a desktop lamp. The gleam of glass bottles marked her path, probably worth more money than she saw in a year. J kept her hands up at the insouciant angle and trusted the shopkeeper not to realize how many different ways she could take the gun away from him as she stepped over the office threshold. There was a large wooden desk that dominated most of the space, a leather-upholstered chair behind it and two in front, and, oh, would you look at that? A small safe sitting in the corner, its door still ajar. There were two vinyl zip-sacks sitting inside, the kind that banks gave out to businesses in order to streamline their deposits.

J hesitated at the sight of the safe and felt the cold touch of the shotgun's barrel between her shoulder blades. Well, she was getting bored. J spun to the side and reach for the barrel. The shop owner jerked back on the trigger out of instinct, a blast of heat racing by J's face and a boom of sound that echoed throughout the small room and nearly deafened her. Christ, he still nearly took half of my goddamned face off! Fear made J rougher than she might have been otherwise; she seized the shotgun from the man's hands, flipped it around, and drove the butt hard into the shopkeeper's stomach. While he doubled over and heaved, J put one gloved hand against the edge of the desk and kicked the nearest chair with both feet. The great leather monstrosity scooted across the floor and pinned the shop owner against the wall. He started to push it away from himself immediately, only to freeze when J held up the shotgun and shook her head warningly.

"Really?" J asked. "Do you have any idea how close you came to ventilating my face with this stupid thing?"

"You're on my property," the man wheezed. Either he was a total baby, or J had hit him harder than she had realized. The man glared at her with as much defiance as he could muster while pinned against the office wall with one of his own chairs. Anger shifted into plain surprise when J bent the gun in half, removed the unspent shell, and hurled it off into the darkened recesses of the back room.

"Just because you're legally allowed to act like a cowboy even though you're grown man doesn't make you any less ridiculous than if you dug out your old hat and stick horse." Surprise became belligerence. He could be a model for a psychology textbook at the rate that they were going through emotions. J growled and kicked the chair again when the man would have shoved it away and tried for a second round. She pinned him there with one leg and balanced on the other in order to reach for the safe. Her arms weren't quite long enough to grab for what she wanted without losing control of about two hundred pounds of agitated yuppie, and she could hear approaching sirens when she listened for them.

"What are you going to do now?" the shopkeeper asked her with a faint sneer. He couldn't possibly be one hundred percent convinced that J wasn't going to shoot him on her way out, but he was still throwing attitude at her. Rich people, or even people who hung out with rich people. J was never going to understand them.

"You're lucky that I'm one of the good guys," J said loftily over her shoulder, flipping the shotgun around so that she was holding it by the barrel. She was careful to keep the muzzle angled towards the ceiling and used the butt as an extension of her arm to pull a deposit bag towards herself. Only the one, though. J was a kind soul, she didn't feel any reason to be greedy. The wire-ledger, for example, was completely unintentional. So was the way that it flopped open for J to read the entries at will.

"Do you know how long you're going to be in jail?" the shop owner asked her. His hands were in the air even though J hadn't told him to raise them, and his voice was querulous. Poor bastard was near tears. J felt bad about what she was doing for about half a second until she glanced down at the open ledger—notice everything and be prepared to use anything, it was a motto that had saved her hide more than once over the past ten years or so—and felt her resolve harden. "You have breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon--"

"You hit me first," J protested before she could stop herself. It's a robbery, not a playground, angel-face.

"Because you broke into my store!" the shopkeeper nearly screamed. It was more likely to be embarrassment than fear at this point, but he was still getting alarmingly red about the face. "I have the right to defend myself, I pay my taxes—"

"Actually, you don't," J interrupted him. She pointed to the ledger on the floor. "You're cooking your books, Giles. Uncle Sam ain't getting nothing from you but a sob story." Bits of the man's hair had come loose from his ponytail, and the eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses were watering furiously. "But who cares, right, so long as your roads are still the ones who get fixed. Might want to think about how detailed a description you want to give to the cops," J said, tucking the ledger into her jacket. She grinned, waggled her fingers, and darted for the door. And maybe she reached out and snagged a scotch that cost more than her boots on the way out, but what of it? Working made a girl thirsty.

Red and blue lights painted J's face as she reached the alley, and she swore explosively. There was a dark sedan parked in front of her getaway car, a portable police light twirling on the hood, and a heavily-built man walking in circles around the car. J recognized the figure before she remembered that the car was covered in her fingerprints, because it had been too damned hot for the gloves and she had figured on being able to wipe the interior surfaces down after returning the car to the lot. Another burst of cursing. At this rate, she was probably giving Ophelia a run for her money when it came to the Most Prolific Potty Mouth award.

Her juvenile record was sealed, she would just have to worry about the rest of it later. J turned towards the other end of the alley…and walked right into the barrel of a gun. Damn it, she had to get her peripheral vision checked.

"Get on the pavement and lace your hands behind your head," the cop told her evenly. He was young, and he had a muscle jerking without rhythm in his cheek.

J whipped around and pointed her hand towards the Audi, the tips of her fingers smoking even through the leather. It was a good thing that Gran was dead, or she would have torn a strip right off of J; one of the lessons that she had tried hardest to instill into J had been respect for the law. Wasn't her fault that J wasn't fertile ground.

The cop jerked, the gun fired, and J saw none of it. Five jets of fire shot from her fingers, cut the air into ribbons. The heat spread back through J's body, better than sex, drugs, or any of those other naughty vices that made the preachers get read in the face. She threw back her head and laughed as the flames wrapped around the car and made the paint bubble with a sound like popcorn popping. The car leapt into the air as its gas tank exploded, landing on four tires that abruptly burst as the air inside of them super-heated with seconds. The shopkeeper rushed out and started hurling curses at her, stopping only to spare few for NPR and MSNBC while he was at it.

"Goody," J muttered under her breath. "As long as I didn't misjudge you." J ran for the fence at the back of the alley, leapt, and snagged handholds near the top while the cop was still trying to decide what he should be shooting at. J started running as soon as her boots hit the ground and had made it three full blocks before she realized that her wig was smoking. "Damn it!" Getting the reek of plastic out of clothing sucked like nothing else. J left it on for now and loped towards more hospital territory for people with her particular philosophy, rich people having a tendency to videotape their stuff so that others couldn't steal it and all. Why, J could not entirely fathom, since going out and buying new stuff in order to replace stolen stuff was an excellent way of letting the world know how rich they were, and J had yet to meet a one of them who didn't love that.

Sirens wailed in approach. J tensed until she realized that they were heading away from her.

Once she felt a little safer, J slowed to a walk and shoved the deposit bag down the front of her leather jacket to rest against the ledger and tucked the bottle of scotch under her arm, working her ruined glove off with her teeth. The flames had come right through the tips, leaving her with a ragged ruin better suited to a Dickens novel. J stuck the remains into the pocket of her jacket rather than leaving even more evidence behind after her cock-up with the car. Supposedly sealed or not, she would still put in a call to Marcus or Ophelia tomorrow to make sure that her youthful indiscretions didn't get her into very adult trouble.

J sighed and rolled her eyes up towards the sky. San Antonio wasn't as bad as a lot of cities when it came to pollution. She could still see the stars. "Sometimes," J addressed them, "I don't know why I even bother to do the right thing."

Thirty minutes later, she broke up a mugging in progress by clocking the thug over the head with her scotch. The bottle didn't break. "I've racked up some good karma," J told a startled woman in the waitress uniform, grinning.

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About the Author

Mari Stroud is a twenty-something living in the Midwest who never quite got the hang of being a grown-up. She has an unabashed love for heroes, explosions, and girls kicking butt, and she has a feeling that this shows. She loves connecting with readers and can be reached via Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/#!/MariStroud), email (MariStroud@gmail.com), or via her blog at http://maristroud.blogspot.com.. Thank you for reading!