章 2431: 14
Disillusion 2.5
Tuesday morning dawned bright and crisp and clear, and I woke up feeling surprisingly chipper. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, all was right with the world…
Okay, so not really, but it certainly felt that way. Yesterday had been surprisingly good, for how crappy it had started out — Lisa and I had spent the rest of the afternoon just…hanging out. We got to see Parian's puppet show — for lack of a better term — we took a stroll along the Boardwalk and chatted about inane, unimportant things, although Lisa did most of the talking. At the end of it, we'd spent maybe half an hour just sitting on a bench, people-watching.
It'd been kind of disappointing to have to go home after just about an hour of that. I finally had a friend after almost two years completely alone, and in spite of myself, I hadn't wanted to say goodbye to her so soon.
"Let me know when you decide to get a cellphone," she'd said just before she left. "And if you ever need anything, you have my number, okay?"
It was…nice, having a friend. Emma had been basically my only friend my entire life, and when she turned on me, she'd done her level best since then to prevent me from making any other ones. No one wanted to risk being your friend when it meant turning themselves into a target for Winslow's queen bitch.
To have someone who either didn't know about that or didn't care, who Emma couldn't frighten off by threatening to make her life in school hell… It felt really good.
Of course, that wasn't the only good thing that had happened yesterday, was it? After all, I'd stood up to Sophia, gave her a tongue lashing like something out of a comic book, and not only had I gotten away with it, I'd gotten away with it in front of all of her friends. No punches, no immediate reprisal — I'd lambasted her with all of the pent up feelings that had been churning inside of me for nearly a year (with Medea along to help, of course), and Sophia had backed down.
Well, catch 22. Whatever she'd done, she would've lost. If she'd punched me, she would've proven me right. If she'd backed down, it meant admitting defeat. I wasn't even sure how I managed it, but I'd put her in a corner that she had no real way out from.
And she'd backed down. I wasn't stupid; my social skills might have been malnourished because of the torment I'd suffered at Emma's hands, but I still knew at least enough to understand that there was a power dynamic in school and it had just been shifted. What was that line from that popular Aleph movie? If you can make God bleed? Something like that.
When I combined both of those with the beatdown I'd given Lung and the praise I'd received from Armsmaster and Miss Militia, it wouldn't be all that much of an exaggeration to say that yesterday had been the best day I'd had in a long time. What kind of cosmic lottery had I won, that so many good things had all happened within the same twenty-four hour period?
That was why I shut off my alarm gently, rather than slapping the snooze button like it owed me money. It was why I smiled into my pillow, enjoying the aftermath of the eight long hours I'd spent in my enchanted bed, and felt more rested and rejuvenated than I had at any point in the past four months, let alone the past two years.
For a bit of context, sleeping in my bed for three hours, give or take, was enough to count for a full night's sleep, and anything past that was strictly unnecessary padding. That padding, though, while it didn't technically count towards how well-rested I woke up, did speed up the rate at which injuries healed. It was more of a side effect — wounds healed faster during sleep, and since the bed was enchanted to increase the effects of sleeping, every three hours spent asleep in it had the same effect on physical recovery as a full night's sleep.
So, as I rolled out of bed, any lingering aches and pains I might have had from fighting Lung, even if I hadn't noticed them before, were gone.
For a few minutes, I just stood there in the middle of my room, wide awake and grinning like a loon. I felt good. Really good. I felt lighter than air and twice as buoyant, like if I let myself go, I'd just float to the ceiling, and if a stiff breeze happened to blow me through an open window, I'd just keeping going up until I reached the clouds.
And aside from Lung the night before last, the only things I'd done yesterday were stand up for myself against my bullies and make a tentative friend.
I shook my head and tried to fight down the grin, but all I managed to do was turn it into a smile, if much smaller and less manic. As good as I felt about what had happened yesterday, I did still things to do, like going for a run, and responsibilities to keep, like…school.
Yeah. Okay. The thought of what would be waiting for me wasn't quite enough to ruin my good mood entirely, but it was enough to knock me back down a peg or two. I was going to be paying for mouthing off to Emma and Sophia yesterday; it was a tossup of whether or not they'd escalate too much farther past their normal antics, although if they tried something like the Locker again, there was no way I was going to let that go quietly.
First, though, before I could worry about that, I had a run that I was supposed to be going on.
By the time I'd pulled on a pair of sweats and made my way downstairs, Dad was already in the kitchen, dressed in a bathrobe and the pair of slippers he'd worn yesterday, halfway through making breakfast.
"Good morning, Taylor," he said.
Maybe it was because I'd been in a good mood the last few days, but on impulse, I walked over to him and gave him a quick hug, careful to mind the stove. He gave a startled laugh, and as I was pulling away, he looped his arm around me, pulled me back in for another few seconds, and kissed the crown of my head as he let me go.
"You certainly seem like you're in a good mood again," he said, smiling. "What's your secret? Mellow Jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed? Can I have some?"
It felt a little…off, maybe forced, like he was trying too hard to make a joke, but I responded to it like I hadn't noticed it.
"Dad!" I said, scandalized.
Dad just laughed, a rich, booming sound the belied his weak chin and his thinning hair, and in that moment, he looked more alive than he had since Mom died.
"Oh, honey, my generation was much worse, let me tell you," he said, grinning. "Why, some of the stories I have…about your mother, too!"
"I don't need to hear about what you and Mom got up to in college," I said, trying not to smile as I pulled on my shoes. "Especially those kinds of stories — yuck."
"Those kinds of stories are the reason you're here, remember," Dad told me. "In fact, I'm pretty sure I remember what night it was, too…"
"Dad, no, just…no."
Dad laughed again, but it was a little more somber than it was before. He was remembering Mom again, no doubt. If ever there was a surefire way to make Dad wistful and sad, it was talking about Mom. Of course; the both of us had a hole in our lives the exact size and shape of Annette Hebert, and even time could only soften the edges of it.
"I just had a good day yesterday," I said, changing the subject. "That's all."
"Oh?" He glanced over at me. "Because of that girl you mentioned last night, what's her name — Lisa?"
"Yeah, that's her."
"Well, I'm glad you're making friends again. Just give me a heads up before you throw any wild parties, so I know when I should work late."
"Da-ad!"
Dad chuckled for a minute, then quieted for a few seconds. "Seriously, Taylor, I'm happy for you," he said. "It's good to see you making friends, and if you need my help with anything, even if that's driving you across the city to meet up with Lisa, I'd be glad to do it."
For a long moment, I didn't say anything, and I thought of what Lisa had said, about the note in my room with her screenname and phone number on it. When, she'd said, not if. I bit my lip, wondering if I should say something, then, tentatively, I asked, "Even if that meant getting a cellphone?"
Dad froze. I understood why. Cellphones had been involved in Mom's crash, were, you could argue, the entire reason why she was dead, and Dad and I hadn't gotten one since then, even though they were everywhere and everyone else in the world seemed to have one. And ever since Emma had turned on me, prevented me from having any friends, I hadn't had a reason to get one. Even if Mom's death hadn't put me off of them, I didn't consider it at all unlikely that Emma might steal it and destroy it or something, and after what she'd said yesterday, I didn't put it beyond her to use it as a tool to taunt me over my mother's death.
Of course, now I had methods of preventing that. Medea made protecting it child's play. I could hide it so thoroughly that the only time anyone would ever know I had it was when I used it, and even then, there were ways I could make it so that they ignored me when I was. The only reason I hadn't done something like that for myself in my day to day life at Winslow was that someone would eventually notice something was amiss and probably call the PRT to investigate, and that was…yeah.
At length, Dad said, "I'd have to check and see what we could afford, but yes, even then." Quietly, I heard him add, "It's probably about time I see about getting one, too."
Again, it wasn't hard to imagine why he was so hesitant about it. We shared that wound.
"Thanks, Dad." Which is why I knew how big a deal it was for him to even consider it.
Dad turned to me and offered a wan smile, before going back to finish breakfast.
A few minutes later, he came over to the table with meals for both of us — eggs and bacon; never let it be said that Dad was an inventive cook — and we ate mostly in silence. I thought I might have ruined the mood, having brought up such a sensitive subject, but I had a friend for the first time in a long time, and a cellphone would be a convenient way of keeping in touch with her. Certainly faster than going back and forth on PHO with our old, slow computer.
I finished eating long before Dad did, and I thought it was probably because he was doing a bit of brooding over Mom, again. I left him to his thoughts as I took my plate to the sink, and then, trying to be quiet, I started towards the door so I could leave for my run.
Dad's voice stopped me. "You have your pepper spray?"
"Yes, Dad," I replied.
I opened the door.
"Be safe, Taylor."
I smiled a little. "Sure, Dad."
Then, I was out the door, I turned, and I started to cut across our lawn — and I froze.
Red, green, black — it took a moment for the image to register in my brain, because this was a scene that did not belong on my front lawn. The red was the red of blood and a lot of it, dried now to a rusty maroon color that seeped across the ground. The green was the green of the grass, untouched and pristine, but for the places where the red blood stained it. The black was the color of the cloth, settled into two large lumps, each roughly the size of half a person, lying on the ground in two separate spots.
It was a few moments more before my brain really started to catch up to my eyes, and then I started noticing the finer details of the scene — the second lump, over to the left, was actually a pair of legs, tangled together as though they had tripped over each other, which meant that the bit hanging out there was —
Oh God.
That meant that the first lump, which I looked at now, was the torso, and now that I realized that, I could see the vague swells that had to be her bust, disguised by the hoodie she wore. The black cloak was thankfully tangled messily around the viscera, blocking it from view, but the hood of it had halfway fallen away, revealing a metallic hockey mask and a few inches of dark skin, pale in death, and black hair that seemed somehow familiar.
It wasn't until my eyes alighted on the crossbow that must have dropped from her fingers when she fell that I realized who it was that was lying on my lawn.
That was about when I screamed.
I wasn't ashamed to admit that it was long and loud and probably woke up half the neighborhood, nor that it would have guaranteed me a spot in a horror flick if I'd been attractive enough to be a movie star. I was still screaming when Dad came rushing out of the house maybe fifteen seconds later.
"Taylor!" he shouted. "Taylor, what's —"
He must have caught sight of what I saw about the time I lost the breath to keep screaming, because he cut off before he finished.
"Oh God," he said, sounding somewhat frantic. "Oh fuck. Oh — Taylor, come here!"
He spun me around and pulled me towards him, and after a moment of looking me over for injuries, he held me against his chest so that I couldn't look back and see the corpse.
"Don't look, Taylor," he murmured into my ear. "Don't look."
My brain rebooted a minute later. All the gruesome details arose in my mind's eye, seared onto my brain like a branding iron, and then my stomach roiled, and I had to force my way out of Dad's arms so I could rush over to the nearest bush and empty my breakfast out onto the grass. It was like I was trying to purge myself of the image of the body, but no matter how much bile spewed from my mouth, it wouldn't leave my head.
It was a bare moment later before Dad came up next to me, pulling my hair out of my face and rubbing soothing circles around my back like he had when I'd caught the flu several years back. I didn't think I'd ever been more grateful to him in my life.
Even once there was nothing left in my stomach to throw back up, I dry-heaved for what felt like several hours. For one wild moment, I had a thought about how much of a pain in the ass it was going to be to clean these shoes, now.
"Are you okay?" Dad asked once I was done and gasping for breath. I swallowed around the taste of vomit and turned my head to reply, but Dad grimaced as though berating himself for his own stupidity. "What am I saying? Of course you aren't."
He glanced back at the…mess and went even paler than he'd been before.
"Gonna have to call the police," he murmured.
"PRT," I corrected him hoarsely.
His head swiveled back around. "What?"
"The PRT, not the police," I said a little more strongly. "That's Shadow Stalker, one of the Wards."
Dad managed to sum up both the situation and my feelings about it in two words. "Oh fuck."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
By the time the PRT arrived in the same white vans I'd seen just a day ago, the entire neighborhood had come out of their homes and everyone within five houses in either direction was peering towards us from their dewy front lawns, dressed in bathrobes and slippers. They were all murmuring and gossiping, but none of them seemed brave enough to come over for a closer look or to offer their support.
I was still staring out at the scene when the PRT vans pulled up along the sidewalk, but I wasn't really seeing either the body or the troopers who were securing it. I didn't even notice when the BBPD showed up, too, no doubt called by one of our other neighbors.
No, how could I focus on any of that? Shadow Stalker was dead on my front lawn, and I was the one who killed her.
My stomach roiled again at the thought, but my mouth was dry and tasted of sick, and there was nothing left in my stomach to heave up.
It was the only conclusion I could come to. A serious cape battle, serious enough that Shadow Stalker, whose power should have allowed her to escape any blow one-on-one, had been sheared in half like cheap tissue, would have been loud and noticeable, would have woken up not only me, but probably half the block. If she'd been fighting someone like Cricket or Hookwolf, there was no way it would have passed quietly enough to entirely escape notice.
Unless she was inside my bounded field.
That was the other problem. Of all the capes in Brockton Bay, none of the ones I knew about really used a cutting weapon that would have bisected a person in one, clean strike. Hookwolf would have left dozens of other cuts, and the end result would have been more like tossing Shadow Stalker into a blender than the two, neat halves lying on the lawn. Cricket, maybe, but what little I knew about her from her wiki page said she used a pair of kama, and their size combined with the sheer upper body strength I had to imagine was necessary to actually cut a person completely in half…I couldn't see her being responsible for this, either.
My Dragon Teeth, on the other hand, wielded large broadswords, and while they weren't strong enough to fight Lung, they were about as strong as an Olympic lifter. They had both the reach and the strength to pull it off.
Then, there was the hardest piece of evidence to ignore: she was on my front lawn.
The defenses I had set up on my house, back when I started to worry about being attacked in my civilian identity, consisted of three stages: first deterrent, which was a bounded field that induced a feeling of foreboding, kind of like, "you don't want to go any further, or bad things will happen," then the second deterrent, which was my Dragon Teeth, and they were designed to fight and defend the house if the intruder couldn't be scared off, and the third defense was a total overhaul of the house itself. Anyone that managed to get through the first two defenses would find the front door and the whole house an impenetrable fortress, and the mere act of trying to get in would sound an alarm to wake me up.
The trick of it, though, and the reason why we didn't find strays or the neighbor's pet cat dead on the front lawn every morning was because all of these defenses would only trigger if the intruder intended to hurt me or my dad. And not just as a passing thought, but as a commitment to cause harm.
Admittedly, that was where everything kind of…stalled. Why would Shadow Stalker, a hero, want to hurt me or Dad? I could think of half a dozen reasons, but they all required that she had a mindset like Lung and knew that I was Apocrypha, which is why most of them were stupid and made no sense.
Unless she knew me in my civilian identity, not my (not-even-two-days-old) Apocrypha identity? But that made even less sense. Where would I have met Shadow Stalker, a hero, and what could I have done to her that made her want to hurt me? What could I have done to a hero that pissed her off enough for her to come after me in my own home?
Of course, Shadow Stalker was a bit edgy. Unlike the other Wards, who were all bright colors and friendly smiles, she was all harsh lines and more black cloth than even the most committed of Winslow's goths. In the stuff she'd been in, the group photos and things like that, she'd given off that stern, anti-hero vibe, complete with a scowling, and frankly a little scary, mask.
But, well, still. Why me? Or Dad, even. Why either of us? Why —
"Mister Hebert, Miss Hebert," a voice said, tearing me from my thoughts. I blinked and beheld a…honestly, a hunk. He was tall, taller than me by about a head and some change, and he had a strong jaw and a face that looked like it could have been chiseled in the image of one of the Greek gods. Broad shoulders, well-muscled arms that looked like they belonged on a professional athlete, and quite honestly, a body that could have been sculpted by Michelangelo.
The blue eyes were worth mentioning, too. They were dangerous — a girl could really fall for those baby blues.
He offered a friendly smile and his hand first to Dad, then to me. I shook it absentmindedly; behind him, I caught a glance of a police cordon set up around our yard, sectioning off an area about fifteen feet across and ten deep, starting at the edge and stretching inwards, around Shadow Stalker's body.
"I'm Detective Neville, I work for the PRT," the man said. "I understand you found the body and recognized it as Shadow Stalker?"
"Ah, no," said Dad. "That was Taylor, actually. I just called the PRT."
Detective Neville turned his head my way. "Miss Hebert?"
"I, uh, yeah," I said, feeling a little lost. "I, uh, came out to the front yard and found her there."
"So you were the one who discovered the body?"
"Yeah."
He scribbled a little note on a notepad I noticed in his other hand just then. When he was done, he looked back up at me. "And how did you recognize her as Shadow Stalker?"
"It's, uh, not her official costume," I replied, "but the black cloak and the crossbow are…kind of distinctive."
"I see." He made another note in his notepad. "And how was it you came across the body? Heading to school?"
"For a run, actually. I take one every morning, whenever I can. I was just heading out when I saw, uh, when I saw…her."
"I see." He gave me a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry you had to see something like that. You were the one who screamed, then?"
I nodded. "Yeah. It was… Well…"
Horrifying. Lung had been bearable, because Siegfried had given me the calm and the experience to keep my head among the gore and the violence, but without that to temper everything…
"I understand." He turned to Dad. "And I assume that that was when you…?"
"I heard her scream and I came running," Dad said. He glanced at me. "She, ah…well…"
"I threw up," I supplied. "Over in the bushes."
Detective Neville grimaced. I wondered if someone was going to have to go and collect that as evidence; I didn't envy them that job.
"That's a perfectly natural reaction," he assured me. "And, Mister Hebert, that was when you called the PRT?"
"After I made sure Taylor was okay, yes. I was going to call the police, at first, but Taylor told me to call the PRT, so…"
"And it's a good thing you did," said Detective Neville. "Jurisdiction between us and the BBPD can get pretty messy on its own, so it was better that we got here before they processed the scene and contaminated any evidence of parahuman ability use."
He jotted a few more things down on his notepad.
"Alright," he said. "That's all of the preliminary stuff out of the way. We will need to take your official witness statement, however, for the record. Miss Hebert — Taylor," he addressed me, not unkindly, "would you be all right to come back to headquarters with me?"
Dad took a step forward, as though to shield me. "Wait a minute. You can't ask her anything without me present, can you?"
"No, we can't, Mister Hebert," Detective Neville replied. "That's why I'd like to ask you to stay here while CSU finishes up and then drive over to PRT HQ. I just think that Taylor might be more comfortable with a cup of hot chocolate and away from — well…"
He glanced back over his shoulder for a second, at the spot where Shadow Stalker's body had lain. I did, too, and I found that though her two halves had apparently been loaded up onto a gurney while we were talking, the grass was still stained a reddish brown, a large splotch amongst the green that stretched between both of the places where her halves had been. Somehow, it was worse than before, because just the thought of what — who — had been lying there and the inescapable conclusion I'd come to about how she'd died was enough to make me nauseous.
Something of my discomfort must have shown on my face, because Dad grimaced, nodded, and said, "Yeah, okay, I…Taylor, if you're comfortable with it, I'd like you to go with them, for now. I'll be right behind you, I promise."
I gave a little nod and swallowed around the nausea. "Yeah," I said, a little quieter than I'd meant to, "okay."
How was I going to explain this, though? How did you tell the PRT and the Protectorate that one of their heroes, one of their junior heroes, at that, was lying dead on your front lawn because she'd tried to kill you and your home defense system had taken exception to that? How did you explain that and also explain that you had no idea why she'd been after you in the first place?
As I followed Detective Neville off the porch and down the stone pathway that cut through our yard, I glanced back at Dad, who watched me with worried eyes, and realized that I'd have to think of a way, a way of explaining this whole mess to the people who might be my coworkers in the near future. And I'd have to do it without getting myself arrested.
Easier said than done.
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