Torrent waved his arms around in long circles. Ostensibly, he was stretching, but the slow, deliberate motions and the fact that he somewhat awkwardly kept his right forearm facing her suggested to Corona that he was subtly calling her attention to his latest piece of equipment: a black gauntlet marked with scrawls in bright blue ink. He abruptly dropped his arms and repeatedly pulled and refastened the strap of the glove's flashlight loop.
At last, Corona gave in. She finished tying her boots and glanced up at him through her eyelashes, a smile tugging on the corners of her mouth. "What's that on your arm?" She was careful to inflect her voice with a note of rising interest.
"Huh? Oh, this thing?" He shrugged as if it were nothing, but immediately launched into an excited explanation. "Just my battle glove. It's a CQB aid — that's close-quarters battle. I got a special deal on it through the UC Cavalry catalog. It's got a ceramic inner in a Silksteel matrix, so I can use my arm to deflect knives, dirks, dog bites — those sorts of things — without getting ripped apart. I haven't figured out how to attach my salad-shooter nozzle just yet, but I think the other features more than make up for it. The knuckles have pouches filled with lead powder to lend extra weight to punches, and it has an adjustable strap for a flashlight. That way, I can always have my fingers free."
"Wow! That sounds really handy!"
Torrent frowned. "Are you making pun of the battle glove?"
Corona giggled. "I would never! But what's the writing on it?" She stood up to get a better look at the script. Words like 'Miasma' and 'Thorpe' were spelled out in proud letters.
Torrent cocked his head up and thrust his jaw out, his frown transformed into a hugely self-satisfied expression. "They're battle honors. In the old days, soldiers would sew the names of their previous battles on the regimental standard. These are all the weirdos I've fought since I became Torrent."
"I know that one well enough," she said, her own orange-gloved fingertip underlining 'Flying Skeletons.' "I don't think you told me about half of these! Who's Grimalkin?"
"That was the Werecat of Hazelwood. Miasma is the mad gasser."
"I don't understand. So these people all told you their names? Do you have conversations with them while you fight?"
"No, I named them, except for Thorpe and the Esqueletos. I imagine most of them don't even think to come up with an alias. But the way you make a name for yourself as a vigilante is by thrashing serious criminals, right? If nobody knows who you beat up, it may as well not have happened. You must name them. And the more badass the name, the more badass you sound for beating them. It's a reputation builder."
"Except you didn't beat Thorpe," Kid Awesome interjected. He breathed heavily as he ascended the wooded slope, lugging his folded-up bicycle on one shoulder. "He saved your bacon, in fact."
Torrent's battle-gloved hand shot up, his middle finger extended toward his friend. "Oh, really? Because I had forgotten all about that, Mr. 'I'm going to break his face.' "
"Don't make this about me. The fact remains, we didn't beat him."
Torrent shrugged his broad shoulders. "I haven't heard of any Thorpe-related vandalism in a while. I consider that a victory."
With that, the trio of teenage vigilantes fell silent and waited for signs of trouble.
There had been a spate of assaults on the walking paths of the Frick Preserve over the past several nights, and so they decided to start their nightly patrol there. Unfortunately, the winding, mostly unlit forest paths were almost unnavigable — not to mention unnerving — in the inky dark of the new moon, so they decided to set up a vantage point on a low hill overlooking a crossroads. They were well hidden in the lee of a wide-limbed sycamore and screened by chest-high dogwood bushes, leafy Arguses whose scores of white blossoms looked like staring eyes in the narrow beams of their flashlights. Beyond the brush, there was some illumination provided by the amber glow of an antique electric lamp set at the foot of the hill, just enough light for their night-adjusted eyes to see the leafy treetops bending in the breeze. So far, the paths were deserted.
"I don't understand why anyone would come here at night. That's just asking for trouble," Corona whispered. She fitted a wireless earbud in her left ear and synced it with her mobi, which was already tuned into the emergency scanner frequency.
"Tell me about it. I almost broke my leg coming up this damn hill. You can't see anything in the brush, and half the paths are washed out or covered with roots," Kid Awesome said.
"Well, they ain't bird-watching," Torrent said knowingly. He didn't want to elaborate in front of Evangeline, but the park after dark was a favorite haunt for tranny hookers and other lowlife deviants rejected even by the flophouses of Homewood.
"Meaning what?" pressed Corona.
"Meaning these aren't the sort of people who call SOS when they're in trouble, so you're probably not going to hear anything on the scanner." Violent criminals more often preyed on the human detritus at the margins of society, where the victims are easy to overlook and retribution easy to evade. There was no subscription patrol company serving the pariahs and derelicts, and the city cops were probably as likely to beat and rob the victims as lend a hand — assuming they'd even venture into the woods in the first place.
"Oh. I see. In that case, I don't think we're going to find anything tonight."
"I hate to tell you this, Corona, but that's most nights," Kid Awesome said. "This job's a few minutes of sublime thrill buried in hours of tedium. You live for the spasm."
Evangeline's head slowly turned to look at Alex, her eyebrow, just barely visible behind her mask, peaked in wonder. "That's... poetic."
Sebastian shook his head and bit his lip to keep from laughing. "That's filthy," he said.
A strong breeze picked up, and a chill ran down Torrent's spine. It was May now, and the thick cloud cover kept the night air mild; he gradually realized that the reaction had more to do with nerves than temperature. His nostrils flared.
"Do you smell that?" he whispered.
Corona and Kid Awesome sniffed the air, glanced around. Evangeline shook her head.
"Dog farts," Sebastian said.
Corona rolled her eyes, but the frown on Torrent's face told her he wasn't trying to be funny. "Dog farts? I don't smell anything."
Other scent memories came to him. Rotten eggs and... something else.
"Sulfur," he said, very quietly. It was just a brief whiff, but it was very strong, almost overpowering. He wondered how they could have missed it.
Suddenly, Kid Awesome pressed his finger against his lip and dropped to a crouch. "Quiet," he hissed. Beneath the sounds of the creaking branches and rustling leaves, the crunch of footsteps on loose dirt became audible.
Torrent pushed aside the dogwood branches and squinted at the pathway below. A man became visible, seeming to materialize from the foot upward as he stepped into the little circle of amber light beneath the lamppost. Slender and long-limbed, he wore shiny black oxfords, trousers, a buttoned suit jacket and wraparound sunglasses — strange clothing indeed for a traipse through the wilderness at this hour of night. Torrent's first thought was that he must be drunk, but he walked very steadily, and as he came to the lamppost, he bent over very slowly, without wobbling, and stared up the hill. Sebastian knew it should have been impossible for the man to see him hidden there beneath the foliage, but in his imagination, the man's eyes locked with his own.
Only it wasn't his imagination.
"Hello there," the man said. His voice was strangely flat, like an automated voice greeting on an old answering machine. He pivoted toward the hill and strolled leisurely up the incline.
Torrent held his breath. He looked questioningly at Corona and Kid Awesome and found them staring back at him in disbelief. "He can't see us," Torrent whispered.
"Hello," the man repeated. "Will you come out from the bushes? I'm looking for someone, and it may be you."
Corona's fingers clamped down on Sebastian's wrist. "This is really creepy. I don't like this at all."
Kid Awesome shot up, his muscles tensed for action. "The only thing this guy's looking for is trouble, and he's gonna get it."
His impetuous lurch toward violence snapped Torrent out of his stupefaction. "Wait! Take it easy now," Torrent demanded. "Go slowly, and approach him from multiple directions. Got it?"
Kid Awesome nodded and stepped off to the right, while Torrent headed left. Corona followed after a moment's hesitation, picking her way slowly down the hill.
"You're not looking for us," Torrent declared. He was pleased by how steady his voice sounded. It was something he practiced, but it was also born of confidence, a confidence bolstered by his weighted glove, spangled with battle honors, and the holstered stun rod that banged at his hip.
"No," the man agreed. "I am not looking for you. I am looking for a woman."
The stranger's eyes flicked away from Torrent and focused on Corona for a minute. Torrent did not like the way he looked at her.
"Not that woman, either," the man said. There wasn't a trace of disappointment in his voice, nor of any other emotion. The mechanical fashion in which he spoke, stringing words together without inflection, was deeply unsettling.
"Here, I have a picture." He pulled a glossy print from his breast pocket and held it out. None of the three vigilantes accepted the invitation to approach.
"Who is she? And why are you looking for her?" Corona asked.
"A runaway. She is called Kali Hutira. We are concerned for her health and eager to return her to safety."
Needless to say, no one was impressed by the sincerity of this explanation. "So you work for her parents?" asked Torrent. "Was she seen here?"
"I represent my employer. He is concerned for her well-being. There is reason to believe she has come to this city in recent days." The man still held out the glossy photo, his arm stiff as a board. "Do you recognize her?" he asked again. It did not seem to occur to him that none of the vigilantes could see the picture at this distance in the dim light.
Torrent exchanged a glance with Kid Awesome, nodded, and they both moved closer to take a look. He held it up for Sebastian first, then quickly turned to show it to Alex. The latter shook his head, recollecting nothing of the girl, but Torrent recognized her almost immediately, even though the young woman in the picture was far cleaner and better groomed than when he had met her. It was the girl that he'd rescued from Miasma, the one who had acted so strangely and fled with his pocketknife. Alex had never gotten a good look at her, but for Sebastian, there was no doubt.
"Never saw her. Tell us your name and some way to get in contact with you, and we'll keep an eye out for her," Torrent said.
The speed and force with which Torrent replied made Kid Awesome's hair stand on end. Alex looked at his friend, understanding instantly that he did recognize the girl and that he suspected the worst of this weird stranger. He took a half-step back, clenching his fists and lowering his head.
All of this subtlety was lost on the stranger, who calmly tucked the photograph back into his breast pocket and produced three smaller business cards. "I am called Mr. Gentry. My employer is offering a considerable reward for her return. We are concerned for her health and eager to return her to safety."
"So you've said." Torrent accepted one of the cards. The whiff of sulfur returned when his fingertips closed on it, and a sudden wave of something assailed his psyche. A collage of indistinct sounds and images, thoughts and memories not his own. He could identify nothing threatening in the impressions, could scarcely make out any details whatsoever, and yet they evoked an indefinable dread and a sense of revulsion that made his heart thud and his palms sweat.
Torrent eyed him coldly. "Where do you come from, Mr. Gentry? You don't sound like you're from around here."
Mr. Gentry's head cocked back minutely and, for a moment, he hesitated. The brief display of confusion was the first time he gave an impression of genuine humanity. Finally, he answered.
"From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it." His lips twisted into a rude approximation of a smile, an expression that looked more appropriate for a jack-o'-lantern than a human face. The gaunt man's muscles writhed beneath his skin, and it seemed to require great effort for him to maintain the rictus.
Just as the stranger's face was settling back to its customary impassiveness, his head rocked back with a massive blow from Alex's closed fist.
"That's enough out of you!" Kid Awesome snarled. A tornado of crosses, uppercuts, and knee strikes followed, sending Gentry's limbs flailing limply in every direction. He looked like a dummy stuffed with straw, ready to fly apart at the seams.
The explosion of violence caught Torrent completely unprepared. By the time Sebastian moved to restrain him, Kid Awesome had dragged Gentry to his knees. The battered stranger sagged, his torso bending in ways that looked impossible for anyone with an intact ribcage or spine. Even as he struggled to contain his friend, Torrent's eyes were fixed with horror on the scene. The idea of a scarecrow or a crash test dummy kept coming back to him. Gentry looked lifeless, but not dead; his crumpled body gave the impression that whatever had animated him had simply departed, leaving only an empty vessel.
Alex landed a final punch as Sebastian dragged him back and the blow sent Gentry's sunglasses flying. Gentry's right eye, now open so wide that it looked lidless, rolled around loosely in its socket. It was as large and black as an eight ball, except for globules of vitreous crimson that swelled and retreated across the surface. Torrent gasped, staggering backward in fear and sudden vertigo. He tumbled against the hillside.
He tried to get up, but the world spun wildly; his stomach roiled and flooded his mouth with vomit. He squeezed his eyes shut to ward off the nauseating disorientation and listened to the mad scramble of feet and the terrifying cacophony of voices: from Alex, a wave of increasingly incoherent threats and obscenities; from Evangeline, a mad, shrill scream that died to a hoarse grating as her vocal chords wore themselves raw. Torrent unholstered his stun baton and rolled onto his side, crawling blindly in their direction.
When his queasiness subsided, he opened his eyes onto a bizarre scene. Corona wobbled on her knees, her arms crossed in front of her eyes, her mouth open in a soundless scream. Kid Awesome sagged next to her, howling and thrashing his limbs at phantoms. Impossibly, Gentry loomed above them, standing straight and erect. His face was swollen and brown with bruising, his broken nose bent at a severe angle, and blood oozed from his burst lips. But gruesome as these injuries were, they were mere accents to the revolting wrongness of his face in its natural form. A network of tiny, purple veins crawled from each eye socket up through his naked eyebrows and across the bridge of his nose — literally crawled, twitching beneath his skin as they spread and reordered themselves. Those gnarled, pulsing roots anchored his grotesque eyeballs, which Torrent now realized were not the results of Alex's fists, but functioning and inhuman organs. More horrifying still, he beheld that the eyes did not match each other. The sight of them overwhelmed Sebastian with loathing. Try as he might, he could not bolster himself with either prayers or bravado; the horror seemed more a physical assault than an emotion.
Then, mercifully, Gentry slipped his crooked sunglasses back over his eyes, and the terror and nausea-inducing vertigo abated.
"I think we have had a misunderstanding," Mr. Gentry said with clockwork diction. "You have my card. Please contact me if you encounter the girl."
Gentry stepped back several paces and adjusted his collar. Then he turned and went on his way, one leg scraping lamely in the dirt, and disappeared into the overshadowing woods.
Torrent groped his way toward Corona, still too dizzy to stand. Now that Gentry had gone, the disorientation was passing quickly. The paralyzing dread, the suffocating sense of helplessness faded, too. He felt it literally leaving his body, like his limbs had been bound in tight ropes which had suddenly been cut.
"Eva! Eva, snap out of it!" He grabbed her forearm, only to quickly jerk his hand back, yelping in pain. Even through his gloves, he felt like he'd just touched a hot kettle.
Startled by his grasp, Corona jerked back, too, and thrust out her other arm in a blind panic, letting loose a searing pulse of heat. Had Torrent not pulled away in pain, he would have taken it square in the chest; fortunately, it was only a glancing shot. Still, the heat was intense enough to make the metal teeth on his zipper glow red and ignite a ribbon of evanescent flame that burned a jagged, black-rimmed gash through his hood. He swore and doubled over, slapping his torso frantically. He gasped, feeling the top layer of skin peel away from his chest, stuck to the melted fibers of his compression shirt. The stench of charred skin and hair filled the air.
"Oh my God!" Eva cried. The shimmering heat distortion in the air around her quickly faded as she mastered herself. "Oh God," she repeated, stumbling over to Torrent. "How badly are—"
"Forget it!" he hissed. "We need to go, now!"
Behind them, Alex let out a cry of rage and anguish. His hand tightened around the arm of a bench, his split knuckles oozing blood, and slowly pulled himself upright. His chest heaved and his lips curled over clenched teeth as he stared at them with wide, tear-streaked eyes. He was still in that lively state of consciousness where fear overlapped fury and animal reaction crowded out reason, relegating thoughts and words to the dark cellar of the mind.
"We have to go," Sebastian told him.
He shook his head stiffly and spun around, searching for signs of Mr. Gentry.
"He's gone!" Torrent shouted.
Kid Awesome pounded his swollen fist against the bench and roared as he flipped it over. He kicked at the wrought-iron frame, setting it rattling and scraping across the concrete until the toe of his boot caught between the slats.
Torrent rushed over and seized his friend by the arm. "Stop it! You're only hurting yourself!"
Alex threw off Sebastian's grip. "That guy is wrong! Wrong! I mean fucking evil! He shouldn't be..." His voice, hoarse and creaking, trailed off, and his shoulders slumped. "He shouldn't be."
Sebastian wasn't sure if Alex was just babbling or making a definite statement. If it was the latter, he couldn't agree more.
~*~
An hour later, the three defeated vigilantes huddled in a booth at Squire's Diner. They were not hungry, but the greasy spoon had more important amenities to offer: bright lights, music piping through the speakers, and the humdrum chatter of humdrum people. These were the signposts of a sane world where eldritch intrusions were unthinkable and impossible. For a long time, none of them spoke to each other; they just sipped their drinks and stared into space. Eventually, the weight of the silence became too much to bear.
"At least you have another name to write on your glove," Alex said sarcastically.
Sebastian looked across the table intently, his narrowed eyelids twitching. "What the hell were you thinking? Explain to me what goes on in your head that says attacking him was a good idea."
Alex did not lift his eyes from the steaming mug of coffee. "I was thinking that he needed to be put down."
"You had no idea what we were up against," Sebastian replied, his voice a tense, growling whisper.
Evangeline looked up from the rim of her cup. "Guys, please."
Alex kicked the table, rattling the silverware and china. He leaned across the table and met his friend in an icy stare-down.
"I had a fucking idea," he hissed. "And you put it into my mind. Talking about the stink of sulfur, and the way you shut him down when he asked about the girl." Alex nodded gravely. "Oh yeah, I have a good idea about him. And so do you. Any creeper who wanders around the woods in the dark, quoting the devil from the Book of Job deserves whatever he gets."
"Obviously he's bad," said Sebastian. "That's not the point. You could have gotten us all killed, or... I don't even know what else."
"He bleeds."
"Yeah, he bled a lot. Then he looked at us, and it was all over."
Alex looked away in shame. His voice trembled. "I lost my nerve."
"We were all afraid, Alex," Evangeline said gently.
"No," Sebastian said. "I know fear; I've been afraid often enough. Fear's just a feeling. Fear you can fight. Whatever 'Mr. Gentry' had going on there, whatever was in those eyes, it wasn't fear. That was a baseball bat to the spine."
Evangeline set down her cup of tea and sighed. "What are we going to do now? If I'm honest with myself, I don't ever want to run into him again, but when I think of that poor girl he's after..." She shook her head.
Alex looked at Sebastian. "You know who she is." It was a statement, not a question.
He nodded. "It was the girl we saved from Miasma."
"How sure are you?"
"One hundred percent," said Sebastian.
"You know her? Where is she?" Eva asked excitedly. "We have to warn her!"
"We don't know anything about her. It's been weeks since we saw her," said Alex.
Sebastian agreed. "She looked like a vagrant, probably riding the rails. She could be hundreds of miles away from here by now."
"Or she could still be in the city," said Evangeline.
"There's more to it than the girl," Alex said, pursuing his own tangent. "Gentry's in league with Miasma. It's too much of a coincidence that they'd be after the same girl. The question is why."
"Maybe she's a psycho-magnet," Sebastian said. Alex glared at him.
"We have to at least look for her," Evangeline insisted. "I can ask around at the homeless shelters. We can't go to the police, but maybe someone in the Troubleshooters—"
"Son of a bitch!" Alex suddenly exclaimed. He fell back into the booth and looked up at the ceiling with an air of revelation.
"Well? What is it?" Evangeline pressed. She was a bundle of nerves.
"That weird hobo disease everyone's talking about. They've been blaming it on talents, but we've been saying it was Miasma and his chemicals. But it wasn't Miasma. It's Gentry! He's causing the disease!"
"That's a hell of a jump," Sebastian said. "I think you skipped over a couple of things there, or else you lost me."
"Think about it!" he said, tapping his forehead like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Satanic prowler goes around, quoting Job. What happened to Job?"
"Lots of stuff happened to—" Sebastian began, but Alex would not be interrupted.
"Don't be an ass! Sores and boils and skin sloughing off, just like the hobos. And why the hobos? He's after the girl, right? The girl's mingling with these transients, and there he is, on her trail, spreading plague wherever he goes. And all these big doctors are stumped, none of them can say what it is. Well, no shit! It's supernatural, just like what he did to us. No, it's more than supernatural. It's Biblical."
Eva lifted a trembling hand to her forehead and made the sign of the cross. Her cheeks turned sickly pale. "If that's true, we could get sick."
"Maybe we already are," said Alex.
Sebastian held up his hand in a gesture of calm, though he was plenty exasperated himself. "All right now, let's not lose our minds. If we start thinking we're going to get sick, we're going to get sick. We're sitting here speculating when we're all scared and confused, so we're leaping to ridiculous conclusions. Whatever it is we're dealing with, I'm sure it's not one of the four fucking horsemen.
"That said, I agree that this disease isn't Miasma's doing. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I'm starting to wonder if it's not this Kali girl."
"What? Why would you blame her?" Eva protested.
Sebastian unfolded his napkin and snapped his fingers. "A pen. Anybody have a pen?" Evangeline handed him one from her bag and he immediately began sketching out his idea. "What are the symptoms? Fatigue, withering of muscles, necrosis, organ failure. Well, isn't that what happened to Miasma? His ankle was rotting away before our eyes! Don't you remember the smell?"
Alex nodded. "You don't forget a smell like that."
"We assumed it was his chemicals, but his chemicals didn't do that to anyone else. I thought he broke his ankle because he tripped, but he didn't. It was the other way around. She grabbed him by the ankle — grabbed him right where he started rotting away. Can that really be a coincidence? Probably she's a talent, biological psychokinesis, like Caduceus. Maybe that's why they're hunting her."
"If she could do that, then how could this Miasma guy catch her in the first place?" Evangeline's voice was twinged with hostile skepticism. It was clear she didn't appreciate his train of thought.
Alex, too, was dubious. "Miasma didn't seem all that worried about her. And he attacked a lot of other people, too."
Sebastian pondered it. "You're both right, and I don't have a good answer for it. But I still think she must have rotted his ankle. I saw his leg."
"He could have been injured before." said Evangeline.
"No way. You didn't see it, Eva. If his ankle was that bad before, he wouldn't have been able to walk at all. He didn't have so much as a limp before she touched him. Besides, there's more," Sebastian said. He drew a big circle on the napkin, labeling it 'Pittsburgh' and scribbled a meandering line to the southwest.
"This is the railroad. The first I heard about this mystery disease, they had a case down in Bridgeville, about ten miles away. One of the victims said that a young girl made them sick; not a freak in a plague doctor's mask or a weirdo with two different eyes, but a young girl. Can we at least agree that if anyone had seen either Miasma or Gentry, they'd have mentioned it?
"Now, the next day, they identified a suspected case all the way down in Wheeling. That's fifty miles away. Unless you've heard of some new cases around this way, we can assume that whoever is causing this is heading southwest. Last I heard about Jerningham, he was still in the hospital; rumor was that he might even lose his leg. And we know where Gentry is hanging around. That suggests neither of them are to blame."
Alex, at least, relented. "I guess I can't argue with that logic."
Evangeline hugged herself and slumped in the booth, obviously uneasy with laying the blame at the feet of the runaway. "So if you're right, at least she's far away from here," Eva said.
"She could be anywhere from Kanawha to the Pacific Ocean by now," Sebastian said. "Either way, it's out of our jurisdiction. Whatever other problems she has, she's at least got a good head start on Gentry."
Alex crossed his arms and sat back. "You know, I could care less about the girl. All I want to talk about is how we handle Mr. Peepers."
Evangeline narrowed her eyes at him, disgusted by his callousness. "Maybe you can punch him some more."
"Maybe your pretty ass could have lent a hand! I'm wrestling with Beelzebub and you get a case of the vapors," he fired back, slamming his fist on the table. "You could have torched the prick!" The low hum of conversation in the dining room dissipated as a dozen pairs of nervous eyes turned on them.
"Would you lower your voice, please?" hissed Sebastian. "We have to figure out what he is and who his mysterious employer is. Learning a bit more about this Kali girl might give us some clues, too. Eva, why don't you see what you can find out about her? I'll see what I can find out about..." He paused, suddenly remembering the business card he'd taken from Gentry. He ducked under the table and searched his pack for it, then slapped it, face-down, in the middle of the table.
From the back, it was no more than a white rectangle of cardboard, as prosaic-looking as any other business card, yet the spooked vigilantes eyed it uneasily, as if in dread of some malignant, supernatural force bound up within it. Sebastian eventually mustered the courage to flip it. Almost simultaneously, the three of them exhaled sharply in relief; the other side bore no hideous images or curses in an extinct language, only a smaller version of the photograph that Gentry showed them accompanied by the text, "Have you seen this girl?" and a communication address.
"So that's one clue," Alex said. "I'm glad you held onto it. I completely forgot about it." The boxer's thick chest swelled as he sucked in a deep breath, steeling himself. "There's no point in waiting. Let's see who answers the phone." He reached for the card but Sebastian swiped it away.
"Are you crazy? Suppose he tracks the call back to you. Do you want to blow your cover? You want this guy knocking at your door at 3 AM?"
"OK, you call with your unregistered dumper."
Sebastian swallowed hard. "I will. Just not here and not now. I want to get a better idea of who this guy is and what we're dealing with, first. It shouldn't be too hard to scare up information on this guy. He's not the sort of person that goes unremarked upon."
"You can start with the Commonwealth Academy of Opthamologists," Alex quipped.
"Aside from the eyes, he fits the Man in Black archetype pretty well," Sebastian said. "Maybe that IMPS group will have something useful on him. I found their records surprisingly helpful against the werecat. Heck, maybe I can even talk to one of them."
"You'd be better off going straight to the diocesan exorcist," said Alex. "Maybe you can borrow some holy water for your salad shooters."
The skin on the back of Sebastian's neck prickled. "He's not a demon."
"You smelled sulfur," Alex reminded him.
"So? That could have come from anything," Sebastian said, though he didn't really believe it.
"We didn't smell it," Alex replied, moving his finger back and forth between Eva and himself. "Stands to reason that the psychic would be the one to notice."
"Like I keep saying, I'm a bad psychic." Sebastian said.
"Let's let it rest for a while," Evangeline suggested. "We're just getting worked up about everything, and we're not getting any closer to figuring it out." She looked at Alex. "I'm sorry for snapping at you before. I shouldn't have."
He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "It's fine. You're a woman. Look," he said, standing up and stepping away from the table. "I'm going home. Eva's probably right. We need some time to regroup, get some sleep, clear the cobwebs. We'll have a better perspective in the morning."
"Wait a minute, I didn't—"
"It's after one already," said Sebastian, checking his watch. "Cripes, Eva, your dad's going to kill you. I'd better get you home."
"Sebastian, my dad's in Buffalo. There's nobody there." She grabbed onto his fingers. "I don't think I can handle being alone in that house right now."
He was quiet for a moment, as if weighing his response. He turned to Alex. "I'll tell my parents I'm staying at your house. Cover for me."
Alex laughed. "Sure thing." He added, in a lower voice intended only for Sebastian, "I guess fear really is an aphrodisiac."
Evangeline overheard the remark, but was too stunned to reply.
Sebastian squeezed her hand. "Come on. I could use the company, too," he said.
~*~
Half an hour later, Sebastian was stretched across Evangeline's sofa. He pressed his weight into the stiff, unyielding mass of what were technically called cushions, hissing through his teeth as she delicately peeled off the cloth bandages he had hastily wrapped his hands with.
"Aww, you big baby, it's not that bad," she said. "There are a couple blisters, but they're tiny. Pass me the aloe."
He handed the half-empty bottle to her (the other half of it glistened on his chest, covering a few larger blisters and a dark red patch the size and shape of Eva's hand), along with an admonition about her bedside manner. "I'll be the judge of how bad it is. You did this to me. You should be more apologetic."
"I have apologized," she said, her attention focused on smoothing the lotion on and around his fingers. "I don't even remember doing it. I don't remember anything except—" She shivered, changing the subject. "Even after all this time, thermokinesis doesn't make sense to me. If I touch a hot stove, it still burns me, but I never burn myself with my own powers."
Marshmallow, Eva's cat, bounded onto the armrest and rubbed his whiskers against Sebastian's ear. The fluffy white feline curled up next to him, rumbling like a bumble bee. "Mmmhmm. You could rub a little more on my chest when you're done."
Eva slanted her head at him, a wry smile on her lips.
"What? I'm not trying to be fresh. It stings."
She leaned over him, squeezing a big glop of the lotion onto his abdomen, smiling as he shivered from the sudden cold. "Sebastian, please don't think I'm ungrateful. It's wonderful to have you here, and I meant what I said about not wanting to be alone," she began, gently rubbing her hands over his torso and trying her best to do it in a non-sexually-charged manner. "But when I said that, I just wanted you to stay at the diner with me for a while longer. I never expected you to invite yourself over. Or to ask Alex to lie to your parents about it."
Sebastian winced. For a while, he stewed in silent embarrassment. "I see. Why didn't you tell me that when I 'invited myself over?' "
"I was mortified," she said, sucking her lip. Too embarrassed to make eye contact, her gaze never lifted from his chest. "I heard what Alex said to you."
Sebastian shooed Marshmallow away and sat up. "Fine, I'll take off," he snapped. "You know, when you said you didn't want to spend the night alone, I had the silly idea you really meant it. This wasn't some scheme to seduce you."
Eva shushed him and gently pushed him back down onto the couch. "No, I know you wouldn't do that." Her fingers glided up to his shoulders, kneading his tense muscles. Her own shoulders heaved in a long, soft sigh, and a pensive smile crossed her face. "Don't go home. Just... don't expect anything except a badly cooked breakfast."
Sebastian laughed half-heartedly. The truth was that the harrowing encounter with Gentry had squashed his libido as thoroughly as a dose of saltpeter.
"Fair enough," he said.
Eva wiped her greasy hands on her cotton pajamas and, for a few moments, just kneeled there on the couch, looking indecisive. Then she curled up beside him, nudging his arm up with her head. "I wouldn't mind if you held me, though."
He rolled onto his left side, working his arm under her long hair and around her narrow shoulders. "As long as you promise not to burn me."
She closed her eyes. "Put your shirt back on, though."
"No," he said, yawning. "I'd have to get up then."
"Sebastian."
"You'll just have to get some self-control."
"It's not that. I don't want aloe all over me. Plus, you'll get cat hair stuck to you."
He clucked his tongue. "Fine, I have to turn the light off anyway."
Evangeline opened one eye and peeked up at him. "Leave it on. Please."
"Sure! Second-degree burns, lumpy couch, light in my eyes. Why not poke me with a sharp stick, too?" he grumbled.
He sat up and very gingerly pulled his undershirt back on. "You owe me a new compression shirt, by the way. That was a ChallengerWear X7, with thermal adaptive fibers, not just cheap spandex."
"Not thermal adaptive enough, I say." She smiled even though her eyes were closed.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm serious. Chemistra designed that. It was expensive." Evangeline didn't reply, but merely allowed herself to be jostled as he settled back in beside her.
Sleep eluded them. They rolled over, shifted their weight, heads on the armrest, heads off the armrest. Maybe it was the uncomfortable setting or their confused memories of the encounter in the park. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt that they were doing something wrong and would be caught, or simply that a pair of hormonal teenagers in their thin nightclothes, limbs wound tightly around one another, could not actually be expected to sleep without benefit of a release forbidden them. Maybe it was just Marshmallow kneading their cheeks with his furry paws. With a frustrated sigh, Sebastian surrendered to the inevitable conclusion.
"Are you still up?" he whispered.
Eva's eyes fluttered open. She nodded.
"I can't sleep."
"I know."
"Did you ever want to run away?"
She jolted back. "What? Run away from what?" Though she feigned confusion, her look said she knew exactly what he meant.
"From home. From your dad," he said. "I'm not asking you to do it. I'm just asking if you've thought about it."
Evangeline's mouth opened, but no words came out.
"I noticed how sensitive you got when we talked about the girl, Kali. I thought maybe it was because you saw a little of yourself in her, maybe you felt like doing the same thing once. I wondered... I don't know exactly what."
She cleared her throat. "You wondered if blaming a young talent girl about my age for hurting a lot of people bothered me because I grew up scared to death that I would burn my house down or kill my cat. You wondered if I might prefer vagrancy to sleeping in a warm bed because Matthew Garver is ashamed of his daughter and thinks she's a ticking time bomb."
"In so many words."
"Yes. That's probably why I got so defensive about a girl I've never met," Eva answered, struggling to keep her voice steady. "Maybe she's a psychopath, maybe she's doing it all on purpose and it would be better if Miasma or Mr. Gentry caught up with her. But I can't help but empathize with her."
"That's okay," he told her. "You're probably right. I just don't want you to think that I don't care."
"I know you care."
"I just don't know what we can do."
Evangeline brushed her forehead against his cheek. "So this is what it's like to be held by a psychometrist," she said.
"I told you, I'm a bad psychic. I just feel like I know you pretty well."
She kissed his chin. "I guess you do, after all."
Sleep did not come swiftly, but it did come. In spite of their emotional burdens (or perhaps because of them), Eva and Sebastian slumbered into the early afternoon, when the light streaming around the living room curtains finally became too much to bear. While Eva went about fulfilling her promise of a badly cooked breakfast, Sebastian lingered on the couch, his head cast back lethargically on the armrest. Periodic blinking and the occasional yawn were the only signs of his consciousness.
Eva left the kitchen, standing on her tiptoes and peering down at him from the threshold. Satisfied that he had not fallen asleep again, she asked if he wanted any eggs.
"Sure. Over easy, please."
Eva's nose scrunched up. "You like the yolk runny?"
"Yup."
"I was hoping you were going to say scrambled. I'm not sure I know how to cook them any other way."
A lazy smile crossed his face. "You weren't kidding about being a bad cook. It's easy. You just don't cook them as long."
She sighed. "I'll try, but I'll probably break the yolk."
"Do your best."
She turned to walk back into the kitchen, but then turned around again, eying him skeptically. "What are you doing?"
"Checking email, catching up on the news." While he appeared to be staring blankly at the ceiling, he was actually scanning the newsfeed streaming across the lenses of his eyeglasses. "There was an article on The Magic Casement about the hobo plague, but nothing new and interesting."
Suddenly, his blank expression turned grave and he lifted his head from the cushion. "We picked the wrong part of town to patrol last night," he said.
'No kidding,' Eva thought. "What's wrong?"
Sebastian held up his finger for her to wait while he finished reading. Once he finished, he summarized: "Rail workers found a man's body staked out on the track in the Hazelwood switching yard, down by the hobo camp in the Blight. Says the victim was beaten, stabbed, and burned, but the autopsy hasn't come back yet. Hasn't been identified either, but they figure he was a drifter."
"That's awful," Eva groaned.
"That's not all. Listen to this," he said, and then quoted from the Pittsburgh Public Monitor story: "Investigators said messages were left at the scene, spray-painted on the ground and on nearby train cars, including the tags 'plague-bringer' and 'phage.'
"This morning, the Public Monitor received an anonymous email claiming responsibility for the murder. The message reads:
"The body in the train yard is left as a message to all of the diseased parahuman rats of the city. You are vermin. There is no place for you here. Learn from him or his fate is yours. Beware! We are always watching."
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