When the Villian Comes Home Read online

  5

  Antoinette had to ride her own bus, a city transit one, to follow up on what little she’d found online. The bus rolled along at a leisurely pace and stopped every block or two to let someone on or off, the folding doors squeaking open and shut. Remembering the Porsches and Maseratis she’d raced for fun and the even faster vehicles bristling with exotic weaponry she’d driven to hijack armored cars and kidnap dignitaries from motorcades, she wondered how anyone endured this waste of time on a daily basis.

  But the other passengers didn’t look like they minded, and that was because they had good lives with families, homes, and peace. They didn’t have to fight the Balance or Osprey over and over again or rot in jail for months at a stretch till they managed to break out. That was a real waste of a person’s precious time.

  As the bus lurched to yet another stop, she told herself she was lucky to be onboard.

  5

  The telephone buzzed. Everybody in the crowded waiting room looked up at the same time like Pavlov’s dogs reacting to a bell.

  The secretary with the narrow, wrinkled face and blood-red lipstick picked up the phone and listened for a moment. Then she called out to the people in the molded plastic chairs.

  “I’m sorry. That’s all the interviews for today.”

  The job seekers looked back like they didn’t understand. But apparently they did, because they started rising stiffly and trudging out.

  It was Antoinette who didn’t understand. She pushed against the outgoing tide to reach the receptionist’s desk. The woman gave her a tight-lipped flicker of a smile. “Can I help you?”

  “‘That’s all the interviews for today.’ What does that mean?”

  “That Mr. Geraghty has filled all the openings.”

  “Without seeing everybody? I had an appointment. I made it online.”

  She had a solid résumé and references, too, far better than these low-level retail jobs should have required. She’d paid big money to Mr. Quill to create her fake identities because he always delivered a quality product.

  “It’s the bad economy,” the receptionist said. “We get so many applicants. If Mr. Geraghty saw everybody, that would be all he ever did.”

  I was here on time, Antoinette thought, and when you didn’t call me, I waited another hour and a half. Her power stirred, warming the core of her and tingling down her arms.

  She took a breath, and the sensations faded.

  5

  Yelling shrilled down the block. A twinge of curiosity roused Antoinette from a dullness born less of fatigue (it took a lot to tire out a metabolism capable of generating hundreds of thousands of amps) than frustration.

  After she’d gone to the places the Internet told her to try, she’d wandered around downtown looking for Help Wanted signs. She hadn’t found many. Quite a few establishments had gone out of business, like the whole city had fallen victim to the drabness she’d already discovered in Cathy and Paul’s duplex and its rundown neighborhood.

  Finally, when the surviving offices, stores, and sandwich shops started shutting down for the day, she’d taken another creeping bus ride home.

  Squinting against the late-afternoon sun, she spotted running figures. Paul was in the lead, but just barely. The other boys were going to catch him in a few more seconds.

  Her hands feeling like they were vibrating on the inside, she trotted forward. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey!”

  Startled, the other kids balked. That gave her time to reach her nephew. Panting, he looked at the ground, not meeting her gaze or anybody else’s.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The biggest kid twisted his square, flushed face into an expression that fell just short of being a sneer. “We were just messing around playing tag. Tell her, Paulie.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Just playing.”

  One of the other boys snickered.

  “Come on in the house,” said Antoinette to Paul. “You need to do your homework.” She stared at the other kids the way she’d learned to stare down even maniacs like Knyfe when the situation required it. “You kids should go home, too.”

  As they climbed up the concrete steps to the porch, and the television next door blared that somebody was a “ho,” Paul mumbled, “That was nice, but I wish you hadn’t done it. If they think I’m telling on them, that will just make it worse for me when there aren’t any grownups around.”

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to walk you to the bus stop. They’d think you asked me along to protect you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t they like you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m the new kid, and it’s not a good school to go to if you’re a science geek.”

  She hesitated, wondering if she should let Cathy handle this, then reflected that her sister wouldn’t even be home from her various jobs until late.

  “You know,” she said, “you’re right that you shouldn’t rat. I mean, tattle. But running away won’t help, either. You have to stand up to bullies.”

  Paul sighed. “People say that, but they’d just beat me up.”

  “Not necessarily. Let’s go in the backyard.”

  As they passed through the house, she thought about how her instructors had gone about teaching her hand-to-hand combat. She’d decided to learn after a near-disastrous encounter with technology designed to dampen a superhuman’s powers, and although she was no Scarlet Bride, she’d gotten pretty good.

  “The first thing you have to know,” she said, “is how to make a fist.”

  5

  Hanging onto a metal pole, Antoinette looked around the crowded bus and recognized many of her fellow passengers. They caught the bus out of downtown at this same time every day, which meant they had jobs.

  And God, wouldn’t her old partners have laughed to hear that she envied them. Sweet Lady Q, who could walk into any bank in the world, toss some lightning around, and walk out five minutes later with all the money she could carry, was jealous of losers who had no choices in life but to kowtow to bosses like Mr. Geragthy’s bitch of a receptionist and grind away at boring tasks day after day after day.

  But no. That was the wrong way, the self-destructive criminal way, to look at it. She made herself focus on what she planned to teach Paul this afternoon, and that helped her relax.

  5

  Antoinette knelt down in the grass so Paul could easily strike at her face with the final move of the combination. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

  He checked his stance, lifted his hands, and then hesitated.

  “You won’t hurt me,” she said. “You’ll stop the final attack short, and if you don’t, I’ll duck.”

  “Okay,” said the boy, “but isn’t this, like, dirty fighting?”

  She snorted. “Are there four bullies and only one of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do what I tell you.”

  5

  Cathy waited until Paul was in bed to sort through her mail. Most of it was bills, some marked Overdue or Final Notice. She closed her eyes and massaged the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

  “You look unhappy,” said Antoinette.

  “I have a headache.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You can get that job you’re supposed to be looking for.”

  “I am looking.”

  Cathy sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that Jack doesn’t pay his child support, the school system lays me off, I run up student loans getting my stupid degree in Medical Office Management, nobody will hire me to do that, either—”

  “And then your long-lost troublemaking sister shows up on your porch like a stray dog.”

  Cathy winced. “I swear to God, I’m not complaining about that. I’m thrilled you’re here. I just wis
h I could catch a break.”

  Antoinette smiled. “I’ll let you in on a secret. You already have. I didn’t tell you before because you acted so nervous about having me around at all, but I’ve still got some of the money I stole. I shouldn’t transfer it for at a while, but as soon as it’s safer—”

  “I don’t believe this!” Cathy exploded. “You swore you were done with all of that!”

  “I am! I’ll never, ever commit another crime. But we might as well use what I took already. You and Paul can have a better life.”

  “Or I can go to prison for harboring a fugitive, and he can go to foster care! You can have your...loot or your family, Nettie. You can’t have both.”

  5

  The stain on the living-room ceiling was just visible in the gloom. Antoinette lay on the couch and stared at it, while next door an infomercial raved about the wonders of a “revolutionary weight-loss drink.”

  She needed the infomercial to shut up so she could fall asleep, put her sister’s paranoid ingratitude in the past, and wake up liking her again. She wrapped a pillow around her ears, and, when that didn’t keep out the noise, got up and padded out onto the porch in her borrowed pajamas and bare feet. She peeked in a window at the front room of the other half of the duplex.

  No one was there. The neighbors had apparently left the set on when they went upstairs to bed. What kind of idiots would do that?

  Idiots who didn’t realize who was living beside them.

  It was a mild night, cool but not cold, and the window was up. She poked her index finger through the screen and hurled a bright, pencil-thin twist of electricity at the television. The set crackled and then went silent and black. Smoke billowed out of the back.

  She grinned.

  5

  “You’re getting better,” Antoinette said. “Your stance is balanced, and your blocks are working. But this time, give me all you’ve got. Hit and kick like you mean it.”

  His face sweaty, Paul said, “I guess I don’t really mean it.”

  “Pretend I’m Roger.” Roger was the beefy kid who’d claimed they were playing tag and was more or less the leader of the bullies. “What names does he call you? Chicken? Faggot? Is he right? Is that what you are, a little faggot? Faggot. Faggot. Come try and hit me, fag—”

  Paul rushed her.

  She blocked five attacks, then stepped back. “Stop. That was better, but—”

  He came at her again.

  She sidestepped and used a foot sweep to dump him onto the grass. “I said, stop.”

  Looking shocked at his own aggression, he goggled up at her. “I’m sorry!”

  She smiled. “It’s okay. That happens in training. People lose their cool. And you had the right instinct. In a real fight, don’t stop, not until it’s over.”

  5

  Winston liked rock climbing and scuba diving and, judging from the way he kept talking about them, imagined that relating his self-proclaimed “adventures” was a good way to impress the opposite sex. Since it was at least more interesting than...whatever it was he’d said he did for a living, Antoinette sipped her Chablis and tried to look attentive.

  Sitting across from him in a dimly lit bar made a change from the duplex, anyway. The quiet next-door was a relief, but now she had Cathy watching her suspiciously, and just because she’d offered to share her money. How insane was that?

  Things were mostly okay when Paul was awake, but tonight after Cathy sent him to bed, the duplex started feeling particularly claustrophobic. Eventually, Antoinette went for a long, brooding walk, which led her here and to Winston.

  She abruptly realized she’d stopped listening to him a while ago, and now he was looking at her expectantly. “Yes,” she ventured.

  He laughed. “You zoned out, didn’t you?”

  “Well...yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I am. I know I go on and on sometimes. Maybe instead of talking, we should dance.”

  That was a little more fun, enough so that when he asked for her number, she gave it to him. But when he drove her home and kissed her good night, the touch of his lips didn’t make her feel much of anything.

  Well, everybody knew the first time could be tentative and awkward. The next one would be better. As she stood on the porch and watched his taillights recede into the dark, she tried not to compare him to real adventurers like Nexxt, Orcan, or even Dr. Umbra.

  5

  The people standing around Antoinette jostled her whenever the bus sped up or slowed down. The vehicle was so crowded they couldn’t help it.

  It’s a damn cattle car, she thought.

  Selfish though it was, she couldn’t help wishing some gentleman would offer her his seat. But nobody did.

  Sweet Lady Q could have scared an ordinary person out of his seat. She could have emptied out the whole bus.

  A teenager with blue streaks in her hair sniffed twice. “Weird,” she said.

  “What?” asked her friend.

  “It smells like it’s going to rain. But we’re inside a bus, you know?”

  Antoinette shoved past a fat man to snatch the bell cord.

  As she watched the bus roll away, she took deep breaths and told herself to be proud. She’d made the right choice and kept her self-control. Then her cell phone rang.

  5

  Antoinette thrust all her cash into the cab driver’s hand, turned, and then hesitated. With its landscaping and basketball court, Juvenile Detention didn’t look particularly grim as such facilities went, and she doubted anyone in Reception was on the lookout for supercriminals in disguise. Still, the place was part of the great machine that was law enforcement, and she’d spent half her life trying to avoid getting caught in the gears.

  But her sister had sounded frantic on the phone, so she took a breath and headed for the entrance.

  Thanks to the metal detector, fluorescent lights shining down on speckled gray linoleum, and smell of disinfectant, the inside of the building was more institutional than the outside. Cathy was pacing back and forth. When she spotted Antoinette, she scurried to her and threw her arms around her.

  As she hugged her back, Antoinette looked around and found a pair of chairs in a deserted corner of the waiting area. It might not matter in the present circumstances, but given a choice, she wasn’t going to talk where the correctional officers behind the counter could overhear.

  “All right,” she said once they were sitting down. “Tell me what happened. I couldn’t understand it all on the phone.”

  Cathy swiped at her eye. “I don’t understand it all, either. The policemen at the school arrested Paul for assault.”

  “Simple assault?”

  Cathy frowned like it was a weird question, but she answered. “Aggravated assault, and the people here said there could end up being other charges, too. Supposedly, Paul broke one boy’s knee and gouged another in the eye. He could lose the sight in it. The doctors won’t know until he’s out of surgery.”

  Antoinette sighed. “Shit.”

  “It just can’t be true! Paul would never, ever do anything like that.”

  “Not unless he didn’t have a choice. The other kids were bullying him. It was self-defense.”

  Cathy stared. “How do you know?”

  Antoinette hesitated. “He told me a while back.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You work fifty-five hours a week and come home exhausted. I thought this was something I could handle for you.” And build a relationship with her nephew in the process.

  “Handle it how?”

  “By teaching him to take care of himself.”

  “Like the terrorists and murderers you work with take care of themselves?”

  Antoinette glanced around to make absolutely sure no one was listening. “Please, keep your voice down. And okay, yes, I taught him
some...techniques. I didn’t know it would turn out like this.”

  “Of course not, because you still have the same wonderful judgment you always did.”

  “Look, I’m sorry! But Paul will be all right. They can’t convict him of anything when it was four kids beating up on one.”

  “You don’t know that. We don’t know who threw the first punch. Even if he does eventually get off, for now he’s stuck in here!”

  Antoinette winced. Bad things had happened to her when she was in juvie, after she started getting into trouble but before her powers manifested.

  “They’ll hold a hearing,” she said. “The judge will set bail.”

  “Even if he does, how am I supposed to pay it? Or hire a lawyer?”

  “I told you, I have money stashed away.”

  “Right, because that’s all we need, for the authorities to figure out Paul’s bail came from his aunt the supervillain. If that doesn’t convince them he’s a budding sociopath, nothing will!”

  The start of a headache drew Antoinette’s forehead taut and tightened her jaw and neck. Then, however, the incipient pain melted into the shivering crawl of lightning along her nerves. The power concentrated itself in her hands, she smiled, and something in her expression made Cathy’s eyes widen.

  “Don’t worry,” said Antoinette. “You’re right, this is my fault, but I can fix it.”

  “You don’t mean you’re going to break him out.”

  Antoinette snorted. “Of course not. If we can’t even bail him out without screwing things up worse than they already are, what good would breaking him out do?”

  “Then what?”

  “You’re going home so no one can connect you to what’s about to happen. Then, tonight, Sweet Lady Q is going to go on a rampage through town.” She grinned. “Who knows why? Sociopaths just do evil, crazy things.”

  Cathy shook her head. “Nettie, no.”

  “While I’m running amok, I’ll blast this place to pieces. I’ll trash the city jail and the police department, too.” Her hands tingled harder as she pictured it, an almost sexual feeling. “Afterwards, the authorities will have no choice but to release underage prisoners like Paul back to their families. They won’t have anywhere else to put them. That will solve the immediate problem, anyway, and you can figure things out from there.”