Authors: Jayden Alexander
“You look like shit,” Williams said the next morning with the wet streets gleaming behind his back. He dressed the part of the city’s top cop with well-made suits and a dark tie loosened to give the impression of hard work tackled at his office. A Starbucks cup sat dead center amidst paperwork piled in every corner of his desk.
The office, in the mid tower of Public Works, suited him with its gray walls and polished gleam of glass cases housing certificates and trophies.
“I haven’t had coffee yet.” In the two hours of snatched sleep, Mac had dreamt of Lana.
Williams didn’t bother to offer him a cup. “What have you got?”
“Some say that he can fly, while others swear he breathes fire. Some say he’s keeping drugs from kids, other that dealers pay him for protection. Drugs are the common thread.”
“This isn’t news.”
“I don’t have all the facts.”
Williams leaned back in his black leather chair, his pale eyes thoughtful, his hair fashionably gray. “Facts aren’t your concern. All I need you to do is weaken his shield or whatever your kind calls it. Get inside and inject him. My guys will do the rest.”
His gut clenched at the words. “Could be a woman.”
Williams threw him a quick, assessing look. “You know something I don’t?”
“Just saying.” Easy to simply push this off back to the cops and go back to New York, L.A., Seattle. If Night Rook were anyone but Lana, Mac would’ve gone back to a cage three days ago.
“Mendoza did report a woman had approached him. Blond, tall, fetish for leather. Maybe somebody working with the Rook? You saw her at Flamingos?”
“Just her back.” Keeping his posture ramrod straight inside the low visitor chair, Mac studied the wet grinning gargoyle behind Doc’s back.
“You’re hiding something. You stopped shooting up, is that it? You got your powers back.”
“That’s what you’re afraid of?” With a small laugh, Mac shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a gut check? Go ahead.”
Brass knucks glinted dull gold on the gray desk. “I wouldn’t know if you fake it.”
“It’s like a blink. Come at me slow, and I’ll be able to control it. You do it fast, instinct trumps over will.” And Mac lifted his arms to leave his ribs defenseless.
“Makes sense.” Steel slammed into bruised and aching flesh. Iced agony exploded in Mac’s stomach, Doc’s strength surprising for a cop ten years at a desk. Mac didn’t fight the need to double over, the burst of pain preferable to conflicting emotions.
“Satisfied?” A good way to disguise a fit of coughing.
Doc’s pale gaze glittered over the coffee cup. “For now.”
“You still don’t trust me.” Hard to hide irony under short, ragged fights for breath.
“Trust you? I hate your kind. Running around with your powers, thinking you’re the law. Or you’re above it.” Williams tossed the cup into the trash with the others. “You’re the only means I have to deal with this Rook. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy—”
A quick beep of the intercom cut off the rest. “Commander, media crew is here.”
“Yes, send her in. Amy Avalon. ” His smile bloomed wide when Mac dropped the pretense of nonchalance.
“You didn’t hire me to talk to a reporter.”
Williams smoothed out his tie. “You get the Night Rook and you’re redemption itself with your hero’s mug. You don’t, then I was right for all these years. Either way, its time you tell San Mike you’re back, and I figure it’ll be good to do that in my office. Assure the people you’re under control.”
“And pave your way to the commissioner’s tower?”
“If it works out.” Another flash of white camera-ready teeth. “Shall I tell Amy you pulled out?” As if on cue, the heavy door burst open and threw Mac back into the past. Same hairstyle in fire-engine red, same glossy, frosted mouth twisted in a smile. Same business suit and heels in matching, eye-searing red.
“Mr. Mac Gamble. Narc.” With her camera crew behind her and a mic clutched in her crimson-tipped hand, Amy stalked toward him. “Pleasure to meet you, finally, in person.”
He hadn’t seen that grin since her triumphant voice spelled out his name for the cameras. “Ms. Avalon.”
Her practiced smile seemed just this side of grim. “My sources indicate you’re consulting with the Night Rook investigation.” Amy settled into a chair, crossing tanned legs. A fringe of bangs dusted over eyes sparkling at the promise of ratings. “Can you confirm?”
Williams watched with a blank face, probably ready to bust out the appropriate expression.
“Your sources are correct.” Mac faced the winking red eye of the camera.
Amy threw him a withering smile and took out a small notepad. “Can you confirm this vigilante has your gifts?”
He pictured Lana in skintight leather, blood on her arm because she hadn’t had the “gift” long enough to understand when the shields got low. “I haven’t seen the full extent of what the Night Rook can do.”
“You have no powers now, isn’t that correct? You’re still using an inhibitor serum?”
“Chief Williams checked moments ago.” And he’d have another bruise to prove it.
The laser momentarily left his face to focus on San Mike’s future commissioner. Williams assumed the appropriate expression of the tired but relentless man in charge. The perfect photo op. “I can confirm Mr. Gamble is—for now—without ‘gifts.’” He busted out the air quotes.
More sparkling teeth. “Too bad we couldn’t see your method of testing.”
“Perhaps another time.”
This garnered another glittering smile. “I understand your abilities run on instinct? You couldn’t, say, fake that you don’t have them? Commander?”
“Doc, please. I still go by my patrol nickname. I’m not as sharp as when I worked the street, but I still drink the same amount of coffee.” Confident, comfortable in his own space, Williams resumed his place behind the desk, San Mike gleaming in the rain behind him. “As far as we know, Mr. Gamble isn’t able to control his responses. I’m told it’s similar to how we blink.”
Amy leaned back against her chair. “Have you considered something drastic?”
Pale somber gaze. “The City asked Mr. Gamble to come back. We don’t have a reason not to trust him.” The omitted
yet
hung unsaid in the air.
“Tell our viewers about the inhibitor.”
“You’re the reporter. Dig.”
Amy re-crossed her legs. “The initial serum was developed during the Cold War against a threat of heroes controlled by the Soviet Republic. If I remember correctly, it was modified in an incident involving your father?”
He should have known Amy had done her homework. Even before the harbor incident, any report she’d done on him had ended with a small vicious jab. “My father assisted in increasing the desired effect.”
A fluttering of lashes. “And what is the desired effect?”
“The paralysis of ‘gifts’ lasts much longer, depending on dosage and one’s body weight.” Unlike Williams, Mac didn’t bother with air quotes.
Last night, he’d calibrated the liquid for Lana’s last recorded weight, which he had Cass look up from her last visit to the hospital. He couldn’t bring himself to read through the list of surgeries.
“In you, the serum lasts about twenty-four hours?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t ask about side effects, the destruction of his liver, or the ice cold he’d lived with since the first kiss of the drug. Those expertly smudged eyes nailed him as if he were a frog about to be dissected. “Can you explain how the Night Rook has your abilities? Did you transfer them before you left San Mike?”
Behind the desk, Williams rose up, a hard commanding presence. “We don’t know how it’s possible,” he said, and bared his teeth at Amy’s lifted eyebrow. “The point is, Mr. Gamble is here to stop him.” He made a slashing motion across his neck. “This interview is done.”
With a whisper of silk clad legs, Amy got up and tucked away her notepad. And jerked away when Williams got up in her face.
“You want every perp out there to try for superpowers? Just what we need, them fighting to get his attention on the streets.” His hand was on her arm, hard fingers digging.
Mac pushed between them, forcing Williams away, but not before Amy nearly clocked him. “I don’t need a damned knight.” With a neat step on mile high heels, she shoved her mic on Williams’ desk. “The public has the right to know.”
“And you’re just a whore for ratings.”
This time, the smile was edged in bitter ice. “You got him back here, that’s your business. You want to use me? Fine. But you don’t tell me how I do my job, and what I can’t or cannot ask for. If he can transfer ‘gifts,’” another set of sarcastic curling fingers, “San Michael’s got the right to know.”
“It isn’t a disease, Ms. Avalon.”
She smoothed back perfectly straight hair. “It corrupts, and it kills. Turns people into monsters. What would you call it if not a disease?” The door closed behind her with a smooth click.
Williams sank behind his desk, as if the chair infused him with strength. “She hates your kind. I heard she chased the idiot hero in New York before getting fired and moving up here to play ace reporter. ” He pressed a phone up to his ear and jerked his gaze back at Mac. “Get me the Rook or get out of San Michael. Either way, Avalon is going to mobilize a mob.”
***
She stayed in her apartment instead of finding somewhere to hole up. Pride—possibly idiotic—refused to give in to the fear of being caught. With all “Night Rook” things stashed in a safe she had installed under the carpet, Lana tossed and turned in thin snatches of sleep.
I will stop you
. Mac’s mouth moved over hers, kisses hungry and yet somehow tender. His large palm curved behind her neck, holding Lana a willing prisoner.
Dreaming in bold bright colors, she burned under the potent draw of his gaze, the brilliant green, stormy with passion. She couldn’t seem to get any air.
Panic bled through in rivulets of heat, leaching her vision with gray edges. His lips no longer on hers, she fought for air, struggling to push past the constriction in her lungs so she could scream. No longer able to see, she knew in her dream that Mac watched from somewhere above her, his gaze icy, his palm still curved over her neck.
“Being a hero is about saving innocents.”
Fire bubbled and hissed over her skin, her body assaulted by pure energy. Those sculpted lips curved in a smile.
Help me
.
“I can’t.” His lips gave her air, his large hands pumping her stuttering heart.
Help me. Please
.
Somewhere above Mac screamed her name, but she couldn’t gulp the fiery air, razor sharp blue and red slicing her eyes. Then she was free, the fire in her skin doused enough to let her gasp in the harsh lights.
Mac was a steady presence at her back when Lana looked into a face she hadn’t seen in years. “Nicky!”
Same cocky grin, same dark Italian eyes, same stubborn cheekbones. “Rookie.” Tears threatened at that somber tone. “You know this isn’t what I want.”
“I’m going to make them pay.”
“It’s not going to bring me back.”
“I know that.” She would have fallen to her knees if Mac, silent and steady, didn’t support her when she stumbled. “I have to do something. I have to pay them back.” The wind snatched the words away, the rising fog slick and black. Whips of fury coiled in her hands, familiar and lethal.
“You have to stop this, Lana.”
“Nicky…I can’t.” She didn’t intend to let the lightning out of her hands, white coils wrapping around him like blazing wires. “Nicky!”
Helpless, she searched for him amidst the fire and the acrid smoke, groping for him in suffocating darkness. Ice burning her throat, she screamed his name as a blast of heat lifted her off the ground, her skin shielded from licks of fire, her head slamming on burning, unforgiving docks.
Breathe! Come on, Lana
. Hands on her chest, pumping acrid air into lungs, lips on her dry gaping mouth. She knew his touch, his hands, but in razor lights, she couldn’t see his face.
Pain in her head, a drill of fire. She couldn’t think past the screams, the shriek of sirens, the nausea a lead ball in her gut. Despite his lips on hers, she couldn’t breathe, the hands pumping her chest pushing harder, constricting what precious air she had left.
“You have to stop.” And something wet and sloppy bathed her face, the weight gone from her chest, her neck prodded with something cold and insistent.
With the iron shades drowning her apartment in darkness, she opened her eyes to make out an insistent canine grin.
“You’re gonna suffocate me one day,” she said burying her face in the coarse fur of Big Al’s neck.
After a minute, he bathed her face in a sloppy kiss, and nudged one of his rope toys against her shoulder.
“Too early to play,” she mumbled, but nevertheless, sat up. She’d gotten used to him waking her up from nightmares. She hoped he’d gotten used to having to stay indoors during the day, his walks dependent on daylight savings time as much as weather. “Come on, get off the bed.”
He didn’t budge and Lana was in no mood to tug and wrestle. Instead she bribed him with a piece of last night’s dinner: butter on real Russian rye bread.
“You gotta have something other than coffee.”
She looked up at her brother, her vision blurry from lack of sleep. “I eat anything else, I’ll puke in the captain’s office.”
Nerves jittered through her skin. You’d think she’d be used to them after six months of the academy and a year on the job. In a couple of hours, she would know if she passed probation after a full year on the street.
“You don’t eat, you get brain fog. I sure as hell wouldn’t want you armed without food and too much coffee.”
He leaned against the doorframe, his recently adopted Mastiff grinning at her with brown happy eyes. “I ran across a bakery uptown. They swear it’s the real deal. I figured you could put it to the test.”
From behind his back, he whipped out a paper bag, and the delicious scent of fresh baked bread had her mouthwatering.