Chapter 18
The demonic sword punched through the wall. Before the dust had settled we were through the gap, dropping the first three thugs in their gaudy blue outfits on the spot. Malevola's hits and my pressurized water jets put them down instantly.
The gang we'd raided had a fairly distinctive look — drunk or sober, you could have picked these guys out of any lineup. Something vaguely monastic about the whole aesthetic, both in clothing and fighting style. Baggy harem trousers, something like ballet flats on their feet, and enormous bead necklaces that apparently let them temporarily enhance their strikes and toughen their bodies.
Not that any of it helped when Malevola came through their ranks with me running cover and her swinging what I can only describe as Guts's sword from Berserk. No fencing involved. The demoness was already formidable purely from her other-world physiology, and she'd spent considerable time developing what her parentage had given her.
I caught myself watching — the tension in her back, the cables of muscle shifting under the red skin, the firmness of her thighs concealing a strength that was anything but soft — and I nearly joined the gang in unconsciousness when she kicked someone over her head and the leg came very high.
"Right," I said, dodging a body that sailed past me, punched through a wall, and landed on the street outside. Time to appreciate Malevola from a safe and appropriate distance, such as a barstool across a room with a whiskey in hand. For now, there was work to finish. Except there wasn't — she'd done it.
"Good work, Herm." She clapped me on the back with enough force to confirm my shoulder blade still functioned, bit her lip surveying the demolished hideout, gave me a precise flick on the chin with her tail, and set off toward the exit with that walk.
"Sure, except I barely did anything," I said, looking around at the wreckage and the fire taking hold in the corner. "You were brilliant as always."
I said it to the empty room. She was already through the door.
"Hm? Sorry, I didn't catch that." She was already on the street, already talking to the cops filing in, already halfway through creating a portal. "Come on, let's get to the bar — I'm tired as a horse."
"As *a* horse."
"What?"
"Tired as a workhorse, that's the expression." I stepped through the portal beside her, suppressing a sigh. "It's a saying."
"I don't understand." She tilted her head, studying me with genuine curiosity. "Too many lo-lo-los."
"*Horse,*" I said, with the exhausted precision of a man who has explained the same thing many times. I even ran my hands along my sides, some kind of unconscious grounding gesture. "Tired as a workhorse. That's the correct version."
"Hmm!" She grabbed her chin with one hand, pulled me into her chest with the other — her standard way of hugging me, since I was one of the few on the team she actually had to look slightly down at. "I don't like how that sounds. I prefer it with guys."
"I'm not going to ask." I scanned the bar — we were first to arrive, which meant I actually had a chance to talk to her before the rest showed up. I took a breath, turned toward the smiling, visibly anticipating-relaxation demon walking beside me. The words were ready. "Hey, Malevola, I wanted to talk to you about something—"
"Hm? Of course, Herm." She pressed my face against her impressive chest with one hand, gave me a tail-pat on the backside, and started toward the bar. "Just grabbing drinks, we'll wait for the others, and you can tell me everything—"
When they sat me down at our regular table — we'd claimed the same spot every night after missions for two months now — I leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling.
Or tried to. Watching Malevola's back as she headed to the bar was somewhat counterproductive.
"Didn't work out again?" I nearly came out of my skin, one hand going to my heart, the other reflexively shaking water off the palm. I turned to find Invidiva materializing beside me. "What?"
"How many times — don't *do* that." I generated a little moisture, wiped my face, tried to calm a heartbeat that had briefly doubled its rate. "I almost had a cardiac event."
"Stop exaggerating, you're way too young for that." She pressed a glass of whiskey into my hand. Warm, lip-print on the rim, ice long since melted. She caught me looking, rolled her eyes, and wiped the rim with her thumb. "You're not such a disaster that you're hung up on Japanese first-kiss purity culture, are you?"
"Basic hygiene." I made a small sphere of water in my palm and wiped the glass again, under her dismissive sniff. "And the cardiac thing — my family tree is basically a medical textbook dedicated to cardiovascular disease."
"Ha, that's actually decent." She punched me in the shoulder, which at her scale registered as normal. "When your brain isn't fried by the presence of our demoness, you can actually be funny."
"My brain isn't *fried,*" I said, doing a very bad impression of her voice.
"Whose brain isn't fried?" Colm appeared from nowhere — explicable, given his size — settled into a chair, and helped himself to whatever was in front of him. "Yours, kid? A bit young for that, sure, but it happens. Don't worry — I know an excellent remedy, Coupé taught it to me back when we were seeing each other—"
"Anything involving Coupé — absolutely not." I put both palms up for emphasis, got an understanding look from Invidiva and after a brief pause an agreeing nod from Colm. "And that's never been my problem anyway — if anything the opposite is true. Occupational hazard of the ability. Going to the bathroom was the inconvenient part early on—"
"Wait." Invidiva's voice went very careful. "You said you lived with your grandmother for years—"
"Don't you dare." I gave her the look. She was barely holding the laugh. "You have a disturbing mind."
She showed me the middle finger and retreated temporarily, which I estimated at roughly zero percent chance of being permanent. The girl had called herself Invisible Bitch for a reason, and no amount of rebranding was going to change that.
"All right, forget it — how did the job go?" She rattled off the next question before I'd processed the first. "Get a good view of your favorite person from multiple angles?"
"Yeah, what — *what?*"
Under the combined snickering of the invisible girl and the short bruiser, I could only roll my eyes, which at least had replaced the stuttering and leaking as my primary expression of irritation. Two months of fieldwork had accomplished that much.
"Okay, okay — joking, just joking." Invidiva raised her hands in peace, jabbed me in the side with her elbow, and snagged two glasses from a passing waiter's tray. He opened his mouth in reasonable protest. She showed him the finger. We gave her disapproving looks. "What? We'll pay for them. Now, how about the job?"
"What was there to say?" I swirled the whiskey, leaned my head on one hand, and sent a quick glance toward Malevola — noticed by my companions — who had already started a beer pong game with what appeared to be a lizard person. "Walked in, walked out. Took about two minutes. We went straight through the center of the building."
"Sounds boring."
"It was. Compared to other jobs, genuinely uneventful. Take this guy, for example." I nodded toward Colm, who clearly hadn't expected to be the opening act. But he was just first in a long line.
I'm not exaggerating. Two months with Team Z meant working alongside everyone at some point. Invidiva and Prizm I'd already mentioned — the latter had backed off on the more aggressive pursuit and settled into mild boundary-crossing flirtation, which was manageable. Malevola was its own category. Sonar, obviously. But the others—
---
"I still think we should kill him." Gently, almost tenderly, Coupé drew her knife along the trembling captive's throat. The man produced a frightened sound but didn't dare swallow the knot of saliva in his throat, knowing any movement risked a new cut. "No person, no problem."
"Come on, Coup." Colm was rifling through the belongings of two accomplices we'd also detained — clearly close to the main target, judging by the anxious looks he kept sending their way. "They'll ask questions about the blood. Different story if they'd actually done something worth it."
"You're right. You're always right." She withdrew the knife and turned to me — former contract killer, which, somehow, had never genuinely surprised me. "Waterboy, have you ever killed someone? Not in a fight, not by accident — but like this, when the target is looking right at you?"
The silence that followed probably needed no description, but to be precise: my face went from normal to flat in a way that required mental multiplication by approximately two to capture. Notably, I wasn't even leaking — I was just annoyed and disappointed.
"I see." Coupé nodded to herself, produced the knife again, and transferred it to my hand with what she clearly thought was a collaborative energy. She moved behind me and began guiding my grip in what I would charitably describe as an extremely intimate instructional moment, directing my arm slowly toward the non-resisting target's throat. "Your first time is always difficult. Messy, painful—"
"That sounds quite ambiguous," Colm observed, apparently indifferent to what his unhinged partner was doing.
"I know. That's the point." The blade was less than ten centimeters from the throat when I shut my eyes and started massaging the lids. "What's wrong? I can't help you if you're going to keep—"
"*Stop.*" I pulled free of the assassin's embrace, suppressed a full-body shudder — she was objectively attractive, but standing near Coupé always carried the faint suggestion of blood — and addressed the actual situation. "Have you both lost your minds? We're heroes. No killing anyone."
"You're a killer too—"
"*Indirectly.*"
"Still counts," they answered in unison. Actual Bonnie and Clyde.
"Not the point. This man is a *grandfather* who was trying to steal a pie recipe from a competing diner. You want to execute him for that?"
"Our client uses SDS services. This one doesn't." Fully certain of her logic, Coupé wasn't retreating. I looked to Colm for support. He had evidently outsourced the entire argument to his girlfriend. "Better to eliminate the competition so the situation can't repeat itself and our loyal client retains market exclusivity—"
---
"HA-HA-HA!" Invidiva was pointing at the arriving Coupé's slightly flushed face as she came through the bar door, drink already in hand. "And after all that, *I'm* the most difficult member of the team?"
"I was naive and misguided," Coupé said, with the gravity and posture of someone reciting a formal statement. "Waterboy and Blond Blazer helped me understand where I had gone wrong."
"That was *last week.*" I leaned over the table. "And Colm already told us you nearly killed a guy who was eating at restaurants without paying."
"How could you tell him," Coupé said, to Colm. Less accusation, more disappointment. Her tone was so flat that even her usual defender showed cracks of doubt. "Was it very obvious? I had hoped I'd gotten better at lying."
"God, the people I work with."
"So who?" Golem said, having appeared at my back without making a sound. "Hello. Good story. More."
He settled on the floor in his usual spot at the head of the table, pulling his cocktail through a straw between sentences.
"Yeah, go on, Waterboy." Everyone was chiming in, particularly delighted by Invidiva's last line. "I'd like to hear you talk in complete sentences before Malevola comes back."
---
"Kill it already!"
"Good boy." Golem was stroking the enormous, deeply unsettling bull and showing no reaction to anything I was saying.
The bull was genuinely disturbing. The farmer who'd called the SDS had been trying to explain what had happened, but mid-explanation we'd spotted the animal watching us through the gap of the barely-open front door — reddish-brown with a few white patches, intelligence clearly present in its eyes — and it had then moved sideways, slowly and deliberately, and disappeared behind the door frame.
That gave me genuine goosebumps. My current partner was indifferent. He was eating the farmer's wife's homemade cookies and nodding at whatever the television was saying while the farmer and I sweated quietly, terrified the infernal creature would hear us.
"Does it understand us?"
"I'm telling you, it's a monster!" The farmer, a short dry little old man, was hissing directly into my ear. "It watches me and Marta!"
"Can we get someone else? Flambé maybe, let him burn this thing?" I turned to Golem for input. He shrugged with complete indifference, which generated another wave of irritation — I'd been irritable constantly lately, but at least it was helping with the stutter.
"Golem, for the love of—" I grabbed the remote from his enormous hand and turned off the television, which visibly displeased him. He straightened to full height, looming over me, squinting his pupil-less eyes. "Do something. My powers aren't designed for exorcism."
Golem rolled his eyes — as much as the material permitted — rolled up nonexistent sleeves, and stomped toward the door.
The farmer and I watched the door close from the inside. No sounds of combat. We gave it thirty seconds, then went out to check, or at least to collect Golem's remains if needed.
Slow, cautious, almost arm-in-arm, under the baffled stare of Marta, we crept to the door, opened it a crack — and witnessed a scene of remarkable absurdity.
"Don't pet it! It'll eat you!" I tried to keep my voice from cracking. The bull had expanded, whatever supernatural quality it had now visibly active, and was regarding the person stroking it with profound unfriendliness. Golem was grinning his wide clay grin, running his giant palm against the creature's grain.
This had been going on for nearly a minute when I noticed the farmer had gone limp in my arms, practically in the fainting-heroine pose, hand nearly to his forehead.
"All right, this is past the point I can manage." I laid the old man down — he didn't want to let go of me — and reached for my communicator. Golem noticed and gave me a questioning look. "I'm calling SDS. They can send someone built for total elimination and annihilation."
"No. Don't call." Golem was shaking his head. "Bull isn't bad. He's good."
Apparently at that exact moment, the stroking crossed some invisible threshold, or perhaps the angle was wrong. In any case — the creature dissolved into an enormous translucent green-tinted gelatin mass and swallowed Golem whole in one movement.
"Right, so now you agree I should call for backup?" The enormous clay head, visible inside the jelly, slowly nodded.
"That's what I thought."
---
"What's good about bulls? They smell and they're terrifying." Prizm had arrived by now and was running a miniature light show on the dance floor with a couple of her copies while the original talked to us. "Why not just get a cat?"
"They're small. Fragile." Golem delivered this with unexpected pathos. "I don't want to hurt one."
"I heard a bull's member can reach one and a half meters," Invidiva contributed, fulfilling her destiny.
"Sounds like that's the only thing that would work for you," Coupé replied, drawing a high-five from Prizm. The feminine faction of our team was heating back up, as it always did — the constant low-grade combat being, apparently, a form of bonding.
"At least one bull would be enough for me," Invidiva shot back, giving me a nudge that drew quiet laughter from the table and a pained sound from me. "You'd be like that girl in the meme with the braces—"
"You small racist—"
"There it is," Colm, Golem, and I said simultaneously, not noticing we'd spoken in unison until it was already out.
"Actually, while you're at it — what happened with you and Flambé?" Colm leaned in conspiratorially, gesturing to emphasize the question. "You two seem fine now, but something clearly went down. I heard Blondie called you both in. And old Chase was even more acidic than usual."
"That's not a quick story."
He understood immediately. He refreshed the glasses, settled in with the attentiveness of a child about to hear a very good piece of gossip, and waited.
This one happened after the first month of work, at the end of a shift, after we'd finally gotten a dispatcher who could function. The early period had been rough on that front — people were nervous around former criminals, they'd make mistakes under pressure, and they'd fold when pushed. Only someone like Chase — who'd been a serious hero once, as we'd gathered from office conversations, and could theoretically unscrew a misbehaving limb — commanded automatic respect.
Then Dave from Wichita arrived. A decent enough guy. Sharp mouth, willing to work, and prepared to push back on former supervillains. Not everyone appreciated that.
---
"When someone tells you to do something," Dave said, poking Flambé in the chest without apparent fear, looking up at him through his Harry Potter glasses, "you do it. Dispatchers and supervisors exist for a reason. They help you do this work without burning the city down."
"What supervision? You sit in an office reading a newspaper and taking bathroom breaks while actual heroes deal with actual threats wearing actual ridiculous spandex—" An awkward pause. "That's specialized heat-resistant gear. They didn't have other colors. And those idiots *choose* to wear that garbage."
"Very interesting. But I'm still right." Dave straightened his glasses and actually increased the pressure rather than backing down. "Because of you, people almost died. You defeated the villain and immediately compromised a residential block. We needed twelve heroes and two fire crews to contain the damage. Heroes don't do that. Stop calling yourself one. You're as far from that title as I am from the Bolshoi Ballet."
He demonstrated this by jiggling his modest stomach and displaying his unremarkable arms, which appeared to be the precise gesture that snapped something in Flambé. The man didn't have much patience under the best circumstances, but naked contempt from an ordinary person hit differently.
Flambé watched Dave's back as he walked to the building entrance, and the moment the door closed, our combustible colleague murmured something, ignited, and shot up through the lobby's ventilation gap.
I'd been an inadvertent witness to the argument. I followed Dave home — more accurately, I trailed him to make sure nothing happened, since he didn't live far and commuted by bicycle.
My concern turned out to be warranted. I came around the corner just in time to see Dave's apartment window erupt in flame and Dave himself sitting on his backside on the sidewalk, staring at his burning home, while Flambé descended toward him in full theatrical glory.
"So, supervisor." He was enjoying the power differential enormously. "Maybe walk me through my optimal approach?"
He probably wasn't going to kill him — something at that level would have brought down a Blond Blazer-caliber response. But hurt him, or just terrify him enough to quit: absolutely possible.
"Dave, you okay?" I stepped into the light and walked over. Multiple emotions crossed Dave's face in rapid succession, from relief to disappointment. Honestly, slightly hurtful.
"What are you doing here, Waterboy?"
"Really? That's what you went with?" I helped him up and guided him behind me, gesturing for him to leave. Flambé just watched the departing dispatcher with contempt, then brought his full attention to me.
"You'll do fine," he said, which sounded more ambiguous than threatening. A respectable fireball appeared in his hand. "You know what, I'm actually glad you're here. I've been wanting to—"
I didn't let him finish. Water was already running off me, finding the nearest hydrant.
"Yeah, sure, already bored, let's go." I waved off the fully-igniting super and layered water across my body — wouldn't hold long, but it'd absorb the first hit. "Come on then, Ash-for-Brains. We'll hit each other, make our feelings known, and go back to work."
"You asked for it—"
The fireball met my water wall simultaneously. The explosion lit the street brighter than noon. Car alarms went off. Windows cracked. The neighbors made their opinions heard.
The water dispersed, steam bloomed across the nearest ten meters, and the fireball was gone — but a wave of fire came right behind it. I was already elsewhere. Sliding on my own water, pulling more from the broken hydrant, circling for an angle while the steam covered us both from curious observers and from each other.
I came around his right side. On the opposite side I raised a humanoid water shape — in the steam, maybe convincing enough. Flambé was drunk, or I was sober, or it was just good enough, because he turned, unleashed a wave at the decoy, and shouted something triumphant.
I hit the back of my water stream like a slingshot. He must have heard or felt me at the last second — he was half-turned when I arrived — so the hit landed off-center.
It was still a good hit. His eyes went wide in a satisfying way. The ripple across his cheek looked excellent. The fact that he was covered in fire reduced the damage considerably, and I'd caught his jaw at an angle instead of dead-on.
He went into the fog with the sound of a car taking a hit.
My knuckle came back with drops of blood on it. Through the noise came Flambé's voice, lisping and profane and very creative in its descriptions of my heritage.
"He's still up. Damn." He emerged from the fog looking disheveled, hand at his jaw, which was hanging at an angle that suggested it needed professional attention. Blood running from the corner of his mouth, right eye swelling — but the left one was burning with a very specific kind of focus.
"You're *done.*" He said it, and became a humanoid column of fire. The heat began drying my water fast, and without the nearby hydrant I'd have lost my main weapon almost immediately.
The water around me started moving at the same moment he did. I was pulling it into a dome, planning to seal us both inside and attempt a very direct solution—
Then the flash of light hit the street between us.
I will say honestly that in that moment Flambé and I were united in a way we had not been before. A more vulgar expression would suit the exact physical sensation — but simply put, every muscle in both our bodies had the same instinctive reaction simultaneously.
His fire went out. My water scattered. The fog dissolved. Everything around us flooded with light, clearly chosen for both effect and obscuring us from onlookers.
We both sat down hard. Looked at each other. Swallowed in sync.
Because directly in front of us, fixing each of us with a gaze that went back and forth with methodical precision, was Blond Blazer. Hovering. Very angry. Nothing like the warm manager or the cheerful blonde.
In that moment I thought, involuntarily, about the God-Emperor of Humanity as a woman coming to deal with wayward psykers — and I laughed, which was a mistake. Those gold-lit eyes stopped moving and focused entirely on me, with the expression of someone reading a soul directly.
---
I wrapped my arms around myself at the memory.
After that evening, I simply could not look at my boss the way I had before. Two minutes in the presence of an angry Blazer had been enough to understand not just the current gap between us but the entire scale of accumulated experience separating us.
Nobody said anything when I finished. Partly everyone was too drunk — several people had stopped functioning entirely, and someone had gone to be sick. But one person was still there.
"Hey." Drunk Flambé, who understood the feeling better than anyone at the table, patted my shoulder. Then he grabbed a full bottle and drifted toward the empty karaoke setup.
We weren't friends. But after the fight, the dressing-down, the punishment, and the shared experience of genuine terror — we could be in the same room without tension. Distant colleagues who'd been through something together.
He'd also hit me the next day. By way of settling the account, presumably. That had probably helped too.
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