Valentine's Day

Brian Laborn/Grue

February 6th, 2013

The whole world drops into slow motion the second Cherie Vasil leaps through the doorway and in that moment I realize that the plan I had for her isn’t going to work. I didn’t realize it last June, when Heartbreaker freed her but the Cherie Vasil that nominated Alec for the Nine is for all intents and purposes, dead.

Before, she was a mastermind of sorts, using her power from a distance to either suddenly cause terror or subtly subvert her enemies. I had been planning to use my power to smother hers, to see if I could use her own abilities to paralyze her with fear and sorrow like she once did to Quarrel.

But the mantle of the Butcher has changed her.

There isn’t any cold calculation in her actions, there isn’t a semblance of a plan in her steps, she’s not the girl who tried to puppeteer the Nine any more.

Now, she’s a wild animal.

Her lips are pulled up into a snarl, baring incisors that are much too big to properly fit in her jaw, a remnant from one of the older Butchers, the lion Case 53. Her hands are outstretched into claws and her manic eyes don’t even give Rachel or I a glance as she tries to leap past us.

Atlas rears his horn up to stop her but she just uses it as a grip to help vault herself over him. No one else in the room matters to her, there’s some primal, furious part of her that needs Lisa dead.

And just as her fingers graze the Thinker’s golden locks, Cherish is yanked back, with Rachel grabbing her foot and throwing the world back into its proper speed. Rachel snarls something I can’t make out, the skin of her knuckles tearing to make way for a row of boney spikes.

The darkness that falls off of me is too slow, the heavy weight of it makes it crawl through the air at a snail’s pace compared to what I used to be able to throw around. The Butcher hits the floor with a snarl and when Atlas tries to pin her to the ground with his pincers, she just yanks her hands out from under him, his strength meaning nothing to her.

She flips onto her back, something in her ankle snapping as she forces herself to look at Rachel. My amber eyed teammate’s grip is white knuckled around the splintered and twisted remains of Cherie’s foot but whatever pain the Butcher might be in isn’t enough to even make her grunt.

Her bright blue eyes flash with a white glow and immediately, Rachel lets go of her, screaming in agony. She tries to throw out a punch, her fist slamming into the space between Cherie’s legs but the blow is blind, the pain coursing through Rachel is too much for her to bear.

My teammate is strong, one of the strongest people I’ve ever met but the original Butcher’s power is only a touch weaker than when he had it. The only difference in the original pain blast and the one every subsequent Butcher has had, is the agony has been lowered from heart attack inducing to just sobbing on the floor.

Angelica tries to squeeze past Atlas to chomp at the Butcher’s arm but like the mutant beetle, her strength is almost laughed off. She rips at Cherie’s shirt, tearing the sleeve off but the skin underneath is unblemished.

A sinking feeling of dread starts to pool in my stomach. The only reason she’s hurt at all is because she hurt herself. Rachel might’ve held her down but the only reason her bones broke was because she was the one to break them.

Cherie pulls her arm free of the monstrous canine’s jaw, some of Angelica’s teeth coming with, before she cocks the fist back and slams it into the mutant terrier’s nose.

Angelica goes through the wall and I hope the reason she doesn’t get up is because she’s unconscious.

Alec seizes on the bed, his limbs flexing out as far as they can go and his eyes rolling in the back of his head. For a moment, I’m hoping it’s something I can explain, that Cherie just got a stray look at him when Brutus makes the same mistake as his sister.

But then, something starts to leak from Alec’s fingernails, something dark and smokey.

A second figure rises up out of his skin, connected to his actual body with thin black strands. The figure is barely humanoid, looking more like an antlered imp when its claws reach out for Cherie.

His sister teleports to the far corner of the room, barely a few feet from us and even trying to shield ourselves, the shockwave still knocks us to the floor. My head hits the wall hard and it’s only because of the fire licking at my ankles that I manage to stay conscious.

I blink away the stars, my head rolling and my eyes blearily trying to focus on the monster Alec’s summoned.

The creature is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, with a spine that must be three times longer than a man’s, the beast is forced to hunch over, its long arms and even longer claws making up for the odd proportions.

A lit in the center of its face tears itself open with a wet pop and a shrill screech escapes it’s mouth as it lunges for Cherie.

But instead of tearing her apart, the shadowy creature instead sinks into her, the black smog growing less opaque as it slips between her pores.

“Jean—” Cherie tries to speak but her voice isn’t her own anymore, instead of the one wordless voice she’s shown this whole fight, now there are many more, some masculine, some feminine, some inhuman but above them all, just a touch louder than the actual Cherie Vasil is her brother. “—too many…”

She stumbles forward, her hands wrapping around her middle in a vice-like grip.

“There’s too many in here— I can’t— I—” She falls to her knees, her arms flying out and back to her sides as a dark cloud leaps from her chest and back into Alec. The moment it sinks back into him, his eyes open wide and he rolls as best as he can to vomit on the side of his bed.

I scramble to my feet, taking a step towards his side when Rachel reaches out for the Butcher. And like moments before, Cherie shows our Brute why she’s ridiculously out of her league. With another flash of white, Rachel screams loud enough to tear her throat but this time, the sound is drowned out by a punch hard enough to send out gusts of wind.

This… this is bad. Her strength is an order of magnitude higher than all of ours and so far, she’s only shown off two of her fifteen powers but worse than that is her eyes. All it would take is just two more glances, one at me and one at Taylor, for the Butcher to neutralize us and kill Lisa. I… I can’t let that happen.

I do the only thing I can think of and, wreathed in my power, I tackle Cherie just as Lisa screams for me not to do what I’m about to.

The instant my dark touches her skin, everything else is dwarfed by the overwhelming senses coursing through my body. My eyes sting like there’s a pair of spring loaded blades right behind them, the scent of blood becomes the only thing my nose can smell, I can hear dozens of heartbeats with my own but all of that pales compared to the sudden vastness filling my head.

It feels like my brain has expanded but the thoughts themselves aren’t any bigger, like the neurons now have to cross through an ocean to get to each other. It… it makes me want to throw up, the nausea bubbles over itself into a rolling wave of dizziness but I force myself to power through it.

Cherie growls as I lock my arms around her, my suddenly sharp nails digging into my own skin as I throw my head back.

Looking back through the doorway, Taylor cries out for me, her voice desperate and pleading as Atlas tries to scuttle towards me. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to leave them here to fight the rest of the Heartbroken by themselves but whatever they can do, I know the Butcher is ten times as worse.

Something behind my pupils slots into place, like a slug in a shotgun.

I pull the trigger and find myself in the hallway, a wave of fire and force coming off of me and Cherie as I wrench her around, throwing her to the floor. Her strength is still leagues above Rachel’s, I can tell that just by the strength in my own, but right now, I’m stronger.

She tries to crawl away from me, her hands leaving the dark and gauging pits in the floor to get out of my shadow. I grab her by her hair and throw her into the wall opposite the doorway as I pump as much darkness as I can off of me. I can’t afford to let her escape me.

She shakes the plaster from her hair as she turns her head in the dark, her eyes blinking rapidly and her teeth bared when that does nothing to dispel my power. She tries to get to her feet again, guided by a sense I can barely feel myself, some kind of shuttering in the air.

I don’t let her use it for long before I slam my boot into her side. Something cracks under the skin and when she’s thrown back into the wall, my eyes are drawn to something on my left.

The Heartbroken are coming for us.

Charging down the hall is a mob of people, enough that most of them are either trampling each other or squeezing shoulder to shoulder.

Some are just maids, beautiful women wearing almost nothing and wielding kitchen knives and bits of debris. Their faces are the most inhuman, their lips curled and bent into expressions not meant to be held for long, locked in permanent anger and desperation.

Some are butlers, well-built men with hardened eyes and body armor, armed with pistols and rifles. They look robotic as they push their way past the women, their eyes locked unblinking on the dark. They have their rifles aimed and ready but none are firing and it’s with a cold disgust that I realize it’s because none of them want to risk hurting the women.

None of them really concern me, the mob of anger and rolling bodies are tempered by their weapons. The guns and knives are proof that they aren’t parahumans, that they don’t mean anything to me or Rachel or Taylor.  But it’s not them that drag my attention away from Cherie. It’s the ones behind them.

The ones with Alec’s eyes.

My darkness turns the world into a perfect monochrome but somehow, even through that filter, I would swear I can still make out that exact shade of icy blue through the smoke.

Most of them are older, maybe around my age or a few years above at the oldest but some… some of them are young, barely eight I’d say. Given Heartbreaker’s power, the blind loyalty he instills, I can’t tell which of them have powers and which don’t.

I’d like to say they must all have powers, that makes the most sense to me but I haven’t been warped like they have. They would charge into hell, powers or no, if it meant making their god happy.

That said, I pay special attention to a few.

There’s a girl in the back, about my age and wearing a skirt and sweater in bright colors. I can’t tell what shade they are through my smoke but given the brightness of the white I can see, I wanna say pink maybe. But her clothes aren’t what concern me, it’s her face, the bright smile gracing her lips.

Is she happy to see us?

On her left is someone that looks almost alien compared to everyone else I’ve seen. Where his siblings are well groomed and dressed, he isn’t. He’s wearing a stained tshirt, sweatpants, and has a beard that’s started to curl in on itself. If it weren’t for his eyes, I’d say he might just be an underdressed guard.

But then he levels his gun at me and when his rifle shoots through the dark, the bullets tear right through the crowd and into me.

The pain is white hot, tearing through my costume but not into my skin and it’s only because of the Butcher’s durability that I’m not dead on the floor. I make a mental note that one must have some kind of Thinker power when Cherie brings her elbow into my nose.The cartilage cracks and enough vessels pop to spurt blood out like a geyser. It hurts but not as much as it should.

The dark stops pouring off of me, my attention taken when Cherie blindly teleports between my legs, making the smog billow until channels carve their way in from the outside, wide enough that I can hear Nikos taunt me.

I don’t know how he manages it, but his voice seems to come from everywhere, loud enough to be heard over the stampede coming from either end of the hall.

“Tell me,” he calls as I turn around, grappling his daughter and spotting just how he’s able to be heard from everywhere. Brass pipes line where the walls meet the ceiling, with horns sprouting out every ten feet or so. It’s an ancient kind of PA system but he has to be close by to commentate “What do you hope to get from this? A place at my side for handing me your girlfriends?”

His words spark a fire in my gut and I let go of Cherie’s waist to grab on to her left wrist and cock my right fist. The Butcher growls silently as my dark fills in the gaps again and as she struggles to free herself, I punch her in the throat as hard as I can. She gasps for air and throws her head back to blindly teleport.

Holding on to her, we both slam into the ceiling, the explosion setting the drapes on fire as we tumble back to the floor. I tighten my grip on her wrist as I stand up, yanking her to her feet as she swipes at my chest with her claws. I just barely manage to dodge the slash when Rachel and her dogs breach the doorway.

She has to be using just her sense of smell to guide her but with a confidence I don't think I would have in her circumstance, she points one claw out to her left as she head for her right. I don’t know how her dogs heard her but they run past Cherie and I to get at the Heartbroken reinforcement.

Judas’ tail smacks into Cherie’s shin as he bolts by her, sending her off balance and forcing her face to meet my jumping knee. Her teeth crack but through the pain, she smiles as she rises up, her food hitting my chin with enough strength to send me into the wall.

Before I can even open my eyes, she’s slamming herself into me again, her arms around my waist when she throws us to my right. The world is heat and fire when I open my eyes and it’s only because of the darkness over my costume that I don’t lose connection with her.

She’s teleported us out of the smog, in the middle of the Heartbroken mob.

“If they’re gifts…” Heartbreaker continues, his voice a little out of breath but still loftily unconcerned as I pour out more of my power.  “I really do wish you had called first, I don’t typically care of redheads or brunettes… that blonde on the other hand, she might—”

A maid’s knife snaps against my shoulder and she calls me a homewrecker as she screams. I Turn my eyes to face her and send her to the floor when they flash white. In that brief moment she collapses, a butler steps over her to point the barrel of his gun in my face.

Even against the soft flesh of my eyes, the bullets barely do more than make me blink and just like the maid before him, I send him to the ground in agony. None of the maids or butlers are any kind of a threat, if anything, the wall they make between themselves and Alec’s siblings just helps me.

Most Master powers are either line of sight or touch based and neither of those vectors are reliable when a mob is blocking both twice as effectively as my dark. Still, I can’t risk getting swarmed, all it would take is just a few of them pushing me away from Cherie and a blind teleport from her to leave me dead in the water.

I yank the Butcher towards me, her boot popping the skull of a maid as she steps on it and I teleport away from the mob and down the hall again.

Cherie  tries to gain control of the situation but blind and deaf, she’s completely unprepared for the three swift jabs I send at her face, each one sending her skull further back into the wall. But just as her eyes get a little hazy from the swings, she blinks and they fill to the brim with a glowing red.

Her lips curl up into a feral grin and when I try to send another hook at her cheek, she catches my fist and slams her forehead into my nose, breaking it again. Having the fight turned on me so quickly lets her get a few more hits in as I cock my leg back, my boot snapping her knee backwards as her hands glow with a sickening green.

Her powers might be weaker in my shadow but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I can’t remember what order they came in as far as Butchers went but I know who these powers belonged to before they took the mantle, a wannabe vampire named Vladimir and a British scumbag named Dirty Rotter.

I’m sure there’s nuances to both abilities but right now general definitions work best, bloodsight and the ability to make anything decay on touch, inorganic or otherwise.

I just barely manage to dodge the first swipe at my chest, the black leather turning white and flaking away to reveal my chest, but the second one catches my wrist when I go in for a cross. Cherie’s grin is all teeth and I would swear her lips split in a feral glee as my skin turns to sagged flesh, then leather, and finally dust as my muscles spurt open with gangrenous blood that smells like fish.

The pain is excruciating and though it’ll take my hand less than a minute to heal from the decay, it’s still gonna be out of the fight for a while. I step on Cherie’s foot as hard as I can, the hardwood splintering underneath her and the rug as her claws slip under my skin, degloving my hand as I bring my shoulder in to slam her into the wall.

The wall itself caves in dangerously and when I follow the crack up to the ceiling, I can see a section of it slowly starting to dip into the hall. Shit, at this rate, there won’t be a house left to escape from in a few minutes.

Something in Cherie’s chest pops and she’s dazed enough that she almost doesn’t fight me as I twirl with her, my eyes scanning for a window and teleporting through it the moment I find it.

The outside air is pain on my wounds, my mangled hand feels it the worst, the flakes of snow that started falling just moments after we came in feel like little drops of acid on my exposed nerves.

Still, there isn’t enough snow on the fake grass to stop it from catching fire and the moment the shockwave ends, it does just that. The flames lick at our ankles, burning away my leathers and her jeans as gunshots ring out from inside.

The sound makes me sick to my stomach, without me inside, the others don’t have the cover I provide them. Rachel should be able to shrug off everything short of a bazooka but I can’t say that for certain.

I want to turn back, I want to be there for them but I know doing that means bringing the Butcher in with me. It hurts to know but right now, killing the Butcher is my main priority, she needs to die and I—

No, no she doesn’t need to— I can’t, she’ll—

The lapse in focus gives her all the time she needs to yank me forward and she lets her back hit the ground as she gets her legs out from under her, her feet pointed at my chest and ready to push my grip away.

I try to flood the courtyard with dark but the damn smog is too slow to stop her before she teleports again.

It isn’t until the wind starts to freeze my ears off that I realize she didn’t teleport us to the roof, she was aiming straight for the sky.

She laughs like the devil herself and when her kick finally lands, connecting straight at the base of my chin, I let go of her.

There’s a moment, an infinitesimally small second where I think I’m dead. All she needs to do is teleport, it doesn’t matter where, just so long as she’s out of my range, she’s won.

In that moment, all I can think about are my teammates, the three girls fighting for their lives a mile below me. 

Rachel will be the first to die, she’s strong and that’s exactly why they’ll kill her first, she won’t be able to hold them back forever. 

Next will be Taylor and she’ll go down just like Rachel did, she’ll fight until the bitter end, until there’s no more bugs left to listen to her and her hands are numb from swinging.

Last will be Lisa and terrible as it is, dying would be preferable to what Nikos promised. The thought of her, trapped in this house, Heartbreaker having twisted her into a shattered reflection of who she used to be, it fills me with a hollow numbness.

Alec’s the one that gets me the most though.

I promised him that we would get him home, I told him that he wouldn’t be here for even a second longer and… no. I won’t break that promise. I can’t.

Cherie stares up at me, her eyes blinking and the second they open up, I know she’ll be above me, far out of reach and ready to watch as I paint the turf red. She’d win and there’d be nothing I could do to stop her but just as they open up to leave me for dead, a blanket of chitin climbs out of my costume.

A hundred bees die from the cold immediately but the corpses shield the others, becoming a solid mat and landing on the Butcher’s face.

She swats at them ineffectively for a moment and when her face pulsates with Rotter’s power, I force myself into a torpedo and wrap my arms around her middle, my dark instantly connecting me back with her powers as I look over her shoulder.

The ground greets us with a crack that makes my legs disappear. And then, after a moment of searing agony, they pop back into my awareness, with most of them broken into splinters.

Cherie thrashes in the crater we’ve made, the dust staining both of us as I pour as much of my power as I can into the courtyard. It won’t do much if I’m being honest, all it will take is another blind look to the sky for her to pull that stunt again but hopefully, with me beating her face in, she won’t be able to tell which direction is up.

But more than that, I have to keep at least one hand on her at all times. If I let her go, even for a second, I doubt I’ll be as lucky as before. No, more likely than not, she’ll run, she’ll kill me, she’ll kill everyone I care about and that’s why I have to do it first, that’s why I need to stop fucking around and choke her out already you stupid piece of—

This… no, I—

Cherie bites down on my shoulder, tearing the skin and ripping out a chunk of muscle as I straddle her, my legs wrapped around her middle as I land blow after blow into her throat, eyes, and chin, the weak spots of her flesh shining like stars in my eyes.

I know this power too, the ability to see weak points, it’s been a good tool for us, for making sure this waste of space, the piece of garbage that killed me is spitting teeth for days— honestly can I hurry the fuck up, the sooner it’s done— the sooner—

No!

The thought comes, loud enough that when it roars through my head, I can hear the echo it makes. I’m not alone in here anymore. The thought makes my brain feel like it’s been dumped into a bucket of ice water but my body doesn’t listen to me as I lean down, my teeth growing into fangs.

My teeth latch on to the soft shell of her ear, piercing it and tearing most of the cartilage away from her head. She brings both of her hands up to the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding  when I flex both of my arms out to my sides, inch long claws sprouting from my nail beds and sharpening to a monomolecular edge with a thought. Where the fuck’s my sword anyway? This would be so much easier if I—

No, I— this isn’t me— the voices— they— where are they coming from?

I can hear them now, all of them, screaming over each other and it’s— I can’t tell where I end and they begin, it isn’t like a group of voices at all, it’s like one mouth with a dozen tongues, all tripping over each other and screaming to get their point across.

My brain itches like mad and when Cherie tries to get up from underneath me, I wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her chest up to mine, my claws raking over the disks in her back until I find the little difference in density that tells me I’ve reach the lumbar. With that found, I plunge both of my claws into her, working them between the disks and cutting with such a completeness that I know it’ll take a minute to heal, even for her.

Keep going someone growls and I can’t tell if it’s me or not, it sounds like me but— no, that wasn’t even English, I don’t think like that, I—

Stop thinking! Another voice hisses, full of hatred and with Cherie’s legs limp, I push her back into the crater, her head bouncing against the dirt and catching fire when a roaring ball of turf rolls into our ditch. She rolls her neck as best as she can, mostly smothering the flames but still distracting her as I slash at her sides.

Kill her, kill the bitch that killed us! Someone screams at me and with her voice comes a vision of arrows fired from a bow much taller than me. You’ll be stronger, strong enough to take whatever you want, strong enough to protect what’s yours—

Her promises fade away and another voice takes her spot, blending into me and her and all the others seamlessly.

Don’t put us back in her head, we can’t think in there! It’s all quiet, all the time, we’re braindead in there man, don’t do it to us pleas—

I can’t— I can’t fucking handle this!

I listen to the first thought that comes and look up, mentally deciding how much juice I want to give the ‘port before going with it. I don’t teleport out of the dark, I know better than to kill myself, the Butcher can’t puss out like that after all.

No, instead, I teleport just high enough that when I come back down, it’ll hurt like hell, Cherie’s eyes are wide even in the dark and the voice must be split between us because the way she tries to scramble out of the pit tells me she knows what’s coming.

She doesn’t have any time though and both of my feet land hard on her stomach. She vomits a mixture of blood and I’m guessing cereal and I can’t help but fucking laugh as I drop back down again.

NO! Someone shouts as I teleport in front of her, the dark around us being blown back by the shockwave as I put my hands on her throat. We can’t do this! We have to save Alec!

I’ve got my legs around her waist, a knee on one elbow when I realize the voice the just yelled isn’t a ghost. It’s me. 

I stop pouring out the dark, barely leaving a trickle between me and Cherie as I slam my palms into my temples, trying to shake out the voices, the madness inside of me, I can’t—

“The voices,” someone speaks up and it’s only because I hear it through my ears that I open my eyes. Cherish is staring up at me, her eyes wide and her mouth open in shock. Her lips tremble as she brings a claw up to her face, the last shreds of darkness evaporating before she darts her eyes back to me, “You got rid of the— give them back! You fucking— give them to me!”

She swipes at us— at me and though the cuts that blossom on my chest hurt like hell, the same rot from before making them breach my skin, it’s the desperation in her voice that really surprises me.

“You have to give them back!” She shouts and then yanks her other arm out from under my knee, not to slash at me though but instead to scratch at the back of her neck. “It’s the only way to get that fucking thing to stop torturing me! He built it for one mind, not fifteen and I— please! It hurts—” her voice cracks, “It hurts so fucking much, I shouldn’t feel them damnit! I shouldn’t be— PLEASE!”

Tears are streaming down her face and in her eyes I see a memory that isn’t mine, I see a man, a caricature of a man, made out of porcelain and faceless. I know him, he’s the one who helped Bonesaw rip me— the real me— into pieces.

But I’m not myself, I’m her, I’m screaming my voice raw and I’m beginning them to please listen to me but the manic violins I toyed with are silent, their emotions operate instruments I can’t hear and the quiet Tinker killer just tilts his head at me, maybe wondering why I’m suddenly so afraid.

My power isn’t working, it might not have ever worked on them, at least, not really. They’re torturing me, they’re promising that my new ‘home’ will make me eternal and that the little, heart shaped device they’re going to put at the base of my skull is to help me. If I like listening to people’s feelings so much, they’re going to shorten the range a bit but force it wide open, I’ll get to hear everything all at once, all the time and it—

“Give them back you—” She tries to scream again and my hands jump to her throat, moving with an unnatural speed as the darkness redoubles, blanketing us, the crater, and most of the yard as the minds inside my own start to quiet before suddenly rising into a chant.

Kill her, kill her, kill her

She manages to roll me onto my back, her spine having healed quicker than it should’ve and she doesn’t waste a second to jam her claws between my ribs, the bones just barely durable enough to stop her nails from grazing my lungs. The pain gets me to let go of her but when I try to pull her hands out of my chest, she curls her fingers around my ribs, keeping them in place as she leans down.

“It’s all your fault!” She screams in our face, her eyes shaking with madness and her teeth changing sizes. “You and your fucking bitch of a girlfriend, if she hadn’t told him what I was doing, I would’ve had the Nine wrapped around my fingers! I would’ve marched them here, I would’ve taken father’s place! I’d be the goddamn queen of the world but she had to talk!”

She growls in frustration and headbutts me again, dazing me as she yanks her hands out my chest. Her hands pop with Rotter’s glow before she shakes it away, she wants to hurt me and she wants to do it with her bare hands. Her claws glide up to my throat but she’s smart enough not to just try and choke us.

Instead of stopping at our throat, her hands glide up a little further to get a grip on either side of my head. Just as I’ve got my own hands around her throat, she lifts our head up just enough to really hurt when she slams it back down.

The force of it rattles my eyes and my hands fall limp on either side of me as I weakly try to buck her off. We’re so much stronger than her now, our strength made so much more than hers because of the dark, but she has something we don’t. Her body is used to us, she has the muscle memory I don’t and it’s giving her the leg up she really needs.

She places her forearm on my throat and leans down with all of her weight, her teeth chomping with each word as she threatens us. No, as she threatens me.

“After I’m done with you, I’m going to fry that bitch! There’s one less family for every fucking person you know!”

The threat to Lisa’s life shakes the cloudiness from my mind and with a snarl, my claws bend and shift through the dirt on my right, lifting up as much as we can. The dirt fizzes with my power, the grains combining and sharpening just how I like it. If I had time, I’d make a knife out of them, it wouldn’t be a good knife but we’ve made do with worse.

But I don’t have that time, some the equivalent of a few sharpened shards of glass will have to do.

I throw the sharp constructs, the dozen little shapes fly through the air and using the same old trick I’d use to pull girls at a bar, all of them land perfectly into Cherie’s blue eyes.

She screeches as she rears back, her hands rising up instinctively to try and scrub at the little knives stabbing her sclera. I use the moment to flip her, my legs wrapping around her middle as I slam her to the dirt. Blood leaks from her eyes but I know it isn’t permanent, in just a few seconds she’ll be as good as new and I can’t let that happen.

I bring my head down on her nose, the cartilage snapping and blood spurting as her hands try to find a weak spot to stab into me. I lift my head up again and stab into her wrists with my claws, the sharp nails pinning her to the ground between her ulna and radius as I bring my head down like a gavel.

She screams and I do it again, and again, and again, and again and finally she starts to get the message, she starts to blink with eyes that sing of a concussion as I rip my hands away from her wrists and down to her throat.

Kill her, kill her, kill her, kill her, killher killherkillherKILLHERKILLHER!

A scream tears its way up my throat and the blood tastes like wine in my mouth as I squeeze the life out of her. I want to kill her, I want to kill her so fucking badly, I need that power, I need to be whole again, I need to be in a brain that isn’t so fucking stupid to join the Nine!

Someone else, a voice further back, like the deepest one in a cave, tries to yell through the noise, tries to say that that time was different, that they were just hiring the Nine and I remember thinking about how dumb I was then too and this idiot decided to fucking join them—

Cherie’s hands slap my face weakly, her strength finally leaving her as I choke her out. Her  eyes roll into the back of her head, her face going slack as she tries to buck me off one last time. Her blood stained lips shake, trembling to form words, probably to beg for mercy but I won’t be soft, It—

“Jean—” She whispers, wordlessly, her hands rising up to grab at my wrists. There’s something off about her grip, before it was tight enough to crush stone but weak as it is now, there’s a firmness to it that doesn’t come from physical strength. Her eyes lock with mine one last time before they fall closed “—Paul, I was never—”

Whatever else she has to say is silenced as she falls unconscious, going completely still as I ease the pressure on her throat. She… they, the voices, they want me to— I can’t. I have to save him, I have to save Alec.

I lift my hands up off her skin and flex my hands to get the claws to snap back into my fingers. The angry choir inside my head screams with a unified anger, almost forming words, forming threats and promises and even one apology but they’re all meaningless now I’m not them any more, there is no us, and I won’t listen to them.

I am Brian Laborn, Grue, the king of Brockton Bay and I will not give up everything that I have, everything that I am just to become another Butcher to be killed by someone even crazier!

With a snarl, I bring the darkness back in, the vaporous sludge sinking back beneath my skin as the fury of the past Butchers turns into fear. The threats to skin me alive are cut off just as the dark starts to fade, the color leaking back in as they shout for mercy.

Don’t force us back in there! A voice pleads, his metaphorical throat tearing raw as he sobs I can’t stand the fucking quiet man, there’s nothing in there, there’s—

His plea and all the others die as I soak every last puff of my power back into myself, leaving no connection between the girl underneath me and myself. And with the sudden quiet, I’m made all too aware of the half-healed wounds webbing over my body.

The pain is enough that I lose control of my limbs, the hard ground collides with me as I fall off of Cherie and even the mere act of inhaling makes my body sing with an agony that refuses to be ignored.

The wounds… this might be the worst hurt I’ve ever endured, short of the torture Bonesaw put me through. The burns that itch like the fire is still licking them, the cuts that form trenches over my torso, and the stabs that feel like they drilled into my very soul, they all pulse and throb with their own heartbeats. 

But despite that, despite the all consuming damage that’s raking over my body like salt on raw nerves, it somehow pales to the sensations I can feel inside my own head.

The vastness, the impossible distance that my mind had adjusted to, it’s gone but my head doesn’t feel like how I know it should. Where my mind adapted to it before, it now feels compressed, like shoving the lid closed on an overfilled jar. My thoughts, the neurons themselves, they all feel too close, too cramped, and the headache that mounts feels like an icepick stabbed through my skull.

It's a pain so deep and unique that a part of me wants to die right here, at least to get rid of the awful incompleteness … but… I have to get up, I need to get up.

Just because Cherie and I’s fight is over doesn’t mean the day is won,  I can still hear it, inside the damn house. Gunshots fire like mad, a swarm buzzes with a wild anger, and screams start up and get cut off just as quickly, each of them making me listen intently, just to check if any of them sound like my teammates.

… I need to get up… I have to get up.

With a roll of my head, my eyes lock on the unconscious form of Cherie Vasil and I can’t tell if what I’m seeing is real or not but I would swear I can see the voices underneath her head, the thoughts swimming beneath the skin like maggots in an infected wound.

I know it’s a bad idea, I know that just because there was a delay before doesn’t mean the voices won’t wake up the second I try to use her powers again. But I also know that it’s really the only chance I have to win this fight.

I reach out to her, my fingers not quite reaching her as my body gives a painful creak, as if trying to get me to pass out from the pain rather than let me put it through that hell again. I ignore the protest and roll over onto my chest, some stab wound gushing open as I crawl towards Cherie.

Every slight movement is a promise that things are only going to get worse from here, every kick of the dirt and desperate crawl of my hands says that if I don’t stop now, I’ll die out here. I ignore it all and once I’m close enough to take her in, I let the dark out.

Just like before, the moment my power touches her skin, I’m bombarded with an avalanche of alien sensations, a crawling under my skin, a second heart beats right over my own, my eyes sting with like hands are scratching at them from the inside but all of it is trumped by the vastness that forces the hemispheres of my brain apart.

I don’t give myself a moment to try and acclimate to it, I just welcome the adrenaline that makes my wounds feel like fuzzy static as I get to my feet, my hand white knuckled around Cherie’s limp wrist.

The voices don’t greet me but that’s of little comfort, they didn’t exactly announce themselves before either. I lift Cherie’s body over my right shoulder, her middle bending around me in a fireman’s carry as I look for the window I left from.

Finding it isn’t very difficult and with a deep breath, I resettle my grip on Cherie, and throw myself back into the fight.

The teleport is loud and attention getting, the fire and force that jumps off of me splatters a maid that was too close to where I came in and a trio of butlers are thrown to the ground to join her, two of them from the shockwave and one catching on fire from the sudden explosion.

The teleport wasn’t muffled by my darkness at all and for a moment, all of the fighting stops to recognize me. In that brief moment of calm, I try to take stock of my surroundings.

The hall is littered with dead, there’s enough bodies here that most standing in the hall are either on top of them or using them like cover. Blood forms puddles between their arms and legs, rising up to a few inches high in some places.

Pretty much is either wounded or dead, and while I don’t see any capes on the ground, with all the carnage it’s hard to tell who’s who in all this death.

I look past the stunned butlers back to Alec’s room and for a moment, my face twists in anger.

Rachel is leaning heavily on the wall, her right arm a ruin of bullet holes and gushing blood, the red dripping down to her limp fingers. Her knees buckle as she looks at me, Brutus supports her weight on the other side but she’s too badly wounded for him to be enough support alone.

She looks at me with tired eyes, the amber gaze dragged down by a haze I just got very familiar with. It’s similar to the look I saw in Cherie’s eyes, a confusion that’s too deep to be natural. She’s been bogged down by too many powers and if any of them are like Cherie’s then it’s got to be too much.

Still, even dead tired and drained, she manages to lift her claw up to point behind me just as something sharp drags down the inside of my spine. The feeling is unlike anything I’ve felt before, one half icy pain and one half a gentle tingle. I follow what the sense tells me and leap forward as I turn around.

The dark wafting off of me isn't thick enough yet to hide my form entirely and because of that, I manage to match the gaze of a man with a hawk's pair of eyes.

He blinks once and they turn back into the typical Vasil blue as he snarls.

He’s lanky, maybe as tall as I am but all shoulders and knees. His face is much more narrow than Alec's soft edges and where my teammate's eyes are defined and elegant, his are almost bird-like in their angularity. 

His hair is just as black as most of his other siblings but where they have a mop of curls, his is noticeably straighter as he lunges for me.

His hands are extended as wide as he can make them, each finger long enough that it almost looks uncanny when he swipes for me.

Something in my brain pings, some kind of encyclopedic knowledge on this one moment specifically and I realize he’s a Striker.

Knowing that immediately puts me on edge and I nearly stumble when I leap away from him. 

His swipe has missed me by a mile but the failure doesn't even make him pause as he chases after me, his feet barely landing on the corpses beneath him as he tries touching me, again and again.

His movements are unnatural, his arms swaying like sleeves as he picks up speed. He almost looks like he's dancing as the guns start to fire.

I don't know what he'll do if he touches me and honestly I don't care, I'm not going to risk getting any more crazy.

He twirls, surprising me with the end of his foot as he pirouettes into my personal space.

That danger sense pings again and I angle my shoulder when he brings his hand up to tap me. Cherie slides a bit in my grip and the strange Heartbroken gives me a look of annoyance as I shoulder check him with his sister.

He's thrown to the floor and I don't bother to see if he's knocked out before I look down the hall, careful to teleport far enough from Rachel that I don't hurt her.

Rachel greets me with a tight nod, her arm whipping out to cleave through an overzealous butler as I look past her and into the room this whole fight started in. 

Taylor is by Alec’s bedside, a pistol in one hand by her side and the other brushing Alec’s bangs back from his face. Our sickly teammate takes all of my attention, his face screwed up in agony and his muscles flexed tight enough that they inhibit his twitching limbs.

I know exactly what’s happening to him, I saw it when he took over Shadow Stalker and I saw it again when he claimed Shatterbird for himself. The only difference though is that back then, the worst he got were a few stubborn charlie horses and phantom spasms, but this… it’s like that times a thousand, like every individual muscle fiber has been twisted into a knot.

His eyes are shut tight and a silent scream works it’s way out of his mouth as beads of sweat drip down his frame. It’s like he’s being tortured right in front of me and when Taylor lifts her head to look at me, the amber lens of her mask meeting my eyes, I step forward, I need to know if he’s going to be okay, if—

“Grue!” Lisa shouts from inside and it’s with a sickening drop in my chest that I realize I can’t see her.

I step past the threshold and nearly drop Cherie when I see who’s leaned up against the right of the doorway.

Lisa stares up at me, her complexion pale and her eyes distant as she blinks at me. Her face is covered in blood and I actually do drop Cherie to the floor as I kneel by her side. She doesn’t look good, she’s got both of her hands pressed tight into her left side,just below the ribs and staunching a nasty stab wound.

“Lisa—” my hands hover her own, Victor’s stolen medical knowledge jumping to the forefront of my mind as I examine her. The wound is deep, enough so that’s it pierced clean through her costume, skin, and a lot of her muscle, if it were only a few millimeters deeper, it would’ve—

“I’m fine,” she interrupts my thoughts, her voice hoarse. “Just… one of the maids got in, she was holding some kid… I thought he was my little brother.”

“You don’t—”

“Yeah,” she cuts me off, nodding. “I don’t have a little brother, the little shit managed to get me good before I remembered that.”

She shifts a bit, a tight gasp slipping between her teeth as she points to the two bodies in the corner. One’s a little boy, barely eight I’d say, with dark almost bloody red hair and wearing pajamas stained with blood.

His chest rises and falls evenly and I swallow the lump I didn’t know was in my throat, he’s unconscious but his breathing is fine, the complexion I can see doesn’t seem unnaturally pale, he’s fine.

The same can’t be said for the other body, a woman with bright blonde hair that lies dead beside him, her eyes wide open and her chest full of gaping holes. The wounds are fresh enough that blood still leaks out of them.

I look away from her and back to Taylor, the brown eyed girl doesn’t meet my gaze this time, instead, she forces her eyes to stare right at Alec, her voice repeating something gentle as Lisa grabs on to my shirt.

“Listen—” she orders and even knowing that she’s going to be fine, I’m still terrified by the gurgle in the back of her throat. “ Someone’s forcing Atlas to stand still, Taylor’s almost out of bugs, Rachel won’t hold out for much longer and I’ve only got one mag left. Heartbreaker went that—” she coughs and points over my shoulder, denoting the hallway to our right “—way, kill him, and his thralls should be dead to the world for a good few minutes.”

I take her directions for the orders they are but before I turn away from her, I lean in as quickly as I can, brushing my lips against her hairline. I don’t know where the impulse came from but the contact is electric, lighting up my whole body as I lean back to stare into her eyes.

“I’ll be right back,” I promise, swallowing down my fear as Lisa nods at me, the smile on her lips too thin to be genuine. I’m about to leave just as quickly as I came back, already hefting Cherie back on my shoulders when Taylor speaks up from her spot by Alec’s bed.

“Kill him,” she says, her voice a perfect numb monotone. It isn’t like her usually emotionless drone though, when she has enough bugs with her, she doesn’t even sound human some of the time but this… this is human in a way it hurts. It’s the same hollow tone I’ve heard from survivors of the Nine, the cold, broken speech of people pushed to the edge and beyond.

Taylor locks eyes with mine, her posture stiff as humanly possible and the gun in her hand held tight enough I would swear her hands are cut. “Kill him,” she repeats, “And if you can, please make sure it hurts.”

The request is unlike Taylor, she’s killed people before but for her it’s always been a job, something that needed to be done and nothing more. She never took satisfaction from it, she never drew it out more than she needed, it was just work, plain and simple.

Still, I can understand wanting to pay back Heartbreaker for all the shit he threw at us, just this once, I think we’re allowed to be cruel.

I give her a nod before I turn around, stepping back through the doorway and entering the carnage again.

I’m about to teleport down the hall, in the direction Lisa pointed but my eyes drag on Rachel.

She’s still fighting, two of her three dogs chomping at anyone that gets too close but…  she’s wounded. I know I saw it earlier but there’s something different about it now, the blood that pours out of her is too red, the way she throws her limbs out, windmilling them, screams of a weakness that’s dragging her down. She tries to look at me but her eyes are even worse than before.

That ping from before sparks up again and this time, the knowledge it gives me makes my breath catch. She’s lost so much blood, enough that it’s a miracle she’s still conscious but worse than that is she’s gone through seven or so Master effects and is still enduring two more.

That kind of confusion, her brain being pulled apart like taffy, if even one of those powers has a permanence like Heartbreaker’s then—

No. I can’t think about that right now, there’s no time to doubt, the only thing that matters is getting to Nikos.

I look away from her, something waking up in the back of my mind as I teleport down the hall, blood spraying me when my explosion pulps the seemingly endless horde of Heartbroken. I must’ve killed at least two people just now but I don’t care, none of them matter.

“Il va pour le maître!” A woman shouts, a metal bat clutched in her hands as she strikes me. The blow doesn’t hurt in the slightest but I bite the inside of my cheek to hold in the grunt, my annoyance rising. After I kill their ‘Master,’ they’ll have to go too.

The thought is violent enough that for a moment, I think the voices are stirring but no. Most of them are still locked away, barely awake. There’s a chill in realizing that the Butcher’s aren’t affecting my coldbloodedness. The point still stands though, after Heartbreaker, all of his maids, butlers, every person that runs this place has to die.

Only Alec's siblings will be spared and that’s only because we don’t want to hurt him anymore than we already have. His relationship with Cherie was unlike any sibling dynamic I’ve ever seen, but somewhere, buried underneath the complicated and fucked up tangle Heartbreaker made of them, they did care for each other, in their own messed up way.

That strange kind of love might not hold for all of his siblings but we’re not going to risk it.

A firefly buzzes past me and down the hall, vaguely heading to the left side. I rush after it, the ‘slug’ of my teleportation not quite loading up as I run, the horde already moving away from my teammates to chase after me.

They scream like a wall of noise at my back, shouting a pretty even mix of threats and promises as the Butcher’s immense strength pushes me far beyond normal human being’s speed. My feet leave holes in the floor as I run, my muscles digging into it with each step as I make it to the intersection, the decoration still as lavishly gaudy as everywhere else.

A nameless man turns around the corner. leveling his rifle at me. He's wearing a chef's uniform, the edges of it stained with a red a little too purple to be blood, his beard is immaculately cut, and his eyes are loyal like the fanatics of street level Empire thugs. He orders me to stop but I don’t even slow down as I bring my fist to his face, his bullets meaning nothing as I knock his head clean from his shoulders.

Despite how much I’ve done it before— how much I’ve done it in just the past half an hour,I hate killing. I hate the way blood sprays, I hate how warm it feels on my skin, and above all, I hate the sounds of it. The arteries spurting, the blood splashing, the men and women choking. I hate all of it.

But it's necessary, that’s the thought that lets me do it, that lets me end all of these lives without flinching.

I skid a bit as I meet the intersection, my shoulder slamming into the wall as I search for more bugs. A trio of fireflies pulse in sequence down the hall on my left and I teleport to the end of it without a thought, my head already looking around for more bugs when a woman charges at me, a broken piece of glass held tight enough to draw blood in her grip.

Her weak stab only hurts herself and silently, I lift my leg up and kick her hard enough that her middle tears, her entrails falling out and—

It feels good

As soon as the alien thought comes, carrying on a voice that isn’t my own, I let go of my darkness and without the myriad of powers bolstering me, Cherie becomes much heavier, heavy enough that I fall to my knees.

All the pain I was able to ignore comes back tenfold, the brief few minutes they had to heal not nearly enough to be forgotten. The cuts sing, the burns itch, and again, my head throbs with a pain that threatens an aneurysm.

Damnit, I don't think I can— I need— this hurts too damn much to—

I can't do this. I know I have to, I know the Heartbroken aren’t that far behind me, I know—

Just when I think things can’t get any worse, the ancient PA system around me, the network of shined brass pipes, sparks to life, the horns echoing with a crackle before a voice comes through.

"Come now!" The Master of the house speaks, a chuckle in his voice as he taunts me. As if this labyrinth of wealth weren't already tricky to navigate, the voice above echoes so completely that I can barely hear anything besides him "Don't tell me you've run out of gas already? Where's the brute that came here to steal what's rightfully mine?"

His rhetorical question sparks a rage inside of me, something red hot and murderous as I try to stand.

"He's not yours!" I shout, my throat tasting bloody as I force all of my hate into the words. I turn my head from side to side searching for more fireflies and doing my best to ignore the sudden pop in my ankle and the pain it brings. "He's ours!"

Nikos laughs and the sound feels like it's coming from inside my head, my brain aches with an agony I've never felt before and the gray light streaming in from the windows only aggravate that pain, forcing me to close my eyes as I try to shut him out.

It doesn't work.

"Yours?" He laughs again, the mirth thick enough that he can barely get the words out "Tell me, how do you have any claim over him? You threw him away, you were more than happy to do so if I recall."

There’s a smirk in his voice, an undeserved ego that makes my knuckles itch with a hope to kill him.

"We didn't—” I try to argue but the pain makes my tongue feel too fat for my mouth, the words tripping over themselves. “—that wasn't us you bastard! That was you! You—"

"Took your love?” he cuts me off, his voice dripping with condescension, “Righted it? You know what's rather funny? He's been here for most of a year, tied down to a bed and fucked everyday I might add, my eyes doing their best to cleanse him, and you know what?"

His tone changes, growing dark and unsatisfied as something buzzes in my ear and he growls from somewhere further in this house.

"He refused me."

He drags out the word, a white hot fury coming off of it as I open my eyes to stare at a fly on the tip of my nose.

"Day after day, month after month, that little flame inside him, that impossible fire you and your paltry little team stoked… it stayed. I worked on it for months, trying to help Jean-Paul in any way I could.” His voice gets a bit more restrained before it suddenly slips away, falling between the words as the rage comes back. “But, so far my power, my children's lesser parlor tricks and illusions, famed psychologists, psychiatrists, half a dozen Tinker trinkets, none of it has worked!”

The pipes along the wall shake with the volume of his voice, dust shaking off them as the fly takes off, trying its best to hover in front of me. “He still refuses to understand, he might regurgitate what I order him to, he might suck whatever I put in his mouth but the truest part of himself, that idiotic little flame inside him, refuses to leave no matter the effort… I’ve even lowered myself personally, torn the skin of my knuckles trying to correct his fantasies of love but still he defies me!"

The fly flutters to my right just as the roar of footsteps sound behind me and the ringing of Heartbreaker’s fury gives way to an introspective lilt.

"And you know what? For all it's taken for it to not work, comparatively? Removing that love inside you was like blowing out a candle.”

His words give me strength I need, the impassiveness of his atrocity lifts me up like a marionette and I let my power soak the air, the Butcher’s mantle empowering me as I follow Taylor’s directions, teleporting again and again.

My darkness comes off me like a forest fire, too thick to be dispelled by my explosions and covering my ears so completely I don’t hear any more of Nikos commentary. If I had heard anymore, I think I would’ve started running through the walls, rabid as the ghosts inside my head start to rise up.

The choir in my mind is unusually united as I run down the corridors, killing any dumb enough to get in my way. The voices hate me, to be honest, they hate everything but they hate the man who owns this house a hundred times more.

Still, even with them egging me on, Taylor’s precise directions, and my powers, it takes me little over half a minute to reach the last firefly.

The insect is incinerated by the explosion I generate, turning into ash as I look for any more bugs, any indicators of a hidden door or sealed panic room when I see him, standing at the end of the hall, a large ornate pair of doors at his back and studded with hundreds of engagement rings.

Despite everything we’ve done, all the servants that we’ve killed and all his children that we beat to a pulp, he almost looks like he isn’t there, utterly unconcerned by my presence, like I can’t crush his skull like a berry. 

He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, his arms down at his sides and leaving himself wide open to any number of attacks. The only signs of exertion I can see is the thin sheen of sweat on his skin and the slight heaviness of his long black hair and even then I can’t tell if that’s from running or from whatever he was doing before we got here.

His nonchalance, his complete dismissal of us, of The Undersiders and of me, fills me with an incandescent rage, a white hot anger that forces me to move before I can even think.

And when he blinks, I realize why he was so uncaring of it all. The moment starts to stretch, his eyes closed for a fraction of a second as everything, all my powers and something far more human, shouts at me to do something.

The feeling of a thousand knives rake over my back, the tingling sense of danger rising up to a fever pitch as Nikos eyes slowly start to open.

I know his power almost better than my own, I have every first hand encounter with him memorized, I could say word for word every single theory Lisa suggested, and worst of all I remember how it felt when Fullstop hit me.

I remember how all of his subtle manipulations felt without any gaps between them, I remember my brain being stretched like taffy and my very soul violated for his pleasure.

One glance is all it will take to make me too afraid to move. I know that now, there's no fighting him, there's no resisting him. All it would take is one glance to replace who I am with whoever he wants me to be.

And, operating off an instinct I didn’t know I had, I shift my grip on Cherie until she's covering most of my front.

The move is… something I’ll have to think about later but for now, she’s a perfect human shield, hiding me from her father’s influence as I start to run, my stomps shaking the hall.

A choir of voices cheer as I charge, each of them roaring with bloodlust, all of them wanting— needing to kill the man in front of me.

There might be some irony to what I'm doing, killing a monster with a monster but I barely have a moment to think about that before all three of us crash together.

It isn’t elegant and with how short the hall was, I don’t have enough speed to pulp Heartbreaker like the servants that came before him. Instead, just a few of his ribs snap as I let go of Cherie, her body flying over us and rolling to the ground as my power leaves her.

My mind snaps like an over pulled rubber band but I don’t acknowledge the pain as I scramble on to my knees, lunging for Heartbreaker. His face is screwed up in pain, both of his arms cradled around his chest when I tackle him.

The look on his face, the overwhelming shock and surprise is like a balm to the fire inside in my head. He really didn’t see this coming, I don’t know how a man like him got to live so long and not realize that this was always going to be how it went.

His eyes shoot open, darting above my head and then to the side of me, my darkness creating an indistinct blob that he can’t quite pin down with his eyes. I won’t give him another chance to warp me like he did before.

The bastard lets out a silent scream as I flip him onto his stomach, his lips half forming words for help as I force his face— his eyes to the floor.

Powerless, I get on top of him, my knee firmly on his spine as my hands rise up his neck, searching for the one place I need to strike first.

The moment my index fingers graze them, he bites down hard on my right pinkie, his blunt teeth taking most of it off it with a spurt of blood.

The pain is just another wound to be thrown on top of the pile, rendered meaningless when I get a good grip on his head, the palms of my hands on his temples as I plunge my thumbs into his eyes. 

I let the dark go and the only reason I do is so that I can personally hear his despair.

I’m not disappointed.

Whatever grunts and snarls he was giving just seconds before are nothing compared to the scream he lets out now. The wail is loud enough that my ears sting with the note and he keeps it rising as my thumbs swirl in the messy viscera of his eyes..

I scream just as loudly, my roar of victory playing alongside his scream of fear. And when we both lose our voices, the screams petering, I can’t help but laugh.

The agony he’s in, the pain I’ve caused, I think it might actually be the first time anyone’s hurt him since he got his powers. There’s something about knowing that, about knowing that I’m the first to hurt him that fills me with pride.

That pride feels all the sweeter when I flip him on his back, his once proudly untouchable blue eyes turned into an almost black bloody pit. What I’ve just done can’t be undone, I’ve blinded him, stripped away the vehicle of his power and it… is so much better than revenge.

He lifts a hand up to his face, his fingers grazing his eyes as he gulps in pain. He knows it as well as I do, the fight’s as good as over.

Now all that’s left to do is put him down.

I lift my hand up, the knuckles popping as I clench them into a fist, ready to be brought down and—

KABOOM

An explosion back the way rocks the house, far stronger than the Butcher’s teleports and as I stand up to face it, my power leaks out of my skin instinctively. The dark smog rolls down to the floor, gliding over the rug, and the instant it touches Nikos’ skin, my world falters.

The breath is taken from my lungs and I jolt forward, falling to a kneel as I struggle to breathe. There’s something new inside my head, not a voice or an illusion but something completely unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Trying to grasp it with my mind is like trying to grab rubber slicked with oil, I just can’t wrap my head around it.

I slam my fist into my chest, forcing my lungs to take a breath as A sickening dread fills my stomach. Is he doing this to me, did he have a Trump card, something even Lisa hadn’t thought of, why—

I look back at the eyeless Master, wondering if I missed something,  if I’m even fighting the real Heartbreaker or an illusion but the moment my eyes meet the bloody pits where his should be, I forget everything else.

That alien sense inside me finally locks into place, not quite a sense of sight or touch or smell but somehow a melding of all of them and none of them.

The feeling that envelops my mind, the alien but velvet softness of it, the consuming security it brings… It's unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.

The sense that slides between the wrinkles of my brain, the information that floods my head, it’s like standing in a candy store when you’re young. All the variety, the shapes and colors, the promise of it all, it’s intoxicating… it’s— words are not made to describe it. Words cannot describe it.

All of Nikos, not just his emotions but everything that he is stands before me.

I can see his fear, his uncertainty, confusion, and anger and all of it is mine to sculpt. My awareness brushes over his emotions and I lean back as I feel the depth to each one, they all have their own nuances and complexities, each so extravagantly complicated that even with a lifetime to figure it out, I wouldn't be able to.

It’s… I can’t—

“Tempting…” the mouth below me speaks, wrenching my awareness back to reality as I catch a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Isn’t it?”

“I…” the darkness underneath me stutters and I shake my head, the awareness of Nikos’ mind vanishing as soon as I close my eyes. My mouth feels impossibly dry and my actual body feels like it’s a world away.“What are you–”

“The eyes of god,” he interrupts me, his lips curling up despite the certainty of his death. “No one would blame you for using it as I have, how could they? There’s no one alive that wouldn’t use it exactly as I have.”

His hands fall to his sides, one pair of knuckles hitting the rug underneath him and the other slapping against the marble with a dull thud. I try to speak, try to deny his ego but no words come when I look at his skin. The power in my eyes, it’s—

“A gift,” he says again, completing my thought for me. “A divine right that was handed to me in my one moment of weakness. It gave me something a world above what other lesser parahumans were granted, it let me see the world for how it really is. That clarity, it…”

He pauses and his expression shifts, the quiet but ever present look of superiority evaporates as he searches for the right words to say. The silence drags and the senses I read from him are too damn distracting for me to think of anything to break it with.

“... it let me see in a way that no one else could ever really understand. No one… except you. So tell me…” his lips pucker a bit as he tilts his head. “Brian…” he leans up as he says my name, his spine bending as he rests on his forearms, “you see it, don’t you?”

His question echoes in the empty hall, the distant sound of his minions is forgotten as the words sit in my brain.

The truth is, I do see the possibility.

All the things I could do to him, it might even be poetic. 

I could make him so afraid of everything that there wouldn’t be a shape or color that didn’t drive him to a heart attack. He wouldn’t even be able to close his eyes without screaming in terror, every sound, every brush against his skin, all of it would only make him more terrified.

I could make him angry enough that he’d run at armed men with nothing but his balled fists. I could direct that rage back on himself, have him try to rip his own body apart in the pure hatred he’d have for his flesh.

I could make him sad enough that all he’d ever wish for is death. I could make him dehydrated with just the tears he’d shed but I would give him just enough strength that he’d never tie a noose around his neck. That could be his life, just a constant march of misery but without enough bravery to end it, too alive to die but too dead to live.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could be so much worse.

I could rip his soul apart, I could make all the things he loves repulsive to him, enough that the thought of sex would make him vomit. I could make pain into pleasure, make the only joys in his life ripping off his nails and salting the beds, I could—

“There it is,” again, Nikos rips me away from my thoughts, a chuckle in his voice as he smiles at me. It isn’t a nice smile, not that any smile would be good in this situation but the one he has right now— it— why is he— “You see it now, don’t you?”

“I don’t—”

“Oh please,” he cuts me off, either unconcerned that I’m still going to kill him or believing now I won’t. “Your girlfriends aren’t here Brian and even if they were, what's it matter? You could fix them with just a look.”

For a moment, the whole world is silent, with even my breath halting. The idea of what he’s proposed hits my brain like slime spraying from a manhole. It leaves my thoughts sticky with an oily disgust.

His words rock me in a fundamental way, shaking the very foundation of who I am. Does he honestly think that I would do that? That I would twist someone around for my own entertainment and security, that I would do that to Lisa, to Rachel or Taylor or fucking anyone?!

I’m not him, I will never be like him and if he thinks I— He speaks up again, still smiling just as broadly and there’s a promise lurking between his teeth, a dark empty promise.

“I could teach you, show you how it works, all the little intricacies that took me decades to master. It’s tempting, isn’t it?”

His offer is echoed by the crowd that’s just gotten close enough for me to hear them, the frenzied march of heavy footfalls make the ground shake as a chorus of terrified French and angry English blend to the point that I can’t pick even a single word out.

They’ll be here any second, ready to do whatever their god tells them.

Nikos’ oily smile dims as my legs lock on either side of him, dropping a hundredth of an inch before he forces it back into shape. The expression vanishes completely when I bring my power back in, the smile falling like a hanged man at the gallows.

For a second, the rapidly approaching mob almost makes me reach out for Cherie and her powers, I don’t know how many of them have powers but I do know that without the Butcher’s, even the rifles will be enough to put me down.

But then, just as the dark starts to slip through my skin, the march crescendos with the sounds of fighting. Guns fire, throats scream, and bodies rip themselves apart with wet tears as I look down to the body beneath mine.

Nikos gulps, his ears tilted towards the hall and his eyebrows raising in fear when he realizes his saviors aren’t getting any closer.

I bring both of my hands above me, wrapping one set of knuckles over the other as Nikos leans away from me, his bloody eyeless eyes staring up at me in naked horror.

“No,” I answer, my voice low and solid without the ambience of my power but still loud enough that he can hear it over the fight. “It isn’t.”

“WAI—” he tries to speak, maybe to beg, maybe to make another promise he’d break at the first opportunity but regardless, I bring my closed fists down on him like hammers. My knuckles sting in pain, the bones vibrating with the ferocity of the hit as the back of Nikos’ head impacts against the floor.

He turns just a bit with the blow, his neck popping painfully but not quite snapping as I tear his left cheek open, the beard sheared away as the skin rips. He tries to bring his hands up to shield himself but they don’t do anything to stop my assault or even slow it down.

I bring my fists down again, this time laying into his other cheek and giving him a matching bruise as he tries in vain to look at me.

“NO—” he screeches as I unwrap my fists, each of them rising up before I bring the flat of my right down onto his nose, breaking the defined elegance of it into an ugly pile. “PLEASE I CAN—”

The offer is silenced as I punch him again with my left, the skin of my knuckles cracking as they graze his teeth, knocking a few of them out to tinkle on the floor. The blow knocks the wind out of him, his breath coming in wild uneven gasps as he whips his head to face me, spitting a glob of blood on my face. 

The pathetic attempt to slow me only draws it out as I bring my fists down on him, again and again and again. I’ve always considered myself to be strong, enough that it’s very rare I meet a nonBrute that can match me. A lot of that strength is owed to technique and discipline but there’s neither of those things in my assault.

It’s all hate, every time I swing my fists down on him, they are driven only by hate.

The seconds turn into minutes, the sounds of battle getting harsher and quieter with each punch I land. For most of that, Nikos tries to fight me, he tries to buck me off, tries to land his own punches, tries to stop mine, he even tries to claw at my throat when he realizes that even if there were two of him, they wouldn’t match my strength.

It’s all in vain though.

I don’t know when I stop punching Nikos Vasil and when I start destroying my hands against a lifeless body but I do know the only reason I stop is because of the gasps coming from down the hall.

I whip my head around to face it, my blood soaked dreads slapping against my back as my power floats off me.

The dark coats the body below me and there’s a certain disappointment from the lack of feedback. Not because I don’t get another taste of his power but because it confirms that the man below me, the architect of Alec’s despair, is well and truly dead.

That disappointment is forgotten when I see the faces staring back at mine.

The air warbles as I cut off my power, the monochrome fog puffing away as I take them in.

My teammates match my gaze, all of them covered head to toe in blood and injuries.

Some of the injuries are minor, small enough that they almost pass below my awareness but some are so glaringly obvious that my throat catches.

Taylor is carrying Lisa, her silk bodysuit torn into ragged strips that just manage to hold on to the chitin armor plates. Someone must’ve torn her mask away because the only thing that’s covering her face right is a thin layer of squirming vermin, her arsenal rendered so small that she can’t cover all of her features at once.

Still, even with the flies, maggots, and roaches covering her face, her warm brown eyes stare right into mine, a soothing relief already filling me as they turn just a bit brighter. With a thought, her bugs drop from her face, either scattering in the air or on the floor and revealing features that I got so comfortable waking up to.

Her thin lips widen with a stuttery smile, a short relieved huff passing through them as she blinks away the first wave of many tears.

Even covered in blood, scratches, and I think one gunshot, she’s still one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever met.

My eyes trail down her delicate neck and to the girl she’s struggling to hold.

Lisa Wilbourn has never looked less in control than she does right now, hair frazzled and dripping with blood, her suit torn and scorched in various locations, and with a spider silk tourniquet wrapped around the wound in her middle.

Out of all of us, she might be the most hurt and once I’m able to look her over, I’m going to pay very close attention. She loves underplaying when she’s injured.

She looks at me with scrutinizing green eyes, her power dancing behind them as she looks me over, trying to see if I’ve been subverted in any way. I find myself standing perfectly still for her examination, hoping to god that that bastard didn’t manage anything before I killed him.

To my immense relief, instead of widening, her eyes gently close as she her lopsided smile rises, her head shaking fondly as she brings her arms up to hug at her shoulders, the fingers crinkling the leather of her jacket as I sag, some of the tension leaving me as I turn my eyes to Rachel.

My strongest teammate has shrunk down to her usual size, the horns having vanished back inside her head as her once tight clothes hang on her. Whatever energy her power operates on must’ve run dry, leaving her just strong enough to hold Alec tight against her. Most of the wounds I last saw her with have healed though, at least enough of them that she’s able to stand without swaying. That isn’t to say she’s wholly uninjured though, the right side of her head is bloodier than the rest, the auburn locks stuck to her in one solid sheet.

Her dogs are in better shape I guess, Angelica and Judas are both limping but those usually fade away once they shrink down. That said… the crack down Angelica’s faceplate has me worried, I can’t remember a gun ever doing that to one of Bitch’s hounds and I think I would’ve heard if the Heartbroken were packing anything bigger than the rifles they pointed at me with.

Brutus is the least injured, his massive tail wagging from side to side before he suddenly stops dead, his eyes fixed on the body beneath me. His lips raise as he bears his teeth, a deep snarl rising in the back of his throat.

I shake my head at the beast, exasperated and signaling him to calm down with the flat of my palm, telling him that the man his master told him to kill is very dead.

Brutus tilts his head at me, acknowledging the order before his massive tongue lulls out of his panting maw. 

I look at Alec last, my mouth going dry as I take stock of the many, many injuries coating him. The bruises are so numerous they form venn diagrams of purple and green over his body, the bandages that covered the worst of it have mostly disappeared, with a few barely hanging on to reveal deep cuts and incisions that have just barely scabbed over.

Seeing it all sparks a phantom fury inside of me, he’s so damn hurt and most of that didn’t even happen today.

I force my eyes to look away from his ruined body and up to his beaten face, the bruises there just a little less prevalent and even more green as a sickly nausea twists his features. Unlike our girls, he isn’t looking at me, instead, his eyes are locked on the corpse by my feet, staring with an unblinking confusion.

I follow his gaze and the sight of my rage fills me with a sense of satisfaction. From the neck down, Nikos’ body looks totally unharmed, the blow from when I charged into him was too fresh for the skin to form bruises.

But from the neck up… it almost doesn’t even look like a head anymore, more like a rotten pumpkin that sagged in under its own weight.

An inch inside the edges of his face, a crater forms, getting deeper as you look towards where his nose should be. A few teeth float in the bloody puddle that fills it, some strands of his long black hair are matted and stuck to the sides of the torn skin.

The once handsome man has been turned into a crime scene just as bloody as all the ones he’s orchestrated and honestly… my one regret is that I only got to do that once.

My eyes linger on the damage I’ve done, my hands singing in pain as I unconsciously clench them into fists. To be honest, I don’t think he looks bad enough. He should look a hundred times worse, to the point that no part of him even looks human and—

No. What’s done is done.

Looking away from the body, I tense up like a coiled spring when I see that my teammates aren’t alone.

They must’ve been the ones that held off the Heartbroken mob when they charged for me and while I don’t doubt the vast majority of maids, butlers, and other associated minions are dead just around the corner, there’s still enough of them that my eyes refuse to blink.

The Heartbroken stare deadeyed at the corpse at my feet, all of them wearing shell shocked and desolate expressions, devoid of every emotion, even sorrow. They’re dead to the world and I can’t blame them, I did kill their god after all.

A few of them, mostly the maids and butlers but some of the children too, fall to their knees, their weapons clattering to the floor as a few of them snap themselves out of numbness, tears falling down their faces but too distraught for any real anger to set in.

Some, mostly the children but a few of the women and guards just stare, maintaining their complete expressionlessness and swaying just enough to be noticeable.

The fight has been drained out of them entirely but I can’t count on that lasting forever, in fact, I bet I have a timer before they suddenly spark up into a homicidal rage. I need them to at least be a little lucid and so, while I have everyone’s attention, I speak up, projecting my voice as loudly as I can.

“Nikos Vasil…” I gesture to the cooling body “Is dead.”

A new wave of gasps ring out at my declaration, shaky inhales and caught screams echo in the wake of my words and I wait for the sound to die before I continue.

“We’re going to be going back to Brockton Bay with Alec.” I gesture to my friend, wincing when his one good eye still refuses to meet mine. “If anyone tries to get in our way…” I look away from him, scanning the crowd until I lock eyes with the bearded man that shot at me earlier, his eyes an odd uneven mixture of respect and disgust. “I won’t hesitate to kill you too.”

My ultimatum is greeted with complete silence, the maids and butlers probably couldn’t care less about their own lives right now but to be honest, the threat isn’t meant for them. I look beyond the brainwashed mob and to the children, teens, and young adults with the blue eyes.

Most of them, the older generation mostly, are able to meet my gaze, nodding in understanding but a few are unable to look away from their father’s body. They are the ones I pity the most.

A little girl, barely eight I’d say, catches my eyes. She’s got her hands clasped over her chest, her face scrunching up with muffled, hiccup like sobs. Her hair has more volume than most of her siblings, jumping away from her head in wild unruly curls that clash with the almost victorian costume she has on.

She looks up at me and despite the horrors she and everyone here must face on a daily basis, there’s still something blatantly innocent in her eyes that strikes me like a knife. She’s only a child.

Most of them are only children and… their father is dead.

For the briefest moment, the satisfaction turns into ash in my chest, the once fulling feeling turning into a rock hard guilt. No one should see their father dead like this, mangled and lying in a pool of his own blood.

I look away from her before the feeling can really set in and when none of the Heartbroken objects, I let my focus drift, my chest feeling less and less constricted.

That’s one more problem taken care of, honestly, even though we subdued more than Alec’s siblings, I don’t know if we have enough gas to take care of the rest. I almost close my eyes as the bubbling anxiety inside me abates, leaving me with nothing but sore memories. The heaviness of my lids grows with the weight of limbs but just before I can indulge in either, something catches my ear.

Even exhausted beyond measure as I am, my senses are still pushed to their limits and my hearing is hyper aware of Alec shuffling in Rachel’s arms.

My eyes snap open as wide as they can, locking on to him and tearing up at what I see. His soft, angelic face is even greener than before, the fair complexion dragged down by the sickly hue as his eyes stare into the corpse of his father, unblinking and full of confusion.

“No,” he finally speaks, his jaw clicking closed with a tight spasm before he forces it open again, his voice hoarse and barely audible. “No, that’s not— that’s not—”

He cuts himself off, struggling in Rachel’s grip and tugging at her arms to let him go. When she refuses to budge even slightly, he tries pushing against her next, his hands on her bloodstained chest.

She refuses to give an inch but that only eggs on Alec’s thrashing, his whole wounded body turning in her grip to push at her with all his strength. He tries to squirm out of her hold like a rat caught in the talons of a hawk and in a second I’m stepping towards them both, blood dripping from my knuckles and landing on the floor in heavy drops.

“No—” he repeats, his voice less soft and growing louder as he whips his head towards Rachel, his face twisting into anguish before snapping back to his father. His struggles are too weak to free him, even if his arms and legs weren’t cramped into a mess of muscle, he still wouldn’t have the strength to get Rachel to drop him. “No, this isn’t— this is a trick. It has to be a trick!”

He stops struggling, his arms whipping around him and reaching out for his father, his fingers strained in wild positions, with the tips of them bent at right angles or completely curled. The sight of the crooked digits makes my heart ache, he must still be in so much pain and yet, right now, the agony is forgotten entirely as he reaches out for his father.

The desperation in that, in this one moment of complete panic and fear, makes my heart drop and my vision blurry with sympathy. Again, I’m struck by the truth I realized earlier. He shouldn’t see this, no one should see their father dead on the floor.

Still, I keep walking, the myriad of people behind my teammates fade away into the background. They ,might still be a threat but right now they don’t matter. All that matters is getting to him.

“He said—” Alec gasps, his breath turning uneven as he stretches towards the corpse. “He said he wouldn’t leave me! He promised he wouldn’t—”

“Alec,” I speak up, my voice as gentle as I can make it as I try to take his attention away from the body, my hands palm side up and unthreatening when something odd hooks my focus.

The shadow beneath him and Rachel is stretching.

At first, I think it’s just a trick of the light or maybe the clouds parting through the windows but no, the way it bends is far too fast and dramatic to be natural. The black patch on the ground grows darker by the second, stretching out from Rachel’s feet until it reaches Nikos lifeless hands.

The moment they connect, Heartbreaker’s body jolts up like Frankenstein, his hips lifting up off the floor with a loud smack as his knuckles slap the ground.

“S-see?” Alec asks, his voice chipping with delusion as his father tries to get up without a head. “H-he’s fine, he’s going to get up and he— he— he’ll— he promised he wouldn’t— he—”

I can’t stand to watch him hurt anymore and as soon as I reach him, I wrap my arms around his shoulders, pulling him tight against my chest as Rachel and I both drop to our knees.

“He—” Alec’s cry finally turns into a sob, the octave cracking as the shadow shudders over the body, the dark breaking into thin tendrils before trying in vain to get back under the skin. “He— he’s resisting me! That means he’s okay, it means he— it means—”

“He’s gone,” I cut him off, one hand rubbing at his shoulder and the other wrapping tighter over his back. “He’s gone Alec, he’s gone.”

I don’t know whether my words reach him or if his power decides it can’t control a corpse any longer but either way, he finally brings his shadow back in as something beneath his face snaps.

It’s odd to watch, like watching ice melt, the change is slow and gradual and when he finally starts to cry, I’m struck by just how quiet it is. Before, in Brockton Bay when his father had warped me into throwing him out, his sobs were loud and wailing, begging for relief.

But now, even with his shoulders shaking, he doesn’t make a sound as he leans into me.

The pain from everything I’ve had to endure today finally reaches a tipping point and without any adrenaline to keep my mind from shutting down, I hold Alec all the tighter as my eyes drift closed, welcoming me into a dark oblivion as hands settle over my body.

Brian Laborn/Grue

February 6th, 2013

I don’t know when I wake up, just that every second of it feels like hell. My body is too exhausted to rise but everything hurts too much to fall back asleep. I groan in pain as I try to lift myself up, one weight pins my left arm to what feels like a bed and on the other side of me, someone is speaking, her voice gentle and low.

“It’s okay,” she says, “go back to sleep.”

I know that voice and groggy as I am, I just manage to turn to face her.

“Taylor?” I ask, my eyes slowly crinkling open and slowly adjusting to the dark all around us. “Where are—”

“Still in the school,” she answers just as I start to make out her face. She’s got bags to rival when the Nine came to Brockton, heavy and purple enough that they’re almost bruises.

The room isn’t completely dark, behind me, a window lets in the pale light of the moon, enough of it that I can see everything around me.

The room doesn’t feel like any bedroom I’ve ever been in, there’s wood paneling that crawls halfway up the wall from the floor before giving way to an old but well maintained wallpaper. The floor itself is hardwood and the ceiling stretches up in the middle to make room for a hanging chandelier.

Looking to my right, I don’t see any furniture save for a fancy armchair in the corner but even if there was anything else, my eyes stick on to Taylor.

She’s dressed in a thin nightgown, with bandages covering most of her arms, legs, and some of her neck. Her long black hair spills over her shoulders, gleaming in the moonlight, complimenting her beautiful features as my mouth goes dry.

“Did—” I clear my throat, “Did we win?”

“Yes,” a new voice speaks up on the left side of the room and I turn again to meet it. Lisa is sitting at a computer, the screen a blinding white as she types away at it. “Heartbreaker’s dead,” she says over her shoulder and lifts her left hand up to gesture at the room. “This is his study, we had to move the bed in here.”

Her comment makes me look down at the tangled mess of sheets covering me, I’m not so sure if I trust a bed found in—

“It had dust on it,” Lisa cuts off my thoughts without looking at me. “Found it in the basement, it’s probably what the old dean had before Heartbreaker got something better.”

I nod as I look to the doors in front of me, both shut tight and barely letting in the light of the hallway.

Movement on the right catches my eye and when my vision focuses, I see Rachel staring at the door, acting as a guard in a very uncomfortable looking chair with her three hounds.

“How long…” I gulp, turning my head back towards Lisa. “... was I out?”

“About six hours,” she answers nonchalantly, as if I didn’t leave them to fend for themselves against—. “Don’t worry about it,” she orders, turning to look at me as she leans back in her chair. “Most of his kids are still here but they haven’t come at us for revenge yet, a few of them might but we can handle one or two.”

“What do you mean most are still here?” I ask, trying to sit up and immediately falling back to the bed when my body denies me.

“I mean most,” she answers, “A few left as soon as you passed out, they gave me some names but I have a feeling they weren’t real. We didn’t let all of them go of course, some are… too young to go out by themselves.”

“Did they say where they were going?” I ask, letting my head drop to the pillow when my neck refuses to crane up any longer.

“No,” she goes back to typing. “They didn’t say and when I asked, they pretended they didn’t speak English.”

I hum and turn my head back to Taylor, watching as she plays with the hem of the blanket. I know what she wants and even though she knows she doesn’t need to ask permission, I give it anyway, nodding as she gets under the covers with me.

She crawls underneath the thick blanket but she doesn’t stop on my right side, instead, she gently crawls over me, heading towards the wall and—

My eyes stop at the figure already sleeping on my left side, his face still damp with tear tracks and his arms holding mine in fervid grip. 

Even screaming in pain, my muscles have just enough strength in them for me to turn onto my side, my right arm laying over Alec’s lithe shoulders and pulling both him and Taylor close to me.

He groans in his sleep, a short, high pitched whimper crawling up his throat as he buries his face into my neck, his cold nose pressing against my skin as my eyes get heavy with unshed tears.

“He’s—” I cut myself off, careful to control my volume now that his ear is so close to my mouth. “He’s going to be okay. Right?”

The silence that greets my question is deafening, so quiet that all I can hear is Alec’s comforting heartbeat in my ears. The dull, hypnotic sound makes my eyes feel just a touch heavier but I won’t indulge in the sound until I get an answer.

The answer doesn’t come for a nearly a minute and as each second drags on, my eyes lift away from Alec and to the girl spooning him. Taylor meets my gaze expectantly, knowing that if Lisa won’t answer, I’ll look to her first.

Only, she doesn’t say anything.

Her brown eyes shake in the sockets, confliction warring with something much sadder as she looks away, her gaze instead fixing on Alec’s curls as she starts brushing his hair.

Her non answer makes the concern twist into something faster, something that flutters and bubbles inside me like a hornet’s nest as I turn my eyes to Rachel.

Even looking away from me, the auburn haired girl flinches when my eyes settle on her, her hands scratching at Angelica when the one-eyed terrier hops in her lap. Seeing her like she is now makes the anxiety rise tenfold, Rachel is many things, she’s strong, loyal, and especially kind to children and dogs and the one thing she isn;t is nervous.

“Lisa?” I address the Thinker as I turn my eyes away from the amber eyed girl. “He’s going to be okay isn’t he?”

Lisa keeps typing and just when I’m about to ask her again, she speaks up, her voice small and unsure.

“Physically? He’ll be okay, even without Panacea, Nikos was always careful not to do anything that might scar.” Her answer barely calms the horrible churning in my guts and that feeling only gets worse when she doesn’t follow up.

“And mentally?” I ask, already fearing the answer.

“It’s…” she trails off, her fingers a flurry before suddenly halting. “It’s going to be a long road.”

I’m about to ask for more, about to demand something more concrete when she silences me, her attention fixed back on the monitor.

“A road we can talk about more in the morning, right now I’ve got maybe three dozen more emails to send out to his network and my head is already aching trying to match his tone.”

“Why’re you—” I try to ask.

“Because, while we killed a lot of his slaves, we didn’t kill all of them. Some were out getting groceries, some others Alec’s siblings wouldn’t let us kill— they’re down in the basement by the way, at least till we know what to do with them— and if I don’t put a lid on this now, there’ll be massacres all over North America.”

The frustration in her voice draws me up short, the massacres she’s talking about, that’s the reason no one has actually tried to kill Heartbreaker before us. He promised the world that if he died, his network of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of thralls will rise up to kill as many as they can. In death he’d bring about as much slaughter as an Endbringer does, only scattered around the continent instead of just one city.

“You think… you can stop that?” I ask, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice. I trust Lisa with a lot but there had to have been hundreds of people working on taking Heartbreaker down, Strategists, Capes, even entire governments and the thought of it all blowing over with just a days worth of emails sounds—

“No,” she answers. “Maybe half of them will buy it, that he isn’t really dead but the rest are too unstable to hold off forever. All I can do is slow it down until we’re back in safer waters… just go to sleep, okay? Rachel and I will swap out with you before morning.”

I follow her order without question, turning my focus back to Alec as the full weight of today hits me.

We killed Heartbreaker, we’re taking Alec home but… the journey doesn’t feel like it’s over yet, not by a longshot.