Changeling (3 page)

Laughing, she said, “Good thing you were home, then, because I don’t believe we own an actual extinguisher. Something else to add to our growing list of needs.” Her voice dropped on the last bit, humor overtaken by frustration. No one, least of all Teresa, had believed striking out on our own would be so exhausting.

Give her something positive to think about, Dal.

“The lobby is almost finished,” I said. “I have one more wall to cover and then we can lay down the new floor. The laminate arrived at the store this morning, it just hasn’t been delivered yet.”

“Good news.” Something still distracted her. Couldn’t be a fight with Gage. They didn’t know how to fight without resorting to makeup sex within ten minutes of the argument. The upstairs walls were pretty thick, but not the doors.

“How’s your room coming along?” I asked, trying again.

“Almost done.” The edge in her voice softened at the topic of her shared room. Definitely not a fight with Gage. “I never thought I’d be the type to spend so much time picking out curtains, especially at twenty-five. Literal curtains and metaphorical ones.”

It was a simple statement that said so much about her,
probably without meaning to. She rarely gave up details about her life during the last fifteen years she and the others had spent without powers. Fifteen long years separated from her childhood friends, from anything remotely like her old life, forced to pretend she’d always been normal; had never been the daughter of two decorated heroes.

From idle conversation, I knew she’d done things she wasn’t proud of in those years, even spent a little time in jail, and she hadn’t found happiness until getting her powers back. It had been a rebirth for everyone, including me.

She had lost her powers as a child of ten, torn away by a pair of mysterious Wardens, then restored when the Wardens were murdered. I discovered my powers during a freak accident at my old apartment, two days after. I spilled sesame oil while attempting a stir-fry and caught the pan’s contents on fire. It sizzled, splattered, and ignited the sleeve of my blouse.

I had screamed, startled less by the fire than by the lack of heat on my skin. The flames licked at the blouse and my hand. As I watched, the fire absorbed right into my body. It remained hot for the next hour, and then faded completely. I’d explained it away as a panic-induced hallucination—even after news began to spread of the Meta reactivation. I hadn’t entertained the idea that I was a Meta until the day the Channel 9 broadcast station blew up, and I really came into my abilities.

No, I couldn’t compare our pain, or hope to understand her feelings of alienation and isolation. Trying to was patronizing.

“I haven’t even thought about wallpaper,” I said, “much less curtains.”

Teresa laughed, and I basked in the warmth of her smile. “You have time to settle in, Dahlia. With any luck, we’ll be here for a very long while.” She picked at a fleck of dried paint adhering to her arm. “So, do you know any good electricians?”

An alarm clanged in the hallway, like an old-fashioned school bell. We turned toward the door in perfect unison.

“Something tripped the security system’s perimeter alarm,” Teresa said, then took off running.

I dashed after her through the door, around a curve in the short hallway, and back down the main staircase. She took them two at a time, moving faster than me, and disappeared. I crossed the lobby, still running, and turned down the left corridor. I ran past the interior courtyard exit on my right, to the first door on the left. Our appointed War Room housed a long oak table and eight chairs. A digital monitor took up four feet of the opposite wall, situated between the room’s two windows. Maps and a dry-erase board decorated the wall on my right.

To my left, another door stood open and voices filtered out. Research and security. Half the size of the previous room, it contained only two computer systems so far. More were expected to be delivered next week. At the moment, the monitor on the right desk was for online research and connecting to our intranetwork, a program that Marco had written for us, after admitting his pre-repowering job was
as a computer programmer (it still felt odd to think that any of us once had real jobs). It collated and integrated all of our combined information about known Metas, unsolved crimes, and even allowed us access to certain protected government databases.

On the left desk, the computer displayed eight different camera angles of our property. The perimeter fence had twenty-four different views and it monitored almost every single inch of the fence line. With that much acreage, it was quite a feat. The display monitor switched views every four seconds, recording everything into our database. I knew the views by heart, since I’d helped Marco install all of the cameras two months ago—right before that friendship went all to hell.

Teresa, Renee, and Ethan were hunched over the monitor.

“Did something trip the alarm?” I asked.

Teresa had taken the desk chair, and she punched a series of command codes into the keyboard. A search box came up. Moments later, the eight angles disappeared and were replaced by one large scene. I recognized the length of fence behind the pool house. A grove of trees created a natural curtain between our property and our rear neighbor. Teresa pressed Play.

Wind rustled the leaves of the trees. Seconds passed and nothing happened. Two birds, about the size of wrens, swooped down from the trees. They chased and danced back and forth across the screen. Then they angled sideways and flew right between the narrow iron bars of the fence. Red letters
appeared on the bottom of the screen: Perimeter Breach Detected.

“Hell, T,” Renee said. “I thought it was some kind of emergency and it’s just a goddamn bird?”

“It’s a sensitive system, Renee,” Ethan said. He tapped a few keys and new words popped up: Perimeter Sensor Eight Deactivated. “We need to find a middle ground with the sensors so it doesn’t get tripped by birds but will still pick up on small objects being lobbed at our house.”

“Yeah, we don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night by a runaway parakeet.”

“It’s fixable, okay?” Teresa said. “There are going to be glitches, folks, we’re still feeling this out. But we responded to the alarm, which is its purpose.”

“What about the earthquake that set it off two days ago?” Renee said.

“The earthquake, really?” I said. I wasn’t home for the 5.2 that shook the town. Earthquakes set off car alarms and such, so our system really wasn’t a stretch.

“We’ll have false alarms, guys,” Ethan said, stepping in as peacemaker. “I’d rather have false positives than a system unable to detect a real threat. Am I alone?”

“No, you’re not,” Teresa said.

Renee grunted, and the others took that as her agreement. Their scrutiny fell on me, and I nodded.

Teresa’s intense, violet-eyed gaze continued to study me, until she finally asked, “So what are your afternoon plans, Dal?”

“Hadn’t really thought much past painting the—” Oh, wait, I had a new assignment. “Electrician hunting, right?”

“Bingo.”

“I’ll get on that,” I said, and darted from the room.

As I passed through the lobby I tossed a guilty look at the paint pan and roller, drying to a tacky mess by the wall. Someone would finish it later. Half the house still needed fresh coats of paint. Thank goodness it was June and not the middle of L.A.’s rainy season. We had the windows wide open and box fans blowing fresh, if somewhat humid, air around to rid the place of the cloying odor of new paint.

My room was on the second floor, like the others. Unlike them, I’d chosen a room in the front of the house, second door on the left, on the opposite side of the house from the rooms of my elders. It’s funny that I still thought of them that way, even though, at thirty, Gage was as old as we got. Unless you counted Simon Hewitt, a former bad guy and current Teresa West Pet Project. He lived and worked in New York, though, with his son, Caleb, and wasn’t technically part of the team.

They were all elder compared to my experience, I supposed, and in bloodline. My mother hadn’t been a Ranger, nor had anyone else in her family. My father—such as he was—had no powers. Someone in one of their family trees had to have been Meta, but I had no idea who and really didn’t care enough to research it. The direct descendants of the Ranger Corps were the five people I worked with every single day. Stories circulated about newly powered people
popping up across the country. We’d publicly invited them to contact us. So far, they were keeping to themselves.

I popped into my bedroom to change. Its meager contents included a well-made bed, littered with overstuffed pillows, and a matching dresser. My favorite wicker rocking chair had followed me from my old apartment. An oversize, peeling white monster with a flat, faded cushion, it was the only thing from my mother’s house I’d kept.

Sentimentality wasn’t my strong suit. I had a shoe box of snapshots packed up in a carton along with the rest of my meager belongings—mostly books and a few academic award certificates. Spiffing up my personal space was less important than getting the rest of the house in order. No one would ever see the crappy interior of my bedroom, but the lobby and downstairs rooms presented an image to others. It had to be a good one.

I stripped out of my paint-splattered jeans and tank top, then did a quick skin check in the closet mirror, as had become a habit. Teresa had smudges of purple on her body, some more noticeable than others. Renee was completely blue. Marco had black and brown patches of velvet-soft fur all over his face, torso, and legs. Sections of Gage’s hair reflected the same silver in his flecked eyes. Only Ethan had escaped noticeable discoloration.

So far, I had an orange streak that no brand of hair dye managed to hide, but no other major colorations on my body. Thank God. Even my eyes had remained light blue.

I slipped into a pair of clean, dark blue jeans and a white silk camisole. A brush through my hair separated the dried-together
bits. I twisted the orange section into a rope, tucked it behind my right ear, and secured it with a barrette. Not too bad. Nothing like the timid journalist I’d been last year.

I opened the door and jumped back, barely missing Ethan’s fist knocking into my nose. His other hand sported bandages on three fingertips.

“Hey,” he said, “change your clothes. We’ve got a job.”

Two

Sunset and Laurel

T
he “job” turned out to be a dead body on Sunset Boulevard. Two LAPD squad cars were double-parked on the street, lights flashing, when Trance parked our SUV behind them. Tempest and I tumbled out with her. The midday humidity felt like dragon’s breath after the chill of the car’s AC.

The Dream Parlor provided just what it advertised, in the form of exotic dancers and cheap booze. Housed in an old comedy club—as were many of the businesses on this strip of Sunset—its façade was painted in garish shades of yellow and green, with the silhouette of a naked woman parked between the
m
and
P
on the sign. Tacky, tasteless, and perfect for the neighborhood.

One of the uniformed officers pointed us left, toward an alley between the Dream Parlor and the vacant building next door. Trance started to thank him, but he’d already turned away. The snub didn’t hurt, not like it had the first time I realized we were no longer city celebrities. We had become, without realizing it, people to fear. The public
wanted us to help them out when needed, but otherwise stay far away.

Fear does strange things to people.

The alley reeked of stale beer, rotting food, and the general odor of human waste, all twisted up into one great, sickly stink. I bit down on the tip of my tongue, willing breakfast to stay put. I could handle broken bones and gushing blood; bad smells would not get the better of me.

A dozen yards down, past a collection of plastic trash cans and rotting cardboard boxes, stood a trio of people. A well-dressed man in a pressed blue suit and expensive shades hovered nearby, jotting something on a notepad. At his elbow was a brown-haired woman, conversely dressed in jeans and a tight, three-quarter-sleeved blouse. Detective partners we worked with occasionally—Pascal and Forney, if I recalled correctly. Another uniformed officer stood nearby, trying his best to melt into the brick wall. He saw us first, another trio in our own unique uniforms.

After quitting the Ranger Corps and the MHC payroll, Teresa had brainstormed a new idea for our uniforms: simple, slick black pants with a variety of zippered pockets, tank tops in our preferred color, woven through with armored thread, and matching black jackets. My color was orange, Trance’s was silver, and Tempest’s green. The stretchable Kevlar in our tank tops was a gift from the brain trust that was ATF Agent Rita McNally. She could come up with some unusual toys, and it made me glad she was on our side.

Trance approached the scene with confidence in her stride. Tempest and I flanked her, creating a perfect triangle.
My palms were sweaty and not from the day’s heat. I schooled my face into the perfect picture of calm as we approached. The wall of human bodies parted, and I gazed down at my first murder victim.

And almost lost my breakfast.

It wasn’t a body as much as it was a body’s case. Skin, hair, and nails, in the perfect replica of a human being. The pink-and-tan body looked like an inflatable doll that had gone flat, but it wasn’t plastic. The details were too perfect, from the lines around the empty eyes to the warts on the tops of the man’s feet. There was no blood, no gore, no sign of the eyeballs or anything else that wasn’t external.

A human slipcover.

“Oh boy,” I muttered.

“You okay?” Tempest asked, a little pale himself. His good hand squeezed my shoulder.

I tore my eyes away from the graphic—yet, oddly, not gory—sight. “Yeah, I think so. Wh-what could do that to a person?”

“That’s why we called you people in,” Detective Forney said. She wore shockingly red lipstick and matching nail polish. A scar ran the length of her left cheek, from ear to chin, thin as a pencil line, but noticeable in the bright daylight. Heavy makeup covered her face, thickest under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose, which seemed slightly swollen.