Equal Parts

Copyright 2012, E. Winters

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reprinted, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without written permission of the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

For Tiri, my own personal superhero.

Although, you must be at least a little villainous, because Achilles wouldn’t exist without you...

Chapter One

Day of the Dead

“Come on, sweetheart. You know them fingers make you a superhero in my books.”

Ha. Would it be highly unprofessional to laugh in the face of an injured, sedated man?

Probably.

“No offense, Roland, but if I really was a superhero, I wouldn’t be sticking around to wash your dirty sheets.” 

And it was the truth. I wasn’t a super
hero
. I wasn’t a supervillain, either. I was superneutral. No bias, no taking sides. In the superhuman world, I was Switzerland. No one provoked me, and I provoked no one in return. Just the way I liked it.

Not that anyone knew, of course.

“You’re honestly tellin’ me those fingers aren’t some kinda miracle-workers?” Roland asked me. He couldn’t be much older than me, but somehow he managed to sound like a middle-aged criminal from a gangster movie.

I glanced down at the hand I’d just brushed across his forehead in an act of checking his temperature. I had no credentials to be making such a check, but he didn’t have to know that. The thing was, that jab about the superhero issue was closer to the mark than he could’ve guessed.

“What makes you think they’re magic, hmm?” I busied myself with collecting the empty cups of water from beside his bed, then spraying down the table with disinfectant.

He tried for a shrug, but his broken arm made it painful. “Dunno. I just feel better when you’re around.” A gap-toothed smile broke across his face. “But that could also be the raging chemistry between us.”

“Oh, give it up, son,” snapped another of my patients, Mrs. Corbet, from the next bed in the wing.

I laughed humorlessly and resisted the urge to wipe the fingers in question on my scrubs. This wasn’t the first time someone had picked up on the way my touch made them feel better, but if someone as drugged-addled and dumb as Roland could see it, maybe I was beginning to slip.

“You’re the best part of my day, dear,” Mrs. Corbet told me in that soft-as-cotton voice when I reached her bedside, giving me a genuine smile. Mrs. Corbet had been in and out of the hospital since I moved to Carova, receiving treatment for two types of cancer. Her husband had died years ago, and she had no other family to visit her.

To hide the lack of gladness – or anything, really – from her compliment, I plastered on a smile. For the millionth time in almost three years, I wished I could feel the sunshine welled in my chest. “Well, hopefully you won’t have to see a lot more of me. You’re going home next week, right? That’ll be nice.”

She said nothing, just nodded sadly and turned her eyes to the clock on the wall. I would make the worst nurse in the world – my bedside manner was terrible. But I wasn’t being paid to be nice – hell, I wasn’t getting paid, period. This whole job was purely volunteer-based.

I started working at the Carova City Hospital about a year ago, when it became obvious my power of making people happy was going to waste. I’d been given this godawful power for a reason, and I guess I had to use it somehow.

Without another thought, I wrapped my fingers around Mrs. Corbet’s slender wrist, and willed a trickle of sunshine to slide down my arm, into my hand, through her skin, into her blood. The effect was instantaneous. Her skin brightened, her eyes regained a twinkle, her muscles visibly relaxed. It wasn’t much – I didn’t have much left to give, after the night I’d had – but it would last her another week, at least.

“You’re a good girl, Felicity,” she told me, before shutting her eyes for a doze.

There, I was done. All my regular patients – and some new ones, like the guy who’d been gutted like a fish in a back alley just this evening – had been dealt with. My fingers tingled with the amount of sunshine I’d dished out in one night, and my chest felt emptier than usual, but seeing the glow of Mrs. Corbet and Roland was enough to keep my spirits high.

I slipped out into the gloomy hospital hallway, its ugly mustard walls half-illuminated by flickering fluorescent lights. I knew this hospital like the back of my hand – every creaky step, every broken window latch, every disabled fire exit.

Technically speaking, I wasn’t allowed to touch patients. No one knew I was a superhuman, but if someone found out, I’d be fired for sure. Superhumans weren’t permitted to interfere with the
natural order
, by law. In other words, we weren’t allowed to take away or save a life, or create ‘unnatural’ disasters, or disrupt society with mental powers, or anything along those lines.
We were supposed to just exist – or, rather,
co
exist.
I think the government thought that if they just ignored us, we’d go away.

However, in Carova – my new home –
superhuman laws didn’t apply
.
Not many normal laws did, either
. By moving to Carova, you gave up a sense of right and wrong. The jobs paid well because nobody wanted to live there, and nobody wanted to live there because the city was at war with itself. It had no culture, aside from bloodlust and superhumans. It had no history, aside from a major cigarette company booming here in the fifties. It had no sense of community, aside from the citizens hiding in fear of being caught out by the fifty-per cent crime rate.

But while it was, in many ways, the epitome of Hell, it needed someone like me to try and bring the peace.
I hadn’t been welcome back in Florida
.
Superhumans were identified at birth by a blood test, and the label tended to stick with you wherever you went, including school and work. Blending in back home had been impossible. Not ideal for a girl who’d rather just be ignored her whole life.

There was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be, mostly because there was nowhere else I would fit in. In Carova, I was anonymous. No one knew me, no one wanted to know me, and no one gave a damn if I was superhuman or not.

I hadn’t felt anything in almost three years.
Like,
anything.
Sure, sometimes I felt lonely, or a little scared, or angry at the card I’d been dealt. But they were just twinges, just tiny niggles at the back of my mind that disappeared when I tried to bring them to light.

So, when I left the hospital for the night, under the full moon, and spotted the cemetery across the road on the way back to my car, I was shocked to find that I felt …
something
.

Not scared, but definitely not safe. Something weirdly like excitement.

Dropping my car keys back into my bag, I grabbed onto the feeling with both hands and followed the urge right into the graveyard.

I’d always thought it incredibly depressing that the hospital faced Carova Cemetery. As if the interior of the hospital wasn’t awful enough, the patients had to look out onto their inevitable fate for a view.

Tonight, however, it wasn’t depressing.

It was
thrilling
.

I climbed over the picket fence surrounding the block of land and followed the gravel path up to the gazebo at its center. There were a few lights across the grounds, but otherwise I was greeted by shadows and strips of moonlight – all the better for a creepy setting. Even the police sirens in the background made for a cheap thrill.

All kinds of horror movie flashbacks came to me in that gazebo, from half-rotted zombies bursting out of their graves, to axe-murderers, to little girls residing in wells. My heart was actually starting to race – the most it’d done for me in almost three years.

The wind whipped up a frenzy around me, carrying with it the sound of feet pounding on gravel.
Was I really imagining things? Was I that scared?

God, this was so easy! I should’ve done this years ago!

My heart beat faster and faster as the noise of footsteps came closer and closer, until I could hear panting along with the crunching … and suddenly I realized I wasn’t imagining things.

Eyes wide, I turned to see someone – some
thing
– stumbling towards me through the darkness, its silhouette slightly hunched.

Usually, when faced with something like this, the ‘fight or flight’ mode sets in. I was a fighter by definition, but a flyer by choice. I never knew there was a third option, though: ‘freeze’. Because that’s exactly what I did – I sat there, rooted to the bench beneath me, staring as a possible madman approached me in a cemetery.

Then the figure came into full view under the flickering light of the gazebo, and I screamed.

In Carova, there were a few distinct heroes and villains that seem to make headlines more than others. The biggest and baddest villain of them all, a guy called Achilles, was notorious for a few reasons: he killed Carova’s mayor, he murdered people on a daily basis, he was weirdly charismatic, and he knew everything about everyone – or so it seemed.

And now, he was standing right in front of me, clutching his shoulder with one hand and a bloodied nail-gun in the other.

“Christ, girl, you gave me a heart attack!” He jumped back at the sound of my shriek.

He was a whole lot scarier up-close than I’d imagined. In my two years in this city, I’d learned to judge people pretty well. Some people hid behind masks, others flourished behind them. With most people, it was all in the eyes.

But Achilles was different. He painted his face into some kind of terrifying skeleton, his eyes blackened completely, with no whites whatsoever. Even though I knew they had to be some kind of contact lenses, they still held a permanent place in my nightmares. And yet, in the flesh, he seemed a lot more ... human. That could have been because he was bleeding profusely, though.

“
Me
? I’m not the one running around looking like the goddamn Hunchback of Notre Dame!” Okay, so I should have mentioned – I’m terrible in a crisis. My mouth has a mind of its own in times of panic or stress, and tends to forget who it’s talking to.

In this case, it was a man a good head taller than me, with twice my muscular strength and a total lack of compassion for human life.

Not a great outlet for such sarcasm.

“What do you know about dislocated shoulders?” he asked, surprising me. Then I realized I was still in my scrubs – he must’ve thought I was a nurse.

“Um, enough to know they’re a real pain in the ass.” God, what was
wrong
with me? I was conversing with a psychopath! I blamed it solely on the panic.

He grunted when he shoved his shoulder against the pole in the middle of the gazebo. “You’ve got that right, darling. Help me out, would you?”

“I … I…”
Crappity crap!
I couldn’t help him – that would be enabling a criminal, right?
But if I didn’t help him, he would kill me. Of that, I was absolutely certain.

“If you don’t help me, there’s a good chance I’ll be dead in a matter of minutes. You really want that on your conscience?” Even with the contact lenses in, I could tell he was in a considerable amount of pain from the crackle of his voice. Blood was smeared across the white paint of his cheek – his, or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.

I stood – whether to run or help him, I still don’t know – but a sudden puff of smoke alerted me to another presence in the gazebo.

“Finnian,” growled Achilles at the newcomer.

Finn Cole was this city’s golden boy. Hell, with surfer-blonde hair and blue eyes, he even looked the part. He and a group of guys he lived with had taken it upon themselves to rid Carova of people like Achilles, though so far, they hadn’t done too much, aside from throw a lot of parties and beat up a few muggers. They didn’t bother with alter-egos or superhero names – to them, the whole business of defeating crime in this city was just a past-time, something to make them look impressive.