Love for the Cold-Blooded (26 page)

It was a gorgeous house — a villa in the millennial style, all stately columns and elegant facade, the typical bowfronts and single castle-like half-tower integrated perfectly to make for an overall impression of airy, light and luxurious elegance that belied the size of the building. Lovely, and well-maintained too, the name of the hotel and the decorative stucco nymphs framing it shining golden and green and blue in the bright winter sun.

Pat would have thought the place was too chintzy for Bitterfly’s taste, but hey, maybe this choice of venue was her idea of conducting a covert undercover operation. He wouldn’t have thought to look for her here, that much was for sure.

“Wait here,” Silver Paladin said tightly, looking up, jaw set and eyes narrowed. The hum of the force fields changed subtly as they prepared to lift him into the air again, and what, no, what the fuck,
no way
—

Pat reacted quickly, darting around to get up in Silver Paladin’s face before his feet could leave the ground. “Hey, hey! Where are you going? The entrance is right there!”

Silver Paladin’s visor was still up, giving Pat a prime view of the horizontal crease that developed between his brows as he gave Pat a flat stare. “According to my readings, Bitterfly has taken the Crystal of Power to the top floor. The entire top floor is taken up by the penthouse suite, so there’s no risk of bystanders or —”

“So what, you’ll pulverize a wall and burst in force fields blazing, like a one-man hoagie wrecking commando?” Raw anger was beginning to awaken in Pat’s gut. He could just picture it — Silver Paladin blasting in, shedding glass and brick and steel everywhere. But no, no way, Pat would not allow it. Not this time. Not the Nymph. “Do you know how old this villa is? The Nymph is a godsdamned cultural heritage. Not to mention that it’s beautiful. Look at it, for fuck’s sake!”

“Patrick,” said Silver Paladin, coldly. He was using his hoagie command voice again, but Pat wasn’t having that nonsense right now. If anything, it just made him angrier.

“And you’re going to be an asshole and turn this lovely and important building into a pile of rubble because you can’t be asked to use the fucking door like a normal human being? Just because you wear a fancy quantum suit, you think it’s okay — after three hundred years,
you
think you have the right to casually destroy something wonderful, inestimably valuable and full of history —”

“Patrick!”

Pat stopped, but only briefly, and only because he was out of breath. “Collateral damage my ass, if you hoagies even tried —”

“I will ask hotel management for a key card to Bitterfly’s suite,” Silver Paladin said, very coldly. He looked angry.

Yeah, well. Pat was angry too.

~~~~~

I
t took Silver Paladin about a minute to have every hotel employee falling over themselves to do the bidding of the great Hero Corps superstar. It was rather disgusting, really, even if in this instance, it was also useful. But still. Did they even know how close they’d come to working in a hotel with no top floor?

Whatever. While the receptionist and the manager were having spontaneous orgasms over the presence of a real live hoagie in their humble hotel, Pat took the stairs up to the top floor, rang the executive suite’s doorbell several dozen times, and then proceeded to pound angrily on Bitterfly’s door.

“Bitterfly,” he shouted through the heavy oak. “Hey, Bitterfly, I know you’re in there! I have to talk to you!”

It was probably just his imagination, because the door was too thick to allow any sound from inside to escape. Even so, Pat thought he could hear something move inside the suite. Another moment, and the intercom crackled to life.

“Who is it?” came Bitterfly’s suspicious voice.

“It’s Patrick — Sir Toby’s minion from earlier. You shoved your elbow in my gut and called me names, remember? Anyway, listen, you can’t use the Crystal! It’s extremely dangerous, it has to be specifically contained or it kills its wielder. You have to return it —”

“As if!” Pat didn’t think it was the intercom that made her laughter sound so deranged. He was impressed despite himself; not every challenger mastered cackling with this kind of skill. “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Not anymore! Now that the Crystal is in my possession, I finally have the power to do what must be done. I will rise up like a phoenix and throw down everyone who stands in my way! I will save this world from the horrors that indifference and bad taste have wrought. I will —”

Uh-oh, she was going off into a challenger rant. Another moment and she would be completely unstoppable. Pat didn’t have time for a grandiose half-hour speech. Honestly, sometimes challengers were just as annoying and predictable as hoagies. “You will die, that’s what you’ll do! And when you’re dead you’ll do exactly nothing. Nada, zilch! Listen to me, okay. The Crystal was kept in a special box before we put it into the MCR, which kept it safe. And Sir Toby designed a special unit for it inside the MCR, so that it was safe in there.” At least that’s what Pat surmised. “You don’t have anything like that, do you? Nothing to contain the Crystal’s eldritch vibes. You were just going to, I don’t know, pop it in your shield generator thingie as though it were a battery and hope for the best! Right?”

Silence — which was basically confirmation. Pat took it as a good sign. At least she was listening. “Sir Toby wasn’t even angry that you’d stolen the Crystal, he was just worried that you’d kill yourself with it. If you return it —”

“Of course he’s saying that!” she shrilled. Her voice stabbed painfully through Pat’s brain, and he backed away several steps from the door before he caught himself. “He wants his Crystal back. There is no lie he would not resort to —”

“Hey!” barked Pat angrily. Where did she get off, saying that kind of thing? “That is not okay. You know very well that Sir Toby is not a liar!”

Her answer was a moment in coming, and sounded almost sullen when it did. “How would I know that? I’ve never met Sir Toby before today. We don’t exactly move in the same circles.”

Not quite an apology, but good enough. The best she could do right now, anyway. Challengers couldn’t apologize in the middle of a scheme; it wasn’t appropriate.

And now Pat had an idea. Bitterfly had sounded bitter just then — more bitter than usual, rather. It must be frustrating to be relegated to the third or fourth tier of challengers, regarded as an unfortunate wannabe who was laughable rather than threatening. Nobody took challengers like her seriously… not their fellow challengers, and not hoagies and the general public, either. She wasn’t remotely in the same class as someone like Sir Toby. Not worthy of associating with him.

Except that that wasn’t actually true anymore, was it? “That energy shield thing you do now is pretty cool,” Pat said truthfully. “That’s new, right? Did you invent it yourself? Because, dude. Wicked.”

Another moment of silence, and then a sniff. “It didn’t work, though.” She sounded caught halfway between belligerence and hesitation.

“Hey, no, it did. Your scheme was foiled, but that’s a different thing entirely. Your shield did great. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. You had the entire city trapped for days!”

“I did,” Bitterfly conceded, a hint of satisfaction creeping into her tone. A large hint; more like a solid unmissable clue, really.

“And the expanding portable bubble you trapped Sir Toby and the others with today? That thing is terrifying. I’d know.”

“It is, isn’t it.” She was all smugness now, making Pat smile. “Even Sir Toby was powerless against my Mobile Agate. Nobody could escape its might… except for you, apparently.”

Was that disgruntlement? Whatever, Pat had to get to the point anyway. Silver Paladin should be here any minute, and it would be better for everyone if Bitterfly had handed over the Crystal before then. “So really, you don’t even need the Crystal of Power, do you? You’re coming into your own quite nicely. I bet even Sir Toby would like to work together with you, now that you’ve shown what you can do. Provided you return his Crystal, of course, and provided you’re still alive when you do it. Which, you know, I wasn’t kidding about that. You try to use the Crystal, it’s not going to be pretty. We’re talking ‘last mistake you’ll ever make’ territory here.”

Bitterfly didn’t respond for so long Pat was actually beginning to hope. “Lies,” she said then, shortly. The intercom crackled and spat as though sympathetic to the agitation in her voice. “Go away, minion. I will not dally further with you.”

“I’m not lying! Sir Toby —”

But the intercom cut him off with a sharp clack, clearly announcing that Bitterfly had closed the transmission. Pat slumped, defeated. Fuck it, he’d thought he’d been getting through to her. He’d thought…

“Worth a try,” said Silver Paladin from directly behind Pat.

Pat almost swallowed his tongue as he whirled around. How long had Silver Paladin been standing there? And when had he learned to sneak up on people like that?

The look the hoagie was giving him was oddly thoughtful. Pat returned it helplessly, not knowing what was going on. It was probably a good thing that Silver Paladin shook his head a little then, and pushed Pat aside so he could insert the keycard into the lock and open the door.

~~~~~

Y
ou could get used to a lot of things in life. Bitterfly’s eardrum-bursting, teeth-rattling screech, though? Not one of them.

At least Pat hadn’t been caught entirely off guard this time, and had already been covering his ears when the door swung open on a startled Bitterfly. Plus, she hadn’t had that much time to scream. Silver Paladin had immediately lifted off and blasted into the suite, tackling her around the middle and cutting her off mid-screech.

Even so, Pat’s ears were still ringing with a vengeance as he stumbled further into the suite, following the trail of destruction. On their way through the entrance hall and into the next room, Bitterfly and Silver Paladin had managed to wreck a rather nice antique table and chair, a tacky crystal chandelier, a large painting and the door to the next room, which hung crazily off its hinges. Even the frame was splintered and half detached from the slightly worse-for-wear wall.

Pat arrived in the suite’s living room to see Bitterfly make a too-familiar gesture with one hand, launching a rapidly expanding green bubble. He ducked back out with lightning speed, and then very carefully peeked around the broken door frame — just in time to be near-blinded by the incandescent flash of Bitterfly’s Mobile Whatsit encountering Silver Paladin’s defensive force shield.

Fuck it, Pat was so ready for this day to be over.

He blinked through the orange aftereffects that swam through his vision and forged on grimly. He did stumble a little over a chair he couldn’t see because of the enormous reddish blob in the middle of his field of vision, but nobody saw, so that was okay.

Silver Paladin and Bitterfly were duking it out in the middle of the room, blasts of silver and green flying everywhere. They weren’t bothering with trying to talk things over, or even with taunts and insults; clearly, the only goal here was to beat the living daylights out of each other.

They’d already trashed most of what looked to have been an extremely luxurious room. Broken wood, glass, and various other debris was littered everywhere, and the glassless drape-framed windows were open to the wind, gauzy curtains billowing in the breeze. The only things that had so far escaped destruction were a floor lamp in the far corner, a small mahogany desk, and a Century-style settee upholstered in brocade and glass shards. A dent in the wall by the settee bore witness that one of the combatants had been tossed into plaster and brick with enough force to leave an impression, but whoever it was hadn’t let it slow them down.

Right… Pat was not going to interfere with those two, that was for sure.

Where was the Crystal of Power? Pat was pretty sure he should be able to spot the thing’s emanations (the eldritch ones, yeah, there really wasn’t a good alternate word for it) even if Bitterfly had put it into a case or something. He couldn’t imagine any ordinary box — or whatever — would do much to fence in that eery glow.

Pat ducked into the bedroom and the attached bathroom to perform a cursory search. As it turned out, the suite also had a second bedroom, as well as a study. And a library. And another bathroom. Seriously? But anyway, none of all of these rooms appeared to hold the Crystal. Pat even checked on the second bedroom’s balcony, although he couldn’t imagine Bitterfly would want to put it there. No. She’d want to keep it close, wouldn’t she? Right to hand, in fact.

Back in the living room, it was becoming clear that Bitterfly was unlikely to win this fight. She was slower than before and panting audibly, and there was a bleeding scrape on one of her cheekbones. And bingo! There, right at her belt, hung a large tooled-leather pouch that emitted an unmistakably eldritch glow. Before, it had been camouflaged by the fluctuating light of all the various energies flying about, but now that Pat was looking right at it…

He should have noticed it before, really. The pouch didn’t complement Bitterfly’s outfit at all, and she wasn’t the kind of person who’d think nothing of attaching random bulging pouches to her belt. It ruined her silhouette.

This time, Pat knew to be careful of Bitterfly’s skull and elbows when he lunged for her. He came in low from behind and pretty much just went right for the pouch.

Everything happened very fast after that. Pat’s triumphant fist closed around the pouch. He looked up and barely evaded Bitterfly’s knee coming towards his face. His frantic dodge took him directly into the path of a blast of energy Silver Paladin had loosed. And bright metallic heat exploded in his chest, stiffening every muscle into cramp-like rigidity.

From his chest, the blast bloomed through his entire body, racing along every neural pathway. To his groin and down his legs, up his throat and into his mouth and tongue and nose and scalp. Down his arms to his fingers — and there, at his fingertips, something sparked and woke at the sudden shock of energy, rising to meet it, to reflect it back magnified by the factor of a hundred, a thousand.