The Rules of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 1) (22 page)

I stared up at Magog, clutching Gabrielle’s unconscious form against my chest.

I would give anything to protect her.

I loved her every bit as much as Mandy.

Even now.

Shit.

Why did I have to have these revelations now?

“Anything?” a voice whispered in my head.

It was not Cloak’s.

“Yes,” I agreed, immediately.

“
Gary
!” Cloak shouted, as if I’d made the stupidest decision of my life.

“Then take my power, champion, and know we will meet again. Then I will collect upon this favor.” The voice sounded like Mandy’s and Gabrielle’s synthesized together. I knew who it was I’d just made my deal with.

Death.

Samael.

The Reaper’s Cloak’s mistress.

Magog pulled his head back to breathe down another tidal wave of hellfire as I felt power within my hands like I’d never felt before. I could have broken my deal by not using it but I’d meant everything I’d said to death. Summoning flames in my hands, I whispered, “Burn, you son of a bitch.”

An immense amount of fire poured from my hands, a tornado of flame which struck the gigantic monster in the chest and caused the entirety of its massive frame to start burning. Thousands of souls were freed in an instant and thousands more joined in the ensuing ten minutes I kept burning it. A crowd of civilians, heroes, and supervillains gathered around to watch me as I focused my flame with an overwhelming hate.

And, eventually, Magog was no more.

Not just in this reality.

But any reality.

I’d killed the Nephilim permanently. Like Sauron after the One Ring had been destroyed or the Kurgen after his head was cut off.

It was a big deal.

Probably.

I couldn’t think about it, though, because all of that exertion came to hit me in an instant. My eyes rolled back into my head and I fell over—unconscious on top of Gabrielle.

I really hoped I wasn’t going back to jail.

I found myself with a monstrous headache, worse than when I’d regained my memories, and woke up.

To mist.

I was surrounded by an endless fog in a dark and foreboding set of surroundings. I couldn’t see anything beyond a couple of feet away and I wasn’t sure I was standing on the ground either.

“Okay, this is weird,” I muttered. “Am I dead?”

“No, just unconscious,” Cloak’s voice said in the mist. It wasn’t coming from my costume anymore. “You’re not even gravelly injured, just exhausted. If you were close to Death, I expect she’d be trying to speak with you now.”

That was when a handsome man in his early forties walked through the mist, wearing an older-style suit with a winning ring on his right hand. He had dark, well-groomed hair, white skin, and a pair of dark foreboding eyes. He was the sort of fellow who, if you were looking for the secret identity of a superhero, you’d look right at this guy.

I offered my hand to him. “Nice to meet you, Lancel.” It seemed wrong to call him Cloak here.

Lancel helped me up. “I tried for years to get people to call me Lance. It didn’t take.”

“Sorry,” I said, dusting myself off. “So this is my afterlife? Or yours? I can’t say I’m too impressed.”

“I don’t think its forever,” Lancel said, looking around. “I can feel the weight keeping me bound here weakening the more you come into your role. I thought Death would be mad at me forever for stealing the Reapers Cloaks but it seems she’s more forgiving than her reputation would suggest.”

“You stole the Cloaks?” I asked, surprised. “From Samael.”

“Persephone, Hel, Thanatos, Baron Samedi, or whatever name you want to call him or her. Death assumes the appropriate mythological form for her audience. She was always a terrifying female specter to me. The supernatural exists, no matter what humans like to label them and mythology is just their medium for communicating with us.” Lancel nodded. “I’m not proud of it but I didn’t begin my career as one of the good guys. I was the secret leader of an organization called the Brotherhood of Infamy. It was a cult devoted to the worship of the Great Beasts in hope of destroying the world so it could be remade into something better.”

Wow, that was like discovering Santa used to kill children in his spare time. “Wow. Why the hell would you do that?”

Lancel looked over at me. “Not everyone deals with their grief constructively.”

I looked at him. “I know something of that, myself.”

Lancel gave a half-smile. “In the end, when the time came to destroy the world for our paradise, I couldn’t do it. I still had too many friends and my brother to tie me to the world. I think, to really believe in a utopia, you have to hate the world. As angry as I was at the world, I wasn’t angry enough to take my revenge out on everyone and everything. So I spent the next eighty years trying to make up for my mistake.”

“The other six cloaks are still out there.”

Lancel nodded. “I’m afraid so. As entertaining as this diversion with Tom Terror is, I can feel whoever possesses them are misusing them. They also all bear the curse Death placed upon them to bring the dead back to life to scourge the living. That has the potential to destroy the world if it’s not stopped.”

I remembered Gog, which was probably still messing up Avalon. “So does a lot of things. You can’t just look after your own mess, Lance.”

Lancel looked down. “No, I suppose I can’t. Does this mean you’ve decided to come over to the side of the righteous?”

I looked down. “I don’t know if I can.”

“That’s surprising, given you almost just sacrificed yourself to save Gabrielle.”

“Ever see
Return of the Jedi
?”

“I may have caught it in theaters,” Lancel said, chuckling. “Is this going to be one of your extended references?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a short and sweet one, like me. I always thought the Force was overly forgiving letting Vader into Jedi Heaven. Darth Vader was willing to kill the Emperor for the love of his son and die to save him. Which is great and all but, what about all the other millions of people he helped the Empire kill, like the Alderaanians? It’s easy enough to die for the people you love. It’s hard to do it for the rest of the world. Gabrielle is,
Mandy
is, but I’m not.”

“That is, perhaps, a bit much to ask of anyone. Sometimes we forget that heroes are not meant to be the standard by which we should judge others, but those people who go above and beyond.”

“What you said, chief.” I’d been mulling over this stuff for the past few days. “My powers feel
really good
. I like using them. I loved the money, the fame, and the respect. I like Cindy and Diabloman, to be honest, and I imagine I’ll like plenty of other supervillains who are as far from Psychoslinger as humanly possible. I hate the people like the Extreme and those bastards who employ them. If you’re asking me if I’m going to give up a life of crime, probably not.”

Lance looked down.

I took in a deep breath. “But maybe there’s a spectrum to these sorts of things.”

Lance looked up, surprised.

“On one end of the rainbow, you’ve got guys like Ultragod and Gabrielle. The people willing to sacrifice everything in order to do stuff,” I said, trying to force down my anger over the fact my girlfriend had chosen the world over me. “At the other end, there’s the Extreme, but maybe there’s something similar with supervillains. Heroes and anti-heroes. Yet, if there’re these, why not Anti-Villains?”

“I’m not sure that’s a word.”

“I’m pretty sure I read it on TV tropes.”

“Again, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I looked at my hands. “Or maybe the line between heroes and villains is just imaginary. A construct of where you’re looking and what you support.”

“Most people learn that when they’re fourteen.”

“My life got skewed at that age.”

Lancel placed his hand on my shoulder. “There is still Tom Terror’s riot going on outside. It’s dangerous. You need to wake up and deal with it.”

“I will,” I said, staring. “Then I’m going to use Ultragod’s teleporter and get the hell out of here. I’m also going to help myself to anything which is going to keep me and my friends out of jail.”

“That is a dangerous self-defeating road, my friend.”

“Only if I lose. Next time, I won’t.”

Lancel frowned, his voice softening. “It is a long, hard, and dangerous road you’ve set yourself upon, Gary, but I suppose we both knew that. I can only offer you my support and friendship. Also, my dear hope you never have as much to atone for as I do.”

“Right back at you, Lance. Where’s the exit?”

Lance took a step aside. “Just go through the mist. A word of caution, though, these mists are made of the same substance all ghosts are made of: memories. You’ll have to pass plenty of them to get through. Ones which are better left behind.”

“I never left my memories behind. Even before I got the Reaper’s Cloak.”

Lancel kept his expression even but I could tell he understood. I walked past him into the mists and hoped to God I didn’t go crazy.

At first, it wasn’t all that unpleasant. The mists weren’t all that cold, being somewhat cool at best, but gradually became cooler as I progressed through them. I heard voices in the mist, too, of my brother, parents, and others who’d influenced my life.

“You’re a disgrace, Gary,” my parents said. “Keith almost ruined us. Did you have to finish the job?”

“You get more like me every day,” Shoot-Em-Up said. “Man, if I’d killed the supervillains you did, I would have gotten twice the money from my book deal.”

“If you wanted to honor me, you could have looked after my daughter,” Keith said, whispering. “You’re going to make her life harder.”

“We’re dead because of you,” a bank teller whispered. “All of us died because you made us a target by being a supervillain.”

“You could be redeemed,” Mandy said.

“You could be a hero,” Gabrielle said.

“You’re just going to drag down those you love instead,” Cindy said.

I shook my head. “Try harder. I know all this.”

The mists took me up on the challenge and I was soon reliving my past. It was five years ago and I was rocking the Kurt Cobain look. I had on jeans and a white t-shirt underneath a black jacket. I was smoking a cancerless cigarette while sitting on a black Honda Accord hood, parked on a cliff overlooking Falconcrest City. The smog and lights blotted out the stars, but I could see the moon above. Mandy was sitting beside me, wearing a black bra and no shirt with her black blue-jeans barely pulled up. The two of us had just had sex in the back of her car.

“So, History, huh?” Mandy said. “You want to be a teacher?”

“I wanted to pursue my Doctorate in Unusual Criminology and be the sort of asshole who writes books and attends talk shows to explain why supervillains do what they do. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, though.” I’d been rejected from the program, even though I had more than enough credits. The fact I didn’t have a Masters in Unusual Criminology shouldn’t have prevented me from pursuing a higher education but things hadn’t worked out that way.

“I think they realized you were the guy who arranged for hackers to break into the student loan records and delete everyone’s debt. The FBI is still trying to recover those files.”

“My hacker is the best,” I said, smiling at her. “There’s nothing they’ll be able to prove.”

“So, going to continue the good fight?” Mandy smiled. “Become some masked online vigilante?”

“Sadly, my days of Guy Fawkes masks and activism are over,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re onto me now so I’d just wind up getting caught. Better to quit while I’m ahead.”

That and my niece was starting her freshman year and I didn’t want to ruin her chances of getting a decent life. Despite it taking every cent my parents had, they’d managed to look after Keith’s daughter after her mother abandoned her. Tina Karkofsky had been raised by Kerri and had a bright future ahead of her.

I wished her luck.

“Smart,” Mandy said, not really sounding all that impressed.

“How about you?”

Mandy stared forward. “My schedule is surprisingly clear. If I had plans for doing anything after college, they’re over now.”

I nodded, deciding now was as good a time as any to make my offer. “Well, we could do it together?”

“Oh?” Mandy asked.

“Yeah,” I said, handing her a ring box.

Mandy blinked. “Seriously?”

“Wow, and I thought my parents story of their marriage proposal was unromantic,” I said, staring. That had involved a pregnancy scare and a shotgun if my mother’s stories at Thanksgiving were anything to go by.

Mandy smiled. She then took the box and pulled out the ring, putting it on her finger. It was far plainer than the one I’d bought for Gabrielle before she up and vanished on me. It was all I could afford. “Are you sure your parents would be okay with you marrying a bisexual Gentile pagan?”

“I’m sure they’d hate you but you’re not marrying them.”

Mandy snorted. Wiggling her finger. “Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have anyone else you’d rather be with?”

I looked at her. “Do you?”

Mandy didn’t answer at first. The Black Witch was serving twenty-to-life for trying to Death Curse some corrupt priests involved in a sleazy cover-up. I thought they should have given her a medal. Finally, Mandy said, “I want to be your wife.”

“Cool.”

Not exactly the kind of story you’d want to tell your grandkids. Still, it was one of my few unambiguously happy memories. I was kind of surprised the mists thought it would break me, if that’s what they wanted to do. The voices which followed were an eerie collection of voices similar to Cloak’s but different. I took them to be the other six Reaper’s Cloak wearers for reasons I could only attribute to intuition.

“
Mandy will suffer if you continue on this path
.”

“
Worse, she will change
.”

“
You will never be able to have the family you want with her
.”

“
She does not want the children you desperately crave
.”

“
You will take what is best from her and leave her a monster
.”

“
You will have her body but never her heart
.”

I shook my head at the lame-ass statements and just carried on, hoping we were almost done. “Mandy loves me and I love her. The fact she’s in love with someone else doesn’t change that. You can love more than one person. I love my family, my friends, and other people too. That’s just how relationships work.”

“
Is it
?”

I was once more in another memory. This time, it was earlier that year with Gabrielle cursing up a storm at the ‘Game Over’ screen in front of the Xbox 360. She was playing the story mode of
Corruption: Beware the Supermen
. It was a controversial tie-in game I wasn’t sure how the Society of Superheroes’ marketing people had let slip through the cracks. You could play as any of the superheroes of the Society as well as a number of pardoned villains. It’s just the game was damned hard with certain characters.