West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (49 page)

“That’s the best you
have, Annie?” laughed Starfish. “I’m disappointed. Now give me the three things
I asked for, and Patrick and you don’t have to die - I’m a reasonable…”

A surge of cosmic
energy, the power of the stars, flared out from Cosmic Kid. It disintegrated
Dr. Sterling, the computers, desks, chairs, and then it hit Starfish. It
shredded his body far faster than he could heal and then the energy surged out
blasting out the walls, ceiling, and floor before it stopped. Cosmic Kid fell
with a crash to the ground, which was now a floor below. He lay there, unhurt,
but exhausted. He was also completely naked as the Cosmic Blast had destroyed
his costume, utility belt, HoloBerry, and everything he had on him.

“I killed Dr.
Sterling,” said Cosmic Kid, standing up awkwardly and dizzy. He started
climbing up smoldering wreckage scanning for any sign of Dr. Sterling or
Starfish.

“You’re naked,” said
Midnight who had entered the devastated area.

“Ah, the vaunted
investigative perceptions of vigilantes,” said Cosmic Kid irritably.

“What happened?”
asked Midnight.

“I killed both Dr.
Sterling and Starfish,” said Cosmic Kid angrily. “She sacrificed herself to
defeat Starfish.”

“No, I didn’t,” said
Dr. Sterling, exiting from what was left of the storage room.

“What? You’re
alive!” yelled Cosmic Kid.

“Yes, and we do have
a dress code in the building.”

“How did you
survive? I saw you get vaporized!” Cosmic Kid tried to work through the
options, but his mind was too tired.

“It was a hologram,”
said Dr. Sterling. “Seriously, we have a dress code and Midnight - stop ogling
him. Where is
Fortina
Knox?”

“The gas canisters
helped and I managed to get her out a window, now Blue Star is dealing with
her,” said Midnight, who turned awkwardly and tried to look at a spot on a wall
away from Cosmic Kid.

Cosmic Kid finished
climbing up to their level out of the hole he had made. He was quiet; he knew
it hadn’t been a hologram next to him in Operations. He could tell a hologram
from a real person. Dr. Sterling had been killed, but she had apparently reformed.
That meant she was a mutant or something else. She obviously didn’t intend to
tell him; it was another of her secrets. There was a lot more to Dr. Sterling
than met the eye.

“Cosmic Kid, will
you quit staring at me and go get some clothes on!” said Dr. Sterling.
“Midnight, go help the Trio downstairs - I fear they are making a mess of the
museum.”

Midnight took a
final peek at Cosmic Kid and then headed off at a sprint, no doubt worried
about the other vigilantes or maybe the museum. Cosmic Kid shook his head - he
was sure Dr. Sterling had been wearing a navy blue suit earlier, not a black
one. “You aren’t going to tell me how you did that, are you?”

Dr. Sterling smiled.
“Nope, but you’re a smart boy and I’m sure you’ll figure it out in a few
Seasons. But go get some clothes on, we have a crime spree to deal with and the
team has suffered some grievous losses tonight.”

“I can’t believe
Gabrielle is dead,” said Cosmic Kid.

Dr. Sterling walked around
the blast crater to a place on the wall smeared with a garish yellow-green
stain, which she began scrapping off the wall with a shattered piece of a hard
drive. “Yes, we have lost both a team member and an excellent PR director, but
she died in the line of duty. That’s a far nobler death than being blown up
walking towards a Costume Launch. Now for the last time, while you do have an
impressive physique, you really need to get clothes on.”

“Yes, of course,”
said Cosmic Kid, jogging for his office where he kept a spare costume. His
first Season with West Pacific Supers was coming to an end and it was nothing
like what he had expected. His old mentor, Dr. Nihilist, had once told him that
all the teen team experience in the world couldn’t prepare you for the
realities of being a professional superhero. He was finally beginning to
understand what that meant.

2:13 p.m., Tuesday, August 20
th
, 2013

West Pacific Memorial Hospital

West Pacific, CA

Seawolf
hated hospitals. They brought back too many memories of early childhood, when
her mother would bundle her up in a coat and headscarf to shield her from the
prying eyes of the neighbors as they snuck out of the house to visit so-called
“mutant specialists”. The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were a time of rampant
medical quacks who claimed to be able to cure
mutancy
.
Back then, especially in small communities like San Pedro, California, where
she was born to deeply religious second-generation Greek immigrants, having a
mutant child was a source of shame and fear. Rachel had been conceived only
after her mother had suffered several miscarriages. Seawolf could still
remember her mother crying to the priest that perhaps God had not wanted her to
have a child and this was her punishment for defying His will. The shame of
having a mutant daughter only increased as younger,
nonmutant
siblings were born.

Some of the doctors
were more understanding than others, but most treated Seawolf like an oddity, a
medical freak, the perfect test patient for “treatments” that ranged from
electroshock therapy to drug concoctions that made her sick for days. Her
mother hid her in the house as the years passed and the treatments continued to
be unsuccessful; she never seemed to understand that the only times Rachel ever
felt unhealthy were when she was under one of the medical regimes. Her father
was more sympathetic to his little “Seawolf” as he called his young daughter,
and she could still remember her parents screaming at each other over what to
do with her. When she was eight, her sister was born, a cherubic little girl
whom her mother doted on. In a fit of jealousy when Rachel was 11, she lashed
out at her sister and her mother declared that Rachel was too dangerous to keep
at home any longer.

Her father delayed
until Rachel turned 12 in 1987, when the highly publicized Hodges Institute
Academy for Mutant Youth was founded. He drove her up the coast and dropped her
off with a suitcase and a tearful hug. She spoke only Greek and had had no
formal schooling. The Institute doctors were different than any she had dealt
with before, especially Dr. Hodges, who never got angry when she refused to
make eye contact or when she ran away from the other mutant children and hid
under her bed. He had apparently inexhaustible patience. Once when she demanded
in broken English to know when he was going to cure her, he told her about his
own daughter. Diana had been born five years before Rachel and with far more
severe mutations. Dr. Hodges explained that after his daughter’s birth, he had
devoted everything to finding a cure for her. When she was six, he thought he
finally had succeeded. He administered the “cure”, but there was an unexpected
reaction and Diana died.

“Very sad,” Rachel
had said, uncomfortable at the sight of his tears. “But you do better now and
cure me.”

Dr. Hodges put his
hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “There is no cure for you, Rachel, because you are
not sick.”

Rachel shook her
head. She knew she wasn’t sick like people who had the flu; her ailment was
everything about her. Her whole life people had been trying to find a way to
transform her into something normal. She struggled to express herself. “I want
to be like you,” she finally said.

“Then work to make
society a better place,” he said. “People used to kill and enslave people who
looked different from them. It was stupid and wrong. People nowadays who think
mutants need to change the way they look to fit into society are stupid too.
There is nothing wrong with you, Rachel.”

Dr. Hodges had never
again spoken to her of Diana, but Seawolf hadn’t forgotten the exchange. She
wished now that she would have spoken of this to Starfish, but perhaps he
wouldn’t have believed her. Sometimes she wondered if she even believed.

Lost in her
memories, it took a while to find Paul’s room and when she did, she could see
through the window that he was sleeping. She was aware of the stares of other
people in the hallway and she entered the room quickly and quietly. She would
keep her visit short; someone was probably already calling an orderly.

She sat on the chair
next to the bed and grimaced as she looked at Paul. His left leg was in a cast
and suspended in some sort of apparatus to keep it level, his normally pink
face looked peaked and pale. Yet the first thing he said when he opened his eyes
and saw her was “Are you okay?”

Seawolf chuckled.
“I’m the ambulatory one,” she told him. “Just a broken arm and a couple of
ribs, and some fractures here and there. You’re the one suspended from the
ceiling. How are you feeling?”

“It’s just my leg,”
he said groggily, “but they had to do surgery to put pins in, I’m on something
for the pain – it’s pretty strong. “ He look confused for a moment, as if he
was processing what she had said and then looked at her in alarm. “Broken arm,
ribs, fractures - you should be in the hospital.”

“I am in the
hospital,” she said with a wolfish grin. “See? Here I am. Doctors know better
than to try to keep me in a hospital past visiting hours.”

“Did you get
Starfish?” Paul asked, struggling to sit up a little and gesturing for the
glass of water on the bedside table.

She handed him the
glass and nodded. “Dead,” she said with satisfaction. “But we lost White Knight
and very nearly the entire team; his house was like a death trap. He was also
behind the Boardwalk attack; he turned out to be one sick bastard.” She
couldn’t help wondering whether Starfish had always been mentally and morally
unstable – even back when he was Dr. Ross Keller – or whether the mutation
itself had pushed him over the edge. No one would ever know now.

Paul finished the
water. “Any idea how many more of those things he created got loose?” he asked,
sounding much more alert. Before she could answer, the door opened to admit a
male nurse who looked at Seawolf suspiciously. She sighed. This was her cue for
departure. She put her good hand on the bed to help her stand and was startled
when Paul reached out and imprisoned it in his own. “I have a visitor,” he told
the nurse pointedly.

The man hesitated,
giving another look at Seawolf. “Come back later,” Paul said. The nurse nodded
slowly and left, closing the door behind him. Seawolf sat back down and tried
to pull away her hand, but Paul held it tight. She flushed, but didn’t
struggle.

“Starfish was
deranged – you know that, right?” Paul asked her.

Seawolf raised an
eyebrow. “He was kidnapping people to do illegal genetic experimentations on
them – he killed three members of his own team, obviously he was deranged!”

Paul frowned.
“That’s not what I mean. The things that he said – he was insane, Seawolf. You
know that, right? He was just saying those things to make you angry. People
don’t think you’re a freak.”

Seawolf looked away
uncomfortably; she tried to withdraw her hand again but Paul was gripping it
tightly and she didn’t want to risk jostling him. “I
am
a freak, Paul,” she
finally said. “A freak means an aberration, something fundamentally and weirdly
different from the norm. That’s what I am. No one else is quite like me. And
don’t tell me that that makes me
special
or
unique
,” she
added angrily. “Special and unique is what people say to try and make someone
feel better about the fact that they’re uncomfortable being around you.”

“I’m not
uncomfortable being around you,” he said softly, moving his hand so that he
could stroke the webbing between her fingers. “And I’ve never thought that you
were a freak.” The way in which he was touching her felt almost unbearably
good. She swallowed hard to regain control of herself and jerked her arm away.

“
Ow
!”
he cried, clenching the side of the bed to steady himself against her sudden
movement.

“It’s your own
fault,” she snapped. “I’m not some dog you can just reach out and pet.”

He flinched.
“Believe me, I know,” he said with a wry smile. “I’ve got two dogs and you’d
make a terrible dog. You don’t fetch, you don’t stay where you’re told to… Come
to think of it, you’re really more like a cat, which is a shame because I can’t
stand cats.” He reached for her hand again, but she was too far away now and he
couldn’t shift much because of how his leg was positioned.

“Come here,” he
said, patting the bed beside him.

She frowned and
shook her head.

“Come on, Seawolf,”
he pleaded. “You threw me down a flight of stairs and broke my leg in three
places. You owe me.”

“Then you should
have listened when I told you to leave,” she grumbled, but she did move to the
edge of the bed and cautiously sat down next to him. “You’re going to get me in
trouble with the hospital,” she complained.

“Since when do you
care about getting in trouble with anyone?” He ran his hand lightly up the
smooth pale-green scales that covered her arm all the way to the grey fur on
her shoulders, neck, and face. “You’re so soft!” he said in surprise as he
explored her skin. “I never thought you’d be so soft.”

She couldn’t think
when the last time was that someone had touched her like this. It was sensual
as hell. She shuddered and then groaned as pain shot through her ribcage.

Paul smiled,
apparently taking her groan as a sign of pleasure. “See, I like you, you like
me, what’s so hard about this? No, don’t answer that,” he said as she started
to speak. “Seriously though, you need to relax. When was the last time you just
relaxed? No, don’t answer that either. Just come closer, I want to kiss you.”

“Why?”

Paul laughed. “Since
when does a guy need a reason to kiss the girl he likes?”

Seawolf flushed.
“It’s daylight,” she whispered.

“Yeah, so?”

“So people might see
us.” She gestured towards the door and its small glass window.

“Let ‘
em
look.” He tried again to turn towards her and grimaced
as he twisted his leg.

Seawolf bent down
and met his mouth with hers. Her arm got crushed between them in the process,
and pain coursed through her ribs, but she didn’t care. He was tracing the
contours of her face with his free hand; he had found the soft spot behind her
ears. She felt like she was melting. But why was he kissing her? Was the
medicine making him delirious? What if someone came in? What if Paul saw the
way that other people looked at her – would he pull away, would he tell her to
leave? She tried to ignore the questions in the back of her head, but they were
too loud, and she started to panic. She pulled back and opened her eyes in
alarm.

“You’re so tense,”
he said sadly as she shrugged off his hand. “Be honest – you enjoyed that,
didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Then why…” He shook
his head and looked confused. “I’m not going to hurt you. Heck, I couldn’t even
if I wanted to,” he said with a short laugh. “Not that I do or anything,” he
added quickly as she stood up. “In fact, come to think of it, you’re the one
who put me in the hospital…Sorry, bad joke… ” He sounded frustrated.

“I think I should
leave now,” she told him, her voice unsteady. Her heart was pounding so loudly
it was hard for her to think.

“Okay,” he said,
looking crestfallen and tired. As she reached the door, he rallied again. “I’m
not going to go away though,” he called. “You know that, right? I’m going to
keep after you until you realize I’m serious. I’m very persistent.”

She nodded weakly.
“So am I.”

Paul laughed. “I know.
You’re a fighter alright. But don’t worry, I don’t give up easily.”

“Good,” she
whispered, pausing an instant before opening the door. “I – I have to go.”

“Okay,” he said.
“Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” Seawolf
managed before she fled the room. She didn’t even know how she got outside, but
she found a bench in the sun and sat for a while until her heart had stopped
racing. When she could breathe easily again, she looked around in wonder at the
sight of people going about their normal business. There was nothing normal
about the way she felt right now: fierce and scared and hormonal - and very
very
happy.