A Darker Path Pt 31 (Patreon)

Part Thirty-One: Making a Point

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Taylor

Without even a stumble, we stepped through into the living room of our house. I let go of Cherie and looked around to see the portal dissipating behind us. On my forearm, the teleport device beeped and showed a timer: 3:32. As I watched, it began counting down.

"Wait, what the fuck?" Cherie turned in a circle, as though unable to take in the fact of where we were. "How did we get back here?"

I flipped the panel closed, then took off my hat and mask so I could grin at her. "We walked, duh."

"But how ...?" She took a deep breath and seemed to be trying to steady herself. "Teleport, right? Something Leet made?"

"Yeah. It doesn't even get in the way of my left hand. Pretty cool, huh?" Tossing the hat, mask and manual onto the couch, I wiggled my gloved fingers to demonstrate, then unlocked it from around my arm and put it on the couch as well. The coat came off next, leaving me looking—in the vest and tie, along with the gunbelt and knife bandolier—like the world's youngest and most well-armed maître d'.

"Isn't Leet's tech supposed to be horribly dangerous?" She threw up her hands. "Uber even said as much!"

"Usually, yes," I conceded. "But I'm pretty sure my power had a word with his power, so this specific device isn't nearly as likely to have problems."

She shook her head. "Wait, what? Powers don't talk to each other. That's impossible!" There was a momentary pause as she stared at me. "… isn't it?"

I shrugged. "I communicate with my power all the time, so is it all that unbelievable for powers to talk to each other?"

I could see her wanting to say yes, but then doubt crept into her eyes. She'd been a cape for years while I was still only in my second week, but I'd already done a crapload of stuff that she would've called out as blatantly impossible. "When you confronted Guillaume and Nicholas," she ventured. "Nicholas tried to make you feel fear, but you said that stuff about being fear, being death, and being Ending in that really creepy voice. Was … was that you, or your power?"

I thought for a moment. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was my power. The fear was affecting me, but my power wasn't letting it stop me from doing what I'd already decided I wanted to do. It doesn't actually talk out loud all that much, but it's a total ham when it does."

She let out a startled giggle at that, as though she hadn't expected me to refer to my power in that way. "Does it tell you to … well, do things you don't want to?"

"Nah." I grinned at her. "Like I said, we communicate. I get ideas for cleaning up the city, it suggests ways that might happen, I throw in ideas, and we kick it back and forth until we've hashed out all the details. But while it can't make me do anything I don't want to, it can let me be a kickass action movie hero. Honestly, it's a ton of fun. And if bad guys die in the process … well, my power is about Ending things, so that's where its strengths lie. To be honest, once I've given them fair warning, it's really out of my hands. They know who I am, and how this is going to turn out. If they're deliberately choosing a path that will harm my city, and they ignore my warnings, they've chosen to die. It's as simple as that."

"What about Damsel of Distress? You let her go home again." She spread her hands. "In fact, you had me pushing her hard to choose to go home, and she really, really wanted to lash out at you."

"Three reasons." I ticked them off on my fingers. "First, she'd only gotten one warning. Sometimes the second warning turns them around. Second, calling in Edict and Licit and letting her go home gave me a boost with the PRT, and gave them an excuse to keep treating me with kid gloves. Third, it encouraged your father to come here when he saw she'd survived the experience. He was going to show up eventually, so I decided last night was good enough."

"What about the boat tonight?" I must have frowned or shown some emotional cue, because she continued. "I mean, I know you're going to blow it up. But you've only given them one warning … right?"

"That specific boat, yeah," I agreed, then held up a finger. "But I already put a blanket prohibition on smuggling drugs or guns into the city. They've got both. Also, I smacked Gesellschaft on the nose the other night, and told them to stop it with that shit. I even said that if they try to bring capes in to start trouble with me, those capes will get murdered to hell and gone. So … guess what?"

It wasn't like she had to think very hard about it. "They're sending capes?"

I grinned tightly. "Bingo."

<><>

Several Hours Later

Two Miles Offshore, on the Fancy Sue

It was so quiet on the repurposed fishing boat that Rob Kendall could hear the gentle waves slapping against the hull as they slid through the water. The engine had been rebuilt for silence, with a muffler that let out the exhaust fumes underwater, so even at high speed (such as it was) the engine would still be quieter than the hissing of water in the bow wave. Everyone was equipped with earpieces and radios so there would be no shouting to carry across the still water.

He was armed with a suppressed MP-5, as were the other members of the guard contingent. No seaman, he had just one job: if anyone (especially, but not limited to, Atropos) attempted to interfere with getting their cargo ashore, he was to ensure that as many bullets as possible found their way to the opposition.

Up until now, Brockton Bay had been both a lucrative destination and an active hub for the distribution of both drugs and high-end weaponry. Despite the official dissolution of the Empire Eighty-Eight and the violent destruction of their stocks already in the city, the Gesellschaft was determined to reopen that rich seam of profit. And so, the Fancy Sue had set out to sea on an innocent-seeming cruise, only to rendezvous well out of sight of land with a freighter that 'just happened' to be passing by. Parcels of drugs and crates of weaponry had been lowered to the Fancy Sue's deck and stowed below in short order, then the two vessels had parted ways as though they'd never been near one another.

He'd been nervous at the beginning of the journey, but now it seemed they were on the home stretch. No Coast Guard boats hove into view with flashing lights and wailing sirens, no curious capes swooped down from above to investigate the blacked-out craft. Still, he knew damn well that it was never over until it was actually over, so he refused to relax. He didn't like spending any time in the wheelhouse with the two creepy capes looking over the helmsman's shoulder every second of the trip, so he opted to head down to the stern, just in case something (or someone) tried to sneak up on them from behind.

While he was there, he briefly debated having a smoke, but it was a bad idea all around. On deck, the cherry of a cigarette would be visible for literally miles, and given what was belowdecks, nobody was allowed to smoke there. In fact, no open flames at all were permitted.

As they were steaming in toward the coast and the half-moon was low in the western sky, he found himself in a near pitch-black shadow cast back over the stern by the superstructure. Leaning on the aft rail, he stared pensively out at the trail of their churned wake, the occasional bubble of acrid exhaust making its way to his nostrils. Without any lights to act as a guide, he couldn't even see the horizon, much less anything trying to stealth up behind them.

Finally, as sure as he could be that they were safe from that direction, he straightened up from the rail and turned … only to come face to face with a silhouette out of nightmare. As dark as the shadows were, she was darker, his night-adapted eyes easily picking out the hat and the long-coat from the surrounding gloom. The white shirt and the grey vest may well have been glaring flashlights to his vision.

"I told you to keep your head down, Rob," Atropos murmured, and starlight glinted on a wickedly sharp blade: her fabled shears. One slash opened his throat, stilling his shout before it properly began, and the other severed the tendons in his wrist so that his finger couldn't close on the trigger of his MP-5. Almost tenderly, she lowered him to the ground so that he wouldn't make a clatter and raise the alarm.

He died in a pool of his own blood, dimming eyes looking up at the stars.

<><>

Taylor

I had four minutes before the teleporter would allow another jump. That was fine; I had things to do between now and then. Easing from one shadow to another, moving in a silent ballet to avoid the notice of the guards, I cracked the hatchway and made my entrance into the boat proper.

There were two guards at the bottom of the stairway, of course, but they'd been lulled by the utter lack of anything happening to the point that they were half a second slow in bringing up their guns. I shot them both before they had time to so much as register my presence, and they slumped to the ground. Fortunately, the noise thus made wasn't quite loud enough to raise the alarm.

This wasn't to say that it went unheard. The Dockworkers' two-way radio I'd repurposed for this outing buzzed in my ear. "What was that? The noise below."

"My bad," I replied in what I knew to be mimicry of the heavier-set man to the left. "I got a leg cramp and tripped. Can I come up and get some fresh air?" To ensure a negative reply, I introduced a little bit of a whine to my mimicry of his voice.

"No." The response was curt and to the point. "Remain on post. Be more careful."

"Okay," I said, adding a tinge of resentfulness, but not enough to invite retribution for insubordination. "I'll stay where I am."

I stepped past him and his luckless comrade, and opened the door into the hold. Toward the front, or the bow (I figured) was the drugs in big plastic-wrapped packages. On either side of the door were crates of weapons; not the ones that anyone could buy legally in the United States, but fully-auto rifles and machine pistols, as well as grenades and other goodies.

If I'd been inclined to wonder where that AT-4 and its friends had come from, I would've been wondering no longer. But I had no time to waste on 'eureka' moments; levering open a crate of grenades, I started lifting them out of their packing to lie loose on the deck. With their pins still in, they were technically harmless, as was the ammunition that I also took out of its storage to roam free with the grenades. One last grenade I sequestered for my own purposes, tucking it into one of the many pockets boasted by the long-coat.

On the way out of the hold, I moved one of the dead men so his boot propped the door open, then I stealthed back up the stairs. The quiet part of the mission was almost over; in a very short time, I would go loud.

All this was according to the plan. While I could murder everyone on board and sink the boat without a single person knowing about it, that wasn't what I wanted. If nobody knew about it, then nobody could learn not to do it.

Leaving the hatch partway open, I leaped upward, grabbed a handhold, and scrambled on top of the cabin roof. There was a guard up here, but he ceased to be an issue when I shot him under the jaw, spraying the extremely recent contents of his skull into the night sky. Suppressed or not, the shot and the subsequent thud of his body was loud enough to get attention … which was exactly what I wanted.

"Stranger at the stern!" I hissed over the radio network, in the voice of the man I'd just shot. It took a few seconds for them to react, then Night started working her way down the left-hand side of the boat, while Fog went down the right.

Going to the right, I shot the men behind Fog, then swung down and kicked him solidly in the side of the head as he began to turn. He collapsed to the deck, still alive, but out for the moment. I didn't want him dead right at that second, but I did want the phone in his pocket.

As I clambered back on top of the cabin with my prize, I heard scrabbling at the stern as the now-monstrous Night discovered my first victim. I went straight back over the top and dropped down next to the hatch that led into the hold. Another crewmember showed his face behind me and I shot him without looking around. "Hey!" I shouted. "Bitch-features! Come and get it!"

A smoke grenade, already spewing grey-black fumes, clattered along the deck toward me. I would be engulfed in seconds, allowing Night to wreak her own personal specialty of havoc on me. Or rather, I would've been, if I hadn't shot the casing just right so it flew over the side and into the ocean. The second one, I shot out of the air and it vanished into the wake.

Her next ploy was to rush me, holding her hooded cloak up in front like a shield. It was festooned with hooks on the side facing me, so that she could wrap it around me with her spiky forearms and then stab me repeatedly through it. The tactic was rough on cloaks, but she could probably afford them. And of course, the idea was that I couldn't see her through the cloak so even if I shot her through it, she would still be an extremely durable monster.

I pulled out the shotgun and blew a chunk out of the cloak, right where she was holding it. It fell away, and then I could see her. She stopped, suddenly aware that she had made a grave error in tactics. I didn't allow her to regroup, closing the distance and spinning her around to smack her face-first into the wall of the cabin beside us.

Her hand had survived the shotgun blast, mainly because she'd changed form after I shot the claw away, so I grabbed it and slapped it against the weather-stained wood. Then I jammed my shears through it and into the cabin wall, pinning it there like a bug on a corkboard. That was when she screamed.

Another one of my pockets held a black bag, which I pulled out and flipped over her head. No matter how she struggled, she couldn't pull free, and her pinned hand ensured that I could always see her. "Sucks, doesn't it?" I asked rhetorically. "Can't see your opponent. About to die. But I warned you."

Pulling one of the blades from the bandolier, I stabbed her in every vital spot I could easily reach, and there were a few of those. Kidneys, heart, carotid arteries and jugular vein. I finished by jamming the blade into her eyesocket through the bag, hard enough to reach her brain.

As she sagged in my arms, dying, I looked up and smiled. Fog was up again, and he'd heard Night's screaming, then her death-gurgles. Whatever he felt for her, whether the affection he showed her was genuine or a byproduct of the artificial personalities that had been installed in them by Gesellschaft's torture chambers, it didn't matter. He was coming for revenge, and everything in his way was going to die.

Or such was probably his intent.

I had other ideas.

As his acidic fog form loomed up over the top of the cabin, homing in on the noise I was deliberately making, I pulled the shears out, allowing Night to flop to the deck. She was already dead, beyond the reach of her power to revive her with a Change; I'd made sure of that. With the shears hanging off my pinky finger, I flipped up the panel and hit 'go' on the next set of stored coordinates. The portal formed behind me, and I pulled out the grenade I'd saved.

As Fog poured down onto the deck, I leaped backward over the rail; at the same time, I tossed the grenade into the open hatch, minus its pin. Passing through the portal, I landed on a little-used dock, a few miles north of Brockton Bay. Shouts of alarm sounded around me as I rolled to my feet with my pistol in one hand and bloodstained shears in the other.

<><>

Fog

Geoff was too busy focusing on the fact that Dorothy was down and Atropos had somehow vanished into nothingness to think about how the killer had thrown something through the hatch. He had no way of knowing that the unknown object, in bouncing down the stairs, had cleared the legs of the dead men at the bottom and was now rolling around on the floor of the hold. It wouldn't really have mattered either way, in three …

… two …

He crouched over Dorothy, searching for signs of life. There were none.

… one …

The close-range detonation caught him by surprise, blasting him into pink mist.

<><>

Taylor

"You know who I am. You know who I've killed. Don't be idiots." They were almost convinced. I just needed one more piece of showmanship.

As I strode forward, inevitability and lethality implicit in every step, my long-coat flared sideways in the freshening breeze. I timed my steps to a nicety; on the third such step, as my heel hit the wood, the boat went up behind me in a towering explosion of flame. Smoothly and implacably, I brought the pistol up to point at the guy I knew was in charge of this bunch of assholes.

I didn't speak again; I didn't have to.

As the sound of the explosion rolled in over us, he slowly lowered his gun and put it on the ground, then knelt down and laced his fingers behind his head. One by one, his cohorts did the same, glancing fearfully from me to the burning, sinking hulk in the distance. Every time I looked in their direction, they cringed away.

I'd been as good as my word, earlier, and passed on word to the Coasties and the PRT about where to find the bad guys. Of course, I'd only sent the text about ten seconds before I teleported on board the smuggling vessel, but that wasn't really my problem.

As I stood there silently menacing them, I could hear the sirens just beginning to echo over the water as the boats sliced in toward the extremely obvious location of the now-defunct Fancy Sue. It wouldn't be too much longer before the capes and PRT found their way to where I was, and I'd be able to "softly and silently vanish away" (thanks, Mom) in my turn.

All of this would of course go toward building my personal legend among the denizens of the Brockton Bay underworld, but that was the general idea. The more they saw me as someone they wouldn't see coming and couldn't beat, the more likely they'd seek lawful employment, and the less need there would be for me to kill any of them for doing something stupid and avoidable. Thus giving me more time to kill the ones who needed killing.

I holstered the pistol; none of the men so much as twitched. Then I pulled out a cloth and carefully polished Night's blood off the blades of the shears, before sheathing them. Still not a movement.

Finally, I took out the phone I'd stolen from Fog, and woke it up. It required an eight-digit PIN which (not altogether surprisingly) did not hold any reference to Nazism within it. There were several numbers in the directory, none labelled; I tapped the third one down, then hit the Call icon.

It rang several times, then a groggy voice answered in fluent and colloquial German, asking Fog why the fuck he was calling at this ungodly hour. "Hi," I responded brightly, in the same language. "This is Atropos. You've probably heard my name before. Night and Fog are dead, as are the entire crew of the boat that was transporting your poison to Brockton Bay. Now, listen very carefully. If you send one more cape, transport one more ounce of illegal drugs, or smuggle one more bullet into my city, I will kill you in your sleep. You have been warned."

I didn't bother asking him if he understood; men like that never responded favourably to such questions. He would argue and deflect and never acknowledge the ultimatum. It didn't matter. I'd told him, and if he pulled that shit again, the top tier of Gesellschaft would be down one asshole. Rinse and repeat. Sooner or later, I'd either train them to keep their bullshit out of my city, or there wouldn't be a Gesellschaft anymore. Either outcome was fine to me.

I tapped the button to access the last set of stored coordinates and flipped the panel down, just before Velocity blurred into sight. His head flicked around to all the kneeling bad guys, then he saw me and raced in my direction. He probably didn't want to fight me, but I didn't care. Tossing the phone in the air so he could catch it, I stepped backward through the portal. The last thing I saw of him was holding his hand out, his mouth forming the word, "Wait—"

The portal dissipated and I was standing in the living room, with Dad and Cherie watching me with interest from the sofa. "Well?" asked Cherie.

I shrugged as I took off the hat and mask. "It was right where my power said it would be. With that information, they'll be able to board the freighter and find enough evidence to take it out of commission for its part in the smuggling. Night and Fog were on board, like I thought they would be. They're dead now."

"Damn." From the way he shook his head, Dad knew how big that was. "You're really yanking Gesellschaft's tail on this one, aren't you?"

I chuckled as I headed for the kitchen. "Oh, you haven't heard the half of it. Is there any dessert left? I feel like having seconds. Shooting Nazis is hungry work."

"Only if you wash up the dish after," Dad called after me.

I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn't see me from there. "Slave driver."

"That's slave driver dad to you."

I grinned as I hunted up a bowl and a spoon, while Cherie giggled at our banter. Fixing Brockton Bay was all well and good, but it was always nice to come home again.

Part 32