Chapter Seventy-One - Getting Saucy

Isabel had been told that this was going to be a routine job.

All she had to do was drive over to some middle-class Merican dream house, slip in the front, and then poke around. The Cabal had a few guys with weird powers that let them know things they shouldn’t: deal-makers, social-manipulators, mind-readers and a few who could predict the future in weird ways. They were part of the organization’s backbone.

They were also a pain in the rear to deal with.

Their little in-group had this self-important, elitist attitude about everything, which rubbed Isabel the wrong way. They thought they were cleverer than everyone else, and them being right about it most of the time made it worse.

So here she was, following their cryptic orders to go over to some nobody, B-list Villain’s place to look for a bundle of information about the Cabal that could be troublesome if it fell into the wrong hands.

This was going to be far, far beneath her. She was Black Shield, the untouchable, unhurtable Hero, not some errand-girl.

Of course, the errand she was running wasn’t meant to involve little raccoon-girl thieves.

She walked into the house, expecting it to be the boring middle-class haven she’d seen in a hundred sitcoms and those cheap interior decorating magazines she was inexplicably fond of.

Catching someone in the house was unexpected; it made her heart skip a beat, and an electric surge of adrenaline jolted up her back. Training kicked in, and she slid into a fighter’s stance, ready to summon her shields to stop any blow… Then her brain caught up, and she made out the scrambling figure that had been robbing the place.

She assumed it was a thief. The girl was literally wearing a striped shirt and a domino mask, with a bag by her hip that had a large dollar sign on it. There was little room for interpretation, except that no actual burglar would wear such a cliche outfit.

An ironic statement, maybe? She didn’t have time to parse it because she was running after the girl.

She made out more details as she caught up with her and grabbed the kid’s ankle. She had ears, animal ears, and a large, fluffy tail, black with white rings around it. “Oh no you don’t!” Isabel said as she tugged her back into the house.

This situation had just gone from routine to not. She had to call it in. The rules about it being a clandestine operation could rot.

The thief girl kicked and twisted, but Isabel interposed her shields before any blow could land, small, paper-thin panes of black non-energy that would move in relation to her, and couldn’t be broken, not by anything she’d discovered yet.

Isabel dragged the kid back into the living room. She wasn’t heartless; she wasn’t going to pin the girl on the floor when there was a perfectly serviceable couch right there. “Stop kicking me,” Isabel ordered.

“No! You suck!”

Children. “What were you doing here?” Isabel asked.

“I heard there was someone really ugly here, then you showed up! You’re so ugly I decided to run away.”

Isabel glared. Sure, she had a full-face mask, and sure, it was a childish insult, but still. “Just answer my question,” she said as she reached into a thigh pocket and tugged out her phone.

Then the kid whipped her tail at Isabel’s face. A shield stopped it, but it blocked her vision for long enough that the kid was able to kick her phone away.

“Damn it,” Isabel muttered. She summoned a few shields to pin the girl in place while she went to fetch her phone. The entire time, the girl called her a poop-head, a jerk, a stupid doo-doo eater, and a few other creative yet still somehow entirely child-friendly curses.

“This has got to be some sort of joke,” Isabel muttered. She walked over to the kitchen, opened a few drawers, and grinned to herself as she found a roll of tape. “Never having kids.”

The girl had powers, that much was obvious, and she was on the Villainous side of the spectrum too, if Isabel had to guess. A Mischief Maker or a Scoundrel or something to that effect.

Maybe a potential new recruit? That would be nice. There was a bonus for that, and Isabel was saving up to buy a nice house in the suburbs. She still had her mission to carry out here, too, but she figured her priorities had just shifted.

She questioned the raccoon girl while she was squirming and jerking around, trying to tug her way out of her duct tape bonds. Her answers were all very predictable and rather insulting. Isabel figured it was the kid’s defence mechanism to insult her betters.

She raised her phone and started to tap in the numbers to a contact when she paused.

Isabel had been in her share of fights and scraps. She’d tangled with Villains and Heroes both, and even if she’d only been at it for a couple of years, she felt as if she’d developed something of a sense for trouble.

That sense was going off now. A sound, maybe? A shadow that moved wrong?

She quietened down and moved towards the kitchen, her power on a hair-trigger to summon her barriers. A shiver went down her spine, and she almost felt as if the shadows in the corners were lengthening.

“Oh no,” she muttered.

She’d fought emotional manipulators before—she knew the first signs. This was subtle, but it wasn’t so subtle she didn’t feel it.

The problem with some of those powers was that even knowing you were being manipulated wasn’t enough to stop them.

The girl!

Sure, she had a raccoon tail and ears, but those weren’t a power. Maybe she had more than a changed physiology. “Hey, kid, what do you think you’re doing?” she asked as she stomped back into the living room.

The brat looked up at her, tape in her mouth from where she was chewing at her bonds.

Then something crashed deeper in the house. Wood hitting wood, glass bursting apart.

Isabel stomped over to investigate. That feeling, the niggling doubt, was still there, but she could force past it. She stalked into a bedroom at the end of a corridor and hissed as something flew towards her face.

It bounced off a shield.

The issue with her shields—one issue, at least—was their lack of visibility. They weren’t black so much as they were lightless. Spots in the world where nothing, not even ambient light, could impact with any success. It meant she had no idea what she’d just blocked until she stepped aside and lowered the shield.

She stared at the pillow on the floor.

“And if you come in here, I’ll smack you with another!” came a familiar voice from within the room.

“Are you kidding me?” Isabel asked.

The familiar sound of a door sliding open came from the kitchen.

Had the girl she’d tied up escaped? She burst into the bedroom, then swore as a raccoon-tailed figure darted past her legs and back out into the corridor.

She noticed an unmade bed, a broken painting frame and some detritus strewn across the ground, but her attention was mostly on the brat scrambling away. “No! Come back here!” she yelled as she went after the girl.

And then, out of nowhere, a bear leapt at her.

Her eyes widened, and she felt an overwhelming sense of dread wash over her. It was a bear. An actual, enormous bear, with claws digging into the linoleum and a large gaping maw opened wide to consume Isabel.

The bear bounced off her shield without even a thump.

She lowered the shield while readying her weapons. Two laser cannons—with settings that went from stun to burn—over each arm, within shield-shaped casings.

Then two more girls stumbled into the kitchen, one looking like a mobster, the other a girl in a leather jacket like a wannabe biker.

Isabel wondered just what in the world was going on.

An incoherent scream from behind her was the only warning she received before the raccoon girl rammed her in the back of the knees. She stumbled back, but she summoned a shield right behind her, giving her something to crash into and push off of.

The bear roared, and Isabel felt the world darkening in the corners again. Her heart started to beat faster. She was outnumbered!

No. It was fear. Someone was playing with her feelings and pushing fear onto her. She couldn’t give in.

With a twist, she aimed her arm at the bear and fired. A buzzing zap sounded, and a red beam lanced into the huge creature and singed its fur. It roared, but that wasn’t enough to take it down.

She growled and adjusted the beam upward, making it stronger.

Then the raccoon girl jumped onto her arm and pulled her off-kilter. “Let go!” Isabel shouted.

“No, you!”

“That didn’t even make sense!”

She raised her free hand and fired.

The beam lanced into, then through the racoon girl’s leg.

The girl stared at the wound, then screamed.

Everyone paused.

Isabel’s breath hitched. Had she… had she just…

She stood there, confused and entirely uncertain what to do, then a saucepan crashed into the side of her head.

***