CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-TWO

Heart to Hearth, Part 1

To Sam’s surprise, it wasn’t Mr. Joveday who was waiting for him inside the black Rolls Royce parked outside the abbey’s rear gate. The woman seated at the other end of the rear passenger seat was Marie Shepard.

“Get in before any reporters see you standing there, Samuel,” Marie insisted.

Her face remained as impassive as ever, although Sam could see that there were more lines on his grandmother’s brow than when they last met.

“Aren’t you with the press?” Sam reminded her.

“Not today.” Marie patted the seat next to hers. “I just want to talk.”

Sam gazed at Marie with some skepticism. She never just wanted to talk, he recalled. There was always a lecture included in these chats. Usually, this was because Marie thought Sam had once again failed to meet her expectations. But in Sam’s defense, it was hard to meet expectations growing up when he was measured against his uber-cool and nearly-perfect dad, Steven Shepard.

He didn’t have much of a choice though. With his enhanced senses, Sam could already hear the pattering of footsteps on the cobblestones, and he guessed that he had seconds to decide whether to take Marie up on her offer for a talk or to deal with the reporters who were running around the corner of the building to get to him.

“Styx…” Sam sighed as he jumped into the car. “Get me out of here…”

“Let’s go, Sebastian,” Marie called to her driver. “Take us to Mr. Moonday’s shop on SoHo, please.”

Sam’s eyebrow twitched upward. “How did you know?”

“That you have an appointment with him?” Marie finished Sam’s thought. “Same way I was invited to your assessment. I have many friends who like to keep me appraised of the goings-on in my city like little birds chirping secrets into my ears.”

“Your city,” Sam repeated. “So, what, you’re like New York’s Varis or Little Finger or something?”

“Samuel…” Marie sighed. “If you want to have a proper conversation then I suggest you dispense with the pop culture references and talk to me like an adult.”

“But you know who these characters are so technically it means you care about pop culture too,” Sam reasoned.

Sam had gotten his love for pop culture from his geek of a father and Steven must have gotten his love for movies from someone else too, and it was obvious who that person was. Sam recalled Marie’s extensive collection of blu-rays, DVDs, and uber classic laser discs filling row upon row of shelves in the very room he liked to hide in when he was hiding from another one of her stern sermons. And now Sam could almost swear that Marie was resisting the urge to smile at his joke.

“Wait… Malarkey said Mr. Joveday wanted to see me so why are you the one who—”

“I asked Mr. Joveday for a favor.”

“You asked one of the most important men in the world a favor and he agrees… just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Sam couldn’t help but feel impressed with Marie’s network of socialites and regular people who seemed too eager to give her whatever she needed from them. “And… you’re friends with Mr. Joveday, too?”

Marie’s brow twitched upward in affirmation. “Just like I’m friends with Mr. Moonday… I understand you’ve commissioned a new suit from him. One that makes use of a relic from your mother’s side of the family.”

A shadow passed over Sam’s face at the mention of his mother’s family, and the reminder about his cousin, who, according to Warden Salvatore, was currently enjoying his temporary new lodgings at the second worst prison in the world because the Crucible remained unavailable for bookings until the ‘Dirty Dozens’ were caught.

“So, you knew about my connection to…” Even now, Sam still found it hard to admit that he was the descendant of the world’s first hero.

Marie glanced sideways at him, and she almost looked concerned. “Adele carried a heavy burden… I didn’t want you to have to carry it too.”

“But… to hide something that huge from me…”

“I didn’t hide it, Samuel.” Marie sighed. It was something Sam rarely saw her do in the five years he’d lived with her. “I just didn’t believe you were ready for the truth… I see now that I was wrong.”

Sam’s eyebrow hitched up again. Higher this time. “Sorry, can you repeat that?”

In his mind, he instructed Triple-A to record the moment, but the system didn’t respond. Typical.

“Did you just admit to being wrong?” Sam raised his arms like he was surrendering. “Holy Zeus, the world must be ending or something!”

“Stop exaggerating,” Marie snapped. “Yes, I was wrong. I didn’t see it. I didn’t know that you could ever…”

She went silent, but Sam knew what she was going to say. That I could ever reach the greatness of my father before me…

If Sam was honest, he still hadn’t. But he wasn’t about to tell Marie this. Not now that she was finally admitting that he had more worth than she gave him credit for. Perhaps she was even guilty for putting him down so many times and ignoring his potential. This thought did nothing to lift his spirits though. If anything, Sam just felt worse. Parents—especially grandparents—were supposed to lift their kids up and make them believe they could conquer the world.

“I miss your father,” Marie said after a while.

She turned away from Sam, although he could see the sadness in Marie’s expression through her reflection in the window.

“I know… you’ve been missing him for eight years.”

He had never dared to ask her this because he’d never had the courage to, but now, Sam felt like it was finally time to open those old wounds and see what sort of rot was festering underneath.

“Do you blame me?” Sam asked in a voice that cracked at the end.

Marie turned toward him. “What?”

“I know dad only stayed to fight her because she… because she…”

Despite his reservations, he couldn’t help but recall the ending to that black night that had shattered his childhood so completely. It was the moment after Adele had fully transformed into an alpha-level banshee and chased her son down the stairs in her desperation to kill him. Yes, the horror had wanted thirteen-year-old Sam dead so badly that he would later assume that his death would have brought her relief from the pain of having already lost one child.

Steven had awakened from his grief just in time to stop Adele from killing their son, but even Peacemaker couldn’t fight an alpha-level horror on his own while also protecting Sam from her wrath. He’d ordered Sam to run while he kept the Adele-banshee from chasing after the boy, and the last time Sam saw his dad, Steven stood at their front door—his broad back blocking the horror’s path like a heroic silhouette set against the garish light of the banshee that wailed from beyond the door like a mournful ghost hellbent on vengeance.

Sam had run to the nearest hero guild office nearly ten blocks away and convinced the heroes inside it to help rescue his father. However, when he returned to his family home with reinforcements, he discovered that their house was gone. As if the earth itself had risen to swallow up the structure and the terrible story it held within while leaving only its bones to serve as the Shepard family’s corpse.

The heroes who’d arrived with Sam found Steven’s body in the rubble, but the horror that killed Peacemaker was nowhere in sight.

It would be much later, hours after she’d become a banshee when Adele was finally defeated. The horror had rampaged around Queens and caused three blocks worth of property damage before a team of newly-minted but powerful heroes cornered her on the Queensboro Bridge and finally put an end to the banshee’s mournful wail.

I… I’ve never heard such a horrible scream before,” Superion had said during his first-ever interview. “It was like Thanatos himself had risen from the Underworld…”

His rookie partner at that time, Weather Witch, had been so shocked by the battle’s frightful and gruesome ending that she couldn’t even speak when reporters had asked her for a comment.

Quite a few heroes fell to the horror’s unnatural strength—something Sam realized only now that he was remembering it might have been due to the blood of Hercules flowing in Adele’s veins. Those who’d survived the battle claimed that she’d been weeping the whole time they fought her. And, at the moment of her death, the banshee was said to have whispered a name that might have started with an S. No one could confirm this though. Not even the young man who would later earn the right to become America’s number one hero.

As for Sam, he’d watched the battle from start to finish from the television of the police precinct he’d been brought to while Marie Shepard stood stoically at her grandson’s side without so much as a hand of comfort to offer him. She reached out for him now eight years later, and to his surprise, Sam didn’t pull away.