15.
Sienna
I was pretty well starving by the time we defeated New York traffic and reached the precinct. I hadn’t even made it to my hotel yet, but it was after dark and I was ready for some food and, surprisingly, an early night. Flying on a plane takes it out of me, though I suppose not as much as doing it under my own power does.
“I’ve got the video over here,” Welch said, directing me toward an office in the corner of a bullpen that was pretty sedate. My guess was that the night shift was mostly out on the town, doing their thing, because I only saw a half dozen guys milling around, a couple clustered in a corner with their heads put together around a computer screen. I got a couple looks, but they’d seen me come through before, so it was nothing out of the ordinary for them by now.
The precinct smelled like a thousand other old public buildings that had seen better days. It had that aroma of hard use and old paint, an air conditioning system that probably needed a good flushing, or bleaching, or whatever it is they do. The walls weren’t peeling, but even without Cassandra powers I could tell that would happen in the near future.
Welch eyed me as I looked over the precinct. I had been here before, but it blurred together with all the other cop shops I’d visited in the last few years. “Try not to destroy the place in an epic battle,” he quipped. “This isn’t Chicago; we look dimly on that sort of thing here in New York.”
“Honestly, would you even notice?” I asked, nodding at a portrait of Fiorello LaGuardia that looked like it might have been hanging on the wall since the man himself was actually in office. It had the weathered look of the Grace painting that hung in the house of every Lutheran in Minnesota.
“I expect the city would notice when the insurance company refused to pay their claim,” Welch said, halting in place, hands on his hips. “‘Acts of gods,’ right?”
“So sexist,” I mused lightly. “They really ought to change that to ‘Acts of goddess’ just for me. I mean, I’m like the O.G. of destroying property—hotels, police precincts, subway trains, stadiums, public parks, museums. You probably shouldn’t stand close to me.” He gave me the stinkeye, and I frowned like I was thinking it over. “I hope my hotel doesn’t get destroyed this time, actually. I’m getting really tired of that.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m the one who hired you,” Welch said, “but I guess I don’t find this line of thought all that amusing. Fears of a darker future, you know.”
“Relax, I try and keep my chaos to a minimum,” I said reassuringly. I kept back the part about how my plans rarely seemed to do much to hold back the tide of mayhem in my wake, though, because, duh, that’s not very reassuring. “Let’s watch this video.”
He ushered me over to a computer and pulled something up on YouTube. I almost scoffed that I could have viewed it on my phone while getting a burger, but felt like I’d done enough to annoy my employer for the day, so I just sat back and watched the clip, which was titled, “GRAVITY GAL DESTROYS CAPTAIN FROST!!!!” I didn’t know who wrote that headline, but I felt like they probably needed a change of undies after all those exclamation points.
The video started up like I remembered, with Gravity Gal delivering some well-placed critique that slapped the snot out of Nadine Griffin. Her face got all frozen, and then Captain Frost’s turn came up.
“If your moral compass involves taking a survey in order to decide what’s right, you’re doing it wrong.” I watched Gravity Gal deliver what one of the commenters had declared a “sick burn!!” with a wary eye. Her voice rang with conviction, which was why the critique probably stung Frost so hard.
I hit the pause button as the camera zoomed in on Captain Frost’s face. Gravity Gal was already shooting up into the air, and I watched her go. I’d seen enough videos to have figured out she didn’t have flight powers like I did. What she had used was something I’d seen once before, which was a command of gravity itself. She seemed to be able to reverse it to push herself up or around, but only if she had a solid object to work with. She arced her way through the air like a thrown ball, pushing herself back up when she sagged, like she was walking on a giant, invisible pair of stilts. The news camera caught her pushing off a nearby building with unseen force, launching south toward Staten Island, which seemed to be where she was from. Again, this was according to the news broadcasts I’d seen and the dossier J.J. had put together for me.
The camera caught Captain Frost’s reaction after Gravity Gal had shot off. They zoomed in on it, just to be sure. He looked he was probably a handsome enough guy beneath the cowl mask that covered his cheeks and face, leaving only holes for his eyes, but his square jaw just begged to be punched, what with all the arrogance that dripped off him. He watched Gravity Gal as she left Wall Street behind, and shouted something angry as hell after her that was lost under the crowd noise. I caught, with my enhanced meta hearing, “—you’ll see!” and that was about it.
“What do you think?” Welch said, looking like he needed a pat on the head.
That was not normally my thing, but like I said, I was trying to be reassuring to the guy who was paying me. “He does look mad,” I concluded with a frown. I didn’t get any of his gut feeling out of it, but I couldn’t deny that Frost was more than a little red-faced at Gravity Gal as she flew off. “I should probably talk to him,” I went on. “See if I can track him down, maybe have a heart-to-heart, get my own sense of him. He could have just been blowing off steam, after all. She did, uh …”
“Kick him in the jimmies?” Welch asked with a smirk.
“On live TV and internet, no less,” I said. “You know how it is with people that have power—big egos and all that.”
“I don’t, actually,” he said with a shrug. “I only deal with metas through you.”
“Oh, I wasn’t just talking about metas,” I said, standing up. I adjusted my short sleeve shirt and wished it was jacket season. My tee was black, my jeans were loose, but the only thing I was carrying in the form of a weapon was the sort of thing legally allowable in New York. So basically a pen and myself. “Anyone who’s got power tends to have a little bit of an ego to go with it. If you’re lucky, though, there’s some humility to keep them out of trouble.”
Welch smiled faintly. “And you have humility, then?”
“Most days, it’s the only thing keeping me out of jail,” I said, folding my arms in front of me. “How do I find Captain Frost?”
Welch put two fingers in his mouth and literally whistled. I blanched because it was especially loud to my meta ears, but a thirty-something guy with a fresh face came popping up behind me a moment later. “You called, Lieutenant?”
“Richardson,” Welch said, like people just came whenever he whistled for them all the time. “Any idea where Captain Frost is right now?”
“Yes sir,” Richardson said crisply. He had a manner about him that told me that in another time and place, I would have enjoyed smacking him in the nose like one of those blowup clown punching bags. He probably wouldn’t pop back up like those, though. Richardson just smiled contently as he answered, clearly unaware of my nascent desire to do violence to his nose. “He’s holding a fan meet-up in Times Square right now. He’s at the Starbucks on the north end at—”
“Got it,” I said, and headed for the door.
“You need a ride?” Welch asked after me, like he already knew the answer.
“Nah,” I said, “I’ll just fly over and have a quick chat.” I did a spin and walked backward, looking supercool as I smirked with all my confidence. “Plus, I kinda wanna stop at Shake Shack on the way there, so …”
“Best of luck,” Welch called after me. “And … try not to destroy anything, will ya?”
“You’re lucky I’ve got humility, Lieutenant,” I said over my shoulder, ribbing the poor bastard as I stepped into one of the offices and unlocked a window before I squeezed my way out into the night, “because otherwise, that might have hurt my massive ego.” I caught him shaking his head and smiling as I flew off into the sky, to get myself a burger, a shake, and a good talk with the blissfully self-unaware douche who had named himself Captain Frost.