Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Read online

  She didn’t care either way. All that mattered to her was to debunk the mystery of the Smog’s source and eliminate it, if possible. Finding a way to deal with Smoker without getting herself killed or any more of her friends hurt, or to get the heroes involved if her efforts turned out to be a belly flop.

  But as she moved deeper into the northeastern reaches of Dead City, closer to where she had first encountered Smoker and Hannah had been spooked by ghostly apparitions, she found herself thinking less about the challenges ahead and more about Hannah’s ghosts. The longer she considered the idea of supernatural entities whose emergence was linked to the Smog, the more plausible it became. Because when Smoker had her trapped within his deadly circle of Smog, she had seen something in the twisting vapors. Something or someone had reached out toward her as if to communicate. And if the villain hadn’t created the spooky ghost train effect to mess with Wisp, as she’d first suspected, then… who had?

  Each and every possible solution sent a shiver down her spine.

  Smoker provided no answers to any of her pondering. The next time he spoke up, they were within a stone’s throw from the warehouse Wisp had tried to investigate the night before. Like then, thick drifts of shadowy Smog swirled behind the office windows but did not spill out onto the gloomy street. It appeared strangely agitated. The way it twisted and writhed reminded Wisp of an animal trapped behind a glass case.

  “Follow right behind me and don’t wander off,” Smoker said as he marched toward the main entrance. “It’ll be perfectly safe if you stay close.”

  I wouldn’t be wearing a full-body raincoat if it were safe. She hugged the small nylon backpack to her chest. After a deep breath filtered through her gas mask, she loosened her grip on the explosive cargo and trotted behind Smoker. Upon his approach, the Smog rolled away from his slender shape as if he emanated an unseen force.

  By the time Wisp stepped through the door the villain had opened for her, the lobby was already completely free of Smog, though she didn’t feel safe enough to lift the gas mask from her face. Her bustling firefly swarm illuminated a lavish faux wood reception desk set with several model cars, the only elements still hinting at the former installation. The remainder of the room was piled with plastic crates and metal barrels Wisp assumed to contain supplies Constantine had no urgent need of.

  Smoker moved straight toward an open passage leading to the adjoining hallway, kicking up pieces of Smog-corroded carpet with every stride. Wisp followed close behind. They made their way past rows of decommissioned vehicles, stacked jerry cans and what appeared to be ammunition crates, a conglomeration of potential explosives waiting for ignition. Wisp hoped with all her heart that she’d no longer be present when and if the place blew up; the sight of all that dangerous cargo made her uncomfortably aware of the pair of grenades she was carrying in her backpack.

  Her destination was made clear when Smoker headed downstairs. Thin drifts of Smog slithered their way up from the bottom of the staircase, unable or unwilling to withdraw deeper into the bowels of the building. Her light swarm dispersed the ones that got too close. The change in Smog density told her something she hadn’t yet considered.

  “Wait,” she told the villain as she clamored down the stairs after him. “Is the basement connected to the sewers?”

  “It wasn’t initially. We poked some holes in the walls.” Smoker stopped at the bottom of the stairs and pulled on a heavy-looking door that was already cracked open, a dense curtain of Smog visible behind the crack.

  Why? Wisp almost asked, but then the door swung the rest of the way open and the question clogged in her throat. Because she was seeing ghosts. Right beyond the doorstep. A myriad of volatile, shifting shapes, composed of Smog but distinctly humanoid. Their features – faces, hair, the appropriation of clothing – formed and dissipated in the blink of an eye, but the overall body shapes remained persistent enough to identify them as male or female. There were children among them. Two or three at least, their smaller forms sprinkled in among the others.

  The sheer impossibility of the situation made Wisp’s head spin. Dizziness tugged at her equilibrium and her mouth fell open, belatedly remembering to suck air through the gas mask filter. Sure, she had seen – or believed to have seen – shapes in the Smog before, but not ones like these. The apparitions in front of her resembled actual people. She could have sworn that one or two were staring back at her.

  “This isn’t real,” she croaked. “You’re messing with me.”

  Smoker gave a throaty, annoyingly satisfied chuckle. “You wish. If I leave the door open too long, a few of them always slip out and head upstairs. They don’t hold their shapes if they stray too far from him, though, and eventually they dissolve and reappear back here.”

  “Too far from him? Who–” Wisp began, then stopped. A wave of hot and cold dizziness engulfed her. “No,” she mouthed, her gloved fingers pressing against the sides of her mask. “No, no, no.”

  In her mind’s eye, the headline barrage after the first Deadening flashed past. Dangerous energy-absorbing villain executed and thousands still missing without trace came first and foremost, overwhelming her memory with grief.

  Luca’s little brother was never found.

  Just like my dad.

  “Finally figured it out, huh?” Smoker turned to the open doorway. “You wanted to see him. It’s too late to be shitting your plastic diapers anyway.”

  He stepped through the open door, and the ghostly armada shied away from him as the Smog had. Human shapes dissolved and melted back into the orange-colored haze all around him. Wisp followed him in a daze, barely aware of the need to stay within the bubble of survivability his presence created for her.

  Her light spheres had never had an effect on mist or smoke. They repelled Smog the way some powers averted other powers, and she wanted to slap herself for not figuring this out sooner. Smog was essentially someone’s Evolved power given physical form.

  Furthermore, power effects ended with the life of those who had created them. The Deadenings had broken the rule by manifesting after Osmotic’s death. Except … the rule hadn’t been broken. Not really.

  Because Osmotic wasn’t dead.

  “They’re not … aware, are they?” she asked as they made their way through a large basement room and toward another open doorway. The chubby, smoke-like shape of what might have been a preteen boy was watching her from the other side of it.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t believe in souls or anything like that, but what he absorbed was raw energy. He had no control over people. I think of these guys as imprints or maybe echoes of whatever juice makes human brains tick. Sometimes it seems like they’re aware of something you said, but it’s just patterns firing without a brain. Programmed behavior.”

  Is it really, though? Wisp approached the smaller chamber, shuffling her way past the volatile shapes that lingered as far away from herself and Smoker as the basement allowed. Seen from the corner of her eye, one of them bore an uncanny resemblance to her dad, but when she turned around to get a better look, it dissolved into amorphous vapors.

  Her imagination raced with alarming possibilities. What if her dad or some small part of him still lingered here, held in place by the very calamity that had cost him his life? She still refused to accept the existence of ghosts in her reality, but she knew all too well what powers could do, especially when two opposing forces – as Radiant and Osmotic had a little more than a year ago – clashed in unpredictable and unexplored ways. Now, more than ever, she needed to investigate the source. The answers it held might crush her soul, but she had to understand. Had to know.

  Her mind raced back to her first meeting with Smoker, to the ring of Smog surrounding her and the volatile, barely humanoid shapes that had emerged from it. Their forms hadn’t been as well-defined, but she must have been a good hundred meters away from the warehouse at the time. The apparitions had manifested before Smoker did. A reaction to her attempts to communicate? Had they tri
ed to reach out to her because they heard her voice, perhaps even recognized it?

  She almost didn’t want to know the answer.

  The interior of the chamber Smoker led her to was so thick with Smog that even the villain’s presence only pushed it back by three or four meters. Wisp caught a whiff of its pungent stench even through the filter of her gas mask, and gaseous shapes crowded the walls in clusters so thick they made it impossible to determine the size of the room. A roughly man-high tunnel with jagged edges breached one of the walls, apparently serving as a venting duct for the steady stream of Smog that originated from the center of the chamber.

  There was something there, splayed out on the dirty concrete floor like an abandoned, grotesquely misshapen rag doll. Not a person, no. People didn’t look like this. Not even Evolved. It was as black as coal and looked just as brittle, though the thick cloud of Smog wafting from it made it hard to make out the details. There was no sign of life. No movement and no response to their presence. The body on the basement floor had been burned to the bone.

  Yet the villain who had triggered an air raid alarm little more a year ago was somehow still alive. After multiple reported hits by Radiant’s thousand-degree hot lasers and camera snapshots showing him on fire, burned to a crisp in the blink of an eye.

  “This is insane,” Wisp mumbled inside her gas mask. Her voice was small and shaky, the words far apart as if dredged up from a horrendous pit. “He should be dead. He looks dead to me.” She pressed a hand to the filter covering her mouth, the pungent stench of chemicals suddenly overwhelming. A nasty taste like ash and rancid lard oozed up her throat.

  Smoker glanced at the body and the curtain of Smog parted to reveal the full extent of damage done by the superhero’s lasers. Once Wisp identified a large clump of charred flesh as the head, it became easier for her to register the position of the skeletal limbs where the skin was burned away to the bone. The torso was in better condition but gave no indication of breathing. The mouth hole gaped wide open, making no sound.

  Worst of all, the corpse’s hands and feet were missing, chopped off by what appeared to be clean, even cuts. Precise and measured. Something told her the missing appendages were no longer in the warehouse. Or if they were, they had been sealed and packaged, prepared for shipping and experimentation.

  “The instant he died,” Smoker said while Wisp fought to keep the nasty taste down, “Osmotic was drawing energy from every source in his range, and you’ll remember that his reach was quite impressive for someone who’d supposedly never experienced a power surge.”

  “Supposedly.” Wisp chewed on the word. It felt unpleasant in her mouth. “And why didn’t the heroes, or the police, or anyone find him before you did? The news said he was incinerated and the ashes blew away.”

  “The way I remember it, the initial cataclysm triggered by his almost-death lasted for weeks and no one could approach the explosion crater for months, not even with suits. None of the available heroes were immune to the effects. Samael went and messed with the Smog without going near it, but that made the situation worse and the top dogs called him off. By the time the smoke cleared, the city had already been sealed off and no one who mattered gave a shit anymore. Besides, the initial blast buried the body under ten feet of earth and rubble.”

  “No one really understood what was happening and why,” Wisp muttered.

  “Right. I don’t think the UNEOA ever realized Osmotic didn’t just warp absorbed energy and re-release it in different forms, he was literally feeding on it. He’s still feeding on it now. Might be snacking on you this very instant.” He tossed her a mischievous grin, his tone light and non-threatening.

  Wisp wasn’t buying it. Her danger beacons were shifting more toward a red alert level by the second, debunking the threat beneath the pleasantries. She forced herself to keep talking. To pretend she hadn’t noticed and drown out the drumming of her heart. “So the Smog is energy he absorbed back then, except it’s a different form now. However much he needs to feed on, he pulls back into himself.” She fought to keep her dad from riding along on this particular train of thought. If she let him, she’d most likely lose her capacity for thinking at all.

  “It’s a possibility,” Smoker said. “And since he was cooked alive while triggering one of the most catastrophic cataclysms ever observed by the public eye, the flow of energy is still influenced by temperature. Or it was, until I came along.”

  Wisp gave him a blank stare. “You’re creating more Smog.”

  “It’s what I’m paid to do. Don’t forget you already picked your side of the fence, it’s far too late to complain about the job now.”

  “Right.” Wisp put her hands over her eye holes, rubbing them as though she was crying. “My dad died that day. Could you give me a few minutes alone here? I think maybe I could see him again. Even if it’s just for a second.” She turned her backpack away from him as she spoke, acutely aware of the camera and the explosives within.

  Smoker returned an incredulous look. “Were you listening when I said these are just patterns and echoes? Your dad isn’t down here, kid. He’s gone wherever dead people go.” He said it casually, making a whisking motion with his fingers.

  “How would you know?” she snapped, then cringed. She had to keep playing the mournful little girl card and hope he’d consider her harmless and vulnerable enough to grant her a minute or two of alone time with the living corpse.

  He airily fobbed her off with “Common sense.”

  “I guess.” The sniffle she produced for Smoker felt real enough to make her heart crack with pain. “I have to try or I’ll keep beating myself up over it. Just for a few minutes. Please?”

  After a long moment of giving her the evil eye, he shrugged. “Fine, whatever. I’ll be by the stairs, so don’t try anything stupid.” With that, he waltzed out into the larger room and out of sight. From her position by the living corpse, the vacant doorway between the two basement blocks showed her a corner of the adjoining room, but not the way up to the first floor.

  She listened to the rhythm of Smoker’s ambling steps until it stopped. Slender puffs of Smog crept through the doorway, filling the void of space where he’d been. This, more than anything else, told her he had indeed taken his leave and wasn’t about to peer over her shoulder in ghost mode. But there was no way for her to relax. Her danger beacons, she realized with a start, had now shifted toward the end of the orange-red spectrum.

  Time to get a move on before things went terribly wrong.

  Grasping the opportunity, she separated one of her thumbnail-sized lights from the swarm surrounding her makeshift environmental suit and dispatched it through the doorway, ordering it to stay low to the ground. It hovered a scant inch above the basement floor, six meters from her position and as far from the doorway as her field of vision allowed. Something told her to stay ready for an emergency takeoff in the not too distant future.

  With this accomplished, she took off her backpack and set it on the floor near the charred body. “Hey, Dad. I know you probably aren’t here, but I just want to be sure. If some tiny part of you is still haunting around and causing trouble, do whatever you can to let me know.”

  The words were meant to be theatrics, a part she had to play in order to keep Smoker off her back. But as she undid the backpack straps to retrieve the drone camera, she caught herself looking around the room, scanning the transient figures in the swirling haze for a reaction. Her throat tightened in anticipation of the impossible, of disproving her own denial of ghosts.

  Nothing happened.

  Even in the face of all logic and despite her best intent to expect nothing, disappointment still gnawed at her gut. Now that Smoker had stepped out, the living corpse emitted a thick screen of Smog and more and more dismayingly humanlike shapes crowded the edges of the chamber. None of them resembled her dad, though, and none made obvious attempts to communicate.

  Wisp inwardly counted to ten before sucking a deep, plastic, and chemical-scent
ed breath through the gas mask filter and aiming the small cubical camera gadget at the supervillain’s sad charred remains. A glance at the doorway confirmed Smoker hadn’t returned.

  Wisp swallowed the lump in her throat and raised her voice, drowning out the click of the device as she pressed the button on top. “This isn’t hide and seek, Dad. You can come out and say hello.” She took another picture as she spoke and adjusted the angle while picking out more words to say. “You’ve left me some pretty big boots to fill. Sometimes I wish you could let me know if I’m doing okay.” Hearing herself say the words created the illusion of him actually being there, aware and listening from the shadows.

  Three more pictures, now aimed at the ghostly shapes. If these didn’t get the heroes onto the scene, assuming that the device worked as expected, she wasn’t sure what would.

  When she glanced at her spheres, they had shifted another shade toward crimson but Smoker had not yet returned, leaving the reason behind the danger level increase a mystery. Wisp wasn’t willing to throw in the towel now that she had come so close to solving the problem on her own. She promised herself to be extra careful as she executed the next steps.

  The two sources of Smog – the undead as well as the living one in the adjoining room – had to bite the dust for real. Wisp considered multiple options involving her gun and grenades, discarding all but one. Having settled on a strategy, she set the camera device on the floor, instead retrieving both of the grenades from her pack.