Chapter Three

  The night air was a bit humid and the sky overcast, but the city provided plenty of light to see as the five of us lowered out of the darkness above into a dimly lit alley in the warehouse district. Julia took the lead as we headed for the steel door on the side of a large brick building. She knocked sharply with triple rap on the door, and eye door slid open and a pair of beady brown eyes took us in.

  The guy said, “You folks look lost.”

  An innocuous comment that Julia told us would be coming, the first half of a challenge and response passphrase for their rich pedo customers. I kind of already wanted to throw up.

  Julia replied coldly, “You’re getting old Ricky, don’t you recognize me?” then screamed.

  The metal door which opened outward, bent, strained, and then ripped inside the building from her sonic attack. Ricci was on his ass, about twenty feet in and going for his gun.

  Having two hundred and eighty powers, I was outside one second, and holding his gun with Ricky laid out on the ground unconscious the next. It was a bit heady, but I couldn’t wait to get rid of most of them so I’d have Mina back, and forty would still make me incredibly powerful.

  The room was richly furnished, belying the shithole of the area and alley outside. Dark brown leather couches, wood floor with Persian carpets, and quality oak furniture including a mini-bar in the corner. Behind the mini-bar stood a younger man in his late teens who was frozen in fear, and two middle aged men in extremely expensive looking suits sipping on bourbon.

  I’d never been so tempted to end a life, but I shot them all in quick succession with a non-lethal energy bolt that’d knock them out for hours. It was about as painful as getting knocked out with my electricity power, but far surer and more predictable in how long it’d work.

  Julia looked a bit freaked out as she walked into the place, but also very determined to do this. She froze when she saw the two bastards on the couch, and then shook her head violently to shake off whatever memories came at that recognition. Obviously long-term customers to this shithole.

  Shannon walked over to one of them and found a cell phone, then kicked the guy as she dialed nine one one, rattled off the address when they answered, and then dropped the cell phone with the call still active on his lap.

  “Ten minutes.”

  I snorted, and Julia waved at the door across the room, “The kids are in there in separate rooms set up like bedrooms. Just… without windows.”

  Lori, Shannon, and Kristen headed that way to gather up the kids and knock out any customers, while I followed Julia to the other door. I really didn’t want to see naked preteen and young teen girls and boys, and someone had to go with Julia to take down the boss and his guards.

  Mostly because if I saw it, none of those fucking pedos would make it out alive, no matter who they were and how much money they had. I was already seething with angry disgust.

  Lori had Crowd Control, Kristen Hypno-Kinesis and Telekinesis, and Shannon could knock people out with her negative energy daggers, so the latter two had the customers and guards more than covered without needing to kill, while Lori would be perfect to coax, gather, and herd the kids.

  Our door opened up into a stairwell, which was metal. Behind the scenes so obviously an original part of the building that wasn’t gussied up for rich perverts. The walls were brick, and we were about three steps up when a very large and wide shouldered man moved to look down the stairs, then went for his gun as he spoke.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I supposed it was a benefit to a partially rusted old metal creaky stairway, no one was going to sneak up it without being heard. Though I doubted they had security in mind when they’d chosen not to refurbish the business end of the building.

  I was about to blast him but hesitated, as Julia pitched her tone of voice in a very persuasive tone that told me she was using Sonic Mesmerize.

  “Relax, Brian. Stand there against the wall and wait like a good boy, for the police, and tell them everything.”

  Brian’s face went slack, and he moved against the wall.

  Julia was shaking and frozen, her hand squeezing the handrail so hard it was turning white. She hadn’t ever gone into detail for me about her captivity, but I was guessing this harsh reaction was because the Brian fellow had not been kind.

  I stepped closer and put a hand on her shoulder, it was a reflex to comfort her, and it was only when she stiffened that I even remembered I wasn’t supposed to touch her outside of sex without her permission. Before I could withdraw it however, she stepped back against me, pressing her body against me, and managed to relax as she put her hand over mine.

  “You want me to do this, Julia?”

  She shook her head, “Just back me up. I need to do this.”

  I nodded, and after a moment she moved forward up the stairs.

  I guessed there was only one guard posted at the entrance stairway, because the unadorned hallway was otherwise empty when we reached the top of the stairs. There were three doors on the right, small windows to outside on the left, and a doorway at the end of the hallway. It was an old and converted warehouse, so I was guessing these were the original four offices that overlooked the original warehouse floor below. Point being, it wasn’t an extensive or large area, just four rooms along a long hallway.

  We checked the rooms one by one. The first was a storeroom of sorts, boxes of liquor and wine, mixers, and racks of clothes small enough to make me grimace.

  The next room was locked, but Julia popped it open with her shoulder. Inside that room was a bank of eight monitors and a lot of electronics including recording equipment. I didn’t look too closely at the monitors, as it was obviously the eight bedrooms downstairs. There was also a woman at the controls, which I didn’t get at all, but I guess evil wasn’t gender specific.

  Julia said persuasively, “Anne, organize and gather up all the evidence in here for the police, and then wait here for them. Be sure to answer all their questions honestly.”

  Julia pulled the door closed, and we went to the last door on the right, which made me see fucking red. It was a new victim, a young girl of twelve at the most chained to the wall and lying in a ball on a dirty mattress. I guessed she hadn’t been broken in and trained yet, which was a disgusting thought, but how these kinds of operations worked.

  Julia said, “Relax, honey. The police will be here soon,” then she closed the door as the girl visibly relaxed.

  Julia shuddered as she closed the door, perhaps remembering her first days and weeks as their captive.

  I was ready to kill all the people in the last room, but I mastered myself. The one in charge would become the meat puppet of Cerberus, and the rest would spend a whole lot of time in jail.

  There were three men in the last room, the leader and the guards slash trainers. Julia screamed as soon as she opened the door, throwing the two men standing by the desk against the brick wall, and even the older one behind the desk was lifted out of his chair and slammed into the wall hard.

  She moved in like a whirling dervish, and absolutely kicked the shit out of the two guards until they fell unconscious. At five times stronger and faster than her base, even with the aid of minimal martial arts training from Mina, it was more than enough to completely embarrass the guards that tried to fight back.

  I let her get it out, it must’ve been cathartic, and I honestly didn’t care if she accidentally killed one, or both, of the evil pricks.

  The guy in charge was in his forties, knocking on his fifties, with salt and pepper hair and terrified brown eyes. He was wiry in stature, and when Julia looked at me, I knocked him out with an energy blast. She tossed the asshole over her shoulder, and then led the way back down into the waiting slash lounge area.

  The other ladies had haunted looks in their eyes. Even Lori who was normally irrepressibly exuberant looked deeply troubled at the lowest cesspit humanity was capable of. We left the place with the sounds of sirens approaching, and when we saw the lights, we teleported home. I took the asshole, Lori took Julia, and Shannon took Kristen.

  “Baby, I have a plan. Tell me how to lower this shield.”

  The ringleader was on the cement floor where I’d dropped him none too carefully. More like a sack of grain, truth be told.

  I frowned at her limp body and unseeing eyes. She’d stopped talking to me a little over two days ago, I suspected she wanted me to accept her solution and it was her way of forcing me to move on. She probably didn’t think it was healthy for me to be down here. Like moving on was ever going to happen?

  I coaxed, “Listen, baby. I have a plan to end this. There’s no need for you to sacrifice yourself and live in this hell. I’d love to tell you all about it, so you could make an informed decision, but I can’t do that. You’re going to have to trust me. I mean, Cerberus is listening too, isn’t he? Really don’t want to reveal our plan to the enemy at the same time. So, baby, you need to trust me. Be my good girl and tell me how to lower this shield. Then we need a few minutes to set up the rest of the plan, but I know you can hold on that long.”

  The silence went on for a while. Long enough that the girls were exchanging worried looks. I was trying to give her the time to make the decision before breaking out the big guns. I was closer to giving up on her agreeing to trust me than I liked, when she finally spoke slowly in that dead monotone I hated. Her voice was usual warm and sensual in undertone.

  “Outside, against the outer wall behind the couch. It looks like a phone box, just open the door and throw the lever. A crude interface, but it makes it blend in.”

  I looked at Kristen, and she took off to go take care of it.

  I walked over and knelt near the asshole, and I put my hand on his chest. Then started to push out my powers, one at a time. Sure to give him the teleport among them, but I also kept the most dangerous powers in addition to his ability to change his form and Shannon already had conjuration. Between the powers shocking his mind as his body became super for the first time, and the energy bolt that knocked him out, I was sure he’d be out for hours. There were a few healing powers in there too, but those only worked if you activated them, they wouldn’t act on their own or wake him.

  Caution was called for, because even without Cerberus he’d be an incredibly dangerous shard with two hundred and forty powers, and powerful enough to kill us all without breaking a sweat, if he woke up before we were gone.

  Kristen was back long before I was finished, it was a lot of power I was handing over to the enemy, but it was what had to be done, the risk I had to take, to make everything turn out right.

  I stood up and moved forward. With forty powers I could still lift six tons, so shifting the couch forward with her on it was like brushing a feather. The five of us got behind the couch, them all touching my back, while I reached down and cupped the back of her neck. My reflexes were extremely thick, but it wouldn’t take long for him to move into me, and this way I was as far away as I could possibly get while still touching her. If I failed to time travel in time, it’d be game over.

  “Alright, eject your brother out of your chest, baby. As soon as he’s fully out we’ll be leaving before he can jump into me, and he has a nice new host body waiting for him, with a lot of his powers. Don’t worry, love, the guy deserves far worse than to become a mentally absent meat puppet. Cerberus, we’ll be seeing you soon. Well, soon for us, anyway. I was nice enough to give back your stasis power, so your long ass wait will go by quickly for you if you whip up a stasis chamber with it. I’m nice that way.”

  Kristen giggled.

  Okay, also a wiseass, granted. More importantly, it would clue Cerberus in on when we were going to meet again, and that we and the remainder of his powers would be out of his reach until he caught up on the timeline. I was sure he was as smart as Mina, and I’d given him more than enough to figure it out in those comments.

  As for the world, well they’d soon enough forget the short time superpowers were a real thing.

  “Baby?”

  She was hesitating, which was fair. I was asking her to trust that my plan was good enough to save humanity, as well as myself, the man she loved. So, I wasn’t offended by her lack of instant compliance.

  She asked, “Task, hunters?”

  I said, “Oh, taken care of. I suppose I can tell you that much of the plan,, since Cerberus will know soon enough anyway and it’s already done. I collected all of them. Today. The only powers left are the ones in me, and the ones in the body waiting for little brother. So no danger from hunters, no new shards possible because I have the control power, and he has as much as he can get so has no reason to risk creating a paradox by killing before he takes his revenge on us.

  “Sorry it took three days, but the previous two I’ve been working on a new plan that will see this done, one way or the other. I can’t live without you, baby. Sorry.”

  She said, “In three.”

  I tensed and got ready, and after three seconds the brightly glowing golden nano-cloud was ejected from her chest forcefully, her white nano-cloud billowing out explosively, and as soon as it was sucked in, I activated the time travel power.

  I turned her around to see anger in her eyes, but I didn’t care as I pulled her against me and kissed the top of her head.

  We were in Kankakee State Park, but of course it was Kankakee five hundred years in the past, long before the birth of America.

  Julia said, “We missed you.”

  She looked up at me and kissed me, then backed away with a scowl on her face.

  “Explain, please. I think you just killed my father.”

  I nodded, “Not yet I didn’t, and that’s all part of the plan, but we need your help to fill in the rest.”

  At that point I went over the last three days, my meditation fugue and what we’d accomplished that day. I was relieved to see her soften a great deal when I got around to explaining my intentions to save both her parents along the way, if it was possible. Even if she never met her mother, I could see the excitement in her eyes at the idea of saving her and meeting her for the first time.

  Hopefully she wasn’t a bitch.

  “So, what we need from you is exact dates and coordinates, and if it’s possible how to avoid tipping off your younger self to preserve the timeline, your personal one specifically.”

  She shook her head, “That won’t be a problem. My father was at our country home two days meeting with other scientists. While I have access to the security there, I never looked at it or questioned it, it was a normal thing. So we should be able to safely make contact with him there a day or two before the lab incident. How will that help?”

  I said, “Let me ask you this, the day of the lab, was your father acting oddly in any way?”

  She frowned in thought, “He was avoiding looking at me, I thought he might be mad at me or something, but I haven’t given it any thought, not after he was stabbed to death.”

  I grinned, “Or, it was me pretending to be your father, and I wasn’t looking at you because I look at you with love and desire. Which would be creepy, if you thought I was your father. I mean, did you see him die, or did you just see him stabbed and fall to the ground?”

  She tilted her head, her eyes warming and melting, “You’re suggesting you’re going to save my father, and already have in my past, even if it hasn’t happened for you yet.”

  As I’d hoped our argument hadn’t been too heated, she was too intelligent and reserved not to hear my side of the story. Still, it was just as well I hadn’t had to break out the big guns, and force her into following my plan, or the fireworks would’ve flown.

  I nodded slowly, “Yes, I’m almost sure of it, now that you’ve told me he was acting out of character that day. We can also pick up your mom on the way, pull her out at the last second before the Grexscil ships bomb the surface of the colony planet to dust in the air, revealing the bedrock. Your father and the government will have no reason to believe she survived, until she shows up in the future with us, which will preserve the timeline. We can stash her in the country home until the right time is passed, and also use it as emotional leverage to convince your father to help us with the deception, as well as taking down Cerberus.”

  She bit her lip, and sounded worried, “But you get stabbed, in the back and through the heart.”

  I shrugged, “Better than your dad being dead, and I’ll have healing engaged the whole time. As long as he doesn’t, or didn’t rip my head off or stab my brain, I’ll survive it.”

  Her eyes watered, and she tackled me. Her kiss was warm, enthusiastic, and lingering. Apparently risking my life to save her father was more than enough for full and passionate forgiveness.

  She said, “I’m sorry I doubted you, and… I wouldn’t have let you suffer in hell for eternity either. So I assume you need the right spatial and time coordinates, and an introduction. What makes you think father can stop him though, he already tried and failed, and my brother has twenty thousand years to figure out how to prevent father from scattering him again. Even without the time travel power in his command.”

  “Yeah, the original plan was rubbish anyway. But well, that’s where your dad comes in. We’ll have to figure that out, brainstorm. We can’t destroy him, so we focus on neutralizing him, which is different. It depends on what your dad’s overrides in the lab are capable of, and I assume you don’t have that knowledge. We’ll also have to convince him to allow me to replace him that day, and to play out the timeline as it happened to you the first time. Otherwise, it will create a paradox and we’ll never meet. Call me selfish, but I won’t give you up, we can save humanity without losing ourselves and our love to it.”

  In other words, I feared her father would want to go to the new plan we came up with, whatever it will be, immediately, instead of using the plan that had failed the first time around. That would play merry hell with Mina’s timeline, and likely reset the past to not include superpowers or us meeting. I wouldn’t allow that to happen.