Alter Ego Read online

  Only Ginger wasn’t there. Instead, Mary found herself looking, again, at Nathan Pearce. He shrugged and gave her that same half smile. Ginger was crumpled in an enormous heap at his feet.

  Reckless for a cop, but OK. Apparently Boston knew how to train them.

  “Behind you,” Nathan said, and Mary whirled around. Thick Neck was still in the game, picking up a bar stool to use as a weapon. Not the brightest idea. There wasn’t much room for swinging furniture in here, even with the crowd rapidly draining from the bar. While he tried to maneuver the stool into the air, no doubt with grand plans of using it to slam her to the floor, she grabbed a full bottle of wine from the bar and lobbed it at his head.

  Thick Neck’s eyes widened as he tried to duck, but the bar stool threw off his balance. The bottle struck the top of his skull with a dull smack, and he collapsed on top of his ill-chosen weapon. Down for the count.

  But hadn’t there been one more thug? Mary evaluated the ring of casualties, sprawled on the floor around her.

  “Where’s Shrimpy?” she said.

  He’d inched his way toward the wall, hands above his head in surrender. The smart one.

  Mary dropped her hands, and Shrimpy slumped in obvious relief.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jenna’s voice was shaking. She was still cowering against the bar, poor girl.

  Mary turned. “I need to get you to safety.”

  “I’m pretty sure safe isn’t an option for me.”

  “You need to trust me.”

  Not comforting, apparently. Jenna’s eyes filled with tears.

  “He’s here,” she whispered, her gaze shifting to focus on something over Mary’s shoulder. Mary whipped around, ready to take Shrimpy down, too, but his neck was already in trouble. A tall man in a wide-brimmed hat had him headlocked in the crook of one elbow.

  “Thanks for rescuing my daughter,” the man said, his voice a gurgle in the back of his throat. Despite the August heat, he wore lace-up boots, a trench coat, and leather gloves. He lifted his head enough to reveal a face covered in gauze, his eyes cranberry-red where they should have been white. A gap in the gauze at his chin displayed a patch of peeling tanned skin. “I guess I owe you for that, so I’ll leave you alive.”

  Mary fought a wave of revulsion. Daughter? “You’re not looking so good,” she said. Trapped in the stranger’s seemingly effortless grip, Shrimpy trembled. “Why don’t you let that misguided piece of trash go so you can rest?”

  “Your concern is uncommon for a vigilante, and I appreciate it. But I’m almost done here,” the red-eyed man said. Then he twisted.

  Shrimpy’s limp form slid to the floor as the man let go. Nothing to do about it now. Mary grabbed Jenna’s wrist and dragged her toward the door. She didn’t have to look back to know Nathan Pearce was staring at her. But what the hell? So was everyone else.

  Mary didn’t like leaving him with the mummy guy, but she had a feeling the stranger wouldn’t stay long once she evacuated Jenna.

  “He found me,” Jenna said, so softly Mary could barely hear her. “All this time I’ve been running. All for nothing.”

  “Jenna,” Mary said. “I need you to run again, OK? Now.”

  “He’s going to follow us,” Jenna said as Mary shoved the door open.

  “Then we’re going to move fast.”

  Mary swung the door open and pushed Jenna into the night.

  2 Nathan

  All Nathan’s police training, his years of experience on the force, were supposed to prepare him for this moment. And he’d missed his chance.

  The women were gone. In the few seconds it had taken Nathan to push his way to the street, they’d slipped into the crowd. He’d stood there like an idiot, scanning the sea of Red Sox gear for black ponytails or plain baseball caps, enduring the steamy August air for so long that the women probably could have made it to their secret hideout three times before he gave up.

  She was definitely the type of woman who had a secret hideout.

  Back inside, the men had vanished too, even the injured ones—even the one that should have been a corpse—while Charlie, the remaining bartender, struggled to close the pub. The stalwart people who stayed after a fight like that weren’t the type to complain about a bit of rubble on the floor. And besides, they were Red Sox supporters in the bottom of the eighth, with the Sox down by a run. To Charlie’s dismay, they’d refused to go anywhere. Charlie hadn’t wanted to call the police, and since Nathan had punched a guy unconscious himself, he wasn’t too eager to summon them, either.

  So he’d ducked behind the bar, unplugged the televisions, and kicked everyone out. He was a cop. He’d seen all those fingers and gestures before, plus the U.K. versions, and it was the least he could do after participating in a row that left the place thoroughly wrecked.

  Now the pub was quiet, leaving Nathan to think about his failure of an evening. He wiped a wet rag along the bar while Charlie collected splintered wood and decapitated bobble-head figures in a dust pan. The poor guy looked exhausted. Bags of skin sagged under his eyes, bruised droplets against chalky skin, and the wrinkles on his forehead were furrowed into deeper ravines than usual.

  “What the hell was that tonight?” Charlie asked for the third time. He had one of the stronger Boston accents Nathan had heard, nasal on the A’s and lacking in most R’s.

  “Not sure,” Nathan said. It was true that he was sketchy on the details, anyway. If he had a solid theory about the basics, Charlie didn’t need to know.

  “That girl walloped the crap outta those guys. You think she was one of those vigilante types?”

  Or maybe Charlie had the same theory.

  “Could be.” Nathan was sure the woman who’d released holy hell on those assholes was exactly that, a ‘vigilante type.’ The cops called them independent operatives, or IOs. They tended to show up when lunatics threatened world leaders or high school chemistry teachers formed delusions of world domination. It’d been a while since they’d been needed full time, so it was hard to predict. Not too long ago, a guy in California had propped up a collapsing bridge with his shoulders while the cars evacuated, unharmed. Another had flown to a hijacked plane over the Atlantic, found a way in through the cargo hold, and restrained the bad guys until they landed safely. Had that been three months back? Four?

  The woman with the black ponytail had moved fast enough to have an enhanced ability of some kind, and unless Nathan had hallucinated that flash of light, Bartender Jenna had one, too. But she’d clearly been surprised by the other woman’s presence, maybe even scared.

  It was more than bizarre, though. IOs had been known to team up occasionally, back in the day, but for the last fifteen years or so—a bit less—they’d only ever shown up alone. Ever since they’d united to defeat the terrorist organization, Wave, IOs seemed to have scattered to their own hidden corners of the world. Theories on the subject ranged from power struggles and feuds to romantic entanglements, but no one really had a clue as to what might have happened.

  “Dunno why they had to come into my bar,” Charlie said. “You ever seen a vigilante in a bar?”

  “Not that I can think of, no.”

  “Couldn’t happen to Reggie down at Donnell’s, could it? The place is a disaster. What if the owner comes by?”

  Nathan plucked a shard of broken glass off the counter. IOs didn’t come into bars, at least not as themselves. And one—maybe two—had come into this one. He’d unknowingly spent some of the evening trying to flirt with one of them. How thick could a person be?

  “One of the guys said he saw Jenna’s hand light on fire,” Charlie said. “You see her hand light on fire?”

  Nathan hesitated. “I’m not sure what I saw.”

  “What times we live in, huh? When these fellas first started showing up in the sixties, no one trusted them. Everyone loves them now, but I’m not so sure.”

  Public uncertainty about IOs had shifted to a feeling just short of worship when an organization called Wave s
urfaced in the early nineties. They’d claimed they were the only ones capable of stopping terrorism and promptly began bullying governments into paying huge sums for their “services.” When they didn’t get paid, bad things happened.

  At first, people had been afraid that the IOs might be affiliated with Wave. They were vigilantes, working outside the law, and authorities resisted their help. IOs still surfaced when trouble arose, but bullets rained at them from both sides when they did.

  And then, in one day, everything had changed. The source of the shift still mystified Nathan. It seemed like such an insignificant incident when compared to the hundreds who were affected every time a bomb ripped apart a subway car or a national monument.

  Three people in a private airplane, and two of them had died. Not exactly a victory. But when the Pearl Knife and the Inferno saved the third, they changed everything.

  Maybe it was because the police weren’t around to shoot at them; maybe it was because the victims were already celebrities, faces to fight for. Whatever the reason, that incident had been the beginning of the public fascination with independent operatives—and once they were involved, they stamped out Wave’s leadership. Took them two years, but they did it.

  Independent operatives had been working with law enforcement ever since, all around the world. He needed to find them. Or one. One would work. IOs were the reason he’d become a cop in the first place, the reason he always sought out big cases. He’d been looking to come in contact with one for years, which meant he’d missed a major opportunity tonight.

  “They do some good,” Nathan said. He didn’t understand the shift in public opinion, but he knew he was lucky it had happened before Wave soldiers showed up at his grammar school in England and held it hostage for eight hours. He remembered the way the room had thickened with hot fear until he’d thought he might suffocate to a soundtrack of muffled crying, noses hastily wiped against sleeves. He remembered his little sister cowering in the first row with the littlest children while he’d been stuck dead center, distracting himself from nausea by trying—pretending—to plan an escape route, a way to reach Chloe.

  For hours they’d huddled there—he still didn’t know why, or what they’d wanted—until, out of nowhere, the Pearl Knife had appeared and sliced a gun out of the lead captor’s hands. She’d saved their lives.

  Nathan had amends to make for what he’d done a year later, but he couldn’t afford to go about it the wrong way. Not again. He needed to find an independent operative, because he needed to become one.

  “Did a good job of wrecking this place, all right,” Charlie grumbled.

  Maybe if Nathan called Chloe to tell her about tonight, she’d actually call him back. So much had changed since that day in the cafeteria. So much had happened between them. But if anything could entice her to be forgiving, it’d be a story about IOs.

  “You should go,” Charlie said. “I’ve got this covered.”

  “What if the owner shows up?”

  “Prob’ly won’t. I’m almost done here, anyway.”

  Nathan gave the end of the bar one more swipe. “All right. If you’re sure.”

  “I got it,” Charlie said. “Thanks for the hand. Wish we had more regulars like you, Officer. Get home safe.”

  3 Mary

  Mary had never been too good at the warm and fuzzy part of this job, the part where she was supposed to convince traumatized civilians that everything would be OK. It was hard to convince anyone else of something she had a hard time believing herself. She usually handed them off to the police—that British one in the bar would probably be good at the comforting thing—or to her friend Agnes, who offered them cups of tea and listened to them blubber until they were calm.

  Bedside manner, not Mary’s thing.

  But Agnes wasn’t here. It’d been an hour since Mary had maneuvered the smart car out of Boston traffic, and now that she was sure they weren’t being followed—it took considerable concentration to monitor the anti-tracking devices and the road at the same time—she could tell that Jenna was nervous. The poor kid was still clenching the armrests so hard that Mary could practically see bone through the skin on her knuckles. Jenna’s freckles stood out on her pallid cheeks like they might pop off, and the dark hair she’d so recently been tossing flirtatiously over her shoulder hung limp around her face.

  She seemed so young and vulnerable. A couple months short of twenty-one, according to her file. Mary was only a few years older, but the difference felt like eons.

  Mary had to think of something comforting to say. What would Agnes tell her? Everything will be fine, relax, you escaped, have some tea. Mary was still trying to come up with something that wouldn’t sound fake when Jenna turned her head suddenly. “You’re Coral,” she said, like an accusation.

  Mary hadn’t expected Jenna to speak first. “Um. Yes, actually.”

  Jenna studied her for a moment as though trying to decide if it could be true. “Where’s your black and silver outfit?”

  “It’s mother of pearl. Like the inside of a shell. Why doesn’t anybody ever get that?”

  “Maybe because it looks like silver.”

  “It’s not here,” Mary said. “I’m undercover.”

  Jenna nodded and went back to looking out the window, and Mary let the silence stretch until Western Massachusetts became Albany, and the frequent streetlights of civilization dwindled into the dark highways of upstate New York, where the only artificial light stretched out from the car’s high beams. Mary could barely make out the fringed shadows of trees blurring against a moonlit sky to either side of the road. After a few weeks in a city, the darkness was a welcome cloak.

  The closer they got to Niagara, the more uncomfortable the silence became. Or maybe Mary was imagining hostility emanating from the passenger seat. Mary tried to imagine herself in Jenna’s position. The girl must be scared. Mary should say something, try to connect with Jenna before they reached HQ.

  “You holding up OK over there?”

  As far as comforting went, it wasn’t the strongest move. For one thing, “over there” was about two inches away. She felt like she should add a “champ” to the end and punch Jenna’s shoulder.

  “What do you think?” Jenna snapped, as though she’d been waiting for Mary to speak so she could lash out like a lunatic. She was still holding the armrests as though gravity might fail and catapult her into space if she let go.

  “Maybe you should relax,” Mary said, trying to make her voice sound soothing. She didn’t have a very soothing voice. These kinds of things had a tendency to sound sarcastic coming from her. She tried again. “You’ve had a rough night, and you’re stressed.”

  “Of course I’m stressed. I just got kidnapped.”

  Mary stiffened. So much for gratitude. “I’m not kidnapping you.”

  “Can I leave?”

  “No.”

  Jenna glared at her.

  “OK, you’re a little bit kidnapped. But I’m trying to help you. That guy in the bar with the bandages—”

  “I can handle him. I’ve been handling him.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Shouldn’t you be off saving the world instead of breaking up bar fights?”

  Mary had seen annoyed or embarrassed victims before, once or twice, but this girl was bringing ungrateful to a new extreme. “Hey, I saved your ass in there.”

  “Why? Why would you do that? You don’t even have a freaking superpower. You have no idea what it’s like. So why would you kidnap me unless you wanted something?”

  Way to make it personal. “Because the last person I knew who had fire powers was my mentor,” Mary said, not bothering to keep the heat out of her voice. “And he’d want me to help you. He’s dead, so I can’t ask if that still applies to a person who’s acting like an asshole.”

  That shut Jenna up. For a second. “I remind you of him?”

  Mary wouldn’t go that far. “He’d never have climbed up on a bar to serve shots when he was suppo
sed to be in hiding. You do have the whole flaming hand thing going, though.”

  “I was hiding in plain sight.”

  “For future reference, that is a terrible plan.”

  Jenna slumped in her seat and rested the balls of her feet on the dashboard so her knees curled in close to her chest. “I needed the cash. But thanks for the input.”

  The sulky-girl thing was getting old. “I’m sorry, would you rather those dudes in the bar had dragged you off instead? I don’t know who they were, but they weren’t planning a trip to Disney World. Or the guy with the bandages. He hinted that you two share DNA. True?”

  Jenna folded her arms and closed her body into a tighter ball. Mary let her sit in silence for a few minutes. Maybe she could reset the conversation, give them a chance to start over. Jenna didn’t know it was a low blow to call out Mary’s lack of enhanced abilities, that one miserable failure in facing someone who did have them was the only reason she was here with Jenna in the first place. Mary needed to find a way to put her mind at ease.

  She took a deep breath, willing herself back to calm. “We’re going to help you. I promise.”

  “Who’s we? I thought you worked alone.”

  Apparently Jenna wasn’t ready to be calm. “You’ll see when we get there,” Mary said.

  “Where?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  She needed an example? “Well, let’s say someone attacks us and kidnaps you—”

  “Re-kidnaps, you mean.”

  “—then you’ll know where we’re going and we’ll be screwed.”

  “Can you at least take off your mask so I can see who you are?”

  “Um, no. Same problem.”

  “OK.” Jenna’s voice was rising in pitch and volume with each question, a breath away from hyperventilating. Resetting the conversation wasn’t going so well. “Then how long have you been following me?”