John Miller - Death Draws Five

One of the team would die that night. Nighthawk couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be him. Caught in the grip of awful fear, the old man looked across the plaza at the ancient cathedral, wondering if that night he would find the answer to the question that had haunted him for the last sixty years. The gloved fingers of his left hand closed around the old harmonica that he always carried, currently in his inside jacket pocket. It was his lucky piece as well as a reminder of past friends. He smiled to himself, but without humor.

“Maybe we find out tonight, Lightning,” he said quietly. “Maybe finally tonight.”

Las Vegas, Nevada: The Mirage

Peregrine tried to slam the newspaper down on the hotel suite desk, but since it was open it only fluttered limply. Still, Jerry got the message that she wasn’t happy.

“You could have been hurt!” she said angrily to John Fortune, who watched her glumly as she paced about the room. “Even killed!”

“There was no danger of that,” Jerry interjected.

Peregrine paused in her pacing and turned her eyes upon him. Suddenly he was glad that she hadn’t packed her titanium talons for the trip.

“You know that how?” she asked in a voice gone quietly silky. Through long experience in body-guarding John Fortune, Jerry knew that when she used that tone she was at her most dangerous. She looked at him with the eyes of a lioness sizing up an antelope for the kill. Even though she was in her late forties, Peregrine was still one of the most beautiful women Jerry had ever seen. Tall, lean, and athletic, her stunning wings matched a still stunning figure that had made only the slightest concession to age and gravity over the years.

“I made sure we kept far away from the tigers when we went backstage,” Jerry said quietly, but his words did little to mollify the angry ace.

“Tigers!” Peregrine spat, as if he’d said mosquitoes or something equally insignificant. “I would expect you to handle tigers.” Jerry’s chest expanded at the unanticipated praise. Suddenly, her eyes narrowed. “Maybe,” she added. She paced some more around the room, then stopped and looked at her son. He was still glum. Still handsome. Still normal looking, except for that orangish-yellowish glow that hovered around his head and the exposed skin of his hands and arms like halos. “But how do you know that simply using his power isn’t dangerous? He’s just a boy. I would expect him to be excited when he turned his card. But you should have known better.”

“Aw, Mom,” John Fortune said, “I had to go help Ralph. You should have seen him. The tiger had grabbed him by the neck and there was blood everywhere! He would’ve bled to death if I didn’t do anything. But I healed him. Ask Jerry. He was right there all the while, making sure nobody crowded us or anything. I just held Ralph and concentrated and he healed right up. It was easy.”

“No,” Jerry said, shaking his head, “your mother’s right. There’s no telling how dangerous using your power might be—”

“Listen to him,” Peregrine said.

“It’s not dangerous,” John Fortune said, his impatience showing in his tone. “I’m fine.”

Peregrine put the back of her hand against his forehead. “You feel warm to me.”

“Aw, Mom.”

“Could just be the effects of a speeded-up metabolism,” Jerry offered.

“Could be,” Peregrine said. Suddenly, she enwrapped her son in her arms and wings and held him to her tightly. She closed her eyes, fighting back tears. “If you only knew how worried I’ve been for you, all these years.”

“Aw, Mom,” John Fortune said, his head muffled against her chest. Jerry was envious. “I’m all right. I knew I would be. My card turned and now I’m an ace, just like you and my father. I mean, Fortunato.”

Peregrine nodded, unable to speak for a moment, as years of desperate worry seemed to squeeze out of her body. But some still remained.

“Promise me one thing,” she said as she still held him tightly. “Don’t use your power again until we get home and have you checked out at the Jokertown Clinic.”

“But what if I have to save someone—”

She pulled away, held him at arm’s length.

“John,” she said sternly, “you have your whole life ahead of you. You have years and years to save people. And listen to me. There’s a big lesson you have to learn right now.”

“What’s that?” the kid asked.

“No matter how powerful you are, no matter how much time and effort and sweat and blood you expend,” Peregrine said slowly, coming down hard on each and every word, “you can’t save everyone.”

The boy was silent for a long moment, as if digesting her words.

“All right,” John Fortune said quietly.

“Believe me,” Peregrine said.

Jerry nodded. “Believe her.”

He knew. Sometimes that was the hardest thing about being an ace of all.

Branson, Missouri: The Peaceable Kingdom

Billy Ray was in Loaves and Fishes, lingering over lunch and wishing he was anywhere in the world except here, when the kid tracked him down. Ray didn’t particularly look like an ace, let alone a dangerous one. He was an average-sized five ten, one hundred and seventy pounds. His suit was expensive and neat, without wrinkle, spot, or blemish. Though a couple of years on the wrong side of forty, he looked younger. His green eyes were sleepy-looking. His features were bland, if a little ill fitting. His broken-angled, rather prominent nose stood out from the rest of his face. He moved slowly, almost languidly. He was even more bored than he looked.

As the kid approached, Ray looked up from his plate piled high with beef ribs and chicken fried steak with gravy and biscuits, green beans, corn on the cob, and real scratch-made mashed potatoes, not from a box. He liked Loaves and Fishes because it was all you could eat, but lately he’d been losing interest in food as well as everything else. He knew what was wrong, but he knew also he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Hi, Mr. Ray,” the kid said.

Ray sighed for about the billionth time and said, for about the billionth time, “I told you not to call me mister.”

“Okay, Billy.” Ray knew that wouldn’t last long. It never did. If the kid was anything, he was respectful. Alejandro Jesus y Maria C de Baca looked like he was about fourteen years old. Slight, slim, dark haired, dark eyed, always smiling, always cheerful, fresh out of spook school and so goddamned respectful that he sirred waiters. It was clear to Ray that Nephi Callendar, their boss at the Secret Service, had teamed them up specifically to annoy Ray.

“Say, mi—uh, Billy, President Barnett wants to see you, right away.”

Ray sighed. God, he hoped that it wasn’t for another prayer session. “Did he say why?”

The kid shook his head. “Nope. I was with him when he saw something in the paper that got him real excited, and he wanted to speak to you right away.”

Ray sighed again. He caught himself, realizing that he was doing entirely too much of that lately. He looked down at his lunch. He wasn’t hungry now, anyway.

“You want some lunch, kid?” Ray asked his colleague.

“I already ate, sir, uh, Billy. But it’d be a shame to waste all that food. I can box it up and drop it down at the homeless shelter after our shift.”

Ray nodded.

“You do that,” he said. He left Loaves and Fishes and strolled through Barnett’s vision of Heaven on Earth to his headquarters centrally located on the top floor of The Angels’ Bower hotel. He had to cut through the part of the park called New Jerusalem to reach it. As always, the Via Dolorosa was crowded with tourists, so Ray took the back way that looped around the rides, exhibits, and concessions. He went by the twenty-foot high statues of the Twelve, wondering, not for the first time, how they’d decided which apostle was bald, which one had a big honker, and where in the Hell Judas was. He could hear the faint screams of the faithful as the Rapture took them to Heaven and then dropped down to the Pit with a stomach-flipping hundred and eighty degree turn that piled on over three gees of acceleration as it fell forty stories straight down to Hell.