Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

“How very noble of you,” she said, deadpan.

He stopped, glared at her. “You’ve forced me to this.” He seemed agitated, like he’d expected her to be frightened and was frustrated that she wasn’t. They always were.

“Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.” She was way too tired for this, and her stomach had started squirming. Vomiting all over their nice empty office would be gross, but it would serve them right. But no, she had to stay well and alert. As well as she could, anyway.

“Sonic, Shark, bring her daughters here. Then we’ll have this conversation again.”

“Shark?” Celia questioned, raising an eyebrow at him. She’d been calling him that to herself as a joke. “And what you do, bite people?” Nobody answered.

The mentalist said, “We’re not going to hurt them—”

Majors cut him off with a gesture. “Of course not. But we need to have some kind of leverage.”

Celia’s imagination spun out because she’d had too much experience with men like Majors and their plans. He could find plenty of ways to threaten Celia without physically hurting the girls: take them away, hold them hostage for the rest of their lives, brainwash them, turn them against her. Convince them to convince her. Make her hurt them. His mistake: seeing them as pawns. Her girls were better than that.

“I’d rather you kept your hands off them,” she said, and was pleased to hear an edge in her voice. A supervillainy edge, even. You meddle with powers beyond your ken, puny mortal …

Majors smiled like he thought he’d gotten claws into her. “You see? I’ll get through to you. Soon enough you’ll understand that this is for the best.”

He nodded at the others, who moved into action. They began stripping, peeling off jackets, shoving down trousers, and unbuttoning shirts. They all wore skin suits of some sleek, shimmering black material. She guessed the fabric had some kind of reflective, antitracking properties. It might even have been bulletproof. At least that was how she’d have done it. The woman put her hair up with a clip, a couple of the guys put on gloves, they stretched muscles and cracked joints in an obvious show of preparation. When they all lined up with Majors, still mundanely clothed, they looked as badass a team as Celia had ever encountered.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at them. They made an effort to ignore her, but they had to make the effort.

Majors said, “Mindwall, you’ll have to stay so her pet telepath won’t find her.”

“I’ll give you as much protection as I can,” Mindwall told the others.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be back before you know it,” the woman said.

“Pet telepath?” Celia said to Majors. “Really?”

He chuckled. “What else should I call him?”

“The father of my children?” she said to the departing team, heading toward the elevators. “You might want to keep that in mind. Just saying.”

“Can we gag her?” the remaining shark said.

After thinking a moment, Majors said, “No. I want her to be able to say she’s changed her mind.”

They settled in to wait. Majors retired to a chair across the space. He sat facing her, his arms crossed, studying her. She wondered what he was discovering. She just looked back, her expression still. Maybe she’d learn something about him, if they kept up the staring contest long enough. Like whether he had superpowers, and if so, what were they. He probably did, to be able to head up a superpowered team like this. Or he might have just been the money, the organizer. So, Delta had superhumans. Majors had to win this battle, or he wouldn’t be able to keep that secret for much longer. That was all she really needed to know, that his threat came out of fear. Frankly, she didn’t much care about Majors in the long run. She knew his type, and his type made mistakes. He needed her alive, so she was okay for the time being. A solution to this would present itself.

The second shark planted himself in a guard position behind her. Her skin crawled, sensing his presence without being able to see him. He was probably some kind of heavy, with a combat-related power. A kinetic strike or superstrength. She wondered if he had a temper to match. The superstrong ones often did. Like her father, who’d have made short work of Majors.

The mentalist wasn’t happy, pacing along the side of the room, just out of sight of the stretch of windows. She couldn’t tell if he was frustrated because the group had separated, or because he disagreed with Majors’s decisions. Maybe this was a weak point in the group. She didn’t have the first clue how to get around his telepathic block. Setting him against Arthur would be placing the irresistible force against the immovable object. Knocking him unconscious would probably do the trick. Simple, really. Too bad she was tied to a chair.

This was not how she wanted to be spending her afternoon.

The second part of any kidnapping was the waiting. The kidnappers made demands, everybody had to wait while the demands were delivered, then wait for a respectable amount of time to pass while negotiations continued. Celia, meantime, waited for rescue, which could happen quickly if the kidnappers weren’t that clever. Or she could be here awhile.

The chair was a standard padded task chair, comfortable for what it was, with plenty of lumbar support. But no headrest, nothing to lean on if she tipped her head back. She wanted to lie back and maybe take a nap. Kidnappers always hated it when she was able to sleep during her own kidnapping.

She dozed off anyway, but it wasn’t comfortable, and she jerked awake when she started to slump forward and tugged against her bindings. Her nose had started running, and she awkwardly wiped it on her shoulder. No dignity. That was fine, she didn’t need dignity to get out of this.

A phone rang. Celia instinctively looked around at her own pockets, but they’d taken her purse and her phone. The noise came from Majors. He retrieved the device from his pocket. Even halfway across the space, Celia heard a panicked voice on the line. Majors’s expression darkened.

“Fine,” he said, when the explanation had stopped. “Just get back here. We’ll deal with it.” He put the phone away and looked over her shoulder, taking in his remaining henchmen. He told them, “There’s a problem.”

Celia smiled.

ARTHURstayed in communication with Captain Paulson as the police attempted to locate the car and identify Celia West’s captors. They succeeded at neither. The car dropped off surveillance after a couple of blocks, ducking through blind alleys and into the south part of town that didn’t have so many cameras. The features of the two people weren’t clear enough—they wore large sunglasses and turned the collars of their coats up—and the facial recognition software, even the advanced version on the Olympiad computer, couldn’t identify them.

Suzanne arrived within the hour to find Arthur at the computer, Bethy slouching in a chair at the conference table, and Anna pacing.

Anna had been pacing the whole time, thinking. Focusing. Trying to drill through whatever the bad guys had done to block her ability. That was Arthur’s hypothesis, that they had a way to block his telepathy, and the same block affected Anna’s power. But she had to be able to do something, and she knew she could find Celia if she could just figure out how. She was giving herself a headache.

“Grandma!” Bethy called and ran to the woman, who caught her up in a hug. Suzanne glared at Arthur over Bethy’s shoulder.

“I had to include them. It was Anna—” He sighed. “Anna, would you care to explain?”

“Not really,” she said. But now everyone was looking at her, and she didn’t have a choice. “I find people. I know where people are.”