Vaughn started coughing as I landed next to him on the roof.
“Got a big breath of hot air and smoke,” he said.
“You think you’ll be okay?”
“Yeah. It’s my own fault, anyway.”
It wasn’t really his fault, but when you depend on wind to fly, it’s not much of a surprise if the wind carries smoke along too.
Continue reading Legio: Part 7
The house sat just off Lake Street. It was big — not Hardwick House big, but eighteenth century “big enough for a family of eight, plus servants” big.
I’d heard somewhere that back then, people built the larger houses on main roads, and at the ends of side streets just off the main roads. It was easier to catch the trolley that way, making the houses more desirable, and thus they were built for people who were better off.
Continue reading Legio: Part 6
Daniel arrived before the police, checked out the unconscious men’s minds, and then concentrated on the van.
“They were all blocked,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t awed by the work. Whoever did it, didn’t have as much power or fine control as I do, but given those limitations, it was sophisticated. It would take me hours of work to get anywhere, and I couldn’t be sure I got everything.
“Fortunately for us,” he continued, “they didn’t do any thing to block impressions from building up in the van. So I’ve got the address.”
“Great,” Cassie said. “Let’s go.”
Continue reading Legio: Part 5
As I slowed down, preparing to land, I felt the wind pushing at me from the right. Checking over my shoulder told me exactly what I suspected. Vaughn flew toward me, catching up.
I landed the usual way, turning my body so that my feet were toward the ground. I gave it a little more fuel, straightening me out, and moving upward before lowering myself to the ground.
Vaughn landed at about the same time.
Continue reading Legio: Part 4
“Red Legacy?” Marcus said. “Are you trying to remind people of Red Lightning? Or was that accidental?”
Red Legacy chuckled. “I was going to remind people of Red Lightning one way or the other.”
He held his hands apart in front of him, facing each other. Electricity crackled between them. It was colored red.
“Oh wow, you’re doomed.”
Continue reading Legio: Part 3
The vision of the room’s past dissolved into the equally disturbing present.
From off to my right, Haley said, “That was… horrible.”
Next to the upstairs stairway, Travis said, “It was definitely intense. Hey, Lieutenant, did you ever talk to the guy from upstairs?”
Continue reading Legio: Part 2
Around four on Sunday afternoon, Lt. Van Kley showed Travis, Haley, Daniel, and I the dead bodies. There were three of them — two men and a woman, each of them horribly burned.
The house looked as bad inside as it had outside. Outside, it stood as an excellent example of urban decay in Grand Lake. Built in the 1920’s, the house had cracked, beige paint over wooden siding with spots of greenish moss. It sat in the middle of a neighborhood of houses almost exactly like it.
Continue reading Legio: Part 1
Pieces of metal dropped out of the air. An engine block landed twenty feet away from me and bounced, smacking into the scrap pile, then bouncing off it and rolling to a stop.
Insulting a guy with magnetic powers in middle of a metal scrap yard might not have been a good idea.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 7
Daniel drove us to HQ and we suited up.
I got into the full Rocket suit because Sean apparently hadn’t realized that the stealth suit was also a Rocket suit at Meijers. I’d told him, but better to make things completely unambiguous if we were going to hunt him down and pretend to be voices of authority.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 6
Haley and I listened until they finished the meeting, but they didn’t have any more bombshells. Not that anything could trump the bit where Russell Hardwick had scanned the relevant bits of Red Lightning’s version of the working Impregnator plans and was handing them out to his people.
Probably at that point, people more competent than we were would have tracked down the engineers Hardwick had assigned the job, deleted their files, recovered the original journal, and scared them away from even trying to reconstruct them.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 5