The screen on Maxim Prather’s desk had barely gone dark when his sleek black phone warbled irritatingly, jarring him and causing him to bang his knee against the bottom of the middle drawer.
He hit the speaker button before the contraption could continue its shrill scream.
“Max.” The voice, a well-practiced whispered growl, was one he thought he’d just got done hearing.
He snatched the receiver up and pushed the earpiece in against his ear, as if he feared the sound would escape from it and go wandering out into the world.
“How many times must I tell you not to call me at my office number?” he whispered furiously. “Any business you had with me could have been resolved during the conference call.”
“Tell me as often as you like,” the Dock Shadow replied. He stood inside an indoor storage unit inside the harbor district, looking down at one of the men—the boys—who were lying dead of gunshot wounds out on the concrete floor. There was a tattoo on the kid’s forearm: an eastern-style dragon, with a long spear sticking out of its flank. The wound was bleeding a stylized black and green drop. “I’m looking at a Poisoned Dragon, Max.”
“Oh, dear,” Prather said. “Where are you?”
“Lucky Storage Company.”
“How did you get out into the field so quickly?”
“What do you mean?”
“The video conference just… oh, never mind.” Prather sighed. “Were you wounded at all?”
“I didn’t fight them,” the vigilante replied. “But Poisoned Dragons are in the Harbor, Max. Why are there Poisoned Dragons in the Harbor?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“You said you saw Opal Song die.”
“Yes, well, who hasn’t?”
“You sounded certain.”
“It was traumatic,” Prather said. “But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have been mistaken… and it doesn’t mean that somebody else couldn’t have taken over her gang, or reformed it. Perhaps… a smokescreen? A cover for some other organization seeking to intimidate the competition?”
“Maybe,” Shadow said.
“Yes… well… hmm,” Prather said. “I’ll just send a supply of my latest counteragents to that fellow who organizes the nocturnal social club, shall I?”
“I need you here on the ground.”
“Do you? You do?” Prather said. “Now is not the best time, I’m afraid… we’re about to launch a new product, and I have… well, there are cases that need investigating out here, too, you know.”
“Opal Song is an alchemist, Max,” Shadow said. “That’s not my world. I don’t know how to fight that.”
“Yes, well, you see… the thing is… strictly speaking, she’s a practitioner of eastern alchemy, which follows a different basis from the occidental school which I follow. So, really, I’d be just about as in the dark as you are. Excuse the expression.”
“‘Just about’. Not ‘exactly the same amount as’.”
“Well, no… not exactly the same amount as. But you know, I hate flying commercial…”
“You have a private jet.”
“A corporate jet, dear fellow, and it simply would not be ethical for me to…”
“There are three eight by ten storage units here full of heroin,” Shadow said. “Dirty heroin. Poisoned Dragon heroin. When was the last time you updated your alchemical counteragents for Opal’s poison?”
“Six months ago,” Prather said. “Just before our last battle. I haven’t had a reason to change it since, or any samples to work with…”
“I have samples here. Three rooms of them.”
“Send me some,” Prather said. “I have work to…”
“Of course you do. Here.”
Prather exploded.
“Can’t you understand that I’m done?” he shouted. “I beat her, do you hear me? I defeated her. My archenemy, the reason I first became Alcheman…”
“You took one villain down,” Shadow said. “Possibly. Even if you did, the job goes on.”
“Not for me it doesn’t. I haven’t gone out… I don’t even have my mask any more. The digital projection is the closest to actually being Alcheman that I’ve come in half a year,” Prather said. “Don’t you see? I became Alcheman to stop her. She has been stopped.”
“We all had a different goal when we first put on our masks,” the vigilante said. “Some of us reach it. Some of us don’t. Either way, you realize soon enough that it doesn’t matter. You can’t just turn your back on evil. Not if you want to sleep at night.”
“Last quarter we gave away a billion dollars’ worth of anti-malarial drugs,” Prather said. “Right now we are working on a pill that could completely replace chemotherapy for certain cancers. I don’t need to beat up muggers to sleep soundly at night… something I never did when I was flying around in satin pants.”
“So you’ll do nothing, then.”
“I’ll offer advice and material support as are appropriate,” Prather said. “That’s hardly nothing.”
“Send your antidotes to Broker, then,” the Dock Shadow said. “I’ll send you pictures when the bodies start showing up.”
He cut off the phone call. Prather slammed the receiver down onto the cradle, then punched the mahogany desk as hard as he could.
That was not wise.
Maxim Prather was a forty-five year old man and not in the best of shape. During the time of his life when he had been in the habit of punching things… a phase which had ended in a burning fortress six months before… he had grown accustomed to being able to put as much force as he could behind his blows, knowing he would suffer no pain and little injury.
Such was not the case now.
Grimacing and cradling his shattered hand, Prather’s eyes drifted towards a frame on the wall. Behind the beautifully rendered diagram of the Tree of Sephiroth was a safe. Inside that safe, tucked alongside the mask and costume he’d claimed to have gotten rid of, were potions… tiny crystal vials which would make the bones of his hand knit themselves back together, and the ampules which held his masterwork.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the picture, but instead of getting up and walking over to it, he hit the speaker button with his left hand and started dialing.
“Yes, Mr. Prather?”
“Hello, Marie,” he grunted, then forced a smile so his voice would sound pleasant. “I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of an accident.”
Some things belonged in the past.
“What’s your opinion?” the Dock Shadow asked.
“I’d have to see them fight to be sure,” Diana Peacock said, scrutinizing the corpses. “But that doesn’t seem too likely at this point.”
“If you run into any more of them out on the street, though, you’ll know?” he asked.
“Before the first punch is thrown,” she said. “Opal Song was a pragmatic woman. Her acolytes received training from a number of different masters. The resulting blend is as distinctive as any of her poisons. Anybody could have stolen from one of her stashes, but the real Poisoned Dragons’ loyalty wouldn’t be for sale and their exact style couldn’t be imitated. Not by martial arts rent-a-mooks, anyway.”
“Hmm,” Shadow said. “We can hope that’s all this is… somebody taking advantage of her absence by creating fake Dragons and a batch of old poison they stumbled across.”
“But you don’t think so,” Diana said.
“I don’t.”
“I don’t, either,” she said. “Opal’s ancestor… if she is a descendant of Jade… was obsessed with immortality, and by all accounts she came as close to reaching it as anybody. She never quite defeated death, but she found a lot of ways of cheating it.”
“Police are en route,” Shadow said, stepping backwards into the dark recesses of an empty storage unit. “You should be somewhere else.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine. We have an understanding.”
“Alrighty, then,” she said, and she headed out of the facility.
She took off her bird-beak domino mask when she hit the street, slipping it into her pocket. She didn’t maintain a secret identity, exactly… she wore the mask or didn’t depending on what sort of attention she wanted to attract at the moment. With it, she was a person of interest just for being within half a mile of a gangland shootout. Without it, she was just a woman out for a stroll.
Not that there were many people out on the street at the moment. Just some skinny old biker dude up by the corner, leaning a European-style racing bike up against a streetlight. He wore off-white leathers, the same color as his bike, and had a face like a cemetery angel: cold, hard, and made of marble.
Diana couldn’t get a read on him… he wasn’t moving enough for her to pick up any cues. He was, in fact, as close to standing completely motionless as she’d ever seen anybody. All the same, her internal badass-meter was going off the chart. The voice in the back of her head, the voice of instinct that warned her about danger, was strangely quiet. He was trouble, but not for her.
“Nice ride,” she said as she walked past him.
The man known to some as Dwight didn’t say anything. He didn’t have anything to say to her yet.
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