We're pitched onto the pavement of the hospital parking lot, and when my feet hit the ground I find myself stumbling. Taylor grabs my arm and pulls it over her shoulders to lift me back to my feet. My stomach is hurting worse now, and as much as it kills me to admit it it would be nice to have a few shots of painkillers right at this moment.
"Did Ivory not work with you on your smooth landings, kiddo?" Tate grunts. "You're like a teenager learning how to drive- stomping on the brakes." However, there's relief visible on his pale face.
"Let's get her inside," Sebastian snaps. I try to slither out from Taylor's grip, feeling dread in my stomach at the prospect of having to eventually tell her the truth, but my legs falter as another bolt of fiery pain trembles through my midsection. Sebastian starts toward me, mouth open to say something, but Taylor stops him with a glare.
"I've got her, cowboy," Taylor tells the hacker in a frigid tone. Without even a warning, she swoops me off my feet and has me curled in her arms bridal-style, like I'm some pathetic victim she's just rescued who is too weak to stand on her own. Her arms are firm and unrelenting but gentle at the same time, like she's afraid to hurt me. God.
"Put me down! I'm not a cripple or some shit, ok?" I squirm in her grip but she just looks down at me with amused amber eyes.
"You're not going anywhere. I have answers I need from you," she says with an off-handed kind of laughter in her voice.
"You seem rather jolly for the woman we just rescued from her creeper ex-flame who endured who knows what kind of shit from him," I accuse. Her expression sobers instantly, and Dominic glances up at her with those doughy hazel eyes.
"I'll deal with that emotional crap later and preferably not in the presence of my son. In the meantime, I'd like some answers and I'd like them now. I can't have my only source of information at the moment to be bleeding out, so let's please stop stalling and just go inside already. Does that sound good to you all?" She grins a brilliantly fake smile and when nobody says anything she takes off marching towards the entrance with me in her arms. I can't help but think how if she knew what I was about to tell her, she wouldn't be carrying me to someone who could save my life- she'd be finishing what that sniper started. It'd be a pity if they wasted all of this worry on me only to discover that there wasn't much worth saving in the first place.
"Is there a Greg, male nurse, that works in here?" Taylor barks as she charges through the automatic sliding doors and startles the sleepy-looking receptionist at the front.
"Is she-"
"Get Greg!" Her eyes brighten dangerously and the receptionist scrambles for the smooth black phone at his desk. He punches in a few numbers and holds the receiver to his ear.
"Hello, yes. This is the front desk. Is Greg Johnston there? We have a female patient literally just brought in, early twenties- what looks like a... bullet wound? To the stomach. They were asking for a Greg, so I thought... Oh, you're familiar with her? Well, I'll send her up to you." The receptionist pauses when he sees the rest of our posse enter in through the hospital's doors. "Just a warning- she's got some friends. Do we need to call security?" Please don't call security, Greg. Please don't call security... "Ok. Well... I'll let them know."
I hold my breath as the receptionist sets the phone back down- which isn't hard, considering it's a bit hard to draw air into my lungs anyway- and I can feel Taylor's skin growing warmer as her irritation grows.
"He's up in Surgical, room 224. Second floor. There's an elevator to your left," the receptionist explains awkwardly, his eyes switching between our group. "I'm assuming there's something weird going on here, but I just want you to know if you're looking for trouble..." His hand stays close to his phone, his fingers splaying close to the numbers like a threat.
"Yeah, we get it." Taylor huffs impatiently and stomps past, making a sharp turn down a wide, brightly lit hallway to our left. A set of elevator doors stand at the end of the hall. She vigorously punches the up arrow with her glowing index finger and waits for the silver steel doors to slide open. Tate and Sebastian guide a weary Dominic behind us, looking about as awkward as looking over the six year old as I am with being held in Taylor's arms.
When the doors finally open, we bustle through into the tiny carpeted square and wait in a tense silence as we crawl upwards. We all burst right out when we finally make it onto the second floor. We're intercepted by a pissed-off Greg, his unruly flop of sandy hair doing nothing to hide the suspicion in his grey-blue eyes. When he sees me, his eyebrows shoot up a few inches.
"It's you," he breathes, his shoulders tensing. "Faith. Or not Faith." He slowly looks at the rest of my posse, his eyes sparking with shock when his eyes land on Dominic. "Holy shit, that's the kid..."
"Listen, she's kind of bleeding out right now, so if we could address that first that would be great, ok?" Taylor hisses. Greg nods cautiously and backs up, silently leading us down the white-painted corridor. A few pairs of eyes watch us on our trek down the halls, staring at the bedraggled, bloodied crew of costumed weirdos.
"Through here," Greg murmurs, pushing a nondescript door open with his hip and flicking on the light switch. It's like any other ordinary hospital room, with a stereotypical white cot in the middle with metal guardrails, and a depressingly blue armchair in the corner of the room in front of a heavily-curtained window. Taylor walks over to the bed and eases me down onto the thin white mattress, surprisingly gentle despite the twitching fire in her eyes. Taylor steps back to let Greg investigate. His face immediately retains a blank, professional expression as he bends down to investigate the wound.
"This doesn't look like a bullet wound..." he mumbles to himself, drawing up the hem of my hoodie with a hand to further investigate the wound. My cheeks flush when I see Tate and Sebastian watching. I don't need them watching as my wound is treated and I lay there like some stupid damsel in distress.
"Get out," Taylor barks to them both when she sees the embarrassment in my face. I open my mouth to protest, but they both retreat out the door with Dominic in tow before I can say a single word. The superheroine then turns back to me and folds her arms over her chest.
"It's an arrow," I tell Greg offhandedly. He pulls the hoodie hem all of the way up, exposing my stomach completely. The wound looks more awful than I imagined it to be- and I have a pretty gruesome imagination. He walks over to a skinny white door kitty-corner to the windows and reveals a closet stocked with various medical supplies. He runs a finger over the labels of a few liquid-filled containers before drawing out one I recognize as hydrogen peroxide. He also grabs a container of cotton balls before joining me at my bedside once more. I watch as he dunks a cotton ball in the peroxide and dabs it at the wound, cleaning up the horror-movie-worthy blood-drenched hole in my skin. I clench my teeth and brace myself for the sting I know to come. Been there, done that.
"So, you're here. I'm saving your life- again. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't call security on you and your pals. Oh, and Faith, did I mention you have a resurrected kid in your possession? Because you totally do," he says with deadpan as he continues to treat my wound. "I saw him get shot in the head. On live television. Then you proceeded to freak the shit out."
Taylor frowns and looks at me with questions in her eyes. I study my blood-coated hands instead.
"He's not dead," I explain softly. "And my name isn't Faith." Greg snorts with satisfaction, his hands prodding at my wound with a cold efficiency.
"Who are you, then?" Taylor asks this time, her brow furrowed. "You saved my son and I, and I couldn't thank you enough for that-- but I can't help but wonder if you're hiding something besides your identity as the Guardian Angel," she says. "What was Gia going to say back there? Why does she know you, anyway? How did you get those bruises on your face that one day when you and I talked outside the bar?"
"Wait a minute- you're the Guardian Angel? Goddamn it, I knew something was up," Greg curses himself. I hiss in pain when he presses a little too hard on the ruptured flesh of the arrow wound.
"It's a long story..." I protest, feeling dread settle in my stomach. Taylor's face doesn't change.
"You have nothing but time, sweetheart. We're going to be here for a while." To accentuate her point, she walks over and settles in the armchair at the corner of the room. Her eyes don't leave me the entire time, unblinking. I wonder once again how she's looking so carefully put-together right now. Looking at her, you wouldn't think we just saved her from the hold of her psycho ex-lover. Who knew what Ivory did to her then? I think of the super, Elixir, that Ivory employed to essentially drug Taylor- how dead she looked when I first saw her outside of Giorgi's.
But right now, she only looks angry. She's looked angry since we saved her. Her eyes are more red than amber, her skin rippling with a heated glow. She looks fit to kill someone right now, and God help whoever is at the brunt of her rage. I won't have it be me.
"My name isn't Faith... It's Maya. Maya Waterman. I used to go by another name, too." I fiddle with my cuticles, thinking I'd rather take a thousand arrows rather than have to tell this story. "I used to be super-villain... I called myself Eris."
Cue the dramatic gasps of shock and rage. Taylor's skin flares so hot that the armchair she's seated in starts to smoke.
"You'll set off the smoke detectors!" Greg snaps at Taylor. Her skin is reduced to a mere faint glow again, but her eyes still burn with a deadly rage directed at yours truly. Greg also joins her, although his is more a look of curiosity rather than murderous rage.
"I didn't pretend to kill your son," I tell Taylor quickly, before she makes to turn me into a burning heap of skin and tattered superhero costume. "I did kidnap him for Reggie, yes, but I actually tried to save him once I realized what Reggie had in store for him. However, Reggie sent his goons after me when I tried to escape with Dominic, and when I woke up he was gone. I figured out later that he had manifested his abilities and teleported right before the car crashed, and Ivory then found him. It was after I kidnapped Dominic, before the car crash, that you found me in Giorgi's parking lot that one day. I had no idea he was your son. Reggie wouldn't tell me who he was. I was such an idiot- I followed him blindly. Then you tried to basically kill me... after, in the bar, is when I saw you in my civilian form. That's why my face was bruised- because you were the one who hit me." I clear my throat, still not looking up at their faces- not wanting to see their hatred and disgust. "After they tried to torture me for information about Dominic's whereabouts, they deposited me on the streets. That's when you found me, Greg- and you know how it goes from there." I look at Taylor now. "Reggie dumped me and took away everything I had. I was at a low point for a while, but I was rescued by an old friend and his boyfriend. They took care of me, helped me get better. It made me realize how much of an idiot I had been, being a super-villain. I wanted to be better than that. When I connected the dots and found out that Dominic was alive, I started to investigate into his whereabouts. I found out about Ivory with the help of Bloodhound, the mercenary. I used your sister to warn you. Oh, and I became a superhero. That basically leads up to now. Any questions?" I still don't look up. There are hot tears caught in my lower lashes, threatening to spill out onto my pale cheeks, and I curse myself for them.
"You became good... because of my son?" Taylor's voice is close, and I startle a little when I look up to find that she's right in front of me, her amber eyes startlingly intense. I can't read her face. It scares me. I don't know if she wants to kill me or talk to me. Greg's busying himself with applying a layer of gauze to the arrow wound, but it's hard to miss the incredulousness in his face.
"Is that hard to believe? I mean, have you listened to him?" I laugh softly, wiping a hand at my eyes that keep welling up. "He's something else."
"He is," Taylor says in a monotone. Her eyebrows are drawn together, her lips pursed, her whole face in a conflict with itself. She can't tell what to make of my story. She has two halves of me- the Guardian Angel who rescued her son, and the super-villain who made her life a living hell. She just has to decide if she believes that I've left the evil in me behind. I could be quiet, let her make a decision in peace, but of course I don't. Like I said before, helpless just isn't my color.
"I never really hated you when you were Crimson. I think I just managed to convince myself that I did. I hated what you stood for. You were pretty and popular and a good guy. You stood up for yourself and wore a slutty costume like you didn't care what people thought of you. I guess I was jealous. I took out my own little issues on you, made my feud with you into a name for myself. I became Eris- Crimson's enemy. I guess I liked that?" I bury my hands in my mouth and draw in a shuddering breath. "God, I was such an idiot. I mean, look at you. How could I have ever thought that I could have competed with you? You're so... you're so goddamn put-together. You just went through things I don't even want to think about, but you just say 'whatever' and go and help somebody else." Taylor surprises me by giving a little bitter laugh,
"Trust me, I'd like nothing more than to collapse into sobs of self-pity and have a few dozen beers to try and forget for a few hours at least what that piece of shit did to me. If it was up to me, I'd barely be lucid right now. But I have to stay together for Dominic. My son. Who wouldn't be alive right now if it weren't for you," she tells me.
"It's because of me that all of this happened in the first place," I protest. "If I hadn't kidnapped Dominic in the first place..."
"Then Reggie would have hired someone else to have done it. And they would've followed through with killing him," she finishes for me. "I know Reggie. I know how he treats his little army. They're replaceable. Malleable. I also know how he far he'll go to keep them in line. I have no doubt you have some sad backstory that made you want to become a villain in the first place, but what really matters is that you overcame that and saved us both, even risking your life for us. You became a superhero, for God's sake."
"Why are you forgiving me?"
"I'm not. Not entirely, at least. It'll take me a while. But I think I can understand, at least. In the end, both my son and I are alive, and that is why you're still breathing right now." She taps her fingernail on my bedrail. "Plus, you killed Ivory. So, bonus points." I laugh but it hurts my stomach so I end up wincing instead. Greg finishes bandaging the hole and pulls my sweatshirt back down over my exposed stomach. She looks lost in thought for a moment or two before her eyes sharpen once more. "A serpent, huh?"
"I have a pet snake," I say by way of explanation. "Her name is Delores." Taylor studies my face to see if I'm lying and eventually laughs a little to herself when she seems that I am not. That's when I really realize how lucky I am. I thought I was alone all this time, but I look back and I realize that not only have I become a superhero, but I've made some friends along the way. Actual friends. Not friends who end up literally stabbing you in the back. I have Ollie and Dave, Tate and Bloodhound, and yes... even Sebastian. And now even the woman I used to call my mortal enemy is willing to speak with me even after knowing who I used to be? I make what the contestants on The Biggest Loser go through look like the lamest transformation ever. I think I know what would be icing on the metaphorical cake...
YOU ARE READING
Super?
Adventure"Stop pretending to be an idiot, idiot." Ouch. It burns. "You're starting to sound like a dear old friend of mine," she adds, her tone implying that her "friend" isn't so much of a "friend" as a mortal enemy who she probably also dragged into an all...
