Emergence (44 page)

“Who the hell are you?”

“Okay, rude!” she said, curling her lip. “I’m Astarte. The Thrasher said you might need help. My team’s helping with cleanup so—”

“Cleanup?”

“Of Tantrum. He hurt Pecos and A-Frame pretty bad and, y’know, s’cuse the expression but P.O.N.E. got pone’d,” she said with an involuntary snort. She flitted around him like an excited pixie, surprisingly quick given her frame. “So my team stepped up and we beat him. We’re the California Girls! I’m Astarte!” she said brightly, then in a conspiratorial tone, she added: “Well, don’t tell Termagant I said it was
my
team, but…you know what I mean. So you’re Pan, right? Cool.”

“Pan, you almost killed this asshole!” the Thrasher yelled in his ear.

“That was the idea!” he said, glad at least to be talking to another adult.

“Uh…what?” Astarte asked, bemused.

Pan turned away and put his finger to his ear, but she simply floated around to face him.

“He killed Tink! And he’s the guy who set Tantrum off!”

“Who is?” the chubby warrior princess asked in confusion, and to his chagrin, she blew a pink bubble of gum and it popped over her lips.

“Look,” said Pan, as much to Astarte as to the Thrasher, “I left three chimerics down but not out in the Plaza and some kind of bomb in the security office on the thirtieth floor. I managed to freeze it, but I don’t know if it’s stable. The kids are out of the daycare and Aisha Cordell’s safe with a guy who’s hurt pretty bad. I’m out of here.”

“Where the hell are you going?” the Thrasher demanded.

“You’re leaving?” Astarte said, apparently disappointed.

“Don’t try to follow me,” he said to both of them and, digging the micro-transmitter out of his ear, he let it fall and soared off toward the coast as fast as he could go.

“You’re hot!” the girl in the armor yelled after him.

It was lost to the wind in his ears.

It was forty-five minutes to San Bernardo County from here by jet.

He was shooting for thirty-nine.

Hook was there.

Hook was Elton Ormond.

And Cassidy was with Elton Ormond.

That was the surprise Hook had planned for him.

EIGHTEEN

Cassidy Hollis was not the character she portrayed on
Capes
. She wasn’t strong, she had no powers. She liked playing Diana Hale because The Amazon was everything she was not. She made her living pretending to be a fearless hero. A warrior.

But she was a mess.

And she was a liar.

She had lived for years with a lie that wasn’t even her own. It had destroyed her, syphoned all the strength out of her over the years like a leech stuck to the small of her back where she couldn’t get at it.

No one alive knew it. Not the battery of therapists who had passed her about like a perplexing riddle, not the so-called friends whom she never saw anyway, not the succession of men and women she’d slept with in the years since the lie.

Only her father had known. It had been his lie, and he’d died for it.

Now she wanted desperately to tell someone. The person, she realized, she’d wanted to tell all along, and had necessarily abandoned all hope of ever seeing again.

Because she’d thought Jim was dead.

But he wasn’t dead. He was alive.

And suddenly there was hope to unburden herself again. The knot in her stomach which she’d tried to bury with years of lies and misdirection surged to the surface and demanded to be untied.

“There’s something you’re not sharing, Cassidy. And until you tell someone what it is, nothing’s going to change for you,” the last therapist had said, before remanding her fucked-up life to the custody of another whom she hadn’t bothered seeing.

Jim was Pan.

Pan was a hero.

She had seen what he could do now, on television, but more, on the bank of screens Elton Ormond had planted himself in front of after drugging her and killing Paul Thurbee, Jolene, Ben Withers, and Scott Furley, the showrunner of
Capes.

He had invited them all to wait out the Tantrum thing here at Second Star, sat them all down to dinner at the biggest table she’d ever seen, excused himself to take a phone call, then come back out with some kind of weird gold and silver thing on his arm.

A thing that ended in a sharp silver hook.

“I apologize to all of you,” he said, walking behind Jolene. “But I just don’t have the time to entertain.”

Then he’d yanked back Jolene’s hair and run the hook under her chin, spraying her dish of chicken parm in blood.

He’d reached over and jammed the hook into the top of Paul Thurbee’s head next. The sound had been a dull, hollow sounding
thunk
, like a ripe watermelon being tested in the produce section.

Ben Withers had gotten out of his chair while Elton Ormond put a foot on Paul’s shoulder to pull his hook free.

He was the only one who tried to do anything. He picked up a table knife and tried to stab Ormond, but the singer had batted his hand away with the metal arm and then run him through with a sword he seemed to bring out of nowhere.

She’d seen the tip go into Ben’s stomach shining silver and when it sprang from his back it was red with blood, dripping like the hook in his other hand.

Scott Furley had just sat there with his wine glass still in hand, covered in Jolene’s blood. He’d begun to cry.

She didn’t see what happened to him, but she heard him scream as she ran from the room.

The house was huge. Just getting to the front door took forever and she made a wrong turn once, then felt dizzy. She tried to navigate a doorway and struck her shoulder on the edge of the frame so hard she spun and fell to the cold tiled floor.

It seemed to take a monumental effort to push up off the tiles. Her head weighed forty pounds and she could only arch her back and whine pitifully before blacking out.

He’d put something in her drink he hadn’t put in the others’.

And they were all dead. The main cast of
Capes
and the showrunner, killed all at once.

Like he’d killed the cast and crew of
Peter `N Wendy
, all those years ago.

She knew that now.

He was the reason her father had told the lie. To protect her.

She’d woken up tied securely to an antique chair.

Ormond had undressed her while she slept, changed her clothes. What else had he done? She didn’t want to think about that.

She woke up wearing a light blue chiffon nightgown, much too small for her. It was made for a child.

It had been hers.

The costume she’d worn in the pilot of
Peter `N Wendy
. The chiffon nightgown of Wendy Darling.

Her hair was done as it had been then, girlishly bound into locks all tied up with a blue silk ribbon.

Her feet hurt. They were crammed into the same old pair of slippers.

He had remade her, from Diana Hale ‘the Amazon’ back to Wendy Darling.

They were in a room she hadn’t seen before, a room with a wall of television screens and a console.

He was sitting in a high-backed chair with his back to her, watching the screens, which seemed to be security feeds, but not from anywhere at Second Star. They were from an office building. She’d been there before, recognized the lobby. It was Vulpes Plaza.

“Oh my God…,” she’d sobbed. ““What are you doing, Elton?”

“Captain,” he’d insisted, not turning around. He was wearing some bulky suit underneath a rich, red velvet, frock coat.

On the console there was some kind of mannequin’s head, or a helmet. It was silver and gold and leering, with empty eyes and a wicked, symmetrical silver smile bridged by a sharp, golden mustache. It had silver, sculpted ears hung with golden hoops. The helmet had a mass of springy golden mesh coils, like steel wool, running down the back. It looked like a head of long hair. Perched atop the helmet was a rakishly tilted, wide brimmed red pirate’s hat with a gold feather.

“What?”

He’d held up his hand. The right hand. Except it was the hook. Clean of blood now.

“Wendy Darling, I must ask you not to speak anymore. Watch. Listen. We shall see how your young hero does.”

And that’s what she’d been doing for the past couple hours.

Watching Jim. Watching Pan.

Watching him fight his way through the lobby against the girl with water powers, through the Japanese restaurant against that sick bastard Handley from the news.

Watching him save the kids.

Watching Jim be a hero.

The hero she had never been.

Her heart broke at every wound he took. She sobbed every time he fell. But he just kept getting up. He just kept going.

Her mind went to their last meeting, when she’d told him how strange it all was, that he was back, when what she really wanted to tell him was the truth about her father’s lie.

He wasn’t a kid. He wasn’t. He just looked like a boy.

But no fairytale boy could do the things he did.

He was a hero.

How could she ever make up for how she’d made him feel?

She’d listened to Elton mock him, direct him like a puppet over a headset mic, and she’d smiled every time Pan had come out on top.

But Elton wasn’t angry. He’d smiled, too.

A few times, he’d even clapped in boyish delight, like when Jim had decapitated the speedster. He’d laughed out loud at that.

Sick
.

Then, when the cameras had gone dark in the studio while Snow Bunny and the fire guy had been fighting, he’d gotten up from the chair and taken off the headset.

He was wearing a full suit of gold and silver armor underneath the coat. It made him taller, and, she suspected, stronger.

He smiled at her, a wild look in his eye, as he lifted the strange helmet from the console. He moved toward her.

“Come, Wendy. It’s Hook or Pan this time.”

#

Pan glided in silently over the pitch black hills, keeping the coast to his left until he passed Santa Barbaros, then he followed the ribbon of the 154 inland.

The Second Star Ranch wasn’t hard to find.

Occupying 3,000 remote acres in a little valley ringed in evergreen trees, he spotted it miles before he arrived. It was lit up like a summer carnival, like a dream city constructed of light, an illumined oasis in a desert of night. The Ferris wheel was turning and flashing gay-colored lights; a small, unmanned steam engine was clacking along its glowing track in tireless circumference of the massive grounds; and the arcade was all aglow in brash defiance of the gravity of Pan’s arrival. Gravel paths lined with cavorting bronze statues wound through the tree-lined property, and a big JumboTron screen on the east end was flashing 52-foot-high cartoon characters to an empty picnic field, making them terrible to behold.

There was music playing. He could hear it as he descended, echoing through the little valley from what must have been a myriad of hidden speakers.

It was
Peter `N Wendy’s Theme.
Looping over and over again.

He came in low, and perched on the star-capped grand arched iron gate separating Second Star from the rest of the world, with its golden lions and the big crest inscribed with
Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense
(“Evil to him who evil thinks”) and
Deiu et mon droit
.

God and my right.

Right hand? Divine right? Did Elton Ormond think his money earned him the right to do whatever the hell he wanted?

Enraged, Pan wrenched the top off an adjoining lamppost and flung it at the crest. It did nothing but make a lot of noise. Not that anything could be heard over the blaring, sweeping music.

He sprang from the gate and launched himself low along the gravel path toward the house, dodging through willows and evergreens.

The golden statues, each with its own light, were all of children. Playing flutes, dancing, picking flowers, girls and boys. All in a line, like the children of the Pied Piper. He thought of how Ormond had portrayed himself over the years, as a philanthropist, a humanist, he remembered all the music videos of Ormond interacting with children, holding them, leading them in dance.

It sickened him.

He made for the main house, a large Tudor-style affair.

Before the front door was a sprawling, intricate garden of multi-colored flowers, arranged so as to portray a Mercury-like figure captured in mid-spring across a starry night sky.

It was Peter Pan.

Standing before the garden on a little dais was a tall statue of Peter Pan, fists on his hips, feet apart and confident, a smile on his face.

Jim’s face.

It was his own face. The statue had been modeled after some publicity shot of him from the show.

He flew to the thick oak door and smashed through it with both fists.

He zipped down the tiled hallway, which was decorated with painted portraits of Elton Ormond in various ludicrous regalia; a decorated generalissimo’s uniform, an ermine robe, an Elizabethan monarch replete with glittering emperor’s crown, and tellingly, a red-coated pirate.

He passed through a living room cluttered with platinum albums and awards, a crowded first edition, ladder-accessed library out of a Frankenstein movie, and through a kitchen big enough for a school cafeteria.

Then he found the dining room and his heart seized up in his chest.

Three bodies lay strewn about the table. He recognized one as Paul Thurbee, one of the actors from
Capes.
Beside him was the corpse of a woman, face down in a dinner plate that was brimming over with blood.

His heart shook as if electrified.

He went to her and gingerly lifted her head with his fingertips.

She looked familiar, but under all that red and dripping with what seemed to be some kind of pasta, he couldn’t tell who she was.

He was sure she wasn’t Cassidy, though. Cassidy had dark hair and this woman was blonde.

He continued through the house.

Bedrooms, bathrooms, a video game arcade, a home theater, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, every room cluttered with strange knickknacks that offered an unbidden glimpse into the brain of the owner. Everywhere the trappings of childhood; remembrances of Ormond’s past, or a spider’s bait to catch little flies?