[SLTS]—❈—06:: Options

Sorry for the short chapter.

Won't happen again. I promise.

—❈——❈——❈—

Mom is surprised and appalled.

I’m a little disappointed and more than a little pissed off.

The only one among us who isn’t particularly bothered by the Shadow Stalker revelation is José, and I wonder if it’s because he’s just that jaded in general or if he’d somehow known this would happen. After all, he’s the one who’d insisted that I meet the wards before we sign anything.

“Did you know?” I ask him. “About Shadow Stalker?”

José shrugged. “Heard rumours. About how… rough she tended to be with criminals; Empire especially. Figured she just had history with them though. An angry kid dishing out justice to the assholes who messed up her life.”

“Instead, she turns out to be a garden variety whackjob,” Mom says.

“That The Protectorate freaking hired,” I add angrily, then sigh and sigh on the couch.

We’re home now, a trip that had taken ten seconds total since I’d made a portal straight from the PRT HQ downtown to our living room.

Careless? Maybe. But I couldn’t bring myself to spend another minute in that place after smelling Shadow Psycho.

“What do we do now?” Mom asks José.

“Now? We wait for their call,” José says.

“Their call?” Mom asks in surprise.

“Why?” I add. “So they can try to explain this away? Say how they didn’t know or something?”

“Kid, psychopaths have families too, and, in many cases, none of them ever suspect a thing,” José says.

I open my mouth to make a rebuttal, but then close it when I realize that I don’t in fact have any.

“Look, I gave you the opportunity to meet the wards so you could avoid office drama, not because I thought one of them is a whackjob, as your mother put it,” José says, then sits beside me on the couch with a slight grunt.

A hand reaches out to massage his left knee.

“You know, I could heal that for you,” I say.

“Yes, you could,” José agrees easily. “But your power also comes with cosmetic changes, and while your mother could get away with that, no one will miss it if I suddenly look twenty years younger.”

“Really, because I’m pretty sure most people think you’re a vampire by this point,” Mom teases.

I smile. “You could always just say it’s a super illegal tinker drug,” I point out, cheekily drawing back to his previous suspicion about Mom’s glow-up.

“Ha ha,” he says unamused.

“I don’t have to heal you all at once though,” I say seriously. “I could do it once a day, or once every few days, maybe even a week; smaller changes over time are easier to miss.”

José seems to consider it for a moment. “I’ll think about it,” he says finally.

I blink in surprise.

Why would anyone turn down free healing? I wonder. For one moment, I almost Smell him, but then I remember what happened the last time I did that, and I immediately temper the urge.

I don’t need to know his secrets so bad that I’ll subject myself to that much grief again.

“You really think The Protectorate will call?” Mom asks.

“Of course they’ll call,” José says. “They can’t afford not to.”

True to his words, they do call, about an hour or so later.

Within that time, we discuss my options.

I want to know what we can do now that it seems like the wards thing has fallen through.

José had advised patience; for us to wait and see what The PRT does first, before making any decisions, but he’d given it to me straight all the same.

According to him, I could try to sign up with some other government agency, which isn’t really appealing to me right now, or I could go the other way, and try out for one of those private, company-sponsored cape teams.

José had been very clear though; “If you think Protectorate heroes are useless, then you’re going to hate company capes. The Protectorate at least has to fight crime; company heroes exist to sell merch. And that’s before we get into all the shady shit that many of them get up to.”

Suffice to say, by the time Hannah calls, I’m well and truly disillusioned with the cape life.

Which is pretty ridiculous, because I was never enamored with it in the first place.

It’s maddening. It’s like the only ways one can exist as a cape in this world, is to put on a costume and either fight crime, pretend to fight crime, or commit crime.

I can’t even go and sign up at a hospital as a healer, because there are like a dozen bills preventing that; the only way I’ll be allowed to use my healing power is either to volunteer it for free like Panacea does, or to join The Wards.

And while I like helping people as much as the next guy, what idiot wants to work for free? We can barely make rent in this shitty apartment, for God’s sake.

Mom picks the call, and instead of Hannah’s voice, it’s a deeper, grouchier, but still female voice that we hear from the phone’s speaker.

“Hello, is this Musa and Mama Bear?” the voice asks.

“Yes, this is Mama Bear,” Mom says. “To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Director Emily Piggot of the PRT East-North-East; I would like to speak to Musa.”

I frown.

Mom looks at me; asking with her eyes if I want to speak with the Director. And isn’t that something? The director of the Brockton Bay PRT wanting to speak with me.

José is right, isn’t he? We really do have them by the balls.

“I’m here,” I say, leaning forward to make sure the phone’s mic catches my voice. “This is Musa.”

“Musa,” Director Piggot says, sounding like the words don’t quite agree with her, “first, let me extend my gratitude to you for bringing Shadow Stalker’s indiscretions to my attention…”

My eyebrow climbs, and the longer the woman speaks, the higher it does.

Holy shit. We don’t just have The Protectorate by the balls; we might as well be holding their puppy hostage by this point.