Chapter 8

It was a few more days before Hilde and I got the same day off and could head back to the castle. I mostly cooked, watched kaiju films, and slept. For some reason I was more tired than usual, which I guessed had something to do with almost being killed, finding out my mother was an assassin, and having my entire worldview upended in the space of a couple hours.

I was starting to regret my decision to join up, but I couldn’t leave Hilde alone with those lunatics, so by the time Hilde and I were ready to check out Whisper and give them a chance to wow us with their introduction package my nerves were running hot. They’d been nice enough at our first meeting, but after we got our feet in the door and received our vaccinations, how would their demeanor change? Would the sheep’s clothing finally fade and reveal their wolfish smiles?

I crawled out of bed early in the morning, splashed some water on my face and washed my hair in the sink to conserve water, then threw on some deodorant. Pop and Evie were already up and prepping the restaurant for the breakfast rush, so I had the tiny apartment to myself. I dragged on my black cargo pants and tactical boots, plus a sleeveless black Henley shirt and a couple of steel chains on my neck and wrists.

I also tucked a folding knife into my right boot just in case Whisper tried anything funny. After seeing their swords and guns I didn’t know what a knife would do, and I supposedly had the power to summon armor and swords at will… but what if all that turned against me and I had to defend Hilde from a fanatical cult of weirdos, you know? Better to be armed and embarrassed than unarmed and dead.

Blossom said inside my head.

“So you say.” She’d mostly left me alone since our big talk the other night, probably because there was nothing to kill. I wondered if she just took catnaps between murderfests. Then something occurred to me. “Is there a way for me to speak with you where others won’t hear me?”

I froze. “So, you just read my mind all the time?”

“Ever hear of privacy?”

I focused on making my words internal, aiming them at her.

I could easily picture her smug smile in my mind’s eye.

I headed downstairs and popped into the kitchen in time to see my dad firing up the stove. I tossed him a wave as I headed toward the back door to the alley, and he shot me a smile in return.

“Another hot date with Hilde?”

“You wish.”

“I do wish. Grandkids would be nice, Eddie, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Yeah, yeah, Pop. Don’t burn the place down while I’m out.”

“I’ll try, boy. Have fun.”

The stiff breeze caressed my masked face as I stepped out into the deserted alley. AvSec had taken their crime scene pictures and sent a cleanup crew to fix the place where I’d battled the ogre, but the sheet metal walls were still dented where we’d slammed into them, and the asphalt still bore cracked craters. I hurried by the spot where I’d sat bleeding to death. Being in the alley still made my skin crawl, but I’d have to get over it sooner or later since taking out the trash was part of my day job.

Hilde lived just a hop and a skip away from Atomic Eats, and I hurried there with a spring in my step. Seeing her always lifted my spirits. But then I thought about where we’d head afterward, into the den of nutjobs, and my steps slowed to a more somber walk.

Hilde lived in a little residential sector where folks generally did their best to keep their homes in the best condition they could. That didn’t mean much with the limited materials on hand. Avalon Corp couldn’t spare much in the way of building supplies, but they still let enough trickle through that anyone serious about home maintenance could keep their place looking neat.

That’s what made Hilde’s tiny one-story place stick out like a sore thumb: the windows were boarded up with plywood or wooden slats, the front yard was bare dirt with rusted scrap tossed around haphazardly, and the roof sagged in. I walked up on the front porch and had to leap to one side as rotted wood fell from overhead. The broken beams crashed on the groaning boards, and I half expected the porch to give way. The front door rattled unevenly in its frame when I knocked.

There was some rustling inside the door, like something heavy being shoved out of the way, and several locks clicked open. Hilde opened the door a crack and peeked through. When she saw me, she opened it just the tiniest bit more to smile at me.

A bitter smell wafted out through the crack.

“Good morning, Eddie. I’ll just be another second, okay?”

“No problem. Take all the time you need.”

She eased the door most of the way shut and I heard her footsteps retreat. Through the narrow crack I could see a bulging trash bag of alcohol bottles beside the door. Hilde had dragged them aside just to get the door open. That bitter smell, like a thousand buckets filled with stale urine, drifted from inside the house, and I almost gagged just standing on the front porch.

From somewhere inside the rundown shack came the sound of a history documentary playing on high volume. I recognized the Battle Hymn of the Republic dubstep remix from the Second American Civil War.

Blossom’s surprised whisper ran through my head.

Hilde’s footsteps returned. I did my best to wipe the grimace off my face, though the stink grew instantly worse as she opened the door. She rushed through and shut the door behind her as fast as she could, but I still caught sight of her dad slumped in his recliner, his beady eyes sullen and glazed in his stubbly face, a bottle of beer clutched tight in his fist as he stared vacantly at the television mounted to the wall.

Hilde clicked the door shut behind herself, then locked it with a tiny silver key which she slipped into her small blue purse. Today she wore a long royal blue dress bound with layered black belts across the waist and down the arms, with a long blue skirt covering tall black boots with more straps and silver buckles. She had the top of her honey-colored hair drawn back in a loose braid adorned with a blue flower on a silver clasp, and the rest of her hair hung loose like silky curtains behind her shoulders.

She favored me with a big smile which crinkled her eyes above her mask. Midcity folks get used to reading expressions without seeing the lower half of the face, and I knew her well enough to spot her phony smile from a mile off. Seeing her attempt to put on a brave face to cover the embarrassment I knew she felt just tore my heart. I turned to leave and, for her sake, did my best to pretend not to notice when another chunk of wood fell from the porch overhang and bounced off my shoulder.

Down on the sidewalk with the house behind us, Hilde clasped her hands in front of her. “Are we headed straight to the castle?”

“Pretty soon. First, why don’t you show me what you’ve done on your car?”

Her blue eyes lit up like fireworks. She hustled around the side of the house, turning back at the corner to make sure I was keeping up. When I rounded the side of the house I saw her tapping in a code on a keypad. It beeped, and a section of the sheet metal lifted up on hydraulics to reveal a garage separated from the rest of the house by another steel door. The garage was kept spotless, with racks of tools lining the walls on organized hooks.

In the center sat an antique red muscle car. The hovercar was far from complete. In fact, it looked like Hilde was still missing more than half the parts she needed to claim a finished vehicle. Still, she beamed as she swept inside and ran her fingers lovingly over the hood.

“She’s so close, I can almost taste it,” Hilde said with stars in her eyes. “I’ve been piecing together the inside lately. It’s tough to match everything to the original design. Avalon Corp didn’t make many of these Stalkers, and I’ve had to do a lot of the work myself by hand, but I’ve got her restored internally to nearly perfect factory design. The undercarriage has been a job and a half. I can’t find the stock lift generators anywhere, so I may have to pay a guy from District Thirty-One to custom build me the parts I’ll need.”

The blonde bombshell sighed as she gazed at her baby. “She’s so close.”

So close didn’t fit my view of the half-built hovercar, but I held my tongue. I treasured the times I got to watch Hilde talk shop about cars, even if I didn’t understand a word of it myself. I’d never ridden in a car before Mia and Kagura had abducted us. Hardly anyone in District Thirty-Two even made enough to rent a car, let alone buy one. I guess the closest we really got were the trash trucks which wove up and down our alleys, but they barely hovered a couple meters off the ground at best.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and strode into the garage. “How’s it looking under the hood?”

“Oh, like a dream.” Hilde pulled a key from her purse and opened the door, then popped the hood. She lifted it back and braced it up with a steel hook she lifted from inside, then leaned in to point at a shiny new part of the engine. “I finally had enough for the catalytic converter after my last paycheck, it only took me four months to save up for a spare from the junkyard. That was a real find, let me tell you. Almost had to fight another puller for it.” She grinned and clenched her fist in triumph. “But there was no way I’d let such a treasure slip out of my hands! I’d been waiting two years to find one of those.”

I surveyed the car. “It’s really coming together, bit by bit.”

“Thanks.” Hilde took out the brace and dropped the hood back into place, then relocked the car. “I can’t wait to get this thing flying.”

“This was your dad’s car, right?”

“Yeah. He bought it about fifteen years ago. I’d spend hours out here with him in the garage watching him fix it, until I got old enough to help. Well,” she laughed, “maybe I didn’t help as much as I think I did, but I did get to hold the tools, and he never got mad even when I got in the way. We had so much fun together.”

Her smile dimmed as her shoulders drooped, almost imperceptibly unless you knew her as well as I did. “Then Mom left, and he stopped working on the car. He stopped doing much of anything.”

The garage fell silent as she stood gazing at the hovercar with glazed eyes. I watched her, feeling like there must be something I could say but at a total loss for what that something might be.

Hilde shook herself out of her memories. “But when I get the car running, maybe he’ll see there’s some things worth sticking around for. Even if all you’ve got left is a worthless piece of junk.” She turned that fake smile on me again. It hurt to see, because I knew she wasn’t talking about the car at all, but I forced a smile right back.

“Yeah,” I said with as much fake conviction as I could muster, “maybe that’ll make him see.”

Hilde nodded, more to herself than to me. I strode out of the garage and she pressed the button to drop the door, hurrying out through the gap as it closed behind her. We walked back to the sidewalk and headed for the train station a few minutes away. The shantytown houses around us were in far better condition than her home, and the air smelled like clean sawdust from a few people out repairing their homes. Hilde waved to them as we walked.

Blossom asked.

I started at the blunt question, then glanced at Hilde’s profile as she walked along beside me in companionable silence.

Blossom’s voice dripped with smug attitude.

Hilde glanced questioningly at me, and I realized I had a severe expression on my face, so I smiled at her reassuringly.

Blossom reminded me.

I wanted to growl back at her but didn’t know how to articulate that mentally, so I shoved our conversation aside and focused on Hilde.

She caught my eye and raised her eyebrows. “Pretty crazy to think about how much has changed in just a few days, huh?”

I shrugged. “Still not really sure how to process it all, or even how much to believe.”

Hilde furrowed her eyebrows. “Have you made peace with joining Whisper? You seemed pretty on edge about them. I appreciate you joining with me, but I don’t want to drag you into something against your better judgment.”

“No, it’s not that,” I hastened to assure her, though it was exactly that.

She giggled behind her hand. “So what is it, then?”

“Well…” I cast about for an explanation and found one easily, far more easily than I’d expected. Like maybe I’d been thinking about it under the surface without realizing it. “I need to understand what they said about my mom.”

Hilde’s eyes widened, and she nodded. “I thought that might be it. That was quite a bomb they dropped on you. How have you been handling it?”

“I haven’t.” I blew out a breath and ran my hand back from my black hair. “I’ve just sort of put it to the side. How can I deal with something that big? ‘Your mom was a traveling assassin who killed magical monsters and lived a brutal and terrible lie, and we got her killed.’ Thanks guys, real helpful. Not like I’ve got enough on my plate with those goons trying to buy the restaurant.” I laughed bitterly. “Except, surprise! They’re linked. If Mom were here I guess she’d just wipe them all out with a machinegun or something. Did she use guns? Man, I don’t even know. There’s so much she hid from me.”

Hilde peered at me earnestly. “Are you mad at her?”

Her question took me by surprise, and I had to think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. She lied to us. I mean, I was a toddler so I can understand her not being able to explain it to me at that point. But what about Pop? I don’t think he knew. He doesn’t act like his family is part of some big magical conspiracy.”

“What if he just covers it really well?”

“What? You think he knows?”

“Well, you won’t know unless you ask him.”

“Oh, sure. I can hear it now. ’Hey Pop, on a scale of one to ten, how real would you say unicorns are? Do you know anyone who might hunt one for me?’”

“If he did, he’d probably grill it and serve it up.” She giggled again.

I smiled at her mirth, but I slid back toward sullen. “I don’t know how to feel toward my mom, or toward this group. They claim it meant a lot to her, that they were like family. That explains why they were so overly familiar and cavalier about taking us back to their place. They probably have this illusion that they already know all about me because they knew Mom. But if they’re asking me to follow in her footsteps, they’ve got the wrong offspring. Evie’s the one with the chip on her shoulder about recreating Mom’s style and flair, not me. I just want to live my life and take care of my family.”

“Sometimes it’s best to let your parental traits stay in the past,” Hilde muttered.

I glanced sidelong at her profile. The joy was gone from her face, and she wore a strained expression. She always got this way when she thought about her mom, and I kicked myself for pressing the conversation in such a direction. I cast about for a new topic that would be big enough to wipe out the previous one and didn’t have to look too far.

“How about you, Hilde? How’s it feel to be able to summon fire and barbecue your enemies at will? Feel like an all-powerful sorceress?”

“Hardly,” she laughed. The strain eased from her face.

“It’s weird for sure.” I thrust Blossom’s question aside to focus on Hilde’s words. “I don’t even know how I activated it, or how to make it happen again. One of the customers the other day talked for too long before eating and complained about their food getting cold. I tried to secretly warm up their plate again with some magic fire from my hands, but nothing came out. Maybe it’s just when I’m upset.”

“Remind me not to tease you too hard, then,” I said with a grin.

She smiled back, but it dimmed after a moment and she turned her eyes down. “I hate living with a part of me I have to be constantly on guard to stop from hurting people. That’s why I agreed to join Whisper, even more than for the vaccines. I need to learn to control this dangerous part of myself. It’s irresponsible to have a secret part of you that you don’t deal with, because it can lash out and hurt the people who need you most.”

“Hilde,” I said quietly. She looked up at me. “You’re not her, you know. You aren’t anything like—”

“Just leave it.” Her voice held just a hint of sharpened steel. It shocked me, and we walked the next few steps in silence.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“No problem. My fault for prodding.”

We were near the station, and the awkward silence stuck with us until we grabbed our tickets and stood on the outdoor concrete platform waiting for the train to arrive. As the train slid to a halt in front of us and Hilde started toward the doors with her head hanging low, I nudged her with my elbow. “So what’s the next part you need for your car?”

Her eyes lit up in a heartbeat, and as the train doors whooshed shut behind us and the train sped away toward the castle, Hilde was already chattering away about lift generators and all-leather interiors.