CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR

Taken, Part 1

Sweat dripped down Sam’s brow as he sat up. It coated his back too. As if he’d been the one fighting with the Trickster during that strange dream.

“Sam?” Thunder called groggily.

He didn’t reply because he couldn’t hear her. The only thing Sam could hear at that very moment was the sound of his rapidly beating heart. It wasn’t until she sat up and wrapped her arms around his waist that he even remembered that he’d slept in her bed again.

“What’s wrong?” Thunder asked.

“I think…” Sam sighed. “I think something’s happened to Crow-Man.”

“Crow-Man?” A second after she repeated his name, Thunder’s arms around Sam slackened. “It wasn’t Crow-Man’s name I heard you shout, Sam…”

As he glanced sideways at her, Sam noticed the guilt in Thunder’s expression. “You know… since when?”

“Since my debut,” she admitted with a sigh. “Marcus and my cousin have been friends for a long time, and he helped Superion look out for me in my freshman year.”

Thunder pressed her cheek against Sam’s cheek.

“I couldn’t tell you because it wasn’t my secret to tell,” she reasoned.

Sam kissed Thunder as if to show that he wasn’t mad.

“I get it,” he said, offering her a wan smile.

“You had another weird dream, didn’t you?” she guessed. “That’s how you found out Crow-Man’s secret.”

Sam was aware that a hero’s dreams weren’t just normal dreams at times because the dreamscape was often the place where gods met with their chosen mortals. It was also the space where the Fates sometimes sent messages or portents of possibility to heroes to help them on their missions. This was the feeling Sam had at that moment, the possibility that his friend, Marcus Flint, AKA Crow-Man, was now in terrible danger.

“What happened in your dream?” Thunder asked.

“The Trickster attacked Crow-Man in his home,” Sam said.

He explained his dream to her in vivid detail, and she waited for him to finish before she freaked out about the part where the Trickster claimed he was taking Crow-Man to a sorceress.

“It has to be Medea,” Thunder deduced. “There aren’t that many evil annoying sorceresses alive today, right?”

“Um, Cerce, Calypso, Morgana Le Fay, Mel Laveau,” he enumerated, prompting Thunder to smack him in the shoulder out of annoyance.

“You know what I mean,” she sighed.

“Just providing a bit of levity to a very bad situation that I’m seriously worried about,” Sam promised.

His phone began to ring, and when he picked it up, Sam heard a familiar voice telling him to suit up.

“The Trickster took Crow-Man,” Farsight reported. “We’re in deep trouble.”

The Argo VII picked them up outside Thunder’s Manhattan residence, although it looked nothing like the war machine that they were introduced to in Mr. Marsday’s garage the previous afternoon. Its treads had been replaced by a set of regular tires, while the propellers attached to its rear were missing too.

When Sam asked her about it, Farsight explained that the Argo VII could disguise itself to look just like a regular school whenever they were cruising through a city.

As usual, she was the Argo VII’s designated driver, with Dr. Hearthstone sitting on the navigator’s chair to the right of the Argo VII’s cockpit.

He greeted Sam and Thunder with a fresh tumbler of his specially brewed coffee and directed them to take a seat in one of the empty stations of what he called the Argo VII’s new and improved ‘bridge’ front compartment.

“This feels more like a war machine than the old version,” Sam noted as he took his seat in the station labeled TACTICAL.

The monitors wrapped around his station displayed information on the Argo VII’s new security features, including a newly-improved javelin system as well as an updated Archimedes Mirror, which, according to the information he just skimmed through, could now store energy in the newly-installed solar batteries so that they could fire their death ray even in the underworld where the sun can’t reach.

“Holy Zeus,” Sam whistled. “Mr. Marsday thought of everything, didn’t he?”

“Tell me about it,” Farsight chuckled. “This baby’s got a tractor beam now.”

Sam glanced sideways to Thunder’s station which had the label COMMUNICATIONS scrawled on a plaque above her seat. The display monitors around her chair were a variety of sensors and radar that wouldn’t be uncommon in a Navy warship’s CIC.

Thunder had put on a headset and was listening intently to the chatter on the other side of it while sipping on a cup of Dr. Hearthstone’s coffee.

“Ash, you might want to cut into Broadway on our way to Fifth Avenue. We can avoid the NYPD’s patrol that way,” Thunder reported.

“What do you hear?” Dr. Hearthstone asked.

“The police are already there, and they’ve already blocked out a portion of the avenue,” Thunder explained.

“Seriously?” Sam frowned. “That was quick…”

He didn’t want to have to tangle with the NYPD over jurisdiction issues when they were in a hurry to find clues that could help determine where the Trickster was taking Crow-Man.

“I’d be more surprised if they didn’t respond right away when someone blew up the top of Flint Consolidated,” Farsight chimed in. “Don’t worry, Sam. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Sam was far too worried about Crow-Man to feel anxious about Farsight’s usual brand of reckless driving. Luckily, the city’s four AM traffic wasn’t as bad. Meanwhile, Sam, with Farsight’s help, recounted the vision he’d seen to Dr. Hearthstone while leaving out the part that Crow-Man and Marcus Flint were the same people. He also found it interesting that his vision was far more vivid than the flashes of images that Farsight recounted for everyone. The one difference in their recounting was how the young seer had seen the Trickster’s arrival on the roof via a paragliding suit before the explosion he’d made with, as Sam had guessed, a freaking RPG.

“Do you usually have visions that put you right into the thick of things?” Dr. Hearthstone asked.

Sam shook his head. “I don’t have that many visions… but this one was different from the ones Apollo usually gives me.”

“Do you think he sent you this vision too?” Thunder asked.

Sam shrugged. “He is the god of prophecy, so maybe… He usually shows up in the middle of them though, so I’m not so sure.”

“Well, if it wasn’t Apollo, then another god’s found a way to hijack your dreams,” Farsight supplied.

Sam wasn’t sure that was a good thing either, and the thought of having to deal with another troublesome god interfering with his life made him even more anxious.

Dr. Hearthstone, a former heart surgeon and medical practitioner himself, noticed the anxiety in Sam’s expression and encouraged him to drink his coffee, promising its calming effects would help Sam cope with the unpleasantness of recent events.

ALERT! [Dr. Hearthstone’s Special Coffee Blend] has invigorated your body, lessening your fatigue from [45%] to [10%].

“Thanks, doc,” Sam said.

“You’re our main healer, Sam, but don’t forget that you need to take care of yourself too,” Dr. Hearthstone smiled. It was a smile that quickly morphed into a frown however when the doc asked a question no one could answer. “How did the Trickster know that Crow-Man would be at Marcus Flint’s home?”

Sam and Thunder glanced awkwardly at each other.

“I don’t know,” was Sam’s reply as he didn’t want to expose Crow-Man’s civilian identity to anyone else. Not even someone as chivalrous and trustworthy as their veteran teammate.

“Marcus Flint wasn’t in your vision, right?” Dr. Hearthstone confirmed.

Sam hated lying to his friend, but he nodded. “I don’t think he was home…”

He knew the doc would understand just like Sam understood it when he realized Thunder had known the truth about Crow-Man’s identity first. However, he couldn’t help feeling guilty about this white lie because that was just the kind of guy Sam was. It was a guilt that would follow him even as the Argo VII parked at a side alley a good twenty yards away from where the NYPD cordoned off Fifth Avenue.

It was standard practice for heroes to arrive in uniform whenever they arrived at a crime scene so that local law enforcement would know they were there in an official capacity. That didn’t mean the NYPD appreciated the heroes’ interference in an active crime scene either. Especially not when they arrived on the scene without prior notice or when they weren’t called on to assist with any ongoing investigation.

Luckily, Sam and his friends were high profile enough that the NYPD officers guarding the barricades that kept civilians away from the Flint Consolidated tower’s front door didn’t deny them entry.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Thunder said, offering the two NYPD officers a smile that caused them both to blush.

“That’s why we put her in front of our formation,” Farsight whispered into Sam’s ear.

When he stepped past the barricade—taking note of how the two officers who’d blushed at Thunder were eyeing him enviously—Sam glanced up. Even from street level, he could see the plume of smoke near the top of the skyscraper illuminated by the lights of an NYPD helicopter.

“Styx…” Sam breathed. “I half-hoped it was just a nightmare…”

“When were we ever that lucky?” Farsight replied.

Sam sighed. “Right… it's always one thing after another... but after Maeve, I didn't think we'd lose anyone else.”