The night was just taking on a biting chill when Katerina Barton zipped up her pack and slung it over one shoulder. She could hear her dad in the other room trying and failing to fall asleep, but knew that he wouldn't investigate any sounds she made; in the week since Mom's funeral he's turned into a zombie, which suited Kate's needs just fine. That made it easier to slip out, even if there was one final strand still trying to hold her back.
Creeping light-footed and sure down the hall, knowing which boards to avoid stepping on, Kate pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and sat on the edge of the bed inside. "You be good," she whispered to the dark shape under the covers. "Take care of Dad for me. Love you, kid." A lump formed in her throat, so she didn't lean down to kiss her brother's forehead goodbye; if she let herself curl around the boy then she would never rise again. Not to mention it would risk waking him, and he would definitely raise some kind of alarm.
Smooth and silent as a shadow, boots clutched in one sweaty hand, Katerina just reached the front door when a light switched on behind her.
Shit. She forgot about Bruce.
Bruce Banner, one of her dad's oldest friends and her kid brother's godfather, had offered to stay with them and help out after the fire. He'd been camped out on the lumpy couch in the front room, back creaking in protest, for over a week, but somehow Kate forgot about him. There was just something about him that made him easy to forget.
"Where are you going at this hour?" he rasped, lamplight catching the silver at his temples. A glass of water sat in knobby fingers that used to push her on the swings until she felt like she could fly.
Kate set her jaw in the way everyone said made her look like Dad. "I'm not a gullible little kid anymore," she blurted out, heat creeping instantly up her neck. "A fire doesn't just happen in one room of the house, kill someone, and then stop on its own. I'm gonna go see Uncle Tony and maybe he'll actually tell the truth."
"Kate-"
"No," she snapped, keeping her tone quiet but hard. Just as it did every time she was faced with confrontation, her throat constricted and eyes burned with tears, but she wasn't going to cry. "I'm twenty years old, Uncle Bruce, and my mom just died, and no one wants to tell me why, so I'm gonna go find out. Okay? Can you deal with that?"
There was a stretch of quiet that felt like it lasted years before Bruce sighed in defeat. He put down his water, opened his battered duffel bag, and offered something out to her. "You know how to use one of these?" he asked somberly.
She gaped. "Why'd you bring a gun?" she whispered, voice pitching higher in surprise.
"Kate. Do you know how to use one of these?" repeated Bruce, urging the gun into her hand. Bony knuckles brushed hers, the callouses familiar. Only when he gripped her shoulder did she nod. Mom taught her how to shoot a gun - Dad a bow - when she was fifteen. It was going to be her kid brother's turn next year. "Good. Because...your dad is going to kill me for telling you this, but...you're right. I can't give you the answers, and if you're going looking for them then you're going to need to protect yourself. Don't be afraid to use this, understand? You're a grown woman, now, and you should be trusted with this, but you're gong to find more than you bargained for, Kate."
"What the hell-?"
He silenced her with a kiss on her forehead. "Stay safe. Don't trust anyone; watch their eyes," he whispered. There was a sound at the top of the stairs and Bruce's eyes flickered strangely. Silent, he urged her out of the front door onto damp grass in her stocking feet. Kate could hear him talking fast but couldn't make out the words.
In trembling hands Kate checked that the gun's safety was engaged, still wondering why BRuce thought the weapon was necessary to offer his support toward grieving friends. Dad's voice joined Bruce's and she staggered out of view of the front room window. She could see her breath rising in a fine mist as she trudged down the road to where she had parked her car earlier in the day, claiming it was at the garage for a tune-up. Once she was safely distant from the house Kate tugged on her boots and stowed the gun in her belt. The thudding of her heart eased slightly as her baby, the battered Jeep Cherokee she bought off a neighbor when she was a college freshman, came into view. It took all of high school pinching pennies to afford it, but Kate had been determined to drive herself to college instead of have an embarrassing family goodbye in her form.
Now she wished she had taken more of those stupid, embarrassing moments and cherished them. Whether the circumstances were mysterious or not her mom was still dead, her dad heartbroken, her poor brother... The last time Kate saw her mom was the last day of winter break a month ago. She was checking her bags one more time when Mom came into her room to say goodbye. Sun shining in through the window set her red hair aflame as she hugged Kate tight. "Be safe," she had murmured, tucking something small into her coat pocket. When Kate investigated later she found one of Mom's little leather pouches full of herbs and tiny rocks of salt and iron shavings. Kate always used to think they were Mom's sad attempts to be crafty like the other moms, but now there was a gun in her belt and the promise of finding more than she bargained for her in mother's unusual death.
Kate caught sight of her reflection in the rearview mirror and frowned. Dirty blonde hair, round face with a few scattered freckles, gray eyes. Mom left very little traces of her likeness in either of her children, and if she hadn't been so beautiful her face might have already begun to blur in Kate's memory. But she had been gorgeous, red-haired and green-eyed and flawlessly pale, shorter than Kate by the end of her short life. Her voice was low and husky but soft when she sang to them in Russian as little children.
School was expecting Kate back by Money. Hopefully the weekend would be time enough to get the information she so craved.
In only two hours she was yawning into the back of her hand, easing off the freeway onto rough dirt roads. Then a thud and a groan in the back seat woke her up very quickly. "You drive worse than Dad," a sleepy voice complained.
She slammed on the brakes. "Vanya, what the hell?!" she screeched. "You're supposed to be in bed, you little shit!"
Her stupid kid brother picked himself up off the floor, then clambered into the front seat with Kate cussing at him in Russian all the while. When he was buckled in she punched him. "Ow, Kat!" he howled, voice cracking. "I'm telling!"
"Who're you gonna tell? We're two hours from home, долбоеб!"
"Заткнись, иди на хуй!" Vanya shot back, and she reluctantly stopped her tirade because of the sheer volume. "I saw your car and I knew you were gonna leave, and I wanna come with you."
"Jesus, you could've asked!" snapped Kate.
He snorted. "And you'd've said no, just like always. I'm not some little kid anymore and I'm not stupid." Curling his knees up to his chest, suddenly shy, Vanya picked at a loose thread in his jeans. "I saw it happen. I know it wasn't right, how Mom died. I was there."
It took a minute for that to sink in, for Kate to catch her breath. "I didn't know that," she admitted. She didn't want to know anything other than the bare details when it happened, and Vanya hadn't exactly been Mister Chatty about that night. In that moment, seeing the pain in her little brother's face, Kate would have given anything to have been there in his place so his innocence could be spared.
"I just wanna know what happened," said Vanya, breaking her out of her reverie.
Gripping the wheel in both hands, she sighed. "Fine," she reluctantly agreed. "But I'm in charge, you hear? We're going to Uncle Tony's, we're gonna see what he knows, and then I'm taking you straight home. We both got school on Monday."
"Why do we gotta go back already?" he complained. "Our mom died."
"You just wanna sleep in, shitbird. Going back to school, going back to normal-"
"This isn't normal, Kat!" yelled Vanya suddenly. "We can't go back to normal because everything's totally fucked up!"
"Dude, stop yelling at me," Kate snarled back. "I didn't do anything, okay? I miss Mom just as much as you, and I don't wanna go back either, but we have to go because that's...it's what we have to do, it's what everyone expects us to do. Okay? So stop yelling at me!"
Her voice cracked, and Kate realized with a pang that they were both crying. She unbuckled her seat belt and lunged across the seats to hug her brother tight, his tears hot on her neck.
"I'm sorry," choked Vanya when they pulled away, shocking her, scrubbing his eyes with the big-knuckled, awkward hands of someone caught in the transition from childhood to adulthood.
She shoved his stringy long hair out of his eyes. "It's okay. It's okay, Jay," she told him, and he sputtered a surprised laugh at their old rhyme. Buckling back in, Kate put the car into gear and resumed driving with one hand firm at the nape of his neck. She had been six years old when Vanya was born, and the minute Mom and Dad brought him home and put him in her arms Katerina declared that he was her baby. Vanya was hers, had always been hers, and would always be hers. She loved him so fiercely it burned in the pit of her stomach, and the memories made her hiccup with fresh tears as she drove, missing her childhood and how much easier everything had been back then. It was as if the long summer of her youth was drawing to an abrupt and premature close, time that should have been spent going to parties and kissing pretty girls in the sun replaced by the dark of winter frost, all promise of her future frozen.
"Do you think someone killed Mom?" her brother asked in a small voice.
Shaking her head, she swerved gently to avoid a hole in the road. "I don't know, but I really don't think it was just some accident," she replied.
A deer darted across the road in front of them, eyes glowing and tail a white streak as it bolted. Kate could hear the question Vanya dared not ask, could taste it on her own lips as well.
Why would anyone want to kill Mom?
Kate couldn't wrap her mind around it. Mom had always been so...Mom. Quiet, graceful, beautiful, capable of striking unholy fear into the hearts of unruly children. She did administrative work for the government center, but otherwise posed no threat to anyone. Maybe it had something to do with her Russian roots? But she had been in America long enough to lose her accent and had no family, so how could she still have ties to what she used to wryly call the Old Country? She had largely spoken to her children (and cussed) in Russian so they would be able to speak both languages, be a little more cultured, but otherwise rarely associated herself with her heritage. Dad said it was too painful for her, because her earliest memory was of the fire that killed her family. Maybe that was why she loved the cold so much, sitting out on the porch in no more than a knit sweater for hours every night until early December finally drove her to a coat or blanket. Kate could still remember hearing Dad's half-laughing, half-groaning complaints about Mom's cold feet echoing through the house at night.
She wondered if she would ever hear Dad laugh like that again, like it filled him up from the inside out.
Within half an hour Jay was asleep again, and Kate withdrew her hand to keep driving. She regularly checked her phone to ensure she was going the right way and that Dad hadn't yet noticed the absence of both his children. If Kate had to guess, they had until midmorning, maybe even longer if Bruce was on their side. She glanced again at her brother and wondered why she felt so uneasy. She just didn't want anything to happen to him, and already something huge had done without her there to look out for him.
Pin-straight country roads gave way to the twist of city streets as the sun came up. It felt like Kate's eyelids had been lined with superglue, they so badly wanted to remain closed every time she blinked. If she hadn't been driving at night it probably would have taken days to get this far; even at the ass-crack of dawn traffic was a slow crawl. They got breakfast at McDonald's, Vanya yawning so wide his jaw cracked and rubbing his eyes as he devoured his third sausage-and-egg burrito. "If you hurl in my baby I'll kill you," she warned him.
"I haven't puked since I was twelve," he glowered.
"That was two years ago, dumbshit, it's only impressive to say that when you're my age."
Hazel eyes glared as Vanya munched on his food. He looked more like Mom with his thin, pointed face and the auburn whispers in his hair, but Mom downright screamed from his features when he was pissed off. It was sort of funny, because Mom never showed anger in her face but Jay was an open book. Quick to temper, first to throw a punch, last to apologize and admit he was wrong, Kate was viciously fond of him and all his bad attitudes.
"Maybe Uncle Tony will be so surprised he won't call Dad," she mused as they resumed their trek through the city. "He might even let us sleep a little longer in the guest rooms if we look pathetic enough."
"You look pathetic enough," Vanya jibed, only to get another punch in the arm. "Ow, Kat!" He still sounded like a baby when he yelled like that. It only served to amuse Kate, which made him even madder. They rounded the corner onto Tony's street and could instantly pinpoint where he lived.
Stark Tower was massive, the world innovator in clean technology, a pinnacle in the center of the city that Kate only saw twice in her life, once at the tower's ribbon-cutting ceremony and again when Uncle Tony married Aunt Pepper. She liked Uncle Tony; he was loud and brash and gave everyone nicknames whether they liked it or not. His names for Kate and Jay always made Mom seethe, but they all knew that she secretly found them amusing. She tended to play at hating Uncle Tony a lot more than she did.
The traffic light turned green, and only moments after it occurred to Kate that the street was empty and silent something plowed into the right rear of the Jeep. She reacted instantly, flinging an arm across Vanya's chest to catch him as her beloved car spiraled across the intersection, turning a perfect circle to face what had hit them. Vanya hissed a Russian curse, holding his head where it clipped the window, not seeing what Kate saw through the cracked windshield.
A man. A man in a tattered suit, like one old people wore in their caskets, full of frills and a burnt flower on his lapel. The skin at his mouth was torn, and he swayed where he stood.
Now her brother noticed the man too, his gaping mouth hanging by a few strings of flesh, blackened fists clenched at his sides. "How...?" he asked, but that was all he could say. The man charged at the Jeep again, and when he hit the front end the whole thing nearly capsized; she screamed and clutched at her brother to keep him in place. When the car leveled out again her jaws slammed together, and blood filled her mouth as the windshield shattered. Vanya was yelling wordlessly in terror, clutching her arm until her skin was broken and bleeding from his fingernails.
"Get out, get out!" she shrieked, struggling with her seatbelt when she saw that the man was still standing. He looked even worse for wear now. One of his arms had been broken under the Jeep's weight and was bent backwards. Vanya tumbled out of the car and ran off, hugging his jacket tight around himself and eyes wide as he watched Kate scramble to be free. She didn't jump out of the car so much as fall, landing hard, skinning her hands and knees on the pavement, trying to put as much distance between herself and their attacker as possible when she heard footsteps thundering closer again.
The bang took her by surprise. Kate screamed and flattened to avoid what she thought was the Jeep being vaulted into her, but nothing happened. There was no impact, no pain, just a soft 'thwack' and Vanya's whimpering. From behind shaking hands Kate looked at the gap under the car and gaped. The charging man had rammed himself into the Jeep again but fallen limp like an actual bag of bones. There was no blood, but smoke rose from his broken body. He was a house burning down.
"Ka-at?"
She crawled around to the front of the car, too shaken to stand until she saw Vanya holding his red bruising cheek. Then she shuddered to her feet and ran to him, examining him for further injury. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?" she asked.
"What was that guy?" he said instead of answering, bulging eyes fixed on the man.
He was unmoving now, but Kate placed herself between the corpse and Vanya so he wouldn't have to look. "Let's get our stuff out of the car and call the cops," she decided. Her head throbbed and steps were uneven as Kate led the way to the car, determinedly not looking at the dead man and murmuring comforting words. He yanked back when a breeze made the ruffled on the body's funeral suit twitched and she gripped his hand. "It's okay, baby, we're okay, just don't look..." She climbed awkwardly over the corpse, not wanting to look or touch. It stank already like it had been dead for months. Vanya was audibly shuddering behind her. Kate yanked her bag from the back seat and passed it to him; he scrambled away with it, leaving her to grab his bag - "You packed ahead, you little shit," she grumbled - and stumble to the curb. "Where's my phone? Where-?"
Reaching into her coat pocket, Kate's hand encountered the tiny pouch of herbs, salt, and iron that Mom forced on her when they said goodbye at Christmas. She could have sworn that she got rid of it... The pouch was soft leather, on its side a circled star with foreign characters arranged around it in red, still fragrant after weeks and weeks jammed in the bottom of Kate's pocket. She caught herself staring at it, wishing more than ever that Mom was here to make sense of all of this.
"Hey, are you kids okay over there?" a voice called, and Kate spun round to see none other than a police officer striding towards them. She sagged with relief. "You hit someone?"
Instantly she wanted to refuse, tell the man what really happened, but hesitated. How crazy would she sound if she said that? "I...he ran in front of us," she haltingly lied, head giving another painful throb. It didn't explain her poor baby's twisted totaled wreckage, but the officer didn't seem to care. Didn't seem to be listening at all, staring with dark eyes at her kid brother. Then his eyes weren't just dark. They were black. Not only the pupils or irises, all of them, the whites and all dark as pitch.
Watch their eyes, Bruce had warned her.
She seized Vanya by the arm and held him behind her, breathing hard. "Get back!" she said, voice cracking.
The officer put both hands defensively up, eyebrows quirked in malicious amusement. He nudged the suited corpse with one foot. "Possession of a dead vessel," he drawled. "Packs a pretty good punch, but they sure do wear out quick." The dead man's skin sloughed away from the bone at the gentle nudge of patent leather to reveal fat white worms crawling in his broken jaw. When Vanya saw he gasped and clutched the back of Kate's coat in both fists.
Searching for something, anything, that might protect them from this...thing without resorting to the gun Bruce gave her, Kate realized that Mom's little sachet was still clutched in one sweaty palm. When Mom gave it to her it was with a plea to stay safe, and now only weeks later she was the closest she ever thought she would be to dying. She thrust it out in front of her without thinking and the officer's grin widened.
"I'm no witch, sweetheart," he sneered.
The leather pouch burst into flame in her hand, but instead of dropping it she panicked and threw it in the man's face. It burst with shocking ease on the tip of his long nose, and red-hot flecks of iron and salt clung hissing to his skin. He let out a yell, clawing at his smoking flesh, and while he was distracted Kate pulled Vanya around to her side and bolted for the tower.
The streets were bare as bones - where was everyone?! - as they ran, legs pumping furiously, sweat and blood stinging Kate's eyes. No faces peered out between blinds-slats. They were on their own.
There was a shimmer, a dark flicker, in the air ten meters ahead, and there was the police man again, scowling behind a cratered smoking face. "Not funny," he chided. "I could have lost an eye."
She skidded to a halt on her heels, a scream tearing from her throat. Giving up all pretense of morality in her terror she pulled Bruce's handgun free of her waist band, released the safety with one deft twitch of shaking fingers, and fired. Vanya yelled in horror as the man was jerked back by the impact on his shoulder. Just like the charging corpse before he didn't bleed, but smoke poured from the wound.
It wasn't enough for him to fall. Kate fired a second time, landing a shell low in his gut; Jay was gripping her so tight the collar of her coat was constricting her airway, sobbing into the plane between her shoulders as more smoke poured forth. She couldn't stop screaming, and her hands shook so badly the gun clattered to the pavement. Just as the smoking police man began staggering toward her, arms outstretched, Kate heard a high-pitched noise like-
"DUCK!" screamed Vanya, yanking her down to the cement. A bright-white ball of...of something shot over their heads and caught the attacking man in his gasping mouth. Instantly an inhuman wail came from him, smoke streamed thick and black from every orifice, and then the body crumpled just as the first had, limp and yielding, staring dead-eyed at the sky. Kate again looked up from between the shelter of her fingers to examine their fallen attacker. She didn't even have time to read his name badge before rough broad hands were seizing her by the shoulders and hauling her upright.
At first her legs wouldn't hold her weight, made watery with fear and shock. Then she saw who was holding her and her shock became so strong adrenaline picked her up again. "Tony?" she croaked.
Grim-faced but smirking as always, Tony Stark patted Kate silently on the shoulder and helped her help Vanya to his feet - after putting down the massive gun strapped to his back. It was bigger than Kate's leg, red-and-gold metal, smoking softly at the barrel. The urge to pinch herself was getting really strong.
"Come on, inside," Tony brusquely said, which made both Kate and Vanya gape in kind. No quips or jokes from the king of cheesy one-liners? Still, they did as they were bid, hastening the last half-block to Stark Tower. They didn't pause in the main lobby; Tony ushered them into the elevator and remained tense as it rose to the penthouse. Kate tried to subtly examine him - or, more accurately, his eyes - but he caught her. He seemed to understand and met her gaze levelly. They remained the same dark brown as they always were. She breathed a soft sigh of relief as the car bumped to a stop.
The last time they visited Stark Tower was nearly eight years ago, the day Uncle Tony and Aunt Pepper got married, when Mom was still alive and the world made sense. It had always been sleek, modern, but still managed the brand of coziness only found in the home at Christmastime. Now, though, watching Tony march ahead with that gun on his back, Kate felt anything but at home. Vanya was already making himself comfortable in the nearest armchair but she hesitated, watching Tony enter a code into the keypad set in the wall, which slid away to reveal an entire wall hidden behind it where more weapons hung.
"What is all that?" she asked, voice hoarse from screaming. Now that the immediate danger had passed she felt all her aches: her throbbing head, her burnt fingers, the bruise on her neck where the seat belt bit her on impact, pains that couldn't be sourced and a burning tiredness crawling up her spine. All she wanted was to lie down and let oblivion take over for a while, but knew that it would be impossible to rest with her mind still reeling.
Hand hovering over the keypad, Tony looked appraisingly at her over his shoulder before stepping back to let her look. "Go on," he encouraged her, and she crept forward. Kate had never seen so many weapons in one place before, and never any like this. They weren't just guns. They were as sleek as the tower, though only the gun Tony hefted was so brightly colored. The rest were silver or black, long and elegant; they reminded Kate of Dad's bow - one of them, in fact, was a bow. Or that's how it looked at first glance, but the rest and knocking point were set far too wide for a regulation arrow.
Before she could ask, Aunt Pepper came padding in wearing a ratty t-shirt and yoga pants. "Okay, Tone, what was all the running around fo-?" She froze when she saw Kate and Vanya and her voice jumped an octave in surprise. "Oh! Oh, my god! Kids! What the hell?!"
"The demon spawn are here, honey," Tony needlessly announced, closing the wall panel so quickly it almost bit the tips of Kate's fingers off. She shot Vanya a look as he bolted across the room to hug Aunt Pepper.
They didn't have a lot of women in their life besides Mom and teachers at school - most of their parents' friends never married - so to a young boy who just lost his mother a hug from Pepper had to have been like heaven. She held him close and stroked his hair just like a mom should have, even though she was no mother. Her time to have children had long since passed, it seemed, or she and Tony agreed against a family. Who could really say? But Vanya looked halfway to sleep by the time Aunt Pepper released him.
"Oh, you poor things look dead on your feet," fretted Aunt Pepper, combing through Vanya's messy hair with her fingers. "I'm sure you're here for a reason, but it'll keep for a few hours while you get some sleep, won't it, Tone?"
"No!"
Tony, Pepper, and Vanya all turned to gape at her shout. Kate had no idea what had gotten into her but she wanted nothing more than to tear her hair out. "My mom...is dead," she choked through gritted teeth. "My little brother saw her die, and we...we were just attacked by this - this thing. My car was ruined-"
"Honey, I can fix you up with a new car-"
Kate yelled, "I DON'T WANT A NEW CAR!" and Pepper winced at the strain in her voice. "I want the world to make fucking sense again!" With a deep breath she mustered herself, regained her composure. "I want to know what the hell that thing was. Now."
Silence fell over the room, thick and heavy, ringing in her ears until Tony put his hands on her shoulders. "That, babycakes, was a demon," he heavily said.
He may as well have slapped her. "A what?"
"He said it was-"
"I know what he said, Jay," Kate snapped. She shoved Tony's hands away. "Demons aren't real."
"Except that they are, and that's what was trying to gank you," Tony retorted with his usual aplomb. Pepper cleared her throat and he softened. "Listen, kiddo, this is heavy stuff, and once I start telling the story I don't rightly know where yo stop."
Heart thudding hard, Kate marched across the room, pulling Vanya with her, and sat on the sofa. "Then you'd better get started," she doggedly said. Tony smiled his grim smile.