Chapter One
Clearing his throat and gripping the podium, Gideon Stargrave held forth with minimal expansive gesturing. "After I emerged victorious at the Battle of MaCragge, Something occurred to me. I am the closest thing to a God your sorry world will ever know. If this microphone wasn't surgically attached to my neck, now is when I'd drop it." As he arrogantly stormed off the stage, assembled reporters could but silently tip their hats to the paparazzi waiting outside like vultures with strobe lights around their necks. The press corps schmucks representing major media outlets screamed questions at Gideon's back like they were contractually obligated (which some of them may well have been) until long after the door had slammed behind him.
Heedless of the clamor of scraping chairs and Moleskine notepads clapping shut, I turned to my contact for the mission, quietly asking, "What, seriously?" Agent J9 - Jeanine, according to her press pass - rolled her eyes.
As though addressing a child with particularly special needs, she said, "It's Gideon Stargrave. He's always up to something like that. Especially when he knows he's on camera." She slowly closed her spiral notebook, in which she had written some emo poetry with too many ellipses and NOTHING ELSE during the three hours we'd been waiting for Stargrave to show up. "Besides, you and I both know this one-ring media circus isn't why came to the city today."
"Getting to business so soon?" I asked, arching an eyebrow. "What's with that? Gotta wrap up the wetwork so you can get back to your nighttime gig as a regular at some dingy, poorly-lit coffee shop?"
Before I could dryly chuckle at my own joke, she lunged out of her chair, knocked me sprawling with a surprisingly strong palm-heel to the sternum, pulled her low-caliber sidearm, and aimed it at my throat. "I'll tell you the same thing I tell the regulars there," she whispered, which I could barely hear over the ringing in my ears from cracking my head slightly open on the tripod supporting a nearby TV camera. "NEVER READ MY POEMS WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!"
She smiled and squeezed the trigger.
There's a funny thing about civilians. Well, there are several. Usually they try to run away from danger, and sometimes they run the wrong way. Sometimes they try to record danger with their cell phones, and usually their phones get taken away by the police. Least often of all, they'll try to be heroes. And that kind of behavior almost always gets them killed. Ryan was that most rare kind of civilian.
Ryan lived a rich inner life of violent revenge fantasies involving the people he felt wronged him in daily life. Sometimes he had to imagine them doing worse stuff to him than they ever really did, to justify the horrible things he imagined would be fair recompense. Someone cut him off in line at the grocery store, he'd cry in the shower that night and picture himself descending through the roof of their house wreathed in a cloud of purple fire and melting the flesh from their bones. He was just that kinda guy, you know? That day, Ryan was five minutes late to work. Traffic had been pretty bad. For most of the three hours Gideon was busy being late, Ryan was flashing back to the traffic jam (which he firmly blamed for getting written up at the office) and practically hallucinating a scenario in which he was telekinetic. Flipping cars onto each other with people still in them, driving five miles per hour over the limit and getting to the news station on time. Jeanine shouting about her bad poetry snapped him out of his reverie.
At least, I assume his name was Ryan. That was the name printed on his press badge. As I held up a hand in a futile defensive gesture, Ryan ran in from the edge of my vision, executed a sloppy flying tackle, and landed on top of Jeanine. Jeanine landed on top of a folding chair in the row in front of us. The chair slid forward a good two and a half feet, sweeping the legs out from under an anchorman for a local network affiliate. The anchorman pinwheeled his arms and landed on top of Ryan. Meanwhile, Jeanine's shot went wild and knocked a hole the size of a trashcan lid through the acoustically-lackluster ceiling tiles suspended over our heads.
I scrambled to my feet, trying to remember where the fire exit was.
Two cops were already sprinting into the room, clearing themselves a path by elbowing the throats of people trying to sprint out. Now, these cops were elbowing throats in a certain way. An undistracted, effortlessly casual way that didn't imply grace so much as familiarity. These were riot cops. The part of my mind that wasn't busy being annoyed and surprised by my contact trying to kill me had to admit it made sense. Gideon Stargrave was known for making inflammatory statements in the public eye. He was an inspirational figure, but what exactly he inspired was pretty hit-or-miss. Therefore, riot cops at a press conference.
I quickly contemplated my options. Blend in with the reporters, and clumsily shuffle out? Jeanine would probably shoot me. Stand and fight? The police might shoot me, or at the very least hold me as a material witness. Find somewhere to hide? Not much to hide behind. Certainly nothing that would stop a bullet. I remembered my initial plan of taking the emergency exit, just as someone opened it and set off the relevant alarm klaxon. My head throbbing from a probable slight concussion, a nearby gunshot, and now a high-pitched fire alarm siren, I stumbled out into daylight.
Gunfire erupted behind me as I broke line of sight between myself and anyone still inside the building. After roughly fifteen seconds of that and five seconds of silence, I heard the distinctive pop-and-whoosh sound of Jeanine's area denial corpse looting prevention failsafe, as it teleported her (and hopefully also the cops, or at least that jerk Ryan) to a small, dark place for later retrieval and analysis by the cleanup team.
Walking away in a brisk yet calculatedly casual manner, I mumbled, "I'll light you a candle on open mic night."