Tempest: Chapter Twenty-Three: A Great Thief


Dick Grayson was eighty-five percent certain that Masquerade was actually Storm Chaser, now all he had to do was prove the other fifteen percent. Of course, that was going to be hard because she wasn't exactly known for being seen on camera, but her heists were growing steadily as time wore on.

She wasn't a major thief, though, that was probably the thing that got him thinking the most that she was Amara, because if there was one thing he knew about Catwoman, it was that she had expensive taste. The biggest thing she'd stolen had to be the necklace she'd made away with right under Speedy's nose, but apart from that, her thefts were rather small.

Dick was following her as much as he could in the BlackNet but it was difficult work; she was very wily and every time he seemed to get close to finding out anything she didn't want him to know, she slipped right through his fingers like a slippery eel.

Only Oracle was that good, so his suspicions had grown steadily over the course of the past few weeks, probably starting when Masquerade had first contacted him on the BlackNet. There were some days where she dropped completely off the grid and they were almost always followed by reports of thefts.

It was like Masquerade couldn't resist being good and it showed in the kind of heists she pulled off. She only stole things that others wanted stolen for good reasons.

There was a painting that was worth a fortune and that the true owners had petitioned the current owner to relinquish only to be warded off with potential charges brought against them. Masquerade had stolen it in the dead of night with proof that it had been stolen and bought illegally on the black market. Then there was a little girl living in an abusive environment so Masquerade had stolen her too, leaving only a mask and a note behind.

But if it was Amara, then Dick had to wonder what was the point of being a thief when she'd been a sidekick once…or was it that she didn't think her biological father would think to consider her rebellious daughter with her hero-like leanings as a thief?

And why was she hiding in the first place? It wasn't like she hadn't faced Weather Wizard before…in fact, if he remembered correctly, she had run after him when she was eight trying to get him locked up…but what was stopping her now?


"Thank you."

James Corbin had been repeating those two words fervently for the better part of an hour and Masquerade was very close to sighing as she kept an arm on the boy so he didn't walk out into the street in his delirium.

"James," Masquerade said, her thick voice very put upon, "you do not need to keep zanking us."

"I don't know, I like it when people thank me," purred her companion.

Masquerade rolled her eyes, though it couldn't really be seen with her eyes hidden behind the masquerade mask secured to her face.

Catwoman wasn't quite what she'd expected. The woman was a master thief, that much she had known before and Masquerade had always liked her. She had a way of moving that was a fluid and grace, it was something she'd admired when she'd been shunted around with her father, her growing limbs making her movements clumsy.

Catwoman wore all black –similar to how Storm Chaser had once dressed– and the material was so tight that to see how her muscles tensed with every move was a simple task. The green eyes behind her own goggles were green and distinctly cat like.

"I had it sorted," Masquerade said with a bit of annoyance. Cheshire had left her to her own devices some time ago and Masquerade had functioned very well on her own thank you very much, and she had been succeeding well in removing a witness to a crime from some gangsters trying to do him in before the trial he would be testifying in.

"Clearly," Catwoman smirked. "And where were you planning to hide him?"

Masquerade glared and Catwoman laughed, even though she couldn't see Masquerade's eyes, because her red-painted lips turned downwards.

"My plans fell zrough," Masquerade said finally as they rounded an abandoned street with illuminating signs over all the doors lining the streets except one that had a plaque with no name on it.

"Lucky for you that I came along, then," Catwoman responded easily as the three came to a stop in front of the door.

Masquerade eyed the door dubiously and James Corbin blinked blearily, exhaustion nearly bringing him to his knees.

"He'll be safe here," Catwoman assured her, seeing her unease. "This is a half-way house that I set up a few years ago. The patron is an old friend, she'll make sure he's well looked after."

Masquerade pursed her lips, but Catwoman appeared to be sincere and she knew that Robin had mentioned a few times about how Catwoman had a soft spot.

"Look after yourself, James," Masquerade said, turning away from her to look to the boy. He was taller than her even in her heels and gangly.

The boy bobbed his head in agreement, wrapping a hand around the doorknob before Catwoman mentioned. "Tell her Selina sent you and she'll set you up."

He gave another grateful nod before disappearing inside, leaving Catwoman to scrutinize Masquerade.

"What?" Masquerade demanded in irritation.

"You smell like flowers," Catwoman mentioned in amusement, tilting her head in a vaguely cat-like manner. "It must be the pheromones."

"Excuse me?" Masquerade slipped and almost completely lost her accent and Catwoman noticed, if the reappearance of her smirk was any indication.

"Pheromones…I know a friend with a certain skill for using them to get what she wants…but yours aren't quite so powerful. I guess you can make people like you and trust you…but sometimes it has an extreme reaction, makes people hate you."

Masquerade's eyes widened in surprise. It wasn't something she typically noticed. It wasn't like she spent all that much time around anyone who wasn't her family or in the Justice League. She remembered there'd been a boy in the flower shop getting some flowers for his mother and he'd been a bit overly nice and it was only when he'd gone that Pamela had laughed and said he was flirting with her. And then there'd been the time she first met Thomas, the son of a man who worked with her father, and he always treated her with glowers and sneers.

She took a step back, her heel clicking on the concrete. "I should head back; I have zings zat need to be done."

"It makes me wonder if you've got her green eyes," Catwoman added.

"Vat're you talking about?" Masquerade demanded, turning around to face her only to find her gone and she was speaking to the air. "And I thought zat vas just a Batman thing."

She shook her head with a small chuckle, the puzzle of the woman's words in the back of her mind as she walked away.


Amara had a United States map taped to her safe house room with various tacks and thread and blurry pictures pasted against it.

To anyone else, it would have seemed a bit like a bundle of confusion, but to Amara it made perfect sense. The tacks represented locations where Mark Mardon (aka Weather Wizard) had been sighted with thread leading from one tack to the next in chronological order, from the first time he showed up to the most recent with any pictures of him that she could catch on camera, but there weren't very many, her father was nothing if not clever.

"Where're you hiding?" she murmured to herself, twisting her sharpie between her fingers as her eyes roved over the information on the wall.

She'd been keeping a steady eye on her family friends, particularly the ones that Amara had received surveillance images of, but there had been no attack against them, and if he really wanted to get her attention, he would have attacked her friends or at least the city she patrolled in, Star City.

But there had been nothing. It was like the images had been sent just to scare her into disappearing…like he was trying to punish her for finding her own family outside of him.

He had never liked it when she was outside of his control.

But Amara had always been a storm personified in human form, unable to be contained and unyielding to those that tried. And she was growing tired of his games.

She wanted to go home, she wanted to be with her mother and father again, her real mother and father, because as far as she was concerned, Mark Mardon had lost the right to call her his child when he used her as his personal lightning rod. Being on her own had been fine for the first few weeks, but it had been almost two months now and Amara was homesick, terribly.

She missed Barry's corny jokes about his speed, she missed Iris singing and dancing to the radio while she cooked dinner, she missed Roy's dry snark, she missed speaking science with Wally –getting blatantly more technical so as to annoy those they were with– and staying up late watching movies with him, she missed Dick and his un-words, she missed racing across rooftops with Dinah and Oliver.

She missed everything that made her Amara Allen.

Amara sighed, leaning back and away from the map, shaking her head and raking a hand through her hair, tugging roughly at the strands, but it changed nothing, she still had no idea where Weather Wizard was or where he was.

One problem at a time.

Amara muttered a few complaints under her breath before making her way out of the room on the small second floor, taking the stairs down to the first floor and entering the kitchen.

The canteen of vodka Jade had left her was locked in a cupboard because Amara didn't really like how alcohol affected brain chemistry, and she was actually going to need it if she wanted to be a doctor. Tea was more of Amara's thing, or, as Wally and Barry liked to call it, leaf juice.

"There's just not enough taste!" Wally had bemoaned once, after drinking some only to gag, while Amara laughed.

Amara dipped the tea bag up and down in the hot water, her eyes absent, not really focusing on what she was doing as she kept her eyes on the other mass of paper she'd pasted to the living room wall.

Unlike the one upstairs, this one was not dedicated to her father, he only occupied half of the information, the other half was dedicated to her unknown mother, hence why she had a large question mark drawn on a piece of paper.

Under it were disjointed thoughts:

-Chloro-kenetic (Powerful?)

-Pheromones (smell like flowers, less powerful?)

-Green eyes

-Villain? Neutral? (Not hero)

-Knows who I am but won't reveal her identity (Fear? Rejection?)

-Ivy bracelet gift

-Is it Poison Ivy?

Three question marks were a bit excessive, but Amara felt it was proper given how she felt about the whole matter with her birth mother. There weren't all that many that were in the Justice League's database that had a certain power over making plants grow and Poison Ivy was at the top of the list.

But Amara's brain vainly held to the belief that if Poison Ivy was her mother, Barry would have told her, he wouldn't hide something like that from her, not if he knew the truth about who her mother was.

The Phalaenopsis Orchid on the counter bloomed brighter.


Chasing thieves across rooftops wasn't exactly in Robin's job description, but Batman was away on League business, which meant Robin was the one holding down the fort, and it didn't help that the thief in particular he was chasing down was Masquerade.

How the hell was she running faster than him in heels?

Robin shot out his grappler, snagging her around the midsection and jerking her back before she could make the leap to the next rooftop. Fortunately, he managed to stop her just in time. Unfortunately, the momentum was on Masquerade's side, bringing her back to crash back against him.

Robin grunted and Masquerade groaned, finding herself pinning his body to the roof. If she really was Amara, she was going to hold this over him forever.

But Masquerade pulled herself upright quickly, the thick emerald on its silver chain around her neck bouncing from the movement, no matter how fluid it was.

She reached back to bring the batons strapped to her back to her hands, twirling them up in the air and catching them again without so much as a blink. Amara couldn't have done it…unless she'd been practicing hard at it.

"Little birds without wings should stay out of matters zat don't concern zem," Masquerade said throatily and Robin extended his own eskrima sticks to match hers.

"Well, I've never been one to play by the rules." He grinned widely and Masquerade smirked before bringing her batons forward to clash furiously against his.

She was good, scary good, like she'd dedicated a lot of time and effort into mastering the use of batons in a fight. She was better than Amara had been, and Amara had been a little out of practice at the time she'd disappeared, given how she'd been more focused on regaining the use of her legs.

Masquerade crouched, sweeping a leg out under him in an effort to unsteady him on his feet, but Robin merely leapt over the leg, performing a twirl in the air only to land lightly on his feet.

"Did ze Bat teach you zat?" Masquerade asked and Robin was sure that her eyes were glittering and green behind that golden mask of hers. "Or ze circus?"

Now that was enough to unsteady him, because only his closest friends knew about the circus –Haly's Circus–, the circus he'd been raised in, the circus where his family had died.

Amara would have known.

His grip on the sticks slackened just briefly and it was shameful how quickly she managed to disarm him (Batman was definitely going to have his head for that).

She held the baton to his throat, which would have been more impressive if it was sharp rather than smooth, but it wasn't the thing that was capturing his interest.

Masquerade smelled floral and the scent was flowing into his nostrils and making his brain fuzzy and his knees weak.

"Goodbye, Robin," she said, and it was only after she'd gone that he realized that she hadn't been speaking in a Russian accent.

Amy, what're you thinking?


Roy's arm was almost completely healed, but not quite, which was better than saying he was benched, so he was going to stick with it, it was better than listening to Wally howl with laughter.

But it still meant that he wasn't allowed to go out as Speedy until the doctor gave the go ahead to take off the sling and begin using his arm fully, but until then, using his bow was a no-go.

And Roy felt so naked without his bow. It was easier for Dinah or even Amara, they were meta-humans, their powers were inside them, Roy and Oliver just used their arrows to get the job done.

Roy glanced up at the sky, wincing in the sunlight even with the sunglasses he was wearing over his eyes that did little to dull the effect.

The good weather was a bit ironic, given the reason that the Star City Heroes were on high alert, and it was all Cupid's fault. Roy couldn't really say that he was surprised that she'd managed to break out of Iron Heights, it wasn't very well known for its ability to keep its prisoners within its walls, not like Belle Reve (but that hadn't stopped Amara's biological father from breaking out without much difficulty).

Rather soon after her escape a letter had been sent to the SCPD –on pink stationary with blood red lettering on the words, and if that didn't scream Cupid, Roy didn't know what did– warning of a bomb that had been placed in a highly populated area that they would be detonating sometime in the next two days.

Of course, the SCPD took that seriously, since the last bomb threat that they hadn't had resulted in the death of five civilians, and they weren't looking forward to adding more to that number.

But finding the location of a bomb was harder than it looked and Roy was sure his adoptive father and Dinah were feeling fairly useless as they scoured the nearby area for any trace of the bomb.

So Roy narrowed his eyes, watching the people pass him on the populated street with no idea of the possibility of a bombing that could be occurring soon.

His eyes caught a flash of red and he turned to catch sight of a girl with crimson curls walking past, a leather jacket over her shoulders.

It made him think about Masquerade and it made him bitter, flexing the fingers of his arm still stuck in a sling from her attack against him.

The girl paused, looking at her phone before yelling: "BOMB!" And vaulting away from where she was standing to crack her shoulder painfully against Roy's and a moment later the air exploded.

The next thing that Roy remembered was being dragged to safety, to the nearest alley by thin arms that belied their strength. And then he saw a blaze of green and he couldn't stop of the nickname parting his lips: "Storm Warning."

The girl knelt and his eyes swam but it was definitely her, Amara Allen, Storm Chaser, Oracle, or whatever the hell she was going by now. It was really her. Those green eyes couldn't have been faked, even if he'd grown so used to seeing them paired with grey or black hair.

She smiled blindingly. "I'm still saving your life, Arrowhead, I guess we've both got problems."

Her cheeks weren't as round as he remembered, as though the last of her baby fat had left her in the time since she'd disappeared off the face of the planet.

"If my head wouldn't spin, I'd punch you in the face," Roy decided, and that made Amara laugh, bright and clear.

"I look forward to it," she said, her fingers probing his head for injuries and he winced as she made contact with the base of his skull. "Tenderness there, I don't know if you've got a concussion or not, but you should be fine to walk."

"Walk?" Roy asked blankly.

Amara was glancing away from him with a frown on her lips, clearly not listening to him in favor of listening hard or thinking, at this point Roy couldn't be sure which one it was.

"Ollie's got an equipment cache close to here, right?" Amara asked, even though she didn't really need to; she could map out where Oliver and Roy's equipment caches in her sleep.

"Yeah," Roy said needlessly, rubbing at his head with a wince. His ears were still ringing, but now he was starting to hear the sound of dulled screams. "Is anyone dead?"

"Not sure," Amara said, a muscle jumping in her jaw. "Come on, I need to get you out of here so I can get a better look at you."

The adrenaline was starting wear off as Roy looked down at himself. There were bits of shrapnel embedded in his skin, in his shoulder, in his abdomen, in his arm that he was sure had come from the metallic awning from the shop across the street.

"You might be right," he decided, grimacing in pain before taking the hand Amara extended to him in order to pull himself upright.

"This might be a little jolting," Amara said, and, before he could say anything, she had carefully wrapped her arms around his midsection before condensing the air around them and shooting up into the sky.

Roy had forgotten how much he hated flying via a hyperactive adrenaline junkie atmo-kinetic meta-human.


"I could give you something for the pain," Amara mentioned, pulling a piece of shrapnel from his thigh that Roy had previously missed in his cursory look-over.

He hissed through his teeth as it was removed. "My anger's dulling the pain."

Amara pulled back to offer him one of Oliver's liquor bottles that he had stored in the cache, not as strong as the vodka that Jade had given her, but it would have to do. "This'll dull it better."

He took it from her and choked on his swallow of alcohol as Amara ripped a rather large piece out of his shoulder. "Sorry," Amara apologized, pressing gauze down on the wound, "I figured I should take it out in one go."

"I hate you," Roy grated.

"You love me," Amara snorted, curling her fingers around his hand as she smiled.

Roy thought he'd seen that same smile somewhere else, in a Justice League file, but he couldn't place it.

"What're you doing here, Amy?" he asked her. "Why'd you come back? Weather Wizard hasn't been caught yet."

Amara's smile stiffened and she glanced to the cameras that showed anyone entering the equipment cache, but Oliver and Dinah were probably still helping sort out what happened in the explosion.

"I'm running out of time," she said with a sigh, holding up her arm so he could see it, so he could see the simple black bracelet tight about her wrist, bearing the Wayne Tech logo and with a thick crack forming on it. "This is the only thing that blocks him from being able to track me down and its breaking."

"I'll get you a new one."

Amara's eyes softened. "Don't bother, I can't keep running from him, I don't want him to have that kind of power over me." She chewed on the inside of her cheek, frowning slightly as she looked away, her whole body tensing.

"But he scares you." Roy had always known it, he had seen it in her eyes whenever her biological father had been brought up.

Amara's shoulders sagged. "You wouldn't understand, you've never been raised in an environment like that. He nearly killed me…I should be running in the opposite direction, maybe I'm just too stubborn not to."

"Or maybe it's because you're strong enough," Roy countered, squeezing the fingers of the hand still holding tightly to his, like a life line.

"You think too much of me."

"You don't think enough."

Amara's lips twisted into a smile. "Thank you," she said and the words meant more with the amount of feeling they were said with.

And then she was gone, leaving Roy with bandages covering his body and a feeling like he'd tried to catch smoke with his bare hands and failed.