"Well, we're in deep shit," Damian said, hanging up his cellphone. "Assuming there is still a we?"
"There is still a we," Raven said calmly. She poked at the kávé pot on the stove with slight suspicion. It made a bubbling sound and she frowned, unsure if it was supposed to do that.
"Well, we are in deep shit." Damian said sourly. "Queen survived. The client is pissed. He's giving me one chance to fix this, but he's not going to pay me the rest of the fee."
"At least you demanded half upfront," Raven said calmly.
"He wants that back if I fail." Damain said sourly.
"And that's a problem?" Blackfire asked. The princess was laying in a patch of sunlight, wearing a pair of lacy dark violet panties and nothing else. Her powers, apparently, came from absorbing ultraviolet light and that was how she recharged. Damian kept having to fight not to stare at her, much to Raven's amusement.
"Given I already spent it paying off my other debts, yes," Damian said sourly.
"I thought I paid those off?" Raven asked.
"No, you paid Gizmo for my equipment fee, and for his services," Damian said sourly. "I owed other people for other shit."
"You're not very good at this, are you?" Blackfire asked, wriggling slightly in the sunlight.
"Shaddap." Damian pouted.
Raven let out a sigh and picked up the pot, following the directions Damain had given her on its use. Hungarian coffee was supposed to be strong, but mixed with chocolate. She was looking forwards to it, assuming she hadn't screwed up somewhere.
"So, we kill have to kill Queen," Raven said. "Who now knows we're after him, and we have to deal with his bodyguard."
"While he's under police protection," Damian said, flopping down into a chair at the table. Raven put a cup of kávé in front of him, before taking her own seat and bringing the cup to her lips.
Strong certainly described the drink. So did gritty. That wasn't right.
"Raven, you forgot to settle the grounds," Damian said sourly.
"Sorry," she replied. "It's a bit...distracting around here at the moment. Your emotions are...uncontrolled."
Her companions gave her inquisitive looks.
"I'm an empath," Raven said. "I can feel what you feel. Both of you are very passionate. It's like having loud music blasted at me all the time."
Blackfire's emotions went cold.
"You are reading my mind?" the princess hissed.
"No!" Raven said, raising a placating hand. "Think of it like a radio. You are broadcasting your emotions and I pick them up. But your thoughts are safe from me."
Well, mostly. Some emotions were thoughts in themselves, and it wasn't hard to pick up or guess what Damian was thinking when he stared at them, even if she couldn't 'see' exactly what he was thinking about happening.
Still, the answer seemed to calm the alien, and Blackfire laid back on the floor. Damian, on the other hand, still wasn't happy, but seemed resolved to just deal with it. Part of him was happy she was dressed, unlike Blackfire. It made it easier to look at her.
A knock at the door forced Damian to get up and Raven felt his annoyance grow when he answered it.
"So, you're still in one piece, huh?" Gizmo's said from the hallway. "I'm surprised."
"What do you want?" Damian grumbled.
"I wanna come inside before our shadow gets a bright idea and figures out he's been bamboozled." the dwarf said. "We got problems."
"Just great," Damian said. A moment later he came back into the apartment, followed by Gizmo and Mammoth. The two new comers goggled at Blackfire's nude form in the sunlight.
"Pretty girl," Mammoth said, half drooling.
Blackfire rose with catlike grace and glared down at the two boys.
"Take the video," the alien said disdainfully. "It will last longer."
"Okay," Gizmo said in a daze. Something with a lens rose from his backpack. Damian sent it flying with a snap kick.
"Hey!" Gizmo protested. "What's the big idea!"
"She didn't mean it literally!" Damian snapped, blushing.
"Asshole, do you know how much that thing cost?" Gizmo yelled back.
"You said we had a problem," Raven interjected firmly, before the two boys could lose it. "What problem."
"Funny arrow guy show up at work," Mammoth said. He gave the chairs a despairing glance, then settled himself down on the floor. His eyes followed Blackfire as she sashayed over to the counter and grabbed a pastry. "Threaten to shoot Mammoth and Gizmo unless we tell him why we outside big house."
"What did you tell him?" Raven asked gently.
"We told him to shift it," Gizmo said, giving Damian one last glare before climbing into an empty chair. Raven decided it was wiser not to ask if he wanted something to sit on when his head barely came up over the table's edge. "Gizmo's Gizmos is a legitimate business and if he wants to throw allegations around, he could show his damn face and face the legal consequences."
"How'd he take it?" she asked. Using her power, she floated the pastries away from Blackfire and to the table. Mammoth took two and the vanished in a single bite. He blushed when she looked at him.
"Same way all these vigilante types do," Gizmo grumbled. "Started trying to break stuff. So I called the cops on his ass. This ain't the US, you can't pull shit like that here."
"I sat on him," Mammoth said, beaming with pride. "He didn't like that."
"So what's the problem?" Raven asked.
"The problem is these guys never learn and they never back off," Gizmo said with a sigh, resting his arms on the table and his head on his arms. It made him look like a Peanuts character and she forced herself not to laugh. "If they don't get what they want, they'll keep trying. They'll call in help, or they'll start pressuring the local government into giving them what they want. If that doesn't work, they just go up the food chain. Stronger heroes, or bigger government agents. Sometimes both. We bought ourselves time, but all we really did was make sure this Speedy guy is going to have it out for us because now he's sure we're guilty."
"Well, technically, you are," Blackfire said.
"Yeah, but that's no reason to persecute us!" Gizmo protested hotly.
Damian flopped down in a chair and let out a disgusted sigh.
"Great, I got hired to kill someone whose friends with a super, and if I fail, it's my ass that ends up in the grass." He grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.
"I kept telling you to vet your jobs better," Gizmo said. A claw appeared from his backpack and grabbed one of the pastries. "But you refused to listen."
"What happens if we kill him?" Raven asked.
"Best case? You get every super this Queen guy is friends with to come down on your head." Gizmo said. "Worst case, you get that, and all the world governments trying to come down on you too and you end up in some place that ends in 'stan' where he's learning arabic and you two are lucky to walk around in burkas all day praying you don't get kidnapped, sold, and raped, and not always in that order. Assuming you don't end up in prison or dead, that is."
"And if we don't kill him?" Raven asked.
"Then you get a very pissed off crime boss who puts a price on your head, which gets picked up by everyone, and you end up either in some country that ends in 'stan' learning arabic praying you don't get kidnapped, sold, and raped, because if the boss gets you Dams here ends up dead and you two girls end up kidnapped, sold, and raped, and not always in that order." Gizmo said, looking sad.
Raven leaned back and thought. Neither option sounded very good. They were damned if they were, and certainly damned if they didn't. It was possible they could take Queen and his bodyguard if the three of them worked together, certainly if the five of them did, but that didn't solve their problem at all. Still, something niggled at the back of her head. Something Frater Benjamin, a great lover of history, had told her.
"Qin," she muttered, grasping at the thought.
"What?" Blackfire asked. "I am...not familiar with this word."
"The Qin Rebellion," Raven said, the story coming back to her. "During the Qin Dynasty of China, there were two generals who were leading an army to a rendezvous. However, they were stopped by a flooded river. The price for being late to a government assigned job was death, no matter the reason. So the two generals, realizing that the punishment for rebellion was also death, decided to rebel and die fighting rather than be executed."
Silence hung in the air as the other rolled over that thought.
"You're thinking if we turn on the boss and hand him over to Queen as the one responsible, he'll leave off?" Damian asked.
"Could work," Gizmo said. "These hero types always want to try and redeem us teens. Might buy us some forgiveness. The question is, can we take down a crime boss with dozens of goons when you guys couldn't even take out one fat cat billionaire?"
Damians' anger sparked at that, but Raven put up a placating hand.
"That's because Damian acted alone and with poor information," she said gently. "This time, we will be working together, all of us, and we'll know who and what we're going up against."
Gizmo looked thoughtful for a moment, then his eyes snapped open.
"Wait, you want us to help you?" he yelped.
"I do," Raven said, giving him, then Mammoth, a seductive smile. "What do you say?"
"Don't know," Mammoth said, returning her a smile. "Mammoth only pawn, in game of life."
"Ah cribble nibbits," Gizmo groaned. "Now we're really screwed."