Chapter 13

A roaring haze of mist soaked the city in yet another record breaking downpour that was bound to drown a dozen stray pokemon and more than a couple of people. Zach stood in the middle of it, looking up into the boiling clouds above. He couldn't see anything. He never could. Not in the smog of day or the polluted light of night, but that didn't stop him from reaching out his hand like daydreamers were known to do. He wanted to touch the sky, but not to wish upon a star.

Stars didn't exist beyond the high rises of Midtown, but storms did. They thrashed and raged with heat, rain, and lightning. Thunder rolled in from the east and rumbled all the way to the west, roaring and laughing at the frightened screams of the humans lurking below. The growling of heaven was not to be taken lightly. Storms shook the earth with their voices, rattling the world with the power of their words.

They spoke now, so thunderous and heavy that Zach felt like he could reach out and touch them. He wanted to feel the electricity crackle between his fingers. The same way it did when Baby and Pantera came head to head at Ace's apartment. They clashed like two opposing storm fronts yet he jolted them to a stop with a single thrust of his hand. With nothing more than five fingers, he stopped the devil in her tracks.

Zach looked into the back of his hand, winking against the raindrops that fell onto his face. Is this what power felt like? Was this the same feeling trainers had when they defeated a pokemon in battle? Staying alive after an ordeal as monumental as assassination sure felt like a victory. He wondered if Baby felt the same. After all, she was the one who led the charge into the darkness. Perhaps catching criminals and pokemon were one and the same for her. Her badge gave her power, and somehow, that power had transferred into him during the fight. It was as if some of her seemingly boundless energy was buzzing through his veins, trying to find its way back to her.

But did she give that power willingly, or did he steal it from her in the heat of the moment? He was a thief after all. The exchange would've happened the last time they touched and that was when Baby offered him her hand after the battle. He'd been hesitant to accept it, but she snatched his hand out of the air faster than a bolt of lightning. Baby clasped it, hard and strong, and helped him to his feet without a second thought. There were no words, just a smile and a pat on the shoulder.

Zach watched the storm swirl beyond his fingers. He twisted them to match the movement of the clouds. Baby was still an enigma to him. She knew fear like the rest of them. He saw it in the hallway before they breached Ace's door. So why did she feel compelled to run towards danger, not away from it? That's what any sensible self-preserving person would do.

Run.

Zach tried to coax her down a safer path on more than one occasion, but no matter what he said, she wouldn't listen. Not in the streets, at her apartment, or in the midst of danger. She always ran in the opposite direction. How many more times would she save his life at the risk of her own? Nobody cared about what happened to a homeless failure. She shouldn't either. Zach paused in a sudden abrupt thought.

Is that why she let him go? Because he meant nothing to the world or to her?

Zach quickly wiggled a finger in his ear. He knew better than that. The only reason he managed to flee the scene at Ace's apartment before more cops arrived was because Baby passed him over to help her partner into the hallway. For an officer with a broken arm, he sure had a hard time moving his legs. Still, there had to be protocol for situations like that. As a rule loving manual hugging officer of the law, Baby could've restrained him, handcuffed him to a pole, or at the very least, told him to stay put, but she didn't.

Instead, she let him go, because she wasn't just a cop, she was a hero. Not the firefighting adrenaline junkie type, or the entitled flag saluting brand, but an honest to God herculean hero. It all suddenly made sense. Baby's seemingly boundless spirit and tenacity. Her raging positivity and kindness. It was who she was born to be. It was written in the stars and he didn't recognize it at first because he never saw them. Baby saved his life because it was the right thing to do, and she would do it again in a heartbeat, even if that heartbeat happened to be her last.

A hero didn't know how to stop, and at this rate, Zach was going to kill her and she was going to let him. He may have been a thief, but he wasn't a murderer. Not without good reason. He'd put Baby's power to good use. She wasn't the only one who knew how to fight. In order for Zach to settle into this life of misery and disrepute, he had staked his claim to it. He fought and he cheated for every scrap of plastic and rubbish he had. Cops didn't care what one criminal did to another in the blackest hours of the night.

Blue lights didn't come wailing down every darkened alley or behind every gutter grate when things went bad. Thieves took matters into their own hands, and Zach's were covered in blood. None of it was his own. There were some things the rain couldn't wash away, even in a downpour as strong as this. Now, it was time to stake another claim and he might just have to stab Pantera's beating heart to make it.

Zach lowered a steel hard gaze onto the face of Reynold's Power Plant. He stood in front of it, just as silent and imposing as its pitch black windows, broken glass, and pointed spires. Pantera was in there. He could feel her, watching and waiting where she couldn't be seen. It was a sense he'd always attributed to paranoia and unregulated medication, but now, Zach was beginning to think it was something else. He was starting to rethink his entire outlook on this black devil.

Pantera started following Zach the very first day they met, but maybe not for the reasons he initially thought. All of Pantera's victims had something in common and that something was him. It wasn't about the blood lust or Baby. Pantera was trying to prove something. To do something, which didn't surprise Zach in the slightest.

Pokemon had been attracted to him ever since he was a kid. They approached him, often curious, sometimes cautious, but usually with a grudge to bear. Whenever he spoke, they screamed. Whenever he touched them, they flinched. Shocked by some invisible charge. Sometimes, making eye contact was enough to condemn him. More often than not, they attacked without rhyme or reason, and worst of all, they didn't stop until they got their point, or their claws, across.

Maybe this thing with Pantera was similar. He'd drawn the cat's attention on some cosmic unseen level that couldn't be ignored. She had to finish whatever began between them and wouldn't stop until it was over. Zach took a slow heavy breath. He felt the weight of the rain soak through the jacket on his shoulders. His life may have been a soggy dumpster fire, but it was still his life, and if he was going to die, he was going to do it on his terms. Baby's courage in the face of overwhelming adversity must've rubbed off on him.

Zach plodded through the metal and weeds towards the black wedge of an unlocked somewhat misshapen door that led into the plant. The path was easy on his steps. He had familiarized himself with the layout since his last visit with the anticipation of making it his new basecamp. Reynold's was home territory, but once he passed through the portal into the plant, he'd lose whatever meager advantage he had. The shadows were Pantera's domain, and the sun was nowhere in sight.

Where was Baby's torch when he needed it?

Zach stepped into the darkness and blinked out of sight. He waited for his eyes to adjust before walking deeper into the hollow belly of the plant. The shadows slowly weakened and shapes began to take form. The white and red danger signs posted on the walls appeared first, not that it did him any good. His entire existence could be considered a biohazard. After that, the furniture and equipment distinguished themselves from the underlying structure, but there was one shadow that refused to come to light.

"I know you're in here!" Zach shouted. "Show yourself!"

He stood in the middle of a blown out production floor where the shrapnel of the explosion rose up from the ground around him like cypress knees. Their sharp edges cut the thin trickle of light streaming in from the far windows, making the shadows darker and deeper than they should have been. Zach turned in a circle, eyeing the dim gray glow of destruction for any sign of life. Not that grim reapers had any to begin with.

Loyal to her cause, the cat revealed herself. Her manifestation was silent, of course, and began with the points of her whiskers. They glimmered like pale crystals in the weak light. Then the ridge of her brow and muzzle rose above the gravestones like smoke. It was as if she materialized from another realm, one so dark and secret that not even gengar dared to roam there. She stood not far from him, sharp and still like the metal shards around her.

Pantera's body looked colder than the darkness, and when it moved, it was as elusive as a figment of the imagination. Zach knew better than to think as much. The great black Pantherian was real, especially when she stepped forward into the glow of the storm flickering outside and a flash of lightning ringed one of her eyes with silver.

Zach clenched his fists to keep them from trembling. Pantera watched his knuckles turn white and flicked her tail. The tighter he squeezed, the faster it swept back and forth.

Swish. Swish.

Zach tensed in anticipation of another attack and the cat pulled her whiskers back in a growl. He couldn't hide his fear from her. He couldn't hide anything from her. Those two unwavering crescents could see through all of the bravado and bullshit right down to his very soul, Baby's heroics be damned. He was going to die. Right here. Right now.

Pantera rolled her shoulders. It reminded Zach of how she danced on Ace's corpse. It was over. All over.

Finally.

Zach accepted his fate and released his hands. His fingers loosened and hung limply at his sides. Pantera stopped growling and lowered her lips. She watched as he relaxed his shoulders, then did the same. He cocked his head and she slowed her tail to a lazy curl. He leaned back on his heels. She sat down. He stared at her and she stared at him. It was like looking in a mirror. She was a reflection of himself he had never seen. Zach reached up his hand to touch this strange paradox. He wanted to understand it. Maybe then, he could see the cat as she saw him and know why she haunted him so. He wanted cat's eyes ringed with silver.

Did that make him crazy?

That's what the world seemed to think. Psychiatrists told him as much. Therapists broke the news a little more gently, but the teasing chants and judgmental scowls of his schoolyard classmates really sent the message home. Then again, the frightened stares of his parents didn't help and the daily drug cocktails only seemed to make things worse. Nothing helped until Zach struck out on his own. He dropped out of high school a few weeks in and ran away from home soon after. Not because he talked to pokemon, but because pokemon talked to him.

They had a name for it: Socio Schizophrenic Displacement: projecting human personalities onto pokemon because talking to people was just too stressful. They said it was a personality disorder. That the voices were all in his head. But they couldn't hear the voices. They didn't know what it was like. How real it sounded:

"Are we friends?"

Zach stepped closer to this so called figment of his imagination. He'd been told by so many people for so long that the voices in his head were his own that he never considered the fact that they might actually belong to the pokemon that projected them. The voice from his dreams was Pantera's. It had to be. Nothing else could be so seductively malevolent. All this time, she'd been calling out to him and he ignored her, just like his parents did to him before he was committed. Zach stopped just a step or two away from the black cat.

What if the doctor's in their white lab coats were wrong: about the voices, about him, about her? What if Pantera wasn't killing for sport, but for a reason, like to protect herself? When one lived on the streets, it was a necessity. What if she was trying to protect someone else? What if she was protecting him? The pokemon trainers she killed beat him. The stray pokemon she disposed of annoyed him. The police she attacked tried to arrest him. Zach's hand began to shake.

God knew how much he wanted it to be true, but the scars of his childhood couldn't be washed away in the rain either. Pokemon and people hurt you. That's what every encounter taught him. He couldn't trust them. Whether on purpose or by accident, physically or mentally, they burned, pricked, bit, poisoned, and tricked. But not Pantera. She had the chance to hurt him back in the alley, but she didn't. She listened when he told her to stop. A pokemon so well controlled could be gentle if she wanted to. She could offer a soft touch. . . Just this once.

Zach carefully turned up his wrist, uncurled his fingers, and offered his hand to the cat as Baby once did for him. Pantera slowly raised her head. She traced the beat of Zach's heart down the veins in his arm and into the nearest nicked fingertip. It pulsated with fear and excitement. The great black cat moved a little closer. Her body slipped in and out of the reflected light of the sheet metal without a sound. She stopped and sniffed his dirty fingernails. They twitched against the heat of her breath.

Zach's heart was pounding so loud that Pantera thought it came from within her own chest. She looked up at him, but Zach looked away, bracing himself for the bite of his nightmares. He refused to come any closer. Everything he had to offer was on the table. Now, it was her turn to show herself.

Pantera flexed her paws and dug her claws into the floor. The tips hooked around the bits and pieces of broken metal, making their edges seem as soft and as warm as charcoal underneath her grip. What would she decide? Pantera flicked her tail again.

Swish. Swish.

The great black Pantherian moved forward, opened her mouth, and stretched out her fangs. Her tongue was just as powerful as the rest of her, so when she licked the tips of Zach's fingers, they bent upwards as if rapped against the door of her soul. Startled by the roughness of her tongue, he quickly pulled his hand away. Zach looked at it and found no wound. In fact, he saw clean skin where the grim had been licked away. It looked tender and soft. So gentle. Zach clutched his hand close to his chest and looked down at Pantera. She sat down again and stared at him with a lazy blink of her eyes.

The devil wasn't going to hurt him.

Zach laughed. He didn't mean to, but he couldn't help it. Everything anyone had ever told him about himself was a lie. They were wrong. They were all wrong: about him, about her, about everything. Zach reached out his hand again, and this time, he didn't ask for permission. Pantera leaned forward and rubbed her head into his palm, purring when the stroke fell just right across her face. The vibrations rolled and rumbled between Zach's fingers like thunder in the clouds and he laughed again. This time, on purpose.

The storm raging across Midtown had finally fallen into the palm of his hand.