I tensed, ready for the fists that would juice me like an orange.

"Not Chosen."

Both Vega's eyes and my own snapped to the wounded dog girl, who was beckoning Angelica to approach. Vega said, "Uh," and then, "Oh," and "Really?" When I gave a jerky nod she asked, "Then what were you doing here?" She looked to the girl again. "Is-"

"Not my friend."

Vega deflated a bit.

Well it's been nice meeting you, too, I thought. Out loud I said, "I was patrolling in the area and I heard her and Fenrir fighting. I just… dropped in."

"Just 'dropped in' on Fenrir, huh?"

"Y-" My throat clogged; I gulped. "Yes?"

Dog Girl reached out a hand as Angelica drooped her head and rubbed her monstrous snout. "Aura."

"Shit!" Vega dropped me, and suddenly it was much less of a challenge to stay solid, to look her in the eyeholes. "Ugh, and I was doing so well with it lately, too!" She considered Dog Girl's leg and said, "You helped fix her up?"

"Yes."

She looked to Dog Girl to confirm and received an affirming grunt. "Okay, cool, you're off my shitlist then. For now, at least. And, you know, sorry about the whole… yeah."

"It's, uh, fine. I don't think you could have-" I straightened like a prairie dog. "Wait, where's Fenrir?"

Vega paused. "Hold on." She raised a hand, and with the talking lulled and my ears focused I could hear a rolling wail in the distance. "Fuck," she said, "Badges. We gotta go." She flew to the nearby back exit, checking around outside for something.

"But all we did was fight a villain," I said. "Why would we get in trouble for that?"

Despite her mask being all but expressionless she managed to inject incredulity into its non-features. "Is this your first night caping or something?"

I hesitated to answer.

"Oh. Oh, wow, is it? I wasn't serious." She floated up to the windows lining the top of the walls, continuing as she peered into the alleys. "Well, then take some advice, okay? Stay away from cops and the PRT, if you can help it. Even if the cops aren't as bad-" Dog Girl huffed "-they have to call in the PRT once they know capes are involved in something, and they only ever make things worse. Better to keep your distance."

She looked down the last corner, sighed, and lowered back down to just above us. "Bad enough there's no vans around to move the dogs, but now there's not even enough time to go get one. If only someonehad told me ahead of time that she was hitting this place tonight, maybe I could'vehelped."

"You said no when I brought it up," Dog Girl growled.

Vega threw up her hands. "Because there was a good chance Fenrir would be here, and look at that, he was! And now these dogs are gonna be dumped into cheap centers that don't give a shit about them, and that's if they're lucky."

"I could help carry one," I blurted, and wasn't it interesting that that was what earned me my first non-hostile look from Dog Girl? "If you want to bring at least one with. I can take a lot of punishment." I demonstrated by dispersing and then recreating my forearm. "If it's aggressive or anything, I mean."

They looked at each other. Vega said, "That would mean taking you to-"

"It's fine," Dog Girl interrupted, pushing up to her feet and leaning on Angelica. "She's offering. We won't be able to keep the place secret long anyways."

She.

Suddenly my chest felt light. "I won't say anything to anyone." Not that I had anyone to tell, really, but saying that would probably have been counterproductive.

Vega shook her head. "Fine. That means we can take three. Bitch, which ones?"

Against my expectations Dog Girl didn't react at all to being called bitch; she merely pointed at three of the caged dogs. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize it might be an on-theme cape name for her.

Vega picked up the cages of a pair of pitbulls like they weighed nothing, one with each hand, and they gnashed and scratched where she laced her fingers through the top bars, ineffectual. She busted the lock to the last one open with a kick, then gestured me over with a tilt of her head.

The dog inside was a sinewy mess of a mutt, torn-eared, lined with memories of wounds, a mottled grey-brown coat housing an oddly stoic disposition. Its beady eyes fixed on me and in them I thought I could see what had compelled Bitch(?) to crash this operation anyways.

Figuring she would know best how to make this go smooth I looked to her. "Let him sniff your hand first," she said, and I did, retracting the oil on it first. He took a tentative whiff, still looking like a old rusted bear trap, caught in a perpetual state of Schrödinger's lethality. He did not bite.

"No time for anything else. Lead him out by the collar, pick him up and get on." She climbed Angelica's bone spikes and mounted her, only a touch slowed by her injury.

She was right, I could hear the sirens much closer now. I led him out from the dingy cage and over to Angelica. He finally bit me when I picked him up, snapping down on my wrist, but all it got him was oil on his teeth, which I made sure to retract. He didn't try again. Angelica's hide proved easy enough to climb one-handed and I managed to settle behind Bitch, a ridge of bone in my grip and a dog under my arm like a flea-ridden hay bale.

"Okay," Vega said, "Sounds like they're at Sullivan by now. Fishhook north, then east. I'll fly low in case they brought Dovetail or Aegis." She shot out the door at the back.

Without so much as a "Hold on," Bitch whistled and Angelica burst into motion, bolting out the front of the warehouse. My heart jostled in my ribcage and it was all I could do to hold on to my ride and my charge both. Somehow we were already moving fast enough the streets were becoming a blur but I was able to make the distinction that, though I could hear the sirens and see the flashing lights spread over the building faces, I couldn't see any response vehicles yet, and thus they hadn't seen us. A small relief when I was stuck riding something pulled out of the harshest annals of all mythologies.

The first time we banked a ninety-degree turn I very nearly lost both grip and metaphorical lunch, and if my powers didn't make me so resilient I would have been feeling that in the morning, and the evening, and the morning after that too. The next turns were just as harsh but I was learning to preempt them by leaning in first.

For a bit it seemed like we weren't getting any further from the sirens but eventually, after we stopped making so many turns, we started to gain significant ground. When we'd gotten a good distance Vega swooped in next to us. The pitbulls didn't look any happier but they'd reduced their barking to growls at least. "Clear," she said, just loud enough to be heard over the rush of wind. "Over here."

We followed her into a series of alleys between run-down apartment buildings and came to a stop in a spot fully hidden from the streets. There was only barely room enough between Angelica's bulk and the walls to dismount. When we had I was treated to a somewhat horrifying sight as Angelica sloughed off chunks of her huge body, spilling unusual flesh and bone onto the already dirty ground. Bitch pulled out a knife - a different one from the one I'd borrowed from her, this one's blade didn't fold and it looked a less-than-legal length - and plunged it into the belly of the beast, presumably to speed up the process. It wasn't pleasant to watch.

When half the mass was shed Bitch pulled a calm, normal-looking Angelica out. She and Vega started down the alleys. After stepping carefully around the mess of meat I'd ridden in on, I followed.

The mutt I was carrying had yet to resist any more since biting me. I tried to look into his eyes but his were pointed straight ahead. I wondered for a moment if I should call him something other than "the mutt" but knew I probably shouldn't be the one to name him.

We came to the side door into a red-brick building, the faces of which hadn't been washed in years. Door and chain both were rusted and the hinges creaked when opened. Inside there was a split in the floorspace: half was taken up by hefty, disused machinery, some bolted in place and others uprooted and shoved into a corner or wall, and half was occupied by all things dog. Blankets, beds, and toys; cages, bowls and leashes, scattered on the floor or hung from hooks in the walls. A couple gas generators were hooked up to simple lights and one or two wires disappeared up the walls.

A cornucopia of dogs perked up and flooded around us, many coming to sniff the new dogs and me, until Bitch gave an order that scattered them back to their side. Angelica bounded up a spiral staircase in one corner. Bitch relieved me of my luggage and carried him over to the empty cages. Vega put the cages she was carrying down nearby and, as if just now remembering I was here, floated over to me.

"So…" she started, "thanks, for this. Bitch won't say it but I'm pretty sure she appreciates you helping."

"Hmph."

Pretty sure? "It's not a big deal, really."

She folded her arms, and I started to recognize that, were she standing on the ground, Vega would come up almost as tall as me. With her half-foot hover she managed to make me feel short, and wasn't that something? "Still, you didn't have to, but you did." She paused. "You said this was your first night patrolling, right?"

"I didn't actually say so, but it is," I said, unsure where she was going with this.

"And you were going it alone? No partner, no team?"

I nodded.

"Does Fenrir know you're out on your own?"

"He tried to peddle eventual recruitment to me after I fought him, so I'd assume he does."

A slight strain slipped into her tone. "Did he mention the Pit?"

Again, I nodded.

Vega swore under her breath. "Okay, well, that's not as bad as him hating you, but it's still pretty bad. Trust me when I say you want to stay under his radar as much as possible. He likes to go after independents like us, hero, villain, whatever, and poach them for the Chosen. It's sort of how Bitch and I started working together-"

"Sometimes," Bitch grunted from the other end.

"-sometimes. It's easier to avoid getting cornered when you've got someone to watch your back. We find places like these to hide from the Chosen, I chip in with the dogs and busting rings, and she lets me hang here so I can be somewhere that isn't school or home."

"Rambling," Bitch said. Her back was still to us.

"Anyways. So if you're on your own… I don't usually suggest this, especially not lately, but have you considered joining the Wards?"

My jaw stiffened. I couldn't keep the vitriol out of my voice. "Not happening."

Vega put up her hands, appeasing. "That's fine! I get it, really. If you're not going to, though… do you want in on what we've got going here? I'd be okay with it, and I'm pretty sure Bitch is, too-"

Bitch shrugged, eyes on the hose she was unwinding.

"-and I'd really rather not see another decent cape get conscripted."

I chewed on the offer. "Is this you putting together a team?"

"No," they both chorused. Vega said, "Nothing official like that, we don't have any big goals and we're trying to keep low profiles. This is just us making sure we can each do what we do without getting snatched up or beaten down. All we'd ask is that you help us out when you can, and in return you'll get backup when you need it and," she gestured broadly around the space, "a pretty chill place to lay low."

I cocked a brow, though I wasn't sure how well she could tell through my oil. "Um…"

She waved me off. "It's not all for the dogs. There's this loft space upstairs too. We haven't got much in it yet but there's a couch and a TV, at least. Extra rooms too, if you want one for yourself." She inclined her head, expectant.

The offer was more than a little tempting. The fight with Fenrir and his interest in my capabilities had shaken me, and knowing I could count on two people with experience keeping that at bay would do wonders to set my mind at ease. On top of that, having people in my life I didn't have to hide my power around, who understood what it was like to be a cape in a city turned against itself, sounded like a boon of its own. I wasn't holding out hope that they'd want to be friends with me, but I'd take what I could get.

What cinched it for me was that it came with minimal strings attached. If or when the stick to match the carrot came down, the option to cut my losses cleanly would be at my disposal. If it hurt, it didn't have to hurt for long.

"Alright," I said. "I'm in."

Vega pumped a fist. "Cool!" she said. "Good, cool, okay. Welcome aboard." She lowered to the ground and shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, abruptly casual. "Now that that's settled, do you wanna get food? Bitch is gonna be tied up washing the ring dogs and their cages for forever and I'm sta-ha-harving." It came out as an unabashed whine. "Is night breakfast okay with you? I've been thinking about hash browns for probably the last hour."

The shift in tone caught me off-guard but now that she'd mentioned it, all that terror and thrill had stirred up a mean appetite. My adrenaline was slowly crashing and the idea of slinking into bed before replenishing my energy now seemed preposterous. "Sure. I don't know if there's anywhere serving breakfast this late, though."

She 'tsk'ed, sounding genuinely offended. "You've never been to Hash-It-Out? God, do you even live in Brockton?" She took me by the wrist and started pulling me towards the door we'd come in through. "It's decided, we're going. Clearly someone needs to save you from yourself."

I let myself be dragged away - and wow, was her grip strong - but as we exited into the cold night air a thought came to me, and I almost liquefied on the spot.

If we were going to eat together, I'd have to take off my mask.

If I unmasked to her, I'd probably have to come out to her.

I swallowed, but the lump in my throat was there to stay.