Little Hunter

Lisa did her best not to hate everyone in the room.

It was… A complex feeling.

The strongest drug she'd ever taken in her life was a damn Aspirin. Oh sure, she could have shot herself up with any number of things to quell the headaches. They were certainly killer enough.

It was just a road she knew to never go down. Drugs were drugs. No matter the reason, it eventually became about getting another high.

Lisa didn't take anything.

It was Calvert and his fucking assholes who held her down and jammed needles into her arm. Nothing street level, no. That would impair her ability to use her powers. It was tinker stuff. The kind that would make her more 'compliant.'

But what good is keeping your pet drugged up if she can still scheme ways to get out of the room? Obvious answer. Use stronger drugs.

Calvert was a fucking monster that way.

And his sick plan had worked. Lisa never took a step off that cliff. She'd been shoved off and left to hang by the throat.

The end result was the same.

She gave in. Once. After she'd been rescued.

Weaver had been waiting in the wings for her to try and all but dragged her into meetings. Lisa kept going. She'd decided nothing was more humiliating than reducing herself to some twitching skeletal shell of herself who could only think about getting high all the time.

"Lisa," she said when her turn came. "Opioids."

"Hi Lisa," the room said back.

And she took her seat. Which made it the next person's turn. Her sponsor, coincidentally.

"Annette. I'm an alcoholic."

She was so well known to the group that most just nodded rather than make a show of greeting her.

It was a generalized meeting. There were more focused or specialized ones, but Annette knew Lisa would never stick to those. They were too small, and she wouldn't be able to skate by. So long as the group was large and varied, Lisa could blend in, speak when spoken to, and otherwise just sit and listen.

It helped. Sort of. If nothing else, it reminded her of every cliché about addiction she never wanted to apply to her.

Annette took her seat, and the meeting proceeded as usual.

Mostly.

Lisa didn't need a power to know something was bothering the woman. Something big. She was way more antsy than usual. She stayed that way throughout the meeting.

She never attended Tuesday meetings.

"We need to talk shop," Lisa whispered during the ten-minute donut break.

Annette only offered a nod.

Something was absolutely wrong.

But group was group. Even if the room wasn't full of recovering addicts, a community center gymnasium wasn't the place to talk about anything cape-related. Never mind that despite her best efforts, Lisa had too much respect for what people were trying to do to disrupt the process.

So she waited quietly.

That was nothing unusual for her. She only spoke rarely during meetings, and people let her get away with it.

It was Annette's silence everyone noticed, and more than a few tried to get close and subtly ask if she was okay.

She gave them excuses about a bad day at work.

Something must be really wrong if she was too bothered to even try giving Lisa a subtle message through doublespeak even a two-bit thinker could figure out.

The full two-hour meeting had passed before Lisa found a chance to slip away with Annette right behind her.

They went to the roof access stairwell.

The roof itself was too open, but the stairwell was tucked into a back corner of the building no one went to but near a back exit that made going that way plausible.

It wasn't the first time Lisa and Annette had slipped away to discuss things.

"What happened?" Lisa asked.

Annette kept her expression even, which had the opposite effect she wanted. Weaver didn't do 'even.' She did serious. And angry. And how many heads do I have to hit before people listen?

Even-measured was something she only did when upset.

Lisa waited, her own serious face on and her shoulders square.

It took a few minutes for the thinker's pride to drop and for both of them to relax.

"It's not something you need to worry about."

Lisa knew better than to overtly use her power on the woman—they both stopped doing that to one another years ago—but she didn't need to. Not this time.

"Someone from your past show up out of the blue?" she asked.

Annette's reaction shocked her.

"What happened?"

"You first," Annette said.

She figured. "Rachel called me a few nights ago. Someone had poked around her supplies at the goodwill."

Annette didn't speak, and Lisa kept talking.

"I figured Empire"—and she noticed Annette already seemed to suspect something else—"and went calling our contacts. One didn't answer. I sent Rachel to poke around and woke Imp and Regent to do the same. Rachel arrived first."

"Vista reported crossing paths with her," Annette said.

"Same night," Lisa confirmed. "No bodies, but there was blood and discarded personal items."

Fishing in her purse, Lisa produced J's phone.

"The killer used this one. I cracked it open and went looking through. Lots of general searches about the city. Capes. Gangs. PRT. Protectorate. Stuff you might do if you're wandering into town and don't know who's who."

"And?"

"And I figured random cape until I noticed a pattern in other unrelated searches. Take a look at the history."

Lisa handed the phone over, and Annette started thumbing through the menus.

Her stoic but angry demeanor dropped fast.

"Danny?"

"At least thirty pages on his murder. Explains why they were poking around Rachel's supplies."

"The memorial."

"Yeah, and I thought it still might be the Empire because Rain is definitely gunning for you specifically, even if the Pure at large are more focused on the city. Still working on that, by the way."

Annette kept scrolling, and Lisa could swear there was a flash of anger on her face.

She could guess why.

"The camp. Yeah. Nearly a hundred links about it. The survivors. The families… What's really weird is that there's a delay in the time stamps. Like our suspect finished, tossed the phone, then came back to use it again a few minutes later."

Annette's snarl deepened. "Weaver."

"Figures they'd look Weaver up. Weaver was all over the camp massacre case before she joined the Protectorate. What's really weird is that this person doesn't seem to have known anything about that or about Nilbog."

"Not everyone pays attention to what happens in one corner of the world."

"Who doesn't know who Nilbog is?" Lisa shook her head. "Nah. If this was someone from the Empire, they'd have been given all this information before coming here. No need to look it up in such a boneheaded way."

"Unless they wanted to send a message."

"Last search."

Annette looked, and Lisa's brow rose.

The woman paled.

Weaver never paled.

"Annette?" Lisa pressed.

"The camp?"

"Yeah… Goggle Maps search. Like they wanted to go there. I figured it might be a trap. An attempt to lure you there, so I went ahead and sent Imp instead to scope it out."

Lisa reached into her purse for another object. A simple polaroid picture.

She held it out.

"Here's what Imp found."

Annette took the picture and stared.

"A deer—" Her voice hitched.

"What is it?"

"Deer." Annette all but shoved the picture back into Lisa's hands and pulled her phone on. "I need to make a call."

"What? Wh—"

She started dialing and then started to raise the phone.

Lisa frowned and pointed at the ground.

Annette inhaled and nodded.

She switched the phone to speaker.

They were friends. Had been for years. Because 'Coil' and Weaver worked together, the city transformed from a gangland hellscape to a place you could at least take a walk at night in a few short years. The Io portal helped a lot with that, sure. But really?

A hero and a villain set all the law and order and freedom and money aside. Lisa and Annette came together. Decided kids not getting gunned down in the street—or overdosing in dark corners—was the most important thing either of them could realistically achieve.

If Lisa thought she could get away with it, she'd ban the entire drug trade from the city. She was a villain, but she wasn't a monster. Her own experiences certainly hadn't endeared her to dealers and kingpins.

But that was a pipe dream. Only deluded fools and idiots thought there was any winning in a war on drugs. The reality of it was that people who wanted to get high found a way, and a whole lot of blood and bullets got traded for the chance to provide it to them.

At least if she cornered the market and controlled it, she could control the dealers and keep their poison out of schools, hospitals, and rehab centers. With the heroes on the same page, they could do it.

It took a lot of trust.

And the thing about trust was that it went hand-in-hand with a healthy amount of distrust.

The phone rang several times before picking up.

"Mrs. Hebert?" a girl asked.

"Hello, Naomi."

"Wow… Sorry. You haven't called in a long time. Took me a moment to remember it was your number."

The name was familiar but Lisa—Right. She looked at J's phone. Naomi Higgens. One of the two survivors from the camp massacre.

"Do you need something?" Naomi asked.

"Just a quick question if it's okay." Annette's eyes narrowed, and her expression turned solemn. "I think once—just once—you told me a story when we talked. About a deer?"

"Deer? Oh! Oh yeah, I remember. We were doing a nature hike thing with workbooks. We came around a bend in the trail, and this deer was just there. We all talked about it for the rest of the day."

Annette turned her eyes on the photo, and Lisa rose from her seat as something visibly broke.

"Anne?" she asked.

"Mrs. Hebert?" Naomi called out. "Is—"

"Was Taylor there?"

"Yeah. We all were."

Her fingers pinched the polaroid so tight she bent it down the middle.

"Mrs. Hebert. Do you need to talk to someone?"

"No. I'm fine."

"Are you sure? I have a number for emergencies—"

"No. I'm with someone right now. It's alright. Thank you."

Annette hung up and turned away.

"Where are you going?" Lisa asked.

"Did Imp mess with that deer skull?"

"Of course not. She knows better." Lisa started following. "You're going to check it yourself?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"It's not—"

"I'm going with you either way, so you might as well tell me."

~ ~ ~

The drive was long but familiar.

Annette had driven it a dozen times.

The trail was overgrown and abandoned.

She barely needed it.

She'd gone to the camp so many times after it happened. She scoured it. Used her power on every inch of every cabin.

Her power could do a lot of things, but one thing it couldn't do was conjure something from nothing. She needed objects. She needed disturbance. Something tangible she could see in the winds and colors that flowed through the world.

So little of the camp was left.

A fact evidenced to her as she walked into it and found the forest swallowing the place whole.

The cabins still stood but were more stripped than ever. Much of the evidence was taken by the PRT long before Annette started coming. Many personal items were returned to families. Scenes cleaned by the company owning the camp in some vain attempt to resell the property.

Some perverse jackass actually tried to turn the place into a 'horror camp' once.

Annette didn't feel much shame she'd stopped that dead in its tracks.

Her hand reached for her breast just thinking about it.

"Anne?"

"I'm fine."

Lisa didn't push.

Annette didn't have to look far to find what she was looking for.

The skull was mounted on a stick jammed into the ground. Cleaned to a pure ivory without a single mark on the bone.

Annette hesitated.

She crouched in front of the skull and unleashed her power to its fullest.

Color flooded the world around her. Flowing like a storm in every direction. As it moved, the colors hung. Catching on the buildings, the trees, the skull. Images reconstructed. Pieces of things charged with signs of passage.

She focused on the skull itself.

On the image of a tall figure in a mask reverently setting it in place before standing and looking at the sky.

The same woman who dared to wear Taylor's face and invaded her home.

The DNA results meant nothing. Positive? What did it prove? Anyone could fake that with enough effort. It had to be fake. Taylor was dead. She died a long time ago.

Annette focused harder.

Her temples began to pound. It was a hard thing to describe. She didn't know how it worked. It was nothing like Lisa's Sherlock Holmes-like power, Calvert's parallel cognition, or Alexandria's memory. All of those powers worked off of tangible things.

Annette's seemed to reach into some void—a lock box or a vault—and rebuilt the past from within it.

And the harder she focused on the skull, the stranger it became.

The woman who'd set it was a blank. There were images of her running through the woods. Stalking someone through the city. Lisa's agent, probably. Also searching…

Kneeling before a stone plaque with someone beside her.

Her power tended to focus on a single subject at a time. Annette couldn't make them out in shape, only their presence.

She pushed harder.

Deeper.

Her head began pounding, and she felt her lungs contract in her chest.

There was a void.

A long span of something she couldn't see.

And then there she was.

A girl tall and thin for her age, with glasses and long dark hair.

Her hands fumbled, reaching into her jacket over her breast and yanking the flask from inside.

She had it with her. Always. Because she liked torturing herself sometimes.

Her entire body heaved as she fumbled for the cap. Just as she started to unscrew it and could almost taste it on her lips, a hand reached down the snatched it away. She tried to follow, but Lisa's other hand fell on her shoulder and pushed gently.

Annette sat on her knees, the blonde just behind her with nonjudgmental eyes.

"I—"

"Don't worry about it," Lisa said. "You did it for me once. Just returning the favor."

Annette tried to compose herself.

She didn't like thinking of those years. They were painful. And lonely. And hateful. She'd made mistakes. Mistakes that cost people their lives and that she was still paying for.

She looked again.

A girl tall for her age with dark curly hair—Annette and Rose's hair—wide lips and a nervous smile.

The same girl, scarred and shaken, looking up at something with wide eyes.

"It's her," Lisa whispered. "Isn't it? It's really her."

Annette shook and said nothing.

She couldn't think.

Couldn't speak.

Lisa knelt beside her, an arm around her shoulder. "It is her."

Annette nodded mutely.

"Shit… Wh—"

Lisa's phone rang, and she frowned.

She moved to silence it but froze.

"It's Bitch. I—One sec, Anne. Don't do anything."

Annette nodded.

"You don't have another flask, right?"

She didn't.

"Okay. Just being sure."

She stepped back and answered her phone.

"What is it? I'm kind of—Wait, what? Cassie, slow down. Where?!"

Annette pulled herself together.

Something was wrong. Rachel needed help.

That was something to focus on, at least. Something not—

Lisa turned, eyes wide, and Annette stiffened.

"What?"

Lisa bit the inside of her cheek. "It's… It's about Taylor."