After a few more minutes of staring and sputtering, Bella and Bobby sat down with Lulu and me at the big round table.
“Explain it to me again,” Bella said, rubbing her head.
“I’m still a little confused. Johnny joined up with you guys to take out the ubervillains, but Siren hypnotized the men.”
“Right.” I nodded.
“How was she able to do that?” Bobby asked. “Surely Mr. Sage would have been able to resist her. He’s a powerful psychic in his own right.”
“It’s that damn microphone she had. It upped her power tremendously.” I drummed my fingers on the table. Sparks flew everywhere. “Nobody could resist it but me, and that’s only because I was a woman. And totally pissed off.”
“It’s not just the microphone, Fiona. Weren’t you paying attention to Siren? Didn’t you listen to what she said?”
Lulu asked. “She told you exactly what she and Intelligal are up to.”
I shrugged. “Not really. I was more concerned with not being able to move at the time. And in the end, all ubervillains want the same thing—to rule the world. The only difference is the crackpot scheme they come up with to try to help them do it.”
“Well, let me tell you, Siren’s plan is a doozy.” Lulu typed on her computer. Images began to pop up on the film screen hanging on the wall.
“Hey, it’s that radio thingy the two of them were protecting so fiercely,” I said, staring at the box with its odd wires and diamond-studded frame.
“It’s not just a radio thingy,” Lulu corrected. “It’s a voice amplifier and projector. Or VAMP for short.”
I snorted. “How fitting.”
“Indeed. Anyway, the VAMP machine is designed to take a sound, like Siren’s voice, and distribute it over a wide area.”
“Like, say, the whole city?”
Lulu shot her finger at me. “Precisely. Siren mentioned something about a broadcast while she was rambling. They must be ready to use it.”
“What happens if they do that?” Bella asked.
“Siren’s voice will spread out over Bigtime. Not only does the VAMP machine boost the range of her voice, it also ups the power, which is how the others were brainwashed into doing her bidding. It’s really quite an impressive machine. Luckily, I thought to put a filter on everyone’s comm links to screen Siren’s voice, or I probably would have been under her spell too. But if we don’t stop them, Siren will enslave everyone.”
“Why would she want to do that?” Bobby asked.
“Who knows why ubervillains do what they do? I quit trying to figure out their motivations a long time ago,” I said. “She’ll probably do something totally lame and cliché and hackneyed like get people to bring her all their money.”
“But wouldn’t she have to keep talking into the machine the whole time to keep people under her control?” Bella asked.
We looked at Lulu.
“Not necessarily,” Lulu said. “She could record her voice and just loop the recording so that it plays back over and over. The only problem with the VAMP machine is that it’s not quite powerful enough to broadcast Siren’s voice over the entire city. So she’s going to need another power source or a way to piggyback the signal onto one of the radio or television stations.”
“Then that’s what we need to figure out,” I said. “Where the ubervillains are going to go to unleash their doomsday device.”
“I’m on it,” Lulu said, hands flashing across her keyboard.
We sat there in silence while the computer hacker went to work. Bella and Bobby kept shooting furtive looks around at the maps and globes and books. I got up and paced back and forth behind Lulu.
Lulu glared over her shoulder at me. “You know I can’t concentrate when you flounce around like that.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I snarled. “I can’t sit still, and I can’t crack any skulls until we get a positive location for Siren and Intelligal.”
“Oh, go eat what’s left in the refrigerator or something. That’s what you usually do.”
Lulu turned her back to me and started typing again. I resisted the urge to light her hair on fire.
“Come on, Fiona. I’ll go with you,” Bella said. “Do you want anything, Grandfather?”
Bobby shook his head. “No. I think I’m just going to sit here and look at everything. If that’s all right with you, Fiona.”
I waved my hand. “Fine. Just as long as you don’t disturb her computer highness over there.”
Lulu shot me another dirty look. I just tossed my hair over my shoulder.
———
Bella and I walked down the deserted halls until we reached the underground kitchen. I opened the doors on the restocked refrigerators, desperately in need of ten thousand calories or so. It’d been a busy night so far, and tomorrow, rather, today would only be worse. I needed to keep my strength up.
“How about some cheesecake?” I asked, pulling a large pie out of one of the refrigerators. “It’s triple chocolate, one of Quicke’s specialties.” The restaurant delivered a couple dozen of the delectable desserts to Sublime every week.
“Well, I really shouldn’t. I’m on a no-sugar diet…” Bella’s voice trailed off as she stared at the luscious cheesecake.
No-sugar diet? No wonder the poor thing was so uptight.
No sugar, no fun, in my book.
“Well, you’re going to have a piece tonight,” I said, cutting her a slice. “I think we’ve all earned it. I certainly have.”
Bella took the cheesecake from me and poured herself a glass of milk. I thought she’d just pick at the yummy cake, but Bella downed it and came back for seconds. She was a quick eater, just like me. Maybe we’d get along better than I thought.
“I still can’t quite believe you’re a member of the Fearless Five. And that I’m sitting here with you in the supersecret Fearless Five headquarters.” Bella took another big bite of her cheesecake. “It’s all a bit surreal.”
“Tell me about it. I can’t believe you come from a family of generational superheroes. I also can’t believe your brother is actually Johnny Angel, and that I’ve been dating him.” I eyed Bella. “Do you moonlight as somebody too?”
“Of course not. Johnny Angel is the only one in our family.”
She sounded offended, as though being a superhero was some vile occupation.
“Do you have an exoskeleton like Johnny does? Or some other sort of power?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know if you’d call it a power, exactly. It’s a little strange.”
“Oh really? Strange how? Strange like you can manipulate the weather with your bare hands? Strange like you can create unbreakable force fields around yourself? Strange like you can create earthquakes just by thinking about them?”
I stared at the fashion designer. Perhaps if Bella had some hidden superpower, she could suit up and go out into the field with me. I could use all the help I could get when I went after Siren and Intelligal. My eyes flicked over her body. She was about Carmen’s size, although quite a bit curvier. Surely, I could find her some sort of costume to wear—
Bella laughed. “Not that strange. I’m just lucky.”
So much for that thought. “Lucky? That’s not really a power, is it?”
Bella shrugged. “Not really. Not like your power.”
“So how does it even work?”
“I just think about things, and stuff… happens. Especially when I’m stressed out.”
I thought back. “Is that why the coffee table cracked the day I was at your house?”
Bella nodded. “That’s one of the problems with it. You can have good luck…”
“Or bad luck,” I finished. “Show me. Show me how it works. Or doesn’t work.”
“I can’t control it all the time, but I’ll try.”
Bella stared at me. I looked back at her. Her eyes didn’t glow. Her hair didn’t snap and crackle. Sparks didn’t fly from her fingertips. She didn’t seem to be doing an
ything at all, other than eyeing me. Some power.
But I kept that thought to myself and raised my fork to take another bite of cheesecake. To my surprise, my hand wobbled, and the cheesecake fell onto the table. What a waste. It was a good thing I still had plenty left. I stabbed another bite. Again, the cheesecake slid off my fork and splattered onto the table. I frowned at the chocolate stains. I wasn’t that clumsy, especially when it came to food.
I eyed Bella with suspicion. “Did you make me do that?”
She smiled and cut another piece of cheesecake off with her fork. “What do you think?”
Bella raised the fork to her lips. She was just getting ready to pop it into her mouth when the dessert slipped off the silver tines and joined the rest of mine on the table.
She stared at the chocolatey mess and let out a long sigh.
“Unfortunately, it always seems to boomerang around back to me—in a bad way.”
Maybe there was something to this luck thing. Too bad Bella didn’t know how to control her power. Or at least make Siren and Intelligal have a string of bad, debilitating luck.
We sat there in silence. After I finished off the cheesecake, I made myself a dozen cucumber-and-tomato sandwiches, which I ate with three bags of chips, five liters of soda, a box of oatmeal-raisin cookies, another box of crackers, a pound of grapes, and a wheel of Gouda cheese.
Bella fixed her amber eyes on me. “So what are your intentions regarding my brother?”
I almost choked on my sandwich. “Excuse me?”
“What are your intentions regarding Johnny? Do you care about him? Or is he just a fling to you? Some random guy you can have great sex with?”
I wiped the mayonnaise off my mouth, stalling for time.
I’d fallen in love with Johnny Bulluci, but I wasn’t sure quite how I felt about it. Much less what I should say to his sister about him.
“I ask because Johnny really likes you. I even think he’s starting to fall in love with you,” Bella said in a soft voice.
My mouth fell open. I couldn’t speak.
“Do you care about him, Fiona? Because if you don’t, you should walk away from him when this is over. I know Johnny appears like he’s cheerful and carefree and that nothing can hurt him, literally, but you could. He told us about your fiancé. How he was murdered. How much you loved him. How you still wear his engagement ring. If you’re not over your fiancé yet, you need to tell Johnny now, before he gets any more involved with you.” Bella’s eyes bored into mine. “I won’t let my brother get hurt, especially not by a superhero. Do you understand me?”
For once, I chose my words carefully. “I care about your brother a great deal. I’m not leading him on. That would never be my intention. As for Travis, I’ll always love him. I’ll always miss him. But he wouldn’t want me to live my life in the past. He wasn’t that sort of man. As for me and Johnny, I’m just trying to take it one day at a time. Things are a little… complicated between us right now, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Some of the bright, angry glow drained out of Bella’s golden eyes. My words seemed to satisfy her. At least she hadn’t cracked the table this time. I’d hate to lose the rest of my food.
“I noticed,” Bella said. “Things are always complicated when it comes to my family.”
The odd tone in her voice struck me. “What do you mean?”
Bella sighed again. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time until we find the ubervillains.”
Bella stared at the refrigerator, but the vacant look in her eyes told me that she wasn’t really seeing it. “I don’t know much about your childhood being the daughter of a superhero, but I grew up in a home where it was all Angel, all the time. If we weren’t talking about Angel or motorcycles or ubervillains, my mother and brother and I were patching up my father and grandfather when they’d come home late at night. Can you imagine being a kid and going through that?”
I flashed back to my high school years, when I’d go out and prowl the streets with my father, fighting crime. They were some of my fondest memories. “Oh, I can imagine.”
“When I was a kid, I thought it was so fascinating that my family were the ones behind Johnny Angel. I used to ride on the motorcycle with my father and dream of the day when I’d get to be Johnny Angel.” Bella’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. “Of course, I didn’t realize then that Angel was more of a man’s name. And a man’s tradition.”
“And when you grew up?” I asked, sensing this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
“I realized how silly it was. Dressing up in a costume, riding around town on a motorcycle, raising hell with other bikers. And I remembered the strain on my mother. How she’d sit up late at night worrying whether my father was going to come home or not. It’s the same thing I did with my father before he died. And it’s the same thing I do now with Johnny every night when he’s gone.” Bella rubbed her head. “I don’t want to have anything to do with superheroes and ubervillains and weekly battles anymore. I’m so tired of it all. Johnny Angel, the worrying, the constant fear. Johnny was too, until our father died.”
I squeezed her hand. “It’s not disrespectful, and it’s not wrong of you to want to have a superfree life. Some people can’t handle the lifestyle. Like you, I grew up around it. But to me, my powers have always been a part of who I am. I couldn’t imagine not being a superhero, not trying to help people, but I can understand how you feel.”
I took a deep breath. “When Travis was alive, he’d go out on missions by himself. I’d do the same thing you did—sit up and worry. I wore out more carpets pacing back and forth than you can imagine.”
Bella smiled. “You do seem like a bit of a pacer.”
“You have no idea.”
“What are you going to do if Johnny wants to quit being Angel? Or if he doesn’t?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Let’s worry about rescuing him first and dealing with Siren and Intelligal. Then, we’ll talk about the complicated relationship stuff.”
———
An hour and another cheesecake later, Bella and I went back to the library to check on Lulu and Bobby. The elderly Bulluci sat in front of one of the computer monitors, flipping through various television channels. He looked extremely bored, until he stumbled across a soccer game. That perked him up a bit.
Lulu sat nearby, type-type-typing away on her computer like usual. Sometimes, I wondered if she and Henry did anything but stare at their monitors when they went out on dates. The two of them were never far from an electronic device of some kind or another.
“Anything yet?” I asked.
Lulu shook her head. “I’m still trying to narrow down the list of places Siren and Intelligal might go to turn on their boom box. It has to be somewhere fairly high up so they can hook into a radio or television signal. I’ve been focusing on SNN and the other local television stations downtown, but I don’t know how the ubervillains would get past their security. Most of it is state-of-the-art.”
I snorted. “Get past security? Please. Intelligal can just use those cursed missiles of hers to blast their way in.”
Lulu shook her head. “I don’t think so. Remember in the fish-stick factory, Siren said the radio is very finely calibrated. That’s the reason they didn’t explode you right then and there. Siren didn’t want to risk the shockwave disrupting the VAMP machine.”
“So they’ll have to do it real quiet-like. Sneak in and set everything up before Siren goes live.”
“Bingo,” Lulu said.
“Well, let’s get cracking,” I said.
The four of us started naming the tallest buildings in Bigtime. Bobby not-so-humbly pointed out that Bulluci Industries was housed in one of the highest skyscrapers in the city.
“What about the observatory?” Bella asked. “Isn’t it officially the highest point in the city?”
I flashed back to the benefit and the scientific models I’d seen. More than a few of th
em remarked on the observatory’s height. “It sure is. Wouldn’t that be the logical spot for the ubervillains to turn the volume up on their radio? Wouldn’t they get the strongest, clearest signal from there?”
“They would. Let me check on something.” Lulu pounded away. After a couple of minutes, she stopped. “That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“I hacked into the observatory’s database so I could see what programs were scheduled and how many people might be on the scene in case Siren and Intelligal tried to sneak in with the regular folks. Guess who’s doing a live morning show there for SNN in a couple of hours?”
“Who?” Bobby asked.
“Erica Songe,” Lulu replied. “And the weird thing is, she’s going when there are no school groups scheduled. No tours, no benefits, no press conferences, nothing.”
“Erica Songe? What would that little twit be doing at the observatory—”
An odd thought struck me. Erica Songe. I thought back to my run-ins with the news reporter. Her hissy fit at the shop a couple of months ago. Her relentless flirtation with Johnny. Her pushiness at the observatory benefit. All the pieces slowly formed a picture. For a moment, I felt just like Carmen.
“You know, Erica Songe is a trashy little thing, just like Siren is.” I snapped my fingers together, remembering something else. “And she has a sister. Irene something. A total geek, just like you.”
Lulu stared at me. “You don’t think…”
I nodded. “I do think. And so do you.”
“Let me pull up some pictures of them off the Internet.”
Lulu’s fingers smacked against her keyboard.
Bella looked back and forth between the two of us.
“What are the two of you talking about?”
“We’re talking about Siren actually being Erica Songe, a news reporter for SNN,” I replied.
Bella, Bobby, and I hunched over Lulu’s shoulder as she pulled up photos of the two women. I studied the pictures.
Same black hair. Same blue eyes. Same collagen-injected lips. Same supersized boobs. There was no mistake about it.