Los Angeles

Daylight shone with an unnatural intensity, shattering any remnants of the period of magic-induced night the city had been forced to endure. Though efforts were being made to clean up the remains of those who hadn’t heeded the warnings about vampires throughout Los Angeles, most of those remains had been turned to ash as they completed the transformation from corpse to vampire, unable to retreat toward shadow when the extended night ended. The vampire threat was over. Life returned to normal.

Though night had ended across the city, darkness still permeated the lives of its protectors.

Audible even above the sounds of flapping wings were the screams of Primo Falcone. Enveloped in the body of his falcon exoskeleton, he held the battered body in his arms. It belonged to his brother, Matti. Not so long ago, Matti had been brutalized by telekinetic cuts from the Hayes couple. He had survived, only to succumb to an infection.

After everything that had happened to them, from the fire to the fight with the golem in the Vivarium, Matti ‘s killer was visible only under a microscope.

The city was soon left behind as the wing beats grew faster and faster. Soon, the larger homes that marked Beverly Hills came into view. Not caring if anyone saw the giant, green falcon touch down in the yard, Primo landed, dissolving the energy exoskeleton as his feet hit the ground. The Yorkes’ former household was quiet and empty, save for the possessions of the dead. Primo stumbled in the door, working his way through the house to the Yorkes’ library. He lay Matti on the leather couch and went to the desk at the edge of the room. Picking up the receiver on the phone, he dialed the code for the base under the La Brea Tar Pits.

After just a moment, there was a beep. “Hello?” The voice belonged to Alex Wilder, the boy who had ended up the leader of the unlikely group of kids.

“Alex…” Primo choked out. “You need to be up here.”

No sooner had Primo finished his sentence than there was a super-speed-induced breeze in the room. Alex stood in front of the couch, his hand over his mouth. “Oh god,” he whispered. “Not another of us.”

“Yeah,” Primo uttered. “Someone said…that runaways, they always end up in the gutter.” He wiped away tear tracks from his red cheeks.

“Guess they were right.”

THE HANDS OF SET

Part I: Snakeskin Tears

By Hunter Lambright

The Juice Box

The Pusher Man flexed his gauntleted fingers, posed at his desk in preparation for the new arrival. Most of his time was spent high at the table, thinking about the finer parts of life. The world would be a much better place if he were in charge. He knew that, of course, but it would take awhile for the world to see it that way. Until then, selling exotic, highly illegal substances would have to do.

The teleportation portal opened up in the antechamber with the sound of reality tearing, spitting Chase Stein out onto the ground. He pushed himself back to his feet, dusted off his knees, and looked up. This was standard fare, until the Pusher Man met Chase’s eyes. One eye was pure black; the other was pure white.

“Yo, Chasey, baby. Either I am trippin’, or you’ve got new contacts,” the Pusher Man said. “You tell me.”

Chase stormed up to the Pusher Man’s desk and slammed his hands down. “I’m the one who’s tripping,” he said. “I took Blade before the Cape was out of my system. Now I’m Cloak and Dagger’s bastard kid!”

The Pusher Man held his hands up in defense. “Chill, catzilla! Lemme tell you, Chasey, baby, I just sell the stuff. God knows what happens after that.”

“Yeah?” Chase asked, reaching across the Pusher Man’s desk and grabbing him by the collar. “Well get this. Blade and Cape are off the market. One thing my city doesn’t need is more super-powered freaks. These things?” He flared the power in his eyes. “These things didn’t go away on schedule. I think it’s permanent and it freaks me the fuck out. I don’t need a street gang of Cloakdaggers forcing me to micromanage. I just want to live my life, all right? And if you don’t let me, normal as normal can get at this point, I’m gonna fuck you up.”

Chase heard a click and felt cold metal pressed up against his carotid artery. “Not today, you aren’t.”

The Pusher Man’s bodyguard, Bo, pulled Chase back from her boss. Sweat trickled down the side of her face. “The Baker job took a little longer than planned. Didn’t expect sorry little shits to start breaking down doors while I was out.”

“Relax, Bo,” the Pusher Man said. “Fella knows what he wants.” Bo moved her switchblade away from Chase’s neck, but kept it out, flipping it back and forth just in case.

The Pusher Man stood up and wandered the shelved walls of the Juice Box. Finally, he pulled out two giant glass jars. Both were filled with a seething, thick substance. “You want it gone?” He dropped both jars to the floor. Glass shards skittered across the floor as the jars shattered, spraying traces of the super power-inducing drugs across Chase’s tennis shoes.

“That the whole stash?” Chase asked suspiciously.

The Pusher Man nodded. “Whole kit-n-kaboodle, baby. I get some recompense?”

Chase turned his back on the Pusher Man, walking back to the teleportals. “Sure, whatever. Just bill the Pride.”

The heat of the afternoon was amplified underground in the Pride’s lair. The La Brea Tar Pits acted as a convection oven of sorts, pulling heat in from the outside and causing the heat to spread out evenly in the underground hideout. Alex had once spent half a day trying to rev up the ventilation system until he figured out that the ventilation system was working the entire time—just not very well. After some digging, he found out that it had been next on their parents’ to-do list until everything went to hell and they went six feet under.

With two fans going in the room and no sign of the heat lessening, Alex flopped down on the side of the bed with a sigh. “Ready to do this?” he asked.

Nico Minoru groaned, lying on top of the sheets. The pale, dark-haired girl looked even paler in the new heat. “Is Primo okay?”

“He’s taking it pretty hard,” Alex said. “I mean, he’s supposed to, but that’s the stage he’s in.” He paused. “It might be a good not to let him anywhere near Molly right now.”

Nico sat up. “Why’s that?”

Alex shrugged. “Molly’s parents are the ones that nearly killed Matti in the first place. The doctor—Physique—said that the infection was a result of the injuries the Hayes gave him. He died because of her family. If it were my family that was hurt, I’d be pretty resentful, too.”

“That’s awful,” Nico said. “I mean, it’s not her fault, but she’s going to take some heat from it? Primo’s not thinking straight.”

“Isn’t that, like, the grand metaphor of our lives?” Alex asked, frowning. “All we’ve ever done is take the weight of our family’s burdens since we found out the things we found out—and they all did it because they were carrying the burdens of our futures. It’s like payback for something we never asked for.”

“Yeah? Well, I think it sucks,” Nico said. She reached to her bedside table for a dark brown book emblazoned with a footprint that had six toes. “Ready to just do what we came down here in the first place to do?”

“Doesn’t that feel like cheating, though?” Alex asked, putting his hand firmly on the cover of the book. “If we use that book to look for information on your missing brother and father, we could be screwing things up. We might mess up the future just by knowing it.”

“Then we don’t look at the future, okay?” Nico asked, her eyes pleading with him. “I just need to know about the truth of the past, because the one everyone else told me was a lie.”

There was a sudden beeping noise in the room. Alex reached for the PDA strapped to his waist, the latest version of his father’s W.A.T.E.R. alert system. It correlated data from across the nation while containing information on every criminal enterprise that the Pride had its fingers in. The beep meant that it had correlated information that it found to be of particular importance to the Pride.

Alex pulled the PDA out and opened up its display. The automated voice came to life. “Correlation: Grave robberies across the nation – five to date. These include designates: Basilisk, Death Adder, Rattler, Cottonmouth, and Bushmaster. The reported grave robberies are all correlated by belonging to snake-themed villains. This is of import beca—”

The voice was cut off as Alex shut the screen. “Screw that. I’ve got other stuff to worry about besides a bunch of dead snake villains having their bodies desecrated. Open the book.”

“How long ago would my mother have been pregnant after me?” Nico asked, flipping through the dates on the Abstract.

“Let’s start with eight months after your birthday to be safe and work our way forward,” Alex suggested. “That way, if he was born early and your mom got pregnant immediately after having you, we’re good.” He squeezed Nico’s shoulder and forced a smile. “Ready? Here we go.”

When Molly Hayes woke up, the sun had already faded from the sky, leaving only a bit of its golden shade across the outside. Molly could tell what time of day it was based on the temperature in the Lair of the Pride, but that was something they all could do by now.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and yawned, stretching her arms up over her head. As she brought them back down to rest at her sides, she paused at the top of her head to straighten the kitty-cat had that kept her hair in place. How much of what had happened last night, then, how much of that had been real? She couldn’t help but wonder that as her alertness changed. I mean, was she really still in the Hostel after an extended night of fighting vampires?

Her feet touched the floor of her room. No shag carpet, no trying not to step on stuffed animals. She fought back tears. It hadn’t been a dream after all.

“Hello?” she called out into the darkened lair. “Anybody here?” She yawned. “Dinner for breakfast sounds good.”

There was no response. “Hello? Karolina? Nico?” Molly asked. Everyone was either busy or out, Molly guessed, and so she hopped out of bed and out of the room.

“Alex?” she asked, walking down the hallway. Still, no word from anyone.

Help.

“Hello?” Molly asked, her eyebrows narrowing in confusion. She looked up and down the hallway, but there was no body to belong to the voice.

Help us.

“Help you who? Where are you?” Molly asked, her voice transforming from curious to frightened in just a few words.

Help us. Under. Help.

“Under where?” Molly asked. Her eyes glowed pink with a mutant signature. “Creepy voice? Are you there?”

The voice went silent. Molly looked around, then walked to the main, open area of the lair that was directly under the tar pits. Still, no one was there. She would have been creeped out by everyone else’s disappearance if a ghostly, disembodied voice hadn’t been haunting her instead.

Satisfied that there was now no one to stop her, she walked to the elevator shaft that let out in a hidden area of the La Brea Tar Pits dig site. She stepped inside and pushed the up arrow.

Straightening her cap once more, she steeled herself with the most resolute face a twelve-year-old could wear.

“Beam me up, Shawty.”

A kaleidoscope of pastels lit up across the darkness of deep night as Karolina Dean spiraled upward. Her Majesdanian solar-based powers were a birthright, but with them came the loss of her humanity. Ever since discovering that her parents were aliens and part of a cabal of super-villains that ran Los Angeles, Karolina had found herself taken out of the fight early and used by others. After spending the majority of the vampire invasion unconscious in the trunk area of an old Ford Bronco II, she had realized that enough was enough. It was time to take control of her life.

Alex was always worried that if she flew at night, she would be seen. Worse, he was worried that there would be a point that her solar powers, which charged during the day, would run through their reserves, sending her plummeting to earth. Well, screw Alex and his theories, thought Karolina. What mattered was what felt right, and flying was at the top of the list.

Karolina flew that way for awhile, until she began to tire out. Then she took it back to ground level, slapping the emergency notification bracelet around her wrist the second she hit the earth so that her aura would disappear. Flying was no fun if it meant broadcasting her position to any hero-stalkers.

So, what does a girl do with some newly-declared self-sufficiency? she asked herself, looking around. The streets were quiet. Few dared to leave their houses after dark thanks to the recent vampire epidemic. Karolina couldn’t blame them. Enough had died that most knew someone who had been affected by the fanged bastards if they hadn’t been directly affected themselves.

Maybe this hero thing wasn’t such a big deal at all. Karolina hit the sidewalk and looked for the nearest convenience store. Flying was great, but it left her dehydrated. She would kill for one of those imported Peace Tea drinks right now. Thankfully, she had a dollar and change on her, so murder wouldn’t be necessary tonight.

The bell above the door announced Karolina’s arrival through the glass doors of the gas station. She took a look at the candy bars before walking toward the coolers that lined the back of the store. She took a look in the cooler and rolled her eyes. They were out of the imported Ceylon flavor, and she definitely wasn’t in the mood for green tea.

The bell rang again as Karolina made her way toward the front, only this time the customers didn’t walk in. They stormed in.

“Everybody down!” shouted the first man, a ski mask covering his face. He fired a single shot from a pistol into the ceiling, shattering one of the light fixtures and sending sparks flying. The woman at the counter hit the floor at a rate suggesting that she had seen this happen before, and Karolina felt her knees hit the greasy tile floor before she consciously realized she had moved.

The second man waved two handguns in the air. “Nobody move, all right? This’ll be over before ya know it.”

Karolina could see the scene in the reflective metal dome in the corner of the store that was meant to show the woman at the desk the area most shoplifters might normally expect to get away with it. She could see two teenagers huddling there, energy drinks rolling across the ground after leaving their hands.

She set her jaw and made her decision. Karolina ripped off the bracelet.

The store exploded with light.

Blinded, the second gunman fired wildly into the story. Karolina hissed as a bag of cheese puffs imploded next to her face. “Not so fast, moron,” she growled, cocking her finger like a gun. She folded her middle finger and squeezed, firing a blast of light as each of his wrists. The guns clattered to the ground as he screamed. Burning flesh had replaced the sensitive skin on the undersides of his wrists.

Karolina jerked toward the first gunman, hand raised, only to find him staring right at her. He squeezed the trigger. “Super heroes are my bitches,” he spat.

Holding her arms in front of her, Karolina found herself still breathing seconds later, her body engulfed in a shell of light. “Whoa,” she whispered. “Didn’t know I could do that.”

“Oh, what the fuck?” the gunman asked. Karolina didn’t give him a chance to saying anything else. She clapped her hands together, hitting him with a stream of light. She poured all of her power into it, flattening him against the cigarette lockboxes.

Karolina dusted her hands off, looking into the eyes of the clerk and the teenagers. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be here all week.”

As she walked out of the gas station, she couldn’t help but think that this was proof of everything she had been telling herself.

She had power. She never had to let anyone take it from her again.

Nico slammed the Abstract shut and threw it to the floor. “Nico, wait!” Alex said, holding up a hand to stop her as she stormed out of the room.

She turned around at the door, mascara bleeding from the corner of her eyes. “No, you wait! You wait and think about what you say! Your father stole my brother when my parents thought he was miscarried! He’s out there somewhere! What about this is okay?”

“Nothing about this is okay,” Alex said, holding his palm out. “But please, you need to calm down about this. We know your brother is alive. That much is good.”

Nico paused, breathing heavily. Then, she slowly walked toward Alex. He met her eyes. The fire raging under her dark irises was unmistakable. He never saw her open palm coming up. It connected squarely with the side of his face, and she was back in the doorframe by the time he registered what had happened. “Nico?”

“Your dad messed this up, Alex,” Nico said. “What was it you said about us being better than our parents? What the hell are we if we leave him out there, Alex?”

“I understand,” Alex said. “But, taking it out on me is just making you into a hypocrite. We can do this. We just have to do it right.”

Nico’s face grew red with rage. She let out a noise that was a rough cross between a growl and a screech and stormed off into the lair.

Alex looked from the doorway on as she walked away. “Whatever it takes, Nico,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw. “I’m going to make this right. You can count on me for that.”

The funeral of Matti Falcone took place in the dead of night.

The individual Runaways gathered in the same graveyard they had buried their parents in before the vampire invasion of Los Angeles. It seemed like it had been a long time ago. In reality, it had been just over two weeks since the death of the Pride. Being in the same cemetery after so little time was like salt on an open wound.

“I don’t blame Molly for not coming,” Alex said, doing his best not to look at the casket. Primo hunched over it, saying his goodbyes.

Karolina nodded. “We’re having enough trouble with this as it is. Imagine how she’s handling it. She’s only twelve.”

“I forget sometimes. We’ve kinda had to grow up pretty fast,” Alex said.

Nico moved forward, directing her words toward Karolina. “Look who showed up,” she said, her gaze toward the entrance of the cemetery.

Chase stepped out of the driver’s side of the Ford Bronco. The door slammed shut as he slouched his way to the back of the small cemetery. “Sorry I’m late.”

“What have you been up to?” Alex asked, frowning. “We haven’t seen much of you around.”

“I’ve been testing things out, figuring out what I’m good at and what I’m capable of,” Chase said. He held up both hands. In his left, he gathered a ball of light. In his right, a ball of pure darkness formed. “I’m still learning, but it looks like none of got away unscathed.” He stared pointedly at the casket.

Primo stood up, wiping away the tear tracks from his eyes. “He, uh, he would have been glad you guys came.” He paused. “If we don’t do it now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring myself to do it at all. Should we all, uh, lower him in?”

“You’ll do nothing.”

A man stood in the path between the headstones. His face was covered in a green mask, and the glow of his orange shirt was visible in the moonlight. “Hand me the body.”

Primo’s eyes glowed green. “Not on your life.” Alex held his arm to block Primo from moving forward. “Who are you? What do you want from us?”

“My name is Viper,” the man said. “You will give me what I want. I am Hand-trained, self-exiled, and immune to the witch girl’s magicks. Give me the body of Matti Falcone, and no one else needs to die.”

Chase flipped down his goggles. “You heard the kid. Not on your life, motherfucker.”

The cemetery lit up with the force of the blast from Chase’s hands. Viper was flung back twenty feet, cracking a tombstone in half with the force of his impact. Chase grinned. “See? That was easy.”

The grin was wiped off his face by Viper’s boot. The man sprinted and jumped before he could react. Chase fell to the ground in a heap and stayed there. “Your friend was foolish. I will do the same to you if you will not stand aside and let me leave with what I came for.”

Alex went from calm to furious in the time it took Viper to finish his sentence. “You want to do fast? We can do fast.” He kicked in with the speed-boosters that Jonas Harrow had implanted in his body. They released energy to his muscles at a rapid rate, enabling him to move at superhuman speeds. Alex landed five hits on Viper before he realized that the only thing he had damaged was his own hand.

“I bathed in the blessed water,” Viper said. “My unit thought I was crazy, but I found it. Even after all my time with the Hand, it did what they could not. You cannot hurt me, children.”

“Not going to stop me us from trying!” Karolina shouted. Her bracelet fell to the ground at the same time that the Staff of One emerged from Nico’s chest. Viper had both of the girls and Alex on the ground before they could begin a group offensive.

“You aren’t taking him,” Primo said. “I don’t give a fuck about what you want. He’s my brother. He’s not yours to take.”

“Stop me,” Viper said. He punched forward, only to find his fist clenched in the mouth of Primo’s falcon-formed energy exoskeleton. Viper shook it off. “Thing about birds? Brittle bones.” He dangled from his bleeding wrist and swung, using the leverage to twist his body around, kicking the exoskeleton in the side of its neck. The falcon exoskeleton screeched as it flickered, shorting out and taking Primo’s consciousness with it.

Viper walked to the casket and flipped open the lid. Inside lay Matti Falcone. He lifted the boy’s shirt to confirm the presence of the snake tattoo. Then, slinging the body over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, he walked out of the cemetery to collect his due.

Stained glass filtered the moonlight into a prism of pale colors in the darkened sanctuary of the church. Viper walked in through the main entrance and lay Matti’s body at the foot of the podium, under the view of the upside-down cross in the baptistery. “I’ve brought you the sixth body, Mr. Wilder,” he said as a man in purple robes entered the room.

The man put down his hood, revealing his cracked, wrinkled skin. “Good,” he said. “I thank you for that. You do good work. And I’ve told you before, only my son is to call me Mr. Wilder.”

“Yes, sir,” Viper said. “Though I mean no rush, you had said that there would be seven targets. I’m ready to go for the seventh so that I can collect the second half of my fee and be on my way.”

“My god requires seven who bear his totem to act as his hands in this world,” Wilder said, pacing across the stage. “Seven snake-themed heroes and villains, dead, all of them. The problem was, no matter how far I looked, I just never could find that seventh one. And then it clicked.”

Wilder drew a gun from his robes and fired it once, twice, three times. Viper looked down to see the front of his orange shirt bleed red. “Armor-piercing rounds, son. But don’t worry. If all goes as planned, you won’t be gone long.”

Viper slumped to his knees, one hand clutching his wounds and the other reaching toward his murderer. “Mr…Wilder…?”

Wilder shook his head. “I told you, son. Call me Cornelius.”

To Be Continued…