CHAPTER TWO

BACK IN BLACK IS NOT JUST AN AC/DC SONG

I walked back to the Warren mansion, which was its own little Versailles constructed by the late Uther Warren way back in the 19th century. It was sort of like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu except not a complete waste of money (and you just thought I made Star Wars references). The place was ridiculously large and frankly looked like it was something someone had created with CGI when they needed to show someone was super Old Money Rich types.

The place had a West Wing, East Wing, North Wing, South Wing, and Central Manor with a courtyard stretching behind it that led to a hedge maze, pool, guest houses (as in plural), plus its own 18-hole golf course. That wasn’t including the secret nuclear bunker that also had its own separate mansion formerly used as the headquarters for the Society of Superheroes back in their pre-moon base days.

Personally, I thought the place was a victim of changing social standards since it had been constructed Downton Abbey style with the implication that something like a hundred servants would be living there full-time. Lancel Warren, a.k.a The Nightwalker, had devoted himself to fighting crime, evil wizards, aliens, and Nazis for a century, so he hadn’t really done much to expand the family line. His nieces and nephews had also gone on to build their own little mansions. The whole thing had come to me in an estate sale after the city finally acknowledged the legendary hero was not only merely dead but really, most sincerely, dead.

I missed Cloak.

Most of the mansion remained uninhabited and covered in white sheets to keep it from turning into a dusty cobweb-filled haunted house owned by an evil necromancer. My home was meant to be a clean and perky haunted house owned by an evil necromancer. Enough space existed in the place so that I could live there, along with my sister, my niece (when she wasn’t crashing with her fellow Texas Guardians), Diabloman, Cindy, my two kids, and a bunch of freeloaders from alternate realities.

To show how much I valued security, I walked up to the back of the mansion and immediately opened the unlocked door to enter one of the halls. Agent G, a Ryan Gosling-looking cyborg from a Blade Runner universe, as well as one of those aforementioned freeloaders, was lying on an expansive couch in his underwear. He had a half-empty bottle of scotch lying beside him and looked about as drunk as a robot with a fleshy covering could be. The ornate carpet on the ground was being vacuumed by a trio of foot-tall yellow robots with one eye that my daughter had made in homage to a certain movie’s mascots.

“Nyaaaaah, boop, blah!” a Henchbot said.

I made the Vulcan peace sign. “Live long and prosper to you, too.”

“Nah, nah, nah, beep boop!” the Henchbots said, saluting me together. There were God knows how many of these things moving around the house and serving as a substitute for the servants I neither wanted nor could afford. Being a billionaire barely covered the estate tax on this house. By the way, even supervillains fear the IRS. That’s how they took down The Bootlegger King ya’ know.

“Case,” I said, referring to G by his chosen name. “You know where Gabrielle is?”

Most people were only lucky to find love once in their lives and sometimes not even then. I’d been lucky enough to fall in love three times, though each was a very different kind of love. Gabrielle Anders, a.k.a Ultragoddess, was the mother of my youngest child. She rarely had time to spend with me but I treasured each second we were together. She’d walked past me when she’d arrived this time and told me to give her an hour. I was pretty sure that meant she wasn’t visiting for fun—which was a shame. I had no idea how I was going to explain, “By the way, I just scared off the child-threatening dregs of the U.S. army at the cemetery. Oh, and I also killed a Federal agent. That won’t have repercussions, I’m sure.”

Case woke up with a start and pulled out a high-tech gun from under a pillow, aiming it every direction in a quick sweep. Thankfully, he didn’t fire.

“Ah, morning PTSD,” I said, pausing. “How did they even program that into a robot?”

Not my nicest statement but I was having a spectacularly crappy day. It wasn’t even noon yet and I’d made an enemy of the U.S. government. Because, really, I wasn’t stupid enough to buy that they were backing off. They were just waiting for me to let my guard down and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t wait more than a few hours. The last time I’d been an enemy of the state they’d blown up a good chunk of the mansion. This time? This time would be worse.

I could feel it.

Case glared at me and put the gun away. “No one programmed my nightmares. I’ve earned them the same way other people have.”

“Shouldn’t you be going back to your magical world of megacorps, holographic babes, cheese-in-a-can, and super-slums?”

Case was from Earth-C, a reality where pretty much every William Gibson and Ridley Scott movie was real. Okay, not Robin Hood. It was a cyberpunk world without superheroes but sporting plenty of villains. Life was cheap there and it had been Case’s job to charge for it. Much to my surprise, he preferred to live in my world. The thing was, I wasn’t sure that it was possible for him to stay indefinitely. I would have let him if it was up to me.

“Cheese-in-a-can is what stuck out about my world to you?”

“I miss it so much in this world and yet cannot find it at my local grocery store anymore!” I said, raising my hands. “I lived off that stuff in college.”

Case felt his head with both hands. “Your priorities are deeply skewed. Also, I remind you there’s a thing called the Internet you can order it off of.”

“I note you’re dodging the question about returning home.”

Case and Jane Doe had been brought from their respective universes by Death to fight in the Eternity Tournament. Strangely, unlike me and my group, they’d been taken in astral form. In simple terms, their bodies were lying back on their homeworlds. Jane was in a sweat lodge and Case was hooked up to a virtual reality simulator. Theoretically, when and if they decided to go home, they’d return to the exact moment they’d left with a whole bunch of new memories.

You know, like the Chronicles of Narnia. Neither of them expressed much of a desire to do so. For Jane, it was because she’d bonded with my daughters as their nanny (God, I had a nanny—I was officially part of the bourgeoisie) while Case stayed here for Jane. Both had romantic partners they’d left behind, which would have appalled me, were I a massive hypocrite.

Case stated his reluctance to leave upfront. “Even if it’s getting nastier and grimier, your world is still a colorful world of superheroes, magic, and super-science. I’ll take that over my hellhole Earth any day.”

“Said someone who has never lived through a zombie apocalypse followed by their evil twin coming to kill them.”

“My evil twin has tried to kill me,” Case pointed out.

I ignored his response. “Come on, you can come back anytime you want to. I’ll even help you settle back into your world. We can do some Runner missions where we rob big corporations, kill the evil executives out to bulldoze the slum, and steal vital information for shadowy employers only to be double-crossed.”

“You’re describing my Tuesdays, Gary. Also, you don’t get talk to me about retiring from being a badass mercenary while you’re retired.”

I raised my hand and made a shadowy cloak appear around me with my regular magic. I wasn’t anywhere near the world’s strongest wizard, not even in the top 100, but I had my PHD in sorcery. Powers, Hexes, and Deviltry.

“I’m not retired anymore,” I said, simply. Then I faked excitement. “Merciless is back, baby!”

The Henchbots all released a cheer and started running around the room. Two of them collided and knocked each other out. I wasn’t sure if Leia had programmed them to be endearingly clumsy or there were just limits to what level of balance a seven-year-old could install in downloaded open source artificial intelligence.

“Are you sure we’re not going to be sued for those?” Case asked. “I mean I love the Despicable—”

“Shh, don’t mention the name,” I said. “We can defend against any foe except the copyright office. Besides, Leia has a plan.”

“Your seven-year-old has a plan?”

“Yes, nuke the studios if they object.”

“Does she have a nuke?” With anyone else, I’m sure Case would have assumed I was joking.

I looked sideways. “She doesn’t not have a nuke.”

“Gary!” Case said, fully believing my joke.

“What? I needed to give her something for her birthday! She only uses it to threaten people!”

“I literally don’t know whether you’re joking!”

I threw out my hands. “Of course, I’m joking! She built her own! She got the nuclear material from one thousand glow-in-the-dark Ultragoddess stickers!”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Yeah, I think someone needs to sue that company for potential health hazards. I may own it, though.” The scary thing was, I was only half-joking. I’d managed to stop her before she built the launching mechanism.

Case felt his face as one of the Henchbots handed him his finely pressed clothing. He started getting dressed. “Okay, okay. So, what inspired you to get back into the supervillain game? I mean, I thought you were done-done.”

Case, once dressed, managed to look more handsome than most Hollywood stars after hours of makeup. All his cybernetic enhancements were below the surface, so he was more like a Terminator than Darth Vader. Honestly, I wasn’t anxious to kick him out of my home since it was good to have someone around who had gone through something similar to my own experiences… at least in terms of being the bad guy until you were honestly sick of it. I just hoped that I could knock some evil back into him the way the Feds had just done to me.

“Well, a bunch of government stooges from the Department of Harassing People came to Mandy’s grave and blew it all to hell,” I explained. “I may have killed one of them and scared the President into declaring I don’t exist.”

I wasn’t a big fan of President Karl Trust. He’d been elected in the emergency following President Omega’s declaration of war against everyone and everything. He was a celebrity media mogul and ex-Governor of Florida that embodied the worst of the Right and Left. His only platform was to make sure things ran smoothly, and if that included pretending problems like me didn’t exist, then so be it. I’d heard he’d done the same for other supervillains as well as a few heroes. Most of his platform consisted of declaring superheroes a menace, but at the same time protecting their rights, which strangely made him a moderate.

“You killed a Federal agent!?” an angry female voice spoke from down the hall. “Goddammit, Gary, you can’t do things like that!”

I turned around and blinked as I saw Cindy Wackowski wearing an avocado mask, a bathrobe, a weird set of clippings in her hair, and a necklace of life-crystals bought from the most expensive Useless New Age Medicine stores. She’d also had her nails and toes done by the look of cotton and red around them. Standing behind her was Jane Doe, a.k.a Weredeer, holding the tiny form of my daughter Mindy.

Jane Doe was a short, svelte, bowl-cut young woman who still looked like she could win a few Olympic events thanks to the fact lycanthropy (cervidthropy?) gave you tight abs and muscular thighs. She looked, basically, how Chun Li would look if she was Anglo-Odawa American instead of Chinese. That meant she was part Native American, part Canadian, part deer. It explained where all my organic maple syrup kept going. Seriously, the girl drank it out of the bottle with a straw.

“It just happened, okay!” I said, throwing up my hands.

Jane shook her head. “Seriously, you can’t just kill a Federal officer. On my world, that brings down reprisals, arrests, investigations—”

“Not without me, you can’t!” Cindy interrupted.

“Wait, what?” Jane did a double take.

“Do you know how boring it’s been just lying up here surrounded by endless stolen millions, my every need waited on, and adored by millions of Internet followers?” Cindy asked.

“Oh, you poor thing,” I muttered.

“I’ve had three reality shows while you’ve been lying around, doing nothing! I had to hire a couple of Gary impersonators to do evil stuff in the background,” Cindy said.

“I wondered who those guys were,” I said, rubbing my chin. “What about Mr. Inventor?”

Cindy waved a hand. “He has to go help people. What about helping me? I would have invited the Backstreet Boys to seduce, but I know your policy of killing all boy bands.”

“It’s for the greater good,” I said.

“The who?” Jane asked.

“Before your time, Jane,” Case said.

“Is that why you’re getting, uh, all beautied up?” I asked, waving at her.

“Pfft,” Cindy said. “Spoken like a man who doesn’t have to spend twenty-four/seven focused on making sure she looks presentable in a villainess costume. It’s nonstop calorie management, electrolyte treatments, and Jazzercize.”

“Jazzercize?” I repeated, surprised anyone still did that.

“How do you and Case keep looking like you do? You live off doughnuts and him Jack Daniel’s?” Cindy asked.

“Well, I’m a machine,” Case said.

“Eh, I use magic to stay young and beautiful,” I said, shrugging. “Magic is the cheat code to the universe and I freely take advantage of it.”

Cindy muttered something about science catching up with me someday. “What about you, Jane? You live off Mountain Dew. Not the kind of mountain dew deer drink either.”

“Weredeer burn ten thousand calories a day,” Jane said, shrugging. “I have to eat piles of salt and fries with every meal.”

Cindy glared at Jane. “No one asked you.”

“You just—” Jane started to say.

“Well, I’ve decided to get back into supervillainy! I shall rob from the rich and give most to the poor! I shall humiliate the corrupt and prank the peerless! As for the really evil? I will horribly murder them and laugh at any consequences.”

“Great example you’re setting for your kid,” Jane said, rolling her eyes.

“Kill Nazis,” Mindy said, cheerfully.

“Please tell me those aren’t her first words,” Case said, grimacing.

“Why?” I asked, knowing they weren’t, but very proud they were her sixth or seventh. “It’s the best sign of Cindy’s parenting yet. I can’t wait to see what she teaches our grandchildren.”

“That’s it,” Cindy said, waving her hand. “I am no longer going to age! Gary, contact me a vampire.”

I stared at her. “Cindy, we’re not contacting a vampire.”

The mental trauma I’d suffered watching what I’d thought was Mandy become a soulless abomination was something that still haunted my nightmares. Vampires were not cool or attractive creatures to me but horrible monsters. Because they had about as much sex appeal as a walking corpse.

“I’m aging, Gary!” Cindy said, looking at me. “I used to be twenty-something Julia Stiles hot. Now I’m—”

“Thirty-something Julia Stiles hot?” I suggested.

“Who is Julia Stiles?” Jane asked. “Is she an actress?”

Case shook his head.

“Jane, be less young,” I said, sighing.

“Yes, do that!” Cindy snapped. “Wait, do weredeer live forever?”

“No,” Jane said.

“You still age slowly,” Cindy said, stretching out her arm. “Bite me and infect me with your lame shifter disease.”

Jane’s eyes narrowed and there was a look of pure supernatural fury behind them.

“Lame shifter disease? We are not diseased!”

“Well, I don’t have anything cool around like a werewolf to bite me!” Cindy snapped. “Werewolf women can still be hot. Anna Paquin was one.”

“Anna Paquin is a werewolf in this world?” Jane asked, confused. “Sweet.”

That was the problem with having conversations with my friends. No matter how urgent a topic you might be discussing, everything rapidly degenerated into nothing more than a series of digressions. It was like The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. That was a literature reference to Thomas Jefferson’s favorite novel about an author who could never get to the point. Consider yourself to be slightly more educated.

I raised my hands in the air and whistled for everyone’s attention. “Listen, everybody, I need your complete and undivided attention.”

“I need to change Mindy’s diaper,” Jane said.

I sighed in defeat. “Yeah, you do that. But, seriously, all I want is to know if anyone has seen Gabrielle. I need to tell her that I’ve decided to become a supervillain again. Given she’s only at the mansion maybe a quarter of the time, it’s important to catch her while I can.”

Gabrielle was legally forbidden from superheroics in the United States, not that it prevented her from diverting nuclear missiles fired at it or fighting alien invasions. She instead devoted her time to building hydroelectric dams, stopping famines, and punching out other nations’ collections of supervillains. It turned out most people didn’t have the love/hate relationship with superheroes the U.S.A. did and were just happy to have people help out. Really, the only places she wasn’t welcome were Russia and China. It turns out if you are pro-democracy and freedom of speech that those two places don’t much like you trying to talk about them. North Korea, well what was left of it at least, had learned that the hard way.

Case looked at me. “Oh, is that what you were asking about?”

“Yes!” I snapped.

“She’s in the living room,” Case gestured with his thumb.

“Pppft zip zoop blah!” the Henchbots said, doing circles around us.

“Don’t let them change Mindy’s diaper,” I said. “Even if she’s an indestructible baby, as Cindy has demonstrated.”

“I only dropped her a few times,” Cindy said, looking guilty.

“She’s meeting with the Pulp adventurers from Cthulhu world,” Jane said, walking over to a door leading to one of the house’s forty bathrooms.

“Cthulhu world?” I asked, wondering if we were having to deal with another alternate reality.

“Yeah, John and Mercury, they’re a pair of superheroes I met in the tournament,” Cindy said. “They’re from a post-apocalyptic world where the Great Old Ones destroyed humanity. Basically, their world is like ours but what it would look like if we didn’t have superheroes punching the giant godlike aliens.”

“Ah,” I said, grimacing. “Don’t tell me they want to move in, too.”

“No,” Case said. “They want your help invading a lost kingdom.”

“Oh, great,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Because that’s what I want to do with my day—go on one of those weird side-treks storytellers send their heroes on when they’ve run out of stories in the Big Cities.”

“Apparently, the kingdom is overrun with Nazis,” Case said.

I blinked. “I’m in.”