Truth Among Friends

As it so happened, the way Liberty looked at me like some king of demon was the least of my problems. Once the fighting rage died away a little, I got really dizzy. I’d wrapped the lady’s off white linen curtains around me to cover my scales, but they rapidly stained dark red. Someone was losing a lot of blood. I should do something about that. I wondered vaguely what I’d done with my kit.

Liberty caught me as I staggered. She carried me out as the world went all swirly. I had a bad feeling I was going to see the inside of a hospital room again.

Bobcat tried to use Liberty’s distraction to limp quietly away.

She stuck a foot out and hooked his good ankle, tripping him onto his furry face. The cop cars caught up with us about then, pulling to sudden stops all around us.  One cop pulled right up onto the lady’s lawn and jumped out.

“Hi, Flynn,” I waved with my non-scaly arm, the rest of me thoroughly covered, in increasingly blood-soaked curtains. Bobcat’s claws must have nicked a good sized vein somewhere in my belly. Or, he could have damaged my liver considering the location of the claw slashes. I’m not sure my internal organs are in the same place as a normal’s but that’s where a liver would normally be. “Can you call Jack for me? I think I need to go to the hospital.”

“Same thing happened last time I worked with you, supe girl,” Flynn commented.

“This time I got the bad guy, though.”

“Looks like he got you worse.”

“I need transport to the nearest hospital, right now,” Liberty said, all field commander again. “Special teams has the perpetrator in custody.” She nodded over where the supe squad SWAT guys had put a metal muzzle on Bobcat. Metal bowling ball looking things went over his hands. They put them on his feet, too, and loaded him on something that looked like a motorized wheelchair had a love child with a moving dolly. Yeah, Bobcat was bagged and tagged.

Liberty got in the back of Flynn’s squad car, still carrying me. She held me like a big baby, wrapped in red-soaked swaddling. Flynn ran the siren and the flashy lights and drove damn near as crazy as Jack. The siren sounded different, though. Police, fire, and ambulance sirens each have their own song.

“Dee, I need you to answer the question.” Liberty shook me a little.

I didn’t remember her asking me a question. “What question?”

“What are you, Dee?”

“I’m just me, okay?” The hurt I felt when Liberty saw me all scary-looking came back. I turned my head away so she wouldn’t see me trying not to cry. “No matter what I look like, I’m still me.”

“I know you are, Dee. I’m a Protector. I’ve worked with Platinum Princess, Stone Golem, and the Human Shark.”

“That guy is freaky-looking, with all those huge teeth.”

“He knows the genus and species of every butterfly and wildflower in Central Texas. His gardens are beautiful.” Liberty shook me a little again, like I’d started to doze off. Did I? Not sure. That ride is all a little fuzzy. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. I need to know if there’s anyone who might be able to donate for you.”

I chuckled a little. Some days it sucks to be an endangered species. I stopped because chuckling really hurt. My belly felt like it was stuck in the Human Shark’s mouth. My face itched, too. I touched my cheek and felt bone, though, so didn’t think scratching was a good move. “Maybe Vlad or Fafnir, but they’re the wrong clans. Knight would be my closest match, probably, but he’s gone, too.”

“White Knight could donate blood for you?” Liberty sounded surprised. “He’s like you?”

“We’re like 6^th cousins or something, same species and clan in any case.”

“Dee, I’ve got one more question.”

“Shoot. I’m not going anywhere.” My whole body felt like it was made of lead. It was an amazing effort to wave one hand in a “whatever” kind of gesture.

“Did you kill White Knight?”

I blinked. That was a weird thing to ask. It woke me up a little. “Kill him? You have no idea how much trouble I went to to SAVE his sorry ass.” Some vague part of my mind realized that Liberty was using my woozy condition to pump me for information, but I couldn’t muster the energy to care.

“Is that what happened at Vlad Tchovsky’s house two months ago? You saved White Knight?”

“Vlad would have shishkabobbed him. Never go after Vlad with a sword. He’ll feed it to you.”

Liberty smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.” She nodded to herself as if I’d confirmed her suspicions. “I was afraid Knight might go after Tchovsky after that confrontation on Mansfield Dam. Knight seemed to think it was his duty to kill him because Mr. Tchovsky called himself a dragon.”

I nodded. “Because he’s like me.”

Liberty blinked. “You’re a dragon! Of course. That explains a lot.” Then a tiny wrinkle appeared between her perfect golden eyebrows. “But you said Knight was …”

“Yeah. Knight’s a dragon, too. He just didn’t know it before. He does now, unless he’s a complete idiot, which I wouldn’t rule out.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Knight’s alive, then.”

“Why did you think I killed him?” I wondered vaguely. I shivered under the curtains. “And why would you work with me if you thought that?” And why didn’t Flynn turn on the heat? It was freezing in that car. The siren kept going far away and coming back in some weird Doppler effect. He needed to get that looked at.

“Knight’s never taken more than a day or two off in the 40 years that the Protectors have existed. I asked Eye in the Sky to find him. Nothing. He’s completely off the grid. When I got the report about the disturbance at Tchovsky’s place the same night he ‘went on sabbatical’ I thought you and Tchovsky had probably killed him together.” she shrugged. “I worked with you because I wasn’t going to treat you like you were guilty until I had proof. And, I just didn’t think you were the kind of person to do something like that, unless Knight forced you to, in self-defense or to protect your friend.”

“Innocent until proven guilty.” Of course, Liberty would be the one person to live that to the letter. I huddled against her warmth. And she could deal with my weirdness. As friends go, she was okay.

Too bad she couldn’t pull several units of Silver or Green clan dragon blood out of thin air.

I fell asleep, knowing I wouldn’t wake up. Even Liberty couldn’t save me.

D Dragon

Freak Like Me

I ran to the car that one of the world’s most famous and powerful superheroes had crashed into from 7 stories up.

Liberty had a nose bleed. She sat up on one elbow on the ruined metal roof with an imprint of her whole body in it, wiped her nose on her hand, and looked at it quizzically for a moment. “I didn’t know you could fly,” she said after a moment, like she was irritated with me.

“Yeah, I don’t advertise,” I said, relieved beyond words that she wasn’t badly hurt.

“I need to know things like that if we’re going to work together." She shoved her crown back into place. "I wouldn’t have made that risky a move if I’d known you weren’t about to be killed.”

“Oh.” I looked up at the tall building above me. Bobcat jumped across the little sliver of parking to the adjacent building. “Crap.” I blew it, and the bad guy was getting away.

Liberty held up a hand for a second, listened intently, then sighed. “He’s gotten past our perimeter. I wish I had a flyer who could follow him.” She blinked, and looked at me. “He’s headed northeast. That way!” she snapped, pointing.

I hesitated. She wanted me to take off in the middle of town in early evening when hundreds of people were out.

“If we don’t catch him tonight, more women will die," Liberty said.

That was the essence of it. It didn’t matter if someone saw me in the sky and realized I was a dragon. It didn’t matter if someone posted pics of me on the internet and the Georgians hunted me down later. What mattered was pretty young women with their whole lives ahead of them getting ripped to pieces by a psycho because I messed up.

My jacket and shirt were toast, so I tossed them aside. I leapt as hard as I could using my wings to get higher, grabbed onto a third story window ledge on the other communication building, the one that’s only four stories tall. I leapt again to the edge of the building, pulled myself up to the roof, and used it as a launching point to leap as high as I could into the air. With that much altitude to start with I was headed in the right direction with good speed in seconds.

The mic in my ear crackled with static, then I heard Liberty’s voice. “Do you see him yet?”

“No sign,” I said. I scanned like a hawk hunting a mouse, widening my search in desperation, and saw a flash of movement far ahead. “I see him! He’s already up to 30^th and Speedway. He’s heading into a neighborhood. Damn, that guy is fast!”

“I’m right behind you, Dee. Don’t lose him.” I could hear her breathing hard and realized she was running, following me as fast as her super-strong legs could carry her.

I flapped like a maniac until I felt like my arms were going to fall off, then dove again trading my altitude for more speed.

I saw him, jumping from roof to roof in a small neighborhood.

I saw him, but he didn’t see me. My wings were quiet as a whisper as I let the momentum I’d already built up be enough, and glided.

He sensed me somehow, at the very last second. He stood on the peak of a suburban house, about to jump to the next one, hesitated and turned around.

I hit him doing maybe thirty miles an hour.

“Mine!” I shouted in triumph. I flying tackled him off the roof of the unfortunately only one story house, riding the weight that was more than my wings could hold to the concrete of the street.

“Dee, no!” Liberty shouted in my ear. “Don’t engage him until I can get there to back you up!”

Too late, I thought, as I rolled in the street with a snarling, spitting, clawing demonic blond monster thing.

Those claws flew and slashed so fast that I couldn’t keep them off me. I raised my left arm up to cover my defenseless face. Without my jacket to conceal my vulnerabilities, the places that weren’t armored were all too obvious.

Bobcat found the bare section of my torso, just over my right hip. His claws ripped deep into flesh instead of scraping over scales.

He laughed as I screamed and bled.

I do not like being laughed at.

I growled in his face, overwhelmed with rage even more intense than the pain.

I got bigger. I didn’t exactly stop and analyze it right then. I was a bit busy fighting for my life, but I felt the shift in my body. My fangs popped out of their own accord, and I’d swear I had more and sharper teeth in my mouth, and it felt distorted, too. I have no doubt my eyes were as bright red as flashlights. My feet ripped through my shoes, the claws on them growing longer and sharper. I stopped trying to defend myself and returned the mad frenzy of claws.

I curled up, protecting my vulnerable torso with armored legs. I dug my feet into his belly and shoved, ripping flesh and fur as I launched him through someone’s rose trellis and into their living room window.

Without even stopping to think, I launched myself right after him.

Bloody gashes marred his furry belly where my foot claws had gotten him. He had a dozen small cuts from the window glass. The flickering light of a television set showed him snarling insane rage at me, bloody saliva dripping from his fangs.

I snarled my own rage right back and dove on him.

He rolled out of the way, and clawed at my armored back.

I twisted, grabbing for him, but he evaded.

He slashed my face, opening my cheek to the bone in three long gashes. My blood splattered onto some normal’s flower print couch.

Bobcat got to his feet, jumped, landed in the middle of my chest, and used me as a launching pad to hurl himself out the window again.

I tried to grab for him while I gasped for air, but only managed to scratch his ankle with the venomous claws of my left hand.

It was enough.

I saw him land in the large tree branch he’d been aiming for in the front yard, saw his foot, give under him, and saw him fall.

He tried to escape in a stumbling run, but Liberty tackled him. His claws didn’t do him any good against the queen of invulnerability.

She got super-cuffs on him in less than three seconds.

Then she looked up at me.

I stood in the darkness of the living room, the light of the television flickering over me, my wings half extended, wearing just my slashed blue jeans. Blood streamed from my ripped belly and my face and dripped from my clawed left hand.

I heard a noise behind me, footsteps.

I whirled to face the new threat. I snarled defiance.

A lady in pink bunny slippers and a blue velour robe dropped her cup of coffee on the floor and fainted.

I caught her before she hit the ground, laid her down gently, outside the spreading circle of the scalding hot spilled coffee. That was going to stain her rug, no doubt.

Liberty frog-marched Bobcat to the window. His right leg dragged like a dead thing. He looked woozy. Liberty’s hand might have been the only thing keeping him vertical.

Sirens closed on us from three sides.

Liberty looked at me crouched like a gargoyle over the lady in the bunny slippers. “What are you?”

I felt a flush of … I’m not sure what to call it. Embarrassment? Sort of. Shame? Not exactly.

The way Liberty, who I’d begun to think of as a friend, looked at me… It hurt. It hurt worse than the raw open wounds in my face and side.

I felt my body shrink back to its normal size and shape. I grabbed the bunny-slippered lady’s living room curtains to wrap myself up in. I covered myself, not out of fear of discovery, but because I didn’t want anyone looking at me like that.

Bobcat looked at me, too, but all I saw in his dazed yellow eyes was a perfectly normal hate. In that moment, I had more kinship with Bobcat than with Liberty.

“Like I told Bob, I’m a freak like him.”

D Dragon

Bait in a Cat Trap

Writing in your diary may not be what most people do when playing bait in a trap for a homicidal maniac, but then most people wouldn’t have volunteered to be the bait in the first place. I’m supposed to be pretending to be a UT student. I could have brought my laptop and surfed the net or something, but I was afraid it would get damaged if the proverbial feces hit the spinning blades. When Jack had to be bait in a trap, he just skipped bathing for a while and we ran over his worst clothes with my Jeep a few times. I went to a used book store, got a textbook on Organic Chemistry, and brought my diary to write in, so it looked like I was taking notes.

I took Chemistry in college, but that was nearly half a century ago. It looks like things have progressed a lot, or maybe I’ve just forgotten a lot. I may have to go back to school. It’s not like I’m going to go get a job as a lab assistant or anything, but it sure would be nice to be able to analyze my own venom. I still have no clue what the venom from my claws does exactly. I can’t very well randomly start scratching people to find out. Those claws saved my bacon from Domina Death when she nearly killed me, so, if bad comes to worst, maybe I’ll see how the big bad Bobcat likes being the claw-ee for a change.

All the girls Bobcat attacked over the last few weeks were outdoors when he found them. His last victim was on her way to her dorm from the Communications buildings across the street. I staked out a comfy grassy spot, and settled in to “study” in the dorm courtyard about five in the evening of the day after the police tape was removed. The students had all been encouraged to spend the evening on the other side of campus via text message.

It seemed a bit obvious to me, but Liberty had done the homework. She said Bobcat wasn’t real high on the IQ scale. Liberty believed he was likely to bite on what to me seemed like a particularly obvious trap. Apparently, Bob, was a product of a cat-human gene splicing experiment by Doctor White, the same guy who made the spider device that stole nearly a century of my life. Liberty said Bobcat thought more like a predator than a man in some ways. He was likely to come back to a place if he’d found easy prey there before.

I bowed to superior experience. Liberty’s only in her mid thirties, but she’s been superheroing since she was in a training bra. I’m the novice in this world.

Liberty’s voice whispered in my ear bud, “Any sign?”

“Nada,” I whispered back, holding the Chemistry book up and squinting, so it looked like I was puzzling out a particularly complex concept.

“Are you certain, Dee?”

The way she said it made me tense between my shoulder blades. I’d been here for hours. The sun was setting. I’d just taken off my protective sunglasses now that the light was more bearable to my overly sensitive dragon eyes. And this was the first time Liberty had broken radio silence since we tested out the comm gear. “Why?” I whispered. You have to be quiet if you’re going to catch a bad guy with ears as big as my hands.

“Listen.”

I did, but there was nothing unusual even with my own super-duper dragon hearing, just cars, people chatting a block over on the drag, and the wind in the trees. “I don’t hear anything,” I barely whispered.

“The grackles stopped.”

I was so used to the standard evening racket of flocks of roosting black birds, like every Austinite, that I had completely ignored the hundreds of birds in the trees around me, except to make sure none were sitting over me, ready to add their own personal touch to my hair or books.

The racket I’d been ignoring wasn’t there anymore. Hundreds of birds sat in the trees around me and did not make a chorus of sounds like rusty metal hinges. They were completely silent.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Something heavy hit me on the back of the head, slamming my face down into the open Chemistry book. My nose left a splash of blood on the page.

The birds took off all at once in a flurry of black wings.

I blinked tears and tried to get up.

A huge hairy arm hooked around my waist, yanked me backward, and slammed me to the ground.

“Son of a …” I kicked up, but only hit air. The hairy cat-man dodged sideways and slapped me in the face, an open-handed, no claws casual slap that still rattled my teeth.

I tried to punch him, but my hand swished through empty air where his face had been a moment before. He hit me harder this time, a closed fist punch that crunched into my temple.

When I came to, I was upside down, in a fireman’s carry, a bony shoulder digging into my armored belly, looking at a plumber’s crack covered in blond fur. Beyond that less than inspiring sight was a whole lot of air, about five stories worth. The ground was far enough away that I figured puking right now wouldn’t really affect much.

So, I did.

It made my mouth taste sour, did nothing for the pounding in my head, but my stomach settled a little.

Voices were yelling in my head. “He’s got her. He’s on the move!” “Where the hell did he go?” “Have you ever seen anything move that fast?” “I see him!” “Oh, my god, he’s climbing the building with her like King Kong.”

“Cordon off the block,” came Liberty’s voice. “Don’t bother with warnings. If you get a clean shot at him with a trank gun, just fire. Confirm your target, though. Don’t hit Dee. Team 2 cover the elevator and front door. He might try to come down through the building.”

That was Liberty. She looked like a Hollywood starlet, sounded like a public service announcement when the cameras were on, and in casual situations, she chatted with me about life like any BFF, but in situations like this, she sounded like a front line general commanding troops.

The world spun and shifted under me while Bobcat punched his claws into the dark rust-colored metal of the communication building where Austin City Limits gets filmed. He pulled himself and me both onto the roof.  I got an upside down view of a gigantic radar dish and several smaller ones on an elaborate metal framework.

I thought about struggling, but didn’t really want to get free seven stories up over concrete sidewalks with my wings folded under a jacket. I waited until we were fully on something flat and solid. When I tried to make my move, I moved more sluggishly than I expected. I elbowed him in the back, but it wasn’t a solid blow.

Bobcat threw me down onto the gravel, which actually didn’t hurt much now that I’m mostly armored, aside from the swimminess that it increased in my head. He pounced on my chest. He extended shiny black hooked claws four inches long from the back of his hand. He laid them over my face, one claw right over my eye. “I hear them, bitch, but they won’t get here in time to save you.”

He could hear the voices in my ear mike.

“It doesn’t matter if you can hear them,” I said. “You won’t be able to get away this time.”

Liberty snapped, “Switch channels to 224.” She sounded a little breathy, like she was running or doing something strenuous. The chatter in my ear all went silent.

I no longer knew what Liberty or the SWAT team were doing, but now, neither did the bad guy with the big claws sitting on my chest.

Bobcat leaned in close to my face and licked my cheek. Gross. His claw tips just drawing blood in the skin of my face made moving seem like a really bad idea. “Pretty, pretty coed looking down on me. I bet you wish you’d never made fun of freaks, now, popular girl. Say you’re sorry, and maybe I won’t mess up your pretty face.”

I laughed. I know, not the normal thing to do when someone’s about to rip your face off, but the idea of me as the pretty, popular girl, making fun of a freaky kid, was about as bass ackward as you could get. “You’re picking on a fellow freak, Bob. Take a look at my left hand.”

“Whuh?” Bobcat said. He pulled the claws away from my face as I held up my left hand, covered in the usual black leather glove.

I popped my claws through the leather. They’re only a couple inches long and silver, not black, but the similarity between the two of us was crystal clear.

While his less than brilliant mind pondered that, I took a swipe at his face with my shiny new claws. No telling what they’d do to him, but considering what he’d been about to do to me, I wasn’t real concerned.

He moved faster than a freakin rattlesnake. He caught my arm in mid-swing, but not with quite enough force to stop it. He twisted, snarling, with my arm in his grip to keep my claws away from his furry flesh.

I used the momentum to roll over, get on top of him instead of the other way round. We rolled over in the gravel, a couple times, but I seemed to be a little stronger than him. I kept the top position. I punched at him, but couldn’t get in a solid hit the way he kept twisting and moving. He slashed at me, but all he did was put slashes in my jacket and t-shirt. The needle sharp tips of his claws screeched across my scales making us both wince.

He tried to bite me on the shoulder. Fortunately, it was my left shoulder.

Crunch.

His teeth made a sound on my scales like someone scraping their teeth on their fork. I hate that.

“OWRRR!!” he griped.

“Heh heh. This morsel’s got a hard crunchy shell, furr boy.” I’m not sure why I thought making fun of the psychotic serial killer was a good idea. It just slipped out.

His face turned ugly, even uglier than before, I mean. His flat nose wrinkled, and his yellow eyes narrowed to slits. His legs curled up into me and he raked my belly with his claws as he shoved, hard.

Another chalkboard screech, and he’d hurled me off of him. I’ve got very well-armored abs, so no harm there.

I tumbled in the air, crashed through a small radar dish, (ow) and saw the low safety wall around the seven story building as it flew by. YIKES!

I scrambled for the edge and managed to scrape the metal with one hand, then hook on with two claws on the other. I’m not one to worry much about heights normally, but hanging eight stories above a parking lot by two fingernails almost made me wet myself.

“Who’s laughing now, bitch?” Bobcat started prying my fingers loose of the metal wall.

Liberty yelled from up on the roof, “Leave her alone!” Not sure when she got there, or from where.

“Make me,” he growled at her and lifted one of my two fingers. It took his whole hand to do it, but I only had one finger left. I’d gotten my brain together enough to realize if I lost my grip, I could just pop my wings out and glide.

I stopped being scared and got pissed off. This guy was making me look bad in front of Liberty. “I’ll make you,” I growled.

I swung up my other hand, trying to grab his wrist where he was prying at my finger.

He dodged back, and laughed at me. “Pretty, but dumb,” he said. “You can’t catch me. You’re too slow.”

“I’m not,” Liberty said, and did a diving tackle.

I got a good look at the last part of that dive as Bobcat sidestepped and shoved like a matador with a bull.

Liberty went sailing over me, head first down into the parking lot.

“NO!” I yelled and tried to grab for her. I let go of my grip on the roof, pushed off, but physics wasn’t on my side. Liberty was going down first, and I didn’t have time to catch her.

I popped my wings out as the parking lot tried to hit me in the face. My shirt and jacket were both shredded, but I back-winged hard and kept the landing from doing more than slamming me to my armored knees. Before I hit pavement, Liberty hit car.

Liberty shifted to a skydiver’s flat pose in the air, so she hit on her whole front, rather than on her head, on the roof of a parked car. Glass shattered and the car roof smashed in like it had been hit with a wrecking ball.

I’ll write more in my diary later. Right now, I want to sleep for like, a week.

D Dragon

Bobcat

I looked down at a dead girl, body slashed from right shoulder to left hip by four deep gouges. Bobcat.

A few weeks before, the corporate sponsored All American Alliance hero Amazing Ashley had accidentally freed a clawed serial killer in Austin, and nearly killed me trying to recapture him. I recovered with no permanent damage, but Bobcat got away. Now, a super-strong criminally insane cat-man with four inch razor sharp claws was loose in my city.

Yeah, I guess Austin was my city now.

I’d made a stand here against the Order of St. George, the religious fanatics who murdered my dad, and who wanted to murder all dragons. I’d spent most of my life running and hiding from them. Now, I wasn’t running anymore. I still kept my scales and wings hidden, though. I wasn’t going to live in paranoid fear anymore, but I wasn’t going to be stupid about it either.

Liberty, the leader of the local chapter of the US government sponsored hero group, The Protectors, had put out an APB with the local Austin police for Bobcat. The Austin area hero community had been on the lookout for him as well. You’d think a huge cat-guy with pointed, fur-tufted ears would stand out in a crowd.

Not so much, really. It’s Austin after all. Home of the weird.

On the UT campus, I’d seen a girl with six inch long elf ears in a chain mail bikini just yesterday, accompanied by a guy who looked like a Klingon, complete with wrinkly forehead and a bat’leth. There weren’t any sci fi conventions in town or anything, just a normal Saturday on campus. Add that to the high number of supes drawn to the area and you got a lot of folks who wouldn’t blend anywhere else blending just fine here.

So, Bobcat was still free. And just past sunset on what had been a 75 degree, sunshiney Sunday in January, some nice young Co-ed ended up as a statistic. She’d still been breathing when the cops called the ambulance.

Jack and I, as usual with Jack driving, got there in record time, but it wasn’t quite fast enough.

Jack brushed the dead girl’s dark hair back from her face with a gentle hand and felt for a full minute, hoping against sense for even the flutter of a pulse. Jack’s my boyfriend, my partner, and the bravest man I know.

She’d been pretty, the dead girl.

“Bobcat,” I said.

Jack looked at me and nodded. His lips tightened in frustration. He drove our ambulance like Mario Andretti, but it wasn’t quite fast enough this time. This was the third pretty young dark-haired girl with claw slashes we’d seen this week. Between his driving and my healing venom, we’d been able to save the other two.

I touched his face, tracing the line of his high cheekbones. He had soft Asian features that normally wore a crooked smile that charmed the world and made him look even younger than his twenty-seven years. I could see in his dark eyes now that he was kicking himself for not getting here faster.

He leaned into my hand for a moment, accepting the comfort.

Officer Flynn made notes on a pad. “That makes six victims. The captain’s on all our asses to find him. I called the detectives right after I called you guys. Long’s on his way.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and speed dialed the second most powerful superhero in the country. It used to make me feel important that Liberty knew me. It still did, I guess, but now, I felt more that she was a friend who wanted to stop this lunatic as much as I did. We both felt partially responsible for letting him get away since we’d both failed to stop him.  I put the call on speaker so Jack and Flynn could hear. “Liberty, we found another Bobcat victim. Another college age woman with dark hair. This one didn’t make it.”

I heard a sad sigh. “Where?”

“North side of UT campus, near Eastwood Park.”

“Could he still be nearby?”

“She was still breathing three minutes ago.” I looked around and tried to think like an insane cat-man. I’d seen him bound from roof to roof to put the best parkour practitioner to shame. “Honestly, he could be anywhere by now.”

Liberty’s voice fell with disappointment. “We’ve got to get ahead of him, Dee. Every day he’s free, we lose lives.”

“He’s hit campus twice, both right around sundown. These girls he’s after look a lot like me. I’m up for playing bait.”

 “That’s a very brave offer,” Liberty told me. “Unfortunately, he has an embarrassment of choice. You would be one among hundreds of potential victims.”

“Maybe not,” Jack said. “What if we could clear the campus somehow, get all the real students out of sight?”

It seemed like a good idea, but there was a catch. “Bobcat has super-hearing. Anything the students talk about, he’s likely to overhear.”

Flynn said, “The campus police set up a Twitter handle and voluntary cell phone sign-up list for all students and professors. It’s becoming common practice after a few shooters have gone postal on college campuses. We can send out a signal that essentially says, ‘A killer is loose. Stay indoors from sundown to two hours after. Spread the word digitally, but don’t say anything out loud.’”

“That might work,” Liberty said. “Dee would need formidable backup, but they also would have to be nearly silent. I will, of course, lend my own aid, but the other Protectors are all on assignment elsewhere. We’re short-handed without White Knight. Officer, we will need some help from the supe squad.” That’s the nickname for the SWAT team that handles super-powered criminals, usually after a superhero has already subdued them.

Jack looked down at the dead girl. She had light cinnamon brown skin, a prominent nose, thick dark hair past her shoulders and slightly Hispanic features. She did look a lot like me, actually. Except that she was dead from bloody claw slashes. Jack swallowed. He didn’t bother to try to talk me out of it. Jack knew me too well. “Be careful, Dee.”

I would have said something flip, like, ‘Aren’t I always?’ Or ‘You know me,’ but the trouble was, he did know me. Careful is not really something I’m good at. “I’ll try.”

D Dragon