a federal warrant and deputized us.
Chakra tried to talk Blackstone out of going back out into the field, but he chose to lead Team Two. With the exception of Watchman, all the more “durable” Sentinels went in Team One; after all, we’d be the center of the trap. Blackstone took Artemis, Rush, and Riptide—all the sneaky ones—with him (I didn’t consider Riptide sneaky, but he could enter a building through the drain). Watchman went as their muscle.
They’d launched their attack the instant Lei Zi reported we’d been hit, and now I set off car alarms with my overpressure wave getting across town.
I landed in the weed-grown parking lot hard enough to add more cracks. Dawn light flashed off the building’s silvered windows as I jerked the lobby doors open, breaking their bolts.
“Astra?” Rush queried. “Lei Zi said you were on the way?”
“Where are you?” There was nothing in the lobby but dust.
“In the warehouse. Come on back.”
Right. Remembering the blueprints, I danced around the reception desk and flew down the hall. The locked warehouse doors didn’t slow me down.
The place had seen better days. Something had torn the loading bay doors away, and along one wall shipping crates had been shattered, scattered, and burned. Riptide had put out the fires, but smoke filled the air.
I recognized Flash Mob. Someone had handcuffed the psycho to some pipes, and since he couldn’t generate more dupes for at least a few hours, he was harmless. I didn’t see Tin Man. A fancy ritual circle like the one in Hecate’s home filled the center of the floor, but big cracks ran through it.
Hecate, in dramatic black, lay in her blood in the middle of the circle. I’d seen way too many dead bodies since last September, but I still had to force myself to look away.
So where were the… “Guys?”
“Over here,” Rush called, and I found them around the other side of a pile of crates stacked by the bay doors.
Oh my God. I swallowed, and Rush looked up from where he worked on Artemis. He’d spread an EMT kit out, and was tightening a tourniquet bandage around the stump of Jacky’s arm. The wayward arm lay beside her, but she had her head turned to the sunlight pouring in the broken doors. Riptide stood beside them, looking helpless.
“Watchman has already taken Blackstone to Northwestern Hospital,” Rush said, giving Jacky’s bandage a final tug.
“Jacky?” I said tentatively.
She opened her eyes. “Devourers are tough. Ready to fly? They have a team waiting for me at Northwestern.”
* * *
The Northwestern Memorial trauma team stoically ignored my babbling and whisked Jacky and her arm away. I sternly ordered the part of me screaming that we had to stay and watch them work to Shut Up, and flew back to the scene of our street-fight to help clean up. Riptide joined us; I found out later that when Rush had worked on Jacky, the big, tough, ex-supervillain had nearly fainted.
I couldn’t blame him; I’d felt pretty wobbly myself.
Chakra beat us back to the hospital to join Blackstone, so I had no worries about him. Once back, I found out they’d checked Watchman into their special unit, the one tooled up to setting bones and doing other things for people as tough and hard to work on as we were. Riptide told me Watchman had gotten hit by something indescribable and nasty of Hecate’s, then eaten an Israeli Spike missile—a nasty weapon designed to core tanks and take down superhuman targets like us—fired by Flash Mob, who loved his toys, and still managed to crack the warehouse’ foundation. That broke Hecate’s magic circle and allowed Artemis to put three bullets through her heart, but not before the witch summoned another Devourer—the one that carved her up and almost got Blackstone. Rush took it out with incendiary grenades from his bike’s combat-loads, and Riptide took down Flash Mob using his water-form.
Paper-scissors-rock, and Dispatch records showed that the instant Artemis killed Hecate, Villain-X’s possession broke.
Fisher found me outside the secure rooms that held Artemis, Blackstone, and Lei Zi, watching TV with Seven and Riptide as we waited. We weren’t going anywhere till Tin Man had been captured—he hadn’t been in the warehouse—or till we could move everyone to the Dome. The trauma-team leader had told us Jacky’s supernatural regenerative powers had kicked in almost before they’d finished reattachment. He’d shrugged; the weirdness was normal. Lei Zi’s hearing would recover, and Blackstone was being monitored carefully after his blood loss. He really