The Devil of Brockton Bay - Chapter 59

“That wasn’t you.” Armsmaster said rhetorically as I quickly dropped Amy and kicked away the mannequin – no need to risk Coil hiding something unpleasant in it if I didn’t need to.

“Trickster from the Travelers, a team hired by Coil. Line of sight teleporter and absolutely enough of a bastard to kidnap a twelve year old for his boss.” I confirmed anyway as dismissed the bug zapper spell and swapped it for a teleportation one.

My group was too spread out, and we needed a plan before Coil could hide Dinah away somewhere.

“The team that used to operate in Boston? Not good, several of them are considered heavy hitters on their own. The Protectorate will be hard pressed to deal with them.” Armsmaster mused.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You won’t have to. My Peerage will be enough to defeat them and get Dinah back without your help.”

“Not an option. You burned that when you had your friends attack a Birdcage transport. The best thing you can do now is surrender and give us what information you can before the girl you held hostage pays the price.”

“Please, Lucifer.” Miss Militia added, “If what you said about Coil being behind this is true, this is the best way you can help that girl. To give us the chance we need to find her.”

My face went cold. “I gave you all a chance when we told you about this weeks ago. But you were more interested in getting a collar on me than dealing with the problem.”

“That wasn’t our fault. Orders from–”

“Triumph didn’t even know she was being targeted!” I interrupted. “We all but hand-fed you everything you needed to know about Dinah’s situation and you couldn’t be bothered to tell the one person who cared the most on your team. I don’t give a damn what ‘orders’ you had, you had your chance and you wasted it. And now I have to deal with that on top of fighting off a combined attack from nearly every villain in the city.”

“You gave us hearsay and rumors that shifted any blame away from your group.” Armsmaster snapped back. “The Protectorate upholds the law, we don’t just ignore your crimes because it's convenient for you.”

I almost laughed at the utter bullshit he was spewing for the audience, but I had more important things to deal with right now.

“We both know that’s a lie, but I don’t have time to debate you right now. I have a little girl to save. Amy, you ready?” I got a nod from my Bishop and took one last look at the remaining capes surrounding us.

New Wave was still standing between us and the Wards, who of the ones still capable of action – seemed uncertain of what exactly to do.

Laserdream caught my eye with a look that said they would catch up with us later. And I understood. Supporting us openly against the Protectorate would be a lot more complicated for them.

And speaking of the Protectorate, only Armsmaster and Miss Militia looked like they were ready to keep fighting. Armsmaster’s weapon had reconfigured itself to do… something, but I couldn’t immediately tell what… and Miss Militia had changed her power into a drum-fed automatic shotgun that was pointed straight at me. Velocity was still down from whatever Amy had done to him, and Triumph…

Triumph had recovered from Skitter shoving a fly down his throat constantly, but he looked more likely to attack Armsmaster than me.

Not my problem though, so I ignored whatever Armsmaster was yelling about and triggered my teleportation spell.

A flash of light later, and we were back in the mansion… or what was left of it. The insides looked like a tornado had gone through the place.

I felt a flash of rage at the sight of my violated home, but even more than that, I was worried about the only member of my Peerage that should have been here.

“Carl!”

-o-

Thankfully, my Pawn was only slightly battered instead of anything worse – something Amy fixed within minutes – but the general mood was still pretty dark among us.

I think Kaiser’s announcement was finally sinking in.

We were outed, our home was attacked, and while Dinah wasn’t actually a member of my group – she was under my protection and had been kidnapped.

To say I was pissed would be the understatement of the year. But first–

“So what happened?” I asked Carl once we had cleared enough of the wreckage that we could all sit down at least somewhat comfortably.

“I don’t really know.” He said miserably. “One second I was running overwatch for the girls with Dinah watching over my shoulder, and then the next she was replaced by Stormtiger and everything went crazy. I managed to activate some of the house’s defenses and take him down, but he just seemed to vanish somehow. I don’t even know how he got inside without tripping an alert.”

I blinked.

The house had inbuilt defenses? When had that happened?

But sure enough, when I looked around again, there were little turret mounts built into the ceiling and walls that I had missed thanks to them being mostly smashed up.

I’d have to keep a better eye on what Carl tinkered with in the future, because I probably should have known about that.

“The Villains all teamed up against us.” Amy informed him. “The Travellers have a teleporter on the team.”

“And the magic wards don’t cover that. Fuck.” Carl finished. “Alright, what’s the plan then, boss?”

“For now, wait for the others to get back or to get in contact with them. We’ve already been attacked twice and I really want us at least somewhat coordinated before we go out and try to fight all of Brockton’s criminal capes all at once. Especially since I’m sure there’s at least one trap waiting for us to just go rushing into.”

He nodded. “Right, that makes sense. I’ll see if I can call them and how much stuff I have that still works. You?”

“Now that we don’t really care about being subtle, I’m going to see what other quick defenses I can throw up without tiring myself out. Amy, want to help?”

“Sure. Just tell me what to do.” She said.

And then there was nothing we could realistically do except work and wait.

Amy and I threw up a basic forcefield and then layered an illusion over it that hid everything inside.

I would have been kicking myself more over not adding it earlier since it was almost a direct counter to Trickster’s power but honestly it wouldn’t have mattered too much. We simply didn’t have a reliable way of powering that many wards without burning out the batteries Carl scraped together, and even now the new wards would only last a few hours without me personally powering them.

Sure the new wards would have kept Trickster out, but the previous ones had kept everyone else out.

At least that’s what I was telling myself.

That was all we had time to do since just about when we were finishing up, the rest of my Pawns made it back.

“Rias, what happened to your dress? Are you okay?!”

“We lost contact with Carl and couldn't get ahold of him either.”

“What’s with the new shield? And what happened to the house?!”

“Is Amy okay? What about Dinah?”

Almost immediately I was bombarded with questions while I carefully looked them over for any injuries myself. While none of them looked hurt, we also hadn’t planned for us being specifically targeted by villains today either.

Thankfully aside from a few scuffs on their uniforms, all of them were completely unharmed. And while I wasn’t paying her specific attention in favor for checking over my pawns, I did see that they had come back with a small blonde woman with feathers in her hair.

Which meant they successfully broke Paige McAbee out of the Birdcage transport

So at least something today had gone right.

“I’m alright, but a lot happened while you guys were busy. I… don’t really know where to begin, so I guess we’ll deal with Paige real quick and then I’m just going to ramble a bit. Don’t stop me till the end, please?” I asked them.

I got nods all around, so I just turned to the ex-singer, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable standing around a wrecked building in prison clothes – and I just remembered I’m still basically in my underwear, shit!

“Hi, there. Sorry about ignoring you for a bit. I’m Rias Gremory, the leader of the Peerage and the one behind your release.” I said, just hoping the awkwardness of the situation would go away if I ignored it hard enough. “I imagine you have questions?”

“Paige, or Bad Canary, but you knew that.” Paige said softly. “And your friends explained some of it when they rescued me from…” she shivered, “when they rescued me. They said you felt I didn't deserve what was happening and that was it, but I have a hard time believing that especially if your home was just attacked.”

I winced at that. “That’s a fair point, but the house thing is unrelated. A villain in town did this to kidnap someone that was staying he–”

“”””DINAH WAS KIDNAPPED?!””””

“–re. We set up some more precautions against that, but if you’d rather leave I won’t stop you.”

“Where would I even go?” She laughed wetly. “I lost everything and was sentenced to hell. Just because you broke me out doesn’t change that I have nothing left now.”

I let out a slow breath because as much as I sympathized, I didn’t have the time to address that right now. “Well, you’re free to stay here until you figure something out. At the very least you can get a shower and get out of the prison clothes. The fighting didn’t get to the bedrooms and I have some stuff you can borrow.”

“No offense, Rias, but she can use some of my stuff.” Amy cut in. “It’ll at least be a bit of a closer fit that way.”

“And you are?” Paige asked cautiously.

“Amy Dallon, AKA Panacea.”

Paige visibly paused and looked at her. “Panacea?! But aren’t you a hero?!”

“It’s complicated.” Amy snorted. “You’ll figure that out if you hang around the Peerage long enough. Anyway, shower is this way…”

I watched for a bit as the two of them left before turning back to the impatient looks from the rest of my Pawns.

Right, no more dodging the issue.

“So, you heard right earlier. Dinah was kidnapped. It turns out that…” I started to explain everything.

Kaiser’s message outing all of us, the attack on the gala, Trickster rescuing the Undersiders, and finally coming back to the mansion to find they had attacked while we were all out.

By the time I was finished Amy and Carl had finished what they were doing and rejoined us. Paige was notably absent, but that was fine. This was now more about how the Peerage would respond to the attacks on us rather than what to do with the singer.

It became very clear, very quickly that most of us wanted to rush out and rescue Dinah as quickly as possible even if that meant possibly running headlong into a trap. So much so that the conversation around our leaked identities was barely a couple minutes long.

Apparently none of them considered that to be a priority when Coil had his hands on our little oracle, and while I agreed somewhat, I still made a note to circle back to that once things had calmed down a little.

For now…

“So we’re agreed then?” I asked one last time to be sure, and got nods all around. “All right, if the gangs want to start a fight with no rules… we’ll show them a fight with no rules…”