Chapter 31 - Episode 20: Metropolis Part 1

Meteor Freak

Episode 20: Metropolis

Date: Wednesday, November 23, 2011.

Location: Gotham City, New Jersey

The Batmobile cut through Gotham's underbelly, the streets thinned out, the buildings growing older, more decrepit, until civilization seemed to give up entirely. Then the road narrowed to a single lane flanked by dead trees, and Arkham Asylum rose from the fog.

"Cheery," Tyson said.

The asylum sprawled across its island; gargoyles crouched along the roofline, their faces worn smooth by weather but still managing to look miserable about it. Guard towers punctuated the perimeter wall at intervals, their searchlights cutting slow arcs through the mist. The main building was a Victorian monstrosity, all peaked roofs and arched doorways, the kind of architecture that said we built this to house the mad.

"Would you believe me if I said it was my first time at a prison for the criminally insane?"

"It's a psychiatric facility."

"Right. The gargoyles really sell the therapeutic vibe."

Batman said nothing. He guided the Batmobile through a side entrance that opened at some signal Tyson didn't catch, down a ramp into a sublevel garage that smelled like concrete dust. The car settled with a hydraulic hiss, and the canopy slid back.

They moved through corridors that got progressively cleaner the deeper they went. The screaming from the upper levels faded to a dull, ambient hum, replaced by the beep of medical equipment and the soft shuffle of orderlies in white. Batman led them past security checkpoints where guards straightened up and pretended they hadn't been slouching, through a wing marked MEDICAL - RESTRICTED ACCESS, and finally to a room at the end of a long hallway.

It was a hospital room. A good one, by any standards, not just for Arkham. Private. Clean sheets, modern equipment, actual flowers on the windowsill. Two beds, separated by a curtain that had been pulled back.

The bed held an old man.

He was sitting up. Thin, dignified even in a hospital gown, with white hair combed neatly. He was reading a book. He looked up when they entered, surprised for half a second before the composure settled back into place.

"Ah, company," the old man said.

"Alfred, this is Tyson. He may be able to help."

Alfred closed his book and set it on the side table. "A pleasure, I'm sure."

"Likewise. So this is the 'associate.'"

"He is."

"And you moved him here because..."

"Efficiency. Two patients, one location."

"Sure." Tyson walked to the first bed. The unknown man's chart hung from a clip at the foot. He didn't bother reading it. "MacGregor's Syndrome. Stage four?"

"Late stage three," Batman said. "Progressing rapidly."

Tyson pulled a chair over and sat down next to the man's bed. He placed one hand on the man's forearm. The skin was cold and papery.

"This'll take a minute."

He closed his eyes. The healing moved through him like warm current, flowing down his arm and into the man's body as a golden light, seeking out the disease. MacGregor's was ugly work. It had threaded itself through the man's circulatory system like weeds through a garden, and pulling it back meant coaxing every capillary, every vein, every chamber of the heart back toward something functional.

The damage unwound under his hands. Color crept back into the man's face. His breathing deepened.

Tyson opened his eyes. "He'll need fluids and rest. But the syndrome's gone."

Batman stood perfectly still by the door. His jaw was set, his posture unchanged, but his gauntleted hands had curled into fists at his sides. He hadn't moved once during the entire process. Not to check the monitors. Not to verify. He'd just stood there.

Tyson leaned back and wiped his palms on his knees.

Alfred was quiet for a moment. He looked down at his own hands, turned them over, flexed his fingers. "Young man," he said. "I have spent a considerable portion of my life in service to someone who makes a habit of the impossible. I thought I had become rather difficult to impress." He paused. "I find myself impressed."

"It's the glowing hands. Very theatrical."

"I mean it." Alfred's voice was steady, but there was a weight behind it that the steadiness couldn't quite hide. "I was given to understand my condition was terminal. I had made my arrangements. So when I say thank you, I hope you'll understand that I am not being merely polite."

"You're welcome, Alfred."

Alfred gave a small nod, the kind that closed a matter with dignity. Then he glanced past Tyson toward the door, where Batman hadn't moved.

"I don't suppose he asked nicely," Alfred said.

"He was Batman about it."

"Yes. He would be."

Alfred looked toward the door. Protective. The same look he'd probably aimed at Batman's back ten thousand times.

"It wasn't a bad thing. When I say he was Batman about it, I mean he did something nobody else could have done. He gave me something I needed. Information, resources, a shot at something I couldn't reach on my own." He paused, choosing the next words with more care than his tone let on. "If I manage to use what he's given me, I'll save at least three lives. People who matter to me. So everything is even. He helps me save three, I help him save two and turned in the Joker." He let that sit for a beat, then added, quieter, "He did good, Alfred. You should know that."

"I have always known it," Alfred said. "Though I confess it is gratifying to hear it."

Batman turned from the doorway. "The other patient."

Tyson stood, gave Alfred a nod that the old man returned with a slight incline of his head, and followed Batman back into the corridor. They walked in silence for thirty seconds. Then Batman spoke without turning around.

"You were comfortable with him."

"He's a likable guy. Good bedside manner. I bet he makes a hell of a cup of tea."

"You knew who he was before I introduced you."

"I don't know anything."

Batman stopped walking. His hand closed around Tyson's bicep, not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough to make the point that stopping was not optional. Tyson looked down at the gauntleted fingers on his arm, then at the cowl.

"Look," Tyson said. His voice stayed easy, conversational. "As long as you forget about that spellbook, I don't know anything. I'm just some energy healer fraud who happened to visit on the day an old man and a woman got better from a disease. Could be some Wayne Foundation miracle cure. Experimental drug. Whatever you want to call it." He shrugged despite the grip on his arm. "It's not my problem. I'm just worried about a potion made by a vigilante with a cave full of computers that must have cost, what, a billion dollars? More? I just need to do this and get back to my girlfriend."

The grip didn't tighten. It didn't loosen. Batman held it for a long beat. Then he let go. He turned and kept walking. Tyson fell into step behind him. Neither of them mentioned it again.

The temperature dropped as they descended. The stairwell went from institutional chill to meat-locker cold in the span of two flights, and by the time they reached the sublevel, Tyson's breath pooled in front of his face. The walls down here were reinforced steel lined with frost, and the lights had shifted from fluorescent to a cold blue that made everything look like the inside of a glacier.

A guard station sat behind three inches of ballistic glass. The men inside wore thermal gear and watched monitors showing a single room from multiple angles. One of them buzzed them through without being asked.

The cell was more laboratory than prison. Cryogenic equipment lined the walls, humming and clicking, venting plumes of white vapor that curled along the floor. The temperature readout on the wall said negative twenty-three Celsius. A raised platform in the center held a containment unit, and behind it, under a vent that poured freezing air directly onto him, sat Victor Fries.

He was larger than expected. Broad-shouldered, thick through the chest, sitting on a metal bench with his back against the wall and his hands resting on his knees. His skin had a crystalline quality to it, pale silver that caught the blue light and threw it back in fractured patterns. He tracked them from the moment they entered. Intelligent, exhausted, and hostile in roughly equal measure.

But Tyson wasn't looking at him.

The stasis pod occupied the far wall. It was a vertical cylinder filled with pale blue fluid, and inside it, suspended in perfect stillness, was a woman. Her hair floated around her face. She looked like she was dreaming.

"Nora Fries," Tyson said.

"MacGregor's Syndrome," Batman said. "Same as Alfred. More advanced. Fries put her in cryogenic suspension to halt the progression until he could find a cure."

Tyson stepped closer to the pod. He placed his palm flat against the glass. Cold bit into his skin immediately, sharp enough to sting.

"I can't heal her through this," he said. "Too much interference."

"Can you heal her quickly? Outside the pod, she won't last long."

Victor moved. He'd been still as stone since they entered, but at those words he surged forward off the bench, crossing the cell in three strides before the chain at his ankle caught and jerked him short. He hit the end of his tether hard enough that the bolt in the floor groaned.

"You will not touch her." His voice was deep, raw, from years of cold air. "I will not allow you to take her out of stasis. She is stable. She is safe. I will not let you kill her with some experiment."

"She's not stable," Batman said. "She's frozen. There's a difference. The syndrome is still progressing, Fries. You know this."

"I am close. My research—"

"Your research has stalled. You're running out of options, and you know it."

Victor strained against the chain. "You do not get to decide this. Not you. Not anyone. She is my wife."

Tyson stepped between them. He held both hands up, palms out, one toward each of them. "Victor. I can help her. But I need you to trust me, and I know that's a big ask from a stranger standing in your cell. So let me show you something first."

He walked toward Victor. Batman shifted behind him, a subtle redistribution of weight that said I'm ready to move if this goes wrong. Tyson ignored it. He stopped just outside arm's reach of the chained man and knelt down on the frozen floor.

"What are you doing?" Victor said.

"Feeling generous today."

"That wasn't the deal," Batman said from behind him.

"Too late, big guy, you already paid."

Tyson held his hands over Victor's chest. The golden light poured from his palms and sank into Victor's body. The wrongness was immediate. Every cell in Victor's body had been rewritten by the accident that changed him, restructured at a fundamental level to require extreme cold the way normal cells required warmth. Reversing it was like trying to teach a river to flow uphill.

He pushed harder. The light intensified, spilling across Victor's chest and arms, running down to his hands, his feet. And slowly, the silver began to recede. It pulled back from his fingertips first, revealing skin that was pink and raw and warm. Then his wrists. His forearms. The crystalline sheen melted away like frost on glass, and underneath it was a man. Just a man. Pale, shaking, but human.

Victor looked at his hands. He turned them over, flexed his fingers, watched the color move under skin that hadn't been skin-colored in years. He touched his own face. He pressed his palm flat against the floor and flinched at the cold, actually flinched, because for the first time in years the cold was something he could feel as discomfort rather than necessity.

"Now," Tyson said. "Will you trust me?"

Victor looked up at him. His mouth worked, but nothing came out. He managed a nod. Small and shaky.

Batman moved to the stasis pod. His hands found the release mechanism, inputting a sequence that disengaged the locks with a series of heavy, mechanical thunks. The front panel slid open. Blue fluid rushed out across the floor in a wave that soaked Tyson's knees and spread to the walls, and Nora Fries began to fall forward.

Tyson caught her with his telekinesis. She lifted free of the pod, fluid streaming off her body and hair, and he guided her down to the floor as gently as he could manage. She was limp, barely breathing. Her heartbeat felt thready and irregular, a clock winding down.

He placed both hands on her sternum and pushed everything he had into the light.

This one fought him. Alfred had been straightforward, Victor had been complex, but Nora was both. The MacGregor's had been frozen mid-progression, and thawing it was like waking a predator from hibernation. It surged the moment the cold left her body, racing through her bloodstream with renewed aggression, and Tyson had to chase it, corner it, burn it out while simultaneously repairing the cryo-damage to her tissues. His jaw clenched. Sweat ran down his temples despite the freezing air.

Minutes passed. The golden light pulsed. Victor had crawled across the wet floor to get closer, his chain pulled to its absolute limit, his newly warm body shivering violently in the cold room. Batman stood by the pod, monitoring Nora's vitals.

Then the light faded, and Tyson sat back on his heels, breathing hard.

Nora's chest rose and fell. Color flooded her cheeks, her lips, her hands. Her fingers twitched against the wet floor. Her eyes opened. Blue. Confused, unfocused, blinking against light that must have seemed impossibly bright after years of darkness. Her lips moved.

"Victor?"

He was there. He'd dragged himself across the floor on his hands and knees, chain scraping behind him, and he gathered her up off the cold ground and into his arms with the desperate, shaking grip of a man who had spent years holding onto the idea of this moment and couldn't quite believe it was real. Nora's hands found his face, his shoulders, his chest. She was crying. He was crying. Neither of them seemed to notice or care.

Batman didn't stop it.

Tyson got to his feet. His knees were soaked. He stepped back until he was standing next to Batman, and for a moment they both just stood there.

Victor was whispering to her. Tyson couldn't hear the words and didn't try to.

"He'll still be imprisoned for life?" Tyson asked quietly.

Batman gave a single nod. "He's killed. Too many to overlook."

Tyson looked at Victor and Nora on the floor. At the chain still bolted to Victor's ankle. At the cell walls that weren't going anywhere.

"Is it really one less tragedy, then?"

Batman looked at Nora. At the color in her face, at the way her fingers curled into Victor's shirt like she was afraid he'd disappear.

"His wife lives," Batman said. "We'll allow his research to continue. If he can find a way to replicate what you did. Cure MacGregor's Syndrome for everyone, not just the people here. Then it will be."

— Meteor Freak —

The elevator doors opened on the Royal Suite at ten past nine in the morning. Gotham's skyline was doing its best impression of something beautiful through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It wouldn't last. Nothing pretty lasted long in this city. Tyson stepped into the suite with both hands behind his back and found Ivy and Harley on the curved sectional, legs tucked under them, talking in the low, comfortable way that meant they'd been up for a while. Two mugs of coffee sat on the glass table. Harley's had a lipstick print on the rim. Ivy's was untouched.

They both looked up when he came in.

"Morning," Harley said, bright enough to suggest she'd been awake for hours or hadn't slept at all. With Harley, both were equally likely.

Ivy uncurled from the couch and stood. She opened her mouth to say something, and Tyson cut her off by pulling his right hand from behind his back.

The necklace caught the grey Gotham light and threw it everywhere. It was an absurd piece of jewelry, the kind of thing that existed because someone with more money than taste had decided that regular diamonds weren't enough. Hundreds of them, graduated in size, set in a cascading pattern that swept downward to a centerpiece stone. The stone was yellow, deep and warm, cut in a shape that looked almost organic. Like a rose that someone had crystallized mid-bloom.

"L'Incomparable," Tyson said, in a French accent bad enough to constitute a minor crime. "By Mouawad. Some French shit, huh?" He held it out toward Ivy. "Second largest diamond necklace in the world. The first largest being the one I took back from you last night. Fifty-five million dollars."

Ivy stared at the necklace. Her fingers hovered over the yellow diamond without touching it.

"What about me?" Harley said from the couch.

"Didn't forget about you." Tyson pulled his left hand from behind his back and held out a thick stack of papers. Legal documents, bound with a clip.

Harley took them. She flipped through the first three pages with the speed of someone with no attention span.

"She gets a necklace, and I get papers?"

"You both get papers. Fifty-fifty ownership."

Ivy took the necklace. She held it in both hands. "Ownership of what?"

"This place."

Harley's head snapped up from the documents. "The hotel room? You bought the room for us?!"

Tyson shook his head. "That'd be silly." He let the pause sit for a few seconds. "I bought the whole hotel."

Harley shot off the couch like she'd been spring-loaded. The legal documents went everywhere, pages scattering across the sectional and the floor, and she grabbed Tyson by both shoulders and shook him.

"You bought the whole hotel?" She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, shaking him with each word. "The whole entire hotel? This hotel? The one we're standing in right now?"

"That's the one."

"With the pool? And the restaurant? And the little soaps?"

"All the little soaps."

Ivy hadn't moved. She stood with the necklace in her hands. "How much?"

"Three hundred and thirty million."

Harley stopped bouncing. Ivy's fingers tightened around the diamonds.

"You spent almost four hundred million dollars," Ivy said slowly. "In one night."

"Yeah. Give or take."

"Why?"

Tyson shrugged. "Because I could."

"That's not a reason."

"Sure it is. It's the best reason." He sat down on the arm of the sectional and looked at both of them. Harley had stopped bouncing but was still vibrating, suggesting she might start again at any second. Ivy was watching him. Still deciding.

"Look," he said. "Keeping you two happy and away from the Joker is worth it. It's not complicated." He nodded toward the necklace in Ivy's hands. "That's probably not what you really wanted. But you could sell this hotel, probably make most of the money back, and use it to go preserve some plants somewhere. Save a rainforest. Fund a botanical garden. Whatever gets you going." He paused. "Or you could spruce this place up. Literally. Get it? Spruce..."

The joke landed in silence. Tyson grinned at his terrible wordplay, knowing it was bad and not caring.

Harley snorted first. Then she laughed, the full-body kind that made her tip sideways into the couch cushions. "That was awful."

"Thank you."

Ivy closed her hand around the yellow diamond. "You're a strange man, Tyson."

"I've been told."

She looked at the necklace one more time, then at him. "Thank you. I mean that."

Tyson nodded. He didn't make it into a thing. Ivy would have hated that.

The goodbye was short. He preferred it that way, and Ivy clearly did too. She gathered the necklace and her copy of the ownership documents and retreated to the bedroom.

Harley walked him to the elevator.

"You're weird," she said.

"Thanks, Harley."

"No, like." She punched his arm. "You're weird weird. Like, good weird. Like, I've met a lot of guys who throw money around, and they're all doing it because they want something, and you're doing it because..." She trailed off, nose scrunching, searching for the reason. "I dunno. Because you're weird."

"That's about right."

"Come back and visit. We own a hotel now. I'll give you the good room."

"I had the good room and gave it to you."

"I'll give you a better good room. I'm the owner now. I can do that."

She hugged him. Quick and fierce. She smelled like coffee and the shampoo from the hotel bathroom. Then she stepped back, punched his arm again in the exact same spot, and pointed at him.

"Don't die."

"Solid advice."

"I'm serious! You've got that whole 'I'm gonna go do something dramatic and dangerous' face on. Don't die."

"I'll do my best."

The elevator doors closed on Harley Quinn waving at him with both hands, standing in the hallway of a hotel she now co-owned, wearing pajama shorts with little cartoon hammers on them.

Tyson leaned against the back wall of the elevator and let the smile drop.

There went the contingency plan. Harley and Ivy were compatible hosts. He'd mapped it out during the night, turning it over between one healing and the next. Two women, two villains' autonomy weighed against three witches'… his three friends' lives. He wouldn't do it. Wouldn't condemn them to losing their bodies, their autonomy. Killing Dr. Walden was about as much moral sacrifice as he was willing to make this weekend.

The elevator reached the lobby. Tyson walked through the marble atrium, past the concierge desk, past the doorman who held the glass door open, and out into Gotham's morning air. It tasted like exhaust and river water.

He had two Stones of Power in his pocket. Two vials of Batman's counter-seal potion, nestled in cloth, in another, so they wouldn't clink. The spellbook was in a pack he slung over his shoulders.

He knew how to break Isobel's primary seal. He had the tools. He had the knowledge. He had everything except certainty, and certainty was a luxury he'd stopped expecting when he'd been jumped by his girlfriend right before not-having a threesome.

The world slowed as Tyson ran toward Metropolis. Toward the end of this.

— Meteor Freak —

Metropolis could be seen from thirty miles out.

Gotham had crept up on you. It slouched on the horizon like something waiting in an alley, all stone and gargoyle. Metropolis did the opposite. It stood up straight. Glass and steel caught the midday sun and threw it back at the sky like a challenge, every building competing to be taller than the last.

Tyson slowed to a jog at the city limits, then to a walk. He pulled his hood down and joined the foot traffic on Sullivan Avenue, letting the crowd absorb him. Nobody looked twice. The streets were wider than Gotham's. Cleaner. The sidewalks had actual trees planted in actual soil beds instead of cigarette butts growing out of concrete cracks. People walked with purpose, briefcases and coffee cups and Bluetooth earpieces. Even the pigeons looked healthier.

It was the kind of city that had no room for what he was about to do in it.

He found the address Kara had texted him. A house on the outskirts of the city, not dissimilar from something you'd see off Main Street in Smallville.

He knocked twice.

The door opened, and Kara Zor-El was standing there in a grey t-shirt and jeans, blonde hair pulled back, no makeup, barefoot.

She looked good. She always looked good.

"Hey," Tyson said.

"Hey."

They stood there, both unsure what to say.

"You going to invite me in, or should I do the whole vampire thing where I stand here until you say the words?"

Kara stepped aside. He walked past her into the house. Open kitchen, living area, windows facing east toward the bay. Clean. Sparse. A few photos on the bookshelf. A mug on the counter with steam still rising from it.

She closed the door and leaned against it.

Three months. Ninety-something days since they'd been in the same room. Two phone calls in that stretch, both of them careful, both of them full of pauses that lasted too long and words that didn't go far enough. The first call had been after Lana. After everything fell apart. Kara had asked if he was okay and he'd said yes and they'd both known it was a lie, but neither of them had pushed it. The second call was before the Gotham gala, coordinating, business so to speak.

Now there was no phone between them. Just a fourteen-by-twenty living room and all the things they hadn't said filling it up.

"You look tired," Kara said.

"Flatterer."

"I'm serious. When did you last sleep?"

"I caught a few hours in Gotham. I'm fine." He set his pack down on the kitchen counter and unzipped it. "We need to talk about the plan."

"We need to talk about a lot of things."

"Sure. But the plan first. The other stuff doesn't matter if we're dead."

Kara pushed off the door and walked to the kitchen island. She stood across from him, arms crossed, watching him pull items from the pack. The spellbook. The cloth bundle with the vials. The two Stones, wrapped separately in layers of fabric.

"Those are—"

"Yeah."

She stared at the wrapped Stones. Her jaw tightened. Kara could hear frequencies humans couldn't, and whatever the Stones were putting out, she was getting the broadcast. He set them aside and spread the spellbook open on the counter. "Here's what we're doing. I contact Isobel. Offer a negotiation. I have two of the three Stones, you have the third. She has Lana's body. We meet. We talk. We trade."

"She won't trade."

"No. She won't. But she'll show up, because she can't resist the Stones. That's the whole point. We're not negotiating. We're baiting."

He pulled the two vials from their cloth wrapping and set them on the counter. The liquid inside was dark, almost black, with a faint iridescence that shifted when the light hit it.

"These are counter-seal potions. One for Chloe, one for Kyla. Batman's recipe, derived from the spellbook. One dose strips the binding seal that ties them to Isobel's coven. They drink this, they're free. Isobel loses two-thirds of her power base in one move."

"How do we get them to drink it?"

"That's the problem, isn't it? My thought. Wine." He said it like it was obvious. "Isobel's a sixteenth-century French countess possessing my girlfriend's body. She's not going to turn down wine at a negotiation. We lace the glasses, make sure Chloe and Kyla get them. Leave Isobel's drink clean."

"Why leave hers clean?"

"Because Isobel's binding is different. It's a primary seal. The potion won't break it. For that, I need something else."

Kara waited.

Tyson tapped a page in the spellbook. The diagram showed a rune pattern with a single point marked in red ink, a notation he'd added himself.

"The primary seal has a keystone. One point in the rune structure that holds the whole thing together. I hit that point with enough focused energy, the seal cracks and Isobel gets evicted. But it has to be precise. One shot, exact location. Miss, and it holds. Blanket the whole thing in power, and it won't evict the witch, and I risk damaging Lana."

"How do you know where the keystone is?"

"I have a source."

"What source?"

"A reliable one."

Kara's arms tightened across her chest. "You're not going to tell me."

"I can't. I made a promise."

"You made a promise to someone about how to break a magical seal on your girlfriend's body, and you can't tell me who."

"That's an accurate summary, yeah."

She held his look for a long moment. Then she let it go, because Kara understood.

"What about Kal?" she asked.

Tyson stopped arranging the items on the counter. His hands went still.

"Clark is tracking the Stones. He showed up at the Gotham gala. Came through the ceiling like a cruise missile, no warning, no conversation. He wanted the Stone, and he didn't care who was in the way."

"How bad was it?"

"Bad. He's faster than before. Stronger. He can fly now. Whatever Jor-El did to him, it took the limits off."

Kara's expression didn't change, but she knew what it meant because she was Kryptonian too.

"He's not Clark right now," Tyson said. "Whatever's driving him, it's Jor-El's agenda. The Stones, the caves, the whole Kryptonian destiny package. He's running on programming."

"He's still in there."

"Maybe. But 'in there' doesn't help us if 'out here' is throwing me through walls." He picked up one of the wrapped Stones and turned it over in his hand. "If he shows up during the negotiation, I need you to handle him."

"Handle him."

"Slow him down. Redirect him. Buy me time. You're the only person on this planet who can match him physically, and even then—"

"I know my limits, Tyson."

"I know you do." He set the Stone down. "I'm not asking you to fight him. I'm asking you to keep him busy long enough for me to break the seal. After that, Isobel's gone, Lana's free, and we can deal with Clark together."

Kara was quiet for a moment. She picked up her mug and held it in both hands without drinking.

"You really think this is going to work?"

"I think it has to."

They spent the next hour on contingencies.

Kara pulled a lead-lined case from under the kitchen floorboards. Inside, nestled in foam cutouts like ammunition, sat a chunk of kryptonite the size of a golf ball. It glowed faintly green even through the lead, and when she cracked the case open, Tyson felt nothing. Kara flinched.

"If Clark shows up," she said, snapping the case shut, "I engage. I keep him occupied. You focus on Isobel and the seal."

"And if the negotiation goes sideways before Clark's even in the picture?"

"Then I'm the cavalry. I come in fast, hit hard."

Tyson nodded slowly. It was a solid framework. Simple plans survived contact with the enemy better than complicated ones. But something had been nagging at him since he'd walked through the front door, and he'd been turning it over while they talked, waiting for the right moment.

"This house," he said. "Walk me through the security."

Kara gestured vaguely toward the walls. "Lex had it built. Lead-lined throughout. Kryptonite mesh embedded in the grounds and the exterior walls. Sensors on every approach."

"The kryptonite mesh. That's in the walls?"

"Foundation, walls, roof, scattered around the grounds. Full coverage."

"So the whole building is essentially a kryptonite cage."

"It slows down anyone trying to get in. Clark couldn't just punch through. He'd weaken before he reached the interior. By the time he broke through, I'd be ready."

Tyson leaned against the counter. "And if you need to get out?"

Kara paused.

"The mesh works both ways, Kara. You're sitting inside a box designed to keep Kryptonians contained. If you need to retreat, you're pushing through the same kryptonite barrier Clark would be. You'd be weakened before you hit open air."

"I can handle it."

"Against Clark, maybe this location makes sense. He hits the walls, he slows down, you're fighting on even ground. But we're not just dealing with Clark." He tapped the spellbook on the counter. "Isobel is a four-hundred-year-old witch with access to magic that doesn't care about lead lining or kryptonite. If she decides to bring the fight here, you're trapped in a box that weakens you, fighting someone whose powers aren't affected by any of it."

Kara's mouth pressed into a thin line. She didn't argue, which meant she'd already thought about it and hadn't liked the answer she'd found.

"We need somewhere else," Tyson said. "Somewhere we can control the environment without boxing you in."

"Where? We can't exactly rent a conference room."

"I don't know yet. But not here. Here is a kill box with your name on it if Isobel shows up angry."

Kara set the lead case on the counter next to the spellbook. She was quiet for a moment, thinking, and in that quiet the conversation ran out of road and left them standing in the personal territory they'd both been skirting since he walked in.

She picked up her mug again. Took a sip this time, then set it down.

Her hair was shorter than the last time he'd seen her, cut just above her shoulders instead of falling halfway down her back. It changed the shape of her face, made her jaw look sharper, her neck longer. It was a small thing. The kind of thing that meant she'd been living a life in Metropolis that had nothing to do with him.

"Your hair's shorter," he said.

"Yeah."

"Must be a pain finding a stylist when your hair can't be cut with scissors."

She smiled. "I use a small shard of kryptonite. Hold it close enough and the hair becomes... cuttable. Lex hates it. Says I'm being reckless for cosmetic reasons."

"He's not wrong."

"He's not. But it works, and I like it short."

It suited her. He preferred it long, but he didn't say that. He didn't need to, and saying it would have opened a door he wasn't ready to walk through.

The silence stretched past comfortable. Kara looked at him, then at the spellbook, then back at him.

"How is Lana?" No warmup, no preamble. She wanted to know, and she respected him enough to ask it straight.

Tyson owed her the same.

"The answer to that question would've been very different a week ago. She's who I'm doing this for," he said. "All of it. The Stones, the spellbook, Gotham, Batman's potions. It's for her."

He said it without apology, because there wasn't one to give. They both knew that.

Kara took it. Spine straight, chin level, the same way she took everything.

"Good," she said. "She's lucky to have someone willing to go this far."

And that was the thing about Kara. She meant it. Not as a barb, nor twist. She just meant it, and that made what Tyson had to say next feel like swallowing broken glass.

He'd tried rehearsing this on the run from Smallville. A dozen versions, all wrong. Too detached, too apologetic, too much like a speech. He'd given up and decided to just say it.

"I didn't want to do this," he said.

Kara's hand stilled on the mug.

"Really. I didn't. But I loved you, Kara."

The past tense rippled across her face. Loved, not love. She absorbed it.

"I still do, honestly. It's hard to admit. If you'd never left, I'd still be loving you. But you did leave." He paused. Gave her the space to interrupt. She didn't take it. "I know you had your reasons. Whatever they were. Pleasing Lionel. Serving LuthorCorp. Hell, it might've even been to protect me." He let out a breath, and it came out as a light laugh. "But you didn't exactly explain everything. I get it, I'm not a super open book. It was still hard."

Kara set the mug down on the counter. Carefully. The ceramic hardly made a sound against the granite.

"I'm not saying Lana was a rebound. She wasn't. She isn't. But really?" He spread his hands. "Metropolis is, what, a six-minute run for me from Kansas now? I'm sure you're faster than me, Clark is. You couldn't have stayed and just run back and forth? Or flown, you know, since you can fly?"

The words were coming faster now. He'd opened the valve and the pressure behind it was doing the rest.

"Pop out. Do whatever you need to do for Lionel. Come back. Or stay here and come back at night. Or on weekends. Or anything. Literally anything other than just leaving and cutting me out of your life." He put his palms flat on the counter, leaning forward. "Waiting for me to call is a copout, Kara. You could've appeared in my apartment at any time. You could've hovered outside the window like you did that night..." His voice caught. Not dramatically, just a small hitch. "...like you did the night we made love."

The kitchen was very quiet. The mug on the counter had stopped steaming. Outside, a car passed on the street, its engine a distant hum that faded into nothing.

Kara stood across from him with her arms at her sides. Not crossed anymore. Just hanging there, like she'd forgotten what to do with them. Her throat moved once. She was looking at him the way she looked at the sun sometimes. Like it was the source of everything she needed and everything that could burn her.

Tyson stopped talking. He'd said it. All of it. The word vomit, the mess, the ugly honest sprawl of it. He waited.

Kara's fingers pressed against the counter's edge. She was processing. Kryptonian brain, Kryptonian speed, and none of it helped here. This was the one thing that slowed her down to human speed.

He gave her the time. Then, when the silence had gone on long enough that it started to calcify, he spoke again.

"I love Lana. But I'm not going to pretend I don't love you too. But I—"

"Stop."

The one word silenced him. She said it quietly, without anger or pleading. Just stop.

Kara came around the kitchen island. She moved at human speed, each step deliberate, until she was standing in front of him with less than two feet of air between them. This close, faint gold flecks showed in her blue eyes, only visible in direct light. He could smell her shampoo, something with lavender, different from what she'd used in Smallville.

"You think I didn't want to come back?" Her voice was low, but a tremble ran through it. "You think I sat in this city for three months and didn't think about flying to your window every single night?"

She took a breath. Not because she needed the oxygen. Because she needed the pause.

"I left because Lionel made it clear that staying in Smallville put a target on you that I couldn't always intercept. Not because I stopped wanting to be there. I left because every day I stayed was another day someone could use you to get to me, or use me to get to you, and I couldn't—" She stopped herself. "I wouldn't let that happen."

"You could have told me that."

"And you would have said it didn't matter. You would have said you could handle it. You would have been brave and stubborn and stupid about it, because that's what you do, Tyson. You walk into danger like you're going for a stroll at the park on a nice day."

He smiled. She wasn't wrong.

"So yes. I waited for you to call. Because if I came to you, I wouldn't have left again. And if I didn't leave, eventually someone would have hurt you. Maybe someone worse than Lionel. Maybe someone I couldn't stop." Her hands were fists at her sides, not from anger but from the effort of keeping them there instead of reaching for him. "I made a choice. It was the wrong one. I know that. I've known it since the second week, when I flew to the edge of Smallville at two in the morning and sat on the water tower for an hour listening to your heartbeat because I couldn't sleep without it."

The water tower. He could see it from his apartment window. He'd stood at that window, staring at nothing, and she'd been right there.

"I should have told you," Kara said. "I should have explained. I should have trusted you with the reason instead of just shutting you out. That's on me. All of it."

She unclenched her fists. Flexed her fingers.

"But don't you stand in my kitchen and tell me I didn't love you enough to stay. I loved you too much to stay. There's a difference, and it's the worst difference in the world, and I have hated every single day of it."

Tyson opened his mouth.

"I'm not finished." Kara's chin came up. "You love Lana. I believe you. I can hear your heartbeat right now, and it didn't skip when you said her name. You mean it. And I'm not going to stand here and compete with that, because she's your girlfriend and she's in danger and you're here planning to fight Kryptonians and witches to save her, and that's exactly the kind of man I fell in love with."

She swallowed.

"But you don't get to tell me I took the easy way out. There was nothing easy about any of it. Not leaving. Not staying away. Not hearing your voice on the phone and pretending two calls in three months was enough. Not cutting my own hair with kryptonite in a bathroom in Metropolis because the last person who touched my hair was you, and I couldn't sit in a salon chair without—"

She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Breathed.

"I'm finished now," she said. Ending it just like that. "So let's go get Lana and Chloe, and Clark's girlfriend, and Clark back."

Tyson let out a breath. That conversation was done. That door, closed. "We still need a location."

"Club Zero," Kara said.

Tyson stared at her. "A club? That's worse. That's significantly worse. We're almost certainly walking into a fight, and you want to do it at a nightclub?"

"It's a club Lex had some… dealings at. We ended up buying it. Everyone in the club can be LuthorCorp security. Armed, trained, positioned before Isobel even walks through the door." Kara uncrossed her arms and leaned forward against the island. "Think about it. You said you need to get the counter-seal potion into Chloe and Kyla. You can't just pour them a drink at a negotiation table. Two glasses, handed directly to two specific people? It looks like a setup because it is a setup."

"And a nightclub solves that how?"

"A nightclub has a bar. Waitresses. Drinks circulating on trays. People accept drinks from bartenders in clubs. Chloe and Kyla get handed cocktails by a bartender, and it looks like atmosphere, not assassination."

He turned the logistics over for a full minute. LuthorCorp security as the crowd. Controlled entry points. A bar staff briefed on exactly which drinks went to which people. Music loud enough to cover conversation. A public enough setting that Isobel might hesitate before going nuclear, because even a four-hundred-year-old witch had to consider witnesses. It probably wouldn't stop her for long; she had fought him in the apartment with the party going on downstairs, but it was something.

"Alright," he said. "That actually works."

Tyson pulled out his phone. He thumbed to Lana's contact and hit dial.

It rang twice.

"Mon chéri." Isobel's voice came through warm and intimate. "I was beginning to think you'd forgotten about me."

"Hard to forget. You're wearing my girlfriend."

"Am I still that? Your girlfriend? After everything? How romantic. How... persistent."

"I've got all three Stones, Isobel."

Silence on the line. Just for a second. Just long enough.

"That's a bold claim."

"You know I have yours, and I have the one from Metropolis. All three. Plus the spellbook."

"You've been busy."

"I've been motivated. Here's the deal. Tonight. Metropolis. Club Zero, downtown. I bring the Stones and the book. You bring Chloe and Kyla. I'll have three girls here for you. They won't be special, but they'll be young, fit, attractive. You need what I have. I need what you have. We talk. We trade. Everybody walks away."

Another pause. Longer this time. Centuries of experience weighing against the simple math of leverage.

"What time?"

"Midnight."

"How theatrical." Isobel let out a low laugh, Lana's laugh but sharper. "Very well, mon chéri. Midnight. I'll bring the girls. You bring the girls. Do wear something nice. I liked you in that tuxedo."

The line went dead.

Tyson set the phone on the counter. Kara was looking at him.

"She'll come prepared," he said.

"So will we."

— Meteor Freak —

Club Zero occupied the basement level of a converted textile warehouse on Metropolis's east side, three blocks from the waterfront. The entrance sat below street level, down a flight of concrete stairs flanked by brushed steel railings. It didn't have the spectacle Tyson expected, no neon signs, no velvet rope. Just a matte black door with the club's name etched into a steel plate at eye height, and a pair of bouncers.

Inside, the space stretched through what was the original warehouse, stripped of everything original. Brick walls painted black. Industrial ductwork running along the ceiling, wrapped in strips of warm amber light that gave the room a perpetual golden glow. The main floor held a bar that ran the full length of the left wall, backed by mirrored shelving and enough top-shelf liquor to stock a small country. Opposite the bar, leather booths lined the right wall in a row, each one recessed into its own alcove. The dance floor occupied the center, though tonight the music was kept at conversation volume, something with bass and piano.

The VIP section sat at the far end, elevated two steps above the main floor and separated by a frosted glass partition. Its own bar. Its own booths. Its own air, slightly cooler, slightly quieter.

Every person in the building worked for LuthorCorp.

The bouncers at the door were private security, pulled from Kara's personal detail that she rarely used. The bartenders had been briefed three hours ago. The twenty-odd people scattered across the main floor, nursing drinks and holding conversations that went nowhere, were all employees from various divisions, recruited by Kara with the promise of hazard pay and the understanding that if things went sideways, they were to evacuate through the service corridor behind the kitchen. They wore jeans and button-downs and cocktail dresses, and they played their parts well enough that the room felt alive without feeling crowded.

Tyson came down the stairs at eleven fifteen wearing his tuxedo. Black wool, peak lapels, the jacket cut close through the torso and clean through the shoulders. White dress shirt, black bow tie, onyx cufflinks. The mask sat in his breast pocket. He'd put it on before Isobel arrived. For now, he moved through the main floor, taking the stairs up to VIP. The section was empty except for the bartender behind the smaller bar, a woman in her late twenties with dark hair pulled back tight and steady hands. Her name tag read SARAH. She was LuthorCorp legal, second year, and she'd volunteered for this after Kara explained what was needed.

Tyson set the bottle on the bar. Château Margaux, 1996. From the Luthor private reserve, one of eleven bottles Lex kept in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Metropolis penthouse. The label was immaculate. The cork was untouched.

She knew what to do.

Sarah placed the bottle on the shelf behind her, positioning it as a display piece. Bait.

Tyson checked his watch, pulled the mask from his pocket, and settled it into place, the black domino covering his upper face, reshaping him from Tyson into Tuxedo Mask. He adjusted the fit, then took a seat in the central booth, the one facing the entrance to the VIP.

At the next table over, three women sat together. Mid-twenties. A redhead, a brunette, a blonde, because Isobel would appreciate the variety and Tyson understood presentation. They were LuthorCorp employees too, technically, though their participation required a different kind of briefing. His pheromones held them in a state of calm compliance, aware of their surroundings but unbothered by them, content to sit and sip their drinks and wait. They talked quietly among themselves, laughing at something the redhead said. They looked like friends enjoying a night out. They looked like nothing was wrong.

Tyson hated it. He'd asked for volunteers and gotten them, women who understood the plan and consented to the pheromone exposure before he'd activated it, but the sight of them sitting there, pliant and waiting to be offered like party favors, made him uncomfortable. It was necessary. It was also ugly.

Kara was somewhere out of sight. Close enough to hear everything through the walls, far enough that the kryptonite placed in various areas wasn't a factor. She had her own shard in a lead box in her jacket pocket. Insurance. The kind you hoped you didn't need but always kept close.

The music downstairs shifted. Something with more strings, a cello. The LuthorCorp employees on the main floor kept drinking, kept talking, kept performing normalcy.

Midnight struck.

The door opened. Tyson stood from the VIP booth and moved to where the stairs were visible, waving the girls over. Heels on concrete as they approached. Three sets, synchronized.

They appeared at the top of the VIP stairs.

Black leather pants, low-slung, paired with a corset top in deep burgundy that laced up the front and left her arms bare. Lana's dark hair fell loose past her shoulders, and the way she carried it, the tilt of her chin, the roll of her shoulders, was all Isobel. Boots with a heel. Silver rings on every finger. She looked like she'd dressed for a fight and then decided to stop at a cocktail party on the way.

Chloe flanked her left. Kyla flanked her right. The same formation from the Gotham gala, the same triangle, the same pink auras shimmering faintly around them. Chloe wore a black dress that Chloe Sullivan would never have chosen, too tight, too short, too much. Her expression was pleasant and vacant. Kyla scanned the VIP section, less airy than Chloe.

Isobel stopped at the edge of the booth. She looked at Tyson. At the mask. Her mouth curved.

"The mask again," she said. Lana's voice, but the French accent bled through on the vowels. "Mon chéri. I prefer the face underneath."

"I like the mystery." Tyson grabbed the mask from his face and slid it back into his pocket, then gestured to the seat across from him. "Sit."

Isobel didn't sit. She stood there, one hand resting on the back of the booth, and took in the VIP section. The bar. Sarah behind it. The three women at the next table. The exits. Cataloging everything.

Then she sat. Chloe and Kyla slid into the booth on either side of her, moving in sync.

"Drinks?" Tyson said.

"You're offering me drinks in a club." Isobel crossed one leg over the other. "How generous." She picked up a cocktail napkin from the table and folded it between her fingers. "I appreciate the effort. It's a better stage than your apartment."

Tyson signaled Sarah. Sarah reached for the bottle.

"Château Margaux," Isobel said, watching the label as Sarah pulled it from the shelf. The amusement left her face. "You raided the Luthors' wine collection for me?"

"I asked nicely."

"No, you didn't." But she was watching the bottle with the attention of someone who'd drunk wine in French cellars before the Revolution. Sarah poured four glasses and set them on a small tray and brought them to the table, placing each glass.

Chloe's hand moved first, reaching for the glass nearest her. Kyla followed half a second later, fingers closing around the stem of her own glass.

"Don't."

One word from Isobel. Both hands froze. Chloe's fingers uncurled and returned to her lap. Kyla settled back against the leather of the booth. Neither woman looked confused or frustrated.

Isobel picked up her own glass. Held it to the light. The wine was dark, almost black at the center, thinning to garnet at the rim where it clung to the crystal. She tilted it, watching the legs run slow and even down the inside of the glass. Then she set it back on the table without drinking.

"Four glasses," she said. "Three for us. One for you." She looked at Tyson's glass, still sitting untouched in front of him. "How do I know it isn't poisoned?"

"If you have Lana's memories," Tyson said, "do you really think I'd poison someone?"

"You'd poison me. For Lana, you would do it without hesitation. You'd smile while you did it."

"You are Lana."

"If you believed that were true," Isobel said, "you wouldn't be fighting me so hard."

She reached across the table. Not for her glass. For his. Her fingers wrapped around the stem and she drew it toward her. She brought it to her lips.

Tyson didn't stop her.

Isobel drank. A slow sip, unhurried, letting the wine sit on her tongue before she swallowed. Her eyes never left his.

"Margaux," she said. "Soft tannins. Black currant. A little tobacco on the finish." She took another sip. "Whoever kept this stored it properly. The Luthors have good taste in wine."

She set the glass down. Pushed it back toward him.

"Your turn."

Tyson picked up the glass she'd drunk from. He drank. Same wine, same glass, same unhurried pace. He set it back between them.

"Satisfied?" he asked.

"That yours isn't poisoned? Reasonably." Isobel's mouth curved. She pulled her own glass back toward her and raised it, but didn't drink. "Of course, the clever move would be to poison all four glasses and take the antidote beforehand. You'd sacrifice a mouthful of tainted wine to sell the performance. You're theatrical enough for it."

"That's a lot of credit you're giving me."

"I've been inside Lana's memories, mon chéri. I know exactly how much credit to give you." She swirled the wine. "Then again, the truly clever move would be to poison none of them and let me sit here second-guessing myself until the wine gets warm. Paranoia is its own kind of poison."

"Now you're overthinking it."

"Am I?" Isobel leaned back. "Four glasses. You drank from yours. I drank from yours. Neither of us has touched mine, or theirs." She gestured at Chloe and Kyla's untouched glasses without looking at them. "So either the poison is in those two glasses specifically, which means you planned for me to be suspicious of my own glass and leave it alone. Or the poison is in mine, and you're counting on me to switch. Or there is no poison, and you're wasting a very good Margaux on a bluff."

"Or, I opened a bottle of wine because I'm sitting across from a four-hundred-year-old French woman and I thought she'd appreciate the gesture."

Isobel laughed Lana's laugh. She picked up her glass and drank. A real drink this time, not a sip. She closed her eyes for half a second as she swallowed.

"It is a very good Margaux," she said.

Isobel took the glass. Held it up. Studied the color against the amber light.

"To negotiations," she said.

"To getting what we came for," Tyson replied.

The two of them drank.

"Three Stones," Tyson said, placing his glass down. "All of them. In exchange for Chloe, Kyla, and Lana. You release them. Fully. No tricks, no delayed triggers, no anchors left behind."

"And if I want to negotiate the terms?"

"There are no terms. That's the deal."

Isobel set her glass down. She looked at him across the table with something between admiration and pity.

"Three Stones of Power," she said. "Artifacts that have shaped the course of civilizations. That were old when Rome was young. And you're offering them to me for three girls."

"For three people. Yes."

"You could unite them yourself. You have the spellbook. The power those Stones represent, combined, is beyond anything this world has seen."

"Not interested."

"Liar." She said it fondly. "You're interested. I can see it in you, the same hunger that drove me to search for them across four lifetimes. But you've decided that love matters more than power, and you're young enough to still believe that's a choice you get to make."

"I'm making it right now. I'm plenty powerful already, you know that."

"So you are." She sipped her wine again. "The replacement vessels. You mentioned them on the phone."

Tyson tilted his head toward the adjacent table. The three women sat there, relaxed, smiling, the redhead twirling a strand of hair around her finger while the brunette said something that made the blonde laugh.

"Under my pheromone control," Tyson said. "Compliant. Healthy. Young."

Isobel studied the three women. "Adequate," she said. She turned back to Tyson. "You know what I find fascinating about you?"

"My sparkling personality."

"How much you must love her." Isobel's finger traced the rim of her glass. "Lana. This girl whose body I'm borrowing. You fought for her. You stole for her. You traveled across this country and bargained for her. Now you control innocent women with your pheromones and dress them up as offerings for a witch. All you had to do was let her walk away. Let me have her. Find another girl. You're handsome, powerful, young. You could have anyone. But you chose the hard road, the bloody road, because you love her."

She said the last word like she was tasting it. Like love was a vintage she'd sampled centuries ago and still remembered the finish.

"You're right," Tyson said. "I could've walked away. Found someone easier to love. Someone who didn't come with a four-hundred-year-old witch as a roommate. But here's the thing about easy, Isobel. Easy is what people choose when they don't care enough to suffer. I care enough to suffer. Maybe in some twisted way, that's romantic. But it's the truth."

"Truth," she repeated. "You really believe everything that you say. Your conviction is strong."

"It's how I sleep at night."

"You don't sleep. I can see it in the circles under your eyes." She smiled. "But I admire the commitment. Truly. It's rare, in any century."

Tyson raised his glass.

"To new arrangements," he said.

Isobel watched him for a beat. Then she lifted her own glass and turned to the women beside her.

"Drink," she said. "It's a toast."

Chloe's hand was already moving before the second syllable landed, fingers closing around the stem of her glass; she'd been waiting all night. Kyla followed, slower, her hand finding her glass but not lifting it.

Chloe brought the wine to her lips. She didn't sniff it or study it or hold it to the light the way Isobel had. She drank the way someone drinks when they've spent four centuries without a tongue and finally have one again. A full mouthful. She swallowed, and her eyes closed, and a small sound escaped her throat that was pure, uncomplicated pleasure.

"God, that's good," she said, in Chloe's voice but with an accent. She took another drink. "This century. This century."

Kyla raised her glass to her lips.

Chloe coughed.

It was small. A catch in the throat, the kind that follows wine taken too fast. She pressed her fist to her sternum and cleared her throat; just a girl who'd drunk too quickly.

Then her hand dropped from her chest to her stomach.

"Something," she said. The accent was thicker now, the consonants blurring. "Something is—"

She stood. The motion was jerky, graceless. Her hip caught the edge of the table, sending her glass toppling and wine spreading across the white tablecloth in a dark stain. She took one step back from the booth and her knees buckled.

The pink aura around her body convulsed, strobing. Pink. Gone. Pink. Gone. Chloe's face changed; the vacant pleasantness cracked. Something underneath fought its way to the surface, confused, frightened, and aware. Chloe hit her knees on the hardwood floor. Her hands clawed at her midsection, fingers digging into the fabric of the black dress, and the sound that came out of her mouth was a stream of sixteenth-century French that tore from her throat like something being ripped out by the roots, each word a curse or a prayer, and the pink aura blazed brightly before it guttered and died and blazed again.

Chloe's eyes snapped open. Pink. Clear green. Pink. Clear green.

Kyla's glass froze in her hand.

Isobel turned to Chloe. She watched the convulsions, the French pouring from lips that didn't know the language. Her face went still. Not angry. Not yet.

Then she turned to Tyson. The flirtation was gone. The amusement was gone. The game of seduction and wordplay and mutual appreciation, all of it, stripped away in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

"You poisoned her," Isobel said. "Just their glasses. Of course. You'd never risk Lana. You love her too much to gamble with her body. But the others." She gestured at Chloe, who was curled on the floor now, the pink aura flickering like a dying signal flare. "Your friend. Your friend's girlfriend. They're acceptable losses."

"Actually," Tyson said, and he picked up his glass, the one they'd both drunk from, and turned it in his hand, "you guessed right the first time. I poisoned all four glasses." He took a sip. Set it down. "I didn't take an antidote, though."

Isobel's hand flattened against the table. "You'd kill us all then? Over the girl you couldn't have? That's not romantic."

"Apparently you never read Romeo and Juliette." Tyson leaned back in the booth. "Just kidding. It's not really a poison. More like a potion. Took me a while to decode that spellbook of yours. I got a little help from a friend who's better at detective work than I am. Found the counter-seal to the possession binding." He nodded toward Chloe. The pink aura flared one final time, brilliant and desperate, and then it collapsed inward like a star dying, and Chloe Sullivan gasped, and her eyes were green, just green, and stayed that way. "I didn't kill her, Isobel. I freed her."

Chloe was breathing hard on the floor, both palms flat against the hardwood, her whole body shaking. She looked up. At Tyson. At her own hands like she'd never seen them before.

"Tyson?" Her voice. Her actual voice. No accent. "What... where am I?"

Isobel stepped out of the booth. Her fingers came up, and her lips began to move, shaping syllables.

The air around her hands turned purple.

Tyson was already moving, reaching for Chloe, pulling her back, when the ceiling exploded.

A column of concrete and rebar and shattered ductwork blew inward and downward with the force of a cannon shot, and through the hole came a shape.

Clark Kent hit the floor between the booth and the bar like a meteorite finding ground.

The shockwave scattered everything. The table flipped and splintered against the far wall. Isobel's glass, Tyson's glass, all of it became shrapnel. The three women at the adjacent table screamed and dove for cover. Kyla's glass was still in her hand, still full.

Clark straightened from the crouch his landing had carved into the floor. Dust and debris settled around him. The overturned furniture. Isobel standing with purple light coiling around her fists. Kyla still in the booth with her pink aura intact and her face blank with confusion.

Isobel's spell hadn't stopped building. The purple light around her hands had deepened, thickened, and the words still poured from her mouth, each syllable adding weight to whatever she was constructing. She looked at Clark in confusion.

Tyson pulled himself up from behind the bar where the shockwave had thrown him. He'd had to roll with it to protect Chloe. His tuxedo was covered in dust and wine. A cut on his forehead bled into his left eye. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

"Clark. Your timing is, as always, impeccable."

The ceiling was still raining debris when the blur hit Clark from the side.

Kara came through the hole he'd made, but faster, angled. She slammed into him shoulder-first, wrapping both arms around his torso, and the impact carried them both sideways through the VIP section's back wall. Drywall and steel studs disintegrated around them. They punched through the storage room behind the bar, through shelving units stacked with liquor boxes, through the exterior wall, and out into the Metropolis night.

The sonic crack of their exit rattled every intact glass in the building.

Tyson was already behind the bar, one arm hooked under Chloe's shoulders, hauling her upright. She was limp, her legs not cooperating, her eyes wide and glassy with terror. She'd been evicted from their own skull and he'd just handed the keys back without explanation.

"Chloe. Look at me."

She looked at him. Her pupils were blown wide. Her breathing came in shallow, rapid gulps that weren't getting enough air.

Tyson pressed his palm flat against her sternum. He didn't ease into it. There wasn't time to calibrate, to find the gentle frequency he'd used when healing paper cuts and headaches. He healed her and immediately shoved the electricity into her in a raw, unfiltered pulse, jumping from his hand into her chest like a defibrillator charge. Chloe's back arched and she made a sound between a gasp and a scream, her hands grabbing his wrist, fingernails digging in.

With his other hand, he flicked open the locket and placed it on the meteor rock. The healing passed along the electricity. It left him. Her breathing steadied.

The healing gift rooted itself in Chloe, locking in, becoming hers. He was giving Chloe Sullivan a piece of what he was, and trusting her to figure it out on the fly, in a building that was falling apart around them, because if anyone could learn to fly on the way down, it was her.

"You can heal now," Tyson said, pulling his hand back. "Only others, not yourself. So stay out of the way, do what you can, and do what feels right. I know this is insane, but we may need you before it's over. Welcome to being a Meteor Freak."

"Tyson, I don't even know where I—"

"Run. That direction. Don't stop until you're outside."

He pushed her toward the service corridor behind the bar. Chloe stumbled, caught herself, and ran.

A bolt of energy blew apart the bar top three feet to his left.

Tyson rolled sideways as a second blast carved a trench through the floor where he'd been kneeling. Bottles exploded in a cascade of alcohol and glass. He came up in a crouch behind an overturned table and assessed.

Isobel stood in the center of the ruined VIP section, both hands raised, purple light wreathing her fingers. Beside her, Briana, still wearing Kyla's body, had risen from the booth. The pink aura around her pulsed steady and strong. Her hand was extended, palm out, the residual glow of the blast she'd just fired fading from her fingertips.

Where was it? Tyson looked around until he spotted it. She'd placed the glass down.

Two witches. Casting positions staggered, Isobel forward and left, Briana back and right. Overlapping fields of fire. They'd done this before, in other centuries, in other bodies.

Isobel's lips moved. Briana's voice joined hers a half-beat behind, the same incantation offset like a round, and the air between them thickened with energy that tasted like ozone and copper.

Tyson grabbed a broken table leg with his telekinesis and hurled it at Isobel. Not to hit her, though that would be a bonus; to make her flinch, to break the cadence. The wood caught fire three feet from her face, as he used Coach Walt's power on the wood.

She didn't flinch. Her casting consumed it.

"Impellere!"

Both witches spoke the word simultaneously. Twin concussive blasts, pink and purple, converged on his position from two angles. Tyson threw himself flat, and the blasts met where his chest had been, the collision point detonating with enough force to blow out every remaining window on the second floor. Glass rained into the street below.

He was already moving, rolling behind the bar's steel frame, buying seconds. He hadn't been using his speed; he needed to give them a target. Chloe's footsteps were fading down the service corridor. Good. She was clear.

Isobel advanced. Briana circled right, flanking. They moved in concert, herding him toward the corner where the walls would limit his options.

"Mon chéri," Isobel called, her voice carrying over the settling debris. "You freed one. I'm impressed. Truly. But Madeline was always the weakest of us. Briana won't fall for the same trick."

Tyson's hand found a shard of mirror behind the bar. He angled it, caught Briana's reflection. She was fifteen feet to his right, moving along the wall, her free hand building another charge. By the booth, sitting on the ground was the wine glass she'd set down. Full. Untouched. The potion sitting right there.

Isobel fired again. A lance of purple energy that punched through the bar's steel frame like it was cardboard, missing Tyson by inches as he twisted sideways. The heat of it singed the hair on his forearm.

Outside, something hit the building hard enough to make the floor jump. A distant boom, then another, Clark and Kara trading blows somewhere above the city. The sounds were moving away, Kara doing her job, creating distance, pulling him from the Stones.

Briana's lips parted. She drew breath for the incantation, chest expanding, jaw dropping open to shape the first syllable. "Impel—"

Tyson moved.

Superspeed collapsed the fifteen feet into nothing. One heartbeat he was behind the bar. The next he was in front of Briana, having retrieved the wine glass from the floor near the booth. He tipped it upward, angling the rim past her teeth, and the dark liquid hit the back of her tongue mid-syllable. It was a tricky thing to do at superspeed; he needed to slow himself on his approach.

She swallowed out of reflex, choking, sputtering.

Briana's eyes went wide. The pink aura around her body seized, stuttered, and then began to strobe the same way Chloe's had. Pink. Clear. Pink. Clear.

Tyson caught her. Lowered her. Kyla's body convulsed in his arms, and the stream of French that poured from her mouth was different from Chloe's, angrier, more desperate, Briana clawing at the walls of a vessel that was rejecting her. The pink aura flared once, brilliant and furious, and collapsed.

Kyla gasped. She stared up at Tyson with the raw, uncomprehending terror of someone surfacing from a drowning.

"You're okay," Tyson said. He set her down against the wall. "Stay down."

He turned.

Isobel stood alone in the wreckage of the VIP section. The purple light around her hands had dimmed. She'd stopped casting. She stood with her arms at her sides, looking at the girl on the ground, her coven, her sisters, expelled and gasping and gone.

She'd burned for them. She'd come back for them. Four centuries of death and patience, and in the space of ten minutes, a boy had taken them from her with wine and a stolen spellbook.

The loss passed. What replaced it was colder.

"Clever," Isobel said. The flirtation, the French endearments, the cat-and-mouse warmth, all of it had burned away. What remained was the woman who'd faced the Inquisition's fire and chosen to come back rather than stay dead. "You used my own spellbook against me. My spellbook. My magic. Turned against my own coven." She looked at where Chloe had retreated, then at Kyla slumped against the wall. "Madeline. Briana. They trusted me to protect them. I brought them back from death, gave them bodies, gave them life, and you ripped them out like weeds."

"I gave those bodies back to the people they belonged to."

"Belonged." Isobel's mouth twisted. "Ownership. Property. You speak of these girls as though they have some inherent right to flesh they were born into by accident. Madeline and Briana earned their place. They fought for it. They died for it. What did Chloe Sullivan ever do to deserve that body except be born?"

She looked at him the way she had across the table, when the wine was flowing, and the game was still fun. But the game was over now, and what she saw wasn't a charming adversary or a potential conquest. It was the man who'd dismantled her family while smiling at her over a glass.

"It's just us now," she said.

"Just us."

Countess Marguerite Isobel Thoreaux raised her hands. The purple light returned, deeper than before, almost black at the edges, drawing from reserves she hadn't needed when she'd had two sisters to share the load. The air around her crackled. The scattered debris on the floor began to tremble, then to rise, splinters and glass and broken steel lifting from the ground in a slow, rotating orbit around her body.

She smiled. It was not a warm smile.

"Then let's stop pretending this was ever a negotiation."

The building shook again. Harder this time, close, the impact transmitting through the floor like a drumbeat. Dust cascaded from the fractured ceiling. Through the ragged hole Clark had punched on his entrance, two figures traded blows in the airspace above the Metropolis skyline, each collision producing a flat, percussive crack that sounded less like a fight and more like an artillery strike.

Kara was losing.

It showed in the geometry of the exchange. She was faster, technically. But Clark hit harder. Every block she threw rattled her to the shoulder. Every dodge cost her altitude. She was fighting defensively, absorbing, redirecting, buying time she was running out of.

Clark drove a fist into her guard, and the shockwave blew out windows on the building across the street. Kara tumbled backward through the air, caught herself, and came back in with a spinning elbow that caught Clark across the jaw and snapped his head sideways. It bought her two seconds. She used one of them to look down.

Through the hole. Through the settling dust. Directly at Tyson.

"Catch!"

Her right hand went to her hip and came up holding something that caught the city light and split it into colors.

The Stone.

She threw it. A fastball pitch, straight down through the hole in the ceiling, and the moment it left her fingers she torqued her whole body into holding Clark's arm, both hands now, feet braced against nothing, every ounce of Kryptonian strength committed to the single task of keeping him from moving for the half-second the Stone needed to travel.

Tyson's hand came up. The angle was off. He snatched it with his telekinesis and pulled it in. The Stone hit his palm, and the moment it touched him, he felt the other two respond, the Stone of Fire in his jacket's inner pocket and the Stone of Air in the pouch at his belt, all three vibrating in sympathetic resonance like tuning forks finding the same note.

Three Stones. On his person. At once.

The world shifted. Not visually, not physically, but as if the planet itself had noticed him and turned its attention his way. The air tasted different. Charged. Expectant.

Isobel saw him catch it.

She tracked the Stone's arc from sky to hand, and the purple light around her fingers guttered as her concentration broke. She'd spent four centuries chasing those three Stones and just watched all of them land in the possession of a man standing twenty feet away.

"Oh," she breathed. "Mon dieu."

Clark's head snapped down. He found Tyson through the hole in the ceiling. The Stones called to him, and Tyson was holding all three, and Clark stopped fighting his cousin and became a missile with a target.

Kara tried to stop him. He backhanded her out of his way. His arm swept sideways and caught her across the chest, and the force of it sent her spinning into the side of a tower hard enough to crater the concrete. She hit, bounced, and dropped two stories before she caught herself against a window ledge, gasping.

Clark came down.

Tyson was already gone.

Superspeed kicked in like a switch being thrown, the world stretching into smeared color and frozen motion, and Tyson blew through the service corridor Chloe had used, through the kitchen, through the fire exit, and out into the alley behind the building at a velocity that turned the steel door into confetti. The Stones burned against his body. Clark was behind him like a hawk's shadow on a rabbit.

He hit the street and turned north. Metropolis blurred past him, storefronts and streetlights and late-night pedestrians frozen mid-stride, the city reduced to a tunnel of light and glass. His feet barely touched the pavement.

Clark was faster.

The sonic boom hit before the displacement. The air ahead of him compressed, thickened, and then Clark was there, dropping from above into his path like God had thrown a stone. Tyson planted his foot and cut left, superspeed carrying him through the plate glass window of a closed department store, through racks of clothing, out the back wall, across another street.

Clark adjusted, and every course correction Tyson made bought him fractions of a second that Clark erased with raw, stupidly unfair Kryptonian speed.

Three blocks gap. Two. One.

Clark was closing.

Kara pulled herself from the crater in the facade. Concrete dust coated her hair. Her ribs ached in a way that Kryptonian ribs were not supposed to ache, a deep, structural protest that told her Clark's backhand had cracked at least two of them. They'd heal. They were already healing. But it meant she had minutes of reduced capacity, not seconds.

She dropped from the building face to the street. Landed hard. Straightened.

The VIP section of the club was visible through the hole in the roof.

Isobel Thoreaux stood in the wreckage, surrounded by her orbiting corona of debris, and she was already looking at Kara when Kara looked at her. The witch smiled. It was the smile of a woman who recognized a change in partners and found the new arrangement acceptable.

"I watched you fight him. You're better trained. He's stronger. It must be maddening," Isobel said. She tilted her head, studying Kara through the gap in the ceiling.

Kara dropped through the hole and landed on the ruined floor of the VIP section. Glass crunched under her boots. She straightened to her full height, which was not impressive by Kryptonian standards but was more than sufficient by human ones.

"You're the one possessing Lana Lang," Kara said.

"Possessing is such an ugly word. I prefer cohabitating. Lana and I have an arrangement."

"Lana doesn't have arrangements. She has a parasite."

"A parasite with her memories," Isobel said. "With her feelings. Her desires. Every secret want she's buried under that small-town propriety." She stepped over a fallen ceiling beam, the debris field orbiting her body parting to let her through and closing behind her like a living curtain. "I know what she dreams about. I know what makes her pulse quicken. I know the face she sees when she closes her eyes at night."

Kara said nothing.

"No wonder he liked you," Isobel continued. She circled right, slow, unhurried, the way someone walks through an art gallery. "You're magnificent. All that power packed into such a tight body. It's even piqued my interest, and I don't say that lightly. Men and women, kings and cardinals, and no one I've encountered radiated force the way you do." She paused. "I'm beginning to wonder if your Tyson didn't want my descendant so much as he could feel my power sleeping inside this body. If what drew him wasn't Lana's face but the echo of something worthy of him."

"He doesn't love me for my power," Kara said. "And he doesn't love you for yours."

"Love," Isobel repeated. "You said, love. Present tense." The smile that spread across Lana's face was slow, pitying, and genuinely delighted. "Oh, you poor, magnificent creature. You actually believe that. You think this boy is in love with you."

"I didn't say—"

"You absolutely said. You chose that word. Not cares for. Not wants. Loves." Isobel laughed. It was a real laugh, warm and throaty, the kind of laugh that belonged at a dinner party, not a battlefield. "You're delusional. Completely, beautifully delusional. He's known you for what, weeks? Months? And you've already built a cathedral in your head where he worships at your altar."

Kara's jaw tightened. Not because the words cut, but because the witch was looking for exactly that reaction, then using it as ammunition.

"I've lived inside desire for four hundred years," Isobel said. "I know what it looks like. What it tastes like. What he feels for you is real, I'll grant that much. But love?" She shook her head, still smiling. "Love is what he'll feel for whoever holds the Stones."

"You're the one that's delusional," Kara said.

"Am I?"

"You think you're special. You think there's something about you that drew him to Lana. Some mystical connection across the centuries. Some grand destiny written in those Stones. I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but you're not special. You're a dead woman squatting in a high school student's skin. Whatever he felt for me, he felt for me. Whatever he felt for Lana, he felt for Lana. You're just in the way."

Isobel's smile didn't waver.

"This body," Isobel said, and she placed one hand flat against her own sternum, fingers spread across the skin above Lana's collarbone, "knows what it feels like to have him inside it." She watched Kara's face for the flinch as she said it. "Just like yours does. Every gasp. Every whispered name in the dark. This flesh remembers him the same way yours does. The only thing that makes you different..." She raised her other hand, purple light pooling in her palm like liquid. "...is your power."

Her fingers curled. The purple deepened to violet, then the incantation started low in Isobel's throat.

"Aufero—"

The second syllable never came.

Kara was simply not there. The space she'd occupied held nothing but settling dust and the faint displacement of air rushing to fill a vacuum. Isobel's spell discharged into the empty floor, the purple energy scorching a black circle into the hardwood where Kryptonian boots had stood a fraction of a heartbeat before.

"Protego!"

Isobel spun. Too slow.

Kara materialized behind her. Close.

The shield erupted outward from Isobel's body in every direction, a sphere of compressed force that solidified like blown glass, purple and translucent and humming. Kara's fist was already in motion when it hit the barrier and stopped dead. The impact rang through the ruined VIP section like a cathedral bell, vibrating the broken bottles behind the bar, shivering the dust from every surface. The barrier held.

Isobel turned inside her sphere. Breathing hard. Smiling harder.

"Fast little thing, aren't you? But I've seen that trick before."