The Reflection of Hope Excerpt

Chapter One

Rip stood in the corner and watched the sparring match going on in the center of the room. The target, a young woman with the ability to defy gravity for short periods—but longer than a jump by a normal person—was fending off attackers with decent skill. She was small, with the agility that often came with it, and got enough height to use her legs against the men who were bigger and stronger. She also had enhanced speed, so she could get low and attack their base before they recovered from the upper strikes. The problem wasn’t her ability to defend herself. The problem was that they all respected her too much.

Tulie Altamura, the new head of Slate, Salt Lake City’s superhero team, stepped in to stop the session. Everyone gathered in a semi-circle around him, listening as he critiqued form and use of the individual powers each of the five-person team had. Then he nodded at Rip, who stepped forward. Heads turned. Two people jumped, startled at her approach, and the rest looked surprised though a little more adept at hiding it.

“Slate, meet Vanessa Ripley. You can call her Rip. Do not call her Vanessa.”

She smiled at his teasing tone. He’d been through hell in the last few years and almost given up when Slate was attacked by CASE, the superhero hate group, a few months ago. It was good to hear some lightness in his voice.

“Where’d you come from?” one of the guys asked, bulging arms folded. She knew he had super-strength and the ability to absorb kinetic energy, which meant when someone punched him, it had no effect.

“The wall,” she answered. Half of them glanced at it, as if expecting to see a portal closing in the painted cinderblock. The other half watched her steadily, waiting for the punchline.

“Rip’s abilities relate to perception,” Tulie told them, “among other things. But that’s not why she’s here.”

“I know who you are!” One of the guys pointed at her. She just looked at him and held her tongue with the words yeah, because Tulie just told you who I am freezing on her taste buds. She was trying to be less…acerbic, as one former colleague had termed it. Tulie deserved her best behavior.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told the guy, who was looking around as if assessing whether or not he had the jump on his teammates in recognizing her. “The reason you recognize me is not the reason I’m here.”

“Rip has trained some of the best superheroes in the country.” Tulie folded his arms. “So you’d do well to listen to what she has to say.”

She stepped closer to the half-circle and addressed the young woman who’d been the center of their drill. “You have good instincts, and some talent with fighting, with or without your abilities involved. But the problem here is that it’s not out there.” She pushed a hand toward the exterior wall. “If you’re up against a group of criminals, they’re not going to take turns. They won’t let you get into a rhythm. What I saw looked like choreography from an action movie. Real life is a lot messier than that. You’ll have to train that way in here or learn it on the job out there. And out there tends to hurt a lot more.”

They nodded, and with their natural resistance eased away, they got into some real training.

Two hours later, sweaty and wincing at a contusion blooming on her upper arm, she followed Tulie into his office and collapsed in the battered visitor’s chair in front of his desk.

“So, what do you think?” He eased himself into his leather rolling chair with a show of “old man creakiness,” but she ignored the act. He might feel old and battle weary, but he was barely forty, and she was no coddler.

Of course, that attitude meant she couldn’t sigh over the soreness of her left thigh, where one of his team had landed a hefty kick that took her to the ground. She sighed and began unwinding the wrap on her hands. “They’re a good team. Work well together. They think a helluva lot of you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not my doing.” He tugged off his Broncos ball cap and scrubbed his hand over his buzzed head before slapping it back on. “I’m grateful to get some outside input. But this isn’t the main reason I asked you to come here.”

She caught herself halfway into letting a mask of implacability fall over her expression.

He saw it and smirked. “Not going to work on me, and you know it.”

“What do you need from me that I obviously don’t want to give you, since you felt it necessary to lie to your team?”

“I didn’t lie to them. And it was a good training session.” He leaned back and fiddled with a pen. “I need a favor.”

She didn’t say “name it” because she wasn’t that stupid. He knew she felt that way for ninety percent of anything he’d ask of her. He’d been a mentor to her early in her career, before Chicago, before San Diego, before the Citizens Against Superhero Existence went after half the superhero teams in the country. He’d lost his fiancée and some of his closest friends in their attacks. But there were a few things for which her automatic response would be “no,” and no doubt one of them was coming.

“You know what happened in Ohio back in May.”

She finished unwrapping her left hand and deliberately wound the tape into a donut. “When The Chaser was captured.” He was one of CASE’s biggest assets until five months ago, when he targeted a personal enemy and lost. Turned out he was telekinetic.

“Yep. He’s been surprisingly helpful to our side since then. Verified intelligence has come out of the tank where they’re holding him, and the task force is ready to make a move. But they need powered individuals because The Chaser isn’t the only member of CASE with abilities.”

She groaned. “You want me to join the task force.”

“Yes.”

“You know I don’t work in the field anymore.” He was one of the few who knew why, so he also knew it wasn’t the reason she was saying no now. CASE had to be stopped, and if her powers were needed, she’d offer them.

The problem wasn’t the task force. The problem was the person who ran it. And she really wanted to avoid that conversation.

“I can’t tell you what I know about the task force’s plans,” he told her. “It’s top secret, and you have to sign the paperwork before they’ll release the details. But trust me when I say that they really need your skills.”

She was intrigued, as he knew she would be. And she wanted to help. But she had to say no.

He worked on her for half an hour. Then they went to dinner and caught up on non-superhero stuff for most of the meal before he tried again, this time digging under the things she really didn’t want to talk about.

“You know it’s personal for Evan.” Tulie sipped the Irish coffee the server had just delivered. “Mmm. Good. Yours?”

She inhaled the sharp, rich aroma of her rum-and-Tia-Maria-infused version. “Perfect. And yes, of course I know that.” Evan Forgeron was the current leader of the task force investigating and trying to stop CASE. Before that, his father had been in charge until he was killed in Chicago, along with two superheroes. Then Evan’s sister, Summer VanNostrand, had been killed when a violent empath bent on revenge used CASE to attack the Washington, DC, superhero team. Evan’s family dynamics were complicated, and he’d lost his sister before they could fully reconcile. It had nearly killed him.

And then Rip almost finished the job. She couldn’t go back into that. They were poison to each other. Self-preservation alone would keep her away, but protecting him was even more important than protecting herself.

“He has good people on his team, but they’re mostly regular people.”

She nodded and drank her coffee, savoring the fresh whipped cream on top, but didn’t say anything. The reason Evan didn’t have supers on his task force was because it was a government-run organization, and most superheroes chose to remain independent. They were afraid once the task force achieved its mission of defeating CASE, they’d shift their focus onto the superheroes themselves. Not all powered people were heroes, after all, and it wasn’t a big leap from incarcerating criminals who did damage to incarcerating heroes who’d made mistakes.

“Did you know Evan is the reason I’m still here?”

She shook her head. “He set you up to lead the team here?”

“I was with Slate before the regatta. They were newly formed, working together to get this guy who could literally walk through walls. You’ve never seen greener. But they were already good together, and had vision. Believed in helping others, you know? And I felt like it was my redemption, after San Diego.” He cleared his throat and fiddled with the coffee spoon. “So then CASE sets up their trap at the regatta. That’s what they do best, draw you in with some mishap, then destroy your efforts so it looks like you’re more of a menace than the bad guys. Turn public opinion against you. We lost two again, plus six civilians, twenty people in the hospital…I was done.”

“I know this, Tulie.” She reached across the table and gripped his hand. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“Yeah, I do. Because when I say I was done, I mean terminado. Suicidio. Evan left Ohio, left Eclipse in the middle of a crisis and came to me. Protected me. Convinced me that I was not to blame for the horrors. Saved my life, convinced me of my purpose, and set me back on the path I belonged on.”

Her fingers tightened on his to match the tension in her throat. She hadn’t known it was so bad. To hear how close they’d all come to losing him, so soon after Luciana… No, she had to push that aside. He wasn’t trying to manipulate her—that wasn’t his way. So her emotions weren’t relevant. But if she let him see how deeply she was affected by his words, he’d go for the kill.

She sighed. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because now he is the one in need. But I can’t help him, not this time. Not yet. Maybe at the end. In the meantime, I can do what he will not, and ask you to step in.”

“God, Tulie.” She flipped over a steak knife and held it out to him, handle first. “Stop with the slow bleed, already. Just end me.”

He smiled. “So it’s working.”

“No,” she lied.

The smile dropped away.

She sighed and squeezed his hand again. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain. But I simply cannot do this. I really am sorry. And I really am here for you for literally anything else you might ask of me. But not this.”

He made a gesture of sad acceptance and signaled for the check.

“It’s on me,” Rip told him. “I deserve it.”

“Yes, and more.” He rattled off a list of curses in Spanish, only half of which she followed, but all of which she accepted. And then they went out to the valet, exchanged hugs and kisses on both cheeks, and went their separate ways.

Heart heavy, Rip knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.