FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 2

Detective Kolter surveyed the devastated cathedral nave, his eyes hidden by sunglasses that shielded his sensitive arctic blues from the broken rays of light that played visual havoc through the damaged stain glass. His spotted white feline muzzle, obscured by a ceramic mug of coffee, sipped slowly as he walked the trail of a meta-fur battle's progress, mapping it in his mind.

He could see where the fight had begun, by the condition and placement of the front doors, one hanging by a single of its four hinges, the other lying amidst a tangle of shattered pews. Lowering his mug, he brought up his voice recorder and spoke into it, in curt tones.

"Assailant entered by breaking in the front doors. Immediate combat commenced, looks like an ambush. DA should probably consider charging both parties, if no warning or offer to surrender was given."

Kolter had knelt down, brushing a paw fastidiously to straighten a crease in his pant leg, when his eyes alighted on something odd. The recorder came back up, and he spoke into it with a curious tilt of his eyebrow.

"Note to self: Have the CSI guys figure out what this shatter pattern means. Hard strike to scatter shrapnel? Hm." He traced a fingerpad through a jagged groove in the stone, where little blobs of dark metal had fused to the stone. "No, this is from current. Call Meta-Affairs in the morning to log new collateral-damage-potential meta-furry."

Then, as other uniforms and plainclothes detectives continued their work, the snow leopard walked off toward a dark corner of the vast and disused space. Once, large congregations had filled every seat, back in his grandfather's days. These days, the only reason the dust hadn't built up to shoe-swallowing levels was the devoted old priest who now lay dead on a coroner's gurney, waiting to be picked up and carted off to the morgue.

"The Diocese," said a soft voice that oozed from the shadows, "has fallen on such sad times. When I was young, the Catholic Church would have responded to such an affront with fire and calamity. Nowadays they are so much less exciting."

Kolter knew no one could hear them. Even in the vast, vaulted and echoing chamber of St. Mary's main nave, the being with which he now spoke could deaden and warp the sound away to nothingness. Just one of his manifold and subtle skills. As Kolter rounded a corner into one of the side passages, he turned and waited, watching for his little shadow.

Just a moment later, the small black cat trotted to him from the opposite way and reared up, digging the tips of its claws through his immaculate slacks to prick at the back of the leopard's knee. Restraining a jump of surprise, Kolter looked down at the small feral feline, black as the darkness he had emerged from, with its shimmering golden eyes. For just a second, he wondered what it would be like to be frightened or weirded-out by a talking feral cat. Since their first meeting, he never had been. The thought just made him feel a bit old and jaded.

"I had to pull favors to get on this case, Locke. What do you want?" Even to his own ears, his voice sounded tired. In need of a vacation, Kolter thought, as he sipped the last of his coffee down. The cat called Locke responded in an amused and playfully chiding tone.

"My my...So you HAVE looked into me. Bravo, detective! And on top of that, digging for information! While I must say, I've been quite disappointed by the modern church, police work has advanced by leaps and bounds!"

The snow leopard's sour look matched the acid in his stomach, as he glowered down toward the amused feral with its glowing golden eyes. He knew quite well that Ambrose Locke, despite being stuck in the form of a simple housecat, was more than capable of killing him messily in any of a hundred ways. But the cat had never threatened him, except with oblique and playful jabs to get him motivated once or twice. The fact he had never revealed his own origins was an annoyance, but one he was willing to deal with.

"Yeah, thanks for the compliments, but you didn't answer my question. If I'm gonna tell you anything about what's going on, you're gonna have to tell me what you want to know and why you wanna know it."

The cat stared at him, and for a moment Kolter felt as if he couldn't look away. The golden eyes, shimmering and deeply lustrous like polished fire opals, held his gaze locked. Something touched him, and he tried to twist his head away, only to find his muscles wouldn't move, and neither did the dust particles that were suspended in mid-air. Then the moment was past as if it had never happened, and he was juggling his coffee mug as muscles suddenly responded to his call to motion.

"I care nothing about the steel-skinned rube. But the...I believe you call him a 'perp?'...The one who conjured dreams. His power interests me. Additionally, the miscreants who ambushed the aforementioned rube are minions of the one who cursed me to this form."

"Conjured...Dreams? What?" Kolter had a paw up to the bridge of his muzzle, rubbing at the growing headache. Talking to Locke always seemed to bring them on, especially when the damn thing gave him that time-stop stare of his.

"Yes, conjured dreams! I'm rather curious myself, you see. Rather difficult thing to do. Anyway! Find out for me who those young 'heroes' are, and where the young oneiromancer went, and I will be very much pleased with you."

"Alright," Kolter responded. "But all we have so far is that he's killed three priests. All Catholic, all lupine, similar build...All of them dead by their own paws. That's it."

"Then keep looking, dear detective! The devil, after all, is in the details."

When Kolter opened his eyes again to give a sour comment on taking lectures about proper detective work, the cat was gone.

Somehow, he never thought to wonder why he was sharing information of an ongoing investigation with something so clearly magical and more importantly not a cop. It felt entirely proper, given the trade of information the cat gave him. Or, perhaps, that locked stare was something more than a disturbing hallucination.

"GodDAMNIT, what do you WANT?!" the black-furred jaguar snarled, as he yanked the door to his apartment wide open in the hopes of scaring off whoever had knocked for the last five minutes straight. His hopes were instantly dashed by the sight of John Silverstone, in his long black trenchcoat, right paw in a fingerless leather glove still raised to continue annoyingly incessant knocking. Jeff's short, blunt, frizzy-furred face twitched in aggravation just as the Wolf in Black's rose in a smug, smirking grin, his paw pointing downward.

"Clothes in the laundry, kitty?"

Jeff Castillas would have turned bright red, if it wasn't black already. Instead, he turned around and stalked away from the door, long whippy tail lashing above the heart-festooned black boxers that left him looking like a silk-covered naked person.

"Kiss my ass. It's hot out. Come in if you're gonna come in, but stop knocking on my fucking door."

The wolf paused to eye said ass, and found it to his liking, if a bit on the skinny side. Chuckling to himself, he shrugged one shoulder and followed after the nearly-naked jag. Hissing out a wince as he closed the door, before putting a paw gingerly to his side under the jacket he'd worn despite sweltering pre-storm heat, the wolf gave his surroundings quick examination, hoping for some clue to his team-mate's state of mind. One quick sniff told him all he needed to know about his grouchy, acidic friend.

The air stank, a rich aroma of spicy jaguar musk, acrid solder, and the ozone of potent electrical discharge. Before his lupine eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, his ears picked up a crackling of electrical equipment, confirming all senses' guesses a moment later when he saw what the jag had laid out on a series of tables that occupied almost the entire main room of his two-room apartment.

"Wow, dude...Awesome. Uh...What the hell is it?"

Jeff's eyeroll was pure condescension, and John's wolfish grin told the jaguar he'd stepped right into some trap he couldn't be bothered to understand. Nonetheless, by the fluffing fur of his thick tail, the jaguar was still riding a wave of annoyance. John elected to start asking questions, rather than waiting on the cat to start a conversation.

"First time I've seen you in a week. I guess it's no surprise you're making all kinds of weird electro-gizmos."

Jeff sighed, on the realization that his team-mate wasn't going to be put off by sullen stares, and leaned over one of the tables to snap up a piece of loose copper wiring. He waggled it at the wolf, who laughed and wagged his tail right back, crossing his arms over his chest as Jeff started in on his traditional sardonic comments.

"Weird electro-gizmos? Seriously? That's the best you can come up with to describe the components of my new suit?"

The wolf's ears were up instantly, and his eyes lit in a sort of enthusiasm that had Jeff hunching back defensively, and clasping the copper wire in his paw.

"What? What the fuck's that look for?"

"So you aren't out. Good. Because we're going to need you."

"We? We who? And who said I'm ever going out there again?"

"We, as in me and whoever else we get together to go hunting. That little fuck that messed with Eve's head is out there somewhere, and we've got to find him before he makes it worse for her."

Remembering the dream he'd been given by that nameless villain, Jeff felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. Then again, he'd felt that way since he'd awoken two days ago in the hospital. With a grimace, his head lowered, staring down at a table-top full of problems far easier to face than those involving people, he spoke in a voice soft enough to be a whisper.

"I'm just as bad as he is. If she'd been any closer to me, she'd be dead, not catatonic."

"Then why the hell are you making a new suit?"

"So I can..." Jeff tried not to choke up, but having come so close to admitting something he was so afraid to say, his voice just seized and he stood there, trying to breathe deeply and keep the tears in his eyes from running down his face. So I can run and hide and not hurt anyone again.

For a few seconds, they just stood there in the mostly-silence of Jeff's harsh breathing, John's softer inhalations, and the sound of crackling juice running through the sea of circuitry on a testing board across the room.

Then the leather-and-denim'd wolf strode around the table and wrapped his arms around his jaguar friend, ignoring a feeble attempt at token resistance that suddenly gave way to wracking sobs from the normally grouchy but composed grad student.

"Doc told me about your past, Jeff. It's not my style to get all philosophical and shit, but you care too much about regular people to be one of the badguys. Just isn't in ya."

The jaguar nodded slightly, with his face against the white cotton of John's t-shirt. He felt as if he were trapped in a wave of grief and self-directed anger, guilt that he'd managed to put off since waking up and realizing what he'd nearly done; nearly killed another by accident yet again, like the monster he saw reflected in peoples' judging faces every day.

A paw rubbing his back set his fur to crackling with built-up static, and with his heart suddenly jolting in terror that he'd just shocked his friend, Jeff yanked himself back, stumbling into the table as he stared wide-eyed at the dark-furred wolf that stood there with a raised brow and a half-grin.

"Heh oh yeah, by the way. Turns out my immunity works on your electricity. So the fact you lose control sometimes ain't no thing to me."

Silence drifted for an uncomfortable, heavy moment, before Jeff's mind snapped to something, a tiny detail his quick mind picked out that others might have missed.

"It also means I'm not creating electricity and releasing it. It means my power is inherent in the released energy..."

Forgetting he hadn't showered in days, that he was in his boxers showing off a shapely ass to his only gay friend, the nimble creature whirled back to his work bench, grabbing up bits of electronic equipment and wiring far beyond his team-mate's comprehension.

"I have an idea."

Four hours and a grudgingly accepted advisory to shower and clean himself up later, Jeff Castillas stood atop the university bell tower, looking out over the quad and buildings, dotted with lightning rods as insurance against the stormy Midwest weather their state was so famous for. Below him, inside the tower's belfry chamber, the Wolf in Black monitored a weather radio that would have suffered too much from the spattering rain to expose it, and spoke to him in tones filled with muted excitement.

Jeff didn't miss the fact that the older mentor assigned to them by Dr. Theorem was now the only other functional member of the Presidents. Looking down at himself, dressed in his undecorated but mostly-complete new prototype suit, the idea of calling himself Thomas Jefferson again just seemed silly.

"Okay, weather report says the thunderheads are headin' this direction. You sure about this, Jeff?"

The jaguar raised his head, looking up into the gently crying sky. Pitched the color of a dark bruise, it fit his mood so well he might have laughed, had he not been so focused. Until just a few hours ago, he had been on the verge of angry tears for two days, struggling to fulminate an idea without any surety of its purpose. Like the thunderstorm, he felt like this whole day had been born in a tumult of conflicting energies, hot and cold, highs and lows, soggy misery and dry desolation of the spirit.

But now, like the storm, he was building to the final head. The winds had calmed, as had the campus all around him, students having moved their daily ordinary lives indoors, in that very ancient reverence for the lethal power and majesty of the mighty thunder-gods of old.

"My family's from Mexico, but did you know we've got almost no Spaniard in us?"

"Huh? Well no, you never told me. What's uh...What's the relevance?" John was being diplomatic, another aspect of his many-faceted character, Jeff mused. With a laugh, he caught himself wishing her were gay. Dating a guy who liked to play around but also knew how to be serious would be far easier than any of the short, stunted relationships he'd had with the few women he'd let get close enough.

"I'm about as pure Aztec as you can find these days. My life's been one of fear and pain and death...And thunder. Lightning. My ancestors had a god who helped people to the afterworld, but was also characterized with lightning and fire."

"I think I see where you're going. Eve's going to be mad that we're ditching the whole Presidential theme."

Jeff snorted into the walkie-talkie pinned to the collar of his new suit. More streamlined than the last, there were no exposed wires on the surface this time. Instead, it was all black, like his fur, but spotted evenly with barely-visible black rosette patches of conductive metal that shone in flashing light like the rosettes of a melanistic jaguar, when lightning zipped across the sky in the distance.

"I'm not too worried. Hillary Clinton was never actually a president. Besides, if we can prove our effectiveness as a team, I'm sure Eve will live with whatever we decide on. Anyway, when I'm costumed, I'm not Jeff. Call me Xolotl, in deference to a god of my ancestors."

"Zo-Low-Til? That sounds like some kinda' Prozac knockoff."

"You're thinking of Zoloft. Also, you are such a gringo," Jeff laughed into the walkie, just moments before another lightning bolt zig-zagged across the sky. The thunder came just a few seconds later, and the great cat knew it was nearly time. His heart was throbbing with anticipation and a little bit of fear, as he flexed the black gloves of his costume, and then spread his feet as a blast of suddenly growing wind rocked him back on his heels.

"Heh. You mean I'm a barely-educated white guy who can't pronounce Mexican? That's totally unbelievable! Me, the son of a highschool dropout and his teenage girlfriend. Who'd've thought!"

"It's called Nahuatl actually. The language of the Aztecs, I mean."

"Oh right. Well that explains it."

"I'll tell you all about it sometime. Don't worry, I'll use small words."

"Condescending ass."

"Ignorant hick."

"It's pronounced ig'nint."

"It's pronounced 'bite me'."

Then they both went silent, in pregnant waiting, as the mighty thunderheads crowded in upon them. Increasing rain and battering winds conspired together, buffeting the slender jaguar as he held his ground atop the flat rib of the gabled tower. He could feel it building, the electrical potential of the storm, mightiness that began with the tiniest bit of friction between a single pair of atoms that would rapidly build to a torrent of current and amperage that could slag the mightiest of furs.

That once could have blasted and burned the great buildings of a university to the ground, before the advent of lightning rods. Rods that festooned Windsor U's many four and five-story lecture halls and science labs.

When lightning struck, he counted the seconds, running the calculations on distance in his swift, analytical mind. Some more primitive, basic part of his brain was yelling for him to get down, that it was too dangerous, commanding his heart to pound and send adrenaline shooting through his veins in a rush. On any other day, he would have obeyed it, calling himself an idiot all the while for having climbed up such a tall building especially in the middle of such bad weather. He would have obeyed the fear's siren call, and hid himself away, much as he'd done after their run-in with the nightmare-wielding priest killer.

Today, he stuck out his right paw, and pointed his suit's shiny black metal palm, struggling to use a mental 'muscle' he'd never discovered before. The theory, as he'd explained to John on the trot across campus, was convoluted but broke down easily. If John was immune to the jaguar's electrical discharge, it meant that Jeff's power wasn't just generating electricity. If the juice was completely normal and un-powered, John would have been fried trying to get close to him.

Which meant the electrical discharge was still part of his power. He not only generated electricity, he channeled it out, however wildly into everything around him. And if it was part of his power, it went to reason he might be able to control its direction or intensity by some means other than a bulky, ridiculously dangerous capacitor-bearing suit covered in vulnerable and dangerous exposed electrodes.

So he closed his eyes, and visualized the student life building's main lightning rod, with it's little red blinking airplane light. He envisioned the scientific equations for lightning's discharge and how it's path was selected for it by physics. The jaguar threw every bit of his will into forcing his power to somehow congeal, in some way he'd never even thought of before that day, as action potential that would lead a single stroke of lightning from the storm to hit that one simple pole of metal.

Lightning flashed, so bright he saw the veins in his own eyelids, and thunder exploded so hard the jaguar felt like he'd been punched in the gut. Flicking his eyes quickly open, he saw a cloud-to-cloud blaze of light finishing just overhead, having failed to leap where he meant it to. Snarling, he stood up taller, and brought both paws forward, curling them into angry claw-shapes.

Another flash came, lancing down from the sky to stroke a hilltop less than a mile away. The thunder was loud enough to make windows flex in their frames, in a boom strong enough Jeff felt his insides shiver.

"God damnit! Do what I tell you, you fucking lightning...shits!"

"Hey! Hey, Jeff, are you okay up there? The radio keeps fritzing out!"

"It's Xolotl, damnit!"

He threw a paw out, gesticulating angrily, and for a brief moment his favorite target of anger flew through his mind's eye. It was an image half himself and half his father, dreamed up when he was still a child, when he was afraid of what he'd see in the mirror one day. It'd driven him to drink, in his high school and undergrad days, and to a number of self-destructive exploits. He was lucky that face, burned into his imagination, hadn't landed him in jail.

This time, as the father-self hatred face flew across his mind, he felt something else inside him. A broiling wrath that, instead of fuzzing out at the edges, hot and impotent, focused into a single hard point somewhere behind his breastbone. So, he did the only thing he could, the only thing that worked when his chest tightened up and he felt he was about to start hyperventilating. He let out a feral, terrible scream, the sort of thing that gave folks nightmares of eyes in the dark, the kind of thing that put furs off camping after hearing it once.

Six strokes of lightning blasted down from the sky in the same instant, slagging the lightning rod atop the student life building and blasting a hunk of concrete the size of a compact car along with it. The jaguar exhaled so hard as the roar finished leaving his lungs that he nearly fell over in the gust of shocked wind as six overlapping strokes of thunder hit near instantaneously. Somewhere down below, he saw glass breaking, and noted he couldn't hear it do so.

Staring in shock at the glowing-hot, shatter-patterned concrete of the student center, Jeff felt the last buffeting winds of the overlapped thunder eruptions roll past him, and that tickling sense of energy in the air die down as if it had been drained all at once. It had all seemingly gone into his limbs and all of his muscles, a tingling of sheer rapturous glee he felt as if he could leap off the building and fly from the lightness of it.

Sucking in a breath of ozone-scented air, he let out a whoop. Then, with dawning terror, realized he'd just blown a giant chunk off the student center, broken half the glass on campus, and also failed to hear his own cry of victory. Cursing, he brought a paw up to his ear, and saw blood when it came back into his vision.

"Shit shit shit," he yelled, deafened by his own lightning strikes, as he brought his other paw up to cradle his left ear, likewise bloodied. Then a flash of light blazed in the distance, no lightning-stroke this time, and cold terror flashed through his blood, intermingling with the exuberance of a moment before as bile suddenly rose in his throat.

A normal lightning strike would have done no damage to the university, and engendered no response except maybe a few MyBook posts from lucky shutterbugs who caught the brilliant blast on their digitals. Two or three lightning hits might have made the lightning rod glow a little, and drawn a furious stream of attention and study from the campus meteorology club. Even six sequential hits would have done nothing but necessitate an inspection.

Six simultaneous hits had melted the heavy-duty lightning rod and then blown it asunder, and were a virtual meteorological impossibility. An impossibility that would have set off sensors in a few different super-labs across the city. And now that a pack of top-tier supervillains were free of the extra-dimensional prison called the Negative Zone, any such bombastic exhalation of power would draw plenty of attention.

"Oh shi-" made it out of his muzzle, before his words were entirely cut off by the need to throw himself flat on the narrow strip of flat roof that straddled the tower's gables. Like an oncoming avalanche of metal, a silver and white robotic suit half again Jeff's height and many times his weight shot through the space he'd occupied a moment before with a hum of vibration left in the air that he felt in his itching teeth.

The jaguar knew who he was up against, and knew right away that he was in trouble. Tokamak was one of Dr. Theorem's contemporaries, a walking fusion reaction contained inside a many-times reinforced suit designed more to protect others from massive radiation and the energy of a small star than to protect Tokamak from anything else. What was more, it was common knowledge that Tokamak always warned verbally before attacking, and brutally mauled anyone who didn't immediately surrender...A warning Jeff couldn't hear or respond to.

"I surrender, I surrender, I'm sor-SHIT!" he yelped, ducking as the armored behemoth came at him again, throwing a punch that would have broken his jaw at the very least. Sliding on the sodden roof, his foot flew out from under him, and Jeff slammed down on his back hard enough to blow the wind from his lungs. Along with it came a blast of intense cerulean electricity, that seemed to draw upon the tingly sensation that filled his body, plowing into Tokamak's glittering armored shell hard enough to send the famous superhero flying backwards off the tower's roof and down out of sight.

Suddenly realizing his own lack of breath, Jeff curled up on the water-sheeting rooftop and struggled to get air, shocked by the power of his own exhalation, and knowing Tokamak wouldn't have been put out of action by such a hit. Despite metal skin that would conduct electricity right through him, the creature inside was essentially pure energy. So long as his containment wasn't breached, a simple jolt of electricity wouldn't do much more than knock him around.

A distant whining noise told him his hearing was starting to return. And with it, Tokamak, flying upward on a column of white fire filtered through sophisticated vents and conversion systems in his suit. The rain water instantly vaporized on contact with his super-charged arms, making the tailless vaguely marmot-esque suit look as if it was wearing a shroud of angry skirling clouds.

Jeff saw the behemoth's paws come together, and recognized Tokamak's energy building in the hum he felt more than heard. He had only seconds to live, because the armored giant had mistaken him for a supervillain, many of whom had armored suits and artificially-enhanced powers of resilience.

Then a shadow that sheeted water into his face stepped in the way, throwing its palms out wide. Somehow, the Wolf in Black had made his way up onto the tower roof during the brief and terrifying brawl. Now, he was shielding Jeff's uncooperative body with his own, as he stood akimbo, arms and legs spread to make it impossible for Tokamak to take a cleans hot.

His hearing had returned just enough to hear when John roared out in his most authoritative voice.

"You know better than this, Toka! Now land and let me fucking explain, you goddamn hand grenade!"

Jeff just looked up at John, only able to see his soggy tail and soaked-through jeans, and stared at him in bewilderment. Tokamak was known for a fair and logical demeanor outside of a fight, but once his ire was raised, not many could get away unscathed after making such a demand. While John would be immune to most of the mighty hero's attacks, he was just as soft and breakable as any above-average furry, and the mighty silvery beast menacing them both had more than his fair share of nuclear-powered muscle.

Which just confused him all the more when mighty Tokamak flew toward them, slowed, and cut his thrusters in such a way as to land with barely a thump, before grabbing John and hugging him.

A metallic, humming, synthesized voice boomed, making the poor jaguar's ears ring.

"I thought you were fighting a potent villain, when I saw the wave-form he emitted! He is a friend of yours, John? New boyfriend perhaps?"

Jeff blushed, and was grateful nobody could see it through the suit and his fur. Luckily, John was unflappable as ever and kept the conversation going, sparing Jeff the necessity of a stammered, annoyed denial.

"Haha! No, I'm still with Bobby, and most of us Earthlings are pretty monogamous."

"Hm. Not based upon what I have seen in your television shows."

"Pff! C'mon, you're an alien but you ain't stupid. Jeff, you okay man?"

"Yeah! Fucking peachy!"

"Good. Let's get ourselves down from here before the storm blows us all to shit.

"It's Xolotl while I'm wearing the suit."

Tokamak's shining armored suit tilted its head to one side slightly, in a fashion not unlike a four-legged dog.

"Xolotl? I know that name."

Jeff blinked at him, and wiped at the water in his eyes.

"You do?"

"Yes. An exiled Brightling, much as I am, though from a long time ago. Come, I will fly you back to your home."

"I uh...Could we go somewhere else? I don't really want to explain this to Dr. Theorem just yet..."

"Detective Kolter, I'm with Special Crimes," the snow leopard said, and nodded his consent when Mack Franklin held out a paw for his badge. It was smart, Kolter knew, for the burly lion to take down his badge number. While the big disheveled feline fumbled with and snapped a pencil in half trying to write, Kolter took a brief moment to observe the two he'd come to interview.

Eve Hightower was a pretty vixen in a pixyish sort of way, though the hospital gown, bed, and monitors she was hooked up to left her seeming fragile and helpless, like a lost child far from home. Her eyes were closed, the monitors steadily pulsing along, though the traditional television-sound-effect noises were turned off. For all her meta-fur powers, she was as helpless as that lost child image could be.

Mack Franklin looked like he'd taken on the unasked-for job of a bodyguard and was taking it maybe a little too seriously. He smelled of day-and-more old sweat and more than a bit of the sour musk of frustrated leonine. Kolter already knew from the officers on scene at St. Mary's that Franklin was a meta-fur, but at that moment he looked like about the saddest superhero ever.

Smoothing down the lapels of his suit jacket, Kolter turned and leaned against the wall, watching as Mack finally got the number down on paper, looking frustratedly through the holes he'd punched through.

"Hard to control it, huh? I guess I can't say I understand, but I can sympathize. Recovering alcoholic, myself."

If the lion was going to react with anger at the observation, that impulse died before it could make its way out. Kolter read him like a book; that comment had hit a nerve, but Franklin was smart enough to realize the detective was showing empathy, not being a prick. Which, of course, was only half true. He could empathize with the poor kid, as sad and helpless as he looked, but it was also a ploy to win some trust and truth out of him.

"You already gave a statement to the uniforms on scene, but I have a few more questions if you don't mind."

"Are we going to prison?" the lion asked, without looking up. His eyes were on Eve's unconscious body, tiny and bundled up in the bed. He couldn't even hold her paw, for fear he might squeeze without realizing it. With her not conscious to warn him when it was getting painful, his first indicator would be the crackle of breaking bones.

"We're still waiting to hear from the Archdiocese about whether they want to press charges for the fight. I have to be honest with you and say if they do press charges, you'll be in trouble. Evidence points to your group ambushing him without giving warning."

A simple deception, Kolter knew, that would never hold up in court. The evidence pointed to Steamroller, a known and recidivistic criminal, smashing through the doors and assaulting them. But putting a bit of pressure on wouldn't hurt the lion, he judged, and he needed to know what really happened.

"We meant to. Eve was going to offer him the chance to surrender as soon as he was in place. He charged me before we had the chance, like he knew we were going to be there. I think we were set up."

"Set up? Any ideas who would have it out for you?"

"N-no...I mean, I don't think so. We'd trained a bit as a team, and we'd been out driving around a few times. Y'know, stupid team-spirit bullshit Eve thought would make us work better together. Rescuing animals, if you'd believe it. This was our first big throw-down. Kinda hard to have enemies your first time, right?"

"Mm...True. How did you know you would find Steamroller at St. Mary's?"

"We didn't, detective. We uh...Look, I can't say exactly how, but we knew something bad was going to happen...So we went to go check it out."

Protecting someone. Kolter nodded, and clicked his pen a few times, before pensively licking its tip and starting to scribble. Apply passive pressure. Predictably enough, the big lion started to squirm after about a minute. The lashing tuft-tipped tail and flicking ears told Kolter he was onto something.

"Do you...Have any other questions?"

"I do. Would you say reasonable force was used in the fight?"

The silent, disbelieving stare telegraphed Franklin's response and emotions like a neon sign. He was both offended and frightened, but not incredulous at the inherent accusation there. He expected to be in trouble, even though he didn't like it.

"The guy is a freight train, what were we supposed to do? Hit him with pillows?"

"And the other perpetrator?"

"What...Other perpetrator?"

"You don't remember a second attacker?"

"No, look...I...I passed out partway through the fight. Had some w-weird hallucinations and...John and Jeff finished the fight, I think. I don't know, the paramedics wouldn't tell me anything and Eve...Sh-she...She's not gonna wake up, is she?"

The pain in his voice was palpable, and even the hard-boiled 10 year veteran detective felt a pang of sympathetic suffering. Folding up his notepad, sliding it into his pocket, he then slid tiredly into the seat opposite Mack's, across the bed with the comatose girl between them.

"I don't know, son. I hope she does. We've already got a dead priest on our paws, this whole tragedy doesn't need any higher of a body count."

"A...Body count? That's..." Mack leaned over her, rather protectively glaring at the detective, who held up both paws defensively.

"Sorry. She's not just a number. Her name's Eve Hightower, and I'm going to do my best to help you protect her okay? If you remember anything about the second assailant, give me a call."

As he was digging out a card to hand over, Mack surprised him with a detail. He hadn't expected to hear anything for at least a few hours, as the footballer worked over alpha-male issues in his head.

"The hallucination was a dream I've had once or twice. Except way, way more powerful. It was like...Like dreaming in Technicolor. Feeling in Technicolor too. Sorry, but anything else, you need to find John Silverstone. He's the one who has the answers."

Bobby leapt up out of his E-Z-Boy chair and reached the front door so fast he lost his slippers. John had left earlier that day saying he was going to go check on Jeff Castillas, and per usual had forgotten to call to check up. Though the cheetah knew there was nothing wrong with that, the throbbing, clenched-up pain behind his breastbone told him to be very frightened, scared to death he was about to open the door to find an apologetic police officer there to convey his regrettable news.

Instead, he opened it to a sight so familiar from the old days that it took him a second to realize what he was seeing. His gut was way ahead of his mind, wrenching itself into knots that made him gasp in a hard, painful breath.

"T-Toka?"

"Hello, Bobby."

"C'mon in, everybody," John said, as the dark-furred wolf slipped sideways past Tokamak's metallic bulk to wrap his arms around Bobby's waist. When he leaned in for a hello kiss, the tense-to-breaking cheetah slipped out of his arms instead, and retreated into the kitchen with his arms wrapped tight around his chest.

Hiding his troubled look by keeping his back to the others, John took a few steps inside as Tokamak and Jeff walked in behind, closing the door.

Ten minutes later, Bobby was still in the kitchen, unable to run up to the master bedroom. The stairs to the second floor were across the living room, which would mean exposing himself to Tokamak. The last time they'd been in the same room together, half of their team had died in a battle of cataclysmic proportions, and though that wasn't the alien's fault, Bobby was a wreck with nerves just at the thought of being around him.

Memories of that horrible battle kept flashing through his head, as the slender cheetah hid in a corner of the kitchen, back to a corner of the wall. In the other room, he could vaguely hear the others chatting amiably, over the sounds of explosion and implosion, flesh on flesh, and screams that reverberated through his mind.

Shockwave, Tokamak, Living Mountain, Paladin, Blotter, and Dr. Theorem had once been the Nightsiders, a superteam of legendary reputation. They had taken on the world's worst, and with a combination of telekinetic might, energy manipulation, sheer physical might, the enchanted swords and spirits of her ancestors, the power of darkness, and mastery of the arts of magic, had always come out on top. They'd put down threats other super-teams quailed to face.

The risk of being so renowned, however, was that the badguys were more careful, more canny, when such a potent group was around. The Nightsiders had been ambushed by four times their number, lead by the nefarious and ancient mastermind called Warlocke. In the knock-down drag-out conflict that ensued, the Nightsiders had wreaked havoc in an all-out brawl for survival that had wrecked much of Chicago's city center in its ferocity.

Looking down at his paws, as he leaned against a wall in his suburban kitchen, Bobby saw Living Mountain's sticky, dripping blood flowing all too quickly through his fingers, just as he had in person when the titanic hero had finally been brought low and died in Bobby's paws. Just moments later, Blotter had been killed by Mr. Cruelty's nerve disruptor cannon, which bypassed his shadowy shields as if they weren't there.

An hour of cat-and-mouse frantic fighting later, after Bobby, once known as Shockwave, had broken Mr. Cruelty's spine and crushed Bladespitter to slowly-regenerating goo, Paladin had finally managed to intervene in the cataclysmic exchange of magical might between Dr. Theorem and Warlocke. With all her might, the lioness managed to deliver a knick to Warlocke's face, just enough to distract him, just enough to enrage him into vaporizing her under his withering curse-magic wrath. In the moment of distraction, Dr. Theorem struck with everything he had, and Warlocke had vanished with a horrible nerve-ripping scream that haunted him to this day, presumably killed in the eldritch explosion that followed.

By the time the battle was finished, every hero team in the state had shown up, along with most of their villainous counterparts. Chicago had been lucky to have such a low civilian death toll. That was the one comfort Bobby could take from the whole messy affair. The only reason he and his surviving team-mates hadn't ended up under federal lock and key in the Negative Zone was that they had clearly fought only to defend themselves and the innocent bystanders.

It had been three years since he'd seen Tokamak anywhere but in snippets of news caught before he could hurriedly change the channel. Now John had brought him home, in his usual accidental insensitiveness, and all Bobby could do was hide in the kitchen and hope the anxiety would stop.

Then a hard knock at the door nearly broke him, dancing across his jangled nerves like barbed wire. Speedy footpaws, still bare from a day of staying home, carried him to the door before he knew what was happening. He pulled it open, just as the blocky snow leopard outside was reaching into his open coat toward an underarm-strapped pistol.

Abruptly, too fast for the leopard to register surprise, he was wrenched off the ground by an unseen force and flung through the doorway and over Bobby's head, the door slamming shut behind him. The white-furred feline slammed into a heavy ceramic vase in the hall with a sharp crunch, shattering it with enough force to make him yell out in surprised pain, while struggling to draw his gun.

Bobby had thrown him across the hall and halfway up the stairs before he saw a sparkling badge go flying through the air, having left the paw he'd seen reaching for a gun. Tokamak and John were coming out of the dining room that very moment, one with his blocky M1911 in paw, the other with a silvery palm raised and glowing. Behind them, the college-boy jaguar stayed hunkered down but close.

"Put me down! I'm Detective Kolter, with the police!"

The cheetah abruptly cut his telekinetic power, and Kolter landed on his shoulder, rolling awkwardly down two steps before coming to a stop on the landing, growling in aggravation as he straightened himself up. His suit was crinkled, covered in reddish terra cotta dust, and his white fur appeared blood-stained by the stuff.

Before he could get up a good head of steam to start yelling about assaulting an officer, though, Bobby cut him off by whirling on the others, shrieking into John's face as he came.

"YOU! I told you not to involve me! I told you to keep them away from me!"

The slight cheetah jabbed the tip of a finger hard into the black-clad wolf's chest, strong enough to rock the larger fur back on his heels with a bewildered and suddenly sorry look on his face. Trying to get a word in edgewise was just not going to happen.

"Get out of my house! Get out! Get out and take your fucking friends with you!"

Two minutes later, out on the porch with the strangely black-clad panther, Kolter growled, shoved his pen back into the spiral-ring binding of his notepad, and grumbled out. His question was backgrounded by a one-sided yelling match audible from the street.

"So I take it you don't know anything about your assailant?"

"Uh...No. Sorry."

"Here's my card. Give me a call when your friend's available."