The entrance to the basement was a stairwell dripping with death. It reeked down here minutes before I even got anywhere near it. The kind of odor that lends itself to flies and humidity, and down here, where the lights were out and the wires spat dull orange sparks onto our shoulders, it was getting hot. Really hot. It left the dead bodies in a state of blistering and swelling, but maybe those were just the maggots from the Kaiju crawling around our feet, finding new homes inside the guts and chests and heads that filled the stairwell all the way down to the basement.

  I had never been inside of a strip club before, and so far, it wasn’t a great experience.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Carter muttered, accidentally stepping into a pile of discarded organs, drenching his shiny leather shoes in filth. He held a flashlight up for himself, because trust me—I didn’t want to see any of this, but my powers made sure I would. “Some of this stuff ain’t even murder. It’s just brutal.” He shook off his shoe and led the way toward the end of the hallway, muttering quietly under his breath. The jazz in his voice was gone. The punch and the energy sapped dry as he passed body after body that painted the walls red and the floor different shades of bodily fluids from ruptured stomachs. The worms had made this place their home. They’d infested it all.

  And because of that, there was this ever present squelching noise in the corridor that made my skin crawl. Ava didn’t want to be inside the bag anymore, and that left me carrying her in both my hands, meaning even if I really wanted to puke, I had to swallow it without my hand being on my mouth. Gods, I thought, stamping my foot down onto the floor again and sending a jolt of electricity through it. Like last time, they dried and smoked.

  But there were just too many of them. On the walls. On the ceiling. A latticework of fleshy string.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Ava said. “And you’ve made plenty enough to know that this one is the worst.”

  “Easy top five,” I muttered. I hung back a little, feeling the ground shake again as Carter neared the door at the end of the hallway. It was the one thing that wasn’t battered and scarred or blown apart, just like the walls and floors upstairs. It stood fine, except for the hole carved through the middle of it. Inches worth of reinforced steel, punctured as if someone had just stuck their finger through wet paper. “But we help people here, Ava, remember?”

  “You help people. I’m here to tell you where we should be going to get the help. He’s untrustworthy.”

  “Kettle calling the pot black here,” I said to her. “You said I should go to him for help.”

  “I never said anything about helping him in return.”

  “He’s your uncle,” I said, turning her around so I could look at her. “Your family is always making deals, trying to get people to do what they want—are you really that surprised that we’re down here right now? Really?”

  Ava said nothing, which, you know, I thought so.

  Carter jerked his thumb at the door. “Ladies first.”

  I rolled my eyes and forced his niece’s head into his hands. Pussy. But…that didn’t stop me from hesitating a little bit as I stood just outside the door. I flexed my fingers, already feeling the dull ache I’d so long forgotten creeping back into my bones. Fuck me, this was the last thing I needed right now. So much as smelling it had kept my powers from developing for nearly my entire life. Being in a room that smelt like it was full of the stuff was…

  I didn’t want to say suicide, but stupid was a better word. Carter wouldn’t know. I could count the number of people on one hand who knew about my weakness, and even if he did, I could still take his head off if he tried something funny. So, with that thought circling in my mind, trying to give myself some kind of comfort and to put my restless thoughts at ease, I ducked into the hole, entering the room beyond it. My first thought was the darkness. Even with my eyesight, even with my irises making the darkness softly glow golden, it was hard to see. And then came the temperature—it was hot in here. Very hot. I swore and ran my forearm across my head, already sweating.

  I stepped in something that crunched under my sneakers. The stink of hot saliva suddenly filled the air. The rattle of chains quickly followed, then came that ground-shuddering force that nearly toppled me over. Not once or twice. Several times. I glanced at the hole in the door, and Carter wasn’t the one peeking through it, but Ava, her eyes squinted as she tried to see what I was struggling to make out. I swallowed, then raised my hand.

  Golden electricity erupted around my fingers, shoving the shadows to the corners of the room.

  Carter had said this was a basement. It was more akin to some kind of dungeon.

  Glass vials littered the floor, and the wooden crates they spilled out of lay shattered around me. Wooden pallets and styrofoam pellets, and the dust—that golden haze that dusted the floor and nearly everything near me.

  I yanked my t-shirt up to cover my face, but it didn’t stop me from coughing so hard it felt like I’d just been punched in the gut. I shook my head, and focused on the biggest problem, other than this fucking guy having so much Ambrosia down here he could probably treat half of the state for the Kaiju Virus. There were girls here. Women lined up along the walls, nearly stripped naked and surrounded by snaking metal chains that wrapped around their throats and wrists and ankles. They stared at me, their pupils so large it made me step backward out of surprise. Their eyes were bloodshot. Their skin was…cracked. It looked cracked, as if they were shattered pots that had been put back together. And underneath all that filth. The blood and the dirt and everything else, they glowed.

  It was their veins, I realized, slowly stepping toward them, that pulsated with soft glowing light. They stared at me, barely blinked. But when I got close, they flinched and scrambled away. They broke their chains off the walls. They were free. But they crawled around on the floor on their hands and knees, skittish and nervous and afraid of the light that was flickering around my fist. One of them snarled at me, made a sound so animal-like I almost thought they would lunge at me, fingernails bared and crooked, broken yellow teeth aiming for my arms.

  She did, actually, lunge at me, splintering the concrete underneath her as she did. Normally, I’d dodge her or catch her or spin her around and put her on a hold until she either passed out or relented. Not this time. Not now.

  My body hurt just being in this room. It hurt even more when she slammed me into a wall, killing the light coming from my hand instantly. She was a storm of fingernails and teeth, rabid and frantic and violent as she cut and dug and bit down so hard on my arm I screamed. I punched her. Hard. Her jaw loosened enough for me to slam my foot into her gut and kick her off. She skidded along the floor and crashed into the rest, careening into crates of wood with a bang. I panted, swore, and glanced at my arm. Fuck. What the fuck? Bite marks. Deep, bleeding bite marks that left blood dribbling down my arm and dripping onto the floor. I went straight for the door before any of the glowing golden junkies got the chance to gather themselves, grabbed Carter, and bodily forced him in here.

  I threw him onto the floor and scooped Ava up with my good hand. He groaned. I put my sneaker onto his back and forced him back down so his face could be buried into the mounds of golden dust he had been pushing.

  Because why else would he have this much in his basement? And with all these people.

  And…I paused for a moment, a realization dawning on me.

  “How long?” I said quietly. “When did they get this sick?”

  “I don’t know,” Carter gasped, struggling underneath my foot. “Month, maybe?”

  A month? A month! Most of the city has this shit in their veins!

  I kneeled beside him, ignoring how badly my arm hurt, or how long it was taking to heal. My skin burned and so did my blood, simmering in my veins. I needed to get out of here. It was a biohazard staying here, making me feel like my skull was getting pounded in and my bones grinded down against bits of rubble. “You’re telling me,” I said quietly, as the women began picking themselves up again, shaking their heads, clicking their teeth, “that you’ve had these people in your basement for a month, and they ended up like this, and you never said anything?”

  “You were gone!” he said defensively. “Vanished for two fuckin’ months, kid. I woulda knocked on your door and asked for help. Hell, I woulda called the Olympia hotline if you’re so pissed about it! But you left, kid!”

  “I’m not…” Gods, what the fuck is wrong with these people? “There are people who deal with shit like this all over the city! Call Damage Control for all I care! Tell Cassie that her fucking powder is turning people into these things!” I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache banging away at the back of my eyes. Ava said my name quietly. I opened my eyes, watching as she winced as my blood got into her eyes. I pinched my nose again and swore under my breath. “Listen up, you bastard. Tell me straight. Who attacked you, and what did they get?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Carter stared at me, at the blood that ran over my lips and down my chin, and the gouges in my arm that struggled to knit themselves together. I narrowed my eyes at him, daring him to try anything—say anything that would make this a very, very long day for him. He shut his mouth and got off the floor, dusting himself off and offering me a handkerchief from his pocket. I took it and kept it to my nose. “You know,” he said, looking at the girls that crawled around on the floor—at their bruised knees and raw palms, the animals in their eyes and the feral brains that made their mouths froth at me. “People in our line of work, we don’t really like dealing wit’ you. You’re a no-go for a reason. The bastards unlucky enough to come across you get made into an example.” I was about to tell him to spit it out, but then he looked at me. “How are we supposed to come to you for help when you’d kill us on sight, kid? You think I wanted to get myself into this mess? I push information and blackmail, not drugs and hookers. Fuck me, human trafficking? That’s her old man’s business, not mine. My hands were tied, alright?”

  I glanced at Ava, then back at him. “Pretty shitty excuse to still do this, don’t you think?”

  He shook his head, eyes darkening. “You don’t get it. You? You don’t have to worry about someone coming after you. Things don’t kill you easily. Us normal people, it’s different. They took my daughter. They took my wife. I ain’t got nothing left except this goddamned building and a brother who ain’t got my own back.” There wasn’t sadness in his voice. No empathy or emotion. Plain old facts, and the cigarette he lit in the corner of his mouth. He slowly breathed out, and kept the flame on his zippo going, pausing the girls from getting any closer. They marveled at the soft light, their eyes wide and mouths wider as it danced in his hand. “The feds told me to fuck off and stay quiet, and a Rivera ain’t gonna go to another gang looking for handouts. We just don’t got that kind of social credit anymore. There ain’t no superheroes anymore to help us out, and you vanished for months.”

  I stood up slowly, feeling woozy, fighting to keep straight. “What’s that got to do with any of this?”

  “You go looking for help wherever you can get it, right?” he asked me, tossing his zippo into the horde of spindly women around us, watching as they huddled around it, staring as it slowly died out. “I mean, look at ya. Zeus’ kid, and you’re here bothering with the likes of me for help. Any other day, and I woulda felt special. You go

  looking for help anywhere you can when you’re desperate. So I went to the one place that I knew would help a guy like me out.” He sighed and massaged his eyes, almost as if getting to this part physically hurt. “I called Cassie.”

  I stared at him, the pain in my body briefly forgotten. “You did what?”

  “I heard down the grapevine about Ambrosia coming back,” he said. “You weren’t born when it was hitting the streets back in the day. Revolutionary shit. Our family was built off the backs of it.” He didn’t sound proud of that either, but he continued after a drag. “So when I heard it was coming back, and I saw what was going on with these girls, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the shit we had in our day. This was new. Synthetic. Deadly.”

  “So…you called her to, what, ask her for more?”

  “I called her to warn her,” he said. Carter chuckled and shook his head. “She wasn’t too happy about getting a phone call from a guy she doesn’t even know, talking to her about a product she’s gonna make billions from. She made sure that I either keep my mouth shut, or get cozy in the pits of gold right alongside her, so…well, I made a decision that was gonna put the Rivera Family back to where it belonged. Right back on the gold throne.”

  “Yeah, and now look at you,” I said hoarsely. I coughed once, paused to catch my breath, and decided it was better that I ducked back out of the hole so I could throw up. Like I had said—our bodies build immunity to almost anything. The more we fight, the stronger we are. The sicker we get, the healthier we become. But gods, this was something worse. Something terrible. Maybe it was the volume of the stuff, or Cassie had changed whatever she’d mixed in this new batch, but it left me clinging to the wall, my stomach gurgling and my body threatening to topple over into the dead body I had just emptied my guts onto. I slowly turned my head, listening as Carter left the room as well, hands in his pockets and his head tilted, watching as I gathered myself. No sympathy for the hero.

  But I guessed that’s what I get from a gangster.

  “Stomach bug?” he asked quietly.

  I knuckled away the vomit and turned. “So you started pushing because she sold you a dream?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “What can I say? We’ve got a penchant for arrogance and contracts.”

  I mulled over my thoughts, because it all kind of made sense, didn’t it? Cassie had been infecting these people for months now with the Kaiju Virus right underneath my nose as I tried to play Big Shot Superhero. Then the time came for her to save the world from her own disease, but she had to test it out somehow, didn’t she? She had to make sure the billion dollar product that anyone could buy in bulk would bring people back from the brink of death. Who cared about a few hookers and drugged up teenagers wandering around the streets? Who cared about the dead body and piles of guts left in an alleyway without a killer in sight when the city was getting torn apart by a creature that had wiped out city block after city block? And gods, the worst thought of all echoed through my head.

  Lucas would have known about all of this for months now, too, wouldn’t he? It almost left me wondering if I should have just kept playing along with his game. Kept gathering info on whatever it was that was happening. But I wouldn’t trust him to tie my shoe laces, let alone tell me about how rotten the filth he covered himself in time and time again was. I had to bank on the idea that Cassie wouldn’t sell the world a drug that would turn people into things like that. Like she had said, she wanted their wallets and their eyes and their attention—animals can't’ give you any of that. But, on the other hand, how many other people had this version of Ambrosia in their veins?

  Too many, that was my thought. Way, way too many.

  “The person who did this,” I said. “Cassie’s person?”

  “Funnily enough, I don’t think so,” he said. Carter threw the cigarette into the open stomach cavity of a former bodyguard beside him. “I didn’t get to see much of them, but I know this kind of violence. It’s a brand that two people own. You, but you weren’t here, and you’d have been a lot more…flashy. The other person is dead.”

  “Dead?” I asked quietly. The hole in the door was suddenly filled by a curious head. Her eyes flicked around, possibly drawn to the noise or the smells or the sounds. She looked ghastly. Her gaunt cheeks and her black eyes and the thin strands of hair still clinging to her scalp. What do I even do with these people? “Then how…?”

  “Ever heard of a guy called Ben Ross before?”

  I froze still. Yeah, I went to his funeral.

  “Heard he had a sister or something,” Carter muttered, glancing at the freakish skull now grinning at him through the hole in the door. His eyes narrowed, his lips thinned. “And the voice I heard didn’t sound familiar.”

  …no.

  No.

  It wasn’t Bianca who’d done this. Simple as that.

  That’s just a straight lie.

  “Bullshit,” I said. He cocked an eyebrow. “Your whole family is full of shit. All you ever do is lie and lie and try to get into my head so you can get what you want from me. Is this some kind of way to get me to go fight your battles for you, is that it? Want me to go beat up Cassie freaking Blackwood because she made you her bitch?” I was panting, in pain, my arm a bloody mess that was finally starting to heal itself. I used that same bloody finger

  to point at him. “I’ll deal with these…things, and then you’re gonna hold up your end of the deal. You deal with Cassie after that, because that’s your freaking problem, not mine. You people need to learn how to fix your own godsdamned problems for a change without having to lie your way into my good graces every fucking day!”

  “Hm,” he hummed, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Fiercely loyal. Hit a nerve, huh?”

  I would have planted him through the wall, if the creature in the doorway didn’t move just as fast as me, appearing in front of Carter with hellish delight on its face. My raised fist shook. My planted feet dug into the floor and left my sneakers smearing through the blood. The girl stared at me, her strands of blood red hair falling over her face, reflective in the glow of my eyes. I looked back at Carter, and watched as he stared down his nose at me.

  “They’re going to put your friend down like a mut,” he said dryly. “The Talon won’t tolerate this.”

  I spat at his feet. “Yeah, but they’ll tolerate Cassie damning this city to hell?”

  Carter shrugged one shoulder. “You’re missin’ the point, kid. Cassie is gonna know about this. She always knows about everything. Within the hour I called her, I’d gotten a knock on my door and had a bullet through my head to make the message clear that she could get to me whenever and however she wanted. She finds out about this mess, and whaddya think happens? She knows what Ambrosia can do. She knows how badly superhumans can hurt people. Yet she’s just turned most of New Olympus into a breeding pool for Supes.” He jerked his chin at the creature stopping me from briefly killing him. “And if this pales in comparison to the thing that wrecked my entire operation, just so it could get its hands on raw Ambrosia, then she’s gonna want to get it on an operation table in that fortress of hers by the time we’re saying Happy Holidays. My little problem ain’t the girls. It’s the billionaire.”

  He wants me to hunt Bianca down for her own sake.

  I knew Cassie. I knew she wouldn’t be above hurting a teenager and cutting her open and Gods.

  I didn’t want to believe a single word he said, but…what other choice did I have? If this was all Bianca, then…why? She wouldn’t do this, and I figured that’s why it was all so hard to believe. She knows how to hold her own. Hell, I was the one who taught her how to, just in case. But she wasn’t a murder. Some maniac that would leave grown men and women in piles of their own organs for nothing more than a quick fix. The worst part about all this?

  Carter wasn’t lying. I could smell Bianca’s perfume lingering in the air.

  That’s what I had smelt first coming into this place, it was her. My mind just couldn’t fathom that she’d even be here, let alone be the one to do all of this. No. Something must have happened. Someone must be using her.

  Something must be using her. There’s someone who’d know about all of this. Someone who would know if there was some kind of connection to what Carter was telling me about Ben, about the level of violence he could have left in his wake in a single night. I never heard anything about Ben’s murders, or his cases, or him snapping. Ben was kind. He was pure. He stole ice cream for Bianca and I out of the fridge at two in the morning, and took us to go see movies we weren’t old enough to see yet. He was the brother that I never had, and the same person who supposedly would leave corridors matted in gore this shredded apart? No. It wasn’t clicking. But he would know.

  The same guy I had promised to kill if I ever saw him again would definitely know something.

  “Fuck me,” I whispered, pushing my hand through my hair.

  When does this ever get any better?