GraceFall [ONC 2024]

4

Amid the tumult ...

Zjahn fought to keep control of everything. The illusion of Phaross still hovered above, but he had not made the image say anything for long seconds, meanwhile, the man lay there dying due to his own incompetence. Betty knelt beside the man, ineffectually attempting to stop the bleeding, while dozens of other people rushed, screaming for the doors. He had to do something!

"Pah! Your champion is a coward!" Zjahn's fingers gripped a nearby wall as he forced Phaross to speak. "Let it be known that his day is over! I shall return and, when I do, I will kill Psycona!"

Zjahn made the image rise up, back through the shattered skylight and, once outside, he allowed the illusion to fade away. That, at least, allowed him to return a greater swathe of his power to other tasks. Maintaining his human image, for one. It had only happened for a fraction of a second, he doubted anyone saw, but the illusion of the human body he cast about him and flickered.

With that illusion strengthened, he turned his attention to that oaf of a man, the man that, by rights, had no business surviving. Not with the thoughts Zjahn had read in his mind. But it was not Zjahn's place to pass judgement. He was a Peacemaker, a superhero, not a lawmaker. Not a judge.

A thought took less time than any doubt and he formed a psychic barrier against the severed artery in Wade's throat. A patch, nothing more, but enough to stave off the man's death for a little while longer. A death that he may well have caused.

As emergency medical practitioners and police officers burst into the room, Zjahn waited until they had the situation under control before allowing the psychic barrier to fall from the man's injury. The blood began to pour once more, but, from the thoughts of the medical personnel, they believed they could transport him to surgery in time.

He watched as they rushed Wade past him, on a gurney, and could do nothing but berate himself. He could only imagine he had miscalculated. That the complexity of his plan, the strength required, had proven greater than expected. He would not make the same mistake twice.

A bloodied hand clutched at his arm and he turned his head to the woman. She appeared in shock. Shaking, pale, cold. He could not read her mind. Whether she still had feelings for Tompkins, or whether she cared equally for anyone hurt by such things. If she could only read Zjahn's mind, she could learn who had brought the man she knew so close to death.

And Zjahn could not shake the memory that, in that moment as Phaross descended, the man had glared at Zjahn and Betty and, in that self-same moment, Zjahn had wished him dead.

-+-

Later, Betty Burns' apartment ...

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't wash the blood from her hands. She scrubbed and scrubbed, used an entire bottle of soap, had taken a shower, a bath. Nothing worked. The blood remained, ingrained within the lines and whorls of her skin. Or, at least, it felt like it did. In truth, she suspected that she imagined it.

In all her years as a reporter, she had seen more than her fair share of blood, of death, but never with anyone she knew. Wade was a dick, he really was, but he didn't deserve that. No-one did, and now, despite the fact that her hands still shook, she had to do her job. An eyewitness to tragic events. To the arrival of a new, cruel, super-villain. Phaross. Like the lighthouse? Her mind had already started to work out the sequence of events.

Yet, she sat in front of her laptop, the page empty but for her byline. The cursor blinking, taunting her to write something, but nothing came. In her mind, she had the entire article mapped out. Putting it down in words was proving far more difficult.