Chapter 6

The San Francisco SPAM field office was a twenty-story monument to federal modernism as interpreted by a first-year architecture student. A bland, heavy rectangle of cement with rows of darkly tinted windows that stared blindly out over the street, it managed to force the eye to slide directly over it rather than encourage admiration. The effect was so expertly done it had to have been intentional. Only the small brass letters next to the entrance that spelled out SPAM gave any indication of what was inside.

Harlan waited for me on the sidewalk in front of the SPAM building. Leaning heavily on his cane, he looked tired and rumpled, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, but the way his eyes lit up when he saw me took years off his face. His lopsided smile was still the same as it had been when he was nineteen.

“Nice coat,” he called as I walked up to him. “Really leaning into the whole private dick thing, aren’t you?” He snickered and I knew it was because he’d said dick. I shook my head and bit my tongue to try and hold back my answering grin.

“No hat?” He started to lift his injured arm, flinched, then lifted the other one to pat roughly at my hair. “Too much hair?”

“I’m being discrete, remember?” I dodged the clumsy touch. “Besides, you love my hair.”

“I do.” He nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes a little unfocused.

I knew that look. “You’re stoned.”

“Pfft. No, I’m not.” The slight sway of his body said otherwise. “I feel great.”

“I bet you do.” I took his arm to support him. “Did we take some painkillers with lunch?”

He shook his head no and then nodded yes, blinking dizzily after the movement. “Just a half. My wrist hurt and my head hurt and the doctor said I could.”

God, he was still a lightweight. We’d split a joint a couple of times in the past and the best part of it for me had been how easy it was to make him laugh afterward. A video of a kid hitting someone in the balls with a whiffle ball bat could have him rolling on the floor with tears leaking out of his eyes. “Are you sure you’re up for teaching? Maybe you should cancel.”

He flapped his hand in my general direction. “Piece of cake. Could do it in my sleep. C’mon, don’ wanna be late.”

Now that I’d thought of it, it was odd that I’d never been inside a SPAM office before today. I’d worked with supes for years, but never in an official capacity. Harlan was definitely hiding something from me, some reason why he wanted to keep me away from SPAM. I may not have had his way with reading people, but I knew him.

SPAM policed the supe community to an extent. People with powers weren’t required to register with SPAM or to declare themselves in any way. It helped that they were such a small percentage of the population and that most powers didn’t do more than help someone find good parking spots or get in the fastest checkout line at the grocery store.

The supes with more dangerous powers were subject to the same laws as everyone else, but it was hard for normal law enforcement agencies to arrest someone who could walk through walls or who was invisible. If one of them went on a drunken rampage or even went full-on supervillain, which didn’t happen often, SPAM agents were the ones who answered that call.

The more I’d looked into them, the more questions I’d had. What government division were they under? Were they even a government agency at all? For that matter, what country had jurisdiction? Other US alphabet agencies like the CIA had equivalent agencies in other countries, such as MI6 in the UK or the MSS, Ministry of State Security in China. SPAM was SPAM, no matter where they were headquartered.

Internet searches for the agency led to either circular dot-gov pages that all pointed back to each other in an ouroboros of noninformation or to conspiracy theory sites that placed responsibility for the organization on the Illuminati, a shadowy one-world government, or aliens. Or an unholy alliance of all three.

I’d followed Harlan into worse places, though, always with faith that we’d get through together. Despite everything, I’d still follow him anywhere.

“Oof.” I smacked into Harlan’s back, almost knocking him off his feet. I wrapped an arm around his waist to keep him steady.

“Sorry.” He’d stopped with his uninjured hand on the push bar of one of those old-fashioned revolving doors. “Door’s heavy.”

“Oh, yeah. Let me help.”

Now, I’m not saying I had to stand behind him and slide my arms over his to push the door with him, I’m just saying that, given the size of the wedge-shaped opening, I felt it would be the most efficient use of space.

Standing this close to Harlan was a confounding experience. His body felt the same as always yet different against mine. He still felt right, just like coming home, but he was wider, the wiry muscles of youth replaced by no-less-strong bulk. The scent of Irish Spring soap that used to cling to his skin had been replaced with something woodsy and expensive.

I wanted to pull him to me forever and I wanted to shove him away before he broke my heart again.

The door slid forward reluctantly, and Harlan’s laughing groan instantly transported me back to a rundown shotgun house in Alabama, the air so thick with humidity we could barely breathe and our bodies slick with sweat as we slid against each other. Fuck. I leaped away before my body could betray me.

If fate or the 8-Ball—or Harlan, for that matter—thought the past could be forgotten in service to some bullshit destiny, it, they, whatever, could fuck right off.

I deserved an explanation and some hard-core groveling if he wanted me to take him back. Not that he’d asked me to. Damn it.

After the usual rigmarole needed to get into a secure government building, my picture was taken, and I was handed a visitor’s badge on a lanyard. The brown-haired, brown-eyed older man working the badging station studied my ID before handing it to me. “Philip Weinstein.” He looked from the badge to my face and back again. “Any relation to Natalie Weinstein? Worked for SPAM back in...” His eyes drifted up, shifting back and forth as if scanning some internal database. “Oh-three. Forensic accounting.”

“Don’t know them. But impressive memory.”

He shrugged. “I got a knack for names and faces.”

“Convenient.” Beside me, I could feel Harlan freaking out. Hard to be discrete when the badge guy had perfect recall. Whatever. It would be fine.

I checked his badge for his name and added him to my mental rolodex. Agent Elton Samuels. You never knew what or who could come in handy.

With a tip of the hat to the old agent, I turned and followed Harlan through a maze of cubicles and down some suspiciously unpopulated hallways. “Where is everyone?”

Harlan shrugged. “Lunch?”

We stopped at a set of wooden double doors reminiscent of a high school auditorium. A quiet murmur slipped through the crack between the doors.

“Oh, fuck me.” Harlan tipped his head back and groaned loudly.

“What?” I leaned around him to see what had upset him.

A paper taped to the door read “From Zero to (Subpar)Hero: A Beginner’s Guide to Minor Superpowers.”

“I forgot I was supposed to be leading this seminar today.”

“What it is?”

“It’s a presentation this office gives to new recruits and opens to the public.”

“SPAM agents don’t have to have powers?”

“Duh. ‘M here, aren’t I? SPAM can’t discriminate. They take anyone qualified. Although everyone does have to pass a physical test, just like any other agency.” He scanned the still-empty hallway and beckoned me to lean closer. “It’s basically a joke test. Your grandma could probably pass it. Don’t tell those jerks at Quantico. They think they’re so cool.”

“My lips are sealed.” I mimed zipping my mouth closed.

He beamed at me. “I know you won’t.”

Close enough.

A disturbingly familiar man in a dark blue suit and a red power tie rushed down the hallway toward us. He smiled at Harlan. “Harlan, glad you made it.”

Harlan nodded at him in greeting. “Agent Hamilton.”

When the guy caught sight of me, his toothpaste-commercial-perfect smile slid to something more intimate. “Dashiell. Long time no see.”

Fuck a duck. So much for discrete. Now I remembered this guy. Had he told me he worked with SPAM? I didn’t remember exchanging a lot of words.

They both turned to look at me and then spoke over each other.

“You know this guy?” Harlan asked me.

“How do you come to know our Dash?” Axel asked Harlan.

“I work with him. How do you know him?”

“We hooked up in the bathroom of a club.”

“Really?” Harlan turned to me, shook his head.

“Four years ago,” I added quickly. Not that Harlan had any say in who I screwed.

He turned back to Axel with a glare. “We dated.”

I whistled sharply, then held my hands up in a T-shape. “Time out. Harlan, Axel and I had a one-night stand four years ago.”

Axel crossed his arms and frowned at me. “Could have been more, but I thought you didn’t date SPAM agents.” Funny how tone alone could turn a man from a polished agent into a pouty queen. “Harlan and I were...” How to explain me and Harlan in a few words? “In the military together.”

Harlan’s face went through a complex series of expressions ending in hurt. Lord spare me from emotional men. Both of them. “Don’t you have a seminar to teach?”

Axel sneered. Literally sneered. I’d never seen that expression in real life before. “Are you signed up, Dash? SPAM finally recognize your party trick of a power?”

I wanted to tell him that little lip curl made him look ugly. “This is why we never dated, Axel. You’re a snob.”

Axel sniffed, thus proving my point.

“You have a power?” Harlan asked him, eyelids blinking as he tried to will the drugs out of his system.

“Don’t you know?” Axel smirked. With infinitesimal changes to his body language and expression, Axel slid into a whole different person. An incredibly sexual person. As his pheromones filled the air, I felt my dick start to harden and even though I knew what he was doing, I found myself leaning towards him. Which is why we’d ended up in the bathroom of that club in the first place.

Axel was good-looking, withthick, dark hair, grey eyes, and a mouth that could definitely cash the checks his body was writing, but when he deployed his power, he was irresistible to any adult with a pulse. He held out a hand to Harlan. “Special Agent Honeypot. What’s your name, handsome?”

Harlan sucked in a breath, his hands tightening into fists, and his eyes raked up and down Axel’s body. He swayed forward, drawn to Axel like iron filings to a magnet.

Unfortunately for SPAM and Axel, he couldn’t focus his power. The wave of pheromones spread over anyone in a seven-foot nine-inch radius. Fortunately for everyone, Axel had an iron-clad policy of not deploying his power when there was any possibility of people under twenty-one being in the area.

Which meant the woman in an unflattering suit hurrying down the hall was over twenty-one, because the second she entered Alex’s range of influence, she gasped loudly and stumbled over nothing.

Harlan stopped, turned to me, and shook his head as if he were shaking off a spell. Then he smiled at me, winked, and turned back to Axel. “Impressive. That usually work for you?”

“Always.” Alex’s eyes narrowed and a slightly unflattering wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. “I thought you didn’t have any powers, Agent Dean.”

Harlan shrugged his good shoulder. “I don’t.”

The new woman reached a hand toward Harlan’s arm but he slipped sideways out of her reach. ““And that doesn’t make him a bad agent. He’s the best instructor in the agency.” A slight woman with brown hair and pretty hazel eyes behind thick glasses, she had the earnest nervousness of a freshman mathlete trying to get the attention of the star quarterback. The SPAM ID badge hanging around her neck read Selena Calder.

She crossed her arms over her chest and alternated between glaring at Axel and turning her big, hazel eyes at Harlan. I could practically see the cartoon hearts floating around her head.

No. Wait. I squinted indirectly at her as if I was trying to see the image in one of those stupid magic-eye posters. God damn. Faint cartoon hearts were actually popping into existence in front of her eyes and then quickly fading away.

“Thank you, Agent Calder. Agent Hamilton was just asking a question. Why don’t you go find a seat and we’ll get started in a minute?”

“If you’re sure, Special Agent Dean. I’ll be down in front.”

Axel and I exchanged eye rolls. Subtle eye rolls.

Blushing, Agent Calder tugged the door open, somehow almost managing to smack Harlan in the face with it. Luckily for Harlan, Axel yanked him away before he could get a broken nose.

We filed into the room, which was a typical lecture hall filled with curved rows of seats sloping down to a lectern. Giant screens hung in front of the back wall and a projector that appeared to have been manufactured in the nineties was tethered to a blocky laptop. Another, even older projector hung from the ceiling.

I followed Harlan down the aisle and slid into one of the chairs with a half-desk attached to one arm that often occupy the corners of college lecture halls. From there I could see most of the audience.

Picking the trainee agents out of the crowds was as easy as spotting the tourists in Chinatown. They were in their early twenties to mid-thirties, physically fit, clean-cut, their fingers poised over their laptop or tablet as they waited for Harlan’s first words, all of them sporting ill-fitting suits and serious expressions.

The rest of the crowd ranged from kids barely old enough to drive to old people who probably shouldn’t be driving anymore. Drawn from San Francisco’s colorful population, they looked like tech bros and skater boys, shopkeepers and schoolteachers. I wondered what powers they had, if any, and what drew them to this class.

There was a ton of introductory stuff that gave me time to examine the crowd. Not that I thought I could pick out a killer on sight. Sadly, it didn’t work like that. I wonder if someone had a power that could? What would it be like to look in a crowd and know someone in it was thinking of murder?

Handy, I supposed, but given what I’d learned from years of digging into people’s dirtiest secrets, too many people were capable of horrible things. If you wanted to be able to leave the house and feel safe, it was probably better to remain clueless.

I turned my attention from the murderous capacity of humans to Harlan. Standing behind the lectern in front of a crowd of people looking to him for help, he looked exactly the way you’d want someone responsible for guiding people through a confusing and strange new experience to look. Competent and caring, he kept the discussion on track while assuring everyone they would be heard eventually.

His blinking returned to normal speed as the drugs wore off. Unfortunately, so did his pain. I could read the strain in the lines around his mouth and in the tension of his jaw.

I shot off a text to DT asking him to get in touch with the healer we’d worked with before. Rebecca Finch was an extremely private person who only worked with select people. Most healers were because when word of their abilities got out, they became a prize, an asset to be exploited. Rebecca wanted to help people as and when she chose. I was going to take advantage of the fact that she felt she owed me for some help I’d given her a few years ago.

Holding my phone so others couldn’t see its screen, I pulled up the very sketchy files Harlan had forwarded to me and tried to match faces to names and powers. If this was the best SPAM could do, I worried for all the people thinking they were somehow protected by them.

An annoying voice distracted me from my research. “I just think a person should have a superpower to join SPAM, or at least something demonstratively useful.”

Spoken like a douchebag who thought he had a superpower.

The speaker was easy to spot by the smug look on his face and the Men’s Warehouse suit he wore. Rookie agent. I wondered what his power was. I crawled through the records again, trying to match the face to a file.

Harlan nodded as if he were seriously considering the guy’s words, then leaned an elbow on the lectern. He looked very professorial and I was hot for teacher. My brain and heart were not ready to forgive Harlan (not that he’d asked for it) but my body was all aboard the Harlan train.

“How do you decide if a power is super or not?” Harlan addressed the question to the class as a whole.

Agent Douche spread his hands. “Isn’t it obvious which powers are useful and which are basically party tricks?”

“Is it? Let’s ask your classmates. Anyone, what are some powers you think would be classified as superpowers?”

Before anyone could call out an answer, the douchebag held out his hands and shot flames from his palms.

The audience oohed and aahed. Colors flashed across the skin and clothing of a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. It made him look like a human cuttlefish.

The woman next to Agent Hothands puffed up her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet and exhaled with an audible whoosh. The flames disappeared.

Cuttlefish Boy laughed and his skin flashed yellow and orange.

Harlan shot me a look of pure mischief. Oh, that look had gotten me in trouble more than once. No, let me revise that. I’d willingly followed that look into trouble on several memorable occasions. He winked at me and turned back to the crowd. “Anyone else?”

As the people in the audience called out powers, Harlan used a grease pencil to write them on a sheet of acetate on the overhead projector.

Super strength

Flying

Invisibility

Make fire

Telepathy

Teleportation

Harlan waved at the audience. “Okay. That’s enough.” He stared down at the list, tapping his pencil on the side of the machine. “I can think of at least one negative for each of these powers and come up with a scenario where they are not just useless but can actively make things worse.”

So could I. Telepathy in particular sounded like a nightmare.

Harlan pointed to a female agent sitting halfway up the rows of seats. “Agent Tan. You can fly, correct?”

She stood, hands clasped in front of her. “Yes sir.” The stance and the way her hair was scraped back into a tight bun screamed former military.

“You are what SPAM refers to as a Bird, correct?”

“Yes sir.”

“A Bird is a person with the power of flight,” Harlan explained for the benefit of those in audience who might not know. “Agent Tan, what are some of the drawbacks of deploying a Bird?”

She nodded and stared into the middle distance while answering. “We’re very conspicuous. I’m very vulnerable in the air. I can be shot or have my flight pattern disrupted by strong winds. With no way to brace myself, the recoil from a weapon forces me backward, so I can’t use them while flying. I can only carry an additional fifty pounds when I fly, so my use as a retriever is limited.”

Harlan nodded thoughtfully. “Now tell us how it feels to fly.”

A grin spread slowly across her face, and her stance softened. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

Harlan’s eyes sparkled. “This isn’t the military, Agent Tan. Speaking freely is encouraged.”

Her grin exploded in a blinding smile. “It’s fucking awesome.” He nodded at her and she sat down to mingled laughs and applause from the attendees.

Harlan used his cane as a pointer and tapped at the screen. “One of the most useful powers is the ability to ascertain if a person is lying or not.”

It was also one of the most sought-after by all the intelligence agents, both to use and to study. So far, no one had been able to fool an HLD, a Human Lie Detector, but the Powers that Be kept on trying.

The number one most coveted power by the global military-industrial complex in its never-ending superpowers arms race was the ability to predict the future, in whatever capacity.

My hand strayed to my 8-Ball. Whether it was self-imbued or merely a vehicle for some power I possessed, I didn’t want it falling into SPAM or anyone else’s hands.

I was no seer, no oracle or prophet. If I were, I would have known Harlan was going to break my heart. But though most of the answers my ball gave me were ambiguous or uncertain, when it did return an unequivocal yes or no, it had yet to be wrong, even about future events. There was no way I wanted to be thrown in a government prison “for my own protection” and then forced to be some kind of fortune-teller for billionaires and their pet organizations.

Harlan’s lecturer voice drew me back from my cynical musings. “My point is that the utility of a power, super or not, is dependent on the requirements of the situation. Much in the way diplomatic solutions are often more effective than threats, a subtle or subpar power can bring results that a more overt power would be unable to achieve.”

“How so?” Cuttlefish Boy leaned forward, squares in shades of blue pulsing and flashing on his skin.

Harlan nodded in approval and made a notation on the paper in front of him. “The mightiest army in the world can’t force a flower to bloom.”

“I can,” a young person called out. I couldn’t make out if the green tinge to their hair was natural or not, but either way, it suited them.

“Could you give us a demonstration? And please tell us your name.”

They stood, pushing their long hair behind their ears. “I’m Dylan. And if you have a plant I could use, sure.”

Like the teacher’s pet she desperately wanted to be, Serena jumped to her feet and offered to find out. At Harlan’s nod, she scurried up the aisle.

While we waited for Serena to return, Harlan kept the students engaged by explaining some of the exercises they’d be doing later in the seminar. These included the Power Pair-up, where participants were paired to see what they could accomplish together, and the ominously named Emotional Influence Relay. That sounded like a disaster in the making.

Harlan clumped his way to the front of the lectern and swept his eyes over the rows of people. “If you take only one thing from this class, remember this. The person makes the power, not the other way around. In the right hands, the smallest and seemingly most useless power can make the difference between life and death.”

Why was he looking at me when he said that last part?

The doors to the lecture hall swung open and Serena hurried to the front of the room, clutching a small cactus perilously close to her chest. Dylan made their way out of the row and followed her down.

“Will this help?” Serena shoved the cactus at Harlan and he stepped back in surprise, banging his funny bone on the lectern.

Serena paled. “I’m so sorry!” She reached for him and his cane slid out from beneath him. Dylan caught him before he fell.

That was three times Harlan had been injured or almost injured in her presence. That couldn’t be a coincidence. I quickly pulled up her file. There was not much on her. Serena Brown, aka Mischance. Her powers only worked on people she had a crush on, causing a string of nonlethal accidents when she was around them.

Well, damn. Toots had the hots for my ex. Not sure how I felt about that. But if it was her, her powers must have been amplified since this dossier had been complied.

Did Dylan still have their arms around Harlan? That seemed unnecessary.

Serena apparently agreed, judging by the look on her face. That sent a chill slithering down my spine. In the words of Raymond Chandler, it was the smile of a woman whose mind was not smiling. Her eyes narrowed and the overhead projector on the ceiling came loose with a squeal of metal as the bolts loosened.

Someone screamed. Possibly me.

“Harlan!” Twice in one fucking day, I’d been too far away from Harlan to keep him from getting seriously injured. From now on, I was sticking to him like glue. He was moving into my house. My room. Fuck that, my bed. I’d handcuff myself to him if I had to.

Seconds before the projector slammed into Harlan’s head, he flew backward like someone had yanked him. He landed hard on the floor, managing to roll enough to avoid smacking his head on the linoleum. A man in the third row stood with one arm outstretched and a hand across his mouth. “Sorry! I don’t have a lot of control of it yet.”

The project jerked to a halt. It hung from its cord and swung back and forth.

My attempt to leap to my feet was thwarted by the half-desk wrapped around my waist. I pushed up anyway, the combo chair-desk dangling from my hips. “Harlan. It’s her! It’s Serena.”