Before I left New York, there were rumors. There are always rumors, of course, in the Big City—alligators in the sewers and whatnot, but these were specific and they were consistent. A superhero, they called it. Not just some nutjob vigilante, but someone with actual powers. There are levels to believing a rumor. “it’s not powers,” my boyfriend, the “real” journalist, said. “If it’s happening at all, it’s a guy in a suit with elaborate gadgetry. If I were you—or if I believed it at all, which I don’t—I’d start looking into really rich orphans.”

But there was no mistaking it. “I’m talling you, mom,” said one thug in police questioning, “I could feel motherfucker’s hand on my threat even though he’s at the end of the motherfuckin’ alley. Motherfucker picked me up four feet off the motherfucking ground, threw me into the mutherfucking wall. I’m telling you, that motherfucker is real!”

So how should we account for this oedipal demigod?

He stood accused of Telekinesis, but of something else, too.

Before he came, there were whispers. Every windless (though admittedly some of them only when pressed) remarked that just before the “creature” appeared, they heard whispers that seemed to be coming from inside their own skull. “Who’s there?” they might say, or “The fuck is happening to me?” and in the case of violent crimes, usually this distracted them enough for their (intended) victims to get away.

Then NightShade would get to work.

That’s what they called him. He’d sweep in “like a shadow in the night”—all anyone ever saw was his silhouette against slightly-lighter backdrops. It was fitting because he did act like a poison for the people he attacked.

The problem was, not all of his victims were guilty.

I guess that’s really the issue with every vigilante, whether or not they have “superpowers”—there’s supposed to be due process, protections for the innocent, but this NightShade isn’t subject to any of that.

It wasn’t long before the NYPD came up with a task force to track down this vigilante, but of course that didn’t work—it couldn’t possibly. NightShade has superpowers, for crying out loud, and apparently knows very well how to use them. None of the cops were ever able to even get close to him. How can you exert authority over something you can’t destroy? Or even hurt? And so the reign of terror continues. Last week, apparently, a young father was flung around an alleyway and strung up by his ankles to dangle from a fire escape, apparently just for yelling at his kid for misbehaving. Even if that was a crime, what kind of punishment is that? I managed to pull some strings and get hold of the transcripts of the report. The young father was one of the few who said he could actually make out some of the whispers he heard beforehand. Words like “trafficking”, “kidnapping”, and finally words like “molest”. I’m not going to mention the guy’s name, out of privacy and such (though it’s remarkable how few news outlets are respecting that) now that he’s essentially been accused of child abduction.

Here’s what really bothers me, though—well, two things: first of all, of course, if he’s such a nutjob, how are we ever going to catch him or even negotiate with him? But perhaps more importantly, at least the one that really strikes me: these whispers. I mean, he’s obviously telepathic… how is he getting things wrong? How is he making any mistakes? I mean, clearly he’s out to clean up the streets… is it possible he knows something we don’t about these people who are supposedly innocent?

I’m not saying we should trust NightShade blindly and crown him king or anything weird like that—at the very least his methods are cruel and unusual.

But what if he’s right?

“Mummy,” the officer seems to say as he reaches up to her, “can I have some more?”

There is a hole where his mouth used to be. You think of the mouth as a hole, but a door is only a door until it’s ripped off its hinges, and then it’s a hole in the wall.

He doesn’t claw for her. He isn’t trying to snatch or to hurt—none of them are. They aren’t reaching to take, they’re reaching to be given. That’s how she knows they need her as a mother, not as a meal.

Not all of them raise their hands to her but perhaps that is only because not all of them have hands anymore. Or arms. Or even faces. And yet hundreds of them here in this tomb that was a tube station not twenty minutes ago, reach out for her, as a savior, as a mummy.

Until she tells them to stop.

Obedient, they turn away and she imagines them all as showing a sense of shame in the way they look off, like a young man honorable enough to realize his advances have been unwelcome, and to mercifully stop. But she knows better. She knows there is no emotion in any of these reanimated corpses. Their hearts no longer beat, the holes their heads no longer draw breath, their tearducts—those that have them still—have run dry. She is the only one here still feeling anything and the feelings she has, echoing through the chamber out the tunnels from longer ago than she cares to remember, are making her see things, are projecting onto these corpses like the toys of a child whose parents are fighting again.

Why is she doing this? What does she have to gain?

Soon they will come for her. They will find a way, and why shouldn’t they? She never wanted this to happen, either. She has wrought too much rot in this brave new world, so let the crows come to claim her. But now, in this one shining moment before she unravels, let her have this, let her feel this need from these creatures to whom she’s given life. Before they come for her and she loses this feeling again, let them reach for their mummy.

Dana Lord never thought of herself as a great beauty. No one, in fact, had ever thought of her as a great, or indeed any kind of, beauty. But she’d managed to find herself a man, through charm and luck, they told her, and she had to agree with them that it was luck even after her husband died in a car-crash while she was pregnant. She was devastated, of course, but still forced to talk about how lucky she had been to know him and for him to have loved her (even though he’d been no great beauty himself) because after all, no one as plain as she could just expect love to come to her like a great beauty could.

But when her child was born, it was apparent immediately that something was wrong. It wasn’t just the issue of the genitals. She’d been told her baby would be a boy, but when it came out, “A miracle!” the doctor exclaimed upon checking. “I’ve heard of cases like this—rumors, mostly—but to actually see one!”

Her child had been born with a penis and a vagina, both fully formed.

“And functioning!” the doctor insisted, though what he meant by that…

“But will he be able to have children?” Dana demanded. “Or… she?” Shocked, she settled on “It?”

“I believe ‘they’ is the preferred form, but perhaps you should wait and see how the child tends. I’ll need a name now,” said the attendant, “For the birth certificate.”

Dana was handed the baby and that was when she noticed what was really wrong. “Angel,” was the only name she could come up with. “My baby’s name is Angel.”

Perhaps if Dana had allowed the doctors to perform the simple procedure that would have pushed them one way or the other, things might have turned out different, but she kept arguing with herself—what if she got it wrong? And then looking into her child’s angelic face, she thought How could I mutilate this with a choice when they could have both?

But even if Dana Lord had made the choice for her Angel, would it have been any different? She or he would still have had that face. The most beautiful face imaginable.

Even as an infant, in the hospital, people were drawn to it, to the point of neglecting the other newborns. Attention was lavished on Angel Lord to such an extent that Dana breathed a sigh of relief that nothing bad could ever happen to them, they would want for nothing. They were too beautiful to suffer.

But by the time Angel was two, the price of beauty became apparent. Dana came home to find the uncle she’d left with them in the one position you never want a babysitter to be in.

“I just… I couldn’t help myself,” said Dana’s brother. The rest of what he said, how he tried to excuse himself, was unfit for any ears but those in prison who would punish him for it.

But it did show Dana what she needed to do to keep her child safe. She thought about mutilation, scarification, maybe make it look like an accident. The price of beauty was too high to pay, but how could she destroy the face of an Angel? So instead, she fashioned a Veil for her Angel and made them wear it wherever they went. At first, she tried to get dispensation from school, but no, no, no, it was much easier to teach them at home, keep them away from the eyes of the curious.

“But it’s uncomfortable!” Angel complained all the time as they got older.

“Oh, you think that’s uncomfortable!” Dana exclaimed. “Think what they’ll think of you without it—I promise you, that’ll make you uncomfortable!”

At fourteen, Angel Lord fell in love with a girl they met online. “Why do you wear that Veil?” the girl asked.

“Because I’m ugly,” replied the Angel. “So ugly that people will try to hurt me if they see my face.”

“I won’t try to hurt you!” the girl insisted. “I could never hurt you!”

So Angel sent a picture, sans Veil. “You’re beautiful!” the girl said, tears in her eyes.

She tried to come to them, and they tried to get away, but couldn’t outfox Dana. Time and again, the girl failed. So after the dozenth or so attempt, she wrote one last message: “If you can’t have me, no one will!” and she was found the next morning. Angel wept.

“I told you,” said Dana to her child, “No good could come of her seeing you.”

“But she told me I was beautiful,” Angel sighed.

“I know,” said the Angel’s mother.

When the girl’s computer and internet history was searched, they found the image of Angel Lord in all their glory. Men, women, any one of any persuasion or taste, became captivated at the sight. “We have to leave,” said Dana.

Angel Lord tried to cut themself—“I don’t want to be beautiful!”—But the blade wouldn’t pierce and where it finally did, the scars only leant more character. They tried cutting other places—perhaps if they joined the girl who’d loved them—but something stopped them every time.

“I’m going to stop wearing the Veil,” Angel Lord told their mother when they were twenty-three. “I don’t care what happens to me, I don’t care what happens to the world, I need to be myself and I need the world to see me.”

They plunked themself down on a park bench and waited.

A young man walked by and smiled and they were suspicious, but he say and they spoke and they told their story.

“Well, you are very beautiful,” said the man, “But does that mean you caused these terrible things? Terrible things have happened to you, but that doesn’t make them your fault.”

“You don’t want to… do things… to me?”

“I don’t want to do anything to you,” the young man said, “that you don’t want me to do.”

Dana objected to the marriage when the proposal came several months later, but Angel Lord had let their mother’s paranoia and possessiveness rule their life for quite long enough.

Katelyn Nichols’ blind date was not going well at all. Colin West seemed like a nice guy, I guess, a sweet guy with sweet inhibitions and sweet stories about living with his grandmother until she passed. But there was nothing there—so much nothing in fact, so much sweetness, that she was kind of afraid to ditch him, for fear he might just wilt and crumble into a puddle of wimp, and she didn’t want to see that.

Across the bar, though, she saw Raphael Mann. She didn’t know that was his name, but given enough incentive and cause, she probably could have come up with it. He was so swarthy and windblown and chiseled he could easily have been the model on a cheesy Romance cover. She found her eyes drifting off in his direction periodically over the course of Colin’s accounting-driven conversation style.

“Excuse me,” she found herself saying, “I’m gonna have to go powder my nose.”

She never got to the powder-room, though. Instead, she found herself drawn off in the direction she had seen Mr. Chiselchest wander a few minutes ago. This turn led her out onto a dark alley.

Shit. Why was she here?

“You are not lost,” a nonspecific European accent drawled behind her. “I knew you would come.”

Suddenly, she felt him behind her, hot breath on her neck, hands at her hips, fingers pressing past her skin—this was it. This was what she meant when she said she needed to get back out there!

“You wish me to stop?” he whispered, his words landing on her ears like silk, like smooth jazz.

“No,” she breathed, rolling her head back onto his shoulder.

“Good,” he said.

And then Katelyn felt pressure on her neck. A familiar pressure, at first, that reminded her of early boyfriends’ hickies and college roommates’ forays into kink, but then it didn’t stop there and suddenly there were needles like tines on a barbecue fork treating her neck like an eager virgin girl—

This wasn’t what she signed up for. But then, what else should she have expected from a late-night encounter in a dark alley behind a bar?

She grabbed the back of his head, his hair, trying to pry him off, but that only drove his daggers deeper.

“Stop!” she finally managed to whisper, and as soon as the word was out, she stopped feeling him. It was as though every part of his body stopped touching hers at the same time.

“I apologize,” he sulked. She turned around to him and at first, he wouldn’t even meet her eyes. “I saw you inside and I thought this was what you wanted. If I misestimated and got carried away…” Finally, his eyes met hers. “I am sorry.”

Then he vanished back into the building like smoke blending into the clouds.

Katelyn wasn’t sure about following her attacker back into the bar, but it was either that or brave the alley. And besides, she thought, I have a boring-but-safe date still waiting for me there. 

“Are you all right?” Colin voiced his concern, but she brushed him off. He paid while she anxiously darted her eyes around the room for the Vampire.

Vampire. Was that what she was calling him? Seemed fair enough.

“Could you walk me home?” she asked him, but then discovered his place was closer. “Could I bother you for a night-cap?” she blushed when he didn’t seem to be going in for a kiss.

What was she doing? She’d only just been assaulted—hadn’t she?—in the back alley of a bar, and now she was—what?

Reclaiming her agency, she told herself. That Vampire had taken liberties she hadn’t granted him, so now here she was mending her pride by taking charge with a guy who definitely wasn’t going to do it himself.

“Sorry I don’t have any wine,” said Colin, bringing her water.

“That’s okay.” She brushed his hand more than she had to, taking the glass from him, and found and held his gaze. This elicited an awkward chuckle.

“I like water more anyway,” he told her. “It’s good for the soul, you know?”

“Yeah,” she breathed, inching closer to him.

“It’s cleansing,” he told her, his voice shaking—no doubt from proximity to her. “And you want to be clean, don’t you?”

This seemed like an odd thing to say, making her frown, but it wasn’t as odd as seeing him whip out a knife and stab her with it.

She had just enough time to scream before it pierced her belly.

I knew it! some part of her brain belted. I knew he was too fucking nice to be true!

She slashed at his face with one set of manicured nails and then caught his head in the other hand and sank both her thumbs into his eyes. Now he was the one screaming.

She slid off the couch, trying to gauge her next move, but then there was a knock at the door.

“Are you all right?” came a familiar European accent.

“Who the fuck are you?” Katelyn screamed.

“Is he dead?” the Vampire asked, sounding relieved.

Just then, Colin answered by blindly shrieking and launching himself in her general direction. Without thinking, Katelyn pulled the knife out of her gut and plunged it deep into his chest. Shit, she thought, realizing too late that removing the knife had been a bad idea. She could feel herself bleeding out.

“Is he dead?” Raphael Mann yelled through the door again.

“Yes,” Katelyn whispered.

In the blink of an eye, the room was filled with shards of the door and her previous attacker was cradling her head in his lap.

“My darling,” he coo’d, “I am sorry, but I must bite you now.”

“Will I become one of you?” she found herself asking.

“If that is what you want,” he said. “Something terrible has happened to you. Now, the choice is yours. Your life can be over now, or you can become a monster. Or, if you are brave and dedicated, you can recover. You can never be who you once were, but perhaps… perhaps you can be better.”