The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 608: 608 | The Rules of the Ride-Along

Delancey sat four blocks east of Lin’s, and Dralun walked the whole distance. He never broke into a run. His pace forced me into a half-jog to keep up, and people on the sidewalk stepped off the curb before he reached them, a courtesy they seemed to have learned a long time before I showed up. His tail swung behind him in lazy arcs that cleared a newspaper box by an inch every time.

A man selling phone chargers from a card table called out his name as we passed. Dralun grunted once. Ophelia, clomping behind us in her spiked boots with the parasol furled under one arm and Mr. Stitches under the other, informed me that the grunt meant yes, even though nobody had asked a question.

“He’s saying hello,” she added. “He says hello to everybody on this block because he’s secretly a golden retriever wearing a dragon costume.”

“Keep talking and you’re walking home,” Dralun said.

“I live upstairs from the office, genius. I’m always walking home.”

The smoke hit me a block out. It wasn’t the clean campfire smell from the Crucible, where a thermal engineer had tuned every flame. This smoke carried melted vinyl siding and wet insulation, plus a chemical note I didn’t want to identify. It coated the back of my throat, and my eyes started watering before we turned the corner.

The building was a two-story duplex on the corner of Delancey and Fourth. The upstairs windows had gone orange, and black smoke rolled out of them in heavy sheets that climbed into a pale November sky. A single engine crew had parked out front, hoses unrolling across the asphalt. Six firefighters for an entire block. The neighbors had gathered on the opposite sidewalk in slippers and bathrobes, and one lady in a pink housecoat was filming on her phone and narrating to someone named Denise.

Dralun stopped at the curb across the street. He pointed one massive finger at a bus bench bolted to the sidewalk, its green paint peeling off in long strips.

“Stand right here and don’t move.”

“What happens if something comes up?”

“Then you watch it come up.” He turned his head, and those tired brown eyes pinned me to the bench from three feet away. I had faced down a twelve-foot monster with six horns and no Core. This look landed harder than that thing’s palm. “You’re provisional, Belmont. You touch nothing and you help nobody. If I see gold, I’m driving you back up the hill myself, and I don’t own a car.”

He crossed the street before I could make a joke about that. The firefighters parted for him, and a captain in a white helmet shouted something about the back stairwell. Dralun nodded once, walked straight through the front door into the smoke, and the building swallowed him.

I stood at the bench.

The pink housecoat lady told Denise that the dragon had gone in, and that the dragon always went in. Ophelia perched on the backrest of the bench next to me, legs crossed at the ankle, and opened her parasol against a sky that held no sun whatsoever.

“You look like a golden retriever too,” she said. “Except the kind somebody leaves tied up outside the grocery store.”

“I’m observing. It’s a major part of my field placement.”

“You’re pouting, and it’s gross, and you’re minus ninety-five now.”

Across the street, a skinny guy in a Raiders jersey started heckling the firefighters. He wanted to know why the Hero on this side of the river was a lizard when the Strand got Radiant and the Strand got movie stars. He had a tallboy in a paper bag and a lot of opinions. Ophelia sighed the long sigh of a woman who’d been interrupted during a manicure.

She snapped her fingers.

A pink bat the size of a sparrow tore itself out of the air above her palm and flitted across Delancey. It flew straight into the man’s chest and out through his back in a small spray of glitter. He stopped mid-sentence and sat down on the curb. Then he put his face in his hands and started telling his beer that he should have called his sister back in August.

“Did he ask for that?” I said.

“He asked for it in spirit.” She twirled the parasol. “That’s a thousand cute points for me, and zero for you, because you’re still standing there like furniture.”

She had a point, and I hated it. I had four constructs that could pull a family of five off a second floor without touching the stairs. I had a Legendary stick in an inventory nobody could scan and a lightning cloak the entire country had watched on repeat. My current job consisted of holding a bus bench down so the wind wouldn’t take it. ℯℯ𝑙.

Dralun came out the front door carrying an old man over one shoulder and a cat carrier in his other hand. The cat inside was screaming at a volume that suggested it held the dragon personally responsible. He handed the old man to a paramedic and the carrier to the pink housecoat lady. Then he went back in.

The engine crew got a hose line up the front steps. Water turned to steam against the siding, and the orange in the upstairs window dimmed toward a sullen red. The interface cracked open in the corner of my vision to congratulate me on my progress.

[OBSERVATION: Host has remained stationary for eleven minutes.]

[Host is currently providing zero value to anyone present.]

[Recommendation: Continue. Dralun can see you from the window.]

I glanced up. He could, in fact, see me from the window. His horned silhouette stood framed in steam, and the glare survived all the way across the street.

I sat down on the bench.

That was when I saw the movement next door.

The duplex shared an alley with a squat brick building on the far side, a pawn shop with a hand-painted sign reading DELANCEY GOLD & LOAN over barred windows. The alley between the two buildings was dark, full of smoke that drifted down from the fire and pooled low. In that smoke, something climbed the brick wall of the pawn shop.

I call it climbing because I don’t have a better verb. It didn’t grip anything or reach for handholds. A slim black shape went up the vertical brick like somebody had tilted the wall ninety degrees and made it a floor. It slid a hand along the surface, then a knee, then a hip, and the body followed in one long curving pull. I watched it reach the gutter and roll over the lip onto the roof, and the only sound it made was a squeak, high and rubbery, like a sneaker on a gym floor.

A bag hung from its shoulder, and the bag was full.

I looked at the duplex. Dralun had disappeared from the window again, deep in the smoke and busy. Ophelia had turned sideways on the bench to film the crying heckler for what she called her content. The firefighters had their hands full and every neighbor had their eyes on the flames.

Dralun had told me to watch. He never said which direction.