The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 612: 612 | I Have a Door

I blinked. “How do you know there’s a card?”

“She always leaves a card.” He waited, and his tail swept once behind him. A kid on a bike swerved around it without looking up from his phone.

I dug into my jacket and put the black card in his hand. Next to his claws it looked tiny, a flimsy rectangle with a green snake biting its own tail. The lipstick kiss in the corner was dark plum, matte, and very much out of place on dollar-store card stock. Dralun turned it over once and then back again. His jaw worked, and a low sound rolled out of his chest that I couldn’t classify as any of the three grunts Ophelia had taught me.

“Lamia,” he said.

“That’s her name?”

“That’s what she calls herself.” He tucked the card into a vest pocket and patted it flat. “Nineteen. Branded, full serpentine expression. Zero-friction dermal layer. She’s been on my block since she was twelve and stealing from it since she was thirteen.”

“She told me to say hi to you.”

His eyes flicked back up to mine. “What else.”

“She said the laundromat’s dryer number four is eating quarters again.” I shrugged. “She said you’d know what that meant.”

For the first time since I’d walked up the black stairs, Dralun’s face did something I could read. The exhaustion under his eyes shifted. It wasn’t much, just the slightest tightening at the corners, like someone had pressed a button inside his head that changed the channel from weary resignation to something more immediate. The corner of his mouth twitched upward just enough to disturb the scar tissue near his good horn. It wasn’t a smile. It wasn’t anywhere close to one. It was the expression of a man who had been waiting for a phone call he knew was coming and had just heard the line finally ring.

He turned without a word and started walking back toward Halverson.

I looked at Ophelia, whose parasol was still propped against her shoulder. She looked back at me with those cool grey eyes ringed in enough black liner to qualify as a defensive perimeter. Then she looked past me to Dralun’s retreating tail, already twenty feet ahead and growing. Her shoulders dropped like someone had pulled the air out of her.

“He does that,” she said. The theatricality had thinned out in her voice. “He just leaves in the middle of conversations and expects everyone to follow him like ducklings. It’s gross.”

“Are we following him?”

“Obviously we’re following him, gold boy. Do you think I want to stay here and smell smoke? The aesthetic is already ruined.” She hopped off the bench. Her spiked boots hit the concrete hard enough to echo. The skirt flared on the landing, which was an observation I registered purely for tactical awareness purposes. I aimed my eyes at a streetlight so hard that my neck complained. She caught me doing it and sniffed. “Plus one. For the streetlight thing.”

“I’m at negative one nineteen, by the way.”

“You’re at negative one twenty. I rounded.”

We walked four blocks back to Halverson behind a dragon who did not slow down for either of us. Ophelia kept her parasol open the entire time and made me walk on the street side, claiming that Mr. Stitches got carsick near traffic. The Eastside had gone blue in the early dark, and the neon signs were waking up one letter at a time. The bodega was still playing salsa, and the old man from the barbershop was still sitting outside on his folding chair. He saw Dralun coming and raised a hand without looking up from his newspaper.

“Buenas, lagarto,” he called.

Dralun grunted once. The old man seemed satisfied with that.

“Everybody knows him,” I said.

“Everybody hates him,” Ophelia corrected. “And everybody calls him when the building’s on fire, so it evens out.” She spun the parasol against her shoulder. “Grandma says he’s the only licensed Hero who still lives east of the river. The rest live in Creston and drive over when they’re scheduled.”

“How many are scheduled?”

“Two agencies cover this district.” Her voice lost some of its brightness. “One of them is him, and the other one takes fourteen minutes to show up.”

I thought about the scanner in the office and the red pins on the wall map. I thought about two people in costumes on a Tuesday nine years ago, answering a call in this same grid of streets, and how long the backup took to arrive. The second heartbeat under my sternum pushed outward once, slow and patient, and I pressed two fingers against my chest until it settled.

Ophelia noticed. Her grey eyes tracked my hand and then slid away, and she said nothing, which I appreciated more than I would ever admit to a girl who carried a stuffed bear as a moral authority.

The laundromat at 1147 Halverson was still locked, and the handwritten sign still told me not to knock. Dralun ignored the sign and the lock. He walked around the side of the building to a steel door I hadn’t noticed on my four earlier passes, pressed his palm flat against the frame, and pushed. Something inside clicked, and the door swung inward on hinges that had been oiled recently.

“You have a key?” I asked.

“I have a door.” He stepped through and ducked his horns under the frame.

The inside of the laundromat was dark and smelled of dryer sheets and old lint. Two rows of front-loading washers ran down the middle, their round windows staring at us from the gloom. Along the back wall stood eight industrial dryers stacked two high. Somebody had spray-painted numbers onto their doors in white, and the four on the fourth dryer had been painted twice, once in white and once in bright acid green.

Ophelia flicked on the lights. The tubes overhead stuttered and caught, and I winced at the glare.

“I hate this room,” she announced. “The lighting is a crime against my skin.”

Dralun walked straight to dryer number four and crouched in front of it. His tail curled around his boots to keep from knocking over a laundry cart. He didn’t open it right away. He pressed his palm against the steel door and held it there for a long moment, and I realized he was listening.

“Is it going to bite?” I asked.

“It’s a dryer, Belmont.”

“Everything in this district has bitten you at least once.”