Two months after the accident, Chris quit his job and moved six hours away to San Francisco.
It had taken two weeks to recover physically, four days for the changes to manifest, another week of experimenting to fully map out the extent of them, and the remaining month-and-change to practice making them happen when he wanted and not happen when he didn’t.
It had taken a morning to pack everything he cared about from his shitty little studio apartment into his car, an afternoon to cart the rest to the nearest Goodwill, and the rest of the day to kiss LA traffic goodbye. He’d held up his middle finger out the window for good measure, as the I-5 took him up through Santa Clarita and beyond.
His new place in SF was almost as shitty and almost as expensive, with the added bonus of steep hills, fog, and roommates. His new job was much the same, meaning office buzzwords cobbled together to describe a workday full of answering emails, reading spreadsheets, and coming up with new and creative ways to agree with everyone in meetings while sounding like he was contributing. In his free time, he braved the hills and the fog just to run through San Francisco’s narrow, uneven streets. A few more months of this, and his calves would look like they did back in high school track and field.
By night, his runs took on a different purpose.
He’d settled in… not the best neighborhood, but that was by design. He wasn’t a powerless kid anymore, running and cowering while someone else fought battles for the good of everyone. He was the fighter now, the defender, the one with power and all the responsibilities that came with it.
By moonlight, he patrolled his new home. He had his work cut out for him; the streets were crawling with criminals: muggers and predators lurking in the shadows, waiting to prey on anyone unlucky enough to be caught out at night. It made sense; San Francisco had only two heroes to its name, and they probably had bigger problems, deadlier threats to tackle.
He bloomed with pride the first time he sent a guy running without having to start a fight. It had taken less than a week for the lowlifes in the area to learn to fear him. He hoped, fervently, that Hazard would be proud of him.
When he finally got his chance to find out, it was a complete accident.
He was in line at the bank, because his employer refused to do direct deposit and only gave out physical paychecks. It was well into October, and Chris was not trying to catch the usual fall cold, so he was masked. Thank God he was masked, or he might not have chanced it when it happened.
One moment he was filling out a deposit slip; the next, he was crouching under the table while a man in a balaclava fired a gun at the ceiling. People screamed. The single security guard, well past retirement age, stood frozen at gunpoint while a second masked robber relieved him of his phone and taser.
There were two of them, possibly more outside in whatever getaway vehicle waited for them. They worked quickly, frantically, snarling at tellers to empty cashboxes. Chris waited on bated breath. The robbers were in a hurry. Probably because if they didn’t finish quickly enough—
The bank door opened. The robber guarding the security guard turned toward the figure that stepped through, and had time to do exactly nothing before the figure blasted him across the room with a deafening yell.
Chris watched, wide-eyed, as Howler stepped into the bank, dressed in bright gold and angry red, a cagelike muzzle guarding the lower half of her face. The second robber swung his gun around to aim at her, only for it to misfire in his hands.
It misfired twice more before a series of muted cracks rang out. The robber yelled, face splattered with bright purple paint, before another staccato shout from Howler incapacitated him.
It was all very neat and well-practiced until, from Chris’s vantage point, he spotted one of the kneeling bank customers, hood up with dark sunglasses and a facemask, slip a handgun from his pocket, and take aim at Howler’s back.
The almost-two-months of practice paid off. It had taken almost that long just to stop feeling nauseous at the sensation of bones and cartilage shifting and rearranging in his face. By the time his muzzle was fully formed, he had already snapped it shut around the would-be gunman’s wrist. The gun still went off, but the shot went wide. By the time Howler reached them, the third robber was pinned firmly to the ground by a hulking seven-foot wolfman.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Hi!” Chris said brightly, kicking the gun out of reach. “Big fan.”
Howler opened her mouth to reply, before the entrance door opened again, and a masked face in purple and black poked in. Chris’s jaw dropped at the sight of him, which was unfortunate, because his tongue had a way of just kind of flopping out if he didn’t keep his mouth shut in this form.
“Cops are almost here,” Hazard, the fucking Hazard, called out to them. “We should—what the fuck.”
“It’s cool, he’s friendly,” Howler called back. To Chris she muttered. “You better come with. Stay like that until we’re away from the security cameras.”
Howler was inviting him along. Hazard’s partner Howler. Holy shit. Chris was so glad his tail was caught in his pants, because it was desperately trying to wag.
He’d done it. After all these years, he’d made it. The dream was real.
***
At the beginning of his freshman year, Chris had tried out for track and field. He’d missed the varsity team by the skin of his teeth, and breezed into it the following year, shaving off his runtimes little by little until he could run circles around anyone else on the team. He loved track, loved running—he had since taking the track and field unit in seventh grade, when he’d taken off on the hundred-meter dash and felt himself fly ahead of his classmates. He’d crossed the finish a solid three seconds before the next-fastest kid, and he’d been chasing that high ever since.
And then, in senior year, varsity track and field got just a little bit shittier.
He was doing warm-up stretches on the blacktop, limbs buzzing with limber energy, when a shadow fell across morning practice. He looked up, swallowing a groan when he saw who it was.
“Oh, great,” Robby muttered. “What the hell is he doing here?”
Joel Durante, the second biggest asshole at Ramsey High, stood at the edge of the track, eyes raking over the whole team with his usual flat, judgmental stare. Coach Whately was making his way over, clipboard in hand, and Chris braced himself for the inevitable fallout when he told Joel to get lost. But instead, Coach said something that Chris didn’t quite catch, marked something on his clipboard, and motioned Joel toward the rest of them.
Joel’s eyes landed on Chris just for a moment, before he dropped into a hamstring stretch noticeably deeper than what Chris could manage even on a good day. Any chance that Coach Whately might realize his mistake and kick Joel off the team was destroyed when Joel came in second on their first run of the day, forcing Chris into a near-panicked sprint just to stay ahead on the last few yards.
“Not a bad first showing, Durante,” Coach said. “Varnham, good save.”
Someone—probably Travis Hui—snickered behind him. Chris’s ears burned with embarrassment. Good save. He’d nearly lost his top spot on the first day of senior year, and everyone knew it. Joel looked up and caught Chris’s eye, a smug smile pasted across his face.
After practice, Chris emerged from the locker room with fresh clothes and damp hair, and gritted his teeth when he found Pearl Watanabe scowling at him from the blacktop. Great, he thought. And there’s the first biggest asshole.
Before he or Pearl could say anything, Joel shouldered past him to join his crony.
“Took your sweet time,” Pearl barked. “I’m sweating like a pig out here, and I’m not even the one running.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on.”
“How’d you do?”
God, how did Joel manage to fit that much cocky asshole into one shrug? “Almost beat Chris on the first run. If you bothered to watch, you would’ve seen it.”
“Call me when you actually kick his ass,” Pearl snorted. Chris saw red, just in time to meet her eyes over Joel’s shoulder. “The fuck are you looking at?”
“Hey, unlike you, I’m actually supposed to be here,” Chris retorted. “You don’t like me looking at you, then go stand somewhere else.”
“Watch it, Varnham,” Joel said, without looking over his shoulder. “She’s with me.”
Chris ground his teeth. Other team members were behind him, either stepping out of the locker room or hanging back to watch. Just like that, on day one, Joel was gunning for him hard. Trying to take his top spot on the team hadn’t been enough; now he was trying to make him look like an idiot in front of his teammates, too.
He hated how small it made him feel.
“Hey, nobody wants you here either, Durante,” Robby snapped, and for a moment Chris’s heart lifted. “I don’t even know why you bothered trying out.”
Pearl lunged forward, teeth bared, but Joel stopped her. “Don’t bother,” Chris heard him mutter. “He’s not worth your time.”
Protective fury rose in Chris’s chest—Robby was his best friend since kindergarten, he was worth ten of Joel and twenty of Pearl put together—but the two of them were already walking away. Chris sighed with relief, cherishing the feeling of triumph.
“Thanks,” he murmured, and Robby simply knocked their shoulders together.
It was a shitty start to the morning, capped off by an even shittier afternoon: halfway through lunch, the lights in the cafeteria went out, the acrid smell of ozone filled the air, and the sound of skittering legs sent students scrambling for the exits.
Chris tripped over a chair while making his own way out, heart in his throat as he heard the scuttling come nearer. Spidertaurs—why did it have to be the fucking spidertaurs again—
Chris wasn’t sure who had coined the term—Eddie Tran got laughed at for calling them “driders” because he played Dungeons and Dragons like a fucking nerd—but someone had, and it had stuck. Spider on the bottom, human on the top. The fangs were the thing to watch out for, but the human parts were always armed.
Like the one currently charging directly at him, a trident gripped in either hand.
Chris had all of two minutes to contemplate his own mortality before the spidertaur’s head jerked back, an arrow sticking out of its eye. Its body collapsed into dust inches away from Chris; one of the tridents ripped through his jacket sleeve before it clattered to the floor.
A blur of purple and black flashed by from behind Chris, close enough for him to feel the air displaced. In an instant his fear vanished, and his heart lifted at the side of a familiar dark purple coat. Hazard was here, and that meant everything was going to be fine.
One of the other spidertaurs rounded on the figure with a snarl, spear raised to throw. Hazard reached it before it had the chance, grabbing the spear just short of the blade and using it to swing around onto the monster’s back. It was dust before Chris could blink, and Hazard was off to deal with the next one.
Chris watched, awestruck. He’d known about heroes before. A lot of major cities had at least one of their own—rumors, first, then mysterious celebrities. Bright and flashy and powerful enough to defend thousands of people from anything from muggers to the things that crawled through the veil.
Ramsey High didn’t have thousands of people. Hazard wasn’t bright or flashy; his costume was an old thrift store coat and cobbled-together sports gear, his arsenal was whatever he could steal off the monsters he fought.
But he got the job done.
Within moments, the spidertaurs were dust. Hazard stood in the empty cafeteria, shoulders heaving as he caught his breath. Chris stepped toward him, only to freeze when Hazard held up a hand.
For a moment, Chris thought the roof was caving in. Dark gray dust, the same that the monsters had been made of, descended from above, throwing shadows over the entire room. The few students who hadn’t fled screamed. Chris found his back pressed against the wall, staring at the formless, shifting entity in mute horror.
It wasn’t every day the Eidolon got pissed enough to show up in person.
“You again,” Countless mouths opened within the gray, flickering orange like the mouths on a jack o’lantern. “This land and its power are mine, insect.”
“Buddy, we’re trying to go to school here,” Hazard said flatly. He fired the crossbow, shooting out one of the mouths.
The Eidolon surged down. “I will take it if I have to rip it bloody from under your corpse.”
Three more shots, and three more mouths went out like candle flames. Hazard met Chris’s eyes from across the room and jerked his head. Chris ran, because what else could he do? But one day.
One day he was going to stand and fight, too.
