Archive of Our Own ^beta

I’ll bury you good and straight and right.

-- “Flood on the Floor,” Purity Ring

"Batgirl," Claire says. "Go to the plane."

Immediate resistance. "It's not two o'clock yet--"

Claire fixes her under a Batwoman glare, whited-out lenses impenetrable in the darkness.

Emma harrumphs and fires a grapple. With one last glance over her shoulder that is mostly obscured by her mask, anyway, she jumps over the lip of the roof.

Batwoman waits until she has disappeared past the curve of the Campbell building before turning. "Come out, Alex."

The sneer in Alex's voice is almost a tangible thing, even if the helmet concealing her face reveals nothing of her expression. "It's Hood."

"Why not 'Helmet'?" Batwoman suggests.

Silence answers her. She can picture Alex's unimpressed stare, though, the one that was fixed on her all the many times she was home from college and getting into fights with Dean as Alex looked on, angry and unable to understand how someone who had been Batgirl could be angry at Dean.

How the tables have turned.

"What do you want?"

Alex sets a gloved hand on top of the holstered gun at her thigh.

"Business, then," Batwoman says. "You in over your head on something?"

"I'm hearing things," Alex says.

Claire stiffened at this. Images flashing through her head of seeing Alex when she was first back, when blood streamed from her temples where she had clawed at her scalp and ears with her newly clawed hands, trying to tear out the parts of herself that weren't her anymore. She has dead's man blood darts in her belt, but she doesn't know if Alex will ever forgive her if she uses them.

(She hates Dean, in this moment, for leaving her to deal with this alone.)

Alex must sense the direction of her thoughts. A dark humorless smile twists her voice. "Not that kind of hearing things." The smile leaves her voice. "People are saying Ma—Celia's here."

Claire keeps very still through a great effort of will.

"If she is—" Alex's voice almost trembles with rage. "Stay the fuck out of it."

"You know I can't do that."

"You will," Alex says. Pure force and threat. "If you know what's best for Dean Jr."

Batwoman stiffens. She opens her mouth beneath the cowl—

Hood is gone.

When she gets back to the Batjet, Emma eyes her suspiciously. "What were you doing?"

"None of your beeswax," says Claire, and ruffles her hair. She gets one good swipe in before Emma growls and knocks her hand away.

Bobby comes down and finds her sitting in front of the Batcomputer after Emma has gone up to her room. Her leg crossed over one knee, hand at her chin, eyes unfocused.

"Time for bed, Miss Claire."

She stirs, glancing up. "What, no hot chocolate to tuck me in?"

"I'm thinking of your teeth," he says dryly. "You're welcome."

Claire smiles slightly, standing up. "Where's Charlie?"

"She went to Titans Tower…" Bobby trails off suggestively.

"Or so she says," Claire translates. She sighs, digging her knuckles into her forehead. "She mad at me?"

"Not that she said to me," Bobby says. He puts a hand on her shoulder. "We all gotta deal with loss in our own ways."

"I know," she says. "Just—" It's too whiney to say that she knows they all have to deal with loss, but she's the one who has to deal with wearing Dean's cowl and raising Dean's kid and running Dean's company. It’s—

Bobby's hand tightens. "Go to bed, Claire."

"I saw Alex tonight."

Bobby stiffens.

"She said Celia's back in town."

Bobby is quiet for another moment. Then he says, "All the more reason for you to get some sleep."

The next morning Bobby pulls the Royce up in front of Campbell Enterprises. "I'll pick Emma up from the school today," Claire says as she opens the door, extending her leg carefully to get out. She's in Blahniks today, a pull in her hamstring reminding her of an ill-judged jump she made last night.

"Oh good," Bobby says. "That'll give me a chance to catch up on Days of Our Lives."

Emma goes to the very exclusive Gotham Preparatory Academy in central Gotham. Only the best for Dean Campbell's daughter. Retrieving students from the school requires fingerprint and retina scans but not a dress code, and Claire arrives in jeans and a navy blue hoodie, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail.

Emma eyes her as suspiciously as she had eyed her last night, her hazel eyes now exposed where before they had been covered by the white lenses of her mask. "Where's the drunkard?"

"Bobby had to go for his colonoscopy," Claire says.

Emma wrinkles her nose. Claire offers her hand, but Emma ignores it, charging ahead of her toward the security scanners and the doors outside them. Claire watches her, the swinging ponytail, black knee socks and pleated uniform skirt, remembering her sister's red ponytail, her second hand My Little Pony knapsack. She had written her name on the front in big Sharpie letters (A N N A) so Claire couldn’t steal it and pretend it was hers.

Emma stops outside, waiting expectantly to be escorted to one of the gleaming cars idling in the round-about. Claire keeps walking, instead, down the street, and Emma frowns, then trots to charge ahead of her. "Where are we going?"

Someone steps around the corner.

"You," Emma says. She backsteps, colliding with Claire's legs.

Alex eyes them both with her dark gaze. Yellow flecks the circumference of her irises. Claire curls an arm around Emma, moving in front of her to place herself between her and Alex.

Emma's nostrils are flared, her eyes huge, and the skin at the edges of them is starting to blush dark. "You're Jones."

Alex gives an insincere smirk. "The one and only."

Emma wheels on Claire. "No one told me she was a vampire." Further realization lights up her eyes. "Last night--you were talking to her!"

"Jealous?" Alex says.

Emma is white with something. "Take me home," she commands Claire.

Claire hands over her keys, lips compressed. Emma beeps the fob, and the red Romero two parallel parking spaces down beeps. Emma stalks toward it.

Claire turns back to Alex, who still looks mocking. Her arms are crossed over her chest in her too-big black leather jacket.

"There were better ways to do that," she says quietly.

Alex shrugs. "She needs to know the kind of company you keep."

"What company?” Claire says. “My sister?”

Alex says nothing.

"That's what you are, Alex. None of this changed that."

Alex's mouth twists.

"Look—" Claire takes an aborted step forward. "I need help."

Alex gives a jerk of her chin, a go on.

"Crowley's planning a big bank heist," Claire says, low. "He's got Raphael involved. Gotham PD'll suffer a lot of casualties if it goes through—"

"Where's your other sidekick?" Alex sneers.

An expression flashes across Claire's face like a flinch.

"Huh," Alex says. She steps back, thumbs in her pocket. "Comm me the info."

"How—" Claire begins, but Alex steps off the curb into traffic, neatly dodging a bicycle messenger, and melts into the pedestrians streaming down the other side of the street.

"Fuck," Claire mutters under her breath. She crosses to the Romero, sliding into the front seat next to a silent, flame-eyed Emma.

She flips down the visor for her sunglasses. A Post-It flutters down. There's a comm frequency written on it.

“No one told me my father’s second apprentice had been Turned.”

Batwoman is careful not to let her hands falter as she presses the ignition button for the Tumbler. She can still taste the leftover macaroni and cheese she ate for breakfast this morning, a little bit of noodle stuck between one of her molars. It was the same thing Dean used to make for them on the nights Bobby wasn’t there to make dinner, except Dean made it with corkscrew noodles and real cheese, not from a box. Sometimes she did her homework there at the table with the bowl steaming beside her as he worked on something of his own, a mug of coffee sitting at his elbow beside the food. Other times she did her homework in his study with him, or in the cave, between the legs of the T-rex while he sat at the computer. Emma disappears upstairs to do hers, and doesn’t reappear until it’s time for dinner.

“It’s not my story to tell.”

She’s not sure if it’s the right thing to say. She’s pretty sure that it isn’t the fair thing to say, but whether that fairness, or unfairness, is to Emma or to Alex or to both isn’t as clear.

Though the cowl limits her peripheral vision, she can see that the line of Batgirl’s mouth through the fabric of her mask is tightly drawn. She doesn’t say anything, and that makes Batwoman say: “She wasn’t a vampire until after.”

It wasn’t just you, she wants Emma to understand. You are not the problem. You are not a problem.

Emma would just shrug off any comforting touch Claire tried to give her, she knows. So she holds the steering wheel tighter, and tells Batgirl to comm ahead so Bobby has food waiting.

The kid moves more like Batman than Claire does. Her movements are swift and controlled, close to the ground, although Dean did that to take advantage of his center of gravity, and the kid’s likely doing it because of her height. Alex shifts on her elbows, flat against the gravel-covered rooftop in her leather jacket, tilting her binoculars. She’s lost sight of the new Batgirl more than once already tonight, even with her helmet removed to improve her field of vision; Batwoman keeps backflipping into the way. Maybe it’s intentional on Batwoman’s part, keeping attention on herself in order to keep it away from Batgirl, or maybe it’s just because that’s how Claire was trained from birth in the Big Top, to snatch attention and not let it slide away.

Sirens wail into earshot. Alex releases her gaze from Batgirl’s small dark shape to flick her attention down to the ground. The squad cars are fishtailing to stops on the empty asphalt under the streetlights; officers in matte black vests jumping out. One of them is familiar, shouting an order to the rest of them as she draws her firearm.

One of Crowley’s henchmen positioned as a watchman in one of the windows midway down the bank building takes aim at her.

Alex squeezes her trigger. The back of his skull explodes in a spray of dark blood. The man positioned a few windows down shouts, then begins to spray subautomatic bullets up into Alex’s general direction. Shouts burst from the cops on the ground, Commissioner Mills’ above all of them (“Get DOWN!”). Alex squeezes her trigger once, twice more, and the second hired gun drops, slumping forward over the window sill. His upper body hangs there a minute; then it slides forward one inch. Then another. Then, as the subautomatic rifles slips from his limp hands, the weight drags the body forward. It plummets.

“Don’t move!” Alex hears Mills shout at her officers. She’s already racing in a low crouch to the opposite side of the roof and jumping over it, the arch of her jump line swinging her to the Michaels Corporation building and then, as she releases it, to the ground.

She hits the sidewalk running. Cold night air, the throb of blood in her chest and her ears, the pound of her boots on pavement. Then: rounding the corner of the building. The back entrance of the bank, the loading dock, and the get-away van parked in the service entrance. Three SUVs flank it, hooded men piling into them as the van’s engine rumbles to life.

A man in black bursts out of the service entrance door. He shouts orders to the men piling into the SUVs. He is looking back over his shoulder as he scrambles up into the van; his scent is scared.

Gunfire erupts, peppering the brick and plaster walls of the bank. Sirens wail up behind Alex, and the gunfire splits to spray the street behind her. She stays flattened against the wall, hidden in the shadow of a dumpster, and doesn’t turn back to look when she hears the screech of brakes and feels the shudder of an impact traveling through the cement of the streets up the soles of her boots. There is the scent of blood. It makes her hands tremble a fraction as she pulls a fresh magazine out of her jacket and reloads her gun. More shouting, more bursts of blood reaching her nose; she leans around the corner of the building and takes careful aim as the van barrel toward her.

One wheel explodes, then the other. The van careens to the right. It smashes into the SUV flanking it on that side. Then they both slam into the half wall separating the bank’s service entrance from the rest of the street.

A cacophony of twisting metal and breaking glass. Burning rubber, fractured concrete, metallic blood. Alex flips up onto a fire escape as her mouth waters. She catches the glimpse of two caped shadows emerging from the bank’s service entrance fifty feet away as cops stream onto the scene, a man staggers out of the van’s wreckage, and a stand-off begins.

Her mouth is watering, her mouth is watering, and she does not stay to watch.

Hours later she gets to her safe house. Peeling off her helmet and throwing it onto the bed. It rolls across the mattress before coming to a stop. She eyes it in hatred and turns to the bathroom, stripping off the Kevlar-enforced vest over her head for a shower. She avoids her reflection in the mirror over the sink as she strips, the patchwork of scars holding her chest and belly together, the deep twin punctures like a brand of possession on her neck.

Hot shower, scalding shower. Cold sheets, the helmet shoved off her bed to land with a heavy thunk on the floor, rolling under the bed.

Falling asleep only to wake in a cold sweat, her hair slick with perspiration and her shower. Mama here, in Gotham, maybe miles, maybe feet, away, and Alex’s body twisting into knots in response to her presence, preparing itself for its Maker. Or maybe it’s only her own anxiety doing it, terror pulling at her nerves and her guts, urging her to wake up and to run.

She crawls out of bed, pulling on pants, a bra. A jacket over them both, wrapped tight around her stomach. There are some documentaries on Netflix she hasn’t worked her way through yet.

She senses the darker shape in the living room the moment she steps out of her bedroom. Hot saliva rushes into her mouth.

Charlie steps out of the shadow-filled corner. She’s in the old Batgirl costume, Alex’s Batgirl costume.

Alex can barely see past the rage that reddens her vision. “Get out.”

Charlie’s face looks haggard under the domino. “I need to talk to you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Alex. It’s for Dean.”

“Dean’s dead.”

Something animalistic flashes through Charlie’s eyes. “I need to know how they brought you back.”

Every part of Alex goes cold and sweaty. “Get out.”

Charlie’s fists clench. “You don’t—” she begins, but before she can get any further, Alex is on her. Yanking her head back by her hair, seizing her arm and slamming her face-first into the wall. Charlie fights, snapping her head into Alex’s face and stomping on her instep, but she’s no match for Alex’s inhuman strength. Alex crushes her face-first against the wall, breathing raggedly against the fury boiling in her eyes, her veins.

“I’ll kill you,” she hisses into Charlie’s ear. “Did that not come across the first time? I’ll take a crowbar to your skull and leave you choking on your own brains.”

Charlie stiffens. The scent of her pity is a sharper scent than that of her terror, more acrid in Alex’s nose, and she lets go of her abruptly, stepping back.

Charlie turns. The skin under her eye is already darkening to purple, her lip split and bleeding down her chin.

Alex takes another step back. “You wanna help?” she says hoarsely. “Go back to Claire and pull your fucking weight.”

- - -

Dean didn’t want her to be Batgirl. Alex was the one who sneaked into the Batcave when she thought he was off-planet with the League, who took Claire Novak’s abandoned purple Batgirl costume out of the case and pulled its sleek gloves over her fingers, strapped the Nomex vest in place around her ribs. Sparring with the dummies in the Cave were different with the weight of the armor on her, with the cape flapping around her elbows and knees: She dropped, and lunged, and spun, and—

Met Dean’s eyes.

The wooden dummy spun to a slow halt behind her.

“I,” Alex began. Feeling suddenly stupid and embarrassed and ashamed. And scared. Always, always, the fear that she was going to be kicked back into the streets. She hated that she was scared of that; that she had somehow become the kind of person who was willing to put food and a bed before her own dignity. Dean didn’t own her.

“Put it away.”

She didn’t. “I wanna go out with you.”

“Tough shit.” He pulled back the cowl and strode down off the landing pad to the computer console. He sat abruptly, cape sweeping out and settling behind him.

Alex made her way up the stairs from the training area. “You let Claire do it.”

“I’m not gonna ask again, Alex.”

“Fine,” she seethed, and ripped off the gloves. The vest and the cape, too, and slung them all to the floor, crumpled heap. She made an obscene gesture at Dean with her finger and almost, almost spat on the pile of costume on the floor behind him. A sense of self-preservation or an awe of Claire, or him, stopped her, and she stalked up the stairs to the manor instead, studiously ignoring Bobby calling her name from the kitchen and making her way outside, down the stupid rich marble front steps and down the gravel-paved driveway.

She didn’t belong there. She never would.

“Hey,” Claire said when Alex finally picked up her cell phone that night. “Heard you and Papa Bat had a fight.”

Alex glared at the neon OPEN sign in the diner window below her. The insides of her fingers were red with rust from the old fire escape that used to be hers, before she had a bed to sleep in every night at Campbell Manor. There were cigarette butts that she didn’t recognize lying on the grate when she arrived, and the presence of something she didn’t know on that fire escape hit her like a kick to the jaw. Slid homesickness like a knife between her ribs.

“Look,” Claire said into the silence of Alex’s response. “I didn’t always…see eye to eye with Dean, growing up.”

Yeah, Alex wanted to say, that’s why he keeps your costume in the cave and makes moon eyes at it every night before he goes patrolling.

“Sometimes—” Claire hesitated, “you have to ask forgiveness. Not permission. You feel me?”

Alex set her teeth.

There was a street corner on the east side where pimps picked out foster kids they liked. In black sweat pants and a ski mask, wearing a filched pair of Claire’s old gauntlets, Alex crouched on the balcony of an empty tenement and watched. She waited until she saw one of the men she recognized from her pre-ward days.

Then she dropped.

One night, two, three. All coursing with exhilaration and the thrill of me, I broke his bones, he didn’t break mine. Such a head rush to be on the other side of the violence. She went out for a fourth and returned sweaty and exuberant and to Dean sitting in her desk chair.

The room was dark. He turned on the desk lamp. There was a tie loosened around his neck; he was wearing a tux and he smelled like expensive women’s perfume. He looked at her, and Alex looked back, through an eye that was starting to swell shut.

“Alex,” he said, and looked almost guilty. “This isn’t why I brought you here.”

“If I wanted to be locked in somewhere and bossed around, I could’ve gone to juvie,” Alex said.

Dean dropped his face into his hand. He kept it there for a second, breathing in and out, and then he finally looked back up at her. There was resignation in his eyes, but a sort of relief, too, and he looked younger than she’d ever realized he was.

“You’re sure,” he said. It was a question.

“Fucking positive,” she said. And followed him downstairs into the dark.

- - -

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Hood turns from surveying the Narrows. “What?” she retorts, although she’s pretty sure she knows.

Batwoman’s fist closes in her jacket. “You could have killed Charlie!” She bears Alex backward with a strength Alex wouldn’t have thought she had. Her helmet bounces off the metal of the rooftop duct.

“Dean’s dead!” Batwoman snarls. “You were dead! And now Charlie—are you trying to get rid of all of us?” She shakes Alex. “Do you hate him that much?”

“Did she tell you why she came to me?” It would be easy to escape Claire’s hold, but Alex lets the black gauntlet hold her there, against the wall. If she didn’t have her helmet on, she would be able to feel Claire’s breath on her lips, they’re so close. “Or did you not even bother asking?”

The white lenses of the cowl are impenetrable. Alex bares her teeth at the reflection in them.

“She wants to duplicate what happened to me.”

Batwoman’s heart skips. Alex can hear it, the skip and stumble and panicked rush, blood pounding at epinephrine-constricted capillaries.

“Exactly,” Alex says, and yanks out of her hold. “You’re welcome.”

She starts to walk away.

"She doesn't know."

Alex stops.

"We never told her," Batwoman says. "What you--"

Alex's lips part. Her fangs slide out. She says, without turning to face her, "What I am?"

"It wasn't our story to tell." The voice is Claire’s, not the Bat’s.

Alex licks her teeth and jumps over the side of the building.

She can't do anything right, it seems. Claire pinches the bridge of her nose coming out of a meeting; Adler and Michaels had been making a hell of a lot more satisfied-looking eye contact with each other across the table than she was comfortable with, and she has the feeling something is brewing between them that Charlie would already have picked up on and nipped in the bud if she was running Campbell Enterprises. Emma's teacher has sent home a concerned e-mail about one of her drawings at school, specifying that she would please like to speak to Mr. Campbell this time, whether he's out of the country on business or not, and Charlie still isn't answering any of her texts or calls. Or Batwoman's.

"I know that look," Bobby says as he pulls the Royce away from the curb.

"Do you?" Claire says tiredly. She can't remember Dean ever having a look that said he felt like shit at everything. The looks she remembered on him were distracted, focused, wistful. Pleased, occasionally. The rest were curves of mouth and jaw, the rest hidden by the cowl.

"Do you think," Bobby says, "maybe it's time to ask for help?"

Claire doesn’t say that she has. Nor that Alex has helped, in her way, and it’s only gotten people killed.

(Dean wouldn’t have asked Alex for help. Claire isn’t sure that is a mistake, after all.)

“There’s still Cas, y’know.”

Claire eyes the visible part of Bobby’s forehead and receding hairline in the rearview mirror. She doesn’t say anything, and after a minute Bobby’s forehead creases with the line that means his eyebrow is lifted in a judgmental way.

She looks away from it. “I’ll call,” she says, half promise. “If I can’t handle it. I will.”

Two more tabloids that day speculate on Dean Campbell’s continued absence from the Gotham nightlife—and from his other known haunts, which include London, L.A., Paris, and Buenos Aires. One says he’s on a gay honeymoon in New Zealand with Henry Cavill; another claims to have an eyewitness to his kidnapping by a local mob family. Claire just happens to have access to a preserved severed human finger, and she drops that off on the doorstep of the latter at the beginning of her patrol that night before proceeding to oversee Emma’s intervention in two muggings and one attempted carjacking.

Emma’s doing a lot better at controlling her strength these days, although in the case of these three she seems so contemptuous that it’s as if she doesn’t deem them worthy of her full strength rather than actively holding herself back. Claire lets herself get distracted by considering this fact as Emma zip-ties the carjacker, and misses the hidden switchblade that snicks out of the front of his boot until too late. He kicks out, slashing the front of Emma’s leg, and she gasps in shock, then lunges. His maxillary bone is protruding from his face and his right eye darkening with blood before Claire gets Emma off of him.

“Home!” she snaps. “Now!”

Emma’s face is hidden behind the black of her mask, but the betrayal rolling off her is palpable. She takes a step back.

“Did I stutter?” Batwoman snarls.

Batgirl makes a movement like she’s about to cross her arms defiantly. Then she reconsiders and takes another step back, instead, and stalks angrily to the edge of the roof.

“Roost,” Batwoman says into her cowl, “expect a landing.”

Bobby clicks the comm twice in acknowledgment. Claire turns her attention back to the perp. He’s not even as old as Alex, she sees when she crouches beside him and turns on her flashlight, his chin and jaw patchy with uncertain patches of stubble and his fingernails pale and scooped from malnutrition. His pulse is strong, and he focuses on her, though his gaze seems somewhat hazy, as she carefully palpates his skull for other fractures.

There are two burner phones in her belt. She uses one to call 911 and retreats to the rooftops until sirens enter the street.

Her pulse pounds. She feels it under her tongue, in the floor of her mouth. Her cheekbones sharp inside her face now that she knows what they look like poking outside. The furious unstoppable strength of Emma’s small body.

She isn’t sure how long the Batsignal has been lit before she registers it. She is many rooftops away from that siren-lit one when it finally filters into her vision, and then her awareness.

She hesitates a minute. Certain that it’s because someone realized, someone saw. It was Batgirl who perpetrated that carnage.

(There will be ultimatums. Stop her or we come after you. You stop or we come after her.)

She goes.

Mills is standing with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her fleece-lined jacket, zipped up to the chin. A hat with ear flaps is pulled snug over her head. The legs of her pants ripple in the wind.

“You called?” Batwoman says.

The wind carries her voice to Mills. The commissioner wheels around.

“’Bout time!” she says. “You know how long I’ve been out here freezing my ass off?”

Claire cranes her head to look. “It’s still there.”

Mills’ lips press together in the way that means she’s smothering a smirk. “Ha ha, smart ass.” Her eyes flick past the cape. “Where’s the kid?”

Batwoman says nothing.

Mills looks like she’s about to say something for a second, then she just shakes her head at herself. “Look,” she says, stepping forward. Her eyes bore into Claire’s, or try to, through the cowl’s lenses. “Be honest with me, kiddo. Are you handling things okay?”

Batwoman remains quiet.

Mills sighs again. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?”

Silence.

Mills unzips her jacket far enough to pull a manila folder out. She hands it to Batwoman, who takes it with a gloved hand.

“Put together by one of my beat cops,” Mills says as she opens it. “He keeps an eye on the undesirable, shall we say.”

Batwoman thumbs through the collection of papers and sketches. It’s good detective work. Disbelief ripples through her, followed by shame. How did she miss this?

“A whole lot of people have gone missing who haven’t been reported,” Jody says.

I’m hearing things.

Batwoman slides the papers back into the folder.

“Usually with this many people missing we’d have found some bodies by now,” Mills says into the silence. The wind nearly carries her words away. “Hate to say it, but I sure hope we find some soon.”

“I hope so, too.”

Mills raises an eyebrow. Batwoman detaches a compartment from her belt. She flips it open with her thumb and withdraws a syringe. She tosses it to Mills, who catches it and holds it up to the light of the Batsignal. Behind the dark red liquid, her expression is dubious.

“Do I wanna know?”

“If you need it,” Batwoman says, “you’ll know.”

On her way into the sewers, she goes back and forth. To call the Titans or not to call. Jesse would scoff at wading through sewage, but he’d be able to hover above it anyway, and even with an army of freshly-turned vamps at her disposal, Celia would have to have trouble dealing with a half-demon from Azarath. The same would go for Aaron or Hael. 

They would come if she asked them. It’s stupid to feel like she would be betraying Dean by bringing metas into his city. She doesn’t owe that to him. If she even owes anything to him at all, which she (knows she) does.

He never let her see Alex’s body. He must have had pictures of it, she knows, if only to torture himself with, to remind him of why Never Again. She never found them, despite nights spent in the cave, clouds of breath puffing from her mouth in the cold, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder to make sure he hadn’t come back in, that he wasn’t there to catch her trying to hack the mainframe. (And how it had fanned the flames of her resentment that there were still files, after all this time, that he had locked from her access. As if she didn’t deserve everything he had. As if she hadn’t earned it.)

Her boots clink quietly against the rungs of the ladder down which she climbs. Squelch quietly as she starts down the walkway lining the stream of waste, stooped slightly to keep the ears of the cowl from brushing the ceiling. She’s taller than she was the last time she came down into this section of the sewers, hunting Killer Croc with Batman. It was summer then, the air thick and oppressive, coated with the smell and taste of the sewage. She remembers the slight breeze that followed in Dean’s wake, from his swift soundless stride, and how she’d scampered along after him to catch it, felt it push through her hair to cool her sweaty scalp where it was exposed in the back beneath her cowl. Alex might have walked this same sewer with Dean, and Charlie too, and Claire feels a strange, stupid urge to bring Emma down here with her, someday when all this is over, and follow the footsteps of the Batgirls who came before her. Maybe it would make her feel like she belongs.

A whisper of sound. Batwoman stills, flattening against the wall.

Nothing she can pick up, hard as she strains her ears. She touches her cowl, activating the heat vision. Starts down again.

After fifteen more minutes of walking. Blue-gray shapes slumped against the blue-gray curve of the wall. She deactivates the heat vision and snaps her fingers. Neither of the slumped bodies turn toward her.

She checks the line of sight down the two adjacent passageways. No one that she can hear, or see, and she crouches beside the bodies, pulling a pen light from her belt, cape pooling behind her. One body is a boy, not likely much older than fourteen, wearing three layers of jackets and jeans several inches too short on his bony ankles where his legs are splayed out in front of him. His neck is a gory mess of torn-out chunks, hyoid bone hanging forlornly from a string of gristle. The tongue inside his slack mouth is pale, and so is the rest of him. The beds of his nails, when Batwoman lifts one of his hands, are blue.

The girl beside him is a few years older, maybe, with only a synthetic fur-lined coat to protect her from the weather. Under it she wears a halter top and a mini-skirt with torn fishnet stockings. She is just as pale, and both her neck and the inside of her thigh are livid with perimortem trauma, clearly imprinted bite marks at each site.

They both have freckles and curly brown hair. They could be brother and sister. There is no way of telling from their position. The girl’s body has been dumped on top of the boy’s. They weren’t alive when they were placed here, or at least not alive enough to be mobile.

Batwoman examines the surroundings. There are no footprints in the residue that coats the walkway, no trails of blood or refuse. She plants a tracer in the girl’s jacket and in the boy’s hoodie, then begins down the more western passageway, eyes scanning the floor and walls, her senses strained. There is the sound of the sewage running quietly down its path, and the occasional rumble of vehicles overhead, through the streets, but nothing else.

She advances soundlessly down the passage. It opens, perhaps another two hundred feet later, into a wide junction-way with a central reservoir, the water coursing down from the river beside Batwoman to pour into it. Nothing can be heard over the rush of the water, and nothing appears on her heat vision, but on an instinct, she deactivates it again, squinting through the cowl down at the narrow walkway that rings the central reservoir. She sees a glimpse of yellow and swoops down.

It’s a young man. He has the same curly brown hair and stark freckles as the two bodies she just saw, and his neck are torn open the way the boy’s was, but his eyes are open, a sick yellow that catches in the meager light from the storm drain above them. There is a body right in front of him, dark smears around his mouth; he was feeding on the flesh, and he drops the body as Batwoman lands in a crouch in front of him.

His speed is inhuman. Batwoman shoots a Taser and lunges out of the way at the same time; he scuttles off the wall like a spider and barrels toward her. Knocks all the wind out of her when he slams into her, pinning one arm to her side and tearing through the fastenings of her suit, and the Kevlar. Batwoman, teeth ground, scrabbles for her Taser and shoves it into his side.

He shoves her away with a howl of rage and pain. Batwoman disengages the Taser head and shoots another one; he claws at the heads, tearing them out in chunks of flesh, and Claire scrambles for the rest of her belt, for the darts of dead man’s blood in the third pocket.

“Who did this to you?” she shouts. “Who turned you?!”

The Renfield doesn’t answer; he’s in a mindless frenzy, snapping at her as she sinks the dart into his pectoral. Black blood vessels bloom from the site. The cords in his neck collapse; he drops his head, chest heaving. His legs and arms sink to the floor and lie still. He stares at her, eyes wide and terrified and panicked and thirsty.

“Who?” Batwoman growls.

A whisper of sound is her only warning. She throws herself off the Renfield, flattening to the ground. A thud. When she raises her head, a deafening spray of bullets has torn apart its neck. The remains of the head make one roll, two—drop into the reservoir.

Batwoman is on her feet immediately, sprinting in the direction from which the gunfire came. “Show yourself!” Her voice more a shriek than a shout. “I know who you are! Celia!”

The Renfield isn’t in the files that Mills gave her, but the girl who could have been his sister is. Haley Collins, foster kid turned sex worker turned missing person. Looking into Dean’s database finds that she has two brothers, both younger, the first one a dead ringer for the turned Ren and the other a dead ringer for the dead body with Haley’s in the sewer.

Their bodies, Claire realizes blearily as she sits in the huge swivel chair before the huger screen on the Bat computer, are still down there in the sewers. The tracer signals haven’t moved.

She digs her knuckles into her eyes. She can’t endanger any cops by sending them down there to a possible vamp nest, but at the same time she recognizes that she isn’t equipped to go back down there on her own. There’s Charlie, but after what Alex told her about how Charlie wanted to try to bring back Dean…

She digs her knuckles harder into her face. Draws her legs up into the chair, pushing her forehead against her knees.

“Kiddo?”

She jerks. Thinks automatically, Dean wouldn’t have flinched. “Bobby.”

“Where’ve you been, kid?” His eyes run over her punctured Kevlar, the sewage-soaked hem of her cape. There’s an insinuation in them, a clear disappointment as he lifts his gaze to meet hers.

“There was a Renfield,” she says. “If you think I’m taking Alex down there—”

“I ain’t thinking anything.” Bobby’s voice is almost stern.

He helps her out of the Keflex, Claire holding her breath as she sits carefully on the edge of the table and he pours disinfectant onto the breaks in her skin.

“Rollin’ around in the sewer,” he says. “You’re gonna be lucky if these don’t get infected.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open for pennies on the ground.”

Bobby huffs out a reluctant laugh. Claire gives him a grateful, if tired, smile.

Neither of them notice the small shape crouched at the top of the stairs.

“I’m comin’ home, baby.” The voice croons from all around her, like Alex is enveloped in Mama. The warm-sour smell that clung to the flannel she wore, that wafted from the crevices between her teeth. “You been a good girl for me?”

Alex bolts awake. Chest heaving, clothes wet with sweat under her arms, her breasts. Her eyes fly around, wide-pupiled, but there is nothing to see, nothing to smell, except the silhouettes of her furniture and the tang of her own sweat, the musty smell of her sweaty, unwashed patrol clothes. No smell of Mama. No sound of Mama.

But still. In the dark…

She switches on her nightstand lamp. The light casts long shadows across the room, but there is nothing in them.

Her breathing is still ragged. She can hear it. She gets out of bed and goes out onto the fire escape. Her bare feet are sweaty and slippery on the cold rusty metal, her fingers the same as she tries twice to get her lighter to catch to light a cigarette. The nicotine does nothing to her now, too weak to constrict the panic-fluttering walls of her arterioles. They flap in the surging rash of her blood like scraps of cloth in the wind, and Alex sucks, and sucks, and tries to breathe.

- - -

They dropped down in the dark. There were sounds coming from several yards away, strange sounds that were sharp and wet at the same time. It sent a frisson of unease up Alex’s spine below her Kevlar. She eased her boots carefully along the ground, careful to make no noise, and sucked in a breath when Batman grabbed her arm.

“Stay back.”

He released her arm and moved forward himself. Batgirl stayed motionless for a minute; then she started soundlessly after him.

Almost soundlessly. Her boot squeaked.

Something landed behind her.

She froze at the same time an arm tightly encircled her neck and another her waist, immobilizing her.

“Shhhh,” crooned a voice in her ear. Her eyes widened; she tried to wrench away and butt her head backward. A sharp arc of pain erupted along her scalp instead. She felt the hot rush of blood down her ear and the side of her neck.

A sharp intake of breath behind her.

Pain, and then everything went black.

She woke up in the cave. It smelled like antiseptic and her head throbbed dully under the sting on her scalp. Her mouth tasted like cotton.

Moving her head to the side on the pillow was an effort, but it brought Dean into sight, sitting in a chair next to the medical bed. It looked like he’d just taken a shower: His short hair was wet, droplets of water sliding down his neck to dampen his white undershirt. His face was grim.

“What was that?” Alex said muzzily. 

“It’s the reason I told you to stay back,” he said shortly.

“Wow. That’s exactly the kind of answer that’s going to force me to investigate on my own and probably get me into more trouble.”

Dean gave her a Look.

“That thing drank my blood,” Alex said. She could feel the sharp bite of an IV in her arm. “As far as I know, leeches don’t have arms, so that was either a giant mosquito or…”

Dean’s Look intensified.

“A vampire…?” Alex finished. She gingerly touched her head, the movement jostling the IV in her antecubital. She felt giddy and more than a little detached from her body, and reality.

Dean pushed her arm back down.

“Oh my God,” Alex said. Reading his expression. “Are you seriously telling me Batman believes in vampires?”

Dean leaned back in his chair, propping his socked feet on the bed and crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s that Star Trek quote? When once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, however unlikely, must be the solution.”

“That’s from Sherlock Holmes, doofus,” Alex said. It sank in. “Oh my God. You think Lydia is a vampire?”

Dean was wearing the I’m Protecting You face that meant he didn’t plan on giving her an answer. She started to sit up to swing her legs out of bed.

“Unfortunately,” came Bobby’s voice, and he came into view over Dean’s shoulder, looking cranky under his baseball cap, “yes. And she dropped your hemoglobin damn low, so unless you want me to tan your hide, stay in the damn bed.”

Alex obeyed grumpily, shoving her legs back under the sheets. Her head tilted woozily for another few seconds before resettling. “How many other things from Buffy are real?”

“Hopefully,” Dean said, “only Giles.” He pointed at Bobby.

Alex huffed out a laugh. It came out more of a sigh, her eyelids already falling shut, weighed down. She felt a callused hand smooth her hair back and then nothing.

- - -

There are two choices. Fight, or run. (She knows the second will eventually lead to the first.)

She sneaks into hospital morgues at three in the morning, wearing the powder blue scrubs of patient techs, the royal blue polo shirts of transport members. There is no rhyme or reason to when bodies get moved to the morgue, especially in the winter months when beds are in short supply and bodies are not, and the fewest people are around to ask questions at three in the morning, when corpses get pushed into the freezer room and marked off on a clipboard and wait for the day shift to arrive the next morning to complete their reception paperwork. Alex doesn’t have a badge but she acquires them: for St. Gregory’s, for Mercy General, for Campbell Memorial. Her contraband is small and easily pushed into her pockets: capped syringes of blood drawn from the cold veins of the bodies in their refrigerated drawers.

Sleep becomes less frequent. Mama is always there.

(There’s no reason for her to want Alex. Alex is nothing important. Alex is going to kill her.)

She fantasizes pumping Mama full of so much dead man’s blood that it seeps out of her pores. Her skin turning black with the amount of it pouring out of each tiny hole. She fantasizes scenarios where Dean was the one to do it: where he drove a stake into Mama’s chest from the front and hacked her neck from her head piece by piece. Imagines the difficulty he would have with severing the difficult spine, his gauntlets slippery with her oily blood. How he would stamp her skull to a pulp afterward, bits of brain and hair and eye gore, and crush Alex to him in a hug and tell her in his Dad Voice that no one was ever gonna touch Alex again.

It makes her sick to think of doing it herself. She needs someone to do it for her. She needs someone to do it for her. Because of her. Because they love her so much they want to tear Mama apart.

(The only one who will tear anyone apart is Mama.)

She gets so far gone that she imagines Claire doing it. Trapping Mama’s neck between her heavy metal escrima sticks and snapping it to loll forward nervelessly. It makes Alex feel safe, and hot.

Her hand slips. There in the second-floor morgue of St. Gregory’s at two a.m., it slips, and the syringe needle slides into her finger.

She gets about forty seconds before the symptoms start in earnest. A cold sweat rushing over her, drawing weakness into her legs and nausea into her gut. Her mouth tastes like metal.

She makes it onto the first floor holding tight to an empty wheelchair. The tall poles attached to its frame keep her from taking it out of the hospital. She moves slowly out of the ER entrance with slow, magnetic steps. Time seems to lapse in and out after that: She finds herself outside the parking garage, and then moving past the alley of a diner, and then

A smell.

When she finds Batgirl, there are three Renfields surrounding her. Two are out of it, pupils swallowed by yellow; the other hangs back, watching them like a trainer. Batgirl is snarling at them through the black cloth of her mask; there are tears in her sleeves that speak of them having gotten hands on her.

Alex barely has the strength to lift her gun from inside her jacket. Her hand is shaking like a druggie coming down. She swallows down the mouthful of vomit that lurches up on her tongue and disengages the safety.

The first shot goes wide, but the second blows one of the Rens’ heads open like a watermelon dropped from a twenty-first floor. Brain and biological shrapnel spray. The second Ren lunges for it, and Alex kinds of blacks out for a few seconds after that. She comes to when her knees slam painfully into the cracked asphalt and struggles back to her feet again, blinking rapidly. The third Renfield has already taken off; Alex tenses, shoulders tensing as if to make a narrower target, and blows off the second one’s head. This one is sloppier; about a quarter of the head and neck get taken off and the other seventy-five percent doesn’t, disgorging black blood onto its front and the ground. Alex staggers back onto her knees again, retching herself, and flicks at her lighter again, again, again before finally getting a flame. She tosses it at the corpse.

It roars aflame like the blood is gasoline. The stomach-turning stench of dead flesh races out at her from the cavity of her own brain—the disbelief when you realize you’re on fire—

She vomits.

Time collapses again. She comes to on her side, small hands dug into her back to keep her at a ninety-degree angle to the ground.

She tries to sit up. The smell of burned body still greases the air. There are sirens, somewhere.

“Get up,” Baby Vamp says. She sounds half-commanding, half-shaken.

Alex manages to get mostly upright. The rank pile of sick half a foot from her seems to have siphoned off a lot of the toxin; she feels able to walk maybe ten steps, instead of two. She pushes away from Emma, shooting a grapple gun into the eaves of the tenement building two doors down. The kid does the same, and they both shoot silently up onto the rooftops.

Baby Vamp goes first. “I didn’t need your—”

“Shut up,” Alex rasps. “Does she know you’re out here alone?”

Batgirl bristles under her hood. “I—”

“Shut up,” Alex says again. “She’s got enough shit to deal with right now. She doesn’t need you adding to it.”

The kid’s face is completely hidden by the stitched black fabric of her mask, but the rage pouring off her is palpable. She starts to spit something; Alex grabs her hood first, yanking it forward. It nearly upsets both of them, Alex is still so weak, but she barely notices, digging her fingers into the stitched line of Batgirl’s mask under her eyes. “Let me tell you something,” she hisses. “There’s a vamp wandering around Gotham right now who makes your mom look like June Cleaver. If she finds you, she’ll peel your face off so she can sew it on a doll. Do you understand me?”

Emma yanks Alex’s hands off her, seething. “My mother will--”

“Your mom doesn’t give a shit about you, or she’d be here right now getting you the fuck away from her.”

Batgirl stares at her a minute longer, her eyes unintelligible behind the white lenses of her mask.

Then she kicks Alex in the knee cap and darts away.

She wakes up the next morning to her black-out curtains being yanked open by Batwoman.

“The fuck,” she mumbles, rolling over and burying her head under her pillow.

It’s torn out of her grip. She hears it land on the floor. “Get up.”

Alex stays stubbornly face-down on her mattress. “No.”

The other pillow on the bed is yanked from it. It slams into Alex’s head from behind.

“Ooh, a pillow fight,” she mumbles into the mattress. “Are you gonna braid my hair next?”

“This isn’t a joke,” Batwoman says. “What the hell did you say to Emma?”

Alex finally rolls over, shoving the pillow off the mattress. She’s just in briefs and a cami, and she doesn’t miss the way that Claire’s eyes dart down her behind the lenses of the cowl. “You know, I’m getting real sick of being blamed for all the family drama.”

“Then stop causing it.” It’s the Batvoice, and Alex would be lying if she said it didn’t turn her on a little bit.

Claire crouches. There’s nothing aroused, or amused, in her face.

“Here’s something you might know if you bothered trying to be part of this family. Emma chose us. Lydia told her that if she came back to Gotham with me, Emma was dead to her.” Claire digs her knuckles into Alex’s sternum, getting in her face. Her eyes blaze. “Have you ever seen Emma’s back? Have you seen the scars from the Renfields Lydia sent after her when she came back with me?”

Alex wets her lips. “I didn’t—” know.

“Exactly.” Claire shoves off of her. Her cape falls shut around her shoulders, closing off the bat insignia on her chest. “You didn’t. You never do. It’s always you, you, you.” Her red-painted mouth tightens beneath the cowl. “Grow the fuck up.”

She turns, cape flaring. At the window, she stops and looks over her shoulder. “And stop telling them to help me. They’re kids. It’s my job to take care of them.”

 “Then who’s gonna take care of you?” Alex means it to come out angry, but it comes out as something else instead.

Batwoman is still for a minute, her gloved hand on the sill.

“Why don’t you give it a try,” she says, and leaves.

- - -

Claire was visiting from Titans Tower, ostensibly to have Sunday dinner with them but actually to have it out with Dean over her wish to move off-campus with Bumblebee the following semester, when a flutter of motion in the corner of the cave caught all three Bats’ attention. Claire’s angry “You’re so controlling that it is seriously bordering on abusive, Dean” was cut short as Castiel landed gracefully on the cave’s floor.

He glanced between them. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” Dean said at the same time Claire said, “Yes.”

Cas raised a brow.

“He’s being completely unreasonable,” Claire said. “Twenty-something adults move out on their own. It’s a thing we do.”

Cas’s eyes flicked toward Alex, silently checking on her. She avoided his eyes, not wanting to influence the argument one way or another. She hated when Claire and Dean fought. It made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach.

“Perhaps,” Cas said, “we may discuss child-raising on our way to the Watchtower, Dean.”

“Perhaps,” Dean mimicked in a terse tone, “I’ll listen to your opinions on child-raising when pigs fly.”

“I’ll ask Zatanna to arrange it,” Cas said mildly.

None of them missed the quirk of Dean’s mouth beneath the cowl as he pulled it on. It was gone within an instant, though, and he said, “Why are you here, Cas?”

“The treaty party from Purgatory has arrived a week ahead of schedule. Naomi would like us to come greet them.”

Batman’s lips pursed. He glanced at the computer screen, where the night’s patrol route was laid out in a red blinking line next to a browser window showing layouts of the apartment buildings Claire declared she would be staying in next semester.

“Alex and I can take of Gotham tonight,” Claire said. “Right, Allie? You guys head up to the ‘tower.”

Batman eyed her. Claire eyed him back. There was a silent stand-off while Cas rolled his eyes.

“The leader of the party has asked for you by name,” he said. “I’d prefer not to start out the meeting by offending them.”

“Yeah, Batman,” Claire said. “Be diplomatic.”

It was a Wednesday, a slow day for crime and homework, and after two hours of patrolling with only one attempted mugging to show for it, Flamebird called a break, walking into Baskin Robbins in her costume to buy them ice cream cones (chocolate for Claire and vanilla dipped in chocolate and sprinkles for Alex). They settled in on a pair of their favorite gargoyles to eat them, Flamebird straddling the back of hers and swinging her legs.

“Sooooo. What’s got you so quiet tonight?”

Alex hadn’t intended to say anything. But—She studies the pattern of sprinkles on her cone. “Do you have to fight with Dean like that?”

Flamebird is licking a smiley-face into the side of hers. “Like what?”

“Like—back at the cave. About school.”

“Um. Yes? We weren’t really fighting. More like…a friendly exchange of barbed truths.”

Batgirl grimaced. “Don’t you worry he’ll kick you out?”

Flamebird eyed her a second, dropping down off her gargoyle and swinging gently from its extended paw before climbing back onto its head. It was her form of thinking, considering something before she spoke. “Remember what I said? Permission versus forgiveness? Sometimes D has to be pushed out of the nest to learn that he can fly.”

Alex’s brow creased above her domino.

“I.e., that he can live without having me under his eye every minute,” Flamebird clarified. “And that I can live that way, too.” She swung onto the gargoyle’s outstretched paw again. “Without getting killed.”

Batgirl was quiet. Flamebird swung back up onto her gargoyle, this time, and crowded close, wrapping an arm around her. “He’s not going to abandon you because you disagree with him a few times, Allie. He didn’t when you put on the suit, remember?”

“Yeah,” Batgirl said uncertainly.

Flamebird flashed her a grin. Then her comm went off, a vibration against both of their hips where they were pressed together. Batgirl jumped, and Flamebird pulled it from her hip.

“Flamebird,” she said automatically, voice something a few degrees cooler, more adult. A superhero that Alex didn’t know; the kind who belonged to the Titans and attended general meetings of the Justice League. “Acknowledged. I’ll send you my coordinates.”

She clicked off the comm. Batgirl said, “Titans?”

“Titans,” Flamebird confirmed. She took a last lick of her cone and then, as Miss Martian’s bioship suddenly materialized in the air beside them with a silent shimmer, handed it to Batgirl. “Rain check?”

“Yeah,” Batgirl said. Gauntlet closing automatically around the chocolate ice cream cone as the bioship’s hatch opened for Flamebird. “Of course.”

Flamebird shot her a last grin and grabbed onto the ladder that dropped down out of the bioship. She was inside and the ship gone by the next time Batgirl blinked.

“Bye,” she said to the air.

- - -

Alex takes a deep breath. Then she reaches for the big ugly knocker on the manor’s monstrous front doors and raps it three times against the old polished wood.

When Bobby opens the door twenty seconds later, he freezes in shock. Then he seizes Alex in a hug, his chin digging hard into her back. The smell of his baking and the bristle of his beard brings heat to her eyes, and she blinks rapidly, pulling away.

"I brought picnic stuff," she says, holding up her bodega bag.

Bobby takes it and chivvies her downstairs. Emma is in the cave, flipping over and over the parallel bars, in black leggings and a black tank top that leaves her skinny little arms exposed, visibly trembling with her efforts. Alex watches her for a few minutes, then sets her motorcycle helmet down on the console and steps down into the gym area. "Hey."

Emma freezes immediately in her routine, hands bracing hard on the bars. Her face is flushed, dripping with sweat so that her braided blonde hair looks dark where it’s pasted against her forehead. “What are you doing here?”

Alex doesn't answer. "Looks like you could use a break from the bars," she says instead.

Emma watches her suspiciously as she shrugs her jacket off, and the sweatshirt she was wearing underneath it, revealing her own black tank top. "What are you doing?"

"Getting dressed for sparring," Alex replies. "You up for it?"

Her tone is challenging. She sees the spark that ignites in Emma's eyes in response. The kid springs down off the bars, her bare feet slapping against the mat. She's in a stance Alex recognizes as one from aikido, doubtless taught to her to take advantage of her small size against larger opponents.

Alex charges at her.

Emma grabs her wrist in both hands as Alex aims a punch; Alex uses her forward momentum to swing her right leg forward at the same time. Emma jumps up onto it instead of taking it, using Alex’s hands and knee to pull and propel herself into the air. Alex ducks before Emma can take advantage of her trajectory to land on her back and get her arms around her neck, rolling out of the way. Emma loses no time following her, launching a series of atemi that force Alex to concentrate her focus on blocking. Emma is inhumanly fast, and Alex is forcedly reminded of sparring with Lydia.

She performs her own double single-handed grab when Emma strikes out with both hands: a mistake on Emma’s part, she thinks, until Emma uses Alex’s grip to yank herself forward and plant a double-footed kick to Alex’s chest. She goes sprawling, shoulder blades and butt hitting the mats hard. Emma lunges. Her pointy knees dig into the junctures between Alex’s thighs and hips unbelievably painfully, and Alex bangs her head angrily back against the mat, shouting. She snarls, fangs flashing out.

Emma’s weight against her flinches in shock. “You can’t do that!”

Alex bares her fangs wider. “Why not?”

“It’s not allowed!”

"Nothing's not allowed in a fight."

Emma's mouth compresses. She sits back a little, face defiant. "Batgirl can't be a vampire."

"Says who?"

Emma glares harder. "She just can't."

"Guess you'll have to call yourself something else, then," Alex says, and surges forward to throw Emma's weight off of her.

Emma's fangs come out, her eyes flashing yellow, and she lunges for Alex's throat. Alex catches her, and they roll, thrashing on the mat.

That's when Bobby comes in, clearing his throat. He does a double-take at them, shakes his head, and says, "Lunchtime."

Alex releases Emma from a chokehold, Emma hissing and spitting. Emma leaps onto her back, arms around her neck to squeeze, and Alex automatically squeezes the back of her neck.

Emma releases her immediately, then looks affronted with herself for doing such a thing. A laugh escapes Alex at her expression—and that's when Claire comes in, just in time to hear the laugh. Shock flashes across her face.

"Um.” Her eyes go back and forth between them.

"Lunchtime," Bobby says again, emphatically, and Emma slides off Alex's back. They're both sweaty, and Alex grabs a towel from the stack on a side cabinet, slinging it around her neck and snagging up her sweatshirt and jacket to take with her. She feels Claire's eyes on her, all the way up the stairs and out onto the back deck, a sprawling Italian marble-tiled space that looks out over the grounds.

It's a warm autumn day, a small breeze making the napkins that Bobby has set out on the wrought-iron table flutter. They're held down by silverware and plates that are way too fancy for the bodega-fare Alex brought, like the cheap M&M-filled trail mix that has been poured into what Alex is pretty sure is a caviar dish. She flushes somewhat self-consciously behind her ears, but no one remarks on anything, not even Emma, who climbs possessively into the chair next to Claire’s.

Bobby sets two silver thermoses down on the table, one in front of Emma and one in front of Alex. Emma unscrews the cap from hers and drinks greedily. Alex freezes in shock when she detects the scent of the contents. Her eyes fly to Claire’s.

Claire looks back steadily. Alex's gaze flinches away, despite herself; she looks at Emma, again, at her little red tongue licking her lips.

She reaches for the thermos in front of her. Unscrews the lid just slightly, the way she would something she suspected was poisoned to scent it. The smell is the same as what wafted across from Emma's cup: blood, coppery with iron, the grainy undertaste of herbivore.

She sets it back down. Pretends that she can't feel Claire's eyes on hers, or Bobby's either.

"It's the best you're going to get," Emma says when she notices Alex not drinking it. "They won't let us have human."

Claire takes a sip from the glass in front of her. It's got red juice in it: fruit punch, which Alex knows Claire dislikes; wonders if she's drinking it to make their own red drinks less conspicuous. "Wah wah," she says.

Emma flares up. "I'm not complaining!"

"It sounded like you were."

Emma scowls. She pushes back in her chair and aggressively ignores the potato salad Bobby spoons onto her plate.

“They told me when I was Made I wouldn’t be able to go a week without blood. I haven’t had any in six months.”

She can feel Claire’s sharp gaze on her. Embarrassment rises cold on her neck, but she keeps looking at Emma, whose eyes are narrowed skeptically and mouth downturned uncertainly.

“I don’t believe you,” she announces.

Alex shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to me if you do. I haven’t.”

Emma’s eyes narrow further. She’s quite visibly chewing this over. Her eyes flick back to her cup, and then to Claire and Bobby. “You’re slower without blood,” she says quietly, almost a mutter.

“Not slower than the vamps who have come after me.”

“What vampires have come after you?”

Claire’s heel digs into Alex’s boot.

“Story for another time,” Alex says smoothly. “Anyway, what happened to the mats out here?”

“What mats?” Emma demands.

“I forgot about that.” There’s wonder in Claire’s voice, like she can’t believe she hadn’t remembered. “We used to drag yoga mats out here and practice on them.”

Bobby nods. “Alex performed her first back flip on these very paving stones.”

“You baked me a cake to celebrate,” Alex remembers. “Dean ate so much of it he threw up.”

“Red velvet,” Bobby says nostalgically. “We never did get the stains out of your school shirt.”

“It was worth it,” Claire says confidently. “Jeez, after that you broke your arm backflipping off the staircase, do you remember that?”

“Dr. Visyak tore Dean a new one,” Bobby says nostalgically. “I never saw him go so white.”

Emma, in her spot at the table, is going white too, her lips pressing together progressively tighter with each memory of Dean that is brought up. The last one puts her over the edge; she shoves her thermos over on the table and shouts, “He wasn’t your father! He was mine!”

Her eyes are turning yellow, the skin around them red.

“He was,” Claire says, her voice low and soothing in a way Alex hasn’t heard it in years, since before there was a Y-incision down her gut, and it makes something drop hard and heavy into her belly like a punch. “He was your dad and he was very proud of you.”

Emma is panting shallowly. “He was mine,” she repeats.

“Yes,” Claire says, and slowly, telegraphing the intention, puts her hand on Emma’s back. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair of us to talk about those things when you didn’t get to have them with him.”

Alex watches as Claire coaxes the baby vamp into her lap. With baited breath, like watching a circus performer put their arms around a lion, their throats so close to the glistening teeth.

“He was mine,” Emma says again, into Claire’s neck this time.

“I know,” Claire says. “I know, baby bat.”

Perhaps fifteen seconds pass. Then Emma pulls away, her color not quite back to normal but closer to what it usually is, and she disappears upstairs.

Silence fills her absence. Bobby sighs, gets up, and heads inside. The clinking of the liquor cabinet travels out onto the veranda.

“That was dangerous, what you just did.”

Claire casts Alex a glance.

“She could have torn out your carotid.”

“So could you,” Claire says mildly. “Or Killer Croc. Or any number of other people we both regularly spend our nights chasing.”

“It’s—” different, Alex doesn’t say.

Claire changes the subject. “I didn’t know that. About the blood.”

“I figured.”

A moment passes. “Did Dean know?”

“I don’t think it mattered.” Alex stares straight ahead, at the tree on the grounds where Bobby once helped her string up a hammock. She read the seventh Harry Potter book in that hammock one glorious summer. She remembers rocking back and forth after Harry found out Dumbledore had known he would have to die all along, staring sightlessly at the sky through the tree leaves above her. “You only had to step over the line once, for him.”

“It wasn’t like you had a choice.”

Alex glances over at her. “You sure about that?”

Claire studies her for a long moment. Then she says, “Yes.”

Alex holds her gaze for a long time. Then she looks away. “Doesn’t matter anyway.” She had wanted the blood, even if it hadn’t been her choice to drink it. “It didn’t change anything for him.”

“You know he never forgave me for leaving?” Claire says out of nowhere. Alex is startled into looking back at her again. “His parents and his brother—they left him because they were killed. But me… I chose to leave. You didn’t. That made a difference to him.”

Alex doesn’t say anything. Keeps staring down at the grounds, her arms around her knees.

Claire gets up. “Stay for dinner tonight. I’ll help Bobby make stir-fry.”

- - -

Claire approached cautiously. Dean was staring at the computer, his cowl pushed back from his face.

“Dean.”

He glanced back at her. He showed no sign of surprise at seeing her here in the cave when she should have been eighty miles away.

“Charlie called me.”

“She’s in the med-bay.”

Claire stiffened.

Dean turned back to the screen. There were about twenty different tabs up, and that was just in the browser window Claire could see.

“Charlie said she’s Lydia’s,” she said.

Dean sat back in the chair. Dragged a hand down his jaw. Nodded.

“Last I knew, Lydia was a…”

His mouth curved without humor. “Your knowledge is up to date.”

“So she’s—?”

“Half,” Dean said. “Of a Master line. I don’t know what that will mean.”

“And…” Claire moved closer slowly, telegraphing each step. Rested her hand on the back of the chair’s head rest. “What’s a Master Vamp baby doing in Gotham?”

“All Lydia said was that she can’t protect her right now.”

Claire didn’t move her grip from the back of the chair. “What could threaten a Master Vamp?”

There was blame in the tense square of Dean’s jaw. His hard gaze was directed at his own reflection in the screen. “Another Master Vamp,” he said, and Claire understood. Lydia was one thing, and…Eve was quite another.

After a long, long silence, she moved to go upstairs.

“Claire,” he said.

She looked back.

“Go armed.”

Dean’s daughter was a skinny girl in monk clothing. She lay pale and motionless on the exam table, looking like a doll that had been cuffed down at its arms and legs. Deep, deep unease shifted in Claire’s gut.

A sliced-off ponytail lay a few feet from the table, red hair scattered around it. At the desk, Charlie sat with her right eye and cheek slowly swelling, her hair ending at her chin instead of her shoulder blades. Her lip was bloody.

Claire was at her side immediately, grabbing her face. “Charlie, what happened?”

Charlie tilted her chin at the unconscious child on the table, wincing as the movement pulled on her scabbing lip. “She happened.”

Claire followed her gaze reluctantly. It floated back to her, how even though Anna had been years younger and smaller than her, her bites hurt like hell when she was mad, and her kicks, too. But Anna wasn’t—

“Did she bite you?”

“No.” Charlie exposed her throat for Claire to check. “Not for lack of trying.”

Claire took a step back toward the table, tracing anew the tiny creature’s features. “You knocked her out?”

“Dean did. Dead man’s blood.”

Of course he did. They all travelled with dead man’s blood in their belts since Alex came back, even if Charlie didn’t know that was why they started carrying it. It made Claire sick to think of using it, though, and she felt just as sick looking at the results of Dean’s using it. She was a child.

As if in response to that thought, the kid’s eyes slid open. Her irises were hazel-green. They looked just like Dean’s.

She stared dazedly at Claire for a minute, her mouth parted vulnerably. Compassion swept through Claire, and she stepped closer to brush the sweaty hair back from the girl’s forehead.

Fangs sank into her wrist.

Charlie shouted out from behind her. Claire thought maybe she shouted, too, felt herself trying to shake free; then the sharp vice around her wrist slackened and slid free.

“Let me go!” the kid shouted. But her voice slurred, falling in volume. Charlie stepped away from her, capping the syringe in her hand. “Where’s…my…fa…”

Her eyes didn’t close all the way. Only halfway, as if she couldn’t keep her eyelids up, and her breaths were shallow and uneven, rocking her chest. She looked miserable. Claire’s blood was red around her mouth.

“See?” Charlie said.

Claire’s mouth tightened. She looked behind her. Dean stood there, watching the tableau wordlessly.

Anger slid through her. Dean leaving Charlie to deal with this; Dean allowing his own daughter to be treated like this; Dean not taking care of a kid that was his the way none of the rest of them were, or would ever be. She moved unconsciously to stand between them, blocking the girl from him and the girl from seeing him. Their eyes met, Dean’s and Claire’s, and Alex hung there in the gap between them: Alex as she had been, eager and fearless; Alex as she was now, bitter and afraid.

Claire turned back to Emma. “When was the last time you drank?”

The child glared at her instead of answering.

The hostility changed nothing. Claire remembered how fiercely gaunt Alex looked when she first came to the manor; how she snapped like a rabid dog, lashing out and then cowering away again, watching them with eyes of venom. How she softened only with the reception of food, watching them as she ate distrustfully, then ravenously.

“How about this,” Claire said to the room at large, “I know a butcher.” She knew him because he had been selling pig’s blood to teenagers who were running a Satanic cult, but that was neither here nor there. “How ‘bout I go get some red stuff?”

- - -

Alex doesn’t stay for dinner, but she begins to come over more frequently. Claire comes upstairs the following week to hear two voices coming from Emma’s room instead of none. She approaches as silently as if she was tracking a villain through the streets and peeks inside. Alex is sprawled out on Emma’s bedroom floor as Emma does homework at her desk, boosted up on a large encyclopedia in her chair to allow her to reach the desktop.

“The next word is ‘voracious,’” Emma says.

“Well, that’s an easy one,” Alex says. “The story’s about a T-rex, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s just eaten three-quarters of an apatosaurus.”

“So make it a girl T-rex and have it taking the other one-quarter to its voracious babies.”

“I don’t know if T-rexes feed their offspring after they’re born or if they leave them to fend for themselves.” Emma slides off her makeshift booster chair and pads across the room to fetch her iPad from its charging station on her nightstand.

Alex is rolling her eyes. “It’s a story to practice your spelling words, brat, your teacher’s not going to be checking it for scientific accuracy.”

Emma ignores her, tapping search queries into the iPad.

“Can I read this masterpiece once you’re done with it?” Claire asks, leaning into the room.

“No,” Emma and Alex say.

Claire laughs and continues on her way, ignoring the tug that wants her to flop onto Emma’s bed and join in. There are Campbell Enterprises reports to be reviewed and approved, and after that, surveillance footage to be reviewed in the Cave.

“Where’s Claire?”

Bobby tilts his chin downward in their gesture for “downstairs.” Alex takes the fireman’s pole in the study down.

The soft clinking of tools leads her to the main bay. Claire is under the newest Batmobile’s hood in gray yoga pants and a cami, her hands black with oil.

She glances over her shoulder when she senses Alex approaching behind her. There is rue and a streak of oil on her face. “I wish I could just take this thing to Jiffy Lube.”

“What’s going on?”

Claire snorts. “The belts. They screeched like I was trying to run someone over when I turned over the ignition in the Narrows.”

“Did you get laughed at by Gotham’s seedy underbelly?”

Claire makes a face at the amusement Alex isn’t bothering trying to hide. “They weren’t intimidated,” is the most she admits. She looks down at the silver wrench in her hands and slaps it against her thigh once, twice. “Dean was a lot better at this.”

Alex doesn’t say anything to that. She does, though, after a minute, elbow her over and take the wrench. “Where’s your flashlight?”

Claire finds one, and holds the flashlight for her as Alex gets to work prying out the fraying serpentine belt. It takes time, during which the only sounds are the clinks of metal and their own breaths and the sound of the waterfall at the edge of the cave, yards away.

“He liked it when you guys worked on the car together,” Claire says abruptly. “I was jealous.”

Alex grunts.

“You two were more alike than him and me ever were.”

Alex makes a noncommittal sound. She’s not so sure about that, considering that Claire and Dean both saw their families killed in front of them, while Alex’s just decided she wasn’t worth sticking around for. But there’s a peace between them right now that she doesn’t want to shatter, the same way there was between her and Dean when they worked on the cars and bikes together. Even later, when it seemed like they fought every time they took a breath, this time was a refuge, a time that she could do things right in Dean’s eyes when the rest of the time all she did was disappoint him.

“What about the kid? She too fussy to get her hands dirty?”

Claire raises a brow at her. “Alex. She’s eight.”

“Claire. So?”

“I’m not gonna let an eight-year-old stick her hands in a four hundred pound engine!”

Alex snorts. “You keep forgetting she’s a vamp.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not a kid,” Claire retorts. “Someone’s gotta worry about protecting her.”

“I don’t need protection.”

“See?” Alex gestures over her shoulder. “Kid,” she calls. “Anyone ever teach you that eavesdropping is rude?”

“Anyone ever teach you not to talk about people when they aren’t present?” Emma retorts, coming into the light.

“Touché.” Alex inclines her head into the engine.

Claire rolls her eyes at both of them.

Emma eyes her from toe to oil-smudged face. “Why do you look like a menial laborer?”

“I’m trying to make sure this thing doesn’t embarrass us on patrol!” Claire exclaims, making a lunge for her.

Emma lets out an undignified squawk that Alex never would have believed had come out of her if she hadn’t been there to see it, and jumps up onto the Batmobile to escape Claire’s grab. Alex stands stock still as they chase each other around her. Eventually she tips a leg out, and Claire goes flying over it, tucking into a somersault and landing on her feet a few feet away. Emma grins victoriously at her from behind Alex’s legs.

“Girls!” Bobby’s shout echoes down the cave. “Dinner!”

Claire makes another feint at Emma. Emma jumps. Then she scrambles up Alex’s back onto her shoulders and vaults off of her, hitting the ground running, pattering triumphantly up the stairs.

Claire turns back to look at Alex. She’s panting and grinning. “You coming?”

Alex hesitates only a minute. “Okay.”

It took Claire a while to realize that, aside from her Gotham Prep uniform, she never sees Emma in anything but her white or black tunics from her mother. When she brought this up to Bobby, he said, “Took ya long enough.”

Coaxing Emma to the mall requires promising to allow her to stay out on hour later on patrol each night (she initially demanded three hours, which Claire negotiated down to one plus a promise to stop communicating in emojis), but eventually they get there, entering through the food court entrance.

Emma peers around suspiciously, eyes narrowing at the mill of people. It’s a Saturday, and busy.

Something occurs to Claire. “Is this…your first time?”

Emma throws her a look. One that is offended by the very suggestion and also…clearly guilty.

Claire doesn’t say, Oh my God, this is your first time in a MALL, or I’m popping your mall cherry! She is very proud of her restraint. “How did you get your clothes before?”

“We had a tailor.”

Claire laughs until she realizes Emma’s serious. “Oh. Um. We…don’t have that.”

“I’m sure my father did.”

“Uh,” Claire says, and realizes she’s not sure. Dean’s clothes were just there—she figured Bobby acquired them for him, since she could hardly imagine Dean in a Walmart or J.C. Penney’s, or even a Nordstrom’s. How had they gotten clothes for her when she was young? Dr. Visyak? Commissioner Mills? She certainly doesn’t remember going shopping for herself until she was ten or eleven. “Maybe he did. But probably only for suits and stuff.”

She has a sudden mental image of Emma getting fitted for a three-piece suit, waistcoat and all. She would be beyond adorable.

Emma eyes her like she knows what Claire’s thinking, wrinkling her cute little nose.

Claire wisely keeps her thoughts to herself and steers them into The Children’s Place.

They emerge less than ten minutes later, Emma having become violently offended by the little girl she saw picking her nose and touching the clothing inside. (“I am NOT wearing anything from here!” she announced shrilly, looking as close to throwing a tantrum as the three-year-old boy being refused a Spiderman shirt several feet away.) They head to a department store next with Claire promising the clientele there will be less….young. But the momentum stutters when Emma spots a girl and their mother coming out of a dressing room and replacing a shirt on a rack. “What are they doing?”

“They tried on the clothes,” Claire says warily, seeing where this might be going. “She must not have liked that one.”

Emma is affronted. “The clothing I am going to buy may have been worn by others?” She casts a look of disgust at the clothes on the rack.

 “People try on clothes to see if they like them, Emma. That’s what they do.”

“Then we’ll order clothes online,” Emma commands, “where I can be sure no one has worn them before me. Or wiped their bodily secretions on them.”

Claire rolls her eyes but abandons the dark jeans and shirts Emma had chosen to the waiting basket in the dressing room and goes to the Guest Services section of the shop to place orders for the items Emma had liked. She orders three of everything; she has the feeling Emma isn’t going to agree to go shopping again for a long time, if ever.

It’s the shortest shopping trip she has ever been on. She looks at her watch as they emerge from the store. She had told Bobby they would probably be here at least three or four hours, anticipating many long and drawn-out battles with Emma over not being able to wear all black and/or the lack of Nomex in children’s clothing. Instead, they now have over two hours to kill.

She looks around. There’s a glow-in-the-dark miniature golf course, a pretzel shop, and a carousel, none of which seem like they will prove particularly appealing to Emma. Maybe they should just go home. She has cases she could be reviewing, and Emma will be just as satisfied practicing her kata.

She glances over at her. The little girl’s eyes are focused a few feet away; Claire follows them and sees a child a few years younger than her perched on the edge of the decorative fountain, her mother crouched in front of her showing her how to tie her shoe. As they watch, the mother demonstrates and then prompts the little girl to do it herself. They both clap and cheer when she does it correctly.

A raw look of want is on Emma’s face that makes the inside of Claire’s chest ache. She wants to grab her hand but knows it won’t be accepted. She looks ahead instead and sees something.

“Hey,” she says. “Let’s go on that.”

Emma quickly looks away from the tableau of child and mother, following Claire’s pointing finger to the bungee jump framework just past the pretzel shop. It stretches up toward the vaulted glass ceiling two stories above them.

Her mouth curves in amusement. “Hardly our usual height.”

“I know,” Claire agrees mournfully. “But the best I can do in daylight.”

Claire forks over the twenty bucks to the ride’s operator, a college kid with a chemistry book open at his podium, and the two of them climb up onto the trampoline framework. Their bungees are about ten feet apart, and the operator checks Claire’s vest first, tugging on the ropes to ensure they hold, then Emma’s. Emma stiffens as he checks hers, and the guy, mistaking the flinch for nervousness, says kindly, “It’s okay, your mom’s right over there. Can you see her?” He points at Claire, who, not able to hear what he said, waves.

Emma stares pointedly forward, enduring the rest of the check without speaking.

The operator climbs back down to the ground and gives them the thumbs up.

“Go!” Claire shouts needlessly, and pushes off the trampoline with an energetic leap. She barely clears six feet with that first jump; the second takes her sailing up level with the second floor, where the food court is full of milling children and strollers and the Chick-Fil-A cow. One of the kids spots her and cries out, pointing; Claire sinks back down to the first floor, then sails back up, this time to an audience of at least a dozen children who shout in delight upon seeing her.

“Check out our adoring fans!” she calls to Emma as they fall back toward the trampoline. “Ready?” This time she does a somersault in midair, ignoring the shout of warning from the operator below her. She darts a challenging grin over at Emma, who looks determined and nonchalant at the same time, and blows a wolf-whistle with her fingers when Emma executes a flip on their next trip upward. Their audience, which has expanded into at least twenty kids pressed up against the railing separating the food court from the atrium, erupts into cheers and little hands clapping.

“Wave,” Claire shouts to Emma, sweeping a deep bow in her bungie, and Emma, her face uncharacteristically shy, gives a little wave.

When they dismount, Claire is flushed and excited, handing the college kid an extra twenty to make up for giving him a heart attack with their acrobatics. “I feel like going to Six Flags,” she announces. “You up for Six Flags? How about after our next fifty collars we take a trip!”

Emma has never been to a theme park. That much is clear from just the half disapproving, half excited look on her face.

“Dean hated the Needle. You’d never guess it from all the roof-jumping, but he nearly peed himself every time we went on. He made me go on them alone. You gonna wimp out on me, too?”

“I don’t wimp,” Emma informs her.

Claire laughs joyously and ruffles her hair. “Then it’s a date!”

After patrol a few nights later, when Emma is safely upstairs (she knows; she’s checked the manor and Cave security cameras to make sure), she contacts Charlie. She doesn’t answer the first hail, but on the third ring of the second, the call connects, and Charlie’s exhausted face appears on the monitor.

“Hi,” Claire says.

“What,” Charlie says. Her eyes have bags as dark as Claire’s under them. She looks like she’s forgotten to eat, although Claire can make out the rims of at least three coffee mugs at the bottom of her screen.

“Just wanted to check in with you,” Claire says carefully. “Wonder Girl said they haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’ve been busy.” Charlie isn’t looking at her anymore; her eyes are focused on what is ostensibly another computer screen, the sound of typing coming through from her end.

“Charlie,” Claire says softly.

“Don’t.” Charlie’s voice is terse.

Claire charges ahead. “I’m worried about you. Please let me come get you.”

“No.”

“Charlie.” She would have gone already to get her; but she’s deactivated her tracking signals, and even Dorothy and Kevin don’t know where her current safe house is. Claire’s asked them. Their first loyalty is to Charlie, but they’re as worried about her as Claire is, and Claire is ninety-eight percent sure they would have told her if they knew. “You’re burning yourself out.”

“I’ll rest when I’ve found Dean.”

“Charlie.” Her voice breaks this time; she can’t help it.

“He’s not dead,” Charlie says flatly. There’s something frightening her eyes, a sort of gleam that Claire has seen in their Rogues before, and once or twice in Dean’s own eyes, after Alex—but never in one of her sisters. “I know he’s not, Claire. I have proof. There are new paintings at Lascaux of bats, it’s a message, he was there and he’s sending us a message—”

Claire is shaking her head. “Charlie, please, just come home—”

“I can’t!” Charlie shouts. “Why don’t you get that? He’s out there—”

“He’s dead!” Claire snaps. “He’s dead, Charlie, and he’s not coming back, and you’re killing yourself for him, and I—” Need you.

The anger is only building in Charlie’s face. “I thought you would be the last one to give up on him,” she says, and disconnects the call.

- - -

Dean Campbell had no funeral. To the public, he wasn’t dead. Batman had a funeral on the Watchtower with no body to be buried, and Flamebird was the only member of the Bat clan who went.

She sat, cold and numb and trying to be present, as people went up on the podium that Batman used to use for mission briefings and share their best memories of him. She sat through them and heard half of them, and that was not enough and it was too many, and she didn’t realize that they were finished until hands were gripping her shoulder and murmuring condolences and promising “any way I can help.”

It felt like a bad dream. It felt like Scarecrow had caught her again. This was going to end any minute.

It didn’t.

“You know somethin’?”

She looked up. Missouri, the League’s Magician, stood next to her.

“These things—” Missouri motioned out around her, at the funeral. Her eyes were very piercing. “They aren’t for the departed. They’re for the people that get left behind.”

Flamebird hugged her elbows to her stomach. “I know.”

“Honey, you don’t know shit.” Missouri tipped her foreheads to Flamebird’s. “I’m sorry you’re goin’ through this.”

Flamebird exhaled. And thanked her, and stood up, and went to the Monitor Womb. It was quiet and empty.

Except:

“Cas.”

Superman turned toward her. His eyes, distant and ice blue, held the emptiness of an arctic landscape before they focused on hers.

For the first time since she had known him, he looked like an alien.

“Claire,” he murmured. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Flamebird nodded. It felt wrong, to accept condolence when he was the one who looked as if his world had been torn from him. Again.

Cas said nothing more. They stood in front of the view shield, the cloud-swathed expanse of the earth stretching out beneath them, and eventually Flamebird murmured her goodbye and left.

Charlie was in the cave when she returned.

“People asked where you were,” Claire said.

Charlie’s eyes didn’t leave the computer screen. “I had more important things to do.”

“More important than paying tribute to him?”

“I don’t need to pay tribute to someone who isn’t dead.”

They were both tensed. They had felt this moment coming, the fight swelling between them like an abscess, getting harder and bigger and finally coming to a head.

“Charlie,” she tried gently, crouching down next to her. “I know this is hard. But he’s gone.”

“That’s conjecture.” Charlie pushed Claire away, shoving to her feet in the same movement. “They didn’t even find remains.”

“Because there were none.”

“You think he would give up this easily if it were one of us?” Charlie spat. “If he didn’t know where we had gone, he wouldn’t rest until he found us!”

Claire couldn’t breathe past the constriction of her ribs and the desperate press of her stomach against her diaphragm. She couldn’t watch this, she couldn’t watch Charlie run herself into bones and skin for something she would never find. Charlie had always been the most like Dean of all of them, and Claire couldn’t let her become him.

“Don’t do this,” was all she managed. “Please don’t do this.”

Charlie’s only reply was a venom-filled glance. There was betrayal in it, too, pulling down the corners of her mouth and tightening the corners of her eyes. She reached inside the folds of her suit and pulled out the tracker that they all carried.

She crushed it beneath her boot.

“If you’re not going to help,” she said, “don’t bother trying to find me.”

She climbed onto her cycle, backpack slung over her shoulders, and roared out of the bunker.

Claire went to the manor. She had very little memory of what she did past putting down the bottle of Blue Moon to open the cabinet in the cave where the benzodiazepines were kept.

When her eyelids cracked open hours, days, years later, Bobby was standing above her, a looming presence of disapproval in the cold dark dampness of the cave. The metal of the cot frame dug into her back.

“Breakfast is ready,” he said, and left.

Upstairs, the table was empty. Claire gripped the edges of the table in one hand and held a cold glass of orange juice at the other, nauseous from the smell but aching for the coolness of the glass as she held it against her face. Heat throbbed behind her eyes.

She waited for Bobby to ask where Charlie was. She waited for him to tell her.

He did not. There were the quiet sounds of him moving in the kitchen and nothing else. The silence rang in her ears.

“Emma’s downstairs,” he said what might be hours later. She forced her eyelids apart. Met his gaze blearily.

“She found you there,” he said. Conversational.

Claire closed her eyes again.

Then she pushed to her feet, taking the glass of juice with her. She felt sluggish and dirty. Dean would have never stooped to this. Dean would never trust her again if he saw her like this.

Dean’s daughter was moving back and forth among the wooden training mannequins. The loud impacts of her wooden staff against them sparked like fireworks in Claire’s skull. The throb in it worsened.

“Emma.”

The kid didn’t stop. Claire exhaled and resigned herself to sitting and waiting until she stopped.

Except there was no leisure just to sit and wait. All moments needed to be used to their full capacity now. She seated herself at Dean’s computer and began to review his open case files. There was a legal pad still covered with his writing beside the trackpad, and she swallowed down the wave that rose and tried to engulf her. Concentrated hard on the facts and the plans and the sour taste of the orange juice aging on her tongue.

Hours later, she perceived the absence of sounds from the training mat. She turned and saw no movement. Got up, padding soundlessly closer, and saw Emma slumped forward against one of the wooden dummies. Her staff lay at her feet and her tiny shoulders were heaving.

Claire climbed onto the mat. “Emma.”

“Go away.”

Claire did not go away. “When was the last time you drank?”

“I don’t need you to take care of me!” Emma shouted. “Mind your own concerns, you gypsy trash!”

Claire stood there a moment longer. Then, as Emma picked back up her staff and began again, an angry cacophony of wood against wood, she returned to the computer and sat back down. Concentrated on facts, and plans, and orange juice, again.

Afterward. She avoided it instead of dealing with it. Went out on patrol in the suit with Dean’s colors, Dean’s symbol, a long platinum wig. Mills eyed her suspiciously but gave her information; Batwoman went out and came back bleeding. Silently endured the accusing looks from Bobby, fell into bed, and went to Campbell Enterprises two hours later, came home and repeated it all over again.

She tried to call Charlie, again, again, again. Needed someone to watch her back. More than that—needed someone to remind her that there was something to come home to. To come home for. She ignored calls from her friends because they wouldn’t understand why she needs to do this; they would tell her to stop and she already had her own voice in her head telling her that she should, that this wasn’t her job and it didn’t have to be. But if it wasn’t her, then it was no one, and—

She didn’t stop.

A morning in January at dawn when she couldn’t feel her fingers, her lips, her nose. Snow settled on top of his unmarked grave, and Alex’s, in the cemetery behind the manor. His parents’ and brother’s markers almost buried because Claire hadn’t come to dig them out the way Dean did, every week.

She crouched down in front of all of them and sobbed.

When she got to the bunker. It was empty and silent and on the computer desk next to a mug of tea that had gone lukewarm there was an orange prescription bottle. Claire Novak, it said, and Prescriber: Dr. Elinor Visyak, and Escitalopram 10 mg.

The tablet was small and round and white. It went down on the second try.

She drained the mug. The tea had gotten bitter, sitting too long, and she cast off her cape on the chair and headed for the stainless steel refrigerator outside the medbay. The bottom shelf was full of bottled water, the top shelf with carafes of blood for Emma. All of which, when she opened the door, were full.

Her thirst receded. She studied the untouched containers, then closed the door.

Emma was not upstairs. Nor was she in the training room, the medical bay, the shower area, or on top of the computer, where she had lurked several times before Dean…

She was about to call Alfred when she thought of one last place to check.

The small workroom where they kept machinery that needed fixing glowed with the small yellow work light kept over the bench. Claire turned on the overhead light.

Emma didn’t look up from the batarang she was whetting carefully against the stone on the bench. A stack of them lay gleaming on the bench next to the whetstone, newly sharpened. There were sheets of metal next to the rolling mill that hadn’t been there before, Emma’s hands and arms covered with small nicks and glinting gray shavings.

“Emma.”

She was ignored. She took a step closer, not missing the way Emma’s shoulders went tighter under her thin jacket. It covered the clothing she usually wore to train in, and her hair was in the tight braid she wore to do so. It was still damp with sweat.

“Emma.” Claire gripped her shoulder.

Emma knocked her hand away. Her face was unusually pale even for her, and the bags under her eyes were red, crescents of yellow gleaming in her hazel-green irises. “Leave me alone.”

Claire grabbed her again. Swung Emma up into her arms this time, and the weakness with which the vampire child fought her hold woke unease in Claire. She was ruining everything that Dean had left her.

“Let—go!”

Claire put her down long enough to open the refrigerator, keeping her trapped between her legs and under one arm. Emma tried to scrabble free; Claire sat down with her, trapping Emma’s legs under her own and getting her arms pinned under one of Claire’s, Indian-style on the floor.

“NO!” Emma shouted as Claire brought one of the carafes of blood to her mouth.

“Swallow.”

“You can’t make me!”

Her fangs were lengthening, though, the yellow in her irises widening. She pressed her mouth and her eyes both shut, jammed her head back against Claire’s collarbone, away from the rim pressing to her mouth.

“Emma.”

Emma shook her head violently.

Claire put down the carafe. “Emma. Emma!” She shook her until Emma’s eyes opened to meet her gaze. “Listen. You’re not honoring him by starving yourself.” She held on tighter as Emma fought harder to get free. “Listen!” She jammed their foreheads together. “No matter what you are, he wouldn’t have wanted you to die.”

They stared at each other for a long minute. Emma’s breath stumbled, harsh and hot against Claire’s face.

Claire let her go.

Emma sat forward and reached for the carafe. She choked its contents down, crying, hiccupping.

Less than thirty seconds later she was throwing it back up. Tears streamed from eyes and snot from her nose. Her body shook, angry and wretched. Claire pulled her back into her arms, rubbing her back, smoothing her hair from her face. Sour-breathed sobs filled her shoulder.

They waited a few minutes for Emma to cry herself out. Then they tried again. She drank the next cold carafe of blood with a blank despair in her eyes, staring into a distance Claire couldn’t see and needed to bring her back from.

She held her closer.

“I need help,” she said. “Emma. Will you be my Batgirl?”

- - -

Batgirl and Red Hood find her in the Narrows. Her forehead is stiff under the cowl with drying blood from a scalp laceration, and she’s operating in a sort of tunnel awareness narrowed by exhaustion, panic and guilt. She punches Hood twice before she’s even aware that it’s Alex grabbing her by the arm, not some thug, and even then she’s still baring her teeth, because she came out here to be useful, not to be stopped.

“Hey,” Hood is saying, voice filtered by the helmet. It’s almost coaxing. “C’mon, B.”

Batwoman glares her down. There’s uncertainty in the lines of Batgirl’s limbs as she hangs back, letting Hood get closer to Batwoman, and it’s another weight laid on top of her. She’s supposed to be the constant. She’s supposed to be the one making Emma feel like things are stable and safe.

“I got her,” Hood says like she’s reading Claire’s thoughts. “C’mon.”

They go to the Bunker instead of the cave. Batgirl hangs back in the computer area, not taking off her mask, and Alex orders her to go make some tea or “whatever the hell it is you guys keep to drink around here.” Batwoman she manhandles into the bathroom to get her cowl off and scalp lac sutured, and when they’re done, clotted blood and gauze and scissors scattered on the bathroom counter next to where Claire sits on the closed toilet lid, she says, “You wanna talk?”

It’s clear from the pained look on Alex’s face that she doesn’t want to be the recipient of Claire’s verbal enema, but the fact that she’s willing to listen makes all the compressed gas inside Claire solidify, suddenly, and feel easier to contain. She rests her forehead forward against Alex’s armored stomach for a long, shivering moment.

“You’re doing a good job, you know,” Alex says. Her armor shifts against Claire’s forehead as she talks. “You fucking are. Better than Dean would be doing if he was you.”

An exhalation of laughter escapes Claire.

Alex hauls her up. There’s cots outside, and she pushes Claire onto one of them and sits on her to keep her down when Claire starts to struggle back up. She brushes Claire’s blood-stiffened hair back from her head, again, again, again, and Claire drifts off like that.

The cave’s comm chimes while Alex sits there trying to work through Batwoman’s open cases. A money-laundering scheme through First-and-Third, impending shipments at the dock from a drug cartel operating from Cartagena, a dirty judge taking bribes to funnel convicts into Arkham instead of Sing-Sing.

She punches the button to accept the call. Her helmet is on.

“Alex.” Superman looks surprised. “I was hoping to reach Claire.”

“She’s taking an enforced break.” When his brow rises, she elaborates: “Bobby-enforced.”

His brow descends. “I see. Is she handling everything all right?”

“Yes,” Alex says dangerously. She’s not about to out her sister to the alien, even if Claire probably views him as a closer ally than she views Alex.

“And you are wearing the cowl in the interim. I understand that was what you were hoping for not so long ago.”

Alex’s eyes narrow at this allusion to the beating she gave Charlie months ago. She changes the subject. “You want me to take a message?”

“No.” He’s looking at her with that penetrating gaze of his, and Alex doesn’t like thinking of the things he might see inside her skull.

“Bye, then,” she says, and disconnects the call.

Claire gets a call a few nights later from Lantern asking if she can fill in for her on Monitor Duty that night. She says yes out of a combination of obligation and guilt—the League has left her off the Monitor Duty schedule for months now even though it’s Flamebird, not Batman, who is only a reserve member of the League. She knows that as overwhelmed as she has felt trying to fill Dean’s boots, the League has probably struggled just as much, the main engineer and strategist, not to mention leader, of the group plucked from them with no warning.

The halls of the Watchtower are deserted as she and Batgirl step from the boom tubes down into the echoing steel passageways. Half the league is off-world on a diplomatic exchange with Oa, she finds upon texting Aaron; Supes was unexpectedly grounded secondary to kryptonite poisoning, and Lantern had to go in his place.

“Who got him with Kryptonite?” Batwoman is asking as she palms the door panel for the Monitor Womb; Aaron had gotten impatient with the “slow” speed of her texting and called her instead. “I thought Lucifer was in—”

Castiel looks up from the second seat in the womb.

Claire breaks off. “I’ll—talk to you later,” she tells Aaron, and hangs up.

Cas’s eyes are glowing with veins of green and blue: the residual isotopes of kryptonite in his system. It makes him look more otherworldly as usual as he inclines his head to her in greeting.

“Sorry,” Claire says. “Wouldn’t have been talking about you behind your back if I’d known we were pulling Monitor Duty with you.”

“No offense taken,” Cas says. His costume is the same black and white it’s been since he returned after Darkseid; the difference today is that there are flecks of white in his dark hair that don’t match the agelessness of his face. “Hello.”

Claire realizes, belatedly, that she has forgotten Emma is behind her. “I’m sorry. This is E—Batgirl.”

Cas gazes at her. Claire realizes that despite the full-face concealment of Emma’s mask, Cas is able to see through it to her face below, the curves of her cranium and mandible. The teeth.

But the expression on his face is not one of distrust, or even of concern. It is wistfulness, and hunger, so fierce that Claire’s chest is tight at the sight.

“You resemble your father strongly,” he says, finally.

Emma fidgets in the boom tube back to the Bunker after they finish their shift. She never fidgets.

“Go on,” Batwoman says. “Ask.”

Emma glares at her. “How would he know if I’m like him?” Her voice sounds more uncertain and longing than the scoff she probably meant it to be.

“Because he was Dean’s best friend.”

Emma steals a look up at her.

Batwoman pretends not to notice. “Maybe next time you could ask him what he meant.”

Emma goes quiet. She’s thinking, Claire can tell, as they make their way onto the elevator up to the penthouse.

There are pictures of Dean as a child somewhere, she knows. Kept safe and jealously preserved by Bobby, more precious than the thousand-dollar antiques perched on thousand-dollar pieces of furniture throughout the manor.

Most of them have even been digitized. She scrolls through the files on the external hard drive hooked up to the computer in Dean’s study, hundreds and hundreds of them in no particular order, differing only by the date they were scanned and put onto the hard drive. She goes for the earliest first and is immediately met by a picture of Dean when he couldn’t have been more than five years old, standing next to a hospital bed staring wide-eyed at a baby being held in a tired-looking Mary Campbell’s arms. The very shape of his eyes knocks the breath out of her with the familiarity: His face could as well have been Emma’s, hazel-green eyes and a freckled nose and the exact same curve of chin, vulnerable and stubborn at once.

She glances over the top of the monitor to where Emma and Alex are on the sofa by the crackling fireplace, working on another of Emma’s spelling stories or maybe something else. There’s an ache in her chest under her ribs, below where her heart must be. Dean used to help her with her homework down there; she learned how to divide fractions on that coffee table in front of the hearth.

She returns her gaze to the monitor and clicks down. Another punch to the gut: a scanned newspaper clipping for Heaven’s Circus, featuring The Soaring Novaks. They grin up at her in cartoonish glory, the caricatures of her blonde mother, her dark-haired father, and two little girls, one red-haired and the other blonde, standing on their parents’ shoulders in their blue leotards and waving at the crowd.

“What are you looking at over there?”

Claire automatically clicks several files down. A procession of pictures of her on her first days of school, taken by Bobby, flash across the screen before she stops clicking, safely away from the pictures she had been looking at. “I was looking for old pictures of us.”

Alex groans. Emma ignores her, climbing directly over her on the couch to drop over the back of it and pad to the desk. Claire scoots over in Dean’s huge desk chair to let her see the monitor. The picture on it is of a blonde girl, her hair pulled tightly back into numerous braids with pink streaks of dye throughout it, purple lipstick and black-painted fingernails. She has on a black leather jacket several times too big for her, scuffed at the elbows and wrists.

Emma’s brow creases; she glances up at Claire. “Were you undercover?”

Alex comes to look, too, and promptly doubles over with laughter.

“No, that was me,” Claire says. “I was expressing myself.”

“Expressing…displeasure,” Emma guesses.

Claire considers the picture. “Probably.”

“About what?”

“…myself, I guess.” Claire shrugs. “I didn’t like who I was on my own, so I had to change it up a little. Emulate elements of people I wanted to be like.”

“Hmm. Black…black…more black… I wonder who you were imitating,” Alex says.

But Emma’s focus is thoughtful. She studies the picture. Claire reaches out to pull her close, trying to catch her for a noogie, but Emma ducks out from under it, slapping the hand aside as she does so, and escapes back to her corner of the room. Alex snickers at both of them and commandeers the computer mouse for her own, scrolling through a high school career’s worth of embarrassing photos—including Claire’s first, scanty, designs for Flamebird. Claire settles back to watch them both.

- - -

She was in tenth grade, jostling down the steps in the diaspora of Gotham Academy students eager to escape school for Labor Day weekend, when a whistle caught her attention. Looking over toward the faculty parking area, she saw a baseball-capped man in flannel and a leather jacket leaning against an illegally parked motorcycle.

She picked her way toward him, crunching through the gravel in her Doc Martens. “Wow,” she said. “Are you cosplaying as undercover Captain America?”

“Ha ha,” he deadpanned back. “Try undercover Falcon.”

“Falcon wouldn’t be caught dead wearing flannel,” she declared, and Dean cracked a touché grin beneath his cap. He took the spare helmet off the side box and handed it to her.

She weighed it in her hands. “What’re we up to?”

“Cas invited us to Smallville,” he said. “Feel like catching the next train?”

She took the front porch steps two at a time, thundering up to the front door. It was never locked, and today was no different. “Hello!” she shouted as Dean followed behind her with a duffel bag over each shoulder. “CAAAAS! IT’S US!”

She reached the kitchen. Chuck looked up from the table, blinking behind his reading glasses. “Claire.”

“Hey, Grandpa Chuck,” she said easily. She clomped past him in her boots to the fridge, dropping a kiss on his cheek on the way.

Chuck looked at Dean, who shrugged back as if to say who can control teenagers?

Chuck sighed. “Cas’s out back.”

Dean dropped their duffels in the corner and took two beers from the fridge before heading out the back door that exited from the kitchen.

Claire slid into the table across from Chuck with her own glass of lemonade and began to interrogate him regarding his latest series. It sounded like a love story, which was a new genre for Carver Edlund, as she pointed out.

“Writers shouldn’t just keep writing the same things over and over again,” Chuck said, but his shoulders hunched and he very pointedly did not look out the back window over the sink.

Claire did. Dean and Cas were visible through it, Dean sitting on the fence with the rim of his beer hovering at his mouth while Cas tossed the last bale of hay onto a neat stack beside the tractor. They were both wearing flannel, Dean’s blue and Cas’s red. As she watched, Cas took a perch on the fence next to Dean, accepting the beer Dean handed him and saying something unintelligible that made Dean throw his head back with laughter.

She looked back at Chuck.

He turned red. “I’m not fanboying over my son.”

“Sure you aren’t,” Claire said. “Do you guys have any Pizza Rolls?”

Dinner took place at the Shurleys’ creaky old kitchen table, covered with a checkered tablecloth like something out of whatever magazine farmers read for style tips. Becky was still at a romance novelists’ convention in Ontario, and Cas insisted on cooking for them but had to take off midway through frying the chicken for an earthquake in South America, so that Dean took over and lassoed Claire into helping.

“But we’re the guests!” she protested as Chuck continued to clack industriously away at his laptop, peering over his glasses on the tip of his nose.

“Don’t let that burn,” was Dean’s only reply, so she reluctantly returned to flipping the chicken as Dean put the finishing touches on the crust of the pie that he and Cas had peeled a whole pile of apples to make.

The house smelled amazing by the time Cas got back, his hair smelling a little like ash but also of exotic spices and night air, the way a drive through countryside instead of Gotham would do. His eyes went immediately to Dean standing at the counter with his sleeves rolled up his elbows and arms smudged with flour, and the expression in them was so private that Claire looked away.

The look was carefully hidden away by the time they sat down to eat, Dean across from Claire and Cas across from his dad. They unpiled the pieces of chicken from the plate in the middle of the table, Claire gleefully claiming all the drumsticks with Chuck mournfully watching her. Dean and Cas talked shop over their side of the table as Claire stuffed her mouth, occasionally interrupted by interludes in which Cas asked her how school was going or whether she’d perfected any new bar routines lately. She happened to glance at Dean, once, while she talked about the quad she had landed in a meet, and he was watching Cas with that same expression in his eyes, but by the time Cas glanced back over at him, it, too, was hidden.

Claire met Chuck’s eyes. He smiled and gave a small shrug.

Claire rolled her eyes and set into the apple pie, ignoring Dean’s cry of protest.

- - -

A few days later, Cas invites them to Smallville.

The invitation surprises them all, including Alex. Because she’s included in it. Cas says he has something to show them.

“What could he have to show us?” Emma asks suspiciously. But she doesn’t protest going, or even bring up the list of things they could and should be doing in Gotham instead, the way Alex does. Alex has zero intention of traveling out to “the middle of Bumfuck,” as she puts it, but Bobby says, “I know I didn’t raise you to be such an ingrate not to go visit the man who might as well’ve been Dean’s common-law partner when he invites you, Alexis Jones,” and that shuts her up. She throws herself into the Audi with poor grace, snatching the keys from Claire.

“Remember when I had my Mustang?” Claire says reminiscently once they’re on the interstate out of the city. They have the Audi’s top down; Claire’s hair hangs loose and whips around her face in the wind. She’s wearing denim and aviator sunglasses and she looks like a dream.

“You mean before you totaled it?” Alex doesn’t need sunglasses. There’s a third, translucent lid over her eyes now like a crocodile’s, protecting her from the wind.

“I didn’t total it. There was an explosion. Totally different.” Claire twists around to look at Emma where she sits in the back seat, engrossed in her tablet. “I was obsessed with Nancy Drew back in the day. When I turned sixteen, Dean got me a blue Mustang like she had in the books. I used to pick Alex up from school, her friends were soooo jealous—”

She launches into a story of a time she took Alex and the boy (she thought that) Alex had a crush on out for ice cream on a double date with Jesse after school. Alex watches the road in the windshield and the rearview and the side mirror, watching the asphalt fly away behind them. She can remember those days, too: getting picked up from school by glamorous blonde college-aged Claire with her sunglasses and effortlessly cool grin, how it had felt to have people see Claire’s grin widen when she was Alex and waved her over to the car. How it felt to sit there next to her as they sped through town, the wind racing through her hair and her heart spinning like the wheels underneath them, Claire’s attention on her and not on Dean, or Batman, or the Titans.

They patrolled together sometimes in those days, too, Batgirl swinging after Flamebird on their zip lines, wind rushing onto her face around the domino mask. She used to imagine Flamebird catching her in midair, wrapping her hands around Alex’s waist with those orange finger-striped gauntlets. Stupid juvenile fantasies that seem so cotton candy now compared to the filthy things she imagines in her bed, leather gauntlets and hot tongues and teeth. But it felt amazing anyway, when she missed a jump and Claire caught her in midair. She had felt small and taken care of, and she wants to feel that way now. But she wants to attack Claire and consume her, too.

Claire is saying something about how she went to Gotham Prep like Emma did, not GCHS like Alex.

“Like hell was I going to some stuck-up nerd school,” Alex says.

“You mean you weren’t accepted,” Emma says.

Alex gives her the finger in the mirror. Emma laughs, the sound surprisingly devoid of malice. Claire, in the passenger seat, grins at them both.

The hills are wide and rolling, full of rolled bales of hay waiting to be transported to their destinations for the winter. Dirt rises up and billows away into the wide blue sky as they trundle down the unpaved road to the Shurleys’ two-story farmhouse.

The driveway has an old Ford with rusting curves but new tires and a gold Cadillac with a worn blue COEXIST sticker on the back. Visible in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch is a disheveled-looking man in a ratty robe, balancing a notepad on one knee and holding what Alex is pretty sure is a doobie in the other.

“Here we are,” Claire announces as Alex kills the ignition. “Superman’s house!”

Emma looks uncertain. “There is a homeless man on Superman’s porch.”

“That’s Superman’s dad,” Alex stage-whispers back.

Emma looks shocked, then affronted. Meanwhile, Chuck has noticed them and is trying to hide the doobie inside his sleeve and also get inside the house without being noticed.

Claire gives him no such opportunity. “Grandpa Chuck!” she calls loudly as she gets out of the car.

His shoulder slump in defeat. He turns back around, pulling his robe shut over his boxers. “Kids…” he acknowledges with a sigh.

Emma eyes him in fierce study, clearly trying to figure out how this specimen is the father of Superman.

“I know,” Chuck says, noticing her gaze. “What can I say. He takes after his mom.”

“He doesn’t really,” Claire tells Emma. “Becky writes romance novels even more outlandish than Chuck’s. Cas is strictly non-fiction.”

“Anyway,” Alex interrupts. “Where is the boy scout?”

“He had a, you know.” Chuck makes some sort of gesture that is maybe supposed to indicate taking flight Superman-style. “Anyone want anything to drink? Er—I don’t have any bodily fluids readily available, sorry.”

“Do you still have that blueberry soda from way back?” Claire asks, wandering into the kitchen. Emma follows her, still eyeing Chuck like she hasn’t decided what to think of him yet.

This leaves Alex and Chuck on their own in the living room with its paisley curtains and afghan-covered couches.

“So,” Chuck says. “How’s school going?”

“Wow,” Alex says. “You’re really behind, aren’t you.”

“I have other things to think about!” Chuck exclaims. “Besides, in my defense, Dean adopts a lot of kids.” A flash of regret crosses his face. “Adopted. I mean.”

“Dad.” Cas is standing in the front doorway, so quick and silent that Alex didn’t even notice him opening the door. He looks rumpled and tired, shirt collar uneven beneath his sweater and worn-out blazer. Even his blue eyes look faded behind his glasses.

“Yes.” Chuck jumps up. “I’m going to—go get dressed.”

Cas closes the front door behind him and puts his briefcase on the floor. “Alex.”

“Cas.”

“It’s good to see you.”

Alex gives an insincere laugh. “Not really. But thanks.”

Cas looks at her. “You,” he begins, but then Claire and Emma re-enter the room. Emma is crowded behind Claire, watching Cas closely. It’s the sort of intent gaze she usually reserves for Claire, minus the possessiveness. “Girls.”

“Cas,” Claire replies. She spreads her arms. “Here we are.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for the invitation.”

The formality is ridiculous. “Why are we here?” Alex says.

“There’s something I need to show you.” A breath of displaced air, and then Cas is standing in front of them in a t-shirt and jeans, a green flannel pulled over both. He grabs a flashlight from the kitchen counter and leads the way down the back porch steps.

They loop around the farm and the tractor parked outside it. There are bits of grass starting to grow into the tread; it doesn’t look as if it’s been used in at least several weeks. The fields are empty despite it being prime harvest time.

Alex elbows Claire.

She rolls her eyes. “Where are we going, Cas?”

“To where my parents hid the ship that brought me from Krypton.” He glances back at them over his shoulder as he leads them down an overgrown path into the trees that ring the property, leading down toward the river that encircles the northern border of town. “We have caves on the property. The only people that know about it are my parents and myself. And Dean.”

The path starts to slope downward into a gully. Cas holds out his hand. Claire is the only one who steps forward to take it. He shows no indication that he’s offended, merely floats gently down onto the leaf-covered ground six feet below with Claire standing on his boots. Alex flicks a glance at Emma; they both jump down into the space, landing in crouches. Alex’s boots slide a little in the leaves. The ground underneath squelches with soft mud; this place sees a lot of water, probably floods when it rains.

The gully twists away on either side, the walls of the gully covered with creeping roots and trailing weeds. Leaves have gotten caught in them, too; moss grows on the few uncovered patches of rock. They head north for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then Cas pulls aside some clinging undergrowth.

There is a narrow craggy space revealed behind it, looking barely big enough for Cas to fit through. He goes first anyway, though, doubtless aware that neither Emma nor Alex would agree to Claire, or themselves, going into this unidentified space first. He vanishes into the space quickly enough, his clothing scratching softly against the rough rock. Then there is a sound of rock scraping, and the craggy slit widens to a space big enough for two of them to walk abreast.

Alex and Emma glance at each other. Claire walks into the space.

Cas has the flashlight on. The beam illuminates rocky walls, a passageway little wider than the entrance he opened. The passageway slopes downward for only a few feet and then levels out, the passage tunneling off into four different directions. The sound of dripping water is audible somewhere.

Cas takes the second passageway. It ends almost immediately in a small space so low-ceilinged that he has to bend nearly in half. His flashlight beam reaches across a pile of tree branches covering something that gleams metallic underneath, and then up to the cave wall above it.

Her insides tighten.

Claire steps closer. She reaches up to touch the roughly chiseled outline of a bat in the rock. Her hand casts a long shadow across it in the beam from the flashlight.

“It wasn’t there before,” Cas says into the silence. “I was here at Easter, and there was nothing on the wall then.”

They’re all quiet. Absorbing what it means. Could mean. Dean died in May.

“The outside was undisturbed.” Cas’s voice is quiet. “No one had been here.”

Claire continues to feel the ridges in the rock, her fingertips pressed against the smoothed lines.

Alex comes up behind her. She touches the etching cautiously like she might touch something hot. The edges feel worn smooth like something that has been there for years.

She pulls her hand back. It’s too much to hope, to consider.

“Charlie found other things like this,” Claire says. “Caves in Lascaux, where there are Cro-Magnon paintings—our symbol was there.”

“What are you saying?” Emma’s voice is sharp.

“We’re not saying anything.” Alex looks warningly at Claire: don’t lift her hope. “It’s probably a trick—a plot. Something.”

But Claire isn’t looking back. Her eyes are on the symbol, alight with hope and hunger, tracing it with her fingers like something precious. Emma takes a step forward to get closer to it, her eyes filled with the same light, the way the people in the Bible must have looked at that golden ox.

What are you imagining he did? Alex wants to say. Went time-travelling instead of died? Don’t delude yourselves. Don’t.

But she sees it in their eyes, caught up in the possibility, imprisoned by the ravenous hope, and she walks back up to the ground and waits there as dusk falls velvety dark over the farm.

She’s silent on the drive home. Drives fast, reckless, like she has three vampires in the car instead of two vampires and one fragile human. Claire leaps out of the car even before Alex pulls it to a stop, taking the steps two at a time down to the cave. Alex’s fist clenches; she hits the automatic lock.

Emma looks up at her.

“Just,” Alex says. “Don’t—get your hopes up. Okay?”

Emma stares back. Her eyes gleam blue in the light from the console.

“Why are you saying that to me?”

“Because,” Alex says, “people don’t always get saved.”

She gets out of the car, tossing the keys to Emma.

- - -

Things got harder as Alex got older. Claire was busier. More distant. Dean had more things to do with the Justice League. Batman and Batgirl went out less often; Batgirl was forbidden to go on patrol while Batman was off-planet. Claire was off-planet frequently as well, out with the Titans, and Alex…Alex was discarded.

She defied Dean’s orders. Went out on her own, slipping past Bobby, who she thought was more than a little sympathetic to the way she had been left behind like an outgrown toy.

It was harder to work on your own. You had to be more violent. There was no one watching your back. You had to hit hard enough on the first time that scumbags went down and couldn’t get back up to come at you from behind. The first time someone got her from behind, it was when she had finally worked up enough guts to venture into the Narrows on her own. Her heart and stomach sat in her mouth, pounding with nerves. A pair of johns, one down, she was knocking out the second when the knife sliced her from behind. She spun, she struck, and struck, and struck. Until she realized blood ran hot down her knuckles through the gauntlets, and he wasn’t moving, he wasn’t moving, and she ran.

She checked the news obsessively the next day for news of a mauled corpse in the Narrows. Hacked into hospital systems to check intake records for a man or DOA with extensive blunt force trauma to his face. Bobby watched her furtive search with suspicious eyes; she tried to pass it off. Her heart thudding hard the whole time. She stayed off the streets. Watched the evening news with the reports of all the crimes she felt too guilty to stop, her arms wrapped around her knees, crushing close her roiling stomach. On the third night, the newscaster offhandedly reported a body found in the Narrows, the man identified—“the public is urged to come forward if they have any information”—and Alex recognized the face.

She lay awake all night on the couch, unable to sleep, turning over and over around the pit of fear and guilt in her stomach. Like she was revolving around it, like if she kept in one spot it would suck her in.

A search of his name the next morning, her eyes red-veined and burning, linked him to several alleged rapes. It should have made her feel better. It should it should it should.

It didn’t.

She stuffed her costume deep into the hamper in the cave. Bobby said nothing, only watched her with worried eyes, and Alex couldn’t bear them. She lived inside herself at school, living a nightmare as algebra and John Donne went on around her, and afterward she couldn’t go home. Crept to the trains instead and rode them late into the night, her hood drawn up over her hair.

Eventually she returned to the scene of the crime. Able to understand now why criminals did it. Drawn by some invisible force that only strengthened the longer it was defied. There was no yellow police tape, no chalk outline. Just girls working the street as usual in their heels and warmest, skimpiest clothes, and the pimps at the corner watching the cars that slowed to consider them. Alex crouched, setting her shoulders against the grimy brick of a condemned tenement, and watched them.

“Hey.”

Alex’s head jerked up. A woman with crinkly red hair and heavy makeup stood beside her. The—

She bolted to her feet.

The woman held up her hands. “I just wanted to say thanks,” she said hoarsely. She smelled like cigarettes and sounded like them, too. “You saved me. That guy was gonna—”

Alex wanted her to leave. “I’m glad you’re okay.” Couldn’t say she was glad for anything else.

The woman didn’t leave. She kept studying her. “You okay?”

“’m fine.”

“No you’re not.”

Alex said nothing. The woman regarded her a little while longer. There was a cigarette lit in her hand that she brought to her lips and from which she took a drag.

“You feel bad ‘cause of that ballsack,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna tell on you. He deserved it.”

Alex wanted that fact to make her feel better. So badly.

The woman took a last drag from the cigarette. Dropped it and ground it under her heel. Then she stroked her hand along Alex’s hair, a soft caress.

“Hang in there, kid,” she said, and headed down the street.

It didn’t occur to Alex until after she got home that the woman had recognized her out of costume. She rolled over in her bed and grasped her pillow tighter.

She sneaked back to the same street corner several nights later. It was later, the streets emptier, but the woman was on the corner, apart from the other women shivering on the curb. She wasn’t shivering, and her eyes, though it was dark, landed on Alex almost the moment she slipped out of the alley. She crooked her finger and headed further into the Narrows. Alex followed.

“You come back to say hi?” she said when Alex reached her. Patted her on the head, a careless motion with her manicured hand. “You still got that rain cloud hangin’ over you, babycakes.”

Alex did not lean into the touch.

“You need to be distracted,” the woman said. “I know how that goes.”

They went to a diner. The man at the register called the woman Mama. She ordered food for Alex and a coffee for herself. They sat in a booth near the counter, side by side, leaving the opposite bench empty, and Mama started to talk. Alex couldn’t remember quite what she was talking about, later, but it was the feeling of someone who knew what she had done still being able to look at her and talk to her and smile at her that was important. She felt so safe that she started to drowse. She jolted awake a few times, but Mama just smiled and shushed her and smoothed her hair back and tucked Alex back into her shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Mama’s got you, baby.”

- - -

Charlie flinches when she sees Alex on the screen. She masters herself quickly, face turning guarded and eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

“Claire isn’t going to tell you. Cas found something in his Kansas caves.” She taps a key; she hears the chime of Charlie’s phone receiving a message on the other end of the transmission.

Charlie frowns down, opening it. Then her face freezes.

She looks up at Alex. “Do we have a date for this?”

“Go carbon-date it yourself. There’s coordinates in the message.”

“Wait!” Charlie cries as Alex reaches to end the call. “Why are you telling me this?”

Alex ends the call.

“Alllliee.”

“Alll—ieeeeeee…”

Alex twists.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Mama whispers. “Baby. Why’re you—“

Alex jerks upright. Gasping. Drenched sheets. Red lines up and down her arms like she’s been trying to claw things off.

Claire is in the Bunker. It’s past three but she’s there with dark crescents of sweat under the cups of her bra and the hollows of her arm as she sits in front of the cave’s computer. Her damp hair escapes in wisps from a bun, the way she always wears her hair when she’s been on the high bars. A cup of tea sits at her elbow.

She flinches when she catches sight of Alex’s reflection in the screen. “Jesus, Alex.”

“Got you,” Alex says blackly.

“You did.” Claire swivels the chair around with her hands, legs folded up beneath her. Her eyes narrow. “Are you okay?”

“Why do you let her wear the full-face mask,” Alex says.

If Claire is startled by the question she doesn’t show it. “Because it’s what she wanted.”

“You think an eight-year-old should be able to make choices like that?”

“You think an eight-year-old should be running around punching criminals in the teeth?”

“No,” Alex says. “I don’t. And maybe you shouldn’t be letting her.”

“You’re high if you think I let her do anything.” The first note of anger colors Claire’s voice.

“You might do a little more with your influence considering you’re the only one she gives a shit about—”

“Why are you ripping up at me?” Claire demands. “The hell is this about, Alex?”

Alex shoves her. So full of rage she can’t get it out any other way.

Claire seizes her wrist and yanks it behind her back, spinning them both around. Alex slams her head backward; Claire’s grip loosens, and Alex yanks away only to stumble forward as Claire’s knee slams up between her legs. She snarls and whirls. Claire blocks her arm with an updrawn one; Alex lunges after her and Claire blocks each blow, her own expression becoming uglier and uglier.

The anger builds and builds and builds. Flaring with each blow to her face, her chest, her cheek. She hates Claire. Wants to kill her. Wants to be killed by her.

Seconds. Minutes. Long eternities. Claire on top of her and her eyes faltering on something above Alex’s collar, below her face.

Alex tenses. It’s the gnarled mass of scar tissue where Mama chewed into her; it’s the slap in the face that brings guilt and clarity flooding back into Claire’s eyes as she flinches back on Alex’s thighs. Like a brand under the sweaty fabric of her shirt Alex can feel the Y-line bisecting her from sternum to clit; her body is a shout of this is what you let happen to me, and with Claire’s weight on top of her, horrified and bruising, Alex doesn’t want that shout to be heard. Tomorrow, probably, or even later tonight, when she’ll want to take a handful of her guts and scrub them into Claire’s face where she’ll never escape the texture, the stink, of them, the way Alex never will. But not tonight.

The pulses in Claire’s thighs beat hard against the sides of Alex’s. She stares at Claire’s mouth. Pink and wet, the corner of it swelling with a faint violet shadow promising a bruise.

Claire gets up. She moves deliberately, telegraphing the movements, spreading her feet loosely in a jiu-jitsu pose. An invitation.

Alex rolls to her feet. They watch each other for a long moment. Then Alex moves.

Claire backflips out of the way of her charge. The movement is economical despite its altitude; she twists in midair to sweep her foot at Alex’s legs, out from under her. Alex back-rolls into a somersault, coming up in a lunge that leaves her core muscles screaming. Claire aims a right hook; Alex blocks the left-sided chip it was trying to distract her from and shoves toward to connect her knee with Claire’s solar plexus. Claire transfers her center of gravity like a creature made of water instead of flesh, swirling away and leaving Alex stumbling forward. She catches herself, then keeps low, deciding to go on defense instead of offense.

The dance becomes a grapple instead of a spar, Claire’s shoulder braced against Alex’s in an attempt to gain ground. Alex is able to hold her back easily and feels a rush of power at it, at being able to overpower Flamebird, the big sister who had somehow always been able to jump over her before, or sweep her, laughing, onto the mat and plant her foot on her chest and crow, maybe next time, Allie-cat!

They sit there on the mat, panting, Claire on her back with Alex’s knees pinning her down, calves to thighs, knees to groin, hands to wrists. They look at each other. A drop of sweat slides down Alex’s bangs where they fall forward over Claire, down, down, down, and lands on Claire’s collarbone. It rolls down, into the valley between her breasts. Alex’s eyes follow it until it disappears under her bra. Then they slide to Claire’s face. Claire is staring back at her, very still, her femoral artery throbbing against Alex’s knee in an excited tattoo, and Alex leans down. Slowly, not taking her eyes from Claire, follows the path of the drop of sweat with her mouth.

Claire’s hands come up to Alex’s face. She arches, exposing the milky underside of her throat, the tiny lines where blades have been held to it in threat. Alex travels back up to them, dragging her nose and then her tongue across them, the miniscule ridges in the softness of Claire’s skin, and it brushes the tip of her nose against the underside of Claire’s chin, a soft taunt, and their mouths meet as Claire lowers her face again, her hands finding the bolt of Alex’s jaw. She grips Alex’s hips with her thighs and rolls them, following Alex’s mouth, so that Alex is flat on the mat and Claire above her.

They fuck.

She wakes up afterward in the cold of the cave, cheek stuck to the synthetic material of the sparring mat. She turns her head, pushing up on her elbows. The movement, carefully as she shifts, wakes Claire; when Alex glances back down, her blue eyes are open, watching her.

Alex hesitates. She feels like that awkward street kid again.

“C’mere,” Claire says gently, and reaches up to smooth Alex’s hair back. Alex lets the hand pull her down, in. Presses her own mouth to the corner of Claire’s. Claire strokes her hair again, a thank you and a good job and a more, please, and Alex makes herself pull away. Gives Claire’s knee a good shove as she gets up, and finds her clothes, and heads out.

- - -

The pathologist came out. She had washed up, removed the scrubs and gloves, but the smell of cadaverine and putrescine still clung to her, drifting from the tight ponytail of her blonde hair when she turned her head. It was the smell of Alex’s body now.

“Tox screen was clean. Her PT/PTT were elevated.” Her eyes were steady on them although Commissioner Mills was standing behind them, listening. “Cause of death is difficult to narrow down at this time. The fire consumed…a lot.”

Claire looked over at Dean. He was motionless.

She looked back at the pathologist. “What were you able to figure out?”

“We were able to recover…” Dr. Hanscum shook her head, cast a doubtful look at Mills. “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s not—”

“Tell us,” Dean said.

Claire watched him uneasily.

Hanscum pursed her lips. “Her trunk was fairly intact. We were able to examine her organs. There are markers of hypovolemic shock. If she was lucky—she may have bled out before the fire got to her.”

Afterwards. After Eve sent Dean her condolences by having the pureblood that turned Celia impaled on a stake and beheaded, his corpseless head sent to Wayne Manor. After the papers finally stopped running pictures of the Campbell ward’s funeral. After the Batsignal had gone days without being answered. Claire dressed up in her Flamebird costume and tried to fill the hole, to save people, hunt things. Nothing at her back but the night and the cold and the guilt.

It was weeks before she turned from tying up a thug and Dean’s shadow was there.

They operated just outside each other’s silhouettes all night. Blood was left behind on the streets they patrolled, blood and punched-out teeth and shreds of skin. Flamebird followed the Bat, silent, anxious, scared: a little girl again, intimidated by the big dark man who took her in.

It took her all night to screw up the courage to say it. When they got back to the cave as dawn streaked the gray sky.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

He ignored it the way that man would have. Pulling off his cowl and stalking toward the computer.

She wasn’t the same girl anymore. “Dean.”

He sat. Stared at the screen. The case file log appeared, and he began to type.

She put a hand on the back of the chair. He stopped typing. She tensed, collecting the air inside her for something that would make a difference, something that could—

“Get out.”

The bottom of her stomach dropped out as if punched.

Still, she didn’t move.

Dean finished typing. Then he rose, pulled his cowl back on, got into the Batmobile, and roared out of the cave.

Claire changed out of her suit mechanically. It came away easily, stretched out by too many wearings in a row without laundering. She put on jeans, a t-shirt, her boots, and went upstairs.

Bobby was there, sitting at the table. His robe was on over his pajamas, and a decanter of bourbon that was almost empty stood in front of him next to a full glass.

Claire hesitated. Closed her fingers over the headrest of the chair opposite him but didn’t sit down. “I’m sorry, Bobby.”

Bobby studied the bourbon a minute before looking up at her. “You got nothin’ to be sorry for, kiddo.”

She still felt the need to defend herself. Her leaving. “He—”

“His problems ain’t yours.” Bobby held her gaze, searching her eyes fiercely. “You got that?”

Claire’s eyes were hot. She bit down hard on her lip and nodded.

Bobby gripped her hand in his callused one and then she left.

(But they were. They are. They should have been. That empty outfit in the vault.)

- - -

Alex’s phone rings. The screen says Private Caller.

Alex picks up. “What.”

“You free tonight?”

Alex shifts her grip on the neck of the pimp she found following a group of kids in the Bowery. There’s something terrifying and exhilarating about what she’s about to say yes to, like jumping off the side of a building without her zip line. “Depends what you’re offering.”

“A romantic stroll through the sewer.”

A snort escapes Alex. “You gonna buy me dinner first?”

“Do you really want dinner before heading into that?”

“I sure as hell won’t want it after.”

“Great,” Claire says cheerfully. “A cheap date. See you at 5^th and Harrison at one.”

Things get complicated. The pimp has a friend, who has a bodyguard, who has a Glock. Alex has one, too.

It’s one-thirty by the time she gets to 5^th and Harrison. There’s no sign of Batwoman except for, when Hood crouches down next to the manhole cover, one of the long ridiculously curled strands of fake hair from the Batwoman wig stuck between the manhole cover and its rim.

She swears and shoves the manhole cover back out of the way. The hair flutters down into the gloom.

It’s difficult but not impossible to follow Batwoman’s Kevlar-and-sweat smell in the fetid passages. About twenty feet in, the scent disappears; Claire must have bitten the bullet and decided to wade through the sewage to hide her trail, which means she was worried about her scent being detected, which means vamps or wolves or something else Alex isn’t even aware exists yet. Great. Was Claire coming down here to investigate a Killer Croc-vamp team-up?

She tries to raise her on several comm frequencies. There’s no answer, and Hood grits her teeth, hoping to God that the absence of Batgirl’s scent in her nose means that she was smarter about neutralizing her scent than Batwoman was, not that Batwoman’s down here on her own.

She hears the roaring from a distance first. Thinks it might be the sound of construction before she remembers it’s two a.m.

She breaks into a run. Splashing through the muck of the sewers, and there’s an explosion of water in the cistern ahead of her, a wildly bouncing beam of light. There’s a flare, the sizzle of a Taser, but it bounces off what it hits and falls into the water. Another roar.

Hood can hear Batwoman coughing and gasping. Then—gurgling, and nothing. Violent splashing.

She shoots.

Croc howls. There’s no blossom of blood-scent in her nose, but he moves: Hood hears a smaller body break the surface. Sees the caped silhouette flail desperately for the edge.

Croc must see her, too. He roars again, and his tail flies through the air.

So does Batwoman.

She hits the sewer wall. The whited-out lenses of the cowl flash on impact, then extinguish. She slides back into the sewage.

Hood opens up with a rapid barrage of gunfire. Croc roars angrily. It’s a mistake. Blood-scent explodes in her nose as her bullets tear into the unprotected flesh of his tongue and soft palate.

His tail lashes out, agitated thrashing. The tip of it bites into Alex’s skin through her jacket, parting it like butter, and she hisses despite herself, crouching to lessen the target she makes. She snarls at the same time, wading toward where Batwoman’s body sank. Raking her hand through the water, trying to find a handful of cape.

Croc starts to slither closer. Alex snarls again, so feral she feels it rush through her again, the reckless uncontrolled rush of being Made. Her fangs are lengthening. She is emptying her magazine, a deafening infinity of sound.

She feels his retreat more than hears it, the rapid swish of his tail in the water, propelling him upstream. She is still a minute, fingers raised from the triggers; then she is stuffing them back into their waterproof compartments on her bandolier and rushing forward, raking both hands through the water in search of Claire.

She finds handfuls of cape and drags her out. Sewage sluices down Batwoman’s limp boneless form. Alex presses her fingers under the high neck of the suit, sliding against her skin, until she finds a pulse. A noose loosens around her throat when she finds it.

It’s the scent that lifts her head up. The same putrescent smell as the rest of the sewers but thicker. More concentrated. She raises her head.

Things are bobbing to the surface of the water. Pale and ghostly in her night vision, bloated and melting apart.

Inferi, she thinks stupidly.

She thrashes backward. Finds her way out of the cistern somehow, Batwoman hauled over her back, her cape dragging in the water like a hand reaching back toward the surfacing bodies.

The smell.

The Batjet is waiting for them on the street outside when they emerge from the manhole. The cockpit pops open the second they emerge from the manhole, as if it has been sent to wait for them. Alex hefts Batwoman’s weight into the passenger’s seat and climbs into the pilot’s. The cockpit lowers, and the jet takes off without waiting for her to touch the controls.

Emma and Bobby are waiting in the Bunker. The skin around Emma’s eyes is red.

Alex and Bobby get Claire’s limp, reeking weight onto one of the exam tables. Bobby strips off the cowl efficiently, checking for an airway, penetrating trauma, things Alex should have looked for and didn’t.

“Get the rest of her,” he orders as he works. Alex starts with Claire’s boots as Bobby peels up her eyelids and shines a penlight into each one. She works her way up, checking each new undressed body part for signs of trauma. Claire starts to rouse by the time she’s down to her skivvies, and Alex leaves her to Bobby because she’s this close to killing something. Beneath the Bat suit, Claire’s body is mottled almost as dark as the Kevlar from bruises old and new.

Emma follows her into the shower area. She’s vibrating with tension, practically broadcasting her thirst to Turn Claire. Alex pulls suturing tools out of the locker she has adopted as hers and breathes through her mouth, trying not to be affected by it. She can smell the desire for ownership sometimes, the way Emma wants Claire to be hers completely, but it’s never been as strong as this.

She threads a new needle with 5-0 and begins to suture the laceration on her arm shut. The flesh is pale and bloodless. Nothing drains from it as she pulls the needle in and out, black Ethicon in slanted lines traveling toward her shoulder. There are other, older lacerations beneath her clothes, still held together by nothing but the sutures in them, undead skin that will never actually close.

“She didn’t tell me where she was going.”

Alex severs a stitch with her teeth. “They’ll do that.”

“She doesn’t need to protect me.”

“Why are you telling me that?” Alex drops her needle in the sharps container and jerks her head in Claire’s direction.

“She doesn’t listen to me.”

Alex pulls her shirt over her head, tugging it down over her bra.

“I could make her listen to me.”

Terror jolts through Alex. She is careful not to show it. “Then she wouldn’t be Claire anymore, would she?”

Emma studies her like she hears Alex’s thoughts. The skin around her eyes still smolders red.

“Thank you for saving her,” she says finally.

“You’re welcome,” Alex says, and goes to call Commissioner Mills.

They block the intersection off with yellow police tape and black-and-white cruisers. Officers clad in SWAT vests flank individuals in CSU jackets down into the manholes. Slowly, like ants carrying crumbs of food back to their ant hill, bagged body after bagged body is levered carefully up into the street and into waiting black vans.

Alex watches from a rooftop. Her neck burns and aches.

When she gets home that night, a fruit basket sits outside her door. It smells only of ethylene and AVG, no gunpowder. She picks it up and opens her door to find Claire lying on her couch.

She doesn’t walk in. “How’d you get in here,” she says flatly.

“Close the door and come in before you start yelling at me.”

Alex shuts the door behind her. “You should be in bed.”

Claire waves a hand dismissively. “Wasn’t my first Killer Croc rodeo.”

“It was your first as the Bat,” Alex says. “It could’ve been your last.”

Claire shrugs, almost hiding the wince it costs her.

Alex thunks the fruit basket onto her counter. Claire eyes it with lazy interest. “What’s that?”

“A thank you.”

Claire’s brow rises beneath her hair. “From who?”

“Your wannabe kid.” Alex pulls the tag out and tosses it to Claire. There’s nothing on it but a scrawled Jones. She watches Claire turn it over. “You know it’s her instinct to Turn you.”

Claire glances at her.

“You’re something she wants. And she always gets what she wants. She’s been raised that way.”

“She’s still being raised.”

“Hmph.” Alex leaves it at that and crosses her arms, leaning against the couch arm, gently enough not to jostle the cushions under Claire.  “What the hell were you thinking, going in there without me.”

“You were coming.”

Alex doesn’t respond to that. “Did you know the bodies would be there?”

“I had a hunch,” she says. “Mills gave me a file a few weeks ago with info on almost twenty kids who’d disappeared from in and around the Narrows. I’ve been trying to track them down since then. I thought at first it might be Celia—” She glances at Alex, “but none of them matched unID’d remains from anywhere within the tri-state area.”

“What did match?”

“They all went missing after Jack Montgomery escaped from Belle Rêve in July.”

“Last I checked, crocs don’t hibernate,” Alex said. “Why would he kill a bunch of people and just sit on the bodies instead of eating them?”

“They brumate.”

Alex almost but doesn’t quite flinch at Emma’s voice coming from behind her. She looks over and sees the kid lying on her stomach in her bedroom doorway, a book propped open in front of her.

“What?

“Brummation,” Emma repeats. “Crocodiles are cold-blooded, they can’t regulate their own temperatures. When it gets cold, they find an insulated place and stay there until it’s warm again.” Her tone says, duh.

Alex turns back to Claire. “So…Montgomery is displaying a hell of a lot more forethought than he ever has before.”

“Maybe he finally decided to Wikipedia crocodiles,” Claire says. They both ignore Emma’s disdainful sniff at the mention of Wikipedia. “But I’m with you; it’s fishy. You up for coming with us tomorrow night to see what they’ve dug up in the morgue?”

“Oh, you mean you’re not going to leap in on your own this time?”

“I have been read the riot act already from Emma and Bobby,” Claire says pitifully. “I don’t need it from you, too.”

“Whatever,” Alex says, and gets up. She stretches. “You guys didn’t happen to bring any food with you, did you?”

Emma points at the fridge without looking up from her book. Alex heads into the kitchen and finds a tower of Bobby’s faded red and white Tupperware in the fridge.

Claire coaxes Emma into watching Chamber of Secrets with them on the couch. It’s the only DVD Alex has. Emma agrees with poor grace, staying on the floor next to the couch instead of on the couch itself, ostensibly so that she can keep reading from the light of the lamp from Alex’s bedroom instead of watching the movie, but a few glances at her from the corner of Alex’s eye show her focused on the TV. At least until the first scene with the Mandrakes, at which point she appears to have fallen asleep on her book, cheek smushed against the page.

“What’s she reading, anyway?”

“Their class history book,” Claire says. “She says it’s completely inaccurate and she’s drafting a complaint letter to the school trustees.”

“Ugh,” Alex says. “I do not envy you, having to take her to school.”

“The first day was nerve-wracking,” Claire admits. “Dean was having Bobby homeschool her, but it seemed like…” She shrugged again, not hiding her wince this time. “She needs more than me and Bobby. I hoped school would give her that.”

Alex raises a skeptical brow. “Did it?”

“At least it gives her something to complain about other than me,” Claire says dryly. “Besides, she’s good at school. And it’s something she doesn’t have to feel conflicted about being good at.”

Alex forks chicken dumpling into her mouth. “You mean she feels conflicted about being good at bashing skulls in? You really are a strong influence, Claire-bear.”

“I think we both know the influence isn’t mine,” Claire says quietly.

Alex chews her dumpling. Neither of them say anything for a few minutes.

“Bobby homeschooled me for a while, too,” Alex says finally.

Claire visibly makes an effort to pull herself out of her brown study. “No kidding?”

Alex watches her a minute longer. “Yeah. He used recipes to make me learn how to divide fractions, it sucked.”

Claire’s attention has become a little more genuine, her smile. “Me, too.”

Alex looks over sharply. “Bobby homeschooled you?”

Claire returns her look. “I grew up in the circus, remember? My mom taught me how to add and stuff, but I wasn’t exactly on a second-grade level when I came to live with Dean. Bobby homeschooled me for half a year before I could start at school. And they still put me in remedial reading.”

When Alex doesn’t answer, she glances over at her again. “What? Was that TMI?”

“I almost failed sixth grade when I came to live here.” Sick with dread every night that Dean would find out she didn’t know how to read and kick her out. If she knew Claire, the golden child, had been in the same boat—

Claire looks genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry. Dean and Bobby probably didn’t feel like it was their place to tell. I was pretty embarrassed about it.”

Alex’s mouth twists. “Yeah, well.” She darts a glance over at Claire. “Never realized you were so human,” she mutters, almost under her breath.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that growing up I hated you for being so perfect,” Alex says flatly. “It seemed like nothing was ever hard for you.”

“No,” Claire said, and her tone is something Alex has never heard from her before, “it wasn’t hard to see my little sister’s brains splattered on my bare feet. Or my mom’s on my face. Or—”

“Cla—”

“You know what else wasn’t hard?” Claire cuts her off. “Being a kid with PTSD raised by a man who had nothing close to a handle on his own. I didn’t spend every other second of my childhood and adolescence wondering if the next thing I said was going to send him into a manic depressive spiral.”

Alex’s insides are tight. She thinks she might throw up.

Claire, like she notices, stops and looks away, her lips compressed. Alex forces her fists to unclench in the fabric of the couch.

“Sorry,” Claire says after a minute. “I didn’t—“

“I didn’t,” Alex interrupts. “I’m sorry.”

They fall into silence.

“I did love him,” Claire says after a minute. “I do. That—none of that changes that.”

She sounds so guilty. It rips Alex up inside.

“I know,” she says quietly, and forces her fingers into Claire’s clenched ones.

The next night. One Police Plaza. Perched outside a window of the fourteenth floor.

“I don’t understand why we aren’t calling the commissioner to let us in,” Batgirl mutters.

“Because some of us give a fuck about her not losing her job, that’s why,” Hood says.

“Why? We’re the ones doing her job for her,” Batgirl says.

Hood grabs the chin of Batgirl’s mask and stretches it down.

She sputters, pulling it back up so that her eyepieces aren’t over her nose. “I’ll kill you,” she informs Hood.

“I’d like to see you try.”

“We’re going to get caught before we even get into the M.E.’s office if you two don’t shut up.” Annoyance tints Batwoman’s voice.

“Sorry, Mom,” Hood says.

Batgirl snorts. “As if your relationship wasn’t incestuous enough already.”

Batwoman and Hood both freeze. Then pretend not to have heard the comment, Batwoman finishing cutting into the window latch and Hood silently lifting it away for them to slip inside.

Their boots are silent on the carpeted floor. This level of the building is offices. They split up to take two separate stairwells down to the first floor level where the morgue is located, Batgirl and Batwoman in one stairwell and Hood in another.

There is a guard sitting at a desk in front of the card-reader to let them into the morgue. His mouth opens when he spots Hood, and at the same time, the gas-pellet of chloroform she rolls toward him explodes, expelling him in a sweet-smelling cloud. He slumps forward onto the desk.

“Not as good as Tasing,” she mutters when Batwoman and Batgirl emerge from the stairs behind her.

Batwoman flicks her the finger. Hood smirks behind her helmet and holds the guard’s card against the reader. It beeps, and they push inside the door. The space inside is empty: Ten minutes earlier, at two-thirty a.m., they watched the medical examiner finally leave for a few hours of sleep.

A respectfully covered body lies beneath a sheet on the closest table. The two others are similarly occupied, and colored paper inserts in the metal drawers along the wall indicate that ten of the twenty available slots are occupied.

Hood goes to the computer at the desk in the corner. Batwoman goes to the bodies on the tables. Batgirl, with obvious dissatisfaction, stands watch at the door. They agreed (or were overruled) ahead of time that Alex and Emma would be kept away from the actual corpses in order to avoid blood exposure, which had provoked Emma’s indignant protest that, while Jones was a completely different matter, she would never be clumsy enough to expose herself to dead man’s blood.

Batwoman’s small camera clicks quietly as she photographs the bodies. The sound joins the soundtrack of Hood’s fingers tapping on the keyboard as she works to crack the security system. For a minute, those are the only sounds.

“Got it,” Hood says.

She waits for the program to load, then starts scrolling through the reports that have been filed thus far on the remains. Quiet resumes save for the click of the camera, the roll of the drawers on the wall as Batwoman opens and closes them, and the scrape of the computer mouse.

“So far it seems like Hanscum is having a hard time getting C.O.D. on any of them because of soft tissue degradation,” Hood says finally. “She’s found marks on the clavicle and hyoid in a few of them.”

Batgirl stiffens. “Which ones?”

Hood lists the numbers of the bodies. The first is in an upper-level drawer; Batgirl scrambles up onto the adjacent lower drawer and perches nimbly on the top of the drawers, pushing open the one she wants and crouching over it to look. Her posture is tense, her face unreadable behind black fabric.

“What?”

Batgirl doesn’t answer, just jumps down to the next body, this one in a bottom drawer. She gets up close to it, peering at the bloated, disgorging throat and then sniffing up and down it. Her posture is very tense; she’s almost bristling.

“These aren’t from the crocodile man’s teeth,” she says.

“Yeah, Hanscum said the length didn’t match—”

“These are from a vampire.”

Batwoman and Hood’s eyes meet.

“None of the reports said anything about exsanguination,” Hood says, scrolling back through them.

“They weren’t drained,” Batgirl says. “Someone was trying to Turn them.”

Silence.

Batwoman and Hood’s eyes meet again.  Fury in Batwoman’s and dread in Hood’s.

“Why didn’t it work,” Hood says.

“If the mark is killed before they can ingest enough of the Maker’s blood, the Turning fails,” Batgirl answers. “A new vampire, unused to the lure of blood, might lose control before completing the process. But—” Her mask shifts with a frown.

“What?”

She directs her eyeless gaze to Hood. “These corpses smell like you.”

Hood’s stomach drops out.

“Hood didn’t kill these people—” Batwoman begins firmly.

“I’m not saying she did,” Batgirl retorts. “I’m saying the one who made her did.”

Hood tries to keep her voice steady. “Celia’s not a newbie vamp. Why didn’t it work?”

Batgirl nearly sneers. “Only Master lines can make themselves more than one companion at a time. Made vampires can only make a new companion if theirs dies.”

Realization opens up inside Alex like a sinkhole. Things crumble, plummet into it.

“Hood,” Batwoman says. She hears it as if from a distance.

“She thought I was dead.” Every dead body in here is because of her. “She was trying to make a new one.”

“Hood—”

Batwoman’s voice is cut off by the click of the lab door opening. Dr. Hanscum blinks at them in an old gray hoodie, holding a can of Monster in her free hand.

“Um,” she says.

It’s all the distraction Hood needs to disappear. A streak of brown and black and she’s gone. Batgirl snarls and moves forward in pursuit; Batwoman catches her by the hood.

“No,” she says. “I’m not risking you to Celia.”

“You think I can’t handle a mangy Made vampire?”

“I think you’ll listen to me or I’ll chain you up in the cave,” Batwoman responds.

Batgirl’s lenses widen. “As if you could!”

“This is what non-assassin parents do,” Batwoman says. “Get used to it. Do I have to follow you home to make sure you get there?”

“Don’t waste your time.” Batgirl throws the gauntleted hand from her shoulder and shoves away.

Batwoman started at the sewers. The manhole to the area where they found the bodies was still cordoned off with yellow tape that she ignored, descending hand-over-hand into the pungent depths. Her head twinged with each step, as if in the memory of the trauma sustained here less than seventy-two hours ago.

She found nothing, and no one, new in the cistern. She is disappointed but unsurprised; Montgomery would have had to be a good deal stupider than he was to return to somewhere with such a heavy police presence. She wonders who proposed the arrangement for Montgomery to keep Celia’s failures, how long Celia has been trying.

The Narrows are next, checking Alex’s old group homes, the fenced-in school playgrounds, the sketchy parks where shapes huddle under blankets on benches and under trees. Then her safe houses—she only knows the location of three of them, and not if there are more, and it makes her realize how little she knows about Alex, after all. The safe houses are empty, each with just an old used mattress on the floor and ammo stuffed under the floorboards.

Dawn streaks the sky gray by the time Batwoman finishes checking the last one, and tries on her comm once more to raise Hood. No answer on any of the frequencies, and that, too, is no less than she expected.

Her head starts to throb and ache in earnest, pounds that send pain arcing through the side of her head. She’s had enough concussions to know that she doesn’t have much time left in which she’s going to be cognizant, just enough to summon the jet and enable the autopilot for home. She presses the command and closes her eyes and tries not to throw up.

Emma waits in her bed until her tablet shows that the Batjet has been summoned. Then she throws off the blanket Singer had drawn over her when he came the third and last time to make sure she was asleep and slips silently from her room. She can hear the slow rhythm of Singer’s breaths and pulse in slumber a floor away.

The elevator carries her soundlessly to the bunker. Emma glances at the surveillance camera above her, but there is no point to disabling them. She will be long gone by the time they look for her.

She stops in front of the memorial cases in her uniform, cowl still hanging from her neck, before she leaves. Jones’ suit gleams under the hazy white light from the pedestal beneath it. Beside it looms her father’s suit, the eyeless holes of the cowl burning down at her. Emma stares back at them for a moment, then pulls her cowl over her face.

The stench of Celia and her failed spawn fills the pier. It’s a mixture of Jones’ smell and something else. It makes Emma’s hackles rise to smell it, fury and possessiveness swirling inside her. Neither members of her Coven truly belongs to her, Claire is her father’s and Jones Celia’s, but the rages rises inside her anyway, the fury at one of Hers being Called by another.

“Celia,” she says. She doesn’t raise her voice; a vampire of a Master line doesn’t need to. “Approach.”

Silence. The putrid mist curling through the night from the grates in the sidewalk. Then, slowly, movement.

The Renfields creep closer first. She snarls at them, but they don’t shy away the way that her mother’s always did, servile and afraid. These ones snarl back, their mouths curved in rictuses, and the first ripple of unease makes its way up Emma’s spine. She stands her ground, upright like the rod of metal her mother sewed into her spine, and awaits the creatures with her chin raised in expectation of her approaching subject.

Celia doesn’t bow when she approaches. She doesn’t approach at all. Something sharp hits Emma in the back of her neck, and the world collapses.

Emma snarls when the bag is taken from her head. A woman stands on one side of her, and in front of her is a long wooden bar counter, sticky and pungent with the residue of countless spilled drinks. Emma is in a bar stool with her legs lashed to the metal ones of the stool and her wrists to the back rest. Silver chain necklaces rope around the lashings, burning into her skin.

She tries to snarl at the woman behind the bar and chokes on the salty metal chains in her mouth, tears springing to her eyes as they cut into the sensitive flesh beneath her tongue.

Celia smiles and grabs her by the chin. Her thumbnails dig into the skin there, drawing blood as she shakes Emma’s head, hard, and Emma chokes in fresh disbelief and rage as blood squeezes out from beneath her fingers. A growl rumbles deep in her chest, her eyes beginning to redden, and Celia’s face, previously amused, goes dark. She yanks Emma’s head back with a snap. “None of that.”

Emma spits at her.

Celia blinks. Then smiles, wiping the saliva from her eyelashes. She snaps a finger, and a male Renfield moves closer. There is a phone held up in his hand like a camera. He directs it at Emma, and Emma stares at him with venom and more in her eyes. His step falters, his gaze starting to unfocus, and Celia’s hands come around Emma’s eyes from behind, covering them.

“Ah ah ah,” she breathes into Emma’s ear, so close that her crinkly crimped red hair brushes Emma’s cheek. “Play nice now.”

Emma thrashes to snap at her. The vampire merely moved her hand to cover Emma’s mouth, too, the other moving to cover both her eyes. Emma breathes hard through her nose, nostrils flared and furious.

“Alex, baby,” Celia says next to her ear. She’s talking to the camera. “Your little sister misses you.”

Emma slams her head back. She meets Mama’s fangs instead of her chin, and they slice her scalp open. Pain arcs through her head, increasing when long-nailed fingers dig into her hair and wrench her head back. “You need some discipline, little chickadee.”

“Remove your hands from me!” Emma shouts, her mouth freed—

Fangs sink into her neck.

Emma gasps. As much from shock as from pain—no one has ever dared to drink from her.

Celia’s mouth goes still. Then she lifts her head, hand falling from over Emma’s eyes. Her mouth drips Emma’s blood, bright and red. She drags her tongue across her lip, savoring it.

“I knew it,” she says. “A Master Vampire, slumming it with my Allie.”

Emma is nearly crying in rage. “My parents will tear you apart!”

“Batman didn’t kill me for little Alex,” Celia says. “What makes you think they’ll do it for you?”

Emma screams, a wordless shriek of fury and power. The glass in the windows around them shatters, blown out, and so does the screen of the phone. The male Renfield stumbles, falling to his knees. But Celia just smiles and sinks her mouth to Emma’s neck again.

When Claire wakes up, her cheek is digging into the familiar leather of the sofa in the study. Alex is lying on the carpet beside it.

Claire moves her head to be able to peer down at her sleeping face. The slope of Alex’s nose gives way to the dip of her philtrum in a curve so perfect she wants to trace it with her mouth.

Alex’s eyes open. The hazel of them practically glows in the sunlight streaming through the ceiling-high window.

“Hi,” Claire says fondly.

Alex grunts an embarrassed noise and starts to get up. Claire shoves a pillow onto her face.

Alex yanks it off indignantly. “What was that for?”

“You carried me up here,” Claire says.

Alex’s eyes flicker away in embarrassment. She grunts.

Claire arranges herself more comfortably on the couch, elbows tucked around a new pillow. “So. Something brought you to your senses.”

Alex’s averted eyes travel to the ceiling. She stares at it for a long time. “Running off on my own was what fucked me over last time,” she says finally.

They say nothing.

“We’re going to find her,” Claire says.

“Yeah?” Alex says. “And when we do, what then?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“No, we won’t. I’m going to kill her and no one’s going to stop me.”

Their eyes burn into one another’s. Claire can’t quite breathe. She wonders if this is what it feels like, to be glamoured by a vampire, or whether it’s just Alex, for her. She reaches out and traces a fingertip down the path her eyes had followed before, down to Alex’s mouth. The dent her fangs make in her lower lip.

A knock from behind them breaks the moment. Claire rolls over to look at the doorway.

Bobby’s troubled eyes meet hers. “Any a’ you seen the little one?”

Alex starts to get up. “She should be in her room.”

“Well, she ain’t,” Bobby says bluntly. “I was hopin’ she was with you two. Her room’s empty.”

They all exchange glances and split up. Bobby and Alex go down to the bunker, Alex reviewing footage from the security cameras while Bobby searches all the nooks and crannies he’s becomes familiar with through four generations of Batgirls. Claire sweeps the rest of the penthouse.

“She took off last night,” Alex reports about five minutes into their search. “Didn’t bother scrubbing the footage.”

“Can you—do you feel anything?”

Alex shakes her head even though Claire isn’t beside her to see it. “No. She’s…” She doesn’t say, gone.

“Girls.”

They both stiffen at the tone of Bobby’s voice. Within seconds, they’re next to him, in the den, where BREAKING NEWS is running across the bottom of the screen on Gotham News Network. Above that is grainy cell phone footage of a bound child screaming as an auburn-haired vampire feeds from her neck. Blood cakes her head and face, obscuring her features, but her dirty blonde hair and Celia’s red frizzy curls are unmistakable.

Alex retches onto the carpet.

“This footage was sent to three news networks in Gotham this morning,” the anchor woman is saying. “The accompanying message—”

Claire is gripping the back of Alex’s shirt hard. “Bobby—”

“I’ll run recognition software,” he says. But his face is grim. “There ain’t much background sound to filter out, Claire. That screamin’—”

“Whatever you can,” Claire says tersely.

Alex has stopped vomiting. She crouches on the carpet, fingers clawed in her scalp. She is breathing hard, rocking back and forth. Then she pushes to her feet, grabbing for Claire’s waist.

Claire catches her hands, confused. “Alex—”

“Where’s the belt?” Alex says hoarsely. “The blood. We need the blood.”

“We have to find where Celia is before we can use the blood on her.”

“Not on her. Me. Need to knock me out.”

Claire’s hands grip Alex’s wrists more tightly. “How is getting knocked out going to help you?”

“She finds me when I’m…out. Asleep. Unconscious.” When I can’t keep her out.

Claire watches her steadily. Her eyes flick back and forth, as if finding chinks in Alex’s eyes. “And how will that help us?”

“I’ll be able to feel where she is,” Alex answers. “She’s…” It tastes so horrible in her mouth, worse than the emesis reeking on the floor. “She’s my Maker. We can always find each other.”

Claire stares at her another minute longer. Alex isn’t sure if she feels sorry for Alex or disgusted by her. Probably both.

But she reaches into her shirt and pulls out a small vial on a silver chain.

Claire insists that she lie down on the med bay bed. Even covers it with an extra blanket first, and then covers Alex with another one, up to her chin. Wipes Alex’s antecubital down with alcohol before uncapping the syringe, as if it makes a difference.

(It does. Alex squeezes her eyes shut, feeling the burn as tears try to make their way out. Oh God, it does.)

- - -

It became a routine. Going to see Mama at night. Dean wouldn’t approve, but Dean wasn’t there, off again with Superman and Lantern on some intergalactic mission. What would bother him most was someone knowing her identity, and somehow Alex always forgot to bring that up when she was with Mama. But Mama hadn’t told anyone about her yet…

“Hey,” Mama said one night. “When you gonna come stay with me?”

They were watching something on TV. Mama’s apartment was small but cozy, filled with blankets and old flannel shirts and ashtrays.

“Seems like you’re pretty lonely with whoever it is you stay with now,” Mama said.

Alex mumbled that Dean took good care of her.

“Takes more than feedin’ a kid and clothin’ ‘em to take care of ‘em. You need love, Alley-cat.”

Alex hugged the couch pillow closer to her. Mama took another drag off her cigarette, exhaled the familiar smell. Alex’s home, her real home, used to smell like this, before the manor and the streets, like ash trays and hairspray. Here, cradled in the memory of it, the thought of the man she killed was something distant and small, something she could dig a hole for and bury, cover up easily. Step on the ground above it without even feeling the lump it made.

“Claire,” Alex heard herself say. “She’d miss me.”

“Who?”

“Claire,” Alex said. “My sister.”

“Where was your sister when you couldn’t sleep, Alley-girl?” Mama’s eyes glowed with anger. For her. Anger that someone wasn’t there to take care of Alex when she needed it.

“If you really love somebody, you feel it.” Mama thumped her chest. “When they’re upset. When they need you. I knew that day, Alex. I knew you needed me, just like you knew I needed you.”

She wrapped an arm around Alex and drew her close. Alex fell asleep in the circle of her arm, the scent of ashes and the warmth of flannel-covered skin.

Dean was in the kitchen when she let herself quietly in through the servants’ entrance the next morning. “Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

Alex’s stomach roiled. She shrugged and moved past him more nonchalantly than she felt.

“Hey, kiddo.” Claire was coming down the stairs, in pajamas with her hair in a sloppy bun. “What’s up—”

“Alex,” Dean said warningly from behind her. Alex stiffened.

Claire noticed. “Oh my God,” she said, stopping at the foot of the stairs. “You haven’t even been back on the planet for two hours and you’re already jumping down her throat? Space, Dean.”

“I’ve got class,” Alex says, moving past Claire for the stairs.

“Alex!” Dean barked.

“Hey!” Claire snapped. Alex couldn’t see her face, but she moved forward like she was squaring up to Two-Face instead of their foster dad. “Go upstairs, Alex. Me and Dean need to talk.”

Alex took one step, then two, up the stairs. Then five of them all at once, and stopped where she would be hidden from the first floor, tightly gripping the banister and holding her breath.

Dean’s voice was terse, the way it usually was when he and Claire talked these days. “Why are you here, Claire?”

“I was on Tamaran for nearly a month,” Claire’s voice said. “I thought it would be nice to see you guys. Apparently I was wrong.”

“You’ll forgive me for being surprised,” Dean says, “considering you stay for months in Bludhaven and Jump City without bothering to visit.”

“Wow,” Claire says. “That’s what it’s going to come back to, is it? More guilt trips. I’m not even surprised.”

There was no reply.

“Am I supposed to believe that you want me around when every other word out of your mouth is a criticism?” Claire says. “Try again, Dean! Jesus, I’m surprised it took Alex this long to start sneaking out to get away from you. You yell at her, you leave her on her own for weeks a time—”

“So do you,” Dean said coldly.

“Yeah, but I’m not her dad!”

Silence. Then:

“I’m not, either,” Dean said.

Mama was waiting. Like she felt that Alex needed her.

“Sshh,” she said. “Sshh. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”

She woke in the night to searing pain in her neck. “Wha—” she started to say blearily, panickedly, but something was shoved over her mouth, muffling her scream. Pinning down her arms.

“Sshh,” Mama said. Her mouth shiny and wet with something dark. “I’m doing this for you, baby. I’m doing it so we can be together.”

Alex sobbed. Fought. Kicked out with her boots with the blades hidden in the soles, and Mama’s fangs slipped. Severed.

“No,” she said in horror through a mouthful of blood. It dripped onto Alex’s face, hot. “No—”

Blood poured from Alex’s throat. The world began to darken, black rushing in from the edges. She felt Mama forcing her mouth open, Mama forcing something wet and salty onto her tongue, but then the taste of it faded, and then even the tactile sensation of it, and there was nothing.

- - -

“Alex. Alex!” Hands catching her chest as she rockets upright, sucking down breaths. She’s soaked with sweat. Takes a minute to focus her eyes past the thirst burning and throbbing in her throat, puckering her tongue and mouth. Claire’s eyes big and pale blue, worried and scared. Her capable hands pressed against Alex’s sternum, over the should-beat of her heart.

“I’ve got her,” Alex gasps.

“Great,” Claire says, which doesn’t match at all with her expression. She helps Alex off the table, keeping one of Alex’s arms over her shoulder even as Alex pulls it back. “Take us there.”

Alex pulls her arm from her shoulder, grabbing her helmet from the nearby counter. “No.”

“Alex, you’re not going there by yourself.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Alex says. “You can fly there in the jet and blow the whole place up. All of it.”

“You’re sure you can get Emma out?” It’s not challenging, exactly, but Claire’s voice isn’t betraying utter confidence in her, either.

“What?” Alex binds up her sweat-soaked hair, then pulls the helmet on over her head. The eye slits flicker to life. “Don’t trust me to put saving Emma before taking Ma—Celia out?”

“I don’t think you can take her.”

Alex feels a stab of anger and fear.

Claire grabs her arm. “I’m not saying it because I don’t believe in you.” She tightens her grip until Alex meets her eyes. “I’m saying it because I love you.

“I want to keep you safe. I don’t want her even looking at you again.”

Alex’s heart thuds hard. She pulls away, though. “Then you know what to do,” she says, and leaves.

She can feel them both, as she packs her bandoliers full of dead man’s blood. Like a finger crooked to coax her closer, a crooned c’mere, baby. She resists the urge to skulk like a dog that has misbehaved creeping back to its master’s side to be punished. Makes herself stand up straight, instead, as she strides into the warehouse. Feels the tracker nestled inside her bra, and in her boot, and inside her bite guard. Safeguards in case others are found. Claire isn’t letting them be taken so easily again.

Renfields are waiting for Emma in the front. She stares them down. “Mama invited me.”

“Not with weapons, she didn’t,” says one of them. A few years older than Alex, maybe, in stiletto heels that could kill.

“If you try to take them I’ll use them on you.”

“Then we’ll make a snack out of the kid,” replies the Renfield. “I’ve never had filet mignonne before.”

Alex almost laughs at their sheer idiocy. They have no idea what they would bring down on their heads, draining a vampire of Eve’s line. It’s like watching a redneck go up against a Star Destroyer with a BB gun.

Mama says, Let her in.

They all feel the compulsion. The Renfields stiffen like they’re being brought to climax, mouths forming O’s as their eyes unfocus. Alex stiffens like she’s being groped, gritting her teeth. When it dissipates, she steps through the Renfields without receiving any protest.

The warehouse stinks of fish in the cool autumn afternoon air. The stench almost overpowers the fainter under-scent of rotting human flesh. Light seeps in through grimy windows high above them, or through cracks in the warehouse’s frame, illuminating stripes of bloating corpses and the gleam of blood on the cement floor. There are a few still being fed upon, and too late, Alex notices the sluggish heartbeat in one of them. Her whole body seizes up, paralyzed in the remembered horror. Then she’s lunging, snarling, shrieking; things lunging and hissing at her; she kicks and slashes back, and only when she’s next to the heartbeat, when it’s stuttering to a stop anyways, a pair of empty eyes staring up at her in the warmthless sunlight, does she realize the voice shouting in her earpiece. “Hood! Hood! ALEX!”

Her own breaths are deafening in the silence of her helmet. She tries to find them. Bloody fingers digging into the torn-open thoracic cavity of the adolescent no older than she had been, as if she could get the motionless heart to beat again.

“Alex,” Claire says again, softly. “Your vitals are haywire. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Alex rasps, and keeps moving.

Mama meant for her to see that. She knows she did. No matter that she lost two, three Renfields to Alex’s rage. It’s set her off balance, made her remember how Mama scared her, how Mama can tear her apart, and—

She forces the thoughts out of her head. Makes herself move forward.

She gets to the place from the video. Except the chair there is empty, its restraints hanging limply. A Renfield is on its knees and hands licking the blood from the floor. It looks up as Alex comes in; she shoots it between the eyes. The skull explodes into pieces across the floor.

“She’s not here.”

“What?” Barely-leashed panic in Claire’s voice.

“She’s. Not. Here.”

“How did they—”

“Shut up.” Alex listens. Trying to— “They’re outside.”

“No, they’re not—” Claire cuts off. “There’s a ship docked. It’s about to—”

“I’m on it,” Alex says. But even as she turns. She hears movement behind her. Renfields amassing in the dark.

“Alex?” Claire asks tersely.

“You might beat me there,” Alex says grimly, and opens fire.

Batwoman steers the jet over to the docked floating vessels. Machine gunfire opens up on her from below. The craft rocks with impact; teeth gritted beneath the cowl, she dives it sharply into the water, thankful for the modifications that Dean and Emma made to allow the easy transition to submersible.

The gunfire follows her into the water, brief fiery sparks in the wavering blue-gray. She fits her rebreather over her mouth and nose and crawls into the aft-most portion of the vessel after enabling the autopilot. The bulkhead opens and water from the harbor pours in: She crouches and pushes off, away from the jet.

The water is murky and filthy this close to the docks, litter floating in the depths; she kicks and rises toward the ladder rising from the starboard side of Celia’s ship, careful to keep out of the suction of the propeller that’s starting to turn. A few seconds’ careful surveillance; then she surfaces slowly, staying still to listen. No shouts or movement accompany her surfacing. She grabs the barnacle-encrusted ladder and makes her way up as silently as she can after wringing out her cape. With each loud beat of her pulse in her ears and wrist and chest she imagines it: finding the body of the child who trusted her, who relied on her, torn beyond recognition.

I’m coming, she thinks hard, like Emma would be able to hear her the way she might be able to a member of her coven. I’m coming, kiddo.

She pauses with four batarangs held between her fingers before coming up over the hull of the boat. There is a Renfield standing watch; she flicks the batarangs and two spin past it, two embed themselves in its hands.

It rushes at her. She moves slightly to the side and flips it over the side of the ship with its own momentum. A churn of sound and red blossoms in the water below her where the propellers are.

She returns her attention forward, hopping over the side onto the deck. Deafening rounds of gunfire are still coming from the warehouse on the shore, and she glances toward it as she heads for the cabin. As she watches, Hood explodes out of one of the upper windows of the warehouse. She lands on the ground in a roll, red helmet gleaming in the sun, jeans and armor dark with blood, and comes up running, racing toward the water. Batwoman shoots a grapple at her, and she grabs it without breaking her stride, leaping into an arc from the dock. Batwoman’s arms tremble with strain until she manages to hook the line over a railing on the bulkhead for leverage.

Hood lands with a quiet thump on the deck, reeking of blood. Batwoman is already moving down into the cabin, ducking as gunfire sprays from it. She can feel Hood on her heels; the space is cramped and small. She collides with hiding bodies and shoves through, ducking low as Hood releases the sharp edges of her gauntlets with a metallic sound and sprays of arterial blood gush forth. Hood is panting loudly into the comm nestled in her ear, but Batwoman is only peripherally aware of them. She can feel something ahead of her, like a magnet urging her close.

A cargo bay. The door hanging open. A chair lying overturned on the floor, and in it, a child.

Batwoman flies to her.

Emma’s swollen eyelids are red with burst capillaries. An ugly mouth of bitten red flesh drools slow red blood on her neck. It mixes with the blood congealing in a glistening track down her scalp from lacerations under her dark blonde hair. Batwoman cups Emma’s face in her gloved hands and touches her thumbs gently to her cheekbones.

Her eyelids force themselves apart. She stares at Batwoman blearily for a long moment, her irises yellow with terror, and then hiccups a sob. Batwoman seals her palm over Emma’s bleeding carotid, and the sound that comes from her is something neither of them have ever heard before, and when Batwoman slices through the silver knotting Emma to the chair, she throws herself into Batwoman’s chest and sobs.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, sweetheart.” Batwoman enshrouds her in her cape and turns. The passageway behind them is filled with crumpled, twitching bodies.

Alex is nowhere to be seen.

Nor is Celia.

She is a tornado of metal, shredding Renfields as if they’re no more than paper. Alex can ignore the first geyser of blood, and the second, but the third and fourth and fifth are creeping through the filter in her helmet, making her vision swim and fingers curl and fangs stretch. She pants, tries to think past it; tears off her helmet as if that will make it better instead of worse. The scents hit her all at once, streaked with her Maker’s touch: baby, these are for you. I made them for you.

“Bats—” she tries to say, but she’s lost Claire somehow; is in a room with bunks and a bolted-down desk and the floor rocks under her feet—

“Looking for me?”

Alex spins out of the way only just in time. Mama closes her clawed hand and grins at her. Her teeth and mouth are red with blood.

“You didn’t tell me you’d made such important friends, baby.” She clucks her tongue, moving closer despite the stake Alex holds in her hand. “Since when do you know Master vamps?”

“Like you didn’t know she was here.” Alex is surprised her voice comes out as steady as it does. The rush of blood in her ears pounds in an off-beat staccato with the pulse thudding in her chest. “You can smell her the instant you hit the interstate.”

“Sure you can,” Mama says. “I didn’t expect her to be four feet tall, though.” She tilts her head and takes another step closer. “Did you think she could protect you from me?”

“I don’t need protection from you.” Alex clicks off the safety on her gun with the hand that isn’t holding the stake.

“Wrong,” Mama says, and in a blur of motion, her hand is around Alex’s throat, hauling her against the wall. Alex gags and kicks out uselessly, her heels hitting the wall behind her as she dangles a foot above the ground. The gun and stake both clatter onto the floor, the gun going off with a deafening retort.

“You know what I do when my babies are bad,” Mama says. “And you’ve been very bad, Allie.”

Alex digs her fingers into Mama’s wrists, choking. She tries to dig her claws in, but Mama doesn’t flinch as sluggish black blood seeps out of her wrists.

“You should’ve come to me the instant that bitch brought you back. Do you know how badly you scared me?” She cups Alex’s cheek. Strokes her thumb down it. “I thought I’d never have a baby again.” Her grip goes cruel, thumbnail digging into Alex’s face. “You let me think I’d be alone!”

Alex scrabbles at her hands. Black dots dance across her vision.

“We would have been so happy together,” Mama whispers. Her breath sour-hot. “You were exactly what I was looking for, Allie. But now… I can’t trust you anymore, baby. I think… I know. As a Renfield is the only way you can stay with me.”

Alex thrashes. “Cl—!” she chokes out.

“Ssshhh,” Mama croons. “This is for your own good.”

She rips open Alex’s armor, the t-shirt underneath. Drags her claw down the Y-scar on Alex’s chest, the black sutures popping as she goes. Alex feels parts of herself start to slide out.

Then Mama’s head rolls off her shoulders.

Alex stares.

At Batwoman, who is holding a machete behind Mama’s severed neck.

Her mouth is in a straight line under the cowl, the white lenses impenetrable.

Alex’s knees buckle. They land hard against the floor, a jolt of pain in her kneecaps that only a very faraway part of Alex feels. Her eyes are fixed on Mama’s head, the tangled hair that has fallen over its face and left only one eye visible, staring blindly ahead.

The world spins around her, and she manages to turn weakly to the side before she’s sick all over herself.

A pair of cold fingers touches her bite mark. She raises her head and sees Emma standing above her, wearing Batwoman’s cape wrapped around her like a cloak. Her head and neck are a dried mess of blood. She meets Alex’s eyes from under one of the dried streaks and digs her fingers in harder.

A claim.

A sound pulls their eyes to the other side of the room. Batwoman, looking strangely small without her cape, is holding a lit match. She holds it to Mama’s tangled hair. It catches flame. Batwoman steps back as the whole head is quickly engulfed in flames. Emma pulls Alex’s head to her.

“C’mon,” Batwoman says. Her voice is hoarse.

They make their way out of the room and into the narrow passageway outside, picking their way through a morass of limbs and carnage. The air is thick with the smell of blood and Alex holds Emma close, Emma allowing it, her skinny arms wrapped around Alex’s neck and her skinny legs around Alex’s waist. Batwoman strides silently ahead of them, more shadow than human. A darkness seems to have fallen over her that that faraway part of Alex recognizes as Not a Good Thing, but there’s no time to deal with it right now. Smoke is billowing out over their heads from behind them, the air growing hot and caustic with smoke.

Sirens are wailing closer by the time they emerge on the deck. The air out here, too, is streaked with the smell of smoke, black billowing up from the warehouse into the light-polluted night as flames dance inside the grimy shattered windows. The smell of cooking flesh fills the air, a grotesque barbecue that makes Alex glance reflexively at the sky for fireworks.

The familiar whine of jet engines joins the approaching cacophony of fire trucks and sirens and crackling debris and popping membranes. The inky black Batwing descends slowly to hover in front of them.

They climb in.

When they get to the cave. Batwoman gets out first. Alex sits in the passenger seat a moment longer, boneless and numb and detached with Emma’s weight in her lap. Then, rousing herself, she gets an arm under Emma to lift her and climbs out.

She’s only taken two steps when Batwoman stops her with a hand at her chest.

Alex glances up.

“Get out.”

Lydia turns from her contemplation of Alex’s old Batgirl suit in its case. Her eyes slide over Alex, lingering on where Emma has gone rigid in her arms, and then to Claire, whose voice had been like ice. “I have as much right to be here as you, gypsy.”

Emma slides down Alex slowly. Alex can hear the uncertainty thudding in her like a heartbeat.

Lydia considers her dispassionately for a moment, then looks at Alex. “Is she dead?”

There’s no need to clarify who she means. Alex grips Emma’s shoulder. “No thanks to you.”

A phantom of a smile touches Lydia’s face. She takes one step down the short stairway leading up to the platform with the displayed costumes.

Batwoman moves forward, placing herself in front of Emma. “Why are you here, Lydia?”

“My faith in your abilities to protect my daughter isn’t as strong as her father’s was,” Lydia says. She descends another step, her eyes on Emma. “I had no intention of letting you keep the body.”

Batwoman snarls. There’s an answering gleam in Lydia’s eyes, a leap of red hunger, but before either of them can move, something sails out of the darkness, exploding in a small splash of black at Lydia’s feet. Dark spots blossom on her boots as she looks down.

“Next time,” comes Bobby’s voice from the stone stairs leading up into the manor, “I won’t miss.” He hefts his rifle, loaded with cartridges of dead man’s blood, against his shoulder. “Get outta my house.”

Lydia watches him for a long moment. Then, with a sweep of her raking gaze across Alex and Emma, she pivots and disappears in a flurry of dark wings.

Alex’s hair resettles against her scalp from where the whoosh of displaced air sent it flying away from her face. Emma is very still under her fingers.

“That’s what I thought,” Bobby says.

She isn’t able to fall asleep that night. Maybe it’s being in the manor, in the dwarfing plush leather couch she used to fall asleep in while Dean worked in the armchair across the way; maybe it’s the weight of the demon-child in her lap who won’t loosen the grip she has on Alex’s shirt even in her sleep. Maybe it’s the dread that sits low in her stomach, knowing that even after all of this, nothing is, after all, actually better.

Something has changed that she can never change back.

Claire stands in front of the window, her arms crossed. She’s been there since Emma fell asleep on top of Alex, unable to be wheedled into releasing her grip on Alex in favor of her bed. Maybe she, too, has that sinking dread in her stomach, knowing that Lydia is still out there somewhere, a vulture waiting to snatch Emma up again the moment she, or they, falter.

Her arms tighten around the kid. Involuntarily, she tells herself.

Aloud, she says, “Do you think she hired Mama?”

“To take Emma? Maybe. To come after you? No.” Claire’s eyes stay on the dark window; her reflection stares back at her from it. “Lydia’s very good at using others’ means to meet her ends.”

“She was there. When Eve brought me back.”

Claire is still. Then she turns completely to look at Alex.

“She was the one who showed me pictures of Charlie. In my uniform.” Alex’s fingers tighten. “She acted like she felt sorry for me. She said that—that it didn’t take him long to replace me.”

They both know what came after that. Charlie beaten within an inch of her life, Alex with blood on her hands and her teeth. The canyon between her and Dean, never to be bridged.

“I ruined everything there was between me and Dean,” Alex whispers. “If I hadn’t listened to Lydia—”

“Eve would have found a way to twist you regardless,” Claire says into the silence. “There was a pot and there was a frying pan, Alex, you were fucked either way.”

Alex hiccups a laugh. Swipes her nose across the sleeve of her blood-spattered jacket. They fall back into a silence broken only by the crackle of the log burning down in the fireplace. Claire goes back to staring out into the dark, arms crossed, her reflection shadow-edged and vague in the floor-length window pane.

“Come lie down,” Alex says after a while.

“Can’t.”

“Hey.” Alex waits until Claire’s reflection’s eyes move to hers. “You saved her.”

Another silence. Then.

“He wouldn’t want me in this house,” Claire says abruptly. Like a bullet popping out of flesh. “After—what I did.”

Alex has nothing to say to that. They both know Dean’s No Killing rule.

Claire doesn’t try to make her. She recollects herself, turning away from the window and forcing a smile. “Looks like you guys finally figured out how to be sisters.”

Alex looks down at Emma, who is still a vampire burrito inside Claire’s cape. “You’re the one whose cape she won’t let go of.”

“Because you don’t have a cape,” Claire says. She’s motionless for a moment longer, then comes to the couch, sitting on the end opposite from Alex and Emma. Perched on the edge.

Alex shifts her thighs, feeling numbness and the prickling return of sensation as she adjusts Emma’s weight. Emma shifts back to where she was without waking up, pushing her head imperiously against Alex’s opposite shoulder, bossy even in her sleep. Alex sighs and sinks further into the couch.

When she looks up, Claire is watching her, her eyes filled with the reflection of the fireplace in the dark room.

“She claimed me,” Alex says, almost involuntarily.

It’s visible, the tension that re-enters Claire’s frame. “What do you mean?”

“She’s a Maker.” Alex can feel the ice-hot burn on her neck, one Mark laid over another. “She took me. From Mama.”

“Is that…creepy?” There’s no humor in Claire’s voice. Her expression is serious and intent.

“It’s actually…” Alex’s voice is barely audible, “really nice.”

Because. It. It’s actually wonderful. Like coming home from school and having Dean ruffle her hair and call her Alley-bat. Like Bobby making cookies just for her, because she aced a test. Like staying up until two in the morning with Claire watching Lilo and Stitch.

This is my family. It is little, and broken, but…still good.

“Oh no,” Claire says. “She’s got you whipped.”

“Whatever,” Alex retorts, ears turning red in the midst of Claire’s laughter. “I’m not the one who called her sweetheart.”

“True,” Claire concedes, and they’re both quiet for a long time, watching the fire. It’s starting to die down already, the orange fading into the glowing hearts of the logs.

Eventually the first rays of sunrise begin to climb over the horizon. As the sky fades to purple, then gray, orange seeping in at the corners, the embers in the fireplace exhale their last bright breaths and dim.

“Will you stay?”

Alex turns at Claire’s quiet voice. Claire isn’t looking at her. Her profile is outlined by the gray sky outside the window, just a silhouette of her tiredly fluttering eyelashes and the wisps of her hair and the sharp divot of her lip.

Alex thinks of her empty apartment with its sweat-stale sheets and narrow bed. The quietness of it, a quiet that crawls down her mouth and nestles in her gut, her lungs, her brain.

Emma is heavy in her lap. Alex shifts her legs, anyway, and twists around on the couch. Stretches her feet across the cushions. Into Claire’s lap, boots and all. Claire looks startled for a second, then rests her hands over Alex’s toes, clasping them gently.

Alex says,

“Yes.”