All around them, the sounds of the library began to grow silent. It was a busy library, and with her new hearing, Lois had grown used to the sounds of people moving, of the occasional homeless person snoring, of books being pulled from racks.
One by one, those sounds began to fall silent. Lois felt something on her skin, like an electrical discharge, and she could smell ozone.
Clark could sense it too, although Jimmy seemed oblivious. He was still flipping through the paperwork and talking about the background histories he’d found on some of the others.
Out the window, Lois could see the last rays of the sun fading from a sky that was turning dark. It was twilight, the time once known as the gloaming.
The sensation Lois had begun to associate with evil was rising deep within her stomach, and she stood up suddenly and moved down the stacks to try to see what was happening down the main aisle.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and saw Clark shaking his head. He gestured to their left, and Lois crouched. Behind them, Jimmy was just falling silent.
Through the books she could see someone collapsed to the floor in the next aisle, and someone else in the aisle past that.
It must be happening all over the library.
For some reason, Lois’s hands itched for a weapon.
The shelving was all metallic. Lois scuttled backwards, and returned to their seats. These had thick wooden slats on the back.
Lois leaned forward on one of the chairs and said quietly, “Jimmy, gather everything together.”
He nodded, for the first time noticing the expressions on both their faces.
Lois heard a cracking sound, and the wooden piece she was leaning against cracked. She looked up at Jimmy, who was staring at her, and she shrugged.
People didn’t take care of things at public libraries anyway.
She pulled at the wood, which splintered, and the whole thing came off in her hand.
Jimmy wasn’t the only one staring at her. She could feel Clark’s eyes on her back, but she didn’t have time to worry about it. Something was coming, and she had a growing sense of danger.
It was then that she heard the sound of the wind.
Lois turned quickly, and Clark was there with her. Jimmy was hurriedly gathering everything together, looking frantically up every now and again.
Clark pulled his glasses down yet again, and he seemed to be staring through the stacks. He stiffened, and a moment later Lois saw why.
Angelica stepped around the corner, and she wasn’t alone.
Worse still, Lois couldn’t move.
************
“You though you were clever, bringing a witch with you.” Angelica smiled at Lois, with an appreciative glance at Clark. “I wouldn’t have expected it of a newcomer.”
She patted Lois’s cheek, and Lois was surprised to find that her hand really was unnaturally cool.
No matter how she struggled, she couldn’t move an inch.
“Did you really think it was going to be hard to hire a witch in Los Angeles?” Angelica grinned. “I told you I’m smarter than the other newbies. I learn from my mistakes.”
Lois could smell the blood on her breath and on her clothes a faint smell of the sewers.
“I’ve heard that the blood of your kind is like a drug for mine. It’s supposed to be better than sex, better than chocolate, a real rush.”
She sniffed Lois’s neck, and then grinned. “I think I’ll enjoy it more if I have an appetizer.”
She stepped behind Lois, out of her field of vision and a moment later Lois heard a horrible wet smacking sound.
If Jimmy died, it would be her fault.
Angelica returned to her field of vision, blood running down her chin. “Young and sweet. He’ll be popular at dinner. Much better than the horrible old winos I’ve had to eat.”
Clark stood perfectly still as Angelica left Lois and headed for him.
She caressed his face, which was expressionless. Leaning against him, she said, “We wasted so much time. Now we’ll be together forever.”
Lois’s finger twitched.
“Get this over with. They’re both hellishly strong, especially him.” The young blonde woman behind Angelica was sweating profusely. “You didn’t tell me he wasn’t human.”
“Skeletons in the closet?” Angelica smiled more widely. “Clark! And I always thought you were so honest.”
Glancing over at Lois, she turned to her last minion. “Kill her. We’ll have dinner cold tonight.”
Marcus smiled at Lois. “Turns out, all that time I was waiting for Rachel…she wasn’t waiting back.
He put one large, dark hand on her neck. “You’d think it’d bother me more.” He lightly caressed her jugular. “You smell really good Miss Lane.”
“We aren’t taking her to the prom. Just snap her neck!” Angela said.
Marcus shrugged and then placed his other hand on the other side of her neck. “Sorry. She’s the boss. Me, I think you’d make a grand va-“
He disintegrated into a cloud of fine dust, and Lois was left staring down at her hand which was holding the stake.
It had slid in like warm butter, not at all like a human. Human ribcages tended to crack and snap.
Lois could hear an agonized howl from Angela, who was holding her bloody mouth. A moment later Angela was flying, and stacks of shelving were falling.
Clark blurred and disappeared.
A moment later, Lois could see patrons appearing in the main aisle as though by magic.
The girl had disappeared, and so had Angela.
Turning toward Jimmy, Lois saw that he was holding a part of his own shirt against a wound on his left wrist. The cloth was rapidly turning red.
“Clark!” Lois called.
She could hear the sounds of the museum restarting as everyone within woke. She could hear sounds of dismay from down below as people realized they had collapsed on the floor.
Clark appeared before her. Before she could say anything, he had picked Jimmy up and he was gone.
**************
“They’re calling it a carbon monoxide leak from the furnace.” Lois stared at the telephone. “It’s summertime and the furnace isn’t even on!”
“He’s going to be fine,” Clark said. “They didn’t even have to give hum a transfusion, although he had to get several stitches.”
Clark was pulling several authentic looking cardboard boxes filled with Chinese food and setting them out on the table near her bed.
In the aftermath of the incident at the library, neither of them had gotten to eat. Given the conversation they were about to have, Lois wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat a bite.
“We need to get Jimmy on the first plane back to Metropolis.” Lois closed her eyes. “He’s going to get killed if he stays here much longer.”
“I’ve already talked to Perry. He’s threatening to yank us off the case as well.”
“What did you tell him?” Lois asked, pivoting on her heel to face him.
“I told him that Jimmy was attacked by the same people who’ve attacked him once already, and attacked the Cortez ranch.”
“We can’t leave now,” Lois said. “I’ve got too much invested in all this to quit. If I have to, I’ll take my vacation time.”
She had a lot of it, almost four years worth, maxed out with time no longer accumulating.
Perhaps after this was al over, it would be best if she used some of that time anyway.
“We need to talk.” Clark said.
For some reason, Lois couldn’t look him in the eyes. She couldn’t stand the thought of looking at him and seeing the same horror, the same disgust she’d seen in the face of the prisoner she’d saved.
She still saw those eyes in her nightmares, reflecting back her own horror. All the things she hadn’t been able to feel at the time had come flooding in later.
She’d felt sick and empty and utterly alone. This wasn’t some youthful indiscretion she could share with her sister Lucy with the lights down low.
It had tarnished the way she looked at herself, made her feel dirty in ways she was only now beginning to be able to describe.
Having Clark see her that way made her shrivel inside.
It was the dark side of respect. People you respected, their opinions were important. Their opinions mattered.
“You had no choice. He was going to kill you.”
Clark was sensitive enough to know what was going through her mind, but he had to say that. It was the expected thing to say.
“I liked Marcus,” Lois said. “Staying loyal to his wife, living so close. I haven’t met many men like him.”
Marcus had chosen to put the needs others first. Lois had just been selfish.
“Look at me,” Clark said.
Lois shook her head. If she didn’t look at him, then some part of her could pretend that it never happened. Once she looked at him, it would be real.
“I don’t think I’m human anymore,” Lois said at last.
“I don’t think I ever was,” Clark said quietly.
At that, Lois finally looked up.
There wasn’t a trace of censure in his eyes.
*************
“I didn’t even know I was different until I was eight.” Clark said. “There was an accident on the farm, and I was…ok. I shouldn’t have been.”
As hard as Lois had hit him in her sleep, he hadn’t been bruised.
“When I hit puberty, things started to change.” He grimaced. “There were all these things I could do, and nobody to share it with.”
“Your parents?”
“It scared them,” Clark said. “They tried to hide it, but I could hear them talking. I could hear everything, and I couldn’t control it.”
His hearing was even better than hers.
“As I got older, I kept getting stronger, and there were more and more things I could do.”
“So you’re some sort of demon?” It would make sense. Lois had already learned that there were enough nonhumans living among ordinary people that doctors knew how to treat them.
Clark stared off into the distance. “I don’t know. My parents say they found me in a spaceship, so I always assumed I was some sort of government experiment, or an alien or something. All this….it brings up unpleasant possibilities.”
He continued. “That’s why I traveled all these years, looking to see if I was the only person like me. With all these things I could do, there was nobody to share it with.”
“It sounds lonely.”
“I managed to help a few people along the way, but I couldn’t reveal myself.”
“Your parents aren’t as tough as you.”
“If people found out what I can do, my parents would never have an ordinary life again. I wouldn’t have one. People would always look at me like I was different.”
“I know how you feel.”
She really did. People had already looked at her that way, and it still gave her nightmares.
“All this is new to you,” Clark said. “Being different.”
“I’ve always been different. Smarter, more driven…I went to Ireland when I was seventeen. At eighteen I got an internship to a major newspaper.”
“The Planet?”
“The Inquisitor.” Lois said. She scowled at him. “What? I was eighteen. They were taking college students with three years of college and I got in anyway.”
She’d been proud of that. It had given her an understanding of the newspaper business that had given her a leg up when she finally had gotten a job at the Planet. She’d known exactly the risks to take to move up the ladder, passing people by with years more experience.
“So you’ve always been…stronger than other women?”
Lois sighed. “No. This is something new. Do you really think I’d be breaking people’s wrists every time I got excited if it wasn’t?”
“It happened in the Congo.” Clark said. She could almost see the wheels clicking in his mind as he put the puzzle pieces together.
“Ten minutes before Sunnydale collapsed.” Lois said. “Just like all the others.”
“You never had any hint of anything unusual before?”
“There were dreams,” Lois said. “Nightmares that started when I was a teenager. They went away after I went to college.”
“And now?”
“Technicolor, wide screen nightmares. I keep dreaming about this girl, and about monsters.”
And about what kind of a monster she was.
“You think Faith’s friends know something?”
“They were at the epicenter, at ground zero. Over the rest of the world, this has been happening to individual girls, but in this one place an entire group of them are gathered together?”
“Maybe it’s something that happened at Sunnydale that changed them.”
“If it was something random, wouldn’t we have been hearing stories about Sunnydale survivors with freakish strength?”
Clark shrugged.
Lois began spooning portions of the different dishes out into several paper bowls. She ignored the portion of herself that wanted to go back to living a non-fat, non-sugary lifestyle.
That was all behind her, it seemed.
Her eyes widened as she took her first bite. “Where did you get this at this hour?”
It was the best Chinese food she’d ever tasted. Now that she was paying attention, she couldn’t see anything at all written in English.
Clark smiled slightly. “I’ve got a knack for finding good food.”
It was more than that; Lois suspected that Clark was capable of a lot more than he had admitted to.
Like creating winds to blow attacking things away without hurting them, finding genuine Chinese food, and moving so fast that even Lois’s eye couldn’t follow it.
He was a wonder. A man with all those abilities who seemed to want nothing more than to help other people.
“Jimmy’s articles…those are about you, aren’t they?”
Clark swallowed a bite of food. Absently, Lois noted that he was using chopsticks and quite adeptly.
“Most of them. There were a couple of stories that I didn’t recognize, but I don’t remember everybody that I’ve helped.”
They ate in silence for a time. The silence was companionable. At this point, with most men, Lois would have felt compelled to babble on about one thing or the other. With Clark she could be herself.
Clark looked up at her, and he almost seemed to be debating with himself.
“What happened in the Congo, Lois?”
Lois’s sense of camaraderie vanished, to be replaced by a feeling of panic.
