He sidled into Captain Singh’s office. Singh was on the phone but looked up as Barry entered. “Oh,” Singh said into the phone. “He just walked in. Uh-huh. OK, great.” He hung up without so much as a “see ya” to the person on the other end.
“Close the door, Allen.”
Barry did so. “Captain, I’m so sorry I disappeared before. I got a text from—”
“Save it.” Singh held out a hand. “Say no more. Wait.”
Barry shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was unaccustomed to standing still like this. The last time he’d done it, well, had been when Hocus Pocus zapped him. Ugh. He didn’t want to think about that. He had to mollify Singh, then figure out how to get the nanites out of his head, then stop Pocus. His days were usually crazy busy, but this one was more jam-packed than usual.
A knock at the door interrupted his contemplation. Singh waved in a stocky, gray-haired man wearing an expression that demanded to know who’d stolen his lunch and carrying an old, beaten briefcase. He focused his alert, flashing blue eyes on Barry, then closed the door with finality.
“You Allen?” he asked in a voice that communicated that he would use as few syllables as possible. Maybe fewer.
“Uh, yeah.”
The man grunted and sat down. He slapped his briefcase on his lap and snapped it open. “Well?” he asked Singh.
Singh gestured to the newcomer. “Allen, this is Darrel Frye. He’s your union rep.”
Union rep. It took Barry a moment to make the connection. The police officers’ union. They got involved only in serious disciplinary situations. Like firings.
“Captain Singh!” Barry came right up to the desk. “Sir, I know I’ve been a little off lately, but my work is always—”
“Allen!” Singh slapped a hand on his desk; Barry jumped back. “There comes a time when I don’t care how good your work is. You’ve been erratic. Unavailable. And then, while I was in the middle of giving you a lecture about how you were on your last chance with me, you just up and left the office!”
Barry realized he was trembling. Then again, Singh was, too. In his seat, Frye yawned. He was the only one not upset.
“Sir,” Barry tried again, “I’m really sorry that—”
“It’s past time for sorry, Allen.” Singh shook his head. “I’m sorry, too. But I have a responsibility to this precinct, this department, and this city. As I’ve said: I like you, but I can’t rely on you.” He took a deep breath. “I’m officially placing you on administrative leave, indefinitely, without pay, until a review of your employment status can be completed.”
Barry sat for a moment, still trembling, choosing his next words very carefully.
“What . . . what exactly does that mean?” Barry asked. He thought he knew, but his mind was spinning.
“It means,” Frye said, “that you’re on ice until he figures out how to fire you.”
11
For the first time since the lightning bolt had shattered the containers in his lab and doused him in electrified chemicals, Barry wandered the streets of Central City at normal speed. The sky had darkened like an overripe peach nearing rot. Night was falling, and Barry felt darkness within, too.
There was nowhere to go. He could have suited up as the Flash and sought out some crime—punching bad guys in the jaw often made him feel better—but even the costume seemed soured now. His superspeed had become tainted by Hocus Pocus, who used it as a tool, a plaything. Besides, Kid Flash would be on patrol soon. Central City would not go without protection.
He turned up the collar of his coat against a late-summer chill. He’d found himself down by the pier, where it all started. He shivered at the breeze coming off the river and at the thought of Pocus walking the same boards he now walked. Magician, meta, scientist, opportunist—did it really matter which one (or how many) Pocus was? If Cisco and Caitlin couldn’t figure out a way to purge the nanites from his thalamus, he would be Pocus’s puppet for life. Never mind losing his job—he would lose everything. How could he be close to Iris, knowing that at any moment Pocus could order him to do something horrible?
Iris. He hadn’t even called her yet to tell her he was going to lose his job. On his way out of the precinct, Joe had approached him, but he’d brushed Joe off and dashed outside. He knew Joe would offer fatherly comfort, and right now Barry couldn’t bear that.
Deep down, he knew he didn’t deserve it. He’d spent his entire life working to be a crime scene investigator. It was the perfect melding of his love of science, his thirst for justice, and his urge to use his gifts responsibly. In fact, now that he thought about it, those three traits each came from one of the three people he was so proud to call a parent: Henry, his doctor father; Joe, his adoptive cop dad; Nora, his real estate agent mother who’d turned her successful business into urban renewal as a way of giving back to the city. They’d blended together to create . . .
A failure.
He kicked a tin can and watched it roll along the board-walk. Some part of his brain—the part that, even before he became the Flash, was always racing—calculated its trajectory, momentum, and velocity. The can would stop rolling right about . . .
The can bumped into something. A dip in the boards? A protruding knot of wood? It spun slightly, changing direction. Much to Barry’s surprise, the can kept rolling in the new direction. Bemused, he tracked its progress with his eyes until it landed in a tiny crevasse created by the intersection of a walkway with the boardwalk.
The walkway was made of old cobblestone and ran for six or seven feet from the boardwalk to a concrete step that led up to a ramshackle, stucco building, a squat little one-and-a-half-story cottage jammed between a closed soft-serve ice-cream shop and a closed T-shirt store. The paint, a sick yellow, peeled like snakeskin. A sign on the door said OPEN, and a larger sign over the doorway read MADAME XANADU.
On any normal day—and on most abnormal ones— Barry would scoff at the idea of a fortune-teller and walk on. Today, he still scoffed but found himself meandering up the walkway. Why not? Nothing else was working for him today. Maybe the (fake) spirit world would have some advice for him.
A tiny bell rang as he opened the door. Within, the space was dark and cramped. The scent of incense hung in the motionless air. Wall-mounted shelves ran along the perimeter, cluttered with bottles, trays, candles, and knickknacks that seemed to have come from some bizarre Indiana Jones movie. And jars. Row upon row of old mason jars, their contents murky and somehow in motion. Toward the back, black curtains hung from the ceiling, so stiff and still that he’d thought them part of the wall at first. He set one foot over the threshold and hesitated.
“Enter freely,” said a woman’s voice, “and unafraid.” He’d missed the table, somehow. It was small and round, like a bistro set, with two chairs arranged at opposite sides, facing each other. In one chair sat a woman, her elbows on the table, long fingers clasped before her. She was tall and slender, wearing a sleeveless dress, her wrists a jangle of golden bracelets of all shapes and sizes. Her face was long and narrow, tapering to a sharp chin just below a knowing grin of a mouth. Her hair spilled around her shoulders, so black that it shimmered a midnight blue in the light of a nearby candle.
“Sorry,” Barry said. “I thought you were open.”
“And so I am.” She gestured to the empty chair with one elegant hand. The motion seemed to take forever, but Barry was mesmerized by it, unable to look away. Her eyes seemed almost too large for her face; they were an unearthly green that caught the candlelight and tamed it into submission.
He made his decision and sat down. “How much?” he asked her.
She threw her head back and laughed a throaty laugh. Tears clustered in her eyes, and Barry blushed, wondering how he’d managed to offend her.
“Let us first see how I can help you,” she said. “How else can we assign worth to my work?”
That made more sense than Barry had considered. He wiped his palms, suddenly damp, on his jeans. “
I’ve never been to a fortune-teller before. How do we start?” He still felt silly doing this, but at the very least, it was an opportunity to talk about what was going on with someone who was a neutral observer. Everyone he knew—Joe, Iris, Cisco, Caitlin, Wally, even H.R.—would sympathize and empathize and pat him on the back. Maybe he needed some cold, hard tough love.
She laid a single, immaculately manicured finger along her cheek. The nail was polished a shining dark blue, with an almost glowing red X painted into it. “You are here seeking direction.”
Barry didn’t find her assessment all that impressive. Most people coming here were probably looking for advice, so it was a good guess. “Sure, I suppose.”
She nodded. From somewhere in the hidden folds of her dress, she produced a deck of cards. It was larger than a typical deck, both wider and taller. The backs of the cards showed a pattern of stars and moons that seemed to move on their own as she rapidly shuffled the deck.
Cartomancy. “Magic” from cards. Barry had read about the tarot once for a case where a serial killer had left tarot cards on his victims. This had been a while ago, before he’d been the Flash, when he’d just started at CCPD. The idea was that there were different cards than in a regular deck. Instead of kings, queens, jacks, and aces, there were the “major arcana.” And instead of tens down to deuces, there were the “minor arcana.” Allegedly, by dealing out the cards, the cartomancer could read minds, see the future, and perform all sorts of magic.
It was all fake, of course. But Hocus Pocus was a fake, too, so maybe it would be helpful to have some fake magic on his side for a change, Barry decided.
She finished her shuffle with a little flourish and fanned out the cards on the table before him. He half expected her to yelp in the nasal patois of a carnival barker: Pick a cahd, any cahd! Instead, she said absolutely nothing, sitting with her hands folded primly on the table.
With nothing but silence hanging in the air between them, Barry took one of the cards and laid it faceup on the table. On it was a painting of a knight in black armor, hoisting a poleax over his head. He stood on the neck of what appeared to be a dragon.
“The Knight,” Barry said.
Madame Xanadu shook her head. “No.”
He looked again. At the bottom of the card, written in a Gothic font, were these words:
the Hero.
Now Madame Xanadu drew a card. She laid it perpendicular to the Hero. This card showed a leering face with a too-wide grin, bloodred lips, teeth sharp and shiny. A bell from a jester’s cap dangled over one eye. The image creeped Barry out. It read:
the Impostor.
“Not a clown or a fool?” he asked.
Madame Xanadu said nothing. Barry figured it was his turn again, so he drew another card and laid it down next to the Hero. It depicted a riderless black horse rearing up on its hind legs. Its front hooves pawed at the sky. Flames shot out of the horse’s nostrils. This one was called:
the Steed.
“This doesn’t look like any set of tarot cards I’ve ever seen,” Barry said, confused, thinking back to his experience on the case.
“I never said these were tarot cards.” She drew another and butted it up against the Steed. The card showed a man dressed in old Enlightenment garb—breeches, doublet, a veritable Shakespeare play condensed into one guy—gazing at himself in a mirror:
eht Gnikool Ssalg.
Madame Xanadu swept up the remaining cards and tucked them back into whatever mysterious pocket whence they’d come. She stared at Barry for long, uncomfortable seconds; her eyes seemed to change shades of green as he watched.
After what felt like hours, Barry pushed back from the table. “What’s going on here?”
“You’ve suffered a setback,” she said to him.
He glanced at the table, unsure how she got that from these four cards. Then again, his demeanor probably made it obvious.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It looks like I’m losing my job . . .”
Madame Xanadu went on, still staring at him. “And there is someone new in your life. Someone who makes you feel helpless. Someone controlling.”
This was getting weird. Barry gestured to the cards spread out between them. “How are you getting that from the cards?”
She tilted her head, her expression that of a woman who had just learned an interesting bit of trivia. “I haven’t read the cards yet.”
“What?”
Before he could go on, she scrutinized the cards, nodding to herself. “You drew the first card. Therefore, it describes you. The Hero.”
“I never said I was—”
“Your destiny says you are. I drew the second card, the Impostor, so it refers not to you, but to someone else. I laid it on its side, so it is someone in opposition to you. Someone fighting you is not what he or she claims to be.”
Pocus. Pretending to be a magician.
“You drew the Steed,” she went on, tapping it with a long fingernail, “and placed it next to the Hero. So the Steed is the solution to your problem.”
He looked again at the card. Black horse. Rearing up. Fire from nostrils. Speed? Well, sure. Speed was always the answer for the Flash.
But she didn’t know he was the Flash. And neither did the cards.
“And then the Looking Glass,” she said, tapping the strangely named card, “next to the Steed. It modifies the Steed. Your solution can be found at their intersection.”
Barry snorted a laugh. “How is this supposed to get my job back?”
Madame Xanadu stood, gathering the remaining cards. With a knowing grin, she quipped, “Who said this was about getting your job back, Barry?”
And she disappeared through the black curtains.
Barry sat in silence for a moment, replaying everything that had just happened. He’d always thought that people who believed in fortune-telling were too gullible for their own good, but now he was beginning to understand how they got lured into their faith. Charlatans like Madame Xanadu were students of human emotion; they knew how to get into your head and feed you what you wanted to hear. For people who were desperate, it was a seductive possibility. Here was someone who seemed to know you better than you knew yourself. Someone who was connected to a higher power with all the answers. All you had to do was to believe, and your trials and tribulations would end.
What a load of garbage!
With a short laugh and a shake of his head, Barry left. A fortune-teller! What in the world had he been thinking?
He was half a block away before he realized: She’d called him Barry, but he’d never told her his name.
12
Midnight. A glowing moon over-head, casting dramatic shadows as Hocus Pocus stood on the rooftop of the Lampert Building. It was a suitably theatrical moment, lacking only an audience.
He gazed down onto the streets of Central City. From this height, the city was less a place of civilization and more a rat warren, a maze of desperate and confused rodent-people flitting to and fro, from pathetic homes to pointless jobs.
What these people needed, Hocus Pocus knew, was something spectacular. Supernal. Empyreal. They needed something bigger than themselves, something to aspire to, something to amaze them and bring sparkle, élan, and majesty to their gray lives.
They needed magic.
And Hocus Pocus needed a triumph.
He grinned, the points of his immaculately groomed mustache quivering. With a wave of his wand, he could control weather, physics, people. This city and he . . . they were in a symbiotic relationship. They needed each other. He could bring joy and wonder into the lives of every man, woman, and child in Central City. And all they had to give him in return was their enthusiastic love and appreciation.
Easy enough. A simple trade. The city would be his, and he would love it and care for it and make it perfect in his image.
He had come here to prove himself. To rise from his station and show his erstwhile master that he, Hocus Pocus, was the superior magician and the superior
villain. Along the way, he’d discovered that his love of the approbation of the crowd did not mean he had to change his goals or even his methods. He could have his victory, crush his old mentor, and have the love of the people of Central City.
He. Could. Have. It. All!
Only the Flash stood in his way.
Hocus Pocus laughed until he nearly choked on his own mirth. The Flash. The Flash was no challenge at all. He already knew precisely how to defeat him, and the time was now.
13
Iris West’s eyes widened in shock.
“She knew your name? What did you do?”
“Well, I ran back there,” Barry told her, “but by then the sign said closed, and she was gone.”
It was late in the morning on the day after Barry’s experience at Madame Xanadu’s. Iris had pulled a late shift on the breaking news desk at the Central City Picture News, so it was their first opportunity to talk since all the madness of the previous day. They were sharing a table in a discreet, poorly lit corner of C.C. Jitters, the local coffeehouse where Iris had brewed, frothed, and steamed her way through her journalism degree. It was while working at Jitters that she’d hit on the idea of a blog about the new mystery metahuman in Central City, the Flash. That blog brought her a lot of grief, but it also garnered the attention that landed her a job at the city’s oldest and most prestigious newspaper.
“I don’t even remember there being a place called Madame Xanadu’s on the boardwalk,” Iris said. “I did a piece on phony fortune-tellers for the paper last summer, and I spent a ton of time down there. I’d remember a name like that.”
Barry shrugged. “I’m not in the market for an investigative reporter right now. Just a sympathetic girlfriend.”
“You’ve got that.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “We’re going to figure this out. All of it. Singh, Hocus Pocus . . .”