Masked by Lou Anders

Author:Lou Anders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction - Adventure, Fiction - Science Fiction, Anthologies (multiple authors), Science Fiction, Fantasy fiction, Short Story, Science Fiction - Anthologies, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Short stories, Fantasy, American, Adventure, English, General & Literary Fiction, General, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Superheroes
ISBN: 9781439168820
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-07-20T09:52:01.675000+00:00

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1942

The papers this morning carried the story of how Joe Dominguez and Felix Uresti escaped from jail in the night. The Clarion quoted the Recondito chief of police as insisting that the two young men could not have broken out of their cells on their own, and must have had outside assistance. The Telegraph, never shrinking from sensationalism, quoted an unnamed jailer as saying that “only a ghost could get through those walls.”

Or a Wraith, I’m tempted to point out.

Without a body to produce, living or dead, there was simply no way of proving the innocence of the two men. Even if I had been willing to step forward, reveal myself, and testify in court, the account would simply be too fantastic for a jury to accept. But I could not allow two innocent men to go to the gas chamber, not if I had the power to see justice done.

The two were startled when I shadowed through the wall of their cell, to say the least. But when I explained why I had come, and what awaited them if they remained, they were all too eager to leave with me. Shadowing with even one full-grown man taxes my abilities to their limits, so Uresti had to hide in the darkened alley behind police headquarters while I shadowed back through the brick wall for Dominguez, but by the time I had both of them free Aguilar had arrived with changes of clothes and busfare for his friends.

They are already on their way south to Mexico, where new lives and new names wait for them. Like my new associate in the boilersuit and wrestling mask, Dominguez and Uresti were both born in California, and neither have left the country before. But I know they will adapt. They are hardly the first to have to leave the land of their birth and adopt new names in order to survive.

A dozen years behind the mask of the Wraith, and I’ve become too quick to make assumptions. Have I learned so much since the day Don Javier found me in the jungle that there is nothing left for me to be taught? Not hardly.

I had assumed the deaths by freezing to be the work of a demon of cold, though neither Don Mateo nor I had ever heard of any such creature before. Had I stopped and thought a bit more, might I have recognized the telltale signs of an untrained shifter-turned-specter, one whose touch bled heat away into the Unreal? And if I had recognized the signs, might some of those who died at the specter’s touch still be alive today? Perhaps.

Too, I was all too quick to assume that a pachuco in a zoot suit was naturally guilty of any accusation. Like the “cold demon” I sought, the young delinquents were an invasion from without, a threat to the security of my city. But like poor Sarah Pennington, boys like Dominguez and Uresti were no invasion, but had been here all along.

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