Epilogue: Halos Made of Summer

Radiance Epilogue: Radiant Blaze #1

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Radiance is a hopeful fiction serial about one of Earth’s darker timelines. It takes place around 2014 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

Previously, arch-villain Archangel was successfully defeated, and Hades rescued from his thrall. But…then what? This time, we revisit our heroes—including the ones who used to be villains—on a very special occasion.

<#10, Part Two || Directory || To Main Directory>

Three months later

Sunny June, bright and warm and humid, pressed heavy against the glass balcony doors of Christabel’s apartment. From the kitchen, she looked up from her work and squinted out at her container garden in thought—dwarf roses, tomatoes, marigolds, basil—then padded around the breakfast bar and through the living room to pull the blinds closed. The glare and the heat’s sharp edge went with them.

“That’s better,” she said. “When I picked this side of the building, I didn’t think about the sun being in my eyes all summer! Sorry, Terpsichore.”

The small white cat who’d just been deprived of solar recharging rolled over and gave her a silent look of annoyance. Christa paused to rub her chin in apology before returning to the kitchen to wash her hands. A buttery-yellow frosted cake sat expectantly on its stand, the top plain as yet and the sides only half decorated. She picked up the icing cornet she’d folded from parchment and got another few inches into her embellishments before someone knocked on the door.

“Miaaaooow,” Terpsichore said, stretched, and leapt from the couch to slink off behind the blinds.

“Yes, it is early.” She set the icing down again, wiping her hands reflexively on a dish towel. “Who do you think it is?”

The plastic slats clattered against each other, but the cat didn’t otherwise deign to answer. Christa didn’t mind. Now that she lived on her own, she enjoyed having the excuse to think aloud. She was six weeks into the lease here, an eleventh-floor unit in a newly-renovated Arlington apartment tower. There was a thick slice of green in the view, and the location was convenient; she liked the place well enough. It felt like a fresh start, but not exactly a new beginning. Not yet. There was still too much suspended in her mind, not settled yet. Another year gone since her last birthday, she thought; another year older, and wiser too with any luck. There was that, for whatever it was worth. Without firm answers, she wasn’t sure that she knew.

She opened the apartment door and gasped. “You’re here!”

“You sound so surprised,” Liam said cheerfully. His smile was presumed, rather than actually seen, because Christa had already thrown her arms around his waist and pushed her face into his shirt. It felt like so much longer than two weeks since she’d seen him last. She savored it for a long minute, and then turned her head to fit close to him more comfortably.

“Only because I didn’t expect you to be first,” she said. “Didn’t Leila come with you?”

“Yes, but she had an errand to run. She’ll be up later.”

“All right.” Christa allowed herself a hopeful smile. In three months, it was the first time they’d been alone together in person. “So, it’s a good day?”

“Yeah, pretty good. I haven’t made blood run down the walls in, what, eighteen whole hours now...” Liam paused, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry. Things have been better. She wants me to work on the sarcasm too.”

“You know I never minded that,” she said, leaning back and smoothing out the wrinkles she’d just put in his shirt with a light hand. “Well, come in. You can watch me finish getting this cake ready.”

There was no logistical hurdle to Liam seeing her more often, even though he was living in New York with his sister at the moment; a few abilities had remained stable from his time as Lord Hades, and portal travel was one. The limited visitation was at Leila’s insistence, as a condition of psychological rehab. As desperately as she wanted to be with him, to talk to him again and work out some kind of label for their uncertain partnership, Christa understood. She was a complication of a degree which she was well aware made Leila nervous, and a lifetime as the half-living conduit of an unnatural evil couldn’t be shrugged off so easily. Most of the time he was back to being just the man she’d come to know as Lord Hades last summer—if less aggressively dramatic about everything—but there were still times when Liam barely seemed himself. He would dissociate mid-conversation, even though he no longer had a Master to take the wheel, or make odd, unconscious demands on the bond between them that left her drained and tired without ever fully understanding what it was he was taking.

Christa herself hadn’t adjusted yet to the change in her power level. She didn’t need to use her powers often, as being re-registered under her legal name meant that she was still trying to keep a low profile, but they’d been a part of her for so long and the fluctuations threw her off balance. Liam might be completely tuned out and she’d find herself struggling halfway through what should have been an easy run, or he might go the other way and accidentally overload her. His voice and his touch had woken her in the middle of the night before, her sheets singed, just to find out he was dreaming about her three hundred miles away. She was getting better at managing, but the lack of feedback across the distance made it an uphill struggle. It was only on the rare good days they shared that she really felt whole again, despite her fear that she might trigger something in him that he couldn’t come back from.

It did seem like today would be a good one. Liam’s eyes were clear, and they sparkled playfully as he looked around the living room. “It doesn’t look like a party in here. Should I tell her to get streamers?”

She smiled as she walked back into the kitchen. “We’re not kids anymore. And it’s not much of a party, just cake.”

“It’s still your birthday, my Lady.” He leaned across the counter and kissed her, and looked back with amusement at the heat suffusing her face. “Aren’t you used to me yet?”

“I was,” Christa said. “Well—no, I wasn’t. Lady Radiance was. Everything’s different now.”

“Not everything, I thought.” He frowned softly, and she felt a sudden, guilty cramp in her stomach. Although the bond didn’t literally let them get inside each other’s heads, she knew his heart. Liam had been holding himself back patiently; it was for her to make her own wishes and concerns clear.

“Not everything. But a lot. You can’t deny that, even if it was a change for the better.” Christa brought her gaze across his face—the strong chin, the pale pink lip, the proud bones so at odds with all his emotion—and back to his eyes. He still attracted her the same as ever—still held her tense between soft affection and the anticipation that he might still bite, after all. “I don’t want you to worry about me right now. You have so much else to handle.”

“Now you are worrying me.”

“I don’t mean to. Look, I—” The words caught, and the blush came roaring back, and she snapped her head down as if that could hide it. “I will always be your Lady,” she said. “Even if you’re not exactly who you used to be, I loved what I saw underneath. I don’t think that’s changed. But I don’t want to force a part on you that you don’t want to play anymore.”

Liam leaned down onto the counter and laid his head down sideways on his arms, pushing his face into her view. “What would I do about it if I didn’t? We’re sort of stuck with each other, aren’t we?”

There were theoretical ways out, but nothing that she really thought was worth trying. She gave a small nod.

He straightened himself out a little, relaxing. “You know, I was serious about being your, uh…”

It took Christa a moment to realize what he was talking about. “Oh, sidekick?”

“Can we not call it that? It makes me feel like some Boy Wonder who’s going to need rescuing all the time, instead of pulling my weight to work off my debt to society.”

She shook her head as she went back to her work. “You know you can’t be the sidekick, anyway. You’ve got most of the raw power now; I’m just managing it.”

“But that’s important, too.” He watched her for long enough without speaking, humming quietly in an unbearably charming way, that she’d almost forgotten what they were talking about when he spoke again. “Supposing…?”

“Supposing what?”

“If you’re not permanently attached to being Lady Radiance,” Liam said, “we could make a clean slate of it. Start over as a team.”

It was a suggestion Christa wouldn’t have accepted from anybody else. With the facts in front of her…he had a point. Perhaps it was time to move on. As foolish as it might sound given all they had gone through, she wanted to believe that things would get better from here. Something good should come out of all this, and one small step was all it would take. “We certainly could,” she said. “I…I think I could do that.”

He smiled, crooked around the edges but so genuinely happy. “So you’ll call me the next time you get the urge to go out fighting crime, then.”

Oh, she would in a heartbeat, but— “It’s not up to me. Leila’s the one who benched you.”

“That’s true enough,” he sighed. “Still, she might listen to you.”

She offered him her free hand and wrapped her fingers into his. “Believe me, as soon as I think you’re up to it, I’ll tell her so.”

He scowled at that, only a little performatively, but kissed her hand and then let Christa take up the decorating again. She had almost finished, slowed by flirting with him between the words of their conversation, when someone else knocked at the door.

“Oh, shoot. Could you get that?” she said from her position trying to switch out icing tips over the sink. These things were always so much harder than they looked on the online tutorial.

“This is new,” Jacob said from the doorway. “Hi, Liam. Chris! We’ve talked about this! It’s not right to throw yourself a birthday party.”

Christa sighed, only partly at the eighth or ninth iteration of that old joke; the rest of it being relief that he was sticking with his promise to give Liam a chance, at least as long as she had backup in the wings. She turned the cake to show him the other side, which was done up much more simply than the frothy, frilly half that had been facing outwards. “Half for me, and half for you. Is that better?”

He grinned. “It’ll do.”

“I don’t think I see the point, myself,” Liam said. He was sliding back into his seat as she attempted to determine how much of Happy 25th Birthday Jacob and Christa she could fit onto the top. “You’re going to cut it in about ten minutes.”

“I know, right?” Jacob reached for a smear of icing and had to be swatted away. “Rude. Are you at least close enough to stop and open your present?”

“Can’t,” she said firmly. “If I stop now, it’ll ruin the lettering.”

“Ughhh. Here, open it for her. I just need to see her face.”

Christa struggled to concentrate on her cursive with paper rustling on the other side of the counter, and gave it up altogether with a couple of misplaced blobs when she heard Liam laugh. “What is this? ‘I will not allow the enemy—’”

“Jake! You didn’t!”

Her brother cackled. “Come on! You owe me that much.”

She supposed he wasn’t wrong about that. Christa held out her left hand and let Liam clasp the bracelet for her. A thin gold chain wrapped several times around her wrist before he linked it with the other side of the little plaque reminding her not to fall for seductions. “I can’t believe you actually got that engraved,” she said through a renewed blush. “You know I don’t need it anymore.”

“Are you sure?” He turned to Liam. “You’ll have to watch out, you know. If you’re no good, you’re going to have problems with me, and if you’re too good, you’re going to have problems with her. She’s always gone for the bad boys.”

“Jake!”

There was another knock at the door. “It’s open!” Jacob called. Christa put her head back down, still feeling a little pink, to try to get the writing done. Where had she left off?

Happy 25th…

…Bday…

“Happy—Christa, how are you good at everything? That looks awesome.” Marissa just let her drop the icing before enveloping her in a hug. “Sorry again for canceling Saturday on you.”

“No, it’s okay! We can look at fabric samples some other time. I understand you—” Christa caught sight of Marissa’s left hand as she moved back. She didn’t only have her engagement ring with its tiny inset stones on. “You didn’t really go and get married without telling us!”

Marissa threw her hands up, but she didn’t look at all sorry. “Okay, in my defense, I didn’t know I was getting married either! All I got was ‘babe, get in the car, we’re goin’ to Virginia Beach.’ If Sebastian hadn’t packed a dress for me, I’d have turned up at the courthouse in stretchy jeans. Of course, he still forgot the shoes...”

“You couldn’t stand up straight in those right now anyway,” Baz said as he set a case of soda down on the counter and high-fived Jacob. “The tennis shoes looked fine.”

“Thanks, hon. It was everything my inner fourteen-year-old could have asked for.”

Christa picked up the icing yet again, without any clear recollection of what she was supposed to be doing with it. “Well—wow, congratulations. What brought that on?”

“If Rissa got any more stressed out about everything she had to plan, she was gonna get cold feet on me,” he said.

“I was not,” Marissa protested.

“You were already up to ‘I don’t get what the big deal is, it’s a piece of paper’.”

“Cold feet,” Jake said sagely. “You’re still going to have the party, though, right?”

“Oh, sometime, yeah. Maybe when she’s not out of her mind with baby stuff on top of everything else,” he said. “Did you hear it’s a—”

Marissa shoved her husband hard, to absolutely no effect. “You! Stop making me have to get out in front of you! I told you I’m going to send an announcement.”

Christa put on her best look of tortured disappointment. “But who knows when you’ll get around to that, and I have to pick a color for the adorable tiny blankie bear,” she said.

“The adorable tiny blankie bear, Dr. Grimes,” Liam said.

She regarded him suspiciously. “You can call me Marissa,” she said. “All right. We’re having a boy.”

“Aww! Good for you,” Christa said. Since she’d switched to freelance design work, she’d started babysitting Clarevoyante’s little girls some mornings—apparently finding childcare for kids at risk for superpowers was a whole thing now, one she was grateful not to be dealing with from the other end—and wouldn’t have said no to another glittery little face at the table. That didn’t seem like Marissa’s speed, though. “Do you have a name picked out?”

“It’s Cade,” she said, a smile tugging up the side of her mouth again. “Cade David.”

“Oh, is David for your dad? That’s so sweet!” She dropped her icing to grab a pen. “I love it. With a C or a K?”

Jacob tapped his phone screen as if to check the time. “So, how much longer do I get to feel like the fifth wheel?”

“I did kind of expect Leila by now,” Liam said.

“Lucas shouldn’t be much longer...” Christa was scratching C-A-D-E down on a stray notepad before she could be pulled away again. The kid was a project in need of a mentor if she’d ever met one, and in the time since their last misadventure, she’d come to consider him a friend as well. Besides, she did still feel it was her fault he’d gotten into so much trouble. “And then your friends are meeting us at the restaurant for dinner, which I had no plans to complain about, just so you know.”

“You’re too kind,” Jacob said.

Liam rubbed his chin in thought, catching her attention. “I’m not complaining, either, but it’s not just me, right? It’s a little weird to have the dessert first?”

“Maybe a little,” Christabel said.

Her brother grinned. “Who cares? It’s been a weird year.”

“You’re telling me,” Marissa said. Baz looped an arm around her. Christa finally found her icing cornet and stared down at the cake, trying to calculate the amount of space left.

…Ja…no.

…J & C…

“Aren’t you supposed to be grounded again?” Baz said somewhere in the background.

“Um, kind of? It’s just from hero stuff.” The sheepish voice belonged to Lucas, who must have come in while she was focused on the cake. “Uncle RJ let me have the suit back now that school’s out, but I’m only allowed to use it with supervision. …you’d supervise me, right?”

“Depends. Did you deserve gettin’ grounded?”

“No! Well—what did he tell you?”

Christa iced an exclamation point after her initial to even out the spacing, and looked down to admire her work. Not bad. Now she just needed to find the candles.

…she did get candles, didn’t she…?

“Liam,” she said, raising her head to ask him to text Leila after all, but he wasn’t at the counter anymore. Marissa and Jake had drawn him off into what looked like a friendly conversation in the living room. Christa hung her apron up and went around to join them.

“It’s just a theory, but the data I’ve reviewed so far fit pretty well,” Marissa was saying. “The world’s always trying to kill us, right? Maybe some of us just have an unusually active immune response. The threats keep getting crazier, so we keep getting crazier right back. I mean, that’s what humans do. We adapt and we thrive, no matter what the universe throws at us.”

“‘We’, is it? How did those genome tests come back, anyway?” Jake asked, all too innocently.

She pulled a grimace. “That…so, Sebastian’s was normal. I mean, on the macro level he’s all kinds of out-of-whack, but there’s nothing atypical about his baseline DNA. If you cloned him from stem cells, you’d just get a regular guy.”

“But you said you were going to have to keep an eye on the baby,” Christa said.

Marissa hung her head a little as she raised her hand. “Yeah, well. Apparently I inherited a ton of little mutations. And you know how I’ve been standing directly next to a whole lot of weird science for the last six years…”

“Oh, no.”

Jake clicked his tongue. “That is some irony.”

“Did you at least get something cool out of it?” Liam asked.

“Actually, yes I did,” she said. “Not just immune to psychic control, as it turns out. Hanging out with test subjects, I’ve been picking up resistance to all kinds of things. Psyonics, telepathy, a lot of the reality-warping, a bunch of different chemical agents, uh—just weird stuff. High-energy EM radiation. I haven’t even figured out how that works yet.”

“Fully embodied obstinacy, that’s you,” Baz said from across the room.

“I love you too. What are you doing over there, corrupting the youth?”

Lucas piped up. “He was telling me a—uhhh…nothing.”

“Nothing?” Marissa said, lowering her drink to stare at him.

“Nothing you, uh…want to...uh, yeah. Nothing. Ma’am.”

Baz sighed. “Okay, now I see why you can’t stay outta trouble. We’ll work on that.”

“Baz! You can’t teach him to lie!” Christa said.

“Yeah, I can. Lyin’s acceptable for operational security purposes.”

“Oh, I am suddenly not looking forward to the next twenty years at all,” Marissa muttered. Jacob snickered and gestured for Liam to hand him a can of soda.

Leila finally came in quietly soon after that, a little awkwardly, with all the stiffness of a chaperone. That wouldn’t do. Christa resolved to look for an excuse to rope her into some conversation—oh, but she couldn’t forget the cake again. “I’m going to go cut the cake,” she said, touching Liam’s arm. “You’ll just all have to pretend that there’s candles on it, okay?”

He snapped his fingers and offered her a small tongue of flame, floating above his fingertips. “No, we won’t.”

“Oh, you’re clever. Thank you.” She scooped it out of his hand with a smile and was halfway into the kitchen when what sounded like an emergency alert went off behind her.

Marissa groaned. “You could at least have kept it on the Kim Possible ringtone.”

“That was only funny once,” Baz said. “Well, this’s been fun—”

Christa turned, pouting, to see him returning his phone to his back pocket. “But I spent so long coordinating everybody’s schedules! Marissa swore you were off today.”

“I am off,” he said. “Chained Lightnin’ is on backup for Crystal Falcon. More or less the last backup, though. It must be a bad day if they tagged me in for this.”

Lucas was practically vibrating. “What’s going on? Can I come? I’ve been practicing, I can help.”

“I mean, it’s just the Cephalomancer menacin’ the Navy Yard, again…”

“My sworn nemesis!”

“I don’t think he knows you exist,” Baz said.

“He so does! When I killed those squids by throwing them on the wharf where they can’t breathe, he was like, Curse you, Featherweight!”

He paused in thought, then shook his head. “Nah, this is official stuff. I’m not supposed to be hangin’ out with vigilantes.”

“Just pretend you don’t know me! Pleaaaaase?”

“We could give you a ride,” Liam said.

Christa looked to him in surprise. “We could?”

His long fingers reached over and pinched out the flame she was carrying, and heat crackled across her skin. As she looked down at her hand, it began to shimmer and then to shine.

Light like joy fizzed through her veins and poured into every corner of her body. The room vanished, replaced by whirling prismatic colors of every frequency, and then reappeared in such high definition it seemed unreal. She was levitating a few inches off the floor, wreathed in gold. Shining skirts flowed beneath her hands, which glittered like sunshine on a jewelry case. She gasped softly and looked to Liam again. His tall form was a blazing column, not quite featureless but still unrecognizable as himself. She put a hand to her face and felt its subtle shift in apparent structure, and her own features still there underneath. It was a temporary transformation, but well done.

“I thought you’d like it,” he said.

“I do like it!” She twirled, casting flecks of light and color across the walls. “Oh—Leila, may I…”

Leila was shading her eyes. “I think you’d better. Just don’t keep him out all night.”

“Yeah, remember what I told you two,” Jake said.

“And what was that?” Leila asked.

“So, I don’t know if you remember—”

“I’ll catch up to y’all,” Baz said, already at the door.

“Hey! You know I’m not saving you any cake,” Marissa yelled to him.

Featherweight was already bounding up to them. “Let’s go!”

The Blaze gestured narrowly, and a little crystalline pool like water appeared between them. Radiant reached for his hand and held it while she focused, tuning out all the extraneous information from their redoubled senses and tapping into the core of their shared magic. Her whole self hummed with excitement as she did—there was a whole life ahead of her still, and love, and adventure. Not exactly the ones she’d imagined, maybe…but better ones, she hoped.

And then she jumped.

<#10 || Directory || To Main Directory>

Thank you so much for participating in what has been, essentially, an open alpha read of Radiance. It’s been a great experiment for me; I’ve had a wonderful time with these characters, and with you.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sending a few emails revealing the series backstory and how it developed over this last year, and talking about changes I want to make as I move through the next stage of the editing and rewriting process. The Radiance cast will return in some of this summer’s short stories, as well as a limited serial starring Featherweight and Intern Josh that I’m unreasonably excited about.

If you enjoyed this serial, you can show it by leaving a like or comment, sharing this post, or just sticking around for whatever comes next. :) Remember— (I left the Radiance TV show theme around here somewhere…where…yes.) You’re a perfect fit~! ✨