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Across the rooftops echoed a long, drawn-out cackle. And then another. Another. Nearer every time. Closing in.Logically, he couldn’t possibly be moving fast enough to circle her as she ran, so it must be a trick. With echoes, or speakers or ventriloquism; it didn’t matter. The point was that it was meant for her. To affect her. To take advantage of her emotional imbalance and get an edge over her.Fuck that. She’d let herself run scared enough today without being frightened by a clown.Whip coiling in hand, she alighted on a warehouse three buildings away from the one she’d been heading for, the place where her nearest emergency drop bag was hidden, and let the trailing laughter catch up. The panicking part of her wanted to run and keep running, refuse to engage with this new threat when she was already in too much danger, but she overruled it.Finally, the cackling resolved itself into words. “The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea…”The hair on Selina’s neck stood on end. So far as anyone knew, the Jokester had never killed anyone, but that was only as far as anyone knew, and stalking her from the shadows wasn’t a good sign. She could have walked into a trap, too preoccupied with what was behind her to notice what was in front of her face.“In a bee-yootiful pea-green boat! They took some honey, and plenty of money…”Where was he? This was ridiculous! She was not dying to a self-righteous giggling lunatic after all this. There. A motion in the shadow of a half-collapsed rooftop shanty. She kept her eyes on it. Striking first would get her out alive, probably, but so long as she wasn’t sure he was out for her blood, she should probably hold back.It wasn’t easy.“Wrapped up in a five-pound note! Sticky money,” the voice tittered, from behind her, now, and it took all her self-control not to bridle and whirl on the spot as though he’d pulled her tail. “Sticky fingers.”Selina raised her chin a fraction. “It’s not news that I’m a thief.”“True!” From her left, now, even as the laughter swung around behind her, and while she’d heard he was a bit of a ventriloquist she was pretty sure there must be some level of mechanical cheating involved in this performance. “Very true, Miss Pussycat. We know.”“And I’m not afraid to use my claws on people who waste my time.”Giggling swooped to the front, and then to her left—and just behind her—the voice whined, “Don’t be like that. I’m here to help you out.”Selina’s thighs tightened a little more to leap; her whip was already comfortingly in her hand. Waiting for the punchline, she rolled a languid, relaxed shoulder, and looked disbelievingly through her eyelashes. “Aren’t I the bad guy?”“You worked for the bad guy. With. Closely. Intimately, even, hehehe. But now he’s out for your skin, or so I hear.”Selina pushed her lips together, but nothing for it. If this clown could run her down, she was clearly farther from her best than she’d thought, and she already knew she was deeply in trouble. Her life was worth more than her pride. She straightened up, less coyness in her pose, less readiness to fight or flee in her posture. “You hear right.”“Well. Always a shame when a celebrity couple breaks up, huh?”“We’d never have worked out, long-term.”“Mm. The bigger owls sometimes eat housecats, didja know that? Just swoop! Though then of course if a cat can get a little owl at a disadvantage….”That wasn’t why. Of course they were both opportunistic predators; that was why they’d had chemistry to begin with. When she’d finally worked out that her employers weren’t actually playing her against one another, because they were the same man…well. She’d been chagrined at how long he’d played her, but stepped up and kept on playing back.In retrospect, she should have started disentangling herself then. The mystery that had drawn her in had been resolved. But he had still been fascinating, baffling and entertaining and she’d thought she had his measure, now she knew the truth about the two of him.She’d rejected his attempt to put her on retainer, but kept making herself available for the jobs he found for her. Rolled in and out of his bed and imagined herself somehow the exception to his compulsion to break everything he touched to bit and bridle.Stupid. She’d gotten her fill of chasing him, but he’d still been on the hunt.Nothing was ever enough for him. She’d known that. She’d looked into that endless hunger and seen her own looking back and thought she was special. Thought he knew better than to expect he could bell the Cat, let alone leash her, thought therefore it shouldn’t threaten him when he could not.As if should ever mattered.
“You took a commission from the Archer?”
Selina glanced over her shoulder as she unhooked her earrings. Talking about work was not necessarily unsexy, but his tone wasn’t promising. “Mm. Fun job, actually. Diamonds.” Blue ones, a perfect teardrop string. Pretty things, though she preferred sapphires.
Bruce got up from his bed. The muscles of his chest flexed in the mirror as he came up behind her; Selina assumed they were being shown off for her benefit, and obligingly admired. He had some scarring, not much—her favorite was the thin line over his left collarbone. She’d given him that.
His hand landed on her shoulder, just a little too hard. “Don’t work for him again.”
Selina shrugged the hand off and slid sideways out of the chair, laughing up into his face. “I make that kind of call for myself, silly bird. You know that. And Queen is a good client, I’ll work for him if he calls with a worthwhile job.”
The Owl made an expression which he probably considered a formidable scowl, but the Cat was more inclined to categorize as a pout. She spun around. “Get the zipper for me, hm?” Not that she couldn’t do it herself in an instant, although no set of field harness she’d ever dropped herself through a skylight on had anything on high fashion for complexity. That wasn’t the point.
After a second, Bruce stepped in, closed the heat of his left hand over her shoulder with a little more care, pinned the top of the collar in place with his thumb, and drew the zipper down.
Yes. She should have known then. She should never have come back to Gotham, should have vanished into the wind—but that was easy to say in retrospect, wasn’t it? It had just been his grim, dictatorial personality, at the time. It hadn’t seemed any more a danger sign than everything else about him.Maybe that was the danger sign in itself.But she’d thought she had it under control.He’d yelled at her, the next time she’d worked with the Black Bow, on a really fun extraction job that involved holding family heirlooms hostage, which was a hoot. He’d yelled. She’d barely heard him raise his voice to be heard at a distance, even, and he’d yelled. About something she’d told him she was going to do!Of course she’d yelled back.And really, that was when it had all gone wrong.Or maybe it had been wrong all along, but when Selina had been stupid enough to stick around and yell back at him—like a man who thought he had the right to shout at her for making her own choices was worth it, like she thought she could trust him, when the whole fun of it had been that of course she never could; like they were anything but colleagues and fuckbuddies, like there was a relationship there worth salvaging.Selina would have said a few days ago that she knew better, but she hadn’t acted like it, so maybe she didn’t.He hadn’t tried very hard to stop her leaving, after he’d reduced himself to vicious murmuring and she’d screamed herself out. Stupidly, Selina had thought that that meant he knew he didn’t really have the right. That this fit of controlling jealousy was just—a fit of masculinity.Which wasn’t to say she hadn’t still been blazingly furious.So she’d robbed him. Not on the way out, of course—too obvious. But she knew his security system inside out by now, and she’d waited a month or so until he left the country on business and took his valet with to let herself in and give the place a systematic ransacking for treasure.The gaudy ruby cufflinks. All the jeweled cufflinks. Tiepins, too. His mother’s best jewels, still kept in their box in the same vanity Selina had used when she came to his bed. The crown of Bialya, taken from its queen’s head after her defeat in battle a few years ago, she could not believe he kept that in the house. (It wasn’t even a traditional relic, they hadn’t done crowns like that in sub-Saharan Africa until what, nineteenth century? It was pretty, though.) Had he never heard of plausible deniability.She was doing him a favor, honestly. Man was so overconfident about his untouchability he wasn’t even doing crime properly.She was also suspicious about the scepter, which she’d found in his study, more like he’d been examining it than storing it there. It looked Atlantean. Atlanteans were incredibly possessive of their artifacts, even ones that weren’t huge and gold and just a little bit alive-feeling under your fingers.Selina was almost mad enough at Bruce to take the thing specifically to tip off the Hydrolord about Owlman having it, but she didn’t actually want to start a war, and if it had been gifted or loaned intentionally she’d be the one with Atlanteans mad at her, and she didn’t need additional enemies. She left it on the desk.Just to be safe, she left the magic-feeling crystal crab in the desk drawer, too. What was Bruce even doing. Was he going to sponsor an ocean-themed magical enforcer? Was he going to sponsor a rival candidate for the Atlantean throne?There was another piece, this one hidden away in a wall safe, that hummed against her knuckles, what seemed to be a stone palm knife big as her hand, knapped not from flint or even obsidian but either topaz or citrine. A beautiful pure one, whichever it was, gleaming a little more than the refraction index of either stone should strictly account for; more golden than gold.The fact that someone (presumably though not definitively a prehistoric someone) had managed to knap it at all suggested topaz, since its fracture planes would lend themselves better to the effort, but the delightful absurdity and incredible implied skill of a caveman finding such a huge and gorgeous gemstone and successfully making a knife out of it without, presumably, other topazes to practice on, made this possibly Selina’s favorite art piece she had ever laid hands on.It would ‘belong in a museum’ as the old canard went, if it had possessed any meaningful provenance, but without that it would be useless to archeology, and was simply a treasure. Her treasure.She’d left a note.Selina fenced all of Bruce’s cufflinks that hadn’t been inherited from his father right away, before he was even back in the country. They vanished into the Gotham black market. Let him track them down if he wanted them back; she knew he could, it would just be troublesome and embarrassing.After that, she should have left town. She had, briefly, with some of her best loot, but she’d come back, because she’d wanted to be there for his reaction.She was such an idiot.The voicemail he’d left when he did come back and find her note had been livid. She’d offered by text to return everything with sentimental value in return for acknowledgment that he didn’t get to give her orders, let alone about who she associated with.He’d responded by setting a meeting place and time.She’d thought that was an acceptance of her terms.She was an idiot.
He’d been at the park when she arrived, fully costumed and seated at the feet of the statue of blind Justice as though it was a throne, attended by his subjects like a king, as was often his habit, though not usually in places as public as a park. Even one that seemed to have been cleared of all bystanders. Not that there were often many innocent bystanders in a Gotham park after dark.
Selina should have left as soon as she saw the scene he’d set, though it was probably too late by then. But still she hadn’t.
After all, she hadn’t specified that he should come alone, because she hadn’t been thinking as if they were enemies. She’d expected him to come alone, because this was a personal matter, but she hadn’t specified it, so she couldn’t really complain.
The expressionless gaze of Talon at his right hand and the hungry look of Onyx at his left were more offputting than usual as she padded into the pool of light cast on the plaza before him by a streetlamp, though, and the sensed though unseen eyes of the rest of his backup, or audience, or whatever they were meant to be, sent a shiver up her spine.
Finally, she’d realized something was very wrong.
“I have,” she began, but Bruce cut her off.
“You don’t have anything, Selina.” His voice was warm and smooth in the way it only became when he was gloating. “All your local contacts flipped under a little pressure. I’ve compromised all your safehouses and impounded all your vehicles. Every route out of town is guarded. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Is that so,” Selina said, arch and bantering even as internally she frantically recalculated everything.
“Yes.”
“And what was the point of all that?” She hefted the sack in her hand so that it jingled. “I brought back your shinies.”
Bruce didn’t even look at the bag.
“You betrayed me,” he stated.Selina scoffed. “I did not. I broke through your security fair and square, I didn’t play on your trust for it. And I’m giving the stuff back.” Getting out of this would probably require retrieving and returning the loot she’d intended to keep, too, even the pretty, pretty topaz palm-knife. And she’d have to do the legwork to get the cufflinks back. And probably a lot of other things, too.
“I don’t care about the treasure, Selina,” he said, which was a lie, but probably convinced his stooges.
“Then what do you care about, Bruce?”
He didn’t even blink at her first-naming him right back. Everyone here must be in the inner circle. “You,” he said, and meant it in all the worst ways.
Selina let out an easy chuckle, because now she needed her mask more than ever. “Well, I’m flattered as always, but—”
“I want you to stay here in Gotham as part of my Court, and work exclusively for me.”
“What, until I’ve paid off my debt?” she could almost live with that, though it would burn, and she’d take a real revenge someday for it, not this petty kind.
“Forever.”
‘Be mine forever.’ It was like a twisted parody of a marriage proposal.
She wondered if he’d expect her to slip into his bed willing as ever, in spite of the collar he wanted to put around her neck.
She wondered if once he’d collared her, all the appeal would be gone anyway.
She smirked. “Haven’t you heard? I am the Cat, who walks by herself. All places are the same to me.”
“Well then, this place should serve you as well as any other.”
No. It wouldn’t.
“…what are my options?” she asked.
“You come along quietly. Or I will…make sure that you come along quietly.”
“And what if I say to hell with both those options?”
He stood. It should have looked ridiculous—childish, at least—because the plinth was six feet high and he had to drop four of them. Too long to be unnoticeable, too short for drama. But somehow he managed to make what by any reasonably definition was hopping down into a controlled act of menace. “Then you get option two. This isn’t a negotiation, Selina.”
She stepped forward. “What if I want it to be one?”
He mirrored her. “You have nothing to bargain with.”
She stepped in again. “I’m the only one who knows where the rest of your things are hidden. Are you sure you don’t care?”
He closed a little more of the distance. “If there’s anything I care to know, I’m certain you’ll tell us eventually.”
Her blood was running cold. She smiled grimly. Stepped again. “So it’s to be torture, love? For playing a prank?”
“For disloyalty.”
I never promised you anything. The rage on her tongue was so hot it burnt away the fear, but she made her body soft, and stepped in again toward him where he was now standing firm in the middle of the plaza, no longer answering her step for step. “Please, Bruce. Don’t do this. Did none of our time together mean anything to you?”
He was like stone. “I could ask you the same.”
The arrogance on the man. To think she’d ever found it even mildly attractive.
Selina glanced down at her bag of gold and jewels. “Do you even want this back?”
A slight shrug. “I suppose I do, yes.”
“Oh, good!” Selina whipped the bag of sentimental treasures up and took him full across the face with the full, gold-bullioned weight of it.
That weight cascaded from the open top of the bag as she let it go at the terminal point of the arc and turned with the spin and fled, like her tail was burning, all pretense of calm discarded, so that by the time Owlman turned his face back with a snarl amidst a shower of the pearls his mother wore to die, she was out of sight.
“Find her!” he barked, voice raised again, and he did not roar like a lion but she’d known what he was from the start. Why had she ever for a moment thought a man with a lion’s heart would be content to have a woman be of use to him, without owning her?
Selina doubted he’d really found all her hidey-holes, but she believed he’d found enough that she couldn’t risk assuming any one of them was safe. She could probably scout around and find the one with the most incompetent ambush, but even if she didn’t burn her lead on the hunters doing so, it would be obvious where she'd cleared out when those forces failed to check in, and none of her hidey-holes was set up to serve as a fortress, even if she’d wanted to risk being besieged.
She only had the one life.
There was nothing in any of her Gotham homes that she was so attached to she would risk her skin for it, and so she ran. She broke one Owl’s neck when he tried to cut her off, and put a dagger in an eye, and barely took the time to hide the bodies before she was running again.
Until she was run to ground on a roof by a clown.
And now here she was, trapped again, unfriendly eyes skirting her, invisible. She should have run a little further—there were too many hiding places on this roof, wide as it was. Motion to her right—nowhere near the spot she’d seen it earlier—no, just a flapping edge of tarp—no he was there.In the same split-second that she realized he wasn’t a mirage, the Jokester stepped out into plain sight. The limited light of the crescent moon and the low ambient glow of the city made his white face and hands (gloves) stand out sharply, though the middle tones of the rest of him faded a little better into shadow, apart from the occasional glint of glitter.The suit, she knew from seeing it in better lighting, was of cheap though not really shoddy material, but as perfectly tailored as a suit could be and still be field-usable. Bruce had tried to track the man’s tailor down a dozen times. He claimed to do his own sewing. It was leaf-green with gold accents, and there was really nothing you could call it but a costume.It looked less ridiculous when there weren’t other people around to compare him to. Everything about him did. Even the grin.Selina bet that if you were alone with the Jokester for even a few hours, you’d start to forget what human faces were supposed to look like.She knew the Jokester, if mostly by reputation. As she was to the average cat burglar, he was to the sort of person who snuck into the local macho jackass noise polluter’s garage and welded a functioning muffler onto his car in place of the sabotaged one. He wasn’t menacing. It wasn’t in his playbook.And yet.And yet, the hair on her neck refused to lie down.“What do you want,” she said after far too long a silence, the two of them watching each other across the roof. The words came out flat and impatient.The unsettling grin widened, but when he spoke it was no longer in that leering, mocking sing-song but an almost normal tone of voice. He said:“We can get you out of town.”Okay. She was listening.Not because she was so desperate she was willing to trust any offer she got, but the Circus did smuggle people out of Gotham on a regular basis. Poof, disappeared. It was one of Bruce’s biggest aggravations with them. The question was, the catch.“What do you want in exchange?”“Five years,” Jokester said, and before Selina could choose a form of expression for her incredulity that he was bargaining in years of her life, whether he meant servitude or actual time like some sort of mythical demon, he spread his hands, pointed a finger at her face, and elaborated. “You don’t accept any contracts to hurt people for five years. No murders. No kidnappings. No extortion. No making off with anyone's life savings. Preferably no making not-terribly-evil companies collapse, resulting in mass unemployment.”He tilted his head, a few degrees too far to look entirely natural, and his grin widened. “Your favorite thing to steal is treasure, anyway, right?”Well, he wasn’t wrong. She’d need to distance herself from the high-paying crime crowd that gave her so much of her commission work, anyway, until Bruce had calmed down enough to be less likely to set a trap. “You don’t care if I make off with gold and jewels, hero?”The clown laughed. It went on a little too long, and it prickled her neck in a different way than he had while he was hunting. “Look. I’ve got kids starving on every street corner; I’ve got yet another guy out there strangling prostitutes. I’ve got organized crime armed with Uzis and your former squeeze experimenting with mind control again, I’ve got a family to support and a peace to keep and a friend who keeps blowing up his lab…“I’ve got all that and a lot more to worry about, so how much do you think I care, if a bunch of rich people lose their pretty rocks?”Jokester shrugged. “I mean,” he allowed, “it’s kind of mean of you to take things with sentimental value, and I definitely disapprove of taking stuff from museums because those treasures belong to everybody, but I’m not going to ask you for a promise there’s no chance you’d keep. That would be stupid.”Selina let out a voiceless half laugh at the last remark, and shook her head. When they said this man wasn’t right in the head, they weren’t joking. “You’re a communist, aren’t you,” she remarked, and he laughed.“Hah! Anarcho-socialist, maybe. Communism’s a little too…centralized, ya know? Plus, I like to trust people, but I trust them more, the less power they got.”“Mm,” Selina acknowledged. What a complicated naïveté. “I accept.”The Jokester beamed, entirely smug. “Right this way, ma’am.”She detoured to pick up her bag, then let him conduct her onward, still wary. She tried not to let him see her flinch at shadows. The route involved more grimy tunnels than she particularly enjoyed, but she’d endured worse for her work, let alone to keep her life and freedom.They stopped when they reached a small, grubby building near the waterfront; Jokester ducked inside and motioned her to follow. “Now,” he said, crouching down in the dim and damp-smelling interior; the Cat mirrored him. “You wait here about a quarter of an hour, studying this.” He handed her…a folded map of the city, marked up in green pen. “That’s your safe route out, and down the coast. We can give you cover out to about here.”‘Here’ was halfway to New Jersey, which was much further than she would have expected their little operation to be able to reach.“Follow the map as closely as you can, coordinating this kind of thing is not easy and the further off-route you are, the more likely you’ll be out of range of the distraction.”“You have another reason for helping me,” Selina stated, feeling rather gullible herself for not having realized it sooner. She rested the block of creased paper against her knee and regarded him. “You smuggle people out of town a lot, and the cordon Bruce has put up to keep me in is making that harder.” She tilted her head slightly, lips pursing in a parody of seduction. “Does everybody pay you in promises?”The clown’s eyes flicked away from her, evidently embarrassed; she could have killed him easily in that moment. “No,” he said, “that’s a supervillain special. Bargain price, not to be matched anywhere.” He stood up, and Selina didn’t press her advantage, content to have been the one putting him off-balance for once tonight.“Be ready to move when you hear the signal,” he said, and closed the door behind him, leaving her in the near-dark.Damn the man.He hadn’t said what the signal was, so it was undoubtedly going to be unmistakably loud. Meanwhile she had a little bit of time to find or figure out what her route was, and how she was meant to follow it, and why she was to start here.Serve her right if he’d locked her in a shed and sent Owlman straight to her. But that didn’t seem in character.Oh, the Jokester would undoubtedly play deeply unfunny pranks, and she didn’t really doubt he could be cruel because who couldn’t? But if he wanted to see you destroyed and it seemed at all likely to happen on its own, she thought he would rather sit back and let fate take its course than involve himself personally in manipulating the odds. Even if it would be funny. That was her view.Also he would never help Owlman.That affirmed, she crept forward through the shed, wishing for the vision of a crepuscular animal. Clicked on a small light once she was fairly sure there was no reason it would give her away to anything, and discovered that she was in a boathouse and had come embarrassingly close to creeping right over the edge of the dock and splashing into the less-foul-than-it-used-to-be Gotham River.The escape route was an actual boat.Just…just a boat. She searched it thoroughly. Very small, incredibly quiet motor affixed to the rear. Also paddles, she supposed for when you required even greater stealth. Or ran out of fuel.It was painted a rich deep shade of green.If the Jokester were still here, she would punch him in the stomach.Outside the shed, something exploded.Time to go.