The old clock on the wall of Liv Benoit’s office ticked steadily toward quitting time—well, quitting time for anyone who wasn’t dangerously devoted to their job. For Liv, the hands might as well have been moving backward. She had no intention of clocking out until she was forced to, and the day had been the kind that seemed to drag itself across the ground on its belly, making inches feel like miles and minutes stretch into hours.
She blinked slowly, forcing her eyes to focus as the data on her computer screen began to smear into meaningless lines. Endless reports, cross-referenced statements, and forensics summaries—it was exhausting work, but still preferable to dealing with the media circus. For that, at least, she was grateful Leblanc had taken it upon himself to act as the lightning rod.
Not that she trusted him. Leblanc reeked of politics, not policing—the part of the job she despised most. She didn’t need to pin down exactly why her gut twisted every time he spoke; her instincts were enough. Leblanc wasn’t her friend, and he sure as hell wasn’t on her side. That was all she needed to know.
Her eyes drifted to the office phone every so often, as if staring at it might will it to ring. She’d spoken with the doctors earlier—McDonald was still critical, the woman stable. They’d promised to contact her if anything changed.
That had been hours ago. Hours of sifting through reports, of listening to the clock grind toward quitting time, and still the phone sat there in stubborn silence. A part of her braced for it to ring with bad news. A smaller, quieter part clung to the hope it might be good. Neither had come.
She reached for her coffee mug without looking, muscle memory guiding her hand. The rim was cool against her lips, the contents lukewarm at best—just dregs swirling at the bottom. She drank it anyway. At this point, it wasn’t about taste; it was about keeping herself moving.
She was tired, and the whole force was wound tight. The attack on McDonald had both the City Police and the RCMP rattled. This wasn’t a gunfight with a mobster or some twitchy ganger hopped up on street chems—it was a cold, deliberate strike with a dagger. Methodical. Audacious. And no one could make sense of the “why.”
She had her own theories, but for most of the force it boiled down to one thing: a calculated attack on the badge by someone with no fear of it—or the uniform behind it. A cop turned into a victim, a protector made into prey. The unease rippled through the station like a bad current. She could already picture the hushed conversations in locker rooms and briefing halls, officers muttering that if they got the drop on Bloodletter, he’d be coming back in a body bag, not in cuffs.
She understood why. Cop killers—or even those who just tried—got under the skin. They rattled people, stoked old fantasies of frontier justice. You could almost hear it in the tone: string him up, put him down, make an example.
For a moment, she let herself slip into the fantasy—a world where justice was simple, where a Mountie could ride out with a unit of riflemen and tell a gang of crooks that stepping foot in town meant risking a sudden case of severe lead poisoning. That was how Sam Steele would have done it: stern, just, unwavering, relentless—the Mountie of legend. She doubted Steele ever had to fill out incident reports or justify every discharged round to a review board.
But that was the romance of it, seen through the rose-colored glass of nostalgia and myth. The logical part of her knew better. She’d studied the history, the hard truths of the RCMP and the slow evolution of modern law enforcement—ethics, accountability, public trust. Things Steele’s era likely wouldn’t have even considered important. The Wild West was cleaner in stories than it had ever been in reality.
Then again, she mused between lines of data, the modern world wasn’t much better. Superheroes had just traded one kind of myth for another, making things look clean because the media had been in love with them since the early 1940s. In headlines, it was always simple: masked muscleman in a cape—good; mentally and emotionally unstable guy in a costume robbing people—bad.
They never showed the messes capes left behind, or how their sudden rise had forced governments to rewrite laws on the fly just to keep pace. And that was before supervillains started crawling into the criminal landscape, warping law enforcement’s job into something unrecognizable. The media, and most of the world, liked their stories simple—and left the real dirty work to people like her, whose “costume” was a badge and whose only powers were a sharp eye, a steady hand, a gun, pepper spray, and a taser.
Not that she disliked superheroes—far from it. She appreciated the genuine ones, especially those who followed Canadian law and went through RCMP training. Those types were basically just cops in capes. Some didn’t even bother with the capes—just police officers with a little extra spice. Minor powers were common enough that she even knew a few officers who were low-level psychics, or Extras with abilities that were useful but not flashy enough to make them media darlings. Still, they were rare. Something like 0.001% of the human population qualified as what the world called a “Special,” so even by the numbers, super-cops with any kind of powers were an uncommon breed.
She pulled her focus back to the present and glanced at the phone on her desk, only for it to mock her with silence. The clock on the wall struck the hour—time to clock out—but she stayed put. From here on, the work she did wouldn’t be for pay. It would be because there was a killer on the loose, and Detective Liv Benoit wasn’t going to rest until he was behind bars with enough evidence stacked against him to guarantee multiple life sentences.
Liv kept at it as the sun dipped low and finally sank below the horizon. By the time she looked up again it was pushing nine o’clock. Screen fatigue gnawed at her eyes, and the hollow pang of hunger twisted in her stomach. She sighed, conceding that if she couldn’t smoke anymore, she could at least feed her body the next best vice—something in the holy trinity of cheese, meat, and carbs.
She weighed her options and decided Ultra Burger was the best bet. It was close, greasy in all the right ways, and—best of all—offered a ten percent discount to cops, firefighters, EMTs, and service members. Liv wasn’t nearly well-off enough to turn down a discount.
She told herself she was saving for her vacation, though that excuse had worn thin over the years. Her coworkers had heard it a hundred times: one day she’d take that big trip to the Caribbean, stretch out on white sand under a sun too hot for her pale skin, drink something sweet from a coconut with a ridiculous umbrella poking out of it, and let some broad-shouldered local rub suntan lotion into her shoulders. Someday. Until then, Ultra Burger would have to do.
“Well, ‘have to do’ wasn’t exactly fair to Ultra Burger,” Liv admitted to herself as she pushed back from her desk and grabbed her coat. The chain was debatably one of the best in Canada—maybe even the world. Sure, it leaned heavy into superhero kitsch, but when your founder was the Ultra Defender, a bona fide Golden Age cape who’d spent WWII knocking Nazi teeth into the dirt, you’d earned the right to get a little campy.
Besides, Ultra Burger was good. Better than good. The quality beat out most fast food, and they had something for everyone—high-end menu items for people with deeper pockets, budget-friendly staples for the rest. Liv had practically survived on their Stellar Smash Burgers through college: cheap, greasy, perfect. Just the thought of one now made her mouth water.
Liv was out the door, giving a lazy wave to the guys coming in for the graveyard shift before hitting the street. The nearest Ultra Burger wasn’t far—walking distance, which beat wrestling Toronto traffic on an empty stomach. Just a block and a half, and the place came into view, decked out in purple neon and glowing signage that cut through the dark like a beacon for the hungry and overworked.
It was no flagship. The real crown jewel was the massive Ultra Burger in the city’s heart, the original diner founded by the Ultra Defender himself. That one still pulled tourists, nostalgia buffs, and superhero groupies. Liv remembered the older ones, too—the retro drive-ins in Ottawa and Montreal where she’d grown up, places her dad had loved. The kind of joints where waiters still rolled up on skates to take your order at the car window. Thinking of it made her smile faintly, a memory that was warm even against the bite of the night air.
This satellite spot was more modest, almost cartoonish in its Golden Age hero décor, but Liv didn’t mind. At this hour, it was quiet. No screaming kids, no lunch rush, no capes making a public appearance for free PR. Just the steady hum of neon, the smell of sizzling beef, and the knowledge that Ultra Burger never closed its doors. That was why cops, EMTs, firefighters—and yes, even the occasional masked hero—loved it. A place built to fuel people running on fumes.
She made her way up to the counter, still thinking about what the place represented. Ultra Burger wasn’t just a chain cashing in on capes—it was the legacy of a man who’d put his neck on the line and then made sure others who did the same could afford a hot meal. That was why the discount was untouchable, part of the creed: if you came in uniform, you got treated right. Whether that uniform was blue, red, white, or stitched out of spandex didn’t matter.
A quick glance at the dining area told the story of the hour. A couple of city cops still in uniform, unwinding with greasy food before heading home. A lone EMT slumped in her booth, staring at her fries like they might answer for her long night. Nine o’clock wasn’t dinner for anyone with a normal life—it was the witching hour for the overworked and bone-tired, a club Liv belonged to.
The woman at the counter greeted her with the kind of practiced warmth that only years in service could perfect. Soft pastel purple and yellow uniform, a cap, and a smile: Ultra Burger’s holy trinity. Her name tag read Linda.
“Good evening, Officer Benoit,” Linda said. “The usual?”
Liv scoffed lightly. “Do I really come here that often?”
“Like clockwork.”
Liv opened her mouth to argue, but closed it again. Linda wasn’t wrong. Instead she smirked. “Alright, fair enough. But let’s change it up. Titan Triple Cheese with bacon. Onion Rings of Power on the side. Grape soda. And—” she added with mock solemnity, “to make it vaguely healthy, a small Green Guardian salad.”
Linda chuckled as she tapped in the order. “I’ll try not to tell the Titan you’re cheating on him with a salad.”
Liv carried her cup over to the soda fountain, filled it with grape fizz—more purple sugar-water than fruit—and added just enough ice to chill it without drowning the taste. She wasn’t sure why she always specified grape soda at the counter. Force of habit, she decided.
By the time she’d settled into her booth, her food came out. She plucked up an Onion Ring of Power and bit down, the crunch loud enough to punctuate her thoughts. What she wouldn’t give for a few more capes in uniform, she mused—real assets on the force, not just PR mascots. Imagine having a dependable psychic on the Bloodletter case. Or a guy with a suit of power armor standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them during an ugly bust. But that wasn’t reality.
Reality was this: the public and the media still clung to the fantasy that heroes could be everywhere, fix everything, swoop in like divine intervention in spandex. It didn’t work that way. It never had. Heroes were rare, and even the good ones were still human under the mask. They needed to sleep, to eat, to live.
Liv chased the onion ring with a sip of grape soda, the fizz biting at her tongue. She’d heard it all before—the cheap talk, the complaints. Cops are a joke, what good are they if the heroes don’t show up? She’d heard people sneer at the Special Containment Division too, as if they weren’t just men and women grinding it out against impossible odds.
Some cops resented heroes for the way they overshadowed the badge. Others adored them, wishing they could join the capes on the rooftops. Liv? She just understood. They were people, same as her. No one could be everywhere at once. No one could fix everything with a snap of the fingers.
That truth didn’t make the job easier. But it made it real.
She sank her teeth into the Titan Triple, grease and cheese spilling just enough to demand a napkin, and half-lidded in the kind of deep, guilty satisfaction only three patties, three cheeses, and a crown of crisp bacon could deliver.
Yeah, heroes had it rough. The media loved them when they shone bright, but the second they stumbled, every failure became a scandal. Miss one life, miss one save, and the headlines turned sour overnight. Maybe that was why some chose masks and aliases—armor not just against bullets, but against the questions, the guilt, the constant public judgment. It was easier to let the world love a symbol and hate a symbol than to drag their real name, their real face, through the mud.
It wasn’t long before the food disappeared, right down to the last bite of the salad, and the gnawing pit in Liv’s stomach finally eased. She checked her watch. Technically, she should head home, get what little rest she could, but the thought of her apartment made her picture herself tossing, turning, and staring at the ceiling while Bloodletter prowled free. No—better to funnel that restless energy back into the case than waste it.
She waved a tired farewell to Linda on her way out, stepping back into the Toronto night. The city had quieted, at least the good, upstanding parts—the families in their condos, the students already dozing off with laptops humming, the nine-to-fivers curled in bed before another commute. But Liv knew better. She’d worked the graveyard years, walked the beat when the streets belonged to the restless, the desperate, the dangerous. Hell, looking at her current sleep schedule, she might still count herself among them.
Liv passed an alley when a shadow stretched across the sidewalk—long, sharp, deliberate. Her instincts prickled, her body tensing before her brain even caught up. She froze, eyes snapping toward the source.
The shadow was cast tall against the concrete, its outline unmistakable: long ears tapering into a fox’s silhouette, lean shoulders drawn in sharp relief.
Liv’s gaze climbed slowly, warily, until it found the figure herself. The Vulpes, half-swallowed by the dark, cloak blending with the night until only her mask and the faint glint of her eyes showed.
The vigilante didn’t move, didn’t menace. Instead, her voice cut through the hush of the street—measured, calm, and deliberate.
“I’d like to talk with you, Detective Benoit.”
