About Party:
As it turns out, being a masked, superpowered vigilante isn’t entirely legal. Who knew?
When a critically ill teenager with powers disappears, part-time superhero and full-time trouble magnet Zita Garcia is on the case. Unfortunately, the girl isn’t the only person to have disappeared, and the culprit isn’t a mystery. It’s a conspiracy.
A shadowy government agency has escalated from irritating robocalls to the obvious next steps, kidnapping and murder. If an intolerant new party can use rising anti-metahuman sentiment to win an upcoming election, their actions might not even be a crime. All Zita and her friends have to do is save the missing and avoid the bad publicity of doing something stupid that would tip the delicate political situation the wrong way…
They’re doomed.
Party is the sixth in the Arca superhero urban fantasy series and contains lame sexual innuendo, immoderate language, and comic book violence.
Excerpt:
The SWAT teams waiting for her might’ve been a sign that Zita Garcia needed to rethink her life choices.
In the shape of a hawk, she drifted in and out of the clouds in a lazy circle, mimicking a real bird performing a similar spiral nearby.
The person Zita had come to meet, the Pie Lady, sat on a wooden bench by the water of the long, oval lake that filled the center of the park. As she knitted something pastel yellow, the older woman hummed. Her project matched the cheery flowers of her short-sleeved blouse, her lemon-colored capris, and the bulging tote bag sitting beside her. Even her hair projected her contentment, the fluffy short cut like a peppery halo of baking sainthood.
Go to church, knit baby clothes while humming a happy song, and have the metahuman ability to bake pies so good they temporarily cure mental illness… is she trying to be somebody’s ideal mom or something? I bet she’s got snacks, tissues, and chanclas in her bag. What’s her name again? Irma? Iris? Zita tried to remember while she scoped out the others there.
Beneath the shade of a wide oak, a mud-splattered white SUV sat empty. A tired-seeming man, Zita’s age, stretched out on a bench by it. He had Pie Lady’s facial structure, the tight body of a serious runner, and hooded brown eyes glued to his phone, making him the only other person in the park who seemed normal.
Everyone else there was wrong. Nicely muscled, but wrong.
When the Pie Lady waved happily at a fit, young couple with a baby carriage, they returned only a curt nod. A dog walker with the balance of a martial artist walked multiple laps, a slight hitch in his stride that might signal a concealed weapon. The canine itself was on alert, with none of the expected joyous sniffing, marking, and dawdling. Two birdwatchers had locked their binoculars on Zita and the other hawk, completely ignoring the smaller birds in the nearby trees. By the shore, a fisherman hung out, busy observing his environs rather than the line drifting in the water. He had no beer, but a three-foot-long duffel lay open at his feet, the bag lumpy with something too big to be a backup fishing rod. Landscapers poked at the dirt as a tray of flowers wilted beside them. The spotless pickup truck nearby lacked any gardening equipment or racks for such. Four black vans and a sedan sat neatly side-by-side next to the handicapped parking spots. Engines rumbled in two of the vans, but the hard-eyed men in the driver’s seats didn’t even pretend to be doing anything other than watching their surroundings.
Despite the heat and humidity, all the suspicious strangers wore jeans and bulky, plain t-shirts that didn’t quite hide the outline of hidden vests on bodies that’d clearly seen serious gym time. They also seemed to share the flat, assessing gazes of cops that moved endlessly over the landscape, as if expecting something or someone to burst out of nowhere.
Someone like Zita.
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