Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(82)

Starting with finding out everything about Holly Vanderhees.





It had been so easy to create Holly Vanderhees.

She wasn’t particularly sad to see her go.

Selina knew that the world was wondering: Who is this socialite crime-queen?

Harley and Ivy were probably wondering it, too.

And as she sat in her filthy solitary cell in Arkham, counting the hours and guards who leered at her, sorting through the shouting of prisoners down the three-storied cellblock, Selina herself wondered if Harley and Ivy would forgive her. For the lies. For being one of the rich assholes they so hated.

By now, the media would have found the social media profiles she’d crafted months ago: summers in Provence, winters in St. Barths, parties with her face seamlessly Photoshopped into group shots around gala tables or on yachts or in clubs. For a woman who’d never existed, Holly had led a remarkably public life.

The hours passed, one by one.

They’d taken her suit, her helmet. Shoved her into a white jumpsuit. In the changing room, even before she’d donned the long-sleeved shirt they gave her to wear beneath the pale threads, the female officer didn’t comment on her tattooed arms. And in the chill cellblock, Selina hauled the rough wool blanket around her shoulders as she sat on her cot.

At least they hadn’t put her in the sublevel below—the one for intensive-treatment inmates. But the cold, reeking air still seemed to reach her, rising up from the floor. As if it were a beckoning grave.

Selina blocked it out. She had suffered worse. Here in the enormous, vaulted space of the female-only east wing, she could watch. And listen.

Hour after hour.

Counting down the seconds, rallying her strength, her mind.

Because the moment Gordon had removed that helmet, baring her face to the world, Nyssa had begun to make her final move.

Selina slept. And ate. And braced herself.

It was nearing dawn when that final move came.

Selina knew within a few heartbeats of the shouting and chaos that exploded in the asylum that Nyssa hadn’t dispatched one or two of her best assassins to finish the job.

Nyssa had sent a small army of them.





The attack unfolded with textbook precision, exactly the way Selina had been taught to do it.

First the outer walls blew up. Or Selina felt they did, the enormous, U-shaped building shuddering, debris raining. Sending the guards running toward the explosions.

Right into the arms of assassins who executed them. All of them. Every leering, corrupt piece of shit who had rattled the bars on her cell these hours, ogling her, whispering the sorts of things that left no shred of pity in her heart as their screams went silent down the smoke-filled hallways.

Silent enough that Selina could clearly hear the click that filled the cellblock.

The doors to the cells swung open. An invitation and a challenge.

She had no doubt that in the west wing, the doors to the male prisoners’ cells were doing the same.

Selina let the blanket drop to the floor behind her as she stepped into the hallway, smoke starting to fill the corridor. The escaped prisoners didn’t look twice at her as they bolted in either direction, vanishing into the smoke.

They didn’t glance at what Selina now approached, the item left hanging from one of the ceiling lights, near a disabled security camera.

Her suit.

No helmet. No gloves. No utility belt or bullwhip. Only her boots, set against the wall a few feet away.

Nyssa wanted her to fight this final battle as herself. No Death Mask. No additional tech.

Selina plucked the suit from its hanging place as the last of the prisoners in her cellblock vanished.

Quietly, she pulled off the white jumpsuit and slid into battle-black.

Her hair—her stupid dyed hair—she left unbound. No hair ties to be found.

Selina leaned against the wall of the hallway, watching the smoke-filled corridor that led out of the east wing.

The League arrived within seconds, wraiths in the smoke.

No individual markings. They were all in identical black, helmets on, their swords the same.

One unit, one avenging force of death. The League’s brutal fist of justice embodied.

With the smoke, she couldn’t count how many went past the ten filling the corridor entryway.

Selina pushed off the stark white wall, arms hanging loosely at her sides.

“You have betrayed your fellow living dead,” the one at the front of the group said, accent placing the woman from somewhere in Australia. “And as such, we shall put you back in the ground.”

Selina smiled. “Took you long enough to get here.”

The assassin before her said, “You stand charged of theft and high treason. Do you deny this?”

“I do not.”

The assassin to the leader’s left tensed, as if yanking at the leash. The leader went on, “Return what you stole, what you have come here to sell to these godless fools, and the League will make your death swift.”

The threat was clear: if she did not…oh, this death would last a long, long time.

Selina laughed quietly. “And what did I steal, exactly?” Beyond time. She’d stolen that. Too much of it.

“You will not delay this with foolish questions,” the leader snapped, drawing a blade sheathed down her back, twin to the ones that had been removed from Selina’s own suit. “You know what you stole.”