Lucien ran, his head slowly exploding, the stolen papers crinkling in his pocket with the sound of success, Darla’s taste still sweet on his lips.
Chapter Five
The Agony of Alliteration
Darla buried her head under her pillow, trying to escape the shrieking siren that sounded vaguely like the ringtone she’d set for her best friend. The acute pain of her initial crash had faded, leaving her feeling like the inside of her skull had been shredded with a cheese grater and then doused in lemon juice. She’d never been this burned.
The shrieking stopped, so Darla dared to poke her head out from under the pillow, squinting in the direction of her clock. Just after nine. In the morning, judging by the light. She didn’t know when she’d gotten home. Or how. She had a dim recollection of staggering up the stairs because she didn’t have the reserves left to fly up the four flights to the balcony of her walk-up. Everything else from last night was still jagged and disjointed, like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle made of broken glass.
Her cell phone began to screech again, and Darla groped for it, connecting the call in self-defense. “Nnph.”
“You’re alive! Thank God.” Tandy’s bright voice pierced her eardrums, and Darla winced. “After the headlines this morning, I didn’t know what to expect.”
Darla thought
alive
might be overstating a bit, but she wasn’t going to quibble. “Headlines?”
“DynaGirl Defeated. DemonSpawn Decimates Darla. It’s all over the front page.”
“They should be punished for that much alliteration.” Rough-edged memories surfaced of slamming into walls and midair grappling. Her entire body ached, confirming she’d been decimated. “Who the hell is DemonSpawn?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know you were battling Demon Wroth’s only son and heir.”
More pieces of last night’s painful puzzle fell into place. The too-familiar black eyes haunting her memories. His father’s eyes. “Shit.”
“Eloquently put. He sounds like a monster. The mayor gave a press conference to offer his condolences to the families of the guards he killed.”
“What? Tandy, no one was hurt.” She may have been out of it, but she’d checked on that personally.
“Oh, maybe the mayor was mixing up his epic battles. Anyway, why is there a picture of Kyle on page six with some blonde toothpick? The press is implying you flaked on the capture because you were heartbroken after he threw you over for some anorexic bimbo. There’s even this bullshit quote—”
“Kyle gave them a
quote
?” Darla shouted, the effects of her power hangover fading in the face of burning rage. She wasn’t surprised to find he’d already moved on to pluck a more delicate flower, but blabbing to the press about their split was beyond gauche. The traitor.
Tandy gasped. “Oh my God. Did you guys really break up?”
“Last night.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t you read the papers? I was busy getting my ass kicked.”
“Seriously? I can’t believe you
lost
,” Tandy said, with touching loyalty.
Darla had grown up with Tandy Nightwing. Their friendship had been almost inevitable, both of them daughters of the city’s elite superhero power couples, but unlike most children of supers, Tandy had never developed any super abilities.
Evidently unlike Demon Wroth’s spawn.
“DemonSpawn…” What kind of man voluntarily went by
DemonSpawn
? “How did they identify him?”
“One of the cameras at the North Courthouse caught him as he escaped. Are you all right? He looks vile.”
“I’d hardly call him vile,” Darla protested, wondering if the cameras had caught the right man.
The long silence that greeted her statement was her first indication that maybe she should’ve quelled the impulse to defend a known supervillain.
“Darla Athena Powers. What exactly happened last night?”
“I…” She had all the pieces of her jigsaw puzzle now, a clear sharp reflection of her humiliation, but rehashing it wasn’t high on her list of priorities.
He’d played her. He’d manipulated her.
He’d kissed her.
Darla shook away that last memory. It was an aberration. She needed to stay focused. The asshole known as DemonSpawn had bested her, and not only that, he’d done it in front of a half-dozen witnesses at the North Courthouse.
“Darla?”
“He has superstrength,” she said, knowing she had to give Tandy something. “I’ve never been hit full strength by anyone who matched me before.”
“He hit you?” Tandy gasped. “But you’re a girl.”
“I’m a super,” Darla snapped. Apparently she was too strong to be feminine, but too feminine to be taken seriously as a hero. Whose ass did a girl have to kick to get some respect in this town? Though her bad boy certainly treated her like she was a worthy adversary. She could almost respect him for not taking it easy on her because she was a girl.
“He tossed me around like I was nothing. And he was fast. Superfast. I’ve never seen anyone move like that.” She remembered the fight in the Crypt, feeling like his strong hands were everywhere, anticipating her every move. She kicked off her comforter, suddenly too warm. “I thought I had him a couple times, but he’s tricky. Just when you think he’s given up, he pulls out something unexpected—”
a kiss that melts me like a marshmallow
“—and breaks free again. I would’ve had him. I know I could’ve brought him in, but my powers burned out and I crashed.”
“Wow. I can’t believe he got away with… What did he do? The papers didn’t say.”
“Classified.” Tandy didn’t have clearance for details on the Crypt. “But he hasn’t gotten away with anything. I had to recharge, but this isn’t over. Not by a long shot.” Darla bounded out of bed and over to her closet, whipping out a fresh supersuit, vengeance and the familiar fierce drive for justice fueling every move. “No one makes me look like a fool and walks away scot-free.” Not to mention the little matter of stolen files. She didn’t know what he’d taken, but she would find out. She’d figure out what his endgame was and be there waiting for him before he made his next move. She was good, and good triumphed over evil, dammit. “I’ll track his ass and take him down. He does
not
know who he messed with.”
“Whoa. I’ve never heard you on a vendetta before. Are you sure you’re okay about Kyle?”
With everything else that had happened last night, there was no room in her thoughts for Kyle.
“This isn’t about Kyle.” Or a stolen kiss she had every intention of making a certain villain pay for. “This is about my reputation. And justice.”
“Are you sure? Because it sounds personal.”
“It is personal. My personal need for DemonSpawn Wroth to rot in a cell for the rest of his natural life.”
“If you say so,” Tandy muttered, her skepticism obvious. “But I’m here if you want to talk.”
“Thanks, Tandy. I’ll call you later.” Right now she had a bad guy to catch. He’d been on the edge of burnout last night when he escaped, but if her power hangover was wearing off, his would be too. She didn’t have a second to waste.
Justice waited for no woman. Especially not one who was having girly flutterings at the idea of confronting a certain bad boy again…
Chapter Six
The Good, the Bad & the Invisible
Lucien’s head still echoed with the aftereffects of his hangover as he held himself motionless, outside the range of Area Nine’s security sensors. Thanks to DynaGirl, getting the secret location and security specs of the prison had nearly killed him—and that had been the easy part.
Now he had to break a high-priority prisoner out of one of the most secure facilities in the world, and he didn’t have time for more than the most half-assed of plans. He’d left the Crypt in chaos, but it wouldn’t take the authorities long to determine what he’d taken. As soon as they knew he was after Area Nine, they’d be ready for him. No, he had to act now. Lucien just hoped the day didn’t end with him as a permanent resident of the cellblock next to Mirabelle’s.
He didn’t know which one was hers, only that she was in the section of the complex designed to contain the prisoners with the most advanced mind-game abilities. She would be isolated, never coming into direct contact with her guards and therefore incapable of projecting false images into their minds. Anywhere else, solitary confinement would be a punishment, but it was the only way to contain mindbenders.
All Mirabelle’s surveillance would be digital, reviewed by a remote guard off-site who could push a button to flood her section of the complex with knockout gas if he saw any anomalies. Lucien patted the pair of gasmasks in his pack. He wanted the guard to hit that button. It would keep the truly dangerous residents of Area Nine from escaping when he put a hole in their wall getting Mirabelle out.
Provided he could first get through the gauntlet of defenses to get to his sister.
Luckily, the facility was designed more around keeping supers in than keeping them out. Being a government construct, they’d cut corners to cut costs—reinforcing the separate buildings within the main complex only as necessary to contain the particular kinds of criminals they held and relying too much on the secrecy and remoteness of the location to deter jailbreaks.
Thank God for bureaucracy.
Lucien gauged the distance he’d have to cover, mentally reviewing his plan—what there was of it—and hoping he had the energy reserves to manage it.
Two miles of open land to cover to get to the perimeter wall. He could run fast enough to confuse the cameras, but motion sensors would catch him. He had to hope the radio-dissonance device he’d bought would confuse the signal from the sensors long enough for him to reach the wall without triggering the alarm. He only needed a matter of seconds.
A burst of superstrength should put a hole in the wall. The powers that be hadn’t been able to afford to coat the entire perimeter in the expensive resistance polymer. The regular steel and concrete would tear like tissue paper under his hands.
No amount of dissonance would stop the alarm from going off when the wall was breached. The sirens would be wailing when he ran the three hundred feet to the outer wall of the building that held Mirabelle. A shock wave should knock out the cameras, and the ninety seconds it took the gas to saturate the building would be more than he needed to find Mirabelle and get the mask on her.
He hoped.
Lucien shoved down the feeling of dread that rose up.
Hope
wasn’t something he had a lot of experience with, and he’d certainly never based a plan on it before, but Mirabelle had already spent six weeks locked away without human contact. Hope was going to have to help him get her out, because if hope failed, all he had left to fall back on was desperation and brute strength.
His gut burned. Six fucking weeks. Six weeks of Mirabelle suffering because he’d reneged on his promise to always be there for her by disappearing to Singapore for a year right when she needed him. No matter how many times he told himself he had no way of suspecting she wasn’t safe in her dorm room, he couldn’t escape the feeling he should’ve
known
she was in trouble. He should’ve been there, standing between her and danger like he’d always been before.
She never would’ve fallen in with that low-life bastard if Lucien had been there to watch over her. No slimy wannabe villain would have been able to manipulate her into using her abilities to break into a bank vault. She had to have been manipulated. Coerced. Mirabelle may not have the most dependable moral compass, but she knew better than to take stupid risks. For people like them, even the hint of lawlessness was a life sentence.
He didn’t know the whole story. The bank robbery had been hushed up—barely a murmur in the press. Lucien had only a few cryptic emails from Mirabelle and the records he’d managed to steal to put together what must have happened.
It had all started three weeks after he left. She’d fallen, hook, line and sinker, for some guy named Kevin who’d fed her bullshit about bringing down The Man and a higher purpose.
Kevin
. What kind of name was that for a mastermind?
He’d known exactly what to promise Mirabelle to get her to cooperate. Justice for their mother after all these years. Small wonder Mirabelle had bought it all. Teenagers building a revolution.
But it hadn’t been a coup. Kevin had used her for his own purposes and hung her out to dry when a stray fingerprint had identified her. A fingerprint that wouldn’t even have been in the system if not for their father’s notorious past.
It was all fun and games until someone ended up in maximum security lockdown.
His watch timer beeped softly. Fifteen minutes until shift change. The guards would be thinking about heading home, easing their diligence. Time to move.
Lucien took a slow breath, shaking away the last vestiges of his headache.
Please let this work.
Sirens echoed across the hillside and smoke spiraled up to the sky, warning Darla she was already too late as she flew closer to the sprawling rural complex known only as Area Nine.
Gas-masked guards were sprinting en masse toward the mind-games cell block. If the gas had caught Wroth and whoever he’d come for, the guards could clean up, but Darla hadn’t bagged her first felon at the age of fifteen by assuming security measures always worked exactly as planned.
Anticipate. Think like a villain.
She circled above the complex, scanning the perimeter. The hole he’d punched in the wall was teeming with guards—he could try to race through there, but that gauntlet would be much harder with the baggage of whoever he was breaking out. No, he’d have a different exit strategy. With his strength it probably consisted of putting a new hole in the wall.
He wouldn’t know that power from the nearby town would’ve been temporarily diverted to electrify a ten-foot swath just beyond the wall as soon as the first alarm sounded.
That
little surprise had only been added last week and the initiative—funded by the town to help protect them from the possibility of escapees—hadn’t been included in the Crypt files.