Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) (3 page)

Though, if he was one hundred
percent honest with himself, he’d had a feeling this was exactly where they
were heading. Apart. That was part of why he’d gotten her the key. As an
instinctive, last-ditch effort to save their relationship.

Always the hero. Always
saving the day. Even when the day apparently didn’t want to be saved.

Two fucking years down
the drain.

Two
years
. Admittedly,
most of their interactions during their first few months of “dating” had been
instigated by local villains, but they’d slowly grown to feel more for each
other than just rescue-induced adrenaline and gratitude. The relationship had
just sort of happened, as if they’d been thrown together so many times that
hooking up had almost been an act of inertia—easier than the alternative of
finding someone else.

But he had come to care
for her. He wasn’t ready to just let that go. “The capital isn’t far. We can
still see each other on weekends. Or, you know, I’m sure they need supers down
there—”

“Julian.” Kim smiled
and for the first time he saw pity there. His stomach recoiled. “I really like
you and I’m sincerely grateful for everything you’ve done for me over the last
couple years. You’re kind and dependable and God knows you’re absolutely
gorgeous. A girl really can’t ask for a better guy to rescue her…”

Again that acidic tang
of not-the-whole-truth. “But.”

“But I want more.”

More. He could give her
more. He’d been playing it safe, but a successful superhero knew when to take
the big leaps. The words stuck, but he pushed them out, wondering if they were
true, unable to hear his own lies. “Kim, I love you.”

“I know.” Her brows
wrinkled and the pity was back in her eyes in full force. “I just don’t want to
be with you right now. I need to be my own person, really find my own identity,
as something more than Captain Justice’s girlfriend.”

“I’m not saying this as
Captain Justice.”

“I know. You’re saying
it because I’m leaving. Because you’re pathologically incapable of letting
anything go wrong without trying to make it right. But this
is
the right
thing, Julian. I’ve barely seen you the last few weeks. Lately, it’s like our
relationship exists more in the papers than it does in person.”

That couldn’t be true. So
why did it sound like truth coming out of her mouth?

Kim sighed. “I’m sorry,
okay? Maybe we can grab lunch before I move to the capital. We’re still
friends, right?”

“Lunch. Sure.” God, he
was such a pussy. If the supervillains saw him now, his reputation as a hero
badass would be shot to shit. He couldn’t even get mad at her. He just felt
defeated. Useless. Which didn’t sit well with him as a man or a super.

What else was he
supposed to do? He was always there for her. Always. He’d kept her in one piece—and
in the headlines. She’d been using him as her personal hero all this time,
advancing her career with their connection. So why couldn’t he get angry? Why
was he numbly helping her on with her coat, nodding dumbly in response to her chatter
about how busy she would be tying up loose ends at
The Sentinel
before
the move? Where the hell was his fucking spine?

The door closed behind
Kim before he could wrap his brain around what the fuck just happened.

Kim had dumped him. Just
dropped his ass. His ears were ringing, the real world receding. Julian shook
his head to clear it, but the buzzing in his brain only grew louder—like when
he’d gone through puberty and his super-senses would go out of whack,
fluctuating wildly between loud and soft. He took a deep, steadying breath, and
the buzzing stopped—then immediately started up again.

Idiot
.
That wasn’t the sound of his brain imploding. That was his fucking phone,
vibrating somewhere in the apartment. He found it wedged behind a couch cushion
and tapped the screen to connect the call before it could go to voicemail a
second time.

“Justice,” he barked,
hoping like hell the call was someone in need of their ass kicked and not a
non-violent interrogation assist.

“Julian? Hey, it’s
Darla. How’re you doing?”

He tried not to flinch
at the cheerful bounce in DynaGirl’s voice. His shellshock must have shown if
Kim was having her girlfriends call to check up on him. “I’m great,” he ground
out between clenched teeth.
Never fucking better
.

“Great! That’s awesome.
Look, I’m calling because—”

The woman who just
ripped your still-beating heart out of your chest and ground it under her
stiletto feels guilty
, he mentally filled in the rest of the
sentence, stalking toward the kitchen to see if he had any hard liquor on hand.
“Darla, I’m kind of busy—” He had an urgent date with a fifth of whiskey.

“—I need a huge favor.”

He stopped in his
tracks, abruptly regrouping. That didn’t sound like a pity call. Maybe there
was some ass in need of kicking after all. “What kind of favor?”

* * * * * * * * * *

Julian didn’t quite
know how he’d ended up at Trident Labs being briefed by DynaGirl, her boyfriend—the
supposedly former villain DemonSpawn Wroth—and Dr. Eisenmann, one of Trident’s
resident geniuses whom he’d met over the years helping test super products. All
he knew was that he needed a distraction and having DynaGirl owe him a favor had
seemed like a good idea at the time.

As Eisenmann reached
over and tapped a button to bring up a closed-circuit feed on the computer monitor,
he wasn’t so sure. The cell that popped up on the screen was small and Spartan,
but Julian barely noticed the stark environment as his eyes locked on the
room’s single occupant. She was tiny, slight of frame and bony thin, with
straight black hair yanked back into a high ponytail.

“Christ, she’s a kid.”

Then her face turned
toward the camera, almost as if she’d heard him speak, and he got a look at her
eyes. The pupils were huge, creepily so. There was nothing childish about those
eyes. There were dark circles under them. With the black and white picture, he
couldn’t discern their color, but what he could see was ruthless with a cold
fire—liquid nitrogen that could burn even more dangerously than heat.

“She’s twenty,” Wroth
said in his low growl of a voice. “Though, if you ask her, she’ll say she’s
nineteen. She doesn’t remember her birthday. These days she doesn’t remember
much of anything.”

Julian forced his eyes
away from the black hole gaze of the junior psychopath on the screen. “I don’t
do supervillain rehab.”

Lucien Wroth’s
shoulders stiffened visibly. “She isn’t a
villain
. She’s a
victim
,”
he snarled.

Julian’s eyes were
drawn back to the monitor, back to the feral light in the girl’s dark eyes. “That’s
no victim.”

Darla leaned forward
before her boyfriend could repeat his snarl, one hand going to his knee even as
her eyes stayed locked on Julian. “She’s confused, Julian. Yes, she has a
juvenile record—”

“Which would have been
sealed if she weren’t a super,” Wroth grumbled.

“And yes,” Darla went
on, “she was involved—involuntarily—in some criminal activity in the last year,
but trust me, if I believed she really did have dangerous villain tendencies, I
would be the first one to say she should spend the rest of her days in Area
Nine. But this girl doesn’t deserve that. We can help her.
You
can help
her. Isn’t that what being a hero is all about?”

If the last twenty-four
hours were anything to go by, being a hero was about saving a woman from peril
for two years straight and then getting dumped when you no longer benefited her
career. Darla’s view of heroism was obviously distorted by her desire to please
her ex-villain lover.

As if a man could ever
truly be an
ex
-villain. Julian didn’t understand how Darla—a straight-as-an-arrow
legacy superhero just like him—could ever trust a man with Lucien Wroth’s reputation
for mayhem.

“I don’t know what you
expect me to do,” Julian protested. “If she doesn’t know when she’s lying, I
won’t know either.”

“But you can…” Darla
hesitated, her eyes sliding sideways to Wroth and Eisenmann.

She knows
.
He hadn’t been aware Darla was privy to his deep dark secret. He locked his
jaw. “I don’t use that part of my abilities. It’s unethical.”

Wroth sat forward
suddenly. “What part?”

Julian narrowed his
eyes. He’d rather not have Lucien Wroth know about his hidden talent, but Darla
would probably tell him as soon as he left anyway. “If I’m in physical contact,
I can force someone to tell the truth.” Eisenmann’s eyes lit with interest. Julian
glared. “But I don’t. Heroes don’t subvert free will—even for a good cause. That’s
how villains are born.”

Wroth glowered, but
DynaGirl was all earnestness, pitching forward in her chair until she nearly
fell out. “What if she asked you to?”

Julian looked back to
the video feed. “She won’t.”

“At least give her the
chance to refuse,” Wroth snapped. “I know we villains are beneath your heroic
magnificence, but—”

“Lucien.” Darla’s low
voice halted Wroth’s tirade. She didn’t take her eyes off Julian. “Will you
talk to her? Just that. Please.”

Julian frowned. He
usually didn’t have to be begged to help—his parents had instilled the heroic
virtues in him from the cradle and he never turned away from a voice calling
out for help—but his reluctance was more than just lingering frustration over
the situation with Kim. They hadn’t actually lied to him, but there was a cloying
flavor of deceit in the air. There was something they weren’t telling him.

“Why is it so important
that I fix her? There’s something else going on here, isn’t there?”

Darla shifted
uncomfortably in her chair and it was Wroth, of all people, who said, “I told
you we wouldn’t be able to hide it from him.”

“Hide what?” he
demanded.

“Do you remember a few
months back? The furor over the Mind Bender who had his fingers in the thoughts
of dozens of politicians and influential businesspeople around the city?”

When Julian nodded,
Darla looked away and Wroth went on without mercy or hesitation, his words cold
and direct. “He was using Mirabelle to get to me. Twisting her thoughts. Implanting
commands. He forced her to steal Apocalyptum for him and would have used me to set
off an Apocalyptum bomb beneath the Super Summit if we hadn’t stopped him.
Mirabelle
helped stop him. But he was inside her mind for months before she got free.”

“I understand that’s
how she got to this point but there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Wroth nodded curtly. “She
keeps trying to escape. She’s not even conscious of what she’s doing. We’ve
caught her every time—so far. But something is compelling her. It could be a
lingering implanted suggestion. We don’t know. It could just be reaction to the
time she was imprisoned in Area Nine, but we have no way of knowing if Kevin
had bigger plans, a longer-reaching agenda that Mirabelle is programmed to
carry out, even now that he’s gone.”

“Can’t you ask the
villain? I thought he was in custody.”

Wroth shook his head
sharply. “His mind is gone,” he said without a flicker of remorse.

“Gone.” Julian frowned.
It wasn’t a word people used lightly in the age of Mind Benders. “You mean he
was wiped?”

“No…” For the first
time, Wroth hesitated. “Mirabelle… She broke him. He’s mad.”

Julian arched a brow,
his gaze flicking quickly to the monitor before returning to Darla. “And this
girl is no villain, eh?”

“It was self-defense,”
Darla said, but Julian’s senses jumped and he knew even she didn’t believe the
lie.

“Of course it was.” Julian
studied the somber faces around him. They cared for the girl, that much was
obvious, but no amount of affection would change her feral nature. She was a
danger to everyone around her. “I’ll talk to her,” he conceded, and the room
itself seemed to sigh with relief, but he quickly held up a hand to forestall
their gratitude. “But if she’s beyond help, I’m reporting her to the Council
and she
will
be transferred to Area Nine.”

“Agreed.” Wroth smiled,
and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Julian didn’t need his gift to know Lucien would
make sure his sister never saw the inside of Area Nine again.

He’d fight that battle
when he came to it. His eyes bounced back to the monitor yet again. She was
compelling, the same way watching wolves hunt was compelling. He knew
instinctively she wouldn’t be tamed. The faster he confirmed that for a fact,
the quicker he could get back to his own misery. “Let’s do this.”

As if in response to
his resolve, the screen flickered and went black, Eisenmann’s phone ringing
instantly. The doctor cursed and yanked up the receiver, and from the
expressions on DynaGirl and Wroth’s faces, they already knew what was coming
before the doctor slammed down the phone and surged to his feet.