Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) (5 page)

“No.” The word barely
made it out, her throat closing to shut it in.

“I think I can help you
figure it out. If you’ll let me.”

Captain Justice, poster
boy for everything heroic and good, wanted to help her. There had to be a
catch. But right now, Mirabelle didn’t care about catches. She just wanted to
know what had happened to her during the last three days. Where she’d gone. What
she’d done. If he could really help her, she couldn’t walk away from that. Supposing
he let her walk away. She couldn’t mask herself from him, so she didn’t know
how she would escape even if she wanted to. He didn’t have to be nice. And
yeah, he hadn’t exactly been nice, but the man had superstrength. He didn’t
have to try to talk her into anything. He could force her to do whatever he
chose. But he hadn’t. He’d tried to talk her down—even if neither one of them
had been able to stop it from becoming an argument, he’d tried. She owed him
her own effort, but her throat was tight and she could only get out one word.

“Please.”

The plea startled him—but
then, there was little about Mirabelle Wroth that matched his expectations. He
knew better than to question her capitulation and came to his feet quickly.

“Shall we get you back
to Trident?”

She made a face, but
came out of her fetal curl. She straightened to her full height, which was
still a good ten inches short of his, and tugged on the lock of hair framing
her face that had come loose from her ponytail. “Do I really have to go back
there? I get…confused. Everything feels wrong when I wake up there and it makes
it harder to keep my head clear. If I could just stay with Lucien... Be
somewhere more familiar…”

“Trident should be
plenty familiar to you by now. You’ve been there for three months.” Julian went
to the vault door, but Mirabelle wasn’t moving. He turned to see why she’d
frozen and saw her face had drained of color.
Shit
. Had no one told her
how long she’d been institutionalized? “I’m sorry. Didn’t you know?”

“Three months.” She
made a choked noise and he could see her begin to shake from across the room. “I
forgot… Lucien said, I mean I heard him, but… What year is it?”

Julian crossed the
vault in two strides and caught her upper arms, hoping the contact would be
enough to stop her impending freak out. She looked like she was on the verge of
hyperventilating and he felt the weight of the syringe Eisenmann had given him
in his pocket. He didn’t want to use the tranqs unless he had to. He wanted her
to trust him, though he wasn’t sure why. She was obviously amoral, with no
grasp on right and wrong—who else would willingly choose to be a villain and
not even bat an eye at grand theft—but her enormous, haunted eyes made him ache
to save her. Even if he was saving her from herself. “Mirabelle. Look at me.”

“Mirage,” she murmured,
her eyes unfocused.

“What?”

“My name.  It’s Mirage.
My father changed it when I was ten.”

“Lucien calls you
Mirabelle.”

“Habit.”

“So you’d rather people
refer to you as an illusion?”

She nodded, then kept
nodding as if she couldn’t stop.

“Mirage.” He said her
name sharply and her gaze snapped up to his face, sharpening and focusing. Her
eyes were blue. A weird dark blue. Cobalt.

“How could I have lost
three months just like that?” He was still holding her arms and she brought her
hands up, fisting them in the front of his shirt, her expression so earnest it
was impossible to believe she’d ever been a villainess. “You have to help me,
Justice. Please. And please let me stay with Lucien. I’ll be more clear there,
I know I will.”

“I’m pretty sure your
brother is living with DynaGirl now. Her place will be even less familiar—”

“So Lucien’s loft is
empty. It’ll still feel like home.”

“I can’t let you stay
there alone.”

“Why not? Because it
isn’t secure? Because there isn’t a cell to lock me in? Trident is secure and
you can see what a bang-up job they’ve done keeping me penned. Why not just
send me back to Area Nine?”

Because Area Nine is where
villains go when they’re beyond hope.
Utterly beyond
redemption. And he didn’t want that for her. For whatever reason, probably some
failing of his own stubbornness, he
needed
to reform her. To prove she
could come back from this.

“We’ll figure something
out, but a bank vault is probably not the best place to discuss it.”

Her gaze flicked to the
door, sharpening, refocusing. “Did you come without reinforcements?”

“Lucien’s checking out
another false-alarm from a motion-sensor across town. We’ve had to split up to
cover them all. You wouldn’t believe how often the damn things give a false
positive.” Or maybe she would, since bending whoever was monitoring the feed to
believe it was a false positive was her best way of covering up her breaking
and entering. “Look, just come back to Trident with me for now. We both know
they can’t keep you there so what’s the harm in coming back?”

“Fine.”

He didn’t give her time
to reconsider. As soon as he had the affirmative, Julian tapped twice on the
vault door and the manager who’d been called in to deal with the unexpected
reset of the alarm system opened it from the outside. The portly man with a sharp
gaze blinked twice when he saw Mirabelle with him in the vault. “How in the—”

“Hero training drill,”
she said quickly, and Julian almost flinched at how smoothly the lie rolled off
her tongue.

The bank manager—Willetts?
Walters?—instantly relaxed. “Oh, good. When I heard the sirens—”

“Sirens?” Mirage
interrupted sharply, shooting Julian a suspicious frown.

“Probably just
responding to a call nearby,” Julian said to assuage both the bank manager and
Mirage. He hustled her up the stairs and through the lobby while lavishing
thanks on the manager he was reasonably certain was named Wallace. It was a
strange feeling, this need to escape the scene of her crime. He was used to
swaggering out with the villain in cuffs rather than hustling her toward the
door with a hand on her arm.

Was this wrong? Sure,
she needed to be rehabilitated, but should she be charged, booked and sentenced
to rehab? It wasn’t like him to circumvent the justice system. He had the most
convictions of any super because he always made his captures strictly by the
book. Whatever else tonight had been, it sure as hell hadn’t been by the book. Was
she somehow manipulating him, even if she couldn’t pull an illusion over his
eyes?

Then they stepped out
the front door and everything went straight to hell, wiping away all thoughts
of the ethics of what he was doing.

Red and blue lights
strobed and spotlights blinded him as a bullhorn-distorted voice demanded they
put their hands where the cops could see them. Julian felt the muscles in
Mirabelle’s arm tense, adrenaline charging up her fight or flight reflex. He
didn’t want to let go of her, having no idea how she would react to the
situation, but he also couldn’t see the cops and he didn’t want bullets flying
before they realized they were looking at Captain Justice in plain-clothes. He
could handle a hail of gunfire, but Mirabelle didn’t have the imperviousness of
superstrength to protect her and Justice didn’t have the speed to guarantee he
could get in front of her before she took a hit. Lucien may be faster than a
speeding bullet, but Julian was just screwed.

He released her arm and
lifted his hands above his head. “I’m Captain Justice,” he shouted in the
general direction of the bullhorn. “The situation is under control.”

“We know who you are,
sir, but I’m afraid we have new protocols in place. We’ll need to confirm that you
aren’t being controlled by the villain, sir.”

Damn. He’d forgotten
about the safety measures they’d put in place after the Mind Bender Kevin had
manipulated half the public officials in the city. He’d been in favor of them,
but now he just wanted to get Mirabelle away from here. Julian’s eyes were
adjusting to the glaring lights and he was able to make out half a dozen patrol
cars. He didn’t want to think about how many guns were pointed their way.

“Mirage,” he said under
his breath. “Put your hands up.”

She slanted him a look,
a sly smile tipping her lips. “I am.”

He felt the air around
him shift, like some invisible force was leaning against him and then he saw
it, a shadow image superimposed over reality. Mirage, hands held above her
head, looking innocent and defeated. That innocence, more than anything else,
convinced him the illusion was a lie.

The real Mirage stood,
hip cocked, and shoved her hands into her pockets. One of those hands instantly
came back out again and she frowned at a small dark object in her fist as if
she’d never seen it before.

“What is that?” Julian
asked sharply. “Did you take that from inside the vault?”

“Oops.”

Mirage tipped her face toward
him and he saw the exact moment her eyes glassed over as the real Mirabelle
checked out and whatever Kevin had implanted in her slid into place.

Oh shit.

* * * * * * * * * *

Mirage felt incredible.
Pure, clean purpose pulsed through her veins. She knew what to do now. She was
strong. She was confident. Confusion was a pale memory.
This
was who she
was meant to be. A god among mortals, twisting fate to suit her whim.

It was so easy to reach
out and yank the minds around her into the vision she wanted. She’d been
growing stronger. Once upon a time, she’d had to be in physical contact to
project illusions or had only been able to hold a few minds at once, but now, now
she felt limitless. Free. As if her abilities had progressed beyond the ability
to measure, let alone contain.

She ducked behind
Justice, letting the crowd
see
a knife in her hand, see it flash across
his throat and draw a sudden gush of blood, see her image fleeing to the south,
leaping the stair rail, running. Spotlights tracked that phantom movement,
gunfire exploded—suddenly, startlingly loud—all of it aimed unerringly at her
other
self as that illusory projection ran, but Justice spun, so fast she would have
believed he had superspeed and threw her to the ground, shielding her body from
stray bullets with his own.

A woman screamed,
gunfire cracked, tires screeched as patrol cars took off down the street after
her other self.

“What are you doing?” Justice
roared, shouting to be heard over the cacophony.

He was so strong. The
mighty Captain Justice. So hard above her, his weight pressing her down onto
the stone steps. He’d protected her instinctively, without even a second
thought. What kind of man did that? He was so dominant, naturally in command,
radiating masculine power.
God, he’s hot.

So why did she want to
push him, to test her powers against his, to see if she could make the
unbending Justice bow for her? She was stronger. She knew she was. She could
twist him. There was no one she couldn’t break. She’d broken Kevin.
Kevin…
The name set off an eerie cascade in her mind, a rockslide, her thoughts loose
fragments of shale pinging off one another as they fell. Something was wrong. This
wasn’t her. Was it?

* * * * * * * * * *

“Mirage.” When she
didn’t respond, Julian tried her other name. “Mirabelle!” Still nothing.
Damn
it.
He couldn’t tell what she was projecting, but he could see the effect. Whatever
the hell she was doing was seriously fucking with the minds of everyone in
range.

He needed to snap her
out of it. He gripped her face, stared into her glazed-over eyes, trying to
ignore the disturbing speed with which her pupils expanded and contracted, and
sent the tiniest pulse of compulsion through his hands. “Why are you doing
this, Mirage?”

Her smoky blue eyes
focused, then filled with confusion. Her face twisted and suddenly there were
tears. “
I don’t know
.”

“Can you stop?” he
asked.

But she was already
gone. Pupils cycling, expression blank. The Mirage he’d been talking to in the
vault wasn’t there anymore and he had no idea what he would find in her place. He
quickly palmed the syringe Eisenmann had given him, lifted it and jabbed it
into her upper arm. She didn’t even flinch.

For a second he was
sure he’d screwed it up, jabbed it in the wrong place though Eisenmann had said
anywhere would work, then she went limp and the gunfire suddenly cut off amid
shouts of “What the
fuck
?”

Julian came quickly to
his feet, lifting a boneless Mirabelle into his arms, and started down the bank
steps to meet the confused fury of the police force.

* * * * * * * * * *

Half an hour later,
after more evasions than he normally gave in a year, Julian had a police escort
back to Trident and was on his way to the cruiser with Mirage limp in his arms
when an all-too-familiar blonde reporter popped up in his path. Kim looked wan,
a little the worse for wear, and he took a vicious satisfaction in the idea
that their break-up had sucked the life out of her rosy complexion.