Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) (6 page)

“Julian, thank God
you’re all right. The blood… That was… I can’t…”

Kim Carruthers,
speechless.

He felt a brief flicker
of shame at his spite as he realized she was probably half in shock from what
she thought she’d just witnessed. The cops had told him it looked like Mirage
had somehow slit his throat. It was probably Kim he’d heard screaming. But she
hadn’t run to him the second she’d seen he was all right. She hadn’t begged him
to take her back. She’d waited until he was done with the cops like a good
little reporter, biding her time for the perfect sound bite. And when she’d
come forward, she hovered back just far enough to stay out of her
photographer’s shot, her recorder held in front of her like a shield to keep
him from getting too familiar. As if he could, with Mirage unconscious in his
arms.

“I see you’re still
here.” His grumble was about the limit of his civility where Kim was concerned.
In the last few days, his initial numbness had taken a turn toward anger. It
wasn’t pretty, but part of him—probably his wounded ego—wanted to punish her
for her indifference, for being able to walk away so easily.

“I leave next week. Just
tying up loose ends and catching a few more juicy stories. Never hurts to get a
couple more front-page bylines.”

He was shaking his head
before she finished speaking. “Not this one. I don’t want this in the papers.”

“Julian.” His name was
a reprimand on her lips. “I can’t bury it. You know that.”

“I know that you owe me
and I’ve never asked a damn thing from you. I’m asking this. Find a way to keep
it quiet.” He dodged around her, making a beeline for the cruiser before anyone
else could get in his way. He heard Kim call after him, but didn’t slow, didn’t
glance back. Eisenmann had said the tranq would keep Mirage out for three
hours, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He needed to get her back to Trident
and figure out what the hell had happened tonight.

Mirage woke facing a
padded white wall. Again. But at least today she remembered it wasn’t the first
time. So that was a plus. Maybe she was cured.

She snorted. Not
likely. A girl wasn’t screwed in the head for three months and then magically
fixed just because she spent an evening bumping shoulders with some buff, straight-as-an-arrow
hero boy. If only life were that simple.

She rolled over and bit
back a shout when she realized she wasn’t alone. A dark, hulking form hunched
beside her bed. Lucien. Sleeping with his large body wedged into a chair. Just
looking at him contorted that way made her spine ache in sympathy.

“Luc.”

He jerked awake at the
sound of her voice, lurching toward her with an outstretched hand as if he had
to touch her to be sure she was really there—though they both knew her
illusions held up to the test of physical contact. Still, she caught his hand
and squeezed it hard. He looked like he’d been through the wars. Deep grooves lined
his face, bloodshot eyes squinted at her like he couldn’t quite get them open
all the way, and his clothing had been slept in at least once. Guilt and
helplessness fought for dominance in the hollow ache in her chest. She’d done
this to him. No wonder DynaGirl looked at her like she was something stuck on
the bottom of her shoe.

“How are you feeling?” His
voice sounded like he’d swallowed rocks.

Mirage was tempted to
turn the question back on him, but Lucien would just ignore her until she
answered him. He never thought of his own welfare when she was in trouble. Their
father hadn’t been much of a father, but Luc had more than made up for any lack
of protectiveness.

“I’m a little fuzzy,”
she admitted. “But at the moment I’m running the show in here.” She tapped her
temple. “So, no complaints.”

“The fuzziness is
probably the sedative. Eisenmann said it might leave you groggy.” Lucien
frowned. “No power hangover? You were burning pretty hot last night.”

Blood. Bullets flying. A
woman screaming.
The fragmented pieces of last night fit
themselves into a sloppy, chaotic image. She sat up abruptly. “Did I stab
someone?”

“You didn’t touch
anyone, but you projected an elaborate illusion into dozens of minds
simultaneously and held it up until Justice knocked you out. Do you feel
nauseous? Headache?”

Mirage probed the
corners of her brain, looking for the ache that always accompanied overusing
her powers, but she felt nothing but waiting strength, the feeling of a muscle
well-worked and itching to be used again. “Dozens?”

She’d never been able
to do so many before. A few at a time, easy. A simple vanishing act where she erased
herself from general awareness, no problem. But a full sensory illusion
projected on dozens of witnesses, all with different angles—which raised the
difficulty stakes considerably—she should be unconscious, collapsed under a
killer power hangover.

Lucien shifted
nervously and Mirage’s focus cut back to him. “What?”

“Eisenmann thinks your
abilities might be going through a kind of second puberty. He thinks you broke
through some kind of internal barrier when you and Kevin… when you…”

“When I broke Kevin’s
mind.”

Lucien grimaced,
acknowledging with a curt nod what he hadn’t been able to say aloud. “Eisenmann
expects you to stabilize at a new plateau, but can’t predict if you’re there
yet or if your abilities will continue to grow.”

Her brother looked
miserable at the prospect that her powers could grow still stronger. At the
moment, she couldn’t blame him. “So I’m becoming a more dangerous weapon and
we’re no closer to figuring out how to disarm me or if Kevin had already aimed
me and implanted a latent command to set me off at some undisclosed moment in
the future. Awesome.”

“We’d like to trace
your steps. See if we can get any clues from the days you were missing.”

“I don’t remember
anything before the vault.” But from the moment Captain Justice had walked into
her life, everything was crystal clear. Even the parts where she hadn’t been
herself were coming back with unusual clarity.

There had been a moment,
right before he’d knocked her out… he’d
done
something to her when he
asked her what she was doing. She’d felt it
push
her thoughts into
order. It was invasive, unsettling, but had it helped?

“Captain Justice thinks
he can help you remember,” Lucien said, his face a study in neutrality. “But
it’s your choice. You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do.” Mirage
tucked her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, dropping her chin on top.
“Darla trusts him and you trust Darla, right?”

“Absolutely. But if you
aren’t comfortable with him in your head—”

“Luc, my head isn’t
exactly a fortress of solitude at the moment. If he can clear out a few of the
excess residents in here, he’s welcome to come for a visit.”

“This is serious,
Belle.”

“Which is why we can’t
afford to be squeamish.” She projected an illusion of absolute confidence at
Lucien so he wouldn’t see her doubts on her face. The truth was that after
Kevin, the idea of another man in her head, potentially manipulating her
thoughts, forcing her to his version of reality, terrified her. But the
alternative… “Luc, why didn’t you ever tell me I’d lost three months in here?”

His face took on the
guarded disappointment that had become so familiar. “I have told you,” he said,
soft and cautious, like she would shatter if he said it too loud.

“Oh.” She swallowed around
the lump in her throat. “All right then. When can Justice start?”

“He’s here now.”

“Now it is.”

“Good girl.” Lucien
nodded and straightened out of the chair, bending to pat her awkwardly on the
shoulder before he slipped out of the room to find her savior. He’d never been
awkward with her before. Their relationship had been a lot of things, but never
cautious. Now there was a distance between them, the awareness of her madness
always the elephant in the room. He kept himself apart from her—afraid of
connecting if she wasn’t going to remember it? Afraid her insanity might be
catching? Afraid she might snap and lash out at him in one of the moments when
those other, unpredictable versions of herself sprang to the fore? Or just
afraid of loving her if she was never going to return to the version of her he
knew?

Mirage hated that fear.
All of it. But she couldn’t blame him for it. Not when she was so afraid of
herself.

* * * * * * * * * *

“Just relax. This isn’t
going to hurt.”

Julian wasn’t sure who
he was talking to more—Mirage, who looked like she was mentally plotting escape
routes from the room, or Lucien, who kept shooting glares at him, making it
very clear he would happily rip Julian’s arms from their sockets if he harmed
one hair on precious Mirabelle’s head. Or at least try to. Since they both had
superstrength, it was a coin-flip who would come out on top if it ever came
down to a brawl.

They’d migrated out of
Mirage’s cell, commandeering a small conference room for their first attempt. Mirage
sat at the head of the table, with Julian to her left and Lucien on her right,
DynaGirl taking up her post on Wroth’s opposite side. Eisenmann had been called
back to the cells to deal with another resident, so at least Julian was spared
having his actions scientifically dissected as well as questioned by a
demented, over-protective sibling.

Mirage looked younger
than ever at the head of the table, though her eyes spoke clearly that she’d
never been a child. Her short life had made her ancient in record time. Julian
hadn’t given a thought to her youth until now. And only now because she looked
so small and fragile, dwarfed by the executive chair and the massive table.

“Are you sure you want
to—”

“Let’s do this.” The hard
resolve in her voice jarred with the nervousness in her eyes.

Julian placed a hand
palm up on the table and she slipped her fingers into it. Her hands were icy
and he suppressed a shiver as the chill seemed to reach up his arm. He wrapped
her hand firmly in his, met her eyes straight on, and asked, “Where have you
been the last three days?” as he pulsed forced truthfulness through the touch.

Mirage jerked, her eyes
widening until they dominated her face. She was all eyes and he was falling
into them, sliding into her thoughts until he came up against something hard. An
impenetrable barrier. He could feel her, sense her, trapped on the other side,
hammering her fists against it, trying to break free, and he reached out with
his gift to help her. He
pushed.

And the blast flung him
bodily across the room, slamming him into the wall.

Mirage blinked to clear
her vision. She was on the floor behind her overturned chair, Lucien’s
concerned face floating above, her ears ringing.

“Belle!” Lucien
bellowed, as if she’d been unconscious for hours, though Darla was still rising
from her chair. Luc must have used superspeed to get to her side before she
could even open the eyes she’d squeezed shut as she fell. “Belle, speak to me!”

“I’m fine!” She shoved
Lucien away and sat up. Julian was peeling himself off the wall, a trickle of
blood dripping out of his nose. Whatever had booby-trapped her mind had thrown
her to the ground, but it had
launched
him. “You all right?”

He waved a hand in what
she assumed was supposed to be an affirmative and pulled out a handkerchief to
mop up the blood gaining momentum from his nose. Trust Captain Justice to have
an actual linen hanky on hand. “Are you?” he ask, his voice oddly distorted by
the gusher he tried to staunch.

It took her a moment to
collect her thoughts and realize he was asking if she was all right. “Not a
scratch. That was unex—” She broke off as Lucien darted across the room, faster
than she could blink, and rammed Justice into the wall that already bore cracks
from the imprint of his body. “Luc!”

“You swore it wouldn’t
hurt her.” He jerked Justice bodily off the wall, then slammed him back into
it, hard enough to make the entire room shiver.

“I’m not hurt!” Mirage
rushed forward—though God only knew what she could do to pull her superstrong
brother off the superstrong Captain Justice—but Darla got there first.

“Lucien, take it easy. She’s
fine.” She got a hold of him—so at least he stopped actively ramming Justice
into the wall—but wasn’t able to pry him off.

“He said there was no
danger!”

“There wasn’t for me,”
Mirage shouted, as if sheer volume could get through to her brother. “He didn’t
hurt me.
I
hurt
him
. By accident. There was some kind of booby
trap in my mind. He had no way of knowing it was there. Hell, I didn’t even
know it was there, though for all I know I put it there. Dammit, Luc,
chill
.”

Mirage slammed an image
into Lucien’s mind, Captain Justice, a bloody and battered wreck—it wasn’t much
of a stretch with the blood still pouring from his nose. Lucien staggered back,
dropping Justice, staring at his hands as if wondering what they’d done without
his permission, and Mirage dropped the illusion.