Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) (7 page)

Luc looked from the
blood-soaked-but-relatively-unharmed Justice to Mirage and back again, then
raked a hand through his hair and grunted, “I need a minute,” before stalking
out of the conference room. Darla didn’t say a word, just followed him into the
hall, leaving Mirage alone with Captain Justice.

His nose had about
stopped bleeding, but he looked like he needed to wring out the hanky.
Yuck.
At least Lucien hadn’t given him a black eye to match.

“Sorry about Luc. He’s
always been kind of irrational where I’m concerned.”

Justice shrugged. “He
loves you,” he said, as if that explained it all. And maybe it did.

“Do you have any
siblings? A little sister you go kind of bat-shit to protect?”

“No. It’s just me.”

“Oh.” What should she
say? Sorry? His parents had died years ago. And something about the flat way he
said it made her think he was completely alone. Her family may give new meaning
to dysfunctional, but she’d always known there was no crime they would hesitate
to commit for her. She’d been secure in that, if nothing else. Poor Justice.
At
least he has Kim Carruthers.

“Do you need anything?”

“Me?” She almost
laughed at the absurdity. He just didn’t know when to stop being
self-sacrificing and heroic. “I’m not the one bleeding all over the place. Shouldn’t
you get that looked at?”

“It’s already stopped.”
He frowned at the bloody mess all over his hands and the handkerchief. “I
should get cleaned up. You sure you don’t want anything? A Coke? Chocolate? I
hear sugar’s good for staving off shock.”

“I’m not shocky, but a
Coke sounds good. Thanks.” Heroes were a weird breed. Even a pint short,
Justice couldn’t stop looking after others. “Sorry about making you bleed.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve
never had a bloody nose before. It’s kind of a novelty.”

One of the aspects of
superstrength was a general invincibility, but Lucien had gotten plenty scraped
up before he’d come into his powers. “Did you always have your powers? Even as
a kid?”

“Nah. Most of my powers
kicked in at puberty—pretty standard for second-gen—but I’ve always had at
least some resistance to injury. And I wasn’t really much of a brawler as a
kid. No reason anyone would try to bloody my nose. What about you?” At first
she thought he was asking her if anyone had ever tried to bloody her nose, but
then, “When did your powers kick in? Mind-bender powers tend to develop pretty
late, don’t they?”

“Usually, but mine came
in when I was seven.” With a little help from her father’s treatments.

Justice blinked. “Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder you…” He
trailed off, thinking better of whatever he’d been about to say, but Mirage
needed to hear it. Some part of her
needed
to know what he thought of
her.

“What?”

“It’s just, you’ve
never seemed twenty to me. You’re—”

“Too broken to be so
young?”

“I was going to say
jaded. Tired. Like you’ve seen too much and you’re exhausted by life already. Not
broken.”

Is that any better?

He lifted a hand, as if
he would have scrubbed his face, and stopped himself, seeing the dried blood
caked on his palm. “I’ll get you that soda.”

Mirage waited until the
door swished shut behind him then retreated to the far corner and sank to the floor,
wedging herself back until the walls pressed comfortingly against her back. She
dropped her forehead onto her raised knees. What had gone wrong? Their first
attempt at forced clarity had been a resounding failure.

Or rather, their second
attempt. The first attempt, outside the bank last night, had gotten through—because
she wasn’t braced for it? Had she somehow rejected his help today? She hadn’t
consciously meant to fling him out like that, but she couldn’t deny she’d had
doubts, an internal resistance she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to push aside.

How could she trust
another man prowling around inside her head? Even if his name was synonymous
with honor and virtue. What if he bent her into his own image just as Kevin
had? He may not even see that it was wrong because he would be making her
good
—which
sounded dreadful to someone who’d never seen herself as a good girl.

But if she had somehow
expelled him from her mind, how had she done it? That kind of physical
manifestation of a psychic blast indicated a
lot
of power. Power she’d
never had. Was Lucien right? Were her powers growing? Or was he only half right
and they were mutating?

Mirage shuddered. The
last thing she needed was a second puberty on top of everything else screwing
her up. Learning to cope with her powers had been hard enough the first time. She
didn’t want to go through those erratic fluxes again, when she could never be
sure if her powers would work or not.

Though at the moment,
everything
she tried was working. The limits she’d always had seemed to have vanished. She
simply imagined something and it was done. Her visions made illusion with
virtually no exertion. And no power hangover. It shouldn’t be possible.

Something cold touched
her arm and Mirage jerked, her head snapping up. Justice waved the chilled Coke
can in front of her face, a half smile playing on his. “I said your name three
times.”

“Sorry. I was somewhere
else.” She accepted the can with a nod of thanks, quickly popping the top and
taking a quick slug of sweet, carbonated goodness. She closed her eyes,
focusing on the simple sensation of bubbles tickling down her throat.

“Somewhere good?”

Reluctantly she opened
her eyes. “Huh?”

“You said you were
somewhere else. Somewhere good?” He slid to the floor beside her, long,
muscular legs stretched in front of him as he chugged half his own Coke.

“Not particularly.”

He nodded, looking
straight ahead and letting the silence fall around them—which gave her ample
chance to admire his profile.
And what a profile it is
. No wonder Kim
Carruthers had gone for him. The man practically defined chiseled.

“Nice table,” he
commented, still without turning his face toward her. “Comfortable chairs.” Mirage
blinked, wondering if the pressure had gotten to Captain Justice. Then he
slanted her a look, just a fraction of one, out of the corner of his eye, one
eyebrow arching slightly, lips quirking slightly. “There a reason we’re sitting
on the floor?”

So when the world drops
out from under me, I don’t fall as far.
“No reason.” She
concentrated on her Coke can, unable to meet his eyes, knowing he could hear
the lie.

He didn’t push it. Just
let the silence wrap around them again. They drank their sodas, side by side,
neither looking at the other, and Mirage felt the knot between her shoulder
blades begin to loosen. She felt calm, clear, and knew it was because of him,
though she didn’t know why. His ability? Or just something about Captain
Justice himself, the man, who eased her?

“Justice—”

“Julian.”

“What?”

“My name. It’s Julian. Julian
Case.”

She blinked, startled
she’d never heard it before. Everyone knew DynaGirl was Darla Powers, but
Captain Justice was
always
called Captain Justice and nothing else. “Is
it a secret identity?”

“No. Just a name no one
seems to care to use.”

“Julian. Nice to meet
you.”

“Likewise.”

He smiled—amused, just
a little bit wry, and a whole lot heart-stopping—and Mirage suddenly had
butterflies doing acrobatics in her stomach.
Keep your distance, you idiot. He’s
taken.
She couldn’t let herself forget that he was very publicly
head-over-heels in love with the perfectly perky blonde from
The Sentinel
.
Even if he was looking at her with enough heat to melt away those inconvenient memories.
Except he couldn’t be looking at her that way. It had to be in her head—just
like everything else lately—because he was in love with Kim Carruthers. Notoriously
devoted to her. He wasn’t looking at Mirage with warmth, affection and…desire? Impossible.

That he could want
anything from her was a delusion she needed to expel, just like all the other
demons crawling around in her brain. “How long have you and Kim Carruthers been
an item?”

Julian’s smile shut
off, his eyes darkening. “We aren’t.”

“Oh.” Relief and
elation threw open the gates holding her baser urges in check. He wasn’t with
Kim. He probably didn’t even like perfectly perky blondes. Suddenly, Mirage had
permission to covet Captain Justice’s justifiably covetable body and that was
all the invitation her hormones needed.
Ladies, start your engines. Captain
Justice is on the market.
But Julian was frowning, not grinning at her like
he should have been if they’d just overcome the misunderstanding keeping him
from jumping her bones, so she kept her lustful impulses in check and just
feigned confusion. “But the papers… I guess you can’t believe everything you
read, right?”

“It’s not that. Kim and
I were together, but we’re not anymore.”

“Oh.” A little piece of
her elation broke off and crumbled. Apparently blonde and perfectly perky
was
his type. “That must be hard. You seemed like you were really in love.”

It was the wrong thing
to say. She knew it as soon as he grimaced. “Just because something isn’t a
lie, doesn’t mean it’s wholly true either. The truth is a spectrum of color,
not black and white. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Yeah, totally.” But
when his brows pulled together, she knew he’d heard the lie and she gave a
self-deprecating huff of laughter. “No. Sorry.” She had no freaking idea what a
spectrum of color had to do with him being in love with Kim Carruthers. God, he
was probably trying to tell her he still loved her.

Mirage hoped he would
explain, tell her he hadn’t really loved Kim, that he’d always secretly been
drawn to waifish girls with black hair, but he just gave a small shake of his
head. “It isn’t important. Are you feeling better?”

Ah. So they were
getting back on doctor-patient footing again, was that it? Things must’ve been
getting too personal for Captain Justice. “As better as I can be as a zombie
girl who isn’t in control of her own brain anymore.”

“You aren’t a zombie. I’ve
never once heard you say you hunger for brains.”

Mirage grimaced at the
half-assed joke. “I just wish I could be sure which thoughts were mine and
which weren’t. I don’t even know if there was some kind of booby-trap or if I
was the one who booted you out of my head.”

“You think you could
have put that barrier in?”

Mirage closed her eyes,
pressing once more against the walls of her mind. “I don’t know. It
feels
like me. But even if I did it, was it me doing it? Or Kevin’s version of me?”

“Kevin’s version?”

“His voice in my head
always sounded like my voice. And now I can’t stop hearing it. My father…” She
hesitated, feeling strange about speaking about her father with a hero, like
she was betraying him somehow, but the man beside her didn’t look like an
avenging super. He looked like Julian. Handsome. Open. Listening. And there
were things she needed to say. Things she hadn’t been able to say, even to
Lucien.

“My father could force
me to do things, but I always knew it was outside compulsion. I never lost that
awareness, that part of myself. Kevin was like a disease—microscopic,
replicating inside my brain, visible only in the symptoms, until I was so
saturated with him it was like trying to think through a fever of a hundred and
four while my brain boiled.”

“Your father used
compulsion on you?”

Mirage sighed. Trust a
hero to fixate on the first tree he came to and miss the forest entirely. “He
didn’t mean to. He was powerful, could make you dance like a puppet if he
wanted to, but he never did. Most of the time he hated his powers. He preferred
science. Cool rationality. But everyone loses control sometimes.” A hero who
accidentally demolished a building when first coming into superstrength was
instantly forgiven, but a Mind Bender who accidentally activates his powers
even once was instantly tarred a villain. How was that justice? “Didn’t you
ever wonder how a hero was able to capture him in the first place? How do you
capture someone who can bend your mind to force you to his will unless he is
intentionally
restraining his powers?”

“He escaped, didn’t he?
How could he be still at large if he never used his powers?”

“I didn’t say he
never
used them. I said he only did it when upset. He didn’t react well to being
wrongfully convicted. Or the attempts to recapture him.”

“Wrongfully?”

“Show me a Mind Bender
who ever got a fair trial.”

“It’s impossible. They
could manipulate the jury.”

“So our rights don’t
matter?”

“
Our
? You put
yourself in the same category as your father?”