Villainous (2 page)

I dug my phone out of my purse yet again and dialed Jean-Baptiste Dupree, better known as the Prophet King.

“Valentina,” he greeted. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I’d put him on speaker phone for Agent Lagarde’s benefit, and the poor sound quality didn’t do justice to his low, smooth voice.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“You still owe me for my last favor.”

“Oh? You mean when we met at that beachfront hotel, the DSA raided the place, and you ran off and left me to get arrested?”

“The DSA was there for you. If anything, I should blame you for endangering me.” His tone was light and teasing, despite the fact that he was absolutely right.

“I’ve already apologized for that. I sent you that nice wine basket, remember?”

“I did enjoy it, the Pinot Blanc in particular.”

“I picked it up last time I was in France. Listen, I just want to talk. Can we meet somewhere tomorrow?”

“What would be the topic?”

“You’ll just have to meet me and find out.”

Jean-Baptiste didn’t answer immediately, and it occurred to me that I should possibly feel nervous. If he turned me down in front of my little audience, I was going to be embarrassed, and that wasn’t an emotion I handled well.

“I suppose in exchange for the wine I could buy you a drink,” he said.

Of course he didn’t turn me down. Nobody turned me down. We scheduled the date for six o'clock the next day, and when I hung up, I lifted my chin a fraction and gave Agent Lagarde a cocky smile.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’ll do. Meet me here at four p.m. tomorrow.” She handed me her card with an address scrawled on the back. “We’ll set up your wire and go over the plan. If anything happens before then, call me.”

And that was the end of that. As Charles and I rode the elevator to the ground floor, I sent Jean-Baptiste a text:

Btw, DSA agents tagging along tomorrow.

His reply came in less than twenty seconds.

What have you gotten yourself into?

I smiled.
Tell you tomorrow.

“So Agent Lagarde was frustratingly stoic,” I commented to Charles as we walked out of the building into the parking lot. “I didn’t get a single rise out of her. I never thought I’d say this, but I think I miss that Lee woman. She could trade barbs with the best of them. I suppose I’ll just have to try harder to be infuriating tomorrow. You don’t think I’m losing my touch, do you, Charles? Be honest.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice surprisingly firm.

“Was that answer in regard to my ability to annoy DSA agents? Because that was the question.”

Charles stopped walking. “You caved too fast.”

We were standing in the parking lot, the afternoon sun pounding onto the asphalt. Two weeks until Halloween, and the heat was still as strong as summer. This wasn’t where I’d have preferred to have this conversation, but then, I’d rather not have this conversation at all.

“You’re the one who said it didn’t look good. And they made their demands pretty clear. I didn’t want to waste time.”

If I hadn’t known Charles for years, he’d never get away with the look he was giving me now. “They wouldn’t have really gone through with it.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “And I’m not willing to risk it.”

“You used to be better at calling people’s bluffs. Ten years ago, the only way you’d have taken a deal was if you got more out of it than they did. Unless working with them is part of your master plan. Do you have a master plan you’re not telling me about?”

I refused to let myself look away from his pale eyes. “Not yet.”

“You’re going soft in your old age.”

“Old age? Excuse me, Mr. Just Turned Sixty. You’ve got a decade on me.”

“I’m not old. I’m distinguished.”

“And I’m going to bathe in the blood of virgins and be young and beautiful forever. So you worry about the paperwork and let me worry about the deal.”

He ran a hand through his styled, white hair. “Just don’t get into any more trouble, hm?”

He
said his goodbyes and nodded at my driver, Eddy, who’d been watching our conversation with bored alertness from behind the tinted windshield of my car. Now
Eddy
was old. His tattoos were faded and wrinkled, and these days, his muscles were camouflaged by fat, but Charles wouldn’t dream of calling him soft. Maybe he was right about me. I’d been better at this when I was younger, but then it was easy to gamble when you had nothing to lose. I had a family to think of now.

Speaking of family, I slid into the car and told Eddy to head to Elisa’s high school. I still had a daughter waiting to be picked up. And then I should probably tell my husband about all this.

Chapter 2

The school’s office had little pumpkins, bats, and ghosts cut from construction paper taped to the walls. Cheap, but at least they were making an effort. As usual, the woman at the front desk pretended not to stare at my scars, thinking that there was something naggingly familiar about me. And as usual, I erased the thought from her head before she could follow it to its conclusion and start a fuss. No one at Elisa’s school had figured out who her parents were yet, and I wanted to keep it that way. My daughter had enough to worry about.

Elisa walked through the door hunched over and clutching her books to her chest as though they were some kind of shield. There was a lot of her father in her. She was tall like him, taller than I was, even when hunching, and while she was lanky now, I had a feeling she’d grow to be an Amazon. Her jaw clenched in the same way as Dave’s when she was angry, and their eyes were the same shade of light brown. When she was younger, before I’d told anyone—even Dave—that he was her father, I used to worry that another supervillain would take one look at her and say “That’s White Knight’s kid,” but no one ever did. I guess other criminals didn’t spend as much time gazing into his eyes as I did. Their loss.

She turned to the boy behind her, whom I’d initially assumed was just coming in at the same time, and murmured, “Thanks.”

“Text me when you get home?” he asked in a low voice.

“Sure.”

Hello, there. And who was this? I hadn’t risked reading Agent Lagarde’s mind, but I had zero reservations about this kid. I pried into his head and found genuine concern mixed with the giddy euphoria of a teenage crush. No ulterior motives or anything I’d have to mind-wipe or murder him over. Excellent. I signed Elisa out and walked her to the car.

“You took aspirin?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

She was in a monosyllabic mood, exchanging the words “hi” and “fine” with Eddy before staring out the window in silence as we drove home. Typical teenage angst, but Elisa had better reason for it than most. When I’d gotten arrested two months ago, the stress had brought on her breakthrough, and my poor girl had gotten my telepathy along with her father’s super-strength. Then the very next day, one of Dave’s old enemies had kidnapped her. (She’d killed him and escaped, but I wish he’d survived. I owned a little place in the woods about two hours outside the city where I could have kept him until he’d thoroughly paid for what he’d done.) I had Elisa in counseling for the kidnapping, and Dave was working with her to control her strength, but the telepathy was harder. She was having trouble making it through the day without the barrage of her classmates’ thoughts giving her a migraine.

“I suck at this.” She didn’t take her gaze from the window, but that was four whole syllables. She must want to talk.

“You do not.” I gave her a light shove. “It hasn’t even been two whole months yet. The fact that you managed to come back to school at all is great.”

She turned from the window. “Did you have this problem?”

“It’s not a contest. Everyone adjusts to their powers differently.”

“So you didn’t have this problem.”

Well, let no one say I never taught my child how to see through bullshit. I changed tactics.

“So who was tall, dark, and handsome back there?”

She looked back out the window as though she’d never seen the palm trees lining the street before. “Nobody.”

“You should have casually said his name and what class you had together. We need to work on your lying skills, my dear.”

She turned back, and her attempt at a poker face was decent. “Carlos. We have chemistry together—chemistry
class
. We’re in the same chemistry class.”

There goes the poker face. I tried not to grin too widely. Carlos, huh?

“Well, move at your own pace. Don’t get pressured into doing anything you’re not comfortable with, but don’t let people shame you out of doing what you want, either. Although now that I think about it, I’m going to have to revise our sex talk now that you’ve got super-strength.”

“Mom!” Elisa glanced toward the driver’s seat with bulging eyes. “Not in front of Eddy.”

“What’s that you said, kiddo?” Eddy called loudly. “I’ve gone temporarily deaf.”

“Sure you have,” Elisa said.

“It’s a medical condition, honest.” Eddy glanced back at us through the rearview mirror. “I have spontaneous periods of deafness. Just ask any cop who’s tried to question me.”

“We’re not having this conversation,” Elisa declared. “Carlos and I—that’s not happening for a long time.”

“And that’s fine,” I said. “But when you do reach that point with someone, remember super-strength isn’t a game-ender. There are plenty of creative ways to—”

“I will throw myself out of this car.” Elisa grabbed the door handle to emphasize her point. “Don’t think I’m bluffing. I’m invulnerable now. I’ll survive it.”

I smiled but kept my mouth shut. She wasn’t moping anymore, which had been my goal, so I shifted the conversation to less embarrassing topics like homework and band practice for the rest of the ride home.

Home was a Spanish-style mansion on Star Island, and when we walked in the door, Irma was waiting with a cup of chamomile tea for Elisa just like she used to make for me when I was younger. She was a gaunt, gray-haired woman in a pale blue dress and apron, and on paper, she worked as my maid. In reality, she was much more than that, but she really was good at cleaning. You’ll never meet a person who knows more methods of removing bloodstains.

“Oh, sure,” Eddy said. “You’ll meet her at the door with tea, but I ask you to bring me a beer, and I get death threats.”

Irma’s wrinkled face didn’t twitch. “One of these days, I’ll skip the threat and go straight to the death part. You won’t see it coming.”

“Nah, you’d be miserable without me.”

“Welcome back, Valentina,” she said, smoothly ignoring him. They’d worked together for over fifty years, so being able to ignore each other was probably the only thing keeping Irma from bringing him that beer after she’d poisoned it.

I was joking, of course. Irma wouldn’t poison him; she’d use a knife.

Elisa muttered something about lying down and went upstairs, and I homed in on the thoughts of the one person in the house I wanted to see more than any other. These days, it was impossible to read his mind without getting a healthy dose of pain. He’d taken a lot of punishment in August—all to save me, which still made me grind my teeth every time I thought about it. It took a horrible amount of force to leave lasting injuries on someone as strong as he was.

Strong is a good word for Dave. Broad-shouldered and powerfully built, he’d never be mistaken for an easy target by any criminal. It was hard to say what I liked best about him: the hard lines of his jaw, the tan of his skin, the slightly crooked nose of a man who’d taken more than one punch in his day. He could snap someone’s neck with one hand, which should make it absolutely terrifying to be in the same room with him, but ninety-nine percent of the time, his eyes were too kind and his words too polite for him to scare anyone. (But during that other one percent, he’s been known to make criminals soil themselves.) I found him in the living room, staring out the glass doors at our backyard and the sparkling waters of Biscayne Bay beyond. He was thinking that our deck needed a good cleaning.

“Dave, if you try to do any yard work, I will smother you with a pillow while you sleep,” I said.

He turned around with a smile. Last month, it would have taken him a while to maneuver the wheelchair around like that, but now the movement was smooth and natural. He shouldn’t have to use the chair for more than another month or so, but if he kept bending himself out of shape to do home improvement projects, recovery was going to take a lot longer. I’d caught him lifting up the entire refrigerator the other day to get a better look at why it was leaking.

“No elaborate death trap?” he asked. “A pillow seems kind of anti-climatic considering how long White Knight and the Black Valentine have fought each other.”

“Smothering is a perfectly valid murder method.” I tossed myself down onto the couch across from him. “It’s hard to find ways to kill people with unbreakable skin, you know.”

“I’m sorry I’m not more murderable.”

“You should be.”

Did I really have to ruin this nice conversation? I could wait until after dinner to tell him, couldn’t I? Except I’d already waited too long. Sometimes I hated being honest.

“We need to talk.”

Dave was already sitting with military posture, so it was amazing how he managed to straighten up even taller. “What? Is Elisa all right?”

“She’s fine. It’s just a migraine. Typical telepath stuff. This isn’t about her.”

He relaxed a fraction, and I smoothed back a loose strand of my hair. “Remember when I said my lawyers didn’t think you’d end up in court for the thing back in August?” I paused, but of course he remembered. “I might have been overly optimistic.”

Dave gave me a look he usually reserved for criminals who’d just taken hostages. Ah, nostalgia. It gave me shivers.

“You weren’t having lunch with your sister, were you?” he asked.

“No. Bianca’s still in L.A.” In L.A. negotiating an arms deal, but there was no need to mention that little detail. I’d been half-afraid something would go wrong and she’d end up on the news and expose my lie, but it was more believable to say I’d gone to meet her than one of my other sisters. My relationship with Sonia was complicated, to say the least, and I had no idea what Mary was up to these days.