Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2)
Read Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2) Online
Authors: Cari Z.
Riptide Publishing
PO Box 6652
Hillsborough, NJ 08844
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Where There’s Fire
Copyright © 2015 by Cari Z
Cover art: L.C. Chase,
lcchase.com/design.htm
Editors: Amanda E. Alvarez, Carole-ann Galloway
Layout: L.C. Chase,
lcchase.com/design.htm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at
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, or at
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ISBN: 978-1-62649-297-4
First edition
July, 2015
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Making a name for myself as a Villain in Panopolis is hard work. Six months ago, my boyfriend broke me out of jail. Now he’s spending most of his time defending our turf against other Villains he accidentally freed along with me. And my new psychic powers are not only impossible to control, but they’re also giving me migraines.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. My skills are improving every day, and Raul—aka the Mad Bombardier—and I have never been happier. That is, until my first solo job is interrupted by a mysterious woman who tells me that Raul has been kidnapped by a ruthless new Villain. The only way to free him is to do a job for Maggot, a man with scary ideas and an even scarier superpower.
I can’t go to the cops or a Hero for help. Odds are they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. If I fail, Raul will be killed. If I succeed, we’ll both be bound to a man who’ll stop at nothing to put Panopolis on the path to civil war.
It looks like the only way to win is to take out the competition.
“My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Hey, if it’s a good enough reason for Sherlock Holmes . . .
SuperTruther here, bringing you the down and dirty on Heroes, Villains, and the people who love them. That last one would be us, guys, your humble blogger included. We’re the gaping maw that gobbles down everything we can get on our Super people. We’re the pushy paparazzi, we’re the Super fans, we’re the ones who buy anything with a pretty girl in a bulletproof leotard on the cover. We’re the fuel that keeps the powers that be churning out Supers, be they Hero or Villain. We aren’t the grist, maybe, and we’re not the guiding hands, but we sure as hell are powering that endless persona mill.
Are you happy, knowing that your conspicuous consumption makes people like the Nightmare? Or the Mad Bombardier? Or hell, look at Edward Dinges, so lately one of us, so quickly one of them. Think about your impact for a moment, people. Think really hard.
I’m not your standard, run-of-the-mill, evil-genius Villain.
By many standards I wasn’t a Villain at all, not yet. I didn’t have a pithy crowd-sourced nickname that made people shudder with fear when they heard it in the news—the reporters just called me Edward Dinges. I didn’t have a big, flashy power-slash-mutation-slash-disfigurement that made kids stare and adults avert their eyes. I didn’t carry a weapon. I didn’t run my mouth at the cops and intimidate crowds of people with a single word, or run the heists of the century and not get caught, and I didn’t—I especially didn’t—get into fights with Heroes. That would be asking for more trouble than I could handle, at this point.
But even though I was no Big Bad Villain like my boyfriend didn’t mean I was passive in the face of a problem. And being stalked, to my mind, certainly counted as problematic. This wasn’t the first time I’d been followed in the six months since I’d been broken out of Abbott’s Penitentiary—otherwise known as the Abattoir—in rather dramatic style, but it was certainly one of the most blatant. Fortunately, I wasn’t unprepared for this eventuality. You couldn’t live in this part of Panopolis, far from the glitz and cleanliness and heavily policed presence of downtown, without learning a few tricks.
This was my first stalking without having Raul with me, though, and for all my preparations, I was still nervous. My hands bunched in my pockets, fisting and relaxing as I tried to control my breathing, act casual, act natural. I could do this. I could take care of myself; I didn’t need Raul to rescue me. More importantly, I didn’t have a choice—there was no turning around at this point, no running back home where I could lock myself away. I had a meeting to get to that I couldn’t afford to miss. Not if I wanted to stay sane.
I walked a little farther along the broken sidewalk, head mostly covered by my hoodie as I listened for my stalker’s position. Only three or four meters back, he slowed down, then stopped and ducked aside altogether when I bent over to feign retying my shoe. Yep, he was the real deal. Fortunately, there was nobody else out on the sidewalk at one in the afternoon, all the people who lived in these tenement houses either at work, at school, or inside where it was marginally safer.
I reached into my pocket and then laid a tiny, weblike array of wires with a tiny battery in the center on the ground, before getting up and resuming my steady pace. I waited until I was almost positive my stalker was in the radius of the trap before I triggered it with a button on my key fob.
“Hkt—” There was the telltale sound of someone’s throat closing up, followed closely by a noisy thud. I sighed, then turned around and walked back to where my erstwhile stalker had fallen, his body still convulsing from the effects of the static taser. It was one of Raul’s inventions, notable because he’d worked out a way to get the shock to travel through the insulated sole of a person’s shoe, and because it could be remotely operated. I waited for the shocker’s battery to run out to grab the little taser and put it away. Once I’d made sure the guy was breathing okay, I rolled him onto his stomach and zip-tied his hands together.
“Hey.” I turned him back onto his side so we could see each other’s faces. “Well, this is an awkward way to meet someone for the first time.” My voice shook from the nerves I couldn’t quite get over, but hopefully he was too out of it to notice.
“F—fff—ffuck—”
“Give it a second; sometimes the charge can make fine-motor control a bit wonky.” I could spare a few minutes to figure out who this guy was and whether I should call the cops to take care of him. Not that they’d make it down here in less than an hour: this was a red zone, hot with Villainous activity and too poor to merit rapid attention. And honestly, I wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of leaving another Villain trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey for the cops to come grab. We were bad to each other, but they were worse to us.
