by Simon Archer
“Of course not, Nicky!” Inferno belly-laughed then went stone-faced. “I’m just sending a message to whatever loon sent this circus act of a villain, and make sure that they know that Lord Inferno and his son are the ones that will defend the world together!”
Defend? Together?
“Are you saying…?” I asked warily. The heat from my father’s over-the-top fireball was almost unbearable at such close proximity, and sweat poured down my brow and along my cheeks, even with my nigh-invulnerability. How did he stand this kind of heat?
Oh right. Super powers.
“Well, I’m not saying anything until we take care of this bozo,” Inferno rolled his eyes. “Now, are you going to help me or what?”
I grinned ear to ear and nodded as I realized what his plan was. “Let’s do it!”
Inferno unleashed the massive fireball straight towards us, not that it had to travel far. It was more like he dropped it and let it roll a few feet like he was bowling for villains. I knew I only had one shot at getting this right. The fireball had to get close enough to force Switch to escape with me still attached to her. She would obviously escape to whatever homebase the Carter kids used, valuable intelligence for us, and before anyone was the wiser, I could burst out of there and get that information back to Alexandria. It would be the critical break in the Carter Academy case. I might even be able to take Switch in as well. The only problem was that there wasn’t much time left in my reserves, but it would have to be enough.
Sure enough, as the fireball grew closer and closer, the more Switch began to sweat, both literally and figuratively. Sure enough, she opened a portal beneath us, and down we went before the fireball could hit us.
Two things happened in the moments that we were falling that I didn’t predict. The first was that, instead of teleporting us to the Carter base, she immediately returned to the volcano on the other side. I didn’t foresee that she was so driven, so fanatical to her academy’s cause to kill my father to risk almost certain death at my father’s hands.
The other thing I hadn’t counted on was my power giving out just a moment later. My body ached as I came down from the mighty high, and my chest heaved as I tried to catch my breath. No way had that been over ten minutes, right? I didn’t think about that and focused what strength I had left in my body on keeping a hold of Switch.
Switch seized the opportunity, driving a hard elbow into my gut and slamming her heel on the arch of my foot. She’d obviously gotten some training since we last met, much to my regret as she broke my hold on her. As I fell back with a grunt, she must have spotted the drill gun still tucked in my waistband, and a wicked smirk spread across her features. She moved in on me, and I twisted to keep the weapon from her, catching her with a glancing jab. If I weren’t weakened from my power use, that alone might have taken her out, but Switch pushed through it, managing to snake a hand past me and onto the handle of the weapon.
“I think I’ll take this,” Switch mused as she portaled away the moment her hand was on it. She laughed as she twirled the drill gun around her finger. “Looks like the perfect way to frame you for the murder of your father after he did all of those dastardly things around the city. And to think that you were fooled by him. Pathetic.”
“You… you know nothing!” I hissed and blindly grabbed for her, but without my powers on, she could easily slip through a portal and out of my grasp.
If only I had thirty more seconds of power…
“We’ll see about that,” Switch replied smugly. She then dashed along the edge of the volcano where my father stood, waving the weapon tauntingly as she kept out of reach. She could have simply portaled by his side, killed him out of nowhere, but she knew I couldn’t power-up again. All she wanted now was to torture me, to hurt me for almost taking her down.
My world moved in slow motion as, with what little strength I had left, I gathered myself and rushed after her. I tried to call out a warning to my dad, but my voice wouldn’t reach him, not before Switch did. Smoke rose from the volcano, blinding me, but I kept going. My heart slammed against my chest, and my body screamed in protest as I pushed myself.
Dad emerged through the smoke and heat, Switch still teasing me by lingering close, but not close enough. He was actually sitting on an outcropping of stone, waiting almost idly for my return, and without his suit on and the enhanced sensors in it, he didn’t see her coming.
And that’s when Switch made her mistake, her new position of superiority over me making her cocky. She waited until I was just a hair too close before opening a final portal to get into firing position. As she slid into it, I dug down deep and made one last, desperate lunge. Again, I fell through the portal right before she closed it, ending up right behind her as she took aim at my father. A split-second before she could pull the trigger and launch the drill into my father’s chest, I wrapped my arms around her and tackled her to the side. We tumbled to the ground in a heap, and I had a split second to react to the drill that was now coming for my face.
I kicked her off of me and sent her sailing forward as she shot off the drill. It embedded itself into the ground not an inch from me, but Switch continued to tumble until she was dangling over the edge of the volcano. Rolling to my side, I stood quickly and rushed to where she’d fallen. Switch was nowhere to be found until an azure portal snapped open right beside me. It was too fast to react to, and before I could throw up a defense, she snapped off a sharp punch to my face and a kick to my gut.
A painful groan wretched from my throat, but I wasn’t giving up. I locked eyes with Switch, and for a split second, I saw fear in her eyes, and that’s when I realized something. It wasn’t just because she was taunting me that she hadn’t portaled straight to my father to kill him. Despite her previous boasts, Switch had a limit, just like I did, and she was tiring out. So was I, of course, but this left me a slim chance.
Either way, this was coming to an end.
“Give it up, Switch,” I huffed. “It’s over.”
“Over my dead body,” she growled with fake bravado, and she lunged at me again.
At that moment, I reacted on instinct. I sidestepped her just in time, snatched the end of the drill extending above the rock, and forced the drill free from the earth. Within the blink of an eye, I spun and jammed the end of the drill into her chest. She gasped as blood poured out of her, and the life quickly drained from her eyes.
“You’re no better than him,” Switch rasped, and I barely had the mind to catch her before she fell into the volcano that we fought upon. Her body slumped lifeless in my arms, and our blood was soon mixed. I didn’t know whose was whose as I pulled her into my chest.
What did I do?
“Nick?” My father’s voice sounded behind me, but I couldn’t respond. In fact, I was sure that I had stopped breathing, too, but everything hurt too much and not at all at the same time.
I was no better than him.
Tears pricked my eyes then. I’d gone out of my way to distance myself from my father, to not turn into the murderous fiend that he had become. I took pride in being a hero that didn’t kill. I didn’t want that under me, but here I was with a dead girl in my arms.
Arms slowly came around my shoulders, and I recognized them as Inferno’s, my father’s. I was angry, confused, and I allowed myself this moment of weakness to be open with him for the first time since I was a child. I wept hard and openly as I clung to Switch’s dead body and rocked back and forth. All the while, my dad held and soothed me.
“You did nothing wrong,” he whispered, and he pressed a fatherly kiss to the side of my head. “You did the right thing.”
I wasn’t sure I did, but the more I thought about it, the more I believed it. If I hadn’t done this, my father would be dead, right when he had a chance to redeem himself, and me? I would have been some lab experiment in a coma at Carter Academy.
So… for the first time in a while, I totally believed my father.
22
Gemma
On an unrelated note, I learned that even those that had lost their homes to Inferno’s penchant for overkill were grateful for the kindness he’d shown them. Another professor here told me that he’d lost everything. All he had left was his daughter after Inferno burned their village to ash, but Inferno gave him a home again, gave him a job, and gave him purpose. I’d heard other stories that were more or less the same from all kinds of people with various walks of life, too, and all of them were thankful that Inferno had given them hope. I wasn’t entirely convinced that there wasn’t some kind of brainwashing going on, but I tried to look at it positively.
Maybe there was something left of the great hero he used to be left in him, something more than the hints he had shown in the past months in his relations to Nick.
All of that were things I learned incidentally. My real reason for coming to Inferno Island, to participate in the exchange program, was my hope to learn something of use to Triton and to Alexandria, especially in regards to the villainous Carter Academy. The fact was that the Brand Academy for New Heroics had an entirely different set of resources and information than we had at Valcav, and as Inferno had been one of Mother’s… Wrath’s targets, I felt that there were answers here to find.
I spent hours poring over books and absorbing as much information as I could. I’d even spent some of my time with Eric, who had an insatiable love for knowledge, but for as much as I learned, none of it helped with the Carter situation. Eric did tell me that he’d found something on a group called Triple Triad, but I didn’t see a connection despite the interest it piqued in me. In hindsight, after the emergency call that came in from Valcav that night, I should have paid closer attention.
My heart was still racing hours after we had intercepted Nick and Lord Inferno on top of the volcano, though maybe that was because I couldn’t stop pacing. If I stopped pacing, then my emotions would get the better of me. I couldn’t allow that to happen, because that was a large reason why I volunteered to spend the semester at Inferno Island in the first place, one I kept entirely to myself.
It all centered around Nick.
During my time here thus far, there were exactly zero nights that were spent not thinking about Nick. I managed during the day, as I had the Brand students to occupy my mind, but it was hard with two of his lovers and his best friend sitting in my classroom for two hours a day. It wasn’t their fault, and I had no right to blame them, but every time I saw them, I thought of Nick.
More specifically, I thought of the way he loved those girls with all of his heart, and how I quietly yearned for the same kind of love he gave them, even the physical part of it. No, especially the physical part of it. I wanted him to touch me the way I knew he’d been with Andie and Aylin. I wanted to scream his name and for him to make a mess of me.
Admitting that, even just to myself, I felt shameful. I had looked after him once Triton and I rescued him from Inferno Island all those years ago. If anything, it was only proper that I didn’t love him any more than a mother should. But I wasn’t his mother, was I? As I watched him grow to be the strong, sexy man he’d become, I couldn’t help myself. I thought that putting distance between us would curb my desire, but it only made it stronger. I suppose it should have been obvious since that’s how the saying goes.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
There were other reasons for my absence at Valcav, however. In addition to gathering intelligence, I wanted to keep Nick as far away from Wrath as possible now that I knew she was back. The villainess would stop at nothing to get her revenge against me for putting an end to her first reign of terror, and I didn’t want Nick mixed up in the conflict. If she came after me, that was fine. I could handle her on my own.
What I wouldn’t have been able to handle is if she used Nick to get to me. Something like that wasn’t out of her wheelhouse of evil, and I knew that staying in Valcav not only put Nick at risk, but the city as well. Inferno had been on board with the idea as well, which was shocking to everyone, not just me.
“Inferno Island is just that, an island,” he had said. “Alexandria is a whole city. My people will persevere and be all right. Alexandria is on fragile ground right now.”
His words stuck with me. He was more worried about Alexandria’s fall than that of his own island. Who was this man? These were the words of the hero of old that he used to be, not the infamous, terrifying villain he had become.
Aside from that, Triton wanted to create a sense of hope for the future by inviting Inferno’s students to study at Valcav for a semester. His wish was that he could bring everyone on the same page when it came to heroism and saving a life. It was a bold move, but a move that Inferno was compliant with as well.
I did notice that the students here were very intelligent in their own right. Yes, they had been taught to take whatever means necessary to accomplish their goal, but they were also relatively open to the idea that they could be better. In fact, they relished in the challenge of making an arrest without taking a life or destroying anything.
Heroism was, at its core, a grey area. We always try to save them all, but we also aren’t always successful. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and one that we don’t really prepare our students for when it happens, and yes, it will always happen. There hasn’t been a single hero to date that hasn’t lost at least one life they were trying to save. I knew this, and yet for some reason I never thought that it would happen to Nick, nor did I ever think that Inferno would be the one to console him after the fact.
I had been in the middle of a lecture when the distress call from Alexandria had come in, and while I was conferring with the other professors as to a response, we all saw Inferno’s giant blast of hellfire out the window. The battle had come to the island, but that wasn’t what spurred me up the volcano.
No, it was Aylin’s scream that stopped me in my tracks.
“Starlight! He’s here!”
She, along with Andie and Eric, were on their feet faster than I could dislodge my breath from my throat. Without a second thought or regard for the Brand students that I was leaving behind, I followed after them as they darted past me.
When we reached the top of the volcano, my heart seized up and my stomach dropped. I knew without having to ask that Nick had killed Switch to save his father, because I knew that was the only reason he would have ever killed anyone in a million years: To save someone he loved. My heart broke in two to see him openly weep into his father’s arms the way a young boy would have.
I hated myself for wanting to be the one to hold him, though.
All that brought me back to where I was now, alone in my quarters because I wouldn’t be able to control myself. If we were alone, I’d profess how much I loved him, and how much he meant to me. I would hold him and beg to be held the way he holds his girls because I wanted to be a part of that, no matter who else I had to share him with. I couldn’t face him right now, at least, not one-on-one, but eventually, I would have to talk with him.
For now, however, I wanted, no, I needed to continue keeping my distance. It was for the best for now. Once Nick was healed and we knew what we were going to do about Valcav’s situation, then I could resume being his teacher and nothing more.
I finally stopped pacing. As I predicted, as soon as the motion stopped, the tears came, and I wiped them away angrily. Who would have thought that the worst villain I’d ever face would be my own desire to be with Nick Gateon?
2
3
We weren’t alone there on top of Inferno Island for long.
The all-out powered battle atop the volcano caught the attention of the forward observers of the Brand’s forces stationed there and, more importantly, the students and faculty of the Brand Academy. The first sign of help was Gemma, grown to her full fifty-foot height, her worried but ever beautiful eyes ten times as large but ten times of a relief to see. She wasn’t along, though, as Aylin, Andie, and Eric were close behind Amazoness, and they weren’t alone. Normally, no one had permission to climb the volcano, and rightfully so because it’s a fucking volcano, but when it came to a violation of the Brand airspace, all bets were off.
I have to admit, things were a bit of a blur after Switch’s death and my father’s embrace. When my friends saw me looking like a hot mess, I dimly remember Andie and Aylin taking me down from the volcano and into the Brand Academy. I could only guess at the time, but they had packed me back to the dormitory room the three of them had been sharing. The one thing I was sure of was the love and affection they covered with me. As Andie took to cleaning my wounds carefully, all three of them, Eric included, listened as I recounted what happened, and Andie took to cleaning me up properly.
As for Gemma, I wasn’t sure where she disappeared too. No doubt she was helping my father and the faculty deal with things on the top of the volcano.
Through it all, I felt numb. I knew the feeling would pass, that I would wake up again, and most of all, I knew that there was no other way that could have gone down, the only way to have saved our lives up there. My head was swimming with different emotions. Was my father really behind all of this? I doubted it, not after the confession he’d given.
It was the most serious I had seen him since I was a child. Well, serious in the fatherly sense. He was plenty serious about world domination for the benefit of all and such, but that was entirely different.