Superheroes Anonymous
Page 17
I could feel my cheeks heating up a little, too, though I hoped I wasn’t blushing. Inwardly, I had to marvel. I had become a supervillain target because of a thrown beer bottle. Not an epic superhero romance. I’d just pissed off the wrong dude, and he’d exacted a petty revenge that had disrupted over two years of my life.
“I think I need to sit down,” I said.
In a blink, Guy was across the room, pulling me toward the bed. I sat down before my knees gave way; warily, he sat next to me.
“So it was all Sykik,” I said. “Just . . . being a little bitch.”
“You know villains. They’re all secretly twelve,” Guy said.
“That was it? This was all over a beer bottle?”
“Was that what you hit him with?” Guy surprised me by letting out a chuff of laughter. “I’ve wondered, but there wasn’t, um, exactly a way I could ask. You’ve got amazing aim.”
“I played softball back in high school, a million years ago.” I rolled my right shoulder once, almost reflexively. A beer bottle, I thought again. It hadn’t been a secret grand romance, which was honestly disappointing. It had been kind of an ego boost to think that maybe all of these situations were happening because I had a superhero secretly in love with me.
Vanity, thy name is Gail.
“Hey,” I said, finally putting it all together. “Guy. When you said you didn’t get there fast enough . . . have you been blaming yourself for this all this time?”
He was quiet for a long time. “You ended up in a lot of really bad situations.”
“If they weren’t my fault, they definitely weren’t yours, either.”
“Yeah. I know that,” he said. “But I think it’s kind of human to wish you’d been able to stop something bad before it could happen to somebody you like.”
“You like me?” I asked before I really thought about it.
For a second, I saw his cheeks go even redder than they had been a minute before. Then I saw the same smile I must have sensed through the mask a hundred times before. “I mean, you’re okay, I wouldn’t get a big head or anything,” he said, and it was my turn to give him a little shove on the shoulder. “But seriously, we’ve always had the connection. I didn’t get noticed as one of the elite superheroes until you started getting kidnapped, and nine times out of ten, I was the one coming to your rescue.”
“All without saying a word to me,” I said.
“Yeah, well.” He ducked his head again, unfolding one arm from his chest to scratch the back of his neck. “I’m not all that great with words. But here.” He was so tall that he was easily able to lean over and grab the phone from the desk. “Just please take it. No strings attached.”
“You realize with my life, this will get smashed in a week, right?” I asked, but I finally took the box from him.
“I got the extended warranty on it,” Guy said. “Gold package.”
I made a noise that made him laugh.
“I can afford it,” he said. “It won’t put me out on the street or anything.”
“You realize you’re disobeying your old trainer, too,” I said, admiring the phone as I pulled it free. It was lighter than I expected it to be, slightly curved, and the glass was smooth and unbroken. It was probably the nicest thing I’d ever owned. “Angélica says I’m not supposed to have anything like this.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t. Jeremy helped me get all of your data on it—don’t ask how.”
“Okay, I won’t. Thanks, Guy. I mean that. For the phone, for even thinking of it.”
He took a deep breath and held out a hand. “Friends?”
I looked at his hand, shrugged, and gave him a kiss on the cheek instead. I had to hide my smile behind my hand at the way he went absolutely still. “Friends,” I said, and hit the power button. “Though, I have to tell you, Guy, this is the most expensive way I have ever seen a guy go about getting my digits.”
“I’m in a class all to myself,” Guy said.
“Yes, you—” I broke off as I stared at my new phone screen.
“What is it?” Guy asked.
I held up the phone. “I have forty-seven missed calls.”
“Uh-oh.”
Chapter Fifteen
RUMORS OF MY not being needed at Mirror Reality, Inc. had been greatly exaggerated, it appeared.
Most of the numbers for the missed calls on my phone, I didn’t recognize. But the others, I did, and they surprised me.
“So, anyway,” Portia’s voice on the recording went on as I listened on speakerphone, “it’s not like you can blame me for lying and saying we were fine without you. I was just so jealous, you know? You went away, and you came back with, like, a really hot bod, and okay, maybe promoting somebody from the mail room wasn’t the greatest idea. Anyway, Angus wants you to call back ASAP, and he wants to know when you’ll be back at work.”
“This woman is your friend?” Guy asked. I’d moved over to sit at his desk, but he remained on the bed, cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. He rested his chin on his fists and frowned at me.
“Unfortunately,” I said, deleting the voice mail.
“You need better friends.”
“What, you don’t find her charming and full of wit?” I asked as I pressed PLAY on the next message.
“Girl? Girl, this isn’t funny! C’mon, pick up your phone.” Portia’s voice rose to a whine. “Don’t you think you’ve punished me enough? Angus was just here and he’s started giving me some of your work and I don’t understand what’s a pivot table and what’s an expense report, and you need to come back to work right now. I’m sorry, okay? Just please come back.”
I checked the time on that message. It was from this morning. There were two other missed calls from her between, but she hadn’t left a message.
Feeling vengeful, I swiped my finger over the DELETE button.
“That explains about twelve of these calls,” I said, frowning as I mass-deleted all of the texts from Portia. “But I don’t recognize the missed number, and they didn’t leave—oh, wait, he or she texted, I just didn’t see it under the ten thousand frowny-face messages my charming BFF Portia sent.”
“What’s it say?” Guy twiddled his thumb against his chin.
The first message was simple: r u dead???
I showed it to Guy. “Somebody obviously doesn’t believe in using full words in texts,” he said, frowning. “Still no idea?”
“The number of people that would think to check on me and make sure I’m not dead is actually depressingly small,” I said. “Jeremy uses full words, like I’m guessing you do, and Vicki doesn’t have my number and wouldn’t have any reason to—”
I broke off when a new text came through, from the same number. girl if ur not dead, text me back. we have a problem. i think i know what chelsea was after.
“Oh,” I said, staring at the text. “It’s Naomi—she’s the one Chelsea attacked at the bank. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear from her again.”
“Why?”
“She’s trouble.” I hovered over the REPLY button for a second. The last time I’d approached her, I’d been hit by a couple of energy blasts from a seriously deranged villain. But if she knew what Chelsea was after, that might help the others at Davenport track down Chelsea before she could hurt anyone again. So I texted her back: Not dead, just complicated. Are you okay?
“What kind of trouble?” Guy asked, and he sounded so serious that I looked up.
“That was a joke, sorry. Both times I’ve met with her, I’ve ended up unconscious because of a supervillain.” I shook my head when he only looked more concerned. “I’m fine now. But Chelsea was at that bank because of Naomi. I don’t know why. I’ve been a little busy dealing with superpowers and cancer to really figure it out, and Davenport doesn’t seem to want to let me near electronics.”
The phone buzzed in my hand with an incoming call. Naomi Gunn was apparently somebody who was never far from her phone. I accepted the call. “Naomi?”
“Girl? You’re alive. Oh, thank god, it wasn’t a hoax.”
“What hoax? You’ve called me, like, twenty times,” I said. “Are you okay? Last time I saw you, you were kind of bleeding.”
“And last time I saw you, frickin’ Plain Jane was hauling you off over her shoulder. You took days to get back to me. What the hell happened?”
I looked around Guy’s room, at the clothes piled on the floor and the man himself, sitting on his bed watching me. “I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t talk to journalists about my life, that’s why. It never ends well.”
“Only fair.” She sounded stressed and a little out of breath, and I wondered just what the hell was going on. “Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I’m kind of on the run for my life.”
“From what?” I asked, giving Guy a puzzled look.
“It’s more of a who. At any rate—” She broke off to swear vociferously, and I sat up straight.
A muffled sound of thumping came through the phone, and a hiss of static. I gripped the phone so hard I heard it start to creak. “Naomi? Naomi!”
There was no answer. Frantic, I checked the phone to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected, but it was still live. Guy, across the room, was on his feet, a worried look on his face.
Abruptly, I heard Naomi curse again. “I’m fine, I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was an octave higher than it had been a second ago. She also sounded like she was running. “Kind of being shot at, but I’m okay.”
“What the hell? Naomi, where are you? My friend—he can come save you.”
“No offense, but I’m safer if you don’t know where I am. I’ve gotten away, for now, I think. I’m going to send you a picture of something, I want you to tell me if you recognize it.”
“What, why? Naomi, do you need help?”
“I’ll be fine.” And she hung up.
I gave the phone a look, caught somewhere between bafflement and annoyance. “You know that feeling you get when you’ve missed something major?”
“I’m acquainted with it,” Guy said. “What happened?”
“I have no idea. But Chelsea’s got goons chasing Naomi. She got away, and she sounds okay, but . . .” I broke off to stare at the phone.
“I can trace the call and find out where she is,” Guy said, taking the phone from me.
“I think she’ll be gone by the time you get there. She’s going to text me a picture. I have no idea why. But it has to be Chelsea after her, right? Is Davenport looking for her?”
“Naomi?”
“No, Chelsea.”
“Well, the bank footage was damaged, and even with Vicki’s description, it’s a bit hard to track down a person like that if she’s not actively using her powers.”
“Gee,” I said, “it really makes you appreciate the villains who stand on top of the Willis Tower and try to blast everybody with death rays.”
“They lack finesse, but it does make some things easy.” Guy tapped a couple of buttons on the phone and handed it back to me. “I set up a trace. It shouldn’t take long.”
“Thanks for doing that. You don’t have to.”
“I hate mysteries. Wait here a second?”
Before I could ask him where he was going, he stepped into the closet and closed the door behind him. I was left alone in his room, but I didn’t dare try to peek in the drawers or anything. So instead I stared at the missed calls on my phone and wondered what the hell was going on with Naomi and Chelsea.
Guy stepped out, wearing black and green, just as a text message alert buzzed on my phone. Naomi had sent me a slightly blurry picture of an open metal drawer. It took me a few seconds to recognize the inside of the safe-deposit vault where I’d fought Chelsea, but when I did, I frowned. Had she been at that bank for something other than Naomi? Inside the box was a piece of circuit board attached to a beige panel. “Do you recognize this?” I asked, holding my phone up.
He shook his head as he finger-combed his hair back. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s from the bank, though, but she’s not exactly being forthcoming with the facts.”
“Jeremy’s better with that stuff,” he said, looking abashed. “Maybe you should ask him.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that while you’re out.” I looked his uniform up and down. He seemed so different while wearing it. The little flame on his chest had a couple of nicks and scrapes on it that I remembered well from our superhero-and-damsel days. “So this is an official thing.”
“I’ll walk you back first.”
Back in my suite, I texted the photo to Jeremy and received an entirely unhelpful answer that it could be anything (and a question about if I was okay, which I answered in the affirmative and thanked him for the flowers). Naomi didn’t answer when I texted her asking for more information, so I settled in with my new phone and started doing searches on Chelsea myself. Nothing came up. After a few dead ends (and a text from Guy that he’d found nothing at the coordinates and he was going on patrol now), I pushed all of that out of my mind and began a new search for Dr. Mobius.
Chelsea wasn’t the only mystery in my life, after all.
ANGÉLICA GREETED ME a couple of days later with “You’re in trouble,” and I immediately started to panic. Did the woman have ninja spies everywhere? How had she discovered the cell phone? I’d hidden it away in the bottom of my new satchel during our sessions, powered down so it wouldn’t ring in the middle of our lesson.
I swallowed hard. “What’d I do?”
“It’s not what you did.” Her grin seemed just a touch mean. “It’s more what’s about to happen.”
I set my bag down in the corner, turning away to hide my relief. I really didn’t want to lose my new cell phone. Naomi hadn’t been in touch (though Portia had called twice), but Guy had put the most expensive data plan on it, and I’d been up late streaming The Bird Also Sings. I’d missed a lot in Chance’s world since Dr. Mobius had kidnapped me. “It’s going to be another day of beating the hell out of me, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I packed plenty of crap-cakes.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“And you’re going to need them.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better.”
“Lose the shoes.”
As I crouched to untie the laces of my sneakers, I eyed Angélica. Today’s stretch pants had a purple stripe across the knee; the muscle tee was a black tank top that showed off her upper arm definition scarily well. Those arms, I thought, would be pounding on me soon. She’d painted her toenails purple to match the stripe.
When I rose, my feet bare, Angélica smiled at me. “You really think that’s what’s going to happen, don’t you? That I’m going to beat the hell out of you.”
“Can’t see why I would. It hasn’t happened like a million times already or anything.”
“What’d I tell you about sarcasm, kid?”
“That it’s a valuable tool in our fight against—whoa!”
The first time Angélica had jumped at me, I hadn’t seen it coming. Now, I saw the way she twisted her hips, and I easily sidestepped. She went breezing by, checked her charge, and swung back just as fluidly as I’d avoided her.
“You’re learning,” she said.
“I’m partial to keeping my skin.”
“Heh. Your turn. Come at me.”
Since arguing was useless, I stood still. Angélica had drilled it into my head that there wasn’t a point in letting your opponent see your move until you were already coming at them, f
ists flying. It was similar to a philosophy I’d adopted in my many hostage situations—if you have an ace up your sleeve, keep it there until the chips are down.
So I waited, and I made my leap. Angélica dodged, as I anticipated, so I feinted, planted my foot, and swung into a roundhouse kick. The blade of my foot barely brushed her rib cage as she sprang back. She landed and immediately tried to sweep my feet out from under me, but I threw myself into a somersault to get away.
When I came up in a fight stance, she was grinning at me. “Definitely learning.”
We traded off on attacking and defending. Sometimes I felt trapped in molasses while Angélica blurred right by me, somehow managing to be everywhere at once. No matter what I threw at her, she dodged or blocked. And she got in quite a few blows that I hadn’t seen coming. By the time she declared a break, nearly an hour later, my ribs stung, and my cheek throbbed. I swiped at it, relieved to see no blood on my palm. It was probably a testament to the past few days that I understood I was going to have a spectacular bloom of a bruise on my cheek for a little while.
“You’re sneaky,” I told Angélica, as we reached for water. I took a deep drink and studied her over the bottle. “Fast. I don’t get how you can be that fast. You don’t look fast.”
“You really haven’t figured it out?” she asked between her own gulps.
“Nope. Maybe you’re the devil and this is actually hell and that’s why you’re so fast and I have to eat this.” I toasted her with the crap-cake.
“Try paying attention. Don’t worry about dodging so much—I’ll pull my punches.” She grinned. “A little. But really watch me, study me. And let’s see what you come up with. This is a valuable skill you’ll need against any enemy, even if it’s just your trainer.”
“Is this an excuse to catch me off guard, so you can just beat on me harder?”