Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella)

by Andrews, Vivi

  Eisenmann continued, “If we hadn’t been able to sedate her quickly enough, she would have broken an orderly’s mind last week. And we’re having to use nearly dangerous doses just to put her far enough under to smother her gift. She’s starting to use it when she isn’t even fully awake. As much as I would like to be able to entrust her to your care, Lucien, she’s simply too much of a danger to everyone around her. At this point, I feel our only option may be to send her back to Area Nine, where at least they can contain her.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “No. It won’t come to that.”

  Mirage was surprised to hear DynaGirl, of all people, agreeing with her brother’s feral snarl.

  Eisenmann sighed. “I’m sorry, but it has come to that.”

  “Suppress her powers.” The harsh command in Lucien’s voice fell like a blow and Mirage flinched.

  He can’t mean it.

  “Lucien—”

  “It must be possible. You have some drug, some chemical that can do it. Don’t tell me Trident isn’t experimenting with it.”

  Mirage wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could protect the wild light of her power where it was buried deep inside her. She wouldn’t know who she was without that light. Lucien couldn’t mean to neuter her that way. It would be like stripping away a piece of her soul. That he would even suggest it…

  “We don’t do that here.” Eisenmann’s reprimand was low, but steely hard. “Trident has always been in the business of celebrating those with powers. To be so gifted…” He trailed off and Mirage wondered if the good doctor realized how evident his raw envy was in that moment. “I would never violate her by tampering with her powers. Unless she needed help honing or focusing them—”

  “Honing her powers is not the issue. They are clearly working all too well,” DynaGirl interrupted. “She’s in control of her powers, just not of herself.”

  “She doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t,” Eisenmann said flatly. “During her time with Kevin, he fed her a string of false images that are still embedded in her memory. There are lingering compulsions and alternate realities, which normally we would be able to help her undo, but her ability to warp the perception of others seems to have played into the illusions Kevin implanted in her brain and it’s exacerbating her condition. She doesn’t have any grounding in reality. Even on the good days, she can’t even tell when she’s lying to herself.”

  A chair creaked with sudden movement. “Lying to herself?” DynaGirl said, her voice sharp.

  “A figure of speech. It’s what we call it when she can’t distinguish whether a memory is something she put there rather than something Kevin did. Often even we can’t determine when a memory is authentic versus implanted—unless we have the records to prove one way or the other, but memory is so subjective…”

  “But the way you put it, like her brain was lying to her…”

  “That is essentially what’s happening.”

  “What if there was someone she couldn’t lie to, whether she wanted to or not?” DynaGirl’s voice was bright, filled with a hope Mirage couldn’t share. “I think I know someone who might be able to help.”

  “We’ll try anything at this point, but if this doesn’t work…” Eisenmann trailed off, leaving the consequences unspoken, but Mirage heard them all the same. Area Nine. Neutering her powers. Either one was a prison. A life sentence. But would she even know the difference with her thoughts in pieces? She was already trapped in the fragmented prison of her mind. Caged by Kevin… had she killed the only man with the key?

  Chapter Two: Sweet Little Lies

  Lies were useful inventions. At least once a day, Julian Case, known to the general public as Captain Justice, found himself wishing he could turn off his innate ability and just believe a lie. This was one of those moments.

  Kim Carruthers stood in his bedroom, hurriedly jamming the contents of her drawer into a bag. Toothbrush, change of clothes, spare hand-held recorder—everything an up-and-coming reporter might need on a moment’s notice. She looked up, blonde hair flipping over her shoulder, and caught him watching her from the doorway. A wry, apologetic smile twisted her lips. “You know I’ll miss you, Julian.”

  Deceit tainted the flavor of the words. It wasn’t a complete lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. He provided the word for her, “But.”

  Her full lips pursed, irritation flashing briefly in her eyes. No one liked being forced to complete honesty. “But this is an amazing opportunity for me. Chief Political Correspondent. I can’t pass that up just to stay here and cover the superhero beat for the rest of my life.”

  “I thought you liked the superhero beat.”

  “I did, and I liked you. Like you. I wasn’t lying about that.”

  “You like me. Gee, thanks.”

  She shot him a sideways glance, still shoving her bag full. “I guess I… love you.”

  Neither of them had said those words before. In their tendency to play their emotions close to the vest, they were perfectly matched, but her lack of enthusiasm still stung like a bitch. “You guess.”

  Kim’s expression softened and her hands slowed. “I do.”

  She wasn’t lying, but he almost wished she was. Acid burned in his esophagus. “But you love your ambition more.”

  The softness vanished into aggravation, her hands moving quickly again. “It’s not about loving it. It’s who I am. Look, Julian, you’re amazing and I owe you my life a dozen times over, but I want more from my life than being the girl who gets tied to the train tracks once a week. You can only play the damsel in distress for so long before it starts getting old.”

  Being a hero gets old too. But it wasn’t something he could walk away from. “I’m sorry you became a target for supervillains by being with me, but I though you liked the exposure.”

  “I do. I can’t deny you’ve been amazing for my career, but I want to be more than just some superhero’s girlfriend. No offense.” She snapped the now empty drawer shut and zipped her bag with a decisive, disturbingly final motion. Just like that, the chapter of her life that included him was closed.

  Julian avoided looking at the next drawer down. The one holding the extra key he’d had made for her last week. He’d thought it was about time they made it official and moved in together. Damn. How could someone who couldn’t avoid the truth be so wrong about where his own relationship was heading?

  Though, if he was one hundred percent honest with himself, he’d had a feeling this was exactly where they were heading. Apart. That was part of why he’d gotten her the key. As an instinctive, last-ditch effort to save their relationship.

  Always the hero. Always saving the day. Even when the day apparently didn’t want to be saved.

  Two fucking years down the drain.

  Two years. Admittedly, most of their interactions during their first few months of “dating” had been instigated by local villains, but they’d slowly grown to feel more for each other than just rescue-induced adrenaline and gratitude. The relationship had just sort of happened, as if they’d been thrown together so many times that hooking up had almost been an act of inertia—easier than the alternative of finding someone else.

  But he had come to care for her. He wasn’t ready to just let that go. “The capital isn’t far. We can still see each other on weekends. Or, you know, I’m sure they need supers down there—”

  “Julian.” Kim smiled and for the first time he saw pity there. His stomach recoiled. “I really like you and I’m sincerely grateful for everything you’ve done for me over the last couple years. You’re kind and dependable and God knows you’re absolutely gorgeous. A girl really can’t ask for a better guy to rescue her…”

  Again that acidic tang of not-the-whole-truth. “But.”

  “But I want more.”

  More. He could give her more. He’d been playing it safe, but a successful superhero knew when to take the big leaps. The words stuck, but he pushed them out, wondering if they
were true, unable to hear his own lies. “Kim, I love you.”

  “I know.” Her brows wrinkled and the pity was back in her eyes in full force. “I just don’t want to be with you right now. I need to be my own person, really find my own identity, as something more than Captain Justice’s girlfriend.”

  “I’m not saying this as Captain Justice.”

  “I know. You’re saying it because I’m leaving. Because you’re pathologically incapable of letting anything go wrong without trying to make it right. But this is the right thing, Julian. I’ve barely seen you the last few weeks. Lately, it’s like our relationship exists more in the papers than it does in person.”

  That couldn’t be true. So why did it sound like truth coming out of her mouth?

  Kim sighed. “I’m sorry, okay? Maybe we can grab lunch before I move to the capital. We’re still friends, right?”

  “Lunch. Sure.” God, he was such a pussy. If the supervillains saw him now, his reputation as a hero badass would be shot to shit. He couldn’t even get mad at her. He just felt defeated. Useless. Which didn’t sit well with him as a man or a super.

  What else was he supposed to do? He was always there for her. Always. He’d kept her in one piece—and in the headlines. She’d been using him as her personal hero all this time, advancing her career with their connection. So why couldn’t he get angry? Why was he numbly helping her on with her coat, nodding dumbly in response to her chatter about how busy she would be tying up loose ends at The Sentinel before the move? Where the hell was his fucking spine?

  The door closed behind Kim before he could wrap his brain around what the fuck just happened.

  Kim had dumped him. Just dropped his ass. His ears were ringing, the real world receding. Julian shook his head to clear it, but the buzzing in his brain only grew louder—like when he’d gone through puberty and his super-senses would go out of whack, fluctuating wildly between loud and soft. He took a deep, steadying breath, and the buzzing stopped—then immediately started up again.

  Idiot. That wasn’t the sound of his brain imploding. That was his fucking phone, vibrating somewhere in the apartment. He found it wedged behind a couch cushion and tapped the screen to connect the call before it could go to voicemail a second time.

  “Justice,” he barked, hoping like hell the call was someone in need of their ass kicked and not a non-violent interrogation assist.

  “Julian? Hey, it’s Darla. How’re you doing?”

  He tried not to flinch at the cheerful bounce in DynaGirl’s voice. His shellshock must have shown if Kim was having her girlfriends call to check up on him. “I’m great,” he ground out between clenched teeth. Never fucking better.

  “Great! That’s awesome. Look, I’m calling because—”

  The woman who just ripped your still-beating heart out of your chest and ground it under her stiletto feels guilty, he mentally filled in the rest of the sentence, stalking toward the kitchen to see if he had any hard liquor on hand. “Darla, I’m kind of busy—” He had an urgent date with a fifth of whiskey.

  “—I need a huge favor.”

  He stopped in his tracks, abruptly regrouping. That didn’t sound like a pity call. Maybe there was some ass in need of kicking after all. “What kind of favor?”

  * * * * * * * * * *

  Julian didn’t quite know how he’d ended up at Trident Labs being briefed by DynaGirl, her boyfriend—the supposedly former villain DemonSpawn Wroth—and Dr. Eisenmann, one of Trident’s resident geniuses whom he’d met over the years helping test super products. All he knew was that he needed a distraction and having DynaGirl owe him a favor had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  As Eisenmann reached over and tapped a button to bring up a closed-circuit feed on the computer monitor, he wasn’t so sure. The cell that popped up on the screen was small and Spartan, but Julian barely noticed the stark environment as his eyes locked on the room’s single occupant. She was tiny, slight of frame and bony thin, with straight black hair yanked back into a high ponytail.

  “Christ, she’s a kid.”

  Then her face turned toward the camera, almost as if she’d heard him speak, and he got a look at her eyes. The pupils were huge, creepily so. There was nothing childish about those eyes. There were dark circles under them. With the black and white picture, he couldn’t discern their color, but what he could see was ruthless with a cold fire—liquid nitrogen that could burn even more dangerously than heat.

  “She’s twenty,” Wroth said in his low growl of a voice. “Though, if you ask her, she’ll say she’s nineteen. She doesn’t remember her birthday. These days she doesn’t remember much of anything.”

  Julian forced his eyes away from the black hole gaze of the junior psychopath on the screen. “I don’t do supervillain rehab.”

  Lucien Wroth’s shoulders stiffened visibly. “She isn’t a villain. She’s a victim,” he snarled.

  Julian’s eyes were drawn back to the monitor, back to the feral light in the girl’s dark eyes. “That’s no victim.”

  Darla leaned forward before her boyfriend could repeat his snarl, one hand going to his knee even as her eyes stayed locked on Julian. “She’s confused, Julian. Yes, she has a juvenile record—”

  “Which would have been sealed if she weren’t a super,” Wroth grumbled.

  “And yes,” Darla went on, “she was involved—involuntarily—in some criminal activity in the last year, but trust me, if I believed she really did have dangerous villain tendencies, I would be the first one to say she should spend the rest of her days in Area Nine. But this girl doesn’t deserve that. We can help her. You can help her. Isn’t that what being a hero is all about?”

  If the last twenty-four hours were anything to go by, being a hero was about saving a woman from peril for two years straight and then getting dumped when you no longer benefited her career. Darla’s view of heroism was obviously distorted by her desire to please her ex-villain lover.

  As if a man could ever truly be an ex-villain. Julian didn’t understand how Darla—a straight-as-an-arrow legacy superhero just like him—could ever trust a man with Lucien Wroth’s reputation for mayhem.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Julian protested. “If she doesn’t know when she’s lying, I won’t know either.”

  “But you can…” Darla hesitated, her eyes sliding sideways to Wroth and Eisenmann.

  She knows. He hadn’t been aware Darla was privy to his deep dark secret. He locked his jaw. “I don’t use that part of my abilities. It’s unethical.”

  Wroth sat forward suddenly. “What part?”

  Julian narrowed his eyes. He’d rather not have Lucien Wroth know about his hidden talent, but Darla would probably tell him as soon as he left anyway. “If I’m in physical contact, I can force someone to tell the truth.” Eisenmann’s eyes lit with interest. Julian glared. “But I don’t. Heroes don’t subvert free will—even for a good cause. That’s how villains are born.”

  Wroth glowered, but DynaGirl was all earnestness, pitching forward in her chair until she nearly fell out. “What if she asked you to?”

  Julian looked back to the video feed. “She won’t.”

  “At least give her the chance to refuse,” Wroth snapped. “I know we villains are beneath your heroic magnificence, but—”

  “Lucien.” Darla’s low voice halted Wroth’s tirade. She didn’t take her eyes off Julian. “Will you talk to her? Just that. Please.”

  Julian frowned. He usually didn’t have to be begged to help—his parents had instilled the heroic virtues in him from the cradle and he never turned away from a voice calling out for help—but his reluctance was more than just lingering frustration over the situation with Kim. They hadn’t actually lied to him, but there was a cloying flavor of deceit in the air. There was something they weren’t telling him.

  “Why is it so important that I fix her? There’s something else going on here, isn’t there?”

  Darla shifted uncomfortably in her
chair and it was Wroth, of all people, who said, “I told you we wouldn’t be able to hide it from him.”

  “Hide what?” he demanded.

  “Do you remember a few months back? The furor over the Mind Bender who had his fingers in the thoughts of dozens of politicians and influential businesspeople around the city?”

  When Julian nodded, Darla looked away and Wroth went on without mercy or hesitation, his words cold and direct. “He was using Mirabelle to get to me. Twisting her thoughts. Implanting commands. He forced her to steal Apocalyptum for him and would have used me to set off an Apocalyptum bomb beneath the Super Summit if we hadn’t stopped him. Mirabelle helped stop him. But he was inside her mind for months before she got free.”

  “I understand that’s how she got to this point but there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  Wroth nodded curtly. “She keeps trying to escape. She’s not even conscious of what she’s doing. We’ve caught her every time—so far. But something is compelling her. It could be a lingering implanted suggestion. We don’t know. It could just be reaction to the time she was imprisoned in Area Nine, but we have no way of knowing if Kevin had bigger plans, a longer-reaching agenda that Mirabelle is programmed to carry out, even now that he’s gone.”

  “Can’t you ask the villain? I thought he was in custody.”

  Wroth shook his head sharply. “His mind is gone,” he said without a flicker of remorse.

  “Gone.” Julian frowned. It wasn’t a word people used lightly in the age of Mind Benders. “You mean he was wiped?”

  “No…” For the first time, Wroth hesitated. “Mirabelle… She broke him. He’s mad.”

  Julian arched a brow, his gaze flicking quickly to the monitor before returning to Darla. “And this girl is no villain, eh?”

  “It was self-defense,” Darla said, but Julian’s senses jumped and he knew even she didn’t believe the lie.

  “Of course it was.” Julian studied the somber faces around him. They cared for the girl, that much was obvious, but no amount of affection would change her feral nature. She was a danger to everyone around her. “I’ll talk to her,” he conceded, and the room itself seemed to sigh with relief, but he quickly held up a hand to forestall their gratitude. “But if she’s beyond help, I’m reporting her to the Council and she will be transferred to Area Nine.”