“Are you sure you want to—”
“Let’s do this.” The hard resolve in her voice jarred with the nervousness in her eyes.
Julian placed a hand palm up on the table and she slipped her fingers into it. Her hands were icy and he suppressed a shiver as the chill seemed to reach up his arm. He wrapped her hand firmly in his, met her eyes straight on, and asked, “Where have you been the last three days?” as he pulsed forced truthfulness through the touch.
Mirage jerked, her eyes widening until they dominated her face. She was all eyes and he was falling into them, sliding into her thoughts until he came up against something hard. An impenetrable barrier. He could feel her, sense her, trapped on the other side, hammering her fists against it, trying to break free, and he reached out with his gift to help her. He pushed.
And the blast flung him bodily across the room, slamming him into the wall.
Chapter Seven: It’s a Trap!
Mirage blinked to clear her vision. She was on the floor behind her overturned chair, Lucien’s concerned face floating above, her ears ringing.
“Belle!” Lucien bellowed, as if she’d been unconscious for hours, though Darla was still rising from her chair. Luc must have used superspeed to get to her side before she could even open the eyes she’d squeezed shut as she fell. “Belle, speak to me!”
“I’m fine!” She shoved Lucien away and sat up. Julian was peeling himself off the wall, a trickle of blood dripping out of his nose. Whatever had booby-trapped her mind had thrown her to the ground, but it had launched him. “You all right?”
He waved a hand in what she assumed was supposed to be an affirmative and pulled out a handkerchief to mop up the blood gaining momentum from his nose. Trust Captain Justice to have an actual linen hanky on hand. “Are you?” he ask, his voice oddly distorted by the gusher he tried to staunch.
It took her a moment to collect her thoughts and realize he was asking if she was all right. “Not a scratch. That was unex—” She broke off as Lucien darted across the room, faster than she could blink, and rammed Justice into the wall that already bore cracks from the imprint of his body. “Luc!”
“You swore it wouldn’t hurt her.” He jerked Justice bodily off the wall, then slammed him back into it, hard enough to make the entire room shiver.
“I’m not hurt!” Mirage rushed forward—though God only knew what she could do to pull her superstrong brother off the superstrong Captain Justice—but Darla got there first.
“Lucien, take it easy. She’s fine.” She got a hold of him—so at least he stopped actively ramming Justice into the wall—but wasn’t able to pry him off.
“He said there was no danger!”
“There wasn’t for me,” Mirage shouted, as if sheer volume could get through to her brother. “He didn’t hurt me. I hurt him. By accident. There was some kind of booby trap in my mind. He had no way of knowing it was there. Hell, I didn’t even know it was there, though for all I know I put it there. Dammit, Luc, chill.”
Mirage slammed an image into Lucien’s mind, Captain Justice, a bloody and battered wreck—it wasn’t much of a stretch with the blood still pouring from his nose. Lucien staggered back, dropping Justice, staring at his hands as if wondering what they’d done without his permission, and Mirage dropped the illusion.
Luc looked from the blood-soaked-but-relatively-unharmed Justice to Mirage and back again, then raked a hand through his hair and grunted, “I need a minute,” before stalking out of the conference room. Darla didn’t say a word, just followed him into the hall, leaving Mirage alone with Captain Justice.
His nose had about stopped bleeding, but he looked like he needed to wring out the hanky. Yuck. At least Lucien hadn’t given him a black eye to match.
“Sorry about Luc. He’s always been kind of irrational where I’m concerned.”
Justice shrugged. “He loves you,” he said, as if that explained it all. And maybe it did.
“Do you have any siblings? A little sister you go kind of bat-shit to protect?”
“No. It’s just me.”
“Oh.” What should she say? Sorry? His parents had died years ago. And something about the flat way he said it made her think he was completely alone. Her family may give new meaning to dysfunctional, but she’d always known there was no crime they would hesitate to commit for her. She’d been secure in that, if nothing else. Poor Justice. At least he has Kim Carruthers.
“Do you need anything?”
“Me?” She almost laughed at the absurdity. He just didn’t know when to stop being self-sacrificing and heroic. “I’m not the one bleeding all over the place. Shouldn’t you get that looked at?”
“It’s already stopped.” He frowned at the bloody mess all over his hands and the handkerchief. “I should get cleaned up. You sure you don’t want anything? A Coke? Chocolate? I hear sugar’s good for staving off shock.”
“I’m not shocky, but a Coke sounds good. Thanks.” Heroes were a weird breed. Even a pint short, Justice couldn’t stop looking after others. “Sorry about making you bleed.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve never had a bloody nose before. It’s kind of a novelty.”
One of the aspects of superstrength was a general invincibility, but Lucien had gotten plenty scraped up before he’d come into his powers. “Did you always have your powers? Even as a kid?”
“Nah. Most of my powers kicked in at puberty—pretty standard for second-gen—but I’ve always had at least some resistance to injury. And I wasn’t really much of a brawler as a kid. No reason anyone would try to bloody my nose. What about you?” At first she thought he was asking her if anyone had ever tried to bloody her nose, but then, “When did your powers kick in? Mind-bender powers tend to develop pretty late, don’t they?”
“Usually, but mine came in when I was seven.” With a little help from her father’s treatments.
Justice blinked. “Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder you…” He trailed off, thinking better of whatever he’d been about to say, but Mirage needed to hear it. Some part of her needed to know what he thought of her.
“What?”
“It’s just, you’ve never seemed twenty to me. You’re—”
“Too broken to be so young?”
“I was going to say jaded. Tired. Like you’ve seen too much and you’re exhausted by life already. Not broken.”
Is that any better?
He lifted a hand, as if he would have scrubbed his face, and stopped himself, seeing the dried blood caked on his palm. “I’ll get you that soda.”
Mirage waited until the door swished shut behind him then retreated to the far corner and sank to the floor, wedging herself back until the walls pressed comfortingly against her back. She dropped her forehead onto her raised knees. What had gone wrong? Their first attempt at forced clarity had been a resounding failure.
Or rather, their second attempt. The first attempt, outside the bank last night, had gotten through—because she wasn’t braced for it? Had she somehow rejected his help today? She hadn’t consciously meant to fling him out like that, but she couldn’t deny she’d had doubts, an internal resistance she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to push aside.
How could she trust another man prowling around inside her head? Even if his name was synonymous with honor and virtue. What if he bent her into his own image just as Kevin had? He may not even see that it was wrong because he would be making her good—which sounded dreadful to someone who’d never seen herself as a good girl.
But if she had somehow expelled him from her mind, how had she done it? That kind of physical manifestation of a psychic blast indicated a lot of power. Power she’d never had. Was Lucien right? Were her powers growing? Or was he only half right and they were mutating?
Mirage shuddered. The last thing she needed was a second puberty on top of everything else screwing her up. Learning to cope with her powers had been hard enough the first time. She didn’t want to go through th
ose erratic fluxes again, when she could never be sure if her powers would work or not.
Though at the moment, everything she tried was working. The limits she’d always had seemed to have vanished. She simply imagined something and it was done. Her visions made illusion with virtually no exertion. And no power hangover. It shouldn’t be possible.
Something cold touched her arm and Mirage jerked, her head snapping up. Justice waved the chilled Coke can in front of her face, a half smile playing on his. “I said your name three times.”
“Sorry. I was somewhere else.” She accepted the can with a nod of thanks, quickly popping the top and taking a quick slug of sweet, carbonated goodness. She closed her eyes, focusing on the simple sensation of bubbles tickling down her throat.
“Somewhere good?”
Reluctantly she opened her eyes. “Huh?”
“You said you were somewhere else. Somewhere good?” He slid to the floor beside her, long, muscular legs stretched in front of him as he chugged half his own Coke.
“Not particularly.”
He nodded, looking straight ahead and letting the silence fall around them—which gave her ample chance to admire his profile. And what a profile it is. No wonder Kim Carruthers had gone for him. The man practically defined chiseled.
“Nice table,” he commented, still without turning his face toward her. “Comfortable chairs.” Mirage blinked, wondering if the pressure had gotten to Captain Justice. Then he slanted her a look, just a fraction of one, out of the corner of his eye, one eyebrow arching slightly, lips quirking slightly. “There a reason we’re sitting on the floor?”
So when the world drops out from under me, I don’t fall as far. “No reason.” She concentrated on her Coke can, unable to meet his eyes, knowing he could hear the lie.
He didn’t push it. Just let the silence wrap around them again. They drank their sodas, side by side, neither looking at the other, and Mirage felt the knot between her shoulder blades begin to loosen. She felt calm, clear, and knew it was because of him, though she didn’t know why. His ability? Or just something about Captain Justice himself, the man, who eased her?
“Justice—”
“Julian.”
“What?”
“My name. It’s Julian. Julian Case.”
She blinked, startled she’d never heard it before. Everyone knew DynaGirl was Darla Powers, but Captain Justice was always called Captain Justice and nothing else. “Is it a secret identity?”
“No. Just a name no one seems to care to use.”
“Julian. Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
He smiled—amused, just a little bit wry, and a whole lot heart-stopping—and Mirage suddenly had butterflies doing acrobatics in her stomach. Keep your distance, you idiot. He’s taken. She couldn’t let herself forget that he was very publicly head-over-heels in love with the perfectly perky blonde from The Sentinel. Even if he was looking at her with enough heat to melt away those inconvenient memories. Except he couldn’t be looking at her that way. It had to be in her head—just like everything else lately—because he was in love with Kim Carruthers. Notoriously devoted to her. He wasn’t looking at Mirage with warmth, affection and…desire? Impossible.
That he could want anything from her was a delusion she needed to expel, just like all the other demons crawling around in her brain. “How long have you and Kim Carruthers been an item?”
Julian’s smile shut off, his eyes darkening. “We aren’t.”
“Oh.” Relief and elation threw open the gates holding her baser urges in check. He wasn’t with Kim. He probably didn’t even like perfectly perky blondes. Suddenly, Mirage had permission to covet Captain Justice’s justifiably covetable body and that was all the invitation her hormones needed. Ladies, start your engines. Captain Justice is on the market. But Julian was frowning, not grinning at her like he should have been if they’d just overcome the misunderstanding keeping him from jumping her bones, so she kept her lustful impulses in check and just feigned confusion. “But the papers… I guess you can’t believe everything you read, right?”
“It’s not that. Kim and I were together, but we’re not anymore.”
“Oh.” A little piece of her elation broke off and crumbled. Apparently blonde and perfectly perky was his type. “That must be hard. You seemed like you were really in love.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She knew it as soon as he grimaced. “Just because something isn’t a lie, doesn’t mean it’s wholly true either. The truth is a spectrum of color, not black and white. Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Yeah, totally.” But when his brows pulled together, she knew he’d heard the lie and she gave a self-deprecating huff of laughter. “No. Sorry.” She had no freaking idea what a spectrum of color had to do with him being in love with Kim Carruthers. God, he was probably trying to tell her he still loved her.
Mirage hoped he would explain, tell her he hadn’t really loved Kim, that he’d always secretly been drawn to waifish girls with black hair, but he just gave a small shake of his head. “It isn’t important. Are you feeling better?”
Ah. So they were getting back on doctor-patient footing again, was that it? Things must’ve been getting too personal for Captain Justice. “As better as I can be as a zombie girl who isn’t in control of her own brain anymore.”
“You aren’t a zombie. I’ve never once heard you say you hunger for brains.”
Mirage grimaced at the half-assed joke. “I just wish I could be sure which thoughts were mine and which weren’t. I don’t even know if there was some kind of booby-trap or if I was the one who booted you out of my head.”
“You think you could have put that barrier in?”
Mirage closed her eyes, pressing once more against the walls of her mind. “I don’t know. It feels like me. But even if I did it, was it me doing it? Or Kevin’s version of me?”
“Kevin’s version?”
“His voice in my head always sounded like my voice. And now I can’t stop hearing it. My father…” She hesitated, feeling strange about speaking about her father with a hero, like she was betraying him somehow, but the man beside her didn’t look like an avenging super. He looked like Julian. Handsome. Open. Listening. And there were things she needed to say. Things she hadn’t been able to say, even to Lucien.
“My father could force me to do things, but I always knew it was outside compulsion. I never lost that awareness, that part of myself. Kevin was like a disease—microscopic, replicating inside my brain, visible only in the symptoms, until I was so saturated with him it was like trying to think through a fever of a hundred and four while my brain boiled.”
“Your father used compulsion on you?”
Mirage sighed. Trust a hero to fixate on the first tree he came to and miss the forest entirely. “He didn’t mean to. He was powerful, could make you dance like a puppet if he wanted to, but he never did. Most of the time he hated his powers. He preferred science. Cool rationality. But everyone loses control sometimes.” A hero who accidentally demolished a building when first coming into superstrength was instantly forgiven, but a Mind Bender who accidentally activates his powers even once was instantly tarred a villain. How was that justice? “Didn’t you ever wonder how a hero was able to capture him in the first place? How do you capture someone who can bend your mind to force you to his will unless he is intentionally restraining his powers?”
“He escaped, didn’t he? How could he be still at large if he never used his powers?”
“I didn’t say he never used them. I said he only did it when upset. He didn’t react well to being wrongfully convicted. Or the attempts to recapture him.”
“Wrongfully?”
“Show me a Mind Bender who ever got a fair trial.”
“It’s impossible. They could manipulate the jury.”
“So our rights don’t matter?”
“Our? You put yourself in the same category as your father?”
“Imprisoned witho
ut a trial? Yes. I’d say we’re in the same category.”
“And yet you both escaped your prisons.”
“Is that supposed to justify it?”
“I met you inside a bank vault. Protestations of innocence are a bit hard to swallow.”
“I never said I was innocent. I have no problem admitting I’ve taken some things that didn’t belong to me. I just said I didn’t get a trial by my peers.”
“I’m not sure you have any.”
Mirage frowned, trying to figure out if she’d just been insulted or complimented, as Julian dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small black box.
“Recognize this?”
“Should I?”
“You went to quite a bit of trouble to steal it, so yes, you should.”
“That’s it? That’s what I broke in for?” Her fingertips itched. Maybe if she opened it she would remember. If she touched it… She reached for the box, but Justice closed his hand, the tiny box disappearing inside his grip. “What’s in it?”
“Where were you the last three days, Mirage? What kind of mission are you set on?”
Their arms were touching and she felt an electric tingle pass from his flesh to hers, the slightest little push toward truthfulness. But her memories stayed shattered, disarrayed. She felt clear in her time with him. Sharp. But the missing days were still missing. It was like everything that happened when he wasn’t around was a fragmented dream and only when he was with her was she awake, making memories, and living as her true self.
“Mirage?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Maybe next time.” The hand holding the box disappeared back into his pocket and Mirage barely restrained the urge to lunge after it, pry it open, expose whatever was hidden inside. She would have, if she’d had any faith it would have been the key to unlocking her truth, rather than another mismatched clue she had to figure out how to explain. She was too drained for any more razor-edged puzzle pieces today.
Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) Page 5