Villains Pride (The Shadow Master Book 2)

by M. K. Gibson

  Prego porn. Why am I not surprised?

  “Fine, whatever.”

  “I can see this is going nowhere. Enjoy yourself, sir. You always do.”

  “I will,” I said defiantly.

  “One last thing, sir.”

  I sighed. “What?”

  “A message from King Stanley came in.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Only that tomorrow morning some things might seem a little different and not to worry.”

  “Then why bother telling me then?” I asked.

  “Because we’re partners, sir. Until the end.”

  Sophia disconnected the call before I could respond. Angrily, I got up out of the recliner. Walking over to the fire, I relieved myself on the charred remnants of the Flynn family portrait. Normally pissing on my enemies brought me joy. But now, after that conversation, my heart just wasn’t in it.

  Damn Sophia.

  I staggered drunkenly to the master bedroom and passed out face down. My last thought before sleep claimed me was “The whole world can kiss my tan ass.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Where I Awake in a New Land, Empower Women, and Gain a New Disciple

  “Sorry, no sleeping here, boyo,” said a voice with a thick Irish accent.

  “Hmm?” I grunted, forcing my mind to wake up and push past the haze of alcohol.

  “Sure’n you got into the drink, oh aye. Been known to take a nip myself. But public drunkenness is bad enough, but indecency, I’ll have to take ye in.”

  “What the holy fuck are you talking about?” I asked, pushing myself up, my head swimming. My vertigo wasn’t from the alcohol; my liver was a professional, after all. Something felt off.

  Opening my eyes, I saw a cop with a billy club in front of me. And it wasn’t just a cop. It was an—I shit you not—blue-uniform-with-pointy-bus-driver-hat, 1940’s flatfoot cop. And an Irish one to boot.

  A cursory assessment of myself revealed I wasn’t just indecent; I was still naked. Well, this was interesting.

  My clothes were under the park bench that was serving as my makeshift bed. I picked them up and I felt my various items—rings, phone and such—in the pockets. Taking a quick look around, I saw I was in Dynasty City Memorial Park amid a picturesque forested glade, complete with a serene pond and quacking ducks.

  “Now I’ll let ye get dressed, but yer coming with me to the station.”

  “Fuck off,” I told the cop.

  “Oh dear!” a female voice said.

  “Don’t listen, Doris,” a man in a suit and a fedora said, cupping her ears.

  A small crowd had gathered. They all stared in shock at the sight of me with judging, puritanical eyes. All the people watching were like carbon copies of one another. The men were in suits with hats, briefcases, and horn-rimmed glasses. The women were all wearing dresses, stockings, and floppy hats, likewise looking like they stepped out of an idealized era that never truly existed.

  And they were all so, so white.

  “Officer Finnegan, what’s this Arab doing here?” one of the men asked the police officer, turning his nearly fainting wife away. “Is this what my tax dollars are going to? We thought Dynasty City was a place for honest, decent folks.”

  “I’m half Persian, if you must ask, my racist friend,” I said, standing up and waggling my penis as I did for no other reason than to get a few gasps and swoons from the onlookers.

  “My mother left Iran when it was still westernized before the 1979 Revolution and met my father, an archaeologist in America. And if you ever speak to me like that again, I’ll amputate your arms, gouge out your eyes, and force you to chew off your own tongue.”

  “1979?” the man said. “I think this half-breed is high on the reefer, officer.”

  “That’s enough!” Officer Finnegan said to me as well as the crowd. “Go on home people, nothing to see here!”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing,” I said, stretching in the morning air while thrusting my pelvis forward. “But I will admit it is a bit chilly, so you’ll forgive me for only flying my flag at half-mast.”

  Officer Finnegan took a step forward, grabbing my left shoulder with his hand. “Move it boyo.”

  I jerked my arm back. “Get your goddamn hands off me.”

  “Blasphemy!” Officer Finnegan declared as he struck me across my temple with his wooden billy club. With the vertigo I was suffering from, I could do nothing but take the hit.

  I brought my arms up defensively as blow after blow rained down across my back and shoulders. “Are ya ready to act like a decent citizen, ye godless heathen?”

  Something in me snapped. My head cleared and I popped up with an uppercut, striking Officer Finnegan under his chin.

  His head exploded as my godly strength connected with his mortal jaw. While it honestly wasn’t my intent to kill the officer, I felt no pity in decapitating the Celtic constable. Police brutality is never funny.

  Well, let’s be honest, it was funny as hell.

  But not when it happened to me.

  His headless body shot blood into the air like a geyser for a few seconds until his heart realized its job was done. The corpse slumped forward and fell at my feet.

  I stood, naked and soaked in blood. The crowd stared at me as if they’d just seen the devil. I looked down to see the puddling blood reach my suit under the bench. I tsked.

  “By chance, do any of you Stepford Wives have club soda on you? Blood is so hard to get out of quality fabric.”

  One of the stunned women automatically reached into her purse, pulling out a small emergency bottle of club soda. Her husband placed his hands on hers, shaking his head.

  “Doris, no.”

  “Oh, oh yes, right,” Doris said with a shake of her head, still in disbelief.

  Bloody, confused, and pissed off, I summoned the shadows to obey my commands. Tangible darkness shot forth from the forested ground, latching on to the citizens, lifting them high above the ground. As I focused my will, the tendrils of shadow squeezed the people, forcing them to cry out in pain and horror.

  “Forgive my forwardness, but where the fuck am I? And more importantly, when the fuck am I?”

  “Doris, cover your ears!” the man from earlier called out to his wife.

  “I’m trying! My arms are pinned!”

  “Doris, Doris, my more poor repressed Doris. You need to ditch this uptight asshole,” I told her, willing the tendril to lower her to me, then release her. She fell to the ground before me, and I reached out my blood-covered hand to help her up.

  I looked the shaken woman dead in the eyes. “Doris, take half the money in the bank. Take the car and drive as far west as possible and don’t stop until you see men with hair past their shoulders. Once there, I want you to get as drunk as possible. Then, find a man, find a woman, I don’t care which, and have a multiple orgasm for once in your life.”

  Doris eyed me skeptically. “Harold said those were a myth.”

  “Harold is an idiot.”

  “Hey!”

  “Shut up, Harold, we’re talking.” I half turned my head toward the husband to silence him, then looked back at Doris. “They are very, very real. Go, live the life you want to live. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Do you understand me?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Good.” I smiled. “Now, be a dear. Where and when are we?”

  “Dynasty City,” Doris said, looking at me with a confused look. “June 1949.”

  Hell. The goddamn Golden Age. That explained so much. With a nod, I let her go. As I did, she smiled, then awkwardly, she glanced down at my manhood, then frowned.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  Doris spun on her heels and marched to the dangling Harold. “You said they didn’t come any bigger! You said that four inches was average!”

  “Uhh . . . uhh . . .”

  “Can you lower him down a little?” Doris asked me.

  “Sure,” I shrugged, indulging her for no other reason than I was
curious.

  Once Harold was eye-to-eye with his wife, the fuming Doris reached back her tiny fist and cold-cocked Harold in the jaw.

  “Oh fuck me!” Doris yelled, shaking her fist. “Ow ow ow!”

  “Doris, what are you doing?” Harold asked shaking his head a little.

  “How’s it feel now, Harold? How’s it feel to be the one being hit?”

  “Doris, I never hit you!” Harold said, looking around at the other citizens wearily.

  “Bullshit, you tiny-peckered motherfucker!”

  “Doris!” Harold yelled. “I only ever corrected you when you made mistakes, that’s all.”

  “Corrected?! I’m not a goddamn dog!” Doris yelled, reaching her fist back again.

  I caught her wrist before she threw the punch. Doris rounded on me.

  “What?!”

  “Take this,” I told her, handing her one of the pills I retrieved from my possessions.

  “What is it? I don’t want to pop any goofballs.”

  “Trust me. Do you want Harold to remember this day?”

  “Yes?”

  “Then take the pill, Doris,” I told her. Then I produced a contract. “If you work for me for a period of five years, I will empower you. Plus, a stipend of significant funds will be paid to an account of your choosing. Do we have an accord?”

  Doris didn’t even hesitate at the chance for empowerment. She scribbled her name on the contract and then popped the pill, dry swallowing it. Once she did, a fraction of my power flooded into her.

  Her form began to shift instantly. Her bright sundress vanished, replaced by an elegant, low-cut, reddish-black dress with a long split up the side. She wore matching black knee-high boots, a black domino mask, and elbow-length gloves made of crushed red velvet. Her hair grew past her waist and turned a fiery red. In her hand, she held a black cigarette holder, complete with a lit smoke.

  “Rise, my new femme fatale,” I said. “I name you Myst.”

  “Mmm, works for me,” Myst said.

  “Doris! You smoke?”

  Myst languidly moved in her new form, appreciating the enhancements. “Oh Harold, there’s a lot you don’t know about me. Did you know I always wished I could be a man, if only so I could hit you the way you hit me?”

  “Doris . . .”

  “Shh.” Myst said. Her form shifted into a smoky shadow cloud, then reformed, coalescing into a brutish thug of a man.

  In her new form, Myst hit Harold so hard, I heard his jaw break. With a laugh, Myst shifted once more into a smoky form. Instead of reforming, the cloud shot into Harold’s open mouth.

  Harold coughed, trying desperately to get his breath. I watched as the abusive man struggled futilely. Harold’s head hung limp in seconds. He was dead. The cloud poured from his mouth and once again, the female form of Myst stood before me.

  “All hail the Shadow Master,” Myst said. Then she quirked her eyebrow at me, looking down past my waist. “Umm . . . Shadow Master?

  “I offer no excuses nor apologies,” I said with a prideful smile.

  Unlike before with Wendell and his transformation, I felt no such hesitation in this moment.

  My erection was justified.

  “So, what now?” Myst asked.

  I picked up my clothing and began putting it on. “How do you feel about secret lairs, mayhem, and general villainy?”

  “Incredibly accepting.” Myst smiled.

  Superhero Fun Fact #6

  Superman once went back in time in Action Comics #148 . . . to ensure Native Americans sold the land that would eventually become Metropolis.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Where I Search for My Missing Minions, Find My Least Favorite, and Mock NASCAR

  “So, this is a secret lair? I’m impressed,” Myst said, picking up random objects and looking them over.

  “Thank you,” I absently said while I looked around my office for something out of place.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know yet. Nothing seems missing, or moved.”

  “Were you expecting a burglar?”

  “Burglar?” I said, raising an eyebrow. Who says “burglar” anymore?

  “A crook.”

  “Do you mean, like a guy in a black and white striped shirt, a mask, and a sack with a dollar sign on it?”

  “Yes?”

  Oh, right. Golden Age.

  OK, time to kill two birds with one stone. “Follow me,” I told Myst.

  With a final discerning look about my office, I walked toward a solid wall and willed an opening into existence. Perk of being a god in your own embassy. Plus, it was the best way to conceal what I did not want to be seen.

  We walked into my lair’s secret command room. “Sit,” I told Myst, pointing to a chair in front of a monitor.

  “Is this one of those television sets?”

  “Something like that,” I said, picking up a wireless neural interface circlet I’d liberated from one of the mad scientists who worked for me. I looked at the object as theories popped into my head.

  Setting my thoughts aside, I put the circlet on her head. Immediately Myst’s head snapped back and her eyes fluttered.

  “This device is wired into the internet. You have a lot of catching up to do, and to be frank, I don’t feel like teaching it. Like all great shortcuts to success—inherited wealth, white privilege, gun ownership, and not being a woman, to name a few—this will bypass all that.”

  With Myst distracted, I went to my command center and activated the holo-monitors. The first thing I did was pull up the internal feed from one of my embassy storerooms. The contents were in place and unchanged.

  Curious.

  Placing a neural interface on my own head, I began scanning through hundreds and hundreds of feeds all through the city. Everywhere I looked, I saw countless superheroes in brightly colored costumes. They all had the brightest white teeth and the strongest jaw lines.

  The female heroes looked like living pin-ups, with corseted figures and pointy boobs. And to think there’s an entire modern subculture who worships those pin-up women as icons by cosplaying as them and tattooing their images on their skin. They do realize that between missions those poor subjugated women ironed shirts, cooked dinners, and cleaned the hero lairs?

  It was easy to spot who the villains were. How? Because they were ugly.

  I don’t mean to be crass or shaming, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and other idiotic platitudes sub-average people and bleeding hearts say to save feelings from being hurt).

  I mean, these sad sacks were repugnant. They were short, or bald, or deformed, or had exaggerated features, like witch’s noses or bat-like ears. It was an era when the all-American jock was deified as the hero while the intelligent introvert was demonized as being a square.

  It pleased me that in the prime universe, said jocks, once their high school peak was over, often were classified as the fuck-nuts who labored in the factories owned by the Silicon Valley nerds.

  And yes, they were fuck-nuts. Anyone who spends that much time obsessing about MMA, beer pong, and “dude, bro” culture was doomed to forever be mediocre, work blue collar, and die early.

  So that put a smile on my face.

  After a few minutes of searching, I found one of the things I was looking for. Or rather, whom I was looking for. He wasn’t my preferred choice, but he’d do. I opened a mental link to my thrall.

  “Wraith Knight,” I mentally sent.

  “God?”

  I forgot sometimes that my thrall, despite my power flowing through him, was originally a petty criminal named Wendell.

  “No, it’s not God. But as far as you’re concerned for the next five years, I am your god.”

  “Jackson!”

  I mentally sent a shock of pain through our soul-bonded link into Wraith Knight.

  “Ahh! My apologies, Shadow Master.”

  “Better. We’re not on a first-name basis yet. But, considering you’re here, in this
time and place, and that I can’t find the Night Watchman, you’re swiftly rising in my ranks. Come to my lair, now.”

  “I am in a bit of a situation, Master.”

  My video feed and data overlay showed that my servant was in the middle of a battle with Captain Zoom and the Zoom Crew, a family of speed-enhanced superheroes who fought crime and taught life lessons.

  “Well, finish them off, and get here.”

  “I’m trying to, Master. They’re hard to hit.”

  Wraith Knight took powerful, lumbering swings with his shadow blades. The deft Zoom Crew easily dodged the painfully slow attacks, while countering with a flurry of supersonic punches.

  While their fists were weak against his shadow armor by themselves, simple punches multiplied by hundreds of times per second had an additive effect. In time, my minion was knocked to the ground.

  Once he was down, the five speedsters ran in a circle around him, faster and faster. In seconds, the Zoom Crew created a controlled tornado, lifting Wraith Knight from the ground.

  I sighed. Well, thanks to the transitive property, an attack on one of my thralls constituted an attack on me. I opened a portal from my lair to Wraith Knight’s location in Dynasty City. Popping my head through, I watched the Crew continue their maneuver while they tried to talk to my thrall.

  “Say chum, you seem to be in a hard way. Can we give you a lift?” Captain Zoom taunted.

  “I say we give this hunk of armor a good polishing!” the youngest of the Crew said.

  “Good one, Lickety-Split!” Zoom bellowed.

  “And let’s do it quickly!” the twins Dash and Dare said in unison.

  “And then we’ll be home in time for a sensible dinner!” exclaimed Mother Mercury. “I have a pot roast in the oven.”

  “Aww mom,” the kids said. “We like fast food!”

  “Oh hell,” I moaned, slapping my hand across my face. The Golden Age had a few cool retro things going for it. Dialogue was not one of them.

  I flicked my hand, causing a needle-thin, razor-sharp, unbreakable line of shadow to streak through the circling heroes. All five of them shrieked in pain.