That was enough. The candy had crept up to her arms while I gave my speech, and her eyes lost focus. I took a step, teleporting back to the drug crate and my unconscious friends. I shoved The Machine against Ray’s chest and Claire’s back, and they both slid upright groggily, but more awake by the second.
“Grab the bottle. We have sixty seconds, tops, before Marvelous breaks free. We’re getting out,” I ordered.
Ray took me seriously. He vaulted over the crate next to him, and when I teleported to the open doorway I turned to see him already racing toward me with the bottle of blood. Vera flew up to meet me, Claire zoomed past me, and I turned and ran for the fence.
Through the door behind me, I heard Marvelous yelp, “My clothes!” Oh, right. Did I forget to tell her the sugar shell spread by eating fabric?
“HA HA HA HA HA!” I laughed. I leaped up over the edge of the sagging chain and shouted to Claire ahead of me, “Sell the bottle fast and cheap. When Marvelous tracks it down, I don’t want it to be in our hands.”
The last obstacle to the street out of the way, I slapped my chest, jumped onto the light bike that sprang into existence in front of me, and sped away.
That was how a professional supervillain does it.
drove up to Northeast West Hollywood Middle and kept going. A couple of kids my age were walking past. I didn’t know them, but I really didn’t want to be seen entering my secret lair. City blocks down that way were huge, so I circled through the residential section on the other side and back around. There, nobody was obviously watching. That would do. I pulled up, dismissed my light bike, and walked across the schoolyard to the double doors that disguised my lair’s elevator.
The shudder as that elevator pulled to a stop on my laboratory level felt good. The job was neatly wrapped up, and I could look ahead to new things.
First things first. I refilled my candy tank, hacking off chunks from my block of sugar and feeding them in to be compressed. When I topped the tank off, my sugar block had been reduced to a pile I could have bought in a bag at the grocery store. That would need attending to. Sugar couldn’t be hard to get, and the gold Claire and Ray sold off would get me a couple hundred bucks worth, right? By then I’d be able to afford more.
Stealing the dragon blood hadn’t taken long. The drive down to Santa Monica and back had taken way longer. I still had a good chunk of the afternoon. I could kick my super power into gear and make us some more equipment, as long as it wasn’t candy based.
I could make zombie rag dolls for Claire. She’d gotten a kick out of the teddy bears in the warehouse. With her bear pajamas, a toy box theme would be perfect for her!
My phone roared. That would be Claire calling me right now. I flipped it up and quipped, “You’ve reached Penelope Akk. To speak to the mad scientist, press one. To order an army of robotic minions, press two.”
Claire didn’t give me time to think of a three. “Are you coming, or what?”
Goofball me, I felt a little panicky. “Coming where?”
“The other half of the operation! You said you wanted to sell the bottle right now!”
I didn’t know Little Armenia, but it was only a few blocks from my house. It was just an itty bitty neighborhood I’d hardly ever set foot in. I met Claire and Ray at the corner of Edgemont and Los Feliz, and we walked down to meet Claire’s fence.
It didn’t look like a bad neighborhood, but maybe it was. Three supervillains in costume walking down the street didn’t get a glance from the residents. Claire held the bottle, and Ray walked like a bird with his hands clasped behind him, grinning maniacally. Vera floated by my shoulder, which I was getting used to. She also stopped to rubberneck constantly, which I was also getting used to.
Whether we looked ridiculous or like bad news, nobody paid the slightest attention. Not even when we stopped in front of the big church. Claire pointed across the street, and we crossed over to stand between two rather cool brown and red three story wooden houses, the kind with sloping roofs and outcroppings where you’re not sure just how many stories they really have. They looked like apartment buildings, fusing together way up at the top but leaving a tiny alley between the buildings locked off by a metal gate.
No, not locked. Claire opened the gate right up, led us down the shadowy path of sick grass and broken stones, and pointed at the metal fire escape. “We go up those. The fence is on the roof.”
The ladder hadn’t been lowered to the ground, but Ray jumped up, grabbed the railing on the second floor, got his feet under him and then jumped up again like a monkey to grab the next level. Fine. He wanted to be that way? I spun in place and took a step backwards, focusing on the stairs I could see but couldn’t reach. My teleport rings deposited me at the base of those stairs, and I turned and aimed for the next set. Metal rails clattered as Ray climbed them, Claire’s grappling hook thumped and hissed, and as I set my foot down on the edge of the roof with my last teleport, her and Ray’s feet hit the tar paper on either side of me.
The roof of this building was crazy. Parts of it sloped sharply like towers, but a wide section in the middle stayed flat to accommodate the little extra building spanning the gap. Claire slid up to that on her frictionless bear feet and knocked on the heavy wooden door.
“What do you want?” a man’s heavily muffled voice demanded.
“We’re here to shop,” Claire chirped back, putting on the cute.
It didn’t work this time. “Halloween was a month and a half ago.”
Leaning forward and doing his bird act again, Ray offered, “I could kick down the door if you like.”
I swatted him in the chest with the back of my hand, which hurt my hand much more than it did him. Good grief, he had chest muscles now, too. What had I done? I tried to put the sting into my voice instead. “Reviled, treat our contacts with dignity.”
Ray lifted his hat in one hand, bowing low. “You’re right. I apologize, Sir. I merely wished to suggest we have the powers to accompany these costumes.”
The door opened—slightly, jerking against a chain on the inside. The gap allowed a guy, maybe college age, to peek through at me. Actually, not at me. He aimed his sullen, suspicious stare at Vera first, then down at me. He didn’t exactly sound angry, just frustrated. “You can’t come in. My grandmother won’t do business with you. She hates technology.”
I raised an eyebrow, although no one could see it behind the visor. “E-Claire, your contact didn’t call ahead?” The name “E-Claire” only made the guy at the door scowl a little more.
Claire gave me a sheepish grin. “I guess not.”
On the other side of me, Ray sounded curious. “I’ve heard about the war between magic and science. I thought it was just a myth.”
“It’s a myth my grandmother believes with all her heart. She won’t do business with you,” the guy behind the door repeated.
“I know my Dad—” I started, when a loud clanging from the fire escape interrupted me, and again, and again with some extra clattering, until Lucyfar hauled herself up over the edge of the building.
She took the surprise way more in stride than we did. “Hey, what are you guys doing here?” she asked as she hopped to her feet and rushed forward to meet us. She sounded as gleeful as if she were opening presents on Christmas morning, and I thought she was going to hug me. Instead, she just grabbed one of my shoulders and one of Claire’s and gave them both an affectionate squeeze.
Claire lifted up the glass-and-gold bottle in both hands. “We’re here to sell this!”
Lucyfar’s eyebrows shot right up. “No way. Is that Fat Dan’s old bottle of dragon blood? I thought that was in China!”
“We stole it from a warehouse in Santa Monica about an hour, hour and a half ago,” I informed her, feeling a little smug.
“Owned by the Council Of Seven And A Half, I believe,” Claire added.
Lucyfar gave our shoulders another hard squeeze, shaking her head and bowing forward in delight. “And right now, Marvelous will do
absolutely anything to get her hands on some dragon blood.”
Ray lifted a gloved hand and studied the back of it theatrically, while his voice drawled with a smugness that had me completely beat. “We may have walked over her prostrate form on the way out the door.”
Lucyfar burst out laughing. First, she doubled forward, leaning heavily on Claire’s and my shoulders, then she reared back and let go, all the while cackling in glee. She eventually had to put a hand over her face just to wheeze, “Oh, man. Absolutely perfect! So you sell the bottle to the old biddy here, and she sells it to Marvelous, whose hands are now clean while she’s also completely humiliated. You have got to let me be the one to tell her where the bottle is. I’m begging! The look on her face will keep me warm all winter.”
She was dragging a big grin out of me, too. I tried to be serious. “Be my guest. I want our involvement in this over as soon as possible.”
Still chuckling, Lucyfar stepped forward past us and snapped at the guy behind the door, “Let ‘em in, Nicky. Your gramma will have a fit if she finds out she could have fenced Fat Dan’s bottle of dragon blood but missed out.”
“You know how she feels about tech villains, Lucy. She won’t even watch TV,” Nicky grumbled.
“She’ll make an exception. Anyway, if you don’t I’ll kick the door down.”
Heroically, Ray managed to stay silent as the door was unbolted, but he did make another show of studying his gloves as he rubbed his fingers together.
We poured inside when the door opened. The owner sure liked her stereotypes. Not only did she hate technology, this place looked like a magical knickknack shop. The windows had heavy curtains keeping the front room dim, and tables and shelves and display stands were all crowded with random looking clutter ranging from knotted string to a two foot long engraved silver wand. All of it was magic, if I correctly interpreted Vera’s rapidly darting attention.
One thing did make me wonder. “I thought there’d be more books.”
“Naah,” Lucyfar corrected me breezily. “Honest to goodness magical grimoires are so rare and priceless no one ever sells them. Kinda like a Conqueror orb, eh?” She gave me an exaggerated wink and nudged me with her elbow, mistakenly confident that I had the slightest idea what she was talking about.
Turning to Claire, Lucyfar held out both hands and asked, “Can I see the dragon’s blood? This bottle is famous, you know.” When Claire loosened her grip, Lucyfar lifted the bottle out of her hands and held it up to what little light the room had. “So how did you get this thing? I want the whole story!”
I was happy to oblige. “One of E-Claire’s mysterious online friends tipped us off about where the bottle was being held. I thought it was you.”
Lucyfar shook her head. “Not me. No shortage of shady customers making deals with supervillains in this town.”
It had been an idle guess anyway. I shrugged. “We kept the heist as smooth as possible. I neutralized gunpowder and electronic communications in and around the warehouse. We traced the magical signal to the bottle, cut the protections out, and ran for the hills. Minimal opposition.”
“A few thugs, Witch Hunter, Ifrit, and Marvelous,” Ray supplied in his airiest fake-casual tone.
Glee burned right up my spine as I tried to match Ray’s lazy smugness. “Ifrit was definitely minimal opposition.”
Lucyfar exploded in another cackling laugh, and I got prodded from several directions by the blunt tips of black phantom knives. “Details, kids. Come on, don’t hold out on me!”
I didn’t want to brag. Okay, I wanted to brag a lot. I was on fire with it. But a supervillain should be a gracious winner and have style, right? “Without working guns, the guards were pretty helpless. I used them to test my new toys. One of those toys explodes on contact with flame, so Ifrit never had a chance. I’ve got a sugar formula now for gluing defeated enemies in place, so once we knocked anyone down, the fight was over.”
Claire lost patience with my restraint and jumped in. “Her new fighting rig is brutal. The harassment weapons are so much fun to watch. Guards went flying everywhere! Witch Hunter waited until the guards were down to challenge us.”
Lucyfar snorted. “Yeah, for a guy who will happily spend twenty hours a day practicing forms, he won’t do a lick of work until he actually has to. Seven and a Half must have known Marvelous would come for the bottle. With all his spell breaking gear, she’d have had her hands full getting past him.”
“Reviled dueled him one on one!” Claire broke in again.
I folded my arms and failed to sound disapproving. “Which is why Marvelous arrived before we could get away with the loot.”
Lucyfar gave Ray a sly smile and a raised eyebrow. “One on one? I like your pride, kid. I’m impressed, too. Witch Hunter’s not a heavy hitter, but he’s way more experienced than you.”
Ray gave me a small bow. “I learned to fight watching Bad Penny. As long as I made sure he never hit me, sooner or later I’d land a finishing blow.” His formality cracked, a grin splitting his masked face. “It was hard keeping that kind of self-control. Everything was split second reactions, because I couldn’t predict what he would do. Incredible adrenaline rush, but I kept thinking, and he was too used to his patterns. Eventually, I hit him from a direction he didn’t expect, and the fight was over.”
“Did he try the knife thing? He does that when he knows a fight’s going south.”
Ray jerked his head at me. “He threw it at Bad Penny.”
“At Vera,” I corrected.
Lucyfar smirked again. “Get used to that.”
Ray picked up a black hat rather like his own off a shelf, turning it over to examine it as he finished the tale. “I needed the duel, but what I learned most is that if I had to beat him quickly and safely, I should have hit him with a crate or some other object too big to dodge or block. The advantage of strength and speed together gives me options that render a martial artist’s skill moot. Bad Penny’s strategy of never letting myself get hit has given me time to figure that out.”
That wasn’t how I remembered my fights. “I wish that was my strategy. My head still hurts from letting Marvelous get a hit in.”
Ray put the hat back down and spread his hands. “I plead ignorance. When I woke up, you were still standing, and she wasn’t.”
That lit up Lucyfar. “So, Bad Penny defeated Marvelous one-on-one and stole the dragon’s blood right out from under her nose? I am so glad I ran into you kids here today!”
I tilted my head suspiciously. Well, suspicious in a friendly way. “You want something.”
Lucyfar clasped her hands together and leaned toward me with a grin more maniacal than pleading. “First, I want to hear all about you taking down Marvelous.”
Oh, boy. Well, no need to tiptoe around the point with Lucy. “I’d like to hold onto my secrets. Sooner or later, I’ll need to use them against you.”
Lucy clasped her hand to her chest, eyes wide in shock. “How could you say such a completely accurate thing? Who wouldn’t trust me, the Princess of Lies?”
Apparently the shop owner wouldn’t. She emerged in an explosion of angry… Russian? It sounded like Russian to me. She looked Russian, like a peasant from an old cartoon, with a shriveled raisin face and a scarf over her head. Everything about her seemed to be gray – her clothes, her hair, her eyes, and even her skin had an unhealthy pallor to it.
She certainly didn’t act sick. She had energy and bad temper to spare as she yelled first at the guy who let us in, then at Lucyfar.
Lucyfar didn’t look impressed and jabbered back at her, although I could hear how much more slow and halting her Russian—Armenian?—was. The old lady pointed a finger and waved it around between me, Claire, and Ray, complaining some more. Lucyfar said something that sounded sarcastic, and the old woman glowered but shut up.
“She’s mad because you’re a mad scientist and because you brought some kind of magical weapon into her shop,” Lucyfar translated. I raised my eyebrow,
and, since she couldn’t see that, tilted my head to one side. Lucyfar’s wide grin told me she got the message. “Yeah, you can’t win, but she wants the blood too much to kick you out.”
E-Claire stepped right up, cracking her knuckles theatrically. “What’s she offering?”
Old witch lady must have understood some English, because she grumbled a couple of sentences and then stumped off through the swinging wooden doors into a back room. I got the impression she wasn’t coming back. Looking tired, the guy who’d answered the door filled us in. “She can’t afford to pay money for it and isn’t going to try. She has plenty to trade, since you seem interested in magical equipment.”
“Oh, that reminds me! Look up here!” Claire blurted out. I glanced at her face. She looked normal. She had the same blonde, soft face, playful eyes, and warmly emotive smile my gaunt hatchet face had always envied.
“Here you go!” she announced, holding out a little plastic card each to me and Ray. Where did those come from?
Oh, right, she’d zapped me with her power. I picked the little piece of colored plastic out of her hand. Bank of…
“You got us credit cards? How did you even…?!” I squeaked in shock.
“Debit cards. We have bank accounts now!” Now it was Claire’s turn to radiate smugness, clasping her hands behind her and rocking forward and back on her heels.
I stared at my card. TIM President. Craning my head over, I looked at Ray’s. TIM Human Resources. Claire flashed hers, which read TIM Public Relations. HA!
“We’re a small business. That’s hilarious. Is there anything in our accounts yet?” I asked, shaking my head in both delight and disbelief.
“Only about five thousand each. Me and Ray couldn’t even get a third of what that gold bar was really worth, not without a paper trail to prove we owned it.” Claire rattled that off so casually, but numbers rolled up in my head. That little bit of gold had been worth more than forty five thousand dollars? And I’d pulled it out of a junkyard? Well, that decided it. I certainly wasn’t in the supervillain business for the money. Me and The Machine could make a fortune legally. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.
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