by Dunne, Lexie
“Oh my god,” I said. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“It means he’s going to be fine,” Angélica said. Vicki, next to her, sagged against the wall and closed her eyes. It occurred to me that Jeremy’s feelings might not be as unrequited as I’d suspected. I filed that away for later and continued to watch in fascination as waves of blue sparks rolled over his hands. The monitors keeping tabs on his brain activity never changed, though. “Looks like we’re getting a new member to the powered team.”
“Oh, he’s going to love that,” I said.
“I’ll stay here.” Vicki swallowed hard a few times. “Somebody needs to keep an eye on him and make sure—”
“He’s going to be fine,” Angélica said. “He’s too vain to come back truly evil, and he wasn’t dead that long.”
I got the feeling they’d been through this kind of transition before. As for me, I was too busy reeling. Being electrocuted hadn’t killed Jeremy.
It had given him superpowers.
He was going to completely lose his mind over that when he finally woke up.
Angélica cleared her throat and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me along. “C’mon, you can buy this newly unemployed friend of yours a chocolate milk in the cafeteria,” she said.
My last glimpse of Vicki, as my ex-trainer pulled me away and around a corner, was of her discreetly brushing a tear away.
Guy joined us in the cafeteria, his tray holding considerably less food than either of ours. It was disgusting hospital food, which I definitely hadn’t missed, but I dug in with gusto. We filled him in on the news while we ate.
“Sam’s going to be okay, too,” Guy said, pushing his brownie toward my plate. “So that’s all of us. We’re all fine—or going to be. For the most part.”
“And Kiki is safe from Cooper, and hopefully Rita Detmer wants nothing else from me.” I finished my first milk carton and reached for the second.
“So what now?” Angélica asked, snatching up the brownie before I could get to it. Guy gave her an aggrieved look, but she only shrugged.
I tried to hide my laughter at his expression. “I don’t know about you,” I said. “But I’m ready for that vacation now.”
EPILOGUE
“This is your idea of a vacation?” Guy asked, landing out of sight of the front gate. “Gail, you realize that’s a prison, right?”
“It’s only a few days,” I said.
“It’s only a few days in a prison.”
Davenport Industries might have granted me a pardon for the charge of working with Brook to kill Angélica, as the latter was definitely not dead, and I had never worked with the former. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t broken the law. So I was going back to prison . . . for breaking out of prison in the first place. And judging from the look on Guy’s face as he set me down in the trees beyond Detmer’s expansive lawns, he was ready to fight each and every member of Davenport on that issue.
“I know that,” I said, rolling my shoulders. “The only part that’s going to suck is being separated from you, I promise. Besides, Rita owes me one. I’ll be fine.”
“Rita Detmer has Villain Syndrome. Her idea of ‘owing you one’ is probably to blow you up and put you out of your misery. You don’t have to do this. I can get you a lawyer, or we can work something out—”
“Rita owes me,” I said again. “I’ll be okay.”
“But why are you going back?” Guy looked distressed now.
“I told you. I need a vacation.” I took pity on him and rose on my tiptoes to kiss him. The height difference was really going to give me a cramp in my neck, but I didn’t care at the moment. Guy sighed when I pulled back. “Relax. Just a few days, then we’re on for that dinner and a movie, right?”
“That’ll be a nice change of pace. I’ll visit you every day.”
“Deal.” I kissed him again. Before I could change my mind, I pushed away, gave him a little wave, and emerged from the trees. The guards at the front gate all snapped to attention as I approached. They weren’t used to prisoners coming to them of their own volition, but after my first experience with a prison transport van, there was no way I was getting back in one of those. I walked up to the first guard and gave him a mocking little salute. “Gail Godwin, reporting for duty, sir.”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Where are your handcuffs?”
I sighed and held out my wrists. Belatedly, they scrambled to slap me in a pair of manacles.
It had been two days since I’d been discharged from the hospital and from Davenport. Jeremy had yet to wake up, but there had been several weird power surges, and even Vicki felt confident enough to leave his side for more than twenty minutes. By all reports, Kiki was going through Davenport and undoing the damage that Cooper had done, and Davenport was launching a full-scale investigation into the Lodi Corporation to figure out if there were any more Mobium subjects.
I really hoped it was limited to Brook, Angélica, and me. The world didn’t need manufactured superheroes. Especially since Mobium’s creator had never been found. I personally suspected the Lodi Corporation had killed Dr. Mobius the night they’d come after him, the night we’d escaped from his false lab together. But—and I was never going to share this with Kiki—I also suspected there was a strong chance he’d been in the Lodi building that Raptor and I had destroyed.
I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
The guards dragged me to processing, with Dr. Kehoe and her assistant (who visibly paled upon seeing me). “Please tell me you have no new scars,” Dr. Kehoe said with a sigh, “and we can just skip that bit.”
“Blame Cooper,” I said as I peeled off my shirt to show off my brand-new scars from Cooper’s incisions.
An hour later, I strolled out of processing, wearing the green tunic and pants one more time. I was already salivating at the thought of visiting the dining room, but I made Tabitha the Perky Guard take me straight to Raze, who tackled me with happiness. I escaped with only a couple of bruises by promising to meet her for dinner, and headed back toward my cell.
As I passed the glass wall of the gym, I felt something cold settle between my shoulder blades. I turned, and, just like that, Rita stood there.
I sighed at her. “You’re not here to deliver another lesson, are you?”
She kept staring.
“Because honestly, I’m kind of done with all of your lessons, no offense. Experience might be a great teacher, but you’re kind of a crappy one.”
Rita made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat. “You survived,” she said.
“I did. It’s really with no thanks to you,” I said.
For a second, I thought I’d gone too far. Rita’s face was still blank and unreadable, but it felt like there was a storm brewing beneath her skin. And I was under no illusions: if Rita wanted to take me out, I would go down, and I would go down hard.
But there was no reason I needed to let her know I feared her, so I pushed my shoulders back. “Kiki says hi. She’s safe. We killed Cooper.” I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that still. It had woken me in the middle of the night with the taste of metal in my mouth. I could still see the sheet-covered stretcher being carried out of the factory in my mind, and the mirrored poses as the current had electrocuted both him and Jeremy. “So even though I know you’re not going to say thank you, I will say this. You’re welcome. Now if you could leave me alone, my life would be so much better, thanks.”
She moved too fast for me to throw up anything but a very basic, shoddy block. I knocked her fist away from my rib cage, but the second punch still landed on the side of my head. I dropped to one knee, surprised that there weren’t little cartoon birds flying around my head. When I looked up, Rita was already languidly strolling away.
I climbed to my feet and brushed my pants off. That answered that question. But right before Rita
turned the corner, I saw her pause and swivel. I went tense, expecting another ambush attack.
The old woman inclined her head, just once. It looked like it took every effort in the world to do so.
Understanding struck: that was all she could do to thank me.
Before I could do anything more than gape, she’d ambled around the corner.
“Always a pleasure,” I said under my breath as I brushed off the front of my shirt for good measure. Rita Detmer was finally done with me. After her insane Villain-Syndrome-fueled plot had completely altered my life in every way possible, she was done. A sense of real and beautiful freedom washed over me.
Of course, I was still standing in the middle of a supervillain prison, but life wasn’t perfect.
Bolstered by that, I stuck my hands in my pockets and whistled all the way to the dining room. After my adventures, I really needed a five-star meal. I spotted Lady Danger and Venus von Trapp across the room and waved to them both as I made my way over. Neither looked particularly surprised to see me back, but they were both bursting with news about what had happened with the new sushi chef (there was apparently a roll named in Lemuel Cooper’s honor) and what had happened after my breakout. I let them gush as I proceeded to order everything on the menu.
When Raze came bouncing up, I made sure to pick the razor blades from my soup. I listened to my rather strange ex-nemeses with almost a sense of contentment. Jeremy was going to be okay, Guy and I were finally going to go on that date, Kiki was out of danger, Naomi had returned to her job at the Domino, and Angélica was alive. Everything in that moment felt crisply, sublimely perfect.
Or it did until an hour later, I made my way back to my new cell to catch up on some more sleep. The woman sitting on the top bunk looked up as I palmed the door open, and a slow, vicious smile spread across her face.
“Hello, roomie,” Brooklyn Gianelli said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEXIE DUNNE is a woman of many masks, all of them stored neatly in a box under her bed. By day a mild-mannered technical writer and by night a novelist, she keeps life interesting by ignoring it completely and writing instead. She hails from St. Louis, home of the world’s largest croquet piece, where she can be found reading comics and spoiling her dog. Supervillains Anonymous is her love letter to the caped evildoers of the world. She does not count herself among their company, no matter how many cliffhangers she writes.
www.dunnewriting.com
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BY LEXIE DUNNE
SUPERVILLAINS ANONYMOUS
SUPERHEROES ANONYMOUS
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SUPERVILLAINS ANONYMOUS. Copyright © 2015 by Lexie Dunne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780062369130
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062369147
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