by Robin Hale
She cut me off with an impatient wave. “Don’t hurt yourself. I’ve known for ages that Kevin Platt is Captain Colossal.”
I gaped at her. “How?”
The look the Silhouette gave me was distinctly unimpressed. “Once I was watching you, it took about five minutes to figure out. You’ve got precisely one acquaintance, work or otherwise, who comes close to the good Captain’s build. Relax. I haven’t murdered him in his sleep yet and I have no plans to.”
Her hands moved over her belt and a small set of tools emerged from the many pockets and pouches that lined it. “I don’t have a lot of mechanical engineering tools, I’m afraid, but I’d got adjustable screwdrivers, a chisel, and a multimeter.” She tucked the tools in the side of my boot like she might’ve strapped armor onto her own body.
“You’d be surprised how many things you can break with those,” I said softly, smiling my thanks.
Lana began to move to her feet, an elegant wave that started in her hips and flowed through her body like water tumbling through a fountain. I caught her before she could move away, cupping her jaw between my hands and giving in to my desire to taste her lips again. The kiss was frantic, desperate. We kissed as though we weren’t sure we’d ever see one another again. I wanted to confess how I felt. I wanted to go forward knowing, no matter what else happened, that Lana knew I loved her.
But I didn’t want to send her off into the night off-balance, so I stilled the words on my lips and told her everything I could with the stroke of my tongue in her mouth.
“Don’t do anything brave and stupid,” Lana breathed against my mouth. “If you do, I’ll be severely annoyed.” Her hands squeezed my own and then she was gone, rappelling down the side of the building as easily as someone else might’ve descended a staircase.
Optimism had replaced the dread that pooled in my stomach, and I allowed myself to hope that we might get out of this one after all.
28
LANA
Kevin Platt, mild-mannered accountant by day, Opal City’s favorite masked hero by night, lived in precisely the sort of building one would expect of someone trying to keep a low profile. It was situated in a neighborhood that wasn’t quite nice enough for his salary: neither the entirely new build of the city’s rehabilitation efforts, nor the renovated historic buildings that I preferred, but a mid-century relic that probably should’ve been torn down, but had been rebuilt just enough to pass code.
It didn’t have a parking garage beneath it, but most of the residents probably used public transportation. There were young families, elderly residents, students pushing the limit of how many people could share a single dwelling without angering the fire marshal, and one resident hero with supernatural powers.
It sat in the shadow of a raised section of freight rail, cutting over a dip in the terrain on a structure that was solid enough, but shook to beat the band every time a train went by. And that train went by a lot for how close to the population center of the city it was. It was the perfect cover for someone who wanted to come and go unnoticed from his window, relying on the sound of the train to distract from everything else.
I’d scoped the place out the first time I put two and two together about Colossal’s true identity but hadn’t bothered to go inside and look around. I didn’t need anything from him, and the amusement I’d get from rearranging his bookcase was really not enough reward to risk the potential fallout.
Remarkably, his living room window was locked — the hallmark of someone who thought of the window as an entrance and exit like his front door, rather than something one might open when they wanted a fresh breeze — but it was the work of a moment to open it.
I slipped in through the window and paused a moment to take stock of the sounds and layout of the apartment. The hum of his refrigerator was audible even from the living room, and I was certain that the good Captain was unaware of my presence. If he could sleep through that, then the sound of my soft-soled boots on his floor would be nothing. It was an unremarkable space, reasonably clean, not especially tidy. Prints of vintage superhero movie posters hung in frames on the wall, and I stifled the urge to snort.
Dork.
The moment of humor was a welcome break from the tension I carried in the back of my neck, a gift from the part of my brain that was intensely focused on Molly and the danger she was in. I’d left her there unarmed, barely equipped with anything useful, and still Opal City’s best hope for disabling the danger that lurked downtown. A danger that no one else was aware of yet. Had the Gravedigger’s son even made his demands known to someone in power?
Would Opal City awake to chaos?
I scowled and hurried down the narrow hallway toward the sound of Captain Colossal’s snoring. One thing was for damn certain: Colossal would wake to my boot on his neck if he didn’t get his ass in gear to help Fawn. And the rest of the city, of course.
I rounded the corner into the hero’s bedroom and didn’t manage to suppress a derisive scoff. Colossal’s bedroom looked like the nest of an oversized frat boy. Laundry was grouped in a series of hampers, his chest of drawers was covered in an array of small items and change amid a coating of dust, and his king-sized mattress — a concession to his size, surely — was perched on a box spring that sat directly on his floor. The good Captain himself was sprawled across it on his belly, mouth open and drool pooling beneath his lips.
Moonlight filtered in through the bedroom window and lit the planes and valleys of his body to rather remarkable aesthetic effect. It was nothing short of infuriating. Even wallowing in that slovenly mess, he looked like the desperately romantic subject of a Renaissance painting. Of course he did. He couldn’t even be a slob like a normal person.
With an irritated huff, I lifted my foot and struck a hard kick against the corner of the mattress. “Colossal.” The word was a sharp rebuke, and I watched the overgrown lout jerk awake with no small amount of satisfaction. He hovered there above the mattress and whirled around, trying to blink the sleep from his eyes and reorient himself to the location.
“Silhouette?” His voice was rough, low and groggy and entirely too dim-witted for my current level of patience.
“Well spotted,” I sneered. “Now get out of bed and get dressed. Fawn’s in trouble.” So was the rest of the city, but that felt rather less urgent to me than Fawn, and I imagined Colossal might only listen to what I had to say if we focused on what united us. It wasn’t an overwhelming sense of duty to the people of Opal City. It was the short, bespectacled genius of a handler that he took entirely for granted.
Colossal was off the mattress and across the room in a heartbeat, and I had to give him some credit. If I hadn’t been entirely alert he might’ve gotten his hands on me. As it was, he was still sleep-slow and telegraphing his every move, and I sidestepped the grapple easily.
“What have you done with her?” He growled.
I indulged in the desire to whap him on the back of the head as I rolled my eyes and darted over the detritus of shoes and abandoned socks on his floor. “Don’t be an idiot,” I hissed. “If it were my doing, would I be here telling you about it?” I stepped into his space and pressed my index finger against his bare chest. Evidently Colossal slept in briefs, and wouldn’t the tabloids love to know that? “Consider me your in-person panic button alert. Fawn said there’s something wrong with it. You didn’t respond.” I narrowed my eyes and regarded the hero suspiciously. If I had to guess, I’d say that he’d screwed it up somehow, since it seemed unlikely to be a flaw in Fawn’s design.
I might have been slightly biased.
As if on cue, a guilty look flashed over the good Captain’s comically handsome features, and he turned toward the cell phone sitting abandoned on the side of his bed. Large, blocky hands dwarfed the metal and glass device, which remained completely unresponsive when his fingers tapped the power button. Colossal’s mouth warped into a sheepish twist, and the realization of what had happened slammed into me like one of Lady Thunder’s sonic b
lasts.
“You let the charge run down?” My teeth were gritted so tightly I couldn’t even manage to make the words sound mocking. How the hell had the people of Opal City consented to letting this guy protect them? “You — Fawn’s panic button sends a message to your phone, and you couldn’t keep it charged?”
The skin on the back of Colossal’s neck and his upper chest went pink with embarrassment, but it wasn’t anywhere near payment enough for the vicious feeling rising in my gut.
“It’s a new tool. I’m not in the habit,” he said. The words were defensive but his tone was resigned, and the implied acknowledgement of his culpability — that, and the fact that he really was the only person I knew who would follow me into that nest of vipers to rescue both Fawn and the city — stilled my hand from drowning the idiot in his own bathtub.
“Great.” I scowled. “Well, that’s something you can sort out once we get Fawn back. She’s in the penthouse of the Kaufman building downtown.” I leaned back against the wall and scrubbed a hand over my face. Damn, this whole mess was exhausting. “She’s been taken by the Gravedigger’s son. Or goons he’s hired to pull off his mad scheme.”
The phone dropped to the bedside table, and Colossal turned his concerned blue eyes my way. “Johansson’s boy?”
“Not such a boy anymore,” I sighed and felt some of my anger toward Colossal drain out of my body along with the breath. “All grown up and ready to hold the city ransom for some impossible demands under the threat of mass poisoning.” I shot Colossal an ironic look. “Kids these days.”
Colossal’s posture went from chastened, oversized schoolboy to Protector of the City in a flash, despite his dishabille. His shoulders squared, his chest expanded, and he turned on me as if I had ever been intimidated by his size in the years we’d been sparring in our little game. “And what’s in it for you, Silhouette?”
The one thing I would credit him with was that he seemed to have accepted that I knew his secret identity and that panicking over it would be useless. I’d expected hand wringing and was happy to skip it.
“What do you get out of me stopping Johansson’s boy and getting Fawn back?” Colossal’s eyes were as cold as they ever got.
A scathing retort was poised on the edge of my tongue, tipped in venom and backed with teeth, but I held it back. The memory of Fawn jerking away from my touch, the way her brow had furrowed at the thought of trying to explain where the pendant I’d had made for her had come from…it wasn’t really my place to tell Colossal that I was in it for the simple fact that I didn’t want to live in a world that didn’t include Molly Fawn. That I planned to do everything I could to earn a place at her side, for as long as she’d let me stay there.
So I dodged.
“Don’t worry about that, handsome. Just be grateful that I have a reason and accept this gift from the universe. I can get us inside, you can handle the goon squad, and we can get this whole thing taken care of before brunch tomorrow.” I finished the taunt with a wink and an air kiss, practically a reflex by that point in dealing with the good Captain. True to form, it rolled off Colossal’s back without making a single impression.
I’d always liked that about him.
Some of the fight went out of Colossal’s shoulders and his brow furrowed in confusion. “Yeah, but…is it some possessive villain thing? You kidnapped her, so you don’t want someone else to kidnap her?”
I could only imagine the expression that must have been on my face. The incredulous disbelief, the narrowed gaze as I tried to determine if the oversized oaf could possibly be serious. “Yes, Captain,” I agreed, determined to get the pair of us out of that depressing little apartment and on our way as quickly as possible. “You’ve caught me. You know how I dislike anyone else playing with my things.”
Colossal, of course, knew nothing of the kind. But he nodded anyway, like I’d confirmed a long-held suspicion about my inner motivations. The man was so infuriating that I wanted to scream.
“Get dressed,” I snapped. “We don’t have much time.”
IN RETROSPECT, I couldn’t really say why I thought the good Captain might go along with my plans to stealthily re-enter the building. Perhaps it was because I had done it once already that evening and I knew that the pair of us could get into the penthouse with minimal difficulty. Perhaps it was because I was accustomed to working alone and I had never had to take someone else’s style into account.
Or perhaps it was because, in my heart of hearts, I honestly thought of Captain Colossal as a mostly humanoid mastiff and had believed that a clear set of instructions would be enough to keep him on his leash.
Whatever I had thought, I was clearly mistaken.
The first clue should’ve been the way Colossal had swept me into a bridal carry on the lip of his apartment building’s roof and launched the pair of us into the sky without so much as a head’s up. I’d reacted…less gracefully than I might have otherwise preferred.
If Izzy could have seen me, she would’ve made an amused comparison to an angry cat and she wouldn’t have been wrong. I clung to Colossal’s shoulders with a ferocity that would’ve bled even his supernaturally thick skin if I’d had claws to help me along. And if I had fur? It would’ve been raised in razor-edged jags along my back.
He flew the two of us through the damp, foggy air at a speed that made me grateful for my ponytail, my goggles, and the distinct lack of exposed skin from my suit. It was miserable. An awful way to travel. And Colossal seemed not the least bit bothered.
“Drop us on the roof and I can get us through the window!” I shouted over the wind in our ears, but the big oaf just shook his head.
“We should clear it from the bottom! Fewer surprises!” And with as little care for my preferences as I’d had for his, he dropped us lightly on the sidewalk at the front of the darkened building. His arm was out, a steadying presence that I ignored while I staggered like a drunk toddler trying to remember how legs worked.
I scowled viciously at his back as he approached the front doors. Why the hell would we clear the building if we didn’t need to? We needed to disable the device and apprehend the ringleader. Surely the police could handle the rest?
If we’d gone my way, we could’ve been in and out with Fawn in tow before the goons patrolling the lower floors had any idea that the plan had gone wrong, and that was just the way I preferred to do things. Captain Colossal had other ideas.
With a sharp breath and a low curse, I followed the Captain into the building, passing him by and enabling one of the night vision modes on my goggles. “If you stick close to me I can get us up to the penthouse with minimal difficulty.”
Like a fool, I’d taken his nod for assent, and had carefully crept along the hallways and stairwells as Colossal followed behind me. At least, until the first goon we encountered.
It was the work of moments to disable the patrol. A roll, a leap, and a silent takedown had removed him from our path without alerting anyone else who might’ve been in earshot. I was pleased that I hadn’t ruined our silent invasion of the building. Captain Colossal, on the other hand, had evidently considered the seal broken on our attempt at stealth and bellowed as he barreled down the hallway toward the glint off the goggles of the next scout. It was terrible. Appalling. A graceless clobbering that resembled nothing so much as a high school defenseman taking down an unsuspecting quarterback.
The scout, dressed all in black and paying nowhere near enough attention to the world around him, had slammed into the wall at the end of Colossal’s charge with a thud like a sack of potatoes hitting concrete from a two-story drop. His hands convulsed as he struck the wall and the darkness of the building was ruined by the spark of a bullet ricocheting off a piece of metalwork down the hallway.
“Colossal!” I hissed. “You’re going to get us shot!”
Belatedly, it occurred to me that avoiding bullets was not something Colossal had ever needed to worry about, and I began planning modifications to my suit in the event tha
t I ever needed Colossal’s help in the future. Kevlar. My suit needed kevlar.
And a hip flask.
I darted along the hallway after Colossal, cringing at the sound of heavy boots on the tile floor. Colossal’s little stunt had alerted every thug working for the Gravedigger’s son, by the sound of it. And they were all converging on our location.
“Are you happy?” I asked with a drawl as I caught up to Colossal again. A peek at the hero’s face told me that he was. Incandescently so. I shook my head and shifted my stance to prepare for the onslaught that was about to come around the corner.
“Do you trust me, Silhouette?” Colossal asked, edging closer to me in a way that was certain to make me never trust him again.
“Not even a little.”
“Ah, well. I’m sorry to hear that.” And then the oaf’s enormous hand wrapped around the back of my belt and I found myself lifted off my feet.
The first of the wave of goons rounded the bend at the end of the hallway, and I barely had time to register what I was seeing before I was flung through the air toward them. With a hissing curse, I tucked my legs and directed the momentum of Colossal’s toss through my feet as I collided with the chest of the unlucky young man at the front of the pack. He went down smoothly, and I rolled over him and back to my feet.
Sharp jabs to the kidneys of the next guard had him crying out and falling to his knees, ready for a zip tie and an unceremonious puddle at the side of the hallway. By then, Colossal had joined the fray and the fight was chaos. I kept the Captain to my back as I danced around the guns of our assailants. I tracked the sounds that his fists made against unprotected guts, the sounds of bones breaking as fragile bodies connected with cement-block walls. Gunfire was a terrifying staccato rhythm that I tried to keep ahead of, and all the while, I could only think of Fawn.
Fawn, alone in the penthouse, surrounded by enemies. Fawn, who could disable the atomizer. Fawn, who had managed to twist my heart so thoroughly around her little finger that I fought, back to back, with the man who had made it his mission to foil my plans.
