“I’m going to fix this,” Dad said, reaching for his phone. Suddenly my father the politician was back. The tender way he eyed Connor disappeared and was replaced with a stony frown while he tapped away at his touch screen. My dad was granite. No one could stop him now.
“What caused the flood?” I asked.
Dad lifted his eyes from his phone for a brief moment. “Not what, Abby. Who.”
“Iron Phantom,” Connor quickly supplied, then groaned and reached for a bottle of painkillers.
My father nodded, looking back to his screen. I didn’t understand. Iron Phantom saved me, set city hall on fire, asked for my help, then flooded the subway? He was the king of mixed signals.
“Iron Phantom is a menace.” Dad began pacing in front of the couch. “He can’t be trusted. The public knows he’s evil, and they’ll support city hall’s plan to have him dealt with.”
“What’s the plan, Dad?” Connor was already rubbing his hands together, eager to get back to work.
My father straightened his tie. It was red and gold striped, matching Red Comet’s suit. Dad insisted red and gold had always been his “power colors.” I just thought he liked to match his son. “Don’t worry, Connor. I’ll take care of everything. The demise of Iron Phantom will be the first step in the reduction of crime in Morriston.”
“What did you have in mind?” Connor pressed on.
My eyes flitted back and forth from my dad to my brother. Connor sat up as much as his bandages allowed, ready to exercise justice, but my father’s eyes were narrowed, deciding how much he wanted to reveal.
“I’ll let you know soon,” he said hesitantly. “I’m still waiting on a few things to fall into place.” I knew he didn’t want to speak because I was in the room, which annoyed me to no end. Whether his silence suggested he didn’t want to scare me or he thought I was incapable of helping, the joke was on him. I was the only one in this house who had any contact with Iron Phantom, and if he stayed true to his word, the villain’s late-night return to my room was well overdue.
I wasn’t sure if the butterflies in my stomach were from fear or excitement.
* * *
When I was a kid, my dad decided it would be a good idea to sign me up for a summer soccer camp. Sports, he said, would help me get stronger. They would enhance my fragile human body and protect me from danger. As the crime rates in Morriston skyrocketed, so did my dad’s determination. Soccer was followed by boxing, which was followed by fencing. (I put my foot down pretty firmly on that one.) I failed to see how sweating all day would help me fight evil, so I quit athletics and allowed my interests to gravitate toward performing instead. This switch was not beneficial to my safety, as I discovered later that evening. Because I hated sports, I had zero muscles to protect myself against the supervillain who came knocking just after midnight.
But I did have a steak knife.
“Holy shit!” Iron Phantom ducked as the knife whizzed over his right shoulder, the tip embedding in the wall. “And again with the throwing.”
“I have more than one tonight.” I pulled the second knife out of my pocket as I stood my ground on the opposite side of my bed. I didn’t plan on throwing knife number two, but if he tried anything funny, then it just might slip.…
Iron Phantom yanked the blade out of the wall, a bit of plaster breaking away with it. Dammit. Now we were even.
I expected him to keep it for himself, to taunt me with it. What I didn’t anticipate was for him to toss the knife onto my bed and turn his back to me.
“This is an interesting change, Abigail.” His laugh sounded like honey—sweet and sticky and something I didn’t trust myself to be around without encountering a huge mess. He shut my window with a soft thump and held a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the lights in my room.
Because Connor was temporarily out of commission and I knew I didn’t have a shot in hell of fighting off Iron Phantom should he try to attack, I decided to use my intellect for protection. My bedroom was flooded with light—the overhead light, the lamp on my bedside table, my bathroom light, even my night-light. I wouldn’t give the supervillain the advantage of the dark again. Tonight I hoped the bright lights would give me the opportunity to discover his true identity. Though I didn’t want to admit it, talking to a super whose name I didn’t know unnerved me.
I made a grab for the second knife. One in each hand. “Don’t come any closer.” I was proud that my voice held steady. Iron Phantom’s eyes raked over my body, which was braced against the wall beside my closet door, and the corner of his lip curled upward.
“What’s with all the lights? If I knew I was being interrogated tonight, I might have worn a different outfit.” He looked down at his black super suit and shrugged.
“I didn’t want to give you the advantage of being in the dark.” I decided to tell him the truth. If I told him lies and he figured me out, then he wouldn’t trust me. And if he didn’t trust me, I would never know who truly was under the mask.
“Ah, I see.” He continued to smirk at me. “But between you and me, Abigail, dark or light, I still have the advantage.”
I winced when I realized he was right. Of course he had the advantage. His powers didn’t diminish if it was light out. He was a supervillain, not a vampire.
But the lights did allow me to get a closer look at him. The portion of his jaw that was visible was sprinkled with light stubble, and a single bead of sweat dripped down his chin from under his mask. His bright green eyes appeared more vivid now, filled with suppressed laughter and sparkling in the glow from my lamp. I could give credit where credit was due, and even for a supervillain, he had really pretty eyes. Gorgeous, luminescent …
Iron Phantom cleared his throat, and my jaw quickly snapped shut. God, I felt like Sarah, drooling over a super’s presence. The supers never affected me before. But this guy did. This guy made my heart pound in my chest, and I didn’t know why.
“Mind if we sit?” he finally asked. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“No.” My voice cracked. Crap.
He laughed. “No, I can’t sit with you? Or no, you don’t mind?”
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, so I didn’t respond.
“Okay. Well, don’t stab me. I’m coming over.” He limped to the bed, cradling his left arm against his stomach. The handles of my knives dug into my palms, leaving deep impressions in my skin, but I couldn’t help my feet from carrying me closer. Was he injured?
“Do you think we can kill a few of these lights?” he asked. “They’re giving me a migraine.”
Once again I didn’t answer, so after checking to make sure my knives were (somewhat) lowered, he took it upon himself to pull the chain on the ceiling fan to turn off the overhead light.
“Yeah, that’s better.” We sat on the bed, him on the left side of the mattress and me on the right. His knee brushed mine while he settled himself, and I flinched, eyes wide. “Relax, Abigail. I just came for a friendly chat about what happened today. I won’t hurt you.” Judging by the way he still clutched his arm, he looked temporarily incapable of hurting anyone. Though his presence wasn’t enough to make me forget about all the people he could have killed today.
“You flooded the subway, you asshole!” I punched his shoulder and he groaned, leaning away from me. “Why did you do that? People could have died!” Connor could have died.
“I didn’t do anything,” he snapped. “If you could see what I have going on under this suit, you would realize it wasn’t me. I just came to talk to you about it.”
“What do you mean? What’s under your suit?”
More beads of sweat dripped down his jaw as he shut his eyes. One gloved hand tugged hard at his suit near his shoulder blade; he was too preoccupied to answer.
“Hey!” I slapped his arm again. His muscles of steel probably hurt me more than my punch hurt him, but that didn’t stop him from shooting me an angry look. “What happened to you?”
“I was
in the tunnel trying to … I don’t know, help I guess. But when the water swept through, it knocked me against the tracks. A piece of concrete broke off from the wall and…” He shook his head, like he was trying to dislodge the memory. “Let’s just say that it’s not easy to stitch a wound one-handed.”
I thought of Isaac hopping the subway cars with his friends. The water came through so fast, and the subway had been so packed. Would he have had time to help anyone?
But it was possible I wasn’t even talking to Isaac right now.
Iron Phantom mistook my silence for disbelief. “I’m not lying to you. If I wanted to cause a flood, I would have made sure I wasn’t in its path. I’m a lot of things, Abigail, but I’m not an idiot.”
The key to spotting the difference between the truth and a lie is to look for a tell. Most people don’t make steady eye contact when crafting a lie. But Iron Phantom did. He scooted closer until I could smell the sweat on his skin and the peppermint gum hiding somewhere in the back of his mouth. The hand not gripping his shoulder reached toward me, his rough glove holding my chin in place.
“I’m. Not. Lying. I know everyone thinks I did it, but someone set me up. I had nothing to do with it. I’m not who you think I am.”
I’m not who you think I am.
He wasn’t a villain, or he wasn’t Isaac? Or both? Whoever he was, I wasn’t about to let him bleed out in my bedroom. His eyes were turning glassy, and more drops of sweat stuck to the sides of his mask. He flashed me a hopeful smile, then dropped his hand from my chin, our bodies still so close. I wanted to know who he was, and only his mask hid his face from view.
“Just sit here for a second, okay?” I scooted to the edge of the bed and walked to the bathroom, pulling the first-aid kit out from under the sink and studying myself in the mirror. My blond hair was in a knot on top of my head. I was short and skinny and had an annoyingly persistent row of acne near my hairline, which required a gallon of makeup to cover on a good day. I severely lacked superpowers. But for some reason, Iron Phantom thought I could help him.
“I thought you could heal people,” I said, dumping my supplies on the bed. Scissors, tweezers, bandages, and a lot of antibiotic ointment. I’d left my knives in the bathroom sink. The super was now leaning against my pillows, but his hand still clutched the fabric over his wound like a lifeline.
“I can’t heal myself. That’s probably my only hamartia.”
“Hamartia,” I repeated.
“It’s a tragic flaw. Better known as an Achilles’ heel.” He eyed the scissors I held warily, but allowed me to turn him on his side so his back faced me. “Another hamartia might be allowing you near me with sharp objects, for example.”
“I know what a hamartia is.” Frankly, I was shocked that he knew. “And I’m not going to stab you … with these.”
“That would be a plot twist,” he muttered. “For future reference, I’d much prefer poison. It’s quick. Usually painless.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I knelt on the bed and hovered over him to get a better angle.
“And you call me a villain.” He tried to turn and look at me, but I held my hand firmly on top of his head. It suddenly struck me how simple it would be to unmask him. With a flick of my fingers, just one little tug on his cowl …
The fingers of Iron Phantom’s uninjured arm grasped my hand, jerking it away. “Less thinking,” his deep voice growled. “More fixing.”
I blew a loose strand of hair away from my face. “Fine. Is it okay if I ruin your suit though?” I positioned the tip of the scissors over the black fabric just above his left shoulder blade. “Last chance to take it off.”
“Hardy-har-har,” he deadpanned. “Just cut it open. I’ll find a way to fix it.”
The first thing I noticed when I sliced through his suit was a thick smear of blood that made my fingers tremble. Ragged, torn skin surrounded the wound that stretched from his shoulder to the top of his ribs, and dirt and debris covered his sweat-drenched skin. The second thing I noticed was that he was in ridiculously good shape. Not like body-builder-ripped or anything, but the kind of intimidatingly toned that makes it obvious when someone seriously takes care of themselves. I told myself that it was likely just his super DNA … because that made me feel a bit better about the two frozen waffles I ate for dinner.
“It’s really bad, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What?” I stared at the definition in his triceps while I wiped the blood away.
“I couldn’t clean it properly. It’s going to get infected.”
“Not if I fix it.” I reached for tweezers to remove a piece of rubble jutting through the blood. He flinched before I even touched him. “I won’t make it any worse. I’ve done this before.”
“To who?” he asked, aghast.
“It doesn’t matter.” I thought of Connor, snoozing down the hall. “My mom used to be a nurse. She taught me a bit. You can trust me.”
“You and your knives?” he scoffed. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’m not the one with superpowers, you know. I’m just human.” My mom’s best approach to patching people up had been to talk to them until they forgot there was anything that needed fixing. So far it seemed to work with Iron Phantom. He watched me suspiciously over his shoulder, but he didn’t flinch when I came at him with the tweezers a second time.
“You’re right about that, Abigail. Powers are intimidating. I kind of miss being ‘just human,’ to tell you the truth.”
“How old were you when you got them? Your powers?” A jagged piece of metal wedged near his armpit pulled free and fell on my mattress with a soft thump. Half a dozen fragments of crumbled bedrock and concrete followed next.
If the amount of debris alarmed Iron Phantom, he didn’t say, and he barely noticed when I unscrewed the cap on the antibiotic ointment and started dabbing it on the laceration.
“My powers? I was nine,” he said.
“Nine?” I shrieked, and immediately covered my mouth. The last thing I wanted was for Dad or Connor to find me tending to a wounded supervillain on my bed. I waited for the sound of heavy footsteps or the pounding of fists against my door, but it never came. “You were so young,” I whispered in awe. According to Connor, most supers received powers between ages fourteen and sixteen. Any time under thirteen was unheard of.
“I can’t believe you were teleporting and reading minds when you were nine years old.” As wary as I was about Iron Phantom, I was also incredibly impressed. Pulling out a needle to stitch his wound, I felt him tighten his muscles, but he didn’t protest.
He sighed. “I told you, I can’t read minds. If I could, I would have you figured out already. Ouch!”
“Oh, sorry!” I had stabbed him with the needle by accident. But in my defense, what he said had shocked me. I bit my lip as my face flushed red. “You would have me figured out?”
“Yeah…” He picked at the edges of his mask, fixing his eyes on my hands as they carefully resumed stitching. That was his tell. The almighty Iron Phantom was nervous.
“You, like…,” he continued, sounding more like the teenage guy I suspected he was and less like a supervillain. “You’re so confusing, like, you seem to think I’m an okay guy, but then you hate me and think I’m evil. Then you try to stab me, but now you’re helping me out even though it’s obvious how much you want to rip the mask off my face.”
“No, I—”
“Don’t lie, Abigail.”
All right, so maybe I did want to tear off his mask and see if I knew the owner of the mysterious green eyes and husky voice. But I had some self-restraint. For a little while.
I finished stitching, his back now covered in a crooked row of sutures, and began packing up the first-aid kit. “Okay, maybe I am curious.” He chuckled at that and licked his lips. “But, I don’t know, I mean, I guess you’re all right. You’ve never tried to hurt me, but you just seem to hurt everyone else.…” His eyes narrowed into slits. “Wait, no, that didn’t come ou
t right.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I had nothing to do with the accident in the subway. Maybe some mind-reading powers would have done you some good.” He swung his legs off my bed, his boots almost kicking me in the process. “Someone set me up, and I thought you might have an idea of who it could be. Or I thought maybe you did your homework and found out something about that microchip I showed you, but I’m going to guess you didn’t do that either. Those were the only reasons I came here tonight. I just wanted to talk about that. Not my powers, not you and me. Just that.”
I was briefly hung up on the phrase you and me. Was there a you and me when it came to me and Iron Phantom? I felt like I always spent half our time together bickering with him and the other half checking him out.
“You have no proof that there was ever anything inside the microchip,” I pointed out, immediately feeling small when his anger appeared to double. If steam shot from his ears, I wouldn’t have been shocked. “No tracking device. No nothing. How do I even know it’s real?”
“How do you know it’s real? How…? Why would I lie to you?” He slapped a hand over his eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Abigail. It’s not like I saved your life or anything.”
“And it’s not like I saved yours. We’re square.”
Iron Phantom examined his wound, now only a red line between the split black material of his super suit. When he spoke again, his voice was rougher than usual. I clearly pissed him off. “Tell your mother thanks for giving you the first-aid lesson.”
My body ached at the mention of my mom. I could handle talking about her myself, but when others did it, it still caused my heart to feel like a block of cement in my chest. “My mother’s dead.”
The Supervillain and Me Page 7
