Super Hot (a Superlovin' novella)

by Andrews, Vivi

  Taser or phone? Did she have time for either? She flicked a frantic glance behind her. They were coming. Three dark figures moving toward the exposed driver’s side of the Mercedes. She shoved the phone in her pocket, grabbed the Taser and flicked it on. She’d have one chance at escape, capitalizing on the element of surprise. If she could get past them and into her building, call for help—it wasn’t that far. She could do it.

  In spite of the abuse the Mercedes had taken, the driver’s side door was undamaged. It sprang open far too easily, revealing a trio in black ski masks. She fired the Taser, the wires hitting the first man on in the chest, the jolt throwing him backward to the ground. It was set to the super setting and if he wasn’t super she’d probably just killed him, but Tandy couldn’t think of that now. Before she could ready the Taser for a second use, black gloved hands jerked it out of hers and dragged her out of the car.

  The biggest of the three yanked her toward the other car while the thin one knelt over the twitching form on the ground. Tandy screamed, kicked, bit and scratched, twisting and dropping her weight against the arm that held her, employing every self-defense technique she’d ever learned, but she was too small. The big guy simply cuffed her hard on the side of her head, picked her up, and carried her to the black sedan to fling her into the backseat while her head was still ringing.

  The thin one appeared a moment later with a gun leveled at her face. Tandy froze.

  If they wanted to kill her, they wouldn’t have pulled her out of the car, she told herself. But the words were small comfort with the business end of a gun a foot from her nose.

  “You and I both know you can’t stop a speeding bullet,” the thin man said with disturbing calm, like they were talking about whether or not it might rain later. “You’re much more useful to me alive than dead, but if you give me trouble, I have no problem cutting my losses and disposing of you. Are we clear?”

  She nodded jerkily.

  “Good.” Without turning his head or moving the gun an inch, he spoke to his big colleague. “Get the syringe. I believe our friend dropped it when she dropped him.”

  The large man moved away, returning seconds later with a liquid-filled syringe. Tandy shrank back against the seat.

  “Now be a good girl or I’ll have to clean your brains out of my upholstery.”

  She flinched at the words, letting the large man grab her arm and jab the needle into the flesh above her elbow. A burning warmth spread from the point of the injection and her eyelids drooped, her head clouded with cotton balls. She needed to stay lucid. Remember the details. But it was so hard with a syrupy fog swamping her senses.

  “Collect our friend,” the thin man said.

  Is he dead? she wanted to ask. Did I Tase him to death? But her tongue didn’t work.

  Then nothing worked and the world faded away.

  She was going to miss her press conference.

  Chapter Sixteen – You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Angry

  For once Eisenmann woke up to the sound of a phone ringing, rather than choking for air under a layer of fire-suppressant foam. He hadn’t relived that night at Wroth’s lair last night in his dreams. No nightmares. No fire.

  Was that a lingering side effect of the frequency emitter? Or was his subconscious finally at ease?

  The phone began ringing again and he rolled off the slab he used for a bed. He needed to get a mattress down here. He couldn’t expect Tandy to keep sleeping on the couch. Though he supposed they could always go to her place. He’d lost his own place to a fire shortly after his powers arose and he’d been here ever since. But with a portable emitter, he could actually risk leaving the bunker. Hell, he could see sunlight that wasn’t artificially produced to prevent a vitamin-D deficiency. The world was suddenly full of possibilities.

  The phone had stopped ringing by the time he got to it, but it had to be Tandy. He dialed her cell, but it went straight to voicemail. He might have some groveling to do. But they would work it out. He was sure of it.

  Amazing how much calmer he was about their morning disagreement after eight solid hours of sleep. Finally, he was thinking clearly, for the first time in days.

  Yes, he still wanted to make sure the technology didn’t get locked away where it couldn’t do anyone any good, but she was right that he couldn’t just be publishing his findings online for any supervillain to find. The fact that he didn’t really know who he’d been corresponding with had been brought home to him in an undeniable way with the revelation that Diana had been dead for as long as he thought he’d known her.

  And even though he’d never known the real girl, he still felt a twinge of grief. He could have saved her, if the timing had been different.

  The phone began to ring again and he snatched it off the cradle. “Tandy?”

  “Eisenmann, thank God. Where have you been all day?”

  “Darla? I’ve been asleep. What’s wrong?”

  “Tandy’s been kidnapped.”

  He couldn’t tell if she kept talking; he was suddenly deafened by the roar of fire in his ears.

  The nightmare was back, but this time it was Tandy helpless at some madman’s mercy. Tandy frightened and in pain. The sharp teeth of panic shredded his control. His was distantly aware of the plastic of the phone going soft beneath his fingers. An explosion to his left erupted, the shock wave making him stagger. He dropped the phone, staring at hands that were engulfed in flame, the fire creeping up his arms. Flaming out.

  He couldn’t help Tandy if he burned out.

  The frequency emitter. He ran toward it, diving for the button, hoping like hell it the fire that was consuming half his equipment hadn’t damaged it. He slammed the button and fell back, the flames at his shoulders now. Ten seconds. It was ten seconds too long. He tried to find his way through the heat and blinding rage. Tried to contain the flame himself, but all he could see when he closed his eyes was Tandy helpless and afraid. Tandy strapped down and injected with fire. Tandy screaming for him to find her.

  The psy-wave finally hit, extinguishing the fire with a whoosh—but reason didn’t instantly fill the void. The panic was still there, the worry, consuming his ability to think. The emitter wouldn’t be able to stop him from flaming out if anything happened to her. She was everything. When did she become his everything? He hadn’t been looking for this. In fact, he’d been trying to avoid looking at it since the day they met, but there was no dodging it now.

  He had to get her back.

  Eisenmann ran back to snatch up the dangling phone, his handprint melted into the plastic. “Darla?”

  He heard her speaking, growling, “That isn’t good enough,” to whoever was there with her.

  “Darla,” he called again and this time she heard him.

  “Eisenmann. You okay?”

  “Under control.” For now. “How did this happen? When she left me this morning she was on her way to a press conference.”

  “She never made it.”

  His vision wavered, like a mirage in the desert. They’d had her for hours. While he’d been sleeping.

  “When she didn’t show, we knew something was wrong. Security footage outside her condo saw a black sedan ram her car into a wall. Three guys in masks tried to take her. She Tased one of them but the others got her.”

  “Fuck.”

  “The supers are gathering. Frost and Chance are out for blood. I don’t know what kind of idiot threatens a Nightwing, but the response is going to be swift and vicious. I figured you’d want in.”

  “How can you respond? Do you know who took her?”

  “No. We tried tracking her phone but they must have smashed it. The car had stolen plates and we weren’t able to get any help identifying her kidnappers from the video, but it has to be related to the other abductions.”

  Eisenmann frayed attention snagged on her words. “What other abductions?”

  “Someone’s been targeting vulnerable supers. Masha Korlova and Kieren Pierce were kidnapped a few weeks a
go. We thought it had to be an attempt to use them as leverage against their families, but there hasn’t been any contact from the kidnappers. No demands. Nothing.”

  “I hadn’t heard.” This was what he got for living in a hole in the ground. “What made them vulnerable?” Why Tandy?

  “They couldn’t use their powers to defend themselves. Masha controls fog and Kieren talks to animals. They’re harmless. The only exceptional thing about both of them is who their families are, just like Tandy. She doesn’t even have a power.”

  “Yes she does.” And she was worth so much more than as just a bargaining chip against her famous family.

  What if she hadn’t been taken because she was a Nightwing? What if none of them were taken because of their families? What made them special? They were harmless, but still super. Exactly the kind of test subjects he would have asked to volunteer to test the emitter, once it was a little more developed.

  What if someone else had the same idea? Diana, DocDavid—they both knew he’d found the answer to neutralizing super powers. And everyone knew he’d thought Tandy was the key. When he hadn’t responded to DocDavid this morning, had he taken matters into his own hands?

  “Darla, this might be a long shot, but do you have a technopath on your super posse?”

  “Yeah, Kieren Pierce’s little sister. But what did you mean Tandy has a power?”

  “I’ll explain later. I need you to send the technopath down here right away. I’ve been corresponding online with someone who might be involved.” God, he hoped he was right. Because if he wasn’t, he didn’t have any idea where to start looking and Tandy had already been missing for hours too long.

  Chapter Seventeen – Accidental Kidnapping

  Tandy woke with an awful, coppery taste in her mouth and a headache. Her shoulder was stiff—she’d fallen asleep in the strangest position. Then she tried to move, the zip ties binding her bit into her broken wrist and she moaned, nearly passing out again.

  Oh right. Not asleep. Just in the seventh circle of hell.

  She listened intently, searching for sounds of her captors, some clue where she was, but all she heard was the distant, dull grind of some kind of engine. The floor seemed to be humming. She opened her eyes a crack, then all the way. She was either blind or being kept in some kind of lightless box. Awesome.

  Moving her arms hurt like the devil itself, but she stretched out her legs, swinging them around as far as she could and not hitting anything. So a relatively big lightless box then. Her cell phone was no longer in her pocket—too much to hope that they wouldn’t have found it. She wasn’t gagged, so probably somewhere isolated, where screaming for help wouldn’t do any good. Lovely.

  Her throat dry, she licked her lips—and tasted dried blood. It was caked on her chin and upper lip too. She vaguely remembered blood as she fled the car—a bloody nose from the airbag? At least it didn’t feel broken. She’d take that as a win today.

  So, taking stock, she was bound and broken, not gagged, and tucked away in some lightless hole near something mechanical. She had no way of telling anyone any of this, she had no idea what her kidnappers wanted, and one of them had already expressed a sincere willingness to kill her if she didn’t play nice. She really should be panicking right now, but the strange thing was, she actually felt remarkably calm. Maybe this was shock. She certainly felt dissociated from reality right now. By rights, she really ought to be hysterical. Instead, she just wondered if it would be long before her jailers came for her.

  Good in a crisis, that was Tandy. A true Nightwing after all.

  She snorted out a laugh, then groaned when the movement tugged at her wrist. What kind of sadist put a zip tie around a broken wrist?

  She heard a distant clank, followed by footsteps. Evidently she wasn’t going to have to wait long to get the answer to that question.

  A sliver of light appeared along the floor—the door was closer than she’d thought. A fraction of a second later, the door flew open, the light beyond momentarily blinding her. She squinted up at the thin silhouette in the doorway.

  “Good, you’re awake,” the thin man said in that same pleasant, conversational tone. He stepped into the room and crouched down—and she realized she could see his face. No mask this time. He had narrow features and a sharp beak of a nose, but he wasn’t an unattractive man. Younger than she’d expected—only mid-twenties, if she had to guess. “Nothing to say?” he asked softly when she just stared. “No demanding to know where you are? What I want from you? Begging to be let go? Threats that your big bad family will get me?”

  She studied him. He didn’t seem crazy. Calm. Reasonable. More like a man with a plan than a villain on a psychotic break. That was good, right? She met his eyes. “What do you want me to say?”

  He smiled. “Clever girl. You’re right. You don’t have to say a thing.” He stood. “Lindstrom, bring our guest to the lab, if you would.”

  The lab. That didn’t sound so good.

  The thin man left the room without a backward glance. A mountain of a man took his place. Lindstrom, no doubt. He scooped her up and carried her without effort, Tandy biting her lip to keep from hissing every time his bouncing steps jostled her bound wrist.

  She studied her surroundings—hoping for a giant neon exit sign, but all she got was a long narrow hallway with a handful of doors. The building was older and industrial—some sort of warehouse or factory. Without knowing how long she’d been out, she had no way of telling if she was two miles from her condo or two hundred.

  The end of the hallway opened up into a large, two-story room filled with equipment—some of which she recognized from Eisenmann’s lab. The thin man was already there, his back to them as he fiddled with some machine. Lindstrom set her on an empty patch of floor and walked away to prop himself against a wall with his arms folded. Not much for socializing, that one.

  The thin man, on the other hand, seemed quite willing to make friends. He turned away from the table where he’d been working, carrying some sort of device as he came to crouch next to her again. He held it up with a flourish. “Recognize this?”

  It looked like a cross between a trumpet and a sniper rifle. Tandy shook her head. “Should I?”

  The thin man turned it over in his hands, admiring it. “My design likely differs somewhat from Eisenmann’s.”

  Tandy controlled her flinch at the mention of her lover’s name—but barely. She was glad the thin man seemed more preoccupied with gazing at his thingy than studying her for tells. She’d thought this was about the other super kidnappings, that he wanted her for her ties to the Nightwings, but was this really about Eric?

  “He calls it a frequency emitter, doesn’t he?” The thin man chuckled. “Always so literal. He scoffed when I originally suggested a psychic ray gun, but I knew from the start this would be our best option.” He held up the trumpet thing again. “I call mine the Sling Shot. Do you like it?”

  Eisenmann’s frequency emitter was the size of a sixties computer. Had the thin man already developed a portable prototype? He seemed to want her to applaud him, so she said, “It’s lovely.”

  “It’s broken.” He rested the Sling Shot across his thighs and returned his gaze to her. “That’s why I need you. Eisenmann’s been quite selfish, keeping you all to himself.”

  At this second mention, Tandy let herself ask, “You know him?”

  “Eisenmann? We go way back. I’ve been helping him with his little project. We’ve shared all our data—until a few days ago, when he became cagey with me about the frequencies. You see, the one he gave me initially did work, but it sent my test subjects into epileptic fits.”

  Test subjects. Tandy’s heart stuttered. Did he mean Masha and Kieren? Were they still here?

  “Unfortunately, one of them didn’t survive the seizures.” His eyes flicked away when she gasped, then back to her. “I’m not a killer. If Eisenmann had just given me the correct frequency, none of this had to happen. It was never my intention to hurt anyon
e.”

  “Just kidnap them. Did you think Masha and Kieren were just going to forgive and forget that you’d held them against their will?”

  “Forgive, maybe not. But forgetfulness is remarkably easy to arrange. That was the first ray gun I ever developed. Useful thing. If Eisenmann had been straight with me, they would have been released—confused, with no memory of what happened to them. As you will be. If you help me.”

  “Help you how?”

  “I need to see what Eisenmann saw. I want you to show me how your power works.”

  “I can’t.”

  He sighed. “I really don’t want to have to torture you, Tandy.”

  I don’t want that either. “No, I mean I can’t. Not without someone here to use it against.” One of them is still alive. She had to see.

  The thin man straightened. “Lindstrom, get the other one.”

  When Lindstrom was gone, Tandy nodded toward her bound wrists. “I’ll need my hands.”

  Her captor smiled and plucked a small knife from one of his work tables. “I don’t need to do the whole if you try to escape we’ll kill you spiel, do I?”

  “I thought you weren’t a killer.”

  He shrugged, reaching behind her to slip the knife between the ties and the vulnerable skin of her wrists. “Sometimes it can’t be helped.”

  With a flick, the pressure on her arms released. Her shoulder muscles spasmed and a thousand needles jabbed her fingers as the blood returned to them. Tandy shifted gingerly to a more comfortable position as he walked away, leaving her ankles still bound.

  Moments later, Lindstrom returned with a figure in his arms. Tandy didn’t know Kieren or Masha well, but she recognized the long fall of curly black hair instantly. Masha Korlova, a soft spoken girl who’d never quite lost her Russian accent. Which meant it was Kieren who hadn’t made it.