by Dunne, Lexie
“No, no, you have a point. It’s been . . . a long week.” He pushed his hands through his hair.
“Bed’s plenty big enough if you don’t want to fold yourself onto that couch.”
Guy paused, his eyes darting up to meet mine. “Are you sure?”
I wiggled a hand. If I were any less exhausted, I would probably feel a little more awkward about it. Guy and I had barely even kissed, and that had been in the heat of the moment in battle. Sleeping together—even if it was just actual sleeping—that was kind of a biggish step. On the other hand, we’d spent nearly four years in the weirdest relationship where we regularly faced stark odds and horrifying danger together, all without really talking.
Normal had never really defined us.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. Though I’m kind of covered in pepper spray, still. Which could cause problems.”
“Right,” Guy said, as if he’d only just remembered something. “Stay put.” He disappeared down the hallway and returned less than thirty seconds later with a Victoria’s Secret bag.
“Let me guess,” I said, looking at it. “Vicki.”
“It’s regular clothes. She didn’t feel you’d be enjoying the . . . orange jumpsuit. And she has about fifty of these bags. She uses them for everything.”
“Gee, I wonder why. Detmer wasn’t exactly a jumpsuit kind of place, but god am I glad to get out of these clothes,” I said, taking the bag from him. “I can probably stay upright long enough for a quick shower if there’s a bathroom.”
“Through there. I’ll, uh—you know what? I’ll go put away the food.”
In the bathroom, I stripped out of the Detmer clothing and stepped under a scalding-hot shower spray. The water felt like it was slicing open wounds on my skin, pounding down on my injured shoulder and all of the bruises from my fights with Rita and the Raptor. I closed my eyes until the pain began to fade, and the heat relaxed the muscles still tensed from the fight. After I’d soaked long enough, I turned the water off, toweled off, and opened the bag Vicki had packed. I grimaced a little at the tank top, as my shoulder was a mass of black and purple, but it couldn’t be helped.
“All clear,” I called once I’d dressed.
When he reappeared, he wore athletic shorts and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. “Sam’s,” he said by way of explanation. “Um, do you have a side of the bed you prefer or—okay, that works.”
I lifted my chin from where I’d flopped onto the side nearest me. “Sorry. Sleepy.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m just glad you’re here, and you’re safe.” I could see the way his eyes lingered on my shoulder.
“Mm. Me too. I’m glad you came for me.” I didn’t bother with the covers. I felt him rustling around and settling in, then a long, soft sigh. Keeping my eyes closed, on the very cusp of sleep, I reached across the expanse in the middle of the bed, hand outstretched. A moment later, his fingers laced through mine.
I fell asleep holding on.
CHAPTER NINE
When I woke up, I smelled pancakes. Angélica felt like being nice today, evidently, if she was making more than just eggs or peanut butter on toast. Pancakes were reserved for special training days, and . . .
My eyes snapped open. In a horrible, crashing moment, I remembered that Angélica was gone. For a moment, things had been okay. I’d been back at Davenport, listening to my trainer cook breakfast as she prepared for another day of prepping me for superheroism. Those moments, the ones where I temporarily forgot she was gone, those were the worst. Everything might have been okay for a time, but reality inevitably returned. Every time it did, its edges cut sharper.
I sat up and pushed my legs over the side of the bed, fighting to breathe until equilibrium returned. The other half of the bed was empty—which explained how the pancakes were being made—so I had a moment to myself. It was the first time in what felt like forever that I really had been alone and safe.
My head still hurt, and it took me a moment to realize why that was strange. Mobium usually got rid of headaches first. Other aches and pains took a little longer to heal. Frowning, I headed into the bathroom and pulled the strap of the tank top aside. The bruising on my shoulder had faded to an ugly green color. Attractive.
Angélica might not have been there, but there was a visitor. Sitting at the table, holding a cup of coffee as she paged through a fashion magazine, was one of the most famous faces on the planet.
Or two of the most famous faces on the planet, really. Most of the world didn’t know that Victoria Burroughs, supermodel, put on a very ugly black-and-white mask and became Plain Jane, superhero, every night. Right now, her uniform was a great deal more green than usual. I really, really wasn’t sure how I felt, seeing Blaze’s outfit on somebody else.
She eyed me up and down. “It’s okay. You’re not the person I’ve made question their sexuality.”
I had to laugh. “Hi, Vicki.”
Vicki swooped across the room. Her hug practically squeezed all of the air from my lungs. “Thank god you’re okay,” she said. “You know prison’s not great for the skin tone. And I really didn’t know how we were gonna keep your boy from razing the place to the ground to get you back. How’s life as a fugitive?”
“Oh, you know how it goes. I thought life was getting a little boring, so I thought I’d see what being a fugitive feels like.” I hugged her back, looking over her shoulder as I did so. Guy, flipping pancakes at the range, gave me a little wave, grinning and rolling his eyes. “I’m glad to see you. Um, how are you? Are you okay? Last time I saw you—”
“Pfft, Konrad was hardly a challenge. I handled him.” Vicki waved a hand. The villain she called ‘hardly a challenge’ had leveled an entire shopping mall with his earthquake powers. This probably said more about Vicki than anything else. “And hey, now there are pancakes, and that’s nothing to shake a stick at.”
She had a point: the pancakes did smell amazingly, sinfully good. I wished there wasn’t a pain sitting behind the bridge of my nose so I could enjoy them more.
“There’s coffee,” Guy said, “and I got the tea that you used to keep stocked in your desk at the office.”
“You went through her desk?” Vicki asked, plopping back down at the table. “That’s adorable in a stalkery sort of way.”
“Uh.” Guy gave me a panicked look. “It was just to get a file, I swear. And it was only the once.”
Since reminders that I’d worked with Guy for years and had never noticed a lot of things about him made me uncomfortable, I stepped forward to pull a tea bag out of the box on the counter. I tilted my head to look up at him. “You weren’t the one that kept depleting my chocolate stash, were you?”
“No, that wasn’t me. I would never—and you’re teasing me again.”
“I would never,” I said. There were pretty white coffee mugs hanging on a rack, but they were close to the ceiling. Right. Both Sam and Guy were tall. Of course Sam would design his safe house with that mind. “Good morning. Or afternoon, I think.”
He flipped a pancake, raising his eyebrows. “Sleep all right?”
“Better than I have in a while. How long was I out?”
“Nearly twelve hours.” He smiled as he reached up and grabbed a mug, holding it out to me. “Is that what you were looking for? You could have asked.”
“Looking pitiful worked just as well, in the end.”
“So, Gail,” Vicki asked, making me look over. “Just how was life in the clink, anyway?”
I sat at the table and considered everything that had happened. Telling them the truth about Detmer, when I knew how they both felt about the men and women who committed evil deeds upon their cities, didn’t seem like a great idea. And I really, really did not want to explain that our country’s tax infrastructure was being run by the most evil people on the planet. I forced a smile and poured water from the kettle into the mug. “It
was okay. You just have to take the biggest con in the yard out on the first day, and everybody listens to you after that.”
“Did you really?” Vicki looked inordinately fascinated.
“Sadly, no. Only one guy tried to pick a fight with me.”
“You beat his ass like I taught you?” Vicki asked.
For a second, awkwardness reigned, like all three of us were expecting a fourth member of our party to snort at her and ask exactly who had taught me how to beat somebody up, again? It sat on the air, almost a palpable thing.
“I didn’t get a chance.” I played with the string of my tea bag, watching the color swirl and seep into the water. “So, do you two have any idea who wanted me to go to jail? Because I’ve been turning it over and over, and I’m just coming up blank.”
“We’ve been looking,” Vicki said. She tossed her magazine to the side, blowing out a breath. “Those texts were pretty damning and—don’t give me that look, I know you didn’t send them. But they’re out there. You’re sure nobody had your phone?”
“How would I know? I had it when Dr. Mobius knocked me out in that coffee shop, and when I woke up, it was gone.”
Guy put a platter of scrambled eggs with cheese on the table. “We’ll keep looking. But right now, the only way to clear your name is to find Chelsea and make her tell us what the hell is going on. The problem is . . .”
“It’s like she went poof,” Vicki said, scowling. “Whoever she is, she’s great at hiding—and being a pain in my ass. She was spotted at Avery Science Labs a couple days ago, but by the time we got there, she was gone.”
“Did she take anything?”
“We’ll let you know when they finish clearing the rubble.” Vicki’s chin firmed as she scooped a good portion of eggs onto her plate and passed the platter to me. “Davenport hid that reporter pet of yours pretty good, but there hasn’t even been a whiff of Chelsea looking for her. They’re moving her today.”
“I thought Jeremy said you guys couldn’t find Naomi.”
“Davenport was hiding her. But it looks like they’re finally keeping her in one place, and guess who’s on guard detail.” Vicki jabbed her own breastbone with her thumb. “Been awhile since I’ve had to do that.”
Guy gave her a smile. “Bring a magazine.”
Vicki saluted him.
Guy carried a plate of pancakes to the table and set them near me. My stomach roiled rather than rumbled, and I blinked. Why was the food making me feel ill? It looked so good. I swallowed down the nausea and speared a small mountain onto my plate. To distract myself, I asked, “There’s a lot they didn’t tell me in prison. Like, I have no idea about anything that’s happened, or what really went down at the mall.”
Vicki seemed more than happy to fill me in. After the fight at the mall, she said, she dropped Konrad the Earthquake Man off at one of the holding facilities and went back to headquarters to find Davenport in absolute chaos. The news that I had been arrested and convicted shortly afterward had been almost as shocking as Angélica’s death.
“Guy kind of lost it,” she said in an aside to me, speaking quickly to cover the fact that her voice had hitched on Angélica’s name.
Guy gave her an aggrieved look. “I’m sorry, who was it that punched Jeremy?”
“That was an accident,” Vicki said at the same time as I said, “You punched Jeremy?”
“Accidentally,” Vicki said. “And I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t stopped me from punching Eddie!”
“Either way, he saved you from ending up in prison right next to Gail,” Guy said, frowning. “You know the rules for attacking a Class D.”
“Eddie’s enough of an asshole to enforce it.” Vicki rolled her eyes. She turned to me. “Eddie gave us the news. I didn’t take it well.”
“And by not taking it well,” Guy said, cutting a pancake into small pieces, “she means she tried to punch the CEO of Davenport Industries even though she’s eighty times stronger than him and would have caused some permanent damage.”
“Jeremy blocked my punch before I could do something I would regret. He’s lucky I didn’t break his hand.”
That explained the bandage on Jeremy’s hand when he’d come to visit me.
“And I apologized. Jeremy forgave me, so I think everybody else should, too,” Vicki said, glaring at Guy.
Guy and I shared a silent look as we chewed. Jeremy would follow Vicki around like a lovesick puppy all day if she let him.
“What happened after Eddie gave you the news?” I asked. I wanted to ask what they had done with Angélica’s body. Had they taken her back to her family in Brazil? Jeremy had mentioned a memorial. It made me sick to think of missing it.
“Guy tried to get you a lawyer,” Vicki said, and I pushed Angélica from my thoughts as best I could. “And that’s when they told us they’d found your phone, and you’d been working with Chelsea all along. Her spy inside Davenport.”
“But why?” I asked. “Where did they even find my phone? Who would do this to me? And why would I spy for Chelsea? Even she didn’t think I was important.”
“She was wrong, obviously,” Guy said.
Vicki rested her chin on her hands. “Aw,” she said.
I ignored her. “What I mean is that Chelsea never gave a damn about me, and so there’s no reason she’d set me up to take the fall for her killing Angélica. So who is it? Davenport? Mobius? And why?”
“We’re looking into it,” Guy said. “And we’re looking for Chelsea. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. Davenport’s got a price on Chelsea’s head. They’ve done a media blitz looking for her, but it’s difficult when . . .”
“When nobody but Vicki and I know what she looks like? Yeah.” Chelsea had popped up out of nowhere. If I hadn’t been visiting Naomi to enlist her help, Chelsea might have slipped beyond Davenport’s radar for a long time. But I’d seen her, and Vicki had seen her, and the next time Chelsea had appeared in public, she’d masked up.
“I barely got a good look,” Vicki said. “She was all dusty, you know, from the fight. You and Naomi are really the only ones who know what she truly looks like.”
“Why not get Naomi to work with a sketch artist?” I asked. “Or me? I’d be happy to.”
“Naomi because she’s been in a coma, and you . . . I don’t know, actually,” Vicki said.
“Wait—what?”
“She actually just woke up yesterday,” Guy said. “The doctors think she’s going to be okay, but she hasn’t been up to talking much.”
I took a deep breath. I might not know Naomi very well, but I couldn’t fight the relief that she was okay. “Maybe she’ll know something that will help us catch Chelsea. Hey, did Sam have any idea what she would want with him, or with you?” Naomi had confessed that Chelsea had hired her to look into Blaze and War Hammer.
“He couldn’t think of anything.” Guy shook his head in bewilderment. “I haven’t fought her before. I would’ve recognized those moves.”
“Somebody from your past?” I asked. He had never shared with me how he had gotten his powers or come to Davenport. There were still large parts of Guy Bookman and Blaze that were a mystery to me.
Guy shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. I’ve tried to put it together, but anybody she could possibly be, they’re all dead.”
“That’s depressing,” Vicki said.
Guy gave her the same aggrieved look.
“Okay, point. Comes with the territory. Sometimes I forget because I’m not all tragic like you sob-story types.” She shoveled the last of her pancakes into her mouth. “But anywho, that’s not important right now. I think your reporter’s the key to what’s really going on here, Gail. Which would be okay, usually, but they’re cracking down on security now, and they won’t let Guy or me in to see her. Not even when we ask nicely. So that means you.”
“Right,” I said. “Because if they’re not going to let two of the biggest heroes on their roster in to see the patient, granting permission to the convict on the run is definitely something that will happen.”
“So don’t ask permission.”
I goggled at her. “You want me to break Naomi out of a secure Davenport facility?”
“You broke out of Detmer. Shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
“Wait, wait, hold up.” I actually held my hands up in a time-out gesture. “Stop. We need to clarify something here. I did not break myself out of prison.”
Both Guy and Vicki paused.
“Rita Detmer, Fearless herself, broke me out of prison. She literally flew me to the fence and threw me over with, like, no warning whatsoever. I was not in on this plan at all.”
“Why would she do that?” Guy asked at the same time Vicki asked, “Wait, you met Fearless?”
“She was my roommate,” I said to Vicki before I turned to Guy. “I have no idea. Like, none whatsoever. She said something about helping her family, but she didn’t say why, and you can imagine I have no interest in helping Eddie or Jessica Davenport right now, especially since the former threw me in jail and the latter did her best to kill me. But it was like Rita was grooming me, or at least expected me to do something, but it’s not like she told me what it was, so—wait, why are you looking at each other like that? Share with the non-hero at the table, please.”
“Rita Detmer has more family than just Eddie and Jess,” Guy said slowly.
I knew that. Jessica had two kids who showed up in the tabloids even though they were barely preteens. And then I remembered: Jess and Eddie had a brother. “Marcus, right? You told me he’s dead. His picture’s in the Annals and everything.” And there had never been a creepier memorial to the fallen heroes—and their families—than the hallway in Davenport Tower full of their portraits.
“Marcus had a daughter,” Guy said. “You know her.”
“I do?”
