by Vivi Andrews
Frost bent and put on his own shoes. Kim wouldn’t stop until she had her answers and he couldn’t let her put herself in peril. The answer was clear.
She would forgive him later. She would understand.
When he straightened she was right in front of him, bouncing on the balls of her feet, her eyes sparkling with anticipation.
He cupped her shoulders, freezing her power and drawing it into himself.
She rocked up on her toes and pressed a quick kiss to his mouth, before settling back on her heels, eyes gleaming. “Let’s do this.”
“I’m sorry, Trouble.”
Before she could do more than frown at his words, he yanked at the teleportation aspect of her power and launched himself toward Pier 42—only himself.
He’d never teleported without bringing the person with the power with him. He knew it could be done, but that knowledge didn’t prepare him for the reality. He’d never been very good at landings, but this one threw him to the ground. He might have cared more about the grimy concrete pressed to his cheek if his internal organs hadn’t felt like they were going through a spin cycle. Hopefully by the time they stopped spinning his liver hadn’t switched places with his spleen.
Note to self: never fucking do that again.
He came up onto his hands and knees, taking it as a victory that he managed not to lose the power bar he’d eaten. A strange taste began building at the back of his throat—like he was swallowing static electricity. It swelled—his hunter’s sense of a power being used nearby going wild until that static taste overwhelmed his senses.
But there was no one here.
The pier was empty at two-thirty in the morning. Frost struggled to his feet, scanning his surroundings, but while the sense of the power remained, there didn’t seem to be anyone behind it. His only clue on the origin of the power was the warehouse at the back of the pier.
He jogged over to the building, every instinct on high alert. He circled, coming around to the narrow side door, but before he could reach for the handle, the door swung open. The interior of the building was even darker than the moonlit pier—that was all he had time to register before something arced out of that darkness at him.
The electrodes hit his chest and electric current tore through his body, sending him crashing, writhing to the ground. Only when the surge ceased was he able to identify the wires that had sprung out at him. Taser. Super strength, by the feel of it.
Frost groaned, unable to move, his fingertips still twitching involuntarily.
A figure appeared in the doorway, oddly shaped and moving wrong, too smoothly, rolling he realized. “Welcome, Mr. Nightwing. We’ve been expecting you,” a silky female voice intoned, as moonlight painted the figure, revealing it wasn’t man but machine. Some kind of robot on wheels. Its arms lowered like a forklift, sliding under his body to hoist him into the air. It reversed back into the building, his body dangling.
The door closed with a clang, sealing them in darkness, but the robot kept moving, not needing light to navigate. Frost tried to call up his power, tried to freeze the goddamn gears or something, but his body wasn’t responding the way it should. He’d never been hit with a super Taser before. Damn, those things fucking hurt. His fingers were still twitching.
The robot dropped him on the ground and then he felt it prodding at his neck, snapping something into place. When Frost could lift his right arm, he touched the smooth, metallic band circling his throat.
“The collar you’re feeling is equipped with several very nasty neurotoxins—any one of which could kill you in under a minute. Should you attempt to use your power in any way, the toxins will be injected into your bloodstream,” that female voice purred. “So please, Mr. Nightwing, don’t be a hero.”
“What—” he croaked, before choking on the surge of that static electricity taste at the back of his throat. He wasn’t sure what he had been going to ask. What do you want? What are you waiting for? Why not just kill me already?
“Patience, Mr. Nightwing,” the unseen woman cooed. There was a ringing clang, like the doors of a cage being secured. “We can’t begin until Ms. Carruthers arrives. But never fear. I’m sure she’s on her way already. Rushing to the rescue for a change.”
“Leave her… out of this,” he managed to growl.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Nightwing. She’s a crucial part of my plan. You both are.”
A trap. He’d known it was a trap and he’d walked right into it. He’d been so busy thinking about protecting Kim, he hadn’t realized he was being a total idiot himself. The woman was right. Kim would come. He should have locked her up, handcuffed her to something, anything to keep her from racing down here as soon as he vanished. So far he was doing a distinctly shitty job of protecting the love of his life.
“Don’t worry.” The voice came again, sweetly taunting—and Frost finally identified it, his stomach knotting with dread. “If you’re a good boy, you’ll live through this, Mr. Nightwing. I’ll even let you go. Right after you watch Ms. Carruthers die.”
Chapter Twelve: Trouble to the Rescue
Kim didn’t waste time gaping at the empty space where her lover used to be. If the bastard thought she was going to let him rush into danger without her, he had another think coming. She was done being useless.
She raced for the front door, already unholstering her phone. The hallway was just as posh as the apartment—creamy carpets and classy, understated décor—but she quickly found what she was looking for. The emergency stairs. With roof access.
Kim dialed Justice as she took the stairs up two at a time. Luckily Frost was only three floors below the penthouse, so she was barely winded when she kicked through the access door—ignoring the alarm will sound sign—and burst onto the roof just as Captain Justice finally deigned to pick up his goddamn phone.
“Kim? Where are you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, eyeing the rather abrupt drop down fifty floors to the pavement. “But in about five minutes I’m going to be at Pier 42 with the Big Bad Bitch responsible for all of this.” She explained the situation as quickly as possible, ending with, “So if you ever cared about me, you can get a super posse rounded up and give me some freaking back up, because I’m going after Frost right now.”
She ended the call and reholstered her phone, trying not to think too hard about what she was about to do.
Then she jumped.
Flying for a telekinetic wasn’t quite the same as flying for someone like DynaGirl who could manipulate gravitational forces. There was nothing graceful or coordinated about the way Kim flung herself across the city with bursts of TK, the same way a kid might try to keep a feather floating by blowing on it. It wasn’t instantaneous like teleportation or particularly controlled, but it was her fastest option, catapulting herself haphazardly across the sky, frantically dodging cell tower spires and skyscrapers.
She landed on the concrete of Pier 42 hard enough to jar her knees, staggering a few steps before her momentum abated.
This was the place. So where the hell were Frost and the uber-bitch?
There weren’t any boats tied to the pier, which pretty much left the warehouse or some kind of underwater lair. As something of a connoisseur of villain lairs, she secretly hoped it was the submarine option, but she’d found most villains weren’t nearly as inventive as they liked to think they were, so the warehouse was by far the likelier option.
Either way, it was a trap. The fact that Frost was nowhere in sight reinforced that. She could wait for Justice and the cavalry, but Frost might be in trouble now.
Kim reached for her telekinesis, calling up the aspect of her power she’d been practicing with for the last two months, building a repulsive field around her so even a bomb going off a foot away from her wouldn’t touch her. It was a neat trick, but keeping everything at bay was harder than stopping a speeding bullet. It would exhaust her power if she kept it up for any length of time, and she could only manage it for about twent
y minutes before she would crash and burn.
Hopefully she wouldn’t need it that long.
About twenty feet above her head, a vent cut into the side of the warehouse. Kim propelled herself up to it and braced herself lightly against the building, trying to peer inside. Without luck. It was pitch black in there. She started to float back, intent on finding a stealthy way in, when the lights inside suddenly flared to life. A spotlight seemed to fall on a giant cage in the middle of the room—and the man lying prone in the center of the cage.
“Frost.”
Subtlety and stealth forgotten, Kim ripped the vent from the wall, flung it aside and dove through the hole. She touched down twenty feet from the cage, another jarring, running landing that rattled her knees.
Frost’s head snapped up.
Thank God. He’s alive.
“Kim! Get out of here. She’s going to kill you.”
That made her stumble a step, but she didn’t stop, scanning the seemingly empty warehouse even as she bent the metal bars to make a Frost-sized hole in the cage. “Where is she?”
“She isn’t here,” Frost said, struggling to his feet.
“She got away?”
He shook his head. A metal collar gleamed around his throat. Was it drugging him? Had he been tortured? Why was he moving so stiffly? “She was never here. It’s Mathilda Torchwood. I put her in Area Nine almost seven years ago and as far as I know she’s still there. Everything she’s done has been arranged remotely. She’s a technopath.”
“Oh shit.”
A technopath. The supers who could crawl inside any machine—cell phones, video cameras, ATMs, anything. If it had circuitry, it was fair game. The previously empty warehouse didn’t seem so empty anymore—filled with gadgets, any one of which a technopath could turn into a weapon.
A soft whirr hummed behind her and Frost shouted a warning. Kim spun in time to see Taser wires arching toward her. Electricity flashed. She screamed and went down hard.
****
Frost roared as Kim slammed to the ground. He ran for the gap she had bent in the bars.
“Ah, ah, ah, Mr. Nightwing,” Mathilda Torchwood scolded. “Stay where you are or I might be tempted to release those toxins.”
He froze, watching Kim hungrily as she gasped on the ground, no longer seizing. “Kim. Talk to me, baby.”
Kim shuddered, but when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t Frost she sought out, but the robot that was the source of the voice. “Why are you doing this?” she moaned.
Frost frowned. Kim Carruthers was the love of his life. And a notoriously shitty actress. She was pretending to be hurt. What the hell? He studied every inch of her, his gaze locking on the Taser wires—where they hovered in the air two inches above her body, not touching.
Thank God for telekinesis.
Mathilda didn’t seem to notice her electroshock greeting hadn’t been delivered. She was too busy gloating. “Why? Didn’t you hear what he said? I’ve been in Area Nine for seven years and Frost Nightwing is responsible. Revenge, darling. What other reason could there be? It’s payback time.”
Frost remembered Mathilda Torchwood well. It was hard to forget the first superheroine who’d ever tried to seduce him into letting her go. She’d been beautiful—but also totally, off-the-rails insane. The middle daughter of another second-generation super family, a family full of heroism just like the Nightwings, she was one of the first rogues he’d ever been called in to apprehend.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think here in Area Nine,” Mathilda went on, reveling in her moment of triumph. “They wouldn’t let me anywhere near anything with a digital pulse. Do you know it took me almost two years to figure out how to use wifi and 4G to access the outside world? Two years of nothing but lifeless paper allowed into my cell. My dungeon. It’s enough to drive a girl a little mad.”
“You were already a psychopath,” Frost growled.
“Sticks and stones,” the robot voice sing-songed. “I thought about you a lot during those two years, Mr. Nightwing. I thought about what I would do to you. How I would destroy you. At first I considered just killing you and everyone you love, but then I realized the best revenge I could have would be to turn you into me. What does a hero fear more than becoming a villain and spending the rest of his life in Area Nine?”
“Frost would never turn villain,” Kim naively defended him.
“Perhaps not,” Mathilda agreed. “Let’s put it to the test, shall we?” The robot rolled until it seemed to be looming over Kim’s prone form. “This isn’t quite how I’d envisioned things. He was supposed to come rescue you, not the other way around, but I suppose as long as he knows he’s failed to save you, the result is the same.”
“You’re the one who arranged to have me kidnapped all those times,” Kim said.
“Not all of them,” Mathilda corrected.
Kim shrugged. “Seventeen of them.”
There was a long pause. If the robot could have been nonplussed, it would have been. “How do you know that number? Who told you? Vic didn’t know that.”
“Figured it out on my own,” Kim said. “Demon Wroth had his own agenda and seven of the others were kidnapping me because they wanted to hurt me or use me to tell their stories to the world. There were only seventeen I couldn’t explain.”
“Well, aren’t you clever,” the robot cooed. “I can see why you like her, Mr. Nightwing.”
“What would have happened if Frost had come for me instead of Justice?”
“I would have killed you the second he arrived to save you,” Mathilda said mildly. “The idea was for him to watch you die, but he never came. It surprised me, frankly. When I watched you together, I was so sure you were the thing he loved more than anything in the world.”
Frost wasn’t sure which disturbed him more—the idea that Mathilda could have watched him with Kim without him ever suspecting or the fact that a complete sociopath had seen his love for Kim more clearly than he had.
“Why did you kill Little Vic?” Kim pushed, always the reporter.
“He spoke out of turn,” Mathilda said, again in that sweet, mild tone. “He wasn’t supposed to tell you I was a woman. He wasn’t supposed to know I was. As soon as I realized clever Little Vic had figured out more than he was letting on, I knew he had to be eliminated. I had hidden a little security policy inside one of the cameras—it’s amazing what my little robot friends can do.”
“You heard him leaving the message—”
“Phones are easy,” she bragged. “You’d be amazed what I’ve heard. Unfortunately, I can’t be everywhere at once—I’d really be omniscient then—but I come pretty close.” She chuckled. “You never know when I’m listening…”
“You have more of those devices,” Kim said.
It wasn’t a question, but Mathilda seemed to be enjoying her interview and volunteered, “There’s one right in front of you. My little robot friend will vaporize you, Trouble.” Frost growled at the sound of his nickname for Kim coming out of the speaker. “And Mr. Nightwing gets to watch. What do you think? Will he go mad or go bad?”
“Is there a difference?” Kim rolled onto her knees, not waiting for Mathilda to answer. “You can control anything with a digital pulse, as you put it, can’t you?”
“I can,” the robot voice purred.
“Then how will you kill me when I pulverize every electronic device in a two mile radius?” Kim purred back.
She flung out a hand in Frost’s direction and he was thrown to the ground and the collar ripped from his neck a fraction of a second before a massive shockwave thundered through the warehouse.
Chapter Thirteen: Demolition For Beginners
Kim threw everything she had into the blast, annihilating everything in range until Mathilda would be lucky if she could find two microchips to rub together. It wasn’t two miles—she didn’t have that kind of energy left—but she vaporized everything inside the warehouse that wasn’t covered by the protective bubble she’d thrown o
ver Frost. She dove to his side as the walls crumbled and the ceiling plummeted down. Several of Mathilda’s devices detonated, little explosions popping like firecrackers around the warehouse, though none of them came close to touching her or Frost.
She wrapped her arms around him, letting the fool shield her with his body as she shielded them both with her power and pushed the telekinetic blastwave a little farther, buying them a little more space, a little more distance from Mathilda, before her gift sputtered and died, pushed too far.
Silence returned slowly, chasing away the ringing in her ears. Her head was already beginning to throb. This was going to be a power hangover unlike anything she’d ever experienced, but she’d do it again in a heartbeat to protect Frost.
She’d saved the day. Kim Carruthers, perennial victim, had been the hero. Delight sparkled in her blood.
Frost levered himself onto his forearms above her in the rubble, grey warehouse dust clinging to his eyelashes. He looked around them, ice blue eyes widening. “Remind me never to piss you off.”
“If you don’t want to piss me off, don’t go leaving me behind like that, you idiot. You don’t leave your partner behind.”
And they were going to be partners. She was a super badass now. His equal. She was qualified to watch his back, so if he tried to walk away again, she’d go after him this time. Before she’d worried that she wasn’t good enough for him, that she’d only endanger him, but now she knew she could save him when he needed saving.
Instead of replying, he kissed her. It was an electric, I-thought-I-lost-you kiss and she would have loved to enjoy it more, but her head was really starting to pound. When he lifted his head, his eyes bore into hers, concern in their glacial blue depths.
“You aren’t invincible. Your powers protect you, but they don’t make you immortal. If you think you can’t be hurt, you’re wrong. First rule of being a super is that no matter how tough you are, there is always someone bigger and badder than you. I won’t be able to handle it if anything happens to you, Kim. I love you too much.”
