If there was anything worse than an ordinary superhero, it had to be a condescending one. I curled my hands into fists as I pivoted around to face Fireball. He was lounging against a streetlight, arms crossed, a smug smile clearly visible below his half-mask. How did he always managed to show up at the most inopportune times? Then I glanced at Sera, still sitting in the car, her face frozen in an exaggerated expression of shock.

A sneer spread across my own face. Of course. He had his little helper watch me. And to think, I had almost believed what she had been saying. All that time she had probably been laughing at me, as she subtly manipulated my thoughts.

“Sure, easy enough to catch a supervillain when you’ve got a mind-controlling former supervillain for a sidekick,” I retorted, taking a casual step away from the car to give myself room to maneuver should Fireball decide to attack.

The snappy comeback I was expecting from the superhero didn’t come. Instead he frowned. “Mind-controlling supervillain? You won’t distract me that easily.”

A car door slammed, Sera jogged around the front of the vehicle to stand between us. In a flash, a plan came together in my mind. I lunged forward and grabbed her shoulder, dragging her backwards. Frowning in concentration, I encouraged her hair to weave itself into a gag. That should keep her lying mouth shut.

“Alright, I’ll cut you a deal, Fireball,” I said, wheezing a little as Sera struggled to free her arms from my embrace. We were about the same size, making it difficult to keep hold of her. “You meet me on the roof of the city’s tallest tower at the stroke of midnight, and I will let your precious sidekick go free.”

There was a pause, and Fireball’s frown deepened as he looked me and my struggling captive up and down. “What’s this now, you’re holding your own accomplice hostage?”

“My accomplice?” I sputtered. “She’s your - ow!”

Sera had stomped on my toes, hard. Ballet slippers might have been a good choice for dramatic pirouettes to impress my minions, but they did nothing to protect my toes from Sera’s boots. I kicked her leg petulantly, but again my ballet slippers worked against me. She didn’t even react.

“I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing at, but the reporters do enjoy a big showdown, and I like to keep them happy whenever I can,” Fireball said, pushing himself away from the streetlight and taking two slow steps towards me.

I backed away, dragging Sera along with me, but Fireball had already stopped walking.

“And I must admit, I do enjoy a dramatic supervillain takedown myself. I haven’t had the chance to do one in quite a while,” Fireball continued. “The roof of the tower it is, then. You do know it’s already after one a.m. though, don’t you?”

Blinking at him, I struggled to catch up with his train of thought. After one am, what did he mean...oh. I flushed as I realized my mistake, and ducked further behind Sera so he wouldn’t see my embarrassment. The superhero was patronizing enough without my making idiotic remarks such as telling him to meet me over an hour ago.

“I said the stroke of two!” I snapped, gritting my teeth at his low chuckle. Sera wheezed as my grip around her waist tightened.

“The stroke of two it is,” Fireball said. He turned, his yellow cape flaring out dramatically in the still night air. “That’s in approximately forty-two minutes, just so you know. Wouldn’t want you to show up late to your own downfall!”

And with that he was gone, running down the street with almost superhuman speed and turning down an alley.

As soon as Fireball was out of sight, I released Sera and allowed her hair to drop from her mouth. She immediately turned around and shoved me, so unexpectedly that I stumbled backwards and almost fell.

“How could you use me as a hostage like that?”

“Well how could you lie to me like that?” I retorted, still fired up from my confrontation with Fireball.

“I didn’t lie to you!” Sera’s voice rose in pitch, echoing off the surrounding buildings.

“No cops, no superheroes. That’s what you said,” I told her, jabbing my finger at her nose. “And what did we have? Fireball conveniently showing up as soon as we stopped moving. If you ask me, they had a little birdie on the inside.”

“I didn’t tell them anything! Fireball doesn’t know I have powers. He doesn’t even know I’m a girl!”

“More lies.”

“I haven’t lied to you about a single thing.” Sera leaned forward, that faint silver gleam entering her eyes again, and I shivered.

“That’s the tricky thing about being a mind-controlling liar. It’s impossible to believe you about anything,” I said, staring at a lock of black hair that had escaped from her ponytail. Anything to avoid looking into those strange, gleaming eyes.

“Delphi...”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I’m leaving now,” I said, suddenly exhausted by the whole evening. My body still ached all over from my malfunctioning explosives, and I had just committed to a confrontation with Fireball in forty-two minutes’ time that I definitely was not ready for. I didn’t have time to argue with a lying ex-supervillain, even if she had bought me pie. Turning, I marched down the street in the opposite direction to that Fireball had taken.

“Wait!” Sera called after me. I paused, but didn’t turn around. I knew what she was going to say, and I wasn’t willing to hear it.

“Are you going to at least think about what I told you?”

I pivoted slowly. “What’s the point in giving any thought to the crazy stories of a compulsive liar?”

“So you’re not going to do anything? You’re just going to walk headlong into a showdown with the most powerful superhero this city has ever known, a superhero whose success is virtually guaranteed by RUBE?” Her face was twisted into a pained expression, a single tear sliding unnoticed down one cheek. A twinge of doubt broke through my anger. What if – what if she was telling the truth after all? But no, she had no reason to be telling the truth to me. She probably just wasn’t used to her lies being disbelieved.

“I don’t know what your motives are, but I’m not some gullible, naïve girl who can be taken in with a crazy story and a few tears,” I said, keeping my voice firm despite the doubt gnawing away inside.

I turned away again, avoiding eye contact.

“I don’t want you to die, Delphi.”

The words were so quiet, so tentative, that I could almost have imagined them. But they were real. As real as the asphalt digging into my feet through my thin-soled ballet slippers. As real as the small sparks of pain from my fingernails biting into my palms.

I could feel the walls I had constructed around my heart cracking, just from that one sentence. For a moment I wavered, torn between Delphi and Death’s Dancer. One hand rose towards my face, fingers stretching, ready to pull the mask from my face. Then my hand stopped, and I forced it jerkily back down to my side.

“Take the night off,” I said, staring down at the broken yellow line running down the centre of the road.

“What was that?”

“You heard me - take the night off. I’m taking down Fireball tonight, single-handedly. This is the only warning I’ll give you. Take the night off from being Coal, or I can’t promise you won’t get hurt as well.”

“After everything I told you, you’re still going through with it? You’re still trying to impress them?” Soft footsteps approached from behind, and Sera grabbed my shoulders, yanking me around to face her.

I pressed my lips tightly together, shaping the air between us into a solid block. This block I rammed into her chest, forcing her to release her grip on my shoulders and stumble back a step.

“Assuming for the moment that I believe everything you told me, which I don’t, then Fireball was trained by RUBE just like I was, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well there you go. I’m not trying to impress them. I’m sending the Rubes a message – Death’s Dancer isn’t someone you want to mess with. What better way to do that than by taking down their pet superhero?”

“But that’s not what you were supposed to take away from all this,” Sera said, looking utterly baffled. She reached out again, grabbing my arm.

I stiffened, but didn’t pull away, not yet.

“Look, just go home. Get a good night’s sleep. Forget about being a supervillain, or a superhero’s weird sidekick, just for one night.” I shook my head, hardly able to believe I was saying this. Death’s Dancer was disgusted with this display of weakness, but Sera kept calling me Delphi, and it was messing with my mind. “I won’t warn you again.”

“Listen to me for a minute, Delphi! Please,” Sera begged, squeezing my arm.

I tore my arm away from her grasp, leaving her standing in the middle of the street with one red glove and a dazed expression. Before she could pull herself together, I threw myself at the nearest building. My hands sunk into the wall halfway up my forearms, and I started pulling myself upward in the semi-liquid brick.

The wall was a blur of red in front of my eyes and I angrily blinked away the tears. “Supervillains don’t cry,” I muttered to myself, but my body cared nothing for that fact.

Heaving myself over the edge of the roof, I swiped the tears away and fixed my eyes on that towering silhouette on the skyline. The tallest tower in the city, where Fireball would soon meet his doom. I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen quite yet, but I had the whole journey there to think of some cunning plan.

The rush of air past my face as I ran, leaped, and reached out for the next building with my mind perked me up somewhat, and I was almost smiling by the time I got close to the tower. Before I made the final leap onto the building, I paused for a moment to catch my breath and look out over the twinkling lights of the city.

“Please stay away, Sera,” I whispered into the thick night air, hoping that she could somehow hear me across the dozens of blocks between us. I didn’t want to have to hurt her, a fact that I was trying not to think about too hard. I was Death’s Dancer – I wasn’t supposed to care about anyone but myself.

Shaking my head, I took a few steps back from the edge of the rooftop, giving myself room for a running start. At the edge, I hurled myself into the space between this building and the tower. As I flew towards the wall, I reached out with my mind towards the concrete...and it didn’t reach back.

For precious seconds as I fell towards the sheer surface of the tower’s concrete wall, I struggled to figure out what was happening. Why hadn’t it worked? I reached out again, more desperately this time, and received nothing in return. Nothing at all. The concrete was cold, dead, and getting closer every second.

The next thing I knew I was smacking into the wall at a velocity much higher than I was used to. The air flew out of my lungs in a terrific whoosh. My right arm, which had been extended outwards to grasp hold of the concrete, took the full force of the blow, and there was a dreadful snap I could hear even above the rushing wind in my ears.

Then I was falling, tumbling through the air towards the alarmingly solid ground. The powers I had relied on for so many years were inexplicably gone, and the shock of that made me insensible to anything else as I dropped through the cold night air. It wasn’t even the fall that terrified me, but the knowledge that my superpowers were gone. A vital part of me had been ripped away, leaving a throbbing hole somewhere deep inside. It might not be a problem for much longer, as the ground rushed up to meet me, but that loss concerned me more than the fact that I was about to die.

I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the stars staring down at me with cold impassivity, growing further away by the second. Who were the stars to judge me, to watch the great supervillain fall, brought down by her own arrogance? Although I was prepared to die, I wasn’t prepared to have my failure observed by those far-off judges. I refused to watch them watching me.

The impact as I hit the ground was not as hard as I had thought it would be, but I barely had time to consider that before blackness engulfed me and I thought nothing more.