You never really realize how heavy a person actually is until they’re clutched so tightly around your torso it feels like they’re actively trying to kill you. I had carried people before, of course, from burning buildings to first responders, away from supervillains trying to use people for ransom money against their families—you know, the usual stuff—but Knuckles was different, because she (at least, I guessed she was a she) had all the strength I wished I had, all of which she made sure to use in crushing my neck and chest in a death grip so perilous you would think I threatened her family. Who knew she was so afraid of heights? I just figured she screamed when I threw her into the air because she just wasn’t expecting to be flung upward so quickly. But live and learn, right?
“You could ease up a little, you know,” I muttered, straining to keep us in the air. Flying like this, so weak, so lightheaded, wasn’t fun for anyone. I dipped and jerked through the sky, uncoordinated, silly, with the inky expanse beneath us. I made the executive decision to keep us away from the gnarled black stones sticking out from the shoreline, just in case I passed out.
That way, we could slam into the ocean instead of the jagged rocks.
Knuckles didn’t listen, and instead wrapped her arms tighter around my neck. I gasped a little. Dipped. I forced myself upward through the air. Closer to the ship now, to the dock illuminated by the muzzle flash of assault weapons. No Capes yet, and nothing from the police.
A part of me felt sick hearing the shriek of Normals cut through the night, and I figured it wouldn’t be long until someone came looking and brought the authorities right along with them.
Nothing. Nobody was coming for now, least of all Olympia.
The gloomy darkness was shattered by an exchange of furious gunfire that I heard slice through flesh and muscle and bite hard into bone. The putrid stink of tire smoke filled the air as armored vans weaved through the dockyard, screeching as they spun around corners. The shadows were still soupy and thick, clinging to the walls of warehouses like some thug preying on a victim. Maybe it was because I was a little low on energy, but even I couldn’t see through them that well. That supervillain was still here, maybe inside one of those heavy duty vans. They’d be the first target, just to make this game a little easier instead of sifting through the darkness for each of them.
“Then how’s about you stop trying to kill us?” Knuckles growled, or tried to through a clamped shut jaw. Her eyes were just as pressed together. “How much further? Answers. Now.”
“You could always just open your eyes,” I whispered to myself. “A minute, maybe two.”
“I saw you fly much faster than this. Blink and you miss it. Are you enjoying this?”
“Yes, Knuckles, because I just love carrying flailing human beings across the ocean.”
An explosion cut short whatever retort she had resting on her tongue. The flash came first, then the burst of heat a second later. I flinched as heat prickled against my skin and dried my throat. Witchling, it had to be, and hopefully that meant we were getting closer to the stolen shipment. Closer myself, now; close enough to fly over the silent, rotting cargo ship. It was barren and decaying, so old I was surprised it had even made it this far, or the ship didn’t come from far at all and came from somewhere along the coastline. I made a mental note to come investigate it later.
But the convoy of about a dozen armored trucks would have to come first.
“How’re you feeling about getting thrown again?” I asked as I lowered through the sky, skimming towering stacks of archaic shipping containers. “And a couple of more times?”
She glowered at me, then turned her sharpened eyes away. “Only if necessary.”
Who are you, behind that mask? I thought. I expected an argument, but just like when I snatched her up into the sky, she complained, sure, but didn’t fight me on anything I did.
It was almost as if she was programmed to be some kind of soldier taking orders. A weapon who only knew how to act when there was a plan to rely on. I guess that put me in charge.
Not the most comforting thought, even for me, but I had more to worry about.
Whatever the case, we were catching up to the slowest bundle of three armored trucks racing away from the cargo ship. Three other clusters of armored trucks were racing off in different directions, trying and succeeding in spreading us thin. A truck full of Ava’s mercenaries were on their tail, and there was something grimly ironic about being on their side compared to earlier tonight. I dipped through the sky, free-falling, making Knuckles dig her fingers into my shoulder. Triumvirate mercs fired a volley of bullets at us, their tracer rounds whistling past my ears as I zipped past them, their tendrils of wind stinging my face as they blurred past. I followed, turn after turn, closing ground until I was close enough to smell the fumes from both vans’ exhaust pipes..
Our mercs had a machine gun mounted on top of their van, but the guy who was supposed to be firing it was slumped over the side of its protective shell, missing a chunk of his skull.
Great, illegal firearms, what’s better than that? I thought, landing on our truck with a dull, heavy thud. Knuckles pushed off me, untangling her limbs from me and clinging to the machine gunner’s dead body for balance. Using my flight, I stuck to the roof of the truck as it swerved and jerked, avoiding bullets with enough force behind them to punch chunks of concrete loose from the shipyard asphalt. Grit was in my teeth and stinging my eyes, and the stench of rubber and gunpowder was lacing my throat like my first drink of beer at summer camp had. I bent, staying low, getting closer to the front of the van. Some of our guys leaned out the window, firing rapidly.
I applied pressure to my hands and feet, then hauled myself onto the side of the truck as it juddered over a patch of loose rubble. I stuck to the dented steel like glue to paper, then made my way toward one of our mercs leaning out of the truck’s shattered window by almost crawling and scuttling along the side of the van. I startled him, judging by his reaction to swing his gun at me.
“What’s the sitch?” I yelled over the gunfire and the swearing. His face was governed in soot, and was that lipstick smeared on his chin? “And where the hell is everybody else?”
“No clue,” he barked. “Comms are fucked and someone jumped the gun!”
Knuckles, ever silent, appeared, leaning beside me. “What happened?”
“Informant,” he said, words laced with venom. “They knew we were coming.”
Shit, of course. The explosions and gunfire that got O’Reiley’s attention must’ve been their way of pulling us all in way before we were ready. They hit us with our pants around our ankles. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of honor among thieves? Freakin’ supervillains. A part of me wasn't all that surprised, but if I was gonna be working with these guys, then it was just about right to feel the brewing anger bubbling away in my gut. On the other hand, we weren’t ready.
Ava hadn’t been ready, and now we were doing the heavy lifting on her behalf.
I shook my head, then whipped around and out of the way before a bullet could slam into my forehead. Being this weak, I didn’t know what a bullet would do to me. Bruise me. Break a bone. It was one thing being invincible, but another thing having thick skin. I was soft on the inside, just as full of guts and blood like all the rest of them for now. Enough rounds to my torso, and I knew how badly it felt to feel like your stomach was being torn open from the inside out with every breath. Gunners first, then. Strip the trucks of their weapons, leaving the drivers defenseless.
“Where’s the closest rendezvous point for Damsel to pick up the cargo?” Knuckles yelled.
The merc shouted at another guy beside him, then said, “Old church building about a block away from the dock! Get us the trucks and we’ll be good to go. We can cut off their route and—”
A sudden bone-chilling coldness rushed over my skin. Call it a sixth sense, this inane ability that told me when a powerful superhuman was somewhere close to me. A warning.
The shadows we drove past leaped toward the van so quickly I almost missed them, reaching out with spindly black arms that stuck to the steel with a dozen sudden slamming impacts. They sank their crooked claws into the wheels, stopping us dead, like hitting a solid brick wall, and shot right past my head as I leaped off the truck, rolled across the concrete, and jumped into the air. Darkness filled the van, flooding human bodies with that same sudden chill that raised goosebumps across my arms. They screamed. Screamed even louder than the gunfire from the Triumvirate mercs speeding away. What the hell’s going on? I thought, drawing nearer, wanting to help because instinct told me to do it, but they were mercs at the end of the day, and besides…
Well, the darkness seeped out of the stationary truck seconds later, and all that was left of their bodies were the desiccated corpses of four mercenaries slumped in their seats. The silence came quickly, just as loud as the night around me. Knuckles had found her way onto the top of a shipping container, crouched on one knee, silent, glaring at the cadavers that toppled onto the ground, and looking down at the pool of shadows sitting underneath the van. We watched as the hands reaching up from the shadows groped the dead bodies, massaging their thighs and hollow faces. I felt sick with anger, knowing that eventually, that something new was coming.
I hadn’t come across this many new supervillains since Halloween last year.
Except the dead bodies that didn’t reek of decay because there was nothing left to rot weren’t just decorations, but were there, empty, gray and tender, spread across the concrete.
I was about to ask Knuckles if she knew any supervillains who could do this.
My answer came when a figure draped in tattered, filthy white clothing staggered out of an alleyway, darkness clinging to his stick-thin arms as he wiped his mouth across his forearm. He was disheveled, maybe a few years older than me. A musk of wet soil and cigarettes poured from his body, an odor too sour for a nose as sensitive as mine to cling onto for long enough to study him. I’d never seen him before, and when he swallowed saliva, looking at me, I shuddered.
Something was off about him. I expected laughter, like Cadaver had. Instead, he stared at us, his eyes unfocused, his stance hunched and staggered as he moved forward as if dazed.
The sheen of sweat on his forehead reeked of… honey. Something painfully sweet.
“Hey,” he said, pointing at me. Bags underneath his eyes, and dirt underneath his fingernails. He looked like the junkies who smoked in the abandoned skating joint near Denny’s. “You’re quick, really quick. But you smell so nice. I bet you’d taste even nicer. Nicer than them.”
I made a face, an unflattering one. “Girls don’t usually go for cannibals.”
If that’s what he was. Some kind of superhuman who fed on life itself? New.
But still strange, a little odd, and still sweating the sickly stench of burning sugar.
He smiled, showing teeth, then flicked his hand. Beside me, fingers shot from the darkness, tendrils that clawed through the air and dug deep into the concrete as I darted away. More, several, down from above as if the night sky was trying to grab a hold of me. I did what I do best, and dived to the ground, rolled, and threw an exposed chunk of tarmac at him like a fastball. His eyes didn’t react, and nor did his hand move, as a wall of darkness appeared in front of him. Stone smashed against the wall, disintegrating it into fine powder and loose bricks that skittered away.
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And there went the idea of throwing Knuckles at him right out of the window.
I bounded away, conserving my energy. Off an abandoned forklift and onto a lamp post, ducking underneath a sliver of tendrils, then lunging toward where Knuckles was perched. She grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me up beside her on the container. We stood, backed away, wordless for a moment. I was panting a little harder than I should have. My throat was dry, my tongue fat and useless in my throat. Looking around us, all I saw was heavy darkness.
Hell, the entirety of the shipping yard was coated in the overbearing blackness.
“Take him out, and we’ll have eyes,” I said to her. She nodded. “He’s probably doing something to the comms too, like that merc told us. Got an objection to the plan?”
“Only one question,” she said quietly. “How would darkness affect electricity?”
“How the hell would I know?” Then he appeared behind us—I felt it, felt this clawing coldness run down my spine. I grabbed Knuckles’ wrist and yanked her away from the blast of darkness, and slammed straight into a wall of it. I had wanted to dart over the side and away.
I only got two steps away before a hand as large as me slammed into my side, throwing us across the container, head over heels, until I got my balance again and forced my fingers into the steel. Knuckles did the same, except she came to a sudden dead stop—the force swayed the stack of containers we were on. An idea clicked into place. A rash idea. A stupid idea. But I was already moving backward, planting my feet into the grated iron, using my flight to push backward, and—
The container moved underneath my feet, and so did the one underneath it.
A lump of shadowy mass formed below me, vanishing from the fallen containers and appearing beneath me. A hand grabbed hold of my foot. Ice filled my veins, paralyzing me for a second. The shadows yanked me out of the sky, slamming me against the container. Blood filled my mouth. My arms felt like lead. Knuckles lunged from above, trying to land a kick that only met a wall of shadows. Where I froze, she shrieked in pain as the darkness grabbed a hold of her.
“Louder,” the boy whispered, saliva on his lips. “I like when they fight.”
I did the only thing I could think of: invert my flight. On my hands and knees, I pulled myself downward and through the container. I landed hard on old wooden crates. The shadows ripped off my body. I gasped, shook my head, then kicked away as snakes of black darted through the hole and chased me down the container. I slammed my shoulder through the doors, out into freedom. I fell through the air, spun around, and darted right toward the containers underneath him. Less force than I needed to rip a hole clean through it. Enough force to shove it out of the pile,
The four containers above it fell, taking the boy with him.
I grabbed Knuckles, ripping her away from the shadows. I set her down on another stack, but she was already on her feet before I could ask if she was at least somewhat alright, and shoved me away. Just then, tendrils shot between us, grasping nothing. The boy was silent as he fell, trapped underneath the containers that slammed him into the destroyed concrete underneath us.
Knuckles jumped to safety as the stack we stood on came crashing down, a bi-product of almost being used by shadow-guy to grasp onto anything that could save him. It was a sound so terribly loud I was half-sure that most of the Olympians would have heard it. A wreckage of steel and iron lay crumpled across the dock, blocking an entire section of the forgotten yard. Stars dotted my eyes. Exhaustion whispered my name. I battled them both and searched for that sweat-smeared guy. Tried to listen to where he could appear from, or if he was pulling himself from the wreckage.
After what I had come across tonight, I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
For all I knew, if this kept up, I was going to see dad again.
All I got in return was a bellow loud enough to make me dizzy. Equilibrium was a weird little quirk about my powers, because even without my flight, I could just about balance on any antenna on top of a skyscraper just fine. But with a sound loud enough to splinter concrete echoing through the night and my head, the wave of nausea and dizziness and confusion was like a fist against my temples. I tried to get my head straight, to see what had made that noise—to see what was still making that damned noise—and instead found myself dangling above the dock. Knuckles was gripping onto my wrist, grunting with effort, muttering about behind heavier than I looked.
She pulled me up (again, I know, I know), and watched as I puked and shook my head like a dog left out in the sun. I saw her look at me, but I ignored it and looked over the side.
The screeching of metal sounded like the worst car wreck I’d ever heard. The thing that threw the containers off of its body was just about the worst creature I had ever seen in my life.
A mess of muscle and too-stretched flesh stood beneath us, looming over the guy dressed in white. He was panting, sweating even harder, as the beast with a mouth sewn shut by blooded spools of thread, tongues of loose skin hanging from its scarred, bulging arms, stared up at us, grunting and roaring and struggling to breathe as if it had something lodged deep in its throat. A girl had appeared, too, clutching onto her stomach as she leaned against the beast. She was dressed in a checkered red and white dress, and was about as pale as the guy beside her was. She was just as thin, like her inky black hair, and had eyes like if you beat the ever-living life out of the sky. Her lips were a deep scarlet, like she’d taken a whole lot of care in smearing them in fresh blood.
“Just one thing after another tonight, isn’t it?” I muttered. Knuckles stayed quiet.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she snapped. The guy flinched as if smacked across the face. “I was just about starting to understand the witch’s abilities. I was winning.”
Knuckles tensed, leaning forward. I put a hand out, stopping her. Being Tempest had taught me one thing—rest whilst I could, even though it was getting annoying to do so.
The three other convoys were getting away, except one of them was far slower. Witchling must be over there, having an easier time now that whoever this girl was, wasn’t there.
“I needed your help,” he said, rasping. He pointed at us. “Their smell, it was—”
She struck him across the face. He staggered, holding his jaw. “You fucking half-breed imbecile. Did those drugs make you a lot more brain dead? I gave you another chance!”
“The girl with black hair,” he said, blood lining his teeth. “She smells different.”
The new girl didn’t bother looking at us as she snapped her fingers and said, “Cherry, fetch. I don’t want to waste my time with any more of their little supervillains for hire.”
Rylee Addams, supervillain for hire, I thought. A new personal low.
Cherry—the beast of hulking flesh and muscle—bellowed once more as the girl began laying in on the guy. It moved forward, then leaped thousands of feet into the sky. We stood, backed up, arched our necks and watched him sail through the sky and come crashing down. We lunged out of the way, left and right, as he landed with a bone-jarring impact. He went for me first, stomping over old trailer wrecks and forklifts and empty oil barrels as I dodged and ran. He was fast, keeping pace. I turned around, pivoting on my toes, and met his giant fist. I swore, crossed my arms, and ate the impact. It sent me flying backward, shooting across the dock, skipping across concrete that burned my skin on impact; I tried to stop, stumbled and kept going until I slammed into the side of an abandoned train carriage. My head rang. My body felt weak, not mine.
But I had to pull myself out of the dent I made. I did, falling flat on my face, eating dirt and gravel. Then I struggled to get off the hard-packed dirt pressed against my face as I wheezed in pain and surprise and raw, unfiltered agony. My lungs expanded, air filled them through a straw.
I clutched my stomach as the ground trembled. Cherry was coming, and fast.
One hand on the earth, fingers clawing through gravel and dirt, finding purchase, then the next arm and two feet, and then I pushed the earth off my chest. Still couldn’t breathe right. Still struggled to fill my chest with oxygen. I spat blood and dirt, then glanced upward to the sky.
I threw myself to the side, rolling to a crumpled heap as Cherry cratered the earth.
I didn’t know how far he’d thrown me across the dock, but it was far enough to toss gravel into the air, right along with shards of metal and wood torn off the cargo trains surrounding me. It rained down like shrapnel, pelting me as I stood, staggering, weak on my feet. Fuck me, suddenly everyone hits just as hard as dad around here. Cherry’s bulging black eyes watched me from the cloud of dust, watched me as it settled on his broad shoulders as he lumbered his way forward.
Hands up, feet squared, heart thumping against my chest, world dizzy, but I’m Zeus’—
He swiped his arm through the air, catching my midriff, sending me into the side of another train carriage. I tore through it. Landed hard. My head slammed against something, wood, maybe, and my body disconnected from my mind. Cherry bellowed and shrieked, rage, maybe, or pure excitement at seeing that I was still clinging to life. I winced, cried out, and pressed my hands against the side of my head. I shut my eyes, something I knew I shouldn’t do in any fight. It was a reflex, and I could almost hear Lucas yelling at me to open my eyes and get up, dammit. Now.
But the dizziness was making me sick. My body was wracked with pain, my head punctuating it with every heartbeat that pounded against the side of my tender temples.
The ground stopped trembling, and I opened one eye.
Cherry stood over me, breathing hard through his surgically sealed maw. The guy and the girl appeared beside me, one scolding the other. Couldn’t tell who from who, not until the girl was close. She used her bare feet to turn me over onto my back. Kicked my side to lower my hands.
“This is what you brought me here for?” she said from very far away. I coughed, choking on blood flowing down my throat. “I told Ceaser you half-breeds weren’t ready. I was right.”
“Frankie,” he whispered. “I started feeling sick again. I need more—”
“Later,” she said, waving her hand through the air. I think she did that, because all I saw was a blur of dull shades. “First I have to see what’s so important about this silly little girl.”
I tried getting up, tried putting my weight on my hands. She placed her foot on my throat and forced me back down. Air escaped my body. I reached to claw at her foot, but darkness wrapped around my wrists, and just as suddenly as before, my body numbed, my muscles seized and tensed up. Anger flared through me, anger that came from a place of being controlled, being made into something that could get beaten around. She saw it in my eyes, and a part of me heard her laugh, then another part of me felt as she slammed the heel of her foot hard into my chest.
“But I suppose you’re right, Wraith,” she said. “It does smell different from the others.”
He jerked his thumb at Cherry. “Use her body parts to make him stronger?”
“Get—” I fought the urge to pass out as I grabbed her ankle. “Get your fucking filthy feet off of me.” She forced me down, but fuck me, I wasn’t going to get dismembered by someone I’d never even heard of before. All these damned supervillains, these new supervillains who could come into my city, thinking they could do whatever they wanted just because they were powerful.
A statue stood in the bay, a golden statue, and this city belonged to him.
And in turn, it belonged to me.
Wraith raised his arm, and tendrils of darkness appeared around me. “Stay. Still.”
“Blow me.”
Frankie kicked me across the jaw. The darkness dug its nails into my wrists, not drawing blood, but making me feel like actual fingers were pressing against my veins, searching for a pulse.
“You’ve got spunk, but I hate that in dead girls, you know? You've got to understand that it makes people a lot harder to cut open when they keep squirming around because it hurts or whatever,” she explained. “Cherry, carry her and make sure Ceaser knows what I got.”
“But I was the one who—” She glared at Wraith. He kept quiet.
“Don—Don’t y—Don’t you fucking dare,” I said through my teeth as Cherry neared. I bucked, kicked at the dirt and the shadows. Frankie watched me the way you would a dying bug.
Cherry’s meaty hands grabbed my arms and legs, hauling me off the ground with ease.
And away from the shadows.
I mustered the morsels of strength I had left and slammed my knee into his nose. I heard a soft crunch, and he reared, screaming, holding his bleeding nose and crooked jaw, as I landed on all fours. I breathed hard and heavy, glaring at the pair. Frankie looked angered. Wraith looked wary. I couldn’t really give a damn what they thought at that moment, because the night was getting long, and the blood in my mouth was getting bitter. I knew for a fact, now, that at least three Triumvirate armored trucks had gotten away. There were still nine more on the loose, but I couldn’t call myself a superhero if I was going to stand around and get my ass handed to me by these two. I might not have had the lightning bold glimmering on my chest, but I had it flowing in my blood.
Hell, I wouldn’t be Zeus’ daughter if I didn’t.
I spat blood on Wraith’s white shirt as I stood, feeling dizzy, sick, weak from my knees to my toes, but stood firm. He blinked, looked at it, and since nobody was around, since Knuckles wasn’t here and nor was Witchling or O’Reiley or anyone else—-well, when had there ever really been anyone else with me?—I let electricity jump between my fingers. Not the tiny sparks that I used to heal the wound Cadaver had carved into my torso, but enough to make the girl step backward as I stood up. The look in her eyes went from boredom and glee to this coldness, this empty fear, this burning realization of who was standing in front of her. I guessed it didn’t matter if they knew who I was now, as the electricity ran up my arms, as I felt warmth flow through my bloodstream and collect in my eyes. These two weren’t anything like Ava and Cadaver.
I was more than certain if I put my hand through their chests, that would be that.
But it was always a good idea to check if your villain had a heart or not.
“You’re…” Frankie blinked, raised her hand for Cherry to get ready. “You’re not supposed to be here. They told us you’d be busy somewhere else. Or… no, you’re not her. You can’t be.”
I was in her face the second she blinked. “Guess you’re about to find out who I am then.”