Shock at the Hero’s words almost made Max drop her dagger again.

“What do you mean, kill him?” he demanded.

“Kill the sheriff. Not the one the next county over. This one here, on the ground.” The black-clad Hero pointed, enunciating slowly, as if Max might be mentally challenged. “Stab him with the pointy end until he retires to that big sheriff’s office in the sky. Normally, I favor ventilating the stomach and keeping my fingers crossed for sepsis.”

She shivered with delight, as if recalling a lover’s touch.

“It’s deliciously slow and painful. But slow is the operative word. We’re on the clock. Gotta copter to catch. Quick and relatively painless will have to do, unfortunately. Stabbing him in the heart is just what Doctor Stiletto ordered. That’s me, by the by—Stiletto. Pleased to meetcha. Hold your applause and autograph requests.

“You’re gonna wanna thrust right here,” the woman added, pointing at the center of her own chest. “But on him, not me, in case that’s not clear. Just last week, I almost got stabbed by another prospective student. That big lummox. A Titan, of course—those brutes generally aren’t known for their brains. All force, no finesse. Not that I’m prejudiced, you understand—some of my best friends are Titans. My father’s a Titan. As a Void Walker, you’re probably not as dumb as a Titan, but one can never be too careful with you newbie Unreals. Giving a teenager superpowers is like giving a kindergartener a hand grenade. Just goes to show the universe has a dark sense of humor.

“Anyhoo, what’re you just standing there for, mouth agape like a narcoleptic hooker? Hustle up! We haven’t all night. Now remember, even though I keep that blade sharp as a razor, you’ll still have to put some oomph into the blow to pierce the breastbone.”

The more Stiletto spoke, the less Max understood. But at least one thing was crystal clear.

“I’m not going to kill the sheriff,” Max protested.

“Oh, poo! Why on earth not? Those weren’t blanks he was shooting at you, you know. He would have given you a terminal case of lead poisoning and lost not a wink of sleep over it. I know the type. Some say I am the type. But they’re just haters. Anyway, do unto others before they do unto you—that’s what the Good Book says.”

“I’m not going to kill him,” Max repeated firmly, in utter disbelief. “Just what kind of Hero are you?”

Stiletto gave him a slow wink. When she spoke, there was a grin in her voice.

“Who said I was a Hero?”

The obvious slapped Max in the face. Stiletto’s strange behavior, her kicking a defenseless man, her urging Max to murder the sheriff . . .

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She wasn’t a Hero.

She was a Villain! Villains were superpowered crooks. Many were killers. None could be trusted.

The realization had barely settled in when Max took an instinctive step back, into the shadows. He shadow hopped away, re-emerging in the woods.

He took off running, deeper into the darkness, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Villain behind him.

“Tally-ho!” Stiletto’s gleeful cry was followed by peals of laughter.

Laughter that was getting closer.

A fresh surge of fear gave Max’s feet wings. He crashed through the woods like a deer fleeing a bear.

Running through the woods in the middle of the night was no easy feat, not even for Max, who had been roaming these woods since he was little. Parts of the underbrush were dappled with moonlight that pierced the woods’ canopy, but that wasn’t much light to navigate by. Max feared he’d trip over something, or twist an ankle, or break a leg.

The only bright side was the fact that Stiletto wasn’t familiar with the terrain. Max had the home-field advantage.

But he had the disadvantage of making more noise than a rock band in a monastery. He realized Stiletto could track him simply by following the sound of him blundering through the darkness as he crunched dead leaves and snapped twigs and branches.

Max slid to a halt next to a sweetgum tree, nearly tripping over a fist-sized rock in the darkness as he scrambled behind its trunk. His heart pounded like a tom-tom.

Panting hard, he closed his mouth, forcing himself to breathe more quietly through his nose as he poked his head from behind the tree, probing the gloom behind him for the slightest sight or sound.

Finally, he spotted movement. Thanks to Stiletto’s dark outfit, she seemed more like a shadow or a trick of the light than a person.

She was right on his tail, closing rapidly.

Instead of bolting again, Max changed tactics. His movements shielded by the tree’s large trunk, he groped for the rock he had stumbled over. He threw it as hard as he could in the direction he had been running.

The rock snap, crackled, and popped through low-hanging branches in the distance, before thumping faintly as it hit the ground. Before the rock’s racket died, Max let himself be swallowed into the sweetgum’s dim shadow.

He emerged from a different shadow, this one well behind where he had spotted Stiletto’s faint movement. Turning his back on Stiletto, he began creeping in the opposite direction of the way he had been going—the one the Villain was still going—careful to not put his weigh down on something that might break underfoot. He was moving as silently as an especially light-footed ghost.

By the time she realizes she’s chasing a phantom, Max thought, I’ll be long gone. She somehow knows about my Hero academy applications, so maybe she also knows where I live. To be on the safe side, I’ll head to the Johnsons’ house. I’ll stay there until I can figure out what’s going on. The Johnsons often let him stay with them when Ben was on a tear, out of his mind with drugs, more volatile than a rickety backwoods still.

He was silently thanking god for the kind-hearted Johnsons when he heard it:

The slightest whisper of a footfall. Directly behind him.

The sound had barely registered on his consciousness when something far more alarming eclipsed it.

A sword sprouted out of his chest like a long needle shoved through an undersized pincushion.

Pain, shock, and a bizarre euphoria from a flood of trauma-induced endorphins all roiled together within Max. There was a dim flash of a black flame in his peripheral vision as he toppled forward, still impaled on the sword. The dark ground seemed to rush up to embrace him.

The last thing he heard was peals of giddy laughter.