When Max Blackwood used his Unreal powers to materialize from the shadows in the backseat of the car, the seventeen-year-old lunged forward, whipping his garrote around the throat of Sheriff Barker.

The garrote made the stout sheriff’s Rottweiler-like head jerk back and slam into the driver’s-side headrest. Dan Barker gasped and gaped like a catfish yanked out of the nearby Mississippi River.

From the passenger seat of the Chevy Impala, Millie Vincent’s eyes bulged at the masked man who had materialized out of thin air behind the sheriff. Millie’s initial startled yelp metastasized into a banshee’s scream. In the shadowy gloom of the car, with Max dressed in black from head to toe, he must have appeared to superstitious Millie like the Angel of Death swooping in to harvest tainted souls.

Max barely noticed Millie’s tear-streaked mascara, smeared lipstick, and the cleavage bulging from her half-undone blouse. He was too busy wrestling with the sheriff, trying to keep the big man from yanking free or squeezing sausage fingers between the garrote and his neck to relieve the pressure.

“Get out of here!” Max yelled at Millie. “Run!” In the frenzy of the moment, it didn’t even occur to the teen to disguise his voice despite how many hours he had practiced in front of his bathroom mirror, faking a deeper, more authoritative, less recognizable voice.

It took a few seconds for Max’s repeated commands to pierce Millie’s hysteria.

But they finally did.

Still screaming, the brunette clawed frantically at the door. She finally flung it open, and promptly fell out of the car. She popped up like a Weeble, and fled into the darkness of the night. Her shrieks trailed her as she zigzagged and stumbled her way through the grave markers of Blessed Memory Cemetery.

While one of Barker’s meaty hands clawed at the garrote squeezing his throat, the other was reaching backward, grasping for Max. Barker’s frantically groping hand seemed the size of a catcher’s mitt. The sheriff was what the folks around these parts called “hard fat,” with the powerful muscles of a former farmhand and college lineman buried under layers of lard from decades of desk jockeying, careless eating, and hard drinking. He outweighed Max nearly two to one. Max had his hands full trying to tighten the garrote while also avoiding the sheriff’s powerful hand.

This had all gone a lot more smoothly in Max’s imagination. When he had planned this attack, Max had assumed it would be like riding a horse, with the garrote as his reins, ensuring he remained in firm control of an animal that knew its place.

Instead it was like riding a very powerful, very angry bull.

And it felt like Max was about to be bucked off. Gone were any thoughts of Max’s maiden superhero speech he had planned to deliver in his rehearsed fake voice, the one about how the sheriff’s days of molesting and raping the women of Rebel County, Mississippi were over.

There was neither time nor energy for speechifying or making threats.

Max was fighting for his life.

The sheriff’s meaty hand managed to palm Max’s head like a basketball. Max’s head was yanked forward and slammed into the back of the driver’s headrest—once, twice, three times . . . .

Stars flashed before Max’s eyes with each impact. Blood spurted from his nose. His grip on the garrote weakened. He felt it being ripped from his grasp, followed by the sound of the sheriff hungrily gasping for air.

Barker was free!

Before Max could react to that realization, the sheriff spun around. His hand encircled Max’s neck and squeezed like a boa constrictor. The bull had bucked its rider, and was now trampling him.

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“Stupid little bitch,” Barker hissed, his voice raspy from the garrote, his boozy breath filling the car with the stench of bourbon. “Don’t you know who I am?”

A real superhero might have had a quippy response locked and loaded. But Max didn’t have a quip ready. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to say it.

He couldn’t breathe. His vision started to tunnel. Barker was choking him unconscious. Considering the lynchings and other murders the sheriff had gotten away with, Max had no doubt Barker would not stop when Max passed out. The corrupt sheriff would choke the life out of him, and then dump his body somewhere. Or just bury Max right outside the car. Ironically, a cemetery would be the last place anybody would look for a missing person’s dead body.

The car’s interior light was on because Millie had left her door open. Thanks to the overhead light, a squirming shadow stretched from Max’s struggling body. His shadow hopping power made him acutely aware of that shadow and all the other shadows in the vicinity the way a sailor was aware of safe harbors on a stormy night.

Max tried to force his body to sink back into his shadow, hoping to materialize from a different shadow safely outside the car. But his Unreal power wouldn’t activate. He wasn’t surprised. He had been obsessively testing the limits of his power since his Awakening four months ago. His tests had indicated he couldn’t shadow hop when something was attached to him. Max had tied a rusty chain to various parts of his body, which had kept him securely anchored and unable to activate his Unreal power. The sheriff’s outstretched arm and body weighed a heck of a lot more than that rusty chain had.

Frantic, clinging to consciousness, feeling terrific pressure building within his skull, Max fumbled for his utility belt. Or at least that was what he called it. It was actually just a fanny pack he had scrounged from the dumpster behind Big Bubba’s Tavern. Max had painted it black to match the rest of his ensemble; he didn’t have the money to buy a brand-new black one. Literally everything about his makeshift superhero costume was repurposed or secondhand. Including the garrote, which Max had fashioned from a plastic-coated wire clothesline he found behind the dilapidated trailer Max and his older half-brother Ben lived in. Even his underwear was a hand-me-down from Ben. Times had been tough since Max’s father died in the car accident that Awakened Max’s Unreal powers. Not that they had been living like the Rockefellers before then.

Max’s increasingly numb fingers finally grasped a canister of pepper spray. He tugged it out of the fanny pack, squeezed his bulging eyes shut, and aimed it in what he hoped was the sheriff’s general direction.

The spray hissed, immediately followed by Barker’s cursing and coughing. The vise-like grip around Max’s throat loosened, then fell away entirely.

Max threw himself backward, falling into his own shadow. An icy-cold frisson ran through his body as he plunged into what he thought of as the shadow realm.

Then he was almost instantaneously flung back out of the shadow realm, ejected out of a different shadow like toast from a toaster, this one maybe twenty feet outside the car.

Max rolled over onto his hands and knees on the dewy ground, greedily sucking in warm humid air, eyes stinging from pepper spray mist that had seeped through his eyelids, nose dripping blood from where Barker had slammed his face into the headrest.

His blurred vision fell on the closest headstone, the one casting the shadow he had hopped out of. Eunice Marie Barker, Beloved Wife and Mother, God’s Faithful Servant, the headstone read. Barker usually assaulted his female victims here, in front of his mother’s grave. Max had only graduated high school, but didn’t need a highfalutin psychology degree to diagnose a clear case of mommy issues. Eunice had died before Max was born, but the stories about her being abusive to her children, a serial adulteress, and an all-around hell-raiser were legendary around these parts. God’s Faithful Servant and the other flowery words on the headstone were more tall tale than objective fact.

But Eunice being a piece of crap didn’t excuse her eldest son from being an even bigger piece of crap.

That bigger piece of crap was now stumbling out of his car. Max’s head whipped toward the sheriff’s coughs and cursing.

As always, Barker wore his khaki sheriff’s uniform. Nobody ever saw him out of it; Max figured he probably wore it to bed. There was a large splotch of red like a gunshot wound on the uniform’s shoulder. Max’s pepper spray had missed its bullseye, hitting Barker’s shoulder, succeeding only in irritating the man’s eyes rather than blinding them. Despite those red eyes streaming with tears, they were wide open, probing their surroundings.

The moon was bright obliquely overhead. Despite Max’s dark clothing and him crouching in a shadow, Barker had no trouble spotting him.

Their eyes locked. Barker’s hand shot toward his belt’s service pistol.

Crap! Max thought as the gun cleared the holster.

In the still of the night, the pistol firing sounded like a cannon’s roar.