Overpowered (Powered Trilogy #2) (16 page)

I run across Evan’s living room and into the elevator, waiting a few extra seconds for him to join me. He punches the button for the fourth floor and then watches me as we descend. I’m glad we
retired our mind reading rings. He doesn’t need to know what I’m thinking.

On the fourth floor, Evan takes me to a refrigerated box full of his nerdy research stuff. One drawer has a dozen vials of the juice. Some of them have my name on it. I collect all of them and grab a few syringes, shoving all of it into a canvas bag.

“You should put this in a vial like Felix’s drug, so I won’t have to use a separate syringe,” I say, rolling up the bag to make it compact for travelling.

“Yeah I know. Too bad I didn’t think like a villain when I was designing this stuff.” He grabs my hand as I walk back toward the elevator. His energy is anxious and hyper. “You want to tell me what you have in mind with this stuff?”

“It’s just a precaution,” I say, leaning up on my toes and planting a kiss on his cheek. “I want to have an extra bit of protection if I happen to need it.”

“Be careful using that stuff around Nova. It’s probably formulated for her blood, too.”

I nod. He sighs in a long breath and shoves his hands in his pockets while we ride the elevator down to the first floor.

“Thanks for the pizza,” I say, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. “And thanks for the juice.”

“Mhmm,” he mutters, standing stiff as I squeeze him into a hug. He walks me outside and to the KAPOW entrance on the beach. “Whatever you’re up to, you need to remember to be nice.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, fiddling with the bag of juice vials
. I load up the syringes and place the protective cap back over the needle. If I can roll it up small enough, it might fit into the slim pocket on my waistband.

Evan’s lips move to the side of his face. “Just listen, okay? You need to be nice. Especially if you’re going to talk to the Retriever
Squad. You can’t be abrasive or rude and expect them to help you.”

“I’m not abusive or rude,” I mutter, knowing full well that I am. That I can be. He lifts an eyebrow and I punch him
in the arm. “Fine, I’ll be nice.”

“Good,” he says. “This isn’t the first time you’ve left with that look on your face.”

I smile up at him and do my best impression of a puppy face. “What look?”

His finger bops my nose and then he kisses me quickly on the forehead. “The look like you’re up to something I don’t approve of.”

I make it home with just enough time to pee and then stash my
syringes of juice under my bed. Just when I’m about to collapse butt first onto my bed and sneak in a quiet afternoon nap before what is sure to be an exciting night of dealing with the Retriever Squad, my Hero alarm goes off.

The former rush of exhilaration that comes with getting a new mission is now a dreary sigh and a shuffle to get dressed and grab a bite to eat before going out. Because all my missions are the same thing lately: break up a human fight before it turns deadly.

I had tried to turn the last few fight missions into less of a waste of time. I asked questions about their drug suppliers and where they bought it and how I could find the main drug seller. I asked the humans involved if they knew who the head honcho was, the big guy at the top of the drug selling pyramid. Surely someone had to know, right?

Nope.

Most of the humans were too busy being dead or about to die, having injected themselves with so much Super power that their fragile human bodies couldn’t keep up. I had thought, in moments of weakness, about stealing some of that power for myself. Injecting it into my own depowered hand just to see if it’d give me the power I once had before it was ripped out of my skin. But I never did. That power could be Dad’s. It would be immoral to take some. Besides, I have bigger problems to worry about.

My BEEPR leads me to a suburban neighborhood
on the outskirts of King City. The neighborhood’s entrance has a manmade waterfall cascading over a rocky terrain. It looks like an upscale place to live. But the dozens of For Sale signs in the yard, most of them with the word Foreclosure over it, says otherwise. This is probably another neighborhood that was built too quickly and filled with homeowners who couldn’t pay a mortgage in a recession.

I jog down Coyote Creek Circle, following the dot on my BEEPR that leads me to a gorgeous two story brick home in the middle of a
cul-de-sac. The porch light is on and the driveway is filled with cars. But the rest of the lights are off. Both neighboring homes look abandoned, with ankle high grass and old newspapers in the driveways. The muffled sounds of humans let me know I’m in the right place. And that everyone is in the basement.

Switching my BEEPR to cell phone mode, I dial up Officer Plummer, the human policeman who requested Hero backup.

“I’m here.”

He clears his throat. “Great, thank you Hero Maci. I’ll be there shortly. My patrol car is parked one street over. Can you tell anything yet? Is this another drug fight?”

I step quietly up the driveway and walk to the back of the house where a basement window should be accessible. “There’s at least a dozen humans in the basement. They’re loud and cheering, so yeah, I’d say this is another drug-induced fight club.”

“Shit,” he mutters into the phone. I hear the rumble of his engine as he idles around the corner to Coyote Creek Circle, headlights turned off. He cuts the engine and I hang up the phone, choosing instead to listen to the thumping of his boots as he jogs toward me.

“I have an ambulance on standby,” he whispers. Then he nods politely and holds out a hand to shake mine. “I’m Officer Plummer,” he says. “Thank you so much for your help.”

I shake his hand. “That’s what I’m here for,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear the resentment in my voice. Together, we drop to our knees and peer through the small rectangle window at the bottom of the house which looks into the basement.

Officer Plummer squints to see through the dingy window. “That’s…”

“Different,” I say at the same time he finishes his sentence with, “Not what I expected.”

Twelve men hang out in the basement of this home. A few of them watch sports on a flat screen television. Another guy is perched on a folding chair, looking intently at a laptop. The rest of them are filling glass vials with silvery liquid from a metal fifty gallon drum.

I turn to the man next to me. “How many handcuffs do you have?”

“Enough.” He unsnaps a leather strap on his utility belt and hands me a set of plastic zip-tie looking things in the shape of two circles. They’re disposable handcuffs. Humans can be clever sometimes. I slip them onto my wrist like a set of bangles.

As long as these men haven’t taken the drug themselves, and it doesn’t look like it since most dealers are in it strictly for the money, taking down twelve humans should be a piece of cake. I’ll just have to remember that humans are fragile creatures and I can’t slam them around, ragdoll style like I would do to a villain.
You know, if I actually got to work with villains.

I stare at Officer Plummer. “You’re wearing a bulletproof vest and all that, right?”

He nods. “Great.” I slap my hands together and rise to my feet. “Let’s do this.”

It only takes a light kick to bring down the front door. As suspected, the house is empty. The men in the basement are just squatters, rodents who need to be exterminated. It might
be an intelligent Hero move to approach the door that leads to the basement, quietly twist the door knob and silently sneak down to catch the humans off guard. But I’m not quiet and sneaky like Nyx and making a polite entrance has never been my thing.

The wooden door splits into pieces as my boot kicks a
butt load of power into it. I swoop down the stairs in a blur of movement and wrap my cold fingers around the neck of the human closest to me. Shock, surprise and fear flicker across the faces of the men in the room, some of which I realize are only teenagers. “Hands in the air,” I yell, letting my superhuman voice roar loud enough to come dangerously close to busting their ear drums. “I am Hero Maci Might,” I call out, winking toward my human partner who appears at the bottom of the stairs. “And this little party you have here is illegal.”

No one fights back. No one says a word.

Officer Plummer and I handcuff every last human and line them up on one end of the room while we wait for backup officers to arrive. He collects identification from everyone and writes down some kind of human cop stuff in his notepad.

The ringleader rotates his neck, grimacing at the bruised skin where I might have squeezed him a little too hard. He’s a short man in his thirties with a
Mohawk of blue hair and a body decorated in colorful tattoos. He leans against the wall, face in a permanent scowl. A few of the younger guys are crying, stumbling through sobs as they try to answer the officer’s questions.

I stand in front of the tattooed guy and bend forward, getting eye level with him. He looks toward the floor. I put one finger under his stubbly chin and lift his face back up. “Where did you get such a large amount of this drug?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes.

With my right index finger still propping up his chin, I look at the BEEPR on my other wrist. “Answer or you’ll regret it.” My eyes scan across the screen. It just shows me the time and that I have no new messages, but he doesn’t know that. In fact, humans can’t read the BEEPR screen at all. The pixels look distorted to their eyes.

“You can’t do anything to me.” The muscles in his neck loosen as he stops struggling to look away from me. He meets my eyes. “You’re a Super. You won’t hurt me.”

“You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you,” I whisper, my voice menacing. A look of pain flashes across his features but I’m not hurting him. I’m barely touching him. The pain he feels comes from somewhere inside himself.

He shakes his head. “With all due respect to you Miss Hero, I’m not telling you anything. Because I know you won’t hurt me. And they will. They’ll hurt me. They’ll hurt my family.”

The guy standing next to him, who until now had his head tilted back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling and muttering what sounded like prayers under his breath, turns to look at us. “He’s right. He can’t tell you.” His head shakes furiously and his expression turns dark as well. “They’ll hurt us, Maci Might. They’ll hurt all of us.”

Officer Plummer puts a hand on my shoulder. “Backup is on the way. I think we can handle it from here. I really appreciate your help, Miss Might.”

“I think I’d like to stay and help with the interrogation. Central is interested in the source of the pow-uh, the drug.”

He nods. “Okay then. I certainly won’t tell you what to do.”

I smile. These guys might not want to talk now, but we’ll see how they react to a little one on one interrogation by a Hero. Maybe I’ll get the information I need and then I won’t have to follow through with my earlier plan. The dangerous plan.

Maybe this way will work out better.

For an elusive moment, I swear I can feel Pepper’s spirit watching over me. And I know he’s proud of me for finding another way to get what I want.

In the seconds that follow, I’m too occupied with thinking of my deceased friend to pay attention to the sound of plastic zip ties snapping in half. But the sound of broken glass and the blur of movement from the corner of the room brings me back to attention in the blink of an eye. Two men must have snuck a vial of the power while we were talking to the leader. Now their eyes pulse, bloodshot red, and a layer of sweat coats their skin. One of them points to me. “If you leave now, I’ll let you go.”

“Ha!” My bark of laughter startles him. In a flash of speed, I slam the table full of powered vials toward the other end of the room, putting distance between it and the other humans that are still standing against the wall. “SIT!” I bellow, sparing just a split second to glare at the humans, who all comply by dropping to the floor, hands still cuffed behind their back. My attention turns back to the rogue humans who are temporarily as strong as I am.

Officer Plummer’s gun slides out of the holster and I hear the metal on metal of the gun cocking. A bullet fills the chamber. It’s cute that a human has my back. But he has no idea what he’s getting into.

The four of us stand in
a circle, facing off, watching and waiting. The drugged men sneak glances at each other and then back at me. I hold off, saving an attack as the last resort. One of them keeps looking at his hand, flipping it over and over again as if he can’t believe he’s looking at his own skin. The other grits his teeth and clenches his fists. “You need to leave.”

I smile. “Humans don’t tell me what to do. I guess you missed the memo on that, eh?” I take a small step forward, never breaking eye contact. Luckily the other
dufus is so freaking enthralled in looking at his own body that I don’t think he’ll be much of a problem right now.

“You see these hooks?” I slide one out of the pocket in my forearm. “They’re Super-made. Not only will they drop you instantly, you’ll also be paralyzed for the rest
of your life. If you even live long enough to see that happen.” His eyes go wide and I take another step forward, planning to distract him with my made up ramblings long enough to detain him. How exactly I’m going to detain someone filled with power, I don’t know. I’ll figure that out right after I secure their fingerprint on my BEEPR. “So you’re going to sit down next to your friends and you will not attack me or Officer Plummer. Tell me you understand.”

The guy’s mouth opens but nothing comes out. At least, I can’t hear anything he says because my BEEPR just launched i
nto an SOS siren, creating a force field of silence over the entire house. Everyone in the area will now be able to hear the message, which they will feel in their body, not hear through their ears.

My heartbeat goes silent. I breathe in a long gasp of air but I don’t hear it inflate my lungs. The familiar sound of my father’s voice pierces into my heart. “Attention every citizen of the Super race,” Dad begins. I wasn’t sure if humans wo
uld be able to hear the SOS message at first, but the horrified looks on their faces confirm it. “Eighteen-year-old Hero Nyx Nightly has been kidnapped. His whereabouts are unknown. Villains are confirmed as responsible.” Water pools in the corner of my eyes, squeezed out of my tear ducts by how hard I’m clenching my teeth in anger. I close my eyes and listen to the rest of the message.

“All Heroes are hereby dispatched to retrieve him. All Supers are called to action-leave no area untouched in your search for our Hero. Information on his whereabouts can be reported to any member of the Retriever
Squad or to a Hero. Proceed with caution: Villain activity has been confirmed.”

Anger and hatred and every bad sort of feeling slips into my subconscious, filling me wholly. My body whirls around, knocking into the two powered humans. I feel the bones in their legs shatter and hear their cries as they drop to the floor. It’s been long enough for their injected power to have worn off. They’re the human’s problem now.