Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (27 page)

“I caught it all. It didn’t take very long,” I insisted.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a supervillain battle in person. It was amazing! Lucyfar threw knives everywhere, and Reviled bounced around like a spastic squirrel. Then they walked off together like it didn’t happen. Are villains often that casual about trying to kill each other?” Ray asked. He didn’t have to fake enthusiasm for the subject.

“Frequently.”

One word. She was still troubled. I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder and promised, “Mom, we’ll be fine. How many supervillains attack Melrose on a busy Sunday?”

“Red Dawn, Chimera, and Logo three times. That’s if you don’t count Bullet Bob, Weasel Fingers, or Jim,” Mom listed without a pause.

“Wasn’t Bullet Bob the guy with all the guns but terrible aim?” Ray asked, drawling with glee over the thought.

It got a smile from Mom, too. “That’s why he doesn’t count.”

“We’re here! Let us out right here!” Claire squealed, and Mom pulled the car up into a no parking spot long enough for us to pile out.

“Have fun, kids. Give me a call when you want to be picked up,” Mom offered as she pulled the door shut. Her moodiness had vanished. Score one for Ray.

We filed into the burger place with the little stone wall around their courtyard, the one I don’t know the name of because it doesn’t have a sign. Leaning closer to Ray and Claire, I offered, “I brought the money Cybermancer gave me, so order whatever you want. I’m paying.”

They did, and we sat down at a stone table with trays heaped with food and bowls of ice cream. Then we said nothing at all, because we were too busy stuffing our faces.

There did come a moment when I wasn’t sure I could eat anymore. I pushed my tray away, rubbed my mouth with a napkin, and complained in a discreet hush, “All this cash is burning a hole in my pocket.” It wasn’t entirely a metaphor. I could feel the lump of money, an intrusive presence hard to ignore in my pocket, constantly reminding me that it was there and should be spent on something.

Ray swallowed a last bite of fried chicken strip and agreed, “I spent the bubblegum money immediately. Partly because I had enough money to buy whatever I wanted, and partly because I just wanted to look good for once in my life.”

Scarecrow thin, but immaculate in black long sleeved shirt and slacks, with his big black hat and that grin just a little too wide to be sane… he did. He looked good. “Immaculate” might have been the wrong word. The fabric had a few rumples, but that didn’t matter. He still looked sleek.

“You succeeded,” Claire promised him while I was still thinking it. I should have said it first. That gnawed at me, and I wanted to believe the smiles they were giving each other were just friendly, but it wasn’t easy.

“It looks like we’re all done. Where do you two want to go first?” I asked, piling my cup and plasticware onto my tray.

The answer came as inevitably as the tides: “Lost World!”

Two blocks down sat the comic book store, or at least the only comic book store I knew of on Melrose. My friends dragged me through the door physically by my wrists as I complained, “I’m not into this stuff!” Theatric, and only mostly true. They ignored it. Having dragged me over the threshold, they left me waiting on the rubber mat and scattered.

Sometimes I wonder if stores have to go through some kind of gladiatorial contest to get a place on Melrose. Lost World was a great example. Technically, it was a comic book store, and sure there were the racks of popular comics in that corner, but they were dwarfed by the carefully sorted archives of obscure collector’s editions on the long wall, the racks of costumes, the shelves of actual books, and oddities like a globe of the heavens, nested crystal spheres outlining what Apotheosis claimed the universe was really like.

To be polite, I wandered over to the comic racks. Dramatizations of superhero battles had never drawn me, but there were the science fiction comics and the weirdly artsy graphic novels. My eye caught on Volume Twelve of Sentient Life. The series finale. I plucked it out of the rack and flipped through cautiously. I didn’t want to spoil the ending, and I’d always wanted to read this comic. That had to be Delph, the evolved dolphin boy. What had happened to his body in the volumes I hadn’t seen? In one frame, he pressed his hand against a screen as restraints fastened him down. In the next, the outline of a hand formed, an illusion of another, more delicate hand pressing against his from the screen’s other side. So Vera had survived to the end. Well, almost to the end. This page was near the beginning of a long graphic novel. That was why I’d never properly read Sentient Life. Twelve fat books, and I’d never been willing to spend the money to read all of them at once. Even with collections, it would be well over a hundred dollars. Who had that kind of money?

Me, that’s who. And all for thirty seconds of scribbling a formula on a wall in a code I couldn’t be sure Cy would even understand. The wages of sin were amazing.

Not, however, the wages I wanted. Ray stood a shelf down from me, poring through a book of maps of LA, of all things. Claire wasn’t much farther, failing to control her giggles at a corset modeled after her mother’s old costume. I stepped between them and offered quietly, “You guys know I’m buying, right? I have a thousand dollars of supervillain money I want to get rid of as soon as possible.”

Ray’s face bent in his most maniacal grin. Claire’s eyes merely twinkled. She’d lost control of her super power for a second. They had to have known this was coming, but they hadn’t wanted to assume.

Maybe they’d even discussed it. They swept right past me, beelining to the long display of statues that took up so much of the store. Statues? Statuettes? Figurines? Whatever. Claire scooped up two boxes, and set one in front of herself and the other in front of Ray. Then she delicately pried open hers and lifted out and set on the rack…

…a foot-tall statue of Lucyfar. Criminy.

“Come on, you two, this is a civilian day! I just want to be normal!” I hissed, rolling my eyes. Rolling my eyes didn’t feel like enough, so I rolled my head, too.

“This is what we talk about buying on normal days. We just can’t afford to!” Claire was right. I couldn’t deny it.

I examined the statue instead. I immediately had to giggle. “No one would wear that.” Lucy’s costume amounted to… well, not much. A black leather bikini, a few skull ornaments, some random straps, and very impractical looking boots.

“Lucyfar did.” New, shameless, super-powered Ray didn’t bother hiding the subtle growl of appreciation at the thought.

“Is it really so hard to believe, now that you’ve met her?” Claire asked, then gave me an impish grin. I had to return it, because the image of Lucyfar flopping onto her stuffed recliner in that getup started forcing hysterical giggles out of both of us. I tried to calm myself down by focusing on other details. This statue had Lucy’s black knives on the end of bony, black wings coming out of her back. Was that made up for the statue, part of the old costume, or an aspect of her powers she hadn’t shown us?

Wistfully, Claire noted, “I wouldn’t mind wearing something like that in a few years when I’ve filled out, except my power will completely cancel the effect.”

My cheeks warmed up. Thanks, Claire. “Don’t let that stop you,” Ray purred in delight. Thanks, Ray.

Then, to my considerable surprise, he changed the subject. “As much as I do like the costume,
this
is the Lucyfar statue I want.” With a little hop, he reached up to slip a big box off the top of the shelf behind the display counter. It dropped into his hands with perfect delicacy. Tesla’s Alternating Current Motor! Would it be too much to ask to repeat the Super Cheerleader Serum recipe, super power? I wanted some of that. My power ignored me.

He lifted the statue out as if it weren’t two eighteen-inch tall ceramic figures that must weigh half a ton. The broad base looked like pavement, with tiny fake dollar bills strewn over it. The statue needed the support, because the statue of Lucyfar stood on the ground with the statue of Gabriel held up only by two wings wrapped around her, the other four spread to keep him hovering. At least Lucyfar was better dressed in that black gown she’d materialized fighting us.

“Oh, wow,” Claire concluded succinctly.

“This was the first time anybody’d seen Gabriel in action. He hadn’t started his blog yet,” Ray whispered to me. To me, specifically. Claire would know this stuff.

Wait- “This really happened? They made a statue of an actual event?”

Ray looked surprised at the question. “Sure.”

Claire bolted away from us over to the comic racks, then scurried back and spread out a magazine. “Compendium: Lucyfar” it read. She flipped through it to a page with a photo of, well, exactly what the statue in front of us depicted—Gabriel hovering and wrapping her in his wings from behind.

‘Lucyfar and Gabriel, The Archangels’, the section was titled. The page was mostly photos because there wasn’t too much to say. Lucy claimed to be the actual fallen angel and that Gabriel was her divine brother. Gabriel said she was making it up, but for all that he freely talked online about what it was like to be a superhero, he never explained who he was, how he got his wings, or how he knew Lucyfar. They did seem to have a connection, and their frequent meetings were half super-powered battle, half bickering about morality. Gabriel had notably caused Lucyfar to go from working with Arson to fighting and defeating Arson, mid-crime. The conversation was unrecorded, but witnesses claimed the winning argument was that Arson’s bombs would level the library next door, and it still had children inside.

Wow. Lucy had a whole magazine packed with this stuff. I flipped a few pages and saw in one header the question that had nagged me earlier. “Where Did Her Wings Go?”

A different question struck me now. “Is there one of these books for The Apparition?”

Ray nodded. Apparently I’d asked a solemn question. Claire returned the Lucyfar magazine to the racks and brought back another one, much more sedately. Chilly nervousness tiptoed up my spine. The Apparition was dead, after all. This might be gruesome.

Unlike Lucyfar’s packed volume, “Compendium: The Apparition” was slim, only half a dozen pages. The only photo showed Lucyfar standing over a prostrate, terrified man in a suit. Next to it was a copy of the same photo, with an artist’s sketch of The Apparition crouching over the man, holding his face in her hands. There were other pictures, and the one on the cover looked exactly like her, but they weren’t photos.

No, sorry, I’d flipped past a page speculating about The Apparition’s powers to a page about her origin. That had a photo, but not of The Apparition.

“Believed to be the ghost of Polly Icarus, accidentally killed by Mourning Dove during the battle when she captured the leadership of the Scarlet drug cartel,” I read aloud. I didn’t want to read more. The stock photo of Mourning Dove said plenty. White hair, jaundiced yellow skin, and white leather from the collar down hiding what the metal plates in her temples hinted at – a dead body returned to life and given horrific powers by technology. Mourning Dove might be stridently on the side of law and justice, but the hero community wasn’t comfortable with that fact. A vengeful, unhappy ghost was the kind of wreckage she left behind. She was better than Judgment, but… not by much.

“Mourning Dove. That’s a name I never want to hear as a supervillain,” I whispered to Ray and Claire. Dutifully, I added, “I’m hoping to switch to being a superhero before it comes to that.”

Ray deflected that with ease. “I think you’re stuck with the villain label for a while. Might as well enjoy it until we can find a chance to publicly switch sides.”

I glanced at Claire for her opinion, but she’d wandered over to the sales counter. As I watched the clerk carefully handed her another statue box, which she brought back over to us.

“We’re not supposed to be able to open up this one, but the power to cloud men’s minds with cuteness has its advantages,” Claire whispered. Then she peeled off the tape and unclasped the lid, being careful not to damage anything, and lifted out of the box a mirror-surfaced bell jar.

Despite the mirror reflecting everything else, inside floated the transparent white figure of The Apparition. The details on her bleak face and loose, simple dress were perfect.

“I want it,” I heard myself husk. Oh, man, I did. “How much is it?”

Claire flipped up the box to show me the label on the bottom. 375 dollars. Ouch.

“I can’t,” I argued with myself. “I can’t spend that much money on a statue.”

Claire took up the other side. “You can. You want to spend the money anyway.”

“I can’t spend half of it in one place. What if you two see something else you like?!” I whined.

Ray picked up the bell jar, placed it gently back in its box, and pushed the box into my arms. Blue eyes looked right into mine. “We’ll take a pass on our statues this time, and use the money to give this to you as a gift. If you still feel bad you can buy us something amazing later. Come on, Penny, let yourself go wild for once.”

My knees shook as I toddled back over to the sales counter. I laid the box by the register, then stepped over to the comic rack next to it and pulled out the entire collection of Sentient Life. I didn’t even look at the total when he rang it up. I counted out six hundred dollars in cash, took my change, and walked out of the store hugging my bag full of treasure to my chest while Claire and Ray grinned on either side of me. I swear, they looked like they were the ones making the big haul. I had the best friends.