Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (30 page)

Could this go any more wrong?

“This game has gone on long enough, don’t you think, kids?” he asked.

“Can I make a sudden-death overtime joke about that?” I shot back, trying to sound glib.

“I think it’s time you three surrendered and came with me. Nobody’s gotten hurt yet. We might even keep you out of juvenile.” That patient, generous tone made my blood run hot, but I’d met the guy and I knew he meant it. He was being nice.

Because, after all, we couldn’t hope to beat him. We’d barely taken down the dragon. Nothing I had, nothing, would so much as scratch his armor. We couldn’t outrun him. If even one of us was caught, they’d know who the other two were. My parents weren’t that blind. And, in a minute, the dragon was going to be after us again. It had managed to lever one of its claws free and was scratching at the others.

I was trapped.

The dragon gave up before I did.

I jumped, tried not to drop the jade statue in shock as it writhed and deformed in my arms, becoming… I didn’t know what. Something ugly, boneless, with too many limbs. Six of them were raised up into a bowl. As hideous as it was, it still looked ceremonial.

I looked up again, watched the dragon’s skin split, the rubbery thing heave out of it. Chunks of concrete stuck to the rubbery bulk as it ripped loose of my static bind easily. Arms like tentacles flailed. It screeched, then again in another voice, and then in a third, like different animals.

It had never been a dragon at all. It was something much worse.

“Hey, could you take care of that monster for us? It’s a little out of our league, and it looks like the bystander eating kind. Okay? Thanks!” Was that my voice sounding so taunting and sarcastic?

“Young lady—” Mech started, his voice exasperated. But as he said it he fired twice, two gleaming ropes firing from his arms to wrap around the monster, stapling it to the ground.

It didn’t like that. Arms exploded out of its body, telescoping, and tongues lashed out of the clawed hands to wrap tightly around him.

HA! I got him!

“Should we help him?” Claire asked anxiously.

“No way. Mech can handle that thing. We are going to escape with the loot,” I corrected her. Sure enough, the tongues wrapped around Mech glowed, then exploded. The monster shrieked, but ripped itself loose from the bonds that tied it down. It was big now. Huge. Nearly two stories tall.

And not my problem anymore. I kicked the top of The Machine’s head. “Split up, circle around, and return to the lab to wait for me.” It took me literally, and as I slid down its back onto the ground it came apart in pieces, all of them growing their own legs and scattering like baby spiders.

I slapped my chest, and blue light shot out to form a motorbike in front of me. I climbed on, and wedged the statue on the seat in front of me. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw Mech blasting away at the monster’s gelatinous bulk with his vaporizer beams. Color me impressed. He didn’t use those on just anybody.

“Thanks, Mech! Ha! HA HA HA HA HA!” I laughed, shoved on the pedals, and my bike leaped forward, zooming out of the schoolyard, over the wrecked fence, and onto the now traffic-less street.

We’d done it. We’d gotten away. Mech would defeat the monster, imprison it so it could never come after me, or kill it if it could die. The statue was mine. We’d won.

But we’d won by the skin of our teeth. Dad was right. Overconfidence had nearly gotten me killed, in a very literal “bullet through my brain” sense, not to mention the dragon. That was not going to happen again. I wasn’t going into another fight without a lot of preparation.

he Machine was heading back to the lab, but not us. I lost track of Ray and Claire almost immediately, since my light bike doesn’t travel the same paths as Claire’s frictionless skates or a super fast boy on foot. Driving it was a bit hair-raising, but fun. I could see through every shiny blue-white surface I touched, and I only had to pump the pedals once to get it racing down the street as fast as any car. I could barely control it, but I didn’t have to. The bike wove around obstacles like a fish without my instruction, and all I really had to do was turn when I wanted to switch streets. So I zipped down Los Feliz, speeding through red lights, circling around cars that rarely bothered to even beep at me. It’s mostly a straight shot from Glendale to our neighborhood.

I pulled up into Claire’s driveway, hoisted the jade statue into my arms, and slapped the button that made the bike dematerialize. Then I ducked around to the side door. I really, really did not want to stand out where I was visible from the street. Not in my mad scientist jumpsuit.

I hardly had my breath back when Ray jumped off the next roof onto the walkway next to me. That had stopped surprising me.

“Did you see Claire?” I asked him.

“Right on our tails.” He slid off his fancy mask and his coat and folded them up into a neat little bundle. That was it; he was in civvies again. So easy for him!

A teenager-sized teddy bear slid down the street at high speed, swerving to spin in a tight spiral across Claire’s front yard until she pirouetted to a stop. Those shoe inserts I made her even worked on grass. Wow. I was pretty good at this.

She coasted up to us, turned a key in the lock, and yelled, “Hi, Mom, we’re back!” as we all piled in. First things first. I rushed into the bathroom and Claire into her room. Thirty seconds later, we emerged at the same time, wearing the civilian clothes we’d left here when we got suited up for villainy. Ray lowered his head in theatrical disappointment at our being fully dressed, and my cheeks felt a little hot. Criminy, I was the sole person with any kind of modesty in the house, wasn’t I?

Still, we were back, we all looked like regular kids again, and we shuffled out all together and collapsed on Claire’s Mom’s couch in front of her giant TV with me in the middle and the statue in my lap. Collectively we let out a giant sigh, and I heard Miss Lutra laugh from back in the kitchen.

I also heard, “Firefighters believe the school is completely evacuated, but they can’t be certain. We’re all lucky Mech has been able to keep the monster contained in the schoolyard so far.” That came from the TV.

Whoa. We were on the news. At least, the thing we’d released was on the news. Monsters were more interesting than regular supervillains. They made no attempt to avoid casualties, after all. Mech still hadn’t killed that thing?

He hadn’t. It had only gotten bigger and uglier. The amorphous, iridescent, particolored body oozed a new arm while I watched and slapped it at Mech, only to have the clawed hand at the end sliced off with Mech’s vaporizer beam. The severed hand hit the ground with a splat, and dissolved into the air in seconds. I couldn’t tell if that caused the monster pain. I counted six mouths, all chanting in different languages I didn’t know nonstop.

I looked down at the statue in my lap. There was the same cluster of eyes, and the randomly placed mouths. I had to congratulate myself. I now owned the ugliest hunk of jade in the known world.

Claire’s Mom walked around the couch, sat down on the arm of it next to Claire, and tapped a few buttons on her phone. “Beebee? I’m guessing you’re watching the same news story I am. I thought you’d want to hear that the kids are at my place.” A pause, and a cheerful, “I understand perfectly. I only look like I’m not having a heart attack whenever I hear the words ‘The Inscrutable Machine.’“

I couldn’t hear what Mom was saying, but Miss Lutra laughed. Then she paused for much longer, and it occurred to me—she’d just breezily lied to my Mom like it was nothing. I couldn’t pull it off myself, but it was an interesting lesson. Always sounding like you were lying was almost as good a poker face as always sounding sincere.

“Of course. He may need your input,” Miss Lutra finished, tapping her phone to end the call. Looking down the couch at us, she explained, “Your father’s talking to Mech right now, Penny, helping him work out how to defeat this thing. What could you possibly have stolen that let loose a behemoth like that?”

We all stared at the chunk of jade in my lap until I confessed, “I have no idea. We found it completely by accident. I don’t know what it is, what it does, or even what I’m going to do with it.”

Claire waved her hand emphatically. “I guarantee we can sell it. I can think of four supervillains right now who’d pay for a cursed statue.”

I shook my head. “That’s kinda the problem. I think this thing is dangerous. Really dangerous.”

“So it is magic?” Ray asked. He reached for it, but I tilted it gently out of the way. Was I just nervous, or was that my power giving me a hint?

“Call it magic if you want. It has to do more than just change shape to be protected by a monster like that.” We all looked at the TV screen. Now holes had opened in the air around Mech, with giant eyes peeking through. Mech punched one, and the hole closed on his fist like a mouth. Yikes.

Nobody wanted to argue that point. You don’t bind a guardian like that to an artifact without good reason.

Ray threw out another idea. “Feed the statue to The Machine. It converts the curse into useful energy and an ugly statue into an untraceable and highly marketable block of raw jade.”

I tried to think about that. Would it work? I tried to look into the thing in the back of my brain that understood the weirdest science, but all I felt was nervousness. “That would probably work, but the ‘probably’ scares the heebie-jeebies out of me.”

Ray leaned back against the couch, folding his arms behind his neck, and concluded rather smugly, “Then keep it. Every villain’s lair needs a few valuable trophies on display.”

He was right. The idea had a lot of appeal. Maybe I could decorate one of the spare rooms with nice marble pedestals. Even if I never got to show it to anyone, a cursed artifact made an amazing display piece. Especially when I snuck it out from under the noses of the rainbow abomination on the TV screen.

Of course, that rainbow abomination wanted the statue back real bad, but as I watched the fight changed. Mech fired his vaporizers and missed, except he didn’t miss. He wasn’t aiming at the monster. Instead, the beams burned complicated patterns into the schoolyard’s asphalt at high speed. The glowing inscriptions looked like a circuit diagram, and he drew them out in a circle around the monster. The effect was immediate. Tentacles and claws flailed against that boundary, unable to cross. Floating eyes winked out of existence one by one. Mech had the monster contained, or would as soon as he closed the circle.

The thing was smart enough to recognize that fact, and Mech had to circle it to keep drawing the imprisoning lines. He strayed past their protection for a second, and the monster hit back— magic for magic. Eyes, tentacles, mouths, beams of light sprang out of all of them, tracing an intricate cage of its own around Mech, blocking his vaporizers, trapping him. More than a cage. Mech bunched up, and I barely caught the flash before the screen blacked out.

Beside me, Ray sounded impressed. “I’ve only ever heard of Mech using his EMP pulse once before. Here we go. It looks like it worked.” The screen lit back up, now with footage from a helicopter above the fight and much farther away. Mech was moving again, but the fight had become a real light show.