Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (41 page)

Claire gave me a sheepish grin. “I guess not.”

On the other side of me, Ray sounded curious. “I’ve heard about the war between magic and science. I thought it was just a myth.”

“It’s a myth my grandmother believes with all her heart. She won’t do business with you,” the guy behind the door repeated.

“I know my Dad—” I started, when a loud clanging from the fire escape interrupted me, and again, and again with some extra clattering, until Lucyfar hauled herself up over the edge of the building.

She took the surprise way more in stride than we did. “Hey, what are you guys doing here?” she asked as she hopped to her feet and rushed forward to meet us. She sounded as gleeful as if she were opening presents on Christmas morning, and I thought she was going to hug me. Instead, she just grabbed one of my shoulders and one of Claire’s and gave them both an affectionate squeeze.

Claire lifted up the glass-and-gold bottle in both hands. “We’re here to sell this!”

Lucyfar’s eyebrows shot right up. “No way. Is that Fat Dan’s old bottle of dragon blood? I thought that was in China!”

“We stole it from a warehouse in Santa Monica about an hour, hour and a half ago,” I informed her, feeling a little smug.

“Owned by the Council Of Seven And A Half, I believe,” Claire added.

Lucyfar gave our shoulders another hard squeeze, shaking her head and bowing forward in delight. “And right now, Marvelous will do absolutely anything to get her hands on some dragon blood.”

Ray lifted a gloved hand and studied the back of it theatrically, while his voice drawled with a smugness that had me completely beat. “We may have walked over her prostrate form on the way out the door.”

Lucyfar burst out laughing. First, she doubled forward, leaning heavily on Claire’s and my shoulders, then she reared back and let go, all the while cackling in glee. She eventually had to put a hand over her face just to wheeze, “Oh, man. Absolutely perfect! So you sell the bottle to the old biddy here, and she sells it to Marvelous, whose hands are now clean while she’s also completely humiliated. You have got to let me be the one to tell her where the bottle is. I’m begging! The look on her face will keep me warm all winter.”

She was dragging a big grin out of me, too. I tried to be serious. “Be my guest. I want our involvement in this over as soon as possible.”

Still chuckling, Lucyfar stepped forward past us and snapped at the guy behind the door, “Let ‘em in, Nicky. Your gramma will have a fit if she finds out she could have fenced Fat Dan’s bottle of dragon blood but missed out.”

“You know how she feels about tech villains, Lucy. She won’t even watch TV,” Nicky grumbled.

“She’ll make an exception. Anyway, if you don’t I’ll kick the door down.”

Heroically, Ray managed to stay silent as the door was unbolted, but he did make another show of studying his gloves as he rubbed his fingers together.

We poured inside when the door opened. The owner sure liked her stereotypes. Not only did she hate technology, this place looked like a magical knickknack shop. The windows had heavy curtains keeping the front room dim, and tables and shelves and display stands were all crowded with random looking clutter ranging from knotted string to a two foot long engraved silver wand. All of it was magic, if I correctly interpreted Vera’s rapidly darting attention.

One thing did make me wonder. “I thought there’d be more books.”

“Naah,” Lucyfar corrected me breezily. “Honest to goodness magical grimoires are so rare and priceless no one ever sells them. Kinda like a Conqueror orb, eh?” She gave me an exaggerated wink and nudged me with her elbow, mistakenly confident that I had the slightest idea what she was talking about.

Turning to Claire, Lucyfar held out both hands and asked, “Can I see the dragon’s blood? This bottle is famous, you know.” When Claire loosened her grip, Lucyfar lifted the bottle out of her hands and held it up to what little light the room had. “So how did you get this thing? I want the whole story!”

I was happy to oblige. “One of E-Claire’s mysterious online friends tipped us off about where the bottle was being held. I thought it was you.”

Lucyfar shook her head. “Not me. No shortage of shady customers making deals with supervillains in this town.”

It had been an idle guess anyway. I shrugged. “We kept the heist as smooth as possible. I neutralized gunpowder and electronic communications in and around the warehouse. We traced the magical signal to the bottle, cut the protections out, and ran for the hills. Minimal opposition.”

“A few thugs, Witch Hunter, Ifrit, and Marvelous,” Ray supplied in his airiest fake-casual tone.

Glee burned right up my spine as I tried to match Ray’s lazy smugness. “Ifrit was definitely minimal opposition.”

Lucyfar exploded in another cackling laugh, and I got prodded from several directions by the blunt tips of black phantom knives. “Details, kids. Come on, don’t hold out on me!”

I didn’t want to brag. Okay, I wanted to brag a lot. I was on fire with it. But a supervillain should be a gracious winner and have style, right? “Without working guns, the guards were pretty helpless. I used them to test my new toys. One of those toys explodes on contact with flame, so Ifrit never had a chance. I’ve got a sugar formula now for gluing defeated enemies in place, so once we knocked anyone down, the fight was over.”

Claire lost patience with my restraint and jumped in. “Her new fighting rig is brutal. The harassment weapons are so much fun to watch. Guards went flying everywhere! Witch Hunter waited until the guards were down to challenge us.”

Lucyfar snorted. “Yeah, for a guy who will happily spend twenty hours a day practicing forms, he won’t do a lick of work until he actually has to. Seven and a Half must have known Marvelous would come for the bottle. With all his spell breaking gear, she’d have had her hands full getting past him.”

“Reviled dueled him one on one!” Claire broke in again.

I folded my arms and failed to sound disapproving. “Which is why Marvelous arrived before we could get away with the loot.”

Lucyfar gave Ray a sly smile and a raised eyebrow. “One on one? I like your pride, kid. I’m impressed, too. Witch Hunter’s not a heavy hitter, but he’s way more experienced than you.”

Ray gave me a small bow. “I learned to fight watching Bad Penny. As long as I made sure he never hit me, sooner or later I’d land a finishing blow.” His formality cracked, a grin splitting his masked face. “It was hard keeping that kind of self-control. Everything was split second reactions, because I couldn’t predict what he would do. Incredible adrenaline rush, but I kept thinking, and he was too used to his patterns. Eventually, I hit him from a direction he didn’t expect, and the fight was over.”

“Did he try the knife thing? He does that when he knows a fight’s going south.”

Ray jerked his head at me. “He threw it at Bad Penny.”

“At Vera,” I corrected.

Lucyfar smirked again. “Get used to that.”

Ray picked up a black hat rather like his own off a shelf, turning it over to examine it as he finished the tale. “I needed the duel, but what I learned most is that if I had to beat him quickly and safely, I should have hit him with a crate or some other object too big to dodge or block. The advantage of strength and speed together gives me options that render a martial artist’s skill moot. Bad Penny’s strategy of never letting myself get hit has given me time to figure that out.”

That wasn’t how I remembered my fights. “I wish that was my strategy. My head still hurts from letting Marvelous get a hit in.”

Ray put the hat back down and spread his hands. “I plead ignorance. When I woke up, you were still standing, and she wasn’t.”

That lit up Lucyfar. “So, Bad Penny defeated Marvelous one-on-one and stole the dragon’s blood right out from under her nose? I am so glad I ran into you kids here today!”

I tilted my head suspiciously. Well, suspicious in a friendly way. “You want something.”

Lucyfar clasped her hands together and leaned toward me with a grin more maniacal than pleading. “First, I want to hear all about you taking down Marvelous.”

Oh, boy. Well, no need to tiptoe around the point with Lucy. “I’d like to hold onto my secrets. Sooner or later, I’ll need to use them against you.”

Lucy clasped her hand to her chest, eyes wide in shock. “How could you say such a completely accurate thing? Who wouldn’t trust me, the Princess of Lies?”

Apparently the shop owner wouldn’t. She emerged in an explosion of angry… Russian? It sounded like Russian to me. She looked Russian, like a peasant from an old cartoon, with a shriveled raisin face and a scarf over her head. Everything about her seemed to be gray – her clothes, her hair, her eyes, and even her skin had an unhealthy pallor to it.

She certainly didn’t act sick. She had energy and bad temper to spare as she yelled first at the guy who let us in, then at Lucyfar.

Lucyfar didn’t look impressed and jabbered back at her, although I could hear how much more slow and halting her Russian—Armenian?—was. The old lady pointed a finger and waved it around between me, Claire, and Ray, complaining some more. Lucyfar said something that sounded sarcastic, and the old woman glowered but shut up.

“She’s mad because you’re a mad scientist and because you brought some kind of magical weapon into her shop,” Lucyfar translated. I raised my eyebrow, and, since she couldn’t see that, tilted my head to one side. Lucyfar’s wide grin told me she got the message. “Yeah, you can’t win, but she wants the blood too much to kick you out.”

E-Claire stepped right up, cracking her knuckles theatrically. “What’s she offering?”

Old witch lady must have understood some English, because she grumbled a couple of sentences and then stumped off through the swinging wooden doors into a back room. I got the impression she wasn’t coming back. Looking tired, the guy who’d answered the door filled us in. “She can’t afford to pay money for it and isn’t going to try. She has plenty to trade, since you seem interested in magical equipment.”

“Oh, that reminds me! Look up here!” Claire blurted out. I glanced at her face. She looked normal. She had the same blonde, soft face, playful eyes, and warmly emotive smile my gaunt hatchet face had always envied.

“Here you go!” she announced, holding out a little plastic card each to me and Ray. Where did those come from?

Oh, right, she’d zapped me with her power. I picked the little piece of colored plastic out of her hand. Bank of…

“You got us credit cards? How did you even…?!” I squeaked in shock.

“Debit cards. We have bank accounts now!” Now it was Claire’s turn to radiate smugness, clasping her hands behind her and rocking forward and back on her heels.

I stared at my card. TIM President. Craning my head over, I looked at Ray’s. TIM Human Resources. Claire flashed hers, which read TIM Public Relations. HA!

“We’re a small business. That’s hilarious. Is there anything in our accounts yet?” I asked, shaking my head in both delight and disbelief.

“Only about five thousand each. Me and Ray couldn’t even get a third of what that gold bar was really worth, not without a paper trail to prove we owned it.” Claire rattled that off so casually, but numbers rolled up in my head. That little bit of gold had been worth more than forty five thousand dollars? And I’d pulled it out of a junkyard? Well, that decided it. I certainly wasn’t in the supervillain business for the money. Me and The Machine could make a fortune legally. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.

Lucy held up the bottle we’d stolen and told us, “Dragon’s blood is worth way more than that. Little Grandmother’s got great stock and information, but you could get a much better deal this weekend.”

I waved my hands emphatically. “No. I don’t care if she’s ripping us off, we’re getting rid of this bottle now before Marvelous finds it. Besides, I find myself suddenly needing new equipment much more than cash.”

Lucyfar snorted, but Claire and Ray spread out gleefully, studying the exhibits now with the eye of prospective buyers.

Claire summed up my reaction pretty well. “I have no idea what this stuff does!”

Ray pointed out, “Anti-magical charms would prevent anyone sneaking up on us with a sleep spell again. I’m certain there are plenty of them right in front of us, if we can identify them. Powerful charms might even protect us from poison attacks, or other insidious physical traps.”

I took the bottle back from Lucyfar, who gave me a noncommittal shrug. “Normally I’d ask Little Grandmother. I shop here because she’s a real expert. She’s too busy throwing a sulk to be any use to us today.”

I grunted. Common sense told me one thing. “I don’t want to buy anything that I don’t know what it does.”

From a tabletop covered in bowls of colored sand, Claire suggested, “I could go home and ask around, get some advice on what to trade for.”

I shook my head, hard. “No, no way. We’re ditching the bottle. We’ll find something here worth buying.”

That got me looking around for my personal magical detector. I found Vera hovering over an upturned black top hat with a bundle of knotted together handkerchiefs hanging out of it. She didn’t have fingers, but her tiny floating hands were strong and precise, and she untied a handkerchief from one of the knots. The knot turned out to be more complicated than I thought, because another handkerchief fell into view hanging from the same spot.

Or had it? I wandered over and helped her untie the knot again. I managed to pull a handkerchief out, but the knot hadn’t changed. Ha! Infinitely reproducing handkerchiefs, a stage magician’s trick performed with real magic.

I untied another. I couldn’t see where the new handkerchief appeared in the bundle, but in the back of my head I could see it, where it came from and how, although everything but the crudest physical parts of the process made not a lick of sense. Other pictures started to build around that image, but I focused on the issue of the moment.

“Okay, we’ll take this. There’s nothing a good mad scientist can’t do with an endless source of fabric,” I announced.

Lucyfar regarded the handkerchief knot over my shoulder skeptically. “There’s a lot of magic in that spell, but you’re still getting ripped off. You kids have no idea what dragon’s blood is worth.”