Where the feck did that come from?
How could I have missed it on my grid?
My whole face is numb and I can’t see. The impact snaps me out of freeze-framing and sends me into a blind stumble. When I finally get my balance, I’m still not able to focus. I hit the wall so hard it temporarily blinded me. My face is going to be black and blue for days, eyes swollen to slits. How embarrassing! I hate walking around with all my mistakes on my face, right there for anybody to see!
I waste precious seconds trying to recover and all I can think is: good thing it was a wall, not an enemy. I’m a sitting duck right now and it’s my own fault. I know better than to lead with my head when I’m freeze-framing. You can kill yourself that way. The body can take a much harder impact than the face. You’ll drive your nose up into your brain, if you’re not careful.
“Sloppy, Mega,” I mutter. I still can’t see. I wipe my bloody nose on my sleeve and reach out to feel what I hit.
“That’s my dick,” Ryodan says.
I snatch my hand away. “Gah!” I choke out. I can feel my face again—because, like, it’s going up in flames. What kind of universe makes me reach out at exactly that fecking level to feel what I think is a wall and puts my hand on a penis?
Then I remember this is Ryodan and scowl. “You did that on purpose!” I accuse. “You saw my hand go out and you stepped right into it!”
“I’d do that why, kid?”
Ryodan has the most infuriating way of asking questions without the proper inflection at the end. His voice doesn’t rise at all. I don’t know why it annoys me so much. It just does. “To embarrass me and make me feel stupid! Always angling for the advantage, aren’t you?” Ryodan makes me totally crazy. I can’t stand him!
“Sloppy is an understatement,” Ryodan says. “I could have killed you. Pull your head out, kid. Watch where you’re going.”
My vision is finally starting to clear. “I. Was. Watching,” I say pissily. “You stepped into my way.”
I look up at him. Dude is tall. The only streetlamp that works is smack behind his head, casting his face in shadow, but that’s the way he likes it. I swear he stages every place he goes in order to keep the light at his back for some reason. He’s wearing that faint half smile he usually has on, as if he’s perpetually amused by us lesser mortals.
“I am not a lesser mortal,” I say testily.
“Didn’t say you were. In fact, it’s precisely because you’re not lesser that you’re on my radar.”
“Well, get me off it.”
“Can’t.”
I get a sinking feeling. Not too long ago Ryodan tracked me down where I was hanging out up on top of my favorite water tower and told me he had a job for me. I refused, of course. Since then I’ve been telling myself he filled whatever vacancy he had with someone else.
I don’t want to fall in with Ryodan and his men. I get the feeling you don’t ever get to fall back out. You just keep falling.
Of course, that doesn’t stop me from snooping around Chester’s. You have to know your competition, know what they’re up to. Dude wants something from me, I want to know what. Last week I found a back way into his club that I bet nobody but me and his men know about. I think they thought it was so well hidden they didn’t need to bother protecting it. Did I ever see some things! My face gets hot again, remembering.
“I’ve been waiting for you to report for work, Dani. You must have encountered a problem I don’t know about.”
Report for work, my ass. I don’t answer to anyone. The way he says that last part makes it sound like he’s been keeping major tabs on me and knows every problem I have and don’t have. “I’ll say this one more time. Never going to happen.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not giving you a choice.”
“You don’t understand. I’m taking it. You’re not the boss of me.”
“You better hope I am, kid, because you’re a risk in my city. And there are only two ways I deal with uncontrolled variables. One of them is to offer you a job.”
The look he gives me makes it clear I don’t want to know what the second option is. I wipe more blood from my nose and puff myself up. “Thought it was Barrons’s city,” I say.
He ignores my jibe. “A risk I won’t take. You’re too fast, too strong, and too stupid.”
“There’s nothing stupid about me. I am fast and strong, though.” I preen. “Best of the best. Dani Mega O’Malley. That’s what they call me. The Mega. Nobody’s got nothing on me.”
“Sure they do. Wisdom. Common sense. The ability to differentiate between a battle worth fighting and the posturing of adolescent hormones.”
Gah! I don’t posture! I don’t have to! I’m the real thing, one hundred percent superhero! Ryodan knows just how to get under my skin but I’m not giving him the satisfaction of showing it. “Hormones don’t interfere with my thought processes,” I say coolly. “And as fecking if my ‘adolescent hormones’ are any different than yours. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.” After my clandestine visit last week, I know a thing or two about Ryodan.
“You’re human. Hormones will undermine you at every turn. And you’re way too young to know shit about me.”
“I’m not too young to know anything. I know you and the other dudes are all sex all the time. I saw those women you keep—” I clamp my mouth shut.
“You saw.”
“Nothing. Didn’t see nothing.” I don’t slip often. At least I didn’t used to. But things are weird lately. My mood changes like a chameleon in a kaleidoscope. I get touchy and end up saying things I shouldn’t. Especially when someone keeps calling me “kid” and ordering me around. I’m unpredictable, even to myself. It bites.
“You’ve been on level four.” His eyes are scary. Then again, this is Ryodan. His eyes are scary a lot.
“What’s level four?” I say innocently, but he’s not buying it for a minute. Level four is like something out of a porn movie. I know. I was watching a lot of them until recently, until somebody who doesn’t give one little tiny ounce of crap about me read me the riot act, like TP cared. It’s stupid to think just because somebody yells at you like they worry about how you’re growing up and who you’re becoming that they care about you.
He smiles. I hate it when he smiles. “Kid, you’re flirting with death.”
“You’ll have to catch me first.”
We both know it’s empty bravado. He can.
He locks gazes with me. I refuse to look away even though it feels like he’s sifting through my retinal records, reviewing everything I’ve seen. Long seconds pass. I notch up my chin, shove a hand in my jeans pocket and cock my hip. Jaunty, flippant, bored, my body says. ’Case he’s not getting the message from the look on my face.
“I felt a breeze in the private part of my club last week,” he says finally. “Somebody passing by fast. I thought it had to be Fade not wanting to be seen for some reason, but it wasn’t. It was you. Not cool, Dani. Way not cool. Am I speaking your language well enough to penetrate that rock-hard, suicidal, adolescent head of yours.”
I roll my eyes. “Gah, old dude, please don’t try to talk like me. My ears’ll fall off!” I flash him a cocky, hundred-megawatt grin. “It’s not my fault you can’t focus on me when I pass. And what’s with all this adolescent bunk? I know how old I am. You the one needs reminding? Is that why you keep throwing it at me like some kind of insult? It isn’t, you know. Fourteen is on top of the world.”
The next thing I know he’s in my space, swallowing it up. Barely leaving me room to be. I’m not about to stick around for it.
I freeze-frame around him.
Or I try to.
I crash, full frontal into him, smacking my forehead on his chin. Not hard either. Freeze-framing into him should have split my head again, not tickled like a stumble.
I slam it into Mega-reverse.
I succeed in backpedaling a pansy foot or two. I don’t even make it out of arm’s reach.
What the feck?
I’m so discombobulated by failure that I just stand there like an idiot. Until this precise moment, I wasn’t even sure I knew how to spell the F-word, much less do it. Fail, with a big fat F. Me.
He grabs my shoulders and starts pulling me to him. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing but I’m not getting anywhere near close to Ryodan. I explode into a Dani-grenade, all fists and teeth, and ten kinds of you-don’t-want-to-hold-me-when-the-pin-is-out.
At least I try to.
I noodle off one limp punch before I stop myself so I won’t telegraph any more catastrophic news to a dude that doesn’t miss a trick and won’t hesitate to use any weakness against me.
What the feck is wrong with me?
Did slamming into him do something to me? Like break me?
Superspeed—gone.
Superstrength—gone.
I’m as weak as a Joe and … ew! Stuck in Ryodan’s arms. Close. Like we’re about to slow dance, or get all kissy.
“Dude, you like me or something? Get off me!”