I crush the earpiece under my heel, then look around the dark alleyway, trying to control my breathing.
No sign of pursuit, either from within the sleek building I just exited at nearly a run, or from outside where my employers—whom I have good reason to believe want me dead—are
“Bow-Shock, your arrow-neous ways are off target! Seeing you quiver before justice is my aim!” Arms akimbo, I stand astride the ledge of the shattered window of the jewelry store.
Clad in a neon-green jumpsuit, Bow-Shock responds to my o-pun assault with a hail of arrows.
I backflip over the onslaught, my
Whoever imagined living on a cloud would be comfortable is an idiot.
Now, obviously, I don’t mean a real cloud. Those are just water droplets suspended in the atmosphere. No. I mean the type of cloud children envision: big fluffy cotton balls where naked babies sporting soft, feathery wings hang out and play the harp.
Every siren in Onda’s class had amazing song powers. Rosa could heal. Jewel could create a defensive shield. Even dorky Cosmo had the power to convince the orcas that they would be better off swimming far away from Rafferty, keeping them safe from attack.
All Onda’s singing ever did was put things to sleep.
“Wake up!” Mama seems scared as she shakes my shoulder. I hear someone yelling in the kitchen. Mama doesn’t like it when people yell.
“Mama? What’s going on? Why are you scared?”
“Hush, Zephyr. I need you to listen to me closely, okay?” Mama opens the window next to my bed. “I need you
After my brother Barney and I complete the second wrapping of tinsel, we spread out Mami’s lock-lid ornament tubs.
Barney nudges me. “So, Arnold, any thoughts on the job offer? I know, you’re an”—faux crystal bell in each hand, he air-quotes—“entrepreneur. You can still be your own boss. A boss that
I don’t sleep anymore.
My apartment is cramped, little more than a closet. Space enough for a few childhood mementos and some clothes, nothing more. No bed.
I was ten years old when I woke one morning to a blazing house and my parents burning alive and myself unscathed in the middle of it all.
“Who does she think she is? The daughter of a villain, trying to be a hero?”
A punch hit me square on the cheek, smacking my head against the road. Fingers tightened around my throat, and I struggled to breathe—an all-too-familiar feeling.
Decay’s superpowers activated. I gasped as my fingertips began to shrivel
The glass roof of the museum’s atrium shatters, and I duck behind a pillar. Twenty-three rotund robots rappel through the jagged opening on extensible steel arms. Riding atop the center bot is a short, pudgy man in a purple-and-green-striped lab coat. Frizzy orange curls encircle his bald scalp like clouds around a shiny mountaintop.
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“If it bugs you so much,” I said, “why you don’t just levitate my stuff back to its proper place?”
“Because,” Steven shouted, “I actually use my powers for good. I don’t levitate things to clean up your messes, you—”
Expletive deleted.
Yeah, I often provoke that sort of reaction from my
“It’s all over, Psycho-Metric! Drop the kilobomb!” I practice the command sotto voce as I scan the harbor, searching for the crimson lights of the mad mastermind’s speedboat.
Bloodbath Bridge looms above the dark water, a line of gold lamps tracing the gentle arcs of its suspension cables. Psycho-Metric has commandeered the six-lane crossing, and his goons are
“What if I told you that you could just go home?”
Toby almost believes the words… until he remembers it’s a villain speaking them, and he shakes himself. He forces a laugh, but pain stabs through the wound in his side, and he stops laughing with a gasp.
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
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