Being the Bad Guy, Page 3

been one of those insecure types who performed crimes so that people would notice her. RiotGryl was in it for the adrenaline rush—the good clean fun breaking limbs. Committing a crime to make a statement wasn’t even something that would occur to her.

  “Who sent you?” I demanded.

  “No one sent me!” She slammed a fist into her palm. “You are such an arrogant bastard, Chris! You never could believe that I might be smart enough to pull off a real crime on my own!”

  For a just second, I felt bad. She had caught me in exactly that train of thought. But the fact that she would have picked the exact same target as me for her coming out caper as a criminal smelled fishy.

  “Play the victim all you want, I’m not buying it,” I said. “Dating you for five years taught me something. You’re more practical than me and a lot less of a coward. You wouldn’t steal somebody’s medal to piss them off. If you wanted to show them you’re better, you’d just go and punch them in the face.”

  She was quiet for a moment, so I peeked around the corner of my cabinet to make sure she wasn’t sneaking closer. Instead she was standing still, blinded eyes looking down at her hands. The silence suddenly felt guilty.

  “I need full credit for the robbery,” she said finally, her words just loud enough for me to hear. She gave a bitter laugh. “Word is that there’s a seat or two open in the Order of Chaos. I needed something flashier than usual to catch their attention.”

  Karen had always been jealous that I’d been ranked as a top-tier criminal just because my crimes were higher profile. I considered just giving her the gaudy thing. It might bury a hatchet. I could think of some other way to terrorize the city. But I couldn’t let it go.

  “And you happened to choose this spot on the night that I was here? Bull! You read my emails, didn’t you? You were spying on me!”

  She trembled; looking as if she were about to cry, but then a change came over her and her shoulders straightened.

  “It’s not my fault you never change your damn passwords! And we’re villains! Did you expect me not to cheat to get ahead?”

  “I guess I thought you were someone I could trust,” I muttered. “Should have learned my lesson by now.”

  I saw her flinch at that.

  “Honestly, I wouldn’t have but I couldn’t think of anything and I was desperate.”

  I sighed.

  “Look, I know you’re going to take this the wrong way, but don’t bother. The Order of Chaos isn’t for you.” Her face pulled tight and I spoke faster, trying to get my words out ahead of her fury. “Not because you aren’t good enough for them, but because they aren’t good enough for you. I didn’t just quit them for no reason. I realized I’d been sticking with them because I liked them as friends. But as criminals, they’d drive you crazy.

  “They’re too afraid to pull any job where they aren’t 100% certain they’ll succeed, and recently they usually even screw those up. Crime isn’t about the excitement to them anymore. It’s a retirement plan that keeps them from having to get a real job. They’d bore you out of your mind.”

  She shook her head.

  “I appreciate your concern.” Her whole body seemed to tense. “But I’ll make my own decision.”

  She launched herself toward me like a missile. There was a human grunt and a metallic groan as she hit the other side of the cabinet. It withstood the blow but did nothing to stop her momentum, and she plowed it across the floor driving me before it.

  My entire body went numb as my spine was smashed into a support pillar. The award slipped from my nerveless hands. I blacked out for a moment.

  When I shook off the cobwebs, Karen was regarding me with a pitying expression. Her eyes were clear, since I’d lost hold of my powers. She was hefting the enormous cabinet in one hand, like it was an empty cardboard box, but tossed it away idly to crush some glass shelving.

  “The problem with you having nothing but wussy tricks to rely on in a fight,” she told me. “Is that all I need to do is wait for you to make one single, stupid mistake.”

  She picked up the trophy and stepped toward the gaping hole in the wall through which she’d originally entered.

  “It’s been fun, supergenius.”

  She ducked outside, into the approaching sirens of the outside world.

  I cursed myself for not just handing the thing over in the first place and trying to rescue something of a relationship with her. I cursed myself more for being stupid, staying in one place, and letting her get a bead on my voice.

  I was half convinced that I would never see her again. So, I was somewhat surprised when she dove back through the breach in the wall a second later, screaming “Shit!” and then running hell bent toward the back stairs.

  A blur of white flew by in her wake. I would have thought it an artifact of my recent blow to the head, except I recognized the conical hat, tassel, and frilly skirts as they blew through.

  Power Princess. One of the Worldbeaters, here to protect what was theirs. I prayed to God she was alone. Even so, I didn’t think it likely me and Karen could take her.

  I found I could stand if I crouched awkwardly, so I told my ribs to shut up and shuffled after them like Igor.

  It wasn’t too hard to tell which way they’d gone—I just followed the divots and the missing stairs. The building shook a couple of times and occasionally pieces of the ceiling rained down on me. I had my doubts about its structural integrity at this point, and wondered why I wasn’t just making a break for it.

  I pulled the shadows tighter around me and pressed on, keeping close to the wall. The sounds of combat began to get louder.

  I turned a corner, expecting to find myself in a narrow hall, but entered into a large open chamber. On the blueprints I’d memorized, this area had several non-load baring walls which had apparently been removed during the last few seconds.

  RiotGyrl and Power Princess eyed each other across a faintly smoking pile of debris. Karen still held the trophy, but her glossy black costume was dull in places with burn marks and the cheek facing me dripped blood from a long gash.

  Power Princess still glowed with energy, and from this close I could hear a faint crackling, like a radio that wasn’t perfectly in tune.

  The Worldbeaters were the real deal, a Class A worldwide crime fighting superteam. They just happened to have made Imperiopolis their home. Power Princess herself was able to harness some immense power source from an unknown dimension and was good enough to have figured out how to do pretty much anything with it—boost her muscles for amazing speed and strength, shoot rays of energy, project force fields for protection. I was fairly certain we wouldn’t be able to scratch her if she didn’t want us to.

  Karen was never the research and preparation type. She probably didn’t know that about her opponent, or perhaps she did and she just didn’t care.

  RiotGyrl moved first, grabbing a conference table and swinging it like an enormously wide baseball bat.

  The quickness of Karen’s attack took Power Princess by surprise, and the hero was toppled backwards as the table shattered into splinters around her, though the blow didn’t even muss her dress.

  Karen pounced forward, hands raised triumphantly to deliver a killing blow. I could see a thin barrier of light surrounding the Princess (probably outside of Karen’s visible range), and knew the strike would never connect.

  This was a critical moment. If I was going to do something to turn the tables in this fight, I had to do it now.

  I wracked my brain, but my racing thoughts came up empty. Maybe Hijack had been right and now really was a bad time to be a villain. These overpowered heroes just had our number.

  Feelings of rage and futility filled me and then, just as suddenly, I found myself letting them all go.

  Who was I kidding? Karen didn’t want me to be her savior. What was it she had said about cheating to get ahead?

  Stepping out of the darkness, I released the shadows that I had wrapped around myself and instead drew in t
he light so that I shone like a megawatt bulb.

  Both heads turned in my direction.

  I made my hand glow bright then shot the light across the room into Karen’s confused face. Her head became pure radiant light, like a metal sculpture in the sun.

  It was all for show—I was only blinding her like before, but I wanted it to look like I was doing something powerful.

  “Wha…” she began but the Princess cold cocked her before she could even finish the thought.

  Bowing, I offered the Princess my hand and helped her to her feet.

  “My lady,” I said as suavely as I could muster. “I am sorry to intrude, but it appeared that you may be in some distress. Are you harmed?”

  Power Princess made an insulted noise.

  “By this?” she asked. Her face did have a bit of a regal look, all sharp and angular, but that didn’t make it unappealing. It was kind of like Karen’s, ironically enough. “I don’t believe I recognize you? Have we met?”

  I shook my head.

  “I have not had the honor.” I lowered my eyes humbly. “Your reputation precedes you, of course, but I doubt that you would have heard tell of a lower-tier crime