Super•Villainous

XXIX

I checked my phone again, the second time in less than ten minutes, and resigned myself to being exceptionally late for my first official day at the Guild. It wouldn't make a good impression to those who didn't know me, but I couldn't leave the conversation where it was, ignorant to how my father could possibly connect the same plane crash that had killed my brother and mother to whatever had happened to his (presumably) murdered father.

The two events were decades apart, with the only thread to seemingly connecting them being my father, so unless he was out on the streets murdering his relatives for insurance fraud — in which case, I was moving out, post-haste — I couldn't possibly see what they had in common.

"What happened with the crash was an accident." I placed special emphasis on the last word, clicking the front door shut as I ducked back into the house. "I should know. I was there. We weren't shot out of the air by laser beams or — or struck by a bolt of well aimed lightning. Supers had nothing to do with it that time, even if they killed your father."

And, frankly, angry heat bubbled beneath my skin at his attempt to turn an already painful memory into something sinister. Was what happened not bad enough?

"It was an accident," he was quick to reassure, and my anger managed to cool a fraction of a degree, until he added, "but not one as unrelated to Supers as you seem to think."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Have you ever wondered why so many bad things happen to you?" my dad asked, the sentence coming out in a rush, as though trying to be ejected out into the open before he changed his mind about saying it at all. "Why you're always getting hurt in bizarre and improbable ways?"

My bad luck charm.

Tempest's words from yesterday rang in my ears, followed by half a dozen jokes I myself had said throughout my life. Major and minor calamities ran on loop in my mind's eye: the plane crash, the building falling on top of me after Shade's attack, meeting Shade himself, narrowly avoiding being hit by that car after storming away from my ex, being impaled by the sign, kidnapping, the branch snapping on the tree in the forest. The list went on. And on.

And on.

Were those not actually just normal, run-of-the-mill accidents? My dad didn't seem to think so — and he didn't even know about half of them.

Slowly, I asked, "Are you trying to say... that I have a superpower... and that superpower is to be unlucky?" I'd heard of pretty crummy powers, but none quite so bleak. "That I caused the crash by merely being on the plane?" Suddenly, I found myself on the ground, my back pressed against the door and my knees tucked in close, either on the verge of laughing or having a nervous breakdown. Possibly both. Eyes wide, I peered up at my father, simultaneously disbelieving and accusatory. "How long have you suspected this and not told me? Have you... blamed me for what happened all this time?"

"No!" The single syllable tore itself from his throat, and he, seemingly surprised by my conclusion, backed abruptly up into the kitchen counter. "You've got it all wrong. You are like me and your mother. Neither of us inherited an active Thaumaturge gene. Charlie, however, he—"

"Charlie, what?" I looked up sharply, the scalding fire of threatening tears pressing up against the inside of my eyelids. "Charlie was no Thaumaturge. I never saw him do anything Super-like."

Open and closed, my father's jaw worked for several heartbeats to finish what he'd started, silently drawing in breath that refused to fuel his vocal chords. In a strangled whisper that spoke potently of betrayal — his own — he eventually managed to say, "Charlie was the one with the powers, Lily. Not you. If — if he was in a good mood, he might find a hundred dollar bill abandoned on the ground, or ace a test he never studied for by randomly guessing the answers. Everything would go perfectly in his favor. But if he was in a bad mood, people around him would suffer strange, usually minor, incidents, like tripping over shoelaces that should have been triple knotted, or having things spontaneously break when they merely touched them. His ability wasn't very powerful at first, until he hit puberty, when all Super's powers awaken in full force, and even then it hadn't seemed like a problem. It was one of those invisible powers, not at all flashy, and terribly easy to conceal. It took awhile to even convince me and your mother that it wasn't random chance at play. We thought it a subtle enough skill that no one would really notice, and, after what happened with my father, I didn't want Charlie registered as a Thaumaturge, just in case." His eyes took on the distant quality of someone reliving the past and pinpointing exactly where they might have made a grave error. "Then came the day your mom took you all to fly out and visit your grandmother. Later, you told me that you and Charlie had been arguing that afternoon."