Super•Villainous

VI

Geez, I wondered who that could be?

I pitched my voice low, into just above a hiss, so that none who passed our small group might overhear. "I stabbed a homicidal maniac, in case you've forgotten, because I can guarantee I have not."

"Do you want to go bald?" Nicole ran a lock of my hair between her thumb and forefinger. "'Cause that's what will happen if you bleach your hair twice in a week."

"Our resident supervillain has been awfully quiet as of late, actually," Leigh mused. "Maybe you hurt his feelings."

Although her tone was earnest, her eyes held a teasing spark.

"I hurt more than just his feelings. In all likelihood, he's out there somewhere nursing his wounds. It's not as though he can go to the emergency room with injuries like those without raising a few alarms."

"The Guild must be bored out of their mind," Nicole added, referring, of course, to the Hero Guild, the dominant crime fighting force in the city with countless chapters scattered throughout the rest of the country. "Without Shade they might just go out of business."

We flashed our ID's for the school security officer on our way out the doors, more a formality than anything. He'd seen our faces for the last four years, and even knew Leigh by name.

"Some lower tier hero stopped a jewelry thief earlier today, and Aqua put out a house fire, but, you're right, it's nothing nearly as glamorous as I'm sure the Guild prefers. Poor them."

"They still get our taxes, Leigh. They'll weather this storm, worry not your fragile heart." Slipping into the front passenger seat, I asked, "Who wants to skip fifth period?"

Leigh snorted, starting the engine and carefully backing out of her parking space. "Maybe your Dads are conflict avoidant enough to let you get away with that, but my parents will end my life on purpose."

"And I have homework to turn in," Nicole added, leaning over the center console from the row of seats behind us.

Leigh made a valid point. Her parents despised sending her to public school, and I suspected they merely tolerated Nicole and I for enticing their daughter to going somewhere so far below their means. Even then, she only managed it by striking a low blow in reminding them that fancy private schools didn't save her brother. He disappeared regardless of the piles of money they threw towards his education, but if they discovered I was trying to lead Leigh down a life of hooliganism they might very well end MY life on purpose, and I didn't want that. With bank accounts like theirs, I held little doubt they would succeed.

"How boring," I sighed, despite the original suggestion only being halfhearted at best. "Keep up this behavior and I might begin to think you two actually want to graduate with our classmates."

"Oh, heaven forfend!" Leigh gasped, clutching at her chest in mock horror, only for Nicole to yell at her to keep her hands on the steering wheel while on the road. They fell easily into an argument about how Nicole didn't want to die today, and Leigh's counter that we weren't in any danger because, "I can drive with my knees, too."

*~*~*

I was above gossiping about the secret identities of heroes who obviously valued their anonymity, but damn if I wasn't curious, so there I sat, not for the first time over the last few days, skipping back and forth through the three cell phone videos worth of footage of me hovering over the car that were viral enough to pop up upon a quick Google search. While the sum total of all three clips were less than a minute long, they each displayed a different view of the scene, showing different potential suspects, one of which who must have been Tempest for me to have been saved from becoming a grease spot on the pavement. As far as we knew, he was the only wind manipulator in the country, and therefor must have been nearby. If I had any moral backbone to speak of, I might have respected his privacy.

Well, I didn't. I was born nosey; sue me. I wasn't about to use the information for evil or anything. A person could only look at a half concealed face so many times without a burning curiosity to know what lay beneath.

Besides, half the internet seemed to be zealously on the job, as well, because they, like me, had no concept of boundaries.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least I was self aware, even if I couldn't resist temptation.

Obviously Tempest was cursed with only a single X chromosome, so I eliminated all the women in the video off my list. Next, perhaps I was being ageist, but I also eliminated any men over forty. "Midlife crisis" was not the vibe I got from him when he carried through the city in his arms, nor when he prevented me from being robbed.

Which left me with still quite a few suspects, actually. It had been a rather busy street, after all, and, of the people actually captured on camera, I spotted more than a dozen men who fit within my admittedly very wide criteria. After eliminating the Ex-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I dropped down to a solid dozen people.

How many people would I need to stalk to get any answers, though? I didn't know their names. I had a vague awareness of software that could identify people based solely on their photos, but just thinking about it made me feel creepier by the second.

Nope. No thank you. That was not a road I wanted to go down.

Abruptly, I closed my laptop and pushed it to the far end of my bed.

It wasn't like I was ever going to see him again, anyway. Two encounters with Tempest in under two weeks were surreal, almost magical, and even though they ranked amongst the scariest moments of my life, they were all each exhilarating in their own right, a high I couldn't help but want to chase.

Except I was normal, and normal people didn't get to live lives of magic and exhilaration. Those encounters were a mere chapter of the long book of my life, over and done with.

But sometimes I hoped otherwise, and other times I felt normality wasn't in the cards for me, not with my luck.