Super Powereds: Year 3 (31 page)

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Vince casually remarked, sending his fiery blast at her legs. She rolled to the side, very nearly putting a toe outside the circle, then scrambled to her feet.

“Yeah, my power is more versatile than I let on,” she admitted, her own eyes tracking his to see where he was aiming.

“Oh, I knew about that part,” Vince replied. “I just didn’t realize it would work against someone like Roy.”

His words brought her up short, causing her eyes to widen and jaw to open slightly. “Wait . . . you knew?”

“Sure did,” Vince informed her. “That’s why I stayed over here.” This time, he switched back to electricity, aiming for her legs again. Through intuition or luck, Camille saw the attack coming and leapt to the side. This time, she didn’t pause for chit-chat. She kept running, zigzagging through the small area of the circle before Vince could draw a bead on her.

Vince realized what was happening and immediately switched tactics. He released a wall of flame between himself and Camille, a far tamer version of what he’d done in last year’s final match. Rather than try and run around, giving Vince enough time to line up a shot, she pushed through it, the fire licking her skin and sending spasms of pain through her already injured shoulder. Breaking through, she thrust her hand out, nearly in touching range of Vince.

Through the entire course of getting to him, Camille had been thinking about how to minimize Vince’s ranged abilities. What she’d let slip her mind, in the fog of battle, was the fact that Vince was far better at hand-to-hand fighting than he was at ranged battle. He slid a boot-covered foot against her ankles as she lunged, taking away her balance and sending her tumbling to the floor. Camille landed prone on her back, staring up at the concrete ceiling and the silver-haired young man towering over her. For a moment, she contemplated grabbing for his ankle; however, she doubted she’d be able to make contact, and even if she did, there was still cloth covering his whole leg.

Looking up at him, Camille realized his face had suddenly changed. In a frenzied motion, Vince ripped off his jacket and brought it down on top of her head with surprising force. He repeated the motions immediately, beating her with the large cloth garment as fast as he could. For a moment, Camille wondered if this was his way to get her to surrender without hurting her.

Then she realized that she could still smell something burning.

56.

“It’s fine, Vince. Really. It’s just hair,” Camille reassured him. She, Vince, Chad, and Roy were heading back to the lifts after a quick meeting with Dr. Moran. It seemed that, when jumping through Vince’s wall of flame, a section of her long, pale-blonde hair had caught fire. Luckily, Vince noticed and put her out before too much was consumed or the flame could reach her skull, but the end results had been some severely charred portions of hair.

“I’m still just so seriously sorry,” Vince reiterated. Only Chad’s perfect memory could keep track of how many times Vince had apologized since the incident, and he really didn’t care to.

“Relax,” Camille commanded. “I called the place in the mall where I get my hair cut. They can fit me in within a couple of days.” Absentmindedly, she adjusted the gray cowboy hat now perched atop her skull. In a move more chivalrous than anyone expected, Roy had placed his ever-present hat on Camille’s head for the walk back to the lifts and onto campus. It looked funny on her smaller noggin, however, it was a far sight better than the lopsided remains of her hair.

“As sorry as I am about your hair, I would still greatly like to know what it was you did in our trial,” Chad interjected. He’d been largely quiet after waking up to Dr. Moran’s healing touch, lost in his own thoughts as the administrator healed Roy and checked over Camille. Vince had been uninjured, but refused to leave the infirmary without his friends, thus resulting in all of them exiting as a group.

“Oh, that,” Camille said. Her eyes darted to Vince fleetingly. He said he’d known, but . . . how much did he know? She dearly wanted to speak with him in private, however, it seemed as though that wasn’t in the cards for the moment. “My healing power doesn’t just take away wounds, it stores them. Then, if I need to, I can expel them into another person.”

“Fascinating,” Chad replied. “Your ability functions more like that of an absorber than a classic healer.” Camille winced; she wished he’d chosen another word. “And you can give these injuries to people even with enhanced endurance, it seems.”

“Yup,” Roy confirmed. “A Camille attack will even bring down guys like us.”

“Incredible,” Chad said. “I cannot fathom how you kept such a skill secret for so long.”

“She was careful with how she used it,” Vince jumped in. “It was her ace in the hole, so it only got used when it really made a difference.”

“That would be prudent, given your non-imposing stature,” Chad agreed. “I will certainly be more careful in how I attack you during our next bout.”

“Our what now?” Camille asked, attention so affixed to Chad that she didn’t even notice they’d arrived at the lifts. Scattered about were several black-uniformed freshmen, along with the occasional spot of gray. One such gray-clad person was a tall blonde who immediately recognized the four people arriving at the lifts.

“Hey, what are you guys doing here?” Alice asked, making her way through the crowd of younger students to greet her friends. “Close Combat let out a while ago, didn’t it?”

“We were required to make a trip to the infirmary,” Chad supplied helpfully.

This raised Alice’s curiosity, not merely because they had a healer with them, but because Chad had included himself in that statement. “Why not just have Camille fix you up?”

“I was getting looked at too,” Camille admitted, suddenly aware of just how precarious the gray cowboy hat on her head was.

“Must have been one hell of a fight,” Alice commented, eyes dancing between the bashful Camille, the guilt-ridden Vince, and the hat-less Roy. “Don’t suppose anyone wants to tell me what happened, or why Camille is wearing the hat Roy almost never takes off outside class?”

“There was . . . an incident,” Vince admitted.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Camille hastily added. “My hair just got a little singed. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

“Mmmhmmm,” Alice said, the words coming out from a set of closed lips. She crossed the small distance between her and Camille, then discreetly lifted the hat and peered beneath. After a few moments assessing the damage, she set the covering back in place. “Do you have a stylist?”

“I go to a shop in the mall that does a good job,” Camille told her.

Alice looked as though someone had struck her with a gutted mackerel.

“They’re really nice,” Camille kept going, “I think they’ll be able to squeeze me in by the end of the week.”

This time, Alice’s wide eyes went from the earnest girl speaking, to the three men behind her, back to Camille, and then ultimately upward, presumably to the heavens she was asking to spare her from such nonsense.

“Oh, honey, no. A thousand times, no,” Alice said at last. “What you’ve got there is salvageable, if, and 
only
 if, the stylist knows what they’re doing. I’ve had my fair share of snafus in getting hair gummed up or stuck on things, so trust me here.” In all her years as a Powered, Alice had never anticipated the times she floated up and got her long hair snagged on things would be useful experiences, but it seemed the universe had a strange sense of humor about such things. “We need to get you to someone with skills, and I mean today.”

“Perhaps you’re putting too much emphasis on the importance of this,” Chad suggested.

Alice shot him a look so full of venom it could have melted the ground. “How about I shave you bald, and we see how important you find it to be, Mr. Perfect-Part-And-Lift?”

Chad looked away, but stayed silent. He did make the effort to appear nice each day, so perhaps he didn’t have the right to criticize someone else’s vanity.

“Um, I don’t really know any other hair-places,” Camille said.

“You don’t worry about a thing,” Alice assured her. “As soon we’re up the lifts, I’m calling one of my people in town. She’ll be ready for you by the time we arrive. Maybe I’ll get our nails done too, as a way to de-stress from the day. Just leave everything to me.” Alice put a reassuring arm over the smaller girl’s shoulders and led her away to the lifts.

Camille had just enough time to shoot Vince a look of panic, to which he responded with a shrug of uncertainty before Alice dragged her completely out of sight.

57.

Distraught as Vince was about turning Camille’s hair into a fireworks display, he didn’t have the option of staying in Melbrook and dwelling on it all night. He and Mary were due for their last round of server training at Supper with Supers, and no amount of guilt excused him from the job. Mr. Transport dropped them a few blocks away, leaving them to casually stroll in several minutes before their appointed time. Already waiting there was a costumed woman around their own age, leaning against the host’s stand and flipping through the reservation book.

“Hey there, rookies,” Lacey greeted. Unlike Camille and Mary, Lacey had chosen a costume that accentuated her chest by clinging tightly to her torso. It was dark purple and blue, topped with a bobbed purple wig and face paint they imagined took several hours to apply each morning. Lacey had been their trainer through most of the process, and it seemed today would be no exception. “You guys ready to work?”

“Sure thing,” Vince agreed. He was quite enthusiastic about the idea, since it meant doing something to take his mind off the match with Camille.

“Indeed,” Mary agreed, with less gusto.

“Good, then let’s roll some silverware while it’s slow,” Lacey ordered them. “Hopefully, that will get our section closed faster later on. Once things pick up a bit, I’ll let you each take a table.”

Vince and Mary nodded. So far, they’d shadowed Lacey during her job and been allowed to assist with her tables; having one of their own to work with would be a step up from what they had done to date. Both were, in truth, a bit nervous at the prospect, but they kept it off their face like the HCP students they were.

“Let’s get started.”

*              *              *

“Bad,” Anastasia said, carefully flipping a section of the pale-blonde hair away to reveal more charred ends. “Bad, but not impossible.” The woman towered over everyone else in the salon, and most of the state. At six feet, five inches tall, Anastasia (one name only) looked more like she should be in spandex fighting criminals than running a hair-cutting business. Her severe face and habit of rarely smiling didn’t do much to make her seem friendlier, either. If Alice hadn’t walked up to the woman with such familiarity, Camille likely would have dashed out the door rather than sit down.

“Yes,” Anastasia announced after more examination. “I can work with this. You sit, I shall get my special tools. I will make you beautiful.” With that, the tall woman strode into the back, thick heels clacking on the smooth tile of the floor as she walked.

“That was . . . intense,” Camille said, once she was reasonably sure Anastasia was out of earshot.

“Anastasia takes hair seriously,” Alice replied. “It’s part of why she’s so good at her job. If anything, when it’s done, you’ll look better than you did before the hair-fire.”

It had struck Camille as curious that Anastasia had requested no explanation for why she was treating burned-off chunks of hair, but she kept this sentiment to herself in favor of staying meekly quiet while being looked over.

“It really isn’t such a big deal,” Camille reiterated.

“Camille, it’s just me here. You don’t have to pretend,” Alice assured her. “I’m not great at everything in Subtlety, but there are things I do pick up on. For example, I’ve noticed how, lately, you take the time to straighten and style your hair every day, or the way you use makeup when we’re not sweating through gym. There’s no shame in a little vanity here and there. You’re a cute girl. You should want people to notice.”

“Oh, that. I was just trying to get a little better at that stuff,” Camille defended lamely. “After my birthday last year, I realized how little I knew.”

“Didn’t you learn how to do it in high school?”

Camille shook her head. “I was training almost all the time. There weren’t many occasions requiring more than some foundation and a little blush.”

“Come on, you must have at least gotten dolled up on dates,” Alice prodded.

“I only had one boyfriend in high school,” Camille admitted. “It was a small town, and not everyone was adjusted to having a Super among them. Even the guy I dated used to pick on me when we were little.”

“Glad he grew beyond the pigtail-pulling stage,” Alice remarked.

Camille smiled, opting not to tell her about how bad the teasing had really been, or how “growing up” had gotten a big dose of help from Vince’s fists. Rick had done a one-eighty after Vince knocked three of his teeth out; he’d told her he’d learned an important lesson about never knowing who was watching. Rick, once her cruelest tormentor, became her staunchest defender. She needed to call and check in on him; he was attending a bible college in Virginia, and it had been a while since they’d talked. Even if it hadn’t worked out romantically (some wounds never quite healed enough for them to grow close), she still wanted good things for him in his life.