Super Trouble (10 page)

“What—”
he croaked, before choking on the surge of that static electricity taste at the
back of his throat. He wasn’t sure what he had been going to ask.
What do
you want? What are you waiting for? Why not just kill me already?

“Patience,
Mr. Nightwing,” the unseen woman cooed. There was a ringing clang, like the
doors of a cage being secured. “We can’t begin until Ms. Carruthers arrives. But
never fear. I’m sure she’s on her way already. Rushing to the rescue for a
change.”

“Leave
her… out of this,” he managed to growl.

“I’m
afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Nightwing. She’s a crucial part of my plan. You
both are.”

A
trap. He’d known it was a trap and he’d walked right into it. He’d been so busy
thinking about protecting Kim, he hadn’t realized he was being a total idiot
himself. The woman was right. Kim would come. He should have locked her up,
handcuffed her to something, anything to keep her from racing down here as soon
as he vanished. So far he was doing a distinctly shitty job of protecting the
love of his life.

“Don’t
worry.” The voice came again, sweetly taunting—and Frost finally identified it,
his stomach knotting with dread. “If you’re a good boy, you’ll live through
this, Mr. Nightwing. I’ll even let you go. Right after you watch Ms. Carruthers
die.”

Chapter
Twelve: Trouble to the Rescue

Kim didn’t
waste time gaping at the empty space where her lover used to be. If the bastard
thought she was going to let him rush into danger without her, he had another
think coming. She was done being useless.

She
raced for the front door, already unholstering her phone. The hallway was just
as posh as the apartment—creamy carpets and classy, understated décor—but she
quickly found what she was looking for. The emergency stairs. With roof access.

Kim
dialed Justice as she took the stairs up two at a time. Luckily Frost was only
three floors below the penthouse, so she was barely winded when she kicked
through the access door—ignoring the
alarm will sound
sign—and burst
onto the roof just as Captain Justice finally deigned to pick up his goddamn
phone.

“Kim?
Where are you?”

“Doesn’t
matter,” she said, eyeing the rather abrupt drop down fifty floors to the
pavement. “But in about five minutes I’m going to be at Pier 42 with the Big
Bad Bitch responsible for all of this.” She explained the situation as quickly
as possible, ending with, “So if you ever cared about me, you can get a super
posse rounded up and give me some freaking back up, because I’m going after
Frost
right now
.”

She
ended the call and reholstered her phone, trying not to think too hard about
what she was about to do.

Then
she jumped.

Flying
for a telekinetic wasn’t quite the same as flying for someone like DynaGirl who
could manipulate gravitational forces. There was nothing graceful or
coordinated about the way Kim flung herself across the city with bursts of TK,
the same way a kid might try to keep a feather floating by blowing on it. It
wasn’t instantaneous like teleportation or particularly controlled, but it was
her fastest option, catapulting herself haphazardly across the sky, frantically
dodging cell tower spires and skyscrapers.

She
landed on the concrete of Pier 42 hard enough to jar her knees, staggering a
few steps before her momentum abated.

This
was the place. So where the hell were Frost and the uber-bitch?

There
weren’t any boats tied to the pier, which pretty much left the warehouse or
some kind of underwater lair. As something of a connoisseur of villain lairs,
she secretly hoped it was the submarine option, but she’d found most villains
weren’t nearly as inventive as they liked to think they were, so the warehouse
was by far the likelier option.

Either
way, it was a trap. The fact that Frost was nowhere in sight reinforced that. She
could wait for Justice and the cavalry, but Frost might be in trouble now.

Kim
reached for her telekinesis, calling up the aspect of her power she’d been
practicing with for the last two months, building a repulsive field around her
so even a bomb going off a foot away from her wouldn’t touch her. It was a neat
trick, but keeping everything at bay was harder than stopping a speeding
bullet. It would exhaust her power if she kept it up for any length of time,
and she could only manage it for about twenty minutes before she would crash
and burn.

Hopefully
she wouldn’t need it that long.

About
twenty feet above her head, a vent cut into the side of the warehouse. Kim
propelled herself up to it and braced herself lightly against the building,
trying to peer inside. Without luck. It was pitch black in there. She started
to float back, intent on finding a stealthy way in, when the lights inside
suddenly flared to life. A spotlight seemed to fall on a giant cage in the
middle of the room—and the man lying prone in the center of the cage.

“
Frost
.”

Subtlety
and stealth forgotten, Kim ripped the vent from the wall, flung it aside and
dove through the hole. She touched down twenty feet from the cage, another
jarring, running landing that rattled her knees.

Frost’s
head snapped up.

Thank
God. He’s alive.

“Kim!
Get out of here. She’s going to kill you.”

That
made her stumble a step, but she didn’t stop, scanning the seemingly empty
warehouse even as she bent the metal bars to make a Frost-sized hole in the
cage. “Where is she?”

“She
isn’t here,” Frost said, struggling to his feet.

“She
got away?”

He
shook his head. A metal collar gleamed around his throat. Was it drugging him? Had
he been tortured? Why was he moving so stiffly? “She was never here. It’s
Mathilda Torchwood. I put her in Area Nine almost seven years ago and as far as
I know she’s still there. Everything she’s done has been arranged remotely. She’s
a technopath.”

“Oh
shit.”

A
technopath. The supers who could crawl inside any machine—cell phones, video
cameras, ATMs, anything. If it had circuitry, it was fair game. The previously
empty warehouse didn’t seem so empty anymore—filled with gadgets, any one of
which a technopath could turn into a weapon.

A
soft whirr hummed behind her and Frost shouted a warning. Kim spun in time to
see Taser wires arching toward her. Electricity flashed. She screamed and went down
hard.

****

Frost
roared as Kim slammed to the ground. He ran for the gap she had bent in the
bars.

“Ah,
ah, ah, Mr. Nightwing,” Mathilda Torchwood scolded. “Stay where you are or I
might be tempted to release those toxins.”

He
froze, watching Kim hungrily as she gasped on the ground, no longer seizing. “Kim.
Talk to me, baby.”

Kim
shuddered, but when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t Frost she sought out, but
the robot that was the source of the voice. “Why are you doing this?” she
moaned.

Frost
frowned. Kim Carruthers was the love of his life. And a notoriously shitty
actress. She was
pretending
to be hurt. What the hell? He studied every
inch of her, his gaze locking on the Taser wires—where they hovered in the air
two inches above her body, not touching.

Thank
God for telekinesis.

Mathilda
didn’t seem to notice her electroshock greeting hadn’t been delivered. She was
too busy gloating. “Why? Didn’t you hear what he said? I’ve been in Area Nine
for
seven years
and Frost Nightwing is responsible. Revenge, darling. What
other reason could there be? It’s payback time.”

Frost
remembered Mathilda Torchwood well. It was hard to forget the first
superheroine who’d ever tried to seduce him into letting her go. She’d been
beautiful—but also totally, off-the-rails insane. The middle daughter of
another second-generation super family, a family full of heroism just like the
Nightwings, she was one of the first rogues he’d ever been called in to
apprehend.

“I’ve
had a lot of time to think here in Area Nine,” Mathilda went on, reveling in
her moment of triumph. “They wouldn’t let me anywhere near anything with a
digital pulse. Do you know it took me almost two years to figure out how to use
wifi and 4G to access the outside world? Two
years
of nothing but
lifeless paper allowed into my cell. My dungeon. It’s enough to drive a girl a
little mad.”

“You
were already a psychopath,” Frost growled.

“Sticks
and stones,” the robot voice sing-songed. “I thought about you a lot during
those two years, Mr. Nightwing. I thought about what I would do to you. How I
would destroy you. At first I considered just killing you and everyone you
love, but then I realized the best revenge I could have would be to turn you
into me. What does a hero fear more than becoming a villain and spending the
rest of his life in Area Nine?”

“Frost
would never turn villain,” Kim naively defended him.

“Perhaps
not,” Mathilda agreed. “Let’s put it to the test, shall we?” The robot rolled
until it seemed to be looming over Kim’s prone form. “This isn’t quite how I’d
envisioned things. He was supposed to come rescue
you
, not the other way
around, but I suppose as long as he knows he’s failed to save you, the result
is the same.”

“You’re
the one who arranged to have me kidnapped all those times,” Kim said.

“Not
all
of them,” Mathilda corrected.

Kim
shrugged. “Seventeen of them.”

There
was a long pause. If the robot could have been nonplussed, it would have been. “How
do you know that number? Who told you? Vic didn’t know that.”

“Figured
it out on my own,” Kim said. “Demon Wroth had his own agenda and seven of the
others were kidnapping me because they wanted to hurt me or use me to tell
their stories to the world. There were only seventeen I couldn’t explain.”

“Well,
aren’t you clever,” the robot cooed. “I can see why you like her, Mr.
Nightwing.”

“What
would have happened if Frost had come for me instead of Justice?”

 “I
would have killed you the second he arrived to save you,” Mathilda said mildly.
“The idea was for him to watch you die, but he never came. It surprised me,
frankly. When I watched you together, I was so sure you were the thing he loved
more than anything in the world.”

Frost
wasn’t sure which disturbed him more—the idea that Mathilda could have watched
him with Kim without him ever suspecting or the fact that a complete sociopath
had seen his love for Kim more clearly than he had.

“Why
did you kill Little Vic?” Kim pushed, always the reporter.

“He
spoke out of turn,” Mathilda said, again in that sweet, mild tone. “He wasn’t
supposed to tell you I was a woman. He wasn’t supposed to
know
I was. As
soon as I realized clever Little Vic had figured out more than he was letting
on, I knew he had to be eliminated. I had hidden a little security policy
inside one of the cameras—it’s amazing what my little robot friends can do.”

“You
heard him leaving the message—”

“Phones
are easy,” she bragged. “You’d be amazed what I’ve heard. Unfortunately, I
can’t be everywhere at once—I’d really be omniscient then—but I come pretty
close.” She chuckled. “You never know when I’m listening…”

“You
have more of those devices,” Kim said.

It
wasn’t a question, but Mathilda seemed to be enjoying her interview and
volunteered, “There’s one right in front of you. My little robot friend will
vaporize you,
Trouble
.” Frost growled at the sound of his nickname for
Kim coming out of the speaker. “And Mr. Nightwing gets to watch. What do you
think? Will he go mad or go bad?”

“Is
there a difference?” Kim rolled onto her knees, not waiting for Mathilda to
answer. “You can control anything with a digital pulse, as you put it, can’t
you?”

“I
can,” the robot voice purred.

“Then
how will you kill me when I pulverize every electronic device in a two mile
radius?” Kim purred back.

She
flung out a hand in Frost’s direction and he was thrown to the ground and the
collar ripped from his neck a fraction of a second before a massive shockwave
thundered through the warehouse.

Chapter
Thirteen: Demolition For Beginners

Kim
threw everything she had into the blast, annihilating everything in range until
Mathilda would be lucky if she could find two microchips to rub together. It
wasn’t two miles—she didn’t have that kind of energy left—but she vaporized
everything inside the warehouse that wasn’t covered by the protective bubble she’d
thrown over Frost. She dove to his side as the walls crumbled and the ceiling
plummeted down. Several of Mathilda’s devices detonated, little explosions
popping like firecrackers around the warehouse, though none of them came close
to touching her or Frost.