The Trials of Renegade X (39 page)

“It’s nothing,” I tell Kat’s dad. “We weren’t doing anything.”

“He attacked me first,” Tristan says, pointing at me.

I’m going to attack him again if he doesn’t shut up. What the hell is wrong with this guy?

Kat’s dad sounds annoyed and unimpressed. “You look fine to me.”

“But—”

“Unless you
want
to get kicked out of here for fighting? Because I can certainly arrange that.”

Tristan hesitates, like he’s considering whether trying to get me in trouble would be worth it. He seems to decide that it isn’t and retreats into the crowd, though not without telling Kat he’ll see her in class on Monday, and not without glaring at me one last time.

“And
you
,” Kat’s dad says to me once he’s gone. “I told you to stay away from her!”

Kat scowls at him. “
Dad
. He’s my boyfriend! You can’t tell me—”

“
You’re
in trouble, too, because I told you not to bring him. In fact, I forbid it.” He pulls out his phone and hands it to her, using his power to commune with machines to make it go online and find pictures of what just happened. He doesn’t have to wake it up or push any buttons or type anything—or even touch it—he just talks to it with his mind or something and it does what he wants. And, yeah, there are pictures of me fighting with Tristan posted all over Twitter and Facebook. One of the gossip sites has even picked up on it already. They have a particularly good pic of me with lightning in my hands, and Tristan with fire in his, and Kat trying to get between us.

It does look pretty scandalous, actually.

“This is exactly why I didn’t want you here,” her dad says to me, taking his phone back. “And I can’t imagine your family’s very happy with you right now, either.”

Nope. Probably not. But it doesn’t change anything. “I’m not going to stop seeing her.”

He raises his eyebrows and takes a step toward me, getting right in my face. “You think after everything you’ve done that you have a
choice
?!”

“Dad!” Kat cries. “It’s
my
choice! And I love him!”

“Kat. Stay out of this. It’s for your own good.” He keeps his eyes on me. “She got seriously injured last weekend because of you. It’s
your
fault she ended up in the emergency room. This isn’t a game, and now you’re here, causing even more trouble for her! I told you you didn’t have anything to offer her, and I was right! And now that everyone knows who your father is, they’re never going to leave you two alone. If you really loved her, you’d turn around right now, go home, and
never
see her again!”

He is
really
scary. And I kind of want to be anywhere but here right now. Well, anywhere but here or at my house, obviously. But even though it’s really hard to meet his gaze and not look away, I don’t back down. In my peripheral vision, I see Kat wipe tears from her eyes. Like she thinks this is it, like she thinks he’s
right
, or at least that I’m going to listen to him. And maybe he has a point. But even if us being together is going to cause problems for everybody, I can’t just give her up. “You told me to stay away from her, and I told you I can’t do that! I said I’d do
anything
for her, and I meant it!”

“Anything? Like ruin her life?!”

“Stop it!” Kat says, swallowing back tears.

“You said I wasn’t good enough,” I tell her dad. “You said I didn’t have anything to offer her but trouble. But I’m here, and I’m not going away. No matter what happens. No matter who says we shouldn’t be together or how much you yell at me. And that’s something. No, that’s a whole hell of a lot, actually, because it’s
all I have
. And if you want me to stop seeing Kat ...” I swallow. “You’re going to have to kill me.”

His nostrils flare. He looks like he
wants
to kill me. Then he straightens and adjusts his jacket. “You’re serious.”

It’s not a question, but I answer it anyway. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”

We stare at each other. I will him to smile and say, “Well, you two kids go have fun, then!” But of course that doesn’t happen.

“You’re still half superhero,” her dad says. “You’re still
his
son.”

“We’ll work around that.” That and the fact that I’ll probably be shipped off to a boarding school for delinquent superheroes as soon as I get home. It’s probably somewhere far away, like France or Siberia, and my cell phone won’t work there, and Kat and I will have to continue our romance through postcards.

Her dad looks me over, like he just hasn’t stared at me scarily enough yet and I might still back down. But when I don’t, he sighs. “I’m not going to kill you,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I like it.”

Which I guess is as much of his permission to be together as we’re going to get.

Not
that we need it or anything. Though I could do without him threatening to throw me off of buildings.

His phone rings. It’s something work-related, and he walks off to answer it.

Kat throws her arms around me. “Did you seriously just win an argument with my
dad
?”

“Looks that way,” I say, hugging her back. “Do you think he’ll knock down the bride-price to something more affordable? Say, like, only five cows?”

“I didn’t think you were going to show up. I didn’t think ...” She chokes up a little, then says, “I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again. Not after what you said. You’re really stupid sometimes, you know that?”

“Yeah, I do. And I have to warn you that our reunion might be short-lived, since I’m pretty sure
my
dad
is
going to kill me. So, I hope you have something in black, since you’re going to need it to wear to my funeral.”

She starts kissing me. Like she might never get to again. I kiss her back, and when we finally stop to breathe, she says, “You want to go to my room? Since it’s your last night on earth and everything.”

“I thought you’d never ask.” And if her dad notices we’re gone and decides he wants to kill me after all, well, he can get in line.

She grabs my hand, but before we can sneak off, a familiar voice behind us shouts, “Wait!”

I turn just in time to see Riley go uninvisible in the middle of a crowd of supervillains, somewhere I
never
thought he’d be. It’s so unexpected, I blink a few times to make sure I’m not hallucinating. Which seems more likely than Riley Perkins showing up to a social event at Vilmore. Uninvited, I might add. But Kat’s eyes go wide, too, so I know we both see him. I also notice he’s holding the personality enhancer, which, last I checked, was still in my room.

“Wait,” he says again. “We’ve got a serious problem, and you guys are going to want to hear this.”

I glare at Riley. “How long have you been standing there, Perkins?”

“Not ... not that long.” His face goes red. He looks from me to Kat, then swallows. “But I couldn’t appear with her dad there, and then ...” He looks away.

“So, you mean you were there the whole time?! And then, what? You thought you’d just watch us make out for a while?!”

“No!” He winces, making a disgusted face. “But I didn’t want to just interrupt! It looked important.”

“What’s going on?” Kat asks.

Riley glances guiltily at the floor. “Sarah’s here.”

Kat goes pale. “She’s
here
?!” She looks behind her, like she expects Sarah to be standing right there with another raygun pointed at us.

“Not
here,
as in this room.” Riley glances around, looking kind of nervous, probably because he’s in a giant event hall full of supervillains. “Look, can we go outside or something? It’s kind of loud in here!”

“Yeah,
and
you’re seriously underdressed.” I shake my head at the jeans and faded striped T-shirt he’s wearing. “Don’t you know Homecoming is supposed to be
formal
? I’m embarrassed to be seen with you.”

He rolls his eyes at me as we make our way to the entrance.

Once we’re outside, I say, “You want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Sarah’s here,” he says again. “At the school. I mean, I think she is.”

“You
think
she is, so you went to my house, got the personality enhancer, and then came all the way down here? What happened to your phone?”

“
My
phone? What happened to
your
phone?! I called you, like, a hundred times!”

I pull out my phone, remembering that I put it on silent before I left the house, right after he called me. Oops. I have thirteen missed calls. I check and see that eleven of them are from him. One is from Gordon, and the other one is from Sarah. A cold prickle of dread creeps up my spine and settles in my stomach.

Riley’s still seething. “Do you think I
wanted
to sneak into your house and steal this thing? Do you think I
wanted
to drive all the way over here and crash some villain dance?!”

“Why do you think she’s here?” Kat asks.

“Because I ran into her dad at the store today, after school. And he actually stopped to talk to me, which I thought was weird, because there’s no way he doesn’t know Sarah attacked me last weekend, right? So then I thought maybe he was going to apologize, or maybe tell me he’s on Sarah’s side and I deserved it or something. And I kind of wanted to pretend I didn’t see him, but he was already coming over to me, so—”

I tap my foot. “Get to the point.”

“Yeah, okay. So, he came up to me and said he was glad that Sarah and I had made up. I didn’t know what to say, because why would he think that? And then he said he’d just assumed that we had, since we were going to Homecoming tonight. He thought it must have been at Sarah’s school. But I know that one was last weekend, too, the same as the one at Heroesworth. And when I just kind of stared at him, her dad said maybe he’d made a mistake. But I knew you’d said you were going to Homecoming at
Vilmore
tonight, and I know how Sarah feels about villains. Right now, I mean,” he adds, glancing nervously at Kat. “While she’s crazy.”

“Is that it?” I ask him. “You’re basing this on something clueless her dad said? Because if you were that desperate for an excuse to come to the dance tonight, you should have just asked. I mean, I would have shot you down—Kat’s a hotter date and
much
lower maintenance—but you still could have saved yourself the trouble of coming all the way out here.” I notice my phone says I have one new voicemail. “Did you leave me a message?”

“No, I didn’t. And no, that’s not it.”

That means the message is either from Gordon or from Sarah. I’m not sure which one of them I hope it’s from, and I’m kind of too terrified to listen either way. What if it’s from Gordon, saying don’t bother coming home ever again? What if it’s from Sarah, saying ... I don’t know, that she’s going to kill me or something? Actually, on second thought, I hope the message
is
from Sarah. Because I already know she wants to kill me. I don’t know for sure that Gordon never wants to see me again.

“After I talked to her dad,” Riley goes on, “I went over to her house. In invisible mode, of course. She wasn’t there. It looked like she’d already left, because her backpack was gone. Anyway, there was a map of Vilmore on her desk. She’d marked up some of the buildings, and one of them was the one next to this one. And, look, I know it’s not a lot to go on, but she’s up to something. I
know
she is.”

Enough to come all the way over here, to
Vilmore
, which has got to be pretty low on his list of favorite places. “I believe you,” I tell him—words I
really
never thought I’d say—“but what are we going to do about it?”

He holds up the personality enhancer. “You got this thing fixed, right? So, we just get to Sarah and blast her with it.” He takes a deep breath and stares at his shoes, like he knows it’s not going to be that easy.

It’s not, and we’re going to need as much information as we can get, so I clench my jaw and call my voicemail. It might be from Sarah. And if it’s from Gordon, I’ll just hang up before I can hear him say anything too horrible, like that he doesn’t like the choices I’ve made and is kicking me out.

“Damien?” Kat says.

“Hold on. This might be her.”

Please be Sarah. Please be Sarah. Please be—

“Hello,
Renegade
,” Sarah says in the message. And even though she says my superhero name like it’s the worst word on the planet, I’m still really relieved that it’s her and not my dad. “You know how I said you were endangering a whole generation of superheroes last weekend? Well, that gave me an idea. A really
good
idea. Why not do the same thing to a whole generation of supervillains? Why not stop them all before they have a chance to commit horrendous crimes that we both know they won’t feel guilty for?”

Kat and Riley are staring at me, waiting for some sign. I nod, indicating it’s her.

“So,” Sarah’s voice goes on, “I’m here at Vilmore, and I’ve got everything set up to wipe out a whole bunch of criminals. And you know some of them are very,
very
dangerous. Maybe of Bart the Blacksmith’s level. That’s who the dance is honoring, right? But we don’t know who that’s going to be yet, so they’ll all have to die. Except, you know what, Damien? I think I know who the
really
dangerous one is. It’s
you
. So here’s the deal. Turn yourself in, and nobody else gets hurt. Come to me tonight before eight o’clock and I
don’t
destroy an entire generation of villains, including Kat. Call me when you get this message, and I’ll tell you where to go. And you
will
call me, because I know you. Your worst trait—the one that makes you so dangerous—is that you actually think you’re a hero instead of a villain.”