Sidekicked (31 page)

Time thaws instantly, and I turn to stare at the face of a police officer who just a second ago was sitting where I am now. He looks completely bewildered as I throw the car into gear. As I screech away, I see him reach to his side for the gun that isn't there.

Up ahead I see Mike tearing down the street in the borrowed Chevy, making trophies of other cars' taillights as he careens back and forth, trying to drive for the first time in his life and with only one good hand. On the police radio, someone is asking me to report in. I figure that's a bad idea. After all, this is the second car I've stolen in less than an hour. Mike is right. I'm probably going to hang for this.

Provided I don't die first.

I
t is said that a bloodhound's sense of smell is fifty million times better than a human's. Bloodhounds can track a scent several days old. They can pick up a whiff of a lost girl from one of her mittens and track her through miles and miles of forest, using their big floppy ears as shields to block out other smells.

But can a bloodhound steal a patrol car and drive with its head hanging out the window, following a faint trail of Purple Passion body spray through the streets of town at sixty miles an hour?

I've been training for this moment.

I can still hear sirens, and I'm guessing several of them are probably headed my direction. I've turned off the constant chatter of the police radio so I can concentrate on Jenna. I don't care about anything else right now. How goofy I look with my mask on and my head sticking out of the car, how much trouble I'll be in from the cops, how much trouble I'll be in from my parents. How there's no way I'll be able to keep my secret any longer. How I'm not even sure that I want to. As long as I find her. As long as she's okay.

I follow Jenna's scent for several miles, to the outskirts of town, past a series of warehouses to an old abandoned factory situated next to a lumberyard. It smells like rotten wood and rusted iron. The factory looks like it hasn't been used for decades. It's the kind of place you see in gangster movies when they tell the snitch who ratted them out that he is “going for a ride.” Even if I couldn't still sense her, I'd know I was in the right place.

I can't hear any sirens anymore, which actually makes me nervous. Surely there is some GPS locator or something that will allow them to track this car down. The cavalry will arrive. And Mike should have gotten help as well by now. Maybe he's even using Mr. Masters's watch to buy us all some extra time without me even knowing it.

Mr. Masters.

Maybe I was wrong about him. Or maybe the Dealer betrayed him, just as he betrayed us. Hopefully I will find him here too.

The huge sliding doors to the factory are all sealed tight, leaving just one entrance on the side, protected by a complicated-looking electronic lock—not something I can pick easily. I reach down to my belt and pull out a canister of concentrated liquid nitrogen—the advantages of a strong background in chemistry. In a matter of moments, the lock is just a block of solid ice. A nearby rock serves as a decent hammer, and the lock shatters in three blows. The door swings open.

Now
this
is breaking and entering.

The air is thick with dust, but Jenna's trail comes back to me. It is stronger than it was outside, and I catch it without even trying. I'll find her first, then together we will find the Titan and the others. I listen for voices, but the place is massive and the walls thick cement. I catch a sound other than the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above me and follow it, taking shallow breaths and keeping my feet from shuffling on the cold cement floor. Every beat of my own heart sounds like a gunshot, giving me away.

The sound I'm following gets clearer, and I press my ear up against the wall. They are voices, muffled through the thick stone that separates us, but I recognize one of them immediately.

“You won't get away with this,” it says.

They are the first words I've heard him say since that day at the bar.

And if he's saying that, it means things are really bad. Supers only say somebody won't get away with something when that somebody is right on the cusp of getting away with everything.

I keep my right ear against the wall as I walk, turning a corner, looking for an entry, but this place is a labyrinth, and the voices are like echoes. As I get closer, I can start to make out the other voice more clearly, and though I've never met the Dealer, never even heard him speak, his voice seems strangely familiar.

“You say that, but all the Supers who had even a chance of stopping me are already my prisoners,” the voice says. “There's no one left to save you.”

I see a door up ahead and crouch down. From inside I hear the Titan coughing, his voice hoarse, barely a whisper. The other's voice is cool and confident, much younger than I would have expected for someone who's been dead for the last six years. It's a soft growl. Almost sultry. “You were the last piece of the puzzle,” it says. “The last on either side, in fact. The Suits are back in prison. All the other Supers are out of the picture. Even that meddlesome watchman is taken care of. The Fox is the only one who can save the day, though I'm afraid she won't arrive in time to save you. You will sink into oblivion as the whole place goes up in flames. When the smoke clears, I will emerge victorious, and you will be forgotten.”

“Then I guess you've thought of everything,” the Titan says.

I stand at the door, trying to understand what I'm hearing, but none of it makes any sense. I'm not even sure who all is in there. I hear the Titan mumble something, and even I have to strain to make it out.

“Killing me won't bring you justice.”

The other voice laughs. “Justice? I'll worry about justice later, when I'm the only hero left who's worth a damn. I'll give new meaning to the word and mete it out, wherever and whenever I see fit. But that's after you pay for what you've done.”

That's it. I've heard enough. I reach for the door with one hand, dropping the other to my belt and grabbing a smoke grenade, hoping that it might buy me enough time to sneak in, maybe even get the Titan free before the Dealer—or whoever it is—even knows what's happened.

Then I catch the scent that brought me here, suddenly intense, and turn to see just the girl I'd been hoping to run into again.

“Thank god it's you,” I whisper. “Where have you been?”

She is in costume. Her hair falls down around her shoulders. Her green eyes glow. The silver shimmer of her outfit reflects the glare from the overhead lights. I expect her to be surprised to see me. Or relieved. She looks neither. She looks irritated.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses, taking two steps closer to me so that we are within arm's reach.

“I came to rescue you,” I say, then realize how ridiculous that must sound coming from me. “I thought Mr. Masters kidnapped you. I tracked you from the apartment.”

If any of this comes as a shock, she doesn't show it.

“The Titan,” I say, pointing to the door. “The Dealer's going to kill him. At least I think it's the Dealer, but it sounds an awful lot like . . .”

I don't finish the thought because something suddenly occurs to me. Jenna is here. The Silver Lynx is here. But she is alone; her Super isn't by her side. And the voice on the other side of the door sounds just like . . . I try to clear my head. It's impossible. There's no way the Dealer and the Fox could be working together. Could they? Surely somebody would have known. Mr. Masters. Or one of the other Supers. Or . . .

“Jenna?”

Something's wrong. Something in the cold, calculating tone of her voice. It makes me shudder as she takes another step closer.

“I'm sorry, Drew,” she says. “This wasn't how it was supposed to go.”

“Jenna, what are you even talking about?” I want to reach out for her, but I don't. I'm afraid. She is so close I can feel her breath.

“It's messed up. I know,” she says. “But I'm going to fix it. Everything will be all right. It's all part of the plan.” Instead she's the one reaching out for me. “I just want you to know that I never meant to hurt you,” she says.

And then I hear a click and look down to see one of my own sleep grenades in her hand.

“I'm so sorry,” she says again.

Then she hits me.

Jenna Jaden. The Silver Lynx. The girl who bloodied my nose and promised to always be friends. Who taught me how to do yoga and introduced me to banana milk shakes, who sat next to me in H.E.R.O. three days a week and recited the Code that we both swore to live by. The girl who leaned in close on the bleachers of the baseball diamond and in only a few seconds, screwed up my life forever. That girl chops me hard across the base of my neck, hitting a nerve that I didn't even know existed, sending me to the ground, right next to the sleep canister that she activates and drops down beside me. The ether seeps into my lungs, instantly making me dizzy. I try to push it away, but whatever she did paralyzed me and I can't move.

I see three Jennas hovering over me, and suddenly I realize what I didn't before: that she's needed me to save her for a while now. Ever since that day at the bleachers. Probably even before that. I want to tell her to stop. That whatever she's done, we can fix it, together. But I can't—in part because I can't even feel my lips anymore—but also because she's not Jenna. She's not even the Silver Lynx.

She's the new Jack of Hearts.

And I'm a fool.

S
o it's Tuesday.

Salad day, as I think I might have mentioned, though you can get the salad with a vacuum-sealed Baggie of ham cubes that look as if they might be made out of used pencil erasers. I have an apple and a granola bar in my bag, which is probably still in a Chevy Suburban somewhere, hopefully being sat on by a group of vigilante ninjas or a team of Navy SEALS, or whoever Mike could scrounge up to come rescue me. It's Tuesday and I'm in costume, for what it's worth, though my gadget belt is stashed away in a corner of this great big hall that I find myself in, thrown there, no doubt, while I was unconscious. Not that I would do much with it anyway. The last thing taken from that belt was used by my very best friend to knock me unconscious. I should never have shown her how to use those things.

It's Tuesday—first week of October—and I'm dangling (again) over a giant pit in the floor of some evil mastermind's secret lair, hidden in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. Unlike the other rooms in the factory, which are all dust and rust, this room sparkles with tech, the far wall bulging with computer monitors, sensors, and gadgets. It reminds me a lot of our school basement. How long this place has been here I don't know, but I have a good guess where the money came from to furnish it—a generous donation from Kaden Enterprises, those costs easily recouped by a few knocked-over banks. After all, being a Super is expensive. I can only assume that being a villain is too.

Now imagine being both.

Because that's what I finally realize. It's not that the Fox and the Dealer are working
together
.
That
would be bad enough. But this is even worse. I think I realized it the moment I heard her voice, but I simply couldn't bring myself to believe it. I had to see it with my own eyes. That they are actually one and the same.

It's Tuesday and I'm dangling above a pit, my hands in cuffs, suspended here by a supervillain known as the Dealer, who also happens to be a superhero known as the Fox, who also happens to be the former Jack of Hearts who my Super supposedly killed so many years ago. The Fox—so good at hiding behind the mask.

And though I'm not one hundred percent positive, I'm pretty certain the pit is steadily filling with wet cement.

Seriously. Wet cement, which is actually very practical, all things considered. Much easier to get ahold of five hundred gallons of wet cement than seven hundred electric eels or two hundred poisonous snakes, and I take a miniscule measure of consolation in the fact that drowning in cement is marginally preferable to being dissolved by acid. Something at the bottom of the pit is slowly churning the bubbling gray mixture, making sure it doesn't set yet, though I have a feeling it won't be long. The fumes are dizzying and burn my lungs. Or maybe I'm just having a heart attack.

After all, it's Tuesday and I'm suspended by my wrists above this pool of cement, feet dangling below me in my cracked, weather-worn Pumas, and all I can think about is how stupid I was not to see this coming. Not the whole “the Dealer is really the Fox who was once the Jack of Hearts who was really the real Dealer's supposedly dead daughter” thing. That's still too much to wrap my head around. I mean, really. How was I supposed to get that?

No, I mean the girl in the silver outfit with her emerald eyes and her wavy blond hair, huddled over there in the corner, looking back and forth from me to her own Super, wiping the blood from her nose on her sleeve.

I should have known because the truth is, guys like me never get the girl. Other guys get the girl. Or maybe she goes off to boarding school. Or maybe she throws in her lot with a notorious villain bent on revenge and is forced to turn on her friends and see them swallowed up in a pit of quick-drying cement. Pick your ending, they're pretty much the same.

And that's why I'm hanging here. Because of her.

I
should
have seen it coming. But I didn't. Probably because I love her. Or love some version of her. Or
loved
some version of her. I'm not really sure anymore. I should hate her, of course, but I can't. Because I know that somewhere there might be that version of her that maybe feels the same way about me.