Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel (22 page)

Nevermore grabbed me by the shoulders and planted a hot, wet kiss on my mouth. She tasted of lip balm and blood, but I suddenly didn’t mind so much.

“When this is done, let’s go to my room and fuck. God, villainy makes me so horny,” she whispered, chewing on my ear until it actually started to hurt.

Odigjod had disappeared right after dropping me off, and he was gone for a good minute before returning and transforming back to his usual, small self.

“Carnivore?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Went to rescue him, but the heroes wouldn’t let me get close enough and said to leave; that Carnivore was now their prisoner.”

I was glad, but not as glad as I thought I’d be. It must have been shock, but I’d have to get over it. They must have had their reasons for not telling us they were going to capture Carnivore, and I was sure they would fill us in.

“Hey guys,” Circus said, opening his massive sack of money, “who wants to get drunk, roll around naked in forty million dollars cash, and watch how much ass we kicked on YouTube?”

Doing that with Circus, no way. The same with Nevermore…

“Can I borrow some of it first?” I asked.

#Supervillainy101: The Face Thief

The Face Thief was one of the earliest members of the Game-master’s Rogues’ Gallery, and though his career was never as notable as Bad Bug’s, his ability to transform himself into anyone he’d ever touched made him a successful art thief and a recurrent thorn in the Gamemaster’s side. However, when remembered in the history books, the Face Thief’s embarrassing end is often given more attention than his decades-long career in villainy.

Paranoid and antisocial in his later years after a few betrayals by underlings and the rise of the Protectors, he’d become reclusive and violent, rarely leaving his lair so he could keep a constant watch on his vast collection of art, which he carefully kept in crates in a high-tech, hermetically sealed vault, away from prying eyes and thieving hands. After a while he stopped leaving his house at all, and even the Gamemaster forgot about him with how busy the War on Villainy had kept him.

After his numerous battles with the Gamemaster, it wasn’t the Protectors who uncovered his hidden lair, but the bank. After the water and electricity had been shut off, a repossession team entered the Face Thief’s mansion. His mummified body was found locked in his vault, pinned under a crate that had fallen on him. All evidence pointed to him having bled to death after trying to eat his left hand.

#LessonLearned:
What good is being a villain if you can’t enjoy the spoils of villainy?

13

DRUMMERS & DRAGONS

After a few hours of sitting in a healing pod for my cuts, bruises, and knee, I wouldn’t have thought I was in need of any more R&R time, but when Adam announced that I looked tense and offered a day at a spa, I wasn’t going to turn him down.

Madame Kedist’olara’s was not quite what you’d expected in a celebrity day spa. I mean, it was in Hollywood, it did have a lot of fruity iced drinks and a few hours there did cost more than a year at a half-decent community college, but its design as a traditional Lemurian bathhouse pretty much ended the similarities.

It had to be more than a hundred degrees inside, with near complete humidity. The carved stone in the walls made it look like we were walking through a cave, and the walls were dripping with water. The spa treatments involved a lot of heavy massages, being rubbed down in fragrant oils, and having layers of dead skin and body hair scraped away with glowing Lemurian daggers. According to Adam, these ancient techniques were designed by scalefaces to make shedding their skin a social event, and were considered quite trendy.

I just wanted to make it through the day with some of my skin still intact.

The scaleface women massaging us wore nothing but thin satin sashes tied around their waists, which would have been pretty hot if they had breasts, or hips, or any definable curves.

It was like being massaged by freakishly strong Olympic gymnasts covered in scales.
Fucking non-mammalian biology.

I yelped in pain when mine started working on my lower back.

“I keep telling you to relax,” Adam said from the massage table across from me.

“I thought I was relaxed.”

“Not,” my masseuse said.

“It shouldn’t be this bad,” Adam said.

“Well I’m hot and missing skin and sore and, and—”

No, I wouldn’t go that far.

“And what?” he asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“No, really, what’s on your mind?” Adam asked, turning over. His towel fell away, and I had to turn my head to avoid seeing his superhero cock.

I didn’t want to tell him what was bothering me. We’d grown friendly in the weeks we’d been archnemeses. Adam was a better friend than I ever had back home, and was almost as good as some of the others I’d met on Death Island. Better even, in ways that only being famous could improve.

“Is it safe to talk, with them here?” I asked.

“Of course it is. They barely speak a lick of English and owe their citizenship and paychecks to Crystal Skull. You’re not gonna say anything, are you, love?” Adam asked, trailing a hand up his masseuse’s side.

“Not,” she said, digging her hands into his chest and abs.

“Fine,” I said, letting the words spill out. “Just what the hell happened with Carnivore? I mean, I hate the guy, but why did you capture him and not tell us? Was that always part of the plan or was that just something that came up? And, and… why are you laughing?”

“Because you babble when you’re nervous, and if you’re so nervous that you’re gonna continue to babble, then we’re gonna have to work harder to get you to relax,” he said, then muttering something quickly in Lemurian. My masseuse then flipped me onto my back and pulled my towel away. She bent down, putting her head between my thighs.

“Not struggle,” she said, getting me hard with a flick of her forked tongue.

“She’s right, you don’t want to fuck around with all those teeth. But those lips are a lot softer than they look.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting. She wasn’t beautiful in any way, and those rows of many small, pointed reptilian teeth did look frightening, but when she took me in her mouth, all my concerns seemed to fade away.

He was right, her lips were a lot softer than they looked.

His masseuse then did the same. I had a crazy, fleeting thought I had to get out: “Does your, oh God, does Adriana know?”

Adam closed his eyes, but didn’t falter. “She knows that a man has needs, and that I’m a man, so she’s okay. But she’s faithful to me, God love her. So, about Carnivore…”

“Can’t we talk about that later?” I asked, running my hand through the short blue feathers that grew at the base of my masseuse’s skull and trailed down her spine.

“There’s never any time like the present,” Adam said. “You ever been in a band? No, of course not, you’d have gotten laid earlier. Every band member plays a specific part. You got your front-man lead singer, you got the nerd on the keys, you got the hot girl singing backup and occasionally hitting a tambourine but mostly just standing there looking hot. Then you got your drummer. The drummer’s the wild man, the one who lives hard and dies of a drug overdose after a year or two, then is immediately replaced by another drummer who’ll repeat the process. If you were in a band, Carnivore would be your drummer.”

Everything went blank for a moment as the scaleface finished me off, slurping with her forked tongue before cleaning the rest with a towel. Adam was nice enough to let me finish before continuing. He wasn’t in as big a hurry to finish.

“You need drummers because they make you look like bad guys. We need you to have drummers because we wouldn’t look good if we let you
all
get away. We stop you, we capture one of the real sick, scary villains people wouldn’t want on the street, the crowd goes wild, and everybody goes home happy.”

“But couldn’t you have at least told us first? I mean, what if we’d been so surprised something bad had happened?”

“You guys still need to work on your acting, so we thought this time it would help to get an honest reaction. Next time we rotate a drummer in, you’ll know what to expect.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Look, you did great out there. I’m sorry we didn’t keep you in the loop the whole way, but from now on, we’ll tell you everything.”

“You really think I did great out there?”

“Are you kidding? The people feared you almost as much as they loved me for wailing on you. You’re a media darling. If it weren’t for keeping our secrets, these two lovely ladies would be singing songs to their people tonight about how they had the honor of pleasuring the greatest hero and the greatest villain in America, isn’t that right?” he said. Though his was still busy, mine confirmed his point.

“So, feeling any more relaxed?”

“More, yeah. Getting better every minute actually,” I said, meaning every word. Now that I knew that what happened to Carnivore was all part of the show, my worries started to fade away. They would take away all the real bad guys, while the rest of us would remain the core. It made perfect sense.

“Good, because tonight’ll be a lot more fun if you’re relaxed.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, sipping from an ice-cold bottle of water my masseuse brought from a nearby refrigerator.

“Yeah. Because tonight, we’re gonna party like superheroes!”

I had to take a quick trip back to Death Island to clean up (gingerly, since I was missing more skin than I’d started the day with) and get dressed. The others were mostly ready by the time I arrived. Circus and Trojan Fox had dummied up some fake IDs for us, in case they were needed, but I didn’t think they would be. Trojan Fox and Geode were over twenty-one, Nevermore and I could pass with a little work, and Odigjod and Circus could change their appearance at will.

Besides, we had the heroes with us.

We waited for their call in the rec room, not having the appearance of a typical group that would normally go clubbing. Geode was dressed and groomed so well that I was sure he’d break a lot of girls’ and guys’ hearts tonight. Trojan Fox looked disgruntled, in a short dress I’m sure Nevermore insisted she wear. Nevermore looked amazing, though with all of her tattoos pulled back into an ornate (and very busy) tramp stamp, I barely recognized her with all the skin showing. She looked used to the club scene. Circus and Odigjod, both in human form, looked like kids about to knock over a candy store. Come to think of it, I probably did too.

We’d spent so much time working that it was finally time for us to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

The Tri-Hole the heroes sent put us in the back of an empty delivery truck. Once we were all through, the door at the back of the truck opened. A portly, middle-aged man whose head was replaced by a clear crystal skull with glowing red eyes stood there. I’m sure if he’d been able to, he would have been smiling.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Crystal Skull said theatrically, his booming, Spanish-accented voice almost covering the heavy clicking sound his jaw made. “Welcome to my club!”

Excitement flowed through us all. I’m sure some of them had hoped—I know I did—that we’d be going here, but I had no serious expectations that we’d actually be going
here
.

Stepping out of the van, we all looked up and smiled. Nevermore squealed, wrapped her arms around Trojan Fox, and kissed her on the cheek. For her part, even Trojan Fox looked impressed.

The large neon sign before us read
MODESTO’S KEEP
. The actual club floated about thirty feet off the ground, probably using the same kind of anti-grav generator that kept
The Pearl
afloat. A series of spiral steel stairways connected it to the ground, while searchlights beneath it lit the club up as bright as day, even though the sky above us was black (well, as black as the sky above Los Angeles can get at night, which isn’t all that black). A small mob of paparazzi stood by each stairway, some of them fighting with security when they saw a limo pull up. A line of people looking to get in stretched more than a block, many wearing capes and masks in fashion inspired by the heroes.

If they only knew what it was like to wear the real thing.

Crystal Skull led us to the VIP entrance, a Tri-Hole set in an elaborate iron frame on the ground and into the club proper.

It was everything I’d ever imagined. Booming music, darkness broken up by swirling colored lights. Beautiful, famous people grinding and dancing, passing drinks and drugs around. Since the club was owned by an ex-hero, there were plenty of supers employed to keep the theme going: scantily clad girls in cages changing their skin colors with the beat of the music, a telekinetic bartender putting on a show as he mixed six drinks at once in midair, balls of colored light forming and floating lazily from the chest of the DJ.

“It’s like heaven,” I said.

“More like the Gates of Home,” Odigjod said wistfully.

“Come on, guys, we’ve earned this,” I said, leading the way.