Villainous (8 page)

“That’s that Hunter kid,” said Mollie. “He’s a lot better-looking when he smiles.”

Daniel decided to let the comment about Hunter’s looks pass unremarked. He sat back in his desk chair and rubbed his eyes. They’d been staring at the computer for hours now, scanning literally hundreds of profiles of kids in their area. Dinner had been a reheated frozen pizza on paper plates, devoured while sitting on the hardwood floor of Daniel’s attic bedroom. They told their parents that they were working on a project for Mr. Smiley, but the truth was they hadn’t
touched their history books. With their final getting close, Daniel felt a bit guilty about that. Mollie in particular should be using this time to study, but then again he was as anxious to learn who these kids were as she was. Characteristically, Mollie told him not to worry, and that they’d hit the books extra hard tomorrow. As if this mystery could be solved in one day.

Daniel copied the picture of Drake and Hunter together and printed it out. He’d cleared the corkboard next to his desk of all his little comic strips and cartoons, and was now using it to assemble his own wall of suspects. Beneath each picture he’d written a name and a power.

“So, let’s go over what we know so far,” said Daniel, pointing to the photo of a girl in a red convertible. She was blowing a kiss at the camera. “We know Janey Levine, aka Skye. I haven’t watched her TV show, but from what I’ve read online, she has some kind of telekinesis.”

“She uses it to put on her makeup in the car. Twit.”

“Then there’s this Hunter kid, the
good-looking one
.” The emphasis was for Mollie’s benefit, but she didn’t seem to notice. “No full name, but I think we can assume he went to Holy Cross with Drake, even though we don’t know what he can do.” Hunter got a question mark on his card where his power would normally be.

“That’s two of them,” said Mollie. “Still nothing on Mutt?”

“Nothing,” answered Daniel. In place of a photo, Daniel
had posted a blank index card with the kid’s name on it. “You ever try doing a search on the name
Mutt
? It’s impossible. We know he’s, well,
animalistic
might be a good word, so we’ll just write that down. Did you see those teeth?”

“Only too well,” said Mollie. “So that leaves Drake.”

“Yep,” said Daniel. “Drake Masterson. Star student, sixteen years old, and I’m guessing their leader.” Daniel pinned up the photo of Drake with his welcoming smile, the picture of a clean-cut Pennsylvania teen. Beneath that, he wrote, “Fire-breather.”

“There they are,” said Daniel. “Students of the academy. The Nobles of Noble’s Green.”

He’d arranged the photos in a cluster, and just off to the side he’d pinned up a picture of Clay, a scowling yearbook shot on which Rohan had once used a Magic Marker to give him missing front teeth and a unibrow. Beneath the defaced picture, Daniel wrote, “Super-strong, super-tough.”

“We know Clay wants to join, but they didn’t seem very impressed, so let’s keep him close.”

“What about Bud?” asked Mollie. “You think he’s at the academy too?”

“If Clay’s there, then I wouldn’t doubt it. Bud doesn’t do well on his own.”

Daniel pinned up Bud’s yearbook picture next to Clay’s. It was slightly out of focus, as if the cameraman had rushed the shot.

Poor Bud
, Daniel thought as he wrote “super-stink”
beneath the picture. The kid couldn’t even convince the cameraman to get close enough to take a decent shot.

“There’s our list of prime suspects,” said Daniel.

“We’re missing one,” said Mollie.

“Oh, not Theo again! I told you I trust him.”

“I’m not talking about Theo,” answered Mollie, and she pinned up a blank card near the top of the board, on which she’d written a single word—
Shroud
.

“He’s still alive,” she said. “And I know you said vandalizing a store is beneath him, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s always a suspect.”

Mollie was right. It was foolish to ignore Herman, and potentially hazardous too. But while they couldn’t ignore him, there was another danger to consider. The worst thing about Herman Plunkett, from a detective’s point of view, was that with him around it was very difficult to even consider any other suspects. Daniel had made that mistake last year, when the Supers were being menaced by strange shadow creatures Daniel dubbed Shades. Herman was involved, despite the fact that he was presumed dead at the time. But the truth turned out to be more complicated, and though in the end Daniel was right about Plunkett being a part of it, he was certainly not the mastermind. The Supers found Herman helpless in his own secret lair, the Shades’ prisoner. Those creatures turned out to be the manifestations of lost memories and powers Herman had stolen with his Witch Fire pendant, a piece of the meteorite that had
burned St. Alban’s to the ground. All the Shades had wanted was their freedom, but Daniel had been too obsessed with catching Herman to see the truth until it was almost too late.

Keeping an open, objective mind while Herman was on that board was next to impossible. The Shroud was a black hole sucking up all the light.

“Herman’s powerless,” said Mollie. “So, what do we write on his card?”

Daniel thought about this for a moment, then took up the black marker and wrote “Really, really evil” beneath his name. Yep, really, really evil. It was important to remember that.

Mollie had taken two more note cards and written “Tree fort fire” on one and “Attack at bridge” on another. Daniel tried to tell her that the word
attack
was a bit strong, but she wouldn’t change it. He could have been seriously hurt, or worse, she said. So
attack
stood.

The only girl on the board was Skye, and naturally their suspicions centered on her. But if she was their mysterious laughing girl, how could she have learned about the tree fort in the first place? Another unanswered question.

Finally, in the center of the board Daniel pinned up a new article from the
Noble Herald
. The headline read, “Superpowered Delinquents Suspected in Vandalism Case.” The article went on to say that because of the speed with which Mr. Lemon’s shop was vandalized, combined with
the sheer amount of destruction, the sheriff’s department suspected that the culprits were “members of the town’s superpowered population.” Beyond that they had no suspects at this time.

Daniel stepped back so that he could take in the entire board. All the smiling faces staring back at him. Academy students, every last one.

The sheriff’s department had no suspects, and Daniel had too many
.

The next morning, Daniel was just finishing breakfast and arguing with Georgie over who’d get the last of the syrup for his French toast when Mollie appeared at the door, looking panicked.

“Have you all seen the news?” asked Mollie, not bothering to ask if she could come inside.

“Why no,” said Daniel’s mother. “Is something the matter?”

Catching the significant look that Mollie was giving him, Daniel hopped out of his seat and headed for the living room. Georgie snatched up the undefended syrup bottle with a shout of triumph.

The TV was already tuned to the local news, and as soon as the picture came on, Daniel saw it—an overhead shot of downtown Noble’s Green. The camera was panning over
the wreck of a building: windows shattered, doors missing. Several buses in the parking lot were actually overturned.

“Oh my,” said Daniel’s mother. “Is that the high school? What happened? Was it a tornado?”

“There weren’t any storms last night,” said Mollie.

Daniel looked back at the scene of destruction. One of the buses was a smoking, burnt-out shell. As the shot cut between the helicopter and a reporter standing in front of the rubble, a graphic flashed across the bottom of the screen:

“Superpowered vandals turn to rampage?”

At that moment they heard the shatter of a bottle breaking, and from the kitchen Georgie’s voice.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Mom, can I have another syrup?”

Never had Daniel felt so slow. Since the high school was only a block away from the middle school, he had sped out of the house on his bike, hoping to get a chance to see the destruction up close and still make it in time for Smiley’s class. Mollie, of course, had simply flown ahead. Daniel pedaled like he was competing in the Tour de France and still it wasn’t fast enough. It felt like he was steering his bike through a swamp.

As he finally neared the school, he passed streets lined with news vans and crowds of gawking people, and it became hard to squeeze through them all. In a place the size
of Noble’s Green, the smallest things became newsworthy, and Daniel still remembered the controversy that had rocked the town last year when the council voted to put a stoplight on Main Street. Of course, everything had changed with the Blackout Event, and the town’s fifteen minutes of fame had finally come. But as he passed the news crews, he saw the faces of the reporters and suspected that the story of the sleepy town of superheroes had already played itself out. Video segments on flying kids and profiles of the librarian who could breathe at the bottom of a lake were yesterday’s news. The public was hungry for something fresh and exciting, and this attack on the high school would be just the thing. It was a new angle on the old story, full of scandalous possibilities—the dark side of Camelot. Even the crowd of camera phone–waving tourists looked like a pack of scavengers as they snapped pictures of the vandalized school. They’d come to Noble’s Green hoping to catch a glimpse of a floating fire chief, but now were being treated to the superpowered destruction of public property.

“Hey,” said Mollie, waving at him from a crowd of jostling onlookers. “Can you believe all these people?”

“This might be worse than we thought,” said Daniel, panting. The ride had really worn him out, and Mollie was standing there without having broken a sweat.

The footage on television didn’t adequately portray the extent of the damage, and for a moment Daniel actually wondered if his mom had been right—maybe a tornado
had
rolled through here. But once you looked closer, you could tell that this destruction wasn’t the result of a random force of nature. It was deliberate. Every window was smashed, probably because nearly all of the desks within had been tossed through them. Someone had emptied each classroom, and the broken contents now lay scattered across the parking lot. The entrance looked like it had been fire-bombed, and the charred doors still dangled loosely from their hinges.

The headlines were right. No one without powers could have accomplished all this destruction in a matter of minutes, not without a small army. That was obvious now to Daniel, and to everyone who saw.

“Wow,” said Mollie. “They would have to hit the high school.”

“Huh?”

“What about the middle school? We’ve got a final coming up!”

Mollie’s attempt at gallows humor was admirable, but they both knew that this was a very serious situation. The stakes of their own little investigation had just escalated.

“You know,” said Daniel, “they say that criminals often come back to the scene of the crime.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I dunno. Maybe because they get a kick out of seeing what they’ve done.”

Mollie scanned the faces of tourists who were mouthing
Hi, Mom
at the television cameras and holding up rock-and-roll fingers.

“You think one of
these
losers did it?”

“No, not really,” said Daniel. “But keep your eyes open for anyone suspicious who doesn’t look like a sightseer. Maybe we’ll see Drake or one of his Nobles in the crowd.”

Mollie nodded and went back to studying the faces. After a few minutes of useless staring, Daniel was just about to suggest they leave for summer school when he heard a commotion nearby. A group of onlookers were complaining loudly as a long black limousine with darkened windows rolled past them, obscuring their view and forcing several to leap out of the way.

The car came to a stop and out stepped two of the largest men Daniel had ever seen. Though both were conservatively dressed in neat suits and ties, they didn’t look like any kind of businessmen. As they turned to scan the crowd, Daniel saw that one had a neck tattoo of a dragon that crept all the way up the back of his pale, shaved head. The other had dreadlocks tied into a tight ponytail, and he wore more rings in his ears, nose, and eyebrows than Daniel could count. Both men were so huge that their expensive suit coats looked ready to split against their broad chests.

They scanned the area for a few moments before walking to the back of the limo. Some of the tourists who’d nearly been run over stomped up to the limo, but when they caught sight of the two bruisers, they walked right on by.

The dreadlocked one kept an eye on the crowd as the man with the neck tattoo opened the back door of the car.

Out stepped a ghost. Daniel almost didn’t recognize him at first. Gone were the sagging patchwork sweaters and dusty glasses Daniel had grown accustomed to. He used to think the old man looked like a turtle when he was playing the part of the aged artist, but when he dropped that disguise, he reminded Daniel more of a snake. Now, as the man stepped out of the dark recesses of the limousine, Daniel was reminded of an old silent movie he’d once watched with his dad called
Nosferatu
. The villain of the film, a thin black-clad vampire, had given Daniel nightmares for years. But that blood-sucking monster was nothing compared to this old man.

Herman Plunkett wore a long black coat that reached almost to his ankles, and despite the late-summer heat, he was bundled up to his chin in a dark silk scarf. The glasses he wore on his shriveled, liver-spotted face were thinner than his old plastic bottle frames, and these new ones had shaded lenses to hide his small, mean eyes. Though he stood taller than he had when he’d been playing the role of harmless invalid, he leaned heavily on a sturdy cane that he hadn’t needed the last time Daniel had seen him.

Not that Daniel should have been surprised. He knew Herman well enough to realize that the oily villain would never stop popping up. The Shroud was gone forever, but Daniel had no illusions that that meant they were safe from
Herman Plunkett. Daniel had destroyed Herman’s Witch Fire pendant, and with it all of the man’s Shroud powers. But he was still dangerous, and always would be.