"Bet you wish you was awake right now," I muttered. Venom's body pressed tightly against mine as my blades slid down the wall. The second my feet felt a window, I shoved him inside so I didn't drag his bare back against the hot bricks. My costume shielded me from the most of the heat as I shimmed down to the dirt.
Static crackled in my ear. "You okay, Shadowcat?" Slasher asked over the radio. "I've got a NSWAT boat bringing out a group of PCD officers. Peregrine needs to redo scout training, by the way. Twenty henchmen. Fuck that, I counted five and none could fight worth a damn."
"What about the cargo containers?" I asked.
"Empty. All of 'em. Bastards knew we were coming. They moved it."
"Or maybe Harpy hasn't finished his new machine yet." I walked around the base of the lighthouse. The fire still burned. Someone had dragged out the two unconscious henchmen who'd started it and tied them together on the ground. "Peregrine!"
"Right here." She landed behind me, a stack of singed papers in her hand.
"Where were you?" I said. "I called your name, and—" Then I realized how pale her face was and how her fingers trembled. "What's wrong?"
"This was all I could salvage. The fire spread too fast. I'm sorry."
"No need to apologize. You did your best." She hadn't backed me up when I'd fought Venom, but I wouldn't press her on that. Everything had worked itself out.
"I wasn't talking about the fire. I meant these."
She passed me the papers. A photograph sat on top. The machine. But this wasn't the machine that had given me my powers. This machine rose to twice the size of the blurry henchman standing next to it. A gleaming white light shone in the middle. The metal chemical tanks hooked up to a spray nozzle the length of a baseball bat. The engine Harpy had stolen from the Speedway sat at the machine's base.
"He did finish it," I said. Slasher cursed over the radio.
"There's more," said Peregrine.
I turned to the second sheet. It was a computer-generated schematic of the machine's inner components. Yellow lines on a black background.
"Haven't you seen it before?" she asked. "Just the other day?"
Everything clicked. Cypher had drawn this for Slasher and I.
YOU ARE READING
Hero Stalker
FantasyTwenty-two-year-old Gloria Dodson has a weird hobby: stalking Centurions, the superheroes who protect her home city. Then she gets a chance to join them. A stalk gone wrong gives her powers of her own. But Slasher, a veteran Centurion, thinks Glori...
