The Vigilante's Handbook (Misfits #1)

Eight: Someone's in Trouble

I was only out for three seconds, that was what Mona told me when she was healing my broken nose. Just long enough for Lucia to win. As I said, she wasn't sloppy. Not that either of us had been declared the winner.

"Forrest was about to call it if you hadn't been such an idiot," Mona said as she laid her palm uncomfortably over my nose. There was a briefly painful sensation as my bones and cartilage reformed, but the blood stopped dripping onto my nicest pair of pants, so I couldn't complain. "Her tag went off while she had you pinned the first time. We thought she was getting ready to kill you with a single punch."

"She was trying to get me to tap out." I pushed myself off the floor but only made it a few feet before I sank into a desk chair. "Are you sure you can't do anything about the headache?"

"You know my limits, hun. Unless you've got some severe brain trauma, the migraine is up to you to control. This should help though." She shoved an ice pack in one hand for my bloody nose and dropped my backpack in the other before she left to make sure Lucia wasn't dying.

"You know you're lucky she didn't use the hole in your arm to her advantage," Stitch said as he and Miguel took Mona's place standing in front of me as my untrained medical personnel. "I would have if I were her. A powerful enough hit there would have ripped the stitches. Probably the skin Mona grew too. Then you would have been practically useless." He described just how easy it would be to cripple me so casually that it sort of creeped me out.

"Remind me not to get in a fight with you."

"I wouldn't have been able to do that. And not just because we're friends now. I lack the upper body strength." As if to prove his point, he took a swing at the air in front of him. As if he needed to demonstrate how weak he was. Then he stumbled onto his hurt leg, and his crutches fell to either side of him. "Ouch."

Miguel, as the only one of us who hadn't taken a severe beating, was kind enough to stoop over and pick them up. Don't ask me how, but he had emerged from our gang fight with relatively little damage.

Mona rejoined us just in time to get a word in. "I think you mean you lack body strength period. Upper body, lower body, core. A decent gust of wind could knock you out."

"Thanks for the observation." Stitch turned to me. "How did you do that ice cage anyhow? I thought you couldn't do anything cool with your powers."

In all honesty, I had forgotten about the ice cage. And the feeling of ice shattering from my hand into the mat. The whole fight was a bit of a blur, but Stitch's words were enough to bring back the memory.

I couldn't remember the last time I had been able to do something with my powers that could so easily be labeled cool by a kid like Stitch. Fog was dull and usually unhelpful, but an ice cage I could work with.

"I don't know. I haven't been able to do anything like that since- well, since forever." Before the whole Eleanor debacle, I had been able to do some things worth mentioning. It at least didn't take me two minutes to freeze a twenty ounce water bottle. But after spending four years with a best friend who gave you psychic headaches and three months locked in your room trying to recover, it was easy to slip into a self suppressive state. Maybe my fiery anger had melted the gift block. Or I had sweat it out. If I ever had the displeasure of seeing Dr. Freddie again I would ask.

Everyone else had left the classroom by this point. The minute Forrest announced that he was going to get Principal Merriweather the room had cleared. No one wanted to get dragged into this whole power mess if they could help it. And no one wanted to get mixed up in whatever was going between Lucia and me. Staying would mean choosing sides, and no one liked either of us enough to do that. No one other than my misfits and Diego.