Chapter Nine #2
She pulled a phone out of her pocket and dialed a number.
Immediately, his pocket started buzzing.
She knelt and fished around in his hip pocket.
The back of his neck went hot, and he avoided her eyes as she found his phone and tugged it out, holding up a screen that clearly showed a call from Nikki.
“Doesn’t prove anything,” he stammered. “There are probably a million ways to hack a cell phone—”
“Do you want me to tell you everything you told me over dinner the other night? About camping with your sisters? About how they always caught bigger fish than you? About how you adopted Ears from the shelter?” She hung up her own call and shoved his phone back in place.
“Only proves you’ve been spying on me,” he snapped.
Had he really been so careless that he’d allowed a supervillain to get close enough to eavesdrop on his date? Dad was right. He wasn’t ready for this superhero business.
Her face fell. “How can I make you believe me?”
“You can’t because I know Nikki!” he snarled, unable to stop his anger and frustration. “Nikki is a sweet, shy, helpless kid, and if you hurt her, if you try to take her place with your obscene powers, I will kill you. I swear! You stay away from her. She’s ... she’s ...”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. He blinked.
That hadn’t been the reaction he was expecting.
Dang it, even knowing it was fake, her sad eyes made him want to throw himself around her and keep her happy and safe.
He hardened himself. “Stop it. I’m not going to be fooled by a shapeshifter with some mediocre acting skills. ”
“I knew it was too much to hope for, that you’d still like me when you found out the truth,” she whimpered.
“You’re right. My powers are obscene and scary and terrible and maybe that means I’m all those things too, but Shawn, when you told Nikki you thought she might be special, I couldn’t help but pretend you meant it about me, even if Nikki wasn’t real, even if I could never hope to be a normal, good person like you thought she was, I wanted .
.. I wanted it to be real.” Her voice cracked.
“Please, believe me, though, even if that can’t be real, I need to keep you safe, but that won’t happen if I can’t get you to trust me somehow. ”
Cold washed through Shawn’s veins. Something about her reaction didn’t feel like acting.
Everything Nikki had ever told him about herself, her strange tics, the way she reacted when he gave her even the slightest kindness .
.. it fit. It fit so perfectly that his heart broke to pieces.
Nikki wasn’t real. Apparition was telling the truth.
The girl he had fallen head over heels in love with was a fantasy created by a supervillain—but why?
Unable to fight it anymore, he stammered, “You’re Nikki?”
Her cheeks reddened. “My name’s actually Kacey.” She sniffed back her tears and wiped her face with her sleeve. “Nikki was just a name my dad picked out for me when he got me the job at the coffee shop.”
“Your dad?” Shawn stammered.
“Mythcreant,” Apparition—Nikki? Kacey?—explained.
Shawn nodded slowly. He hadn’t known that Apparition was Mythcreant’s daughter, but with the age difference and the way Mythcreant obviously called the shots, it made sense.
Also, while not identical, their powerbases were similar, and that sort of thing did tend to be genetic.
He braced himself against the rooftop. Mythcreant was probably lurking.
He needed to find a way to break out of this.
Why couldn’t he have been blessed with super strength along with his other powers?
“So that’s what this is? You pretended to be interested in me to lure me into a trap?” His stomach roiled until he feared he’d be sick.
Apparition rolled her eyes. “That makes no sense. If I wanted to use my persona as Nikki to ensnare you, I would’ve texted you as Nikki then got you to meet me as your mild mannered alter ego or whatever you call yourself when you’re not—this.” She waved towards his uniform.
“Just Shawn,” he mumbled. He’d already fed her enough personal information during their coffee shop interactions that his secret identity was a wash. “So ... what is this? You pretend to be someone else to get close to me, presumably so I’m easier to kill, but now what? You’ve changed your mind?”
“My dad thinks I’ve been just leading you on.
That’s how I could get away with giving you my number and going out to eat with you.
I’m not, though. Not anymore.” Apparition drew a deep breath.
“Dad always told me that superheroes were just like us. They pretended to be good, but really they were only in it for the fame and the money. The ad deals, you know?”
Shawn gawped at her. Yeah, occasionally a big named sable like Glint or Fleet would get a sponsorship, but it was rare and such interactions were closely regulated by DOSA higher ups. He wasn’t even close to that level.
“He said that if I got to know any of you, I’d see you were just as selfish and fake as any villain, but then when we started to talk at the coffee shop, you had no reason to be nice to me, but you were.” She drew closer.
He tried to shy back, but the restraints held him in place.
She groaned. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Says the woman who has me tied up,” he shot back.
She fiddled with the net shooter. “If I let you go, will you hear me out?”
Shawn hesitated for a moment. “Sure.”
She pushed her finger to the side of the net shooter, and the netting holding him in place went slack. Hopping back to his feet, he shook out his arms.
She placed the net shooter on the ground.
“Anyway, you seemed really sweet,” she continued. “I saw you helping people even when you weren’t in your Surge persona. Like not saving lives and all that, of course, but holding doors for people and you paid for that one woman’s coffee when her card didn’t work and—”
Apparition continued to ramble off random things, some of which Shawn couldn’t even remember doing, from over the last few weeks. He frowned. Where was this going?
“Plus you were always so so so so so nice to me,” her voice cracked.
“No one has ever been so nice to me. Dad pulled me out of school when I was thirteen because of bullying, and my co-workers at the coffee shop thought I was a creep at least at first, and other sables, well—you acted like I was human.”
Something within Shawn softened. He might not know much about being a supervillain, but his father had withdrawn him from school when his powers had manifested during gym class and he’d accidentally blasted a fellow student into a wall.
The kid had been all right—well, broken wrist, but it could’ve been worse—but after that Shawn had realized that there’d always be something between him and “normies.” The possibility that he could hurt them or that they’d treat him like an other rather than as a potential friend loomed large in all interactions.
Learning to control his powers and adopting his secret identity upon entering college had helped—a little.
Still, he recognized that desperation to connect in Apparition’s words.
“Well, you are human,” he whispered. “Just like me.”
“That’s just the thing!” she burst out. “I didn’t feel human until I met you, and that’s why I think, well, I think .
..” Her pale cheeks reddened and her image flickered between the freckled face and red hair of Nikki and the black violet locks of Apparition.
The effect churned his stomach as he remembered how attracted he was to her in both guises.
Had everything that had happened with Nikki been a lie?
“I think we should date!” she burst out.
Shawn recoiled. “Date? Like, romantically?”
She hesitated. “Is there another way to do it? I mean, dating unromantically is a possibility, but it seems a little ... awkward.”
He shook his head. He had to be dreaming—or this was a trick, though to what end, he couldn’t guess.
“You don’t want to date me?” she stammered. “I mean, you asked me out for pizza and offered to walk me home, so I thought you might be interested, but maybe I misread the situation—”
“No, you didn’t. I mean, I asked Nikki to dinner because I was very much interested.
” He swallowed. Even when her appearance switched back to Apparition, she still had beautiful, hurt eyes—more than a little like Ears’s if he were being honest with himself.
Apparently sad eyes were his Achilles’s heel.
“But Nikki—Kacey—whatever your name is, villains and heroes don’t exactly socialize.
If I go around your dad or his friends, they’ll try to kill me.
If I bring you into my life, my DOSA connections—including my own father—are going to do their best to arrest you.
Can you see how that could be a problem? ”
She shrugged. “Star crossed lovers are a thing. Romeo and Juliet were star crossed and now they’re all anyone talks about.”
“Yeah, I’ve read that play.” He frowned. “They die in the end.”
“I’ve read it, too, and it was all a communication issue.” She held up her phone. “If I ever decide to fake my own death so we can run off together, I’ll text you first. I promise.”
Is this girl for real?
“Look, Nikki, you’re sweet, and I like you, but this is never going to—”
“Wait, you haven’t even seen everything I put together for tonight!
” She waved her hand towards the other end of the rooftop and immediately a legion of candles burst aflame.
Their light flickered over a blanket with take out containers spread out on it and even a bouquet of roses in a vase.
“I told my dad the coffee shop was having a late staff meeting, so that should buy us a few hours until he checks in on me. I might need to text him a few times and give him an update on the meeting to keep him satisfied, but as long as I do that, we’re safe. ”
He swallowed. “You did all this?”