The Rise of Renegade X Read online

  She scowls at me. “I’m taken, thank you, and go call your girlfriend.”

  “I told you, she has my phone.”

  “Use mine. So, she is your girlfriend, then?”

  “No, we only meet to have sex. She’s probably calling because she has a …” I cup my hand to my mouth and glance over my shoulder to make sure the intern’s not listening. “… a you-know-what.” I balloon my hands out over my stomach, gesturing the shape of a pregnant woman. “It’s a product of passion, unlike me, whom God planted in your womb in a fit of divine and spermless inspiration.”

  “Damien!” Mom’s laser eyes flash. She shuts them, clenches her fists, and counts to ten.

  While she’s not looking, I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out a tiny key. I accidentally bump her precious hypno device with my elbow, sending it clattering to the floor. Mom must hear because she speeds up her countdown. I hurry and slip the key’s look-alike off the rack on the wall behind me and make the switch. I shove the real key back into my pocket right as Mom finishes her count and opens her eyes.

  “For a slightly higher fee,” I inform her, “you can get a video interview that other people can watch. We’ve had a lot of success with those.”

  Lasers shoot out of Mom’s eyes and zoom across the room. They plow through every beaker on the table and singe the knees off of the intern’s pants. He cries out in pain or fear or maybe a little of both. “Damien,” Mom says, her face bright red as she points to the door, “get out!”

  I have a very unpleasant task ahead of me. One whose results will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I’m going to find out who my father is.

  I sigh as I step into Mom’s closet and slide the door shut. It’s dark, but I know where the buttons are. I press the down arrow, and a light dings on the opposite wall. A new set of doors opens up, and I step into the elevator. Once inside, I press the button marked V. Not V for villain, but V for vault. Talk about a walk-in closet.

  Once the elevator stops, I get off and use the key I stole from Mom to open the door. The inside of the vault looks like Mom’s been beating up five-year-old girls and stealing their stuff. The carpet is pink. An old rocking horse sags in one corner, with fading red bows tied around its ears. It’s almost buried by a pile of stuffed animals. A stack of old diaries dominates the center of the room. And when I say stack, I mean a three-foot-by-three-foot cube. Mom still writes in her diary every night, and she’s kept every single volume she’s had since she was seven.

  My chest tightens as I approach the stack. I’m not worried about Mom catching me so much as I am reading about her exploits. The truth is in this pile of R-rated literature. Great. Time to get to work. I put on a pair of latex gloves. Hopefully Mom won’t notice someone’s disturbed her diaries, but if she does, this way she won’t be able to prove it was me. Without the gloves, my X would be a dead giveaway, even if she didn’t have my prints on file.

  The diaries are arranged by date. My stomach twists as I slip the one from seventeen years ago out of the pile. It’s green and smells like lighter fluid. I smile—maybe Mom considered burning it. A promising sign.

  Luckily Mom likes to keep her diary nice and readable and doesn’t write on the backs of the pages, making my job here a little easier. I flip through the book, trying to only catch the dates and not the content. Yikes. My eyes spot the words leather, cape, and … vibrator. I think I’m going to be sick. Heat rushes to my face, even though there’s no way Mom knows I’m reading this. Life would be so much easier if mothers stuck to making cookies and moonshine and didn’t have sex. Not that Mom ever makes cookies.

  I find a section dated during the month of my conception.

  Dear Dairy,

  She spelled diary wrong, and the writing leans heavily and is hard to read, like somebody wrote it in a hurry or in a panic.

  The Mistress of Mayhem has struck again. What have I done? I need more men in my life. Or at least one good one. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted out of desperation. One kiss wouldn’t have turned into a hundred, with his hands sliding down my back and me tearing my suit off. And his. So much for secret identities.

  I scrunch my eyes closed. My ears are so hot, I wonder if my superpower has come in and I’ve somehow inherited laser ears. I take a deep breath. I can do this.

  It happened so fast. One minute we were fighting our way through the subway tunnel, locked in a high-speed chase, and the next thing I knew we were in the subway bathroom, locked in a fast embrace.

  Do you think Mom will notice if someone pukes on her diaries? Do you think she’ll have to analyze the puke in the lab, or do you think she’ll instinctively know it was me?

  I lost my shoe in the toilet, and my hairpin fell to the floor and bounced under another stall from all the commotion. We didn’t say anything the whole time—that would have ruined it—and I closed my eyes to keep my lasers at bay.

  Now that it’s over, I wish I’d controlled myself. I can’t believe I did it in a dirty bathroom stall with the enemy, with

  That’s the end of the page. I look to the next one, my face burning and my palms sweating inside the latex gloves. This is it. My father is—

  a foil pan and a turkey baster. Can you believe that? I tell Mother that I’m going to cook Thanksgiving this year, and she brings over all the supplies, even though it’s not for six months! She thinks I can’t cook, that I can’t take care of myself! I’m twenty-two years old, and I’m doing just fine on my own. She’s always treated me like a baby, even after I got my V, like it didn’t mean anything.

  There are obviously a couple pages missing between Mom’s subway scandal and her Thanksgiving plans—I can tell by the torn edges—but I’m desperate enough to keep reading, just in case. I scan through the part about Grandma oppressing Mom with baking equipment and a lack of trust in her Thanksgiving skills. Believe me, Grandma’s the one in the right here. I’ve experienced Mom’s cooking. It’s a lot like her punch, only without the alcohol, so you don’t even have the benefit of blacking out halfway through.

  But as far as my father goes, no luck. I close the diary and slip it back in its place in the stack.

  I lock up and take the elevator to Mom’s closet. I peer into her bedroom before emerging, making sure the coast is clear. As I’m hurrying past her bed, I notice her current diary on the nightstand. I walk over to it, drawn despite my will, and flip to the entry from a couple days ago. My birthday.

  My worst fears have been realized. I was hoping the stories weren’t true, that he’d get his V anyway. I never had the heart to tell him the truth. My poor little Damien! And now he knows, he knows that his father must be … one of them.

  My parents are going to disown me. They always suspected his father “wasn’t of the right sort.” I hope they don’t take it out on Damien. He’s going to have it rough as it is, and there’s no way he’ll make it to Vilmore—

  I’m sure that sentence ended in something slightly upbeat, like that I won’t make it to Vilmore this fall, or that I won’t make it for visiting day later this spring. But I don’t find out because I hear the bedroom door opening and slam the book shut. I drop it on the nightstand and dive under the bed as Mom bursts into the room. She flings the door open so hard, it bangs against the wall. I peer out from under the dust ruffle. Her boots thump against the carpet, kicking up dust. She has the hypno device in one hand. It might have looked like a busted-up piece of junk before, but now there are even more wires hanging out of it, and it rattles a little as she moves. Oops. I guess knocking it off the table wasn’t such a good idea, but it’s not my fault she buys such crappy equipment. Mom mutters something under her breath about me not being allowed in the lab anymore. She scowls and slides open the closet door.

  I wait until she’s safely in the elevator before getting the hell out of there.

  The Gallant Gentleman, a superhero in one of those red fox-hunting outfits British people wear, twirls his riding crop and scowls at me. He’s not actually British
, since I know he was born in Golden City—I did my homework—but he talks with an accent. He’s got a pack of hunting dogs with him, because that’s his power: talking to dogs. I guess if you’re really serious about it, you can make a career out of any superpower, even a really dumb one. Of course, he’s not exactly fighting crime anymore. I cornered him in the park, where he gives lessons in obedience training every afternoon. He’s kind of washed up, relying on the name he made for himself years ago to keep his obedience school going. He’s only got two students today, and they’re both busy practicing guiding the dogs between the statues in the Heroes Walk. The Walk is a brick path that wanders through Golden City Park, surrounded by blindingly white statues of superheroes who have supposedly done something really awesome for society, like kill off supervillains. I know the woman who defeated Kat’s grandfather has one of these statues, but I haven’t actually seen it.

  The Gallant Gentleman takes one look at me, in my hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans, and I can see his lip twitching in disgust. God, I hope he’s not my father. It didn’t take long to narrow down my suspects. An hour at the library pouring over old newspapers on microfiche—after stopping to pick up a pair of gloves first; they’re black and fashionable enough that no one will question me wearing them until the weather warms up—and I had it down to three. Judging from the description in Mom’s diary, my father wasn’t just any superhero, but someone she was specifically at arms with at the time. And you can bet their adventures made the headlines in this town. That left only four potential people, and one of them is a girl, and I don’t think she did any siring.

  My three suspects are the Gallant Gentleman, the Forensic Avenger, and the Crimson Flash, all three some of Golden City’s most moral superheroes. None of them sounds like a good candidate for doing it in a filthy subway bathroom with my mom, so that makes it hard to narrow down my choices without DNA samples. Hence the visit.

  The Gallant Gentleman smells like mothballs and Altoids. “Excuse me,” he says in his nasally voice and fake accent, “do you have business here, young sir?”

  He says “young sir” like it’s polite, but the tone of his voice is the exact opposite. I can tell he doesn’t like kids, or at least teenagers. I smile at him, though I’m cringing on the inside. What if he’s my dad and I inherit his power? What if it’s already come in and I didn’t notice because I’m never around dogs? I picture myself and this guy wearing matching dog whistles and bonding over playing fetch. Though I guess if we have some sort of psychic connection to the dogs, we probably wouldn’t need the whistles.

  Ugh. I try not to shudder at the thought and concentrate on getting back to business. It’s not like it matters anyway, because I’m not going to bond with him even if he is my dad. That’s not what I’m here for—I just want to know. If I know who my dad is, I can determine how bad this X situation is.

  I raise my eyebrows at him and point at some dog poop on the ground. “What are you going to do about that?” I ask in my snottiest voice. As I do, one of the dogs from his pack gets excited and slurps my hand. I don’t feel it until the slobber soaks through my glove, and then it’s extra gross. G.G. gives it a look, and I imagine I can see the psychic beams radiating from his brain to the dog’s. Probably not, but the dog whimpers and sits down.

  “Good boy, Jack. We don’t touch … strangers.”

  I clear my throat. “Dog leavings count as litter, you know. It’s people like you who make the park unpleasant and ruin everyone’s experience. So, I hope you were planning on cleaning that up.”

  He stands even straighter, as if the stick up his butt still had a few kinks in it and he just fixed them. “What are we coming to, when our young people don’t trust their local heroes? Do you know who I am?”

  I do, and I’m not impressed. He’d better not be my father. Not that I can picture Mom losing her cool for this guy, even in a moment of misguided passion, but I could say that for any superhero, so it’s kind of a moot point.

  “I know you think you’re better than everyone else in the park. Otherwise, you’d clean up that mess!” I point at the poop again, waving wildly and raising my voice. He humors me by turning to look, and as soon as he does, I reach over and snag a loose hair from his coat. I hope it’s his and not one of the dogs’, but it’s gray like his and looks longer than any of their fur.

  I’m not quick enough, and the Gallant Gentleman catches me in the act. He whirls around, sucking in a deep, horrified breath, and grips his riding crop in shock that I actually touched him. Or that I stole a DNA sample, which is kind of serious business in a town with so many villains looking to do in their “local heroes.” Of course, at this point in his career, he’d be lucky if a supervillain took him seriously enough to want to mess with him.

  I hold on to the hair sample for dear life, not caring that I’ve been caught. He looks at me holding the hair between two gloved fingers. Then he scowls and looks to the dogs, who are now growling at me. I don’t need any superpowers to know what’s coming next, so I turn and run.

  One rip in my pant leg—these were new jeans, too—and a lot of strenuous exercise later, and I’m on to contestant number two. The Forensic Avenger is hosting a Junior Forensic Team meeting at the Golden City Public Library. I’m a little old for it, since the other kids here are all under twelve, but I’m so enthusiastic about forensics that none of the parents or librarians have the heart to tell me I shouldn’t be here.

  Today is a stressful day, let me tell you. Investigating the Gallant Gentleman—a.k.a. Mr. Snobby Pants—and getting chased across the park by his pack of dogs, who are probably specially trained to sniff out supervillains, really wore me out. And now I’m here, sitting cross-legged with a bunch of children on the scratchy library carpet, pretending to loooove detective work, all so I can find out which one of these guys did it with my mom and ruined my life.

  The Forensic Avenger is dressed like Sherlock Holmes, with the hat and everything. He holds up a magnifying glass. “Who can tell me what this is?”

  My hand shoots up in the air. “Oh, me! I know! Pick me!”

  He smiles—a genuinely nice smile—but goes with someone younger. I guess as a first-time participant in the group, I can’t expect special treatment.

  I hate myself for thinking this, but I really hope it’s this guy. He has to be better than the Gallant Gentleman, who hated me the second he saw me. And I haven’t met the Crimson Flash yet, but I know he’s a loser because I’ve seen him on TV. He has his own show where he teaches kids how to safely cross the street and stuff. I watch it sometimes at Kat’s house. We think it’s hilarious. So out of the three, the Forensic Avenger is looking the least crappy.

  And as for his power, you know how investigators shine black lights onto stuff, to look for body fluids? Yeah, well, he can see that without the black light. Which makes him perfect for forensic work. I don’t think I want his ability, but at least he doesn’t wear a fox-hunting outfit or sic dogs on me.

  “Suzy?” the Forensic Avenger says, pointing at a little girl in the front row.

  She’s really quiet, suddenly not sure she wants to say anything, and in a very tiny voice manages to mumble, “Magnifying glass.”

  “Very good!” He claps his hands for her, and the rest of the group joins in. I almost forget to fake my enthusiasm and have to kick my clapping up a notch or else risk looking like I don’t value little Suzy’s cleverness.

  “Forensics is all about finding clues that might normally go unseen,” the Forensic Avenger says while a librarian passes out magnifying glasses to everyone. “So let’s take a minute to see what we can discover right here in this room.”

  I bet with his power, he knows all sorts of stuff about this room. Like how many kids have wet themselves.

  I accept my magnifying glass with a smile, though even my fake enthusiasm is waning. I just want to get this over with and go home. I hate to call it quits with only two samples, but I’ll catch the Crimson Flash tomorrow morning, when he
’s out filming his show.

  “What’s this?” I say as I pluck a hair from the brim of the Forensic Avenger’s Sherlock Holmes hat.

  He doesn’t seem worried that I have his DNA. Maybe because I’m sixteen and joining a kids’ group, seemingly without noticing I don’t belong. Maybe he thinks I’m a little slow or genuinely that interested.

  The Forensic Avenger laughs. “You’re really crazy about this stuff, huh?”

  My mind blanks, since I hadn’t expected him to speak to me. “Uh, yeah. I’m especially interested in fingerprinting.”

  He scratches the back of his ear. “You know, I have a class at the community college that might be more suited for you. How old are you?”

  “I just turned sixteen.” I wait for that to ring any bells, like maybe he’ll go, “Huh, that’s funny, sixteen years and nine months ago, I did it with some woman in the subway bathroom. Boy was that place disgusting.”

  “You might be old enough, if your school supports taking college classes in high school.”

  High school. Right. I’ve heard of that, and it doesn’t sound pleasant. “I’m homeschooled. But, um, thanks anyway.”

  “This group is really for the kids.” He looks sort of guilty when he says, “You’re not going to get anything out of it.” He pauses, then digs through his bag of props and pulls out a brochure about going into detective work. “Here. I’ll trade you.” He offers me the brochure while holding out his free hand for the magnifying glass.