Villains Don't Date Heroes! (Night Terror and Fialux, #1)

by Mia Archer

My every word seemed to hit her like a slap to the face. Good. That’s exactly what I was going for, after all.

Damn. We were cutting this one a little too close for comfort.

She might be one of my oldest enemies, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go around turning her into her component atomic parts courtesy of her being too stubborn to admit when she was wrong.

That might be a fitting and poetic end, but I’d feel bad about it. For maybe five minutes.

“You boys might want to turn away,” I said. “This is going to get pretty bright.”

It was about what I imagined the night sky would look like if Betelgeuse ever got off its ass and went supernova in my lifetime.

“You nearly killed everyone in this city with your stupidity,” I said.

I wondered if they’d even bother to wait around for my lawyer to show up or if they’d just let me go the moment Fialux was gone.

“Oh yeah? And why shouldn’t I talk to you like that?” “Because it’s not nice.”

That didn’t mean the plan wasn’t sound.

It’s not like you’re any stranger to doing some damage to the normies yourself,” I said.

The heat and laser vision I could also deal with as long as I knew it was coming. The problem was she didn’t exactly telegraph when she was going to use one of those powers.

Though her backside was a lot more fun to look at than those lizards’. That was for damn sure.

Then again who was I to tell a woman who was the next best thing to a living goddess that she couldn’t have what she wanted?

I was fucking Night Terror. That’s who I was.

“You cause more damage with one of your fights than I think I’ve ever caused in my entire career,”

She was damaging city streets that belonged to me, damn it, and I didn’t like messing up my playground.

Huh. Maybe this conversation was actually going to go somewhere productive. A girl could hope.

I mean it’s not like I should care what she thought of me. She was a hero. I was a villain.

The idea that she thought I was no better than any of the other villains was mildly insulting. Maybe more than a little mildly insulting.

“I’m sorry, for what it’s worth,” she said. “Um, what exactly is it you’re sorry about?” I asked.

Turns out dropping criminals directly into the courtyard of a maximum security prison without an arrest or due process or a court case is unconstitutional as hell.

“So is she a friend of yours or something? Old flame?”

Villains didn’t date heroes. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that was done.

I guess if we were friends on social media our relationship could safely be listed as “it’s complicated.”

This girl was weird. I had to keep reminding myself she was probably from another planet or something.

Maybe it was a little lie. Maybe it was a big lie. Either way it was a lie.

Turns out no good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

"I'm sorry Miss… Terrare?" "It's Terror," I said with a smile. “It's pronounced just how it's spelled."

A job she could've done with half the education and less than half the student loans if she was in the private sector. A job that would've paid much better in the private sector too.

In fact, I'm still trying to figure out how your resume even made its way across my desk."

"That's simple. The lotto system is easy enough to manipulate, but if I started winning it every other week people would ask questions.

I liked big blinking red buttons. I felt like it really tied a piece of evil super science together in a way that other colors of the rainbow just couldn't pull off.

I didn’t want this one getting out there where someone could use it against me.

click. I also liked satisfying clicks.

The last thing I needed was to have a super supposedly under my complete control, doing my bidding in the middle of my lair, and then all of a sudden the mind control device falls off of the table or the big red button gets jostled. Suddenly there's a very cranky living god in the middle of my lair ready to do some damage.

I'd been there. Trust me, it was never fun.

No self-respecting hero or villain would pick a secret identity this soul-crushing and boring.

Thankfully I had two handy nano devices embedded in my ear canals. They were always embedded in there. Mostly because I was the one who invented the technology in the first place and how embarrassing would it be if someone managed to get their grubby hands on it and turn it against me?

Literally government work, since I was going to work for a state school. Again.

"You are going to give me this job," I said. "I am going to give you this job," she replied. "Stop repeating what I say. That's annoying," I said. "Stop repeating what you say. That's annoying," she parroted back at me.

Fialux was somewhere on campus. I was sure of it, and it was time for Professor Terror to find her. Track her down. Discover her secret identity. Hit her with the anti-Newtonian field when she least expected it. And get to stare at her in traditional college girl clothes in the meantime. I bet she looked really good in those yoga pants that had become all the rage on campuses after I got kicked out.

"Journalism." I paused and relished the moment as an entire lecture hall full of students leaned forward eagerly hanging on my every word. I could get used to this.

I smiled at the room. You could hear a pin drop. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say you could hear the collective dreams of a few hundred students in a journalism course being crushed at the same time.

when I was still in school than dealing with an insufferable humanities major going on about how they were totally going to make a living with their writing career. I always wanted to yell at them to get a real degree and a real job, but never gave in to that temptation.

Sure I wasn’t a dude so I couldn’t have a neckbeard, not unless one of my experiments went terribly wrong, but I figured the neckbeard was more a state of mind than an actual physical manifestation on the underside of the chin.

Sure there was a girl in here I desperately wouldn’t mind getting some alone time with, but mostly I was having fun fucking with the humanities types.

They create situations where young journalists have an expiration date that’s shorter than imitation crab meat sashimi being left out at a summer picnic in ninety degree weather.”

Not that I was going to be advertising all the practical experience I had in this subject.

No, she was out there somewhere, but I wanted to be absolutely sure lest I kidnap some unfortunate college student who didn't have a single superpower to her name.