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

by Mia Archer

Assumption one: Fialux was young. Probably a few years younger than me.

Sure, there was always the possibility that another one of her superpowers was lack of aging, that would be just the sort of super perk that bitch would get.

If I was wrong then I started over with my assumptions and lost a week or two having fun tweaking journalism students which wasn’t really wasted time at all as far as I was concerned.

"Welcome to Journalism 105: Surviving A Heroic Intervention."

Her voice rang out across the classroom. Clear, firm, and with a musical quality that carried. I grinned to myself. The name. That voice. Was it really going to be this easy? "Selena Solare."

"Professor Terror," I said. "But we're all friends here. You can just call me Natalie."

"Miss Solare. I did say we can agree to disagree, but since I'm the teacher we'll just have to agree to go with what I say since I'm in charge of your grade," I said.

This was going to be the most interesting semester of Surviving A Heroic Intervention ever.

College kids. College kids everywhere. The last people in the world I wanted to interact with right now. Or ever.

It was taking a sledgehammer to a problem when I usually preferred going at them with a scalpel.

No, my true fear, the thing I was afraid of admitting even to myself, was rejection. That same age-old fear that everybody had from the first time they realized they were interested in the opposite sex. Or the same sex. Whatever. I was still reconfiguring how I thought of these things, the pronouns I used in my head, since this recent change up in my preferences.

Rejection. That was the real terror.

One of my strategies for avoiding rejection, for avoiding this very conundrum, was just avoiding the whole dating question entirely.

Being rejected was a danger I was going to have to live with if I was moving forward with this plan to confess my feelings to Fialux.

Bigger problems in their own way than trying to capture the most powerful hero on the planet. Like how I was going to explain all of this to CORVAC. He wasn’t a big fan of changing the plan, ever, and I was throwing one hell of a monkey wrench into this plan.

Fat chance, but a girl could dream.

Too many issues. Too many balls I was trying to juggle, except instead of balls I was juggling grenades with the pins pulled and at any moment one of them could blow up in my face and ruin my day, my life, my villainous career, in a major way.

I just looked up at her expectantly, feeling butterflies raging through my stomach. Butterflies that were on fire, butterflies that were exploding in small blasts of flame all throughout my body.

Apparently Miss Solare didn’t take the hint that I didn’t want her sitting there, even though I wanted nothing more than to have her sitting there. Complications.

The nice thing about CORVAC was he was just as misanthropic as I was.

Basically the problem was conquering the world came easily to me. Inventing new super science was simple. Dealing with people? That was a whole different ballgame.

I always hated those conversations, but the thing is I wasn’t even sure I was having that conversation right now. I couldn’t tell if she was on to me or if she was oblivious and just making conversation with the new teacher.

This was worse than the time I faced down that angry tyrannosaur I’d accidentally time shifted into the middle of my lab, and that encounter was pretty high up there on my list of super science screw ups I never wanted to repeat. Turns out talking to a pretty girl? Way more intimidating than facing down an ancient lizard without killing it and potentially fucking up history for good.

I was under her control and I didn’t like it one bit. I was in her thrall and I loved it.

“Usually professors are stuffy older types. I definitely wasn’t expecting…” She looked me up and down for the briefest of moments and I felt a thrill run through me. Could she possibly… “…You.”

Apparently her glasses were enough to trip up even the most advanced facial recognition software CORVAC could throw at the problem. Who knew?

No, the real reason why I wasn’t going to break out the stasis field right now was because I was enjoying the feel of her hand on mine. I wanted this moment to last forever, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything to interrupt it.

I wanted to close my eyes, sigh, and melt into her. Not try and capture her.

He might understand the first two, but I sure wasn’t going to tell him the third.

That’d definitely give me a compelling reason to play the studious professor role and maybe enjoy my time on campus instead of looking at it as torture.

Maybe I was clueless even when someone was throwing themselves at me because I was always the kind of girl who was more interested in the science lab than the captain of the cheerleading squad.

That was the kind of look that screamed that Miss Solare was indulging in a naughty professor fantasy, which was just fine by me given the circumstances.

It was the kind of look that said she was clearly interested in me in more than academic terms, and it was so obvious that even I, the queen of the oblivious, couldn’t miss it.

I sat with a fake smile on my face. If I was on the verge of taking over the world and somebody caused my plan to come crashing down around me I’d be embarking on a world class villainous rant the likes of which you’d never seen before, but a romantic failure was unfamiliar territory. I didn’t know how to react.

It was a smile I’d had to spend a night perfecting in front of the mirror when I went from winning every time I implemented a plan to losing every time Fialux showed up.

Yeah, mama needed to get to work.

Every day after class she stopped by my desk to engage in chitchat. Every day she said something that just crossed the line.

Assuming she knew who I really was. The jury was still out on that one.

At that point I’d either rule the city via being Fialux’s new main squeeze, or I’d rule the city because I’d finally captured her and added her to the vast collection of heroic souvenirs I kept buried deep in my lair.

Even if she kept getting my hopes up with that flirtation every day. It was pure torture.

That annoyance, that craziness, might explain why, in a fit of pique, I decided to do away with Little Miss Nice Villainess.

I definitely wasn’t capturing first and asking questions later because she was so damn cute in those tight shirts and tighter shorts and…

Some were looking up inquisitively, others were staring up in terror as though they were wondering what fresh hell Professor Terror was bringing to the classroom today.

Also, Professor Terror? I really liked the sound of that.

Only science fiction became science reality when Night Terror was in the room.

Some of the more terror-prone students, and there were a lot more today after all my demonstrations than there were at the beginning of the semester thank you very much, were starting to glance nervously towards the door.

No wonder the mortality rate for recent graduates from the journalism program was so high at this school.

If any of them did guess that answer they’d get an A for the semester right on the spot.

A wall, I might add, that they had to recently expand for the fifth time since they built the thing twenty years ago because it keeps filling up. Seriously. Those wall panels are ten foot by ten foot. You can fit a lot of names on those things.”

It was driving me insane, and if it turned out that it was all a big tease, that it was all part of some naughty professor fantasy, and it turned out that she was Fialux… Well let’s just say I was going to have a difficult time not testing out whether or not my matter dispersal bomb worked on her invulnerable hide.