Villains Don't Save Heroes! (Night Terror Book 2)

by Mia Archer

It was a fundamental of triage. Fix what you could fix now, and worry about the stuff you couldn’t fix later, or don’t worry about it at all since there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.

I had work to do.

“What the hell?” “Emergency teleportation protocol activated,” my non-CORVAC computer said.

It was a comforting voice. Female. Roughly middle aged. Sort of like the computer you might hear on Star Trek, but I wasn’t willing to pay the licensing fees the Roddenberry estate wanted for using Majel Barrett’s digital pipes.

Apparently the dumb AI I had running my lab was smart enough to figure out that I was in the middle of an emergency situation. Which was more credit than I would’ve given the damned thing this morning.

A lady who’d been working on some old rich looking lady who didn’t seem at all perturbed by a couple of women teleporting into the salon accidentally cut off a big chunk of said rich lady’s hair which did perturb her to the point that she joined the screaming. Then we were gone again.

Damn gentrification ruining my escape plan.

At least I’d thought it was clever. After what happened this morning I was starting to wonder if anything I did was really as clever as I thought it was.

Like, for example, I hadn’t even heard of Fialux, let alone had her briefly become my archnemesis and then my girlfriend.

Several cutting lasers that had been telescoping out on nasty looking arms stopped. They turned towards my voice and it had the eerie effect of making it look like the damned things were looking at me.

I picked Fialux up and hefted her over my shoulder. I really hoped she hadn’t broken anything terribly necessary to her continued survival when she took those hits.

That was the real bitch about trying to do first responder care for someone who was presumably from another world while improbably having a body that looked like something straight out of central casting at a modeling agency.

What if she kept the equivalent of her spine in her left knee or something and I accidentally knocked it the wrong way?

I stepped inside and hit a long combination of numbers that had seemed like a clever idea at the time. I figured it’d keep anyone I didn’t want around from using this elevator for its intended purpose, but now as I stood here with Fialux slung over my shoulder I couldn’t help but think it was a huge waste of time.

If you’re going to put in a code that could potentially result in a failsafe being activated that scrambles all your molecules and teleports them all around the world and into deep space if you get it wrong? Maybe rehearse that number once in awhile so you don’t forget it.

We’d survived. That or I’d been sent on to my eternal reward and it looked a lot like my lab, which was sort of my idea of heaven on earth.

Of course the computer would think of prepping the medbay but it wouldn’t think of disabling the nasty surprises I had waiting in my dummy lab.

There was no use crying over sapient supercomputers who’d developed a taste for overthrowing their masters though.

Hey, she might be my girlfriend, but that didn’t mean I’d lost my scientific curiosity about what it was that made her so powerful. Even if I had been able to do some far more direct anatomical studies in the months we’d been together.

Wink and a nudge. Say. No. More.

“I’ve already run the scan five times to be certain,” the computer said. “Would you like me to run it again?” Okay, that was definitely some sass.

Next to all the impossible shit I regularly got up to the idea of a ray that somehow rearranged Fialux’s internal structure so she was more human didn’t seem all that farfetched.

“How long does she have?” I asked. “Repairs need to start immediately for a chance of recovery,” the computer said. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

There was a moment of hesitation from the medical computer. Which spoke volumes since that moment of hesitation on the part of a computer was the equivalent of an eternity for a mortal human whose mind ran at the speed of human thought.

Or when he hit me with backhanded compliments about how I was the one human he’d ever worked with who could almost keep up with him.

“Do what you have to do to save her,”

I figured the option where I could save her now and potentially rob her of her powers permanently was the better of two shit options.

I probably could’ve made a fortune on the thing, but I figured this was one invention that would be better off out in the world if someone could ever figure out how to make it work outside my lab.

I’d had a couple of trips to the med bay to repair my eyes after I accidentally caught the business end of something that would’ve otherwise permanently blinded me.

“Unable to provide more detail than that at this time.” I grunted. “You’re worse than Windows Update.”

One of the potential side effects of the medbays was temporary amnesia. It’d really messed with me a couple of times.

It seemed fitting that the world’s greatest hero would find herself being rescued by the world’s greatest villain.

That galled me. I didn’t like it when someone got one over on me. It didn’t sit right with me that there was someone out there who could one up me or outsmart me.

Not because I was particularly interested in an after action report so much as it looked awesome, and I wanted to make sure the video made it into the digital scrapbook.

Fialux was counting on me, even if she was unconscious in a med bay and had no idea she was counting on me.

I didn’t even bother running through the halls. No, I was in a big enough hurry that I flew down the halls at top speed for all the world like I was about to fire some torpedoes down a small target a couple of meters wide.

“Damn,” I said. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

I felt ridiculous carrying a tray into the room, but if I was going to go to the trouble of making breakfast in bed then I was going to go to the trouble of doing it right.

Yeah, cheerful was so far from my wheelhouse right now it was a wonder I wasn’t downing enough booze to get a dinosaur drunk with one hand and running a blood purifier in the other hand to cleanse my BAC down a point or so every time it edged from “drunk off your ass” to “potentially deadly.”

That would’ve been downright villainous, and even I had standards and lines I wouldn’t cross.

Not that I thought I’d be that lucky. Or unlucky. I was in a place right now where the line between the two was so blurred that I couldn’t even see it to know which side I was on.

Great. Just what I needed. One new archenemy was bad enough without bringing the old one back into the mix.

I winced. That didn’t look good. And from the way she moaned it obviously hadn’t felt good either.

I walked over to Fialux. Knelt down until I was crouched beside her.

The fact that her hit felt like a normal slap when I wasn’t wearing my suit was telling. Particularly it told me she hadn’t gotten her powers back when she was fixed up. That wasn’t good, but I was a little thankful because damn that would’ve hurt if she’d managed to smack me across the head with me out of my suit and her powers intact.

Maybe there was a small silver lining in her powers being nonexistent. It was a very small lining around a very big nasty storm cloud, but it was something.

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she pitched forward like a ragdoll. I swore under my breath and dove to catch her.

Boy was I glad I’d overengineered every part of this lab with just about every sort of safety system I could invent.

“I’m going to tell you, but you need to promise me you’re going to calm the fuck down. All this excitement isn’t good for your recovery.” “Why should I calm the fuck down?”

“You lost your powers,” I said. “Remember? We were just talking about that?” “I knew it! So you admit it!”