The White Knight & Black Valentine Series (Book 3): Almost Invincible Page 9

  Agent Lagarde raised her eyebrows as she gave us a more severe version of the same look. “No. No more of that.”

  Julio shifted his weight uncomfortably, but I just smiled.

  “Any idea what she’s talking about, Freezefire?” I asked lightly.

  Julio blinked and then grinned. “None whatsoever.”

  “Uh-huh. Gimme that flashlight.” Rosa snatched it from my hand and strode down the tunnel. After a few seconds, she glanced back at Agent Lagarde. “Nice shirt, by the way. Did you buy that at the Cape Closet?”

  For a moment, Agent Lagarde made a face like she’d just eaten something that was still wiggling. “No, I… already owned it.”

  “Huh. We sell the same ones.” Rosa kept walking, oblivious to the fact that Julio’s grin was now brighter than the flashlight.

  He let us walk in silence for about ten seconds, just long enough for Agent Lagarde to probably hope he wasn’t going to say anything.

  “She’s right,” Julio said. “That is a nice shirt.”

  Agent Lagarde kept marching forward and ignored him.

  “Don’t you think it’s a cool shirt, Dave?” he continued in a singsong voice.

  “Be nice,” I chided, well aware that Agent Lagarde was a White Knight fangirl and embarrassed about it in front of me. Val had teased her about it, too.

  “She’s too shy to ask,” Julio went on, “but if you could autograph her shirt when this is over, it would really—”

  “Keep talking, and I’ll give your phone number to every reporter from Miami to West Palm Beach,” Agent Lagarde snapped.

  Julio closed his mouth, but there was a definite spring in his step as we kept walking.

  •••

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for silence to take over. Keeping up a cheerful atmosphere when you were walking through dark, abandoned tunnels was tough. Rosa pointed the flashlight ahead but would pan it rapidly in every direction whenever there was a noise. Last time, it had been someone under mind-control. This time, the noise could be something worse. I didn’t want worse. Fighting Treat had been hard enough. All those people—children—had nearly drowned themselves in front of me, and Julio had almost cooked me alive. I still felt a little nauseated from the heat, and my skin felt as if it were sunburned.

  Then there’d been what I’d said to Julio to break him out of the mind-control. Not a single word was true, but I still felt like a first-class jerk for saying them. But Julio knew I hadn’t meant it… didn’t he? I opened my mouth to say something but then snapped it closed. It was obvious I hadn’t meant it. I didn’t need to talk about my feelings or anything awkward like that. Julio would understand. He would have to, right?

  Times like these, I appreciated being married to a telepath. Val always knew what I meant, even if I didn’t say anything.

  Thanks to my bad knee, I’d fallen behind Rosa’s faster pace. Julio hung back with me, but Rosa and Agent Lagarde had drifted several feet ahead of us. If I kept my voice low, they shouldn’t hear anything.

  “You know I didn’t mean what I said back there, right?” I said before I could chicken out.

  “Huh?” Julio asked.

  “With Treat,” I clarified. “When you were under her mind-control. I said the worst things I could think of to break you out of it. None of it was true.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said in a strained tone that was trying to be light.

  We walked in silence for several very long seconds. I didn’t feel like I’d gotten through to him but didn’t know what else to say.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  He gave me a long look before answering. “Hand hurts like hell. The thing with Treat…” He ran his unbandaged hand through his messy hair. “I dunno. I guess it reminds me too much of what happened with She-Devil.”

  She-Devil, Val’s half-sister, had possessed Julio to escape police custody a few months ago. She’d used his powers to kill three people.

  “I thought I’d be better at resisting it, but…” He shook his head. “Anyway, I didn’t kill you, so I’m okay.”

  “And I’m glad you didn’t, but you’d have broken free even if—”

  Before I could pour my heart out, the ground rumbled. No, not just the ground. The walls, ceiling—the whole tunnel shook dangerously. Rosa shrieked and grabbed Agent Lagarde for support, and I clutched my cane tightly to keep my balance. Hairline cracks formed in the walls, and the pipes running along the ceiling strained and groaned. The shaking grew worse, and it could only mean one thing.

  Mother Earth had found us.

  Chapter 12

  Us poor dumb suckers—we were traveling underground. I’d thought it had been a great idea at the time. There were secret tunnels! Bloodbath and Mother Earth would never find us. I should have thought it through and realized we’d surrounded ourselves with the one element Mother Earth could control.

  The cracks in the walls had expanded from hairline to gaping, and chunks of plaster fell off. One of the pipes in the ceiling snapped and crashed to the floor, spewing steam. Rosa screamed, and I hurried toward her and Agent Lagarde. If the ceiling collapsed, I might be able to shield them. If the whole tunnel collapsed, though… I couldn’t hold it all up, at least not for long. We had to get out of here.

  The biggest crack in the wall widened, showing an earthen cave on the other side, and Mother Earth stepped into the tunnel.

  The shaking stopped. Dust and bits of plaster sprinkled down, visible only when they passed through the flashlight’s beam, but the earthquake seemed to be over. Julio, Agent Lagarde, and I formed a sort of wall in front of Rosa, but the supervillain made no move to attack.

  Daphne Villa, AKA Mother Earth, wore a loose green dress that reached her ankles. Her feet were bare and covered in dirt, and brown soil stained the dress’s leafy design. Dark circles stood out around her eyes, and her stay in the Inferno had left her pallid, underweight, and bony. Stringy, dark brown hair reached her waist, and a crown of incongruously bright flowers sat atop her head. She looked like a fairy from an old story—and not the sanitized version where everyone lived happily ever after. There was something unsettling about the way she silently gazed at us with her hollowed eyes.

  “I’m guessing Bloodbath wants us alive, or we’d be buried right now,” I said. “Let the girl go, and we’ll talk. She’s an innocent bystander.”

  “I’m here to let all of you go,” Mother Earth said.

  A beat of silence followed her statement.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Agent Lagarde in a flat voice.

  Mother Earth took one step to the right, holding out her hand and beckoning to the cave entrance she’d stepped out from. “Follow this tunnel, and it’ll take you under the wall and out of the park.”

  “Sure,” said Julio. “You’re not going to collapse it on top of our heads once we go in or anything?”

  “If I wanted that, I’d collapse the tunnel right here.”

  “If you wanted to help us, you’d take down the wall,” Julio shot back.

  Mother Earth’s mouth tightened. “This is all I can do. Just leave. Please.”

  Julio, Agent Lagarde, and I shared a quick glance. Mother Earth watched us silently, and there was something about the tightness of her neck as she leaned forward that made her seem desperately invested in our answer. I didn’t like it. If she was helping Bloodbath, why would she aid our escape?

  “Sorry,” Agent Lagarde said, “but you can’t expect us to trust you—”

  “Everyone who trusted me is safe!” Mother Earth stepped toward us, grabbing fistfuls of her hair and almost dislodging her crown. “I got out everyone that I could. I told Randall—I convinced him we had enough hostages. When you two came into the park, I opened the wall in the back and let them all escape.”

  I remembered the distant rumbling when we’d first fought Bloodbath. That would also explain why the park was so empty. My heart soared at the thought that Elisa might be safely away, and yet…
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br />   “We have no way of verifying that,” I said in a reasonable voice. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but if you want us to trust you, you have to help us understand why you’re doing this.”

  Mother Earth looked like she was about to yell at me, but then she turned around and hugged herself, her bony shoulders hunching in. She paced back and forth for a second and then spun back to us, decision evidently made. “Randall’s obsessed. We have a second chance now. We could run away and start a new life, but he’s fixated on getting revenge on White Knight and Freezefire. If you two leave the park, I can convince him to leave, too.”

  Huh. Bloodbath and Mother Earth were an item, apparently. I guess it’s true what they say, and there really was someone for everyone. It was an interesting turn of events, but in the end—

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Julio said, beating me to it. “You tell Bloodbath we’ve left the park, and he’s going to throw a temper tantrum that’ll kill every innocent person he can get his hands on. We came in here to save people, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  A proud smile lifted my face. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Mother Earth, however, didn’t take it well.

  “Idiots!” she snapped. “This is the best way. Don’t you see? If you stay and try to fight him, even more people are going to die!”

  “Not if we can help it,” I said.

  “You can’t! You’re deluded if you think you can stop him. You’ll just get more people killed along with you. There are children in this park. Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care.” I looked straight into her eyes. “And if you cared, you’d be fighting Bloodbath instead of helping him.”

  She tore her gaze away, and I liked to think I’d hit a nerve. If I could convince her to help us, to bring down that wall, then this whole mission would get a lot easier. The civilians could escape, and the DSA could send backup. I watched her closely for any sign I was getting through to her.

  She put a hand to her forehead and took a deep breath. “Fine.” As she slowly exhaled, she dropped her hands to her sides, fists clenched. “I can convince Randall to leave just as easily if you’re dead.”

  The tunnel shook violently, and I struggled to stay standing. So much for convincing her to change sides. I channeled my stumbling into steps forward so I could tackle her, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Agent Lagarde took off her glasses, and Mother Earth collapsed in a heap.

  “I think I’d like to go aboveground now,” Rosa said in a squeaky voice.

  Julio shook the plaster from his hair. “We need to—”

  Mother Earth flicked her wrist, and a stone wall shot up and sealed her off from us. Agent Lagarde swore. She was a strong telepath, but her powers needed line of sight to work, and now that that was gone…

  Quakes hit the tunnel, and cracks split the floor under our feet.

  “Run!” Agent Lagarde shouted.

  We didn’t need the encouragement. Rosa led the way, the beam of her flashlight bobbing up and down as she sprinted. The screech of the metal pipes overhead assaulted our ears, and several of them fell from the ceiling with loud clangs. Falling behind, I tried to move my aching body faster. I could just imagine one of those heavy pipes hitting one of the others right in front of my eyes, and me too slow to do anything about it.

  Soon, it wasn’t just pipes falling. The ceiling started to collapse, soil and building materials spilling to the floor. It started behind us, back where Mother Earth had barricaded herself, but was quickly catching up. Adrenaline pushed me faster, but I still limped heavily. I needed to move a hell of a lot more quickly if I wanted to survive. The force and weight of the collapse wouldn’t kill me. No, my body was strong enough to withstand that. The suffocation would be what got me, trapped and blinded beneath the earth, when I’d try to breathe and my mouth would fill with dirt.

  The noise grew louder. The rumbling of earth sounded like a roar, and chunks of soil hit my head and back. The collapse had nearly caught up with me. The others were farther ahead, but could they keep it up? Was Rosa leading us to a way out, or was she just running in a panic? Julio glanced over his shoulder at me, and I wanted to shout at him because he should’ve been focusing completely on running. But I didn’t have the breath to spare, and he wasn’t so good at listening lately, anyway.

  He slowed, turned, and extended his hands. A wave of artic cold went over me, cutting through my clothes, skin, and straight to my bones. It almost made me miss a step, but I caught myself and kept racing ahead, intending to pick up Julio and carry him if he didn’t start running again. But then a strange thing happened. The rolling thunder of the collapsing tunnel grew quieter until it silenced completely, and the shaking floor settled to the slightest quivers. My steps slowed, partly from surprise and partly from the shocking cold, and I turned to see the tunnel collapse frozen in place.

  I stopped, sucking in lungfuls of the frigid air. Agent Lagarde and Rosa stopped, too, and when Rosa shined the flashlight behind us, the unmoving cascade of soil glittered with tiny particles of ice. Just like he’d done with the golems, Julio had frozen the dirt until Mother Earth couldn’t manipulate it anymore.

  “N-Nice going,” Agent Lagarde said through chattering teeth.

  “Yeah.” Julio’s breath rose from his mouth in a puff of fog, and his hands were still extended outward, his brow wrinkled as he focused on freezing the ground all around us. “The subzero temperatures will kill us if we don’t get moving, but at least it’ll work slower than a tunnel collapse.”

  “Where’s the nearest stairway?” I asked Rosa.

  “Right up there.” She pointed with her flashlight, the beam shaking as she shivered violently.

  We didn’t run, but we still moved pretty darn fast. Part of that may have been fear Mother Earth would find a way to force through the ice, but mostly, we rushed to escape the biting cold. This time, when we ascended the stairs, Julio was the last one up. My knee may have been throbbing, but Julio had to continue concentrating on freezing the ground in case Mother Earth was still after us. That meant the brutal chill followed us all the way up the stairs, until we emerged into the hot sunlight and Florida humidity.

  Rosa let out a relieved sigh, and we all took a moment to rub our numb limbs and catch our breaths. The sudden extreme changes in temperature couldn’t be good for us. I felt like a slab of frozen meat that had just been shoved into an oven. On top of all the bruising, I was probably going to catch a cold.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Rosa said, “but I’m ditching you guys here to find another hiding spot. The security hub’s that way. Take a right and look for the signs.”

  She pointed with a trembling finger. The stairs had come up behind a food stall selling pretzels, churros, and soda somewhere in Sea Nymph’s Bay. The amphibious superheroine had a ride that ended by dropping off a waterfall, but we were near the children’s play area, which was a replica of a pirate ship belonging to Sea Nymph’s nemesis, Captain Saber.

  “No offense taken,” I said with a smile. “You’ve more than done your part.”

  “Oh, good.” Rosa was still out of breath. “Because I seriously—”

  A sound rose in the distance like rolling thunder, and I realized a second later it was another earthquake. Metal tongs and stacks of napkins fell to the ground in the food stall, and Agent Lagarde shouted for us to get away from the building.

  That’s when everything started to fall apart.

  Chapter 13

  As bad as the quake seemed from our position behind the food stall, the surrounding area got hit worse. Palm trees shook like frightened animals, and the pirate ship groaned and swayed before falling sideways like a child’s toy. Wooden planks snapped as it collapsed in on itself, and a cloud of dust and debris rose into the air. All around, the people who’d been hiding in silence started to scream. The low rumble of the earth had turned to a steady roar, and the shaking—the shaking didn’t stop.

  Rosa tripped, and
I reached for her. Julio grabbed her first, pulling her up and away from the food stall so nothing could fall on her. We stopped in an area of open pavement, surrounded by low statues of dolphins, sharks, and other sea creatures that would normally be spraying water. A crack in the distance signaled something else collapsing, and I wondered what the hell Mother Earth was doing. If she wanted to save people, this sloppy attack was a crappy way to do it. I couldn’t imagine how many innocent tourists and workers would be collateral damage. Or was Mother Earth just lashing out in anger?

  The tremors slowed and finally stilled, but the damage had been done. Above the trembling palm fronds, a towering, brightly colored waterslide broke apart with ear-splitting metal screeches. The smell of smoke reached my nose, though I couldn’t see the fire. And somewhere nearby, a man started screaming for help.

  “That way!” Julio took off running once he pinpointed the direction the voice was coming from. Agent Lagarde chased after him, and I was right behind her—until Rosa passed me. Despite her declaration that she was ditching us, she rushed toward the cry for help without a sign of doubt on her face.

  As we raced down the street, we passed the most civilians that I’d seen since leaving the clinic. They must have all abandoned their hiding places when the earthquake hit, coming out into the open to avoid getting crushed by falling debris. They looked around wildly as we sped past.

  “Help! Somebody help!”

  The screaming came from what used to be a casual seafood restaurant, if my memory wasn’t failing. I didn’t recognize it currently, since the front half had completely collapsed. Beyond the debris, you could see broken tables and chairs and an abandoned counter beneath dim signs displaying the restaurant’s menu. The man shouting for help was half-buried in the rubble, his hand reaching out.

  Julio coughed as he charged through the cloud of dust that covered the restaurant. He pushed a splintered support beam off the man, while Agent Lagarde shoved away broken roof tiles and other wreckage. Rosa grabbed his arms and pulled, and by the time I reached the scene, they had the man free.