Villainous (13 page)

“It’s not too late to back out,” said Daniel. “There’s got to be another way to get intel on the Nobles.”

For a moment Eric didn’t speak, and neither did anyone else.

The three boys were sitting on the porch, waiting for Rohan’s parents to drive Eric and Rohan up to the academy for their first day. The bags were packed, everything was set, but if Eric said the word, Daniel knew that Rohan would back him. He too understood how Eric felt about Johnny, and if his friend wanted to call it off, then he would call it off.

Eventually, Eric sighed and threw up his hands. “What’s a spy mission without a few twists? But Johnny had better stay away from me, that’s all I’m saying.”

Rohan nodded and Daniel gave his friend a pat on the shoulder. He’d half been hoping that Eric would decide to call it quits, just because he didn’t like the idea of them being up there without him, but then again he still wasn’t any closer to catching Drake and his Nobles in the act. This could be their best shot at getting some evidence against them.

Rohan and Eric were dressed in their academy uniforms—white shirt, sport coat, and tie. With their ties loosened and coats slung carelessly over the porch railing, they looked like an advertisement in one of his mom’s clothing catalogs. Young men of Oxford.

“And,” said Eric, “have you seen the books we’re expected to read?”

Apparently, they were done talking about Johnny, and Daniel was glad of it.

“He thought it was going to be all flying, all the time,” said Rohan, nudging Daniel. “It is a
school
, Eric.”

“Books!” shouted Eric. “I thought we were getting away from books!” He swept his hand dramatically over a stack of textbooks piled up next to his already full backpack.

“Sociology, Shakespeare. Oh, here’s calculus.…
Calculus
, man!”

“That
is
a lot,” agreed Daniel. He wondered if his book list for next year would look anything like that. He hoped not. He was having a hard enough time keeping up with one lousy history class, and the final was looming around the corner.

“And get this,” said Eric. “We are not even allowed to use our powers on campus unless supervised by a member of the faculty!”

“Hey,” said Rohan, pointing. “There’s Mollie.”

Daniel peered up at the sky but it was no use. Mollie would be traveling too fast for him to see, practically invisible to everyone except Rohan.

Sure enough, she appeared in the yard a second later, the only sign of her arrival the accompanying gust of wind.

“What are you guys wearing?” asked Mollie.

“What, this?” asked Rohan, and he took his sport coat off the railing and pulled it on, then began strutting up and down his porch like he was a runway model. A crest was stitched into the breast—a black mountain against a green field. Writing framed the top.

“Hey,” said Daniel. “What’s that say?”

“
INTEGRITY, HONESTY, ACHIEVEMENT
,” said Rohan. “I would have gone with something other than
achievement
. I mean,
integrity
and
honesty
are qualities possessed by people, aren’t they? But
achievement
’s not a quality at all.… ”

As Rohan kept on talking, Mollie turned to Daniel and whispered, “I. Am. Never. Going. There.”

“The uniforms are not so bad,” said Rohan. He’d heard her. Of course he’d heard her. “I think they look smart.”

“Smart?” repeated Mollie, shaking her head. “You’re hopeless.”

Mollie didn’t see it, but Rohan gave Daniel a quick wink. In all the years that they’d been friends, she hadn’t caught on that one of Rohan’s favorite hobbies was to drive her crazy.

Rohan’s mother called from inside, “Leaving in two minutes!”

“Oh, shoot! I’ll be right back,” said Rohan. “Forgot something.”

Rohan hurried inside and the three friends were left with an awkward silence. Eric and Rohan were starting a
new adventure today, one that Daniel and Mollie wouldn’t be a part of.

“So, we’ll check in every night by text,” Eric was saying. “And while we try to get something on Drake, you two keep a watch on the town. We’ll get them one way or another.”

It wasn’t much of a plan as plans go, but it was all they had. The Supers go undercover.

The door squeaked open on rusty hinges as Rohan’s mother stepped out onto the porch. She jingled her car keys in her hand. “Time to go!” she said. “Oh, hello, Mollie. I didn’t know you were here.”

“Hello, Mrs. Parmar.”

“Are you here to say goodbye?”

“Guess so,” said Mollie. “Bon voyage.”

Rohan appeared behind her, blinking at them as he wiped away tears. It took Daniel a moment to realize just what it was he was looking at.

After a moment of stunned silence, Daniel said, “Your glasses?”

“What?” said Rohan. “I got contact lenses.”

“Doesn’t he look handsome?” said Rohan’s mother.

No one said a thing. They would have been less shocked if Clay Cudgens had just walked through the door with a box of doughnuts. Rohan without his glasses was just not Rohan.

“Come on!” said his mother. “We don’t want to be late for your first day.… ” Now Rohan’s mother really was tearing up.

“Mom,” said Rohan, embarrassed.

Daniel helped Rohan with his overstuffed backpack and grabbed a suitcase to take to the car.

“Superhero school,” Daniel muttered.

“Hey, I just realized—why aren’t you flying to school?” Mollie asked Eric as they followed Rohan down to the car.

“No powers allowed. The welcome letter specifically asked that all students report to school on the first day ‘by traditional methods of transportation only.’ Can you believe it?”

“Keep your eyes open, okay?” said Daniel. “And stay out of trouble.”

“You bet,” said Eric. “Always.”

Daniel and Mollie waved as they watched the car pull away. They would need to hurry themselves if they didn’t want to be late for Smiley’s class. Well, Daniel had to hurry. Mollie could be there in minutes.

“What’s going on with Rohan?” asked Mollie. “Contact lenses?”

“Things are changing,” said Daniel. “No doubt about it.”

“You think they’ll be okay?”

“Sure,” lied Daniel. “It’s just a school. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The clock on the wall refused to move any faster, no matter how much Daniel tried to will it to speed up. The sluggish minute hand barely ticked forward, and staring at it was giving Daniel a headache. If he kept looking at that preternaturally slow clock, he feared he’d burst a blood vessel in his brain, which, when he thought about it, might be a welcome relief from the boredom of Smiley’s lecture on the Second Continental Congress. Mollie had checked out long ago, and was slumped at her desk, chin resting in her palm, eyes closed, and drooling. Daniel had been forced to kick her chair twice today when she’d started snoring.

Finally, just when he thought he couldn’t take any more, he heard a sound sweeter than the trumpets of angels—the end-of-day bell.

As they streamed out of the classroom with the rest of the day’s escapees, Daniel switched on his phone.

“I want to see if the guys texted yet.… Uh-oh.”

“What?” said Mollie. “Something up?”

Daniel had four new messages from Rohan. As he scrolled down them, he saw variations of the same thing:

Mollie peered over his shoulder at the screen. “Looks serious,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Daniel. “Lemme go get my bike.”

“No time,” said Mollie. “From the school to the tree fort on a bike? You’ll be there by dinnertime, maybe.”

Mollie might’ve been exaggerating, but she was right that it wasn’t a quick trip.

“Well, how do you expect— No. No! No way, Mol.” Daniel knew that look. He knew what she was thinking and he didn’t like it.

“Oh, don’t be a baby,” she said. “Forget your stupid male ego and let me fly you there. It’ll take five minutes.”

“It’s not my ego,” Daniel said, and loudly before he realized there were people still nearby in the halls.

“It’s not my ego,” he repeated, whispering this time. “It’s that you have a habit of dropping me.”

That wasn’t strictly true. While Mollie had dropped him on a few occasions, it was usually over a large body of water and on purpose. Truth was, he did feel weird having a girl haul him around. Unlike Eric, Mollie wasn’t super-strong, and the fact that an ordinarily muscled fourteen-year-old girl could carry him reasonably well was embarrassing. Especially when the girl started referring to him as “toothpick” afterward.

Quickly, Daniel ducked out of the school with Mollie at his heels. He dialed Rohan’s cell phone and waited. It went directly to voice mail.

“You might not be able to get through,” said Mollie. It was true that phone reception was spotty at best around Mount Noble, yet another of its mysterious qualities. Daniel was lucky he’d gotten Rohan’s texts.

“Fine,” said Daniel at last. “But let’s find somewhere safe and out of sight to take off from. I don’t want some tourist snapping a shot of you carrying me. And go fast, but not Mollie fast, okay? Last time I swallowed a bug.”

With a quick prayer, Daniel wrapped his arms around Mollie and then the two were airborne. She’d been right, and the actual flight lasted mere minutes. As they sailed through the air holding each other, Daniel took in the view he never
tired of seeing. Beyond the boundaries of their town, civilization gave way to green wilderness. A few roads cut through the forest and snaked their way up the mountainside. Somewhere in those woods was their destination—the new tree fort.

For the last minute or so of their flight together, Daniel decided to close his eyes and imagine he was flying alone. He heard the wind blowing in his ears; he felt it on his skin. He could almost pretend that Mollie wasn’t there, except for the smell of lavender shampoo and cinnamon chewing gum—Mollie’s scent.

Even after they’d touched down and Mollie had let him go, the Mollie
smell
still lingered. If he breathed deeply, it was there beneath the tang of the mountain pines. It worried him what he must smell like compared to her—probably closer to an old shoe. Daniel was trying to sniff-test his armpit without looking like he was sniff-testing his armpit when he realized that a strange silence had developed between them. They were hiking along the freshly cleared path to the tree fort, and Mollie hadn’t once called him “toothpick.” She was walking next to him—right beside him, actually—with her hands in her pockets and her thoughts someplace else.

They hadn’t gotten very far, though, before she stopped. “Hold on a sec,” she said, sniffing. “What’s that?”

Oh no
, Daniel thought. He did smell like an old shoe!

But then he caught a whiff of it too—a rotten odor being
carried on the wind from somewhere nearby. Only one creature on this earth could make such an unearthly stink.

“Bud,” Daniel said. The fat bully’s super-stench was unmistakable, but what would he be doing way out here in the woods near the tree fort?

Judging by the sudden look of worry on Mollie’s face, she was thinking the same thing. What if Clay and Bud had found out about the new tree fort and ambushed their friends when they weren’t expecting it? What if their friends were in trouble even now?

“Stayhereaminute,” Mollie said, almost too quickly to hear.

“Wait, don’t!” said Daniel, but he might as well have been talking to the empty air—she was gone before he’d breathed the first word.

Cursing under his breath, Daniel dashed up the path toward the tree fort. Mollie was rushing in without considering another, even more troubling, possibility. What if the bullies had somehow gotten ahold of Rohan’s phone and sent that text themselves? She could be flying into a trap.

The tree fort was close enough that Daniel could just spot its outline through the woods—an unfinished structure half as big as their old tree fort. Nothing looked amiss, but then, if you were preparing to spring a trap, wasn’t that the point?

Winded from the sprint uphill, Daniel reached the clearing beneath the tree fort. Mollie was nowhere to be
seen, but Daniel thought he heard voices from up top. People were arguing.

A rope ladder dangled from an open trapdoor in the bottom, but he didn’t have the necessary angle to see inside.

He could make out words now, and Mollie’s voice raised in anger.

“… out of your mind?” and “… right, you are an idiot!” and “Don’t sit there, that’s mine.”

Those certainly didn’t sound like cries for help.

Daniel was halfway up the ladder when Mollie’s head appeared above him in the open trapdoor.

“Are you gonna take all day?” she asked. “My grandma could climb faster than that.”

And like that, the memory of her smell, the feeling of flying together, his own worry for her very safety—they all disappeared. Mollie Lee was back to being an enormous pain in Daniel’s butt.

He ignored her helping hand and hauled himself up the last few feet into the tree fort. The combination of woodland sprint and rope climb had left him a sweaty, out-of-breath mess. He rolled onto the floor and lay there for a moment—oblivious to the sawdust collecting in his hair. As he stared up at the ceiling, he realized the place still had only half a roof. What had begun as a project of passion had become an afterthought for most of them, with neglected tools and piles of unused lumber cluttering up the area. Daniel wondered, and not for the first time, if it
would ever get finished. The Supers were no longer a secret, and maybe they’d finally outgrown their secret house in the woods.

The Bud stink was definitely stronger in here, and when Daniel lifted his head, he saw his friends standing or sitting around him. A few were holding their noses, and Rohan was wearing a swimmer’s nose clip over his—Bud was kind of Kryptonite to a boy with super-smell. Eric was there in his academy uniform. Michael and Louisa and little Rose were present, though Rose kept blinking into invisibility. Right there and then, finding himself in the same room with Louisa for the first time in months, Daniel wished he could disappear too.