Villainous (6 page)

“She kissed me! I mean, I guess it was more fifty-fifty, but still …”

“So, are you guys dating or what?”

“No! I mean, I don’t really know. I guess. I don’t think so.”

Daniel concentrated on keeping his bike steady as he walked it along the gravel median—it gave him something to focus on. Everyone knew about the kiss, and they’d known for a while now. People were assuming he and Louisa were a couple. Daniel felt a deep flush spreading across his cheeks.

“So?” Mollie asked again. “What are you going to say to her?”

“I don’t know!” snapped Daniel. “I honestly was hoping that if I left it alone, she’d forget about it and we could just move on. I mean it was only one kiss, right?”

“God, Daniel!” said Mollie. “You know, I thought those idiot boys in the movie were bad, but I’m starting to think they didn’t do you all justice. Dumber than monkeys!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You need to decide, Daniel, and it’s got to be clear, okay? Are you two just friends, or are you more than that? She needs to know.”

Mollie stepped in front of him, making him stop. She looked him in the eyes, her face unreadable. “And she’s not the only one,” she said. “So make up your mind, New Kid.”

Then she was gone. One second there, the next nothing but a scattering of dust and wind blowing by. She didn’t even say goodbye.

Fine
, Daniel thought. If she wanted to fly home, why hadn’t she done so earlier? He’d told her she could go after all.

But that wasn’t why she’d taken off, and Daniel knew it. There was something else going on here. For some reason his relationship with Louisa was a huge concern for Mollie. Louisa was Mollie’s friend, and maybe Mollie was just looking out for her, but Daniel and Louisa had shared their kiss months ago, so why wait until now? What business was it of Mollie’s anyway?

Boys might be monkeys, but girls were from a different plane of existence, someplace where the rules of logic were backward. Bizarro world.

Daniel decided to get off the main road and bike through the center of town. He still had plenty of time before dark, and honestly he could use the long ride to clear his head. As he turned his bike onto Main Street, he saw the red flashing lights of a police car up ahead—an unusual sight for Noble’s Green. A small crowd had gathered outside Mr. Lemon’s soda shop. It was a mix of concerned-looking locals and a few tourists snapping pictures of the shop with their cell phones.

As Daniel pulled up, he saw what they were looking at. Someone had rearranged the neon letters above Happy Hero’s Ice Cream Parlor! to spell
HI Poopy!

Daniel started to laugh until he caught a glimpse of old Mr. Lemon standing off to one side, his face buried in his hands. Daniel biked a little closer and now saw that it wasn’t just the sign that had been damaged. The whole front window of the shop had been shattered, and the street outside was littered with cartons of melting ice cream. Inside, stools were smashed, the counter was broken, and everything that hadn’t been bolted down was overturned. The place looked like it had been torn inside out.

Daniel slowed to a stop. He thought about asking Mr. Lemon what had happened, but the man was in such a state that Daniel decided it was best not to bother him. Sheriff Simmons was talking to him, trying to get him to calm down.

“But, I’m telling you, I was only gone for five minutes!” Mr. Lemon was saying, his voice raw and cracking. “I left to deposit the day’s till at the bank, and I heard this crash.”

“Mr. Lemon,” the sheriff said, in the same tone you might use on a hysterical child. “It had to have been longer than that. The extent of the damage … I mean no one could do that in just five minutes.…”

“Bet one of those kids could,” someone said.

“Yeah,” said another. “Who knows what they’re capable of, really? Fly, do all sorts of crazy things.”

Daniel couldn’t tell who was saying what, but from the faces he knew that this was the sentiment of more than just one person. An ominous murmur was spreading through the crowd, and the sheriff took off his hat and scratched at his bald head thoughtfully, staring at the destruction.

Without waiting to hear more, Daniel turned his bike around and pedaled away as fast as he could. He’d just now heard a phrase he never thought would be spoken in Noble’s Green.
Those kids
, someone had said. Not
our kids
, not like they were kids who’d been raised here, who belonged, and who were part of the town. They were
those kids
, the strange ones. The others.

Two little words, but they would keep Daniel awake with worry long, long into the night.

The next morning, Mollie was waiting for him outside the school, their previous day’s argument apparently forgotten. Whenever Daniel showed up, there were several boys—the basketball players, mostly—waiting with her, but she never seemed very interested in more than just small talk, and the minute Daniel arrived, she’d break away from them and join him instead. Daniel had to grudgingly accept that Mollie Lee was a pretty girl, and if the boys hanging around her locker were any sign, she was getting prettier every day. She’d taken her tomboy habits and morphed them into a distinctive style with her sarcastic T-shirts and torn jeans. The earrings
had led to additional pieces of jewelry, and she’d recently expanded her ensemble with several chunky silver rings. She looked ready for high school, whereas the best anyone could say about Daniel was that he looked a little less like a bag of unwashed clothes with a bad cowlick than he once did. But only a little.

But Mollie didn’t seem to mind. Daniel had to wonder, if he was really honest with himself, whether he’d have done the same for her. If a gaggle of cheerleaders had wanted to walk Daniel to class, would he have said no, and waited for Mollie instead? He wondered sometimes whether he was half the friend she was.

When Daniel told Mollie about Mr. Lemon’s shop, her eyes grew wide with interest. She wanted all the details and made him repeat them several times. The attack on the ice cream parlor and the tree fort fire had occurred one right after the other, and it looked like someone in town was having their own little crime spree. Mollie immediately began compiling a list of suspects.

“There are really four villains in this town, right?” she said, drumming her fingers on the locker next to Daniel’s while he struggled to open his. He’d never gotten the hang of the combination lock.

“Four?” he asked absently.

“Sure. We’ve got Herman, of course, but he’s locked in the sanitarium. And his Shroud powers are all gone, but that doesn’t rule him out in my book.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think vandalizing an ice cream parlor
is really his style,” said Daniel, jiggling the locker in hopes that it would miraculously shake open.

“Maybe not,” said Mollie. “Then there’s Clay and Bud. Busting up private property is exactly their style.”

“They’re the most obvious suspects. But if we are going to go with the theory that the girl at the bridge is involved, that makes it pretty unlikely it was Clay or Bud. Not exactly popular with the ladies, those two.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

“But you said there are four villains in Noble’s Green. Who’s the fourth?”

“Theo Plunkett, of course,” said Mollie.

Daniel stopped fighting with his locker and shook his head. Theo Plunkett was Herman’s sixteen-year-old grandnephew, and while being a snob and a confessed car thief, Theo was not, in Daniel’s opinion, a villain. He’d actually proved quite useful last year in their fight against the Shroud. Lots of kids would’ve run once they saw the things Theo saw, but he had toughed it out. Daniel thought of Theo as a friend.

“You’ve been listening to Eric,” said Daniel. “He’s always had a weird thing against Theo.”

“It’s not weird. Theo’s a Plunkett,” said Mollie. “Do you trust him?”

“I do,” said Daniel. “He’s a scoundrel, but he’s no fan of his uncle, and again, why would Theo wreck an ice cream shop?”

“He stole his dad’s Porsche and drove it off a bridge.”

“The bridge was an accident. It’s not the same thing.”

Mollie shrugged. “Fine. But for the record, when you use the word
scoundrel
, it makes you sound like you were born in the 1800s.”

“Okay.”

“Just saying.”

“So who does that leave us with?” asked Daniel. “Setting our mysterious laughing girl aside, Clay and Bud are our best bets so far.”

“Yep,” said Mollie. “So now what?”

“Now the game’s afoot!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s something Sherlock Holmes would say when he started on a new mystery,” said Daniel.

Mollie blinked at him. “Seriously 1800s. You should try a big walrus mustache and suspenders.”

“Whatever.”

“So, what’s next? And enough with the dead-guy quotes.”

Daniel had been giving their next move some thought, and unfortunately they’d gotten about as far as they could with theorizing and speculation. It was time to get out in the field.

“What are you doing after school?” he asked, returning for a second go at his defiant locker.

“I thought we were going to study?”

“Later,” said Daniel. “I want to stop off someplace on our way home first.”

Mollie grinned at him and pushed him out of the way
before giving the lock a twirl and stepping back as it popped open with a reluctant squeak.

“I’m your girl,” she said.

Clay and Bud made their hideout in a neglected junkyard on the outskirts of town. Inside a rusting, hollowed-out old van they hatched their schemes to make Daniel’s life as hellish as possible. It was also the one place they felt was secure enough to stash their petty stolen goods. That was the theory Daniel was going on, at least. He had a hunch that if Clay had done all that damage to the ice cream shop, he wouldn’t have been able to resist taking a few mementos.

“I already agreed that it’s a good idea to search their hideout,” Mollie was saying. “I’m just saying that we could’ve used a better plan. Any plan actually.”

Daniel stood staring at a long tear in the chain-link fence that circled the perimeter of the junkyard. This wasn’t just a section where the fence had come loose, where someone might squeeze through. This was a boy-sized hole, where the steel links had been ripped apart like paper. This was Clay’s work, and imagining the sheer strength it would take to tear the metal like that, Daniel began to wonder if Mollie was right. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was expecting, but meeting Clay face to face on his home turf would be a bad idea.

“Let’s just call this trip recon,” said Daniel. “And if it
looks too dangerous, we’ll come back another time. But if he’s really not home, I wanna get a look inside his van.”

Mollie had already scouted the area from the air and reported back that the junkyard looked empty from way up high, but she hadn’t dared get close enough to be sure. If Clay and Bud were inside the hideout, then they wouldn’t be visible from the sky anyway. Plus, Clay was known to throw junk at passing fliers who got too close. Anything would do—tires, toilet seats, the occasional car.

So here they were, with Daniel tiptoeing into the lion’s den and Mollie right behind. And Mollie wasn’t the quietest person he knew. If only she’d try to sneak more and stomp less.

“Have you thought about what we’re going to do if they’re home?” she asked.

“Haul them in for questioning?” whispered Daniel. “You be the good cop, I’ll be the bad cop.”

Mollie rolled her eyes and snorted. There was only one person in all of Noble’s Green who scared Clay, and that was Eric. If Clay was here, interrogating him without Eric around would be suicide. And Daniel would be the only one without superpowers. In fact, if history was any guide, Mollie would probably end up having to save him. She’d pulled his backside out of enough bad situations already, what was one more?

Sometimes it seemed like he took Mollie on these adventures just to give her something to do.

As they walked beneath the stacks of rubbish, it occurred to Daniel that of all the great landmarks he’d discovered back in those first few months in Noble’s Green, the junkyard was the one that had remained unchanged. Once mysterious and foreboding, Mount Noble was now home to a school. The Old Quarry had collapsed. Now even the tree fort was being rebuilt. But the towering skyscrapers of refuse here in the junkyard were as unchanged as the first time he’d laid eyes on them. Rusted-out cars, broken appliances, and more piles of unrecognizable junk leaned menacingly on every side, and when the wind picked up, Daniel imagined he could hear the creaking of metal as the stacks shifted and settled. One couldn’t walk through this place without wondering what it would take to make the whole thing come crashing down like a line of dominoes. Not much, Daniel suspected.

It was a maze of garbage, complete with its own real-life Minotaur waiting at the center.

As they got ever closer to Clay’s lair, even Mollie began to tread cautiously, taking care
not
to step on every soda can in sight. Daniel hoped that at last Mollie’s instinct for survival might have kicked in. It would be nice to live long enough to have supper.

Their extra stealth was warranted, because they hadn’t gone very far before they heard voices.

Daniel stopped and grabbed Mollie by the arm. Not daring to speak, he gave her a questioning look—could she have
missed someone as she’d flown over? Mollie just shrugged. He hadn’t been there a few minutes ago.

Wordlessly, Daniel tried to signal as best he could that she should wait here while he scouted ahead. Mollie responded with a considerably ruder gesture of her own, and pushed him forward.

He had no choice but to let her follow, and the two of them crept slowly and silently through the garbage. Soon, they came upon a familiar bend in the twisting maze of trash, marked by the smashed-up remains of a truck that Clay and Bud used for target practice when they were bored. On the other side of it, if Daniel’s memory served, lay the van. They were close now, and the voices were clearer. Mollie crouched behind a pile of junk and put her finger to her lips, instructing Daniel to be quiet. As if he needed to be told.