“He’s making me dizzy,” Anna said, watching Teddy flicker in and out of visibility.
“I keep telling you, it’s either this or go patrolling for real,” Teia said. They bent their heads together in a conference.
“We’re not ready,” Anna declared.
Teia didn’t argue about that. “So how did your grandparents get started? How much did they practice before they started?”
“I’m not really sure. The biographies kind of gloss over that part.”
“You don’t talk to your grandma about it at all?” Teia said, disbelieving. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Teia had spent enough time with Anna’s family, she knew that nobody talked about it. Suzanne West had gotten rid of her skin-suit uniform twenty years ago and never looked back. These days, she used her power of heat and flame mostly to cook.
“It’s not that easy, okay? The minute I start talking about it, they’ll know something’s up, and I’ll either have to tell them what we’ve been doing or figure out how to lie about it to my dad.”
“Ugh. Yeah, that would be a problem.”
They all understood the need for secrecy, and not just because of tradition. If nothing else, they needed to keep their parents from grounding them until graduation.
The next time Teddy turned visible, Sam cracked his knuckles and flung an arm toward him, pointing with flat fingers. Searing red lights shot out from the gesture, snapping through the air, leaving a trail of steam behind. The laser bolts hit Teddy, popping into his back, knocking him over. Sam had used low-intensity beams this time. They’d sting a little, not burn through, though Sam could do that, too, if he wanted. During one of the small-scale practices, Sam had burned through a steel garbage can in an alley. It had taken awhile, but he’d done it.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Sam said, grinning. Sam could be a bully sometimes.
Teddy cried out in shock and fell, and though he stumbled back to his feet quickly enough, he’d lost his focus and remained visible. He turned on Sam. “Hey! What the hell?”
Sam laughed. “I’m just helping out. Doesn’t do any good when you know Lew’s going to hit you. You need the element of surprise.”
“Code names,” Anna muttered futilely.
A determined frown settled on Teddy’s features, and he clenched his hands at his sides. Anna knew what came next, and sure enough, he vanished, and the scratching of running footsteps on the gravel path followed. Sam stood and ran, but that didn’t stop invisible Teddy from tackling him. From the outside, it looked as if Sam spasmed, leaping a few inches and then smashing into the ground. He writhed, hitting and punching, yelling. A few red bolts flashed from his hands, scattering wildly. Anna, Teia, and Lew scurried behind the tree trunk for shelter.
Sam managed to grab Teddy’s hand the next time Teddy threw a punch, which was the major drawback for an invisible guy trying to fight hand to hand. Anna kept trying to convince him of that, and he kept not listening. The two were locked together now, trying to hit each other one-handed.
Anna moved out from behind the tree and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ghost, now’s when you’re supposed to phase out!”
There came a grunt of effort, and suddenly Sam was batting at air, his quarry slipped out of his grasp. He sat up and stared at his hands. “Okay, that was weird.”
He fell over, shoved aside by the figure of Teddy, who was once against flashing in and out of visibility like the image on a broken TV. Sam hollered and fired another bolt, which slammed into a tree trunk and left it smoking. Just what they needed, to set the whole park on fire.
“Would you guys stop it!” she shouted, but it didn’t help. They kept wrestling, Sam lunging back at Teddy, who wasn’t invisible and who forgot to phase out again. Maybe because he was amazed it had worked. It was almost funny. They crashed to the ground, landing punches on each other.
Thunder cracked, and the temperature dropped enough to make Anna hug herself and shiver. Frost gathered on grass, and on Sam’s hair and clothing. Sam stopped fighting, and footsteps shuffled away from him as Teddy backed off.
“Teia!” Sam called, jumping up, rubbing his arms. “Lady Snow!”
Teia knelt, hand on the ground, where a fan of frost now grew. Smiling, she blew across her fingers, raising a cluster of ice crystals that dispersed in a fog. Lew laughed. The thunder had been Lew’s—Stormbringer’s. The Arctic Twins, Anna called them sometimes, but they didn’t approve. Anna wondered if both their powers were weather related because they were twins, and she wondered if anyone else in their family had weather-related powers. They insisted their parents didn’t have any powers at all, and they were probably right. Their father had died when they were nine. Anna remembered him as a big, amiable man. Their mother didn’t seem like the superheroing type.
Anna’s mother probably knew for sure.
“You guys need to grow up,” Teia said.
“You need to take this seriously,” Teddy’s disembodied voice answered.
Teia said, “How much more practice do we need? Teddy’s gone out already and did fine. We need to do something.”
“He didn’t do fine, he got the crap beat out of him,” Anna said.
“Only half beat,” Teddy said defensively. “Any fight you can walk away from…”
Anna grumbled.
“It’s simple,” Teia said. “We go out, find a way to prove ourselves, and do it. The crime rate in this city is terrible, and everyone keeps saying we need a new superhero team, and here we are.”
Lew hefted the paintball gun like it meant something. “And if we’re really smart, we call the papers first so they can cover the story.”
“That’s your worst idea yet,” Anna said. But Teia would side with her brother, along with Sam. Stalemate.
Teia said, “Anna, the five of us together? We’re powerful. Even more powerful than the Block Busters. We can do this.” Everyone agreed that the Block Busters hardly counted as a crime-fighting team because they hardly went out together anymore.
But Anna wasn’t powerful. If she was honest, she was scared. She couldn’t defend herself, she couldn’t stop anyone. Most of the time she couldn’t prove that she had a power at all. And they all knew it.
“Then why don’t you go do it?” Anna said, tired. She hugged herself, trying to melt away the last of Teia’s frost, but her arms were still covered in goosebumps.
“She’s just chicken,” Sam sneered.
Teia was the one who jumped in with, “Sam, shut up, you don’t know anything about it. She’s not afraid. She just wants us to do this her way.” She turned to Anna, eyebrow lifted. “Right?”
“I’m just saying we have to be careful,” she said, knowing she was losing this fight.
Teia’s thin mask across her eyes didn’t do much to hide her identity, and if Anna were that pretty she wouldn’t either. She was sixteen, striking, and she knew how to stand—hands on hips, shoulders back—to look particularly heroic. “I say we announce ourselves, stage some events, get some publicity—”
Anna said, “You can’t do that. My mother is watching us. She ID’d Teddy off one security tape. We have to be sure we can stay secret—”
“Why?” Teia said.
Anna had taken it for granted and resented having to explain it yet again. “Because that’s how they get you. It’s how they got to my mother, back in the day.” The argument felt stale, she’d said it so many times. As soon as her grandparents’ secret identity had been revealed—that Captain Olympus and Spark were actually socialites Warren and Suzanne West—Celia became a target. She’d been kidnapped a dozen times after that. Even the Destructor had kidnapped her, leading to the whole sordid mess that happened after that. No, you had to keep the secret so they couldn’t find you.