Hot Mama

  For some strange reason, Henry actually liked his crummy day job at the Exposé. He would play hooky from work only if one of the Fearless Five was in mortal danger—or his precious computer was about to explode.

  I sat down in my usual seat at the F5 table and drummed my fingers on the top. Sparks flew everywhere, adding more scars to the scorched wood. My stomach rumbled. Lunch was gone already.

  “Do you need something, Fiona?” Lulu asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you look just like Carmen did when she was hot on the trail of a superhero she was about to expose. All tense and twitchy and bothered.”

  Being compared to Carmen aka Karma Girl Cole didn’t help my sour mood. But I stopped drumming my fingers.

  Lulu would find out about Johnny when I told Henry and the chief. I might as well tell her what I wanted and get the information now. I didn’t want to wait a second longer than necessary to get the goods on Johnny Bulluci. I wasn’t good at waiting. Patience was something else I’d never seen the virtue in.

  “I need everything you can dig up on Johnny Bulluci.”

  Lulu arched an eyebrow. “Why is that? Is he your new honey?”

  “Yes, he’s my new honey,” I snarled.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Lulu shot me a coy look. “So that’s who had you all hot and bothered last night.”

  I rolled my eyes at her obvious pun. “Yes, that’s who had me all hot and bothered last night. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “Sure there is,” Lulu smirked.

  She was getting on my last nerve, so I did my best to shut her up. “Oh, there’s a lot more to it. I’m pretty sure he’s really Johnny Angel. You know, the guy who rides around on the motorcycle? The one who threatened to kill us?”

  Lulu stopped typing. Her head snapped up. “No way!”

  “Way.”

  I told her everything. About Johnny’s anger over his father’s death, the family obsession with angels, the watch.

  All of it.

  Lulu let out a low whistle. “So you’ve been getting hot ’n’ heavy with the guy who’s vowed to destroy Siren and Intelligal, and the Fearless Five if you get in his way.”

  I shot my finger at her. “You’ve got it.”

  “And I thought I had problems,” Lulu muttered.

  My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that? What’s going on with you and Henry?”

  Lulu looked at her computer screen and refused to meet my hot, searching gaze.

  “Oh come on,” I snapped. “I spilled to you, now you spill to me. I won’t laugh, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  At least, I’d try not to.

  “Henry asked me to marry him,” Lulu said in a soft tone.

  Straight arrow, geek-to-the-max Henry aka Hermit Harris had proposed marriage to one of the most notorious computer hackers in Bigtime. A woman who could expose us with a click of her mouse. Fabulous. Just fabulous.

  “When?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  I thought back. “Wasn’t that the weekend you guys went to that big ubergeek conference in Gotham?”

  Lulu glared at me. “It was not an ubergeek conference. It was a computer symposium about Internet security.”

  I snorted. “Like there’s a difference.”

  “Anyway,” Lulu continued with her story. “We stayed at this quaint little bed-and-breakfast just outside the city and went to the conference during the day. One night when we came back to the room, everything was covered in rose petals. There were flowers and champagne. Henry had hidden the ring in a chocolate cake. He had it made in the shape of a laptop. It was so romantic.” Lulu’s eyes went all soft and dreamy.

  Rose petals? Champagne? A ring hidden in a computershaped chocolate cake? Henry was more of a romantic than I’d given him credit for. In a completely geeky sort of way.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  My voice didn’t come out too strangled. I, of course, thought Henry was making a terrible mistake, just like I’d thought Sam had been making a terrible mistake when he’d started boinking Carmen when the Terrible Triad was after us. But I forced myself to be polite. For once. For Henry’s sake.

  Lulu stared at me like I’d just said the dumbest thing in the world. Maybe I had. A superhero and a computer hacker? Not a good combo.

  “Look at me, Fiona. I’m in a wheelchair, in case it’s escaped your notice. It’s not all hearts and flowers, you know.”

  “So? Lots of people are in wheelchairs. It doesn’t seem to bother Henry any, so why should it bother you?”

  Lulu sighed and pushed a wisp of black and blue hair out of her face. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Is it because of sex?” In relationships, just about everything came back to sex in the end. Sex or money. Or both.

  “The two of you do have sex, don’t you?”

  “Of course we have sex,” she snapped. “Just because I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t mean I don’t have needs. That Henry doesn’t have needs. In fact, Henry and I have sex quite frequently—”

  I held my hand up. “Don’t tell me. I don’t need the mental image of you two supernerds going at it. It’s bad enough Carmen and Sam do the nasty in every corner of the manor imaginable. I don’t want to hear about anyone else or I’ll never be able to sit on the furniture again. So if sex isn’t the problem, what is?”

  Lulu stared at her still legs. “I’m not just paralyzed. I can’t have kids either,” she mumbled.

  “What?” I asked, straining to hear her. “What did you say?”

  “I can’t have kids. I can’t marry Henry because I can’t have kids. There. I’ve told you what’s wrong. Are you happy now?” Tears shimmered in Lulu’s dark eyes.

  “So what?”

  Her mouth gaped open. “So what?”

  I shrugged. “So what? So you can’t have kids. Lots of women and men can’t have kids. Besides, do the two of you even want kids right now? Aren’t you a little young for that? You’re not even thirty yet.”

  “No, we don’t want kids right now. But someday we would, and I can’t give them to Henry.” More tears puddled in her eyes, threatening to spill down her ivory cheeks.

  “You could always adopt,” I pointed out. “There are lots of great kids out there that need a good home.”

  Lulu shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Lulu stared at me as if the answer should be obvious. I was getting rather tired of that look. I wasn’t a mind reader like my father was. I couldn’t discern someone’s innermost thoughts with a single, soul-searing gaze. Beat it out of them, yes. Fry them alive? Always. But glean pertinent information with a quick look? No, not so much.

  “Because of Henry’s power.”

  “What does Henry’s power have to do with you not being able—Ah.” The lightbulb switched on inside my head.

  “If you can’t have kids, then Henry couldn’t pass his mindmelding power on to the next generation of Lo-Harrises.”

  “Bingo. If we adopted a kid one day, we’d love her to death, but she wouldn’t have Henry’s power.”

  “But you don’t even know that Henry’s kid would get his power anyway. Or that it would manifest in the same way. Sometimes, these things skip a couple of generations.”

  My father and I were a prime example. It had been my mother and her fiery temper that had influenced my power, not my father’s calm sensibility. Johnny and James Bulluci were another pair that proved my point. Johnny had a power his father had probably never dreamed of. But that’s what happened when you battled ubervillains on a regular basis. The villains always seemed to live in the nastiest places, surrounded by acres of radioactive waste. The goo wasn’t good for your skin or hair—or for your genes. More than one hero had her powers altered by being exposed to radioactive waste over the years. And if it didn’t get you, then it would more than likely get your kids and change them in some way—either good o
r bad.

  “I don’t think Henry would care about whether or not his kid had powers. He’d love him or her just the same.”

  Lulu shook her head. “I’ve run the numbers. There’s a good chance the kid would either have Henry’s power or some other manifestation of it. I don’t want to take that chance, that opportunity, away from Henry.”

  Run the numbers? Lulu was making decisions about her love life based on some statistics a computer program had spit out. How romantic.

  The other woman eyed me. “Haven’t you ever thought about having kids? About passing your powers on? Isn’t that what you would want?”

  I thought about it. I’d been a fire-starting hellion when I was a kid. Everyone on the street where we’d lived in Ireland had thought that I was an arsonist and hopped up on steroids. Only the fact that my father was a policeman had kept me out of juvenile detention. Even as a kid, I had a tendency to beat up bullies.

  Travis and I had talked about having children, about the fact that we might pass our powers on to them. Travis had been thrilled with the idea, but I was more ambivalent about it. Don’t get me wrong. I loved having superstrength and the ability to zap a pizza with my eyeballs. But powers weren’t the be-all and end-all of the world, as Carmen was so fond of reminding me. Sure, superheroes got plenty of perks, but being one was a lot of hassle too. The long hours and late nights. The constant beatings and narrow escapes. The continual drain on my finances. Having to make nice with the likes of Kelly Caleb, Erica Songe, and other members of the press. My constant need to eat everything in sight. It got old sometimes.

  But the most important thing I’d learned over my years of being a superhero was this—having powers couldn’t keep you safe from all the big, bad things out there in the world.

  Travis’s death was proof of that.

  I answered Lulu. “It’d be nice to pass my power on, but it wouldn’t determine if I loved my kid or not. And it sure as hell wouldn’t keep me from being with the man I loved.”

  I opened my mouth to further argue my point, but Lulu snapped her hand up.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said through gritted teeth. “Talking won’t fix anything, especially not my shriveled-up ovaries and useless legs. Let’s get back to your problem.”

  She pounded away on her laptop, signaling the end of our conversation. For now.

  I started drumming my fingers on the table again while Lulu typed and clicked and muttered under her breath.

  “Oh, go hoover down a pizza or something,” Lulu snapped about five minutes later. “I can’t concentrate with you giving me the laser gaze. All those heat waves make my computer freak out.”

  “Fine,” I sniffed, threw my hair over my shoulder, and flounced out of the library.

  I stalked to the underground kitchen, but I didn’t hoover down a pizza as Lulu had so indelicately suggested. Instead, I ate three boxes of sugar cookies and drank two gallons of milk. I was just finishing up when Lulu’s voice bellowed out of the intercom.

  “I’ve got the information. You can come back to the library now.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, draining the last of my milk.

  By the time I returned to the library, Lulu had compiled several inches of paper on Johnny Bulluci. A printer whirred and chugged in the background, spitting out more reams.

  “How did you get so much information so fast?” I asked.

  “Carmen showed me how she does it,” Lulu said. “She’s still working on Frost and Scorpion’s real identities, although they didn’t leave a trail for her to follow like Malefica did. Carmen doesn’t think any of them died at the ice cream factory, not even Malefica.”

  “I doubt any of them are dead myself,” I replied. “Unfortunately, ubervillains are very resilient. One or all the members of the Terrible Triad will come back to Bigtime someday, and we’ll be ready for them, real identities or not.”

  “Anyway, I set up a couple of computer programs to facilitate the process. I’m just printing the last of it now,” Lulu said, tidying up some pages. “This is all pretty normal stuff. School, college, business honors. Lots of friends, female and otherwise. Until three months ago.”

  “When his father died, and he took over as Johnny Angel.”

  “You betcha.” Lulu grabbed the last of the pages from the printer and shoved them into a thick blue binder. “After that, the life of Johnny Bulluci gets a bit more murky.”

  “Naturally.”

  Life was always murky in the world of superheroes and ubervillains. For someone like Johnny, who wasn’t on one side or the other, it would be positively gray. And I hated gray.

  Lulu tossed me the binder. “Knock yourself out.” She paused. “And try not to set those on fire, okay? I don’t want to have to print them out again.”

  “I won’t, Mom,” I muttered, settling myself at the round wooden table.

  Lulu steered her chair toward the door.

  “Hey, Lulu?”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “Thanks. I really do appreciate it.”

  I’d said thank you twice now in less than twenty-four hours. I really was going to have to quit freaking out and getting people to do me favors.

  She nodded. “Back at you.”

  “What did I do?”

  Lulu stared at me. “You listened.” Then, she opened the door and zoomed away.

  17

  I waited until the sound of Lulu’s wheelchair faded away. Then, I cracked open the binder and started reading.

  Lulu had compiled quite a bit of information on James John aka Johnny Bulluci. Age thirty-six. Hair blond. Eyes green. Blah, blah, blah. I knew the boring facts already. I wanted to get to the good stuff.

  I skimmed through pages detailing Johnny’s progress in high school and college, as well as the business accolades he’d received over the years. To my surprise, there were more than a few of those. I flipped through pages of earnings and stock reports. Since Bobby had retired and Johnny had taken over the majority of Bulluci Industries, the company had almost doubled its profits. Johnny was definitely more than just a sexy guy. He was a shrewd businessman who wasn’t afraid to take risks. Sam would approve.

  Finally, I found what I was looking for—James Bulluci’s obituary. It had appeared in both the Chronicle and the Exposé. Lulu had even downloaded the transcripts off the SNN archive service for me.

  James Michael Bulluci, 58, died in a fiery car accident on Feb. 7. According to Bigtime police, an unknown driver apparently hit the rear of Bulluci’s silver Mercedes, causing the gas tank to explode. Bulluci’s body was badly burned and partially disintegrated. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The family will receive guests at 6 p.m., Feb. 10, at Bigtime Funeral Home. The burial will take place at 10 a.m., Feb. 11, at Bigtime Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Cure Cancer Research Facility…

  I frowned. Died in a fiery car crash? I wondered how the Bullucis had pulled off that lie. They must have paid someone in the coroner’s office to look the other way. Or perhaps one of them had some sort of psychic power or mind-control gizmo. It didn’t really matter how they had done it. Only that they had.

  I kept reading. The obit went on to detail James’s life and his work at the helm of his family’s company, as well as his many contributions to Bigtime charities. The local media had covered the funeral, of course, since the Bulluci family was so prominent in Bigtime society. I’d been out of town on a business trip and hadn’t gone to the funeral, but I remembered Sam talking about attending and what a sad day it had been.

  I stared at a picture of Johnny with his arm around Bella, comforting his weeping sister. Johnny’s mouth was set in a hard, tight line. Even though the picture was in black-andwhite, his eyes practically glowed with fury. The casket stood in the foreground. It was closed. Not surprising. If Intelligal had killed James Bulluci with explodium missiles like Angel claimed, there wouldn’t have been enough of him left to put in a spoon, much
less a casket. Died in a car crash, my ass.

  After the funeral, there were no more mentions of James Bulluci or Johnny Angel. For a while. Then, about a month after the funeral, SNN reported an Angel sighting at the Everything Electronics Store in downtown Bigtime.

  Wait a minute. That name sounded familiar. I closed my eyes and thought back. That was one of the places Siren and Intelligal had hit during their crime spree. I remembered because we’d gone tearing after them when they’d robbed the store, but we’d lost them in traffic. All Siren had to do was crook her finger, and twenty cars had slammed into each other. I snorted. Men. And people thought women drivers were hazardous. Please.

  I kept reading. According to the television transcripts, Angel had shown up just as the reporter was leaving. That’s why we hadn’t spotted him that time, but he’d been tracking them even then.

  I wondered how he did it. And how he’d known the ubervillains were in the factory a few days ago. Did he sit by the police scanner at night like the newspaper reporters did?

  Or did he prowl the streets like the roving crews for SNN?

  Maybe his father’s old motorcycle gang friends had given him the heads-up. Perhaps his grandfather helped him. Or even Bella. She had to know the family secret. She might even have some sort of power herself, since Johnny did. She was probably too uptight to use it, though.

  As the months went by, more and more sightings of Johnny Angel were reported. He always popped up where Siren and Intelligal had been, sometimes missing them by minutes. Occasionally, he’d save somebody from a burning building or chase off some would-be rapists, but he spent most of his time hunting the two ubervillains. Trying to get his revenge.

  Revenge. Johnny wanted revenge on the ubervillains for killing his father. I couldn’t blame him for that. When I’d thought Travis had committed suicide because Carmen had exposed him, I’d wanted to tear her into little pieces and feed her to the fish in the marina. My father had to slip me sleeping pills for a week before I’d calmed down enough to even think about letting Carmen live.