“I’ll text you the address.”
“I’ll be there,” I say as I run out to the car and get in only to find Ellison sliding into the passenger seat. “You are a wounded man. What are you doing?”
“Just go. He might be gone by the time you get there if you’re going to dally the whole way.”
“I never dally,” I protest as I floor the car out of the driveway and take off. I hand Ellison the ferret, and he immediately puts her in the back seat.
She is highly displeased by this treatment and tries to jump from the back seat into the front. She fails spectacularly and decides to crawl under the seats to reach us.
“You’re going to stay with Valerie, correct? Although, I have not yet concluded that Valerie is not a supervillain herself. Her satanic and sadistic tendencies lead me to believe that she’s the ultimate villain in disguise.”
“I think you just don’t like that she makes you adhere to rules,” Ellison says. “Which you should be doing anyway.”
“Rules, schmules. The only rules I have are?—”
“This is why you don’t belong at the top. You’re weak. You need to be better. Yet you don’t learn, you don’t change. You are a joke. If you want to be better, you must cut yourself off from everything around you. Feelings, attachments, they hold you back from what you were created to do. Now do what you’ve been told and kill them all.”
“Deus!”
I jump and look over at Ellison. “What? What’s wrong?”
“What the fuck were you doing?”
“Talking to my demons,” I say.
“You and these fucking demons. Talk to some angels for once or something.”
Nah, the demons I talk to are deep in hell. I made sure of it.
“I do speak to angels—every day I talk to you.”
The glower I get is enough to send me to hell but it also makes me laugh, which shows me that the glower can deepen.
When I pull up to the mall, I notice that there’s a crowd gathering to see what’s going on, and it’s blocking my path. Thepolice are trying to get them back, actually helping for once now that new regulations are in place prohibiting wannabe heroes from being on scene and onlookers from loitering.
Doesn’t mean that all will listen, but I know how to make them listen.
“Fucking ridiculous that even now they still do this,” Ellison grumbles. “They’re wasting police support. Just park over there, we’ll push through them on foot.”
“Nah, I got this,” I say as I keep driving.
“What are you doing?” Ellison asks, looking a bit nervous.
“They’ll either move or it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” I comment as people startscrambling. They’re running and dodging out of the way of my car while I cackle and Ellison stomps on an imaginary brake. Not sure how he thinks he’s going to make it appear.
I come to a stop, then get out and stretch before I look back at the people who I’ve driven a good distance from the scene. Really, the police should take some pointers.
We head over to where Valerie is standing with Landon and August, but she oddly looks displeased to see us.
“What the FUCK are you doing?” Valerie yells, but what I notice more than anything is that the woman is wearing a skirt. I didn’t know monsters could wear skirts. “The media is here and I’m sure they got pictures and videos of that!”
“You’re making it sound like the only reason he shouldn’t have done that is because of the police and media and not because he could havehit someone,” Ellison says.
Valerie is silent.
I wave them down. Really, it makes me feel too special when they fight over me. “My mans, it’s okay. I could have saved lives.”
“You also could have taken them!” Ellison says.
