AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shade shrugged. “You’re right. So, you have a better idea?”
“We need to disappear for a while,” Malik said.
“Or . . . ,” Shade said, glancing back at Cruz. “Oh, my God, Cruz!”
In the rearview mirror was what looked an awful lot like a translucent Taylor Swift.
“I know!” Cruz cried. “I’ve been trying to . . . and it kinda works! I can disappear,” Cruz said, her voice heavy with awe and amazement, “and then reappear looking, well, however I want.”
“And you went with Taylor Swift?” Shade demanded.
Cruz turned her newly stolen iPhone around and showed them both a photo of Swift. It was almost entirely identical to Cruz, aside from the translucence.
“I need a photo and, look, this is real creepy . . .” She turned her head sideways and the entire back half of her head was invisible. It was like she was wearing a Taylor Swift mask over an invisible head. Like the face was floating in air.
“Ahhh!” Malik yelped.
“Okay, that is amazing,” Shade said. She reached to touch Cruz’s face. “Amazing! It feels completely real.” The skin dimpled where Shade touched it. She could feel Cruz’s body heat. She could feel her agitated breath.
Shade touched the invisible back of Cruz’s head, and it, too, felt real.
“You know you just poked me in the ear, right?” Cruz said.
“This is insane,” Malik said. “This is . . . this is . . .” And then he started to laugh his strange barking-seal laugh, the laugh that had embarrassed him all his life, but that seldom failed to elicit a grin from Shade.
Shade’s eyes narrowed and just a hint of her teeth showed through a tight grimace of a smile. “This gives us a whole new power.”
“I know!”
“Are you, um,” Malik began. Then he reformulated his question. “I mean, do you think it changed, um . . . uhhh . . . you know. Other things? Down-there things?”
Cruz-with-the-Swift-face patted her chest, her still-male chest. “No,” she said, a bit deflated. “I’m still a boy . . . down there. I would need a visual, a picture. And la Swift does not pose naked.”
Malik threw up his hands. “I don’t even know how to start thinking about all this. We are way off the weirdness scale here.”
“My God, Malik Tenerife just admitted he doesn’t understand something. I want to record that,” Shade snarked. “Hero, villain, monster, right? So help me figure out how to play hero. It’s our only way through all this. I realize in your comics there’s constantly some big crisis where the cops just sort of stand around helplessly waiting for a superhero to fly in, but that isn’t real life.”
“Is now,” Malik said glumly.
Shade rolled her eyes. “Okay, you know I’m going to ask you why you think that, so why not just tell me rather than dragging it out.”
“Knightmare,” Malik said smugly—deliberately smug, to annoy Shade. “He’s the monster, although I strongly suspect he’s really a villain.”
“Not according to him
,” Cruz said from the backseat. “You saw his Tweets.”
Malik waved that off impatiently. “Doesn’t matter. He can play the monster role all he wants, but he’s left a trail of death behind him, so we can treat him as a villain.”
“Under the official rules of comics?” Shade drawled.
“He destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge,” Malik said, and made a face that said, What, that’s not enough?
“Definitely villain behavior,” Cruz chimed in, herself once more.
They fell silent, Malik and Cruz both knowing Shade well enough to know that in the end she’d be the one to decide.
“Could I beat him in a fight?” Shade asked. “Until the other night in the cemetery, I’d never even been in any kind of fight.”
