“Getting nearsighted in your old age,” Danny teased him, panting for breath from the exhaustion he kept dismissing, “because so far you’ve failed to land a single hit.”
Cho scowled from behind his goggles. “Am I keeping you up past your curfew,kid? Just how young are you under that mask? Still living at home?” He blasted a lamp post, and the metal froze solid, creaked and teetered, and eventually toppled, forcing Danny to lightning jump again to stay out of its path.
At least it gave him a moment to hide that Cho had guessed right. Danny wasn’tthatyoung, but he did still live with his parents. It was convenience not immaturity!
“Hurry it up, Danny, you’re letting Helios and Gaia get away!” Andre chided him over the comms.
Danny had nearly forgotten he wasn’t fully alone out here. He couldn’t play tag with Cho all night. He just had to get in a good hit and he could lightning jump after the truck.
“Working on it,” he said and turned to face Cho again. “Sorry to cut this short, Ice Man, but you’re slowing me down.”
“So frigid, Sparky?” Cho scoffed. “And here I thought we had a rapport going.”
“Maybe next time I’ll putyouon ice,” Danny grinned.
“Try me,” Cho said with a pleased laugh, hands frosted over and ready for Danny to charge him or send out a shock of lightning.
Danny couldn’t resist going for one more hit, one more pass. He had time to catch up to the others. So he lightning jumped forward and let everything slow. For the split second between here and there, the world moved at half-speed. There was Cho directly ahead of him, decked out in his usual gear—the navy duster, the black bodysuit and boots, the goggles, with a taunting smirk on his lips. Danny felt a thrill facing Cho that could not be reproduced with any other villain—his counterpart, his nemesis.
But just as Danny blinked from being across the parking lot to being right in front of Cho, his strength left him like a drop in blood sugar and he swooned. Falling into Cho, his vision swam around him with a wave of dizziness. He hadn’t realized how tired he was; he’d been having too much fun.
“Danny!” Lynn’s voice called distantly into his ear.
“Not how I imagined getting you in my arms someday, Sparky.”
Shit.Danny was helpless in the clutches of the enemy with Cho’s frigid hands clamping down on his arms. The horizon tilted, the ground coming up fast. He wondered if Cho had dropped him, but when he met the ground it was gentle and Cho’s hands didn’t feel as cold.
“How many times did you use that teleportation trick tonight? A dozen? More? Burnt out your charge, didn’t you?”
Danny couldn’t see clearly, couldn’t focus on anything but the sound of Cho’s voice, and Andre and Lynn louder in his ear desperate to know if he was okay.
Cho’s hands laid him out on the ground and he realized how vulnerable he was. Cho could do anything to him right now, had the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Zeus forever just like John had warned him about.
But as Danny laid there clinging to consciousness, waiting for Cho to do his worst, he didn’t even remove Danny’s mask.
“Another time, Sparky. Get your stamina up for our next date or I’ll be sorely disappointed.” A surprisingly warm hand lingered on Danny’s shoulder, and then Cho was gone.
ß
Later, when Andre and Lynn tracked Danny down and helped him back to the precinct, he’d sung Cho’s praises for showing such restraint, for following the rules they’d never really put in place. Surely the villainous Prometheus wasn’t all bad.
Danny had been such a fool back then.
“Did I see Stella on her way out?” John asked as he entered the office.
“Nice try, Dad. I know you called her.”
“Texted. Technically. So sue me, you got a free lunch out of the deal. Wish I could have joined you two, but I have a sad ham and cheese in plastic wrap with my name on it while we watch the surveillance. Ready to take a look?”
Danny stared at the mountain of paperwork he still had to go through, but if they caught something more useful on thefootage, it would be worth delaying the inevitable. “Sure. At least the time window’s short, right?”
It was. Only twenty-five minutes from when the labs were locked up and the technician returned to find the place emptied. There were cameras in every room, and initial glances through the footage were done on fast-forward to see if anything jumped out at them. The first camera they checked went dark about ten minutes after the labs closed.
“So they disabled the cameras,” John said as he rewound to before the camera went black and played it again at normal speed.
“Seems like it,” Danny said, “but how? No one was in the room, but it looked like someone reached out from behind the camera to disable it. Which would be impossible since it’s mounted to the wall.”
John frowned, selected another file from the computer, and opened it to watch the next camera. He sped it up to close to the time when the first camera had blacked out. It was a couple minutes later when this one did the same, but how it had been done looked identical.
