“Danny, don’t listen to him—” she’d said but cried out before she could finish.
Danny had barely explained the situation to his father, Andre, and Lynn, before he raced out of the precinct. His father’s eyes had looked so panicked. Danny couldn’t lose somebody else—he couldn’t lose anybody else.Not his mother. This had to end tonight, but he’d failed to stop Thanatos so many times. He needed Cho’s help.
Where was he?
The sirens in the distance were growing closer as Danny stood before Thanatos, who barred entrance into the power station. He was up in the air a full story high with his shadows whipping about, maddening and menacing.
The power station was coal-fired with a steam boiler. The steam drove the turbine and generator to produce electricity for half of Olympus City. Gas waste alone could be dangerous if tampered with, but Thanatos’s shadows were infecting more than just that. Danny could see them coiling around the smokestacks. It painted such a bleak picture juxtaposed against the bright colors of the circus in town set up just outside the power station’s perimeter like some awful parody of a horror movie.
“Do you really want to take yourself out too?!” Danny cried up at him. “You’re putting the entire city at risk!”
“Explosions can be contained,” Thanatos said, a reverberation in his voice to mask the sound of it, like he was speaking through a modulator. Maybe he was. Maybe it was simply part of his powers. “Crippling the city for days—weeks—by taking out this power station is just a bonus, Zeus. Losing your partner, why...that made things interesting, didn’t it? It birthed you. It started all of our fun. What will losing your mother do, I wonder?”
His shadows were expanding, covering the entire building. Danny had to act. He couldn’t lightning jump into the air, he needed solid ground, but a bolt of lightning discharged towardthe power station could be just as dangerous as Thanatos’s shadows. He needed Cho’s ice.
“Please, don’t do this,” Danny said, hands held up, hoping he could stall, that Cho would show up in the nick of time and maybe this was all part of some grand plan Danny would thank him for later. “If you want me, I’m right here. Just let these people go.”
“Oh, I want you, Zeus. I want you to feel the strength of Death before it comes for you too.”
“Danny, you have to take the shot,” Andre spoke over the comms. “You have to risk it. His shadows, the pressure he’s building in the generator…”
“You can do it, Danny,” Lynn added in support.
The two of them had been with him since the beginning. Danny thought Cho would be here tonight too, but now he knew his nemesis wasn’t coming.
Summoning his lightning, he felt it spark from the coil in his gut and spread outward like a shockwave. His white and yellow suit lit up the dark of the night, electricity arching further from his body, higher,stronger. Danny was going to hit Thanatos with everything he had.
“That’s what makes you so pathetic, Zeus. You think Death will wait for you,” Thanatos said with a subtle flick of his wrist.
The explosion was quieter than Danny expected. Contained inside the building by Thanatos’s shadows, it was muffled, the way movies sometimes show an explosion in space. But the eruption still came—beforeDanny surged his lightning forward.
The windows along the top floor of the station blew out, and Danny could see the fire inside. In moments, every building and street lamp went dark for blocks on end like a great blanket had been dropped and the only light left was from the flames and Danny’s sparks.
When his powers diminished in his shock and the sound of the muted blast faded, all Danny could hear wasscreaming.
He tried to lightning jump inside, but he’d never been in the power station before; he didn’t have a clear enough picture in his head to reach it. He bounced off of Thanatos’s shadows and fell to the ground practically at the other Elemental’s feet.
“Danny!” Andre and Lynn called out, but Danny barely heard them. He had to get inside. The police sirens were getting closer. His father would be there soon. Danny had to save his mother! The screams were already fading…
“Do you know what that sort of explosion does to a person?” Thanatos said as he descended from his towering height, the shadows spiraling around him like tentacles as his feet gently touched down. “The heat. The intensity.”
Danny snarled and blasted fresh bolts of lightning from his hands, but Thanatos’s shadows deflected them like annoying gnats.
“Danny, the police are almost there,” Lynn said. “We still have power at the precinct. Just hold on.”
Danny didn’t want tohold on. He wanted to get his hands on Thanatos and slam him into the pavement. Lightning jumping forward, he dug his fingers into Thanatos’s black and purple suit, but the shadows dove at him like an extra pair of hands and pried his arms back.
Thanatos laughed at him. “There’s nothing left to save, Zeus. Whatever might be clinging to life in there is too busy choking on smoke.”
Danny lunged at him with a broken howl ripping from his throat even as he was held in place. His lightning snapped around him like a whip, refusing to be snuffed out by the shadows he’d been chasing and fighting andhatingfor six long months since they’d first choked Rick from the inside out. And now Danny’s mother…
With a flinch, Thanatos stepped back as if the electricity had finally started to hurt him. Danny couldn’t hold back. Couldn’t concede. Couldn’t stop no matter what.
“Yes,” Thanatos laughed louder as Danny crackled and glowed with his power, summoning all of the lightning that had diminished before. “Isn’t the darkness beautiful, Zeus? Can you see it now? The power that Death brings out in all of us!”
Howling once more, Danny’s vision turned gold from the sparks flowing through him. Thanatos’s shadows tried to beat his lightning back, to subdue it like so many times before, but for every inch the darkness overtook, the brightness of Danny’s lightning lashed back with a vengeance.
It was so bright in the darkness with half the city powerless, Danny could only see Thanatos’s silhouette. He kept pulsing brighter,brighter, until his lightning exploded out of him with a blast much louder than the power station explosion.
