Gasping for breath, Danny rolled across the pavement in the aftermath, but he didn’t pause; he lurched to his feet and lightning jumped to where Thanatos had been thrown the other direction. The Dark Elemental’s shadows had dwindled but still churned around him like mist. Danny didn’t care. He fell upon Thanatos and yanked him up by the front of his suit.
The man laughed at Danny again—alwayslaughing—but Danny’s adrenaline was too high, his anger spiked, his mind empty of anything other than rage.
Lightning pulsed from his hands into Thanatos’s chest, and the Elemental in black seized with a jolt as if he’d been shocked with a defibrillator. He struggled for air, but it only made him laugh harder.
“Shutup!” Danny screamed and shocked him again. His lightning circulated through Thanatos like a Tesla coil going haywire, funneling into him over and over. He’d never discharged so much power before, and never into a person. Hehadn’t dared, always afraid he’d hurt someone if he let so much of himself go. Now, hurting Thanatos was all that mattered.
As the minutes passed, the man’s laughter slowly died and screams took its place instead. Danny liked those screams. He thrived off of them; they spurred him on to shock Thanatos again.Again.
He didn’t realize the police had arrived and that Andre and Lynn were the ones screaming now until thesmellhit him. Thanatos was long silent, still and limp in Danny’s hold. There were no more shadows, just the smoke rising off of Thanatos’s suit from how he was…cooking.
As Danny realized what had happened, he tasted bile in his throat, but when he turned to throw up, he could see officers headed his way, guns drawn, with hisfatheramong them, and he couldn’t let them see this. He couldn’t let his father see what he’d done after failing to save his mother. With Thanatos’s charred suit still clutched in Danny’s fingers, he lightning jumped to the morgue.
Lynn’s scream was much louder in person, her hands flying up to cover her mouth as Danny appeared in the middle of the main room with an electrocuted corpse in his lap. Andre threw up before Danny did. Lynn was used to bodies, but her expression… Danny couldn’t look at it.
He had to tear his mask off so he could breathe, and only then did he realize how much he was sobbing and retching and oh god,what had he done?
The only thing he managed to say, the only thing he could say was, “I couldn’t stop.”
ß
Mal stared. He hadn’t known. People had speculated that Thanatos was dead, but there had never been any confirmation. There had never been any recorded deaths at Zeus’s hands.
“You…”
“I killed him,” Danny said again. He’d looked far away after saying it the first time, like he was remembering the details of that night. “He didn’t leave. I didn’t run him out of the city. I killed him.”
Finally, Danny looked at Mal, though he had to see a giant blur for all the wetness in his eyes. Mal’s hands were motionless but remained steady on Danny’s skin.
“ZEUS KILLS SUPERVILLAIN doesn’t make a very good headline,” Danny said numbly. “Nobody outside my family or the team knows. We had to clean up the body afterward.”
Mal shivered as a chill ran through him, and thatneverhappened to him.
“He’d killed so many people, and he just keptlaughingabout it. When I got the upper hand, I put everything I had into that lightning, and finally…finally he stopped. But it wasn’t enough. I kept shocking him, over and over, electrocuting him until the air smelled like…” Danny’s nose wrinkled as if catching a whiff of that smell now. “He stopped laughing. Stopped screaming. Just laid theresmoking. We couldn’t even pull his mask off later, it was so fused to his skin. We still don’t know who he really was. But the worst part?”
Fresh tears pooled liberally as Danny’s gaze turned distant again. “Sometimes I don’t even care that I killed him. Sometimes I don’t feel anything. And then, when I think I’m okay, I’ll dream about thatsmelland the way Lynn and Andre looked at me…
“I’m supposed to be better than this, better than…” He sniffled pitifully. “I’ve never killed in the line of duty, but even if I had, this wasn’t like that. Now, I’m afraid I’ll lose it again and kill somebody else, and my friends keep trying to help butnothing helps.”
“Nothing?” Mal asked, squeezing Danny’s ankle until he looked at him.
What was he thinking, psychoanalyzing, trying to make Danny feel better because he couldn’t stand to see the kid in pain? It left him too open, his own mask falling away by telling Danny he preferred him without one.
He was risking too much, but he couldn’t leave Danny a whimpering mess. Dannywasbetter than this, better than him, better than what he thought of himself. Danny wanted to make a real difference, save lives, be a hero. People weren’tlikethat. Didn’t he understand how rare and precious he was in a world filled with monsters like Thanatos?
Danny had been a light for this city when it was plagued by darkness, and outside of his suit he offered a rare softness to Mal’s life too. That’s why Mal had anticipated snuggling last night, but Danny had proven to be the opposite of his expectations and curled into a ball on his side of the bed like he was trying to hide from the world. Now Mal knew why.
And it was all his fault.
No. Mal couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t give Danny that kind of power over him. But he couldn’t deny how much he wanted to say he was sorry for not being there like he promised.
“Danny…the reason I—”
“Shut up, Cho. Come here.”
Reaching for him, Danny tangled his fingers in the fabric of Mal’s zip-up and tugged downward to get him to obey. Mal wanted nothing more than to listen if that’s what Danny needed. After everything, he could offer that much.
Shifting on the sofa, Mal crawled up and over Danny’s legs to settle in his lap. He dipped down as Danny pulled him closer, descending slowly until their lips brushed. Danny tasted like cinnamon.
