Tower? I’m a sucker for secret basements.” He looked around the room. “Which is why this one is such a disappointment.”
“And he saw how much Nick wanted it,” Gibby said. “Especially when it started out being about Shadow Star.” She grinned. “Remember the mugging in the alley?”
Nick winced. “Not my proudest moment.”
“He would have made Nick an Extraordinary,” Seth said, sounding grumpy. “At least temporarily. Give him a taste of power, get him hooked. And then he’d tell Nicky who he was. Who I was. He would’ve turned Nick against me. Convinced him that I was the villain all this time, that I needed to be stopped. He knew I’d follow you to Burke Tower. That whole scene was staged. Just like the apartment building.”
“I wouldn’t have done that,” Nick snapped. “It wouldn’t have worked.” Suddenly unsure, he added, “Right?”
Except it almost had. If Pyro Storm hadn’t shown up when he did, wouldn’t Nick have done exactly what Owen wanted him to do? Taken a pill. Become something else. Who knew what would have happened then?
“It doesn’t matter,” Seth said. “Not anymore. You trust me?”
“Yes,” Nick said immediately. Because of course he did.
“And you know Owen is the bad guy.”
“Yeah.”
“Which means he has to be stopped.”
Nick blanched. “Are you—are you going to kill him?”
“No,” Bob said sharply. “We don’t kill people. Ever. We have to find a way to subdue him. He needs help, Nick. More than anything. We’ve waited this long because we were so scared Seth would be unmasked alongside him. But now we need to take that chance. If it happens, we’ll deal with it then, as a family. The world needs to know who Shadow Star is and what he’s capable of. He can’t hide.”
“How?” Nick asked.
Silence again.
“Seriously? You guys don’t have a plan? Any plan? You have a Systemax computer in a basement of a row house and no plan?”
“Sometimes we have muffins when Seth gets back,” Gibby said. “They’re pretty good. Martha makes them.”
Nick threw his hands in the air. “Useless. All of you. You’re lucky I know everything there is to know about being an Extraordinary. I’m pretty much an expert. I write fanfiction, after all. Thank god you have me.”
“Fanfiction?” Bob asked, brow furrowed. “What is … that?”
“I don’t have time to answer your ridiculous questions right now,” Nick told him. “I have a city to save. Move, Martha. I need the computer.”
Martha glared at him.
“Oh, crap. Sorry. Move, please? Ma’am? Please?”
Martha rose from the chair. “Just because a villain is trying to take over Nova City doesn’t mean we forget our manners.”
Nick took her place, pulling the keyboard toward him. Next to it sat a small mic on a stand. The computer screen already showed a map of Nova City, a blinking light somewhere near Burke Tower. “Is that Seth?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “Tracker. Figured it’d be best in case something happened. He’s been staying in the one place we thought Owen would come back to.”
“Good,” Nick muttered. “Okay, so in the outline of my real-person fanfiction, This Is Where We Scorch the Earth, there was going to be a point where I—I mean Nate Belen—was going to help—”
“Oh my god,” Gibby mumbled. “We’re doomed.”
“—was going to help Shadow Star defeat Pyro Storm before they lived happily ever after.”
“What is he talking about?” Bob asked Martha.
“I have absolutely no idea,” she replied. “I think it’s a Myspace thing.”
“What’s Myspace?”
“It’s like Ask Jeeves.”
Nick felt like he was dying a little inside, but he pushed on. “Part of the plot would have eventually led to Pyro Storm capturing Shadow Star, and I—Nate would have needed to come save him.”
“I can’t believe you made Seth beta read this,” Jazz said. “In hindsight, that was a terrible decision.”
“In hindsight, many decisions are bad,” Nick said through gritted teeth. “But we don’t dwell on them because they help us to grow as people and learn from our mistakes.”
“Huh. So, you must have done a lot of growing lately—”
“Gibby!”
“Right. Shutting up now.”
If they survived whatever came next, Nick was going to need to look into getting new people for their superhero backup team. The current roster was severely lacking. “As I was saying, Pyro Storm was going to capture Shadow Star, and Nate would have come in to save the day. But seeing as how everything I’ve ever known is a lie, we don’t need to worry about the whole saving thing and focus on the part where we capture Shadow Star instead.”