as they turned the corner and hurried down the next street, then the next one. The slightly longer route would lead to his apartment.
Once around the third corner, he relaxed a bit and looked at the man he’d rescued.
Yes, he thought with an internal grin. He had rescued someone.
Growing up with a power was sort of a lesson in humility. Of course everyone knew about the Royals and their powers. They would come in with their abilities and singlehandedly lift that truck off the car to save the little old lady. Or they would run into that burning building and rescue the five-year-old twins… then go back into the building for the mother cat and her four kittens.
They were Royal.
They had powers.
They could save people.
And here was Derek, invisible most of the time. He had an obvious power. He was unmistakably related to the royal family somehow. And he couldn’t even stop bike couriers from running into him.
When people found out he was invisible, they invariably had the same reaction. “So you’re a Royal?”
No. He was just Derek Carson. People would be confused. Then comprehension would come over their face.
“Ohh. So you’re like, not Royal? Who’s your real dad? Is it King Adélard?” They always wanted his father to be a king. As if somehow being the illegitimate child of the now-deceased king was cool.
Also, because he wasn’t a Royal with a title, he wasn’t allowed to use his power. The laws of North and South Abarra were very strict and supo powers were enforced by the Ministry of Powers. If you were deemed worthy, one of the Royals would give you a moniker to allow you to use your powers for good. Without that moniker, he was banned from using it. Not that he successfully used them anyway.
His mother had powers too, but thankfully powers that could be easily hidden in society. If you were a would-be mugger who was tasered by a woman using only her hands, you weren’t going around and telling people or calling the police. Peggy Marine had grown up in normal society without anyone knowing apart from her closest family. Peggy and Rosemary had been unknown to the Municipal until Peggy contacted them in the late ’80s, looking for a job.
A young Derek had once told his mother that she should call herself Tasergirl.
She’d laughed. “We didn’t have tasers in our day, or at least we didn’t call them that. We called them stun guns. I would’ve been Peggy Stun Gun. That doesn’t sound that much fun.”
Rosemary Brown had also had powers. It was a weird one—anti-gravity. Rosemary had the ability to touch an item and make it weightless, as long as she was touching it. Great for moving furniture around.
But Derek? He was just a wimp who couldn’t even appear in public. He couldn’t fly or zap or shock or lift. He’d never rescued a kitten or a speeding train full of passengers. He’d never stopped a rampaging crowd of people, or helped it rain on dry land, or put out a fire without using an extinguisher.
Despite loving history and everything that lived over a hundred years ago, he’d never even been inside historic Castle Abarra where Queen Maialen, the Queen of South Abarra, lived. There were tours to go on, but Derek never could do those sorts of thing. He’d simply gazed from afar at their wealth and their happiness and their heroisms, and felt envy. If things had only been a little different in his life, and if only a wedding certificate had existed, he could now be a Royal.
But no—Derek was an archivist for a secret organization who tiptoed invisibly down streets in the dark… and who had now rescued a man from being shot.
“What’s your name?” he asked as they finally turned the corner to his street.
“Sam. Sam Jeffries.”
The street was lit brightly with street lamps. It was one of the reasons he liked his apartment here—no dark alleys for muggers to hide in. “This is where I live, Sam. Would you—” Derek had never invited a man up to his apartment before. When this was all over, this moment was going to fuel his fantasies for weeks. The possibility that Sam would come up with him… see him for the first time… fall in love… and they’d fall passionately on his bed and make love.
“Would you like to come up to my apartment? You can clean up there and….”
… make mad passionate love to me the moment you