The second passed. He lifted his right arm, fist squeezed tight, and aimed.
A piece of paper fluttered from her hold as she launched herself through the mirror at the back of the closet, in the same moment the beam of light blazed from the diode that had risen up from his flesh.
The beam struck the glass. It shattered, the impact sending shards flying across the carpet, into the clothes on the racks, some no doubt landing inside his dads’ neatly organized shoes.
Adrian cursed and, for good measure, threw the poker, too. It hit the backing of the mirror, puncturing a hole through it and sticking there.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he muttered, letting the laser diode sink back into his skin as he ran both hands over his hair. Stomping into the closet, glad to be wearing shoes as bits of glass crunched beneath him, he wrapped his hand around the weapon, but then thought better of it. This would at least explain how the glass had broken.
Huffing, he stooped and picked up the piece of paper Nightmare had dropped, wondering what could have brought her snooping through their house again. He expected blueprints of headquarters or research findings on Agent N or a list of home addresses of all the Renegades currently active in the organization.
Just the thought of the mirror walker knowing where his friends lived made him shudder.
But when he flipped the paper over, he was surprised to see that it wasn’t any of those things.
It was a drawing.
He squinted at the illustration, done in a combination of markers and crayon. It was one of his childhood conceptions of the monster who had, for years, haunted his nightmares. His mom had told him that one way to combat bad dreams was to draw them out—that doing so could teach your brain that they were only figments of your imagination, and nothing to be afraid of.
He had drawn the monster more times than he could count, and it had never made the nightmares any less real.
Crushing the drawing in his fist, he retraced his steps back to the office to see if he could figure out what else Nightmare had taken. Surely this drawing was a fluke—something she just happened to grab along with whatever prize she had really come for.
But all the drawers in the desk and filing cabinet were closed. The stacks of papers neat and tidy. Nothing pulled from the bookshelves.
Nothing, that is, except a single box that usually lived tucked away in the corner of the bottom shelf, but now sat on the carpet. Adrian knelt beside it and began rummaging through the papers that remained, all drawings from his childhood that his dads had cared enough to save.
Why would Nightmare care about these?
He reached the bottom of the box, and a thought struck him.
A terrible thought.
His palms grew sweaty as he flipped through the papers again, hoping he was mistaken. Hoping maybe they were kept somewhere else, that they’d never been in this box to begin with.
But no—they were gone.
Nightmare had taken his comics. The three issues of Rebel Z he’d made as a kid, about a boy who develops superpowers after a mad scientist tampers with him, and later uses those powers to transform himself into a powerful hero.
The Sentinel.
Adrian sat back on his heels, massaging his forehead. She knew. He couldn’t begin to guess how she knew, but she would have evidence enough in the pages of those comics. Enough to try to blackmail him, or out his secret to the world.
In the midst of the dread that clawed its way into Adrian’s thoughts, something else occurred to him.
Standing, he considered the open door to the office. She must have been hiding behind it. He must have passed right by her when he’d rushed to the window.
Close enough to touch.
His gaffe was so obvious in hindsight that thinking of his vulnerability made him slightly nauseous. In all the times he’d fought against Nightmare, never once could he recall her missing an opportunity to disarm her opponent, to get the upper hand.
And this time, she’d definitely had an opportunity to render him unconscious.
So then … why hadn’t Nightmare taken it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BEFORE SHE WAS arrested, Nova had felt like every time she stepped into Renegade Headquarters, she could be walking to her doom. Surely they had figured her out by now. Surely this time they would be waiting to put her in chains.