Page 16 of Lovesick Gods (Lovesick #1)

Danny had dismissed the concerns. He couldn’t imagine Cho ever having reason to do that.

He’d turn a situation to his advantage whenever he could, but there was no future Danny could imagine where losing the unspoken truce between them would ever be beneficial to Cho.

He enjoyed the chase more than any of the things he stole.

So no, Danny didn’t expect an ambush or betrayal to be the downfall of their common dance. He saw opportunity. He saw all the good in Cho that proved he could be so much more than a crook.

“That the best you got, Sparky? Figured you’d be quicker on your toes,” Cho said, icing the ground in front of Danny, but that was an old trick by now and Danny knew to dash around it and keep his feet on solid ground before he dove into another lightning jump.

“Helios and Gaia are already long gone with the haul while you’re wasting time with me. ”

They were in the warehouse district where the Titans had interfered with an entirely different heist Danny had been trying to stop.

One of the local mafia groups had stolen an armored car.

Just as they’d turned onto what appeared to be an abandoned street with Danny ready to jump in and save the day, Prometheus and his team had appeared to intercept.

By the time Danny beat down all of the mafia goons, Helios and Gaia were driving off with the truck, while Cho hung back to keep Danny from following.

There was no one around save a few unconscious men almost a full block away now since Danny and Cho had moved to an empty parking lot during the fight.

It was late, dark, a handful of street lights illuminating the area in this part of town.

They had the whole parking lot and several city blocks to themselves.

It was everything Danny would have asked for after a busy work week.

Coming out of his lightning jump behind Cho, he was forced to dart left when the Titan sensed his presence and turned around with a spray of cold.

“Getting nearsighted in your old age,” Danny teased him, panting for breath from the exhaustion he kept dismissing, “because so far you’ve failed to land a single hit.”

Cho scowled from behind his goggles. “Am I keeping you up past your curfew, kid ? Just how young are you under that mask? Still living at home?” He blasted a lamp post, and the metal froze solid, creaked and teetered, and eventually toppled, forcing Danny to lightning jump again to stay out of its path.

At least it gave him a moment to hide that Cho had guessed right. Danny wasn’t that young, but he did still live with his parents. It was convenience not immaturity!

“Hurry it up, Danny, you’re letting Helios and Gaia get away!” Andre chided him over the comms.

Danny had nearly forgotten he wasn’t fully alone out here. He couldn’t play tag with Cho all night. He just had to get in a good hit and he could lightning jump after the truck.

“Working on it,” he said and turned to face Cho again. “Sorry to cut this short, Ice Man, but you’re slowing me down.”

“So frigid, Sparky?” Cho scoffed. “And here I thought we had a rapport going.”

“Maybe next time I’ll put you on ice,” Danny grinned.

“Try me,” Cho said with a pleased laugh, hands frosted over and ready for Danny to charge him or send out a shock of lightning.

Danny couldn’t resist going for one more hit, one more pass.

He had time to catch up to the others. So he lightning jumped forward and let everything slow.

For the split second between here and there, the world moved at half-speed.

There was Cho directly ahead of him, decked out in his usual gear—the navy duster, the black bodysuit and boots, the goggles, with a taunting smirk on his lips.

Danny felt a thrill facing Cho that could not be reproduced with any other villain—his counterpart, his nemesis.

But just as Danny blinked from being across the parking lot to being right in front of Cho, his strength left him like a drop in blood sugar and he swooned. Falling into Cho, his vision swam around him with a wave of dizziness. He hadn’t realized how tired he was; he’d been having too much fun.

“Danny!” Lynn’s voice called distantly into his ear.

“Not how I imagined getting you in my arms someday, Sparky.”

Shit. Danny was helpless in the clutches of the enemy with Cho’s frigid hands clamping down on his arms. The horizon tilted, the ground coming up fast. He wondered if Cho had dropped him, but when he met the ground it was gentle and Cho’s hands didn’t feel as cold.

“How many times did you use that teleportation trick tonight? A dozen? More? Burnt out your charge, didn’t you?”

Danny couldn’t see clearly, couldn’t focus on anything but the sound of Cho’s voice, and Andre and Lynn louder in his ear desperate to know if he was okay.

Cho’s hands laid him out on the ground and he realized how vulnerable he was. Cho could do anything to him right now, had the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Zeus forever just like John had warned him about.

But as Danny laid there clinging to consciousness, waiting for Cho to do his worst, he didn’t even remove Danny’s mask.

“Another time, Sparky. Get your stamina up for our next date or I’ll be sorely disappointed.” A surprisingly warm hand lingered on Danny’s shoulder, and then Cho was gone.

?

Later, when Andre and Lynn tracked Danny down and helped him back to the precinct, he’d sung Cho’s praises for showing such restraint, for following the rules they’d never really put in place. Surely the villainous Prometheus wasn’t all bad.

Danny had been such a fool back then.

“Did I see Stella on her way out?” John asked as he entered the office.

“Nice try, Dad. I know you called her.”

“Texted. Technically. So sue me, you got a free lunch out of the deal. Wish I could have joined you two, but I have a sad ham and cheese in plastic wrap with my name on it while we watch the surveillance. Ready to take a look?”

Danny stared at the mountain of paperwork he still had to go through, but if they caught something more useful on the footage, it would be worth delaying the inevitable. “Sure. At least the time window’s short, right?”

It was. Only twenty-five minutes from when the labs were locked up and the technician returned to find the place emptied.

There were cameras in every room, and initial glances through the footage were done on fast-forward to see if anything jumped out at them.

The first camera they checked went dark about ten minutes after the labs closed.

“So they disabled the cameras,” John said as he rewound to before the camera went black and played it again at normal speed.

“Seems like it,” Danny said, “but how? No one was in the room, but it looked like someone reached out from behind the camera to disable it. Which would be impossible since it’s mounted to the wall.”

John frowned, selected another file from the computer, and opened it to watch the next camera. He sped it up to close to the time when the first camera had blacked out. It was a couple minutes later when this one did the same, but how it had been done looked identical.

“Or from underneath?” John said. It didn’t look like an electrical surge, more like something covered the lens.

“Or from out of the lens itself,” Danny shook his head with a laugh— that would be scary. “Maybe they had some sort of device, something too small for the cameras to pick up on when it entered the room.”

They finished going through the other recordings.

There was a definite cycle to the rooms, a pattern of one after the other, the cameras going dark with a couple minutes of leeway time in between, meaning there was likely not a dozen people involved, but nothing explained how the items had been taken from the labs in so short a time.

Danny sighed. “Unless we get a line on something that makes sense, this has to be the work of an Elemental, which means Zeus is going to be busy.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” John said.

“It’s okay, Dad. Nothing I’m not used to, right?”

?

Despite the long day at work, Danny looked forward to his ‘date night’ with Andre.

Andre had even made walking tacos for the occasion with a crockpot and all the fixings laid out in the room they’d turned into a working kitchen, complete with mini fridge.

It had originally been a dressing area that connected to the bathrooms and showers, so it sported the most outlets and had a long sink and counter space.

Filling his plate with no less than four bags of Doritos singles, crushed up to turn the chips inside into pieces, Danny loaded them with taco filling. He’d supplied several two-liter bottles of soda to keep them going throughout the evening.

“My mother would call sacrilege on this entire meal, just so you know,” Andre said as they settled in the main room of the morgue with their gaming laptops propped up on Andre’s work station.

“I want your mother’s cooking in the worst way,” Danny said even as he dug into his first taco with a plastic fork.

“Pick a night to crash family dinner, bro. My mom loves you. More than she loves me, I think.”

The smile that had started to form on Danny’s face faltered. The mention of family dinner soured his stomach. He was glad he had an excuse to not be at home tomorrow night. Seeing Cho would be much more fulfilling than forcing small talk with Joey.

“Let’s start with a run on the first level heist,” Andre said, tucking into his food even as he pulled up his character from GTA.

The main game had set characters for the story mode, but the Heists co-op allowed for players to create their own characters.

Andre and Danny both had avatars that basically looked like their real selves, only VaughnDamme was covered in tattoos and wore sunglasses, and NerdsDoItBetter had a T-shirt with lightning on it and a leather jacket.