Page 42 of Lovesick Titan (Lovesick #2)

Stepping away, Mal let his hand drop from being pressed to the wall beside Stantz’s head but kept his other hand forward. “Consider yourself lucky he’s moved onto bigger and better targets. Now…anything else you never shared with the police?”

Stantz continued to stare at the door. When he didn’t answer, Mal let the frost creep out to stress his impatience, and Stantz snapped to attention. “N-No…I swear. Everything else, the police know. It just didn’t seem important to mention the mirrors.”

“Well, that’s what OCPD gets for not divulging their new Elemental of the week’s power set to the public, isn’t it?

Might have changed your tune if you’d heard the theories.

Of course, Ludgate says his power isn’t to travel through mirrors, which means he did figure it out before the explosion.

His powers are what ground him…” Mal let his words drift as he considered what that might mean.

Ludgate had said as much himself, told Danny his power was how he could survive in the mirror world, not how he got there, and now Mal knew how deeply Ludgate’s obsession with mirrors went—even if he didn’t know why .

What he needed to find out was what ‘grounding him’ entailed and how to disrupt it.

“Are you gonna k-kill me?” Stantz asked, bringing Mal back to the moment.

Looking the man up and down, Mal figured he might have a few skeletons hidden somewhere, but likely benign ones, so he held his gaze a moment, then pulled his hand back.

“Much obliged for your time, Mr. Stantz,” he said, patting the man’s shoulder.

“But…” he added as his friendly pat turned into an icy grip, “if I think of anything else or find out you were keeping something from me…”

Stantz gulped.

“…I’ll be back.”

R

Mal found Priestly at the computer when he returned to the safe house, with Dom and Lucy bookending him like sentinels over his shoulders .

“Oz, join us now,” Mal called over the comms. His voice made all of them turn, and their expressions were not favorable.

Oz popped in between Mal and the group at the computer.

“Problem?” Mal prompted them.

Oz seemed confused, but Lucy, Dom, and Priestly exchanged pinched expressions.

They quickly reported that none of them had anything new to share about the Grant family or Rivers and Vaughn, though Priestly had a line on Danny’s location—currently eating lunch at a burger joint, which in and of itself wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

“When he’s off the grid—and this is Zeus we’re talking about, so he’s usually off—I’m guessing he’s at his hideout.

When he’s out and about, he just seems to be…

enjoying himself. And he was definitely enjoying himself last night.

” Eyeing Mal meaningfully, Priestly turned back to the computer, which everyone gathered around.

He brought up surveillance footage from several businesses around Olympus City after closing time last night.

Hanson’s Jewelers. A credit union. A goddamn dollar store —which in all fairness did tend to house a lot of cash.

All of them showed Zeus—caught clearly on each location’s camera just minutes apart even though they were blocks away from each other— stealing everything he could get his leather-clad hands on.

The sight of it shook Mal; even though he’d already known something was seriously wrong with Danny, seeing him brought to this —Ludgate was going to pay.

He had to be controlling Danny somehow. At least he could have had Danny rob those places stealthily.

Mal would be lying if he said he’d never envisioned what it might be like to have Danny on his side for a heist, but Ludgate wanted Danny caught on camera. Wanted him discredited. Ruined.

What could he possibly have done to get Danny to do all this? Had he really twisted his mind into that of his dark reflection?

“And these are just the three that recorded him, though they haven’t shared the footage with anyone other than the OCPD,” Priestly said.

“Official reports state that none of the owners think it’s really Zeus, must be an imposter, but it’s only a matter of time before they realize it’s him and this hits the press, especially if he keeps at it tonight. ”

“We don’t have enough to go on.” Mal stepped away, beginning a slow pace in front of the others. “Our powers can preoccupy Zeus, but if he’s unchecked, he could be out for blood. He’d be too dangerous to face head on.”

“But if we leave it, if we wait and try to get more intel on Ludgate first…” Lucy said.

“Danny’s friends and family could end up dead and Ludgate wins,” Mal finished.

He stopped and turned to his crew. There were others he could call in to increase their number but no one else he trusted, not with a rescue mission.

Not with Danny’s identity. “We have to risk it. Have to reveal Ludgate is behind everything and get his influence away from Zeus.”

“How?” Dom asked, crossing her arms defiantly, much as she hardly looked ready to call it quits.

“We need help to take Ludgate down for good, and there’s only one place all our missing people could be.”

“Zeus’s hideout,” Oz said. “Do you know where it is?”

“No, but I have an idea how to find out. Still need someone on the streets, and you’re our best chance for backup if things go awry. You’ll continue to patrol the neighborhood, but be ready on the comms if we need you.”

Oz nodded.

Frowning, Mal considered their next course of action.

“We have to locate the hideout and keep an eye out for Ludgate and Zeus at all times. There’s no way to know where Ludgate might be looking through at any given moment, no matter how carefully we’ve checked for reflections, and we have no idea how to neutralize him if he shows up. ”

“Actually,” Priestly brightened as he swiveled his chair back to the computer, “I may be able to help with that. Remember your other directive for me, boss? I accessed Zeus’s home computer while I was inside the house.

Found some interesting tech on there to mask reflections.

It wasn’t just the outside windows that were frosted. ‘Hades-proof’ is right.”

“Can you make it portable?” Mal crossed back to him, and Oz, Dom, and Lucy backed away to let him through.

Complicated schematics and coding appeared on the screen.

“Not without time we don’t have. Zeus’s team was probably working on the same thing.

But if you give me an hour,” Priestly glanced at Mal over his shoulder, “I might be able to make it so you can pop a flash drive into any computer and at least seal off a single room. Could keep the safe house more…well, safe, and—”

“No. Do it. But I’ll be taking the program with me.”

“Where?” Lucy asked.

A plan—a solid, working, improbable but entirely possible plan—started to form in Mal’s mind.

“Dom, Lucy, get your gear. Oz, get back on patrol. As soon as Priestly has something I can take with me,” he looked to each of them and felt his confidence returning, “I have one more stop to make before we take this fight to the source.”