Page 49 of Lovesick Titan (Lovesick #2)

Catching Mal’s anxious gaze, Danny smiled as genuinely as he could.

He didn’t care whether his father approved of them.

Nothing could ruin that Mal was here, that he’d said things didn’t have to end between them.

They could start again. Once Ludgate was taken care of, they could start again without any lies or disasters looming.

That’s all Danny wanted. The rest, the real healing, could come slowly.

He allowed Lynn to settle him back on the bed, sitting this time, not lying down, if only to briefly appease everyone, but he was not staying out of the fight. He was done hiding, done running from the responsibilities that lay ahead.

“Okay,” Andre moved in beside him despite Lynn’s scoff that he could wait fifteen minutes for her to finish her check, “Joey is a certified genius and definitely the new team mascot. We have a lot to fill you in on.”

R

“You found a teal contact?” Danny said after Andre had explained events since last night.

“I didn’t know what it was at first, not ‘til Cho mentioned Ludgate having one teal eye and one grey.”

“He has heterochromia?”

“There have only been cases of that happening among leaning people, not Elementals,” Lynn said. “It’s possible, but more likely he’s a Metal Elemental instead of Light and didn’t want anyone to know.”

“His mother was Metal leaning,” Danny recalled.

“Maybe he forged his records,” Priestly said, hanging by the door as if uncomfortable getting too close to Team Zeus, despite working with Andre all night. “People don’t care as much if someone’s leaning is listed wrong. It’s only a felony if you Awaken and don’t update your status.”

“None of that matters now,” Danny said. “So he has a different element than we thought. We still don’t know what his power is. We should focus on what we do know—that he uses mirrors to travel. His actual powers don’t matter as long as we can trap him and keep him from escaping.”

“And on that note…we built the Miasma Maker into Prometheus and Helios’s amplifiers,” Andre said, nodding with camaraderie at Priestly. “Once we realized our technologies were working on similar principles, it was easy, but Joey was the one who suggested it.”

“This way they’ll know exactly how far the radiuses extend,” Priestly said.

“But won’t they need their eyewear for that?” Danny asked. Mal hadn’t been wearing any lenses last night; Ludgate might have been able to use the reflections against them.

“Notice anything?” Priestly tapped the side of his glasses—his glasses , Danny realized with a jolt—with lenses that, despite the Miasma Maker being on, weren’t fogged over. “The trick is for them to not be reflective. I can tweak the goggles and mask to be the same by tomorrow easy.”

“Then we, what?” Finally allowed to hop down from the hospital bed, Danny eyed his friends skeptically. “Are we supposed to get into the mirror world and turn on one of the fields?”

“That’s a big no,” Andre said, and Priestly likewise shook his head. “We don’t know what this mirror world is . If you cut off the reflections while inside it, you could seal yourself in there forever.”

“Or cease to exist,” Priestly added matter-of-factly.

“Okay…so the amplifiers are for after we get Ludgate into the real world,” Danny said, trying not to feel nauseous over the many unknowns to this plan. “Meaning, we start with Joey’s and my idea, create a fun house out of town too tempting for Ludgate to resist—”

“ While the Miasma Maker is on,” Andre interrupted.

“And when we’re ready, we turn it off,” Danny said, understanding where they were going now.

“Ludgate shows up, we close off mirrors as needed to limit where he can go with Mal and Helios’s amplifiers, then we just need to get him out of the mirror world before we seal him off for good.

It’s perfect.” He smiled at the engineer and technician before him.

“So how do we lure him out of the mirror world?”

Andre and Priestly shared a pinched expression before both shrugged.

“We’re still working on that part,” Priestly said.

Danny’s mind spun with the many moving parts and team effort that would be required to pull this off.

The plan wasn’t foolproof, but they were working on it— together .

Team Zeus and the Titans, even Captain Shan and a few too many civilians.

A sense of liberation accompanied the culmination of this support, even with Ludgate still on the loose.

Released from Lynn’s care, Danny scarfed down the quick breakfast she handed him, feeling better by the minute just from a few normal calories hitting his stomach that an IV could not replicate.

Through the door out into the main room he saw John talking with Shan again.

Andre and Priestly had fallen into a tense discussion about ways they could trick Ludgate out of the mirror world, while Lynn busied herself with Danny’s test results, muttering about how miraculous his metabolism was .

It was only then, as Danny was finally ready to take a shower, brush his teeth, and change into fresh clothes to feel something like a normal person again, that he realized Mal had left some time ago and was nowhere to be seen.