Page 59 of Lovesick Titan (Lovesick #2)

Before Mal even noticed that Ludgate’s hand had breached the surface of a mirror, Danny lightning jumped forward to grab it.

His speed meant he almost got a hold of the bastard, but Ludgate could play bait too.

Slamming into the hard surface seconds later, Danny caused a large crack to form up the middle of the mirror.

Ludgate’s laughter ricocheted to taunt him. “Same tired tricks as last time, Zeus? Don’t you ever learn?” His hands darted out of the mirrors on either side of Danny to grab his arms, pulling taut and stretching him against the cracked surface like he meant to split Danny in two.

Mal and Dom jolted forward, but they had nothing to shoot at other than the mirrors.

Ludgate’s hands had disappeared into the reflections, taking Danny’s along with them.

Firing into the open reflections might cause Ludgate to retreat, and Mal shuddered at the thought of Danny’s hands being severed.

Crying out at the strain of his stretched arms, Danny was at his breaking point, but Mal held a hand out to keep Dom back.

Smart. Careful. Patient.

“Come out and face us, Hades!” he called to mollify Ludgate. “If you’re really worthy of owning this city!”

“Come out?” Ludgate scoffed. “Where’d the fun be in that?”

The whine that left Danny when Ludgate released him proved both his pain and relief at being let go. He sagged further against the broken mirror, drawing his arms into his body. Mal and Dom hooked him around the waist to pull him back into the center of the fun house.

“You okay?” Mal whispered.

Danny cringed as he held his shoulders, but when he ducked his head toward Mal…he winked. Looking over Danny’s shoulder at Dom, Mal nodded.

“Now,” Andre said, seeing the signal.

Together, Mal and Dom turned their respective fields on, and in the moment that the opposing temperatures collided, there was an eruption of snowfall.

The ceiling closed them in, but it was high, high enough for just this purpose.

If they were right, there should always be at least one active mirror whenever Ludgate used his tech.

Mal and Dom turned the fields off as soon as the snow began, and as it drifted toward the ground, much of it landed on the surfaces of the mirrors and stuck there, either building up or starting to melt. But for any mirror that was an open gateway, the snow should drift straight in.

“Pretty backdrop, Prometheus,” Ludgate jeered, “but hardly enough to save you or Zeus’s father.”

Ignoring him, Mal scanned for the mirror they needed.

There .

In the corner near the exit with its strip of light from outside, the snow wasn’t collecting on the surface of the mirror, but disappearing into it.

Reaching for Danny’s hand, Mal squeezed and tugged the kid his direction, just as the fun house reflections coalesced into a single image like a wall of monitors building a mosaic, with Ludgate and Danny’s father centered in front of them.

Ludgate held a shard of glass in his hand, raised up, above John’s back, whose head was still covered with Danny’s jacket. He had no idea…

Most people would have been trapped by their fear and Ludgate’s threats, but Danny turned to Mal, trusting in his firm grip.

“Now we end this,” Ludgate said.

“Yeah,” Danny nodded, not looking away from Mal, “we do.”

He had Mal around the waist the next second, had Dom somehow too, and with a jerk of motion faster than any eye could blink, Mal’s stomach got left behind where he’d been standing as he suddenly found himself somewhere else.

They hadn’t lightning jumped to wherever Ludgate stood, but they were inside the mirror world, and it was not what Mal had expected.

The landscape glittered like stars with countless mirrors in an indecipherable pattern stretching further into infinity than what the fun house created, only these mirrors weren’t reflections; they were all real.

Standing equal in height and width, some below them, some above, the mirrors existed in every direction, with a floor and ceiling made of pure black that gave no sense of stability even though Mal could feel something solid beneath his feet.

It was jarring, nauseating. But there wasn’t time to be overwhelmed.

“Where is he?!” Danny called, spinning about, used to this place enough that he was able to ignore the strangeness of it, while the widening of Dom’s eyes proved she wasn’t enjoying the view one bit.

Mal spun around as well, looking for signs of Ludgate, John, or both.

He tapped the side of his goggles to gauge the width of the seemingly endless room, but the tracker zeroed out and started blinking—not usable in a pocket dimension, apparently.

When he didn’t immediately see any signs of life, he paused to coat the top edges of the mirror they’d come from with a frame of ice.

If something went wrong, at least they’d have a chance of finding their way out.

Danny darted between nearby mirrors, scanning as far into the distance as he could, before using a lightning jump to search the other direction and leaving behind the faint afterimage of white and gold. “I don’t see him!” he cried.

“ Zeus ,” Mal reached out, careful not to use his real name in case the citizens of Olympus were still watching.

Crackling came over the comms, a few cut off words in Andre’s voice, but nothing substantial followed, only static. They’d anticipated this, but now they knew—the comms didn’t work in the mirror world. Mal could only guess if their cameras did for the others to still see what they were doing.

“Thought you could sneak in uninvited, did you?” Ludgate blinked into existence in every reflection around them.

“Where’s my father?” Danny’s arms jolted with electricity as he clenched his fists.

Ludgate’s many copies gestured to the left in a trail of motioning hands. “Right there.”

Although nothing had been there a moment ago, the image of John sat tied to a chair, head and shoulders still covered with Danny’s jacket. He was a good dozen meters in the distance, but reachable in seconds with Danny’s powers.

“ Don’t .” Mal grabbed Danny’s arm before he could move.

“I know,” Danny said softly, even though his arm felt tense beneath Mal’s grip.

“Can your suit detect if it’s an illusion?”

“Not here. My sensors are going crazy. They see Elemental power all around us.”

“Option three?” Dom said, holding up her amplifier.

“Not yet.” Mal said glanced back to make sure he had a sense of where the mirror they’d come from stood.

The coating of ice framed it like a gilding of diamonds.

He turned to Danny, “Let’s—” only to feel an impossibly strong grip on his shoulders lurch him back and then throw him forward into a mirror so hard his head smacked against the edge.

“Mal!”

The world spun as Mal hit the ground. His goggles fritzed in front of his eyes, broken, because a crack now marred the right lens all the way down the center. If he hadn’t been wearing them, that would have been his skull.

Danny and Dom lifted Mal from the voidless floor, and he shook off his dizziness, dragging the ruined goggles down to his neck.

“New plan,” he huffed, wiping a trickle of blood from his forehead. “Risk the lightning jump. I’ll follow.” He tapped his amplifier to get the point across that he didn’t mean on foot.

Danny nodded, while Dom cursed and moved to stand back to back with Mal to keep watch behind him. Everything was guesswork without the goggles, but Mal remembered the distance the cold field had last stretched and his steel trap of a memory would not dare let him down today.

Setting his sights on his father, Danny ignored the looming, laughing figure of Ludgate in the reflections. When his lightning sparked and he took off, Mal turned on the cold field, widening the radius further and further until, in his mind’s eye, it reached just shy of John’s chair.

Danny appeared again in front of his father, but when he reached forward to grab him, the image vanished through his hands like smoke.

“ No .” Danny whirled around, dread on his face as he scanned for where his father might be. John had to be trapped inside a mirror like Danny had been, and every image they saw of him was an illusion. “Ludgate, please !”

That laughter again, which set Mal’s teeth on edge. “I do love it when you beg, Zeus.”

Seething on the inside, Mal fought to keep his wits about him and turned the cold field off so Danny wouldn’t stumble into it. They had options. They had backup plan after backup plan. They could still do this.

“Please, do try again,” Ludgate called, and as Mal continued to pivot with Dom at his back, he caught sight of John once more, about the same distance away but in the opposite direction.

Danny lightning jumped from where he’d been standing, but not to his father. He appeared with Mal and Dom again, still thinking smart—good.

“Option three, Dom,” Mal said. If this image of John was another illusion, then the Miasma Field would make him disappear.

As soon as Dom turned the field on, every mirror around them shattered.

“Turn it off!” Danny cried.

Like an eruption, the area around them was covered in debris, a perfect circle of glittering carnage. Mal and Danny both looked to the mirror they’d entered from with its coating of ice. It was still there, just barely out of range of the mirrors that had been destroyed.

“We can’t,” Danny said. “If we destroy the mirror we came in through…”

“We won’t have a way out,” Mal finished .

“By all means,” Ludgate’s laughter picked up again, “keep making things harder on yourselves. And on him , of course.”

In the distance, Ludgate stepped out of a mirror behind John’s chair. He had the shard of glass again, poised threateningly above the man’s head. But now he was out in the open. He was vulnerable.