Villains Don't Date Heroes! Read online

  Villains Don’t Date Heroes!

  Mia Archer

  Villains Don’t Date Heroes

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2017 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, October 2017

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Distractions

  2. Useless

  3. Goddess

  4. New Challenger

  5. Unfair Fight

  6. Curb Stomp

  7. The Authorities

  8. Post Mortem

  9. Front Row Seats

  10. Penultimate Showdown

  11. Back Home

  12. Archenemies

  13. Damsel in Disguise

  14. Back Alley

  15. Shadow Wing

  16. Mind Control

  17. Heroine Distress

  18. Not On My Watch

  19. Snazzy Entrance

  20. Cleanup

  21. Hero’s Dilemma

  22. Fishing

  23. New Job

  24. Super Survival

  25. Semantics

  26. Dining Hall

  27. Lunch Sparring

  28. Nasty Tricks

  29. Really Nasty Tricks

  30. Blink

  31. Wannabes

  32. Office Hours

  33. Secret Identities

  34. A Plan Comes Together

  35. Confessions

  36. The Other Shoe

  37. Betrayed

  38. Contingencies

  39. Path of Destruction

  40. Triangulation

  41. Saving the Day

  42. Villainous Intent

  43. New Sheriffs

  Epilogue

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  Also by Mia Archer

  1

  Distractions

  “Night Terror!”

  I smiled as the dust settled around me. I had to admit that was one of my more dramatic entrances.

  I always figured if you were going to do something then you should do it with style, and a focused energy blast on a revolving door leading into a bank that wasn’t designed to handle anything like a focused energy blast was always suitably impressive to the normals.

  Tellers and patrons alike looked at me in terror, shying away as I strolled through the bank like I owned the place. Which, for the next few minutes at least, was more or less true. I could do whatever I wanted, and there wasn’t anybody who could stop me.

  Damn it felt good to be a villain.

  Of course that didn’t mean the normals wouldn’t try to stop me. Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and saw a chubby security guard wearing a white uniform and a badge that looked almost, but not quite entirely unlike the police badges from the local constabulary.

  He was in the middle of pulling out a gun, an ancient revolver, and moving the barrel towards me. The thing seriously looked like something some prop guy pulled out that had been sitting in the back room since the ‘40s when gangster movies were still the big thing.

  I had to admire his tenacity. And his ability to handle himself under pressure. The gun was only shaking a little bit as he trained it on me. Just enough to make him dangerous, but it was clear he knew how to use the piece. As though he practiced that sort of thing waiting for a chance to use it.

  Definitely not what I’d expect from an older bank security guard. Maybe he was former PD, though it’d have to be way former PD since everyone on the force since I started working knew better than to draw on me.

  Or maybe he was one of those guys who always wanted to be a cop but wasn’t quite stupid enough to pass their entrance exams. Whatever. Not my problem.

  It’s not like that gun was going to help him.

  He fired and time stood still. People screamed. I scoffed.

  Please. As though something as simple as an ancient six shooter could actually be a problem when they had a living goddess in front of them throwing around the kind of futuristic weaponry that would make Heinlein drool.

  I lifted a hand and flicked my fingers as the bullet came towards me. It was easy enough to track it through the heads-up display I had overlaid on my mask.

  A focused energy field sprang up in front of my hand and the bullet ricocheted away with a delightful ting. Only it wasn’t entirely accurate to say that it ricocheted. More that I deflected the bullet away from me, and the energy of that deflection disintegrated it before it could do any real damage.

  Hey, I might be a villain, but I wasn’t completely heartless. Collateral damage was always a pain in the butt. It always got the talking heads jabbering about how heartless and cruel you were. Basically it was a PR disaster that I wasn’t interested in getting involved with.

  Though it was difficult to resist the urge to create a PR disaster by disintegrating the security guard since he insisted on emptying his gun at me. Typical security guard. Shoot first and ask questions later, never stopping to think that by trying to shoot me he was putting the lives of all the innocent people in this bank at risk.

  Not any risk that I might pose to them, mind you. Him firing that ancient weapon was danger enough, and not to me.

  I resisted the urge to vaporize him, but I did set my wrist blaster to stun and fired off a quick shot. I grimaced and hoped he didn’t have a heart condition.

  There was only so much you could do with a “stun” setting on these things. He didn’t look like the type to have a heart condition, but hoping was the best I could do. I certainly couldn’t leave him conscious to keep firing that antique.

  Sure stunning wasn’t as satisfying as vaporization, but at least it took care of him. For the moment.

  I looked around the bank lobby and raised an eyebrow. “Anybody else want to be a hero?”

  Nobody moved. Nobody so much as breathed. Good. The last thing I needed was some normie with more testosterone than brains trying to impress their lady by trying to take me on.

  No, actually the last thing I needed was to rob a bank while there was a real hero in plain clothes hanging out. Not that I was too worried. I wasn’t the number one villain in the city for nothing. The real heroes knew to stay away when mama was working, but it would put a cramp in my plans if I had to take the time to dispatch some hero looking to make a name for him or herself on top of doing the usual work of robbing a bank.

  “Good,” I said with a nod. “You all can go about your business. I’ll be in the vault if anybody needs me.”

  Everyone stared blankly. I put my hands on my hips.

  “Come on. Does anyone here have more than a couple hundred thousand in the bank?”

  No one raised their hands. Figures. No one saved money these days. Then again the system was sort of stacked against people being able to save. Which was a big reason why I was constantly making withdrawals like this.

  “Just what I thought. You’re all insured.” I waved a dismissive hand. “Go about your business and someone let the cops know I’m in the vault when they get here.”

  I turned and marched off.

  I never understood why these banks insisted on keeping vaults full of actual cash money in this day and age. In a world where dollars were created with the push of a button it seemed like a silly anachronism to actually keep the physical
paper around.

  Not that I was complaining. An old school robbery was a nice distraction from time to time. I needed a good distraction right about now.

  Bank patrons and employees alike still cowered behind their desks or against potted plants as I walked through the lobby. I rolled my eyes. They always did that, even after I told them they were free to go about business as usual.

  It’s not like I was a normal bank robber taking people hostage. I didn’t have any need for something as brutish as that. And it’s not like I was actually taking any of their money either. Most of their transactions were electronic as well, and I couldn’t care less what the tellers had in their drawers. I was after the bigger bags of money.

  Good old fashioned impossible to trace cash.

  I whistled a happy tune as I raised my wrist blaster towards the vault. Some enterprising bank manager had managed to get the vault shut before I blew the doors. I knew they’d managed to get it shut because it had been sitting wide open when I walked in wearing plain clothes to scout the place before I stepped out and made the switch to my work outfit.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  Apparently that enterprising bank manager was going to make a stand. A young guy in a cheap suit and tie stepped in front of the vault door and held out his arms.

  “I’m not going to let you do this,” he said.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him and he swallowed.

  “If you’re going to be standing there in a minute then you’d better hope you have superpowers of the invulnerability variety,” I said.

  He swallowed. “You won’t shoot me. You don’t kill civilians.”

  I cocked my head. Now there was an unpleasant development. The moment it started getting around that you tried to avoid collateral damage it gave the collateral damage an excuse to get in your way in an attempt to stop you from world domination. This asshole in a cheap suit was the embodiment of that old quote about having nothing but work once word got around that you’d gone soft.

  Of course there was an easy solution for that. I cocked my head and started charging my wrist blaster. It was going to take one hell of a blast to knock that vault door off its hinges.

  The kind of blast that would go very poorly for whatever poor bastard was standing in the way when it went off.

  “Now you’ve put me in a difficult position,” I said. The ominous hum of my wrist blaster filled the room. Filled the silence. He tugged at his tie and a bead of sweat ran down his face. “Now that I know you have absolutely no plans of moving, that you’re using yourself as a human shield for a bunch of paper and metal, I have more incentive to blast you along with the door and use you as an example than I do to spare you.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said.

  I held my wrist blaster up. Energy crackled and little bolts of electricity arced back and forth in front of the barrel. The ominous hum was growing louder and louder, sounding like the sort of electric hum you’d get from a high tension electrical wire with a couple of angry killer bee hives hanging from it and magnified by about a thousand.

  “Care to try me?” I asked.

  The suit swallowed one last time, that must be a nervous tic with the guy or something, and then he thought better of playing a game of chicken with the most powerful villain in the city and dove out of the way.

  A good thing too, because I was completely serious about him being more valuable as an example than anything else.

  I glanced at the indicators on my wrist blaster. The ominous hum was louder than I’d ever heard before. Strictly speaking it was probably more charged than I needed even for this thick vault door, but I was in the mood for a little theatricality now that a stupid suit dared to defy me.

  He’d put me in a bad mood. That hadn’t happened in a long time, and I figured taking out that bad mood on some of the property he was supposed to be protecting would be just the ticket.

  A little yellow warning light flashed on the wrist blaster. That meant we were about five minutes away from a meltdown that would take out a few city blocks at the very least. That wouldn’t do.

  I might be slightly mad, but I wasn’t suicidal.

  I let loose. A bolt of crackling energy flew across the room and slammed into the door. Solid steel, I figured it was going to take a lot to get it off, but apparently banks had started cheaping out on vault doors.

  The energy blast slammed into the metal and the entire damn thing disintegrated. Disintegrated!

  Huh. That was new.

  Either my stuff was a hell of a lot more powerful than I thought, or somebody had decided to save a little money by getting a vault door that looked impressive but couldn’t hold up to your average super villain with a futuristic charged energy weapon. Which was a major mistake if you wanted to hold onto your physical cash reserves in this city.

  Oh well. That was their problem. Not mine. It was time to get to work.

  2

  Useless

  I stepped through the vault door and put up a force field behind me with a casual wave of my hand. My force field generator really only worked in small directed bursts, good for things like deflecting those bullets the guard shot at me with his little pea shooter, but if somebody really wanted to get in here while the field was spread across the entire entrance they’d be able to.

  Only who would be silly enough to try something like that? They just saw me blow the vault door aside like it was cardboard, and then they saw me put up a force field that shimmered with just enough translucence to make out shapes on the other side.

  Why on earth would someone be stupid enough to go against that? How could they know it wasn’t going to do something like disintegrate them if they touched the field?

  They didn’t. Theatricality was as much a part of being a good super villain as actually having gadgets that could follow through on some of my threats. If one out of five gadgets worked the way people expected then they started to think five out of five gadgets were capable of vaporizing them or doing other nasty things if they dared defy me.

  I glanced around the vault. There were some gold bars that had been rattled loose by the door’s disintegration. There were piles of cash in giant bags. They didn’t have anything as silly as giant dollar signs on them like cartoons would lead you to believe, but I’d stolen enough of them over the years to know a bag full of cash when I saw it.

  I held up my wrist computer. “You ready, CORVAC?”

  “Ready mistress,” CORVAC’s metallic voice came through the wrist computer.

  I moved over to the back wall and leaned against it. I watched the translucent shapes of people running around outside the vault. No doubt trying to get out of the bank while the employees tried to figure out how the hell they’d get rid of me.

  I’m sure the police were being called and I’d have to deal with that once I was back on the other side. I was counting on it, actually, but I didn’t feel the rush I’d expected. Not like old times.

  I slumped down against the wall and sighed. This wasn’t nearly as distracting as I’d hoped. I tapped a button on my belt and a long range teleportation targeter materialized from the pattern buffer in one of my belt storage units.

  The problem with teleportation over long ranges without line of sight was it required something to home in on. Nothing like those stupid television shows that always depicted teleporters just working over ridiculously long distances.

  Talk about unrealistic.

  I mean sure I had one teleporter that was capable of working at interstellar distances, but the one time I’d actually used the thing it ended up killing someone very close to me. The less I thought about firing that one up again the better. With my luck I’d accidentally open a portal to some planet with aliens who were interested in conquering the pale blue dot I’d just brought to their attention.

  If there was one thing I didn’t have time for right now it was singlehandedly fighting off another alien invasion.

  “Do you have the coordinates CORVAC?”


  “Yes mistress,” CORVAC said. “Remotely programming the long range unit now. I still don’t understand why you needed to make a personal appearance for this.”

  I was starting to wonder why I’d made a personal appearance for this. It certainly wasn’t distracting me in the way I’d hoped. Damn it.

  “Just transport everything out of this room in about five minutes,” I said.

  “You’re not coming with?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m going to take the long way out.”

  “Whatever you say, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  I knew he was a bundle of vacuum tubes and circuits that could do a reasonably passable imitation of sapience, but there were times, like right now, when I almost thought he wasn’t faking it.

  Too bad there wasn’t a Turing test for smartassery.

  “I could do without the sarcasm CORVAC,” I snapped.

  “So terribly sorry mistress.”

  Not for the first time I regretted installing that extra module that gave him the ability to feel emotions. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. I figured it’d make him happier. I thought it might make him a more enjoyable conversational companion since he was the only person I had to talk to when I was busy in the lab.