Page 104 of Lovesick Titan

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 guessworkwithout 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 onhim, 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.

Danny lightning jumped again without a moment’s thought, but the distance made it too easy for the mirrors to be a trick. There was no John or Ludgate when Danny reached them, only more illusion. With his lightning surging into his hands, Danny reached out as he collided with a mirror. His powers poured into it, causing the glass to shatter as potently as the Miasma Field had.

“Careful, Zeus,” Ludgate’s voice echoed ominously, “you’ll hurt yourself.”

“Ludgate!” Danny howled.

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