Page 109 of Lovesick Titan

“You might have one more trump card up your sleeve.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Your powers are built on electromagnetic waves, right?” Mal had said as they lay in bed together, enjoying the brief reprieve from what they’d face the next day. “It’s possible you could use your lightning to project your own field just like our amplifiers.”

“I don’t know about that,” Danny had said. “It would be pretty destructive. We’d need time to test it.”

“That’s why we decided against adding an amplifier for you. But I’m talking do or die here, Sparky. You might be able to short out Ludgate’s belt without even touching him or without shooting off a bolt of lightning he’d see coming.”

“I don’t know, Mal, I don’t think I could do that.”

“You did it once before to get out of that mirror trap he had you in. Pretty sure it was do or die then too, and the Zeus I know, theDannyI fell in love with, never says die.”

R

“You know you’re not fast enough, right? To save him before I slice his throat,” Ludgate said, pushing at Mal’s skin with the glass until a bud of dark red began to form. “Your lightning jump isn’tthatfast. And if you fail and he dies, what will you have left, Zeus, but a heart broken like so many pieces of glass.”

Danny was so tired. He’d jumped too many times, and a burst of power like what he had planned would be all he had left, but that’s what this had come to.

Ludgate wasn’t an illusion. Not this time. He wasn’t in a mirror. And while there were many mirrors around him, he was still more than a step away from any reflections he could escape into. Moreover, he was standing perfectly aligned in front of the mirror gilded in ice.

“I want you to suffer like I suffered. To feel powerless like I felt!” Ludgate cried, pressing the glass harder against Mal’s neck, causing him to cough up more blood, too similar to the awful vision Danny saw earlier. It was the only reason Mal had been taken down, Danny knew—because he was hurt, badly hurt, barely able to stand, and it was all Danny’s fault.

No. No. It was Ludgate’s fault. There was plenty that Danny was at fault for, and he’d have to live with that—with killing Thanatos most of all—but this, here,now, was built on Ludgate’s choices. Danny could only try his best, his hardest, to make better choices in the future. That had to be enough. Itwouldbe enough.

“You took everything from me!”

“Because Thanatos took everything from me,” Danny said, “but that doesn’t excuse what I did to him. I never wanted to hurt anyone, Cassius. Not your father, not you, not anyone else. I shouldn’t have given in and let myself kill him. Sometimes losing the people closest to us makes us lose a part of ourselves too. For what it’s worth…I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Ludgate spat. “You think that changes anything?”

“For you? No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

Letting the sparks surrounding him grow and flicker brighter, Danny charged himself with his lightning running hot and vibrant through his veins and slowly started to expand the invisible waves from his core.

“What are you thinking, Zeus?” Ludgate asked.

Mal, despite looking fatigued and fading, recognized what Danny was doing and straightened his posture.

“I’m thinking…” Danny said, sparking brighter, impossible not to notice now, as the arcs of electricity flaring out around him expanded as if he were a lightning rod—though not as much as the unseen waves were expanding, “without that belt, you’re nothing.”

Surprise flashed in Ludgate’s eyes—his eyes, which no longer wore any contacts to hide that they were grey. “Clever kid. You figured out my secret. So what now, huh? You think you can short it out? Youidiot. Do you know what that would do? You’re grounded in this realitybecauseof this belt. It isn’t only my power that prevents me from getting lost in here.

“Without this belt, the entire mirror world will reform,implode. Oh, it’d throw us out of the maze, and we’d be fine—normally—but we’re in the middle of that trap you made for me, remember? When the mirror world goes, so goes the anchor, and right now I’m anchored to your little fun house. That means the second you destroy this belt, we’ll all be cut to ribbons when those mirrors burst from the aftershock.”

Danny’s charging static dimmed, simmering low as he contemplated what it meant if Ludgate was right.

“You wanna risk that?” Ludgate taunted him—always taunting, even when he was bloody and breathless. “All your friends, they’ll be fine. Buthewon’t.” He shook Mal again. “He’s not doing sohotalready, is he? And that’s just it, isn’t it? Because of your little love affair, you’d do anything to save him.

“Oh, I think you’d do it if it was just down to you and me—end it all. We both know about that niggling little death wish of yours.Poor me,” he said sarcastically, “all alone and hurting, with some of the greatest power this city’s ever known.Whata burden.” He rolled his eyes, and Danny saw the pain and fatigue on Mal’s face give way to rage.

Frost crept up his hands but receded before it could thicken into ice. He was too hurt and exhausted to fight back. The rage melted as he looked at Danny with nothing more than pleading, not for himself but for Danny to not listen, to not take Ludgate’s words to heart, to have faith that they still had a way out of this.

They did. Danny saw it now, in the angles, in his own sparks, in the distance between him and Ludgate. He could calculate it all at aglance, and he’d had more than enough time. He wasn’t only a good detective because he was an Elemental. The mirror leading home was the key, and Ludgate had given Danny the perfect setup.

“But you won’t go out like that with him here, will you?” Ludgate said. “So I guess we’re at a standstill, Zeus. Tell you what. You leave first, and I’ll send him along after you. We’ll call the day a draw.”

Mal all but scoffed at the absurdity, which Danny didn’t buy for a second either, even if Ludgate had tried to veil his words with less venom. He wouldn’t let either of them out of here alive without fighting to his own last breath, but that wasn’t what Danny wanted. Not this time. Not anymore.

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