Page 110 of Lovesick Titan

Danny couldn’t change the past, but he could forgive himself for it. He had to be a better hero. He had to be what Mal and the others believed of him.

“That’s your problem, Ludgate. That’s everyone’s problem.” Squaring his stance, he let the sparks around him grow again. “They think it’s always a choice between A or B. But I see a third option.”

Ludgate laughed derisively. “Yeah? What, you kill me and take the belt for yourself, that it? Howheroic. But I guess you would think that, since you’d be saving him. A necessary evil.”

“No,” Danny said, letting the force of his lightning fill his voice, causing it to echo around them. “Killing is never necessary. Not unless it’s life or death, and right now it doesn’t have to be.” He met Mal’s eyes, then returned his glare to Ludgate. “I don’t have to kill you to end this.”

The sparks jumped off of him like the inside of a plasma globe, and Danny took a step forward. Ludgate backpedaled, right where Danny needed him to be.

“Maybe I can save all of us. Maybe I can’t. But you can’t stop me from trying.”

“Sparky,” Mal spoke up, his voice raspy but adamant, “what are you doing?”

“What I have to, to be better than him. To bebetter.” Readying himself to jump, he knew he only had seconds to get this right as the electromagnetic waves rippled out closer and closer to Ludgate.

“Zeus,” Ludgate snarled.

“I love you, Mal.”

“No, wait—”

Danny erupted with his power at the same moment he jumped forward, and the world slowed. He watched Ludgate shift like moving through deep water, pulling the shard of glass from Mal’s neck to point at Danny instead, as Danny disappeared into his lightning and reappeared right in front of them, having only a split second where the world still seemed slowed, and he spared a moment to look at Mal and memorize his face, even if right now it was distraught with panic.

The invisible electromagnetic waves reached Ludgate seconds before his hands did, which was all the additional time Danny needed, fritzing out the belt moments before he pushed Mal and Ludgate as hard as he could into the reflection of the mirror leading home.

Danny tried to follow them, meant to follow them, he was rightthere, but the destruction of the mirror world happened faster than he could move. Mal and Ludgate made it, but Danny...

He’d been soclose.

Before everything shattered.

Chapter28

“Danny!” Mal screamed as he tumbled out of the mirror world like being whipped around in a whirlwind. His breath caught at the sharp jolt left behind from Danny’s discharge of power, like he’d felt only briefly before when touching Danny while thrumming with his lightning.

It wasn’t a simple thud or tumble when Mal landed on the other side, but a crash and desperate roll with the screech of metal and glass and a great, terrible implosion following after them. Mal ignored the awful pain that ratcheted through his body from the wound in his back and pushed Ludgate away from him as he turned toward where the mirror traphadbeen, but now…

Everything was vanishing into a swirling mass of broken glass.

Lurching to his feet, Mal stared in horror at the tornado of carnage, at the spinning and spinning pieces of glass, as several voices screamed behind him, before it all ended in a snap andcrunchand powerful shock of light.

When it was over, only a single, solitary figure remained at the center of the destruction—so red.Redinstead of white and gold from the wounds of countless shards speared through his body like some morbid pin cushion.

“Danny…” Mal gasped, numb and unable to move.

Danny’s mask was half torn from his face, revealing his eyes and part of his nose and mouth. He teetered in the aftermath, in the sudden quiet after the implosion that was soon broken by fresh screams. His eyes blinked, tearing up from pain Mal couldn’t imagine, but they still sought him out to meet his and dared to look happy before they dimmed.

“Danny!” Mal howled, racing toward him, blind to the state of his own body and the chill wracking through his limbs.

Danny’s knees gave way and he toppled, the renewed crunch nauseating and made all the worse when he fell onto his side, limp, bloody, and barely recognizable.

All other traces of glass, of the trap, were gone, what little remained stabbed through Danny’s body, covering nearly every inch of him in jagged edges. Mal blocked out the voices of the others behind him and dropped beside the broken boy, trembling as he reached for a piece of glass in Danny’s face. His eyes were closed now, his chest still, but none of that registered.

“You’ll be okay…” Mal said, a hushed whisper, as he gripped the edge of the shard through Danny’s cheek and wrenched it free. He tossed it aside and reached for another. “You’ll be okay. You’ll heal. You always heal.”

He tore out another piece of glass and another, kept grabbing them and ripping them free, until finally he was able to pull what remained of the cowl from Danny’s face. The skin looked torn, mangled, but it was still Danny, it wasstill Danny, he had to survive this.

“Danny…” Mal’s eyes stung and it grew difficult to see, his vision blurred by tears he didn’t have time to shed. His hands ached from the sharpness of the glass cutting into his skin, but he couldn’t stop. He kept pulling out pieces, freeing them from Danny’s flesh and tossing them away, like that night in his apartment when he’d cleaned Danny’s hand of shards over his kitchen sink.

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