Free Love for the Cold-Blooded by Alex Gabriel Page B

seeing as he was still choking back giggles and wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. It wasn’t even that anything about this was funny, exactly. It was just all so absurd. All of it, from the ridiculous companion misunderstanding to having to be rescued by a superhero in complete earnest.
    Once he’d managed to get himself back under control, he discovered Silver Paladin had flipped up his visor, the better to give Pat a narrow-eyed look that seemed set to burn right through to his bones. Not hostile, precisely; more heroically stern, or whatever.
    “Are you injured?” And there was the heroic voice to match, all no-nonsense firmness and authority.
    “Nah, I’m fine.” It was true enough. “No worries, it’s all good. Thanks for the ride, dude. Or the carry, whatever.”
    Even without the visor covering most of his face, Silver Paladin didn’t look nearly as much as Nicholas as you’d think. Weird. Not that they weren’t clearly the same person — there was just something different about the man in superhero mode. It must have been the addition of the stereotypically heroic bearing… the steely jaw and heroic profile and whatnot.
    Pat cleared his throat and shifted a little, trying not to let on how gut-meltingly hot he found the heroic whatnot. It didn’t seem like the right moment.
    “What were you doing on that roof?” Silver Paladin barked, a stern horizontal crease forming between his forbidding brows. He looked like a schoolmaster who’d caught one of his charges out after curfew.
    What was with the tone — did he think Pat had been hanging out on top of City Hall for fun, just waiting to be caught up in a passing superpowered grudge-fest? “Trying not to fall off, for the most part. Look, buddy —”
    And that was when it hit him: his album. His album! “ Mad Bad and Dangerous to Ho !” Pat shouted.
    He barely had time to register that Silver Paladin’s face now had a definitely shocked thing going on (if there was a prize for disconcerting an unflappable superhero, Pat had just won the gold) before turning to run back to the market square. Or trying to, at least. He’d only managed a few steps when an arm as immovable as a steel bar wrapped around his chest from behind.
    “Civilians are expected to expend every effort in order to stay out of the range of supervillain conflicts,” Silver Paladin growled into his ear. Pat couldn’t help but notice that his back was now pressed tightly to the hero’s body, the hum of force fields beginning to seep through him again. “Civilians who recklessly endanger themselves or others, or who deliberately hinder superhero operations in any fashion, can and will be prosecuted.”
    “Are you seriously throwing the book at me?” Pat squirmed in the Paladin’s grip until he could look up at him, even if all he could see from this angle was a slice of sternly set cast-iron jaw and heroic glare. “This is not the time for that, you loser! Aren’t you supposed to be good at saving people?”
    “I am excellent at saving people,” barked Silver Paladin, glaring. His force field hum was making Pat’s fillings ache, and his stupid face and stupid body and stupid hotness grew more and more annoying the longer Pat was exposed to them.
    “You are so not! I give you two out of ten, you suck so bad. I lost my limited edition album thanks to you, dude! Mad Bad and Dangerous to Ho , the most —”
    “Companion,” said Silver Paladin, his tone somehow both completely flat and utterly disapproving at the same time.
    Pat blinked, thrown. “What?”
    Considering the way the conversation was going, it might have been a good thing that at that point, a furiously loud series of thudding crashes followed by a deeply ominous rumbling interrupted it. The noise came from the direction of the market square and sounded pretty much exactly what Pat assumed a building taking major structural damage would sound like.
    An instant later, a cloud of stone and concrete dust