Free Villainous by Matthew Cody Page A

it became hard to squeeze through them all. In a place the sizeof Noble’s Green, the smallest things became newsworthy, and Daniel still remembered the controversy that had rocked the town last year when the council voted to put a stoplight on Main Street. Of course, everything had changed with the Blackout Event, and the town’s fifteen minutes of fame had finally come. But as he passed the news crews, he saw the faces of the reporters and suspected that the story of the sleepy town of superheroes had already played itself out. Video segments on flying kids and profiles of the librarian who could breathe at the bottom of a lake were yesterday’s news. The public was hungry for something fresh and exciting, and this attack on the high school would be just the thing. It was a new angle on the old story, full of scandalous possibilities—the dark side of Camelot. Even the crowd of camera phone–waving tourists looked like a pack of scavengers as they snapped pictures of the vandalized school. They’d come to Noble’s Green hoping to catch a glimpse of a floating fire chief, but now were being treated to the superpowered destruction of public property.
    “Hey,” said Mollie, waving at him from a crowd of jostling onlookers. “Can you believe all these people?”
    “This might be worse than we thought,” said Daniel, panting. The ride had really worn him out, and Mollie was standing there without having broken a sweat.
    The footage on television didn’t adequately portray the extent of the damage, and for a moment Daniel actually wondered if his mom had been right—maybe a tornado
had
rolled through here. But once you looked closer, you could tell that this destruction wasn’t the result of a random force of nature. It was deliberate. Every window was smashed, probably because nearly all of the desks within had been tossed through them. Someone had emptied each classroom, and the broken contents now lay scattered across the parking lot. The entrance looked like it had been fire-bombed, and the charred doors still dangled loosely from their hinges.
    The headlines were right. No one without powers could have accomplished all this destruction in a matter of minutes, not without a small army. That was obvious now to Daniel, and to everyone who saw.
    “Wow,” said Mollie. “They would have to hit the high school.”
    “Huh?”
    “What about the middle school? We’ve got a final coming up!”
    Mollie’s attempt at gallows humor was admirable, but they both knew that this was a very serious situation. The stakes of their own little investigation had just escalated.
    “You know,” said Daniel, “they say that criminals often come back to the scene of the crime.”
    “Why would they do that?”
    “I dunno. Maybe because they get a kick out of seeing what they’ve done.”
    Mollie scanned the faces of tourists who were mouthing
Hi, Mom
at the television cameras and holding up rock-and-roll fingers.
    “You think one of
these
losers did it?”
    “No, not really,” said Daniel. “But keep your eyes open for anyone suspicious who doesn’t look like a sightseer. Maybe we’ll see Drake or one of his Nobles in the crowd.”
    Mollie nodded and went back to studying the faces. After a few minutes of useless staring, Daniel was just about to suggest they leave for summer school when he heard a commotion nearby. A group of onlookers were complaining loudly as a long black limousine with darkened windows rolled past them, obscuring their view and forcing several to leap out of the way.
    The car came to a stop and out stepped two of the largest men Daniel had ever seen. Though both were conservatively dressed in neat suits and ties, they didn’t look like any kind of businessmen. As they turned to scan the crowd, Daniel saw that one had a neck tattoo of a dragon that crept all the way up the back of his pale, shaved head. The other had dreadlocks tied into a tight ponytail, and he wore more rings in his ears, nose,