Super•Villainous

XLVI

As it turned out, my dad was correct in his speculation. His father was indeed dead. Gone.

The death date listed was a mere six years ago, rather than the several decades past when it ought to have been transcribed.

Swallowing the rest of the information in Shadow's file came no easier. At the outset, it left me feeling vaguely ill, and not because I had any connection to the man outside of shared blood leading a linear path through the generations, no doubt allowing me to inherit my own powers. No, I felt none of that familiarity. He was little more than a stranger to me, so the unease churning in my belly was identical to the sinking sensation when reading about any other purported injustice. I dreaded having to share the information with my own father, who no doubt would feel the loss deeply.

If the things I read about what happened to Shadow were true, and if they had happened to my own father, no remote island would be far enough, no secret bunker hidden well enough, and no wall thick enough to keep me from enacting my own justice on those responsible.

A small part of me considered as much, toyed with the idea with far more realistic consideration than was strictly wise. What had I to lose? I already resigned myself to a life on the fringes of society for society's own sake, and was one small mistake away from being branded an outlaw outright. Stealing top secret information from the Guild likely would have earned me a criminal charge and several years in prison by itself. If they discovered I somehow aligned myself with Shade on top of all that, my life was effectively over.

Perhaps going all in, giving my dad that one final gift of revenge, would be worth it.

I shook off the thought - the events of the previous evening were all too fresh in mind to ruminate over clearheaded, anyway. The father I knew wouldn't wish for me to do anything. He was all about forgiveness and moving on and making peace with the world; pretty notions that held little stock in reality, and he raised me to be that way, too. Or he tried. Because where I once imagined we were cut from the same cloth, I felt as though mine had been dyed dark somewhere along the way. I carried with me a wellspring of rage that saw no bottom, and indeed it only seemed to grow. I inherited no such anger from him. It was something I found all my own, grown in secret and as a result of the countless events that he could not shield me from.

I reached for the second file, Nightshade's file, and found it to be far too light. Too thin.

I ripped apart the surrounding area, denial fueling the belief that it must have fallen out somewhere. When we arrived last night, before I hid it beneath the pile of clothes to go forth on my quest for medicine and other worthy provisions, I was certain the file had been full.

That had been the only time my stolen loot had been out of my sight since I pilfered it from the Elder's Quarter, and only one individual had been alone with it long enough to spirit it away.

I ground my teeth and approached his slumbering form. He slept atop the sleeping bag again, his skin too warm to find comfort otherwise. All the better for me. It made retrieving my stolen file all the easier.

A hand closed around my outstretched wrist millimeters away from contact, so fast I didn't see him move. Without opening his eyes, or otherwise hinting at his awakened state, he asked, "What are you doing?" through barely parting lips.

I tried to wrench my hand away - and failed. "Give me my file!"

That got him to let his eyelashes flutter languidly open. "You're mad at me. Why?"

Words almost failed me at the nerve of him to not immediately know. Almost failed, but not quite. "You stole my file!"

"Not yours," he corrected. "Mine. It had my name on it, did it not?"