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  Lovesick Gods

  Lovesick Series - Part 1

  Copyright © 2017 - Amanda Meuwissen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Editor - Kaila Corrington

  Cover design - Veronika Dolnikova Ivanovna

  Book layout - Mario Hernandez

  Author Photo - Kyle Olson

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943619-35-1

  ISBN-10: 1-943619-35-2

  First U. S. Edition: September 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my family of ice and lightning.

  Without you, none of this would be possible.

  Chapter 1

  There was a time when the thrum of lightning surrounding him, the city blurring and then becoming telescopic in its distinction as he shot across an impossible distance faster than the human eye could catch, made Danny feel happier and more complete than he ever thought possible.

  Now it was all just noise.

  “Please tell me you have a read on this guy,” Danny said as he crackled into existence out of his lightning jump and looked around the empty lot where he’d lost his quarry.

  “Not yet, Danny, hang on,” Lynn said over the comm link.

  “And it’s Camouflage,” Andre said succinctly.

  Danny gritted his teeth. Andre meant well, he always meant well, and he loved his job—both as a CSI for the Olympus City Police Department and as a technician for Danny’s patrols as his alter ego Zeus—which was…good. For Andre. Danny knew to expect the nicknames and lack of professionalism on occasion; Andre had been the one to name him Zeus when he first became an Elemental and embraced his role as the city’s superhero, but some nights it grated on him.

  Like tonight. And the night before. And this past week—month. Danny was losing track of the days that he wasn’t irritated with someone.

  “Guys, he’s getting away,” Danny said through clenched teeth. He scanned the parking lot again, looking for the faint, tell-tale shimmer like ripples of heat on a summer day that so far had been the only indication before this guy attacked. He could blend in perfectly with his surroundings, making him invisible to the naked eye, almost like—

  “Or Predator!” Andre said, following Danny’s same line of thought. “Though that’s copyrighted and arguably less creative—”

  “Andre.”

  “Danny, turn to your left,” Lynn spoke over them.

  Danny obeyed. His Zeus emblem, a golden lightning bolt at the cross-section of his costume over his heart, had been outfitted with various sensors to pick up his vitals and readings from other Elementals. In this case, a Light Elemental who could not only alter his biochromes, but also the miniscule wavelengths of light reflected by the pigments.

  In an empty lot on the edge of town, with no vehicles or passersby around, nothing but the villain of the week should cause Danny’s sensors to go off.

  “Two feet in front of you!” Lynn yelled.

  Danny swung, connecting a hard right hook with the side of Camo’s face. The Elemental’s image rippled into view, just a man at his core, with a shaved head, slim night vision goggles, and a simple skintight suit in black made out of a material that Andre was dying to get his hands on, since it could mimic the man’s natural biochromes when he used his powers to blend in with his environment.

  If Danny knocked the guy out, he could get him back to the precinct, take his suit, and have him ready for transfer to the prison’s Elemental wing in the morning. He might even get six hours of sleep for once.

  Readying his other fist for a sharp, successive left hook, Danny summoned only a minimal amount of lightning to power his hit, but he was too slow. Camo recovered quickly from the first punch, and since he’d dropped the bag of stolen money and jewelry, both hands snapped up to catch Danny’s wrist mid-swing. His black suit sparked with an electrical charge, and Danny had less than a second to realize how much trouble he was in.

  When he’d still been a normal human, merely Lightning leaning like an eighth of the population—the other seven-eighths leaning toward different elements—he’d already been impervious to most shocks and static electricity, but high voltage confused the charge of his atoms even now that he was an Elemental.

  A painful jolt traveled up Danny’s wrist, up his arm, and right to his heart, where he felt the rhythm stutter.

  “Danny!”

  The next thing he knew, he was on his knees.

  ß

  “Detective Grant?” Lieutenant Liu said, drawing Danny’s attention back to her face.

  “Huh? Sorry, what was that?” Danny asked.

  It was earlier that same day. The severe woman looked at Danny over the top of her glasses and recrossed her legs with impatience, as though she’d repeated herself several times. “You and Detective Edwards were the lead officers on the Thanatos case when he first appeared. Correct?”

  Danny shifted in his seat. Doing these Internal Affairs interviews in interrogation rooms always made him feel like the walls were closing in. “You already know that, Lieutenant. Rick and I had the case right up until his death.”

  Liu nodded neutrally. “And after Thanatos killed your partner, you were taken off the case?”

  “Technically.”

  “Nothing technical about it, Detective. Captain Shan pulled you from the case, the official report says so,” she tapped the file folder in front of her on the table between them, “yet you continued to pursue Thanatos on your own. Did you have a vendetta against him?”

  Danny shifted again, twitching in want to scratch his neck or run his hands through his short, ginger hair, which was foofed enough on top that it tended to disobey him. “He killed my partner. What do you think?”

  “Detective—”

  “Olympus had never seen an Elemental like Thanatos before.” Danny leaned forward over the table. Even a city like theirs with close to two million people would only see a few dozen Elementals every other decade, though the numbers were unreliable since many of them chose to live in hiding. “The things he could do… He could drown someone in their own shadow, did you know that? Did you know that’s how he killed Rick? Right in front of me. Darkness shoved down his throat until he choked, and there was n-nothing I could do.” Danny grimaced at the catch of emotion in his voice. He could feel the tears forming. Twenty-eight years old and he was still so quick to cry. “Thanatos started to do the same to me, but then…”

  “Then?” Liu prompted when he didn’t finish.

  Then Danny’s latent Elemental powers had triggered.

  Electricity had discharged from his body like a power surge, forcing Thanatos’s shadows away from him. Danny hadn’t been able to control any of it at first. Thanatos had reached for him, and he’d lightning jumped for the first time. One moment he was on the ground next to Rick’s body, Thanatos leaning toward him in all his awful glory, tendrils of black and deep purple shadow slithering off of him like snakes, and the next moment Danny was blocks away in an alley near the precinct.

  He couldn’t use that part of his powers too frequently in too short a time, but he could become lightning itself when the need arose and teleport long distances in the span of seconds. He’d saved himself that night from whatever Thanatos might have done to him, but his powers hadn’t triggered in
time to save Rick.

  “Detective,” Liu said with impatience again.

  That had been a year ago. It was time to close the case against Thanatos for good, however many pieces to the puzzle remained unsolved, which was the only reason they were having these follow-up interviews now.

  “Then he let me go,” Danny said, falling into the lie easily, “because it was more fun to let me squirm than bother killing me too.” Looking across the table at her, for once he didn’t try to hide how wrecked he was.

  The knit to the lieutenant’s brow smoothed out as she collected herself and maintained a professional tone. She flipped a page in her notes. “Let’s talk about how, six months ago, the night Thanatos was defeated by Zeus, among the victims that died in the explosion at the power station was your mother.”

  ß

  Danny blinked dazedly up at Camo as the Elemental snatched the bag of loot from the ground and made a break for it around the nearest building.

  “Danny!” Lynn cried again. “Your heart rate—”

  “I’m fine,” Danny coughed. He sucked in air as he waited for his healing factor to steady the jagged rhythm of his heart, making his chest feel like he had a hot iron pressed to the inside of his ribcage. He was lucky he was one of the few Elementals who had accelerated healing.

  Five seconds…ten…finally, the pain dissipated.

  “A high volt electrical charge is how he controls the reflectors in his suit. But I think he shorted it out with that trick. I can catch him.” Danny lurched to his feet, wondering for the thousandth time why he had a mostly white suit, because now it was scuffed with dirt at the knees.

  His costume was white leather head to toe, save knee-high boots and elbow-length gloves in gold, as well as golden lightning bolts at his hips and the larger bolt off-center from the top of his left shoulder down to mid-chest to mimic a toga clasp. The lenses for his eyes shone with golden light, and a second larger lightning bolt etched up the center of his cowl from his eyebrows over the crown of his head and down the back of his neck.

  “Be careful,” Lynn said.

  “You got this,” Andre assured him.

  Bouncing on the balls of his feet once, twice, Danny took off in the direction Camo had run. Three possible options for where he’d gone presented themselves once he rounded the corner. “Left, right, or straight up,” he muttered.

  “Right,” Andre said.

  “How do you know? You can’t even see what I’m looking at.”

  “Dude, I’m Metal leaning. I have a great sense of direction.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” As far as Danny had ever heard, Metal people were adept at technology and architecture, not navigation.

  “Metal,” Andre said like the answer should be obvious. “Magnetic? Hello. It’s totally a thing.”

  Danny shook his head as he gauged his options more carefully. Left down an alley back out to the street—likely not. Up a fire escape to the roof of the building—doubtful. Or right beneath a loading dock door that was just barely over a foot up from the ground—a tight fit, but it was possible the man had slid his lithe form underneath, and Danny could easily follow suit.

  “Right it is. Going dark until I have him in my sights.”

  “If we get any obvious biochrome readings, we’ll let you know,” Lynn said.

  Scuffing up the suit as he crawled on the ground to get under the door was more of a nuisance than dangerous, but it still made Danny feel low and annoyed when every night lately felt like an exercise in dwindling patience. Someone whose best trick was being sneaky and giving off a one-shot electrical charge should not put Danny on his ass.

  He just wanted to catch the guy and call it a night. Get some peace and quiet for once. He didn’t remember the last time he’d had a night off. Not since his girlfriend Vanessa left Olympus City. That was weeks ago and Danny didn’t even miss her. She’d been right to leave him. She didn’t know he was secretly Zeus, that he’d become an Elemental a year ago, but she still understood that he was nothing but trouble for everyone who loved him.

  ß

  “Your mother was one of the victims caught in the explosion,” Lieutenant Liu said. “Coincidence or was Thanatos targeting you?”

  Danny contemplated the question. Oh it had all been planned, to the minute, to the very last detail. Thanatos had known he was Zeus, he’d witnessed Danny’s rebirth, he’d caused it. And it had become so much more personal after that, for both of them, even though to this day Danny didn’t know the man’s real name.

  Thanatos enjoyed watching Danny suffer, but the final straw had been to take more loved ones away from him.

  “Coincidence,” Danny said, “of course. Thanatos was too focused on Zeus to care about me.”

  Liu studied him closely, revealing nothing in the thin line of her lips before she spoke. “The names of Thanatos’s victims that night were never released to the public, but the officers here know. Some wonder if you have more of a connection to Thanatos and Zeus than you let on.”

  “People wonder a lot of things.”

  “Thanatos was your case. Your partner and your mother were killed. A good detective might guess that you know Zeus personally. Or that, maybe…you are Zeus. Or Thanatos himself.”

  Danny clenched his fists beneath the table. He knew she was just doing her job, trying to wheedle out a confession if there was one to tell. But she didn’t really believe he was Zeus or Thanatos. No one did.

  “I’m Lightning leaning,” he said with a simple gesture at his yellow eyes, “just like you, Lieutenant, not an Elemental. And Thanatos’s element was Dark. I couldn’t be either of them. As for some other connection, what more do you need than that I was on the case, I couldn’t let it go after Rick’s death, and Mom being there that day was just bad luck. Sometimes a coincidence really is just a coincidence.”

  Liu nodded thoughtfully as she glanced down at her notes. “They never found Thanatos. Some think he might still be out there, waiting for an opportunity to return.”

  Danny trembled at the thought that still haunted his dreams—that Thanatos would reappear someday from out of the darkness to seek his vengeance.

  “At the very least you blame Thanatos for your partner’s death, but also your mother’s. Maybe you blame Zeus too. Plenty of people say the victims that day were at risk because of the rivalry between them. Maybe you hate Zeus,” she said with an almost dismissive tilt of her head.

  Danny hated himself all right. But he wasn’t the only one at fault.

  “Zeus did everything he could,” he said. “He would have succeeded in saving those people if he’d had help. He was supposed to have help. If anyone besides Thanatos is to blame for those people dying, for my mother dying, it isn’t Zeus.” He centered his gaze on Liu’s yellow eyes, so similar to his own. “It’s Malcolm Cho for not showing up like he promised.”

  ß

  Danny stifled a curse as he rolled to his feet inside the…factory? He couldn’t be sure. It was nearly pitch black inside. Pitch black for him, against an enemy with night vision.

  Feeling outward with his hands, Danny walked slowly into what felt like an expansive room. Charging up his powers to light the way would only pinpoint his location, if Camo didn’t already know.

  He tried to strafe the areas he pointed his chest at to give Lynn the opportunity to pick up any readings. Since he couldn’t see anything, he closed his eyes and focused on what he could hear. Scuffling feet…to his left!

  Danny swung—but hit nothing. Turning to face that direction, he listened for Lynn to give him any cues, but nothing came over the comms either.

  Breathing…right!

  Danny swung again—still nothing. Once more, he turned to face where Camo had been, waiting, hoping…

  Feet knocked out from under him, Danny went down, flat on his face, smashing his nose into
the concrete floor. Broken, bleeding—he’d have to reset it for it to heal right. He hated resetting bones.

  Then, finally, Camo made an error in judgment and moved to pin Danny to the floor with his foot, only Danny had already rolled over and caught the man’s ankle in his grasp. Yanking downward, he felt Camo falter, tumble, and hit the ground on his back with an oomph.

  Danny scrambled to get a better hold of him, but Camo righted himself and started to crawl away. No, no, no… He felt so foolish grappling with a man in the dark, but damn it—damn it—he was not going home empty-handed tonight. Not again. Not another night with absolutely nothing to show for everything he put into this, everything he gave of himself to be Zeus, everyone who had been sacrificed so he could live and protect this city.

  Feeling when Camo reached a wall and tried to clamber to his feet, Danny got to his feet first, keeping the Elemental pinned and unsteady as he whirled him around and slammed him hard into the wall. Unable to see anything but the faint shimmer from Camo’s suit, Danny reared his arm back for a swift punch to end this.

  Another shock coursed through him. It was weaker than the first, but it still hurt, and Danny was done, just done. Tightening the grip of his left hand on Camo’s suit, he fueled every ounce of anger he had into his punch.

  The crack of Camo’s nose breaking as Danny’s had was gratifying, vindicating.

  The second punch made the man moan in pain. But he was still conscious.

  Distantly, Danny heard Lynn and Andre yelling for an update, wondering what was going on, but he wasn’t done yet.

  He swung again.

  “S-Stop…” Camo sputtered in a rough, broken voice, spitting at the ground after he spoke, “I give up, p-please…”

  Danny’s fist tightened. He wanted to scream and nearly did as he pulled his arm back again.

  “Danny, answer us!” Andre cried.

  His fist connected, but not with Camo’s face. Danny’s knuckles sank into the plaster of the wall. He’d used too much of his lightning to fuel the hit. He’d punched a hole in the wall. It sparked and smoked—a fuse box. The damage triggered something in the building’s grid, and suddenly, faint blue emergency lights kicked on above and around Danny.