Read Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women for Free Online Page A

My aim, which isn’t fantastic in the best of circumstances, is a little off: I tag her in the shoulder, causing her to jerk as she fires. That saves Missy, but it doesn’t take Stacy down. I expect her to swing around toward me, but instead she finds a target in the street and throws a swirling tornado of white flame at —
    Oh, crap.
Missy, run!
    I tell Sara to close her shield and brace herself, and me, I hit the open sky, because that’s the only way I’m getting out of range of the tanker truck full of home heating oil before it goes up.
    Sara has her own ideas. She gestures at the truck as though reaching out to grab it. There’s a flash and a throaty WHOMP, and for a fraction of a second there is a perfect globe of roiling flame in the middle of the street. Sara cries out, then collapses. The fireball loses cohesion and hits the pavement with a splash, as though someone had dropped a gigantic water balloon filled with napalm.
    I can’t help but gawk stupidly at the scenario in front of me: Sara and Stuart are flat on their backs, unmoving and injured, and Main Street is one step away from pulling a full Chicago.
    (You know: the Great Chicago Fire? Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Look it up.)
    Matt waves to me from the ground, points at something. The phrase
better late than never
pops into my head as Concorde appears next to me, demanding to know what the hell is going on. I’d love to point a finger of blame at Stacy Hellfire, but I don’t see her anywhere. She’s gone.
    I’m getting mighty sick of the bad guys giving us the slip.
     
    Within minutes, the fire department arrived on the scene and began spraying down everything, the police handled crowd control and took initial statements, and paramedics tended to the injured. There were no fatalities, thank God, but lots of nasty burns, and enough psychological trauma to keep Kingsport’s shrinks busy for the next decade. Mindforce and Nina kept to the side, letting Concorde direct traffic. Everyone followed his orders, immediately and to the letter. No one challenged him or gave him any lip. Watching him in action reminded me that, as infuriating as he could be, he was the seasoned pro here.
    Concorde didn’t lay into us right away; he knew his priorities. When he did start in, he was courteous enough to wait until we were all back at Protectorate HQ, so the Hero Squad wouldn’t make the front page of the paper for getting dressed down in public. Better yet, we weren’t subjected to his standard rant about what a bunch of amateurs we were. Oh no. Instead, he gave us grief for trying to handle things on our own instead of calling him in — like I personally promised I would.
    “That woman was blowing the bejesus out of everything,” Matt argues. “Did you really want us to stand there with our thumbs up our butts while we waited for you to show up?”
    “Yes, because then they wouldn’t have gotten injured,” Concorde says, waving at the far wall of the medical bay, where Mindforce is bent over an examination table, gently probing a six-pack of extremely nasty burns spread across Stuart’s torso. His skin is lobster red and covered in blisters the size of quarters, and no one is more shocked about this than Stuart.
    “I wasn’t injured,” Sara protests from the neighboring table, but she’s not very convincing. Her face is pinched and tight, and she’s paler than normal.
    “Maybe not in the conventional sense,” Mindforce says, “but you did experience heavy psychic backlash.”
    “Keeping a tanker full of oil from turning Main Street into a crater,” Matt says, never one to squander an opportunity to throw our success, however small, in Concorde’s face.
    Concorde, never one to squander an opportunity to put Matt in his place, responds, “And she was lucky she succeeded.”
    “Why is everything we do
lucky
?” Matt shoots back. “Would it kill you to admit we did something right?”
    “No, but it might kill you.”
    “Could we not do this