Chapter 1

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 leaninglike 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.

?

“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.