Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel Read Online Free PDF

liked becoming a shadow. It made her feel so flat. Incorporeal. She was a slave to every bump and crack on the surface.
    Still, it had its uses.
    She shot along the ground and turned ninety degrees as she hit the wall. There was no sense of up or down as a shadow. There was only the surface. She flitted up along the outer wall of the Starlight hotel, passing balconies and feeling the roughness of sealed paint beneath her.
    Dimly, she registered the noise of the silver birch creaking and groaning as the sound waves generated tiny vibrations on the tower surface. She paused for a moment to turn her attention back to Solomon. She could just make him out, a fleshy surface against a concrete one, gripping the end of a long low-hanging branch of the tree with one hand, his feet spread wide on the ground. Then, with another crack of groaning wood, the branch swung upwards, sending Solomon flying into the air. Another branch further up rotated and bent down like a friend offering Solomon a hand. He grabbed it and let it pull him back up, flinging him to the next branch.
    If Niobe still had a mouth, she would have smiled to herself. He was getting on in years, but he still knew how to move. She raced up the side of the Hotel, matching him inch for inch.
    The Carpenter could bend wood to his will, use it as a weapon if he wanted. But his real control came over trees and bushes that still had life in them. While a pure telekinetic meta was limited to bending things and hurling them around, Solomon had a kind of kinship with wood-based plants. He said he could sense things from them, talk to them in a limited capacity. Occasionally it came in useful, but trees didn’t tend to be very coherent or observant. They could tell you what the weather was like a few days ago, or when something blocked their light, or if a possum was stripping their leaves. But if you wanted to know if a bad guy had been past, they were as silent as a mobster in a film noir.
    She slipped under a balcony to avoid the light from a street lamp and crossed to the opposite side. She could feel Solomon’s heavy breathing as he heaved himself up in one last leap.
    She got to the balcony of 408 and drew herself back together. Her body and clothes reformed and her normal senses returned. It took less than a second. Quietly, she let out the breath she’d been holding.
    Solomon landed next to her a moment later. “Call it a draw?”
    “You wish, Carpenter.” She peered through the double French doors, but the inside was dark. No movement that she could see. She tried the handle with a gloved hand. Locked.
    Her set of lock picks were nestled in her inner coat pocket, but she didn’t need them. The doors didn’t sit well in their frames. She ran her fingers down the crack between them. It was enough.
    She held her breath and shifted back into shadow form. In an instant, she’d slipped through the crack and reformed herself on the other side. A minor thrill ran through her heart as she crouched and peered around the hotel room. The teenager in her had never got over the excitement of being where she shouldn’t be.
    She could make out a couch and a dining table with four chairs, but only a single one was out of place. Next to the table, a room service trolley sat. She sniffed. Roast chicken. Better than the beans and stew she’d cooked for dinner. A television rested in the corner. Supposedly the Americans all had colour TVs by now, but New Zealand was still broadcasting everything in black and white.
    Satisfied they were alone, she unlocked the balcony door and let Solomon in. He hesitated before entering. She knew the part of his brain trained in Sunday School got anxious whenever he trespassed with her. He preferred the straight-up-and-down fights. Too bad there weren’t many of them going round anymore.
    Still, Niobe was no criminal. You had to have a code. Breaking in to a place was all right, as long as you didn’t take anything or do any actual breaking. You