Chapter 23:

  – Amara –

  Two days ter, the new mansion was finally livable.

  I'd expected Morgana to name it something dramatic like le Fay Manor, the Obsidian Keep, the Fortress of Absolutely Do Not Fuck With Us. Something befitting a thousand-year-old dark witch who'd toppled empires and once made Merlin himself flinch.

  But when the paperwork cleared and the st of the contractors fled the property looking vaguely traumatized—Beltrix had greeted one of them at the door holding a severed chicken head from "dinner preparations," which I suspected was deliberate psychological warfare disguised as domesticity—Morgana had simply signed the deed with an elegant flourish and decred it Bck Manor.

  "Le Fay is a name that echoes too loudly in certain circles," she'd said, tracing her fingertip along the embossed gold letters of the property title. "Bck, however… Bck is yours. Ours…"

  I hadn't argued. Partly because I was genuinely touched, and partly because I'd learned that when Morgana made a decision with that particur softness in her voice—the one that sounded less like a decration and more like a confession—it meant she'd been thinking about it for days and had already considered and discarded every possible objection I might raise.

  Bck Manor it was.

  The estate sprawled across twelve acres of Gotham countryside. It was dramatic and beautiful and completely over the top, which meant it was perfect.

  The interior had needed extensive work. Decades of abandonment had left the bones intact but the flesh rotting. Water-stained ceilings, warped floorboards, a kitchen that smelled faintly of mildew and regret. Morgana had handled the structural repairs with magic, reshaping load-bearing walls and purging decades of decay in a single evening of focused spellwork that left her slightly winded and irritable. The cosmetic details—fresh paint, new fixtures, furniture that didn't look like it had been salvaged from a Victorian funeral home—required mundane professionals.

  We'd hired an army of them. Painters, electricians, plumbers, interior designers who bnched when Morgana insisted the master bedroom needed to be "darker, no, darker, I said I wanted to feel like I was sleeping inside a moonless night, not a department store."

  The pool had been installed in three days by a crew who worked with suspicious urgency after Beltrix wandered outside to observe their progress and casually mentioned she'd once drowned a man in a puddle.

  Now the manor breathed with life. Our life. And it was just far enough from the city that the perpetual fog cloud over gotham didn’t affect us. Those were poor people's problems…

  And on this particur afternoon, with the summer sun pouring across the newly tiled pool deck, I was doing my absolute best to enjoy every goddamn second of it.

  "You missed a spot," I murmured, shifting my hips on the cushioned lounge chair.

  Morgana's slicked fingers traced the curve of my lower back, pressing into the dimples just above the waistband of my bikini bottoms. It was a triangle of bck fabric so minimal it was less a garment and more a polite suggestion. The matching top wasn't much better, they were two scraps of dark silk held together by strings thin enough to snap under a firm breeze.

  My pale skin gleamed where Morgana had already worked the oil into it, catching sunlight and throwing it back in a way that made me look carved from porcein and sin.

  "I assure you," Morgana said, her voice a low, unhurried drawl that vibrated against my shoulder bdes as she leaned closer, "I have not missed a single spot. I am being thorough."

  Her palm slid down my spine, fingers spying wide to cover as much skin as possible. The oil was warm—she'd heated it with a whispered charm. Every inch of contact sent my nerve endings fizzing. Being a succubus meant my entire body was an erogenous zone, and Morgana knew this, exploited it with the casual expertise of someone who'd spent centuries perfecting the art of making people fall apart.

  I bit the inside of my cheek as her thumb traced the ridge of my shoulder bde. A quiet, involuntary moan escaped anyway—low and throaty, the kind that vibrated in my chest before slipping past my lips. "Mmh... you're doing that on purpose."

  "Doing what on purpose?" Morgana's tone was pure innocence, which meant she was absolutely doing it on purpose. Her hand glided along the outer curve of my ribcage, fingertips brushing the side of my breast where it pressed against the lounger. My nipples tightened instantly, aching against the thin bikini fabric.

  I turned my head just enough to peer at her through one half-lidded eye. She was sitting beside me on the edge of the adjacent lounger, still fully dressed in a flowing bck sundress that somehow managed to be both casual and devastatingly elegant. Her dark hair was loose, spilling over one shoulder in waves. Those green eyes held a glint of wicked amusement as she squeezed more oil into her palm and resumed her ministrations along the backs of my thighs.

  I let my eye close again and melted into the sensation.

  The pool glittered beside us. Morgana had enchanted the water to maintain a perfect temperature regardless of weather and to shift color depending on the time of day.

  Beyond the pool, the grounds rolled away in sculpted wns bordered by ancient oaks and dense hedgerows that Morgana had already ced with enough protective wards to make Fort Knox look like a screen door. Somewhere inside the manor, I could hear Beltrix's muffled voice—she was singing, which was a retively new development and deeply unsettling. The song appeared to be an improvised bald about disemboweling traitors, performed with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believed she was the next great musical talent of her generation.

  Daphne and Astoria had retreated to the library an hour ago, ciming they needed to study advanced transfiguration theory. I suspected they were actually reading the romance novels Astoria had smuggled back from her st trip into the city, but I wasn't about to spoil their fun. They'd earned a break.

  "You know," I said, my voice slightly muffled by the cushion my face was half-buried in, "I'm a little surprised you moved us next to Batman."

  Morgana's hands paused for the briefest moment, just long enough for me to register the hesitation, before resuming their slippery path along the back of my left thigh. Her fingers worked into the muscle with practiced pressure, kneading away tension I hadn't realized I was carrying.

  "I moved us next to Bruce Wayne," she corrected, her tone carrying the precise, patient cadence she used when she believed I was missing an important distinction. "Batman is an alter ego. A mask he wears to frighten criminals and indulge his obsessive need for control."

  I cracked open one eye again. "Is there actually a difference? They're the same person."

  Morgana's lips curved into a smile that was part amusement, part something older and more contemptive. She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she poured another generous measure of oil and began working it into the exposed skin of my lower back, right where the bikini bottoms dipped scandalously low. Her thumbs pressed into the hollows on either side of my spine, and I shuddered, a helpless gasp catching in my throat.

  "There is always a difference," she said finally, her voice dropping to something softer, more reflective, "between who someone is and who they become when they believe the world is watching. Bruce Wayne is a man—brilliant, damaged, driven by grief and an almost pathological compulsion to protect what he considers his. Batman is the instrument of that compulsion. A weapon he forged from his own trauma."

  Her fingers traced the curve of my hip bone, slipping beneath the thin string of my bikini bottom just enough to make my breath stutter. I pressed my thighs together involuntarily as heat pooled low in my belly. It was a reflexive response my traitorous succubus physiology served up every time someone touched me with even moderate intent.

  "Bruce Wayne," Morgana continued, seemingly unbothered by the way my body was responding to her touch, or more likely, deriving quiet satisfaction from it, "is someone I can reason with. Batman would never have killed Mordred." And there—right there, in the half-second pause between "killed" and "Mordred"—I felt her fingers tighten fractionally against my skin before deliberately rexing. "Batman," Morgana resumed after a moment, her composure rebuilt so seamlessly you'd never know it had fractured, "would have found the fourth option that nobody else considered—the one that neutralized the danger without spilling blood that didn't need spilling. That is why I respect him, even as I despise everything the Justice League represents." She leaned down, and I felt her lips brush the sensitive skin between my shoulder bdes, barely there and yet devastating. "And," she added, her breath ghosting across my oiled skin, "I am aware that you have developed a fondness for his eldest adopted son. The acrobat with the irritatingly symmetrical face."

  I snorted into the cushion. "Dick is not irritatingly symmetrical."

  "He is. I've studied his bone structure. It's offensive."

  "You've studied his bone structure?"

  "Know thine enemies, darling."

  I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on one elbow. The movement shifted my bikini top in ways that would have been indecent in any context other than a private poolside with the woman who'd seen me in far more compromising positions.

  Morgana's gaze dropped briefly—appreciatively—to where the silk had shifted before returning to my face with infuriating composure.

  "So let me get this straight," I said, squinting at her through the afternoon gre. "You moved us next door to the Batman—the single most paranoid, surveilnce-obsessed, contingency-pnning human being on the pnet—because you think he's reasonable, and also because you're being magnanimous about the fact that I want to fuck his son. Whenever you finally let me lose my virginity that is…"

  Morgana tilted her head, considering. A strand of dark hair fell across her cheekbone. "I said I could spare him," she crified, one eyebrow arching with deliberate precision. "When the time eventually comes for me to settle my accounts with the Justice League, I will exempt Batman and his immediate circle from whatever retribution I deem appropriate. That is not magnanimity, Amara. That is tactical restraint motivated by the desire to avoid making my lovely apprentice cry."

  "I wouldn't cry—"

  "You would cry. You would be devastated, and then you would be furious with me, and then you would refuse to sleep in our bed for at least a few months, during which time you would dramatically relocate to one of the guest rooms and I would be forced to endure Beltrix's cooking without your company at the table, which I refuse to do. Her pancakes are admittedly exceptional, but the dinner conversation is..."

  "Unhinged?"

  "I was going to say vivid."

  I couldn't help the full ugh that shook my shoulders and sent ripples through the oiled skin of my stomach.

  Morgana watched me with an expression I'd come to recognize. She loved making me ugh or just seeing my smile. She'd never admit it in those exact words.

  I reached out and caught her wrist, pulling her hand to my lips and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. Her skin was slick with oil and warm from the sun.

  "Thank you," I said quietly. "For thinking about all that."

  "You are the most important person in my existence," she said simply. "Your happiness is not a concession. It is a priority."

  The words settled into me—they were warm and glowing and faintly painful in the way that genuine tenderness always was when you'd spent most of your life without it. I held onto that feeling for a moment, turning it over in my mind. And then, because I was still me and sentimentality made me itchy, I said, "So when exactly is this revenge plot supposed to happen? Because from where I'm sitting, it seems like you've been pretty comfortable building a coven, buying mansions, and letting Beltrix redecorate the kitchen with skull-shaped salt shakers."

  Morgana's expression didn't change, but something behind it went very still. Her hand, still resting in mine, didn't twitch or pull away. She simply looked at me with those ancient, fathomless eyes, and for the space of three heartbeats, I saw the abyss that lived beneath her composure. The pce where a thousand years of rage and loss and bitter, corroded grief pooled like bck water at the bottom of a well.

  Then she blinked, and it was gone.

  "Revenge," she said mildly, "is not a meal best served in haste. It requires preparation. But when the moment arrives, the strike is absolute!"

  It was a good answer I guessed. The truth—the one I would never, under any circumstances, voice aloud while Morgana's hand was anywhere near my body or my tail—was that I'd been watching something shift in her over the past weeks. Something subtle and gradual, like a tide retreating so slowly you didn't notice the shoreline had changed until you looked up and realized the water was a hundred yards away.

  She talked about Mordred less.

  Not that she'd ever discussed him frequently. It had always been oblique—references to "my son" folded into rger conversations about Merlin's betrayal or the Justice League's sins. But even those references were thinning. The raw, serrated quality they'd carried when I first became her apprentice—the way his name had sounded like a wound being reopened every time she spoke it—had softened into something closer to a scar. Still visible. Still tender if pressed. But healed enough to become less and less of an issue.

  Maybe it was because she had me now. And Daphne and Astoria. And Beltrix, however manufactured that particur bond might be. Maybe the family she'd assembled—piece by damaged piece, held together with dark magic and genuine affection and an arming amount of sexual tension—had filled enough of the hollow that Mordred's absence had carved that revenge felt less urgent than preservation.

  Or maybe she was just waiting for the perfect moment, as she cimed, and I was projecting my own desperate hope that she'd choose the life we were building over throwing it all away for one final epic battle with the league.

  Either way, I kept my mouth shut, smiled sweetly, and let her continue rubbing oil into my hip.

  "Speaking of cultivation," Morgana said, and the shift in her tone told me the Mordred thread had been neatly severed and filed away, "you mentioned visiting a rather interesting shop before we left for the cruise. Madame Xanadu's establishment, yes?"

  I nodded, settling back against the lounger and adjusting my bikini top with a zy tug. The fabric had slipped again during our conversation, and at this point I was barely wearing it at all.

  "Xanadu's," I confirmed. "Tucked away in one of those impossible Gotham alleys that only appears when it wants to be found. The kind of pce that smells like old parchment and makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up the moment you cross the threshold."

  "I'm familiar with her work," Morgana said, her voice carrying a complicated weight. "Xanadu and I have... history. She's one of the few practitioners in the Western Hemisphere whose abilities I consider genuinely formidable, though her insistence on operating a retail establishment has always struck me as beneath her station."

  "She thought I was you at first," I said. "Nearly hexed me before I got a word out. Then she figured out I was younger and rexed. Barely."

  Morgana's lips twitched. "Did she ask if you were my daughter or my clone?"

  "Both. I told her we were going with 'twin sisters' per the current family mythology." I paused. "She looked like she wanted to ask follow-up questions but decided she'd rather keep her sanity intact."

  "A wise woman." Morgana squeezed another palmful of oil and began working it into my calves, her fingers pressing firmly into the lean muscle. I let out a low, appreciative groan that I didn't bother suppressing.

  "So." Morgana's thumbs dug into a knot behind my knee, and my toes curled reflexively. "What did you find for your half-demon paramour? I confess I've been curious since you mentioned it. Raven is... an unusual creature. Powerful in ways that most mortals cannot perceive, yet crippled by self-loathing and repression. Choosing a gift for someone like that requires a certain delicacy…"

  I reached into my inventory and withdrew a small wooden box. The wood was dark, almost bck, with a grain that shifted subtly when you tilted it, as though something moved beneath the polished surface. I set it on the lounger between us and lifted the lid.

  Inside, resting on a bed of deep violet silk, was a bracelet.

  At first gnce, it looked deceptively simple. But when I picked it up, the metal warmed immediately in my palm, and the symbols pulsed once with faint light before settling into dormancy.

  "Shadow-wrought silver," Morgana identified instantly, leaning forward with genuine interest. Her hair fell in a dark curtain around her face as she examined the piece without touching it. "Forged in the twilight realm between the physical world and the dimension of shadows. Extraordinarily rare. I haven't seen craftsmanship this refined in..." She paused, calcuting. "At least three centuries."

  "Xanadu called it a Veil Chain," I said, turning the bracelet slowly so the afternoon light caught the etchings. "The enchantment is made for empaths like her. It has automatic emotional dampening. Raven's had to filter out other people's emotions herself all her life. This is more like... a filter to take some of the load off of her. It takes the raw empathic input she's constantly drowning in and softens it. Reduces the volume without cutting the signal entirely."

  Morgana nodded slowly. "Empaths of Raven's caliber are perpetually overwhelmed. Every person in proximity becomes a source of emotional noise—joy, grief, lust, rage, all of it pressing against her consciousness simultaneously. A filter that allows selective engagement rather than forced absorption would be..."

  "Life-changing," I finished quietly. "Yeah." I turned the bracelet over, revealing a single small charm dangling from the central link—a tiny crescent moon carved from what appeared to be solidified darkness, its surface somehow absorbing rather than reflecting light.

  "The gift is exceptional," she said, and I heard the genuine approval beneath her measured tone. "Raven will treasure it. Though I suspect it won’t be enough for you to fully corrupt her half-bck heart…"

  I groaned at her pyful jab.

  The air around the manor suddenly shimmered!

  Something rge, fast, and decidedly not a bird had just smmed face-first into twelve acres of interlocking defensive enchantments designed to repel anything short of a ballistic missile.

  "Ow!" The voice came from directly above us—high, bright, and carrying the particur tone of someone who was more surprised than hurt. Like a golden retriever bonking its nose on a gss door it hadn't noticed.

  Morgana's hands stilled on my calf. I watched her fingers curl slightly—not reaching for a wand she didn't carry, but gathering ambient magic to her palms the way most people would ball their fists. A reflex born from a millennium of people trying to kill her when she wasn't paying attention.

  I followed her gaze and squinted against the afternoon sun.

  A woman hovered roughly forty feet above the pool deck.

  Starfire floated with her legs tucked beneath her, one hand pressed to her forehead where she'd presumably collided with the invisible wall. Even from forty feet away, I could see the way her costume—if you could call two strips of alien metallic fabric stitched together with hope and Tamaranean engineering a costume—struggled valiantly to contain the physics-defying curves beneath it.

  She suddenly gnced down. Her luminous green eyes found me on the lounger. Her entire face transformed with a delight so immediate and unfiltered that it was almost blinding.

  "FRIEND AMARA!"

  Starfire began waving with the full-body enthusiasm of someone who hadn't learned that a simple raised hand would suffice. Both arms windmilled in wide, exuberant arcs, which caused certain aspects of her anatomy to move in sympathetic rhythm beneath that inadequate costume.

  Morgana's eyebrow climbed to a height I'd previously considered anatomically impossible.

  "I have arrived to visit you before everyone else for your housewarming ceremony!" Starfire announced, her voice carrying across the grounds with the effortless projection of someone accustomed to being heard over the vacuum of space. "I flew as fast as I could so that I would be the first! I believe on Earth this is called 'getting the worm,' yes?"

  I stared up at her.

  Then I looked at Morgana.

  "Our what?"

  Morgana's expression had settled into the particur configuration she wore when reality was presenting her with something she hadn't anticipated and wasn't entirely sure how to categorize.

  She shrugged. The most eloquent shrug I'd ever witnessed, communicating in a single economical gesture—I have no idea what this creature is talking about, I did not pn this, and I am choosing not to expend energy being armed by it.

  I turned back to Starfire, who was still hovering and still waving, apparently content to remain floating indefinitely until someone addressed the situation.

  "Starfire…?" I called up, shading my eyes with my hand, "there's no housewarming ceremony. We just moved in."

  "Yes! That is the ceremony! You have warmed the house by moving into it, and now friends come to celebrate! This is Earth tradition, is it not?" Her head tilted to one side like a confused, gorgeous bird. "I researched this extensively on the Google."

  Morgana made a quiet sound beside me that might have been a sigh or might have been the early stages of an aneurysm.

  "Hold on," I said, sitting up fully on the lounger. "Let me get the ward to—Morgana, can you?"

  Morgana was already raising her hand, fingers moving in the precise geometric patterns of her ward-manipution technique. I felt the barrier ripple outward in concentric waves as she carved an opening rge enough for a Tamaranean to pass through without triggering the defensive protocols. The st thing we needed was Starfire getting zapped by something Morgana had designed to repel interdimensional intruders—which, technically, Starfire absolutely was.

  "The barrier is open," Morgana called upward, her voice carrying the measured politeness she reserved for situations she found bewildering but not immediately threatening. "Please enter before something else decides to test my wards. And next time please use the front door…"

  Starfire shot downward with the speed and trajectory of a cheerful meteor. The air cracked around her as she decelerated from what must have been several hundred miles per hour to a dead stop approximately two feet above the pool deck. She nded with the lightness of a falling leaf, bare feet touching down on the warm tile without so much as a whisper of impact.

  She was taller than me. Her shoulders were broader than mine, tapering to a waist that was narrow but muscled rather than delicate. Her thighs were thick with corded strength, her calves carved from whatever impossible material Tamaranean physiology was built from. And her chest—there was simply no way to avoid noticing it, because Starfire's breasts existed in a state of aggressive prominence that defied both Earth physics and the structural integrity of her costume. They were rge, firm, and riding high on her chest with the casual confidence of someone whose species apparently didn't believe in gravitational limitations.

  She beamed at me with that thousand-watt smile, the one that was simultaneously the most genuine and the most devastating weapon in her considerable arsenal, and then closed the distance between us in three long strides and swept me into a hug that lifted my feet off the ground.

  "Amara!" She squeezed with enthusiasm that would have cracked a normal person's ribs. My enhanced durability absorbed the pressure, but I still felt my spine pop in three pces. Her skin was hot—not warm, hot.

  My succubus instincts purred. They always purred around Starfire. The woman radiated desire and sensuality.

  "You look so beautiful in your tiny swimming garment!" Starfire excimed, pulling back just enough to hold me at arm's length and conduct a thorough, shameless visual assessment of my body. Her glowing eyes traced the contours of my bikini-cd form with the unabashed directness. "The bck fabric complements your pale skin in a way that is most striking. I am very jealous of friend Raven for staking her cim upon you first. If I had known you were avaible for the ciming, I would have pursued you with great vigor on the cruise ship instead of wasting time with those other humans."

  "Star—"

  "Their lovemaking was adequate but uninspired. Nothing like the sounds friend Raven made when you—"

  "STAR—"

  She blinked, registering my expression with mild confusion. "Was that too much information for Earth conversation?"

  I sighed. "Little bit."

  "I see." She nodded solemnly, filing this away with the same diligent attention she applied to all cultural learning. Then she released me and turned her smile toward Morgana.

  "Supervilin Morgana!" Starfire greeted, with the same cheerful warmth. "It is lovely to see you again! Your home is most beautiful. The grounds remind me of the imperial gardens on Tamaran, though I noticed your vil has many more poisonous pnts growing around it from the air."

  Morgana blinked.

  I realized this was possibly one of the few times I'd ever seen Morgana genuinely thrown off-bance by someone's sheer force of personality.

  Starfire was a six-foot-tall alien princess with the combat experience of a seasoned warrior and the social approach of a golden retriever who'd just discovered you had treats. There was no tempte in Morgana's thousand-year-old pybook for how to respond to someone who called you "Supervilin Morgana" with genuine affection and zero irony.

  "Why... thank you," Morgana said after a beat, her voice moduted to a careful neutrality that I recognized as her I'm going to accept this situation and move forward because the alternative is admitting I'm confused register. Her lips curved into something that was almost—but not quite—a real smile. "The gardens are still being established, but I appreciate the comparison. And yes, I am a fan of poisonous pnts… I appreciate the comparison with Tamaran’s royal gardens though."

  Starfire's eyes widened with genuine delight. "You know of Tamaran?"

  "I am over a thousand years old, dear girl. I've had conversations with beings from rather a lot of star systems. I’ve known we weren’t alone in the universe for a very long time…"

  "Oh! Then we have much to discuss! I would love to hear about your encounters with—"

  "Starfire," I interrupted gently, stepping between them before this detoured. "You said something about everyone else coming?"

  Her attention swung back to me, and her expression shifted to something pleased. "Yes! Friend Dick discovered that you had moved into the residence beside his own. He was... very animated about this discovery." She paused, searching for the right word, her brow creasing with the effort of transtion. "I believe the Earth word is 'flustered.' He contacted friend Raven and friend Kara, and they agreed to visit today to welcome you to the neighborhood!"

  "And they told you this... how?"

  Starfire's lower lip pushed forward, her brows drawing together. "They did not tell me," she admitted. "I overheard Raven speaking with Dick through her communicator." The pout deepened. "I do not think they intended to invite me…"

  Something tugged in my chest, it was a feeling that sat awkwardly between sympathy and discomfort.

  I knew the story. Dick had walked in on Starfire with three strangers, Starfire had been genuinely baffled by his devastation because Tamaranean culture didn't frame communal intimacy as betrayal, and the ensuing emotional wreckage had severely damaged the Titans as a team. Dick was still raw. And Starfire genuinely couldn't understand why sharing physical pleasure had cost her the person she loved most.

  It wasn't my pce to fix that. I wasn't even sure it could be fixed. But I couldn't bring myself to point out that her presence here was going to make the next few hours approximately ten thousand percent more uncomfortable for everyone involved if Dick was also going to be here soon.

  "Well," I said, "you're here now, and I'm gd you came. Can I get you something to drink?"

  The pout vanished like storm clouds parting. "I would enjoy one of the frozen fruity beverages with the small umbrel! Cyborg introduced me to these recently, and they are my new favorite Earth invention!"

  Damn, we needed to get some house elves or something because I was sure none of us knew how to make anything like that…?

  "I'll see what we have…" Then I paused and looked back over my shoulder. "Star, one question—when you said Dick was coming today, did you mean—"

  The front gates chimed. I felt the wards pulse gently as they registered three distinct presences at the front door—one human, one half-human, and one Kryptonian.

  "—now," I finished ftly. "He meant now."

  Morgana, who had settled back onto her lounger, gnced up at me with an expression of pointed amusement. "It seems your suitors have arrived, darling."

  "They're not my suitors—"

  "Three heroes arriving simultaneously to visit you at your new residence, all of whom are currently competing for your romantic attention?" Morgana ticked each point off on her fingers with deliberate precision. "In my era, this would have been called a courtship procession. Though admittedly, the courtship processions of my era involved significantly more jousting and fewer skintight costumes."

  "Nobody is jousting for me."

  "And they won’t if you keep up that defensive attitude..." Morgana teased me. “...I suppose it's all the same. I happen to have a—meeting—scheduled for ter with some old associates I’ve only recently gotten back into contact with.”

  I looked down at myself. The bck bikini that had seemed perfectly reasonable for a private afternoon of sunbathing and being molested by my mentor was now, in the context of receiving visitors—superhero visitors, multiple of whom had unresolved sexual tension with me—looking like a liability. The top had been gradually losing its battle with gravity throughout Morgana's massage, and at this point, the silk triangles were covering approximately sixty percent of what they were nominally responsible for. The bottoms weren't much better. The oil Morgana had rubbed into every accessible inch of my skin caught the light with a slick, golden sheen that made me look like I'd been specifically prepared for consumption.

  If Dick, Raven, and Kara walked around that corner and found me like this, nobody was going to be able to maintain eye contact for longer than three seconds. Which, under normal circumstances, would have been entertaining as hell.

  I wasn't above enjoying the effect my body had on people, especially people I was attracted to. But with Starfire already here, and the emotional history between her and Dick hanging in the air like unexploded ordnance, this afternoon was going to be complicated enough without me looking like a centerfold.

  "I should change," I said, already heading for the gss doors that led into the manor's ground floor.

  "Why?" Starfire asked, tilting her head with genuine confusion. "You look wonderful. On Tamaran, we would consider this formal attire."

  Morgana made a sound that might have been a ugh, quickly suppressed behind a cough.

  "Because," I called back over my shoulder as I pulled open the door, "the st time superheroes showed up unannounced while I wasn't wearing pants, I ended up fighting in the nude in front of an underground society of masked aristocrats, and I'd rather not make that a pattern."

  I heard Starfire lean toward Morgana and whisper, loudly enough to carry across the entire pool deck, "Is that a common occurrence for her?"

  "It only happened the one time, but that’s still more than a normal person might expect," Morgana replied.

  …I took the fastest shower of my life!

  Not because I was particurly dirty, though Morgana's oil had turned my skin into something that could have greased a slip-and-slide. It was because I could feel the emotional pressure building downstairs the way you feel a storm front rolling in before the first crack of thunder. Three superheroes and one uninvited Tamaranean ex-girlfriend, all crammed into a house they'd never been inside, with no host present and only my mother Beltrix as their welcoming committee!

  The water was still running when I heard Beltrix's voice echo up the stairwell, cheerfully informing someone that "the sitting room is through there, don't touch anything, some of the artifacts bite, and if you need the toilet it's down the hall but the third door on the left is cursed so don't open that one."

  I didn't even bother drying my hair properly. I threw on the first dress my hands found in the walk-in closet Morgana had insisted I needed, a tight bck number that stopped well above mid-thigh and clung to every curve like it had been painted on. The neckline plunged low enough to show the inner swells of my breasts without crossing into outright obscenity, and the back was cut to just above the base of my spine, leaving my shoulder bdes exposed. It was the kind of dress that said I'm not trying to impress you while simultaneously screaming please look at me, which was basically my entire aesthetic philosophy distilled into fabric.

  I shoved my feet into a pair of simple bck fts, finger-combed my still-damp hair into something approximating intentional dishevelment, and bolted for the stairs.

  I made it exactly four steps down the main staircase before nearly colliding with Daphne and Astoria, who were ascending from the opposite direction.

  Daphne pulled up short. Astoria stood one step behind her sister.

  "Where's the fire?" Daphne asked, her blue eyes sweeping over my outfit with the particur kind of appraisal that was fifty percent aesthetic judgment and fifty percent something considerably less innocent.

  "We have visitors," I said, slightly breathless from my sudden sprint. "Superhero visitors. Three of them. Possibly four, depending on whether Starfire counts as a visitor or an atmospheric event."

  Astoria's eyebrows climbed. "The ones you told us about? The acrobat, the empath, and the alien girl who could bench-press a building? And one more as well?"

  "That's three of them, yes. Starfire arrived first. She flew directly into our wards at approximately the speed of sound and then announced she was here for our housewarming ceremony."

  "We're having a housewarming ceremony?" Daphne's tone sounded upset.

  "Did anyone think to inform us? I would have worn something presentable!" Astoria added while staring at her own frilly white dress.

  "You both look incredible and you know it. But no, we're not having a housewarming. These are just some of my—friends—stopping by for a quick visit," I said and noticed neither of them looked pleased regardless.

  Daphne's expression shifted through several complex configurations. First came recognition of the names, because she'd heard me talk about all of them. Then came the calcution, the quick mental sorting of who these people were and what their presence in our home meant for security, secrecy, and the delicate equilibrium of our coven's operations. And finally, settling in st came the jealousy.

  Daphne was far too composed to let it show overtly. But I saw it in the way her jaw tightened fractionally and in the slight narrowing of her eyes that she probably thought was imperceptible.

  Astoria, who had never once in her life been subtle about anything, was considerably more direct. "So," she said, crossing her arms beneath her chest and cocking one hip in a pose that managed to be simultaneously adorable and accusatory, "the famous hero friends are here. The ones you apparently go on dates with and dance with at nightclubs and fight sea monsters alongside while we sit at home studying transfiguration like good little students?"

  "You were just reading romance novels instead of training," I reminded her. "I know this because I can smell the pages from here."

  Astoria had the grace to blush, but she didn't back down. "Casting magic all day is boring and tiring! That's beside the point!"

  She and Daphne had given up their old lives, their family connections, their safety, to align themselves with Morgana's coven. Their world had contracted to this manor and the people inside it. Mine kept expanding.

  I reached out and caught Astoria's chin between my thumb and forefinger, tilting her face up so she had no choice but to meet my eyes. Her skin was warm and impossibly soft beneath my touch, and I felt the familiar tingle of my [Lewd Touch] ability stirring at the contact.

  "Nobody," I said huskily and noticed her shivering, "is enough for a succubus. But I need you to hear something, and I need you both to believe it—you and Daphne are not repceable. You're not interchangeable. You're not pceholders I'm keeping warm while I chase prettier distractions."

  Astoria's blush deepened from pink to crimson, spreading down her neck and across the exposed skin above her neckline. Her lips parted slightly, and I watched her pupils dite as the sincerity in my voice hit something vulnerable.

  "The heroes downstairs are... complicated," I continued, releasing her chin but letting my fingers trail briefly along her jaw. "They're people I care about in ways I'm still figuring out. But this, what we have here, this coven, this family, you two and Morgana and even Beltrix and her unhinged breakfast songs? This is the foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it. Not instead of it."

  Daphne, who had been watching this exchange with the careful attention of someone cataloging every word for ter analysis, finally spoke. Her voice was quieter than usual, stripped of its habitual composure. "You mean that?"

  It wasn't a question, but I answered it anyway. "I mean it."

  Something shifted behind Daphne's eyes. The jealousy didn't vanish entirely, because Daphne was too honest with herself to pretend emotions away on command, but it settled. Filed itself into a manageable compartment. She straightened, smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her blouse, and gave me a nod that communicated approximately seventeen things simultaneously, chief among them: I believe you, I'm still not entirely happy about it, and we will be discussing this in greater detail ter, preferably while naked.

  "Well then," Daphne said, reaching back to hook her arm through Astoria's and pulling her sister gently away from me. "I suppose we'll leave you to your heroic guests. Come on, Tori. Let's go finish our 'transfiguration research.'"

  Astoria allowed herself to be tugged but twisted to look back over her shoulder. "Tell the empath girl I said hi. And tell the alien one that her outfit from the cruise was fantastic. I saw the pictures online."

  "There are pictures online?" I mumbled as I watched them go back to the room they shared together. And Astoria—the pureblood princess—knows how to use the internet?

  Then I took a breath, squared my shoulders, and headed for the sitting room.

  The sitting room was one of the spaces Morgana had personally overseen during renovation, and it showed. The walls were a deep charcoal grey, the kind of color that absorbed light and made everything inside the room feel more present, more saturated. An enormous stone firepce dominated the far wall, its mantel carved with symbols I recognized as Old English runes mixed with something far older and less identifiable. The furniture was dark leather, arranged in two facing configurations, a long sofa against the left wall and a matching sofa opposite, with a low gss-topped coffee table between them. Tall windows lined the right side, their heavy curtains pulled back to let in the afternoon sun, which fell in warm bars across the Oriental rug that covered most of the hardwood floor.

  Beltrix had, as I predicted, deposited the guests in this room and simply left. I could hear her somewhere deeper in the manor, the faint sounds of what might have been singing or might have been an incantation drifting through the walls. With Beltrix, both were equally likely and equally concerning.

  The scene I walked into was exactly as uncomfortable as I'd feared, except somehow worse because it had apparently been marinating in silence for several minutes before my arrival.

  Dick, Raven, and Kara were crowded together on the left sofa. Dick sat in the middle, which I suspected was less a deliberate choice and more the result of Kara and Raven having independently cimed the two end positions and leaving him no alternative. He was wearing civilian clothes, a fitted navy shirt with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms and dark jeans. His dark hair was slightly windswept. He looked uncomfortably handsome in the way that Dick Grayson always looked uncomfortably handsome.

  Raven sat on his left, pressed into the corner of the sofa with her legs crossed and her arms folded in a posture that radiated get me out of here with the intensity of a signal fre. She'd dressed in something I'd never seen her wear before, a charcoal turtleneck and fitted bck jeans that hugged her legs down to a pair of ankle boots. It was more casual than her usual style, almost deliberately understated, but the turtleneck couldn't hide the generous curves beneath it and the jeans emphasized the shape of her thighs in a way that made my succubus instincts murmur appreciatively.

  Kara occupied the right end, and she was the only one who didn't look like she wanted to phase through the floor. She wore a yellow sundress with a white cardigan thrown over it, her golden hair pulled back in a casual ponytail that made her look about twenty years old and approximately three times more wholesome than anyone in this house had any right to be. Her bright blue eyes were bouncing between the two sofas with the wide, slightly frantic energy of someone watching a tennis match where both pyers were armed with live grenades.

  Starfire sat alone on the opposite sofa.

  She'd arranged herself with studied casualness, one long orange leg crossed over the other, her hands resting on her knee. Her chin was lifted, her luminous green eyes bright and defiant and, if you looked closely enough, glistening with something suspiciously close to tears that she was holding back through sheer force of alien willpower.

  Goddamn, I walked into an emotional storm didn’t I? Or it was more like the storm decided to drop in unannounced…

  Nobody had said a word when I paused in the doorway, but three things happened in rapid succession when they noticed me.

  Dick's eyes found me first, and I watched his gaze track down the bck dress with an involuntary flicker of appreciation that he immediately, visibly suppressed. He swallowed, adjusted his posture slightly, and fixed his attention on my face with the determined focus of a man who had been trained to maintain eye contact by Batman and was going to maintain eye contact if it killed him.

  Kara noticed me second, and her reaction was the opposite of subtle. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and a blush crept up from the colr of her cardigan to bloom across her cheeks. She looked away quickly, then looked back, then looked away again, then gave up and just stared with the endearing helplessness of someone whose Kryptonian brain was processing the dress at superspeed and arriving at conclusions that flustered every single one of them.

  Raven noticed me st, because her attention had been locked on Starfire with the heat-seeking precision of someone mid-argument. When she finally gnced toward the doorway, her expression went through a fascinating transformation. The anger in her eyes softened, then sharpened in an entirely different direction, then forcibly neutralized itself into something she probably intended to look composed and unaffected but actually looked like someone had just spped her with a photograph she wasn't prepared for.

  "Hi," I said from the doorway, surveying the disaster area with what I hoped was a breezy smile. "Everyone comfortable?"

  "Your new mother is terrifying," Dick said immediately, in the tone of someone who'd been holding that observation in for several minutes and couldn't contain it any longer.

  "What did Beltrix do?"

  "She told me my bone structure was 'acceptable for a Muggle' and that if I ever made you cry she would remove my spine through my throat and wear it as jewelry."

  "That's actually quite restrained for her. She must like you." I lied. I knew for a fact, that she did not like him… I stepped fully into the room, and the click of my fts on the hardwood seemed unnaturally loud in the residual silence. "And my actual mentor already told me she's studied your bone structure, so apparently it's a topic of discussion in this household."

  Dick opened his mouth, clearly uncertain whether to be armed or fttered. He settled on a confused half-smile that made him look unfairly boyish.

  "Amara." Raven's voice cut through the room, and everyone stiffened slightly at the ft, controlled quality of it. Her amethyst eyes slid from me back to Starfire. "Perhaps you can expin to your... guest... that eavesdropping on private communications and then showing up uninvited to someone's home is not considered acceptable behavior. On any pnet."

  Starfire's jaw tightened. The bright, unguarded joy that had defined her personality since I'd met her dimmed noticeably, like a mp being turned down to its lowest setting. When she spoke, her voice carried a careful steadiness that sounded rehearsed, as though she'd been practicing what to say during the agonizing minutes of silence before I arrived.

  "I did not eavesdrop," Starfire said, straightening on the sofa and meeting Raven's gre without flinching. "Your conversation was loud, and I was on the same floor in the tower. Tamaranean hearing is more sensitive than human hearing. I simply... heard."

  "And then decided to fly here ahead of everyone else without being invited."

  "I wished to see Amara. I did not realize I needed your permission to visit a friend!"

  The logical move would have been to sit with Dick, Raven, and Kara on the left sofa. They were, after all, the people who'd actually been invited to visit. The people I'd been building something with over the past weeks. The safe choice.

  But Starfire was sitting alone on the opposite sofa, and the way she held herself reminded me uncomfortably of a girl I used to be. A girl who sat alone in orphanage dining halls and told herself she preferred it that way…

  I crossed the room and sat down next to Starfire.

  Dick's expression flickered with something complicated. Raven's jaw tightened a fraction. Kara looked between the two sofas with the expression of someone watching a social chess move she hadn't anticipated and wasn't sure how to evaluate.

  Starfire, however, reacted with joy. Her entire body turned toward me, and before I could establish even the pretense of personal space, she scooted across the leather cushion until her thigh pressed flush against mine. Her skin was hot.

  "See!" Starfire announced triumphantly, looking directly at Raven with an expression of vindicated delight. "Amara and I are very good friends! Good friends sit together. This is Earth custom, yes?"

  The warmth of her pressed against my bare thigh where the dress had ridden up sent a pleasant shiver through my nerve endings that I diplomatically chose not to acknowledge. Starfire's arm hooked through mine with the casual possessiveness of someone who genuinely did not understand why anyone would object to physical closeness, and I found myself caught between amusement and something softer.

  "Starfire," I said gently, "you don't need to prove anything."

  "I am not proving," she replied, and some of the performance dropped from her voice, leaving something quieter. "I am simply sitting with my friend. That is all."

  The silence stretched for another three agonizing seconds. Then Dick exhaled.

  "We came here for Amara," he said, and his voice was steady and warm in a way that I recognized as his Nightwing voice bleeding into civilian Dick Grayson. "That's what today is about. I don't want anyone's personal history turning this into something it doesn't need to be." His blue eyes moved to Starfire, and something shifted in them. Not coldness, not anger. Something closer to exhaustion, and underneath it, buried deep enough that you'd need to know him to find it, a flicker of genuine sadness. "That includes ours, Kori."

  Starfire's grip on my arm tightened almost imperceptibly. Her luminous green eyes held Dick's gaze for a long moment, and I watched something pass between them that was too dense and too old for me to fully parse. Then she nodded and some of the tension in the room loosened like a belt notch being released.

  The silence that followed was different—less pressurized. More like the quiet after someone opens a window in a stuffy room.

  It was Kara who broke it.

  "Oh thank Rao," she muttered, slumping back against the sofa cushion with visible relief. "I was kind of enjoying the drama though, honestly? We never had anything like this on Krypton. Everyone was so private and formal about retionships. If two people were courting, they'd submit a compatibility assessment to the Science Council before their first date. Romantic disputes were handled through bureaucratic mediation. There was an actual form you could file if your partner offended you. I think it was called a Grievance of Emotional Dissatisfaction, or something equally soul-crushing." She said all of this in a rambling, slightly too-fast cadence that betrayed how nervous she actually was, and she only seemed to realize she'd said it out loud when every single person in the room turned to look at her. Kara's face went pink. Then red. Then a shade of scarlet that would have been arming on anyone who couldn't survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere. "That was... out loud," she said, her voice climbing half an octave. "That was definitely out loud. I was, um. I was saying that inside my head. Except I wasn't. Because you all heard it."

  "Every word," I confirmed, unable to suppress the grin spreading across my face.

  "A Grievance of Emotional Dissatisfaction," Raven repeated in a monotone that somehow communicated profound judgment.

  "The Science Council sounds like an absolute riot at parties," Dick added, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that told me he was fighting hard not to ugh.

  Kara pulled her cardigan tighter around herself as if the yellow fabric could somehow retroactively muffle her words, and sank lower into the sofa cushion. "Can we please move on? Please? Let's talk about literally anything else. The house. Let's talk about the house. It's a great house! You have good taste Amara!"

  “Thanks, but I had nothing to do with picking it out…”

  Kara groaned and hid her face in her hands.

  Dick gave her a lifeline and changed the topic again. He cleared his throat, straightened in his seat. "You guys almost gave our butler a heart attack, you know that? Alfred doesn't spook easily. The man has patched up Bruce after fights with literal gods and hasn't broken a sweat. But when he told us Morgana le Fay showed up at the front door with wine and her mother, I swear his left eye twitched when I rewatched the security cameras! I've never seen him almost lose his cool like that…"

  "Morgana makes a strong first impression," I said.

  "She introduced herself as your sister."

  "We're going with that, yes."

  Dick shook his head slowly, but he was smiling. That particur Dick Grayson smile that managed to be both exasperated and fond simultaneously, the one that said I cannot believe the things you put me through, but I'm choosing to be here anyway. "Look, you moving in next door was a surprise. A big one. Bruce had... opinions about it."

  "I can imagine."

  "But I know you." Dick's voice softened. Something earnest and vulnerable surfaced in its pce, and I watched his hands csp together between his knees, fingers intercing with a tension that suggested the words coming next weren't rehearsed. "I know you wouldn't try to hurt me or my family. I know that. Whatever else is complicated between us, whatever lines we're still figuring out, I trust you, Amara. So welcome to the neighborhood."

  He smiled at me then, open and unguarded, and my stupid, treacherous heart did a full somersault behind my ribs.

  I tried to formute a response. Something witty, something deflective, something that would acknowledge the sincerity without letting it crack open the part of me that still didn't know how to handle being trusted by good people.

  But before I could speak, Starfire leaned toward me from her position pressed against my side and announced, "Amara, your heart rate has increased significantly. It was steady at sixty-two beats per minute, and now it is at ninety-one." She turned her glowing eyes toward Dick with an expression of analytical appreciation. "Dick has gotten very skilled at the fttering of beautiful women since our retionship ended. He was never this smooth when we were together. Perhaps heartbreak has improved his romantic technique."

  The room went very still.

  Dick's face performed an extraordinary gymnastics routine, cycling through surprise, mortification, a fsh of something that might have been guilt, and finally nding on resigned acceptance. His hand came up to rub the back of his neck in a gesture I was beginning to recognize as his default response to emotional exposure. "Kori..."

  "It is a compliment!" Starfire insisted, apparently baffled by his reaction. "On Tamaran, noting a partner's improved mating skills after a separation is considered high praise. It means the emotional growth was productive."

  "Different pnet," Kara murmured from the other sofa, her blush having finally receded to a manageable pink. "Different rules, Star."

  I was still processing the fact that Starfire could apparently monitor my heart rate, which raised concerning questions about exactly how much of my physiological responses she'd been tracking since she sat down. My succubus biology made me a walking hormone factory under the best circumstances, and having an alien lie detector pressed against my side while Dick Grayson said nice things to me was not the best circumstances.

  "We brought gifts!" Raven blurted, and the abruptness of her announcement snapped every head in the room toward her. She seemed startled by her own volume, her violet eyes widening slightly before she schooled her expression back into studied neutrality. But the faintest wash of color had risen in her grey cheeks, and she was sitting straighter now, hands gripping her knees with a tension that betrayed how much the st few minutes had cost her composure. It was the voice of someone who had been searching for a way to re-enter the conversation for the st five minutes and had finally decided that brute force was preferable to continued silence.

  I looked more carefully and noticed, for the first time, that all three of them had bags. Dick had a rectangur package wrapped in navy paper sitting beside his feet. Kara had a bright yellow gift bag with tissue paper erupting from the top like a cheerful paper volcano. Raven had a small, dark bundle in her p that she'd been clutching so tightly it was a wonder the contents hadn't been crushed.

  "You didn't have to bring anything," I said, genuinely touched and slightly thrown off bance. I wasn't accustomed to receiving gifts from people who weren't part of my coven. The concept of someone walking into a shop and thinking of me, choosing something for me, wrapping it for me, all without being bound to me by dark magic or sexual favors or coven loyalty, was still novel enough to make my chest ache.

  "It's a housewarming tradition," Kara said, her earlier embarrassment evaporating as she perked up with visible enthusiasm. "You bring something for the new house. Martha Kent said the gift should be something practical, something pretty, and something personal. I tried to cover all three." She held up the yellow bag and gave it a little shake, making the tissue paper rustle invitingly.

  Starfire shifted beside me, and I felt her arm loosen from mine. When I gnced sideways, her expression had changed. She looked down at her empty hands, then back up at the bags and wrapped packages the others had brought.

  "I did not know that gifts were a part of this ceremony," she said, and her voice had lost its usual bright projection, dropping to something almost small. But then she straightened, and I watched determination crystallize in her green eyes. "I know! I can compensate for the ck of a material gift by offering you a personal one instead. It is traditional among close Tamaranean friends."

  Something in the particur emphasis she pced on "personal" made every instinct I had sit up and pay attention.

  "I can make this up to you, friend Amara," Starfire decred with the absolute conviction of someone who had identified a problem and arrived at what she considered the optimal solution, "by giving you multiple orgasms. If you would like! I would be more than happy to do the feasting on your pussy if you would like me too!" She said this the way someone might offer to help carry groceries. Brightly. Helpfully. With the sincere, uncomplicated generosity of a person for whom physical pleasure was simply another form of kindness between friends.

  Then several things happened at once.

  Kara “eeped” and unched off the sofa. Her Kryptonian reflexes fired with enough force that she actually left the cushion by about six feet before gravity remembered it was supposed to apply to her too. She caught herself mid-hover, realized what she'd done, and dropped back to the floor with an audible thud that rattled the coffee table. Her face had achieved a shade of red so vivid it bordered on luminescent, her hands flying up to cover her cheeks as though she could physically contain the blush if she just pressed hard enough.

  "Nope!" Kara squeaked, the single sylble climbing through at least three octaves. "Nope, nope, I cannot... that is not... Stars and Rao, STARFIRE! HOW CAN YOU JUST OFFER THAT IN FRONT OF ALL OF US?!"

  Dick had gone rigid, his spine snapping straight like a steel rod had been driven through it. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. No words came out the first two times. On the third attempt, he managed: "Kori, that's... you can't just offer that."

  "Why not?" Starfire asked, her brow creasing with the honest confusion of someone who could not for the life of her understand the problem. "On Tamaran, shared physical pleasure between friends is the most personal and meaningful gift one can give. It says I value your comfort and happiness above material possessions. It is far more intimate than any object in a bag."

  "That's actually beautiful from a cultural perspective," Kara said weakly from where she stood, still pressing her hands to her burning face, "but on Earth it's... it's really, really..."

  Raven had not moved. She sat in her corner of the sofa with her arms still crossed, her expression frozen in a mask of such aggressive composure that it had circled all the way back around to being obviously, painfully affected. The faint purple blush on her grey skin had deepened to something closer to violet, spreading down her neck and disappearing beneath the colr of her turtleneck. "Starfire," Raven said, and her voice was level, controlled, and approximately two degrees away from absolute zero, "you cannot offer to have sex with someone as a housewarming gift."

  "I did not say sex. I said orgasms. These are different categories. She does not have to reciprocate the pleasure unless she wants to!"

  I closed my mouth before I could respond with anything stupid. My brain, my traitorous, lust-cursed, succubus-wired brain, had already begun constructing an extremely vivid mental scenario based on Starfire's offer. It hadn't consulted my higher reasoning. It had simply received the input "Starfire" plus "multiple orgasms" and started rendering the scene in full sensory detail with the enthusiastic efficiency of a demon that had been handed exactly the kind of material it thrived on.

  I could feel the heat pooling between my thighs, my nipples tightening traitorously beneath the thin fabric of the dress, my succubus instincts purring with the deep, resonant satisfaction of a predator being offered prey on a silver ptter.

  And Starfire, pressed warm and solid against my side, could absolutely detect every single one of those physiological responses because she'd already demonstrated she could monitor my heart rate.

  I swallowed hard and dug my nails into my own palm, using the sharp bite of pain to drag my focus back to the present.

  "Starfire," I said, and was mildly proud that my voice came out steady, "thank you. Genuinely. That's... I understand the cultural significance, and I appreciate the intent behind it. A lot." Too much. My brain appreciated it far too much. "But let's table that for now, yeah?"

  Starfire studied my face for a moment, and something knowing flickered in those luminous green eyes. She could see right through me. She knew exactly what her offer had done to my body and she wasn't even slightly sorry about it. But she nodded with gracious acceptance and settled back against the sofa, resuming her position pressed against my side.

  Kara drifted back down onto the left sofa, tucking her legs underneath herself and smoothing her sundress with hands that still trembled slightly. She took a deep breath, held it for a count of three, and then released it with the deliberate calm of someone who regurly practiced breathing exercises to manage overwhelming stimuli. "Okay," Kara said, and her voice had found its footing again, though a residual pinkness still clung to her cheekbones. "So! Moving on from that! We actually had another announcement we wanted to make. Before the, um. Before the orgasm thing derailed us."

  I raised my eyebrows. "There's more?"

  Kara looked at Dick. Dick looked at Raven. Raven, who had apparently used the Starfire interlude to reconstruct her composure from the ground up, uncrossed her arms and leaned forward slightly.

  "We're leaving the Titans," Raven said. I watched Raven's face as she said it, searching for hesitation or regret, and found neither. The look of someone who had made a decision and was at peace with its consequences. "Dick and I have discussed this extensively," she continued, her eyes steady on mine. "The Teen Titans were formed when we were teenagers. The name made sense then. We were young, learning, figuring out who we were and what we stood for. But we're not teenagers anymore. I'm twenty. Dick is twenty-two. The 'teen' bel doesn't fit, and more importantly, the structure doesn't fit. We've outgrown it."

  Dick picked up the thread with the ease of two people who had clearly rehearsed this conversation, or at least had it enough times between themselves that the words flowed naturally from one to the other. "The Titans will keep operating. Cyborg's taking lead. Beast Boy, and some of the newer potential recruits will stay on. But Raven and I want to build something new. Something that operates differently. Our own team, our own rules, our own priorities."

  "And I am leaving the Justice League," Kara added, and there was something in her voice that was lighter, freer, like a bird that had just discovered its cage door was open. "I love Kal. He's my cousin and he's been incredibly kind since I arrived on Earth. But the League is..." She paused, searching for diplomatic phrasing. "It's a lot of very powerful adults who've been doing this for a very long time, and they have their own way of handling things. I'm the youngest member by at least a decade, and I always feel like the kid who got invited to the grown-up table but isn't actually allowed to speak." "Also," Kara continued, and her bright blue eyes dimmed just slightly, the cheerful mask slipping to reveal something more troubled underneath, "Kal has been acting strange tely. Not in a big, obvious way. Just... off. Small things. He missed our weekly dinner for the first time ever st week and didn't even mention it afterward. Diana seemed distracted during the st briefing. Barry was uncharacteristically quiet. Bruce has been..." She trailed off, gncing at Dick.

  "Bruce has been dismissive of things he'd normally obsess over," Dick finished, his expression tightening. "I fgged some intel for him st week that should have triggered a full investigation. He barely looked at it. Said it was a lower priority and moved on. That's not Bruce."

  I filed it away for the moment, thinking that was strange, and the timing was even worse considering trigon was making moves.

  Wait…? Could the Justice League be…

  "So the three of you are starting a new team," I said instead, steering back to the announcement. "That's... actually really exciting."

  Kara's brightness returned immediately. "Right? I mean, think about it. Dick has all the tactical and leadership experience from running the Titans. Raven has magical expertise and empathic intelligence that would make her the best reconnaissance specialist on the pnet. And I can, you know." She gestured vaguely at herself. "Punch things really hard and fly into space!"

  "You're selling yourself short," Dick told her with a grin. "You're also the team's designated sunshine. That's an actual strategic resource."

  Kara threw a cushion at him. He caught it without looking, because of course he did.

  "That is wonderful news," Starfire said, and to her immense credit, her tone was warm and congratutory and almost entirely free of the tremor I could feel in her arm where it still rested against mine. "A new team, unshackled from old structures and expectations. I think this is a very brave and admirable decision." She paused. Her chin lifted. "I would also love to join this new team. I have extensive combat experience, I can provide aerial superiority, and I believe my abilities would complement the group's existing capabilities very effectively. I would also bring diplomatic experience from my time as Crown Princess of Tamaran, which could prove invaluable for the missions requiring interstelr or interdimensional coordination."

  It was, I had to admit, an objectively excellent pitch. Concise, professional, highlighting legitimate skills and unique value propositions. Starfire had clearly thought about this, had probably been constructing this argument from the moment Dick mentioned leaving the Titans.

  The problem was the faces staring back at her.

  Dick's expression was careful, controlled, and absolutely devastating in its gentleness. The kind of face you made when you cared about someone and were about to say something that would hurt them anyway. Raven had gone very still, her eyes fixed on a point just past Starfire's shoulder, refusing to meet the Tamaranean's gaze in a way that spoke louder than any words.

  Kara was the one who couldn't hide it. Her blue eyes were wide with transparent sympathy, her lips pressed together, her entire body radiating the discomfort of someone who wanted desperately to fix something she knew she couldn't.

  Starfire read the room. Of course she read the room. She was an alien, not oblivious. Her smile didn't falter, exactly, but something behind it shifted. The brightness dimmed to something more fragile, more gss-like, as though it might shatter if anyone touched it.

  "I see," she said quietly. "I was not being invited." The words hung there, delicate and sharp.

  Dick leaned forward. "Kori, it's not about your abilities. You know how strong you are, how valuable..."

  "Then what is it about, Dick?" Starfire's voice didn't rise, but something in it thinned, stretched taut over the bones of something she'd been carrying much longer than today. "Is it because you do not wish to work alongside me? Because seeing me every day would be too difficult?"

  "It's because we need time," Dick said, and the honesty in his voice was almost painful to witness. "Both of us. This team needs to start with a clean foundation, without the weight of our history pulling at it. That's not a reflection of your worth as a hero, Kori. That's me being honest about where I am."

  Starfire held his gaze for a long, trembling moment. Then she nodded once, looked down at her hands in her p, and said nothing.

  I could feel the heat of her skin against my side, could feel the almost imperceptible tremor running through her. And I hated this. I hated the whole ugly, tangled mess of it, the way good people could hurt each other without anyone being truly wrong.

  Well—Okay—Kori WAS in the wrong! BUT, Dick should have probably discussed cultural expectations before dating a freaking nympho alien babe!

  Dick's attention turned to me. "The invitation was actually for you, Amara."

  I blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

  "You," he repeated, and a smile broke across his face, warm and certain and infuriatingly earnest. "I've told you before that you could be a hero, and I meant it then, and I mean it more now. You saved Robin's life. You fought beside the Titans against the Trench and put yourself between civilians and monsters. You've protected Raven, helped Kara, and every time you've been given a choice between walking away and stepping up, you've stepped up."

  "Dick..."

  "I know you don't see yourself that way. I know you think being a hero means wearing white and following rules and never crossing lines." He shook his head. "But that's not what it means. It means showing up when it matters. And you keep showing up!" His blue eyes held mine, and the sincerity in them was almost too much to look at directly, like staring into something bright enough to leave afterimages. "You will be an amazing hero, Amara. I know that. I've known it since the first time we met. And I am going to keep telling you, over and over, until you believe it too."

  I blushed at his speech. This was old-fashioned, human, completely involuntary embarrassment caused by someone saying something kind and meaning every word of it. "That's..." I started, and my voice came out softer than I intended, slightly rough around the edges. "That's really sweet, Dick. It is. And I'm not going to pretend it doesn't mean something to hear you say that."

  His smile widened, turning hopeful.

  "But I'm not hero material," I continued, and watched the hope dim but not extinguish. "And I'm not saying that to be self-deprecating. I'm saying it because three days ago, when I was walking through Gotham to buy a present for Raven, three men tried to attack me and I burned them alive without hesitation, without remorse, and without losing a single second of sleep over it afterward. I walked over their smoking remains and continued shopping…"

  The room went quiet again. A different kind of quiet.

  Dick didn't look away. I had to give him credit for that. A lot of people would have looked away. His expression shifted to something more complicated, more yered, but he held my gaze.

  Kara let out a long, slow breath that sounded like it had been squeezed through something tight. She tilted her head back against the sofa and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Okay," Kara said to the ceiling, her voice carrying the strained quality of someone negotiating with their own conscience in real time. "As Superman's cousin and a member of the Justice League—since I haven’t quit just yet—I am definitely not supposed to hear about extrajudicial killings. That is definitely information that creates ethical obligations I do not want to deal with today." She lowered her head and fixed me with those bright blue eyes, and the look in them was somehow both deeply conflicted and fiercely affectionate. "So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," she said firmly. "Just like I pretended not to hear it the st time. And the time before that. Because if I start keeping a tally, I'm going to have to arrest someone I really, really like, and I don't want to do that, so. Selective deafness. That's my superpower now. I have heat vision, freeze breath, super strength, and the ability to not hear things that my friend says about lighting criminals on fire."

  "That's very emotionally healthy of you, Kara," I said, and I meant it, mostly.

  "It's not healthy at all and I know it," she replied with disarming honesty. "But I'm Kryptonian. We're great at compartmentalization. It's literally in our DNA. Our entire civilization colpsed and I just... moved on. Filed it under 'tragic but manageable.' I come from a long line of people who could watch a pnet explode and then have a calm discussion about agricultural reform."

  "That's the saddest funny thing I've ever heard," Dick said.

  "Welcome to being Kryptonian." Kara shrugged, but her eyes were still on me, and beneath the humor there was something genuine. Something that said I know what you are and I'm still here, and I wish you'd let us help you become something more.

  It was Raven who drew my focus next. She hadn't spoken during my confession, hadn't reacted to the mention of the murdered men. But something else had caught her attention entirely, and I watched the realization spread across her features like dawn breaking over still water.

  "You bought me a present?" Raven asked.

  – Damien Wayne –

  The Batcave was sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, which was precisely the temperature Father maintained year-round regardless of the season above. Damian Wayne had memorized this fact at age eleven, the same week he'd memorized the cave's exact square footage (forty-seven thousand square feet across three primary levels and nine sublevel chambers), the make and model of every vehicle in the vehicle bay (seventeen, not counting the prototypes), and the precise number of bats roosting in the upper cavern network at any given time (approximately fourteen thousand during summer months, dropping to nine thousand in winter when the brown bats migrated to secondary cave systems in the Palisades).

  Knowledge was control. Father had taught him that.

  Or rather, Father had demonstrated it through years of obsessive example, and Damian had absorbed the lesson the way he absorbed everything: completely, precisely, and with the unshakable conviction that he could do it better.

  He sat in the secondary command chair beside the main console, legs crossed, spine rigid, wearing a bck compression shirt and grey tactical pants that he'd been training in before the session was abruptly cut short by the absence of a training partner.

  His katana rested across his thighs.

  He'd been sharpening it for the st twenty minutes. Not because it needed sharpening. It was already sharp enough to split a hair lengthwise. He was sharpening it because he was bored, and because the rhythmic scrape of whetstone against folded steel was meditative in a way that almost compensated for the fact that the one person who was supposed to be here, training with him, sparring with him, pushing him to be faster and stronger and more lethal, was instead across town doing absolutely nothing of value.

  Somewhere behind him, near the medical bay alcove where the cave's only non-combatant resident spent most of her time, Jonathan Kent was making soft, idiotic cooing sounds.

  "Who's a good cow? Who's the best cow? You are. You're the best cow in the whole cave!"

  Damian's jaw tightened.

  Batcow stood in her designated area, a comfortable pen that Father had grudgingly constructed after Damian had rescued her from a sughterhouse three years ago and refused, with the immovable stubbornness of someone raised by the League of Shadows, to return her. The cow was brown and white, roughly twelve hundred pounds, and possessed of a temperament so gentle that she had never once startled at the sound of the Batmobile's engines or the occasional explosion that rocked the cave during weapons testing.

  She also wore a small bck mask across her eyes, because Damian had put it there, and because it was appropriate.

  Every resident of the cave had a mask.

  Batcow was no exception!

  Jonathan was scratching behind her ears with both hands. Jonathan Kent had the emotional range of a golden retriever and the physical capabilities of a demigod, which was an absurd combination that should not have worked as well as it did. He was also the closest thing Damian had to a best friend, which said rather a lot about the limited social options avaible to the biological son of Batman and the daughter of the Demon's Head.

  "She likes it when you scratch right behind the left ear," Damian said without looking up from his katana. "There's a spot where the hide is thinner. It itches."

  Jonathan adjusted his scratching accordingly. Batcow let out a low, contented sound that was almost a purr if cows were capable of purring, which they were not.

  "Dick hasn't been hanging out with me for days," Damian said. The words came out sharper than he'd intended. He drew the whetstone along the bde's edge with more force than necessary, producing a screech that echoed off the cave's limestone walls and made several of the closer bats shift uneasily on their perches.

  Jonathan gnced over his shoulder, reading the tone with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent enough time around Damian to know when casual observation was actually a loaded weapon. "He's been busy, right? With the new team thing I heard about? Which is good because I can’t wait for us to join the Titans!"

  "He's been busy," Damian repeated, "simping over his new vilin girlfriend."

  Jonathan's eyebrows rose. "His what now?"

  "The Bck Witch. Amara Bck. Morgana le Fay's apprentice." Each descriptor was delivered like a prosecution listing charges. "She is a wanted criminal, a practicing dark sorceress, a confirmed killer, and apparently so physically attractive that Richard Grayson, a man who was trained by Batman to resist psychological manipution, has completely abandoned his responsibilities to his family in order to chase after her like a lovesick puppy."

  Damian set the whetstone down with a decisive click and held his katana up to the cave's fluorescent lighting, examining the edge with critical precision. The bde gleamed, perfect and deadly, catching the light along its entire length.

  "He was supposed to train with me every Tuesday and Thursday evening," Damian continued, his voice dropping into something quieter, something that a person who didn't know him might mistake for simple irritation but which Jonathan, who did know him, recognized as hurt trying very hard to disguise itself as anger. "He hasn't been here for a single session in two weeks. And when I called him about it, he said he had 'other commitments.' Other commitments!"

  He said this as though "other commitments" was a euphemism for something profoundly offensive, which in Damian's worldview, it essentially was.

  Jonathan gave Batcow a final pat and walked over to lean against the console beside Damian's chair. He was taller than Damian by three inches now, a fact that Damian pretended not to notice and resented with quiet intensity.

  Puberty was an unreliable ally indeed...

  "That sucks, man," Jonathan said. Jonathan didn't try to expin away other people's failings or offer optimistic reinterpretations of clearly unacceptable behavior. He just acknowledged the situation and stood beside you in it. "But honestly? I kind of get it. Both my parents are always busy too. Dad's either at the Pnet or, you know." He gestured vaguely upward in the universal shorthand for flying around saving the world. "And Mom's been just as busy since she manages a whole team of writers now…"

  "At least your parents have legitimate excuses," Damian said. "Crk is saving lives. Your mother is supporting the family with her high paying job. Dick is attending housewarming parties."

  "Housewarming parties?"

  "She bought a mansion. The witch. She moved into the estate on the far side of the hill from Wayne Manor. She is literally our neighbor now, and Dick is currently over there bringing gifts and socializing as though she isn't a murderer who burned an entire family compound in Britain to the ground less than a month ago."

  Jonathan let out a low whistle. "Okay, yeah. That's... kind of a lot."

  "It is unacceptable is what it is." Damian slid his katana into the scabbard strapped to the back of his chair with a fluid, practiced motion. "I saved her life once. Did I tell you about that?"

  "The ninja thing? With the League of Shadows guys? Yeah, you mentioned it."

  "She saved mine too," Damian admitted grudgingly. "I was outnumbered. Many opponents. All highly trained. She intervened without being asked and eliminated them with fire magic that was..." He paused, searching for the right word, his expression shifting into something complicated. "Efficient. Her combat instincts are sound, her magical abilities are formidable, and she didn't hesitate under pressure. If she weren't a criminal, she'd make an acceptable ally."

  "Sounds like maybe Dick sees the same things in her that you do?"

  Damian shot him a look that could have fsh-frozen steel. "Do not compare my tactical assessment of a combatant to Dick's hormone-driven infatuation."

  Jonathan raised both hands in surrender, but the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth suggested he was enjoying this more than a supportive best friend probably should have been. "I'm just saying, maybe she's not all bad if even you think she's got good instincts."

  "She likes to kill men by burning them alive and then she usually tosses their bodies in dumpsters… The people at Waste Management have been sending numerous compints to commissioner Gordan…"

  "Were they bad guys?"

  "They were attempted rapists."

  Jonathan's grin faded. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and rocked back on his heels, his expression cycling through the particur sequence of emotions that Damian had come to recognize as the farm boy's moral processing routine. Initial shock, then consideration, then the careful weighing of principles against pragmatism that came from being raised by both a Kansas farmer and an alien god. "I'm not gonna say they deserved it," Jonathan said slowly, "because Mom raised me better than that. But I'm also not gonna pretend I feel bad about it, because Dad raised me honest."

  Damian appreciated this answer more than he would ever verbally acknowledge. "Regardless," Damian said, steering back to the core grievance, "Dick's obligations to this family should take precedence over his infatuation with a dark sorceress, no matter how tactically competent she might be. Perhaps I should pay this witch another visit. Remind her that associating with Richard Grayson comes with certain expectations!"

  "You're gonna go threaten her?"

  "I'm going to communicate boundaries."

  "With your katana?"

  "The katana communicates on my behalf. It's very articute!"

  Jonathan snorted a ugh, then caught himself and tried to look serious. He failed completely. "Damian, I don't think threatening Dick's maybe-girlfriend is going to make him want to hang out with you more… Maybe he’s just growing up and branchin’ out more"

  Damian opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He hated when Jonathan made valid tactical observations, primarily because it happened more often than he was comfortable admitting. The farm boy's emotional intelligence consistently outperformed his academic credentials, which Damian found both frustrating and, again in the privacy of his own thoughts, useful.

  "Then what do you suggest?" Damian asked, and the fact that he was asking at all was a concession that Jonathan correctly chose not to draw attention to.

  "Maybe just tell him you miss training together? Like, actually say that? With words?"

  Damian stared at him as though he'd suggested solving crime through interpretive dance. "I am the son of Batman and the grandson of Ra's al Ghul. I do not express emotional vulnerability through verbal communication."

  "Right, I forgot. You express it through increasingly aggressive sparring sessions and pointed silences."

  "It's a system that works."

  "Does it, though?"

  Before Damian could formute an appropriately withering response, Jonathan shifted his weight off the console and cocked his head in that particur way that meant his superhearing had picked up something the merely human members of the household couldn't detect. "Hey," Jonathan said, his pyful tone evaporating. "You hear that?"

  Damian's hand was on his katana before the sentence finished. He didn't hear anything, which was precisely the problem. When Jonathan Kent asked if you heard something, the correct response was not to listen harder but to prepare for whatever was about to happen!

  "What kind of sound?" Damian asked, already rising from the chair, his body shifting into a combat-ready posture that was as natural to him as breathing.

  "It's... mechanical? Like servos. Heavy ones. And something else." Jonathan's blue eyes narrowed, his head tilting further as he filtered through yers of sound. "Energy buildup. Coming from the lower tunnels!"

  Damian's mental map of the cave system activated. The eastern shaft was a secondary access point, rarely used, sealed with reinforced titanium bst doors and monitored by three independent sensor arrays. Anything approaching through that corridor should have triggered multiple arms long before reaching the main cavern!

  No arms had triggered…

  That fact alone turned Damian's unease into something colder, sharper, more focused. His fingers wrapped around the katana's grip. He drew the bde in a single fluid motion.

  The explosion came from the far eastern wall of the main cavern.

  The dust swirled, caught in the cave's ventition currents, momentarily obscuring whatever had made the entrance. Then the currents shifted, the cloud thinned, and something walked through the hole.

  The first thing Damian registered was the shape. Humanoid. Tall. Broader across the shoulders than Father but with a simir general silhouette, which was immediately and deeply wrong in a way that activated every threat-assessment protocol Damian had ever internalized. It stood approximately six feet four inches, its frame constructed from a material Damian couldn't immediately identify.

  Designed to look intimidating. It was a robot. Clearly, unmistakably a robot.

  On its chest, a bat symbol bzed with deep crimson light.

  The face pte was smooth, featureless, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected a distorted image of the cave back at them. But set into the upper portion were two narrow optical sensors that burned the same pulsing red as the chest emblem. They swept the cavern with mechanical precision.

  Those red eyes found Damian first.

  Then Jonathan.

  Then Batcow, who let out a mournful, frightened sound and pressed herself into the farthest corner of her pen…

  How dare you frighten Batcow, you robot bastard!

  The robot stopped walking precisely twelve feet from them. Close enough to be threatening. Far enough to demonstrate it wasn't concerned about their proximity. The positioning was deliberate. Calcuted.

  Familiar…?

  It was the way Father positioned himself when entering a room—close enough to strike, far enough to react, angles optimized for maximum tactical advantage.

  This machine moved like Batman.

  Damian's grip tightened on his katana until his knuckles whitened beneath the leather wrapping. In his experience, which was considerable for someone who had not yet reached his fifteenth birthday, most robots were evil. It was simply a statistical reality of the superhero world.

  For every Red Tornado, there were twelve Brainiacs, six Amazos, three Grid iterations, and an apparently infinite supply of disposable murder drones produced by every mad scientist with a 3D printer and delusions of grandeur.

  He tried to think of another exception to the rule. Red Tornado was a good robot. An actual hero, one who had earned Damian's grudging respect through years of consistent, selfless service. And then there was...

  Huh?

  That was it. That was the entire list. One. One good robot in the entire history of robotics as it pertained to Damian's personal experience. Everything else with a circuit board and an attitude had tried to kill him, kill his family, or destroy the world, usually in that order!

  Jonathan drifted forward, positioning himself between Damian and the intruder. His fists were raised, his feet hovering six inches off the cave floor. "Who are you?" Jonathan demanded, his voice dropping into the lower register he used when he was trying to sound authoritative.

  It actually worked reasonably well, Damian noted. The farm boy had been practicing.

  The robot's optical sensors pivoted to Jonathan with the smooth, mechanical precision of a targeting system. When it spoke, the voice that emerged from its featureless face was ft, moduted, stripped of inflection in a way that sounded less like a machine attempting human speech and more like a human voice that had been methodically drained of everything that made it human.

  "My designation is Failsafe," it stated. "I am a contingency protocol. My activation parameters have been met. I require the location of Batman…"

  Damian's eyes narrowed. Contingency protocol?

  Father had contingency protocols for everything. There were contingency pns for alien invasions, dimensional breaches, rogue metahumans, compromised Justice League members, and at least four separate scenarios involving the theoretical heat death of the universe….

  But Damian had never heard of a contingency called Failsafe. And he knew about almost all of them.

  Almost.

  "I don't know where he is," Damian said, and the admission cost him more than he showed. He hadn't seen Father in days. Not a call, not a message. "But I can kick your ass instead," he added, because acknowledging uncertainty without immediately asserting dominance was a weakness he could not afford. The katana came up, its bde angled across his body in the third defensive stance of the League of Shadows' primary combat form, edge aligned with the robot's midsection. "So either expin what you are and why you're in my cave, or I'll disassemble you and find out the hard way."

  "Amusing," Failsafe said, and the word carried no humor, no contempt, no inflection of any kind. It was simply a clinical observation that someone had attempted to threaten it, and that the attempt had been noted and categorized as irrelevant. "Your combat capabilities have been assessed and logged. You are Robin. Current iteration. Son of Batman. Trained by the League of Shadows from birth, subsequently retrained by Batman and Nightwing in applied crimefighting methodologies. Threat level: moderate. Not sufficient."

  The ftness of the assessment stung more than Damian would ever admit. Moderate. The machine had looked at everything he was, everything he'd trained to become, and assigned him a rating of moderate. Not high. Not considerable. Moderate!?

  "You are not my target," Failsafe continued, its head rotating with eerie smoothness to scan the cave's exits. "Batman is my target. His absence is... unexpected. It suggests his behavioral patterns have deviated from baseline parameters. This deviation is itself significant and will be investigated." The red eyes pivoted back to Damian.

  "Secondary target: Nightwing. Current alias: Richard Grayson. Last confirmed location: Gotham City, specifically the property adjacent to Wayne Manor known locally as Bck Manor. Nightwing maintains the closest operational retionship with Batman and will have current intelligence on his whereabouts…"

  "You're not going anywhere near Nightwing," Damian said. "Not until you expin exactly what you are, who built you, and what these activation parameters are that you cim have been met."

  "That information is cssified," Failsafe replied. "Priority level: Omega. Accessible only to Batman."

  "I am Batman's son."

  "You are not Batman."

  Jonathan shifted beside Damian, his floating form drifting slightly left to cut off the robot's most direct path to the cave's main exit. "Look," he said, his voice carrying the reasonable, let's-all-calm-down tone that he'd inherited from Crk, "nobody's trying to start a fight here. But you just bsted through a wall into a private space, you're refusing to identify your purpose, and now you're talking about tracking down our friend. You have to understand how that looks from where we're standing."

  Failsafe's sensors fixed on Jonathan for precisely two seconds. "Kryptonian hybrid. Jonathan Kent. Designation: Superboy. Son of Superman and Lois Lane. Threat level: significant." There was a brief pause, the mechanical equivalent of consideration. "However, your emotional attachment to the individuals in this room creates exploitable vulnerabilities. You will not attack with full force while Robin is within potential colteral range. This limits your combat effectiveness by approximately sixty-seven percent."

  "That's not..." Jonathan's jaw clenched. "You don't know that."

  "I know everything Batman knows," Failsafe said.

  A machine that moved like Father? That assessed threats like Father? That positioned itself in a room like Father?

  "Resuming primary objective," Failsafe announced. Its head turned toward the cave's main exit with the smooth, inevitable rotation of a gun turret acquiring a target. "Nightwing will be located and questioned regarding Batman's current status. Cooperation is preferred. Noncompliance will be addressed with appropriate force escation."

  "The hell it will," Damian snarled.

  Jonathan didn't wait for further discussion. He unched himself forward with the explosive acceleration that only Kryptonian physiology could produce, crossing the twelve-foot gap in a fraction of a second. His fist cocked back.

  He never connected.

  Failsafe's left arm came up with mechanical speed that matched Jonathan's trajectory, and its hand opened. In the center of its palm, nested in a recessed compartment that hadn't been visible until this exact moment, sat a crystal the size of a golf ball.

  It glowed green.

  Jonathan's forward momentum died as though he'd smmed into an invisible wall. His fists unclenched, his fingers spying wide in a reflexive spasm. A strangled sound of pain tore from his throat as the kryptonite radiation washed over him, and his body, which had been cutting through the air like a missile an instant before, crumpled in on itself.

  He hit the cave floor with a sound that made Damian's stomach clench. Jonathan rolled once, twice, and came to rest on his side, curled into a loose fetal position, his face twisted with agony and his breath coming in ragged, wet gasps.

  "Jon!" Damian took a step forward, katana raised, every muscle in his body screaming to attack, to cut, to protect the person on the ground who was his best friend and who was hurting and who needed him to do something right now.

  But Failsafe didn't press the advantage.

  The kryptonite retracted back into its palm compartment, the panels sliding shut with a soft mechanical click. The green glow vanished, sealed away as quickly as it had appeared. Jonathan groaned on the floor, his body already beginning to recover as the radiation source was removed, but still too weakened to stand.

  Failsafe turned away from them.

  It walked toward the cave's main exit with the same unhurried, measured stride it had used to enter, each footfall ringing against the stone floor with the weight of something that did not doubt its own invulnerability. It didn't look back. It didn't issue warnings or threats. It simply walked, because neither of them had registered as worth the additional attention.

  "What the fuck…" Damian breathed.

  XXX

  Do you also want to read a few chapters ahead of my posts on this site? You can!

  You can check me out on “Pat-reon.-com / Starwaves” to support me and read a few chapters ahead of everyone else!