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Chapter 14

Frank Dickson was in love, but he couldn’t tell anyone, least of all the girl he was in love with: Linda Kent.

He and Linda had a connection – they were two of the biggest geeks on campus. He was majoring in Engineering, Linda in PreMed. They didn’t really fit in with most of the other students, partially because they were two years younger than anyone else in their classes, and partly because they had IQ’s of nearly 160.

Frank was eighteen and Linda seventeen, yet they were second semester sophomores, courtesy of having graduated high school more than two years ahead of most other kids. They’d been classified as gifted and talented since Kindergarten, and they’d taken advanced placement courses all that time.

They occasionally met here in the library on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to study together, sitting in adjacent carousels as they swapped ideas on how to ace out their courses. Neither of them had ever gotten anything below an A, and often as not, they’d win the coveted A+. What with their extra credit assignments, both their GPA’s were close to the ultimate 5.0

They were sharing only a single carousel today as Linda was trying to tutor him on a chapter in Advanced Calculus that he’d missed last week while out with the flu.

Frank was trying his best to pay attention to the difficult problem that Linda was showing him, but it was hard to concentrate on anything but Linda. There was something so wonderful about sitting this close to her, their hands brushing each other’s as they scribbled and erased equations on the paper, her warm perfume coloring the air.

He gave up the struggle completely when she finally leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. “So, you see, when you solve this kind of polynomial, you have to use the arcsine to differentiate the cotangent function. It’s easier than using arctangents. You get it?”

Linda saw the glazed look in Frank’s eyes. “Oh, come on, Frank, this stuff isn’t that hard. Not for you.”

He found himself staring into the depths of her brown eyes, catching a peculiar hint of blue from time to time, almost as if it was peeking out from under the contacts she wore. Contacts she claimed she was blind as a bat without.

His emotions had been floating on air for the last half hour, so much so that he was finding it hard to even breathe now, his heart was racing so fast and his body felt so alive. Between her delicate perfume and the way her black sweater fit so snuggly over her proud breasts, he forgot he was even here to work on his math.

Linda was truly a geek, she had all the credentials save one: she had the body of a supermodel. It was a contradiction that tripped up anyone who tried to date her. Mainly because she didn’t – date anyone in her classes, that is.

Suddenly finding that she was waiting for him to say something, he blurted out the first thing on his mind. “You're wearing earrings. You pierced your ears. You said you hated pierced ears.”

Linda stared back at him for a long moment, her hair covering one eye, suddenly worrying that he might know about her using her dad’s red sun room to pierce her own ears. She quickly pushed that dumb thought away - Frank was probably thinking she’d had it done down at Nordstroms.

She flicked some long strands of hair from her face and sighed. “OK, Frank, why don't you tell me what's going on here. You're obviously not interested in studying calculus today. And what do you care what I do with my ears?”

“I care everything about you.” His eyes opened wide in terror as he heard the words spill unbidden from his lips… oh God, he'd really said it!

Linda just stared back at him, realizing that while she’d been worried about protecting her secret, Frank had just confessed his. “Ah… it’s so nice you care, Frank, but why… ah, why tell me that now? We’ve been study partners for a while.”

Now that he’d started, Frank couldn’t stop. “You’re the most amazing girl in the world. When I'm this close to you, it’s like I'm standing in warm sunshine.”

Linda frowned, as she looked sideways at him, giving him the dubious look that spelled the end of Frank Dickson's love life before it even started.

She heard his heart racing, and tasted his hormones on the air, suddenly realizing where his head was. She decided to let him down gently before he embarrassed himself further. “That’s very sweet, Frank, but I'm sorry if you got the wrong idea about me. I like studying with you, but that’s all it is between us.” She started to gather her books up.

“I’m sorry, but I just had to be close to you.”

“So you haven’t been interested in studying all these times we’ve sat here?”

“I’ve been interested in you.”

“Dishonesty is not a good way to impress me, Frank.”

“Then let me make it up to you. Can I take you to dinner? I’ve already got a reservation for two at Michelangelo’s – the best Italian food in Metropolis. Please give me a chance to explain how I feel.”

Linda saw the desperate look in his eyes, and wondered how many of his feelings came from her aura, and how many were from his heart. Was her curse getting to him, or did he really have feelings for her?

She suspected Frank didn’t have any more of a clue than she did.

While part of her wanted to let him down easy, to respect his feelings, experience with guys like Frank told her to do otherwise. It was better if she removed all hope. “You know that Bruce Wayne and I are going together.”

“Bruce Wayne?” Frank scoffed, sounding incredulous. “The son of that millionaire recluse? He’s studying, what, business administration?”

The way he said it, you’d think majoring in business was a curse reserved idiots and morons.

“Give me a break, Linda. You’re the best student in PreMed at Metropolis U, and you understand math better than most of the engineering and physics majors. You’ll make it into med school easy. Maybe even go on for that PhD in genetic engineering like we talked about.”

He paused to take a breath, knowing he should shut up, but he couldn’t. “You don’t have to settle for being some rich guy’s trophy.”

“A trophy?” Linda replied, trying not to laugh. “That’s how you see me?” She thought it was hilarious that her dad had given her the same argument, but in his reckoning, Bruce Jr was her trophy. He was older, richer and he’d someday become a powerful businessman. Just the kind of partner Supergirl needed. She had the muscles, he had the money.

Yet Bruce was far more than that. He was currently filling his father’s shoes as Batman. But Kal had learned what it meant to be a virtual god living among humans, and since Bruce was 'just human', he warned her to careful of such attachments unless it furthered her crime-fighting career.

Linda stalked away, hating the way her father had said ‘just human’. She felt she was more human than Kryptonian most of the time. Inside, where it counted.

Frank knew nothing of that, he saw Linda through far simpler eyes. He was infatuated in the way only guys in their later teens can be. The result was that his heart flopped on the floor when he saw the conflicting emotions cross her face. Horrified, he realized that she was trying not to laugh at his clumsy pass.

“No, of course I don’t," he quickly blurted out. "That’s just the point, Linda. I think you’re the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. And you’re funny and… and, God, you are so beautiful - it’s like there’s this aura around you of… I don’t know, of wonderfulness, whatever. I just know that when I’m close to you, the world seems so perfect, so wondrous and so alive.”

Linda closed her eyes for a long moment. Frank was possibly the smartest student at MU, and he’d correctly guessed about some kind of aura, even if he had no idea what he'd stumbled on. That was dangerous - who knew what else he’d figure out if given time. Her secret identity wasn’t as bulletproof as the girl beneath.

Her problem, one that a billion women would love to have, came from that strange mixture of genes she’d inherited from Aphrena, her birth-mother, and of course, from Kal-El of Krypton. Not only was she inhumanly healthy and fit, but if she was close to a man, or even some women, for more than a few hours, especially if their skin touched, the other party seemed to come down with a fatal overdose of infatuation - the full-blown, racing hormone kind of puppy love.

If they were jocks, they came on to her like a ton of bricks, refusing to take no for an answer. It was almost like they were high on Ecstasy or somethingYet they would have been horrified to know she had thousands of times their strength.

Usually it was easier if they were geeks, for most of them went doe-eyed and romantic on her. Or they got tongue-tied and shy and stumbled all over themselves.

Either way, it was a problem.

Star Labs had once analyzed her dad’s aura and found a powerful energy field that invigorated and enhanced anyone who basked in it. Her mother certainly had benefited – Lois looked very young and was incredibly fit. So fit that she had the strength to change a flat tire on her car without jack or wrench - just her bare hands twisting those air-hammered lug nuts off as she rested the frame of the car on her knee. In fact, she was manifesting many Kryptonian secondary characteristics now.

Linda had of course inherited that aura from her father, and it had become her curse. Still, she’d hoped Frank would be different from other guys - he was incredibly focused on his engineering studies and he didn’t date anyone, so she figured he might be immune. Or at the very least, he’d keep his feelings all bottled up inside. But in the end, he’d flipped out even worse than most other guys, given the geeky and rude way he’d just put Bruce down.

“Well, Bruce happens to love me, and I truly love him. So good day, Frank Dickson.” She started to turn away, only to pause, and quickly held out her hand, feeling a little sorry for him. “Only one of us can earn that A+ in Calculus this term. I hope it’s you.”

Frank felt as if his heart was going to melt as he enveloped her seemingly delicate hand with his, never wanting to let go. “If you ever change your…”

Linda retrieved her hand and turned to walk rapidly away before he could finish his sentence. She’d learned to never let aura-intoxicated men keep talking – they’d never stop trying to talk her into feeling the same way they did.

Frank felt the last of his romantic lifeblood surge into arousal as he admired the way her long, lean legs flexed so tightly with every step. He had to hold his Calculus book in front of him to maintain his modesty as he swore he’d give the Devil his soul if he could spend just one night between those incredible legs.

Sighing, he knew that would never be. Not now. Not ever.

Not in the flesh, anyway.

He reached under the table to turn off the specimen collector he’d installed there. He might not have Linda Kent, but he had something nearly as good: he had a sample of the air that had surrounded her. Air that contained more than enough of her DNA to program the Simulcrom. If he couldn’t have the real Linda, then he’d have to settle for her virtual re-creation.

The sim-heads over in CompSci claimed they could recreate anything inside the Simulcrom – ranging from experiencing life on the bottom of the ocean as a fish to enjoying a romantic affair with the perfect woman. All they needed for the latter was a trace of the subject’s DNA and a video of her talking and moving around to create a personality profile.

Reality is dull, was their motto.

Frank wasn't dull and was more than a bit imaginative. And he was smart enough to be a genius. In fact, he and his sim-head buddies were the most advanced students in the university. They, along with a handful of faculty, were determined to live life on a far larger scale than ordinary people. They were part of the university team developing the Simulcrom, a device based on a design that Superman had brought back from a distant world.

Whenever their families asked them to describe their work, they’d tell them they were creating the holodeck from Star Trek. It was pretty close to the truth.

Frank felt as if his whole life had brought him to this moment in time. Prior to attending MU, he'd enjoyed exotic on-line role playing games, and his personal goal was to bring some of his fantasies to life inside the Simulcrom. Specifically, he wanted to create his personal version of Supergirl to interact with his Superman character. He was going to use Linda’s genetic profile and personality as the basis for Supergirl, and then morph in some pictures of the Kryptonian's blonde hair, blue eyes and that amazing uniform she wore. He couldn’t think of a more perfect girl to play the role of a young Kryptonian heroine than a blonde, blue-eyed version of Linda Kent.

He had no idea how uncanny his fantasies were.

For her part, Linda had no idea of his bizarre plans for her virtual self as she walked down the steps of the library, but if she had, she’d have been horrified. She depended as much on her klutzy, geekiness as she did her black wig and brown contacts to maintain her secret identity. If Frank morphed her into a blonde and dressed the holodeck version of her in a red and blue uniform, he’d almost certainly see through her secret identity.

Her phone beeped just as she reached the street, and she paused to read the text message that flashed across her screen: “Call me. Stat. B.”

She punched up Bruce’s number, and he answered on the first ring. “So, what’s up, babe?”

“Hope I’m not interrupting your study session?” His voice was hardly audible over the background sound of sirens wailing.

“It just interrupted itself.”

“Good… ‘cause I got a big problem here.”

“Sounds serious.”

“I’m at the I82 exit ramp in South Metro. Some serious hurt is about to go down here.”

“Oh, so this is a Bat call,” she smirked. “And here I thought you just wanted to talk to little ‘ol Linda.”

“Actually, I need that cute blonde I’m so in love with.”

“Charmer. So what’s your problem? Amateur or professional grade?”

“Definitely pro. I got four perps with C4 attached inside a gasoline tanker on the elevated. Ten thousand gallons of unleaded. Enough to burn out a few city blocks.”

“Nice.”

“Arabs want their terrorist buddies released or they blow it in thirty minutes.”

“Can you handle it?”

“Possible, but probability of casualties is too high.” He paused. “Clinton Elementary school is right beneath the elevated. They say if there’s any attempt to evacuate the school, they’ll blow the tanker.”

“So you’d like me to…?”

“Since I can’t get inside the tanker to remove the explosive, I’d like you to remove the tanker and the C4 from the scene. I’ll handle the perps while you do that.”

“Bad idea, Bruce. Explosives are probably triggered by radio. They’ll blow the tanker before I get it high enough. Burning gasoline will reach the ground. Might miss the school, but that area is pretty urbanized.”

“Maybe I can jam the signal. If not, I remember seeing your dad fly in this tight circle once – he was going so fast he created an artificial tornado. I figure that kind of low pressure would suck the burning fuel upward.”

“And you think I can do that? Hell, you know how easily I get dizzy.”

“I know your dad, and his daughter is a chip off the old block.”

Linda sighed. Bruce definitely had plenty of his own father’s personality in him – both the Wayne men thought Krypts could do anything. “Just keep ‘em busy for a few more minutes. Oh, and by the way, love, in case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m nobody’s chip. And the block and I don’t even get along all that well at the moment. And I don’t need a damn coach.”

She snapped her Razr closed before he could reply. Bruce was starting to make her feel like she was his sidekick or something – another bad scene from his father’s life.

She was still fuming when she darted into the dark alley between the Library and Physical Science buildings, her backpack slung casually across one shoulder. Her day wasn't going well. First Frank's juvenile loss of self-control, now Bruce's overenthusiastic tasks.

It was a familiar scene, as guys her age drove her crazy with their immaturity and disappointed her with their lack of means, and older men brought along the expectation of sexual intimacy. That came with its own set of problems, mainly the invulnerable Girl of Steel kind of problems.

But she and Bruce hadn't found some ways around that.  Blow jobs for him – she was wickedly good at giving them, given that she didn't have to breathe - and then his tongue working its magic, for she was even more sensitive than a human girl, especially sexually. Unfortunately, Kryptonian muscle tension being what it was, she was inviolate. A problem that required technology to solve. He wore his uniform, its fabric a unique material that was soft and pliable one moment, yet became harder than carbon steel when an electric current was routed through it.  It's how he managed to both move so flexibly, yet deflect bullets when dressed as Batman.

Once the thin fabric was fully stretched by his erection, he'd apply the electric current that turn it to steel, and she'd straddle him and impale herself as she went wild. It was their peculiar way of making love, although it was anything but safe, given her extreme strength. But it brought semblance of normality to their sex life.

But that wasn't on Linda's mind now. Instead, she resented was the fact that, from the age of six, both her dad and Bruce’s father had tried to tell her how to do everything. Well, except for the sex. Training was one thing, but the two father's still treated her like she was a young girl. Even now, when she was seventeen and clearly a certifiable genius, not to mention a public figure. You couldn't walk into a newsstand without seeing her costumed figure staring back from the covers of magazines.

If the world was comfortable with her being a superheroine, she thought, then why couldn't Bruce Sr and Kal El see her that way?

She sighed and glanced up and down the alley to ensure it was empty. First things first – she had those terrorists to stop. That’s why she had an office in the UN building and a fancy title, Director of AntiTerrorism, even if it was mostly honorary at this point. She could worry about Bruce Jr acting like his dad later on.

Her black wig went into her pack first, then her dulling brown contacts, and finally her street clothes and shoes. She'd never worn a bra and panties in her life.

Standing naked  now in the cool air for the few seconds it took her to pull on her silver thong – a requirement given the short skirt she was about to wear - she snapped her compressed red and white United Nations uniform open while amusing herself by imagining Bruce was here, watching her. He got so hot while watching her strip off her  street clothes and then get dressed as Supergirl. So, naturally, she turned that into a slow strip tease when he was watching, teasing him further by ‘forgetting’ a part of her uniform. Sometimes it was just her cape or boots that she forgot, but other times it was her skirt. Or even her top.

Unfortunately, standing alone in a dark alley full of dead leaves and discarded snack wrappers was a sfar from an erotic setting as could be. She changed as fast as she could, then brushed her blonde hair out with her fingers before turning to catch the reflection of red and white and blonde in a dirty windowpane. Her father hated this uniform, claiming the colors weren’t right for a Kryptonian. She figured what he really hated was the way the back was cut out, baring everything from her shoulder blades down to the small of her back. He had claimed that the bared midriff wasn’t dignified.

She just laughed when he told her the last, and asked him how dignified he thought blue tights on a guy were.

That shut him up, especially since he knew this red and white uniform had been designed for her under special commission for the UN.

She wasn’t about to tell him that she actually wore it because he hated it so much.

Working her fingers into the cracks around the block of granite that formed the corner of the Science building, she eased all two-tons of it  out and balanced it on the palm of one hand as she bent down and grabbed her backpack. Stuffing it into her hiding place before she carefully returned the block, she aligned the edges so perfectly with the other stonework that the most careful inspection would not reveal that the block had been moved since the building had gone up.

Satisfied that her Linda identity was properly buried for the moment, she crouched down, and then leaped strongly upward, her long legs propelling her to supersonic speed by the time her toes left the ground. The suction from her powerful leap filled the alleyway with a swirling cloud dead leaves.

She turned on the flying power now, and accelerated so rapidly that she couldn't be tracked with the naked eye. Flashing across Metropolis, clearing the summits of the tallest skyscrapers by scant feet, her tiny shock wave startling pigeons from their roosts high on the buildings.

Squinting into the hazy distance as she flew, she saw the terrorists Bruce had mentioned. Two men were on either side of the truck, and one on each side had a detonator. The other two were walking bombs – they each had a half dozen blocks of C4 strapped to their bodies.

Slowing below the Mach to keep her sonic boom from alerting them to her approach, she landed lightly on the roof of the closest skyscraper to study the crime scene. Hidden there in the shadows, she fished a tiny earpiece out of a deep pocket in her cape and put it on. It was connected by a spread-spectrum radio signal to an earpiece that Bruce wore.

“So, love, I think I can take out the truck, but how are you planning on handling the walking bombs?”

“Still working on it.” He sounded slightly out of breath.

She saw movement in the shadows just beneath the elevated span, very close to one of the men with the bombs. “That’s very dangerous, love. You can get one of them before he detonates, but the second is too far to reach before he pulls the trigger.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, your father’s code makes this way more dangerous than it has to be. Dangerous for both me and the kids beneath.”

Linda didn’t respond to that. Kal-El had taught her that she must never use her powers to kill anyone, even if it could save innocent lives. She’d sworn to uphold his ideals when he celebrated her tenth birthday by giving her a traditional uniform like her Aunt Kara had worn, and she’d never broken her word since. And later, when she and Bruce started to work together, she’d extracted the same promise from him.

Bruce’s father vigorously disapproved. He’d always taken a more practical approach to handling the most dangerous criminals, and he’d trained Linda from the age of seven to throw SuzyBs accurately enough to hit a two-inch circle at a half-mile distance, the dollar coin arriving a nearly Mach 2. Susan B Anthony coins had the right aerodynamics and weight when thrown properly to be the perfect stealth weapon for a Kryptonian girl. They were also the perfect symbolism in Batman’s mind, given that Anthony had been a female civil rights leader.

Kal had been incensed when he found out, and he and Bruce Sr had argued loudly in front of young Linda. She’d ended the argument by promising never to use them. And now, ten years later, she’d never thrown one in anger.

Still, a few were always rattling around in a pocket of her cape. Never say never was her motto.

“If one of the bombers detonates himself, Bruce, I think the span will hold. Most of the explosion will be deflected upward. But if they both go…” Her voice trailed off.

“About what I figured,” Bruce replied.

“Just make sure you dive over the side if you think you've lost control of the situation. Bat-wing it to the ground.”

“I know how to do my job, Linda.”

“Your funeral if you're wrong," she sighed, uncomfortable and nervous about his approach. "Guess its up to me. Get behind a column on the outside of the span and hold on. I’m hoping my impact with stun them enough to buy you the time you need.”

“Luck, babe.”

“Luck, love.”

She stuck her earpiece back in the pocket and scanned the elevated span one more time, feeling a further twinge of anxiety. If there was ever a time to throw a few SuzyBs, this was it. The terrorists were suicide bombers, fully prepared to die, and there were hundreds of kids just under the span. And then there was Bruce, the man she loved, crawling closer to them, risking his life.

She fingered one of the coins, confident that she could take out two of the terrorists from here, maybe three. That would more than even the odds for Bruce. She closed her eyes and positioned one of the coins in her fingers the way Bruce Sr had taught her, only to remember the last thing her dad had said about killing: “Once you start down the slippery slope of rationalizing human life, there is no safe stopping point.”

Cursing her weakness, or her strength, she wasn’t sure which one it was at the moment, she dropped the coin back into her cape pocket and stepped off the back side of the roof, praying she could come up under the span hard and fast enough to put the terrorists down hard. Breaking their legs was OK... she just had to give Bruce the scant seconds he needed.

She dropped seventy stories in a free-fall, reaching down to keep her tight skirt from lifting up as she approached the crowded sidewalks below, and then, just as the ground rush started, she snapped around to fall headfirst, finally adding her flight power to the freefall. She was diving straight toward the street at marginally below the Mach when she pulled out only inches above pedestrian’s heads, the blast of wind from her passage knocking many of them down as it send bits of paper and shopping bags flying. Ducking lithely under the power lines, she dodged streetlights and overpasses, and nearly clipped a city bus as she made a hard 100G turn at the intersection of 48^th street to race toward the shadows beneath the span, hoping the terrorists hadn't see her coming.

Swooping between two more busses, she broke the Mach just as she pulled up hard under the span, holding her arms extended in front of her with fingers pointed. She put one of her favorite techniques to work, spinning her body at several thousand RPM just before she hit the exact middle of the span, every muscle in her body tensed harder than steel.

While her impact at that speed wouldn’t normally do any more damage than a large canon shell, her invulnerable body now acted like a gigantic drill as she bored through ten feet of ferro-concrete, the shockwave radiating faster than her body through the span, tossing everything on the span two feet into the air, cars, busses, trucks and, fortunately, the terrorrists. The men were still airborne when she exploded from the pavement under the truck, sending shattered concrete exploding outward like shrapnel.

She quickly grabbed the truck’s frame and lifted. It wasn’t horribly heavy for a Kryptonian teenage girl, fifty tons or so, but it was fragile, something she was reminded of when her fingers began to tear through the steel frame. The long truck bent and nearly broke in half, but she backed off her acceleration just in time to prevent that disaster.

Whispering a prayer of thanks to Rao as the ground fell further and further away each second, she further prayed that the two men with the detonators had been stunned badly enough by the impact or cut down by the shrapnel for Bruce to…

WHAM WHAM!

The twin hammer blows of the C4 detonations slammed into her, filling her with fear for the children below. For Bruce as well, as she was suddenly enveloped in a gigantic bubble of burning gasoline – tens of thousands of gallons of it.

Knowing she had only seconds before the burning fuel would rain down over the elevated highway and then the elementary school, she remembered the trick Bruce had suggested. She started racing around in a small circle barely a hundred feet in diameter, moving faster and faster until the air pressure in the middle of the circle fell to nearly zero, her eyes closed tightly to keep from getting dizzy. Once she was going as fast as she could, she spun rapidly upward in a spiral, extending her cone of low pressure for thousands of feet vertically. That created a tube of near vacuum which sucked the burning fuel straight upward, perfectly vaporizing it in the process so the atomized fuel would burn long before any liquid could reach the ground.

The result was a giant tornado cloud of fire that rose a half-mile high, and then spread outward to form a mile-wide mushroom cloud. The sight of it stopped traffic and aborted all flights in and out of Metropolis International, not to mention drawing every eye in the city.

Linda snapped out of her racing circle only to find she was so dizzy she couldn’t tell sky from ground. She knew that some of the heavier parts of the truck would likely fall from the mushroom cloud, so she dove toward the place she thought the ground was, flying in a crazy corkscrew pattern as her inner ear tried to find its balance. Clipping one building before she was able to properly decipher up from down, she finally flipped over on her back and started to send powerful blasts of heat vision toward the solid parts of the tanker as they fell. Brilliant beams of coherent light flashed through the air all around the base of the airborne volcano, vaporizing anything that fell out of it. To the residents of Metropolis, it looked like the mother of all laser shows had started.

Linda was hardly impressed by her show. Her dizzy cross-eyed gaze made it hard to focus, and often as not she missed her target on first glance. One beam sheered the TV tower off a building, although fortunately its guy wires kept it from falling on the people below.

Despite the challenge to her equilibrium, she managed to vaporize most of the parts - all but the huge diesel engine block, which was too heavy to melt in time. She raced after it, still unable to fly a straight line, and nearly missed it as she corkscrewed by, desperately reaching out at the last millisecond to grab it with one hand. She came to a hovering stop a dozen feet above a crowd of oohhing and aahhing spectators who had no idea how close they’d come to dying.

Suddenly finding she was way off-balance, what with her fingers buried in a ton of cast-iron, she flipped it over her head and flung it toward the harbor. It arced upward like the ultimate football spiral, and barely missed another building before splashing into the harbor two miles away.

Linda finally dared to let out a sigh of relief as she landed lightly on top of a light post - the sky overhead was finally clear of debris – only to be interrupted by a smattering of applause and appreciative whistles from the crowd below. Looking down as she caught her breath, she couldn’t help but smile back at all the faces that were smiling up at her.

Feeling a bit embarrassed as she realized they were staring up beneath that tiny swath of blue fabric that masqueraded as a skirt, she quickly smoothed it down with one hand as she gave them a wave and an impulsive little curtsy before leaping back into the air to race back toward the damaged bridge span.

Bruce had three of the perps down by now, but the fourth man was missing. She fished her earpiece out again. “I don’t see the last guy, Bruce.”

“He rappelled down to the school. And, Linda… he’s wired to blow.”

“You stay there. I’ll get him.”

Diving low under the span as she scanned ahead with her x-ray vision, she saw hundreds of tiny skeletons huddled under their desks in the various classrooms. There was a larger adult in each room - except for one classroom filled with the smallest children. That room had two adults in it. Studying the adults closer, she saw a hint of wires around one of the figures.

“Jesus, Bruce, the asshole took a room full of first-graders as hostage!”

“Then you need to know that the other assholes  on the elevated tried to detonate themselves – I barely clipped the wires free in time. You gotta hit him hard and fast.” He paused. “You know what I mean.”

Linda did, SusyBs or maybe her own body, flying fast like a missile. She didn’t like it. “There’s gotta be another way. Stay there and keep your head down.”

Pouring on the speed, Linda crashed through the front doors of the school, her impact blasting the crumpled metal doors from their hinges in a blaze of sparks, sending them clanging down the hallway in her wake. She barely dropped below the Mach as she made two very sharp turns in the corridors before bursting through the doorway of classroom 107. Within the period of a single heartbeat, she managed to deflect the shrapnel from the exploding door, enveloping it with her cape to protect the children as she  somersaulted forward to slam the Arabic-looking man up against the chalkboard.

Reaching behind her back, she grabbed the tails of her cape and spread it wide open to shelter the children if the bomb went off. Denied the use of her hands, she pinned the man to the blackboard with her chest, her firm breasts barely flattening as she compressed his chest with them until he couldn’t breath.

His black eyes stared back into the blue of hers from only inches away, his lips slowly curling into a fatalistic look of defiance.

“The only one who will die now is you,” she said angrily, wishing like hell she could just press a little harder and put an end to him. Anyone who threatened young children this way deserved to die. Instead she said calmly, “Lift your hands away from the detonator. Very slowly.”

The man’s pupils constricted as he grimly mouthed the words: “Praise be to Allah the merciful.”

Linda closed her eyes, knowing what was coming now. She quickly wrapped her legs around the man’s body, not worrying about injuring him now, and stuffed as much of the explosive under her skirt as she could. Still holding her cape wide behind her, she squeezed her legs together, knowing the man’s life was now forfeit by his own hand. She never felt the crunch of his ribs and pelvis collapsing against the steel of her inner thighs as the incredible explosion slammed into her lower body.

The man’s fragile flesh and bone turned into plasma from the burning C4, but her skirt trapped most of the explosive power, deflecting it downward along her legs which were pointed at the outside wall of the ubuilding now. The violently expanding plasma burst twenty feet of brick wall outward, the peripheral blast wave shattering all the windows in the room and overturning desks.

When the ball of plasma faded a few seconds later, her outstretched cape had done the job of protection the children and their teacher. Still they  were buried beneath overturned desks and covered in shattered glass, leaving Linda standing rigidly in place, staring wide-eyed through a huge hole in the brick wall and floor, her heart beating wildly. She slowly lowered her arms and legs as she let her cape hang free, and turned slowly around, revealing that the lower half of her body was glowing as bright as the sun, the distinctive ‘S’ rune on her chest glowing as if lit from inside.

“Is everyone OK?”

The teacher rose shakily to her feet and frantically checked her children. Linda hung back, afraid her skin temperature would burn them if she moved closer.

“Scrapes and bruises, some cuts and probably a lot of ringing ears,” the teacher reported. “But that’s all, thanks to you, Supergirl.” She tried to smile back at Linda as she hung in mid-air, but was too stunned to do anything more than stare at the way her skirt glowed, looking for all the world as if she'd trapped a bit of the sun beneath it. The rest of her body was smoking from the explosive residue.

The children also stared up at Linda with eyes large and fearful, most of them too terrified to even move. If not for her comforting appearance, they’d seen her picture on TV a hundred times, they would have screamed. A few of the girls started to cry, for they'd never seen this angel from a distant star looking like this, what with her hair teased until it stood nearly straight out from her head and her glowing body.

Linda glanced from side to side, only to see the cloud of papers floating around the room start to smoke from the radiated heat of her skin. She smiled back at the children as she backed further away. “I’ve got to go before I start a fire. Please try not to move until the rescue people get here, OK? There’s glass everywhere.”

Without waiting for a reply, she flipped herself backwards through the hole, spinning around as she went, trying not to look at the bits of clothing and bone fragments that littered the ground outside. Two parked cars had been overturned, with one of them badly crushed from the explosion. Many others were missing their windows. A few people were lying on the grass, bleeding from superficial wounds, but there didn’t appear to be any serious injuries outside either.

Smiling in satisfaction, yet knowing this one had been very close to a disaster, she soared upward into the sunshine, heading for the overhead highway. She slowed just long enough to scoop Bruce up in her arms and fly away with him. The police had already arrived to take away the perpetrators, and Batman and Supergirl were no longer needed here.

She set him down on the same skyscraper rooftop she’d paused on when first arriving on the scene and Bruce staggered backward a few steps before regaining his balance. He looked worried as he tore his black mask and helmet off, staring down at her glowing abs. “Jesus, are you OK, Linda?”

“Just a little shook up. That man blew himself up while I held him.”

Bruce was too excited to sense her remorse. “Yeah, but hot damn, that was nice work, Linda! The only fatality was the asshole who pulled his own trigger.”

Linda looked back at the man she loved, wondering how he could be so insensitive at times. Didn’t he have any idea how horrible it felt for someone to blow up in your arms, body parts vaporizing between her legs?

Sighing as she realized he could never understand some things, being a human and all, she combed her tangled hair out with her fingers and tried to think of more pleasant things. Like the wave of pride that was starting to well up inside her. She hadn’t taken the terrorist in the school down the way he advised her, but she’d still got the job done. For once she’d done it her way.

A way her dad could never do. Superman didn't have a skirt to trap the explosive under.

She put her hands on her hips and smiled back at the man she loved. “We do make quite a team nowadays, don’t we?”

Bruce smiled at the girl he loved, very aware of the glow from beneath her skirt as he gently held her, his suit and gloves protecting him from the heat.  “And you are just so incredibly cute.”

Linda tilted her head upward as he leaned closer to kiss her, only to feel him jerk back just as his lips sizzled against hers.

“Ouch…” he smiled, quickly wetting his lips with his tongue to cool them. “And you're definitely one hot chick.”

“This is nothing. Take me to dinner tonight and I'll show you hot.”

“It's a date," Bruce grinned. "How about seven at Freddies?”

“See you there.”

Linda blew him a kiss as she pushed off with her toes, and disappeared into the sky a blink of an eye, leaving a small dust devil swirling around Bruce Wayne Jr.

He just stared after her, smiling brightly, his heart racing. God he wished he could fly like that. Still, he was the luckiest man in the universe. He got to save the world each day as Batman. Even better, the most incredible woman on Earth was in love with him. 

It didn’t get any better than this.

Chapter 15

Freddie’s was filled with the most amazing smells when Linda Kent walked through the door at 7:30 – a half hour late due to her Chem lab running long. She inhaled the delicious scents of oregano and fresh baked Italian bread along with the various sauces simmering in the kitchen, also the olive oil and fresh vegetables of salads, the cheesiness of pizzas, all suffused with the fruitier scent of fine wine. A buzz of cheerful conversation and laughter added further warmth to the busy restaurant.

This was her and Bruce’s special place. A refuge from the storm of violence that raged outside.

She scanned the room as her father had taught her, looking first in the visible and then invisible spectrums, bodies turning to skeletons. She saw two men packing heat sitting at one table - the ID’s in their wallets said CIA - and two women with guns in their handbags sitting across from them. No government ID’s on them. She’d have to keep on eye on that nest of spies. Otherwise the room was clean.

Entering the lounge with her fake ID at the ready, she spotted Bruce at the bar. He was chatting up a devastatingly attractive blonde dressed in a black dress. Linda felt a twinge of jealousy as the older and taller woman reached out to touch his arm as they both laughed.

She quickly walked up behind Bruce and wrapped her arms around his neck, and then leaned down to gently kiss his ear as she whispered, “So, does your super girl get her kiss now or what?”

Bruce spun around on his stool and grinned broadly. Linda stepped back, hips tilted a bit to one side, hands in the pockets of her fashionable slacks, the challenge clear in her characteristic posture. He loved that subdued yet sexy smile of hers.

The blonde turned around at the same time, her piercing blue eyes traveling appraisingly up and down Linda’s body, making Linda feel strangely naked. Fortunately, Bruce welcomed Linda by giving her the hug and kiss she’d been waiting for since that morning, his embrace so enthusiastic that he lifted her feet off the floor. For a brief moment, they were the only two people in the lounge.

Linda was smiling broadly when Bruce finally set her back down. The blonde looked at her with an amused expression. 

“Bruce told me all about you, Linda. PreMed at MU. Not bad for someone who can’t even vote yet.”

Linda wasn’t sure if that was a putdown or a compliment – Bruce was twenty-one to her seventeen years, and the blonde had to be pushing thirty. She didn’t shake the blonde's offered hand as her eyes instead narrowed to scan deeper beneath the woman’s clothes. She was disconcerted to find her body was completely flawless and phenomenally fit.

“Kara, this is my fiancée, Linda Kent. Linda, Kara… ah, I never did get your last name?”

Kara smiled as she lowered her hand and instead rose to tower over Linda, her height easily 6’2” in her heels. “First names will do for the moment.”

Linda felt strangely intimidated and completely outclassed by the much taller woman, especially the way a buckle on the blonde’s dress accented her spectacular cleavage, suggesting to any male the act of undoing it. Had Bruce been staring there as well?

The blonde’s hem line was cut short in the front, but as long in the back as a cape, and her sparkling eyes seemed to give off more light than they took in. She was without a doubt the most remarkable woman Linda had ever seen.

“I've got to visit the little girl's room,” Kara said with a wink that suggested Linda should go with her so they could talk. “Be right back.”

Linda stayed rooted in place as Kara walked away, noting the way Bruce's eyes were glued to Kara's amazingly long legs. She had the tight, shapely calves of a runner. Linda leaned closer to whisper in Bruce’s ear. “She's amazing, Bruce. Who the hell is she?”

He shrugged, still staring. “Never seen her before she bought me a drink.”

“Bought you a drink?”

Bruce turned to meet Linda's eyes, and saw the funny way she was looking back at him. Smiling, he reached up to slip his hand under her hair. “Hell, she’s almost as cute as you.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. "But she's hardly Supergirl."

Linda leaned her cheek into his hand and smiled. “Still, she makes me feel like an ugly ducking.”

“She wouldn’t if you were dressed as yourself, blonde and all”

“Yeah. Then she’d only be a head taller than me and about two cup sizes bigger.”

“I like you just the way you are, love.”

Linda smiled warmer, knowing he’d never been particularly taken with her Linda disguise. He had a really big thing for blondes. “She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place her. Some supermodel maybe?”

They were still speculating about Kara's identity when she started to stroll back across the crowded bar, every man moving to the side to create a pathway for her, their admiring eyes drawing sharper looks from their girlfriends or wives. Kara  strolled down the natural pathway that opened before her as if she was royalty. A man followed closely behind her. He as as tall as she was in her heels, and had the same shade of blonde hair, along with a handsomely squared jaw line and widely-spaced blue eyes. Late twenties and very athletic, Linda decided. And seriously cute.

“Linda and Bruce, this is my friend Matt. He’s a surgical resident over at University Hospital.”

Bruce held out his hand. “A doc, huh? Linda’s PreMed at MU.”

Linda really felt outclassed now. First the gorgeous blonde, and now her date, a doctor and about to be a surgeon. She found it ironic that she was usually the one doing the intimidating, what with her genius IQ and advanced standing in the school. Not to mention the way people reacted to her when she appeared in uniform as as Supergirl. But not tonight. Tonight Linda Kent was just a face in the crowd.

She tried to push her insecurities away, and smiled as she asked, “I’m thinking of going for a surgical residency, but haven’t decided on a specialty. What’s yours, Matt?”

“Reconstructive plastic surgery.”

Ah, Linda thought knowingly as she glanced at Kara. That explains the more than perfect girlfriend. She suddenly felt better for some reason.

“But not the cosmetic stuff. I'm more interested in fixing cleft palettes, trauma repair, burn reconstruction... stuff like that.”

“I thought you plastic guys did mostly boob jobs,” Bruce added, glancing at Kara’s remarkable chest.

Linda took his cue and looked deeper with her x-ray vision, only to be surprised when she found that the blonde was completely natural. How could anyone be that large and that firm and still be natural?

Her longer glance wasn’t lost on Matt. “There are some forms of perfection that exceed the fondest imaginations of humble plastic surgeons. Not to mention mere mortals.” He winked at Kara, realizing that Linda and Bruce didn’t have a clue who she really was.

“He’s gifted with his hands – all surgeons are,” Kara chimed in, smiling as she leaned closer to Matt. “Also apparently with his silver tongue. Just what every girl wishes for.” Her sexy come-on was not lost on Bruce and Linda, let alone Matt.

“Believe it or not, our first date officially started just two minutes ago,” Matt announced. “We briefly met in Starbucks the other day.”

“You guys look as if you’ve known each other for a while.”

Matt smiled at Kara. “In some ways, I think we have. I remember Kara so well from the 1980’s.”

“What were you doing in the 80’s?” Linda asked, surprised to find that the blonde was a lot older than she looked.

“Mostly flying around and getting into trouble,” Kara added as she winked at Matt. “Sometimes getting people out of the same. But I rarely took the time to smell the roses. Something Matt and I plan to fix now that I'm back.”

“Back? And you mentioned flying. Were you were with the airlines?” Bruce asked.

“Not exactly,” Kara said without further explanation.

“But given the trace of an accent I hear, you must be foreign.”

“That’s a definite. But I’ve lived here in the US before.”

Bruce was intrigued and curious. He was a master at detecting when someone was hiding something from him, and he sensed that Kara was an enigma. She was easily twenty hears older than she looked for starters. Instead of dangling a terrified criminal over the side of a building until he confessed his crimes, a typical Batman technique, tonight was the time for subtler methods. Mainly, the tongue loosening effects of a good bottle or two of wine. “Well, in that case, you must be celebrating. Would you like to join Linda and I for dinner? Consider this as our welcome back to Metropolis.” He turned to smile at Linda. “Besides, we’re kind of celebrating a bit of success of our own today.”

Matt looked at Kara, hoping she’d shake her head, for he wanted to be alone with her. But she smiled brighter and said, “I’d love to. Is that OK, Matt?”

“Of course,” he said softly, barely managing to keep the disappointment from his voice.

“So you’re both students at MU?” Matt asked after they were settled at their table.

Linda and Bruce nodded in unison.

Despite just being students, Matt watched as the staff doted on Bruce. They clearly knew him, and just as obviously, they knew he came from money. Big money.

“So, Bruce, I wouldn’t happen to know your family would I?”

“Not unless you know people in Gotham City. I’m Bruce Wayne.”

Matt's eyes opened wide. “No kidding. Hell, everyone knows your father. He’s supposed to be the wealthiest man in the US.”

“Don’t put too much stock in rumors,” Bruce shrugged. “He gives most of his wealth to charity.”

“Some people say that’s batty,” Kara said with a smirk. “Are you like your father, Bruce? A chip off the old block? And a bit batty too?”

Bruce noted the two references to batty, and wondered what Kara suspected. “Actually, I’m just a senior in Business Admin. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do after graduation.”

“Other than manage your father’s billions,” Kara smiled. “Or are some of those billions already yours?”

“Trust me, I get a stipend, and not all that big a one. My father is very much into the idea of my proving myself before I get to wear the mantel of success.”

“I hear you already walk in his boots,” Kara said with a wink. "Even participate in his old capers."

Bruce grew visibly uncomfortable with Kara’s gentle probing, especially her reference to boots and capes as well as bats. He’d invited them to dinner to play tha role of interrogator himself. “So, talking about school and stuff, Linda here is PreMed at MU. A sophomore.”

“At just seventeen?” Kara asked. “That’s very impressive.”

Linda looked questioningly into Kara’s eyes as the waiter returned with the wine list. “I didn’t tell you my age.”

“Bruce did. Before you came.”

“That’s so nice of him,” Linda said as she glanced pointedly at Bruce, kicking his foot under the table. She felt even more self-conscious about her age now. “I didn’t know Bruce could be so… forthcoming.”

“Will we need four glasses?” the wine steward asked, staring directly at Linda.

“Yes,” Bruce replied.

Linda started to reach for her fake ID, but the waiter just said, “Very well, sir,” and set a glass in front of her.

Kara started to laugh as the steward walked away. “Don’t worry, Linda. They won’t card you when you’re with the namesake and son of the famous Bruce Wayne. Or is it infamous?”

Matt cleared his throat, hoping to divert the direction of Kara’s questions before she got cattie. He had been hoping in any case to get Kara to talk about herself. “So, you never did tell me what you do, Kara. Something about being between jobs. And where have you been since I last saw you in the 80’s?”

Kara took a slow sip of her wine before answering the first part of his question. “I was a TV production assistant and also did a little acting, small stuff only. Mostly back when I was in college. I attended Stanhope, out in Chicago. I appeared in a few soap operas after I graduated.”

“Ah, so that’s why you look a bit familiar,” Bruce said. “An actress. Would I have seen any of the shows? Also, any recent work?”

“Not unless they’re on the tenth reruns. You were born when, 1985?"

Bruce nodded.

"That was the year after I quit… acting.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “They killed off my character… put me out of work for a long time.”

“Damn it, they always do that with my favorite characters,” Bruce said loudly. “So, are you staging a comeback now?”

Linda just stared at her boyfriend. She’d never have suspected that he watched soaps of all things. For her part, she never watched TV.

“Maybe,” Kara said, glancing pointedly at Linda. “But my role has taken by someone else.”

Matt saved them by quickly turning the cryptic comments into a discussion about the state of acting today, something they all had an expert opinion on. The conversation quickly became very animated, especially after Matt livened things up with a story about a very famous female actress he’d treated at the hospital. He didn’t say who she was, but he did admit that he’d done a lot of work ‘down below’ to turn her back into the physical equivalent of a blushing virgin. He said it was all over the gossip pages that she was now dating a much younger man.

He continued with a number of other stories about strange goings on in the hospital, most of them involving the illicit affairs of unnamed rich and famous people. Linda and Bruce tried to guess who they were as Kara sat strangely silent, acting as if she didn’t know who they were talking about.

“So I thought you said you didn’t do cosmetic work, Dr. Matt?” Linda quipped. “Doing a vaginal tightening sounds pretty cosmetic to me.”

“What I meant is that cosmetic stuff isn’t my passion. But I seem to have some talent when it comes to that particular procedure, and news spreads. Other patients are coming to me.”

“Talent when it comes to vaginas?” Kara laughed as she rejoined the conversation, leaning closer as she made a show of lowering Matt’s hand into her lap. “God, I hope you’re fucking brilliant.”

Everyone laughed at that, and Kara brightened up enough to contribute one of own stories about the wild goings on while she was working as a production assistant on a soap opera. She described one older actor who could only make love to his wife when two beautiful young things were curled up next to her. He’d never touch the girls, but they always had to be there, dressed in cheerleader uniforms no less.

Linda thought the story was more sad than funny, but she laughed too. She also noticed that Kara didn’t volunteer anything about herself, but only about the people who’d surrounded her. Despite her amazing looks, she seemed to have been a watcher, not a doer. Very strange.

She and Bruce enjoyed the stories but contributed little of their own experiences. Most of the interesting things in their lives had occurred while living as their alter-egos, and they could hardly talk about that. It was one of the very real problems of having two identities while still so young, with one of those identities deliberately mundane.

Dinner ended with some fine liqueur. Matt then invited them all to enter the salsa dance contest that was scheduled to start shortly in the bar.

Kara agreed enthusiastically, claiming she’d been a longtime fan of that sexy and athletic dance style, even before it became popular. Linda and Bruce politely declined, claiming they had some studies to finish before classes started again in the morning. In truth, they just wanted to spend some time alone.

“Well, it’s been nice meeting you guys,” Kara said warmly as they rose to leave, gently kissing Linda’s cheeks before holding out her hand to Bruce. “I can now tell my friends that I’ve met a tycoon in the making. And I’m so glad your father is no longer batty. But I have to admit, his passion for enjoying the company of youth seems to have been passed on.”

Bruce looked at her strangely, wondering once again exactly what she was trying to tell him. “You almost sound as if you knew my father?”

Kara just smiled.

Matt turned to give Linda a gentle hug, surprised to find her body was as firm as Kara’s. “And if you ever want to learn more about the surgeon business, give me a call, Linda. I’ll invite you into the OR to watch a few procedures.”

Linda smiled her thanks.

Matt put his arm around Kara as she reached out to shake Linda’s hand goodbye.

Linda responded, only to be shocked when Kara’s grip closed very tightly around hers. Surprised at her unusual strength, Linda cautiously met Kara’s challenge, being careful as always to hold her strength back. Kara’s fingers crushed around hers with crushing force, holding her so tightly that Linda gasped audibly, astounded to find Kara's grip was so tight it actually hurt.

Kara released her in an instant, and winked at the Linda’s wide-eyed look as she turned to put her arm gently around Matt’s waist, then swished her long blonde hair over her shoulders as the two of them strode off toward the dance floor in the back of the bar.

“That was one amazing couple,” Bruce observed as he emptied the wine bottle into his glass, determined not to let the last of the expensive vintage go to waste. He turned and winked at Linda. “And speaking of amazing. Let’s you and me get somewhere where we can dump this disguise of yours.”

Linda flexed her sore fingers as she stared at Kara’s back as if in a trance. “She isn’t what she pretends to be, Bruce.”

“Yeah… her comments about my father were weird. Like she knows a lot more than she’s telling. But most of what she said had to be bullshit. No way she's in her mid-forties.”

“She’s a ravishingly beautiful woman, and your father had an eye for such beauty. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a fling once, Bruce.”

“Her and my father?” Bruce shook his head. “No way. He's in his late sixties.”

Linda said nothing. Wayne Sr and his taste in younger women was hardly a secret. Like father like son, she wondered?

“Hey... you’re not jealous of her or anything are you?”

“Well, given the way she looks, her height, and, oh by the way, the fact that she’s way stronger than me, I think a little jealousy might be warranted.”

Bruce choked as his wine went down the wrong way. “Wha… what? Stronger than you?”

“She damn near crushed my hand just now when we shook.”

“Jeeze,” Bruce said as he stared off into the bar. seeing Kara’s blonde head bobbing above most of the others. “Maybe she’s an Amazon. She’s certainly got the height.”

Linda shook her head. “There is no Amazon, other than maybe Diana, who could come close to matching my strength.”

“Then…?”

“She’s gotta be Kryptonian born… it’s the only possibility.”

Bruce gasped. “No way. You and your dad are the last… aren’t you?”

Linda flexed her hand. “My aching hand says otherwise. And you’re forgetting the strange encounter my dad had down in New Mexico the other day.”

“That woman didn’t look anything like Kara. But if so, then Christ, we suddenly got Krypts coming out of the woodwork.”

“Out of a wormhole would be my guess.”

“Escapees from the Phantom Zone?”

Linda shrugged. “She said her name is Kara. There’s only one Kryptonian by that name who escaped the destruction of Krypton, and nobody by that name in the Zone.”

“Your aunt? But she died before you were even born.”

“She can't be that Kara. I’ve read everything ever printed about her. Also seen all the picts, the video, you name it. She was closer to my height and build.”

“So…”

“So I have a mystery to solve. It seems as if Supergirl isn’t getting this night off.”

“That goes for Batman too. We’re a team, babe.”

Linda shook her head. “Way too dangerous. If she’s really a Krypt, you wouldn’t last two seconds if you got in her way. For all I know, she’s one of Darkseid’s agents.”

“You said she was stronger than you too. You could get hurt.”

“She’s got maybe 2x my strength. Not 20,000x yours. Big difference.”

“I don’t like this, babe. Don’t like it at all.”

“Me neither.”

“How you going to handle it?”

“I think she needs to meet my better half.”

Chapter 16

Linda left with Bruce, only to return to the restaurant alone twenty minutes later. She’d ditched her wig and contacts and worked some darker golden tint into her naturally blonde hair to make herself look older. Dressed in an exotic, low-cut gown that left her back and shoulders bare, her dress ending in a very short, flared skirt, she looked exquisitely mature. The fashionable gown wrapped around her neck to form a choker, with a swatch of fabric hanging free down her back like a tiny cape.

The outfit was courtesy of an after-hours visit to a neighborhood fashion shop. Bruce would send an anonymous packet of cash to the shop tomorrow to make things right.

Now that she'd shed her Linda disguise, Asha, huddled in the shadows just outside the entrance as she pinned her hair up to make herself look older yet, finally using the mirror of a parked car to apply some lipstick to finish her look. She shifted her ID and some cash and credit cards to the fashionable wallet she'd 'borrowed' from the same store as her dress, hoping as she did that the doorman wouldn't look too close at the dark-haired image on her fake ID. Changing her hair color shouldn't faze an experienced doorman.

She returned to stride confidently through the doorway as if she’d visited this bar a hundred times before, and the doorman just gave her an appreciative smile and opened the door. This was a bar that catered to both the rich and the genetically endowed. She certainly qualified on the later.

The dance contest Matt had invited them to was already underway when she sat down at the bar. He and Kara were currently on the floor, with the two of them doing a credible job of proving that natural talent and enthusiasm could make up for lack of experience in dancing together. Kara was as light on her feet as air itself, which confirmed Asha's initial guess that she was Kryptonian.

Her challenge now was to get close enough to Kara to sense her aura without her suspecting she was being monitored. Given that the dance contestants were sitting together on the far side of the bar, that meant she had to be a participant herself.

Turning to check out the men who weren’t participating in the contest, she spotted a Hispanic gentleman in his early fifties who had the look of dancer about him. Given the way the contestants would nod his way as they took to the floor, her guess was that he was a man of some repute.

She worked her way across the crowded bar to pause in front of him, giving him that pouting yet challenging look that she imagined was appropriate for a Kryptonian femme. The kind of look that told every man that he probably wasn’t good enough for her, but at the same time inviting him to prove her wrong.

“So, what do you think the odds are for the two of us to win the contest?”

The older man turned to look at her, his warm eyes traveling appraisingly from her face down to her narrow waist before finally pausing on her lean legs. She turned sideways, resting her hands on her back as she emphasized her profile. It took a few seconds for his eyes to rise back to meet hers.

He smiled appreciatively. “You look as if you’re quite the dancer, my dear.” He held out his hand. “My name is Amando.”

“And I’m Asha. You up for giving it a try?”

“Absolutely my young friend. I had so hoped to find a partner tonight, but never one as lovely as you.” He nodded toward the dance floor. “But we have some stiff competition tonight.”

Asha's eyes remained fixed on his. “I don’t believe in competition. In my having any, that is.”

Amando chuckled. “I like a woman with confidence, although never one so young. But why not. Let's give it a try.” He walked off to sign them up for the contest.

Asha tried not to freak out as she realized what she'd just gotten herself into, and despite her confident exterior, she was shaking inside. She was only seventeen, her partner was fiftyish, and obviously a salsa expert while she’d only watched salsa from the sidelines. Even worse, her stolen gown seemed determined to desert her, the thin fabric threatening to unwrap itself from around her neck and fall off whenever she moved.

On the other hand, she had unusual intelligence and a phenomenal reservoir of physical talent going for her. This was the kind of superhuman challenge she loved to master - a chance to prove to herself that she was as much of a Kryptonian as her father, not just a half-breed like some claimed.

Amando returned with two tickets, and led her to the floor for a warm-up dance. Their coordination was a bit rough at first. She was trying too hard and wound up leading half the time - a impossible way to dance salsa.

A titter of laugher rose from the crowd, and she heard several of the women in the crowd whispering that Amando was the best salsa dancer in the city, even as they wondered why this girl the age of his daughter was trying to lead him around the floor.

Asha gritted her teeth and realized she had to relax. She focused on Amando, the rest of the room fading away as she watched his eyes, finding that they told her everything she needed to know about what he was going to do next.  She truly gave herself up to Amando’s lead, and suddenly the magic began. Amando smiled as he sensed the change, and began to toss her around as if she was weightless. Despite her inexperience, he led her with flair, and she followed with grace, his daring dips and tosses and rolls looking flawless given her light weight and absolute fearlessness.

The laughs from the crowd turned to ooohs and aahs and finally to applause. Amando was clearly a crowd favorite, and she heard people starting to say that he’d finally found a partner who was fearless and fit enough to keep up with him.

Someone else chuckled and wondered out loud if he was man enough to keep up with her.

When the music stopped, Asha fell lightly into his arms, and he held her as he led her to a table as she feigned being out of breath. Amando didn’t have to pretend anything - he was huffing and puffing - the dancing had been fast and furious.

“My lord, young lady,” he exclaimed as he slumped in his chair, “I have never, ever known a partner so light on her feet. Especially someone who didn’t know a thing about salsa when she hit the floor.”

“You figured that out, huh?” Asha frowned.

“Or anyone who could learn the steps and beat and master the moves during one session on the floor. Most of us take years to learn what you did in fifteen minute.”

“You can thank ballet and dance expression classes in college.”

He winked at her. “Along with more natural talent than I’ve ever imagined possible.”

“The credit goes to you," Asha said gracefully. "I have never been with a partner who could teach me so fast.” Asha turned to watch Matt and Kara out of the corner of her eye. They sat at the next table, wrapped in each other’s arms like lovers.

Kara sensed she was being watched, and turned her head to see Asha staring at her. She leaned closer to Asha and whispered, “I like your new partner better. That bat guy was a bore.”

Asha acted ignorant, even as her heart leaped. She knew Bruce was Batman? “What… other partner?”

Matt turned to see who Kara was talking to, and held out his hand to the stunning young blonde. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“I’m Asha, and this is my new friend Amando.”

Amando shook Matt's hand. “My young friend here is the most amazing partner I’ve ever danced with,” he said gracefully. “She’s not afraid of letting the music free her.”

Asha noticed the way Matt was checking her out. He certainly hadn’t looked at her this way when she was Linda. It was no secret what sexy clothing and hair color could do for men’s libidos, but she’d never gotten past a latent and admittedly geeky resentment that beauty and physical perfection could be such a reward all on their own. Genetics was just luck and chance, especially having been born half-Kryptonian. The really important stuff in life was earned.

All of which made it even more important to find out how much Matt knew about Kara. Were they partners? Maybe he was a Krypt to? What were their intentions?

She debated the cleverest way to test that without doing something that could hurt him, but in the end decided to just open up and let him know who she was. That would open all doors.

“We met once before, Matt. A long time ago.”

“I don’t think so,” he said with a smile and shake of his head. “I’m absolutely certain I would have remembered you.”

“Well, I was dressed a bit differently then. And a lot younger.”

“Still, I’m afraid I don’t…”

“Plane collision south of Metropolis,” Asha blurted out, refreshing his memory. “You were one of the physicians who treated the survivors.”

Matt’s eyes opened wide. “And you were in that plane?”

“Not exactly in it, no.”

Matt smiled broadly. “Then you were one of the volunteers on the ground. God, that was some mess, wasn’t it. I was a brand new intern at University Hospital and scared to death. If not for Supergirl, there would have been ten times the casualties.”

“I was scared too, especially given that I hadn’t been… as involved as that before. Especially after that plane started falling apart as it fell.”

Matt looked at her strangely. “What exactly are you saying…?”

“I'm the girl who caught the aft section of the fuselage and set it down in the field. You were the first doctor on the scene, and the two of us worked together to get everyone out.”

Matt’s eyes opened wide. “You’re… you’re her? Supergirl?”

“My friends call me Asha.”

Matt leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Boy, have you changed. You were, what, maybe eleven or twelve at the time?”

Amando just stared at Asha, eyes wide. “You’re Supergirl?"

"Guilty," Asha shrugged.

"Well, no wonder you danced as if you’re lighter than air then. I’m so very, very glad to meet you.”

Kara leaned closer to the three of them, suddenly feeling left out. “Just don’t tell the judges that two Kryptonian ringers are trying to win their contest tonight.”

“Two…?” Amando asked. “I don’t...”

“I’m Kara Zor-El. Asha here doesn't even know it, but she's my niece.”

Asha stared at Kara, mouth open.

“But you’re… dead!” Amando gasped as well.

“She gets that a lot,” Matt laughed. “Including from me a few hours ago.”

Asha just stared at Kara for a long moment, and then reached out to take her hand, holding her Kryptonian tight. “Excuse us, gentlemen. We’ll be right back.”

She led Kara into the deserted bathroom, and fused the door hinges closed behind them with a burst of heat vision to maintain their privacy.

“Why are you pretending to be Kara Zor-El,” she said forcefully as she faced Kara. “Everyone on Earth knows my aunt is dead.”

“Guess everyone doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Asha laughed. “You actually expect me to believe you’re my dead aunt?”

“Yes, Asha, I do.”

Asha’s still confident gaze couldn't disguise the fact that her heart was racing this time. Still, she looked into Kara’s eyes, her hand resting defiantly on her hip as she tried to project her usual confidence. “Let’s cut the bullshit before I have to kick your little ass off this planet, Miss Kara whoever you are. Who are you and who do you really work for?”

Kara smiled back at Asha. “Well, I’ve got to admit one thing, Asha. You’ve got the attitude and the posture that comes with the job. Been kicking a lot of bad guy’s butts lately?”

“Enough of this bullshit, Kara. You are not going back out there until I understand exactly why you’re here. Your obviously as Kryptonian as I cam, but why were you sitting with my boyfriend in the bar tonight.”

“Because I was wondering what kind of man my niece dates.”

“Which would be none of your business. Even assuming I was… your niece.”

“And as far as the rest of your questions go, Asha. We’ll talk tomorrow. Tonight’s important to me.”

Kara started to turn, but Asha reached out to grab her arm.

“I don’t think so, lady. I may not be wearing my uniform now, but you know I don’t take no for an answer.”

“I never did either when I was Supergirl.”

Asha just glared at her, not sure what to say to that. “Are you really a Kryptonian? Like me?”

“You are only half Kryptonian. Our little handshake just proved who’s stronger.”

“Yeah, but my mother is Amazon. We know how to kick ass.”

Kara’s eyes narrowed as she looked down to where Asha was holding her arm. “Careful who you try to threaten, young lady.”

“Why? Because you’re supposed to be my dead aunt? That’s such bullshit.”

“Look, Asha,” Kara sighed as she opened the buckle on the top of her dress another hole. “I’m having fun here for the first time in a long time. Why don’t we meet at the Fortress in the morning and we can talk this over then. With Kal.”

Asha was startled she even knew about the Fortress. “So… why don’t we go find him right now.”

“I told you. I’m having fun here.”

Asha reached out to grab both of Kara’s wrists, gripping her hard enough to have crushed her arms if they’d merely been made of steel. The fact that she felt no give at all in Kara’s wrists convinced her that whatever else Kara claimed to be, she was definitely Kryptonian. “Let’s go, Kara. Now.”

Kara looked down at Asha’s hands, and saw the powerfully corded muscles which shaped the teenager’s slender arms. There was no doubt she’d inherited a great deal of Kal’s genetics. But not all of them. She needed to learn that she had limitations. Even more, she had to learn work around them. Time for her first lesson.

Kara slowly twisted her own arms upward and outward, revealing even more dramatic muscles across her upper body than Asha.

Asha fought back by throwing all her strength into her silent struggle - she even added her flight power into the mix - but Kara matched her pound for pound, ton for ton. The two Kryptonians were soon channeling immense power through their slender bodies, their arms a hard maze of tendons and deep clefts of steely muscle, their flying power alone keeping them rooted into the same point in space, saving the building from collapsing around them.

In the end, it was Kara who slowly and steadily twisted her arms free. She quickly grabbed Asha’s hands in return, interlacing her fingers in the teenager’s as she started to bend her hands backward.

Asha continued to struggle mightily, her eyes narrowing as she gritted her teeth in determination, yet her hands bent further backward every moment. Soon she was gasping in pain as she slowly sagged to her knees. Kara’s strength was overwhelming, so much so that it threatened to tear Asha's ligaments and break her wrists.

Asha stubborning fought back until Kara leaned further forward, her flight power more than matching Asha’s, and the marble floor started crazing into a spider web of cracks around Asha’s knees.

“Stop. STOP!” Asha shouted. “You’ll bring the building down.”

Kara smiled, secretly pleased that Asha’s surrender was focused on protecting others, not herself. She let go so suddenly that Asha’s residual flight force sent her crashing into a corner of the ceiling on the far side of the restroom.

Kara stood calmly in the middle of the restroom with her hands on her hips, her previously smooth curves now completely replaced by the hard-edged muscles.

Asha stared down at her in shock, her body equally pumped up.

“So, did I make my point, Asha? About waiting until tomorrow?” Kara turned and jerked the restroom door open so hard it ripped noisily off its hinges. She left it hanging crookedly as she disappeared back into the bar.

Asha collapsed into a corner of the restroom, hugging herself as her hands and arms shook in exhaustion. From her earliest memories, she’d never encountered anything that could resist her strength – not steel, not rock. Only Diana and Kal could match her strength. Even more, she’d never exerted herself to the point of exhaustion, and she’d never felt the pain that came with that.

Now she knew both sensations, and she didn’t like them at all. It terrified her to suddenly feel impotent and vulnerable, weak and so completely helpless. And so tired.

Those unusual physical sensations and emotions convinced her that she truly was facing one of Darkseid’s agents. Frighteningly, she had no idea why the woman hadn’t just killed her. The mere thought that she could have done so terrified her even more.

She fished her phone out of her purse and tried to dial it, but her aching hands were shaking too badly to push the buttons. She breathed deeply and flexed her wrists, trying to work the strain out of her muscles. They slowly relaxed, restoring a semblance of her smooth-limbed slenderness. Trying again, she finally managed to dial her dad’s number.

Chances were low he’d even answer it – he was old-fashioned enough that he rarely carried his phone with him. Just as she feared, there was no answer after a dozen rings. She didn’t leave a message.

Snapping her Razr closed; she stared through the restroom wall to see Kara and Matt dancing on the stage again as if nothing had happened. Kara's body was smooth and curvaceous again. Voluptuous really.

All eyes were fixed on the two of them as Matt’s hands caressed her so lovingly as they danced in and out of each other’s arms, never tiring of the beautiful salsa. Then a slow number started, and they began to kiss gently as they moved together, so slowly, so sensually.

Asha just stared in disbelief. Kara’s reference to tonight being special clearly involved her sleeping with Matt. The mere fact that she was out there seducing him on the dance floor while she was huddled here in the smelly restroom fearing for her life was infuriating.

“Damn it,” she growled out loud. "God-damned alien bitch." Still, she was determined to fix this herself. She didn’t need Bruce either. Didn’t need and didn’t want. This was a score she had to settle on her own. This was why she wore a uniform with an ‘S’ on it.

But she had to be smart about it. The could try to disable Kara using some of that green-K that Bruce had. But that would be hard to do alone – the green-K would weaken her as badly as it did Kara. She’d need to have Bruce involved.

That, of course, was unacceptable. There were so many ways a Krypt could kill a human, most of them both effortless and horrifying, and Bruce’s strength-augmented and bulletproof uniform wouldn’t give him much protection when pitted against someone as strong as Kara.

That left the option of finding her dad, but she quickly rejected that too. It was a bad idea on two other counts. One, it would prove she couldn’t handle her job. What would he think of her if she came running to him the first time a dangerous alien showed up? Secondly, he’d been acting really weird around super strong females lately. Diana first. Then Maxima. Finally Cassie. He seemed to have an irresistible sexual attraction to them – probably some genetic imperative to keep the Kryptonian line from dying out or something.

Given that Kara was stronger and more attractive than any of the others, she’d probably wrap her dad around her little finger. Kal's fatal attraction to superfemmes was his only weakness, but it was a whopper.

That left only one other option: Cassie. They were friends, or at least they had been until Cassie started seeing her dad. On their last meeting, Asha had accused Cassie of trying to break up her parent’s marriage, and Asha had wound up shouting some truly hateful things. Cassie hadn’t talked to her since.

Asha closed her eyes and said a little prayer to Rao, and then selected Cassie’s number on her phone. If an apology was all it took to get Cassie to help her take this rogue Kryptonian down, then that would be a small price to pay.

Chapter 17

I wasn’t pleased with my initial encounter with Asha. She was my niece, whether she knew it or not, and I’d been really hard on her. But it had been clear from the start that she’d never been subjected to the kinds of personal risks that humans learned to deal with from an early age: risk to life and limb. If there was anything I needed to pass on to her, it was the ability to find courage in the face of fear. To let that fear put an edge on your skills, not to dull them.

Still, I worried about her as I saw her huddled so weak and defenseless in the restroom while she tried to call someone on her phone, her eyes large and liquid in the way of a sheltered, young girl who’d discovered for the first time that someone had deliberately tried to hurt her.

Fortunately, she wasn’t able to reach her first caller – I’m betting it was her dad. Realizing she was on her own, I saw her eyes narrow and take on an indigent and determined look. Angry even. Good… that meant she might learn something from this first meeting after all.

She talked for a bit on the phone with her second caller, and then walked shakily out the back door and flew off. I smiled as I walked back over to Matt and sat in his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck to kiss him. I couldn’t wait to see what Asha did next. Any more than I could wait to get Matt into my bed.

We danced some more, but increasingly, our touches grew more intimate, our kisses deeper. I knew it was time to find the privacy we both yearned for.

Matt fortunately took the lead and guided me to the door. I might be physically strong, but I like my men to be emotionally strong and very assertive - to tell me clearly what they wanted. Most of all, to not be intimidated by me.

Of course, once Matt made his move, I was free to speed things up a little bit. We were barely two steps outside the door when I scooped him up in my arms and soared straight up into the sky, leaving an astounded doorman craning his neck up into darkness.

Wayne Manor was outside the city limits, fifteen miles away by air, but Matt made good use of our flight time - he undid my dress buckle and began to kiss his way around my breasts.

It was all I could do to keep flying as his tongue traced around one nipple, and then gripped it firmly with his teeth as his hot tongue swirled faster. I gasped and then squealed in pleasure as I briefly forgot how to fly – it felt that good to be intimately touched again after so many years.

I must have lost a thousand feet of altitude before he let go. Far from being afraid of our tumbling freefall, he had a devilish look in his eye that said he’d enjoyed the ride. Even more, that he loved having that little bit of power over me. Which only encouraged him to try it again.

I barely managed to find the Manor in the darkness, for Rao knows I wasn’t paying attention to anything but Matt’s touches. I was in such a hurry to get him to bed when we arrived that I kicked in a locked window, sending glass flying everywhere. I lost my shoe in the process.

Not that it mattered… we were soon standing naked in the bedroom, our clothing forming a sexy trail leading back to the shattered window. I was standing with my hands on my head as Matt slowly circled me, his fingertips tracing so gently across my skin the way I loved it, pausing whenever he felt my muscles ripple to signal that he’d found a particularly sensitive spot. He was learning everything he needed to know about how my body worked – and about the places I liked to be touched the most, and he was a very fast learner.

It thrilled me just as much to sense the way his body was larger and taller than mine, and so very masculine, his large erection brushing against me sometimes, burning a trail of desire across my skin every time it did. I wanted to hold him so much, to drop to my knees and just swallow him, but there would be time for that later. Right now, I was loving the masculine sexuality he projected, his pheromones, his musky scent, and his gathering sexual power, not to mention his sexy touch. Despite my unexpected encounter with Lois, this was truly what I loved - being with a man who could barely restrain himself with desire for me.

And I for him.

He exercised the most remarkable restraint as he slowly drove me insane with desire, seemingly determined to explore every square centimeter of me with his tongue, his lips, his fingertips - each gentle touch building my tension further.

Slow-handed foreplay was my favorite… each touch building my passion until I was tingling so wonderfully that I couldn’t take any more. And Rao, was he good!

Still, it took Matt a long time to take me all the way up that tingling, needful, wickedly intense climb to insanity, his touch so light and intense sometimes that I never wanted him to stop. But my body couldn’t take this forever. I finally opened my eyes and floated backward toward the bed, only to have him scoop me up in his arms to carry me there – not a problem was I must have weight ten pounds I was so turned on.

I floated down, my bodyweight so light that I barely dimpled the comforter. I opened my legs wide in invitation, and Matt followed me onto the mattress, tracing his kisses up the delicate insides of my thighs as I lay there waiting for him to take me to the top. Yet maddeningly, he avoided touching my sex as he teased me by tracing his kisses up one leg and down the other. He bent my leg gently and ducked down to discover that wickedly pleasurable spot in the crook of my knee.

He paused there for only a brief moment before his lips began their upward journey again, and this time I wasn’t going to let him get away – I tangled my fingers in his blonde hair and guided him that last inch to my sex. His tongue wetly traced the length of my slit, and I gasped and arched my back to press my pussy up into his face. His strong tongue teased me open further, tracing a wickedly sensitive path just inside my nether lips now, then circling my unusually large feminine erection, pursing his lips around my clit to blow so gently on it.

I swore my hair stood on end I was so horny now. I don’t know what they teach these guys in medical school, but Matt knew all the ways to pleasure a woman.

I won’t belabor all the details, other than to say that his delicate touch finally gave way to the hard, rough, athletic needfulness that I so enjoyed in men. He couldn’t really make love to me the way he wanted to, and he knew it, but he used his cock in the most wonderful way, entering just my outer lips, pressing urgently against my clit. That touch took me to the very edge, as I safely kept my hands on my breasts as my body grew stiff, slowly arching my back higher and higher as I started to come. He had the good sense to escape over the side of the bed a scant second before I lost it completely, and it took but the slightest touch of my own fingers to complete my journey to ecstasy.

The bed sheets tore as I grabbed them in my free hand now, and when I leaned my head back all the way, but I was barely conscious of the bed frame bending and partially collapsing as I thrashed around on it, my heat vision flaring momentarily to burn a path across the ceiling. I forced my eyes closed tightly and let it all go, and that blinding light of passion washed away the world around me.

Other men have told me that my orgasms are more like epileptic fits – uncontrollable and insane. I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not, but when I finally collapsed limply to the bed, Matt  wasn't afraid. He was right there with his own hard needfulness, taking me deeply with that truly amazing cock of his, exploiting the brief lull in my passion to make love to me in the way of a man, my body so soft and so infinitely accommodating now. He was not gentle, that time had long past, and instead, he fucked me like a man possessed, like an animal, grunting and almost growling, tearing at me like a beast, knowing he couldn’t hurt me, knowing that only his strength could pleasure me now.

He was just as good at fucking as he was at foreplay – which is to say he was brilliant. He even succeeded in catching the edge of my fading orgasm, something no one had done before, and lifted my passion along with his, the two of us racing upward toward ecstasy again. He knew exactly how to work my G-spot, and he had the cock to do it, which made me wild, my passion taking wing to nearly catch up with his. I struggled to hold myself off, trying to keep from getting too tight for him, until I heard him cry out, and his hot rush filling me.

Being the considerate guy he was, he tried to keep going despite having come, knowing I was at the edge, his erection softening only slightly. I smiled like a kid who’d eaten too much candy as I rolled him over on his back and rode him like he was my stallion. I knew I wasn’t going to lose control as badly as I had the first time, but still, I kind of lost it, rolling over at the end so he could fuck me, then back on top, then not even on the bed, pushing his back up against the ceiling.

I finally couldn’t stay airborne I was going so wild, and we crashed to the floor, both of us laughing hysterically as he landed safely on top of me. His hardness had returned in the full now, and he took me right there on the floor, opening up the third chapter of our lovemaking.

I lost track of how many chapters we wrote, but eventually his human strength faded, his body depleted, and he collapsed on his back to smile at me, gasping for air. “My God, Kara, that… that was incredible. I swear I was riding some wild mare as she raced to heaven itself.”

“Yeah… imagine what Saint Peter would think of our arriving that way at those pearly gates of his,” I laughed sexily as I curled up to him. “Fucking like rabbits as he tried to figure out if we belonged inside or not.”

Matt chuckled. “He wouldn’t have to ask us anything. One look at our faces is all it would take to prove we'd already been to heaven.”

“Mmmm... that's a nice thought.”

“If I had to describe heaven on Earth, her name would be Kara.”

“So, describe this heaven to me,” I asked flirtingly. “If you could have any wish fulfilled, what would it be?”

“It would be my having the endurance to fuck you without ever stopping.”

“Good answer,” I laughed, gently closing my fingers around his already stiffening member. “We have something else in common then.”

“So you liked the way I handle the reins, huh?”

“I haven’t been ridden in a very long time. Do you have any idea how much I needed you tonight?”

He smiled like a kid. “I think I got a hint when you broke the bed. And the ceiling. And the floor.” He paused, still grinning. “And do you have any idea how many times I’ve dreamed of this moment?”

“Gee… let me guess…” I chuckled, realizing I’d lost track of the number of times we’d made it. “So you’ve got a thing for Kryptonian chicks, huh?”

“Only one girl. A woman now. The one and only and forever more, Supergirl.”

I sat up to straddle him, his hands rising to hold my breasts so wonderfully as I guided myself down over him. I was so wickedly wet and so relaxed now that I was able to take him easily. “Then how about if we try to cash in a few of the frequent flier miles you’ve just earned. I guarantee a First Class upgrade.”

Chapter 18

While Kara and Matt continued their joyful lovemaking, this time a thousand feet above the mansion, Asha was gritting her teeth as she flew fast and furious toward the west coast.

She could have gone suborbital, but she was mad and she just wanted to burn through the atmosphere. She needed time to think in any case.

Her Mach 6 flight and the resulting 2000 degrees centigrade from the air friction ensured that her makeup and temporary hair color burned off. Knowing her filmy dress wouldn't last two seconds after she leaped into the air, she’d taken a moment to grab an old red and blue uniform from her pack.

She was unwittingly dressed exactly as Kara used to dress as she chased the already set sun, watching the sunset preceding backwards, the sun rising from the west as she outraced the rotation of the Earth. Holding her fantastic speed until she flashed over Marin County, she finally relaxed her clenched muscles and began to slow, dropping below the Mach just as she crossed over the northern edge of San Francisco Bay.

From there she scanned the shoreline, looking for the old bridge that Cassie had defined as their meeting place. She felt both troubled and reassured that Cassie was the one person on the planet who most closely shared her powers and her experiences. Asha had been in the public eye as Supergirl since she was eight years old, so it was natural they became friends when Cassie came from from Paradise Island with her powers at age thirteen.

They’d shared everything during those formative early teen years, both of them secretly thousands of times stronger than the guys who were drawn to them, and it wasn’t until Cassie’s affair with her dad with she was sixteen that they stopped being best friends.

That was the same year that Cassie went public with her powers, while Asha went the other way, digging deeper into her Linda identity and living her dual life.

Cassie had been born Cassandra Swanson of West Palm Beach - an ordinary human girl. Her mother, Eileen, had long been an archivist for the Trump foundation who specialized in Amazon culture. She’d been introduced to Diana Prince during her research, and she and Diana had worked together to set up a special Amazon museum in Metropolis. Eileen’s enthusiasm for Amazon culture had impressed Diana, and the two of them became the best of friends. So when Cassie was born, Diana became her godmother.

When Cassie became old enough to share her mother’s admiration for Diana’s unique culture, Diana treated Cassie to a tour of Paradise Island. Once there, she’d had fallen completely in love with the beauty and splendor of the island.

Cassie had intended on staying for a week, the visit was a present for her twelfth birthday, but an unexpected cosmic storm caused the pocket dimension to stay out of sync with Earth for a full year, trapping Cassie there. Her mother was frantic when she lost contact with Cassie and the Amazons for that long year.

Kal tried to help, but he had no ability to safely travel dimensionally, but he used his Kryptonian instruments to examine the dimensional interface. He proclaimed the portals would align again, but whether that would be in ten minutes or ten centuries, he couldn’t say.

Cassie was too enthralled with Amazon culture to worry too much about the portal, and the Amazons put her to work like any other of their girls, teaching her the skills of a warrior.

Prior to Cassie's long visit on Paradise, no mortal had ever spent more than a few days there at one time, so the Amazons where not aware of the changes that would take place in a woman’s body during an extended stay. They were shocked to discover that the invigorating radiation from the temple walls doubled Cassie’s strength in the first month, and then doubled it again in each of the next twelve months, eventually leveling off with her having four-thousand times the strength of any other human girl of thirteen years age. Which was nearly half as strong as an Amazon-born girl of the same age.

When the portal opened again and Cassie returned to her mother, she looked a year older, her eyes a bit bluer, her blonde hair shade paler, but otherwise she didn’t appear different. That is, until she resumed her favorite hobby of sculpting. She shocked her mother by hand working solid blocks of stainless steel instead of the soft clay she’d used before.

It took mother and daughter some time to sort things out, and Cassie had to learn a whole new way of restraining herself as she interacted with other kids, but she found a way to prosper from her unique genetic changes. Her mother began to sell Cassie’s sculptures to collectors of Amazon art for some considerable sums. Cassie herself would go to showings, pretending to be a visiting Amazon girl, and create one of her marvels right before the astounded eyes of the crowd, her powerful hands shaping the steel so effortlessly, becoming the first superhuman artist known to Earth.

Then came the disastrous affair with Asha’s father, with their sexual relationship starting on Cassie’s sixteenth birthday. It wasn’t something Cassie had desired, for she’d always seen Kal as a middle-aged man whose taste in music was closer to Tom Jones than to Six Inch Nails, and who believed in concepts that had been obsolete since the 1950’s. Even worse, he was so serious about everything.

But Diana talked to her about the need to further strengthen the Amazon blood line. She described her own long affair with Kal and demonstrated the supreme power that she now possessed - her strength many times greater than Cassie’s. She ended by telling Cassie that Kal wasn’t as stuffy as he seemed in public. Once she got to know him, she’d find the Kansas farm boy that still lived deep inside.

Cassie refused at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had an obligation to repay. So when Diana finally insisted a third time, she dressed in her sexiest outfit and sought out Kal-El of Krypton.

He ignored her at first, telling her to go home to her mother, which only made Cassie push all that much harder. Instead of just trying to seduce Kal, she involved herself in in his business as Superman, helping him catch some dangerous criminals. Unlike Asha, who had been active as Supergirl for seven years by this time, Cassie never allowed herself to fall under Kal's training. She always carried herself like Diana did, acting as if she was his equal and not some young girl who had to be trained like Kara had been or Asha was now.  Surprisingly, Kal didn’t try to tell her what to do, and gratefully accepte her help whether she was adept or inept at it. All of which made Cassie try harder to truly become his equal despite her young age and lack of experience.

Their relationship had been strictly business until one weekend after they’d saved a ship full of women and children who’d been abducted from a Chinese port, all of them headed for a life of white slavery. Kal offered to show Cassie around Hong Kong. They checked into adjoining rooms at the Four Seasons and started to see the sights, dressed as ordinary visitors.

Kal found that Cassie’s innocence and youth were charming, especially the way she found everything in Hong Kong so new and fresh. He wanted to get her a unique gift for her upcoming sixteenth birthday, and as Kryptonian tradition expected of him, he offered to give her anything she might ask for. Sixteen was the age of adulthood, both on Krypton and among the Amazons.

Cassie saw her golden opportunity, and casually told him that she wanted him to be the first man to make love to her. On her birthday.

Kal just stared at her for a long moment and then disappeared. She didn’t see him again for two months. Not until the night of her birthday party.

Whether he was just delivering on a solemn promise, or whether he’d truly been looking forward to their coupling, Cassie would never know. What she did know was that it was the most incredible moment of her life.

It wasn’t just the fact that she was no longer a virgin, or just the pleasures she felt in his arms, but the fact that Kal looked so joyful as they made love, so lost in their intimacy, so tender and so strong, so emotional, so vulnerable yet ever so much the Man of Steel, all at the same time. He exuded a playful, boyish charm once his passion overtook him.

Diana had been right about him. He was still a kid inside, at least when he made love.

Their first encounter led to another, and then to many more. Like Diana before her, Cassie found that the act of taking that part of Kal inside her began to infuse her with a portion of Kryptonian power. He radiated an aura of invincibility, and it projected most strongly when he was aroused, and most effectively when he was so deeply inside her.

She was soon stronger than any other Amazon save Diana, and like Diana, she no longer needed bracelets to deflect bullets. Her deceptively soft skin could more than do the job now. She might not be able to see through things like a Krypt, but she had a limited ability to project heat from her eyes. And she could fly far faster than anyone else from Paradise Island, Diana included.

The result was that Cassie and Asha were near twins in strength by the time Asha turned sixteen three months later.

Asha was of course far less vulnerable to harm than Cassie - she could fly through the atmosphere of sun if she wished - and she was by far the better flyer, as well as having that genius IQ of hers.

But Cassie, like all those Amazon-trained was a natural warrior. She was also less affected by Kryptonite than Asha, the scourge of anyone with even partial Kryptonian genetics.

The result was that she nearly always won their wrestling matches, using the complex Amazonian martial arts that Diana had taught her to trap the violently struggling Asha in her arms and legs. Once she’d restrained Asha, she used pressure points on Asha’s neck to slow the blood flow to her brain and knock her out.

Asha would wake up moments later feeling like her entire body had gone to sleep, and so weak she could barely move.

Fortunately, those techniques were known only to the Amazons, and Cassie was sworn to tell no one, not even her ‘Kryptonian sister’.

Unfortunately, Cassie’s family life was far from happy. Her mother and she had a serious falling out over her affair with Kal-El. Cassie finally left home and got a court to legally declare her as being emancipated. No judge was going to deny that an Amazon with Kryptonian powers couldn’t take care of herself.

The judge probably regretted his decision when Cassie started taking on high-end bounty hunting assignments to augment her sculpting. She brought criminals who were beyond the reach of the law to justice, extracting them from their hidey-holes, whether in the jungles of Columbia or the sands of Iraq.

She only accepted assignments which involved criminals who had committed crimes against women and children. Most of all, she enjoyed tracking down the vicious men who’d managed to kill all the witnesses who could have testified against them. Men who could not be convicted in any court. She would study the evidence of their crimes, and if she decided they were truly guilty, she’d bring them to her own form of justice.

That led to the first serious falling out between Asha and Cassie. Cassie believed that she could administer her own capital punishment, often as not directly in front of her client.

In the eyes of her wealthy clients, many of whom had lost a loved one to the deprivations of the accused criminal, it was poetic justice. These sexual exploiters of women and children were dying beneath the hands of a lovely woman who was barely more than a girl herself.

Asha didn’t think it had anything to do with justice – she just thought it was sick and perverted. She called it what it was: vigilantism and revenge, exploiting those rich and corrupt men for her own ends.

Between that and Cassie’s affair with her father, Asha loudly declared their friendship over. They hadn't talked since that day.

Asha sorted through those disquieting memories now as she dropped down from the sky, her skin and uniform cooling rapidly as she flew through the cool, evening mist of San Francisco Bay. It took a moment to spot the blonde Amazon standing under the old bridge span. Cassie was standing on a pile of shattered rocks that formed the shoreline, dressed in an expensive white leather coat that hung to her knees, paradoxically with a casual pair of pale blue jeans and sandals beneath. Asha was reminded that Cassie was a multi-millionaire, but still only seventeen like herself. They'd both been forced to grow up too fast.

“So, how’s the most dangerous woman on Earth doing these days?” Asha asked as she landed lightly a few feet from Cassie. It was the most pleasant thing she could bring herself to say.

“An over-rated title,” Cassie shrugged. “Unless, of course, you kill babies.”

“Yeah… well, your murderous vigilantism has sent the worst of those assholes deeper into their holes. Makes it harder for the rest of us to dig them out.”

“Gee… so nice to meet you again too, Asha,” Cassie said sarcastically.

“This hasn’t been a good year for us,” Asha replied, trying to sound conciliatory.

“Yeah, but we’re young. Things change. We’ll survive.”

“Tell that to my mom. Or to the families of the men you’ve killed in cold blood.”

“Don't you dump that on me, Asha. Your dad has a problem – if not me, then he’d have approached another Amazon. And those men you refer to… they were nothing more than inhuman monsters. Men who’ve destroyed a thousand families. If they had a family, they surely mistreated them as well, and I’m just as sure they’re glad I’ve killed the sons of bitches.”

Asha was surprised by the righteous vehemence in her friend’s voice. “I thought you just did it for money. It sounds personal now.”

Cassie stared intently at Asha for a long moment and then shrugged, trying to act as if it wasn’t a big deal. “I’m dealing with clients who are more than happy to pay to get the closure in their lives that they could not get otherwise. The more I charge, the better they feel. So yeah, I do it for money.”

“It’s not justice, Cassie, and it’s a lot more than just closure. Its revenge, pure and simple.” She paused for a moment. “Or is it? Is this some kind of Amazon crusade like Diana used to go on? Killing off the men who prey on women?”

Cassie refused to bite. “So, did you come here just to piss me off again, Asha? I thought you said something important was going on.” She paused to look funnily at Asha. “Or did your dad send you? Maybe he’s finding life a bit pale without fucking me every day.”

Asha clenched her fists, realizing that Cassie was just trying to get to her. “So… now you’re rich and infamous. Must be nice to have those millions to keep you warm. Tell me about all those boyfriends of yours again?” Cassie had never done well with men. As far as she knew, she'd never even tried to be intimate with anyone except her dad.

“Spoken by a girl who still lives with her mother and has to ask for lunch money. A girl whose idea of fun is getting an A+ in Chemistry. Who dates the dullest and most conflicted man in Metropolis. The old Batman was way cooler when he cleaned up Gotham City.”

Asha sighed. “Let’s bury the hatchet, Cassie. We’re different people than we used to be, but we used to be best friends.”

“I never stopped being one. You’re the one who didn’t want to see me again.”

“OK, I was really weirded out by your sleeping with my dad,” Asha shrugged. “But I’m over that now, given that you had the good sense to call it off.”

“Do you even know why I stopped seeing him, Asha?”

She shook her head.

“Because he went crazy in bed whenever I wore a uniform just like yours.”

Asha’s jaw dropped. “Wha… what are you saying? That he’s… that he thinks… of me… that way?”

“Of course not. He’s still got the hots for his dead cousin. I’m guessing he always did. All I know is that he wanted me to pretend to be Kara – wearing her uniform, adopting that innocent attitude, being so proper and demure. He wanted me to act out his fantasy - that Kara had to have his steel-hard dick to get through the day."

Asha's face turned green.

"Whenever I wore that uniform and acted that way to please him, getting all slutty and hot for him, he’d go totally wild, pouring every kinky fantasy he’d ever had into my body.”

Asha closed her eyes as her world spun around. She knew her dad had a problem with sexual relationships, but hadn’t realized it was this twisted. She suddenly wasn’t sure if she should be angry or sorry for him. “Well, then I’m really glad you brought this up, Cassie, because someone who claims to be her is running around Metropolis.”

"Her?"

"Kara."

Cassie's eyes opened wide, and she laughed. “Man, your mom’s in real trouble then, ‘cause your dad’s definitely in lust with his cousin.”

Asha cringed again. She was really glad her dad hadn’t answered his phone earlier.

Cassie saw the tortured look son Asha’s face. “But we both know that’s impossible, Asha. That Kara is alive, I mean. I read what happened to her – the middle of her body was blasted away by the AntiMonitor. She died almost instantly.”

“Which is why we have to talk. This woman is strong as hell. Way stronger than me. I scanned her body – she’s perfect. Not a scar anywhere. No evidence that she’s ever been injured, not to mention cut in half as you say.”

“So she’s a fake. No surprise.”

“Yeah. I figure she’s one of Darkseid’s agents, but she’s definitely Kryptonian born. That makes her incredibly dangerous, even to you and me.”

“Sounds like a challenge. I’m tired of hunting these humans. Taking on a Krypt ought to be fun.”

“If you don’t mind risking your life. When I said really strong, I’m talking the break our necks kind of strong.”

“Yeah, but can she fight?”

“Let’s not find out. I need your help to get her to my dad’s place in the Arctic so I can throw her into that red-light room he’s got.”

Cassie chuckled. “Why don’t you just let Kal find her? If he thinks she’s Kara, he’ll keep her real busy. He damn near broke my back he got so wild during sex.”

Asha closed her eyes to shut out that disgusting imagery. “All the more reason for us to take her out now." She opened eyes to stare into Cassie’s. “You’ve hurt my family enough. Help me make sure my parents don’t get hurt again.”

“I don’t know… your mom certainly doesn’t want me around. Too many scars. And I don’t want to see your dad again. Things could… you know, start again.”

“I really need your help, Cassie. We trained together. We know each other’s moves, our instincts in battle are synchronized and our reflexes are evenly matched. This Kara person might be a full-blooded Krypt, but we should be able to bring her down together.”

“Well, I am between gigs,” Cassie shrugged again. “I’m just working my sculptures now.”

“Glad to hear that. About not having a gig, that is.”

“Not that I owe you an explanation, but I’m turning the assholes I catch over to the authorities now. That’s really slowed down my business.”

“Doesn’t surprise me, Cassie. Your clients are old, revenge-filled men. The idea of a half naked teenage blonde crushing the life from their victims was a powerful drug to them. Every bit of revenge and sick desire they’d ever had was wrapped up in that one act.”

“Gee… and I thought you were studying PreMed, not deviant psychology.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t understand what was going on earlier, Cassie. Especially the affair. I know now that Diana put you up to it – that it was time to repay a favor. And my dad was such a sucker for your come-on. He should have had a lot more sense than that.”

“Apology accepted. But don’t be too hard on your dad… I can be very persuasive around men.”

“Can we change the subject? Please.”

“Sure… so, you want to take on a full-blooded Krypt. I’m in.”

“Thanks, Cassie. I knew you were the one person l could count on.”

“Yeah, yeah. But one thing, Asha - I lead, you follow. I’m the one who always kicked your ass.”

“Don’t be so sure you can stay alive long enough to apply those famous pressure points of yours. That takes many seconds and she could kill you faster than that. I think she’s as strong as my dad.”

“Too bad she’s not a guy then. Two hot chicks like us could drain him dry.”

“Stop with the sexy sophisticated woman of the world bullshit, Cassie,” Asha said angrily. “We grew up together.”

“Yeah, and both of us are mutants,” Cassie spit back. She paused, and smiled crookedly at Asha. "And we're damn hot chicks."

“I prefer to think we’re just special.” Asha paused, and then smiled thinly. “You remember when we used to tell people we were sisters?”

Cassie nodded. “We were, in most of the ways that count. Even looked a bit alike when you didn’t wear that dumb Linda disguise.”

“Then be my sister again. Let’s use the power of two to kick some Kryptonian ass.”

“So, tell me about her. This Kara person. Where’s her soft spot? What does she care about? Does she have any friends we can use to get to her?”

“Well, there’s this guy she likes. Name’s Matt somebody. He’s a surgical resident at University Hospital.”

“Good. We’ll start with him.”

Chapter 19

Zyara stood in the armored test chamber of Olympus Security, her nose wrinkling at the unpleasant mixture of machine oil and solvent that filled the air. She was here to validate the performance of Olympus’ latest attempt at body armor - validating it by wearing the experimental armor as they tried to breach it with an energy weapon she’d taught them to make.

Barely six months had passed since she gave them the first of the alien designs - a laser-assisted anti-matter projector. A LasMat. That weapon was simple enough for a moderate technology race like the Terrans to produce – it was little more than a high-energy laser forming an anti-matter transport. By Kryptonian standards, it was about as sophisticated as the old rotating cylinder revolvers that the Terrans had used since the 19^th century. Specifically, her weapon used a conical laser beam which was emitted from a ring diode, that beam ensuring that the region inside the photonic barrier was perfectly evacuated. Once the beam established an evacuated transmission path all the way to the target, anti-matter atoms were accelerated down the tube to annihilate whatever they contacted. Simple, cheap and easy to mass-produce.

Simple that is for someone educated in the Kryptonian system and who possessed the quick intelligence of that race. Kryptonian IQ’s started at the 99.5 percentile range of human intelligence and went up from there. The result was that the LasMat had so far proved extremely difficult for the Terrans to implement, even after she’d given them the detailed designs – translated to English even – along with a variety of test systems and a supply of anti-matter.

Her first team, made up mostly of professors and graduate students from Stanford, were definitely in that upper half percent of intelligence. Unfortunately, they’d been so enthusiastic about building the LasMat, and so careless about following laboratory protocol, that they’d blown themselves up while charging the first anti-matter storage chamber. The crater that marked their demise out in the Nevada desert, a terrifying quarter mile wide bowl of fused rock and glass, provided mute testimony to the power of a few grams of anti-matter in the wrong hands.

The second team, recruited from Berkely, had been idiots – they’d made no progress for two months. She’d wound up firing them in her unique way - she’d loaded them into a large tour bus, ostensibly to take them out to a second Nevada test range. Fuming silently in her front seat as the physicists partied behind her, most of them smoking pot, she waited until the bus was in an isolated area of the Mohave, and then floated out of her seat and launched herself at the roll-over braces in the roof. It took but a quick flex of her long legs to lift the bus off the ground and soar nearly straight upward.

Everyone stared at her in shock as they were crushed down into their seats by the acceleration, their already drugged consciousness fading away into the giddy euphoria of the hypoxia as she climbed higher and higher into the thin air. They'd thankfully passed out before their bodies burst like overripe grapes when the air pressure fell to zero.

Half of the Berkely Physics Department stared unseeing out the windows as their tour bus tumbled end over end as it fell inward toward the sun, carrying the vacuum-preserved bodies of the first humans destined to make a solar descent.

Fortunately, the third team she'd recruited, this one comprised of retired cold warriors she’d recruited from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico had done far better than she’d expected. They’d assembled a dozen working weapons with only a few minor glitches.

These were men who’d invented a dozen different kinds of thermonuclear weapons over the last forty years. They'd assembled those horrifying devices themselves, and then tested them, both above and below ground.

Unlike the previous two teams, Zyara made a point of revealing who and what she was at the very beginning of the program. Dressed in a low cut black dress that emphasized the generously firm curves her Kryptonian body, it's very short hem flaunting her long legs, she sat before them in the main conference room, staring earnestly into their eyes with the sparkling blue of her own as she laid it all out for them.

They stared at her in awe as she claimed she was an associate of Superman. Despite her sexy come-on, she further claimed she was a scientist who’d been sent from New Krypton to help the people of Earth to develop weapons to use in defending the planet from an Evil Empire.

Given that these men had worked for the US government all their lives, they knew the patriotic words to that tune. In reality, they’d been itching to build more powerful weapons since US research had been stopped on nuclear weapons in the 1990’s. They'd eventually been forced into retirement when their funding ran out.

Zyara was hardly the scientist she claimed to be, but she cemented her credentials with them by using her Kryptonian education and extreme intelligence to describe mathematical models of anti-matter physics that they’d never even guessed existed. It didn't take them long to realize just how perfect anti-matter would be if used to create a high-energy weapon. Assuming you could find the stuff and contain it and deliver it to the target... all things she claimed she could show them how to do.

Of course, she didn't appeal just to their sense of patriotism or their desire to work in the field again. She was so stunningly gorgeous that she mesmerized them. She'd spent many hours working side by side with these older men, often while wearing attire as exotic as she had during her first meeting with them. Even more interestingly, she became their test vehicle, given that her body was immune to the effects of anti-matter.

It went well at first, but Zyara was desperate this time to avoid her previous mistakes. Darkseid didn’t tolerate fools, and given her two earlier failures, she was perilously close to becoming just that. She drove the men to work night and day, but eventually, Zyara saw them tiring. She was burning them out.

She decided to lighten the atmosphere by arranging a social outing after the team reached an important goal - manufacturing and loading the anti-matter chamber. The boat trip to the Channel Islands off Ventura, California, her version of the ubiquitous company picnic, was her first real social encounter with humans outside of their work, and she unexpectedly found she was enjoying herself as the chartered boat took them to a remote harbor on San Miguel Island.

The men clustered around her as they sailed, she was the only woman on the boat after all, and asked a thousand questions about what it was like to be Kryptonian. She smiled and flirted outrageous with the men as they slowly got drunk, all the while giving them the most bizarre answers she could think of. The Captain and his crew of three, all of them sober, were as enthralled as anyone else.

The questions naturally gravitated to her physical talents, and that discussion somehow ended with her standing at the stern of the ninety-foot dive boat while the Captain dug the ship’s protection out of its secured locker. She'd promised these half drunk weapons designers a unique demonstration. 

The Captain returned with his prized AK47. He claimed it fired a metal-jacketed military round that could penetrate an engine block, and was equipped with an oversized fifty round magazine. He described how he'd captained a small freighter in the Malaccan Straits years before, and he'd used this powerful rifle to drive pirates away several times.

The men formed a circle closely behind him as he cycled the chamber and then carefully sighted his rifle on Zyara's body, daringly squeezing the trigger. The first bullet tore a big hole over her stomach. She just smiled back at them. The Captain flipped the selector to Auto, and fired a long burst that tore her clothing to shreds, her body jerking wildly from the impacts as he plugged her from head to toe.

The men stared slack jawed a Zyara when the
Captain lowered his smoking AK47. Her left breast was clearly revealed now, her clothing half shot away.

Once the Captain saw that she wasn't hurt, he fired another burst. Then another, the spent brass piling up around his feet as the mangled bullets chipped the paint from the boats stern as they ricocheted from her body. The rounds that hit muscle or bone zinged off over his head, while the ones that hit the softness of her breasts merely blunted to the floor by his feet.

The Captain was filled with a wild thrill as he kept firing the wildly bucking rifle, aiming for her chest as best he could, knowing those gentler ricochets would be safer for his passengers and crew.

By the time his magazine was empty, Zyara wore only scraps of her white blouse and skirt, and with large holes torn in those. Remarkably, her skin was unblemished as she glared arrogantly back at them, her hands on her hips, her invulnerable breasts proudly exposed for all to marvel at. Based on her confident pose and expression, the powerful bullets hadn't bothered her in the least.

If not for the way her right nipple had torn through her thin top, the Captain might even have bought that, but he knew an aroused woman when he saw one.

His sexy thoughts were drowned out as his passenger's stunned silence erupted into applause, and then into a hundred new questions as they gathered around her, daringly touching the bullet holes in her remaining clothing, marveling at her soft skin. She'd just proven that she was a woman of steel, yet her skin was as soft and sensuously warm as any other woman. Something she proved as she guided their hands to her bared breast.

No one noticed that the weather had grown hot and sunny as they cruised around the backside of San Miguel Island. Fortunately, the Captain had the presence of mind to anchored in a small, deserted cove, and it was there that Zyara led her half inebriated team ashore to begin exploring the cliffs and caves on the inside of the cove.

Once they were all ashore, she turned to the men who worked for her and challenged them to the traditional company picnic contest. Standing waist deep in the clear water, she described her challenge: she was going to lift a rock, and they were supposed to estimate its weight. Whoever came closest would win a prize.

At one level, it was a familiar company picnic contest for a bunch of geeks -- a game that would challenge them to perform calculations in their heads that they normally relied on their computers for. Yet on another level, it was over the edge, for there was nothing usual about Zyara.

She held everyone’s rapt attention as she brushed what was left of her bullet-ridden clothing off, and then turned her back and explosively jammed her fingers into a boulder half the size of the average suburban house. Cracks spread noisily outward as she wigged her fingers in deeper, tendons standing out on the back of her hands and wrists as she gripped the rock with incredible strength. Once she had her grip, she bent her legs slightly and threw her back into it, and the giant rock gave off a loud cracking groan as it sucked free of the ocean floor.

Her upper body flexed into a maze of hard muscle now as she rose from the water, her long legs tight with shapely muscles as she stood seemingly weightless on the surface like a goddess, the waves gently lapping against the bottoms of her feet as the massive boulder hovered dangerously over them all.

The men just gawked at her, astonished at her raw Kryptonian strength, not to mention her exotic nudity.

The beers they’d consumed on the way over should have taken their toll, yet these aging men were all engineers to the core and they knew what to do. They waded into the water and started to measure the rock, judging its composition, then estimating its volume as they recalled what they knew of rock density to start working the calculations in their heads.

The oldest member of the team, Peter Jergen, the Test Director, approached the problem differently – he asked Zyara to lift the boulder higher over her head, and then used his hands to estimate the size of her shoulder and arm muscles.

Zyara smiled as he traced his fingers gently over her shoulders and down her back, enjoying his touch as she sensed the muskiness of his growing arousal. She wondered if he got turned on when he tested his nukes, and amused herself by imagining that he was turned on by all things thermonuclear. Her body was powered by the sun, after all.

He told her that he was going to use some calculations that had once been done for the size and strength of Superman’s muscles. He estimated the volume of her flexed muscles, then used the coefficients he’d once studied, and used that data to estimate the boulder’s weight from how hard she was working to lift it.

Once all the guesses were in, Zyara declared that Peter had come the closest: 3,205,000 kg. In reality, she had only a rough idea of the boulder’s true weight, but she wanted to reward Peter’s unconventional approach as an inspiration to the team. She set the boulder down with a gentle splash and took his hand to head him around to the backside, ostensibly to give him a reward that she knew would motivate the others to push harder and win as well.

“So, when was the last time you made it with a woman in her twenties, Peter?”

Peter looked at her funny, and then laughed. “Hell… about thirty-five years or so, best I can remember. Why, you offering, darling?”

She winked. “Maybe today’s your lucky day.”

His smiled flickered and then returned. “Now that’s and interesting incentive scheme,” he laughed. “Way better than the DOD’s old 401K or my crummy pension. Or the ribbons they used to give out at the company picnic. But word of this will get around.”

“I’m counting on that.”

He shrugged, trying not to give away just how turned on he was. “Well, it's a nice fantasy… but we both know you’re teasing me. It’s not possible.”

“What isn’t?”

“Intercourse with a Kryptonian.”

“Who said I was asking you to fuck me? I was thinking of a nice blowjob. I’m really good at those.”

“I can imagine. Suck the chrome off a bumper, I suspect.”

“Actually, I can.”

He closed his eyes as a wave of desire raced through him. If not for his wife waiting at home... “Right," he finally blurted out. "Tell you what, Zyara, as nice as that offer is, I’ve got another idea. I did some research once for a friend who wanted to know what kind of forces would be required for Kryptonian vaginal penetration. You know, given the delta in muscle tension between humans and Kryptonians.”

Zyara looked blankly at him, astonished that he was still thinking like some kind of test engineer, not as a man who'd just been offered a sexual prize. “You have some strange friends.”

“He had a thing for Supergirl back in the 80’s. I was trying to convince him how ridiculous that fantasy was.”

“And what number did you get?”

Peter felt himself blushing. “I figured the range was between one and three tons… depending on age and, ah, experience.”

Zyara could only laugh. “Well, maybe if I was unconscious. In reality, some of the strongest muscles in my body are down there.”

“I don’t under…” Peter started to say.

“Its how Kryptonian women make sure that only suitable men toss any DNA onto the racial pile.”

“That sounds weird. And intimidating as hell.”

“In reality, my ova are no harder to inseminate than a human woman’s. It’s just a bit harder to get to them.”

“You’re not invulnerable… inside?” He sounded really surprised.

“My eggs aren’t. Don’t ask me why.”

“So how much force does it…”

“Just watch,” she interrupted as she reached out to break a piece of the hard volcanic rock off. She began to crunch it in her grip, quickly shaping the rock into what was clearly an oversized dildo. His jaw fell open as she leaned back against the boulder and opened her legs wider, giving him an x-rated view of a very pink inside.

“You gotta be shitting me…” Peter gasped.

She gritted her teeth and pressed the elongated rock against herself, twisting it to screw it into herself as she buried it halfway inside. “Just a little something to appeal to the high energy physicist in you...”

“Jesus fucking…”

“Shhh… just watch.” Zyara worked her piece of black rock back and forth, a film of dust covering her vaginal lips as she wore it smooth, her juices wetting it until it disappeared completely. She then crossed her legs tightly, her long quads standing out hard-edge and strong as she contracted her inner muscles, her abs turning into sculpted steel as a blinding glare lit her sex from inside.

“Now that’s a super trick,” Peter gasped, staring wide-eyed as he struggled to regain his equilibrium. He’d not been prepared for anything like this. “A porn star would be intimidated by that thing, but you took it like it was nothing. And that heat...?”

Zyara shrugged. “They don’t call our men super men for nothing. And I like heat.”

He just swallowed, remembering his friend's old fantasies about Supergirl, and realized with a shock how far he'd been off base in describing her strength.

Zyara gritted her teeth and bore down harder, and the glow became blinding.

Peter squinted through the glare to see a trickle of white-hot molten rock beginning to trace its way down the inside of her thighs.

“So, how about that blowjob now, Peter,” she said breathlessly as she lowered herself lower in the water, a cloud of steam and the squealing sound of quenching steel filling the air, extinguishing the glow. “You might like it if I do you while I’m…” she gasped for air again, rocking her pelvis back and forth “…doing this.”

Chapter 20

Zyara and Peter sat together on the boat an hour later as the now hung-over engineering team motored back to the mainland. The swells had grown stronger during the day, and the heaving boat sent more than one of them to the sides to barf beer and pretzels into the water.

Peter didn’t seem to notice as he held Zyara in his arms, the two of them clearly having been intimate back on the island. Everyone who wasn’t seasick watched them enviously, fervently wishing they’d been the one to guess the weight correctly. Perhaps next time, they dreamed, just as Zyara had hoped they would.

Once back on shore and headed for their lab, Zyara was all business again, telling everyone she expected them in to work bright and early the next morning. The fact that tomorrow was Sunday didn’t seem to bother her or anyone else.

Sunday was always test day, and this week started with preparations for their first full weapon's test. They were going to mate the anti-matter charging chamber with the companion pieces of their weapon and try it out for the first time.

They all vividly remembered when Zyara had demonstrated the Kryptonian version of this weapon. Peter and two of his senior engineers had gone with her to meet the leadership of the Brotherhood, a shadowy organization that had allegedly aligned with Zyara to try and stop the religious terrorists. Peter wasn’t happy about that, he still figured the US Government was better suited for counter-terrorism, despite its failures over the years. But he was willing to go along with Zyara. Anything that might shut down the Islamists was worth a try.

Zyara had prepared for the demonstration by lining up ten of the Russian’s largest main battle tanks. She then took the hand-sized weapon, set it for a three-second burst with the beam set to its narrowest size, and blew everyone off their feet as she blasted a hole through all ten tanks. The entry hole on the first tank had been the size of a pencil lead while the diffused exit hole from the backside of the tenth tank was barely the size of a baseball.

She waited until the astonished men got back to their feet and walked around the tanks, convincing themselves that their eyes hadn’t deceived them. She finished her demonstration by setting the beam to its widest setting and melted one of the tanks into a large puddle of molten steel.

The dazzled but greedy men walked about the periphery of the glowing puddle, their eyes bright with plans for conquest as they shielding their sweating faces from the 2000 degree heat. Collectively they were the absolute rulers of Earth’s underworld, and they knew power and advantage when they saw it.

All but one of them returned to stand before her, promising anything Zyara wished if only they could get their hand some of these weapons. Zyara ignored them as she instead studied the one man who stood apart from the group, an American. He reached for his cellphone and started to make a call, something she’d strictly forbidden..

The American's reward for his misguided independence was to absorb another full power blast from the weapon. His body vanished so rapidly that the air crashed together to fill the void with a thunderous CRACK.

The other members of the Brotherhood stared at the spectacle for a scant second, and then doubled their initial offers.

Zyara surprised them by claiming she didn’t want money. Instead, she wanted their loyalty to the new order she was establishing. They would divide the world up, with each of them having responsibility for destroying the terrorists in their area. No government or terrorist group could resist the power of their weapons.

It was  better offer than they’d dreamed of being offered. Yet Peter was horrified by her plan - this wasn’t what he’d spent his life fighting for.

Zyara saw the look in his eyes and drew him off to the side. “Play along with me here, Peter. I need these men to take out the terrorists, and they only understand one kind incentive - power and money. Once I'm done with them, I’ll turn them over to your government so they can step into the power void and clean up the mess. The terrorists will mostly be dead by then.”

“Assuming they don't screw it up and kill a lot of innocents,” Peter whispered back. “These guys are scary. They could use those weapons for anything. Melting holes in bank vaults, you name it.”

“Are you questioning my ability to control them?” she said, her eyes flashing.

“No, that isn’t what I meant… but they're.. crooks!”

“You ever heard the phrase of using a crook to catch a crook?"

"These guys kill people."

"Which is why I want them." Her eyes softened. "Look, Peter, by this time next year, the Brotherhood will be a thousand strong, and each of them will be armed with one of these weapons. As long as I guide them, we’ll use their organizations and their new firepower to make a clean sweep of anyone who supports terrorism.”

Peter slowly nodded, but his eyes were still wary.

His caution was insightful, for in reality, Zyara's plans had nothing to do with the US government or any other. She needed to rid the planet of Superman and his daughter, then then turn the Brotherhood lose on everyone else, creating total chaos. So much chaos that Earth’s governments would sue for peace with Darkseid instead of facing the continuing ravages of the Brotherhood.

She’d then personally destroy these men and the organization she’d created. Peace and prosperity would greet Darkseid when he arrived to become Earth’s first Global Leader.

Assuming she could find him, Zyara thought darkly. Her last contact with Darkseid had been six months earlier, prior to the destruction of his asteroid. But he’d given her orders to follow in case he was delayed. Orders that directed her to proceed with conquering Earth.

It was a very heavy burden for such a young woman, but then, she was Kryptonian. She was an El.

Chapter 21

Once they’d convinced the Brotherhood to take on the Islamists, it was now time to start working on some armor that could resist the weapons she was selling. Working both sides of a conflict was an age-old tactic of the arms merchant, and it would increase the violence of the coming fights.

Looking through the supposedly one-way glass of the test chamber at the remote site she’d rebuilt in Nevada, she saw Peter’s team readying the first Terran produced LasMat. Turning her back to the engineers, she pulled off her top and untied her hair, shaking her head as she combed it out with her fingers until it hung long down her back. She then strapped on the super-armor they’d built from the second design she’d given them - armor that so far had proven capable of stopping any shell or laser beam that was native to Earth.

Now it was time for the ultimate test.

She turned back to face the portal through which they’d aimed a prototype LasMat. Supposedly they’d enhanced the weapon during the fabrication, but she had trouble believing that. Terrans weren’t that smart.

“Are you ready, boss?” Peter asked, his voice sounding very metallic as it crackled from the armored speaker in the ceiling.

“I’m always ready,” she said as she placed her hands on her hips, watching as the men stared back at her, a mixture of admiration, excitement, shock and arousal on their faces. Given that she was paying them each two million dollars a year plus a bonus of equal size for each weapon or armored device they completed, they were already rich men. They'd die as billionaires if everything went as planned.

Given Peter’s initial reluctance, she’d forged some documents that showed that this entire program was now a very black DOD program that Superman secretly sponsored. Why else would a Kryptonian be running such a program in Superman's own backyard?

“Standby… firing commencing…” Peter’s voice said mechanically.

Zyara barely had time to take and hold a deep breath before a beam of white coherent light emerged from the muzzle of the weapon. The laser beam wasn’t really the weapon, but its tens of thousands of degree temperature created an evacuated channel which highly charged particles could travel. The particles annihilated nearly any matter they touched, creating temperatures as great as the core of the sun.

The stream, narrower than a pencil lead, flashed across the room to explode into a fireball when it hit the alien armor. Despite having resisted the most powerful Terran weapons, the advanced composite and ablative armor slowly disintegrated now, resisting that terrible beam for slightly less than the required five seconds before it burned through.

Zyara gasped as the charged particles tried to disintegrate her now, the focused spot between her breasts growing as hot and bright as a tiny sun. The most energetic particles, traveling at relativistic speeds, penetrated her skin to heat a narrow pathway of superheated flesh through her body.

The intensity of the Terran weapon immediately shocked her – as promised, the engineers had increased its power significantly.

Every instinct she had screamed for her to throw herself to the side to escape the deadly ray, but she held her ground, trusting in her near absolute invulnerability as she struggled to maintain her pride. She’d told the humans that no weapon made by the hand of man could harm her. She'd even described how she’d once hugged a nuclear weapon to her body as it detonated, embracing its terrible heat, taking it to herself as she might a lover.

It was an exaggeration, for she was not truly immortal or completely invulnerable, but given they couldn’t prove her wrong, they had no choice but to believe. And they had such a thing for thermonukes.

All of which made her all the more determined to stand rigidly in front of the ray. She closed her eyes and tried to embrace the heat, trying to enjoy the way it made her breasts burn pleasantly even as the penetrating heat actually made her heart ache and burn terribly. She gritted her teeth against the growing pain and tried to think pleasant thoughts, moving herself to the side slightly until the beam centered itself over one breast. She imagined that this was a Kryptonian man using his heat vision to awaken her nipples, a form of foreplay she’d always imagined might be sexy, if only she could find a Kryptonian male to have sex with. 

The beam suddenly stopped as the anti-matter reservoir ran dry. She forced herself to maintain a neutral expression as she slowly tore the glowing remnants of the super armor off to reveal that her right breast was glowing as brightly as the melting armor itself. Glancing over her shoulder at her reflection in the glass, she was surprised to also see a bright spot glowing on her back where the most energetic particles had exited her body.

Turning slowly around, she made sure her technical staff saw it as well. They’d be up all night doing calculations trying to figure out how much energy she’d absorbed, modeling just how high a temperature the core of her body had been heated to. They’d do the calculations, and then they’d be even more amazed.

So much so that they’d be even more inclined to worship her as a goddess tomorrow.

As much as she hated to admit it, Zyara knew this crop of engineers had outdone themselves – the LasMat was far more powerful than the ones she’d trained with back on Darkseid’s moon. These Terrans were proving to be surprisingly adept at taking alien weapons technology and improving upon it – it was clearly only their basic science that was behind the rest of the universe, not their engineering abilities. Show them the science, give them some time, and they might become Darkseid’s most accomplished armorers.

Her body cooled rapidly as she stood silently in the test chamber, waiting for Peter to tell her they’d gathered sufficient data. If not, she’d just have them do it again. That wouldn’t be fun, but she wasn’t here for fun.

Peter suddenly looked up from his screens, his eyebrow lifting as his eyes briefing focused on her glowing breast. He smiled, knowing that she wasn’t just an omnipotent alien – she was a very sensuous woman. And more than a bit of a tease.

“OK, Zyara… we’ve got what we need. Thanks for being our backstop today. No other way to contain that beam after the armor burned through.”

Zyara nodded. Peter wasn’t only an appreciative male and a good engineer, but he was also a man with more conscience than common sense. Security had told her he was working on an immunity deal with the government in return for testifying that they were building advanced weapons and giving them to the Brotherhood. Did he really expect that the FBI could protect him after she found out about his disloyalty? Especially the way he’d supposedly become her friend.

Regardless of his attempt to sell her out, she wasn’t going to kill him right away. Not unless Superman got involved, and for the moment, the government wasn’t bringing him into it. That didn’t make sense, but then, the US military had never been comfortable with having an omnipotent alien hovering over them, judging them.

For the moment, it remained in both their interests that Peter continued his talks with the government agents. She wanted the government and their military Joint Chiefs to be very afraid of her, as that would eventually force them to turn to Superman and his daughter to protect them. If the other Angels did their job and took down the two Kryptonians, then the US military would know they were defenseless - naked and unprotected not only against her, but against the army she’d created, all of them wearing this armor and carry the particle beams.

It was all part of Darkseid’s grand plan for bringing his old enemy, Kal-El, to his knees by forcing his adopted planet to voluntarily join Darkseid’s Alliance. Earth would betray Kal-El after he proved incapable of protecting it.

Chapter 22

She found her top and began to get dressed while turning her attention from the engineers to her next problem - George Fredericks. During her last meeting, he’d made it clear that if she wanted his continued help, she’d have to prostitute herself to him. He wanted her to appear with blonde hair, a Kryptonian outfit and a sunny disposition – everything she hated about the El family - the family who'd rejected her while she was barely more than an infant.

If not for her training and her dedication to the cause, she would have killed Fredericks just for suggesting his trade of her flesh for his mind. But she needed him, and the bastard knew it. As the MindRipper, he’d read her mind as easily as the other Krypts. He’d found her secret horror, that of having sexual intercourse with a human, and turned that against her.

His deal was simple. If he did as she asked and evesdropped on Superman, he wanted her to embrace her own horror and make his fantasy come true. He wanted to have unprotected sex with her.

She closed her eyes and pushed her burning anger away, finding instead that calm spot that lived deep inside her. He was but a Terran. He might touch her skin, but he could hardly dirty her soul.

Besides, she’d beam enough x-rays at his balls that the bastard would be sterile before he touched her.

What was ultimately most important was that he was the only one who could tell her what the Els were planning. Just as importantly, he could reveal their fears so she could play into them as he had hers.

She had only her thoughts for company as she walked out the back exit of the lab to leap into the air, flying quickly from LA to the high desert to land in front of the nondescript double-wide trailer that she’d purchased next to an old Air Force test range. This was her personal refuge – isolated and secure.

It was where she kept the few Kryptonian items she’d brought to Earth. Digging through the invulnerable backpack that she’d worn while diving through a half dozen wormholes, she dug out the caped gown that she’d worn to her swearing in as a member of the Defense Force back on the LifeShip.

Her adoptive parents had been disgusted when she'd joined the military, reminding her that her real parents had been pacifists. They claimed she was sullying their memory by becoming the very thing they’d always hated.

Which was exactly the reason Zyara had joined in the first place. Her real parents had abandoned her, placing her on the LifeShip at the age of six months. They hadn’t known that Krypton was going to explode back then – they were just getting rid of her so they could have another child. The one-family/one-child law of Krypton ensured that Jor-El couldn’t have another child after she was born, and he’d desperately wanted a son.

Her first few years with the LifeShip’s Defense Force had been non-eventful - what could happen in intergalactic space to a bunch of Kryptonians, after all? They had their own yellow sun generators circling the asteroid. Then, during a long patrol when she was drifting along, half asleep out of sheer boredom, out at the very fringe of the yellow light effect, she encountered a small ship approaching the LifeShip. Moving closer to investigate it, she was suddenly enveloped in a strange greenish-colored energy field and everything went black.

When she woke up, she was restrained by heavy metal clamps, and a large greenish crystal was suspended by the ceiling just above her - Kryptonite she quickly realized! She struggled to escape it and return to protect her fellow citizens, but she was too weak to break the restraints. Still she struggled frantically, tearing at them until she was covered in sweat, her muscles aching, her skin red and bleeding.

The room was plunged into absolute darkness after that, for how long she had no idea, a very long time in any case, leaving her alone with that glowing lump of deadly crystal. Yet she did not die, and came to realize that it was carefully placed to weaken her, not kill her.

Eventually, a man in a suit of armor who called himself Darkseid arrived. He seemed to know all the details of her life, starting with describing the way Krypton had abandoned her, how the El family had turned her out, treating her like a mistake, even going so far as to revoke her birthright and banishing her from their world forever as an orphan.

Zyara tried to fight him at first, remembering her oath to the LifeShip, and she loudly denied the very things that haunted her every waking moment. Yet showly, inevitably, Darkseid broke her down until she finally cried out for him to stop. She told him that it no longer mattered. Krypton had been destroyed. By a stroke of good luck, she’d outlived that hated family. She’d never see them again. They couldn't hurt her now.

But then Darkseid showed her that it did matter. He described the way the El’s had sent the son who’d been born to replace her to a safe planet when the end of Krypton neared. He claimed he could give her a chance to even the score with the El family – she could destroy the one man in all the universe that she hated the most – the favored son of Jor-El.

Darkseid awakened all the anger inside her, and focused it into the burning desire for revenge. A chance to correct the greatest wrong in all the universe.

Zyara seized the opportunity for revenge that she’d never dreamed existed, and she became his most loyal agent – the only Angel he didn’t have to mindwarp and condition to turn into his servant. She stood beside him, now both his lover and his greatest weapon, and together, they brought down entire worlds, each one taking them closer to Earth.

Zyara sighed as she relived the fond memories of fighting for Darkseid’s cause. Memories of defeating entire armies with nothing but her body. Now she was here on Earth along with Jor-El’s son and granddaughter.

Yet as much as she wished, she knew she couldn’t confront Kal-El directly – Kryptonian males were uniquely powerful, and Jor-El’s son had basked in the yellow rays of a true sun for all his years, not the artificial ones she’d grown up under. He was stronger than her. So was his daughter.

It would take a combination of Darkseid’s will and her strength to break Superman. Once broken, they would drive him away from Earth and into exile. They’d destroy his soul. And then, when that was complete, Zyara could track him to the ends of the universe, eventually finding a way to destroy his body as well as his soul. Some how, some way.

Smiling at that bright promise, she turned her thoughts toward her next challenge. She had to win George Fredericks over to her side without using fear or any other form of mental conditioning. He’d already demonstrated that his mindreading power failed when he was under mental stress.

Sexual relations had always proven useful in managing human men. Besides, her close proximity would empower him further; turning his sickly, weakness into physical strength and sexual vitality. That would hopefully sharpen his mental powers, and make him even better at reading Superman’s mind.

She would also appeal to his vanity. Any man would be filled with pride at taking a Kryptonian lover. She would stroke that pride just as sensually as she stroked his strengthening body – the two forces combining to make him her willing tool. He would soon be addicted to her presence, addicted to her loving, knowing that he’d once again become a frail, sickly and small man if she abandoned him.

It was a small sacrifice to make to learn the intimate secrets of her enemy’s mind. To live inside the very souls of Jor-El’s spawn.

Walking outside her trailer to admire herself in the reflection of the large windows she’d installed, she decided the blonde wig and clever makeup made her look like a completely different woman. In fact, she wouldn’t even have recognized herself from the reflection.

That said, she wasn’t wearing the red and blue costume George had requested, but she wasn’t going to give the bastard everything he asked for. He’d enjoy the low cut front as she let him exploit the easy access to her body, allowing him to undress her and finally exhaust himself against her body. If he knew anything about pleasing a woman, it wouldn’t be so bad. She would become his goddess, and he her worshipper.

She’d at least get the satisfaction of killing him when it was all over.

She bent down and leaped high into the sky to head back toward Metropolis and the suite at the top of the Four Seasons that George had reserved for their rendezvous.

He’d sense her coming and would be so ready when she arrived.