“Wait, how did you— Come here!” came a shout from within the house.

“Okay,” Emily said. “Plan B. Athena, keep her off balance. Teddy, get in there and corner her. Trinity, one of you stay out of trouble, but try to free yourself and . . . I don’t know, hit her from weird angles.”

“Got it!” Trinity cheered.

There were more sounds in the house, things crashing, stuff falling down, drywall being cracked, and a few choice words from the so-called Hero that Emily really didn’t approve of hearing near her sisters.

Emily jumped over the balcony fence, then reached out and tried the back door. It wasn’t locked.

“Teddy, get in there,” she said.

“No problem, Boss!” Teddy said before she bolted past her.

Emily only had a moment to take in the kitchen and the living room past that before she ducked back into cover.

She figured everything was about to go terribly wrong.

“Who are you? Why are there so many violent children in this stupid house?!”

“Die, capitalist scum!”

Terribly, terribly wrong.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Getting Saucy

Isabel had been told that this was going to be a routine job.

All she had to do was drive over to some middle-class Merican dream house, slip in the front, and then poke around. The Cabal had a few guys with weird powers who let them know things they shouldn’t: dealmakers, social manipulators, mind readers, and a few who could predict the future in weird ways. They were part of the organization’s backbone.

They were also a pain in the rear to deal with.

Their little in-group had this self-important, elitist attitude about everything, which rubbed Isabel the wrong way. They thought they were cleverer than everyone else, and them being right about it most of the time made it worse.

So here she was, following their cryptic orders to go over to some nobody, B-list Villain’s place to look for a bundle of information about the Cabal that could be troublesome if it fell into the wrong hands.

This was going to be far, far beneath her. She was Black Shield, the untouchable, unhurtable Hero, not some errand girl.

Of course, the errand she was running wasn’t meant to involve little raccoon-girl thieves.

She walked into the house, expecting it to be the boring middle-class haven she’d seen in a hundred sitcoms with those cheap interior decorating magazines she was inexplicably fond of.

Catching someone in the house was unexpected; it made her heart skip a beat, and an electric surge of adrenaline jolted up her back. Training kicked in, and she slid into a fighter’s stance, ready to summon her shields to stop any blow . . . Then her brain caught up, and she made out the scrambling figure who had been robbing the place.