Alea Iacta—which was a weird name, but that’s what it said above him—looked kind of pale. That was probably the right response. Teddy would feel kind of pale, too, if the Boss was angry at her.

“A-ask away,” Alea Iacta said with false cheerfulness in his voice. “I live to serve, Lady Boss.”

The Boss frowned at him. “Why were you running from those Heroes?” she asked.

“I swear, I was minding my own business, walking across the street, not bothering anyone. And then they decided to start screaming at me. That Glamazon girl? The one in the awful costume? She started throwing fireworks at me! So I hightailed it out of there. I didn’t mean to run into you, I swear.”

The Boss frowned harder and Teddy caught her cue. She took a deep breath in, then let it out as a low rumble deep in her chest. She even opened her mouth a little to show Alea Iacta her big bear teeth.

“You . . . you were just walking along?” the Boss asked. She sounded shrill, on the edge of either panic or of screaming. Teddy figured that Alea Iacta was about to make the Boss real angry now. Lying was against the rules. “Walking in costume?”

“W-well, maybe I was playing around with my powers a little? You know, I had a quest or two? Little things. Completely harmless. I didn’t rob anyone who doesn’t have insurance to cover it.”

Teddy flexed her claws. They kind of hurt when they dug into the bricks of the wall behind Alea Iacta, but it was worth it to see the man flinching back.

“I might have used my power on people too!” he squeaked.

The Boss’s eyes narrowed. “Your power? How does it work?”

The man waved his arms about. “You know how everyone is a little lucky?”

The Boss didn’t seem impressed by his rhetorical question.

“Ah, well . . . I can take a bit of that luck and tuck it away for a rainy day, as it were. A pinch here or there from people on the street, you know?”

“And you used that to decide which alley to hide in?” she asked. Teddy hadn’t thought of that. The Boss was really clever.

He nodded. “That’s the gist of it, yeah. I used up a chunk of my luck to find a place to hide from the Heroes, and then I met you . . . how lucky.”

The Boss seemed to deflate a little. “That sounds more truthful, at least,” she said. “Can people sense you using your power on them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It feels like, uh, passing gas, but from everywhere? Giving people luck feels like the opposite, or so I was told.”

The Boss’s face went red with anger. Teddy didn’t know what the guy said that angered her so much, but she growled anyway.