“Well, you do look very hot, Fiona.” Lulu laughed. I glowered at Lulu. Just because I was a member of the Fearless Five, one of the most esteemed superhero teams in the world, didn’t mean that I didn’t get snarly from time to time—or that civilians like Lulu had the right to poke fun at me.

Of course, none of this would be happening if Carmen, aka Karma Girl, hadn’t insisted we tell Lulu our secret, superhero identities. Carmen had argued that Lulu deserved to know the truth, since she’d helped save us from the Terrible Triad, a group of ubervillains. Lulu was also the main squeeze of Henry Harris, aka Hermit of the Fearless Five, and he’d wanted to tell her the truth as well. The other two members of the Fearless Five, Sam “Striker” Sloane and Sean

“Mr. Sage” Newman, had agreed with Carmen. So the four of them told Lulu everything, despite my protests. Once the shock wore off, Lulu ingratiated herself with the rest of the Fearless Five. Now, everybody else treated her like one of the gang. She even had her own room in the top-secret, underground compound with the rest of us.

I ignored Lulu whenever possible. It was bad enough she knew our real identities. I didn’t want to invite her any more into our lives. Lulu was a computer hacker. She did all sorts of highly illegal things, like breaking into the FBI 6

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mainframe and swapping corporate secrets, but nobody cared except me. Not even my father, the esteemed police chief of Bigtime as well as a member of the Fearless Five. In return for my blatant hostility, Lulu zinged me with heat-related puns whenever we crossed paths. Fiona’s hot. Fiona’s smokin’. Fiona’s on fire. Like I hadn’t heard them all a hundred thousand times before. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Lulu could have at least come up with something original, if she was going to mock me on a daily basis.

My eyes fixed on Lulu’s hair. I could turn those blue streaks red in a heartbeat. Heat pulsed through my body. My fingers twitched. Just one little spark . . .

“Fiona,” Carmen warned. “There will be no flare-ups today. You promised Sam.”

I had promised Sam. And my father. And Henry. And even Carmen. Three times each. I let go of the fire coursing through my veins and banked it deep inside me. It didn’t matter anyway. Carmen would have just done her empathy thing and used the ambient energy in the room to buffer Lulu and herself from my heat. Carmen had the ability to tap into other people and use their own energy against them. I hated her power, mainly because I hadn’t figured out a way to counteract it yet. Most of the time, I either punched or flambéed my way through danger. But I couldn’t do that with Carmen, because she gave just as good as she got.