Shadowgirl

Chapter 1

I slipped out from behind the boxes in the corner, creeping just inside the wall of the empty warehouse. A man dressed in a strange, shimmering uniform stepped into my field of vision and turned to look in my direction. Giving him a sidelong glance, I froze.

Not that I needed to.

Freeze, I mean.

This guy couldn't see me. Not when I cloaked myself in invisibility.

Stopping like that was instinctive, I suppose. Some remnant of animal instinct buried somewhere in the depths of my DNA. My body didn't seem to know when it became invisible. It just acted as it always did. These days, though, stopping like this only slowed me down. Stopping did have the benefit of silencing any sound I might make, I guess. My power only seemed to remove me from sight. I could still be heard. But with soft shoes that made no sound on the concrete floor, the reaction was pretty silly.

I grinned wryly and shook my head quietly, realizing I was giving entirely too much thought to the subject. So I mentally shrugged and continued moving, even as the armed man continued to scout my corner of the warehouse. I had a mission to perform and didn't have time to waste right now.

As I crept behind the next stacked pallet, I glanced downward. My slender form was clad in the tight, black, form-fitting Shadowgirl costume that my sister had helped me make when I'd turned eighteen. Progressing along the warehouse wall, I remembered the day that I'd been accepted into super.org, my older sister's look of pride. We'd been placed with a different set of foster parents seemingly every year of our childhood, so my sister Andrea had been the one constant in my life. Her approval that day had meant everything to me.

I'd been surprised to get in the highly selective fraternity of superheroes. As powers went, invisibility was not particularly powerful, but it did make me a natural for stealth and reconnaissance operations. Personally, I would have preferred a more tangible power like strength. Or flight. Or even laser eyes. But alas... no such luck. Stuck with invisibility was I.

Everything else about me was normal. At best. Normal strength, normal toughness... okay, so maybe below-average toughness. I tended to burst into tears when I bumped my shin on the occasional piece of furniture or when I pinch my thumb in a kitchen drawer. Some superhero, right?

I wasn't even particularly gifted in terms of normal human abilities. I was a C-student, barely making it through art class by convincing my teacher that my stuff was intentionally abstract. I couldn't hold a tune to save my life and could only manage the second slowest 100-meter time of anyone on the track team. In other words, take away my power, and I was pretty much average or worse in every other capacity.

There was only one thing I had going for me besides my invisibility power. My looks.

Not to brag or anything, but I was beautiful. Maybe not fit to grace the posters in the display at Victoria's Secret. And I probably wouldn't be replacing the latest spokesactress at the Dior counter at department stores, but I was good-looking. When I entered a bar, my ginger hair curled and shimmering, I was—more often than not—the hottest girl in the place. Gazes tended to be cast in my direction when I entered the room, and, thoroughly unremarkable in every other way, I enjoyed the attention. Sue me.

So it was more than a little ironic that my only superpower basically negated the only non-super thing I had going for me. I was pretty, and I had the power to make sure that no one saw me. This, I took as proof that the universe had a sense of humor. A twisted one, apparently.

To make matters worse, I had joined one of the few organizations on earth where I wasn't even among the best-looking women. Even in super.org, I might be better than average, but when every super-powered woman around seemed to be hyper-fit, hyper-endowed, and hyper-gorgeous, I wasn't even exceptional in the looks department. Even when I wasn't invisible. No, at super.org headquarters, Sapphire Valkyrie's were the curves that every male eye roamed. Never mine. But the gorgeous amazon was so freaking powerful and heroic and all that, that I couldn't even manage to hate her for making me invisible! When I, um, wasn't trying to be, I mean.