A Karma Girl Christmas Read Free Page B

the chief were doing their sweep of the city. Besides, I didn’t plan on contacting the others unless I absolutely had to. I didn’t want to give Fiona any more excuses to keep ribbing me about being a rookie superhero, and calling in the crime-fighting cavalry on Christmas Eve would give her ammunition for weeks . I might be relatively new at this superhero gig, having only been wearing my silver spandex a little more than a year, but I still had my pride.
    “Don’t worry,” I said in my most confident, earnest, sincere, authoritative superhero voice. “I’ll take care of the toys. I want those kids to have a great Christmas just as much as you do.”
    Abby nodded, satisfied. She gave me a final smile then strolled down the store’s center aisle, heading for the front doors.  
    My eyes swept over the tree one more time, enjoying the colors and lights, before I started walking a slow circuit around the entire display.  
    Time to go to work.
    #
    The next half hour passed uneventfully. An announcement was made that the store was closing for the night, and all the shoppers drifted toward the exits. The security guards escorted everyone outside, then locked the doors and left as well. Normally, a few guards would stay behind in the store, but the owners had decided to give them the night off because I was here. What did you need with guys with guns when there was a real, live superhero on the premises?
    Actually, I’d probably take the guys with the guns myself. Guns almost always worked the way that they were supposed to, whereas superpowers had a tendency to go on the fritz.
    Either way, it looked like I was in for a long, silent night locked in the store by myself, with only the twinkling lights of the toy tree brightening the scene. Still, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. My inner voice, the one I always listened to, was whispering to me. I just couldn’t quite figure out what it was saying—or what kind of trouble might appear before the night was through.
    My inner voice was part of my powers as an empath, my ability to tune into the emotions and feelings of others and sense their thoughts and future actions. All my life, I’d had these little twinges, vibes really, about things that were going to happen, sort of like knowing who was on the other end of a ringing phone before you ever picked it up.  
    According to Chief Newman, I’d always had a bit of a latent talent, but the radioactive goo—the freezeterium—that Malefica had dumped me into last year had cracked open that part of my brain and amplified the ability a hundred thousand times over. Now, not only could I sense other people’s emotions, but I could actually see the psychic energy that surrounded them—and tap into that power and use it anyway I wanted.  
    As Karma Girl, I basically squinted at ubervillains until I saw the colorful waves of energy radiating from their bodies. Then I could mentally reach out and grab that energy, and use the villains’ own powers against them. That’s how I’d defeated Malefica, along with Frost and Scorpion, the other members of the Terrible Triad. Maybe my power wasn’t quite as photogenic and impressive as Fiera’s fists continually bursting into flames, but it worked for me—
    A faint tap-tap-tapping sound snapped me out of my thoughts.  
    My breath caught in my throat, and my heart leaped up into my chest. What the hell was that? I glanced at the tree, wondering if perhaps one of the toys had come loose, hit the floor, and was rolling around.  
    But there was nothing there. No toys, no clothes, nothing on the floor except the presents sitting in their sacks ready to be handed out in the morning.  
    The tap-tap-tapping came again—low, slow, and steady—and I knew I wasn’t alone.  
    I immediately reached for my empathic ability and scanned the area near the toy tree, turning in a slow circle and looking for the waves of psychic energy that would tell me someone was near—and exactly where