Chapter One

Wyatt sat at his drawing table and worked on a panel for his latest comic book series. Elec Tric, his super hero, had been hit by an otherworldly bolt of lightning one sunny day. Twice. Since then, he’d been able to generate his own electricity. Even stranger, an unseen world of demons and super beings had become visible to him from that day forward. Tric had been forced to make a choice: join the forces of evil who intended to reign supreme over the innocent inhabitants of earth, or join the forces of good who kept the evil at bay.

“Join me, Tric, or I will destroy you,” commanded Delilah Diabolical, the demon queen.

“Never! One demon down; three to go.” Tric pivoted to shoot a bolt of deadly electricity at his archenemy. He couldn’t destroy her, but he managed to send Delilah reeling, which bought him enough time to obliterate her remaining minions. ZAP! SIZZLE! ZAP-ZAP! Gone.

Wyatt finished inking in the bolts of lightning shooting from Tric’s hands and eyes to where the superhero had reduced another pesky lower-level demon to a pile of glowing embers and ash. Then he moved on to the next panel, and a new challenge for his superhero.

“Help!” a pretty blonde cried, as two of DD’s minor demons attempted to drag her off to the underworld. “Somebody, please help me!”

Elec Tric once again rushed to rescue the Mysterious Ms. M, which gave the superhero pause. Why did fate keep throwing the pretty blue-eyed blonde in harm’s way? In his way. Was she another distraction sent by the evildoers to keep him from finding out what they were really up to? If not, what did the demon realm want with Ms. M?

Cue dramatic foreshadowing music. Da-da-duhhh.

Wyatt grinned. Sometimes his stories played through his mind like cheesy movies, and when that happened, he was in the zone. Nothing made him happier than working on his comic books while in the zone.

Noise at the back door leading to the parking lot pulled him out of his imaginary world. He rose from his stool and moved to glance out the window. There she was, the blonde who lived in the apartment above his—the pretty neighbor who’d been his inspiration for the Mysterious Ms. M. Her little boy carried a jug of laundry detergent, while K. Malone—he’d read her name on the mailbox more than once—lugged two large plastic tubs full of laundry, one stacked on top of the other.

K. Malone did her laundry every Saturday morning. Wyatt knew this because he took the opportunity to observe her as she left. And every Saturday morning he wondered the same thing: How would she react if he ran downstairs and out the back door to help her with her heavy load? Would she turn her thousand-watt smile his way, introduce herself and ask if he’d like to get together with her soon? He wished. Oh, how he wished. Longing stole his breath, and he moved back from the window—as if K. Malone might be able to see him watching her from his apartment. “Curse this wretched shyness,” he muttered in his best cartoon character voice.

He wanted so badly to talk to her, to introduce himself and maybe ask her out. He’d even tried a few times, but the words stuck in his dry mouth, his face turned to flame, and his lungs refused to do their job. He was a hopeless mess when it came to women. Hell, he was a hopeless mess when it came to people in general.

He peered out the window until mother and son drove off to the laundromat. Letting loose a heavy sigh, he returned to his drawing table and immersed himself in his made-up world of alter ego, heroic deeds and feats of superhuman strength. It sure beat losing himself in his usual diatribe of self-castigation.

A couple of hours later, Wyatt got up to stretch. He’d finished the panel he’d been working on, and his stomach had been grumbling “feed me” for the past fifteen minutes. He walked to the kitchen to make a turkey sandwich, when he smelled . . . smoke? A second later, the fire alarm went off in the kitchen above his. “Cripes.” K. Malone’s apartment was on fire.