Smoke on the Water

JP rushed into the sitting-room.

'Dad's head's on fire!'

'Again?'

Suzie threw her book aside and leapt to her feet. The sharp, crinkly smell of burning hair drifted from the kitchen.

'Fly to Mum,' she told her brother. 'Tell her we need a cloudburst. Inside the house. Now.'

Feeling the chaos, Pucker had become a blurred, barking circle, teeth gnashing wildly an inch from his tail.

'Go, JP,' Suzie said. 'Go!'

He crouched, extended his arms and squeezed shut his eyes.

'Outside!' Suzie shouted at him, hands fluttering. 'Take off outside.'

Too late. JP aimed for the open window but took off at an angle and crashed into the wall. His head bashed off the framed front page of The Irish Times, hung proudly by their mum five years ago. LOCAL SUPERHEROES RESCUE IRISH ECONOMY. The Powers' first big headline. A week later the economy had plunged into recession.

In a crash of glass and splitting wood, JP fell on top of whirling Pucker. Howls. Flying fur. A painful grinding sound.

Suzie ran into the kitchen. Wide-eyed, their dad was flapping uselessly at his face with a tea towel. Smoke and flame spurted from the top of his head, leaving scorch marks on the ceiling. In his green sweater and tartan trousers he looked like a giant cigarette lighter.

'Aaaargh!' he screamed, but it was his annoyed scream. He wasn't in pain. He liked fire. When he could control it. Twice that summer he had nearly burned the house down.

'The sink, Dad. Stick your head in the sink!'

Ted didn't hear her. Or wouldn't listen. He was not the best listener, even when he wasn't on fire.

'Dad.'

Now he was doing a Pucker, tearing around the room, flailing his arms and shaking his head, making things worse. Actually fanning the flames. Flakes of burning paint dropped from the ceiling. Smoke billowed, thick as tomato soup. It was like a war zone.

In the sitting-room JP threw Pucker aside and brushed himself off. Their mum, where was their mum? Of course – at the garden centre. Where she always was. Two minutes by air. Then he remembered his cape. He could not fly straight without it. Where was it? He stuck his head inside the kitchen door and peered through the smoke.

'Suzie,' he shouted, 'did you cake my tape?'

'Cake your tape?'

'Take my cape.'

'Forget about your cape – go and get Mum!'

All four burners on the stove blazed. The room was like a furnace. This was what happened when their dad tried to light the gas burner with a snap of his fingers. Zing. Blip. Whoosh. He thought he was so cool. Afterwards he would wink at the kids and blow smoke from his finger like it was the barrel of a pistol. A gunslinger making a cup of tea. When he wasn't exploding into flames.

JP sprinted away. Using telekinesis, Suzie made Ted slip on the tiled floor and tumble headlong into the kitchen sink. She unleashed the taps, tripled the water flow and bent the stream upwards so that it doused his head and put out the fire.

Eyebrows smouldering, gasping for breath, he staggered back and fell into a kitchen chair.

'Holy smoke,' he said, rubbing his charred chin. 'That came out of nowhere.'

'Oh, really?' Suzie said. 'Like one of Mum's lightning bolts?'

'Suzie, pet, sarcasm doesn't suit you. If you had powers, you'd know how hard they are to control. Would you mind putting on the kettle? I'm as thirsty as a llama.'

Over the sizzling of Ted's hair came the sound of scrabbling claws, a panicky thumping, growls and panting. Pucker exploded through the door, tearing across the kitchen like a squall of rain, slipping and sliding on the wet floor and knocking Suzie's legs from under her, before he squeezed through the pet door and disappeared into the back garden with a strangled howl.

Dazed, Suzie lay on her back while her dad muttered to himself. 'Let's see now: thin flame, low heat, fin-ger SNAP – high heat, super grill, slow hand CLAP. Or is it the other way round?'

Suzie stared at the ceiling. Was that more smoke? Was her dad on fire again? But there was no smell. Was it – it couldn't be – storm clouds?

Suzie scrambled to her feet and looked out the window. Her mum stood on the footpath, clutching a bag of peat moss and holding a new spade over her shoulder like a rifle. JP was beside her, pointing at the house and jerking his head like a puppet. His clothes were torn, and bits of wood and glass clung to his hair.

'It's out,' Suzie yelled. 'The fire's out!'

But her mum couldn't hear her through the double glazing, and she had that funny look on her face that meant she was bringing on the weather. Let it be a sprinkle, Suzie commanded, but she couldn't get her weather-resistance power going in time.

Blinding rain. An enormous crack of thunder. And then a ragged spear of lightning lit up the kitchen like dynamite and blew Ted's sweater off.

Head wobbling, he blinked at Suzie and brushed burning fibres of fabric from his chest. His hissing hair stood up in soaked spikes. The rain spilled over the appliances, dripped off the counters, splashed onto the floor, where teacups floated like little boats.

'I take it that's your mother outside,' he said.

Suzie nodded, wringing water from her sopping clothes.

'Well,' he said, 'we'd better get changed. It looks like the chipper for dinner.'

The Power of Love

Ted and Clare had been warned. But love is stronger than any superpower.

They had met at the Dark Knights Super Daze convention in London. This was back in the 1990s, when Ireland's only known superhero was a leprechaun named Myles whose power was the ability to pick winners at the races. He was soon barred from every racecourse and betting shop in the country. But by then he was rolling in gold, and he retired to Florida, where he married a weather woman from Fox News and grew fat and lazy.

'And not once,' said Ted darkly, whenever he spoke of Myles, 'did he exercise his power for the good of the country.'

Clare had been talking to Wonder Woman at the Astral Projection booth when Ted walked by. He heard her Dublin accent and waited for her. At least that was how he told it. Clare would later claim that he had been smitten by Wonder Woman.

'You're the one who smited me,' Ted would counter.

'Smote.'

'Smote?'

'Smite, smote, smitten.'

'I'm the pup and you're the kitten.'

'Don't be talking nonsense.'

'Is it nonsense to say that Wonder Woman doesn't hold a candle to you?' Ted demanded.

'You held a candle to her.'

A candle? More like a blowtorch. So flustered was Ted when Clare first spoke to him that flames shot out the cuffs of his duffel coat and lit Wonder Woman's cape on fire. When Clare had tried to generate a localised rain storm, her temperature control went wonky and...