Heroine Complex (14 page)

Dammit. I had actually begun to grow fond of those boots.

The Tommy Thing roared again, his arms extending into the audience, claws slashing. Shrieks rippled through the crowd, nearly drowning out his roaring.

“Hey, we can move!” the messy-haired girl cried. “The seats aren't holding us anymore!”

“THEN EVERYONE GET OUT OF HERE!” I yelled.

Apparently I'd forgotten the rule about screaming “fire” in a crowded theater.

People stampeded for the exits, everyone climbing over each other. The mob was an ugly thing, a mass of terrified faces, grabbing hands, and crumpled popcorn bags.

“EVERYONE, GO STAND IN THE BACK!” I amended. “IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.”

The Tommy Thing reached his claws out farther, trying to get at the mob.

“Hey!” I snapped my fingers at him. “Right here. We were talking.”

His eyes went to me, narrowing with malice. I shuddered, feeling the full weight of his gaze, the pure evil that seemed to thrum through the theater and straight into my soul.

“That's right,” I murmured. “Focus on me.”

I closed my eyes as his arm extended, his claws slashing toward me.

I can do this,
I told myself.
I can save all these people. If I can get him to concentrate purely on me, take me out, maybe his rage will be satisfied. And then maybe  . . .

Wait a minute. What the hell was I thinking? A realization smacked me upside the head.

He might have unabashed rage, but my rage was better.

My eyes flew open. I dodged his slashy claw just in time.

“Forget the fear, Evie,” I muttered. “Focus on the anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to you blowing stuff up.”

I darted out of the way of his claw again, hopping back and forth. I was vaguely aware of shooting pain in the foot wearing the ruined boot, but I did my best to ignore it.

“Goddamn, Tommy Lemon,” I said, turning my voice into a growl. “Forget this movie. Your last movie sucked even harder. I took my sister to see it and she wouldn't talk to me for a week. Our relationship is damaged enough and you made it worse.”

His claw narrowly missed my left hip. “You're a symbol for the worst kind of mediocrity!” I continued, darting behind a row of theater seats, dragging my aching foot behind me. “So lazy you can't come up with a concept that's half original. You keep dressing up as stupid things and making the same stupid movie. I wanted to stab myself during that last one!
Stab myself
!
”

“RAAAAAAAR!”

I ran-limped down the row of seats as his claws slashed out for me again, destroying the seats one by one. The stuffing exploded out of them in angry clouds of white polyester:
bam, bam, bam
.

“You're a hack!” I screamed. I landed in the center aisle, dancing out of his way. “And I do
not
need your bullshit today. My crazy boss just moved me into her
house against my will, I'm being forced to take orders from my juvenile delinquent of a sister, and I'm either hallucinating or not hallucinating demons, depending on who you talk to.” I raised my hand to point at him, my index finger jabbing defiantly at the screen. “Also?
You ruined my shoes
.”

Rage surged through me and for the first time, my blaze of anger was shot through with satisfaction. I welcomed the heat in my palm. I encouraged it. I set it free.

A bright burst of flame arced from my hand, catapulted itself toward the screen, and hit the Tommy Thing squarely between the eyes.

“RAWWWWWWR—” His screams were cut short as he exploded, what was left of the movie screen caving in on itself with a
ripppppp
and leaving nothing but a big, black hole.

I took an involuntary step back. In the back of the theater, someone started a slow clap. It gained strength, more and more people joining in, until it crescendoed into full-on applause.

“Aveda Jupiter is
on fire
!” shrieked a little voice. Messy-haired girl again.

I stared at my palm, then looked up at the destroyed movie screen.

“Yeah,” I murmured to myself. “That just happened.”

I COULDN'T STOP EATING.
Loaded potato skins were my new best friends. Also stuffed mushroom caps.

Lucy and Nate eyed me with awe (and, okay, maybe a little disgust) as I crammed another forkful of over-salted, over-cheesed goodness into my mouth.

“Oh, God,” I moaned, licking sour cream off my fingers. “Don't get me wrong, saving all those people was nice, but this might be the best reward for Evil Tommy Lemon slayage.”

They just kept staring at me.

“Guys, I'm kidding. And Aveda says
I'm
the stick-in-the-mud.”

“We're confused, Evelyn,” Lucy said. “Your diet normally consists of processed cereal products. Between the fancy dates last night and this feast . . .” She gestured to the artery-clogging spread in front of me. “Your taste buds seem to be undergoing some kind of shift.”

“Or your metabolism is,” Nate said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. “This latest incident of excessive hunger was preceded by a meaningful use of your fire power at the Yamato. Maybe using your power depletes your system in ways you weren't previously aware of.”

“So my need to eat potato skins is science,” I said. “It
can't be that I'm, like, enjoying them. Once again, science explains it all!”

I gave him a mocking look. He held my gaze for longer than necessary and I flashed back to last night's moment in the bathroom: his fingertips brushing against my skin, my heartbeat ratcheting upward. A flush crept up the back of my neck and I quickly averted my eyes, allowing them to roam the dank atmosphere of The Gutter, San Francisco's seediest piano/karaoke bar.

The Gutter was a place where I felt like I could hide. The lighting was bad, the red velvet tablecloths were worn to patchiness, and the clientele was beyond geriatric. Kevin, the owner, presided over the grimy bar with gusto. I watched as he planted his hands on his hips and frowned at someone's (undoubtedly pedestrian) drink order. Somehow he managed to make even that minor a movement look simultaneously disdainful and fabulous, his tight B
LATASIAN
AND
P
ROUD
T-shirt flowing sinuously over his three-hundred-pound frame. Kevin—who was indeed a mix of Black, Latino, and Asian and enjoyed making people guess exactly how much of each—knew how to rock an empowering message tee.

And as usual Stu Singh was perched behind his scratched-up baby grand, signature fedora in place. Karaoke requests hadn't picked up for the night, so he plunked out his own composition, a melancholy little tune Gutter regulars had been hearing for the past few months.

After Nate patched up my foot, which turned out to bear nothing more than a medium-size cut, Lucy declared we had to celebrate my Yamato triumph. I demanded we go to The Gutter. Then I demanded five orders of potato skins. Those gouda-stuffed dates had opened my eyes to the potential wonders of non-cereal foodstuffs. Call them the gateway dates.

Surprisingly Nate agreed to come with us, but Aveda
still couldn't move around easily and said she needed her beauty sleep. I'd thought Bea would try to wheedle me into taking her underage ass back to the scene of one of her most recent alcohol-infused crimes, but she'd said she had “a lot of work to do analyzing today's media metrics.” I didn't know what that meant. I was just happy she hadn't started a fight.

“So,” I said, slathering guacamole on my last potato skin, “let's talk about something more interesting than me.” Once I'd emerged from the heat of battle and wasn't preoccupied with, you know,
not dying
, something had niggled at the back of my brain. Something I couldn't quite put into words. I decided to try anyway.

“What
was
that Tommy Thing today?”

“What do you mean?” Nate asked. “As you pointed out in the moment: obviously a demon, not a special effect. Even Aveda came around to that line of thinking.”

“A demon for sure,” I agreed. “But didn't it seem like a different kind of demon than usual?”

“They're always different, though, aren't they?” Lucy said. “They take the form of the first thing they see. And in this case, that seemed to be that dreadful cardboard Tommy standee at the entrance of the theater.”

“Right,” I said. “But its skin was kind of weird and it chose to make itself very large—”

“Which has happened before,” Lucy mused. “Sometimes they don't get the texture or proportions exactly right. Remember that hair salon attack where Aveda had to battle strangely massive bottles of shampoo?”

“True,” I said. “But what's really weird is there was no ‘they.' No swarm. It was just the one demon.”

“I am conducting an exhaustive search of all past demon sighting reports to discern whether a single demon sighting has occurred before,” Nate said. “Perhaps I can connect today's sighting to—”

“It's not just that, though,” I said. “He also didn't immediately jump out of the screen and try to eat me.”

“You weren't bleeding, initially,” Nate said. “Not until he got your foot. And while demons may attempt to attack when you aren't bleeding, they're most vicious when they scent your blood—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “I've seen all of that up close and personal. Many, many times. But the weirdness of this particular demon goes beyond that, even. The way he acted, the way he moved . . .”

Suddenly it hit me. The thing I'd been trying to articulate, the connection I couldn't quite grasp.

“He moved like the Aveda statue demons!” I yelped, slamming my fist on the table. Nate and Lucy jumped a little. “Slow and lurchy, not swarmy and piranha-like. But the way he interacted with me wasn't like the Aveda statues at all. Or any demons we've seen before, really. We had, like . . . a conversation. Sort of. And there were times where he reacted like the real Tommy Lemon might. I mean, he was mad because people didn't like his movie—”

“And then tried to kill everyone,” Nate said. “Which
is
in line with the way the demons usually act.”

“But the way he was talking about it was . . . nuanced,” I said. “I mean, in between the growly sounds. He seemed genuinely upset that people weren't laughing.”

“What are you trying to say?” Nate asked.

“I don't know.” I shook my head, trying to put my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. “I really don't know. All this stuff contributes to this overall . . . feeling I got from him. An impression. That he was different.”

Nate met my eyes. “Impressions—”

“Aren't exact data,” I interrupted. “Yes, I know.”

“Perhaps the demons are getting more creative,” Lucy said. “It seems logical that an evil species would be content with things like bitey little cupcakes for only so long.”

“There
were
oddities about the attack today,” Nate said. “But we should start with the facts—”

“‘Oddities' meaning the force field that kept people stuck to their seats and me frozen in the back of the theater?” Lucy said, wincing. “Evie, if I haven't said it enough already: I'm sorry I couldn't get to you. Whatever that thing was, it was holding me in place. I couldn't move until it released the crowd—and then I was just trying to corral them, get them under control. They were such an unruly mob—”

“We've seen force fields before,” Nate interrupted. “Though they are very erratic and I haven't been able to find a pattern yet. Sometimes they're visible, sometimes not. Sometimes people can move in them, sometimes not. And sometimes it's a mix. For instance, there was one at the attack a month ago at the bicycle shop: Aveda was the only one who could move through it, but she said it was like punching molasses. No, I meant like the lack of a portal—”

“That's right, there was no portal!” I exclaimed. “So where did that Tommy Thing come from?”

“Maybe you missed the portal, love,” Lucy said. “You were running around quite a bit. Or it could've been behind the movie screen.”

“There was no portal,” I said firmly. “Rose and her team inspected the site after the attack and she confirmed it.”

Nate nodded thoughtfully. “I need to put this information in a spreadsheet.”

“Forget the spreadsheet!” I sputtered, my frustration bubbling over. “We have to think beyond spreadsheets. We have to put all these
impressions
together, because they might actually mean something. Are the demons evolving? Changing?” Dread bloomed in my chest as a horrible new thought occurred to me. “Could this be a new invasion attempt by those human-shaped demons that tried to get through the first portal? Because the Aveda statues and the Tommy demon? Human-shaped.
Very, very human.” I was babbling now, spurred on by my runaway train of thought.

“That's definitely not it,” Nate said. “These most recent demons still followed the pattern we know: they imprinted on a statue and a cardboard standee. And those are still objects.”

“But they're objects that represent human forms,” I countered. “They're similar objects, even.”

“So maybe they're targeting certain types of objects now?” Lucy said, her brows drawing together. “Because that does seem different. Like, smarter?”

“It's still not the same as the humanoid demons that came through the first portal,” Nate said. “Those demons were shaped like humans to begin with. Now as to the rest of it: yes, the idea that our usual demons are evolving is worth further exploration.”

“So wait—now you're agreeing with me?” I said, not bothering to hide my surprise.

“I wasn't disagreeing with you before,” he countered. “I was trying to get you to put your impressions in more concrete terms.”

I shook my head, my frustration morphing into annoyance. “So I have to phrase my observations a certain way in order for you to consider them valid?”

“No, I . . . I'm just trying to understand . . .” He frowned and blew out a long, exasperated breath. “I'm surprised you want to discuss this at all. When I tried to talk to you about the strangeness with the Aveda demon statues before, tried to get you to look at my most recent analyses, you didn't seem interested.”

“Right, because . . .” I trailed off. It was true; I had brushed aside his attempt to talk to me about the statue demons earlier. But the reasons weren't things I could share with him. It was because . . . because I was being shoved into so many new high-stress situations, I didn't trust my own eyes. Because I was trying to deal with
those situations as best I could while also not setting anything on fire and that took up all available space in my brain. Because I was overwhelmed by the possibility of finally achieving normalcy: the one thing I wanted most in the world. Because he tended to discount whatever I was saying in favor of information that could be understood as hard data and he always brought out my most immature side and my first response was to counter whatever he was saying anyway.

Why did I let him irritate me so much?

“In any case, we simply don't have much data beyond a few oddities right now, which is not enough to form a full-fledged hypothesis,” Nate continued.

“But we definitely have oddities, like, going on,” I said. “Oddities are
happening
. ‘New and improved demons' isn't exactly number one on my birthday wish list, so I think we should keep talking about all this and
try
to form that hypothesis. And I will be sharing my impressions, even if they aren't exact data.”

I shot him a challenging look, expecting him to counter with some kind of snotty, superior retort. Instead he just nodded and said, “Okay.”

“Glad we settled that,” Lucy muttered, her eyes shifting from me to Nate and back again.

I frowned at Nate, willing the perfect comeback to form on my tongue. But he had already moved on to other things, his eyes roaming the bar as he lifted his beer bottle to his lips. And as I continued staring at him, I found myself oddly distracted by those lips: the pleasing way they curved around the beer bottle, the surprising fullness I'd never noticed before. Just as I had been momentarily and irrationally obsessed with his hands the night before, his lips were now embedding themselves into my consciousness as something worthy of being stared at and I didn't even have a sub-zero body temperature or near nudity to blame and, seriously, what the hell was wrong with me?

“Team Aveda, right?”

I tore my gaze away from Nate's stupid lips to see a familiar figure standing in front of us.

“Shasta!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“And where's your Evil Overlord?” Lucy said.

“Maisy's busy writing up the Yamato incident,” Shasta said. She planted a hand on her hip then shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. Without Maisy standing next to her, she looked strangely adrift, as if she was trying for some kind of defiantly bitchy pose, but didn't quite know how to position her body.

“You guys were there today?” I said.

“Naturally.” Shasta shot me a withering look. “We're always on the scene when Aveda Jupiter does something noteworthy.”

“Right,” I said, remembering the bathroom conversation about Maisy “cozying up” to Aveda from the night before.

“Anyway, Maisy knows you guys hang out here, so she sent me to get a quote,” Shasta said. “No one's answering the phone at your HQ and our emails haven't been returned.” She gave us what was probably supposed to be a disdainful glare. It looked more like she had indigestion. “Do you cretins have something I can bring back to her?”

“‘Cretins'?” Lucy muttered under her breath. “That's the best you can come up with, as far as sassy insults go?”

“Apologies for the lack of response; Aveda's getting some much-needed rest,” I said, kicking Lucy under the table. “She'll send out a statement ASAP, but in the meantime, you can let Maisy's readers know that she's very proud to have saved the city once again.”