by Sarah Kuhn
She looked confused. “Mom didn’t have a vlog.”
“I meant the creative bit. The way you looked at something and came up with an idea just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Like when Mom found that box of buttons at the swap meet. Remember? They weren’t just buttons to her. She made them into those cute figurines? Little button people? Created something strange and adorable out of something seemingly ordinary.”
“Huh,” Bea said. “Mom was totes Etsy before Etsy was a thing.”
“Yeah. And that’s you, too.” I gave her an affectionate nudge.
She beamed at me. More sunshine.
“Why don’t you take this idea to Aveda?” I said. “Because she’ll probably want to—”
“She’ll want to what?”
Bea and I sat up straighter in bed and turned to the doorway, where Aveda was shuffling in, propped up on a pair of crutches. Her ankle was now encased in an immobilizing air cast boot Nate insisted she wear.
“Because right now, she just wants to talk to you about this,” Aveda said, brandishing her iPad as she dragged herself across the room. She heaved herself onto the bed, landing soundly on my feet. I winced. The cut on my foot from yesterday was healing pretty well, but the last thing it needed was a dramatic superheroine throwing all of her muscular body weight directly on top of it.
She waved the iPad in front of my face and I realized it was cued up to the same scene I’d just watched on Bea’s phone: Me as Aveda nuking the Tommy demon.
“Pretty cool, right?” I said tentatively.
She passed me the iPad. “Read the comments.” Her tone was clipped. Clearly “cool” wasn’t exactly what she was thinking. I studied her for a moment. Yesterday I’d noticed that she seemed frustrated and was coping by micromanaging me . . . and maybe acting a little crazier than usual. Now that crazy flared to the surface, giving her eyes a hint of desperation.
But what could she possibly be upset about?
I scrolled past the video to the comments.
You guys?! This fire power deal is amazeballs!
I know, right? When was the last time Aveda Jupiter did something so kickass? Frankly, with the zit and everything, I was kinda worried she’d lost her mojo . . .
Facts are facts—her attacks have been looking totally same-y lately. But now . . .
Just say it: Aveda hasn’t been this awesome in months! All hail the new girl on fire! It’s like we’ve got a real, live Katniss up in here!
Motherfucking hail! Aveda Jupiter 2.0 is the new bomb diggity . . . wait, do people say “bomb diggity” anymore?
“Isn’t this good?” I said, setting the iPad down on my fuzzy chenille comforter. “You said you wanted the right kind of press. And this is basically, like, Aveda Jupiter is the Most Awesome Thing Ever. Full stop.”
“You were supposed to merely prep them for my impending awesomeness,” she said. “Not steal the spotlight entirely.”
“But everyone thinks it’s you,” I countered. “You and your . . . awesomeness.”
She shook her head, that bit of crazy flaring in her eyes again. “You were supposed to prep them,” she repeated, whine overtaking the steel in her voice. “And then once I got my fire power, I could take the stage and really wow everyone. But now they’re talking about how I’ve lost my mojo.”
“You will wow them,” I said. “You just have to be patient.”
“Too late,” she said, the whine dissipating into something even more pathetic. “Aveda 2.0 is already a viral sensation.” She jammed a fingernail into her mouth. “I’ve worked so hard,” she muttered. “Given my life to keeping this city safe. And then you come in and show off that fire and within two days, all they can talk about is how much better you are.” She glared at the iPad. “This commenter, MissionMan364—he hasn’t said anything remotely complimentary about me in months.”
I studied her scrunched-up face, trying to make sense of what she was rambling on about. I guess she thought that I’d make a competent stand-in, but the comments about Aveda Jupiter being super-duper incredible wouldn’t really start up until she took over. Bitching at me for being a bad Aveda Jupiter was one thing—it gave her a sense of control over the situation and allowed her to boss me around as usual—but she hadn’t anticipated what might happen if I surpassed competent stand-in mode and actually did a good job. And people started talking about it. Because even if they thought it was her . . . she knew it wasn’t. She knew they were commenting positively on me-as-Aveda and dissing the real Aveda in the process. She knew that on top of being unable to do the one thing that gave her purpose, she had to watch someone else win praise for doing it in a way the fans deemed better. And it was clearly driving her nuts.
“It was your idea for me to do this,” I reminded her.
She shrugged, pulled her finger out of her mouth, and examined her nails. They looked ragged, the ends chewed and uneven. In fact she looked different all around—like a sharp photograph gone blurry at the edges. Her hair, always so full and shiny, hung in limp hanks around her face. The zit from a few days ago had returned with a vengeance. But even more disturbing was her stooped posture, the ghost of defeat flitting through her eyes. The Aveda Jupiter bravado that usually emanated from her every pore was absent. I could only recall her looking like that in two other instances. One was after our kindergarten classmates made fun of her mom’s soup dumplings. The other was whenever her parents gave her one of their dismissive “Mmms.”
She looked, I realized, achingly human.
“Annie . . .” I said, without thinking.
Aveda’s eyes flashed, her shields going up. “I’m fine,” she spat out. “I just want to be . . . back. Back to doing what I do best. Back to being me.”
With as much haughtiness as she could muster, she stood, grabbed her crutches, and hobbled out.
“Bea.” I turned to my sister, who’d remained silent during this whole exchange, eyes wide, phone clutched to her chest. “Can you go, I don’t know—”
“Make sure she’s okay? Offer a little comfort? Show her some of the ‘squee’ comments about last month’s sourdough bread factory triumph? People love the sight of her—the real her—annihilating those bunny demons.”
“Yes. Great idea. Nice Social Media Guruing.”
“That has nothing to do with social media, Big Sis.” She rolled her eyes at me. “But thanks anyway.” She gave a nod and scampered out of the room, nearly running into Lucy, who was on her way in.
Apparently my nice new room was an everyone welcome free-for-all.
“Evie? Good gravy, why aren’t you up yet?” Lucy bounced onto the bed, jostling me to the side.
“Morning, Luce,” I said. “Are you also here to talk about how I’m a viral sensation?”
“No. But you should probably get that looked at, darling. It sounds dreadful.” She tipped her head back against the headboard. “I wanted to inform you that I sealed the deal with Letta. She came knockin’ on my door after we got home last night.” One side of her mouth tilted up. “The power balladeering worked.”
“Oh! That’s great!” I squeezed her hand. “And a testament to the everlasting power of The Bangles. Is Letta still here? Did you leave her all alone just to share this earth-shattering news with me?”
“No.” Lucy gave a dismissive wave. “Last night was fun, but her pillow talk skills are seriously lacking. Once you get past the red hair and the intriguing emo shell, she is rather dull.”
I gave her an amused look. “I could’ve told you that.”
“But!” Lucy grinned at me, eyes full of mischief. “I’m hoping my sex mojo rubs off on you so you can make proper use of my ‘welcome to Jupiter HQ’ present . . .”
She reached over and eased the nightstand drawer open, revealing a giant pile of condoms. There were so many of them stuffed in there, I wasn’t sure how the drawer had close
d in the first place.
“Lucy!” My eyes bugged out of my head. “I don’t need all that!” I hissed, reaching over her and attempting to slam the drawer shut. It only closed halfway. A few of the condoms spilled onto the floor. “Or any of that.”
“You do!” she protested. “I told you, this fake superhero thing is going to break your three-year dry spell. And I’m going to do everything I can to facilitate that.”
I shoved at the drawer again, but that only jostled the condoms further. More of them fell to the floor, their bright wrappers sparkling luridly in the morning light.
“Lucy, I do not want—”
“Evie—oh. Hello, Lucy.”
My head jerked away from the condom avalanche to see Nate lurking in the doorway, his expression turning uncertain when he spotted the two of us crammed together in bed. My heart gave an annoying little hop. And dammit, this time there was no “Eternal Flame” to blame it on.
“Did you want something?” I said, sounding more standoffish than I intended. I wondered if he noticed the half-open drawer of condoms. Or the ones on the floor.
“Yes . . . no. I mean yes.” He raked a nervous hand through his hair and stepped more fully into the room. I fiddled with my comforter, running the fuzzy edge along my thumb. Lucy’s eyes darted from me to Nate and back again.
“Well, I should get going,” she sang out, her voice suddenly way too loud. “I have to, uh, do some things!” She winked at me and slid out of bed. I gave her an “oh, come on” look, but she just skipped out the door.
Leaving me alone with Nate. Which, if I’d had to pick, was at the very bottom of my List of Desirable Situations.
I wondered if Lucy suspected anything. She had taken notice of my ruined shirt the night before. I’d hastily explained it away as a fire power-related mishap, which she’d seemed to accept readily enough, what with the sprinklers going off and all.
Maybe she was just so intent on ending my dry spell that any heterosexual man who so much as entered my bedroom was a winning prospect. And Nate was even more of a prospect since she was always trying to get me to notice his hotness.
Well, I guess I’d finally noticed last night. I’d noticed a lot.
I blew out a long breath and pulled the comforter around me in a makeshift cocoon.
“The company doing remodeling work on Cake My Day just sent something over,” Nate said. His nervousness had vanished and now I couldn’t quite read his expression. I wondered if being alone with me was at the bottom of his List of Desirable Situations.
Dammit, Lucy.
“They found it embedded in one of the mixing bowls,” Nate continued, crossing the room. He sat down next to me and deposited a smooth, round stone in the palm of my hand. I scrutinized it. It was one of his supernatural gibberish stones, but this one had two clear words etched into it:
You need
“Flip it over,” Nate prompted. I did. On the back there was a single number:
3
“Wow,” I said, my tone continuing on its not-entirely-intentional standoffish bent. “Real, actual words.”
Nate frowned at my lack of reverence. The frown made me relax. A frown put us back in comfortable territory.
“If you ever paid attention, you’d know many of the portal stones have real, actual words on them,” he grumbled. “But this is the first case where they seem to be arranged as a directive—a command. The question is: a command from whom?”
“Or for whom,” I murmured, turning the stone over in my hand.
“What do you mean?” Nate said, still frowning at me. I frowned back, exasperated.
“It’s just as valid a question,” I said. “Correct me if I’m wrong—and I’m sure you will—but our little demon friends are usually pretty haphazard. There’s no rhyme or reason to where and when they attack and they don’t seem organized enough to have a leader. If a directive is being issued, that says there’s now someone worth issuing directives to. Which could possibly be a bit of data to log for our still-amorphous ‘demons changing and evolving’ theory.”
I gave him a challenging look, expecting him to contradict me. But his frown dissipated.
“That’s true,” he said. “Hmm. Interesting.”
He took the stone back from me and studied it, brow furrowed. As he stroked his thumb contemplatively over the stone’s surface, I couldn’t help but flash back to him stroking . . . other things the night before. A flush crept up the back of my neck.
And we were back to that damn closet tryst highlights reel.
I shifted uncomfortably and pulled my comforter-cocoon more tightly around my body, banishing any and all images from the night before from my mind.
Of course, then he had to go and ruin it.
“Evie? I wanted to talk to you . . .”
Oh, no.
He set the stone on the bed, reached over, and brushed a hand against my shoulder. The briefest of physical contact, but his touch seemed to burn its way through my comforter, leaving an indelible mark on my skin. He dropped his hand in his lap, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“. . . about last night.”
Nooooooo.
I turned to him, silently ordering my face not to betray me. The way he was looking at me, the way his voice shaped itself around my name—rough and husky, just like the night before—made me want to come apart. But the last few days basically amounted to a series of random outbursts, impulse control problems, and emotional vomit. And now that we had possible demon evolution issues, I couldn’t add this to the list. I just couldn’t. I needed to have a firm handle on something.
“What do you want to talk about?” I said, my voice as steady as I could make it. “The fact that we were both bored and horny?”
Disbelief passed over his face. “That’s your explanation? We were horny?”
My index finger poked out of my comforter-cocoon, jabbing into his chest. What was it about this man that constantly gave me the urge to point?
“Well,” I said. “Weren’t we?”
He glowered at me. We faced off as if frozen in place, neither of us willing to budge. After a moment of heated silence, I caught a bit of movement in his face, a faint twitch of the lips.
“Are you laughing at me?” I snarled, retracting my pointy finger. “This is not funny. And shouldn’t we be trying to figure out this whole demon . . . thing?” I flapped my hand at the stone. “Don’t you think that’s more important than our debatable levels of horniness? Like, possibly panic-worthy?”
“Yes.” His face sobered. “You’re correct. Laughing in the midst of discussing this situation is inappropriate. But I can’t really explain any of my behavior around you. You make me . . .”
“What? I make you what? You don’t have some technobabble-y science term for it?”
“I do,” he retorted. “‘Completely insane.’”
His voice was resigned and puzzled with a hint of warmth, making that last bit sound more like an endearment than an insult. I squelched the heat rising in my cheeks.
“Guys?” Lucy ducked back into the room. “Um, sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got an emergency going on.”
“A bigger emergency than a possible demon evolution?” I said.
“Yes. Well . . . sort of. It’s Aveda.” She hesitated, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she needed to say next. “She’s missing.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’D NEVER RACED up a moving escalator before.
But there’s a first time for everything. And boy, had these last few days brought me a lot of firsts.
We’d spent an hour trying to track Aveda down, only to receive a phone call from the security department of the San Francisco Mall. She’d been detained there, she was in some kind of trouble, and could we come by immediately?
As soon as we burst through the massive
glass doors of the mall, Nate, Lucy, and I were off, clattering up the impossible-looking loop-de-loop of moving stairs that curved through all eight levels of the shopping mecca. It took the otherwise run-of-the-mill mall into sci-fi territory, a futuristic cityscape out of Metropolis.
“Superhero security detail coming through!” Lucy barked, leading the charge through the sea of shoppers clogging the escalator. “Move aside, please!”
“They really wouldn’t tell you over the phone why Aveda’s been detained by Nordstrom security?” I said, mouthing “sorry!” as I pushed past a pair of women weighed down by what appeared to be several metric tons of shopping bags. One of them gave me a dirty look.
“They wouldn’t tell me anything,” Lucy said. “Which is why we need to get to her as soon as possible.”
Adrenaline thrummed through my system as we shoved our way through the mass of bodies. The crowd reminded me of the Whistles crowd, thick and sweaty, but the momentum of the escalator gave me an extra lift, propelling me forward. We finally landed on the fourth floor of Nordstrom, a wonderland of heels, wedges, and boots arranged on marble platforms and spotlighted from above. A cloud of flowery perfume seemed to coat the air, and a gleaming grand piano sat near the top of the escalator, positioned on a bit of plush red carpet. Even though the lid was closed and the actual player appeared to be off duty, the mere presence of the piano gave the store that extra little bit of luxury.
“Security office is that way,” Lucy said, pointing toward the back.
I decided not to ask how she knew that.
As we marched purposefully through the shoes, I spied a pair of all-too-familiar figures.
“Shit,” I muttered, my adrenaline levels ratcheting upward.
Maisy Kane and Shasta were loitering outside the security office like a pair of overdressed vultures. Maisy was doing a yellow thing today: honey-colored sundress and sandals with plastic daisies on the toes. Another daisy was tucked behind her ear, as if to create the illusion that she found it growing on the street and whimsically plucked it from its urban prison. Her hair was now dyed golden blond.
