Heroine Addiction

by Matarese, Jennifer

  “Oh, for heaven's sake, Mom, have you become a conspiracy theorist while I've been gone or have you just taken to watching telenovelas with Abuela?”

  “You try living a double life and see how you like it,” she snaps.

  I'm not even about to touch that one. “Hazel said she thinks she saw you trying to kiss John.”

  She almost laughs. “Yeah, well, worked out as well as can be expected,” she mutters.

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  Mom freezes, and if I were a betting woman I'd think she wasn't supposed to have admitted that. She chooses instead to go with her instinct, whirling on me and declaring, “Don't you dare tell your father that John was even at that party. He's got too many other things on his plate right now, and he doesn't need you distracting him.”

  “You're lying,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. I know her tells well enough by now – the way her fingers tremble and grab at her dress so tightly the fabric audibly tears is a big one. I imagine if I checked with the Brigade I'll find Dad has been ducking his responsibilities, and that no one but my mother knows what he's been doing for at least a couple of days.

  “I have enough practice for it, don't I?” she says.

  A moment later, she's gone. A stiff breeze rattles the contents of my apartment, shaking the curtains and threatening to knock the books from the shelves in the living room.

  “Damn it,” I say, angry as hell that I didn't expect this out of her. It's not like she has to wait for me to take her back to the city. She can speed out and fly back whenever she felt like it. If anyone knows how to get in the last word in an argument, it's my mother.

  There's nothing I can do about Mom after she's left, of course, other than settle into a strange sort of relief. The real Ivy Noble is still in there hiding behind the excited smiles and dreamy gazes she's been shooting my father ever since this whole tragedy started. I shouldn't be so comforted that my mother's being an utter bitch to me again, but I suppose it's not my family unless I leave feeling graceless, inferior, and exhausted. On the bright side, I don't have to go anywhere right now, so –

  I bolt up off the couch, already blushing with shame.

  Oh, hell.

  I teleport back to the lobby of my parents' building, hoping that Hazel's actually listened to me for a change rather than done something both of us would regret, like returning to the penthouse or heading into the city or falling into an open well just because she can.

  But she hasn't. I reappear in the lobby to find her sitting on the artfully uncomfortable steel and leather bench next to the elevator, leaning forward with her head down and her joined hands resting between her splayed knees. She's already frayed at the seams a bit in my absence, her thick blond hair losing its body, her pale skin pallid under the fluorescent lobby lighting.

  She lifts her head, pinning me down with her gaze, and I feel like I'm sinking into the floor.

  “Hey,” I say, feeling awkward and stiff.

  Hazel says nothing at first, just stares me down with a far too serious expression that doesn't sit well paired with her pert little nose and definitive dash of freckles. It's a bit like Shirley Temple attempting to intimidate you, if Shirley Temple were carved out of stone and bone, hard and jagged around the edges and getting more ragged by the second.

  “Take me home,” she orders, her voice a raw bitter nerve.

  13.

  I reek of smoke, I haven't eaten in hours, and my head still buzzes from the baconyl's lingering effects. All I want right now is to go upstairs and fall asleep sprawled across my couch with nature documentaries on my television and a pint of half-finished cherry chocolate ice cream slowly melting in my lap.

  Unfortunately, I might as well wish for a pony and a million dollars, as long as I'm requesting things I won't get.

  I land outside of my apartment, fully expecting Hazel to make a run for it. I should have known better. She stalks toward my front door as soon as I release her hand.

  All right, I guess we're hashing this out right now then.

  When I follow, I half-expect to find the curtains still shuddering from Hazel's ill treatment of the door as she slammed it behind her. She could have gone home, but instead she fled upstairs with a bolt of energy spurred on by aggravation. She'll be raiding my fridge, of course, probably searching for whichever food I might have left around the house to be devoured without my permission. So much for the last of the fruit I have left in the house.

  I open the door and head up the stairs, unable to resist thinking that if I were genuinely seeking out a fight, I could have simply teleported upstairs and really riled Hazel up.

  I reach the top of the stairs to find Hazel tearing her way through an apple with sharp deliberate bites as she paces back and forth in the living room. She stiffens as soon as she spots me, her blue eyes narrowing in a calculating way that only for a moment makes me contemplate turning on my heel and heading back down to Tea and Strumpets to hide in the kitchen.

  I slip off my shoes with a sigh before I pull out a kitchen chair and sit down. “All right, go ahead,” I say.

  She scowls. “Go ahead with what?”

  “We dated for a year and a half, Hazel. I know when you need to get something off your chest.”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake, Vera.” She tosses the half-eaten apple into the sink, pitching it hard enough for tiny bits of apple to spray into the air when it hits. “I'm not enough of a bitch to yell at you now.”

  I lean forward, rest my arms on my knees. “I can take it.”

  “Do you even understand why I want to yell? Or do you seriously think I like to hear my own voice that much?”

  “Look, I know you have a problem with my parents being who they are, but –“

  “I don't give a rat's ass if your parents are the king and queen of the marshmallow people. What's freaking me right the hell out is you throwing yourself into the path of danger the way you just did.”

  “So, what? I should have just let whoever set off that smoke bomb get away with it and left all those people there to fend for themselves?”

  “You quit that life, Vera. You torched your damn costume, for crying out loud.”

  Actually, I threw it into the burning crater left in the Rafters by a badly-aimed atomic rocket in front of a slobbering phalanx of reporters, but I wasn't in the mood to quibble over that particular detail. “I can't just stop having superpowers, Hazel. Well, not without the use of a high-powered laser beam and a very determined supervillain, in any event.”

  “You were at a party full of goddamn superheroes! It's their job to take care of that sort of thing, not yours. You didn't have to do anything but finish your drink and watch a parade. That's it.”

  “I wouldn't have watched that fucking parade if you'd wired a million dollars into my bank account.”

  Hazel startles in response to my cursing, as unused to hearing four-letter words from me as I am to saying them. But I stand by my statement. I'd rather swallow acid than catch a glimpse of any more of that nauseating parade than I already have.

  “I worry about you,” she says, and for a moment her voice sounds very small, curled up and trembling like a frightened mouse. “I worried about you so much when we were dating, and now we're broken up and I can't stop. And this is what I worry about, all the time. Even now.”

  “I'm trained to do this,” I point out, barely restraining the urge to throw my arms up in the air in frustration. “I've got a degree in this from the best college for superheroes in the country, for heaven's sake. I was the valedictorian.”

  She sniffs dismissively. “Yeah, I noticed. I also noticed why the hell you moved here of all places.”

  A jagged chill races down my spine.

  “That's a cheap shot,” I murmur.

  Her cheeks burn with color, the only sign she's the least bit taken aback by what she threw out onto the table. When I left the city, I started driving in my rarely-used pickup without any particular destination in mind
and somehow ended up at a simple marble memorial in the woods just outside of town. I leaned up against it for hours and soaked in the sun under the two marble golems made up to look like costumed heroes, both of them staring down at me in dark disappointment. After I'd had enough of the silent persecution, I got back into town and put a down payment on the first building I spotted with a “For Rent” sign in the window.

  I have a life here – a job, a home, a new family I built from scratch – but as much as I try to pretend that I've severed my ties with the superhero community, there's still an enormous marble reminder that I'm never free from tucked away in the woods behind the high school.

  She rumples her hair with vicious intent, a sad excuse for a scalp massage. “Vera, your grandfathers couldn't catch a comet and they were indestructible. You've given yourself a second-degree burn baking cookies, for fuck's sake. I just –” She sighs heavily, and her entire body appears to sag. “I worry. That's all.”

  “You don't have to worry about me.”

  “Well, somebody has to,” she says, her voice dripping with exasperation. “Finding somebody in your family who can find time in their busy schedules to give a shit about you is probably about as hard as I'm thinking it is.”

  It's hard not to literally handwave her concern. It's possible I had the desire for a cookie-cutter family life drummed out of me long ago by too many years of Take Your Daughter To Work Day involving alien laser beams from outer space and teleporting supervillains into jail cells. “There are more important things in the world to them than worrying about me when I'm perfectly fine,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah? Which things, dropping giant boulders into active volcanoes to keep them from exploding or presenting at the Oscars?”

  All right, I'll admit skipping my twenty-fifth birthday party so they could present the Best Special Effects Oscar had disappointed me a little bit.

  Hazel slouches against the wall, bony shoulders hitting the wall with a thump. “Sharona and Kate warned me I shouldn't date a superhero,” she grumbles.

  I doubt I'm supposed to hear that, but it's hard to miss, and it manages to hit a nerve I never seem to recall is raw and frayed until it's too damn late. “No, Sharona and Kate told you you shouldn't date a bisexual. There's a difference.”

  “That wasn't what they said,” Hazel says. From the tone of it, she knows she's said the wrong thing.

  I can't help but get to my feet. “Oh, right. They called me the indecisive slut, if I recall correctly. Just out of curiosity, did they ever get back to you on that advice I requested in regards to what steps they took when they decided to be lesbians? You know, to help me make up my mind and all?”

  She sighs, her gaze darting away from me with thinly veiled guilt, and for a brief moment I feel awful about going there. Hazel only has a handful of lesbian friends – this town is so small Hazel and I pretty much are the gay community – and most of them have no problem with me even now. Some of them even like me. But Sharona and Kate don't like me any more than a lot of the straight folks in town do. The moment the word “bisexual” dropped from my lips, both of them wrote me off. You have no idea how much it stings to be necking with your girlfriend in the cozy back corner of some bar only to have two of her best friends interrupt to inform her of all of the ways I'll inevitably break it off with her for someone with a penis.

  “I don't want to fight anymore,” she says.

  “Then why did you come up here rather than going home to your grandmother's?”

  “Fuck, hell if I know.”

  There's a reason I enjoyed our arguments a lot more when we were dating. Back then, it was practically foreplay. Now it's just an exercise in winding up the both of us and leaving us unsatisfied. It's a bad state to be in when I just wish I could snuggle into the depths of my bed linen with a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a questionably edited young-adult vampire novel and slip into a comforting coma.

  Unfortunately, I can't. Not just yet.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  Hazel flashes me a dark scowl. “Then why haven't you gone already?”

  I give her a pointed look, one that makes her roll her eyes in response. She doesn't bother with saying goodbye after that, stomping past me on her way to the stairs.

  She can lock the door on her way out. She always does.

  14.

  One of the few advantages as I have due to the strength of my bloodline is a more flawless sense of global positioning than most other teleporters. I might not be able to throw a car at someone or cause runaway trains to brake with the power of my mind, but I've never been saddled with the need to verify the exact location where I'm going to land before my departure. Lots of teleporters aren't so lucky.

  At least I've never had to stoop so low as to cart around a GPS tracker with me everywhere I go, I think with a disgusted shudder as I arrive at my destination.

  It's not quite what I expected.

  After a quick check of precisely which unpaved country road aligns with the address on Morris's key, I land with only a minimum of stumbling on the dirt road which aligns Morris's makeshift lair. The toes of my shoes rest mere inches from the unkempt edge of the lawn when I land, my aim still commendable. The grass here grows wild and untamed, a tangled waist-high crush of ferns and weeds and brambles. It subtly deters anyone from investigating further, warding off inquisitive strangers just as much as the rusted carcass of a '97 Chevy splayed catty-corner to the road. Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't desire a visit to the unwashed trailer home tucked into the rambling jungle surrounding it, but then again there's always one wayward adventurer in every lot.

  I take a cautious step forward, only to hear a low insistent hiss from the depths of the gardener's nightmare before me. My hands slip to my waist as I give the lawn a dark warning look. I don't doubt that the hisses are simply Morris's conniving way of keeping away anyone not already frightened off by the dilapidated trailer and lush overgrowth. If I dig deep enough under the greenery, I'll bet I find mechanical snakes more likely to shock than bite.

  Not that I'm about to test that particular theory by wading into that disaster area, of course.

  “All right,” I say aloud to myself, “I'm Morris, and there's a nasty intruder encroaching on my lair. What do I do to keep them out?”

  I take in my surroundings with sharp eyes, noting the distance between the crumbling trailer and the neighbors, the depth and thickness of the grass, just how realistic the deteriorating state of the trailer home may be. The Duffy farm peers down at the lot from a picturesque hillside a crystal-clear country mile away, a perfect view of Morris's lair on their hands if not for the unkempt flora guarding it in an impenetrable wall. The trailer sheds dirty gray siding and peeling maroon paint flecks, but the foundation itself holds solid, hinting at the dangerous reality behind the depressing illusion.

  I only wish it were simply a pathetic excuse for a mobile home.

  My frown twists my lips into a grim caricature as I crouch down to pluck a few rocks from the road's surface. Morris wouldn't set up a shiny new lair without the most sensitive and up-to-date security system he could whip up. I may not be able to spot the specifically bred killer squirrels in the shadows or the robot bees just waiting to strike, but there's always something, and I'm not dumb enough to teleport any deeper into its orbit and just hope for the best.

  Standing back up again, I eye the compact open-air porch for distance, judging just how well tossing one of the pebbles in my hand in that general direction will turn out. My aim's never been all that brilliant when it comes to throwing anything. Sure enough, the first stone I pitch at the porch goes wide by about ten feet, plunging into the dense greenery.

  A moment later a series of enormous rotating blades swipe through the lawn, felling the overgrown grass in one dramatic wave and disappearing into the ground as though they'd never been there at all.

  I stand there for a long moment, silently blinking.

  Well, that's certainly overkill
.

  It would be easy for me to simply pop over to the porch and try the key, but I know Morris better than I'd like. I toss the next rock casually from one hand to the other, assessing just how far off I was the first time. The blades would have been a blaring neon sign to stay away. I imagine he programmed them not to dice any possible offenders so much as give them the impression Morris wasn't above slicing them thinner than potato chips.

  “It's that sort of intimidation technique that generates parades in honor of your horrible death, you know,” I say quietly to Morris, wherever he may be.

  The next stone hits home, skittering across the dusty floor of the porch and triggering exactly what I expect. A ripple in the air rebounds outward from the building as soon as the stone strikes. The wave cascades across the lawn, invisible to the human eye except for the way it rumples the newly cut grass. It moves through the air like rising heat off concrete, rolling outward from the trailer like steam from a hot paved road in summer. I somehow restrain my instinct to teleport to safety and allow the unseen wave to engulf me.

  Doing so requires a certain level of trust out of Morris. I have to believe, at least for this one moment in time, that Morris wouldn't do anything to make this more difficult for me than it already is.

  Considering I'm trying to break into his highly illegal lair by not actually breaking in at all, he'd better deliver, that's all I've got to say.

  Morris likes to know his adversaries, and the genetic pulse thrums outward for what feels like forever, the barely-there bone-deep hum it gives off fading after a minute or so. I freeze in place, a sudden teleport at this juncture probably an awful gamble. The concussive blast originating from the trailer would have registered my genetic signature, identified the proper containment course to keep me from moving any closer, and possibly whipped up a quick platter of my favorite foods while it's at it. Morris always did like his guests comfortable and well-fed, even if they were officially kidnapped for short but inconvenient periods of time.