Heroine Complex Read online

  She took care of our fair city and I took care of her. I was her babysitter, confidante, and therapist, all rolled into one. The way I saw it, I was doing my civic duty and getting paid for it.

  Yes, I realize that’s not how “civic duty” works.

  “Is that why you don’t quit when you’ve gotta clean disgusting shit like that?” the reporter pressed.

  Well, sure. Also 1) I needed a steady job to amass enough cash so my little sister, Bea, could go to college, and the well-paid pickings for PhD Program Dropouts Who Only Have Experience Working in Academia were basically nonexistent and 2) said job gave me the routine and safe space I required to maintain my sanity and 3) Aveda had saved me pretty much every time I’d needed saving. And there had been one time in particular when I’d really needed it.

  I may have been a total cowering-behind-countertops type, but I was also very loyal.

  I didn’t say all that to the reporter. Instead I gave him a conspiratorial smile, like, “Look, my superhero-adjacent life is just as fabulous and cray-cray as your wildest imaginings, sir! It’s way too exciting to quit! And you can print that shit!”

  He did not print that shit. I was a little disappointed.

  There was a crowd to greet us when we emerged from Cake My Day. Lucy had herded the bakery’s customers outside when we’d arrived on the scene, and they were still milling around, buzzing about the terrifying nature of demon pastries. They’d been joined by a slew of fans and press types. Luckily Cake My Day’s heavy white curtains had prevented anyone from witnessing Aveda’s snit (zit) fit.

  When the door flew open, everyone cheered.

  Aveda adjusted immediately, plastering a smile on her face. I noticed her brush her hair over her cheek, covering the zit. She beamed out at the crowd, glowing with heroic charm and grace. You’d never know that just minutes earlier, she’d been smacking porcelain unicorns around.

  “Saved us from the demon swarms again, didn’t you, Aveda?” a girlish voice piped up from the crowd. Maisy Kane, founder of San Francisco’s popular gossip blog Bay Bridge Kiss, elbowed her way to the front. “What would we do without you?”

  “That’s a question you’ll never have to answer,” Aveda said. “Protecting San Francisco is my duty, my love, and my life.”

  A pleased murmur rippled through the crowd and I couldn’t help but smile, even though I knew Lucy was rolling her eyes behind me. That was one of Aveda’s patented sound bites. She spit it out at every press conference and the public ate it up like, well, cupcakes.

  “Were there any demon escapees this time? Any increased danger to the city my readers need to know about?” Maisy tilted her head, her hair—light pink, quite a change from last month’s forest green—swaying back and forth. “Because I’m sure none of us want a repeat of the incident from last month. You know, wherein two demons somehow escaped from their portal site, bred like bunny rabbits, and proceeded to utterly destroy the sourdough bread factory by the waterfront.”

  “As you must remember, I evacuated the factory and eradicated the demons before anyone was seriously harmed,” Aveda said, standing up a little straighter. Her hair fell away from the zitty spot. I reached over and discreetly brushed it back into place. “And that incident occurred because a misguided citizen happened upon a pair of demons who imprinted on stuffed toy kittens and thought he could keep them as pets. He’s lucky his lapse in judgment only cost him a hand.”

  The crowd nodded in agreement. That idiot citizen had been lucky. His actions served as a useful reminder: no matter how cute the portal demons might appear, they were vicious little motherfuckers.

  “‘Only cost him a hand’—oh, Aveda! You are a gosh-dang hoot!” Maisy giggled, easily transitioning from hardnosed reporter to eager fangirl. She peered at Aveda from behind the (probably fake) lenses of her cat-eye glasses. “We so have the same sense of humor. It’s like we’re best friends!”

  She nudged her actual best friend—Shasta, owner of hip local lingerie boutique Pussy Queen, who was glued to her side. Shasta was nearly always glued to Maisy’s side, but like me, she tended to blend into the background. Unlike me, I got the sense this wasn’t intentional. “Shast! Aren’t I always saying how we’d be best friends?”

  “Yes,” Shasta said, her eyebrows rising into the impenetrable fortress of her Bettie Page bangs. “Always.”

  I tried to catch Shasta’s eye to give her a nod of sidekick solidarity, but she avoided my gaze.

  “In any case, it’s important to remember my key tips on demon-related safety,” Aveda said. “Number one: if you witness a portal opening, evacuate immediately and contact Aveda Jupiter, Inc. The easy-to-remember number—”

  “Cleanup crew’s here,” Lucy whispered. I turned to see Rose Rorick leading her team into Cake My Day’s side entrance. As head of the San Francisco police department’s Demon Unit—a special squad in the Emergency Service division—Rose was responsible for cleaning up any leftover mess after Aveda had saved us all yet again. That meant capturing and/or squashing lingering demons, collecting any supernatural detritus they might have left behind, and scanning the area to make sure the portal was totally closed. I gave Rose a little wave and she responded with a stoic head nod. I grinned. A stoic head nod from Rose was the equivalent of a bear hug from someone else.

  “Hey.” Lucy nudged me. “How much longer is Boss Lady going to pontificate for?” She nodded at Aveda, who was still droning on about demon safety measures.

  “She has two more points to cover,” I whispered back. “And be forewarned: once we’re away from her adoring public, The Aveda Jupiter Tantrum will be back in effect.”

  “The zit has not been forgotten,” Lucy murmured.

  “The zit will never be forgotten. All other zits shall cower in fear and immortalize it as their one true god.”

  “Goodness.” Lucy giggled. “Such drama.”

  It was total drama. But when it came to The Aveda Jupiter Tantrum, there was nothing but drama.

  Here’s the thing about The Aveda Jupiter Tantrum: just like the leaves on the trees and the frost on the mountains, it has a natural life cycle. It’s no good trying to truncate or disrupt said life cycle. The frost will come back harder and you’ll be buried underneath the snow and probably forced to cut off a limb in order to survive.

  The only thing to do was wait.

  After we’d wrapped up the Q&A, Lucy and I wordlessly trailed behind Aveda as she stomped her way back to Jupiter HQ—a crumbling Victorian in the Lower Haight—and tornadoed into the second-floor gym. Staring at the sticky trail of demonic cupcake frosting she left in her wake, I heaved one very long, very gusty sigh. I’d have to clean that up later. And demon-based fluids had a persnickety way of dribbling into the scratches gracing our weathered hardwood floors. They stubbornly wedged themselves there until I flopped onto my stomach and picked them out with my fingernails.

  Aveda’s boots would also require meticulous hand-washing, I realized, remembering how they’d gotten covered in frosting during battle. That job was always a pain. The buttery leather was delicate and I needed to make sure it survived the cleaning without getting scratched. Otherwise she’d just go buy another pair.

  Thanks to personal appearances and endorsement deals, Aveda Jupiter made a more-than-decent living. Unfortunately she was phenomenally bad at managing her money and thought nothing of dropping a few thousand bucks on shoes that were identical to the dozens of pairs she already owned. I wasn’t about to complain, since she overpaid me quite handsomely for my menial assistant duties, but I tried to keep her in line by coupon-clipping, balancing the books, and doing everything in my power to ensure she didn’t actually need another pair of boots.

  That reminded me: bills were due in a couple days. Yet another thing to add to my ever-growing to-do list. Said list existed only in my head, a giant mental bulletin board containing a mishmash of multicolored s
ticky notes with my tasks, Aveda’s schedule, and various notations I’d made tracking her mood swings and Tantrum info. To anyone else it would probably look like a mess, but I knew where everything was. I kept fastidious track of each sticky note and its place on the board and I made sure the pieces that represented my tasks were checked off in a timely manner. My mental board wasn’t as flashy as Lucy’s extensive knife collection, but it kept HQ running in a reasonably efficient manner.

  I reined in my sighs, trudged up the stairs, and plopped myself outside the gym door, prepared to weather the storm. I needed to be ready to provide support whenever The Aveda Jupiter Tantrum wound up to a big finish, and self-pity was definitely not part of the equation.

  “Here, love, sustenance.” Lucy returned from her foraging trip to the kitchen and plunked a bowl of Lucky Charms into my hands. “But let the record show: I highly disapprove of you eating that garbage for every meal. You must have scurvy by now.”

  I inhaled the intoxicating scent of processed sugar and chemicals. “Then why are you enabling me?” I dipped a finger into the bowl, searching out the nefarious purple marshmallow bits and casting them aside.

  She sat down next to me, primly tugging her lacy hem over her knees. “There’s nothing else in the kitchen. Which means I have to starve.”

  “I’ll put extra kale and kale-like things on the shopping list for you,” I said, giving my cereal one last purple-check. It was all clear, so I dug in, savoring the way the sawdust-like texture crunched against my teeth. “Wasn’t Nate supposed to do a grocery run last night?”

  Thwack!

  The sound of Aveda’s fist smacking into her boxing bag jolted us out of our conversation.

  I suppose I should be grateful The Aveda Jupiter Tantrum usually involved heavy working out rather than whining, but Aveda’s intensity when it came to attaining the physical perfection required of a superhero was a little scary sometimes. Not to mention the fact that she had a tendency to destroy boxing bags at the rate of roughly two per Tantrum.

  Much like the boots, they added up.

  Thwack! Thwack! Thwackthwackthwack!

  Better add “budget for new boxing bags” to the to-do list, then.

  “I’ve told her she can’t go so hard after a demon takedown,” Lucy said. “Her muscles are cooked. Should we go in?” She nodded at the door.

  “Not yet.” I shoveled more cereal into my mouth and got a bite that mixed pink and green marshmallows with the perfect ratio of sawdust bits. “We don’t have to get her out for the party until seven and we have . . .” I checked my watch. “Approximately twenty minutes ’til she cycles through her rage levels, embraces a feeling of helplessness, and asks for my assistance.”

  “Or you could storm the gym, tell her to stop acting like a perfection-obsessed loon, and take a stand against her piling all her diva crap onto you.” Lucy idly twisted one of her long, honey-colored locks around her finger. “Just for example.”

  “The ability to accept any and all diva crap is a highly valued skill in personal assistants.” I scraped my spoon across the bottom of my bowl, scavenging for stray sugar granules.

  Lucy snorted. “Then you must be very valuable. But really, darling, the way she lit into you during her little screaming jag today—”

  “Luce. We’ve been over this. Saving the city from packs of bloodthirsty demons is stressful; sometimes she needs to vent. And my special gift in life is knowing how to absorb, defuse, and contain said venting. I am an expert at handling her and this is how I handle her.” I set my empty bowl to the side and checked my watch. “And we’ve got eighteen minutes left, so let’s get back to more important things. Like the groceries. Did Nate forget to go to the store?”

  Lucy sighed, apparently willing to let the matter drop for now. “He’s been buried in his basement lair for the past twenty-four hours. Obsessively mapping out our latest round of demon portals, trying to find a pattern.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The pattern is that there is no pattern. The pattern is also that he needs to remove the gigantic stick from his ass and go on the damn grocery run.”

  Lucy smiled. “Not to mention the fact that he should be thanking you on a daily basis for even having a basement lair to call his own?”

  “Have I ranted that rant before?”

  “A few times, love.”

  “Mmm.” I closed my eyes and allowed my head to fall back against the wall—then winced when a new series of angry thwacks rang out from behind the gym door. “Then I’ll spare you.”

  It was true, though: full responsibility for Jupiter HQ went to me. I found the Victorian, I scouted it, and I got the small business loan that allowed us to buy it off its former dot-com millionaire owner five seconds after the second (or was it third?) tech bubble burst. The instant I saw its faded pink wallpaper and scratched floors, I knew it was perfect—weird and rickety enough to project proper superhero mystique, but cozy enough that Aveda could call it home. It also had something very few San Francisco living situations do: space.

  Enough space for Lucy to knock out a few walls and make the second floor into a makeshift gym. Enough space for Nate Jones—Aveda’s physician/demonology expert/annoying non-getter of groceries—to forge a creepy mad scientist lab in the basement. And most importantly, enough space for the small arsenal of workout equipment, beauty products, and high-end designer shoes that made Aveda . . . well, Aveda.

  I heard a series of determined grunts from the gym. That meant Aveda had moved on from the bag to her push-up/pull-up/sit-up routine. I checked my watch again. She must be reaching her final rage level, which meant about seven more minutes.

  “Why are you two loitering out here?” A gruff voice boomed down the hall. “We need to debrief regarding today’s attack.”

  “Or maybe,” I said, frowning at the black-clad figure striding toward us, “we need to remember when it’s our turn to get groceries, Nate.”

  Nate came to a stop, his six-foot-four frame looming over us like an angry tree. He crossed his muscular arms over his broad chest and glowered at me through deceptively mild-mannered-looking wire-rimmed glasses. Given that his face was made up of sharp angles—from the high cheekbones to the too-long nose—his glower tended to be pretty intimidating. Lucy claimed his incongruous combination of brawny physique and uptight, nerdy demeanor made him “weirdly hot in that cute scientist meets broody thug way, if you’re into that kind of thing.” Given her own preferences, I knew she wasn’t, so I was pretty sure she was just saying that in the hope that I’d suddenly take notice and smash myself on top of him.

  Lucy was very invested in my non-sex life. You know, in that she encouraged me to drop the “non” part. Maybe because she thought I needed extracurricular activities that didn’t involve Aveda. Or maybe she wanted me to chime in with my own juicy details when she shared her exploits. Honestly? I was happy just to listen.

  In any case, I wasn’t into the Nate kind of thing either, especially since our working relationship contained so much glowering. I met his dark eyes without flinching.

  “And before you make your next not-so-incisive observation: we are working,” I said.

  “Did you get the stone?” he asked.

  “There wasn’t one.”

  His glower deepened. “There wasn’t one, or you didn’t bother to look for it?”

  “We were a little busy with the demonic cupcake fighting to look for anything. And as you haven’t even bothered to notice, our boss is in the middle of a crisis.” I pointed to the gym door. The grunts had intensified. Push-ups/pull-ups/sit-ups were almost done; kettlebells would be next.

  He raked a hand through his unruly shock of hair, making it stand on end. “I’ve told you: those stones are crucial to my research.”

  “And I’ve told you: the number one priority for this organization is Aveda. It’d be nice if you expressed some facsimile of concern
for her well-being after a big demon battle instead of fixating on your ‘experiments.’” I actually made air quotes around “experiments.” Something about his condescending, know-it-all tone always brought out the contrary three-year-old in me. “And anyway, if we missed a stone, Rose will send it to us.”

  “Which will take at least twenty-four hours, which is time that could’ve been spent studying the specimen—”

  “If finding the stones is so important, why don’t you join us on the missions? Get your hands dirty.” I gestured to my frosting-spattered jeans. “Actual fieldwork might be better research than, say, locking yourself in the lab and ignoring the rest of us for days on end.”

  He stiffened. “And what, exactly, do you know about scientific research? Unless you mean researching Aveda’s favorite shade of lipstick.”

  “There’s definitely a science to that.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I knew he didn’t get my jumbled mental bulletin board way of doing things. If something wasn’t written down in an official-looking spreadsheet, he thought it didn’t count.

  Hmm. Maybe if I scrawled “get the damn groceries” on one of his spreadsheets, he’d consider it a task worthy of his notice.

  Anyway, I was only half joking about the lipstick science side of things. My job might not seem important to him, but considering his severe lack of interpersonal skills, I doubted he’d be very good at it.

  His glare shifted to the side. “What’s this?” He grabbed my hand and pushed my hoodie sleeve up, revealing the welt on the inside of my wrist.

  “One of the cupcakes bit me,” I said, pulling away. “No big deal.”

  “I have a salve for that,” he said, grabbing my wrist again.

  “I don’t need a salve.” I yanked my hand away and tugged my sleeve down. “It’ll heal on its own.”

  “It’ll heal faster if you use the salve—”