Heroine Complex (2 page)

One of her flailing hands swept out, knocking a whole parade of unicorns to the floor. This time there were just too many of them; Lucy managed to save only a couple from plummeting to their doom.

Aveda whipped around, pointing an accusatory finger at us.

“And sometimes,” she said, “I just
really want french fries
.”

With that, she turned and stomped toward the door.

“Are you coming?” she barked over her shoulder. “I have to greet my public. And
then
I have to get back to work.”

I could already hear her muttering under her breath about the different techniques she was going to apply to the spinning backhand to make it absolutely flawless. So powerful no one would be able to say jack-shit about any imperfections that dared show up on her face next time.

“My word.” Lucy gently placed one of the unicorns she'd saved on the counter and patted its head. “Given the choice, which would you rather face, darling: an Aveda Jupiter tantrum or our sugary little demons?”

“The demons,” I muttered without hesitation. We both watched as Aveda flung the bakery door open with such force, the foundation of the building seemed to shake. “Always the demons.”

“YOU KIND OF
have the world's worst job.”

A reporter said this to me once while waiting for Aveda to make her grand interview entrance. I was scrubbing at an especially nasty patch of demon goop on Aveda's leather pants, my face twisted in concentration as I battled the crusty ooze.

“Maybe,” I retorted. “But I'm kind of the best at it.”

It was a quippy response to a quippy observation, but it was also true. Much as I might joke about preferring the demons, I was the only person who knew how to handle Aveda's canyon-size diva mood swings. And what can I say? I was proud of that.

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 sticky 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?”