LUCY AND I worked out for two hours. Most of our “training” ended with me on the ground, gasping for breath. But I kept reminding myself that even if I didn’t feel as brave as Michelle Yeoh/Invisible Girl, I needed to be prepared to act like her.
Afterward I darted up to my room, showered, and changed into jeans and an old T-shirt with a stretched-out neckline that drooped off my shoulders. I was just adding some fuzzy socks to my lazy ensemble when I got a text from Bea:
Dissection results in. Plz report to lab. URGENT!!!
I hustled downstairs, my mind whirling. Had they discovered something crazy or was Bea just being melodramatic?
Nate’s lab really did look like a cave, its surfaces gray and gloomy and depressingly sterile. Why he enjoyed spending so much time down here was beyond me. He was leaning over a long table in the middle of the room, poking and prodding at what appeared to be pieces of the thumb specimen. Bea, meanwhile, was perched on a stool next to him, jotting down notes.
“Evie!” Bea’s eyes widened. “We dissected the thumb. That thing is bananas. And the results are . . .” She looked at Nate. “Do you want to tell her?”
“You go ahead,” he said.
Bea’s face was so dead serious, I found myself holding my breath, my trepidation rising.
“It has human tissue,” she said.
“Wh-what?” I sputtered. Holy shit. Okay, so the dramatic text had been warranted.
“But not all human. It’s, like, a hybrid. Of human and something else.”
“Which means . . . ?” Nate prompted.
“Which means!” Bea exclaimed, stabbing her pen at her notepad. “This wasn’t an example of a demon imprinting on something human-like. This was a demon fusing with an actual human.”
“Fusing . . .” I tried to process the information. As far as I knew, we hadn’t encountered anything like that before. Then I thought about how skillfully the hand played the Nordstrom piano—and the tune it had played. A horrific realization started to take shape.
“Nate,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Remember how Lucy mentioned that Stu hasn’t shown up for work? That they’re not sure where he is? The music the hand played yesterday . . .” I swallowed hard. “It was Stu’s original composition. The one he’s been tinkering with for months down at The Gutter.”
“Shit.” Nate frowned at the thumb pieces, as if willing them to provide further answers. “All right. I’ll mention that to Rose. I’m sending her our findings to see if SFPD can get us a DNA match off the thumb’s human tissue. I also compared the results from the thumb with the dissection records for the humanoid demon corpses found near that first big portal. They don’t match. Those corpses may have looked human, but DNA-wise, they were all demon.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, my frustration rising. “So whatever this is, it’s definitely new. Nothing from the past is going to give us useful clues?”
Nate nodded. “That is the logical conclusion. But I wish we had something from the other oddities we’ve witnessed—Aveda statue demons and the Tommy Thing—to compare these results to. Something to give us a solid connection.”
Bea looked up from her pad. “As far as connecting things: Evie’s observations are still solid. Like, how these guys have that weird way of moving and at least a couple of them seem all smart and stuff?”
Nate and I looked at her in surprise. She waved her pen at us. “All data is useful at some point, right? In terms of adding to the bigger picture?”
Nate hesitated, then smiled at her. “Yes,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I blurted out. “Are you actually acknowledging that messy, vague, real life experience-type data is just as good as the hard facts that go in your spreadsheets?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m coming to see that, as Beatrice says, all data is valuable. And methods of data collection, even if they aren’t my own methods, should not be discounted. Especially if we want that bigger picture to come into focus.”
I gawked at him. “Well. That’s different.”
“Ahem,” Bea said, giving both of us a look.
I shook my head, tried to wipe the shock off my face, and refocused on what she was saying.
“So even though we don’t have bits of the other oddities for dissection, we can totes speculate based on what we’ve seen recently,” Bea continued.
I drummed my fingers on the table, trying to follow the thread. “Say we keep assuming all three things are connected,” I said. “If the hand is a demon that fused with Stu, was the Tommy Thing a demon that fused with the actual Tommy? Rather than a demon merely imprinting on a cardboard Tommy standee?”
“You did mention that it acted like him. That it was upset about people not liking the movie,” Nate said. “Has anyone seen the real Tommy Lemon recently?”
“He’s supposedly on one of his zen retreats right now. His social media claims he’s trekking through the Andes or something,” Bea said, making a face. “That’s where Dad is, too, by the way. He just emailed me that he’s on another vision quest with Yogini Lara.” She shrugged, trying to look like she couldn’t care less what Dad was up to. “Maybe he’ll come back for my birthday.”
“Maybe,” I said. Dad had forgotten her birthday for the last four years.
“What about the statue demons?” Nate asked. “Do we think they were fused with anything?”
“They had the weird movement thing going on,” I said, trying to work it out. “But they seemed to be created the same way our non-humanoid demons usually are: by coming through a portal and imprinting on the first thing they see.”
“And there was a swarm of them,” Bea piped up. “With the other two things, there was a single demon, and we’re theorizing that it fused with a specific person: first Tommy, now Stu.”
“So maybe the statues were some kind of test run or prototype—maybe they somehow had human DNA, but weren’t fused with one specific human? Does that even make sense? Or are they connected to this at all?” I said. I leaned back against the long table, my frustration mounting again. We just kept coming up with more questions.
“Let’s try to connect Stu and Tommy and go from there,” Bea said, scribbling on her pad. “While Nate is getting the thumb tested for possible Stu DNA, I can do further research on Tommy’s whereabouts—the last time he was sighted, how long this retreat thing is supposed to last.”
“That sounds like a good start,” I said, meaning it. I smiled at her. She gave me a tentative smile back. I felt like we were forging new territory and I had to tread carefully. “Also, Bea, can you talk to Rose, see if she and her team have observed or found anything weird the last few days? Rose Rorick? Head of the cleanup crew—”
“I know who Rose is,” Bea said. “I’ve been taking care of the Jupiter HQ general email account while you’ve been busy, Evie. Rose is super smart. And she said I could come to the next portal site and she’d show me how the portal scanner thingy works.” She perked up. “I’ve always wanted to see one of those in person. Anyway. I’ll go get started on the Tommy research.” She slid off her stool. “And I have to update Twitter with an ice cream coupon thingamajig. Humphry Slocombe said they’d give ten percent off to anyone who comes in and mentions Aveda’s fave flavor.”
“We got ice cream earlier,” Nate said, filling in the blanks. “Very important for powering through research. There’s some for you in the freezer.”
“Thanks.” I nodded at him and Bea. “That was nice of you.”
Bea gave me a brisk nod in return. “I’ll get on this research thing as soon as I’ve updated Twitter.”
I watched her leave and let out the long sigh I’d been holding in. The thumb may have given us new information, but it still felt like we had a bunch of assumptions and half-theories with no real answers. And I needed more than that if I was going to take on whatever this new demon force was at the karaoke battle.
“Beatrice was very helpful,” Nate said, cutting into my thoughts. He was cataloguing the pieces of dissected thumb, putting each one in a plastic baggie and labeling it with a Sharpie.
“And she hasn’t yelled at me at all today,” I said. “Which is a pretty novel feeling since she always seems to get madder at me than anyone. I guess it’s a family thing, you know?”
“Not really,” he said. “I’m not in contact with my family.”
“Why not?” I said, then clapped a hand over my mouth. “Sorry. That was nosy.”
“It’s okay.” He frowned contemplatively, then shrugged. “We don’t share the same worldview.”
While he worked, I wandered over to another part of the lab, trying to rearrange the information we’d gathered in my head, trying to pull a full picture into focus. I stopped at a table shoved in the corner with a pile of stones on it. Nate’s Otherworld gibberish stones, I realized. They looked like they were in the process of being sorted into piles. Most of them still looked like gibberish to me, nonsensical scribbles carved into their surfaces. But some of them did indeed have real, actual words.
The You Need stone from Cake My Day was in a pile of four. I picked through the ones sitting next to it, reading their inscriptions.
Once He Sees All
The Golden Princess
Son Will Rise
Maybe the demons were secretly a bunch of wannabe haiku writers?
“Hey, Nate,” I said. “What’s going on over here? Did you sort these?”
I turned and gave him an inquisitive look. He had finished tagging and bagging all the thumb pieces and was standing by the lab’s basin sink, washing his hands. He turned off the faucet and crossed the room to me.
“No,” he said. “Beatrice did.” He plucked the Golden Princess stone from the pile. “This is our most recent acquisition. Whistles management sent it over while you were training this morning. A customer found it in her mozzarella sticks.”
“And these all go together?” I gestured to the pile around the You Need stone.
“That’s Beatrice’s theory, as all the phrases are rendered in similar letter shapes.” He nodded at the neat piles. “She started cataloging them.” He pointed to a piece of paper next to the stones, which had a makeshift grid rendered in Bea’s loopy handwriting.
“She’s making her own spreadsheet?” I arched an eyebrow. “You are a terrible influence.”
He laughed. “She has an aptitude for scientific studies. She started finding patterns in the stones I’d never seen before.” He pointed to one of the piles. “For instance, she thinks these are all markers of powers humans received when that first Otherworld portal opened up.” He picked up one of the stones and handed it to me. “This could be Aveda.”
“‘Lifts Most Weakly,’” I read out loud. “Let’s not show this to our fearless leader.”
“Or this one,” he said, pointing to another stone, “could be your Human GPS friend Mercedes.”
“‘Auto Track,’” I read. “Where’s mine?”
“Bea thinks this one is you.” He plucked a third stone from the pile. The words on it were smaller and I had to squint to make out the phrase.
“‘Anger Shatters Field,’” I read.
“Because of the anger leading to a destructive action,” he clarified. “It works.”
“It sounds like a badly translated fortune cookie. Reminds me of a paper I wrote in grad school about the cross-cultural impact of incorrect movie subtitles.”
He grinned and set the stone back in its Bea-approved pile. “If it’s acceptable to you, I’d like her to continue with this. She’s finally making sense of the, as you always call it, gibberish.”
“Right. Gibberish.” I hesitated and picked up the Anger Shatters Field stone again. I’d always been so disdainful of it all: the stones, his spreadsheets, his attempts to make sense of the Otherworld. And he’d seemed dismissive of me in turn.
But he’d just admitted that his worldview had been broadened. That he now believed all methods of gathering data were worthwhile. I’d felt a surge of triumph because he’d finally admitted my observations were valuable. And then I had promptly ignored the other side of it. Which was my dismissiveness.
I’d been so fixated on getting him to see that my point of view was valid, I’d never acknowledged that his was, too.
Instead I’d spent pretty much every moment before today making flippant comments about how useless his research was.
I’d told myself it was because I was exasperated with him for refusing to go out in the field while the rest of us put ourselves on the demon-y front lines. For refusing to see anything but his black-and-white charts and grids, his numbers and data, while the rest of us dealt with the real world. But as I picked one of the stones up and felt its weight in my hand, I realized something else had been bubbling underneath the surface of my disdain the whole time. Something I’d been afraid to admit until now.
“I’m all for any Bea hobby that doesn’t involve her finding new ways to be mad at me,” I said slowly. I ran my thumb over the stone’s smooth surface. “And about the whole gibberish thing. I’ve been a jerk to you. About your research. Now that we’re up against some crazy demon force that seems bent on accomplishing some serious evil, well . . . I see how important it is. How everyone needs to work together on some spreadsheet action. I didn’t mean to dismiss your work or you or . . .” I bit my lip, trying to put the right words together. “I was scared.”
I took a deep breath and stared down at the stone in my hand. I didn’t look at him; I still had more to get through.
“I didn’t want to know about my power, didn’t want to even think about it. I wanted to pretend it didn’t exist,” I said. “I think I was secretly afraid of what your research on Otherworld ‘science’ might reveal. What you might discover about my whole Little Miss Totally Destructive Fire Power deal. Like, if you made just one too many spreadsheets or put too many pieces together, you might find out that I’m . . . I’m . . .”
“That you’re extraordinary?”
“That I’m a monster.”
I’d never said those words out loud. But as they landed in the air, rushed and staccato, I knew down in my bones that they had guided me since that horrible day at the library.
What if you’re a monster? What if you’re a supervillain? What if you allow yourself to let go and be all unguarded and feel something for just one millisecond and everyone dies and it’s all your fucking fault?
“You’re not a monster.” Nate reached over and took my hand. “I’m standing by extraordinary. And for the record, when I’ve suggested exploring your power, it’s not because I think you’re an experiment or a science project or whatever you want to call it. It’s because I want you to see that, too. That extraordinariness.”
“Thank you,” I said softly. I tried to process each one of those words, to internalize them. I’d gone to the brink of monsterdom—nearly taking Aveda’s head off—and come back from it. I was on the other side of almost realizing my greatest fear and I actually felt okay. I was even making plans to use the fire more and battle this still-nebulous demon force.
For a moment we just stood there, Nate’s hand clasping mine. I reveled in the gentle warmth of that touch. In the past, any kind of heat near my palm area would’ve been enough to start that familiar panicky feeling spiraling through my stomach. Now it just felt . . . nice.
“You may have been, as you say, ‘a jerk’ to me, but I’ve been nothing but hostile to you throughout our acquaintanceship,” Nate said, bringing me out of my thoughts. “I should apologize for that as well. And I should tell you why.”
He stopped so abruptly, I wondered if there was more to that sentiment or if I’d heard wrong.
“Okay,” I said, trying to be encouraging. “Why?”
He dropped my hand and rocked back on his heels, his eyes going to the ceiling. This bit of movement looked strange on him: casual and waffly and weirdly vulnerable.
“This is going to require ice cream,” he finally said. He crossed over to the freezer in the corner of the lab, opened it, and pulled out a small dish with a wooden spoon stuck in it. Then he grabbed a stool and dragged it over to me.
“Sit,” he ordered. “And eat this.” He shoved the dish into my hands. It was the promised ice cream. “There are some things I want to tell you. But I would like to request that you not interrupt me.”
I couldn’t respond, because my mouth was already full of ice cream. Clever man. And it was the best flavor from Humphry Slocombe, Secret Breakfast: cornflakes and bourbon and sugar. I savored the taste and hoisted myself onto the stool and motioned for him to continue. He took a deep breath and fixed me with a piercing gaze.
“I’ve wanted to see you naked since the moment we met.”
I nearly choked on my mouthful of ice cream.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s one of those sentences that didn’t quite come out right.”
“But—” I sputtered unattractively. “How can you . . . you probably don’t even remember—”
He held up a hand. “No interrupting. I do remember: You answered the door that first time I came to HQ. Your hair was coming out of its ponytail, sticking to your neck, and you were wearing a very tight T-shirt with a cartoon duck on it. And you told me, without so much as a hello—” A smile played around his lips as he went into a spot-on imitation of my put-out tone. “‘The bodyguard position has been filled. We are not accepting new applications at this time.’” He ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end in that way I used to find so odd. Now it was kind of endearing. “I have never meant to come off as disrespectful of you, the way you live your life, or the way you see the world . . . but I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’ve done. I was trying to put as much distance between us as possible. In the past, it’s been very necessary to keep my life free of distractions. And you are a very big distraction. Especially in that goddamn tight T-shirt.”
He looked at the floor, stuffing his hands in his pockets. I licked my spoon and set my dish on the table next to the stones. My heart was beating very fast, and I didn’t think it was from the sugar rush.
“So our sexperiment has been a long time in the making,” I said. I was going for “teasing,” but my tone came out more like “do me on this table right now, please.”
“Indeed. But perhaps we shouldn’t call it that since I just clarified that I do not think of you as an experiment—”
“No, no, it’s a joke. A funny wordplay thing,” I said quickly. “I mean, we agreed orgasms are our only purpose. We’re not actually collecting hardcore data or anything.”
I was babbling now. I couldn’t think of what else to do.
“Hmm.” He paused and placed his hands on the table on either side of me, hemming me in. I sat very still, trying not to betray how much the heat rolling off his body affected me. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Or are we?”
Whoa. Was he trying to be teasing now? Because his tone was definitely matching my “do me, etc.” cadence.
Should I keep going with it? Could I pull off sex kitten for more than one line? Actually, it wasn’t even quite sex kitten, it was more like—
Jesus Christ.
Was I really overthinking incredibly hot sex again?
“I’ve collected an abundance of data so far,” he said. He dipped a finger in the melting remnants of my ice cream. “For instance,” he said, “my highly scientific analysis indicates you have a very sensitive spot right . . . here . . .” He dabbed a droplet of ice cream on the curve of my neck, right below my earlobe.
“Hey!” I protested, unprepared for that bit of cold against my skin. Before I could elaborate on that thought, he leaned in and flicked his tongue over the spot. Which was indeed quite sensitive. A giggle escaped me. “Very funny.”
“It’s not funny.” He gave me a stern look. “It’s science. I have also been able to discern that you turn a rather violent shade of pink right . . . here . . .” He dabbed another drop of ice cream along my collarbone. “ . . . when you’re aroused.” He pressed his lips against my skin, gently sucking at the ice cream. The melding of the cold with the heat of his tongue created an irresistible sensation, a feeling so heady I couldn’t find words superlative enough to describe it.
But I was pretty sure that bit of skin was now an exceptionally violent shade of pink.
“And here . . .” He eased the stretched-out collar of my T-shirt over my shoulder, exposing the top slope of my right breast. He dabbed the last of the ice cream just above my nipple, which remained frustratingly covered. “Here, you like teeth.” He grazed the spot to demonstrate. I inhaled sharply, all of my nerve endings standing at attention.
He kept his focus on that spot, licking and sucking, even though the ice cream was long gone. Desire coursed through me so fiercely, it felt like it was jabbing at my vital organs, a repeated shock to the heart. A single thought pulsed through my brain, relentless and ridiculous.
Science is awesome!
Science! Is Awesome!
Science . . . is . . . awesome!!!
“Science . . .” I gasped out loud.
And then I felt it. That telltale warmth in my palm, that sensation that was usually accompanied by panic.
But once again I didn’t feel panic.
“Nate!” I pulled back from him and held up my hand.
Right there, perched in my palm, was a perfect fireball. It was contained and still and unlike the wild bursts of flame that usually shot out of my hands. I goggled at it, unsure what to make of its seemingly docile nature.
Nate’s eyes went wide.
“That,” he said, “is awesome.”