Page 53 of All Superheroes Need PR
Dr. Larsen elaborates, “I thought your relationship was fake. My wife, Diamond, a hopeless romantic, was convinced it was real. She was ready to throw down over it. Well, throw me down anyway.” She waggles her eyebrows at me in a way that I truly hate.
“Pervert.”
She laughs hard and shakes her head, a pink tint in her cheeks when she looks back at me and says, “You’re telling me that you get permanent tattoos when your girlfriend touches you, andI’mthe one with the problem?”
I huff half a laugh myself as she tilts her head. She doesn’t make any notes on her computer, and I really fucking like that. “Does she have anything to do with your dreams?”
The dreams were why I’d come to see Dr. Larsen in the first place. Vivid and terrible, they were dreams of darkness and of murder. I’d been so full of rage in the dreams, and I could see myself lashing out and attacking strange and terrible monsters that were also trying to attack me. And every time, I’d woken from those dreams angry and stayedangry until I saw her face. For whatever reason, she sparked the dreams, but she could also make the rage they brought go away.
“I didn’t dream last night when I slept beside her. At least, I don’t think I did.”
“Hm.” Dr. Larsen’s mouth scrunches up.
“Hm? That’s the best you got, Doc?”
“Call me Emily, and yeah, sort of. I can’t say that there’s a manual for this, and if there is, I’m sorry to tell you, but you and I are the ones writing it. The COE hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information either.”
I grunt, frowning. “Don’t you have all the files?”
“Most, but some are redacted, and Mr. Singkham won’t explain why—though he might not even know. Those files were originally redacted by the SDD before the Champions Coalition got them. You also might remember we don’t have the villains’ records either; those were stolen in the VNA raid of the SDD twelve years ago along with all that equipment.” The pods. I remember. The villains went back for some of the pods we’d landed in as little alien kids, lost in the cosmos. I’ve never given much thought to what they took but am suddenly struck by the feeling that they might be kind of important.
Fuck. Makes me wish I hadn’t severed ties so irrevocably with the Marduk.
Emily continues, “I’ll do a biopsy on the tissue, but I’m not expecting miracles. I’ll also poke around in the Forty-Eight archives and see if I can’t find anything to explain this or any evidence it might have happened to another Champion.” Her graying hair is in a ponytail on top of her head, held together with a bright-green scrunchie that’s fighting a losing battle against the mass as she works.
Not meeting my gaze as she takes a few notes, she adds, “I’d tell you that you’re free to go if you weren’t looking at me like you’re debating whether or not you’re going to gouge my eyes out or ask me a question. So.” She spins fully around on her stool, something a little kid might do, and, on the upswing, smacks her clipboard down onto the counter,her bright brown eyes all but glowing with a curiosity she’s trying her damnedest to suppress.
Go on. Throw her a bone.
“There’s something else.” I clear my throat and hold out my hands. She blinks. “You want a manicure? I’m very regretful to inform you, but I pay someone to do this.” She holds up her own hands in a mirror of how I’m holding mine, and I see that her hands are, in fact, tipped in short bright-green fingernails that match the color of the scrunchie in her hair.
She waggles them at me, and I scowl. “I don’t need my nails done.” And then I pause. “Actually.” I clear my throat. “I do. But every day. Every damn morning I wake up, and my nails are pointy.” I swallow as she watches my face, expression unchanging. “And hard.”
“Pointy and hard?”
I nod.
“And you’re describing your fingernails, yeah?” She snorts, and it takes me a full breath to realize she’s made a joke.
“Perv,” I huff, trying to keep the smile from twisting my lips.
She rolls forward and takes my right hand between both of hers, without gloves on, and smooths the side of her thumb around the top curve of my fingers. “Well, well ... ow!” She jolts on her first pass around my thumb and looks at the pad of her own. She shows it to me after a cursory glance, and I see that it’s got blood on it. She’s also grinning ear to ear.
“Jesus.” I jerk my hand out of hers, fucking petrified, but she grabs my right hand and pulls it back. “They weren’t sharp like that this morning, I swear.” I swear ... I hope. I had these fingers in-fucking-side Vanessa. What if ... no. No, she’d have said something. I can barely get the lump down in my throat.
Emily’s eyes sparkle with fascination. “My, my, my. You trim your nails every morning then?”
“After joining with the Champions, I noticed my nails getting darker in color. Tinting to almost black. Didn’t bother me, but in theweek leading up to Washington, I started having to file them every other day, maybe less. I didn’t file them when I was out there saving those people, obviously, and when I got on the plane to come home, I noticed they were long—like half an inch. I cut them on the plane using a goddamn knife one of the security women had on her, and then I cut them again this morning.” A couple hours before I touched Vanessa, I’d rifled through her bathroom and found a set of clippers; they weren’t hard to find in a neatly marked container labeledNails. My little psycho.
“So this growth is, what—six hours?”
“Something like that.”
“Your nails are already an eighth of an inch past the nail bed ...”
“And I cut them to the quick this morning.”
“And you say they get pointy if you let them?”
