Page 65 of All Superheroes Need PR
We meet in a desperate collision, the momentum of my flight pushing me down the street. The momentum of my shock making it hard to regulate anything other than my impulse to erupt into a bonfire. I’m falling all over myself, and when I reach her, I keep falling. I slam into her body, tackling her back to the ground and catching myself on one arm before I accidentally crush her. I wrap one arm around her neck while I try to find my limbs and control them. I’m shaking. Fucking shaking.
She starts to cry again, softer than she had been over the phone. She’s wiping her face convulsively, tears mixed with red on her chin. “Sorry ... I wasn’t crying in ... the house, b-b-but after I got outside, I haven’t b-been able to st-st-stop.”
“It’s all right, baby,” I try to say, but my voice comes out as a gash as I manage to get one knee under me as well as a foot and push myself up into a crouch, pulling her with me. Holding her up in a seat, I loom over her, blocking out the sun so that when she looks up, all she cansee is me and all I can see are the bruises on her face and the blood on her mouth.
“What ...” I have my hands on her face, and she’s clutching my wrists as I tip her face to the left and then to the right.
Her cheeks glitter with tears. Her lips are swollen; her eyes are too. The blood on her chin is dribbling from a split in her lip, one deep enough that it might need stitching. Purple splotches decorate her face above the jaw on the right side of her face. She got hit. Somebody fucking hit her.
I blink longer than I need to, just to get my bearings, just to try not to fucking implode. Trying to cycle through every possible scenario I can come up with for how she ended up out here looking like this while I was stuck inside of the goddamn COE headquarters, one of the most secure buildings in the entire fucking world.
I’ll slam my fist through the center of the earth and tear the whole thing apart from within. No one deserves to live while Nessa’s sitting here broken like this.
But ... that’s not what heroes do, is it? And I told her once already that I wasn’t gonna try. I was gonna do.
I cover my mouth with one hand and take a breath. My other hand cups the back of her head, her hair tangling between my fingers. She doesn’t flinch from me as I thought she might, and the next breath I take comes a little easier. I drop my hand from my mouth, gather my senses and what tatters are left of my sanity, and I roar at the top of my lungs,Who fucking touched you?
No, I don’t. I whisper gruffly, “Where else you hurt?”
Her lips part shakily. She shakes her head, and her hair falls around her face. Her hand flutters away from her knees, and it shakes as she gestures down her body. I’m distracted by what her other hand is doing, though. Like she owns me, she’s placed her hand on my thigh.
“They, um ... they grabbed my hips. I think I’ve got bruises. They ... sting. Other than that, I’m fine.”
Theywhat? I’m frozen solid, made of ice instead of flame, as she reaches down and lifts the hem of her button-up. White today. There’s blood on it. She shifts onto her knees, looking pained as she tries to show me what happened.
“Stop, baby. Hold up. Don’t hurt yourself. Gonna take you to the doctor. I just need to make sure it’s safe to move you.”
“It’s safe. It’s not a big deal.”
“The fuck it isn’t,” I grunt, covering my mouth again to keep myself from saying anything else stupid.
She sniffs and shivers down to her feet. “I just ... really don’t want to go to the doctor right now.” A dry sob racks her chest, and I can’t stand it. I pull her against me, worried I’m gonna hurt her, but when I pull an inch, she falls a mile. She slumps against me when I stand, forcing me to take her with me. It’s no hardship.
“I’m not hurt bad,” she says, nuzzling into my chest. Her eyelids look heavy. “I just need you to ... do something for me.Please.”
“Anything.” I’d tear my heart out of my chest if she needed it now.
She blinks and glances back toward the structure, the one I haven’t even bothered to look at.
The smell insults me before the sight of it, because the empty house has been that way for a while. The wood holding it up is half-rotten. Even calling it a house is generous. It’s a one-story rambler, maybe two or three rooms. The front door’s ajar and is hanging off one hinge. There is no grass, only dirt and weeds. Some abandoned bottles litter the space meant to be a yard. But I recognize it from the photos I saw in her file. I know what this place is.
“What do you need, Nessa?” I whisper against her temple.
She’s fully buried against my bare chest, holding me like she thinks there’s even the slightest chance in hell I might set her down, leave her here, and fly away without her. I don’t know how she got out here, but once I find out who brought her here against her will and how, I’m gonna find it and kill it dead just to ensure she never ends up this far away from me ever again.
She sniffs, but her breathing seems better, calmer than it was. She blinks, and the sky turns the bronze-and-brown color combination of her curls the same color as her skin. She looks like her whole body was dipped in gold and dragged through sunlight. She’s too good for me. And I couldn’t care any less.
“I need you to be the Pyro,” she says. I give her a surprised look, horrified and touched in turn by the sudden surge of violence I hear in her voice. “Burn it down, baby. Be my hero.”
I have to fight to stay on my feet. I nod at her silently, and without breaking her gaze, I push energy out and away from my body. I find the house’s center, find the heart of this shithole and set it alight. The fire that starts in the center of the structure fans outward in a burst hot enough to feel from here. I take the structure down in less than three minutes. The fire swells and swells, forming the shape of a heart before I bring it back down in the center and, with it, the rest of the house.
I make sure the flame is doused, but I also make sure that not one single plank, one floorboard, one piece of shitty fucking plastic remains. The appliances I melt so they don’t explode apart. I take the foundation out, the few cinder blocks that there were, and raze it down to the earth beneath it until only a blackened pit, a scar on the earth, remains. I take the weed-covered yard too.
She watches the fire burn, and I watch the reflection of the flames on her face all the way until the last ember is doused. She still doesn’t look away. A truck rambles down the road. I can hear it coming though it’s still far off. I stand there, letting her absorb this for a few moments more until I ask her, “You ready?”
She nods after a brief hesitation and then looks up and pulls on my neck, and it takes me a second to understand what she wants, but when it clicks, I don’t hesitate after that. I kiss her with all of me.
Her mouth is swollen and tastes like tears and rain, and her kiss is wet and needy. She’s pulling so hard on my neck that it’s hard for my mind not to trip out of this plane and into another more illicit one. Mycock doesn’t know that this isn’t the time or place, and I pull back too soon, before it’s over.
