Page 5 of All Superheroes Need PR
He arrives in front of me in the time it takes for me to blink and catches my arm. His hand is a shade of brown darker than mine. Huge, it envelops my elbow, holding me upright and keeping me from falling. We’re the only two at this point who aren’t leaning against a wall or table or scattered like bowling pins across the floor. And he doesn’t seem to notice.
He’s too busy invading my space, staring at me in a way that makes my toes actually curl. His eyes are blazing white until spots of pink start to flutter through them, and my mouth is hanging open in dumbfounded shock. I can’t get past his pink-and-white eyes ringed in heavy black lashes, looking like fireworks. Staring into them directly is like staring at the sun during an eclipse. I feel ... woozy.
I waver on my feet, and the Pyro drags me to the left. He pushes me in front of him so I’m forced to walk backward. My ankle rolls, and my arms windmill to catch myself. The Pyro curses.
“Clumsy,” he hisses and grabs my waist. He lifts me up and plonks my ass down on the edge of the table, then slams his hands down onto the sleek charcoal-gray tabletop on either side.
“You ...” he snarls, and a deep rumbling fills the air with what can only be described as vibrations. Chills shoot through my body as the overwhelming sense that something impossible—or at least deeply improbable—is happening and that I’m not prepared for it. I am just a simple human, with deep insecurities underpinned by a whole heap of anxieties, who happens to be good—really good—at marketing. I’m not meant for supernatural shit.
I sit up straight. I feel like I’ve been tased. He steps back like he felt it too. Someone shouts behind the eclipse of his body, “Earthquake!” which is my thought, too, until he shakes his head so subtly I think I might be the only one who sees it.
His eyes flare bright white, and when he clenches his jaw and the little vein across his forehead pulses and the muscle twitches beneathhis left eye, I finally understand the intensity he’s throwing at me like a javelin. I can finally put a name to it.
Hate.
This man—male—hates me, even though I’ve never met him before in my life. And then, as Mr. Singkham and Margerie attempt to restore order and Jeremy approaches the Pyro from the side, the Pyro acts.
He lashes out, his arm moving with shocking speed as he grabs Jeremy by the front of his button-up. He drags Jeremy in close. He does all this without ever once looking away from my face with those eyes that were once white and are now flickering with pinks and faint oranges.
He points at my face in a way that spells trouble. My parted lips flounder, working but saying nothing. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. I don’t think I could say anything to stop these trains from colliding, my career the innocent bystander tied to the tracks between them.
“I want her gone.”
Chapter TwoVanessa
“It wasn’t that bad,” Margerie insists for the four hundredth time since arriving at Bah Bah Black Bar. It’s already packed, the bar area more so than the restaurant side, so we head there, Dan and Jeremy crowding after Margerie and me, Garrison and Vanya pushing ahead of us, Jem leading the charge. We snag a high top, the last one available, and Jeremy immediately orders a round of red wine for everyone.
“Red wine?” Vanya asks as she slides onto the stool between Margerie and me. She’s fresh out of her master’s program, a Russian woman who majored in Arabic. Immediately afterward, she realized she didn’t want to become a career diplomat, as she’d always envisioned, and was desperate for a job, and I wasn’t stupid enough to let her slip through my fingers when her résumé landed on my desk. She’s a genius, and if we’d landed that COE contract, I’d have had enough to give her a significant pay raise. Combined with my incessant prayers, I’d have stood a good chance of her not getting poached. Now I’ll be lucky if any of them last the week. For the thousandth time, I flush, embarrassment making me choke.
I think the sheer overwhelming force of my embarrassment is the reason I’m here at this bar to begin with. Inevergo to bars. Never evernever. Too big a chance for strangers to try to talk to me—but after the day I’ve had?
The waiter slides a glass of dark-red liquid in front of me and I sniffle once into my glass before taking a sip. And then a bigger sip. “Tastes good,” I mumble. There’s a lipstick stain on the rim, but I don’t even bother sending it back. I just wipe it off and keep going.That’show far gone I am already, and I’ve only had a few sips. I’m surprised I didn’t break down in the bathroom, but I think the strange feeling in the pit of my stomach kept me from it. Shock, probably.
Meeting one of the Forty-Eight turned out to be just as traumatic as I imagined it might be. Maybe Elena is right. Maybe there is something off about them and they should never have come here. Or maybe the problem wasn’t with him. Maybe it wasme?
“That’s because it’s a day red,” Jeremy answers as if that means something.
“Day red?” Vanya smirks, then her expression switches to something more appreciative as she brings the glass against her glossy red lips. “Wow. That’s delicious.”
“Strong.” Jem makes a face and whispers something under her breath in Amharic. She’s head of my legal team and the most impossible-to-please woman I’ve ever met. She’s only been working for me for six months, way overqualified and way beyond our budget, but she’s amazing. If she doesn’t turn in her resignation Monday, I’ll have to make a sacrifice to whatever god takes sacrifices and has a special affinity for legal.
“I know. Fabulous, isn’t it?” Dan adds, releasing a sigh as he sips happily, his hand on Jeremy’s thigh under the table.
“What makes it a day red?” Jem says, hailing a waiter and ordering a margarita instead. Mezcal. Top shelf.
Jeremy loops his arm over the back of Dan’s high stool and makes a reproachful sound as he toasts his glass of day red in Jem’s direction. She hisses at him, actually hisses, like a cat. He laughs, actually laughs—like we weren’t fired only an hour ago!—and says, “It’s an easy-drinkingred wine, dry but with fruity forward notes, that’s served chilled and cures any and all instances of did-that-meeting-really-just-happen and I-can’t-believe-what-an-asshole-the-Pyro-turned-out-to-be. Womp womp. What a disappointment.”
“Meeting your childhood heroes always is,” Jem says.
“Or your childhood villains?” Vanya adds, making Margerie and Jem laugh despite her cynicism. “What did you even expect from him? He gets a perfectly adequate subsidy from the SDD, doesn’t need to work, gets to sit around on his butt all day and do nothing if he feels like it.”
She shrugs and drains the rest of her glass in one swallow, then flips back her blond hair. Her bright-red lipstick screams confidence, and I envy her in this moment, how flippantly she seems to be able to shrug off such a brutal and unwarranted rejection. But then again, she didn’t feel the full force of his ire like I did—ire and whateverelsethat was.
Jeremy huffs. “I don’t know. I expectedsomethingelse. More. The other Champions go out and save people from burning buildings, act where the police and emergency workers are too slow or in places they can’t access. Fight the villains. And even if he was a villain, I thought he’d be more ... like ... I don’t know! Cool, I guess.”
“He was pretty hot, though,” Dan adds, winning him an elbow to the ribs from his partner.
Jeremy smiles, his cheeks turning pink. “Okay, yeah. He was, kinda. In a rugged, unwashed mountain man kinda way.”
