Heroine's Journey

by Sarah Kuhn

  “Bea!” he shouted. “Bea.”

  I turned to the right and saw a row of Kathy’s glass vases exploding in quick succession: BAM, BAM, BAM!

  I heard screaming and saw people running, and then I saw that other things were breaking apart, too: the abandoned pretzel stand was crashing to the ground, the woman with the bootleg t-shirt business was scrambling away from her collapsing stall.

  “We need to get out of here,” Sam said, shaking my shoulder.

  “No,” I said, my voice raw and hoarse. “No, we can’t—” I whipped back around and saw Kathy Kooper running in the opposite direction. She looked over her shoulder and gave me a mean smile.

  “We’ll meet again, Beatrice,” she yelled. “Count on it.”

  I gathered up whatever shreds of emotion I still had—I didn’t even know what they were anymore, they were messy and fragmented—and threw them at her as hard as I could.

  I felt that responding mental shove, and it hurt so bad, I gasped. Everything went fuzzy around the edges again, and the red haze descended over my vision again and it was all too much and I felt myself falling and falling and falling, Sam screaming my name. And then everything went black.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “IS SHE WAKING up? I think she’s waking up—”

  “Shhhh! Lower your voice. If she’s not waking up, she definitely needs rest—”

  “Don’t crowd her, darlings, we still need to make absolutely sure she’s not injured—”

  My eyelashes fluttered open, and I was greeted by a swirl of faces staring down at me. I blinked a couple times, trying to make them come into focus, and took stock of my surroundings. I was back at HQ, in my bed, and I felt like I’d been smacked on the head by a very large mallet. Evie and Nate were perched on either side of me, Aveda and Scott were leaning against my dresser, and Lucy was draped over a rocking chair. They all looked worried. Sam was there, too, hovering around in the background.

  “What happened?” I said, sitting up and rubbing my temples. “Ow.” My head hurt like hell. “And can I get, like, a vat of ibuprofen up in here?”

  “On it,” Scott said, heading for the bathroom.

  “Sam called us,” Evie said, reaching over to take my hand. “We came out to the Market and got you and . . .” She swallowed hard, her gaze sweeping over me, like she was trying to convince herself I was okay. “How do you feel?” I could tell she wanted to reach out and put a hand on my forehead but was trying to tamp down on those Momming instincts.

  “My head feels like I spent last night drinking an entire liquor cabinet, but otherwise . . .” I took stock of my various body parts. Scott came back into the room and handed me a couple pills, which I dry-swallowed. “Yeah, I don’t think anything’s broken, bruised, or otherwise amiss. But oh my god, you guys . . .” I sat up straighter, my eyes going wide as my afternoon replayed in my head. “You will not believe the craziness that went down today. Let me recap Bea’s Super Awesome Superhero Adventures for y’all.”

  I told them about my Ferris wheel side trip to the Otherworld, my thrilling escape from the gigantic mecha Spider, and my run-in with probably evil mastermind Kathy Kooper. I may have exaggerated and embroidered just a teeny bit here and there, like when I described how I’d bravely jumped out of the way of the Spider’s tentacles slamming onto the ground, or when I mentioned that Kathy’s eyes seemed to have an evil, supernatural glow about them. (I saw Sam raise his eyebrows at that one.) But, you know, it had been pretty exciting—I was just emphasizing that fact.

  “So I guess I passed out,” I said, my brow furrowing as I reached the end of my tale. “But what happened after that? Did Kathy Kooper, like, magically teleport herself back to her evil supervillain lair or what?”

  “She slipped away in the chaos,” Sam said, stepping forward. I noticed then that his face was pale and drawn and very un-Sam-like. “I didn’t know what was going on between you two, just that all of a sudden stuff started exploding around you.”

  “Was it affecting the entire Market?” I said. “Like, was the whole thing crashing down while we were having a brain battle, or what?”

  “It was pretty much just in your immediate vicinity,” Sam said. “All those vases in her booth exploded, and the pretzel stand and that t-shirt stall next door came tumbling down.” He shook his head, like he was trying to remember. “It was enough to freak out folks around those booths. They probably thought it was an earthquake or something. There was some running for the exits, but it didn’t quite escalate to a stampeding mob.”

  “Just enough mayhem for Kathy to get away,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “Argh. You should have chased her, Samuel.”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you.” He met my eyes, and his gaze was so unnervingly intense, I squirmed. “You passed out, Bea. I didn’t know if you were okay or what.”

  “I am,” I said, sitting up tall. “I mean,” I turned to Nate and Scott, “I assume you guys examined me from both medical and magical standpoints. I’m fine, right?”

  “We did,” Nate said, frowning. “And you are mostly fine.” He hesitated. “When we pulled you out of the, hmm—let’s call it the between dimension, perhaps?—back at Pussy Queen, we did so because your heart rate spiked so high, and some of your other vitals were very alarming. The tests we did on you afterward indicated you were mostly back to normal, but that you’d experienced a moment of . . .” He turned to Scott. “Can you explain this?”

  “It was like a moment where your brain and body were completely overwhelmed by Otherworld magic,” Scott said. “From what we can tell, it was a very brief moment. But if you experience that overload for any longer, we don’t know what will happen to you.”

  Nate nodded. “When we examined you at the Market, it looked like you’d just experienced the same thing—a brief moment of magical overload. After hearing your account of what happened at the carnival, it would be logical to hypothesize your trips to the Otherworld and to that between dimension are overloading your system somehow. You’re fine right now, but if you go to either place again, you may not be.” He met my eyes, giving me his most serious of ultra-serious looks. “We cannot risk sending you there again until we know more about what we’re facing. And I would suggest you do your best to not follow the lead of mysterious voices trying to take you there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Please, Bea,” Evie said, her voice shaking. “Listen to Nate. I don’t know why you thought it was a good idea to go off by yourself to creepy carnival land in the first place, why you let the voice lure you—”

  “I’m not possessed if that’s what you’re thinking,” I grumbled. I looked at Nate. “Right? Still not possessed?”

  “Still not possessed,” he affirmed.

  “I was the only superhero on the scene,” I continued. “I had to investigate. Anyway, I protected myself with my powers, didn’t I? Do I need to repeat the part where I stood tall and screamed, my cape dramatically blowing behind me in the wind—”

  “Yes, I got that,” Evie said. “But—”

  “And why was I the only one there, anyway?” I barreled on. “We were all supposed to go to the Market, but you and Aveda and Lucy dropped out at the last minute to do something more important. What was it?”

  “Rose and I went to scan your mother’s grave site,” Lucy said. “I know there’s not an actual body or anything in there since you scattered her ashes. But we thought that perhaps the site might have some of her, I don’t know, essence. That we might be able to pick up a clue. But unfortunately, there was nothing.”

  “And Evie and I were also doing something important,” Aveda said, giving Evie an encouraging look. “Very, very important.”

  “Right,” Evie said, her gaze shifting to the side. “We were . . . um. We went with Lucy and Rose.”

  “You did?” That surprised me. Evie never wanted to visit the grave site. It was too much fo
r her.

  “Yes,” Evie said. “I didn’t want to . . . um. Upset you. Until we knew something for sure. Anyway. When you’re the only superhero on the scene, you also have to take certain precautions. And given what Nate and Scott’s tests revealed, you can’t just go jumping into the Otherworld again. No more following weird voices.”

  “And no more doing spells to try to connect you,” Scott said, giving me an apologetic smile.

  I frowned, unsure how to respond. How could I convince them the Otherworld was where the answers were? The Otherworld was where Mom was.

  “Have you noticed any other changes in—well, anything, now that you’ve returned to our world?” Nate asked. “Anything unusual or even just different?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  Okay, so that wasn’t exactly true. My ability to implant thoughts directly into people’s brains had happened right after the first time I’d visited the Otherworld. And this time . . . I mean, could the reason Kathy and I had caused so much destruction during our face-off be due to yet another change? Did I get little level-ups and new features to my power every time I crossed over? Well. I sure as hell wasn’t telling them about any of that. They were already trying to block me from my quest. I didn’t need to give them even more fuel.

  “I get the message,” I muttered, crossing my arms over my chest and slumping against my pillows. “But listen: we have to figure out how to find Kathy, because she’s clearly doing some messed up shit. She somehow banished that pretzel guy to the Otherworld, and she may have done the same thing to Mom. And she also appears to have some kind of superpower—”

  “Hold up, darling,” Lucy said, raising a hand. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff to cover here, and we need you to back up to the beginning of your—what did you call it?”

  “Bea’s Super Awesome Superhero Adventures,” I said. “That will also be the name of the animated TV series. Oh, they better get an Asian girl to voice me, though, or I will start the mother of all internet campaigns—”

  “As Lucy was saying,” Aveda said, sounding impatient. “I think we need you to go back to the beginning. So, a creepy voice told you how to enter the Otherworld this time?”

  “Pretzel Guy,” I confirmed. “And I was definitely there physically this time. Then when the mecha Spider attacked, I think I was back in that between dimension. Only this time, unlike at Pussy Queen, I could actually scream.”

  “Maybe the supernatural energy in that area is active rather than dormant,” Nate said. “That might contribute to why the between dimension seemed different this time.”

  “Even if you were in the between dimension, the way the ride attacked you sounds somewhat like what’s been happening with the Wave Organ,” Lucy said, cocking an eyebrow. “A location being weaponized.”

  “Down to a person disappearing into thin air,” I mused. “First the tourist at the Wave Organ and now Pretzel Guy. So maybe Kathy spirited the tourist away, too? Does she need to trap someone in the Otherworld in order to weaponize a location?”

  “And why was there this huge break between trapping your mom and trapping people now?” Scott said.

  “Also, was there any result from trapping your mother all those years ago?” Aveda said, her brow furrowing. “Because these weaponized locations seem to be an entirely new thing.”

  “For all we know, trapping people physically could be a new element as well,” Nate said. “We still do not know if she trapped your mother’s body or merely her consciousness.”

  “Or if she actually trapped Mom at all,” Evie murmured. “Remember, this could be an Otherworld trick.”

  “Mom did say the evil that trapped her was back,” I said, choosing to ignore her naysaying. “Maybe something happened now that activated Kathy’s power. Or made it better.”

  “But what is that power?” Lucy said, shaking her head. “Bea, when you were mind battling it out, you said it felt like the two of you were projecting at each other, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It felt like she had the ability to block or, like, push back against my emotional projection—which I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before.”

  “And somehow this mind battle resulted in destruction of physical objects,” Nate said. “Intriguing.”

  “We’ve already talked to Rose about evacuating and cordoning off the Market for the time being, as her team did with the Wave Organ. I’ll make sure she includes the carnival, too,” Lucy said. “Just in case any more rides want to come to life and attempt to stomp people to death. Even if you were in the between dimension at that point, we’d best not risk it.”

  “And we’ll do a thorough scan of the whole area tomorrow,” Aveda said, nodding.

  “How do we find Kathy?” Evie said, rubbing her temples. She looked very tired. “Scott, do you have a locator spell that might work?”

  “I need a personal effect,” Scott said. “Which I’m assuming we don’t have?”

  “The box!” I exclaimed. Everyone looked at me quizzically. “The box of Mom’s stuff,” I clarified. “I mean, I guess technically it doesn’t belong to Kathy, so it might not work. But it was in her possession long enough to maybe possibly count as a personal effect?”

  “Good thinking, Bug,” Scott said with a warm smile. “We’ll give it a try.”

  “If that’s all we need to discuss for now, I’d suggest we clear out and let Bea get some rest,” Nate said.

  “I’m fine with that—get out!” I said, making an expansive gesture toward the door. “Do not darken my door again for the rest of the evening. Unless it’s to send up a number three combo from that Vietnamese place on California Street. With extra meat sauce.” I gave them a hopeful smile.

  “I’ll have Rose stop by on her way over,” Lucy said, hopping up. “You deserve a treat for defeating that terrifying carnival Spider thingy.”

  “Can the rest of us get in on that, too?” Evie said, elbowing Lucy. She seemed to have perked up a little. “How much food can Rose carry by herself?”

  “She is remarkably strong, darling,” Lucy said, swooning. “But we could dispatch one of these big, burly men to help her.”

  “I’ll go,” Aveda said. “I am actually the strongest person here physically. As I’ve proven multiple times.”

  “Yes, recall the great pull-up competition of two years ago,” Scott said, slinging an arm around her shoulders.

  “Why did we never do that again?” Evie said, her brow crinkling.

  “Because I kicked all of your asses, that’s why,” Aveda sniffed. “It was frankly embarrassing. For the rest of you.”

  “Did you all not hear the ‘get out’ part?” I said.

  “I’m staying,” Sam said, settling into the rocking chair Lucy had just vacated.

  I swear I heard a swoosh as every member of Team Tanaka/Jupiter swiveled to look at him.

  “Bea said ‘get out,’ young man,” Aveda said, bristling. “I don’t know how things work in your household, but that alpha male bullshit does not fly around here.”

  “If you are unwilling to leave of your own accord, we will remove you,” Nate added.

  “And some of your fingers might get broken in the process,” Lucy said cheerfully.

  “Whoa, guys, whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “Sam can stay for a bit. He’s my friend, and we have a healthy relationship built on clear communication. I’m perfectly capable of booting him out myself.”

  “All right,” Aveda said, still giving Sam massive side-eye. “But remember what Lucy said about broken fingers.”

  “Ask Rose to get an extra number three combo,” I called after them as they finally exited the room. “Because I’ve been told that I’m ‘the worst food sharer in the history of ever.’” I made little air-quotes with my fingers.

  “I’m pretty sure they already know that from living with you,” Sam said,
leaning back in the rocking chair.

  The door clicked behind Team Tanaka/Jupiter, and we were finally alone. I was struck by the quiet that descended on the room.

  “Oof,” I said, flopping back against my pillows. “What a freaking day.”

  He didn’t respond, just studied me. His face still had that haunted look.

  “Dude, I know it’s part of the accepted social code that we no longer say this to other humans, but—you look tired,” I said. “Why don’t you go home, get some sleep?”

  “Bea.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the bed, staring at me with that unnervingly steady gaze. “Seeing you collapse like that today, then hearing about what you went through at the carnival while I was sitting on my ass talking to Kathy, it was . . .” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Really fucking scary.”

  “I’ve been in plenty of scary situations before, Samuel,” I said, trying to make my tone light. “It didn’t freak you out then.”

  “I know,” he said, giving me that intense stare again. “But there’s something about actually . . . seeing you in danger up close and in person, versus watching you in danger on a clip on social media or something. And then hearing what Nate and Scott found when they examined you . . . I know you said you’re okay, but . . .” His eyes searched my face, like he was trying to find a hidden injury. “I can’t . . . I don’t want to leave you. Until I’m sure.”

  “Didn’t you hear Aveda?” I said. “That alpha male bullshit does not fly here. I told you I’m fine, therefore I’m fine. The end.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them?” he said abruptly.

  “Tell them what?”

  “Tell them about what’s been happening with your power,” he pressed. “You figured out you could do that new thing when we were at the hospital and then today . . .” He frowned, leaning forward. “What if the Otherworld is changing you in some way? What if it’s dangerous? I mean, they already said you shouldn’t go back—”