Page 5

My brothers are pissed. Not quite as pissed as the Pyro was when I met him or when I threw up on him yesterday, but pissed enough. Last time I saw them this pissed off collectively was when I told them that I was moving out of our parents’ house to live on my own in the big bad city, despite the fact that I was twenty-one years old and already out of college, and all of them but Luca and Emmanuel, who were still in school at the time, had moved out already. They’ve treated me like I was thirteen from the moment that I moved in with them when I was thirteen, and over the last twenty-one years, I haven’t aged at all in their eyes. Though ... right now ... maybe I can sort of see why.

The CEO spine I sometimes manage to cobble together from all the roughshod bricks of my personality is nowhere to be found. It’s crumbled the fuck apart. I slink down in my seat at the dining table, my back curled into a C shape, my eyes hardly visible over the edge of the table. In the smallest voice I’ve ever even heard, I squeak, “Sorry.”

I hiccup and burp, and Emmanuel shakes his head at me. “Jesus Christ.”

Elena, our mom—their bio mom and my adopted one—slaps him upside the head. “Otros cinco dólares en el tarro.”

“ Cinco? Since when is the going rate for cursing five bucks?” Emmanuel grumbles, but he pulls money out of his wallet anyway.

“Inflation,” Elena responds, pointing to the jar on top of the refrigerator marked with a skull and crossbones and stuffed full of dollars.

“I’ve got twenty. Anybody break a twenty?” Nobody pays him any attention. My other four brothers are all still busy glaring at me while my dad prepares breakfast and Elena makes coffee.

“So you, uhh ... all are here?” My stomach pinches uneasily as I choke down another bite of tamale. Elena swears by her tamales as a hangover cure, but right now I’m eyeing my dad standing at the stove, hoping against all hope he’ll finish making blueberry waffles before I have to choke down another mouthful. Elena’s tamales are legendary for their experimental and, more often than not, horrifying flavors.

She might be Mexican, born and raised, but she’s lived in Sundale for the past fifteen years. A former nurse, she’s gotten really into the health-food movement in the last couple years. Her best friend, Tina—my brothers’, my dad’s, and my archnemesis—owns a fancy natural food and wellness store and has been encouraging Elena on her journey. Enabling her, may be a more accurate word for it.

This tamale recipe is undoubtedly Tina’s and is among the more outlandish that I’ve had the misfortune of sampling. An unholy union of corn, quinoa, and hempseed with black bean, kale, and pineapple filling. Pineapple. The sweetness of the pineapple does not complement the salt of the black beans, and—did she even cook the kale at all? Big chunks of it float around in my mouth like the stiff pieces of construction paper from some kid’s unfinished art project.

My dad stands at the stove glaring at me. He doesn’t break my gaze as he flips over a single egg with the speed of a man who sees his hungover daughter is suffering and fully intends to make her pay. And pay I do as I take another bite of tamale. I’m paying dearly.

Elena returns to the table and passes me a cup of coffee. Emmanuel gets up and goes to the swear-word jar on top of the fridge that’s permanently stuffed full of cash and starts rummaging through it, trying to find change. Luca, David, and Charles all glare at me with a glare that makes them look eerily similar, even though Luca and Charles take after our dad, who’s Black, and David, like our other brothers, is Elena’s spitting image.

Vincent’s stare is the least harsh, but that’s only because he’s half-distracted by his phone—new girlfriend would be my first guess. Work, my second. He’s a commercial airline pilot but, on his off days, sometimes takes tourists sightseeing by helicopter. Vinny has a stake in the helicopter sightseeing company Vantage Point, and it’s doing really well.

I swallow hard and try a new tack. “You have a flight today, Vinny?”

“No, Vanny.” He sets his phone face down on the table and gives me a glare twice as harsh as the rest of theirs combined. So much for solidarity. “Talk.”

“I went out drinking.” I make a stupid gesture with my hands like I’m trying out for cheer squad. In my haste to redirect it, I reach for my coffee. “After the workday I had, I got a little drunk.”

“A little drunk?” Vinny scoffs.

“How’s, um ... the waffles ...”

“The waffles will be ready when the waffles are ready,” my dad answers. “Sunday breakfast is sacred and can’t be rushed.”

I hadn’t forgotten that my brothers all piled into my parents’ house every Sunday for breakfast, but I had forgotten that this week’s brunch had been moved to Saturday because of Luca’s lacrosse game tomorrow. Despite the fact that both Mani and David were in serious relationships, it was rare that any of us missed this. I’d already planned not to attend—and given them three weeks’ notice—because of my meeting with the COE.

I’d been expecting to need to use the weekend to get started on our work for the short-term contract, but that had been voided, our fee was still unpaid, we’d taken on fewer clients in preparation for the COE work, which would have been our largest contract to date, both in cost and prestige, and it’s now unlikely we’d get any more work again ever , given the fact that my face is currently plastered all over the internet.

My brothers had, bless their hearts, at least had the decency to turn the TV off and take my phone away from me.

I turn to Luca. “So, are you ready for your game tomorrow? Last one of the season and all?”

“Vanny.” Luca might be younger than I am by thirteen years, but he’s just as stern as Charles, who at thirty-seven is the oldest. “Answer the question.”

“I forget the question.”

“Then start from the beginning,” Charles says. Not Charlie—Charles. “How the fuck did you end up being flown by a fucking supervillain home from a bar drunk as a skunk and sick as a dog?”

“Dios mío.” Elena makes a sign of the cross over her chest, as she does every time someone mentions one of the world’s seventeen supervillains— eighteen now . I shudder. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how I might have cost the world everything by simply ... doing what? Existing?

A fleeting and unfamiliar anger flits over me as I think about how rude Mr. Casteel was to me. And how strange my reaction to him had been. Maybe it’s how everyone reacts to him—that intoxicating smell, the intensity acting so bizarrely as a lure rather than a repellant—but regardless, I don’t like it. It makes me ... want to know him.

Not that Elena would ever stand for that. She was pissed when I told her that my company wanted to bid on the contract. She made the sign of the cross over her chest, just like she does now—just like she does anytime anyone mentions any one of the Forty-Eight aliens .

Me? I pitied them, knowing what it’s like to be alone as a child. After all, they arrived here twenty-two years ago when they were children with no memories of where they came from. Given up by some parents somewhere, they must have been scared, especially when they were rounded up, poked, and prodded. Some, like the Pyro, were kept for years in governmental facilities—agencies that later became one single entity known as the SDD, the Supernatural Defense Department—before public outcry forced the agency to release all of them and place them with loving host families.

Elena was among the few who quietly thought that they should still be locked up somewhere, that they were dangerous, and I’d always thought it was a poor moral failing on her part to think so ... but after meeting the Pyro, I’m feeling a little less generous toward alienkind and am starting to wonder if Elena was right after all.

I turn to her for help. “It wasn’t that bad. I just had too much day red.” I push out my bottom lip and watch Elena’s face soften. She comes around the table to me and reaches for my shoulder, but before she can touch me, Charlie swats the back of her hand.

“Don’t you dare. And you ...” He points at my nose. “The lip thing’s not gonna work this time. You can make your eyes as big as you want.” He slaps his palm down onto the table, rattling his orange juice glass, bringing back memories that make my stomach revolt.

Elena turns her concerned stare into a glare and thrusts the coffee pot in her other hand in my face threateningly. “You are good, Vanny. Gracias, Charlie, for setting me straight.” She mutters something in Spanish under her breath that I don’t quite catch. Embarrassingly, my Spanish is okay but still not fluent. I’ve never been good at languages, and I don’t really know why. No, I know why. I don’t practice. I’m too scared to say something wrong and sound dumb. You’re such a stupid little girl, Vanessa .

My brothers all laugh lightly at whatever she said, and I feel my face heat. I sip gratefully from my yellow coffee mug, handmade by Mani in his university wheel-thrown ceramics class. Elena loves it. She has artwork all over the house from all her sons. Mine, too, though I didn’t really make any art worth putting up until later in high school. Coloring just reminded me of childhood therapy. I didn’t really like doing it in my free time so much.

“Go on, Van,” my dad says, clomping over from the stove, a steaming skillet in hand. He dishes out eggs onto everyone’s plate but mine, and when I look up into his eyes, he’s got one eyebrow lifted.

“Are you holding my breakfast hostage?”

“You already have breakfast. And you’re not eating near enough to soak up all that wine. It was wine, right? The poor man—alien—was covered in it.” Elena tsks. She also makes the sign of the cross as she settles into her seat at the other side of the dining table. Her gaze moves to me. They’re all staring, and I can’t help it, my lips quirk in a little contented sigh.

Everything here is familiar, and I feel at ease in ways I’m not used to. I can tease here; I can be teased and know it won’t hurt. I can tell them about falling and causing a ripple effect that took out the whole boardroom and about new Jeremy—though I withhold the bit about my boobs—and I can tell them how I was caught, on camera, projectile vomiting onto the Pyro and how that footage has been circulating freely all over the internet in a sickening spiral that’s taken all the top headlines.

The Forty-Eight are rarely caught in anything but heroic or villainous circumstances, and if they are, they’re always looking dashing and elegant, walking down city sidewalks to collect coffee or doing other mundane tasks that prove they’re really just people too. Too pretty to touch, to be one of us, but not too godlike that they can’t be among us. Because they are, by whatever twist of fate, here with all their smoky smells and burning pink eyes and soft promises. I wouldn’t do that.

I tell them about all of it—except that. I don’t tell them about the soft moments. Those ... feel like mine, and I’m strangely loath to share them. They feel too dreamlike. And like a dream, I don’t want to voice it and have anyone tell me it wasn’t real.

I sigh. “And then I actually passed out. I didn’t know he ... um ... brought me home until Luca told me this morning.” The thought that I flew with a super—uh—person is insanity. I can’t wrap a shred of a thought around it, so I don’t even stop to try.

“Oh mi nina ... corazóncita ... mi amor ...” Elena murmurs sweet things under her breath and shoves away from the crowded circular kitchen table. She comes to me and wraps her arms around me. She gives me a hug that I feel all the way through my soul. She kisses the side of my head and crouches next to my chair. “You must have been so upset to be treated like that. You are so professional, and that creature doesn’t sound like he has an ounce of decency in his bones.” Her cheeks flare pink, and her dark bangs bristle against her eyebrows when she scrunches up her nose.

I can’t help but grin. Elena’s sincerity makes me feel so seen ... and exposed. I want to retreat, but I don’t at the same time. And then my dad comes over and gives me a squeeze on the shoulder, and when my dad swats Luca on the arm, he reluctantly leans across the arm of his seat and one-arm hugs me, and then my other brothers reach across the table, except for Charles, who continues glaring.

“None of that explains the wine.”

Vinny and my dad both groan. Elena’s jaw drops in shock. “Have a heart, Charlito.”

“No me llames Charlito.” He points at her and then at me. “And you still owe us an explanation for why you got drunk enough to let a fucking asshole carry you home .” He punctuates each word by reaching into his wallet and pulling out three five-dollar bills.

“You only owe two,” my dad, William, says.

Charles grunts. “Bank one for later. I’m gonna need it.”

“He wasn’t ...” I swallow hard, meeting Charlie’s gaze tentatively. Charlie returns my hesitancy with a glare that’s unflinching.

He has dark eyes and a dark complexion the exact same shade as my dad’s with only slightly looser curls. Elena always jokes that God played a cruel trick on her, making her carry a baby that turned out to be the spitting image of his father and without a shred of her. She also jokes that he must have heard her complaints because her next three sons all took after her with lighter brown skin, darker hair, and waves instead of outright curls. Luca looks the most like both of them with skin somewhere in between and dark, glossy curls.

I ... don’t look like any of them. Of course, that’s only if you look closely, which most people don’t. Most people see my brown skin, my mass of loose, puffy curls, and the same brown eyes we all share—except for David, whose eyes came out hazel—and just assume I’m Elena and William’s. Nobody ever corrects them.

But if you look for just a second longer, you’ll notice my skin isn’t the same shade of brown. It’s milkier, less golden caramel. I wash out in the winter and look like a ghoul in all our Christmas photos compared to the rest of my family, who all remain a vibrant, rich brown three sixty-five.

My hair is finer—not thin, to be sure, but I don’t have the thick strands Elena’s genes gave the boys. My hair is a lighter brown than any of theirs, mousy and kind of boring, if you ask me, which is why I keep it layered and colored so that it’s highlighted all the way through. It hangs around my shoulders, long and insanely poofy unless I twist it or put in a roller set before bed, which I rarely do. I kind of like the poof. Like disappearing into a big shrub, it helps me hide a little better. Well, I usually like the poof. But right now, I can see the way it sticks straight out of the side of my head in my peripheries, whacking my family members in the face every time they dare come too close to love on me.

“Wasn’t what?” Vinny prompts, seeming to have softened toward me again. He’s drumming fingers on the back of his phone.

“He wasn’t ... an asshole to you guys, was he?”

My brothers all scoff. My dad grumbles something as he bites into his eggs. Waffles have been served and so has bacon—some of which has even made it onto my plate. I greedily abandon my tamale derivative and devour the fat and bread, that good southern cooking churning in my stomach, probably twice as likely to make me purge as the tamale.

“He was an asshole,” my dad finally grunts loudly enough to be understood.

I blink, shocked to hear my dad curse. “What?”

“You heard me,” he grunts.

“También debes cinco dólares,” Elena huffs.

“What did he do?” I speak on top of her, surprise morphing into nervousness as I wait.

“First off,” Luca butts in, speaking louder than my other brothers, though all of them try to speak first. “He landed in our driveway like he owned the goddamn place ...”

“My driveway—” Dad interjects.

“Ahem?” Elena coughs theatrically into her fist.

My dad sinks into his seat a little bit. “Our driveway.”

She gives him an even more pointed look.

“Elena’s driveway.”

I smile. My brothers all smirk.

“Point is, he landed in the driveway, walked right up to the door—didn’t even knock—and the asshole melted the doorknob.”

“He melted it?”

Luca nods, but it’s Vinny who says, “I was still up—jet-lagged from Greece—watching TV on the couch in the living room when the door opened and a stranger fucking walked in carrying my baby sister’s body like a corpse.”

Vinny frowns, and I understand now why he’s more reluctant than the others to offer sympathy. That vision must have been ... not so nice. If it had been him, I can’t imagine how I’d have felt. He exhales deeply and cards his fingers back through his long hair, pulling out the hair tie and letting his man bun fall loose over the shaved sides of his head. He might be the only guy in the universe that can pull off the look, in my opinion, though when Elena first saw it, she about had a heart attack.

Vinny snarls, “I obviously got up and freaked the fuck out, and the bastard—even though he broke and entered—demanded to know who the fuck I was and wouldn’t hand you over, even after I told him I was your brother. Woke Luca up. He came in with his goddamn lacrosse stick—”

“Which he burned to shreds! Literally vaped it on the spot! The bastard owes me a new lacrosse stick!” Luca slaps his palm on the table, and my dad slaps him upside the head.

“To be fair, you did whack him in the back with it ...” David adds.

“He was trying to steal our baby sister!”

“I’m older than you,” I grumble.

Charles is thirty-seven, Vinny’s thirty-five, I’m thirty-four, with David right behind me at thirty-three, and then there’s a huge gap in which Elena was done having kids before an accidental Emmanuel, who’s now twenty-five, came along. Not wanting him to be “alone,” as she puts it, she had one more kid, Luca, who’s now twenty-one and about to graduate from undergrad.

Luca stabs David in the ribs with his elbow while Elena brings the swear jar from off the top of the fridge and slams it down in the center of the kitchen table. Charles is glowering at me, like I’m the problem. “He took you back outside and would have flown off with you if Mom hadn’t woken up and seen him holding you and screamed bloody murder.”

“And even after he came inside and put you on the couch, he still hit me,” Luca sputters, showing me the back of his head. I can’t see anything through his curls, but I still feel my heart lurch.

“He hit you?” I choke on my mouthful of coffee.

“He took my whole face in his hand, and he shoved me all the way into the bookcase. All the way across the room!” Luca should be outraged, but once his expression breaks, he can’t keep the grin off his face. “I didn’t know he’d be that strong. He barely touched me. Did you see it, Vin?”

Vinny’s mouth twitches. He nods. “It was fucking insane. I can’t believe you haven’t posted about it.” He glances at his phone.

Luca sinks into his seat sheepishly.

Vinny raises his eyebrow. “You did? How many views?”

“Five hundred K. Nobody believes me, though. They want to see him on the house cam, and nobody believes we don’t have one.”

“Don’t need companies spying on us,” my dad grumbles. “A good old-fashioned gate’ll do the trick.”

“Not if the intruder can fly!” Luca chuffs.

“That’s what the shotgun is for.”

“Did dad tell you he almost shot him?” Emmanuel snorts.

“Dad! You can’t shoot one of the Forty-Eight!” I squeak.

William shrugs. “Nobody comes into my house and threatens my little girl.”

I’m not sure how it’s possible to feel so much love, so much shame, and so much terror in equal doses, but the combination is too much. While the rest of my family might be chuckling and reliving the adventure, tears prick the backs of my eyes. I also feel like I could faint all over again.

“I ... I’m so sorry, everybody. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.” My throat constricts.

“Hey,” Charles says. “It’s not your fault. The drinking is,” he says, pointing his fork angrily at me. “But everything that happened after is on him.”

“You could have gotten hurt. He’s dangerou s.”

“We had it handled,” David insists, and that gets everybody talking simultaneously, including me.

“You slept through the whole damn thing,” Mani shouts.

“No lo tenías handled ,” Elena says at the same time.

I all but screech, “He shoved Luca into a wall!”

“It didn’t hurt. I could have still taken him.” Luca’s cackling. Emmanuel, seated beside him, tries to shove him off his stool.

“Querida, todo está bien ahora. Todo el mundo está bien y sano.” Another sign of the cross before she switches to English. “It’s good that we don’t ever have to see that terrible creature again.”

“And if he so much as sets foot on my porch, I’m gonna blow his damn head off.” My father bangs his fist on the table.

The doorbell rings.

Ding ding.

It happens like we’re in a movie. The laugh track rolls as we quiet and stare around at each other like we’re about to be invaded by enemy combatants. We all hunker down and, the children we still are, look to our parents. On my right, coffee frozen halfway to his mouth, David says, “You expecting somebody?”

“?Durante el desayuno?” Elena’s eyebrows pull together, and she slaps her linen napkin down onto the table. She starts to stand, prepared to go to war, but my dad puts his hand on her arm and pushes back from the table. A heavyset guy who’s six two to my mamá’s five four, he certainly looks more intimidating that Elena does—but that’s only if you haven’t met Elena and disturbed her family brunch.

“I’ll get it,” he says, sparing whoever’s life is on the other side of that front door. Or, well ... that’s what I thought until ...

“Papá!” Luca, Mani, and I all shriek—because as my burly teddy bear of a father leaves the kitchen, he grabs his shotgun, which just so happens to be casually lying on the window seat, nestled between Elena’s brightly colored pillows.

“Sit down,” he grunts, and so we sit and remain seated, mouths open wide enough to catch flies. We’re all completely quiet, straining to hear the sound of my dad undoing the locks and the new door creaking on an old frame. Some light murmuring ... but it doesn’t sound hostile ... before my dad returns.

“Shit, Vanessa.” My dad hooks his thumb over his shoulder, his dorky purple T-shirt with wolves howling at a faraway moon presenting an odd contrast to the shotgun hanging limp in his right hand. “You didn’t tell us you knew the president of Cambodia.”