Then the river monsters and demon packs stopped for a while, just when I was getting good at them.

Minerva and I ended up strolling up and down the Charles watching for river monsters, handling smaller calls like bar fights and assisting with arrests.

Most drunks and criminals surrendered instantly when they saw Minerva. I knew she had a reputation as a top-tier hero, but I had never seen the power of that before. Most of these guys had spent the last twenty years watching her on TV and had seen what happened to anyone or anything that fucked with her.

“Did we really just do a whole night on bouncer patrol without punching anybody?” I asked. “I feel like I’m slacking.”

“You should be damn proud of how you did tonight. It’s the most impressive thing about you so far – the way you handle humans with just enough force to resolve a situation, and you always try to talk first. I am not training you to be Sonny Mao. I am training you to be smarter than Sonny Mao.”

We didn’t see any real action until multiple packs of zombies rose up out of the river and tried to crawl on land. I started to punch one and Minerva said, “Wait. Can you pick these off at range?”

“Yeah, but it would be total overkill,” I said. “Takes a huge amount of magic, blasts everything in front of me in a big cone shape, and I can only do it three times before I have to rest.”

Any other woman would have made a joke here, but Minerva said, “Can you scale it down? Use just enough to destroy these things, without wearing yourself out?”

I was about to say no, but I had strict instructions to never say no to Minerva, and this sounded like exactly the kind of thing I needed to figure out.

I still used too much power the first few times, spraying water in all directions, blasting body parts halfway across the river.

“See?” I said. “This thing is impossible to narrow down.”

“Don’t worry about aiming right now. Just try to regulate your power level, and see how long you can keep this up, just running on Boston background magic.”

The packs were slow enough, we ended up strolling along the river, just chatting, while she watched me take out zombies. My range was too short, and I couldn’t aim for shit, but I managed to scale Anson’s artillery spell down to a kind of magic shotgun that could blow zombies apart.

Minerva turned out to be a surgeon with the brand, lashing out and popping their heads off with a casual flick of her wrist, whenever one got past me. I had learned to respect it, and stay out of its way, after the first few times it cut through my wards and melted my pants or got close enough to burn the hair off my arm.

We got in a rhythm after the first hour. I kept trying to speculate on where these things were coming from, and why they seemed to be in such a wide variety of clothes, like some of them had died hundreds of years ago.

But Minerva refused to speculate on why questions. “You do not have time to ask questions during a fight. Every moment you spend asking questions is a moment you’re leaving yourself open.”

I nodded, then we both proceeded to ignore her advice, walking side by side, casually destroying any zombie that popped up.

Minerva got a call in the middle of this and briefly stopped fighting while she took it, encouraging me to pick up the slack and handle everything for a minute on my own.

Whatever happened on that call seemed to irritate her, because she put up the brand and started smashing zombies hand to hand, busting their heads open as she sent them soaring back over the water.

“Whoa!” I said. “What pissed you off?”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“It’s the Public Relations drone from Bluestar 2 again, trying to be super polite while she begs me to post ‘slice of life’ and ‘tourist videos’ from around Boston. They tell me my likeability rating is dropping again, and I need to post some ‘spontaneous unscripted content’ to get my numbers back up. I used to get these requests once a month, now they’re calling every day.”

There were long gaps between attack waves after the first one, so we had an unusually long time to chat. I don’t remember how we got on this, but we ended up arguing about toaster tarts.

I was talking about how hard it was to eat breakfast on this schedule, and Minerva said she just kept an entire cabinet full of toaster tarts at home.

“You have an unlimited Mitsumi credit card, and you’re not even buying name-brand toaster tarts? You seriously just get generic ones at distro?”

“I think these were originally intended to go in MREs. Anyway, they’re just as good as anything with a label on it.”

“I had to eat generic toaster tarts in the compound sometimes. Anything tastes good when you’re hungry, but god I hated them. What’s your favorite flavor?”

“Raspberry.”

“Raspberry!” I gagged theatrically. “That is the worst. In the compound no one would even trade you for raspberry! At least strawberry had some flavor. People would trade you double value for chocolate and vanilla, and one guy liked cinnamon. Blueberry and wild berry at least tasted a little like fruit. I wonder why they didn’t have apple? I could really go for some apple toaster tarts.”

The argument escalated until we realized we had been walking for an hour without encountering a zombie. We put ourselves off duty and turned zombie watch over to the normal cops.

On the way back, I suggested, “You know what we should do? We should settle this with an audience. Let’s buy a dozen boxes of toaster tarts and let the audience rate flavors with us.”

“That would get PR off my back, but Kovak, I am really not good at things like this.”

“Well, who knows, maybe I am. I don’t even have to be a superhero. I’ll just pretend I’m your charming personal assistant. And besides, if they really are planning to use me for secret assassination shit, showing my face in a viral video would really piss them off. Let’s do it!”

* * *

We came back to her room and took turns in the shower, washing zombie guts off our clothes.

Minerva still refused to close the bathroom door, so I closed it for her, rummaging through my overnight bag to get fresh clothes. I was destroying shirts and pants so fast; I had learned to keep spares of everything in her room.

Minerva emerged from the shower, and I had to turn my head again to give her some degree of privacy. She had spent so many years changing clothes in labs and locker rooms, she couldn’t even understand the concept, and she thought my insistence on it was cute.

She flopped on the bed in sweats and a tank top and said, “Have you ever abused a concierge before?”

I laughed and said, “No.”

“Oh, you have to do it at least once. Remember, the first step to being a VIP is to stop worrying about what’s possible. That is not your problem. Just ask for what you want and give them a deadline. Don’t be rude, but don’t waste time trying to explain yourself. Call and order what we need for this stream thing.”

I shrugged and called the concierge desk on her secure line. I told them we needed twenty boxes of toaster tarts, in as many different flavors as they could find on short notice, a mix of generic and name brand.

And then, at Minerva’s suggestion, I told them to have the chef make a gourmet toaster tart fit for a goddess, raspberry, and then an apple one for me, to be delivered a couple hours after they dropped off the boxes.

“For some reason,” I said, “I always want apples when I hang out with you.”

Minerva and I killed some time watching live streams recorded by other heroes, watching Jade Katt and Sonny Mao do spontaneous streaming and travel stuff, like PR wanted Minerva to do. Jade was remarkably good at it, doing a casual California girl bit that may have been her real personality.

Sonny’s videos were usually a robot camera following him around, watching him drink and tell crazy stories like he didn’t know he was being filmed.

I tried to look up video of us at Pink Sensation and found Sonny dancing around with a pixelated blob that was supposed to be me, doing awesome Angel of Death moves with a fireplace poker while we wrecked Herman’s house.

Minerva seemed to really enjoy the property damage, to the point where she made this weird barking noise that I guess was supposed to be a laugh?

“Did they ever try to send you to a DMA mousetrap like this?”

“Oh no,” Minerva said. “I’m supposed to stay away from stuff like that so they can sell my merchandise to kids. I still get to sign stuff for little girls now and then. And even if they could keep it quiet, they wouldn’t invite someone like me to a place like that. They know I can’t control my strength, and everybody assumes I’m associated with the Church of Olympus.”

“Are you? Seems like you should have a hundred guys following you around.”

“No,” she shook her head. “The church hates me since I’m an exile. They put out a new statement every year, denouncing me as a harlot.”

“Sorry. Is it even a real church? Could I go there and pray to Apollo or something?”

She shrugged. “The church is mainly a front for Hera’s spy stuff, so if there are any real Olympians associated with it, I would be the last to know.”