“Why do you want to know?” he finally said.

“Well,” I said, taken aback by the coldness in his voice, “it’s just that you weren’t answering me.”

A voice popped up on my other side. “He means why do you want to know about superheroes?”

I turned to find a bald-headed youth staring at me with an equally closed expression. He had a twin—identifiable as such by a T-shirt that said i’m his twin with an arrow pointed in the first boy’s direction—who duplicated his expression and his stance, right down to the spindly arms crossed over his chest. As twins are wont to do, I supposed.

Keeping my eyes on the twins, I spoke to the man. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this, or is this not, a retail establishment? I buy, you sell. I ask, you reply. The customer is always right…any of this sound familiar?”

Dead silence.

Clearly the mantle of “reasonable adult figure” was being thrown solely across my shoulders. I took on a commanding stance—as one did when facing a prepubescent Inquisition—and crossed my own arms over my chest. When all eyes had finally returned to my face, I cleared my throat. “If you really must know, I’m doing a paper for school. You’ve heard of college, right, boys? It’s where you go if you haven’t ditched too many high school classes to hang out with Wolf-boy over here—”

“No!” A voice flew at me from the back of the store. I looked in time to see a head duck back behind an upside-down comic. Even if the voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of the single syllable, it wouldn’t have been an especially impressive show of vigor.

“No, you haven’t heard of college?” I asked sweetly.

“No, we won’t tell you about superheroes,” the man behind the counter finally said.

I returned my gaze to him, clearly the ringleader. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Zane.”

“Well, Zane, I’d like to speak to your manager.”

“I am the manager.”

Wolfie giggled beside me.

“The owner, then.”

“I’m the owner too.”

“Then sell me a comic book.”

“No.”

Confused, I stared at him. Then, figuring I’d been given this body for a reason, I leaned over the counter and asked again nicely. Olivia, I thought, could have done no better.

“No,” he said again.

Now, if I’d been in my own skin I might have given in to the impulse to take Zane by his greasy hair and slam his head into the counter so that glass became a permanently identifiable part of his features. But I was Olivia now, and Olivia would never. Besides, I didn’t relish the thought of taking on Wolf-boy, Tweedledee and -dum, the town crier…and whoever else might be lurking in the back of the store. I straightened and sighed, reconciled to trying reason.

With a grown man who read comics.

“Well, why on earth not?”

“Because earth is all your puny close-minded psyche can fathom!” yelled the crier, rising halfway from his chair. His face was bright red and he was unconsciously crushing the comic book in one balled fist. “There’s a whole universe out there you’ll never grasp! A whole world that can never be accessed by the likes of you!”

“Sebastian!”

The boy dropped back into his seat, deflated, and lifted the crumpled comic to cover his face. His hands were shaking.

“Is he on medication?”

A chorus of growls met this suspicion, and I could feel the hostility rising in the room. I inhaled deeply, imagining the air passing through my limbs, my chest, every cell down to my toes. I scented deodorant, raging hormones, and a taut thread of high-strung affront, but there were no weapons, no Shadow agents, and no superheroes in the bunch…including Wolfie and his plastic claws.

“Sebastian is a little sensitive,” Zane said unnecessarily. “We all are when people like you come poking around.”

Did he mean people who brush their teeth after each meal? I wondered, catching sight of something plantlike between his front teeth. “People like me?”

“People who want to study us like bugs under a microscope—”

“You tell her, Zane!”

“Who think we’re a sociological macrocosm to be dissected and analyzed, then served up in a report so you can get an A-plus in some moronic class that perpetuates the myth of modern-day society. But we don’t accept your mores and values, got it? We defy your definitions of what is right or wrong, and what is truly the norm. We defy you!” He finished off with a pump of his fat fist, accompanied by a loud chorus of victorious accord.

I looked around the store suspiciously. Seriously, reality shows were popping up in the strangest places these days.

“Now get out of here,” he said, breathing heavily, “before Sebastian really gets upset.”

I glanced doubtfully at the quivering mass of nerves at the back.

“Fine. There are other comic book stores, you know.” I hoped. “Somebody will take my request seriously.”

“Not in that dress they won’t.”

I turned to leave, the derision of a half-dozen adolescent boys licking at my heels, before I paused in my go-go boots.

Did superheroes take this kind of shit from mere mortals?

I mean, if I couldn’t face down a pack of Xbox addicts, then how was I going to rid the entire Las Vegas valley of twelve homicidal Shadow agents? Not to mention a being imagined into existence?

Turning back to Zane, I leaned my palms on the glass countertop, mostly because I knew it would annoy him, and pushed my face into his. The victory cries died off into a strangled and wary silence. “Look, forgive me for not knowing your password or secret handshake or whatever gets a person access into your labyrinth of anarchy here, but I need this information. I’m not really writing a paper. I’m not even in school. I mean, have you ever seen an undergraduate who looks like this?”

His eyes flickered, but the rest of his face didn’t change. “Then why do you want to know?”

I sighed loudly, then motioned him closer. Four bodies leaned in. Sebastian strained forward from his seat in the back. “The truth is, I’m a new agent for the Zodiac troop 175, paranormal division, Las Vegas. I’m the Archer, and I need to do some research.”

They all drew back as if propelled, or repelled, by a single force, but no one spoke. As Zane was nearly drooling again, I decided backing up sounded like a good idea.

“Shit, lady,” Wolfie finally said, scratching his half beard. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

“Yeah, man. We’re big Zodiac fans. Travis here has all the trading cards.”

His twin looked up at me. “I don’t have you, though.”

They all looked at me, wariness once again overtaking their features.

“I’m a new recruit. I didn’t even know I was superhuman until I underwent metamorphosis.”

Zane nodded thoughtfully. “Ah…a late harvest.”

“Ripe, though.”

I scowled down at Wolfie, who grinned.

“Show the lady where the Zodiac manuals are, Carl.” To me, Zane said, “I’m going to trust you are who you say you are, even though you obviously know nothing about your microuniverse and you have no identifying symbol.”

“Symbol?”

“Your glyph. You know, your Zodiac emblem? You’re not marked as an agent of Light or Shadow.”

Is that why they’d all been looking at my chest? I looked down, saw only impressive cleavage, then looked back up into a less-than-impressed face. I shrugged. “I’m working on it.”

Wolfie tugged on my hand. “C’mon.”

He led me deeper into the shop, passing Sebastian along the way. The boy peered up at me from the corner of his eye, extreme agitation marring his brow. Nothing, I thought, a little Thorazine couldn’t take care of.

“Boo,” I said, and he yelped and scurried away.

“Dang, this stuff itches,” Carl the wolf-boy said, yanking off his mustache as he walked.

I winced. “I thought you were taking hormone pills?”

“Nah.” He pulled off another tuft of his beard, studied it, then tossed it aside. “Model glue.”