by Amie Gibbons
The woman was in her fifties or so, but in pretty good shape for her age, and had about ten inches on me.
She didn’t make a sound as she stumbled back, just raised the baton again.
Something like a grunt sounded behind me and I didn’t have to turn to know AB had gotten up and Karma was struggling with her.
“She wanted you to power it,” Karma yelled, grunting again as the thing inside AB growled. “That’s why the infection came back with you!”
“Got it,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet and keeping my arms up.
My gun had skipped a few feet away and there was no way I was getting to it without the baton-swinging mama getting me on the way over.
Wait! Mama!
“You’re the one who cast the spell to go back in time in the first place, aren’t you?” I asked, keeping my eyes on her middle.
Arms can wave, legs can distract, but the center never lies.
If she was going to attack, I’d see it coming from her middle.
She didn’t answer.
“And you never left,” I said, licking my lips and trying not to look at my gun.
When would I remember to always bring a backup!
“That’s why we couldn’t find you. That’s why it was so fuzzy. Not just cuz you changed things, but cuz the person we were looking for literally didn’t exist anymore. Not in our time. What did you do? What was so important you’d risk setting off a series of disasters?”
Her lips pulled back and she growled at me.
What was with the growling!
My head snapped back.
“Holy crap on kittens, it’s still in you, isn’t it?” I asked. “The force thing, the infection? It already reproduced itself and part stayed in you and part went out, right? I’m right, aren’t I?”
How far had this thing reached since it’d been set free?
Wait, who’d set it free in the first place?
She grinned, eyes flashing green as she raised her hand and flicked her fingers.
Something grabbed me around the middle and pushed me back like a linebacker picking me up and running me to the end zone.
“No!” I screamed as I sailed over the side of the building.
Chapter sixteen
The ground rushed up.
Way too fast.
I screamed, putting my hands down like I was trying to catch myself.
And I slowed to a stop.
Floating in midair right above my still knocked out vamps.
Lucky no one had wandered by yet.
I focused on the ground, on pushing up away from it.
And started inching up.
“Holllllly crap,” I whispered as I pushed harder in my mind.
I still inched.
I lifted my arms, flapping them like wings.
And gulped down a laugh when I didn’t go any faster.
I squinted at the ground, straining my brain, imagined me picking my body up and moving it like I had AB.
I moved faster and finally cleared the top.
AB and… whoever the other woman was, cuz I still didn’t know her name, were shooting at Karma, the woman with some kind of red power balls and AB with my gun. They bounced off some shield around Karma but she looked like she was feelin’ the strain.
AB fired, but the gun wasn’t making any noise, quiet beyond even suppressed guns.
Magical sound suppression. That was a new one.
The gun clicked on empty and AB made a face, tossing it aside.
Karma waved a hand and sent AB sailing into the side of the little building pop up hiding the stairs up to the roof.
What were those things called?
So not important right now!
I landed on the roof and if any of them noticed, you couldn’t prove it by me.
Which meant I had the upper hand. The element of surprise.
What did I do with it?
AB pushed up, head snapping toward me.
Crap.
So much for the element of surprise.
She flicked her fingers with a whisper and magic grabbed me, slamming me to the ground.
I pushed against it and landed softly, popping back up like I’d hit a trampoline.
I was gettin’ the hang of this!
“You bitch,” AB breathed. “You’ll ruin everything.”
“Ruin what!” I huffed, squinting at her.
She stumbled back and caught herself before she fell, straightening with a smirk at me.
“You think you can take me?” she asked with a chuckle. “You don’t know the first thing about controlling your powers.”
My mouth fell open. “I found y’all, didn’t I? I saw you were messin’ with things. I saw that woman was the one who did it. I saw a lot.”
She snorted, and I risked a glance over.
Karma and the woman were shooting magic of all kinds of color at each other and ducking for cover behind shields.
The magic flew so thick it was like rainbows bouncing all over the roof.
Whoa.
“I meant your magic,” AB said. “You didn’t even know you had any besides psychic before last week. You have no clue what to do with it.”
Was it just me, or was she talking a lot for someone in the middle of a battle?
“You’re trying to distract me,” I said. “Why?”
She smirked and it was my turn to growl.
Powers. I had powers.
I just had to tap into them.
How had I gotten into my psychic powers when they first came on?
She took a deep breath.
Like she was focusing in.
Like I did.
I focused on her, on the power I knew I could control.
It wasn’t a flash like I was used to.
It was knowledge.
She was eating through AB, building up her strength. That’s why she was stalling. She wanted to draw up enough energy to hit me with one big blast.
“Karma!” I yelled. “Can you hit that one with the imbalance she created?”
Karma didn’t answer.
“Karma!” I said mentally. “Can you hear me?”
“How are you doing this?”
“That woman did the spell to come back in time and changed things so it started the spiral in our time. Can you hit her with that imbalance in this time? Can you hand her the karma you would’ve in our time?”
“I get what you’re saying,” she said. “I can if you get her off me long enough.”
I looked at AB.
I couldn’t do anything to her without the thing using the energy to reproduce…
No! No, that wasn’t correct. It hadn’t wanted me to shoot her.
So maybe it could only use her life force for itself if she took her own life?
And maybe, since it was in the middle of growing inside AB, it’d have to use its energy to save her if she was injured, if only to save itself or its babies or whatever.
My heart seized, and I took a deep breath.
I had to risk it.
“Please forgive me,” I whispered to my friend.
I focused on AB, grabbed her around the waist with my magic, and hauled her up.
And threw her over the edge of the building.
I flinched as the thump of her body hitting shot through the air like a champagne cork.
I said a prayer that that thing would save my friend to save its babies.
And turned and ran for Karma and the woman.
I tackled the woman from behind and her magic cut off as she belly-flopped.
“Do it!” I yelled at Karma, grabbing the woman’s head and smacking it against the ground.
Karen. It came to me just like that. Her name was Karen.
And she’d had a seriously good reason for changing the past.
Her daughter, Natalie, had been eleven when she’d been molested by her friend’s dad at a sleepover.
Karen hadn’t known.
Her baby girl had be
come withdrawn, angry, and only got worse as she got older. She fell into drinking and drugs, had gotten pregnant and miscarried at sixteen.
And a month ago in the original version of time, she’d killed herself.
She’d left her mom a note explaining everything.
Saying she was sorry she couldn’t be stronger. She’d been suppressing it for years, never got over it, and couldn’t take it anymore.
Her poor mother had had no idea what’d happened to change her happy, athletic, outgoing little girl until that note.
She’d broken, died with her daughter that night. Because she should’ve known.
And she’d searched magic shops and went to psychics until she hit on real magic.
And fixed the evil done to her little girl by killing the man responsible before he could lay a finger on her.
I slapped my hand over my mouth with a sob.
I didn’t like this new version of my psychic power. Visions were fuzzy and not real, like a TV show.
This was knowledge and emotion injected into my brain and way too real.
“What if you found out magic was real?” her voice echoed in my head, like she was speaking to me mentally through the thing that’d taken her over. “And all it'd take to undo the greatest tragedy in your child's life, was one little spell? Light a few candles, say a chant, sprinkle some salt, and that's it.
“You're telling me you wouldn't take the chance? Wouldn't try it? Just in case it worked?”
Karen, the thing inside her, whichever, flipped around and to her feet way too fast to be natural and punched me before I could get my hand off my mouth and someplace useful.
My head snapped back, and my eye exploded in pain as I stumbled.
I grabbed my eye, bile choking me as my stomach rolled up and my head pounded.
“Karma?” I thought as loud as I could as I backed up, keeping my good eye on the attacker.
“What!” she snapped.
“Can you put the imbalance on the virus thing inside her, instead of in her? Put it on that thing and all its babies? She was a mom saving her daughter from being molested.”
“You want me to curse the fucking magical rabies virus here?”
“Um, yes?”
Karen took a step forward and I backed up.
“I don’t know,” Karma said after a moment.
“Try? Maybe cursing it will stop its spread. Here and in my time.”
“I can try, but you’re going to have to hold her off. Can you do that?”
I nodded. “I’m gonna have to.”
Karen grinned, staring at me.
She ran forward with the speed of a vamp and I whirled outta the way barely in time, her shirt whispering across mine as she rushed by.
I turned and pushed with my mind, sending her over the edge.
Her scream cut off with a sickening crunch right after it started.
I ran to the edge.
My vamps were twitching, the motion saying they were healing themselves.
Karen pushed up to her feet, her head twisted so far to one side her neck had to be broken.
She grabbed her head with both hands and snapped it back into place with a crack that made me want to puke. She squinted up at me, slowly moving her arms like she was healing them too.
So she wasn’t gonna be out of commission long. The fall had barely stunned her.
And AB?
My heart leaped as I scanned the ground and didn’t see her.
Karen was okay, so AB had to be too, right?
I looked again, still not seeing her.
She was up!
That meant she was okay!
No.
My heart fell to my feet as my eyes scanned down closer to the building.
She lay so close to it I’d missed her at first.
Her body lay sprawled out, head toward the building.
Took me a second to realize why this looked so familiar.
She was in about the same position Thomas had been when the tulpa last week took him over and made him jump out of his apartment window.
That was some creepy, weird parallels there.
But he’d been trapped in limbo by a curse, still tied to the world, so we’d been able to put him back in his body.
Nothing like here.
If the fall killed AB, she’d stay dead.
And I would’ve killed her.
Murdered her.
On a hunch.
A whimper broke through my lips and I sank to my knees.
I’d killed my friend.
I lay on my side, pulling my knees to my chest and curling up.
I couldn’t do anything right.
It’d been my idea to go back in time. To bring AB. Even when she’d been so fragile.
This was all my fault.
Something sounded far away, a voice saying something.
I closed my eyes, tears filling them, and started sobbing.
I couldn’t do anything right.
So I should just stop trying.
Because all I did was make things worse.
If I stayed here, stayed still and closed my eyes, I wouldn’t wreck anything else.
I couldn’t hurt anyone anymore if I stopped.
People couldn’t leave me if I left them first.
People couldn’t hurt me if I stayed here and gave up.
“Ariana, snap out of it!” someone said loud enough to break through the clouds.
Snap out of what?
“Don’t make me hurt you!” the person said. “Fight it!”
Fight what?
The peace in the darkness?
Why would I ever want to do that?
I opened my eyes and I was in the ballroom from before.
I stood up, the darkness pulling me down gone.
No, not gone.
That dark blood red swirled above me.
Trapping me here.
I barked a laugh.
The virus had gotten into me.
It took me over through my grief about AB.
“And how do you fight yourself?”
I whirled at the voice, arms up, and took a fighting stance.
Me dressed in blood red scrubs faced me down.
“You can’t win,” she said. “I am your pain. Your regret. And you have so much of it, I am feasting right now.”
Regret?
Like the cave I’d been trapped in.
The puzzle pieces clicked into place and I laughed, slamming my hand to my forehead.
“You put the hit out on me,” I said. “Or somebody you took over did. That’s why it was so hard to trace, because we were looking for a person. The cave even tried to tell me. I could tell there was this thing feeding on regret. Why? Why go to all this trouble just for me?”
“Same reason I’ve been setting people off and boosting their spells. I need the powerful distracted,” she said. “Karma and the rest of her kind have been run ragged. You? Well, I wanted you dead or in a position where I could suck you dry. Took a lot more than I thought to push you over the edge, so to speak, but now I have the chance to fuck with the past too. Do you know how far I can spread with your power?”
Karma’s kind?
Not important now.
This stuff had only been going on a few weeks, so whoever’d let this virus out was probably doing whatever its plan was.
And it wanted the world of magic distracted.
Which couldn’t be good.
“Who set you free?” I asked.
She smiled, making my face evil and hard.
“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew,” she said.
“You don’t know? You’re a sentient virus and you don’t want to know where you came from? What if someone’s using you?”
She shrugged. “Don’t care. I’m free and spreading. That’s all that matters.”
“What are you?”
She was obviously trying to keep me distracted while she took over my body, but I didn’t know what to do
besides keep asking questions.
I need to fight. I need to get out of here.
Like she heard me, the virus jerked, squinting at me.
“You can’t fight me,” she said. “Don’t even try.”
It was my turn to smirk.
I ran full out at her, tackling her around the waist.
We slammed to the ballroom floor and I grabbed her head, slamming it against the ground.
My, I was getting mighty good at that move.
I slammed her head against the floor again and again until the skull split open.
And red goo the same color as the ceiling oozed out, covering my hands and crawling up my arms.
I jumped up, shaking my arms.
The goo stayed, inching faster and faster.
And beaded up.
Into itty bitty bugs.
I screamed as they bit into me with a shadow of the pain I’d be feeling if this was real, and water flowed out of my arms, washing the bloody bug things away.
They cried out as the water crashed to the floor, and my jaw fell open as the place began to fill with water so fast we’d drown in under a minute.
No.
I wouldn’t.
I was a water.
That’s what I’d kept hearing from my powers and others over and over again.
Maybe that meant more than my personality.
Maybe I had power over the element itself?
“What are you doing?” the virus screamed, making my voice high and shrill.
Wait, didn’t Karma call this magical rabies?
What if it really was like rabies?
Like water could kill the virus.
I treaded water as the room filled and she went under.
All I had to do was wait till the water filled to the top and push through the swirl of red up there.
How hard could that be?
Something grabbed my ankle and yanked me under the waves.
I couldn’t even scream before my head went under.
My lungs burned, and my eyes joined them as I forced them open.
No.
This wasn’t real.
And this was my element.
I took a deep breath of the liquid and kicked the thing holding me.
It didn’t look like anything resembling a person anymore.
It was a red slug maybe four feet long, with like a hundred long, thin white appendages coming out of its belly.
It had one wrapped around me.
“If I’m going down, so are you,” it hissed.
No clue from where, considering it didn’t have a mouth.
