by Danny Bell
It was just the two of us, I had made the call that Ann should stay at the store and act as the guardian of the group. It was an idea Ann was wholly uncomfortable with, but it was either her and a spellbook or Claire and a baseball bat. If I was being honest with myself, Olivia was far more useful in a fight, even without her gun. Ann cast a single wind spell and passed out; she was going to need a lot of practice before she could start soloing anything. Besides, the second I brought up Logan’s family, there wasn’t a chance in hell I could keep Olivia on the sidelines.
She was a lot more relaxed now, however, as we could see into the living room that Logan’s older brother, Andrew, was relaxed on the couch and watching a show in the dark, the pale glow illuminating his yawning and nose picking. If there was a danger to him, he was at least unaware of it at the moment, and it wasn’t immediate.
The monstrous eighty-five-inch television in their living room was an insistence of Logan’s mom, I’d been told. Not even for the viewing experience, she just wanted the place to feel important to guests. “What is he watching? Blade Runner or something?” Olivia asked, peering past me.
Even through the haze of rain, I could’ve been across the street and still be able to make out what Andy was watching. That screen pushed the boundaries of good taste. “Nah, that’s Overdrive, it’s dope.”
“You say dope now?” Olivia chuckled.
I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Yeah, trying something new, people say dope.”
Olivia refocused her attention on the screen. “At least you aren’t calling people ‘dawg’ anymore.”
“Hey, relax,” I chided. “I remember when you got really into ska for a bit, we all go through our phases.”
Olivia winced but didn’t make eye contact. “Oof. Fine, are we going in?”
“Yeah,” I replied, mockingly dancing in my seat. “Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.”
“Wait,” Olivia gripped my arm as I moved to unbuckle my seatbelt.
“They don’t love you like I love you?”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “No, idiot. A plan?”
“The front door feels like a pretty solid plan unless you prefer to go all Kool-Aid Man,” I hoped she didn’t notice my accidental rhyme. “Look, it’s not that serious. We just need to keep a third eye on papa Kobayashi, so we go in and high-five Andy, you pretend you don’t like third-wave ska, and while that confuses the heck out of him, I’ll steal something scry worry and drop a smoke bomb or ninja dust or something. Or just leave. Dealer’s choice.”
“And you see absolutely nothing wrong with showing up here in the middle of the night, unannounced?” Olivia asked slowly. “In this storm? With me? Think it through, you’re almost there.”
“Because you were the last person to see his brother, I get it,” I confirmed. “It’s not ideal. They don’t have a chimney, and you ain’t Santa, so we gotta suck it up. Five uncomfortable minutes, and we can keep his dad safe. Seems like a fair trade.”
Olivia gave me an impatient stare. “Yeah. Probably. Or we can use my key and go in the back.”
It was my turn to be just a little impatient. “And what if he hears us? It might be a bit more difficult to explain why we’re low-key actually sort of technically robbing his parent’s place.”
My friend’s expression changed for a moment into something unrecognizable, and her voice softened a little. “Hey, seriously,” she said, maintaining eye contact. “Let’s just do it my way, okay?”
Alarm bells rang in my head, and I suddenly had a thousand reasons why this might be hard for her, and my anxiety-riddled brain came up with a million tiny hints Olivia might’ve been giving me before this point. Why we sat quietly in the car for so long when we arrived, why she was so eager to come despite just the obvious reasons. Olivia wasn’t being a superhero here. She felt guilty.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to show that I caught on. “Pretty smart, actually. Andy might tell his dad we were here. Side door it is.”
I pulled the hood up on my coat before we stepped outside, and the second we were out of the car, it was like my magical senses were being blasted with static from distant AM radio stations; that magnified sound of ants crawling, punctuated with a high-pitched squeal filled the back of my mind, even if it never touched my ears. Olivia felt it too, and I could only imagine how spectacularly we might fail if we tried to cast without words or my rod in the middle of this.
My coat was buttoned up to the throat, I was wearing waterproof hiking boots, and I still felt immediately like I’d been drenched in a cold shower. I almost didn’t stop to grab my bookbag, but it seemed a lot safer to have it.
I felt guilty sneaking around here, even if I had good cause. I would’ve bet that Logan’s brother would’ve welcomed us inside with open arms, and his mom had never done anything to slight either of us. She was very mildly narcissistic, just barely so, but she loved her sons, and this was her home. Even Logan’s dad, angry as he was, was justified. At least from his perspective. Best I could piece together, parts of the Orochi approached him with evidence of something magical about me, be it my involvement with Freyja or, well, anything. And after that, he’d be likely to believe anything, even that I or Olivia or the whole gang had something to do with the fate of his son. Not hard to believe, given that he was probably being told right around ninety-nine point all of the nine’s percent of the truth. With our playing dumb for months, we lost all credibility.
So yeah, it fell on us to keep an eye on him, but breaking and entering, even just the entering part, felt like we were adding to our wrongness pile.
Olivia pulled the gate open carefully as to not make any noise, not that anyone would’ve been likely to hear it over the wind and rain, but it was probably just a move she was used to. The moment we were on the other side, though, the key was in her hand, gripped tighter than she probably needed to. Something about the way she held that key made me nervous enough to hold onto something of my own, and on instinct, I went for my rod.
It buzzed like a hornet’s nest.
“Olivia,” I said absently, staring at the rod in my hand. When she didn’t respond and kept moving toward the backdoor, I repeated myself as loud as I could without yelling. “Olivia!”
“What?” she hissed, not turning around as she unlocked the sliding glass door.
“Seriously, wait!”
She finally turned at the urgency in my voice and looked at me quizzically.
I don’t think she could see what I was seeing. The rod pulsed in my hand like it was gulping down stray magic, something was expending massive amounts of it carelessly, and even through the haze of the rain, I could feel it like steady jolts from a taser. “There’s something happening in the back house.”
“Talk about it inside?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“No, whatever this is, it’s big,” I said to myself, holding the rod out in front of me now with both hands, I almost didn’t realize that I was allowing it to divine for more, that my feet were moving toward the door. “It’s huge!”
My friend called after me, but I only half heard it. I crept forward until I was at the door, the rod threatening to burst into splinters, and I placed a hand to the door and pressed gently. It wasn’t locked; it wasn’t even latched. It swung open effortlessly to reveal a living room with six figures in green, silk robes standing in a candlelit circle around a shirtless Kaito Kobayashi as he lay on his back. I recognized a few of them. The museum guy I was supposed to try and save. The politician who stabbed me with her tail. The ice boy who nearly froze me to death. They were chanting, and their voices reached a crescendo as the power in the room spiked.
That’s when the snake slithered into Kaito’s mouth and down his throat. And that’s when I gasped and drew every eye onto me.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
I was utterly unprepared for what I was seeing, but thankfully, not a single person there expected me to just walk in on…whatever the hell this was. And so, it b
ecame a quick draw, six on one, and I was totally outmatched. Even if I focused on one or two of the most dangerous of them—and I had no way of knowing who that might be—surely someone else was going to get me. So, I did the only thing I could think to do in that situation. I stopped trying to hold onto the stray magic accumulating in my rod, quit trying to control the swirling energies, and relaxed my grip on it all, everything in the rod and within me, and allowed it to flow out of my very being as a burst of pure kinetic force.
I was borrowing their stray magic. I just gave it back.
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did that. It seemed like a profoundly dangerous idea born in the split second of a profoundly dangerous situation. The result was catastrophic and immediate, an invisible concussive explosion that lifted several people off their feet and obliterated a considerable section of the roof and most of the front of the backhouse.
Janet had been closest to me, and it was with some barely acknowledged glee in the back of my mind that she took the brunt of my assault. Her skin had begun to change in color and texture as she lifted into the air, bowling over Makoto and three others I didn’t recognize and soared fifty or sixty feet into the air along with most of the roof with a trajectory that probably sent her a couple of blocks over.
I hoped she landed in another voting district.
The power expended from me was overwhelming, unfortunately, and I collapsed in a heap, stunned for at least a moment as it felt like every muscle in my body seized and the breath was sucked out of me. And as I fell, I could see that I’d missed a couple. The first was Kaito, who suddenly sprang to his feet with inhuman intensity in his eyes and screamed at me like a rabid animal. The second, and far more unfortunate person to have missed, was ice boy. He had a name, and I’d heard it, but it was the furthest thing from my mind just then.
He just stared at me for a moment in disbelief, the weight of what I’d done a moment ago overcoming him. Or maybe he was just still freaked out about how our encounter ended the last time, it was hard to tell. Either way, his eyes were somewhere between panic and fury, and his snake side must’ve won out, because I could see him leaning toward fury. Ice daggers appeared in either hand, formed from seemingly nothing but the falling rain, and he pushed past Kaito and over the rubble and advanced on me.
Something made him stop, and as I struggled to get to my feet, I realized it had been Olivia. To my horror, he looked to her and prepared to hurl one of those daggers, and for reasons I’ll never know, Olivia chose that moment to take instruction from me and attempt a magic word with her spell.
“Pare-feu!” she shouted, but it lacked conviction, and she was a hair away from stumbling over it. And if anything, the rain certainly didn’t help. It was these factors and who knows what else, but the end result was the same. A wholly unimpressive disc of heat formed in front of her, maybe a foot in diameter, and it did very little to slow the projectile.
Maybe it knocked the icicle off target, and maybe that’s what saved her life, because at least when it struck her, it hadn’t been in the heart or the head. It was the stomach. Olivia staggered back through the backdoor, eyes wide with disbelief.
My grip on the rod tightened, something else in me taking over as I regained my breath and the use of my muscles. A second hand that almost didn’t feel like my own joined in gripping the rod and pooling every stray fleck of magic I could draw, I activated the stored strength in my power gloves and swung like a kid in little league trying to earn their absent father’s love.
There were two magnificent cracks. The first was ice boy’s entire damned kneecap and the surrounding bone and cartilage as something ruptured with the impact of my blow. That much force could have shattered granite into dust, and I found my mark on a mostly human leg. He howled, but unfortunately it was in unison with me as the unfortunate second crack came from my left wrist. The strain of abusing the power gloves while low on energy had finally caught up to me.
There was a burst of pain and then numbness as I got to my feet and shoved the rod in my book bag with my good hand, scrambling toward Olivia as she braced herself upright in the doorway. Kaito was, peculiarly, not moving, but the others were all recovering. With my good hand, I was fumbling for salvation, and my hands found it. Ann had told me to only break it in case of emergencies, and if this wasn’t an emergency, I wouldn’t want to see what qualified.
An opaque, black sphere covered in cloth and rubber bands. It occurred to me that Ann never got around to explaining to me what this one did, the same way she wanted to see my face when I drank her magic meth beverage. I could only hope it wasn’t anything all that pleasant.
I was with Olivia now, at her side in the doorway, and with a reassuring look, I hurled the potion at the ground between them and us. It shattered, and a black liquid, thicker than water and seeming to be at immediate odds with the rain, began to pool and seep into the concrete before growing wildly out of the ground and into the air like a wall of chalky black tendrils manically searching for anything to hold. In seconds, it had nearly covered the entirety of the backyard and was still growing. I was agape at the impossible growth, not wanting to find out what would happen when it found something to hold.
Jesus Christ, Ann, what is Wilma teaching you?
It was the only thought I allowed myself to have before remembering myself and gingerly pulling Olivia into the house. She was hurt but standing, and that had to be good enough.
A door swung open in front of us; it was Andy, and before he could say anything, his eyes went past us to see the monstrosity in the backyard, and his face filled with terror.
“Run!” I screamed at him, and he didn’t stop to ask questions, turning and fleeing for his life, down the hall, and out the front door, into the storm. We were right behind him, though at a much slower pace. Except when we got as far as the living room, I dumped Olivia on the couch and heard a gasp of pain as she winced, still clutching her stomach.
My friend was breathing frantically and looked at me in confusion. “Why are we stopping? We have to go!”
Sounds were coming from behind the house, terrible sounds of tearing and gnashing, and my gut told me that their combined talents were going to overcome our distraction sooner than later. “We won’t make it in the car, and even if they don’t catch us, they’re going to follow us anywhere we go.”
Olivia didn’t know what I was suggesting, and it wasn’t a great option by any means, but I didn’t have time to debate with her. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “We’re going to have to go in.”
“Go in what?” I heard the sliding glass door slam and break in the other room. We were out of time.
I turned my gaze away from her and to the glow of the absurdly sized screen, still flickering images of a dystopian future full of the cybernetically enhanced, digital ghosts, and questions of what it means to be human.
I pulled my friend into a hug, focusing on the show and remembering a quote from the show.
“The clouds will not break despite the rainfall. The waves will rise but not crash. You will seek distant lights but you will not find safe harbor. Not until you turn and face what chases you.”
As we fell into the show, I realized I had no idea what any of that was supposed to mean.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We crashed hard onto the cold concrete of the nightclub’s dance floor, our rain-soaked clothes immediately creating hazardous puddles for anyone with two moving feet and shut eyes. My already fractured hand folded under the weight of my body and I screamed in surprise, a brief but throat-shredding noise that went unnoticed by a sea of dancers all moving as if controlled by the music, most of whom held a look like they were all a million miles away. And even if they weren’t, the massive, pulsing bass thumps and piercing electronic beats mixed with the neon and lasers and UV lighting probably made noticing much of anything an impossibility.
I tried to ignore the pain radiating through me, and I inelegantly pulled Olivia to her feet and encou
raged her to keep moving. I wasn’t sure how badly she’d been hurt, but the dance floor was no place to find out. The last thing we needed was getting roughed up by a bouncer or worse. I dimly recognized this place. It was a club called Thrasher, and given that it was still operating, that meant we were somewhere between the first and second episode of Overdrive. Sooner rather than later, there was going to be a firefight in here between a synthetic and a bounty hunter, a drug deal gone horribly wrong. A lot of people were going to get hurt, hundreds shot or blown up, and this place was going to be shut down. I’d rather prefer that we weren’t here when that happened.
We shoved our way out of the back of the club and out into the rain, nearly falling when I misjudged the depth of a dirty black pool of water in the alley. The rain was gentle at least, but I couldn’t help but feel like we couldn’t catch a break. Olivia stumbled her way to the opposite side of the alley, her back slamming into the wall under the glow of purple neon that came from some rooftop signage. She slid to the ground, breathing heavily as she did.
It took everything I had to peel off my gloves, and even my good hand ached and swelled horribly when I did. There were tears in my eyes from the pain, and wiping them with my rain-soaked coat sleeve only made my face wetter. I shoved the gloves into my bag and leaned down to check on my friend. “Let me get a look at that,” my voice came unsteadily. Using my good hand to pull back her coat, I breathed a sigh of relief as I did. For one thing, Olivia had been layered densely because of the rain, a sweater, hoodie, and an unseasonable ski jacket I never thought I’d see her wear in Los Angeles, let alone in July. Credit where it’s due, she knew how to dress for the mountains, and that translated to being dressed for a proper storm. It did its fair share of work in stopping most of the icicle. Her heat shield, weak as it had been, didn’t hurt either. Still, there was a puncture wound about the size of a dime just above her hip that didn’t look terribly deep, and I probably made things worse by pulling the layers of clothes away to see it. She was still bleeding, but not excessively.
