The sound of her own voice seemed to shock the air around her, like chemicals dumped into a pond, because she could swear that she saw it shimmer around her. In the branches far overhead a bird of some kind chirped, and something else squawked in response, and a third, deeper voice chattered a command for them both to shut it. Wren could relate to that third voice.
After a few minutes of waiting nervously for something—anything—to come raging out of the trees or rising up from the soil after her, Wren gathered her legs underneath her more comfortably into a cross-legged position in the dirt. Her palms now rested flat on her knees, and she pushed back, feeling her spine unkink and straighten, and her heart slowly return to a more normal beat, while her skin slowly lost the warm, red flush of fear.
Think, Valere. Don’t just react. She had been caught in current backlash before—she had been the cause of current backlash before—and it had never felt like that. And yet it was, undeniably, current that she had felt. Thick, angry current, black like tar and strangely familiar…
Black tar. Angry.
Her heart stilled, but her body shivered in recognition. She had felt that combination before, yes. Inside herself, in her core, in her veins and under her skin, like sludge instead of blood and bone. She had felt it inside herself when she wizzed last year, when the pileup of trouble, cumulating with several Nulls trying to rape and murder her had sent her into current overload. The greatest fear of any and every Talent, to be so lost to the current inside and out that all sense of self-control disappeared into the storm. It had been days before she realized what was happening, and once she did, the situation had gotten so bad that insanity had been all that allowed her to survive and do what needed to be done.
In the dark hours of the Blackout, when she had been the focal point of the Fatae-donated current, when she had led the Cosa in striking back against their enemies, sanity would have gotten her killed.
Nobody came back from wizzing. Not ever. She should have been lost in that abyss, too, driven by despair, overwork and too much current use. Instead, her partner, Sergei, and the demon P.B. had dragged her back out of the abyss, barely and by the skin of their teeth. It had taken a magical bond P.B. had created—or allowed to be created—between them, and by extension, between P.B. and her partner/on-again-off-again lover; a bond that had never before—so far as they knew—been attempted, much less established.
That triangular bond of friendship had saved her sanity, and her life. Whoever she had touched out there just now wasn’t so lucky. It was still lost within the maelstrom, howling and alone.
Had it been alone? She remembered feeling something deeper, below the blast, like the echo of a scream….
The feel of that anger made her start to shake all over again, and she backed away, retreating to a safer distance from even the memory. Jesus wept. He wept for the sinners and blessed them in his name. She wasn’t religious, her upbringing casually Protestant and left behind when she went to college, but those two words, Jesus wept, had resonated with her, curse and prayer all in one. And in this case, both curse and prayer were wholly appropriate.
Wizzarts were dangerous. Not just because the overload made them crazy, but because crazy made them—what was the word Sergei used? Feckless. Without control, without any concern for their own well-being, they could access more current than was safe…and that much power in the hands of a madman—or woman—was never a good thing.
She brought the shaking under control, schooling her body into obedience. That wasn’t her, hiding her essence deep within the earth’s crust. That wasn’t her core, so dark and tarry, rather than clear and sharp. She wasn’t wizzed. She was in control, damn it. She wasn’t a danger to herself, or anyone else, not any more.
Whatever—whoever—had snapped at her back there was a danger. And yet, the wizzart hadn’t hurt her, even though he—definitely he, she thought, remembering the taste of the current’s signature—he had been angry enough to do some serious damage. Angry and frustrated and quite mad.
But he hadn’t hurt her. She kept coming back to that, above and beyond the anger and the crazy; that and the inescapable fact that that current-signature had been oddly, confusingly familiar. How could she know…?
Wren swallowed hard, a sick queasiness rising in her gut that had nothing to do with fear. “Oh damn it to hell and back. Max?”
It was half question, half realization, and it had the unexpected, unplanned, and unwanted result of bringing him to her.
Unlike the last time Max appeared, there was no blowout of electronics, no sudden windstorm of energy. He was just there. Older than she remembered him being, still dressed in his usual sloppy sweatshirt and khaki shorts showing off knobby knees, but his face was even more like a dried apple, surrounded by a mane of shaggy, white hair. His blue-green eyes were still bright—too bright, and too wild to trust. She could feel the current crackling within him, making him unsafe to touch, unsafe to be near.
This time, though, his body shimmered outwardly, too; the current visibly feeding on him even as he fed on it, some unholy symbiotic frenzy. It was terrifying, and terrifyingly beautiful, like a fire raging out of control. Which, she supposed, it was. An electrical fire, destroying him from within. Destroying anything too close.
Some part of Wren’s mind that wasn’t busy panicking wondered if he had always been like this, if everyone who wizzed looked like that, and her descent into the same maelstrom was what allowed her to see it now—and if she, too, looked like that to his eyes.
Those bright eyes stared at her without blinking. “Hey hey hey, brat. Hey, little girl.” His voice was rusty, as though he hadn’t used it in a long time.
Wren took a deep breath, and calmed down. For the moment, at least, Max seemed to be, well, not sane, but in control. She hadn’t been a little girl in years—decades—but he had been a friend to her mentor for decades before she was born, and would probably always see her as a thirteen-year-old with braids and no brains.
Right now, she was okay with that. It was probably why she wasn’t dead, those few random, faded, fond memories still caught somewhere inside the crazy. Just don’t rely on it, Valere, she reminded herself. Don’t assume a damned thing. He could and probably will snap at any instant.
“Max.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, considering how her insides were churning. “It’s really not so good to see you.”
He cackled at that, a scary-ass sound. “You’ve been busy, brat.”
Stewart Maxwell, also known as The Alchemist for reasons that she’d never had explained. Every time she encountered him she barely got away with her life. Not that he had any grudge against her specifically—he was fond of her, the girl-child she had been—but wizzarts just naturally tended to the homicidal. So far he’d tried to pitch her over a cliff—seven years back—and then brought up a current-storm to wipe her off the face of the earth a few years ago. She didn’t really want to know how he’d think appropriate to kill her this time. Or what she might be capable of now, to try to stop him.
Try, and fail. She had no illusions about that. She was good. He was crazy. Crazy trumped even very good, every time. But they could do significant damage to anyone caught up in the area during the battle. Better not to get into it at all.
There was a reason nobody in their right mind stayed near a wizzart. Their entire maddened existence was dedicated toward channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every living cell turned toward the goal of becoming the perfect, one hundred percent Pure magical conductor. And that included their brain cells.
Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action, without any thought to consequences or responsibility, only more and more and more of the lovely, seductive, orgasmic power. There was never enough to satisfy, and chasing it made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious, and deeply dangerous. She had to get away; but carefully, carefully.
“What happened to the dog?” she asked, trying to buy time, figure out how she was going to get out of this without further