Page 76 of The Fantastic Fluke

Weird. No one ever rang the bell except for the occasional political canvasser. I’d been put on the religious zealot no-fly list when I’d told them I was a mage, and sent them off with a little of their own incessant social energy funneled into a big old mental “you’re not welcome here” sign.

“I’ll get it, you go ahead and eat,” I told Fluke, and headed for the door. Either he understood me or he didn’t give a damn, because he was scarfing down another piece of sandwich as I left the kitchen.

As I opened the door, I had a momentary fantasy of Gideon standing there in the doorway, all flesh and blood, and one of those romance movie moments where I threw myself into his arms in slow motion.

Instead, Lina Merton stood on my doorstep. Well that was a giant fucking step down from what I’d been picturing. I tried not to frown at her, and I’m sure, failed horribly.

“Um. Mrs. Merton. Can I help you?”

She offered a bright smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Your friend told me you had the day off, and I thought maybe we could talk. But she said you had agreed to sell her half the shop.”

Ahh, she was miffed and wanted to air her grievance. “I’m sorry, but yes. We’re going to give it a shot, try to make a go of making the store our own. Bringing it into the twenty-first century, you know?”

Oddly enough, she didn’t seem too bothered by that, just gave a little sigh and nodded. “Well that’s understandable. It’s a great spot, and you’ve got a clientele already. I’m sure you’ll lose some of the older people, but it’s a college town, after all.”

“That was what I was thinking,” I agreed.

But she wasn’t leaving. What the heck did she want?

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Again, she sighed. “Oh, you’re going to make this hard, aren’t you?” I only had a second to try to formulate a “what the hell?” response, but she didn’t really give me time. Instead, she grabbed a baseball bat that I hadn’t noticed she’d leaned against the side of the house and thrust the rounded end of it into my stomach. “The appropriate thing to do is invite a lady in. Didn’t anyone ever teach you manners?”

I fell back, gasping for breath, and tried to slam the door shut in her face.

She was ready for me, and used the bat to block the door, then put all her weight into opening it. She was thin and small, but I was both exhausted and trying to catch my breath after her blow, so she got in. Then she slammed the door behind her and locked it.

“This is worth the work, though,” she said with a sweet smile. “The second you tried to help that guy in my shop, I knew I’d hit the motherlode. I can’t just go around killing people forever, you know? But I can only absorb some of their magic before they die. But you? Even a tiny fraction of your magic should get me over a five.”

“You,” I gasped, trying and failing to catch my breath. “You killed Kurt.”

She shrugged, her expression a calm little, “What can you do?”

That was when an orange-red blur hit her from the side, launched straight at her face. Fluke was a hell of a lot bigger than Cheese had been, but all I could see was her baseball bat.

I lunged at them both, but she shoved me back with invisible force. Magic, a kind I didn’t recognize on sight. Body magic, like a doctor. Of course. That was why I hadn’t seen anything in the coffee shop, and how she’d managed to burn out people’s magical abilities. There were reasons the magic that could manipulate the bodies of others was so heavily regulated.

I reached for the convergence, but too much, too fast, and it reached out to snatch me and drag me away. I had to let go, shove it away, watching as she swung the bat at my familiar.

If I’d felt like I couldn’t breathe before, it was amplified a hundredfold. I tried to gasp out his name, or scream, or anything, but I couldn’t get air into my damned lungs. Even the little I managed refused to make a sound when I pushed it back out.

She hit him full in one of his front legs, even as he lunged at her again, barking for all he was worth. He went down with a yelp, and then a pitiful whimper.

“Fluke!” My voice finally worked, but it came out pathetically tiny and high. I tried to ignore the black spots dancing in my vision, calm my racing heart, and reach for the convergence again, but instead, Lina did it for me. She reached inside me with her magic and pulled.

The immense energy of the ley lines bubbled up out of me and flowed directly into her. The ecstasy that crossed her face was downright nauseating.

I struggled against her, but she had me pinned both physically and magically, and my control of my magic just wasn’t good enough to wrench it back from her.

Fluke pushed himself up and sprang at her again, this time clamping his teeth around her ankle.

She screamed and pulled back the arm with the bat to swing at him.

In the ultimate act of desperation, I yanked on the convergence, pulling at the hardest current I could find and shoving it into the stream that was flowing into her.

She gasped, and her bat hand went slack. At first, she seemed even happier, falling back against the door, eyes rolled back and mouth hanging open. That wasn’t really the kind of feeling I wanted to give my killer, so I shoved harder.

That was when she started screaming.

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