Page 113 of Amethyst Flame
A second spikey cord of blue lightning hit my shield. My butterflies held but the force of the lash hurled me back. I hit the pavement on my hip, slid a few feet on my side, then rolled to a stop, face down. If my skin burned before, now it roared…and sparkled.
“Imo—!” I heard Dane shout.
And then a loud bang as something big and heavy hit the Kidnapper.
I pushed myself up to find him sprawled on the hood, the last licks of blue lightning snapping along the pants of his black suit. The windshield was smashed.
As Dane sat up, he shrugged off the shreds of his suit jacket and ripped at the shredded white shirt beneath. His bare chest was peppered at the center with hair and rippled with muscle. A cruel, thick stripe of deeply puckered red crossed his torso at a diagonal. But Double-O-Dane seemed okay.
The crowd went wild with a falsetto “OoooOooooh!” and, yeah, his physique deserved the approval.
In my peripheral vision, another tongue of light rippled toward me—
—I rolled, and it cracked the pavement at my side, leaving a black scorch mark and singeing my arm hairs.
Breath heaving, I came to a defensive crouch, searching the street for Hive Will. But he wasn’t there anymore.
Oh yeah. Fucking invisibility cloak.
Still jealous.
I released a field of butterflies to [map] him…but the area was so big, and if he could float, then could he also fly? The lights blinking and jangling all around me confused my vision.
As I searched the deepening sky, my attention snagged on the huge blinky billboard of the nearest hotel, which featured an image of—oh, no. Oh,god,please no. When I was done with Hive Will, I was going to kill Jacob. It was the pic of me in that purple catsuit from the mall. Amethyst power sparked and zapped on my open palms and whizzed around my body. Butterflies of golden filigree fluttered behind me.
Jacob had hacked the billboard.
Stylized text read:
~ Butterfly Witch ~
Coming This Summer!
And he thought people were going to buy that bullshit?
The lash came out of nowhere in a loud, hot snap across my shoulders. The pain blanked my mind for a sec and then seared. The smoky funk that reached my nose was…scorched me. Which made me hyper-aware that this could go very, very badly if I didn’t get myself together.
And still my guts, my lungs, and my brain buzzed and hummed, probably accelerating the megabot effect or whatever Will called it when he’d begged for help while I blithely ate fries dipped in milkshake.
My gaze darted from glittering light to camera flash, searching. My butterflies were too diffused to show me where Hive Will might be hidden.
Dane had climbed off the hood. “Get in the car, Imogen. Please.”
“He’ll just blow it up,” I returned. “And Jacob is doing nerd stuff with St. Croix.”
Trembling in cold, rank fear, I slowly rotated in place as I waited for the next blue strike.
And all the party-goers grinned like Legendelirium’s corpse crows, as if my impending death was merely their momentary entertainment.
Into the hush of the street, a sudden, fast electronic beat drummed first from the Kidnapper’s speakers and then blared from speakers on The Strip.
A wave of black dots swam in my vision as St. Croix’s big, clumsy nanobugs joined the fray. Apparently, he had more where the first ones had come from. They grouped into little stars, floating at different intervals above the street like magical fireflies.
Oh. Good. Like a 3D net. This would help with the invisibility cloak thing since I couldn’t fight what I couldn’t see.
My terror numbed me, but it also scattered my thoughts. And I needed to think. Like now.
M’kay, so…somehowmy butterflies responded to the muscle memory-turned-instinct of my gaming commands. Maybe it was because in Legendelirium, magic was magic, nohownecessary.
