Page 107 of Amethyst Flame
Instead of trying to push back at him with more force, I eased the outer reaches of my shield forward, inverting it around Will’s furious, in-my-face attack.
With a sharp cry, he threw up his arms to block the energy bouncing around him. Blue sparks sizzled and popped, like microwaving a potato in a piece of tin foil.
When I glanced back, Dane was hustling the two white coats toward the open door where presumably Teller’s dad had fled. “Hurry,” I barked at Dane. “I’m not sure how long—”
Will hit me with another bolt of blue. This wasn’t the nanobot version of a drunken shove he’d tried before or even the more coherent blue whips he’d slung at me in the desert; this was a death radiance aimed at my face. Luckily, the butterflies were faster than I was. They collapsed inward in a silvery rush, and their reflective surfaces scattered the concentrated beam in all directions.
The backwash of energy burned past me, and I yelped at the stinging scatter. I’d flinched away instinctively—I might be nanobotically enhanced, but that shit still hurt—but I straightened up at Dane’s incoherent shout.
He leveled his gun at Will who was shaking off the burst of expended power.
“Dane, don’t!” As much as I appreciated a high body count in my games, I just didn’t want anyone else to die. Maybe it was selfish. Maybe I wanted to think that someone would still hesitate before putting a bullet in me if I fucked up beyond hope.
To my shock, Dane looked at me—and didn’t pull the trigger.
Instead, he threw himself at Will, full-body tackle, fist swinging, schoolyard-scuffle style.
They went down, hard, in a tangle. In another heartbeat, Will would recharge.
If he infected Dane…
I rushed forward, shaping my butterflies into a [gather] as I’d done with the spilled water in my Banta office. If the human body was seventy percent water, Will was probably that plus thirty percent murderous intent.
With a strangled bellow and snap of blue, Will threw Dane off him. Six feet plus of Secret Agent Man went flying and crashed somewhere behind me, but I was already enclosing Will in a bubble of amethyst, all the way around this time.
Through the translucent haze of my butterflies, his expression was a rictus of anger and pain as his bugs ricocheted back at him from all directions. I pointed another stream of butterflies at his cage, amping up the containment strength.
On the back of my hand, the old, healed X looked angry and inflamed—the rush of purple power and blood under the skin turning a bright, pomegranate hue.
I couldn’t keep going much longer. My body was shaking with the start of that post-sugar/caffeine/all-nighter letdown.
I had to convince Will to fight what was inside him and not me. That was the only way he could win. The battle with himself was the one-on-one he really needed.
I tapered off the outward rush of my butterflies, maintaining just enough flow to hold the amethyst bubble in place. Within its confines, Will was hunched over, hands on his knees, his shoulders moving in gasps, like he’d run a marathon or was crying.
But when he glanced up at me, his eyes were just purely pissed.
“Will, listen to me. I’m being straight with you: I’m gonna fall apart any minute here.” Well, soon, anyway. “And I think you are too. But hold on just a little longer, and help will be here. This isn’t the first time the avalanche has happened to someone. They will put you in stasis. You and me. We’ll sleep while the problem is solved.”
“Sleep sounds good.” When he lifted his gaze to mine again, there were no blue sparks left, no anger either. I felt like I was looking into the heart of him… And there was nothing there.
“Doesn’t it? And when we wake up, we’ll be free.” Maybe my response lacked a touch of assurance this time, considering no one could go back to exactly who they were in the past, right? It wasn’t like we’d truly forget who we’d been and what we’d done with these wild powers. Those memories—and the last smattering of nanobots trapped and suspended within us—would always be there.
“No more bugs crawling around under my skin? No more wondering what’s happening to me?”
Back to managing the Desert Freeze. Back to scrambling between decisions about what to do with art school and my mom and the rest of my life. Back to my days before all the secrets and danger and purple power.
I hesitated a heartbeat too long. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop it. Because I didn’t know.
Will straightened. “That’s what I thought.”
I widened my eyes, my stance, and the torrent of butterflies streaming toward him.
But it was too late. With a twist of his grin and his fist, he stepped through the amethyst bubble in a thunderous burst of icy blue.
Three shots rang out—bam! bam! bam!—but Dane’s bullets just sank into the nano-blues and hung in the air like a joke.
Until they slowly spun, the little black eyes of their hollow pointed ends glaring toward us.
