Page 1 of Amethyst Flame
CHAPTERONE
I waselbows-deep in cleaning the Desert Freeze juicer—nasty business, the ass-ends of fruits and veggies squished down to pulp—when a soft throat-clearing brought my head up.
“Um, excuse me. I’m so sorry to bother you. But would it be possible to get a straw?”
The young mom who’d just gone through the drive-thru window and ordered three Frootee Sun Funz! was hovering on the other side of the counter, one eye on me, the other angled toward the car parked at the front. Two kids of, like, waist-high age were wrestling in the backseat. As much wrestling as they could do while strapped behind their seatbelts, anyway.
I smiled at her. “Sure. How many?”
My minion Rique, who was supposed to be minding the window, cleared his throat in a much less nice way. “Straws are only for people who need them.”
The mom flushed the bright color of a strawberry Frootee Sun Fun! and started to turn away.
I glared at Rique and grabbed three straws. “Here you go, ma’am. Have a Freezing day.”
She took the straws and hustled out. Rique huffed.
Now if I actually thought my insubordinate subordinate gave a flattened fig about the environment or whatever, I might’ve been gentler and explained how that poor woman clearly had issues or why would she come into the Desert Freeze (no franchises available, sorry!) in Arbolito, Arizona, when she had a car that could take her literally anywhere. But Rique had been gunning for management for a year now and hadn’t managed to overthrow me yet, so he’d flex about frickin straws since that was all he had, loser.
“Finish cleaning the juicer,” I told him with a gimlet stare. “I’ll take the window.”
Grumbling under his breath, he switched with me. As I passed the machine, I trailed my hand across the controls and sent a subtle pulse of energy through one finger. Not much, just a little flicker of violet sparks across the stainless steel…so that right when Rique hunched over it, the machine whirled to life and blorked up a disgusting mix of silage and soapy water. He let out a little shriek.
I tsked over my shoulder. “Ooh, didn’t you check the power? That’s a safety violation, Rique. You could lose a finger if you’re not careful. I’m afraid I’ll have to write this up.”
Through a smoothie facial he would’ve paid big bucks for in Paradise Valley, he whined, “But the power is off.”
Hmm, yes, it was now.
“Speaking of off,” I said, “I’m out of here in ten minutes. Amanda is in charge while I’m gone.” More grumbling from my hapless underling. “Be good, cuz I’ll be watching.”
When he slouched away with more under-his-breath invective, I used the [activate] command, a tight V with my thumb and pointer finger, at the security cam in the corner.
With the gesture, I sent a nearly invisible thread from my Molecular Tactical Hive toward the camera. Over the last five months, I’d trained my tiny robot moths to block and reactivate the camera on command, so I needed only a flick to send them on their way.
The first time I’d tried, I’d fried the cam totally and had to lie to Shirleen, the Freeze’s owner, that a freak lightning bolt (i.e. meeeee) must’ve caused the damage. Feeling guilty, I even offered to pay for it. But the next day, she happily reported that a new security company had given her a ridiculously cheap monthly contract that included all new hardware.
Damn it, Dane. I’d’ve bet my measly monthly salary, he was watching me, wasn’t he? Super Secret Agent Man thought I’d burned all the moths out of me when I had to fight off a mad scientist to save my mom. But I knew he would still want to keep one eye on me. As if I had no more say over my life than a little kid tied into the place other people thought I should stay.
I’d tried to convince Shirleen to stick with our old company—“Maybe they have a rewards program?”—but she wanted something more.
“Can’t be too careful around here,” she told me. “And we seem to be having a lot of power problems these days.”
Okay, most of those were me too.
But if I was going to master my purple power I had to practice.
“You can’t control it. Too often, you act on your emotions. Maybe with a little discipline and maturity—”
“Fuck your discipline and maturity.”
Control it, Dane had told me, more than once. Fuck you, I’d told him, every single time. And as for maturity, he couldn’t be that much older than me…five years tops.
That responsehadlacked some discipline and maturity, it was true, but in my defense, he’d kidnapped me. The only reason I wasn’t locked in some mysterious warehouse somewhere was because Dane thought I was just a nobody again. And he needed to keep thinking that.
Messing with his cameras was just for practice.
Well, plus it was so much fun to imagine his annoyance every time he had to leave his super secret hideout, wherever that was, to replace the battery, the power cable, the sensor, the SD card, oh, and that hot day at the start of spring when the weather-resistant housing had somehow melted right over the lens. How weird was that? Global warming really is a problem, I guess.
