Jessica’s Volt pulled to a stop at the top of a mountain path there should have been no way it could have climbed up. Where the ground wasn’t loosely-packed snow, it was treacherous gravel and dirt, and the road itself—if it could even be called a road—ended with an abrupt widening at the beginning of a vertically-tending coniferous forest. Snow-wrapped pines towered in the last hour of daylight above them. The trees seemed as they were the elderly grandparents of the ancient forest near the Olson’s lake-house—these trees were the ancient of ancients.

Jessica turned off the car and looked over to Seth. “Hope you’re bundled enough.”

He tugged his black neck-and-face gaiter down. “As much as I can be.” Seth replaced it over his nose, then ensured it was under his beanie in the back, leaving only his eyes exposed. He wore a thermal tee and a flannel under his jacket, and then sweats under his snow pants. Gloves, wool socks and his boots were a given. It was a cozy two degrees out, Seth wasn’t screwing around.

They stepped out of the car and Seth’s eyes immediately watered, as a howling gust of wind whipped past him and stung the bit of exposed skin he had. He gritted his teeth and growled out a few curses that were unintelligible even to himself—more simply a string of wordless exclamations of discomfort. Fortunately, the wind seemed to bounce off his jacket and pants. He looked over the car at Jessica, who smiled in amusement. She didn’t even have her neck gaiter up or a beanie on her head.

“God, I wish I was Russian,” Seth growled.

She shrugged. “Ne bud sukoy.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s that mean?”

“It means,” she said, raising a flashlight and shining it into the woods. “That you should tell me if you need hand warmers.” Seth caught the faintest hint of a smirk as she strode forward. He stamped his right foot in the snow and followed her, willing his third eye open as he did so.

The darkness under the boughs of the forest brightened. Flecks of ambient magic hung in the air like fireflies, little specks in hues of orange, purple, and blue. A few ones here and there were a dark anti-light, more like miniature black holes the size of a dime or smaller. All of the ambiance gave way as Jessica and Seth walked through them, pushed on invisible currents of air or whatever magic caused them to float there rather than fall to the earth.

The trees were not so dense as to hamper their movement, or even to require them to walk in single file. Jessica glanced at him. “How close do you think we are to where you saw the flare?”

“Depends on how close to the ridge we are. It came from beyond that.”

Jessica nodded. The ground sloped upwards, through she’d found them a finger of the mountain that would take them over the ridgeline without too much trouble. They walked in silence for a bit, the only sound the snow under the heels of their boots and Seth’s breath behind the gaiter.

“You never did explain what the aura I saw under the mountain was. You kind of just locked yourself in your room and told me to get ready to be cold.”

She nodded, sweeping the flashlight back and forth along their trail. “You really want to hear scary stories in the dark?”

“I doubt it’s scarier than anything I’ve heard so far.”

“Well, then it’s class time.” Jessica stepped over a root protruding into our path. “Time to learn about the planes of existence—at least more in depth.”

“I’m all ears.”

Jessica raised a hand in front of her, palm up. Seth saw her aura flicker with a concentration of will for a moment, and then magical exhaust leave her mouth in an exhalation of breath. A flame flickered into being above her palm. Another spell was cast and the flame froze solid in place, a hovering ice sculpture that might as well have been motionless blue flame. The ice shattered into mist, and then pebbles sprang into existence, orbiting each other for a moment like a stone atom before she let them fall to the ground. The utter lack of effort to seamlessly transition from one spell to another was readily apparent.

“Fire, Earth, Water, and Air,” she said. “The four Elemental Planes, and the energy source of a lot of magic. You can feel the connection when you evoke. You are literally pulling essence from another dimension to create whatever effect you wish. Then, the four Elemental Planes intersect through the three Planes of Reality—The Negative Plane, the Intersection and the Astral Plane.”

She paused and looked at him, making sure Seth was following along. He was certainly trying his best. “Seven total planes. Got it.”

“No, not seven. There’s a lot more. But the biggest point is that there are six that all converge, with the focal point being what is called the Intersection or the Material Plane—our world. You know all the training we’ve been doing to astrally project?”

That always recalled an unpleasant memory for Seth—the girl Jessica had saved dying just a day later. “Yeah,” was all that came out of Seth’s mouth.

“You can do that with any of the Planes that converge on the Intersection. Project your soul from your body into them. It’s just that astral projection is the most common, and the easiest, because the Astral Plane is almost identical to ours aside from where the denizens reside.” She looked up, and pointed through the trees at the half-moon. “Up there,” she said. “In the Astral Plane, that’s the equivalent of Earth. That’s where everyone lives, mostly. The Astral Plane is also used for making spirit oaths, which are like blood oaths, but they kill you quicker if you violate them.”

“Who lives in the Astral Plane?”

“Fey. A lot of spirits. Beyond the scope of this discussion. What I’m trying to get to is the Negative Plane. You watched Stranger Things, right?”

“Yeah, but the second season kind of lost me.”

She gave Seth the most serious expression of offense he’d seen from her. “You take that back, Seth Blackwell.”

He shrugged.

“Well, the Upside-Down? Kind of like the Negative Plane… just without the analogues to the real world. There’s no guarantee of a dark-side version of anything being there. What’s more is that the Negative Plane is where energy for a lot of necromancy spells is pulled from. Even more, it’s inhabited—and a lot of the most powerful creatures there have an aura like the one you described. Orange wreathing black. Particularly one race of creatures, which I’m really, really hoping we’re not dealing with.”

“Care to tell me what that is?”

“Nightshades,” she said, tight-lipped. “Motherfucking nightshades.”

“And those are…?”

The ground took a sharp upslope and they both stayed silent for a minute as they had to use their hands to keep moving up. It flattened out in about fifteen feet and they found themselves on the ridge-line, suddenly exposed to powerful gusts of wind. These ones did bite through Seth’s jacket and he shuddered, crossing his arms. The last rays of the sun stretched across the mountainous landscape of Colorado, diffracted over peaks and casting deep shadows through valleys. His third eye highlighted everything, making the darks darker and the lights lighter. The purple hues of the sun were brilliant shades of violet and crimson, giving its last farewell to the land before it dove behind the horizon and plunged the world into fathomless night.

“They’re bad, is what they are,” said Jessica. “The easiest way to think of them is demons, but that’s only an analogy. Demons and nightshades are two separate races, with entirely different abilities and personalities… But both are outsiders to our plane that like to pop in and occasionally fuck things up until an Order gets called in to put them down. Or Hunter, I guess.” She sighed as her hair whipped around her face. She seemed entirely unperturbed by the wind chill up here. “Spot anything or do I need to take a minute to open my eyes as well?”

Seth scanned the side of the mountain that sloped away from the ridge-line. The forest continued, coalescing further into thick, tangled glades that drained into a valley in the side of the mountain here. The whole thing was a swirl of shadows and now completely shielded from the last rays of the sun. The trees gave off their normal green aura, but it was muted here, not as bright as other patches of forestry on the mountain.

Seth pointed. “Aura of the trees seems duller there.”

“Yup, that’s it,” she said. “Someone’s probably using the trees like a giant battery for their spellwork. I mean, honestly, if that’s all they’re doing, this isn’t our guy. Per the laws, taking life-force from plants is the legal way of doing things. You can skim a lot off the top of older trees without doing any damage at all to them. We might just have someone experimenting with magic who knows people don’t like necromancy.”

“What about the nightshade?”

“Well…” Jessica shrugged. “Might be unrelated. I wouldn’t expect the same type of person who would summon a nightshade to be the same type of person who would obey the laws governing necromancy power supplies. But, since this does seem to be what we’re looking for, let me take a minute to open my eyes. I want to see what you’re seeing.” She set the flashlight down beside her, and knelt in the snow, closing her eyes. The sun shone its last as she did so, and slipped the last bit behind the horizon, plunging the world into darkness.

Seth stared down at the forest below them, now illuminated by stars and sparse moonlight. It looked like a half-mile descent, through foliage and snow drifts. Fun. The peak was to their left, rising up into the sky a good couple hundred feet still above them. Seth hoped they weren’t in for another avalanche. Or could Jessica stop one of those? He hoped so.

Snap.

Seth whipped his head around and stared into the forest they’d come from. The ambient magic still floated everywhere like fireflies. The wind whipped past, spraying snow up in little dervishes as he scanned the trees. he saw no auras, just unsettling darkness between the trunks. Seth narrowed his eyes and bent down to pick up the flashlight.

Snap.

Seth turned hard and fast, aiming the flashlight in the direction of the noise. He caught the eyes of a small fox, snow peppered throughout its hair. They stared at each other for a microsecond before it turned and bolted off into the dark. Seth let out frosty plume of air through his gator as he scanned the treeline with a quick sweep of the light. Nothing.

“Alright,” said Jessica, standing up. A third eye now sprouted from her forehead, looking identical in every way to her other two. “I’m ready.”

Seth nodded, staring at it for a long moment. “Jessica, do I…?”

“No, you don’t have one. This is a spell known as True Sight. This is beyond even what you can see. Come on.” She set off down the mountain.

Seth glanced back into the forest for a second before following her. The slope here was a lot harsher than on the other side, and he had to work to maintain his footing as they made their way into the denser part of the mountainside forest. The ambient magic was less prevalent here, and there were far more of the void-motes hovering in the air. Those and the orange flecks seemed to dominate the air underneath the dull green auras of the pines.

Jessica spoke ahead, her voice barely a murmur. “There’s been more draining than is legal, I think…” She moved to a tree and placed a hand on its trunk, closing her two natural eyes. The one in the center of her forehead stayed open and she stayed there for a long moment. “This… Isn’t good, Seth.” She opened her eyes again. “These trees are teetering just above what’s needed to stay living.” She looked back with a concerned expression. “Stay on your guard, Seth. We’re entering a bad place, and I have no idea what to expect.”

The ground began to even out as the woods grew thicker and closer together. The auras of the trees were inconsistent. Some had almost their full power, others hardly glowed at all. The colorless auras clung to those like flies to a rotting piece of meat, moving with more speed and unpredictability over the trunks than they did just floating in the air.

“Jessica,” Seth hissed, grabbing her arm. “What the hell is that?” He pointed up and away.

The trees there formed a small archway of branches, a small sliver of a path that immediately devolved into a further tangle of trunks. In the branches over the archway, some forty feet or more above their heads, crouched a dark shape. Two crimson slivers like narrowed eyes glowed in the vague semblance of a head.

“It’s a spirit,” said Jessica flatly. “Harmless unless you engage it.”

Seth nodded and they passed under the watching entity. He could feel its red eyes following them. The wind whipped hard through the trees in a sudden, howling gust, and Seth shivered hard. The wind sent the flecks of magic in the air swirling, and he felt the void-motes brushing over his clothing. They had a small weight to them, a gravity almost. They were hungry. Harmless, maybe, but hungry.

Jessica slowed us as they came to a bridge. It was small, crossing a narrow frozen stream, and made of well-treated wood. The thing had a dim aura of pale blue, almost too faint to be seen.

“Abjuration,” said Jessica. “The bridge is most likely trapped.” She crouched down, peering at the frozen stream. “Yeah, I think there’s a boundary line here. The spellwork is on the other side, though—I couldn’t tell you what actually happens if we cross it.” She made a snowball for a moment, and then chucked it across. It landed on the opposite bank with no effect.

“Jessica,” he said. “Where’s the ambiance?”

She stood up and stared with him. Across the stream, there were no flecks of orange or any other color. Only the little voids wafted through the air—and not a single tree beyond wasn’t covered in them.

She pursed her lips. “We’re near wherever this person is doing their spellwork. That looks like a blight—a necromantic backlash. He’s pulling way, way too much. This forest won’t survive a year. Not if he keeps this up. This forest needs a druid to cleanse it, and I say that hating druids.” She sighed. “But, I need to know what’s going on now.” She looked up to him. “You can stay on this side of the boundary line if you want.”

“No way-”

“I can shield myself, but I don’t want you getting caught in the backlash of whatever that abjuration line is. Let me go first.”

Seth shone the flashlight around the way back. The woods drank the light, it didn’t seem to go as far over there. “Be careful.”

She nodded and strode towards the bridge. Her boots crunched through the silence of the snow as she approached it, then changed to dull thumps on the wooden planks that composed the arching structure. She walked right up to the middle of it, then murmured a few words and stepped across the center.

Nothing happened. She stopped on the other side and looked to Seth with a big shrug. “I- Oh.” Her third eye narrowed as she studied something he couldn’t see from this side of the stream.

“That’s not for keeping humans out. Get across, Seth. Now.” There was a vague urgency in her voice, and he didn’t hesitate to follow her instructions.

Crunch.

Seth turned at the halfway point and stared out into the dark woods behind him as he heard the sound of a foot in the snow. He swallowed and scanned right to left through the forest. The wind whispered through the trees. Not a soul stirred among the motes of ambient magic. He finished crossing the bridge and then turned to stare at the wards with Jessica.

A high wall of pulsating sky-blue energy rose from dead center of the bridge, and followed the curve of the stream. The color shifted shades and lines swam through an ocean of fractals along it. Occasionally, it would crackle, and an arc of what looked like electricity would hop from one point to another.

“Uh, what am I looking at?”

Jessica stepped back onto the bridge and touched the field, trailing her hand through it. “Very specialized warding magic. There’s a generic spell called a Prismatic Wall. I think this is a custom version of it. It’s keyed to…” She closed her eyes. “Creatures from the Negative Plane. They can get out but not in.” She looked back to Seth. “You don’t craft a spell with this kind of power unless you’re trying to keep something extremely dangerous away— like a Nightshade. I think this is powerful enough to hold one back.” She walked back to Seth and crossed her arms while still staring at the wall.

“I’d put some Negative energy through it to show you what it did, but I don’t want this down if the nightshade is out there and I have no idea how much of a reserve this thing has. This wall is multi-day ritual territory.” She turned away and began walking. “For now, we find out what it’s guarding.”

Seth followed her and they continued their journey into the woods. The trees grew more and more crowded and deathly the further they went. Snow was thin on the ground here, as not much of it could make its way down through the canopy overhead. Just as the forest narrowed to near-impassable, it opened and they found themselves standing on the edge of a wide glade nestled in what felt like a low point in this little mountainside valley. In the center of the glade was a house.

The house wasn’t in good repair. It had needed a fresh coat of paint for at least a dozen years, and maintenance for even longer. Of the ten windows presented to them on the front, five on each level of the building, four were boarded up. The door stared hungrily from the veranda. The roof sagged here and there, but had yet to truly give in to its age.

Many things were wrong with the scene. One, snow didn’t adorn the house. Not the roof, not the veranda—not anywhere. The snow actually stopped a good twenty feet from the foundation of the house, as if nature itself wanted nothing to do with this place. No patches of melted ice, simply a hard line of snow at the edge of a field of dead grass.

Second were the spirits. Much like the one Seth had witnessed earlier—shadowy, with eyes of various colors—floating around the house, surrounding it in a sphere of darkness. He looked over to Jessica.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s definitely a necromancer’s house.”

“So this is the guy who summoned the Nightshade?”

She shook her head. “There’s no way to tell that out here.”

“So we go in?”

“No, Seth. I thought you were coping with the Emma situation without developing a deathwish.” She waved an arm, gesturing to the whole glade. “If this guy can make that wall we saw, there’s no telling how warded his house is. Hell, we’re at risk just standing on the edge of the clearing. Do me a favor. Go hide. I’m going to try and get him to come out.”

“I’m not hiding and leaving you-”

“If he goes after me, I want you to catch him off guard. Go!”

Seth nodded and moved back into the woods, circling left a few dozen yards and crouching behind a tree. Within the glade, he saw Jessica cup her hands to her mouth. She spoke, but he couldn’t hear her. She looked like she was whispering. Seth turned to look at the house and waited.

A long moment passed as the shadow-shapes of the spirits continued to whirl and twist around the house. After a bit, they parted, opening up like a cracking egg as the front door of the house swung open with a creak he could hear even from his hiding spot outside the clearing’s edge.

A figure stood in the doorway, shadows within concealing much of its form. It was tall, with broad shoulders, but beyond that Seth couldn’t discern a thing—aside from the deep orange aura that surrounded the figure. It spoke in a booming voice. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know how you’ve stumbled on my residence, but you need to leave. I don’t accept visitors. If you walk straight back the way you came, no harm will come to you. Go.” The figure slammed the door shut before Jessica could say anything in response.

She glanced over to where Seth crouched in the treeline and they made eye contact. He could see her weighing the decision. The wind howled down the mountain and through the valley, whipping up little cyclones of powder at the edge of the clearing. She shook her head. “Let’s go,” she said, just loud enough for Seth to hear.

He rose and moved back through the trees to join her as she walked away from the glade. “We’re just leaving?”

She glanced back over her shoulder. “That place is warded to hell and back, in all likelihood. It’s not worth it.”

“But what about the nightshade?”

The snow once again crunched under their feet as we headed back towards the bridge. “You didn’t see a binding aura around it. Even if this guy did summon it, he can’t just snap his fingers and send it back. It’s not tied to him.”

Seth took one last look at the house as it disappeared through the trees. He swore that he saw the door cracked, and the faintest hint of an orange aura through it. He returned his attention to following Jessica through the forest. They made it back to the bridge in a matter of minutes, where she stopped and crossed her arms, staring at the crackling blue ward.

“I don’t like this,” she said, glancing over to him. “This is to keep something out. Something out there. As a rule, I don’t trust necromancers.” She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment with a gloved hand. “Seth, be ready. This could all go very, very sideways in the next few minutes. If it does, protect my back. I’ll level whatever is in front of us. I just need you to keep something from sneaking up on me, and also behind me so I know where to cast protections if I cause an avalanche.”

So she could stop an avalanche. That was good, at least.

“Yeah, I’ve got you,” he said.

“Good. Come on.” Their boots thudded on the wooden planks of the bridge as they crossed over. The wall offered the tiniest bit of resistance as he passed through and Seth wondered for a second if it had something to do with his unknown heritage. Was it of the Negative Plane? Maybe not, he thought, as their boots once again met the crunch of snow underneath. Maybe it was just how it felt going out of the ward versus going in.

Snap.

From the left. Seth and Jessica both whipped their heads in sync to stare off into the void-mote shrouded woods. The section the snap came from seemed darker, the trees denser. Certainly there were a few of them with no residual green aura, dead husks sprouting from the earth.

“Seth?” Whispered Jessica. “You see how it’s darker over there?”

He nodded.

“That’s a spell. It’s a shrouding spell. Keeps all forms of second sight from seeing into it. I can only tell it’s magic because of my True Sight spell. We need to move, fast, but we need to watch wherever the trees look darker. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Seth squinted, trying to pierce the veil with either his physical vision or his third eye. He saw nothing, only the darkness of a forest at night. They continued to follow their tracks out of the valley, both their heads staying on a swivel the whole time. Seth found himself wishing for one of Hunter-33’s cold iron ammunition weapons. He didn’t even have his knife with him. Why hadn’t he brought it? Oh yeah, he thought, because he was so confident in his ability to dish out strikes that stopped literal gargoyles in their tracks.

But this felt different. A couple thousand pounds of force focused into the metal surface of his augment felt like it might not be the right kind of weapon. Cold iron stopped magic, and his augment was made of mithril. He made a mental note to ask Olivia if she could make an augment of cold iron.

The valley sloped up, and as it did, the darkness shifted. It was in front of them now, all the void-motes and auras suddenly gone, lapped up by the greedy shadows. Seth’s breath caught in his throat and his right foot instinctively slid back into a fighting stance. Jessica held up her left hand, muttering under her breath. For a second nothing happened, and then there was a visible pulse that expelled from her hand, followed by a burst of bright white light. The darkness retreated.

That within did not.

Towering between two trees, hunched and bent and warped, was a creature that surpassed the grotesqueness of anything Seth had seen in the real world so far. Back-bent legs held it above the snow, covered in patchy, grey-white fur. The body was all sinew and gristle, patches of skin missing to reveal ribs and muscle and tendon. It was shaped vaguely like a human, just stretched too thin. At least, until Seth looked at its head.

A grinning deer skull sprouted from a long neck, eyes empty sockets of shadow, crowned by massive antlers at least two yards from end to end.

Jessica breathed out one word. “Wendigo.” Then she moved. Both her hands were up in front of her in a flash, speed clearly fueled by her body dumping every ounce of adrenaline it had. Seth’s third eye could see an immense inhalation of breath. He’d seen it before. She was going straight to an Overdraw—a magician’s ability to cast one or two levels higher than they normally could at the cost of immense physical pain and risk of injury.

“Igni majora!”

Twin vortexes of flame leapt forward from her palms, sending shrouds of steam into the air as snow passed through the stages of matter in less than a tenth of a second. Seth held a hand over his face as the heat washed backwards towards him. The scent of burning wood filled the air, and the night became bright as day.

Seth’s ears rang as he lowered his hand.

The wendigo stood untouched, a wall of black energy shimmering out of existence in front of it. It seemed to grin broadly, though for a face made of nothing but bone, that should have been impossible. And then, it blurred, moving and sending whirls of steam as it vanished from sight.

Jessica rested one hand on her knee, forcing herself to stay upright as she coughed and hacked up blood onto the now-bare ground of the forest. “Fuck,” she said. “We need to go now.” She whipped her head around, and Seth could see her swaying as she struggled to maintain consciousness. “I have one minute before I’m good enough to translocate us. Move towards the ridge. Come on!”

She started up, her walk more of a limp, but Seth came up behind her and tossed her over his shoulder. She didn’t protest, and to him, her hundred-and-ten pound frame was basically as light as a pillow now. He could feel her watching over his shoulder as he loped up the edge of the valley towards the ridgeline.

“Se-”

Something blurred in from his right and crashed into Seth with the force of a semi-truck. Jessica went flying and so did he, smashing face first into a tree. A few months ago that would have knocked him out cold. Now it just pissed Seth off. He turned, holding out his hand as he had done in Jessica’s basement. “Tellumni-”

Ice itself gripped him by the jaw, a cold, long-fingered hand covering his mouth and smashing the back of his skull into the tree, then shoving him upwards. Seth could feel chunks of skin and hair being ripped clean off his skull against the rough bark. It was enough to elicit a scream of pain and rage, but no sound could get past the vice-grip on his face.

Seth stared over the edge of the hand into the empty eyes of the wendigo. For a moment, they were locked into each other’s gaze.

Then its maw ripped through his jacket and tore a chunk of flesh from his side.

Seth screamed as it dropped him, unable to brace his fall from the shock of losing at least two pounds in one bite, and his right ankle snapped clean under him. He fell on his side and the wendigo dove after him, hands grabbing for purchase as the jaws snapped.

Time began to slow as the fangs descended towards Seth’s face. Everything in his body hurt. He was bruised, battered, bleeding, and broken, and he could see Jessica lying unconscious a few yards away. She would be next. She would die too, unless Seth reached deep down and called up the angry void within him. The void he tried so hard to keep down and to master. It wouldn’t be hard to do. He was already full of rage from the attack. But with the void came every bit of numbness that he hid from so desperately, the pain, the hurt.

In his mind’s eye he was back in the sacrifice chamber, with a gun to Nicole’s head.

“Surviving,” he had said.

Seth’s hand shot forward, fingers latching around the spiny throat of the wendigo and stiff-arming its snapping jaws away from his face. He twisted, planting his augment on the ground and hauling into a poorly-leveraged right cross from the ground. Leverage didn’t matter when you have superhuman strength, though.

Shards of bone flew and the wendigo fell backwards as Seth forced himself to his feet. Blood spurted from his side. Not good. He couldn’t let this fight last long at all. He surged forward, reaching for every bad memory he had. His mind settled on the memory of stepping into the cage with Jayson at David and Anthony’s party.

Embracing the pain, he planted on his broken ankle. He could feel more things snapping as he ripped into a vicious roundhouse kick with his augment. Mithril met bone and bone gave way. The wendigo fell even further backwards, but so did Seth as his brain turned from embracing the pain to realizing the pain. That had hurt.

He couldn’t let it see that, though, not if it was less injured than him. Seth forced himself to roll over his shoulder and stand up, putting almost all his weight onto his augment rather than his broken ankle. Another spurt of blood erupted from his side, splattering over snow in a cascade of crimson.

The wendigo stood as well, towering above him. All told, it would have been at least nine feet tall if it straightened its hunched back. Seth refused to swallow, but he knew he would be unable to defend against this next attack. Chunks of bone were missing from its face, but Seth was pretty certain it was unfazed.

SHRIK!

A massive icicle sprouted from the ground, racing up, spearing the wendigo through the bottom of its skull and lifting it high into the air in a gruesome facial crucifixion. It flailed over thirty feet above the ground, battering its limbs against the ice but failing to break it. An unholy, gurgling shriek erupted from it, hurting Seth’s ears even more than the fire spell already had.

Jessica’s hand grabbed his wrist and her other covered his forehead. “Conmero.”

The world blurred for half a second and he found himself jammed into the passenger seat of Jessica’s car. He growled, clamping down on his tongue at the odd angle his foot had been jammed under the dash. He fumbled for the seat controls and shoved backwards with his augment, his intent to simply give himself more space. But his newfound strength was too much and he ripped the seat off its rails and drove the entire thing into the backseat.

“Insurance will cover it,” said Jessica as the Volt mewled to life and she proceeded to perform a J-turn in 3 feet of snow before barreling down the mountainside.