Page 21 of Witch Slap

"Is it my fire or your fire?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters enormously, Stormblood."

We were winning.

That's the part I keep going back over. We were winning, and I was laughing, and my best friend was standing in a ring of flame with her ponytail coming apart like an avenging Sunday school teacher.

Somewhere in all that, I stopped watching the house.

The kitchen door banged open.

"MOM!"

Nine years old. One sock.

Jack Greywood came off that porch at a dead run in his human shape, because he'd woken up under a table in an empty kitchen with the world screaming outside, and he did what any kid does. He went looking for his mother.

He got eight feet.

Two things happened at the same moment. I've had a long time to think about the order and I still can't put one in front of the other.

Six imps peeled off the main body and moved on him. They spread as they came, sealing off the grass between the boy and the porch with the tidy economy of something that had been told exactly where to stand.

And my magic went out like a light switch.

All of it. Every root on that lawn, all at once, limp and gray and lying there like rope. The gold under my skin snuffed between one heartbeat and the next.

And there I was. Bare feet, wrecked yard, both hands open and absolutely nothing in them.

I have never hated anybody the way I hated myself right then.

"JACK!"

I was already running.

Here's the thing nobody in that yard knew, because nobody in that yard had ever needed to know it.

Before the magic. Before the sigils. Before a book drank my blood in a library and rebuilt me from the inside out, I was the best fighter in the Gatekeeper's Coven.

The actual best, with nine years of broken noses to prove it.

I trained their enforcers. I put grown males on the mat twice a week for nine years, because it was the only thing I had that nobody could take off me. Danika allowed it because a dud who could break a jaw was marginally less embarrassing than a dud who couldn't.

I hit the first imp at a full sprint with my shoulder. Something inside it came apart.

Caught the second by a wing. Swung it into the third. They went into each other like two bags of wet sand.

Number four got my elbow.

Number five came up off the gravel with its little hands out and its mouth open, and I took its head off the top of its spine with the heel of my hand. That's a strike I have thrown ten thousand times at a canvas dummy in a basement in Cleveland. Never once on anything alive.

Number six reached Jack.

It got its claws into the back of his calf. He went down screaming. I covered the last four feet in a way I genuinely don't remember and came down on it with both knees.

It was still moving.