Page 20

Brenda squares her shoulders and stands her ground.

The wyvern moves too fast, too quick, and I’ve got the teleport spell on the tip of my tongue, but I needed one more detail from Brenda to finish setting up the coordinates, and I can’t think fast enough—a defensive spell, a shield, maybe freeze the air, but my runebook has the teleport spell up in edit and quick-cast mode, and I can’t switch spells without losing my progress—

Brenda steps in front of me and throws something at the wyvern. It clatters to the ground, a small thing rolling and coming to a stop just as, with her other hand outstretched, finger pointing directly at the wyvern, she shouts, “I cast Lightning Bolt !” her voice steady with conviction.

I can feel the mana in the air shift, energy flowing toward Brenda.

A dazzling blaze of light flashes from Brenda’s finger, intensifying in a huge explosion of crackling white-hot lightning tinged with fiery blue power.

My jaw drops—a spell of this magnitude without a focus anchor or any runes or sigils to channel—

The lightning bolt flares and meets dusky scales, and the wyvern screeches with annoyance and fear. It turns tail, scampering off and hissing, disappearing into the toppled shelves of the destroyed store. Somewhere in the distance glass shatters, and then the clawed footsteps echo and disappear.

“What—” Brenda gasps, wavering on her feet, as she stares in wonder at her hand.

My feet find themselves and I dash forward just in time to catch her as she completely loses her balance. “I—” Her eyes find mine, and she smiles breathlessly. “Kat.”

“Hi, hi, Brenda—you—” I shake my head, holding her close. “That’s a level-five destruction spell—”

“I can’t believe I—I, um, instinct? Gut?” Brenda says weakly. “Because, like, I’m a wizard. Lightning Bolt?” She giggles a little helplessly. “Why can’t I word?”

She burrows her head in my neck, and I hold on to her. “You’re okay, you’re okay. You just need to rest.”

In the distance, I hear sirens and the muffled conversation of those still in the store, the sound of shopping life starting again.

A few feet in front of Brenda, something glitters. The thing Brenda threw. I’m still in shock at that massive work of raw magic. It must have been her focus object. “Can you get my d20?” Brenda mumbles.

“Your what?”

“It’s my lucky d20, can you get it?” she says, struggling to keep her eyes open.

The sirens get louder—the wyvern wranglers will be here soon, and then police, and there’s going to be a lot of questions about the wreckage of the store. Best to get out of here.

“Yeah, I got it. I just need one more thing.” Locking someone in without a namekey to a physical spell is difficult enough standing still, let alone programming while running for your life.

The details are all mundane and mostly random, but now with Brenda in my arms, this last bit seems a little too intimate. “I need your hand.”

“Here.” Brenda giggles again, offering me her hand palm up.

I take it, the warmth of her skin seeping into my own as I measure out the length of her heart line with my runebook.

I see with a quick cursory glance the frayed fate line running down her hand, one strong central line that splits into a million directions.

She presses her face into my neck again and breathes in deep, sending a jolt down my spine.

“You smell so good,” Brenda breathes, a husky half whisper that sends my heartbeat into a rapid flutter of nerves.

“Here, don’t fall asleep,” I say gently. I carefully disentangle myself from her and lean her against the remains of a shelf. “I’ll be right back.”

She nods sleepily at me and I step forward, looking for the thing. It clattered earlier, but there’s nothing on the linoleum tiles except a puddle of melted liquid.

I kneel down, peering closely, but I don’t think it’s something I could pick up and give back to her. “I think it’s done. Focus objects are usually destroyed if they aren’t anchored to anything, and that spell—I’m sorry.”

“Ohhhh, no. I loved that one. What happened to it?”

“I’m not… sure.”

Melted into the floor is a pool of shimmery blue-gold liquid, with little numbers floating in them. In the center is a gleaming 20 .

“Feeling better?”

Brenda nods, leaning back against the coziest plush couch we have.

I teleported us both back to the coffeeshop and immediately set her up with an array of pastries and a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

She pushes back the empty plate, making a sigh of satisfaction.

“That Target, it looked exactly the same, but…” She trails off.

It hangs in the air, the impossibility of what she’s saying, that she’s from a world without magic. And yet she just saved our lives with a spell of a power I wouldn’t dare summon.

I’ve got so many questions, and I can’t stop shaking.

I’ve never come this close to being a wyvern’s lunch before, and what happened—Brenda saving us—I’m still reeling from it.

It was so, so stupid. Amazing, but stupid.

Who with any common sense would try to cast something like that?

And the way she’d reacted, the fact that she didn’t have any spells at all ready to go in case of an emergency—she doesn’t even have a runebook or a namekey —it’s starting to sink in for me.

“You really are from somewhere else,” I blurt out.

“But how? Where? I’ve never heard of anywhere in the world that doesn’t have magic.

” I want to ask her so many questions that I don’t even know where to start.

I can’t imagine life without magic; it’s tied into everything we do, how our world works.

“I don’t know, it was like I was in a completely different Target.

Like I walked in…” Brenda blinks, thinking.

“When I walked in here”—she gestures at the door and then sits up a little taller, her eyes bright with excitement—“I wonder if it’s like a portal or something? Between parallel dimensions?”

It seems so impossible, but I can’t explain how else such a thorough person like Brenda would have so little common sense around magic.

“Everyone knows you don’t cast spells without at least a matrix to guide you, and you just jumped right into that without thinking.

You’re lucky there was a mana surge, because that power cost could have killed you.

” I shake my head in disbelief. “I’m still freaking out.

” I try to keep the panic out of my voice, my nerves spiraling, and I can’t stop moving, jittering my legs as I tap my foot under the table in a rapid-quick beat, the heel of my boot a comforting clunk clunk clunk against the tiled floor.

“You’re freaking out? I’m freaking out! Magic is”—Brenda drops her voice to a whisper—“ real .” Her eyes widen, and there’s fear there, but also something else: something like awe.

The color’s returned to Brenda’s cheeks, and her eyes are starting to shine again. Good, good. I push my cha siu bao at her and gesture for her to eat. Brenda gives me a shy smile before digging in with a happy sigh. Carbs. They’re the best.

She looks much better than she did in Target—I was so scared, the way she was lying in my arms, but I couldn’t just take her to the hospital.

They’d have questions and then ask her for her mage license, and if she had a permit for destruction spells, and the whole process definitely wouldn’t have been good.

Now that we’re talking about parallel universes, the implication is even bigger and Brenda could have been dragged off for experiments, or worse. I’m glad I just got us out of there.

“This is so good,” Brenda mumbles sheepishly. “Why does everything taste so good?”

“It’s because you just cast a level-five destruction spell with raw magic, and your body is desperate to replenish that energy,” I say. “The quickest way to recover from magical exhaustion is rest and food. That, and my dad is an amazing cook.”

“Wow. Tell him thanks.”

“I will.” Dad’s running errands at city hall or something like that today, so I only got minimal teasing from Jordan, who took our order earlier.

Brenda polishes off the rest of her bao and wipes her mouth with a happy sigh. “I’m so tired. Does magic always feel like that?”

I shake my head. “No, it shouldn’t—I mean, the effect on you depends on the spell and how much mana it needs, how much power you’re giving it, whether from you or from another source.

If you do it again—which, don’t , because the only reason you survived was because that mana surge provided the brunt of the power—it can kill you.

Even just channeling that was dangerous. You’re very lucky.”

Brenda stares at her empty plate. “I—thank you. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“You were the one who saved our lives with that lightning spell, so—thank you .”

Brenda blushes, her brown skin flushing prettily with a warm, rosy glow.

“I—I had no idea that would work. I mean, it was just the first thing I thought of, because I’m a wizard.

I mean, I play one, in Dungeons & Dragons.

It’s a game. In my world.” She blinks and laughs a little in disbelief, like she’s still wrapping her head around the idea, too.

“A game . Fighting a dragon is a game?” Sounds like the right way to get killed.

Brenda raises her eyebrows at me. “Do you have real dragons then? What are they like?”

“Extremely temperamental.” I frown. “There’s a rumor of a dragon hibernating under the LA River somewhere.

Hopefully it sleeps for another hundred years and we never have to meet it.

I mean, we’ve got dragons, yeah, but they keep to themselves in their territories and the preserves mostly.

People steer clear of them and rightfully so. ”

Brenda gives me an awed smile. “That’s amazing. I want to meet a real one.”