Page 52 of The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo 1)

His feet slammed into the painted iron and stuck without moving an inch, a perfect 10.0 landing. The sudden stop should have liquefied my internal organs. The impact should have sent a bell-like clang throughout the platform. But neither happened.

Localized laws of physics, I told myself.

“We’re here,” said Quentin.

I didn’t get off him. Instead I clapped his chest excitedly.

“Again!” I shouted. “Again! Let’s go to Wine Country!”

He dumped me on my feet. “This isn’t a joyride. We’re here to train.”

“Nerd.” I flicked his ear, making a little clack against what used to be my jewelry.

We were alone high up in the gray sky. I knew they let people go to the top of the bridge on occasion, so the platform wasn’t without the trappings of safety. But I was still heady from the way we’d arrived, making the red tower feel like uncharted alien territory. Olympus Mons.

“Look around and tell me what you see,” he said.

“I see the city. The Bay.”

“Good. Now open your eyes and tell me again.”

I did as told before realizing the incongruity.

The landscape suddenly became a painting, full of bright brushstrokes and swirling pigments. I could see the details of the world in thick outlines of color and black. My sense of scale was limitless, unconfined. The daubed-on windows of the smallest building were as visible to me as the tallest spires of the city.

“Oh wow,” I murmured.

Cars in motion danced across the bridge like flipbook animations. I could see inside to the passengers, their faces zoetroping between emotions. That man was hungry. That woman was bored. That child held a secret.

I felt as if I could touch things on the far side of the Bay. Farther. I was hemmed in only by the Sierra Nevada and the western horizon.

I glanced at Quentin, and then stared. He blazed like a golden bonfire.

Energy poured off him in licking waves, an act of inefficient combustion that leaked so much power into the air I could hear the atmosphere whine and sizzle. There was a scorching heat at his core, and I was immune to it.

Around his shoulders was the faintest palimpsest overlay of another form. Skin as hard as diamonds. Fur as soft as velvet. A face of becalmed savagery. He was magnificent. Godlike. A Buddha victorious in battle.

“Well,” he said in two voices, one his normal classroom baritone and the other a bass that could crack the sky. “Do you have anything to say?”

“Yeah. Did you put something in my coffee?”

Quentin laughed, and I could have sworn they heard him in New York.

“No. The only magic there is that it was expensive. You have true sight now, Genie. Technically you have my true sight. I used to be able to see the world like y

ou can right now, but that’s mostly gone. My guess is that our powers had become so intertwined in the old days that when you became human, you ripped this one from me like dirt clinging to a stump.”

“I am genuinely sorry then,” I said. It would have felt like a tragedy if I had to give this experience up to someone else, and I’d only had it for seconds.

“Try the lie detection,” Quentin said. “It’s pretty neat.”

“Well, you have to tell me a lie then.”

He blanked for a bit, one of those understandable moments where you have too many options to choose from.

“I hate you,” he finally settled on.

As Quentin said it a dark, metallic bubble popped out from his lips, like he’d blown it from mercury. It pulsed in the air, a tiny opaque jellyfish, before floating away and dissipating.