Chapter 33
When the burst of big magic subsided, Talula stood on a blue-hued floor.
Shocks of magic zinged through her connection to the Volta like electricity, the power almost unbearable.
It hurt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.
Talula used every ounce of willpower to shove the pain out of her mind.
Then she looked around. She was surrounded by glasslike walls that flashed with jagged arcs of lightning.
Beyond the walls, blue smears of raw magic boiled like magma, as if Talula were inside a blue-tinged fishbowl.
Talula gasped, finally realizing where she was.
The Volta had taken her to the center of its wellspring of power, like the eye of a storm.
But Talula wasn’t alone. The Volta’s eye contained the dozens of hunters she’d pulled from Pine Hollow and beyond.
After being conjured through two different magical ordeals, the hunters were unsteady on their feet, talking and shouting—they hadn’t noticed her yet.
With the Volta’s power still sizzling painfully under her skin, Talula illusioned herself invisible.
Damien called for order with all the cool of an agitated poodle. “Shut the fuck up, you pussies!”
(Talula glared invisibly.)
“Sir, where are we?” one man asked.
“I don’t know.” Damien seethed.
“How are we getting out of here?”
Damien didn’t answer.
“Could we just—” one man reached a hand through the (apparently) semipermeable walls of the Volta’s eye.
Talula bit back a warning and watched as the man went white with pain.
He let loose a scream of bone-deep agony.
A few nearby hunters yanked him away from the walls.
His hand didn’t come with him. The hunters stared at a bloody stump cauterized by ferocious magic.
An eerie silence fell over the crowd as the maimed man’s magic cuff cracked and fell away. Even a jinn-made cuff couldn’t hold up against the Volta’s raw sorcery.
One down, Talula thought to herself, slinking to the back of the crowd. Forty-nine to go.
As the hunters squabbled, Talula sunk deeper into her magic.
The Volta had supercharged her, allowing her to see the different magics that made up her core.
She saw the white-gold of her witchfire, the rich mossy green of her elemental powers, the cerulean of her strange portal skills, the mirror-silver of illusion-working.
There were dozens of other colors, signifying more abilities she had yet to master.
Talula spotted a strange, multicolored thread—immediately, she knew it was the part of her magic that could manipulate time.
It had been there all along, just under the surface.
She held the thread firm in her mind and focused on a nearby hunter’s protective cuff.
Talula saw the cuff as it would be in ten thousand years, eaten away by rust and time.
Steadily and silently, the cuff’s metal degraded around the hunter’s wrist. She focused until the cuff was a firm tap away from falling apart.
The man remained oblivious, still distracted by the racket of arguing hunters.
Talula moved on to the next cuff and the next, until she only had four cuffs to go. Then her heart stopped.
Dahlia was here, zip-tied, rumpled, and glaring at the hunters, who held her like a caught criminal for Damien’s interrogation. Talula jerked, stopping herself from leaping at him.
“What is this place? What did that bitch do to us?” Damien demanded.
Angry red lights flashed like popped blood vessels in the Volta’s walls.
Three more cuffs to go, Talula thought to herself.
“Is she here?” Damien gave Dahlia a vicious shake.
But Dahlia kept her lips tightly closed. Enraged, Damien threw Dahlia down to the ground so hard, Talula could hear Dahlia’s gasp of pain.
If the Volta was pissed before, now it was incandescent with rage—and so was Talula. The Volta’s raw magic hammered against the walls like an angry fist. Two more cuffs decayed to the brink of breaking.
Which left only one more. Damien’s.
“Tell me what you know, or I’m going to stop asking nicely.” Damien reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
Rage and magic roared through Talula. She dropped her invisibility, shoving the last of her magical focus at Damien’s cuff. “STOP!”
Damien smiled his sick, smug smirk.
“There she is.” He trained his gun on Talula. He jerked his chin at his hunters. “Bring her here.”
Fingers dug into Talula’s arms as the hunters dragged her to Damien. Dahlia struggled to her feet just a foot away to Talula’s left.
“Nice try, babe,” Damien said, patting Talula on the cheek. “But we’ve got you and your girlfriend, and my guys will blow up your town once we are out of here.”
“No, they won’t.” Heart racing, Talula gave Damien a smirk of her own. She inhaled, summoning her air affinity. She exhaled. A forceful gust of wind emanated from Talula’s breath. It swept through the crowd of hunters, blowing at their clothes and hair.
“That’s it?” Damien laughed sinisterly. “Jesus, what kind of half-rate witch are you?”
A moment later, there was a clink. Then another, as forty-nine jinn-made magical cuffs of protection clattered to the ground, aged beyond recognition and completely useless.
Damien stared at the scraps of metal. His lips thinned to two pink squirming worms of displeasure. But Talula wasn’t done yet.
“Let go of me, or you’ll get burned in three, two…
” she said to the hunters who held her. She let lightning-hot witchfire coat her limbs like a second skin.
The men scrambled to get away. Talula sent out another burst of air to curl around Dahlia and reel her in like a lasso.
Talula created a ring of witchfire around the two of them.
“Are you okay?” Talula sliced through Dahlia’s ties with a razor-thin bit of flame. “How did you get here?”
“The conjuring, I think.” Dahlia exhaled a shaky breath into Talula’s shoulder. “The hunters were holding me, and when you conjured their cuffs, I came, too.”
Dahlia looked at Talula and gasped. “Your eyes! They’re…they look like the Volta.”
Talula turned inward, looking toward her magical core.
She bit down a scream. Minutes ago, her core had been a colorful hearth of magical fires.
Now the Volta’s cerulean had taken over, turning her magical core a swirl of blue-hued magic.
She’d been channeling the Volta’s unfettered power for too long.
It was filling into the spaces between her molecules, eating away at her life force.
Adrenaline and fear had helped Talula compartmentalize the pain, but she was running out of time.
“I’ll be fine. I have to finish this.” Talula tried to calm her too-fast heart. “We can’t let them keep hunting.”
“I have an idea,” Dahlia said, determined. “Do you think the Volta will listen to me?”
The voice that answered Dahlia through Talula’s lips reverberated with sorcery and time and power. “Yes.”
The Volta had answered for her.
“Let me do my thing and stick to the plan.” Dahlia slipped her hand into Talula’s.
Outside their witchfire circle, the hunters paced like wolves. Damien crossed his arms over his chest. “You can’t stay there forever, witch.”
“She won’t have to, dick,” Dahlia responded cheerily. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to tell you a story. Then, you’ll never hunt again. Because this is the Volta, and you’re dealing with the strongest sorceress in an age.”
Even as Talula struggled to keep the Volta’s power from tearing her apart, her heart soared.
“Once upon a time, a bunch of assholes got dropped into the late Cretaceous period because they pissed off my girlfriend.” Dahlia let her voice carry out over the hunters. She turned to Talula. “Can you show them?”
Talula felt a shiver of something from the Volta through their connection. It was…delight.
The magic outside of the Volta’s walls blurred.
Images rushed along the blue-tinged barriers.
When it finally stilled, gasps broke out through the crowd.
On the other side of the Volta’s blue membrane was a tropical landscape populated by impossibly huge reptiles.
One gorged itself on the corpse of a triceratops.
Talula could hear the sick snap of connective tissues as the larger reptile tore into its kill.
“Bullshit—this is an illusion!” one genius in the back shouted.
“Volta, sweetheart?” Dahlia cooed. “Could you drop the curtain a bit?”
(Talula got the sense that the Volta was absolutely undone by Dahlia’s sweet talk.)
The Volta let a section of blue wall open up.
Hot, humid air wafted through. The fetid scent of earth and blood flooded Talula’s nose.
Abruptly, the Tyrannosaurus rex—an actual T.
rex—swung its head from its dinner to stare at them all, flinging chunks of meat through the Volta’s opening.
The dinosaur opened its jaws and began to charge.
“That’s enough.” Dahlia, unbothered, continued, “Let’s fast-forward, shall we?”
Taking the hint, the membrane restored itself, and the T. rex disappeared. With a jolt, the Volta traveled to an Italian metropolis on the verge of volcanic doom. Ash fell and lava rushed around the Volta’s walls.
“Enough!” called one of the hunters. “What do you want?”
“Toss your weapons over here, now,” Talula demanded.
The men clustered away from Damien, unholstering their guns, tasers, and other arms and kicking them over to Talula’s witchfire circle. With a strained grunt, Talula let her witchfire lap over the weapons, melting them into an ugly mess. The hunters held up their hands in surrender. Except Damien.
Furious, he pointed his gun at the hunters. “You cowards, you’re going to let these stupid bitches destroy our business?”
With an effort, Talula threw her illusion magic at the gun in Damien’s hand. In a blink, he was holding a bright pink dildo.
In answer, the hunters tackled Damien and zip-tied his hands together as he bombarded them with insults.
Talula took a relieved breath. The ordeal was almost over, but it was getting harder and harder to stay standing.
“Hold on,” Dahlia whispered, squeezing Talula’s hand.
Talula, her blood burning with the Volta’s power, reached for her magic again. The walls around them changed to reveal a space lined with shelves that floated a little off the ground—Talula’s Voltlette.
“What is this place?” the man who tied up Damien asked.
“A pocket dimension,” Talula panted. Her body felt as if she’d been running uphill while carrying sandbags. “You’ll be safe. Go. Now.”
The Volta created a doorway into the Voltlette. A few men eagerly pushed others out of the way to get out. Talula dropped the witchfire ring—she couldn’t maintain it and withstand the Volta’s power anymore. She slumped against Dahlia.
“Hang on,” Dahlia murmured, watching the hunters file out of the Volta. “Almost there.”
Damien was the last in line—he’d shaken off the hunters who’d held him and walked on his own. It was just Damien, Dahlia, and Talula in the Volta’s eye. Suddenly, there was a muffled pop.
Free from his ties, Damien threw himself at Dahlia with a roar as Talula collapsed to the ground. The Volta’s barriers closed back up, locking the other hunters in the Voltlette.
Damien stood, an arm wrapped around Dahlia’s throat, something horrible pressed to her temple.
Talula had missed a gun.
“Thumb dislocation,” Damien said. Pain hitched his breath, but his smirk was back. “You never want to have to use that trick, but, hey. It works.”
“Let her go,” Talula growled. “Or else—”
“Or else what? Looks like you’re all out of magic tricks, and I have the best thing that’s ever happened to my business.”
Talula, drained and dumb with exhaustion, stared.
“You.” A gleeful chuckle rumbled through Damien’s chest. “I can sell tickets to dinosaur hunts now. Mammoths. Saber-toothed tigers. Anything we want to hunt, any time we want to hunt it.”
“No.” Talula ground the words out. “I won’t.”
“You will.” Damien grabbed a fistful of Dahlia’s hair and yanked. Dahlia yelped, and Talula’s magic-corroded heart lurched. Damien read it on her face, victory lighting his eyes.
“As long as I have her, I have you. As long as I have you, I have an extremely lucrative business model.”
Sweat trickled down Talula’s forehead, her pulse a panicked thunder in her chest. Damien was right. After all her sorcery and keeping the Volta’s power from totally destroying her, Talula was running on magical fumes. If she wanted to keep everyone safe, she needed more power.
There was only one way to get it.
Talula looked at Dahlia, the person who’d given her back the world. Who made her feel extraordinary and alive and exactly who she wanted to be.
“I love you.” Talula’s voice broke over the words. Bittersweet tears leaked down her cheeks. “I love you so much.”
“Talula!” Dahlia cried. “No—”
But it was too late. Talula stopped resisting the Volta, letting its unbridled power take over her. One last time.
Pain erupted through Talula on a subatomic level, her cells burning up with magic that was too big for her body to hold. With an agonized scream, Talula became a conduit for a power that could level a continent. She knew she couldn’t handle it. But for a few moments, she could use it.
Talula turned her gaze to Damien. She saw herself in his pupils, alight with blue-white fire, sparkling with magic. Damien’s fingers tightened on the trigger.
“Stop,” Talula commanded with the Volta’s voice.
Damien froze, his limbs as static as a statue’s.
Dahlia wrenched herself free, and one of Damien’s pinkies snapped off with the force of her struggle.
Talula didn’t even flinch at the sound. She flicked her hand at the Volta’s walls.
A portion of the barrier swelled, then blew out, forming a clear, blue-tinged bubble.
The bubble wrapped around the frozen Damien.
The Volta pulled Damien and his new prison into itself, absorbing the bubble until he disappeared.
“Talula, stop!” Dahlia reached for Talula. “You’re dying.”
Talula was breaking apart and burning up from the inside out, like a house on fire. Sinking to the floor, she made one more request of the Volta, her friend, her partner, her end. “Take her home. Please.”
The Volta traveled again, stilling in front of the Joneses’ front porch. Tendrils of blue magic formed around Dahlia, drawing her out of the Volta’s eye and into the world. Dahlia clawed for Talula, but in a moment, she was gone.
Finally, Talula was alone in the blue.
“We did it,” she whispered.
Talula, relieved, closed her eyes and succumbed to the Volta.