No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,100

room lit up, soft green with glimmers of white and gold. Suzy stared at her legs, then pulled the covers over them and lay back down, her eyes squeezed shut again.

She knew—she’d known for some time now, of course—that she was the granddaughter of a god. The daughter of a demi-god, which made her think she should be called a semi-god herself, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that her grandfather’s legacy gave her power, more power than she knew what to do with. She’d deleted someone from the time line once, with that power. Other times she’d seen dozens of futures, and had tried to help people pick the right path to the only safe one.

And every time, she’d burned, blazed, with brilliant green magic. That was the color of her power, as it was the color of Cernunnos’s and of Herne’s. She knew what using that magic felt like. Breath-taking. Liberating. Exciting. Terrifying.

It was not a gentle glow or itchiness in the middle of the night. Something was wrong. Extra-wrong, and when magic went wrong the only person Suzy knew to go to was Detective Walker. Who was in Seattle. Where Aunt Mae had forbidden Suzy to ever go again without adult accompaniment.

She tried, briefly, to envision going into Aunt Mae’s room, waking her aunt up, and asking to be taken to Seattle, all while glowing like a firefly. She failed. Which meant she had to go to Seattle alone. Again. While glowing green.

She was going to be grounded for the rest of her life.

The whole idea made her skin itch even more. Suzy rubbed her arms ferociously, then stopped when the magic coursing under her skin brightened with the activity. It was no use panicking, she told herself as she threw the covers off again and got up to find clothes. At least she didn’t have to turn the lights on. She could navigate by the glow of her skin. and wanted to bite her arms by the time she found some jeans, like she could suck the magic and the itching away as if it was poison. There was a bus at a quarter past midnight, the last one heading to Seattle. She could probably catch that. If she had an extra minute at the bus station she could even call ahead to warn Detective Walker she was coming.

She dragged her jeans on, hopping around the room when she lost her balance tugging them up. The mirror caught her attention a couple of times, reflecting an image so weird it looked like it belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Green highlights came from within, making her wheat-pale hair glow emerald, especially near the roots. It faded out to almost white around shoulders mostly bared by a spaghetti-strapped nightgown that wrinkled at her waist as she pulled her jeans all the way up and buttoned them. The light dimmed considerably, so her eyes were just big and dark, no longer reflecting green. She would need a hoodie to keep from attracting attention. And maybe sunglasses, because now that she’d noticed them, her eyes were starting to itch too. Suzy made a face at the mirror and turned away from it, looking for a shirt and shades.

Her fingers were two inches from the hoodie when the air shriveled up against her skin, turned cold, and pulled her backward through a hole the size of a pinhead.

There was power. That was all she could tell. Power latching on to her own magic, hauling her up a slick emerald path full of loops and twists and turns, like a roller coaster. More like a waterslide. She’d never liked waterslides. The joinings weren’t smooth enough and the water wasn’t deep enough, so she always fell out of the inner tubes and scraped herself up on the joints. This one was smooth, though, and fast enough that the friction made her skin burn. It burned the itch away, which helped. It also buffed her like she was a diamond—an emerald, she guessed—so that she wasn’t so much glowing as shining. Like a star, if stars were green.

She ran up against another pinhead-sized hole, and got shoved through head first onto a shag carpet floor.

For a minute she couldn’t see anything. There was light, lots of it, but it was all coming from her, drowning out everything else. She wasn’t even afraid yet, but something was bubbling deep inside her chest. A warning, one that ran deeper than anything