No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,101
Suzy had ever known. A warning that up until now she’d used her magic for others, but that she had no sense at all of the depths she could plumb if it was herself she needed to protect. It gave her confidence, though at the same time it ran so deep it was itself a little scary. She was the child of gods, and no one in their right mind messed with gods.
Weirdly, the thought calmed the deep warning inside her. There couldn’t be much that threatened gods. Joanne Walker did, but Joanne knew where Suzy lived. She would have called if she needed her, not magicked her away. Anybody else who thought they could hold even a semi-god like Suzy was either very, very powerful, or very, very dumb. She could give them the benefit of the doubt for a little bit, and assume they were dumb.
The itching had stopped. She thought that was the other reason she wasn’t going absolutely crazy with fear and anger. She’d fought zombies, after all. She’d gotten through the horror of her parents’ murders, and then she’d watched her birth father sluff off mortality to become the Green Man. She thought she could handle anything as long as she didn’t want to scratch her skin off.
Joanne was always using her powers to discover things. Suzy’s didn’t work like that, or at least, she didn’t think they did. But at the same time, she felt confined somehow, like she’d been pulled into something with a specific size and shape. She stretched out her hands and encountered resistance. A flare of her own magic shot around that sensation, exploring it in the same way Suzy had explored parks when she was little: up, down, under, over, around, in. That had been what her mother called organic exploration, using her whole person to learn the world. This was the same thing, except Suzy’s wholeness included magic now.
She’d never explored a pentagram before, though. It surrounded her, wobbling with paltry human power. It would barely hold a mouse, much less her. Suzy laughed. Someone would have the scare of their life and end up grateful that they’d conjured a polite modern teenage granddaughter of a god into their flimsy pentagram instead of one of the much, much worse things that were out there. She would start by shattering the pentagram, just to show them how much trouble they might have been in. She reached out to flick it away with a fingertip.
Just before she did, a high-pitched, familiar voice squeaked, “Suzy?”
Suzy froze mid-motion, then moved her hand above her eyes, like shading them would help her see out of the pentagram when she was the one emitting the light. “Kiseko?”
“Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy cra—” The litany came in a whisper, followed by an even softer, “How do we shut this thing down, Rob? That’s Suzy, holy crap it’s not a nature god you dork it’s my friend Suzy how did we call Suzy OMG WE DID MAGIC—”
The last part was overrun by a boy’s intense, soft voice: “Kiseko, be quiet or we’ll wake your parents up—”
“Well I told you we should’ve done this at your house, your parents are all big into the paranormal thing—”
“First, my parents would have noticed us raising a pentagram in the basement,” the boy said very dryly, “and second, they’d ground me until I was fifteen for messing with this stuff without supervision. Kiseko, stop panicking, you’re just feeding the power circle with your emotion. That’s not Suzanne Quinley, is it?”
Kiseko blurted, “Yes!”
The unseen boy groaned and muttered something Suzy couldn’t hear, then stepped up to the pentagram, putting his hands against it. Suzy could see him then, a tallish boy of twelve or thirteen, with a serious, apologetic expression. “Aunt Jo’s going to kill me,” he announced. “I’m really sorry. We’ll get you out of there in a minute.”
“Who are you? What are you—oh, nevermind. Kiseko talked you into this, didn’t she?” Suzy sat down and put her face in her hands, not sure if she should laugh or cry. “Kiso, what did you do?”
“Oh, I just wanted to try a little magic,” Kiseko said with an impatient stomp of her foot. “Robert, why won’t this thing come down?”
“You’re putting too much energy into it,” Robert repeated. “You need to calm down.”
“Kiseko,” Suzy said into her hands, “doesn’t do calm. She’s Kiseko Anderson, Superhero.” Which was nicer than super-emo, which was what Suzy’s mother used to call Kiseko.