Fluke pushed himself up and sprang at her again, this time clamping his teeth around her ankle.
She screamed and pulled back the arm with the bat to swing at him.
In the ultimate act of desperation, I yanked on the convergence, pulling at the hardest current I could find and shoving it into the stream that was flowing into her.
She gasped, and her bat hand went slack. At first, she seemed even happier, falling back against the door, eyes rolled back and mouth hanging open. That wasn’t really the kind of feeling I wanted to give my killer, so I shoved harder.
That was when she started screaming.
When her whole body went slack and she collapsed in the entryway, the table with my wallet and mail tumbling onto her, I tried to throttle back on the power, but it wouldn’t let me. The convergence itself kept pushing.
No.
The anger of a child filled me, the sense of injustice at the first realization that the world wasn’t a kind and just place. For a moment, it was completely separate from me, like I was seeing the emotion played out on a screen, but then it surged inside me, red hot and seething like the lava flows beneath the crust of the earth. She had hurt my new friend, used me to hurt him, and I would not allow her to do that again.
The convergence would not have it.
“You’ll kill her,” I whispered. “You’re killing her.”
Finally, the power slowed. Kill?
“Kill. She’ll stop existing.” I reached for an example it might understand or care about. “Like Gideon did. Like the man in the coffee shop.”
It pulled back, considering, but it was much, much too late for Lina.
She looked like one of those bodies they pulled out of ancient tombs, black and desiccated, but still smoking slightly. It seemed like I should feel something about that. Nausea, at least. But there was nothing. It was like the horrific body was in someone else’s entryway.
I pushed off the wall and my foot brushed against what was left of her leg. Her form crumbled into greasy black dust and spread across the tiled floor of the entry in a choking cloud.
Okay, that was gross.
Diving to my knees and ignoring the pain as I hit the tile, I checked on Fluke. He whimpered, his front leg curled against his body, but it didn’t seem to be at an odd angle, and he’d moved it. I still needed to get him to a vet, but he was okay. He was breathing and whimpering and alive.
“It’s okay, bud. You stay here, I’m gonna call Beez. She’ll close up the shop and come take us to the vet. Okay? We’ll get you the good foxy drugs, and you’ll be as good as new in no time.” I petted the side she hadn’t hit, as softly as I could, then turned to stumble across the living room and into the kitchen. I needed . . . my phone. And the mop. Did I own a mop? Oh gods, I was about to mop up a human being.
Yes, she’d tried to murder me, but that was still awful.
Was that tantamount to destroying evidence? I hadn’t killed her.
Had I?
I froze, the entire scene replaying in my head like a nightmare, and there was the nausea that had been missing the first time. Bile stung the back of my throat and my eyes watered. I wasn’t sure if it was for me, or Fluke, or the convergence itself.
I was the one who increased the flow of magic to painful levels. The convergence, with its childlike terror and anger, couldn’t be held responsible for that. And it hadn’t known what it was doing. It had stopped when I told it to; I had just been too late.
My phone wasn’t in the kitchen, and it was more important than cleaning up Lina. I had to get Fluke taken care of first and foremost.
Still, I was staring blankly at the mop and bucket when I heard the table scrape across the entryway floor. That wasn’t Fluke. He wouldn’t be moving things around. No, it sounded like the front door opening. Lina must not have locked it like I thought she had.
But who . . .
I turned, and David was standing in the arch into the kitchen, lips drawn into a tight line and a strange sadness in his eyes. “Oh Sage. I really am sorry. I hoped it wasn’t you.”
Chapter Thirty
“Hoped what wasn’t me?” I asked. I sounded confused, even