* * *
I became aware standing in a
wheat field with my jeans and boots glued to my skin with rain and muddy
ichor. Lightning struck a tree maybe
twenty feet away, threatening to arch in my direction. “Well, fuck me.”
This was not the first time I
had found myself wandering in a strange location I did not recognize. A flash
of light directed at my eyes, momentarily blinding me. Was this it? My mouth
had gotten me into some serious trouble before, but this even beat Las Vegas.
“What in the Sam Hill are you
doing out here?” A rumbling voice accompanied what I now recognized as a
flashlight. “We’re in the middle of a tornado watch...” It took him a moment to
realize that I was not the person he had expected to find. I was not even the type of person he expected to find. His
voice dropped off.
“I know what you are.” He
finally whispered, his tone flavored by bitter abhorrence. “Why are you here?”
The lightning struck a little
closer, honing on my position. At this rate, I would be stuck spilling my own
blood just to keep us from dying. I would piss off a storm god on my first day
back in the land of the living. “Story time later. Much running now.”
I whistled for the pieces of
wood to return to me. I could reform them into something useful with just a
drop or two, but trying to keep a plebeian from turned into kindling might be
another matter. Electricity was one of my elements to harness, but there was a
big difference between being shocked by wiring and having a mini-Zeus rain
bolts on your ass.
He bolted toward the closest
wooden structure, a gray weathered lean-to that had once been a barn. As long
as I didn’t direct the lightning his way, this plebeian would not get hurt.
“Since when did I become Helpful Annie? Fuck this noise.”
Oh, right. I liked being free.
Incarceration might be nothing compared to what Captain Overcompensation was
about to do to me, but I really did want more time being Duchess Valira’s
personal whipping girl. The scars still stung with hellfire.
I ripped open my left wrist with
my fangs. There was no time to be graceful. My staff reformed from simple oak
into hardened ebony and the runes glistened in sanguine hue as I gave them new
purpose. “All right, you fucking coward. Get down from those storm clouds and
come get me.”
The entire sky in front of me
became a black wall of doom clouds. “That can’t be good.” People never seem to
be too happy when I talk. I cannot imagine why. I had
not thought King Grab Ass packed away this
much power in his itty bitty cod piece.
“What in the hell are you
doing?” The idiot human had not kept running for safety, he had turned the fuck
around to grab at my shoulders as if I were your typical bag of easily marred
flesh. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“That’s my line, hayseed! Get the
fuck back in the barn before he...” I did not spit the rest out when lightning
tore the right side of my face open, depositing some of my teeth, jaw bone, and
tongue on the man. He pissed himself before he could belt out a whining-pitched
scream, which seemed to be a perfectly logical response.
The problem is that I am not
known for logical. Even as my power began to spill out of the open wound, my
eyes flashed with vinegar and sulfur. I was so fucking pissed at this tighty-whitey
wearing brat-cum-divine. He would be licking the mud off my boots before I was
done with him, if nothing else but because he temporarily took away my right to
spew awesomely witty phrases at his lame, zit-covered, face.
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