And she was never going to get back to sleep with the green shimmer peeping through her elbow or her thoughts going circles on the topic of The Halloween Incident. Once she started remembering the zombies it was all over anyway. Suzy sat up with a sigh and threw the covers aside.
The 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 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?”