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No… no, no!
My skin rippled with the sensation that promised its transformation into scales. I gritted my teeth and clenched my abdomen as I fought the urge.
I couldn’t turn here, not in front of Dad. Not when I hadn’t told him yet. Worse still, I’d be a sitting duck without my legs in a fight like this.
The good luck mark tingled faintly on my arm, its power waning. Given how much I had called on its power lately, was it any surprise?
The urge disintegrated under a wave of pain as a breeze dashed against my open wound. I gritted my teeth and grabbed handfuls of the grass as the agony radiated up to my torso and into my very bones.
“Maeve!” Dad scrambled to my side and rolled me more onto my side as he inspected the wound. “Gods…”
Keith and Wendy had taken cover behind a pair of trees as Nigel and Robert staggered out of the black smoke, hacking and coughing. Soot smeared their faces, like they had just fallen out of a dirty fireplace.
My body convulsed for the final time as a police siren cut through the night, and the sound of hurried footsteps approached.
I fell limp as exhaustion took hold, the tears in my eyes blurring everything. Even Dad’s voice sounded fuzzy, and I sank into a stupor bathed in red and blue light.
My daze continued as I was loaded into an ambulance, driven to the hospital, and deposited onto a bed. Light came and went from my sight, but always looked like Yule tree baubels no matter how much I blinked.
Dad fussed the entire way, but his words became garbled noises in my ears.
The pain had my jaw clenched so tightly that it ached, but my main concern was keeping my transformation at bay. My body hadn’t indicated it would turn since just after the fireball hit me, but I couldn’t lower my guard.
The impulses to transition always came fiercely and without warning. It would take all the effort I had left to stop them if they surfaced again.
“What do we have here?” The cheerful voice that entered the room appeared to come from a colourful figure snapping on a pair of latex gloves.
“She got burned. Do you have talismans to—?” Dad scrambled to get the words out so fast that they merged incoherently.
“Theo, come on now, stand back.” That was Sandra’s voice.
The doctor stepped so close that all I could see was her white coat.
“Goodness me, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill burn. This is deep. Do you know what caused this?” she asked.
I opened my mouth, despite the monumental effort it took, but it turned out she wasn’t even talking to me.
“It was a fire wand.” Dad’s voice broke on the word “fire.”
“The Everharts?” Sandra asked.
“Who else?”
“A regular fire wand doesn’t have the power to cause this much damage,” the doctor said. “Are you sure that’s what it was?”
“I’m positive. I saw it happen,” Dad said.
The fog in my brain couldn’t make sense of much, but one thought surfaced. Had the fire affected me more because of… what I was?
Something cold pressed to my hip and I flinched as my wound flared.
“Hold on for me a minute, chicken. You’ll be healed in no time,” the cheerful doctor said.
An icy sensation pooled around the pain, numbing it, and within moments, both subsided completely.
I blinked and rolled over onto my back, my vision slowly returning to normal. I scrabbled at my jeans to look at the wound, but it had disappeared.
“Take it easy, Maeve,” Sandra said as Dad rushed to my side. “You’ll need some time to recover from the magic.”
