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All I feel is rage.
Not the wrath that my immortal Fury mothers grant when they allow us the chance to avenge those who wronged us. No, this irritable crankiness that I embrace when slamming into someone and knocking them off the rink? It’s my shield against the rest of those gods-awful feelings that threaten to erupt and leave me behind as a hollow shell.
“Way to go,” my Fury sister calls. Kiva’s not my blood sister because I couldn’t save either of those. But my found family gets my need for violence, and while I don’t fit in anywhere, I can almost pretend here in Syn City.
Hit, smack, elbow, crunch. I attack other roller derby players like they’re manifestations of the invisible enemies that I can’t touch. How can I avenge my family’s murder—my murder—when the killer’s already dead? I’ve failed this family as much as my last, and my sad little salvation has become taking out the other Houses on the track like a one-woman demolition crew.
The shrill tweet of a whistle has me stopping, not even retaliating against the Gorgon who got in one last shove after the long rolling screech meant the end of our makeshift jam.
“You really nailed me with that hip check.” Tisia, the Gorgon who I’d been battling for the last lap, slaps my hand in a high five that sends me rolling. “Good for me that you’re such a skinny thing. If you had Jupiter-sized junk in the trunk like your Fury sister over there—”
“Hey,” Kiva interrupts, popping out her hip and smacking her butt. “Not everyone can have this booty.”
“Or their own makeup brand.” Tisia nods at me and points to her cheekbone. “How’d you make the swirly thing that looks like a whip in your eyeshadow today?”
I shake out my wings, releasing the tension from skating with them tucked. “It’s all in a flick of the wrist.” As a human, cosmetics had been my way to hide that I was the less-pretty sister. Now, I camouflage so much more behind eyeliner, glitter, and customized skates. “I can show you if you want.”
“I’ll take you up on that.” She glances to the stands—the empty stands. Without screaming fans, blinding spotlights, the smell of popcorn and cheese dip, the stickiness of spilled soda on the floor, and its usual cheerful chaos, The Rink seems a hundred stories tall instead of six. “Gotta go. My shift starts soon. See you at the Hack and Ale later?”
“Save me a target.” Because lobbing an ax at a bullseye before tossing back one of Tisia’s special brews sounds amazing right now.
“I’ll leave it up to you whether your sisters can bring their shifters.”
I don’t bother hiding my scowl. Shifters. Ugh, I can’t stand them, and my two Fury sisters mated with shifters.
Laughing at my expression, Tisia rolls away, her Housemates following. Most of Syn City’s shuttered since we don’t have tourists to entertain, but the Hack and Ale’s still open along with a few local hangouts. Otherwise, having this many deity daughters stuck in one town would be asking for trouble of the magical variety. Some people work puzzles or knit when they’re stir crazy. We’re more likely to strangle each other with supernatural strength and speed.
Kiva skates toward me with her dark wings streaking behind her, seemingly on a collision course to crash into me when she jabs her toe stop into the concrete to brake to a halt. I don’t flinch. While I’m good on skates, she’s amazing. “Must be hard being you, beauty queen,” she says. “I can’t imagine how many poor human hearts you broke before becoming a badass Fury.”
I throw a mischievous glare her way instead of confessing the truth that no one in Syn City would believe. The only guy I ever liked? He treated me like a little sister. Not shocking since we met when I was eleven and he was almost nineteen. But when I had my fifteenth birthday? Almost overnight, he began ignoring me. Or worse, if I somehow did manage to attract his attention, it was to remind me that I was the weird girl in high school who talked to plants and didn’t rate time with a wolf marshal.
I was looking for connection. He wanted nothing to do with me.
Worse, his brother and my sister had been together which meant he was at my house almost every friggin’ day. Of course, that was before his wolf shifter brother went rabid and killed me and my whole family—including his fiancé and even my baby sister—only to off himself. The jerk who I’d crushed on, the high and mighty wolf marshal? He did his best to cover up my family’s murder as if it’d never happened.
Screw shifters.
And screw my twisted brain for dredging up memories of Nolan Bankston and my family when Kiva had been trying to compliment me.
“You up for racing?” I ask her. “We might as well get some speed work in. The House Cup challenge won’t win itself when the crowds return.”
Kiva dashes away. “I’ll win.”
I zoom to catch up with her. “Cheater!”
“Says the loser.”
The clack of our skates on the track echo in the empty stadium, and I surrender to the whirring of wheels, Kiva’s laughter, and my pounding heartbeat as I pour on the speed. Dizzying laps later, my Fury sister declares it a tie.
“Good thing our third wasn’t here.” I hold my arms overhead to slow my ragged breathing.
“Dottie would’ve smoked us both,” she says.
True. Our other Fury sister is a speed demon. “We could’ve made it a wings-out round. She would’ve tripped over her big butterfly ones.”
“Next time—” Kiva cuts herself off, looking up into the stands.
I follow her gaze. Bunny, the rabbit shifter who’s in charge of maintenance at The Rink, stands next to the railing, much closer than she’d normally get when I’m here. It’s not a secret that I don’t like shifters. Although Bunny isn’t a predator. I can’t see the grey-haired, fast-talking rabbit as someone who’d go rabid and tear apart the people who loved her. Then again, no one had expected that of Lowell either.
