High Voltage (Fever #10)(2)

Where had it come from?

Consumed by the mystery, he opened his eyes. Although he healed with remarkable speed, he was in no mood to burn his hands again so he stalked to a nearby tumble of rock and selected a long narrow wedge.

Returning to the far-flung star, he nudged it with the stone, working it up the side of the sandy indentation so he could flip it over and examine it. Even with his hands a fair distance from the object, it cast enough heat to blister his skin.

He, who believed in neither signs nor death, who, truth be told, believed in nothing at all, stared down for a long time, no bloody idea what to make of it.

On the opposite side of the fallen star, etched by a quill of stardust, three words gleamed:

I’M OKAY I’M





THE SOULSTEALER HAD NO idea how long it slumbered.

It didn’t know it was slumbering.

It thought it had died.

Strains of music shivered into the earth, burrowed deep into fertile soil, through rock, clay, and rock again, sinking deeper into iron, lead, copper, silver and gold, then an alien, immutable alloy until, at last, the ancient melody penetrated the tomb and nudged the deadly leviathan awake.

Awareness dawned in slow stages.

It remembered then.

The arrival of the Faerie, the endless, unwinnable war, the lies and deception, the loss of power. The torture. The conquest. The brutalized face, the mask. The incarceration, the disease that claimed it, until finally it was a shade among shadows. Mask clattering to age-old stone, it had become as insubstantial as air.



At the end, with the last vestige of its awareness, it managed no more than a feeble protest.

It had once believed itself obdurate, eternal, unstoppable.

It would make certain of that this time.





The pupil in denial; I can’t take my eyes off of you

“I SMELL BONES!” SHAZAM EXPLODED, whiskers bristling with excitement. “Bones everywhere. Thousands and thousands of them! You take me to all the best places, Yi-yi!” He slanted me an adoring look before launching himself at the earth and digging, sending tufts of grass and dirt flying.

“Stop digging,” I exclaimed. “You can’t eat those bones.”

“Can, too. Watch,” came the muffled voice.

“No, I mean, you’re not allowed to eat them,” I clarified.

He ignored me. Dirt continued to fly, mounding rapidly behind him.

“Shazam, I mean it. You promised to obey my rules. My expects,” I reminded, using his often-stilted manner of speaking, “bars on your cage.”

Head buried in the dirt, he said in a muffled voice, “That was then. This is now. Then, I didn’t have a home.”

“Shazam,” I said in the warning tone I knew he hated. But heeded.

Pudgy body wedged halfway into his hole, my Hel-Cat stiffened and inched out—exceedingly slowly and begrudgingly—and glared at me. Dirt dusted his broad nose, his silver whiskers, and clung to his long, silver-smoke ruff. He sneezed violently, licked his nose then scrubbed it with a furious paw. “But they’re bones, tiny red. They’re already dead. I’m not killing them. You said I couldn’t kill anything. You didn’t say I couldn’t eat things that were dead.” His eyes narrowed to violet slits. “You bofflescate your expects. You bofflescate my head. Who even does that?”



Bofflescate wasn’t a word I knew—he had many of those—but I intuited the meaning. “These bones are different. They matter to humans. We bury them in certain places for a reason.”

He spoke slowly and carefully, as if addressing a complete idiot. “Me, too. So they’re easy to find when I’m hungry.”

I shook my head, a smile tugging at my lips. “No. These are the bones of people we care about.” I gestured at the dark silhouettes of gravestones that stretched for acres around us. “We don’t eat them, we bury them so—”

“But nobody’s doing things with them and they’re rotting!” he wailed. Slumping on his haunches, he splayed his front paws around his pudgy white belly. “You give bones. I find bones. Same thing. One good reason why I can’t eat them,” he demanded.

I debated trying to explain human burial rituals to him, but many of our traditions defied his comprehension. A bone was a bone was a bone. Convincing him that graveyard bones carried an emotional and spiritual attachment to humans, unlike the cow or pig bones I sometimes brought him, could take all night, and leave him just as bewildered as he’d begun. And me exhausted.

I gave him the only answer that worked at a time like this. The answer I’d hated as a kid. “Because I said so.”

He rose to his full height, arched his back and hissed at me, baring sharp fangs and a long black-tipped tongue.



I returned his snarl. With Shazam, I didn’t dare yield or say “just one bone, just this time” because in his mind if a rule could be violated once, it was no longer a rule and never would be again. Unless, of course, it worked in his favor.

His eyes turned flinty.

Mine cooled to emerald ice.

He cut me a look of scathing rebuke.

I switched tactics and flayed him with an expression of reproach and disappointment.

His violet eyes widened as if I’d struck him. He shuddered dramatically, toppled over, collapsed on his back, and began to weep with great, hiccupping sobs, clutching his paws to his eyes.