Knowing it was the last I might ever give him, I made myself smile at him.
Bobo jerked his head up and down, his ears flopping. he repeated.
“Joss, no,please,” my dad said while I stepped over my friends’ bodies and lowered myself into the center of them.
I draped a leg over Griffin and another over Layla. I rested a hand on Hunt and the other on Brady. I made sure my bare skin touched theirs. Then I closed my eyes.
My dad began shouting. Orson soon joined in with quieter pleas that were just as insistent.
Man, had my life ever jumped tracks and railroaded down the Crazy-Town line.
Full steam ahead.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d done it the previous times. I didn’t know how to do it this time. So I did what had worked for me before: I got the fuck out of my own way and let that knowledge which transcended this form roll through me.
The floor gave a final rumble beneath my seat—was the battle not over everywhere, then? At least I heard no more gunfire.
I sank into myself, feeling where my skin connected with my friends. I reminded myself I wasn’t just a human, I was also alushina. What they could do, I could do. I was the one responsible for my crew’s immortality. All I had to do was renew the spark of that everlasting life within them.
Give them a jump start.
Searching for that electric lightning juice cycling within my system, I found it crackling already, a part of me now.
My dad yelled some more. Other voices did too.
Then they faded.
Power, like an electric storm, crackled and arced and sizzled up and down my insides, jumping outward to coat my skin, making me untouchable by mere mortals.
I traveled back to my mindspace, relieved not to find any lingering remnants of Magnum within. I felt for my friends’ energies, for their own mindspaces, and when I found them, all at once, I dreamwalked into them.
Then, like a defibrillator in the flesh, I pulsed my power into them.
I demanded—not through our telepathic link, which felt dead too, but of their very essences.
The power of lightning and thelushinasurged through me in long pulses.
In the same instant, the four of them responded.
Their energies came back online.
They turned on.
I imagined their essences as heartbeats, and, slowly at first, they began thumping.
Ba-dum.
Next, they sped up.
Badum. Badum. Badum. Badum. Badum.
Something bulldozed into my body.
Bobo.
Unable even to catch myself, I crashed backward onto my friends.
