My sweet, sweet boy.All Bobo had ever done was be a good dog. All he was to blame for was loving me, loving my friends too. His goodness was met with evil, with a terrible darkness. With greed and a power-hungry need for more, more, and ever more.
It took me several moments to realize I’d begun speaking.
“No. No. No,” spilled from me, over and over.
“Joss. Baby,” Griffin whispered soothingly at my ear.
“No!” I only said it louder. I only meant it more.
“Everyone, get away from me. Don’t touch me.”
I didn’t bother couching my request in politeness.
Griffin, being the awesome bestie-boyfriend that he was, slid back and away from me without comment or question.
Around a monster’s body and the blood and gore of its insides—gray like the rest of it—my friends knelt and crouched on the ground. They circled Bobo and me but didn’t touch us.
“What are you gonna do?” Brady asked, his words sad as a dejected trombone.
Bobo might have been my dog in name, but he was all of ours. We all loved him.
And we’d already lost enough.
I closed my eyes and cradled Bobo’s heavy, limp body. I ignored the goop that coated him and felt beyond it to what was only him.
My pittie. My baby boy.
And then I recalled that, somehow, in some inexplicable way, I contained power beyond this world’s understanding. I had, apparently, gifted my friends with immortality. I’d presumably taken lightning or something from one of the institute’s students. According to Hunt’s father, I even walked his dreams. I could speak telepathically to my friends.
And I could love them and Bobo so freaking much that it practically felt like a superpower.
I had no knowledge of the extent of my abilities. I had even less of a comprehension of where exactly they came from, or why they were mine before anyone else’s.
But, however it had happened … whyever it had … magic had found me. Whether it was from this world or another entirely, it was, I allowed myself to believe,mine.
And so was Bobo.
In a ferocious pulse, I released into Bobo’s bodymy will, my determination that, despite all appearances,he shall live.
I heard crisp crackling but didn’t see it.
I smelled the electricity, mingling with the scent of blood and remains.
I pulsed and pulsed and pulsed what was feeling more and more like my magic with every passing breath.
I pressed and pushed my magic into Bobo.
Until I felt him move his legs.
The motion was subtle, hardly there, but my eyes flung open.
The pale blue of lightning arced across his body, jumping from mine to his and back again, so that he practically glowed.
I stared at him—willing, willing, willing him to be alive, not to have imagined his weak movement—until his eyes fluttered open.
I exhaled a disbelieving laugh, a sound incongruous in our surroundings.
Beyond the bright light that still encompassed his body and mine, I glanced up.
