We waited for a couple of minutes, hiding behind the van. The area was silent. I peered out.
“Is it over?” Jess said.
“I think so. There’s no-one left. Just you and me.”
Vincent’s dead body, lying in the middle of the stones, still glowed with some of the power he’d absorbed. It began spewing out of him. Great beams of light poured away from his body, and then streamed towards the two of us. The beams of light raced across the field from Vincent’s corpse, curling and twisting into a funnel that was targeting us.
“Ethan?” Jess yelled in alarm
“I don’t know,” I said, panic in my voice. I couldn’t understand it. Was Vincent still alive? Had all of this been for nothing?
And then all the power Vincent had absorbed at the last minute raced towards Jess and into her. Jess gasped as the energy flowed into her body.
“What?” I shouted. “No!”
I waved my hands at the beams of light, but they swept past me, intent on reaching their target. There was nothing I could do as the energy poured into Jess. Her eyes went wide and her body shook.
“Jess!”
“What’s happening?” she asked. “Ethan!” she shouted, terrified now.
“I don’t know!”
The energy continued to flow into her, seeming to settle within her. I’d seen something like this before, when Vincent had absorbed all the magical energy after the death of Marian.
I intuitively guessed what was happening.
The power inside Vincent needed to go somewhere. Normally it would have dissipated into the world, but Jess - Jess had tried practising magic. However limited her attempts might have been, it had opened her up to magic. She was the closest living potential witch in the vicinity, and all that power was drawn to her as if she was a lightning rod.
I stared at her, not knowing what to do or say, as her body glowed with the sudden energy. Unlike Vincent, she had no idea how to direct it or what to do with it. Her eyes blazed, crackles of electricity danced around her fingers. For a brief few seconds she was lifted a foot off the ground and hung there as the energy seeped into her. Then she collapsed to the floor.
I knelt beside her, checked for a pulse.
“Jess?” I said, but she was unconscious.
Dee appeared beside me as I was trying to bring Jess round, and I do mean appeared. Straight out of thin air, in his blue-skinned djinn form. I jumped up, yelping. I was initially too startled and too concerned with Jess to notice there was something different about Dee’s djinn form.
“How did you do that? You appeared out of nowhere!”
“The portal opening, it’s restored the rest of my power,” Dee said. “I was watching over you, mate, in my spirit form. Just like old times, really. Had to knock out two soldiers as they were headed this direction, made sure Victoria had really gone. Kept you safe. What happened to Jess?”
“The magical energy floated over this way and went into her.”
“Terrific,” Dee muttered. “That’ll be all the mucking around with magic spells she tried. Nearest potential witch in the area. I’m sure that won’t make things complicated at all in the future.”
“Will she be alright?”
“She should be. There’s no reason for the power to harm her, but that was a lot of energy flying around out there. If she’s absorbed it all, controlling it will be difficult. Crikey, what a mess.”
“Can you vanish her out of here? Like, teleport the way you just did, get her to a hospital?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dee said. “I switch into an ethereal form, it’s not teleportation in the strictest sense. Can’t take anyone with me is the bottom line.”
“Then we’ll have to carry her.”
“Looks like it,” Dee said. He moved towards Jess.
I gawped.
“Uh, Dee?”
“Yeah?”
I squinted, not believing what I was seeing. Now I’d noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it.
“Boobs,” I said, “You have boobs.”
Underneath the orange jumpsuit there were indeed the unmistakable signs of breasts. Dee sighed and turned to face me.
“You’re a girl?” I said.
Well, okay, maybe I sort of squawked it.
“Remember when I told you I couldn’t shift all the way into my true form because there wasn’t enough energy in the world?” Dee said.
I nodded dumbly.
“This is my true form.”
I gawped at Dee. He – sorry, she - was an inch or so taller than me in her full djinn form, the orange jumpsuit stretched to breaking point by her transformation. Her skin tone was a darker blue than I’d seen before, and the white-blue pupil-less eyes were glowing, something else that was new. Fingernails still the colour of obsidian, sharper than before. Black hair which was longer than Dee’s standard short cut.
Other than that, the most obvious difference for the new, magically super-charged Dee were the aforementioned couple of unexpected developments.
“And, you, uh, didn’t think to mention you’re a girl djinn earlier?” I said, trying not to stare at Dee’s boobs and failing.
“You were freaking out about the djinn thing as it was,” Dee said. “Besides, what did you think I meant every time I said to you ‘I’m really a girl’?”
“What? You said that like three times, and I thought you were joking about that prank you played dressing up in your sister’s school uniform.”
Dee facepalmed.
“Sometimes, mate, you really miss what is right in front of you. Okay, look, shall we deal with this later?”
I nodded.
“Yeeaaaah,” I said eventually. “Let’s do that.”
“You’re not freaking out now, are you?” Dee asked.
I lifted my hand up and held my thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.
“About that much, maybe?”
Dee grimaced and shifted back into her Deepak form.
“He freaks out more about me being a girl than being a demon,” she muttered with a roll of her eyes.
I grinned. “Fair point.”
It was still Dee.
Jess’s head rolled on the grass, and she opened her eyes.
“What happened?” she said.
“Well, as of three minutes ago, I’m pretty sure you just became one of the most powerful witches on the planet,” Dee said.
“Also, Dee is actually a girl,” I added, then deadpanned: “but we’re dealing with that later.”
Jess did a double-take at Dee, then looked at her own hands, her eyes wide.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” she said.
“For now, keep your cool,” Dee said, “And be really, really careful about wishing things were different. Or imagining something. Or wanting something. Or trying to do something you couldn’t normally do. Or getting angry or upset. Especially those last two. Big no-nos.”
Jess looked stunned.
“So basically do nothing at all?” she said.
“That’s why you’re the smart one,” Dee quipped. “Look, we’ll have to sort something out to help you control it. But for now, you need to act as if you’re carrying a nuclear bomb with a dodgy trigger, okay?”
Jess continued to look stunned.
“Okay,” she whispered.
I realised something. Dee had been a few hundred metres away from going home to Arcadia through the portal that had been opened by Vincent. Dee could have left at any time in spirit form.
The thought of abandoning us hadn’t even crossed her mind.
I’m never leaving my friends behind again, I thought.
I wish I’d been able to stick to that, but it wasn’t how things worked out.
As we stood there deciding what to do, Section 13 finally put in an appearance. Late as usual, their cranky vans racing towards us and the scene of carnage all around.
“Reckon that’s my cue to get out of here,” Dee said.
“Go,” I said. “I can deal with this. And look, can you tell Mum everything is okay? She’ll be worried sick. Again.”
“No problem. Going to take me a few hours to get home, though.”
“Right, wait, what happened to Alice?”
“You mean your vampire girlfriend? She bailed on all of us. As soon as the fighting started, she took off in the opposite direction. I told you. Never trust a vampire.”
Dee’s body turned to a near translucent smoke and she flew away.
Torches shone in our faces as Jess and I sat on the damp grass, shell-shocked but alive. We held our hands up.
“Don’t shoot!” I called out, “I’m with Section 13. I need to talk to Moorecroft.”
The torches were lowered. Through the white spots dancing around my eyes, I saw the squad leader I’d met twice before, once at school and the second time in High Wycombe.
“Kid,” he said, surveying the devastation and dead bodies, “I swear you have more lives than a damn cat.”
“Trust me,” I muttered. “You have no idea.”
Author note: I'll be publishing 3 chapters a week moving forward due to a change in personal circumstances. I'll update my Patreon to reflect this next week, cheers all :)
