He was going to—
Not again. Not again. Not again.
People screamed.
He couldn’t do this. He needed to find a way to—
Except the feeling was already gone.
He hadn’t snapped.
People were still screaming. Why were they screaming?
“Silas! Silas, come on!”
Hands grabbed at him, and he opened his eyes to see Anika, struggling to get his seatbelt undone. The airbags had gone off at some point, he realized. He raised a hand to his breastbone—it was tender, bruised from the force of slamming into the airbag. How had he not felt that?
“Motherfucking motherfucker of a goddamn fucking seatbelt—”
For some reason, he gathered, it was very important that he get out of this seat. He pushed Anika’s hands away and fiddled with the buckle until it opened.
“Thank fuck,” she said. “Out. We need to get out.”
Silas exited the car, immediately getting assaulted with smoke and heat. The fog cleared from his mind as he took in the scene in front of him.
He might not have snapped, but someone else certainly had.
The immediate problem presented itself quickly—a streetlamp that had fallen on top of their Escalade. The engine was smoking beneath it, and Silas smelled gasoline leaking into the air. Whether that was from their car or the dozens of others that had been turned into a battlefield in front of them remained to be seen.
Silas stood frozen, taking in the scene, until Anika ran to him and pulled him a few feet away from their car, ranting about explosions and fires and “who knows what the fuck else, what the literalfuckis going on right now?”
“Snap,” he said, the only word he could get out.
Anika turned to him, her eyes wide. “Fuck.”
He didn’t bother responding, instead looking out at what had been the line of cars they’d been stuck in.Traffic’s cleared, at least, the morbid voice in the back of his head offered.People are dead, the sane part of him responded.
Most of the damage was a few yards ahead of them. A pedestrian bridge that ran over the roadway had collapsed, scattering concrete and plastic andpeople, screaming people, on top of the cars below. Silas’ gaze searched through the wreckage, doing his best to tune out the noises of anguish and terror that filled the air.
He didn’t know how, but Sylvia had caused this. He had to find the source of the snap. Had to find who had done this and make sure they could never do it again.
Smoke billowed through the air, blocking Silas’ vision as he searched the debris. Vaguely, he heard Anika behind him, felt her trying to grab for his arm. He kept going. Someone shoved his shoulder, and he saw blood on their body.
He kept going.
Until.
The car was in the center of the chaos, everything else radiating from it in a gruesome circle. It was only a few feet away, but the haze made it difficult to see clearly. All Silas could grasp was the faint outline of a figure huddling inside, exposed to the air by car doors that had been blown off their hinges.
Anika spotted the car at the same time he did.
“Silas, don’t,” she said, reaching for him. He evaded her grip, rushing toward the car. He heard her feet pounding behind him, but he didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, even as he tripped over bricks and bodies and god knew what else. He was single-minded, focused only on putting an end to the dark power that had caused this.
But when he got to the car, he saw that the dark power was a teenager, if that—the short-haired kid who was curled in a ball in the back seat might not even be out of middle school. Their head was in their hands, their body rocking back and forth as they wailed. It sounded so much like his mom that for a second Silas was thrown back in time, the sheer misery of it dropping him to his knees.
All of the violence that had invaded him disappeared, his body going slack in its wake. He felt paralyzed, stuck on the pavement, watching a life be unraveled.
Anika, though, was not paralyzed. She moved around him to the cowering teen. She reached out her hand, carefully laying it on the kid’s arm.
