Page 140 of The Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium

“Didn’t your mother teach you to play hard to get?” Damien tsked at her. “I’m not calling anything off. Not until I see this thing in action. How soon until the next visitor gets here?”

“Sooner than you think, you toad-dicked troglodyte,” Kiki purred.

Damien spun on his heel, following that familiar voice.

“Hi, honey,” Kiki called from the basement’s stairway, leaning over the railing with their hat tipped toward Damien like a ’20s mobster. “Did you miss me?”

Damien froze, shock paralyzing him for a scant second. It was all the time Talula needed. She tapped into her conjuring ability, focusing on the protective cuff, on all the protective cuffs. Talula’s magic stretched and stretched, creating blue-rimmed trapdoors all over Pine Hollow and all over the world. In a blink, those trapdoors dropped their targets right into the basement of the Blue Moon. On top of Damien.

Trophy hunters in various states of rage and confusion were piled on top of one another, limbs flailing. Just as she’d planned, it was chaos. It gave Talula just enough time to make her next move.

Talula locked eyes with Kiki. The jinn gave the sorceress a stoic salute and disappeared. Talula reached for the Volta and let its might pour through her. Her nerves burned with magical overdrive. This time, she was braced for it. She let the Volta’s power reach into her magical center, rooting into her very core.

Wrapped up in the Volta’s magic, she made her request to the Volta. In response, she sensed ferocious determination from the portal. But there was a pressing against her mind, a message communicated in amorphous images and feelings. Fear seized her muscles as she realized what the Volta was trying to tell her—that she’d need to channel the entirety of the Volta’s power, unfettered, to pull this off. And it might just kill her.

Damien turned and locked eyes with Talula, his snarl a murderous promise.

One she’d never let him keep.

Without hesitation, Talula shattered the spells that contained and controlled the Volta and its ancient power source. There was a deep, subsonic boom that she was sure rippled through the bones of every organic being within a five-mile radius. The Volta’s enormous, unstable wellspring of raw magical power was unleashed. Through Talula. She was haloed in blue-white light, the portal behind her a swiftly expanding schism in reality. The hunters gaped at her.

“Welcome to the Volta, assholes,” Talula called, her voice resonating with pure magic.

And the Volta swallowed them whole.

33

When the burst of big magic subsided, Talula stood on a blue-hued floor. Shocks of magic zinged through her connection to the Volta like electricity, the power almost unbearable. It hurt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Talula used every ounce of willpower to shove the pain out of her mind. Then she looked around. She was surrounded by glasslike walls that flashed with jagged arcs of lightning. Beyond the walls, blue smears of raw magic boiled like magma, as if Talula were inside a blue-tinged fishbowl. Talula gasped, finally realizing where she was. The Volta had taken her to the center of its wellspring of power, like the eye of a storm.

But Talula wasn’t alone. The Volta’s eye contained the dozens of hunters she’d pulled from Pine Hollow and beyond. After being conjured through two different magical ordeals, the hunters were unsteady on their feet, talking and shouting—they hadn’t noticed her yet. With the Volta’s power still sizzling painfully under her skin, Talula illusioned herself invisible.

Damien called for order with all the cool of an agitated poodle. “Shut the fuck up, you pussies!”

(Talula glared invisibly.)

“Sir, where are we?” one man asked.

“I don’t know.” Damien seethed.

“How are we getting out of here?”

Damien didn’t answer.

“Could we just—” one man reached a hand through the (apparently) semipermeable walls of the Volta’s eye. Talula bit back a warning and watched as the man went white with pain. He let loose a scream of bone-deep agony. A few nearby hunters yanked him away from the walls. His hand didn’t come with him. The hunters stared at a bloody stump cauterized by ferocious magic.

An eerie silence fell over the crowd as the maimed man’s magic cuff cracked and fell away. Even a jinn-made cuff couldn’t hold up against the Volta’s raw sorcery.

One down, Talula thought to herself, slinking to the back of the crowd. Forty-nine to go.

As the hunters squabbled, Talula sunk deeper into her magic. The Volta had supercharged her, allowing her to see the different magics that made up her core. She saw the white-gold of her witchfire, the rich mossy green of her elemental powers, the cerulean of her strange portal skills, the mirror-silver of illusion-working. There were dozens of other colors, signifying more abilities she had yet to master. Talula spotted a strange, multicolored thread—immediately, she knew it was the part of her magic that could manipulate time. It had been there all along, just under the surface.

She held the thread firm in her mind and focused on a nearby hunter’s protective cuff. Talula saw the cuff as it would be in ten thousand years, eaten away by rust and time. Steadily and silently, the cuff’s metal degraded around the hunter’s wrist. She focused until the cuff was a firm tap away from falling apart. The man remained oblivious, still distracted by the racket of arguing hunters. Talula moved on to the next cuff and the next, until she only had four cuffs to go. Then her heart stopped.

Dahlia was here, zip-tied, rumpled, and glaring at the hunters, who held her like a caught criminal for Damien’s interrogation. Talula jerked, stopping herself from leaping at him.

“What is this place? What did that bitch do to us?” Damien demanded.

Angry red lights flashed like popped blood vessels in the Volta’s walls.