One Week Earlier

Blood had been everywhere. On the sunlit pavement pooling, splattered like an artist's paint on her sister's face, gunking in her hair. For a moment, Malyssa flat-out panicked. Who knew a head wound could bleed so much? Then she bolted to action. It felt like Dianthea's life depended on it. Perception, thought, and memory switched speed gears to allow only flashes, only split-second choices, ones Malyssa wouldn't remember making.

Throwing her roadbike so that it smashed to the sidewalk, hitting the curb in just the right place to dent the frame. Kneeling right in the red pool in the white sneakers Auntie Sophia had bought for back to school not a month before, which she struggled until now to keep pristine in a dirty city. Placing a ring on her index finger that could get her arrested for illegal magic use, even underage as she was.

And then the hard part. The impossible. Brain surgery, skull fracture re-alignment, replacement of cerebrospinal fluid, a lumbar drain to reduce pressure, a blood transfusion, which was simpler than blood regeneration with a donor by her side who shared not just Dianthea's blood type but every strand of her DNA. Then, an antibiotics spell to cast away bacteria, and pain relief, swelling reduction.

It would take years of study before Malyssa would have the words to understand or describe what she was doing. Right now she was like an emergency responder diving into a pool to save a drowning victim with only a second-hand knowledge of how to swim.

An instinct took over and her mind went to battle, and though a little training guided her, most of her jabs, ducks and strikes were nothing but mindless nerve, action and reaction. Healing the torn meningeal artery that had been severed when Daia's head struck the pavement felt like reforming a clay riverbed with her hands to block a stream, but the brain bleed stopped.

The downhill decline was one the girls had sped down on their second-hand bikes a thousand times. Or at least a quarter of that because they grew up downhill of Bernal Heights on the south side of the working class neighborhood, and it was one of their four favorite streets to fly down the hill on. Biking home from school every day since the fourth grade, they always made the effort to climb up to the boulevard that ringed Bernal Hill for the view, as if from Mount Olympus, that captured a panoramic of San Francisco.

Starting with downtown to the north, which didn't even look very big from here, swinging down past the bay and its industrial waterfront, and looking out to the south at the dense checkerboard of a million tiny toy bungalow roofs of Portola and the Exelsior. They would steady themselves like pro skiers, then launch down the incline, streaking past picture book residences with cars parked on sideways driveways, tipped onto an angle.

Rain or shine, wet slidey streets or dry — never snow, though, in the Norcal city — the twins ended their trip to Aunt Sophia's home at the bottom of the heights, with an adrenalin rush dare devil dive off the top of the world.

Daia chose not the wear a helmet that morning because she "couldn't find it." More likely because Aaron in twelfth grade asked her to get pizza with him for lunch that day and she didn't want helmet hair. Yet neither of the sisters was a speed demon — neither was reckless or wild. They both held hands over the brake handles the whole ride. They looked well ahead to check for cars.

Today they swept down Bernal Heights Boulevard, an uninterrupted view of uncountable clay tejado roofs on their left, they reached its tail end and swung around a curve to intersect the road it had run parallel to. Gathering speed to rush through the protected intersection. In their blindspot going downhill, a car ran a stop sign and clipped Daia's bike from behind. As if weightless, her body had soared. Her skull snapped to the cement. Malyssa reached her first. No thought of the driver, there was no room for thought.

Performing brain surgery in the middle of the street, she lost all awareness of the world around her, sprawled on the ground, her bookbag still clinging to her shoulders as she knelt, her knee getting stiff where it struck the pavement when she fell to a sit (without her noticing) and her thighs getting sore from the crouch (but she couldn't think of that while using nothing but her mind to repair an artery for the first time).

Only when her sister, her spitting image, a vision of herself, opened her eyes a fluttering millimeter and her chest rose to suck in the first breath in a while did Malyssa pause to notice the driver.

A woman in jogging attire who stood over them pointed a firearm and held a phone to her head — two equally dangerous weapons. "Yes, I'm seeing clearly. How dare you," the woman's voice hushed into the phone, as if Malyssa were a wild animal who might not notice her if she kept her voice low. "The first girl had a gallon of blood leaking from her head and the second one closed her eyes and poof! No injuries. Not a scratch. Please get here fast. Tell me you already dispatched someone six minutes ago while we've been having this conversation."

Malyssa rose her voice to interrupt, "Excuse me, ma'am?" She recoiled as her mind pictured the gun going off — a single round firing into her chest where it was pointed. "Ma'am, could you please lower your weapon?" Nervousness and extreme fatigue strained her voice. It was hard to speak up and speak calmly with the combination of adrenalin from her heroics a moment ago and the fear and stress hormones flooding her system at the sight of the woman's pistol.

The driver wore a sleek ponytail and pristine jogging attire — brightly colored, barely worn, not like the hand me down ten-year-old sweatshirts the runners from the neighborhood wore. Had the gun been in the glove compartment? Had this woman driven to Bernal Hill to go for a run with a view from its glorious peak?

Her eyes flashed in Malyssa's direction and away, as if to say she had seen enough, and she continued raving into the phone as if uninterrupted. "I stood over her for a good five minutes while she was in a little trance. I know what I saw. I told you, they were biking recklessly. The little witches must have made the bikes faster with a spell, the two came out of nowhere and collided into each other right in front of me. I ran over to check on them but it wasn't just the unconscious one who was unresponsive. For the past, I don't know, seven minutes now, the little witch has been casting spells. A healing spell, maybe bringing back the dead." Her mascaraed and shadowed eyes went wide. "Are you getting all this down? This is my statement. I can't wait here all day, I have an appointment. I want these lawbreakers locked away where they can't grow up to be violent criminals."

The whole while sirens had crooned and wailed from a distance. There were always sirens to be heard in San Francisco. It took until then before it occurred to Malyssa that the howl of sirens was coming for her.

Yet her mind cleared enough — despite the terror of staring down the literal barrel of death, the chaos of having seen her sister at the gates of the same, the distraction of the blaring sounds entering her ears and swamping her head and the beating blows of this woman's words — to cast one more spell. One she had been taught and had never practiced. Taking a breath and a gaze down at her sister, bracing herself as if to jump off the top of a great height and not even close to certain where she would land — she teleported right before that psycho vigilante's eyes. In her mind, eyes open and fixed on Daia's frosty ones, it was like solving a maze as fast as a computer could; but when you reach the center, there's no way to see where it leads.

The pavement behind Daia turned to grass. Long, lush, uncut grass. Pure luck had it that they hadn't landed on a digging squirrel, or refuse from the renovation of Sophia's bungalow, or a stray child from the daycare next door or someone's dog getting into the nest of wildflowers. Because she hadn't yet learned how to look through the center of the maze to scout where she was going.

Blinking woozily, Daia pushed herself up on an arm. "We should teleport home everyday. Biking is dangerous."

And so the twins were laughing their heads off when Aunt Sophia came rushing out of the back door, breaking through the brambles on the stone patio and tripping to them. What chance that she had been looking out the back window just as the girls had teleported?

"What is — what did you — where are your bikes?"

A sinking feeling filled Malyssa's stomach as she turned her helmeted head to her aunt. Right. The bikes hadn't come along for the ride.

Thanks for reading this new story! Another chapter is out now. This book will update a lot. If you enjoyed it, please leave a star⭐️ Thanks!✨