We drive across Davis. The purple haze moves slowly, lazily, and once it’s properly unfurled in the map, my headache disappears. So just an onset-headache, then. A notification-headache.

  I hope sticking more Rank Tokens into the Ability will make the headache a little less intense.

  A few red dots show up as we drive, but most of them disappear as we move past them. I’m starting to understand that not every monster out there shows up on the map. Maybe it’s strength, maybe it’s proximity, who knows. I’m too busy giving Nancy directions that I don’t have time to speculate.

  Actually, I totally do, since we drive in a straight line. But every time I try to change the subject, Nancy tells me to focus.

  We drive past the GO train station, the hospital, and the Kawartha Dairy store—and we almost stop. “They’re literally a shop that just sells specialty dairy,” Nancy considers as we slow to a crawl going past. “They have to have a backup generator, right?”

  “Even if they don’t,” Ryder says, nose pressed right up the window, “I’ll drink the ice cream soup.”

  “Not if it’s been sitting unrefrigerated for three days,” I say.

  Nancy pipes up. “And not for the ice cream,” she says. “I want to take the generator.”

  “A generator isn’t a bad idea,” I say to her before I look over my shoulder. “And I have some ice cream in my inventory. We can have some later.”

  “But is it Kawartha Dairy?” Ryder asks.

  “No, it’s Chapman’s. Take what you can get.”

  The car doesn’t speed up.

  “And if we’re stopping anywhere, it’ll be the Costco by the highway. They might even have generators. Come on, the surge is moving,” I say. “Nancy, drive.”

  That seems to get the ball rolling and off we go again. I turn us down the next main intersection.

  I realize that the purple haze has slowed down. And the red dots are starting to congregate. “I think the location is settling,” I say.

  “We’re not really in an environment fit for fighting,” Nancy says, looking around the industrial buildings and strip plazas of fast food restaurants, nail services, and offices for optometrists and tutoring services.

  “We’ll have to make do,” I say, even as I start to realize where the haze has settled, and where we are on the map. “Because we’re heading into that Tim’s.” I point in the distance. “Up there, on the right.”

  Ah, Tim Horton’s. The Canadian Dunkin Donuts, but better, of course. The coffee chain named after a famous hockey player that was eventually bought out by some American conglomerate. Timbits. Double-doubles. Bagels.

  What I would give for a working Tim Horton’s right now.

  “Tim Horton’s!?” Nancy shrieks, her jerking motion toward me making the whole car swerve.

  “Whoa,” Ryder says from the back—though whether from Nancy’s outburst, the bad driving, or our current destination, it’s hard to tell.

  “Don’t miss the driveway!” I call out.

  Nancy swerves into it at the same moment a few birds swoop down from a telephone line. Nancy’s bad driving means they can’t get out of the way in time. They bash into the front of the Volvo strong enough that I figure they’ll leave dents. “Oops,” Nancy says. “Sorry, birds.”

  “Hey, those are monsters that we would have had to fight,” Ryder points out, already reaching for the door and lighting his fireball. “Don’t apologize for making our jobs easier.” With that he hops out, and before I can even think of following, he’s letting out a wild battle cry and running toward the coffee shop.

  “Ugh,” Nancy moans. “There’s a whole field right over there. And a Starbucks! Why couldn’t it have been a Starbucks.”

  “Of course you’re a Starbucks girl,” I laugh, climbing out of the car before pulling my baseball bats—two now, one for each hand—out of my weapons storage.

  It might be easier to swing with two hands on one bat, but the more the merrier! Maybe I’ll stick an extra Rank Token into my strength to be able to wield them better.

  Gotta go bash some skulls in, first.

  I pause in the middle of the parking lot, letting out a sigh at the absurdity of the thought. And then I keep on my way, watching a few skunks heading from the townhouses across the park and toward the Tim Horton’s. Ugh.

  Something—or someone—has busted the glass windows of the Tim’s, leaving scattered beads of glass all over the sidewalk. I crunch through the glass, but I still take the door. Old habits, and all that.

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  It’s chaos inside. The map is basically a solid mass of red now, and Ryder’s got a fireball in each hand.

  He really needs to upgrade that skill, so he can actually throw the fireballs. Or develop some other fire power, like a whip.

  I’m distracted by a squirrel leaping for my head. I hack with one of my bats so hard I hear the swoosh and the squirrel gets catapulted out a broken window.

  I loose track of the fight. I kick, I swing, I lose a bat and eventually sucker-punch a deer in the throat. The skunks set off their spray but it doesn’t smell; clearly, their magic evolution mutated their spray from being stinky to being sticky, and the goop slowly hardens while a pair of rabbits try to escape. They fail, the skunks’ spray fully hardening, and a Rottweiler-sized raccoon literally bites one of their heads off and swallows it whole.

  Thinking becomes hard. Feelings become impossible. All I know is the survival instinct, the way the adrenaline seizes my body and my hands grab whatever I can swing. When my second bat gets wrenched from my hands, I grab an overturned chair and swing with that. The chair shatters into pieces when it makes contact with one of the concrete-spraying skunks, and I stab the thing through the eye with one of the broken, jagged chair legs.

  I vault over the counter at one point while wrestling with a Canada goose (I have just enough sense to think, I had a nightmare like this when I was a child, like any good Canadian) and yank open a cabinet hard enough to stun him. Then I toss him inside, most of the way, and slam the thing shut on him again. A few extra slams and he’s beheaded, just a bloody goose body at my feet.

  The red just keeps amassing, and the purple on my map starts getting thicker, more opaque. But I notice that it’s also shrunk again, the purple, as if the epicentre has moved. And now it’s placed outside the Tim’s. I run, slipping over the gore on the ground to get to the front half of the cafe, needing to get to Ryder. I nearly twist my ankle tripping over one of my bats, which I snatch back up. “Get outside!” I scream, seeing him pinning a fox beneath an overturned table and burning its tail to the bone. “The surge will be strongest outside!”

  Ryder glances quickly at me before turning back to the fox. “Is it coming!?”

  “Any second!” I yell back, clotheslining some sort of bird that tries to fly past me. I had to shove my fingers into the dirt the last time. There’s no dirt here, just a guts-covered ground and more monsters than we can handle. Ryder might get a Rank Token, but all these guys are going to level up somehow, too. I don’t want to know what’ll happen after that. “Get outside, get to the ground,” I say, getting close enough to him to act as a sort of bodyguard. “Hands on it, attention on it, whatever. Maybe try to find some dirt! You need to—” I swing at another raccoon with a grunt, a smaller one that makes me worry that it’s got magic, and it smacks into a wall with sickening satisfaction.

  “Need to what!?”

  “Figure it out!”

  Though whether that was supposed to be the original ending of the sentence, I couldn’t tell you. I swing, kick, and smack as many of the monsters as I can manage, trying to keep them away from Ryder, while he ends the fox. I grab the back of his shirt and haul him to his feet, shoving him toward the broken windows. We clamber out and into the parking lot. The pandemonium out here somehow seems to be worse.

  No, I lied. This is worse: a voice I don’t recognize. “I did see other humans, I told you!”

  I look over. A small group of people, maybe six or seven, stand clumped between the Tim’s and the plaza beside it, up the drive through line.

  They let out a collective shriek as a few bodies of animals go careening out the window, one bird righting itself and taking off.

  The animals near us hear them and, as one, every monster head turns in their direction.

  Shit.

  The animals forget each other. They trip over themselves, the others, to head toward the humans, their eye rabid and saliva dripping out of their mouths. That… isn’t right.

  “Get back!” I shout, trying to catch up with the mutants before they can reach the people. I golf swing at a couple of the smaller critters and they go flying, but I can’t keep up. The raccoon on steroids that bite off the rabbit’s head is at the front of the pack. I’m not going to make it in time.

  A man pushes the group behind him and holds his arm up. It takes me a second to realize that he has a handgun. “Get out of the way,” he yells, using the gun to gesture to the side. So I do; I throw myself against the brick wall of the Tim’s, the one spot of the exterior that isn’t totally made of windows. A few shots go off. A girl shrieks—Nancy? One of the strangers? Me!?—but the raccoon goes down.

  That’s when there’s a small rumble. The magic surge, right, the reason that we’re here. The man goes to shoot again, but I don’t want to know what a magic surge would do with projectiles. “Don’t shoot!” I scream, my voice hoarse. He pauses.

  And so does every single monster in the place. They hesitate, like a crowd at a concert taking a collective inhale when the lights go down before the headliner. And for just a moment, the monsters act more like the animals they were. I don’t know if it’s just the chaos or if something in the rumble seeps their magic away before returns it exponentially, but I take the moment to drop onto my knees and press my hands into the ground. “Now, Ryder!” I call out, but I have no idea where he is.

  And then the surge hits, properly.

  It’s not as potent without my fingers in the dirt, but that might be for the better given how much damage it almost did. I can feel the slight shockwaves up through my feet and hands. The asphalt rumbles so hard it vibrates, and a few spiderwebs of cracks explode across the parking spots. Gravel chunks rain down around me.

  I tuck my chin as the wave crests, riding out the moment. There’s no pain like the first time—is it because the asphalt is acting as a barrier? Is it because I’m stronger? I don’t care why. I’m just glad, and after the waves ends, the monsters around me sag, drunk on the magic.

  My gaze goes right to the strangers. They take a collective step backwards. I’m sure I look manic, covered in animal guts.

  And then one of the strangers steps out of the clump, turning in place, face panicked. “Elisa!? Where’d you go?? Elisa!!!” She stops, facing me, but looking beyond me, her face suddenly ashen. Acid rising in my throat, I turn.

  Ryder is crouching beside the body of a child. She makes him look like a full grown adult, so she can’t be more than three or four. She’s on her side in the middle of the parking lot, her head resting on one extended arm, and she looks like she could be sleeping.

  Except for the tumble of innards that spill from a gaping would in her stomach.

  Ryder meets my eyes. “Check your notifications.” He grimaces when he speaks. I check my notifications.

  Body of Human Child discovered! Would you like to harvest Human Child’s soul for the magic core inside her?