I stood up.
Charge was already running in both hands and I hadn't decided to put it there. White light under the skin of my palms, crawling along the tendons, the air between my fingers tightening without a command. The side of my face where his fist had landed still held the bright afterimage of the impact.
Max was in pieces on that road, and this wasn't a branch I'd looked down and rejected. This was the one that had actually happened, and it had happened because I'd walked into it blind and spent nothing on checking.
A man like Vince kills you inside the second you spend thinking.
Every single second mattered now.
He stepped forward into the space where Max's blood should have been. The smoke came off his shoulders — thin threads of it, black against the street light — and went into the road and left him standing there in a borrowed body in the middle of a street.
He faced me.
"When Ethan told me I had a brother, I was excited."
