She saw her classmates’ bodies on the floor, but she didn’t let that stop her. She held the gun in the position she’d learned from her father, and kicked open the doors to the gym.

Carrie ran inside, and immediately took a bullet to the chest.

She fell on her back and looked up at the ceiling.

God damn, she thought, it hurts to get shot.

All Danny had to do was to disconnect the fuse before the countdown was finished. All he had to do was sever the right wire and the charge would never reach the bomb. It wasn’t rocket science.

Except he couldn’t find the right place to begin. The wiring was spaghetti. Every loop led back on itself. He would have thought it was a clever way to prevent anyone from defusing the bomb, but he didn’t think Wade and the Warriors were that smart. Most likely they were just sloppy.

They’d built a bomb so crappy and dumb that he couldn’t beat it. As it turned out, stupidity was Danny’s kryptonite.

So he switched tactics and focused on the detonator.

It was wired to a Sharp clock radio. He had one on his own nightstand. The factory where they were built was across town. He’d seen them inside and out his entire life. He could disassemble one with his eyes closed.

He knew how they worked.

He switched the multi-tool to the screwdriver head, and began to take the back off the clock radio’s casing.

He heard more gunshots. He thought again of Carrie.

Then he focused on the problem in front of him.

For the first time, Eric saw what he’d been fighting since he was a child. For the first time, he faced Colchester himself, not his minions or his long-distance spells.

And he was getting his ass kicked.

Eric tried everything he knew. He drew every symbol in the air he could think of, every glyph, every spell he’d learned from Merlin. He opened a portal to a volcanic vent in the ocean and directed the blast at Colchester. Colchester gestured, and sent it backward in time, disappearing into the dim, prehistoric past. Eric called down more lightning bolts. They hit the old wizard, blackening his skin further and burning him down to muscle and bone, and it bothered him not in the least.

Colchester sent blasts of necromantic energy sizzling through the air. Eric’s shields began to crack under the pressure. He felt one slip past, inches away. It felt like watching his father pack up his things on the day he left, like the whiskey breath of a too-friendly uncle on his cheek, like opening a vein into a warm bath. Any one of those bolts would shrivel your soul if it touched you.