“I’m okay. I’m okay!” I shouted as the first tried to get me to sit back down, and the second started flashing a light in my eyes. “It was just an inertia dampening charm. I think it was so big ordinary metabolic functions couldn’t break it. I got out using a standard breakage charm. And get that light out of my eyes, will you?”

“A breakage charm?” the one trying to fit a blood pressure cuff on me said, and I nodded, glad that ambulance teams were required by law to have at least one witch on staff and he knew what I was talking about.

“I’m willing to try anything,” the first said, turning to look at the line of people.

“They’re going to wake up thirsty,” I said, but they were already striding back to the people under the sheets with a new purpose. Thankful that Ivy hadn’t let them put me in that horrible line, I gave her arm a squeeze. “Thanks,” I whispered, and her fingers slipped from me.

“It works!” came an exuberant cry, and a cheer rose as a man sat up, groggy and holding a hand over his eyes.

I was so glad that I wasn’t going to be the only one to wake up from this. “Where’s my car?” I asked as I scanned for it, and Ivy winced.

“I.S. impound, I think.”

“Swell.” My keys were still in it, and tired, I looked in my bag to make sure I still had that golf ball. “Okay, who out here owes me a favor?”

Jenks rose up from Ivy’s shoulder, turning in midair to look toward Cincinnati. “Edden.”

Nodding, I gathered myself, and as Ivy hovered to catch me if I stumbled, we shuffled that direction. I was surprised. As a captain of the street force of the FIB, or Federal Inderland Bureau, Edden didn’t get out much, but this had happened six blocks from their downtown tower, and with both human and Inderland Security fighting for jurisdiction, he’d want to make sure the I.S. didn’t sweep anything under the carpet.

The chaos was worse on the Cincy side of things and they were still moving cars out. Unfortunately none of them were mine. Behind the blockade were even more official vehicles, and behind them, the expected news vans. I winced, trying to hide my face as a helicopter thumped overhead. Three hours?

But the shadows on the road agreed with the lapse of time, and as we looked for Edden, I thought back to that inertia bubble. They didn’t make them that big, and it wasn’t a cascading reaction of one triggering another, either. It had been a misfired charm in a morning of them. What the Turn was going on?