The whip struck the earth by the side of the road. It didn’t break the lights, but it disturbed the placement of one, where it was in muddier. As I pushed forward, the red lightning arced across my upper body instead. A glancing hit, momentary, as the arc lanced through me, cut out, then resumed behind me.

The shock and the sudden pain made my heart skip, and it didn’t start again. My muscles spasmed and joints strained across my arms, shoulders, and hands, and I couldn’t convince my body to take a breath, nor could I make my heart beat in a way that meant anything.

I toppled, landing with my head and upper body on the road, arms curled up in front of me, trapped between my torso and the road. My legs, insignificant in the moment, were left draped along the steep incline between ditch and road.

I would have called out for help or first aid, if I could’ve breathed.

Time of death was given at the moment of the flatline, the arrest of the heart. Was I already dead and unaware of the fact?

I twisted, kicking out with one leg to try to get to a position where I wasn’t staring at the ground. I could see some of the road and some of the field where the villains had been making their approach. Harbinger One was down, and Two was wounded, making a limping retreat.

Etna had fallen out of the air too. Paris didn’t have his power but was putting up a fight, keeping the remaining Harbinger on his heels. One of the Case Fifty-Threes was grabbing Sveta by the mass behind her face, where organs were hidden in the morass of tendrils. Sveta and the other Case Fifty-Three were limp, barely moving. The powers that gave them the ability to move weren’t, at least for the moment.

I could hear a small, high pitched sound that seemed to rise in volume by the second. It wasn’t in my head either. The higher-pitched noise drew the attention of Rachel’s animal, which no longer had a handler. It pawed closer, head low, every inch of it radiating hostility and tension. And it was mutated and nearly its full size, which meant there were a hell of a lot of fucking inches of it.

A short whistle from Rachel made the animal stop. The ongoing sound made its head turn back in my general direction again.

In a lapse between alternating twinges and spasms of my shoulder, I felt a vibration at my throat, and realized the sound was coming from me.

I made the strained whining sound stop, a process that saw me making an ‘agh’ gasp, then figured out breathing as an extension of that. With breathing resuming, air surging into my lungs, I felt my heartbeat flutter, blood pumped, and the spasms became worse.