Page 13 of Orc'd & Loaded
She lunges for one. Misses. Her hip clips a newspaper box. The bus tub goes flying.
She does not stop. She does not even slow down. She just abandons the tub and keeps running, grabbing at the air with bare hands, her face a mask of concentrated, murderous focus.
Another mushroom sails past my window. Two more follow it, one of them hitting my front door hard enough to rattle the hinges.
My hands are already on the counter.
I clear it in one vault. Both palms flat on the lacquered oak, legs swinging up and over, boots hitting the floor on the other side with a heavy crack. Tavvi yelps. The broth sloshes.
"Watch the hearth!"
I blow through the front door and into the street.
The air is thick with golden spores. They shimmer in the sunlight like pollen from some alien meadow, coating everythingin a fine, glittering dust. Mushrooms bounce in every direction. One hits a fire hydrant and launches twenty feet straight up. Another ricochets between two parked cars in a rapid zigzag before pinging off a street lamp and arcing over the roof of the hardware store.
Solene is forty feet ahead of me, still sprinting.
"Rostova!"
She does not turn. She snatches a mushroom out of the air with her right hand. The impact spins her sideways.
I close the distance in six strides. My legs are longer. My lungs are bigger. I have been splitting firewood since dawn and my blood is already hot.
A mushroom flings off the sidewalk directly in front of me, rising fast. I snag it at the apex of its arc. The thing squirms in my grip, dense and springy, pulsing with kinetic energy. It kicks against my palm like a living thing. I tuck it under my arm and grab a second one that glances off a parking meter.
"Rostova! How many?"
She whips around. Her eyes are wild. A smear of golden spore dust runs diagonally across her left cheek like warpaint.
"Seventy-two pounds! Six crates! Someone cut the straps!"
"Cut?"
"Cut!"
That stops me for half a second. Deliberate. Someone did this on purpose. But there is no time for that particular fury because three more mushrooms are careening toward the intersection and a delivery truck is pulling through the light.
I sprint past her. The truck brakes. The mushrooms bounce harmlessly off the front bumper and scatter into the crosswalk. I grab one out of the air with each hand, a third with the crook of my elbow, and body-block a fourth against me. It rebounds off my sternum and I catch it on the backswing.
Solene reaches me. She is breathing hard. Her pristine coat is destroyed, covered in golden dust, the top button torn off. She holds five mushrooms in a precarious armful, her chin pressing down on the top one to keep it contained.
"We need cold water," she gasps. "Below thirty-four degrees. It kills the kinetic charge."
"My bar. Ice bin behind the counter. Two hundred pounds of ice."
Her jaw clenches. Something passes across her face. Pride warring with arithmetic.
The mushroom under her chin makes a break for it.
I catch it before it clears her shoulder. My hand closes around it an inch from her ear. My knuckles brush her jaw.
We both freeze.
The mushroom writhes between my fingers. Solene's pulse hammers against my knuckles where they press her jaw. One heartbeat. Two.
Then she jerks backward, chin snapping up.
"Your bar. Go."
