Click.

  Her apartment was only a five minutes’ walk away, through this alley, then home would greet her with a warm sofa, a cup of tea, and a sci-fi episode.

  The alley smelled of old metal, of leaking pipes, and of forgotten junk rusting away somewhere. Her heels clacked too sharply and clearly against the brick walls, for the night was unusually silent with no sirens or traffic, except for a distant helicopter droning overhead.

  She could have driven, probably should have. But five minutes of driving, parking, driving, parking felt pointless.

  Yes, yes, she knew. A woman, alone, in the dark, taking a shortcut through an alley was as much of a cliché as screaming “Who’s there?” in a slasher film.

  Click.

  She stopped. A footstep lagged half a beat behind hers.

  Not Louboutin.

  Instinct tightened her stomach before logic caught up, a reflex hard?wired into anyone who had ever walked alone at night.

  Click.

  The second set of steps grew louder, closer, treating her pause as permission.

  Melissa exhaled sharply through her nose.

  Do not say it.

  Don’t.

  “Who’s there?”

  Damn it.

  She turned before she could curse herself.

  A man stepped forward, peeling himself out of the alley’s shadows. Impeccable suit. He did have a charming smile, she’d give him that, save for the sweat beading along his flushed skin.

  Dubai Man. (Because she absolutely, categorically, did not give enough of a damn to remember his real name.)

  He was a blind date her parents had black?mailed her into. The man couldn’t get through a sentence without name-dropping another penthouse, another yacht, another billionaire friend.

  Men like him were routine. Her parents’ idea of an eligible bachelor because, obviously, at twenty-five, she had clearly surpassed the acceptable marriage age in their eyes.

  During dinner he had watched her the way she watched her Coffin Bay King oysters, measuring the best way to consume them.

  Melissa knew she was attractive.

  But come on. Not that attractive. Not enough to make someone look at her like a goddamn meal at first sight.

  She folded her arms. “Dubai Man: The Return. The sequel nobody wanted, yet here we are.”

  His face lit up like she’d just confirmed she was totally into him. Of course he did. When he stepped forward, the smell hit her.

  Burnt. Acrid. Like air after lightning.

  He licked his dry lips. “Come on, Mel. It’s not safe to walk alone. Let me walk you home.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the street.”

  He straightened his tie as if it choked him. “Look, you’re tough, independent, all that. But if you really didn’t want to talk, you wouldn’t—”

  His sentence died in a gasp. His pupils blew wide, then snapped small.

  SNAP.

  A spark jumped from his fingertips. The smell of ozone thickened.

  Oh. That part of his file.

  Her first reaction was irritation instead of fear. She slipped a hand into her coat and reached for her phone. “Is this a threat? Or just the most pathetic attempt at flirting I’ve ever seen?”

  Her thumb hovered over emergency dial while she assessed him. Calling the police seemed like the logical choice, until she got a better look. Bulging veins, racing pulse… maybe what he needed wasn’t an arrest.

  Maybe he needed a doctor.

  Or she could simply block his number and let natural selection handle the rest.

  She assessed him again. Dilated pupils, tremors, skin flushed too red. Overdose? Neurological overload?

  Please tell me my parents are not that desperate.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Sparks crawled higher and bit into the seams of his suit. Designer fabric blackened at the edges.

  Melissa groaned. For absolute heaven’s sake. This was exactly why she had explicitly, unequivocally, repeatedly told her mother she had no interest in dating another Gifted.

  A date gone wrong. With extra sparks. No puns intended.

  And now, here she was, watching a six-foot-one investment bro glitch out like a malfunctioning Westworld host.

  “Help me… Doct—or…” Bioelectricity flared again, jagged and wild.

  Melissa took a step back. Assess. Plan.

  Stall.

  “I would love to, but fun fact? Turns out, ‘spontaneous combustion in public places due to uncontrolled arcane discharge’ is, surprisingly, not covered by my malpractice insurance.”

  Another arc of raw current crackled toward her feet—a direct hit on her brand-freaking-new, piano-black, thousand-dollar Louboutins.

  Melissa inhaled. One, two, three, four, five. Exhaled for seven, because she was too dignified to curse.

  The scent of burnt leather made her eye twitch.

  “Honestly. I have ten appointments tomorrow. If you think I’m rescheduling them because you decided to spontaneously, publicly, and with painstakingly disregard for expensive footwear, combust, you—"

  CRACK. A fresh arc of lightning snapped toward her.

  Melissa jumped back, her heels skidding against uneven stone, followed by a snap. This one she recognised immediately.

  Her beloved designer shoe was now destined for a landfill.

  Ugh.

  Her foot twisted slightly, enough to make her hate everything.

  Fine. Fine.

  Professional bleeding-heart ethics, apparently, still won out over personal irritation, even when said irritation involved imminent Louboutin sacrifice.

  “Mel… I need… you,” a dangerous electric current lunged toward her.

  “Need me? Shocking.” Melissa flicked her wrist. Water surged upward and formed a protective barrier in front of her. The mineral-rich, perfectly conductive water guided the arcs of electricity away from her.

  She shaped her barrier with a twist of her fingers, threading it through the pavement’s cracks, pooling it near a metal street grate, giving the charge an exit.

  “I need you to focus,” she ordered. “Control your breathing. Count backward from—”

  His eyes rolled back.

  Typical. No one ever listened to their doctor.

  The situation was deteriorating faster than expected. If he kept hemorrhaging power at this rate, he’d experience cardiac arrest in under a minute.

  She tapped her chin, considering.

  “Well, guess that would technically solve my dating problem. Silver linings.”

  She was joking. Mostly. A dark, slightly inappropriate part of her brain appreciated the irony.

  Melissa adjusted her approach, focusing on how power moves through his body. Blood, cerebrospinal fluid, neural networks. She needed to reroute the energy into the water.

  But it wasn’t working fast enough. The charge kept building, neurons misfiring.

  She huffed out a breath. “Alright. Aggressive intervention it is.”

  Drawing moisture from the air, she condensed a precisely ionised sphere, designed not just to absorb power, but to stabilise it. She pressed the sphere to his sternum and forced his bioelectric field into a controlled reset, like flipping a circuit breaker.

  Except this one was made of neurons and magic.

  A violent shudder ran through his body. His back arched, muscles locking up as the forced reset kicked in. Electricity surged along the water-lined path she’d created, snapping toward the grate and grounding safely into the earth.

  Then, finally, his body settled, steam curling off his suit.

  Melissa huffed and dialled triple zero. Her other hand pressed against his forehead, channelling a gentle stream of water onto his skin, then deeper into his cerebrospinal fluid. It was a conductor, a pathway that extended even to the arcane heart, bridging the gap between body and magic.

  From what she could tell, it wasn’t physical drugs corrupting his brain. This felt… magical.

  But it wasn’t her problem.

  At least, for now, he was safe from… well, from bursting into arcane fireworks again. The CSF wash worked its way through the lattice of his arcane system, diffusing the worst of the instability.

  Another life saved. Another bill to send. Another unwilling episode of the badly scripted monster-of-the-week show that, ironically, she’d just remembered she wanted to go home and watch.

  And definitely, absolutely, the last blind date she'd ever let her mother arrange.

  She rose to her feet, wobbling slightly thanks to a cracked heel. Then something changed.

  The air turned cold in a way that wasn’t natural. It wasn’t the slow drop of temperature that came with the night. It was instant.

  Melissa’s breath fogged.

  There weren’t any sounds or footsteps, but she definitely felt a presence as the moisture in the air changed.

  She spun sharply and found herself gazing into a pair of piercing crimson eyes.

  Moonlight caught the silver strands of the woman’s hair, making them shimmer like something out of a legend—beauty whispered about in myths, always tragic, always cursed.

  Unfair, really.

  Though instead of wearing ethereal silks or medieval finery, she dressed like a teenage anarchist in an oversized leather jacket, a short plaid skirt, and a black lace choker.

  Melissa’s brain, proving itself thoroughly useless, paused for a single unsteady second to appreciate the aesthetic. Because, honestly? She had eyes. She liked nice things.

  Sue her.

  Wait. She was at least eighteen, right?

  No, actually—focus. More important question.

  Was this a post-electrocution hallucination? Because that would explain a lot.

  “Doctor Melissa Le Bleu?” the silver-haired woman said.

  Melissa remained silent; she knew better than to answer this.

  Another click of heels. Another presence. Melissa resisted the urge to groan.

  And just like that, the genre changed. Sci-fi horror bled into dark fantasy. Cue dramatic lighting. Cinematic slow motion. The villain entrance.

  Eydis.

  She wasn’t the girl Melissa remembered; the one drowning in oversized glasses and ill-fitting clothes. She had been an enigma when they first met, but this time…

  She wasn’t even trying to hide it.

  Dark hair spilled over her shoulders, rippling like the night itself as she stepped forward.

  Again. Not. Fair.

  It was ridiculous to think this way about a teenager, but Eydis moved like she knew the shadows belonged to her. And when she reached the silver-haired woman, standing so close that their shoulders nearly but never quite touched, Melissa noticed something else.

  The softening of those crimson eyes.

  She blinked.

  “Doctor Le Bleu.” Eydis’s smile was warm, if you were stupid enough to mistake that for kindness. Because her words?

  Anything but.

  “What a coincidence. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were following me.” Eydis tilted her head. “Now wouldn’t that be a twist?”

  “What are you even on about?

  From the corner of her eye, Melissa caught the barest twitch of the silver-haired woman’s lips, something almost human breaking through all that ice.

  Her own heart, because it was deeply unhelpful, picked up a fraction faster.

  Afraid? No.

  Just deeply, deeply concerned that the universe had turned her life into a stress test for increasingly attractive disasters.

  This night had already been a nightmare in slow motion.

  And now it was playing in 12K.

  Character Reference Sheet