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she’d taste good when one of its heads bit her in half?
    Adrenaline scorched a path from behind her sternum straight down. It sloshed around inside the wound left by Murmur’s departure.
    She missed him. A bitter laugh escaped her lips.
    It broke her paralysis.
    Staring into the burning, whirling yellow-green eyes of the hydra, she breathed the odors of terror, death, gasoline, diesel, and hydra poison deep into her lungs. Drawing energy in with the foul air, she concentrated power at her core. It steadied her.
    The hydra took an impossibly big step toward her. It crushed a semi beneath one clawed foot and a tiny import car beneath another.
    Quaking, clenching every muscle to keep from running, she shoved her awareness deep into the river of liquid sunlight, gathering it, calling it up for use.
    “Changing Woman, I sure need help with this one,” Isa muttered, naming one of the deities from her childhood. She wasn’t blood of Changing Woman’s people; 520 wasn’t necessarily Changing Woman’s land.
    Isa hoped it wouldn’t matter. She only knew she was unequal to the task of neutralizing the being currently dedicating two heads to plucking shrieking victims out of Lake Washington.
    Terrible, wet splintering sounds stopped the screams.
    Her heart faltered and her gorge rose. Isa swallowed hard.
    No more victims. She had to get the thing under control.
    Power rose in a whirl, lighting her from within. Bright as noon on the desert, but no warmth. Isa pushed the glittering magic outward in a bubble around her, strengthening her shield, drawing it tight and impenetrable, she hoped, around her.
    The creature appeared to sense the energy moving. Every eye fastened upon her. One of the hydra’s many heads darted down.
    She poured power into the shield, turning the magic into something impermeable.
    Serrated teeth, dripping bloody slime, impacted the shield. The hit resonated through to her bones. She stumbled.
    The hydra rebounded, shock in the coiling of its other necks. It threw four heads to the sky and bugled a challenge.
    Her ears rang. Isa cringed.
    The creature had more raw power running through it than she’d ever encountered. It could snap her shield with a thought. If it had any rational ones with so many heads. Given that it didn’t seem to realize it courted destruction by overloading on magic, she gathered it didn’t know how to handle the energy coursing through its matrix.
    Her first piece of luck.
    She couldn’t count on any more. Though her breath shuddered and her hands still shook, she took her time summoning yet more power. She focused the energy into her tingling right palm. Lifting the arm to sketch a circle enclosing the hydra brought cold sweat to her forehead.
    Shimmering motes of energy, like sun shining through rain, rose in the air behind the maddened beast.
    It struck again.
    The blow weakened her shield, and drove her to her knees. Intent upon closing the circle around the hydra, she couldn’t afford to allow her attention and intention to waver.
    Somewhere in the wreckage of vehicles and body parts, someone with enough magic to see the creature, but not enough training to know that bullets couldn’t touch a rogue tattoo, began shooting.
    Isa clenched her teeth and concentrated on carving out the rest of the circle that would cut the hydra and her off from the rest of reality. Nothing else mattered.
    Not the bullet that shattered the windshield of the car next to her. Not the sharp-edged pain scoring her face. Not the sirens approaching from the Montlake Cut connecting Lake Washington to Lake Union.
    Police boats?
    She hoped so. They could fish survivors out of the frigid, choppy lake.
    Pivoting on her knees, she closed the circle. Containment. For as long as her will lasted.
    As Isa directed more power overhead and underfoot to cut them off completely, she prayed to any deity listening that she hadn’t enclosed any survivors with them.
    Magic and Ink rippled in lieu of muscles in the