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hydra’s body. It swiveled heads in all directions as if only now realizing she’d trapped it. It flung its heads at the glimmers of her magic hanging in the air.
    The impact rang through Isa like an intangible bell. The sheer magnitude of uncontrolled, stolen magic rampaging through the creature knocked the breath from Isa’s lungs.
    The hydra penetrated the shell. One beaked head chirped. Another hissed. Two growled.
    Isa flung panicky energy at the breach, closing it again.
    The hydra attacked. Head after head rained blows upon her.
    Her shield held, but the effort of maintaining both the larger circle and her personal shield crushed her, facedown, to the wet, stinking concrete. Her backpack strap sawed into her left shoulder.
    From far away, Isa heard Steve shout.
    Settling her cheek in noisome liquid that made her stomach lurch in protest, she turned her head so she could keep her gaze on the hydra.
    One of the heads vomited acid green poison over her.
    Something heavy pressed on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Her shield bowed under the assault, then shunted the goo to the bridge deck in a circle around her. As it slid away, so, too, did the weight on her ribs.
    She drew breath and promptly choked. Where the poison touched the ground, the cement smoked. Isa couldn’t maintain both draws on her magic. She couldn’t even lever herself up off the roadway, much less access the tools in her backpack. She’d naively planned to shove the tattoo out of this world into the etheric and talk it onto stasis paper.
    In the face of its raw power, her little sheets of paper amounted to a sleight-of-hand trick. Stasis would never hold it.
    The creature threw etheric sparks warning of a coming, catastrophic arcane explosion. If it blew, the hydra would act like a magical dirty bomb.
    At least her circle would contain the worst of the damage. People nearby might suffer, but no one else would be likely to die. The explosion would render the bridge impassible, even for normal people, for a couple of generations.
    Not ideal.
    Breath quivering as she drew it in shallow gulps that did nothing to settle the deep-seated quiver in her bones, she let her personal shield go, and shunted the power into the containment bubble.
    The hydra crowed and thrust a razor wire tendril of magic, muddy with too many stolen colors, through Isa’s back, testing.
    A coughing rasp of protest broke from her throat until the pressure wave from an approaching head crushed even that out of her.
    The stench of rotting meat surrounded her. Fabric screamed as it ripped.
    Isa was lifted from the ground, dangling from the strap of her backpack. She croaked a cry of surprise before her brain kicked a flood of fight-or-flight chemicals into her blood.
    The hydra had her.
    Time clicked over to frame-by-frame slow motion.
    The creature had caught her backpack in its teeth and was drawing her up so it could snap her in half.
    She had one shot.
    Twisting, she sacrificed a few layers of skin to slip her arm out of the backpack strap and fell. She landed with a bone-jarring
crunch
on the hood of a miraculously intact sedan.
    Something internal to Isa popped.
    Shards of glassy hurt wrapped her chest.
    Above her, crystal imbued with her power shattered between the teeth of one of the hydra’s heads. Her Live Inks. Fragments of Isa’s power died between the monster’s teeth and grounded back to her, stinging like wasps peppering her internal skin.
    She sucked in a shallow sip of cold air. It set her lungs afire. Would the Live Inks push the creature into overload? Isa tensed, as if locked muscles could repel an arcane explosion flaying her into a sticky smear on the car windshield.
    The hydra swallowed the backpack with a noisy gulp and smacked the lips of all five heads.
    Confused nerve impulses from her left leg suggested that something in the limb was very wrong.
    The hydra froze. It belched and the rainbow of colors whirling in its massive scales dimmed.
    Isa