His face fell. He knew I was right.

“Can you manually cast the spell that you used at the cannery?”

“I’d have to circle the whole golf center with chalk. There’s not enough time.”

“Try again to use your ability,” he suggested, panic in his voice. “Maybe it’s possible when the moon’s not out, just harder. Take a few breaths first.”

Mumbling obscenities, I closed my eyes and attempted to calm myself enough to call up the power. Attempted to block out the image of the spell spreading through the town and destroying buildings like some sort of apocalyptic magical plague. Tried instead to visualize the experience of the blackness pushing away my surroundings and the blue pinpoint of light appearing.

“Come on, come on,” Lon muttered.

Something clicked inside me; it crouched at the edge of my consciousness. I could just feel it connecting. Maybe I could pull it up if I tried harder. . . .

“Shit!” Lon yelled.

My eyes flew open. The entire park was cracking and crumbling as if a silent earthquake had hit. The fissure was spreading faster. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if it touched us.

Apparently Lon didn’t either. “I think we’re done here, witch.”

He grabbed my hand and we fled like rabbits, hopping down terraces and cutting through the courses. Mud seeped into the hems of our jeans as we stumbled through underbrush and soared around the maze of dead course obstacles, past the unassembled dinosaur—

The ground suddenly cracked below my feet. My shoe snagged, midrun. I face-planted into the mud, the wind knocked out of my lungs.

Lon’s yelp of surprise floated over my head. I couldn’t breathe. Desperately I clawed at a puddle as my lower body sank. A horrific rumble shook my bones. Metal creaked behind me.

I couldn’t see. Mud stung my eyes. I felt Lon’s hands wrap around my wrists like steel bands. He pulled, but my foot was stuck in the earth. When the section of metal dinosaur came crashing down, it sounded like a bomb. An explosion. A car wreck.

Pain ripped through my leg.

I think I screamed, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t hear it. The ground was swallowing me. My leg was trapped under a metal dinosaur torso. Lon’s hands slipped away from mine. I struggled—fought, pulled, thrashed. . . . I was feral. Completely out of my mind.

My body was sinking faster. The dinosaur was weighing me down. I stopped fighting and clung to a crumbling sliver of ground.

I was going down.

Buried alive. What a horrible way to die. I’d often imagined myself being torn apart by some primal Æthyric demon, or poisoned after testing a bad batch of medicinals—maybe even shot down while fleeing an FBI agent, come to collect me for my parent’s heinous crimes.

But not this.

Not half-blind and suffocating in a whirlpool of mud.

Something pressed against my side. The steady vibration of the quaking ground was punctuated by three stronger thuds that reverberated through the metal dinosaur like a struck gong. It was Lon, kicking at it. On the fourth kick, the pressure lifted from my pinned leg. I yanked. Lon yanked. My knee found purchase on a tree root beneath the sinking ground, and I climbed, grasping fistfuls of wet grass above my head.

Lon grabbed the back of my jacket and hoisted me as I scrabbled to heave myself aboveground. My hip had barely cleared the unnatural sinkhole when I felt myself being sucked back down again. I wedged my fingers inside an expanding crevice. My jacket and shirt nearly slid over my head as Lon strained and yanked me forward.

“Up!” he yelled, not giving me a moment to rest.

Pain shot through my leg when I tried to stand. The earth shook and I wavered on my feet.

“Move—go!”

Lon gripped my waist and tugged me along. I faltered, then limped, then jogged, ignoring the pain. It only took me a few seconds to run without aid. We sloshed over the rumbling mud, outrunning the earthquake.

The fence was only a few yards away. Lon glanced back at the advancing fissure. “Climb,” he instructed, securing the mudied silver tube inside his jacket.

No trash can on this side, so he boosted me up with his hands splayed across my ass. Under better circumstances, I might’ve appreciated this more, but it was all I could do to pull myself up and over the damn fence, even with his help.

Lon started climbing before I’d finished, pressuring me to drop. He slipped by my side and jumped down, then reached up to help me.

“Oww!” I cried out in pain. The leg of my jeans was torn and stuck on the fence.

The ground shook with crashing trees. The fissure was a few feet away. I twisted to jerk at my caught pant leg, grunted and tugged. The denim ripped, I fell into Lon’s arms, and we tumbled, knocking over the trash can as we crashed to the ground.

Lon groaned as we untangled and pushed ourselves back to our feet, preparing to run again. Then everything went silent. No quaking. No sounds of destruction.

“It stopped!”

I glanced back at the park. The fence was still standing. A couple of aftershocks made us both jump, but when we were sure that it was really over, I warily peered through the chain link. Sure enough, the craggy fissures had crept all the way to the fence, then inexplicably halted. The entire property looked like it had been nuked and then swallowed by the earth. Nothing was standing but the brick entry building and the fence; the courses were just a mass of crumbled obstacles and fallen trees.

We surveyed the decimated land for a long moment, both of us breathing heavily. I squeezed my eyes shut, then reopened them, hoping to find everything restored. Maybe it was magick, like the cannery. That had been an illusion—the bugs had disappeared; they weren’t real. This was.