“Are you okay with that?” I asked, watching as the next group of tendril monsters began to clamber over or around their dead predecessors.

“We need to get down there,” she said, squeezing her left hand in a way that I knew was drawing blood and power along with it.

From the other side of our group, Yellow Mask, who’d been stabbing tendril monsters with her rapier turned to stare at Bloodmaiden, “Is that blood magic?”

Amy turned to stare back, “Go stab monsters and get off your high horse. You’re a felon. Remember my name?”

To be fair to Yellow Mask, in our universe blood magic was mostly used by vampires and necromancers. To be fair to Amy, she wasn’t from our universe even if blood magic was used by the (living, not undead) vampires there. She was descended from them which made her a kind of dhampir.

Yellow Mask all but snarled and stabbed a mushroom monster with her rapier, the blade erupting into a glowing white flame. Then she hacked into another, searing it as she cut.

I was reminded once again that I should have checked in with Mateo and asked why she’d ended up on probation as special forces. He might not tell me, but from what I understood, the mask was a family inheritance, so he’d know.

Amy held her left hand in the air. It dripped blood, but the blood seemed to be vibrating and even glowing. The way it illuminated her body made me think of her transformation sequence.

The red, crystalline edges of her armor glowed and even the black metal sections seemed to take on a red aura. At that point, the otherworldly chanting began even though that didn’t sound the same as when she transformed. The beat was faster, more insistent, more urgent.

No one stopped fighting, but everyone was shooting her looks—not least of whom Dayton and Jody who were giving her a wider than normal berth as they darted around her to chop into the monsters around us.

Yellow Mask stabbed another tendril monster and shouted, “What’s she doing,” at me as I grabbed the first tendril monster to land and threw him into the group behind him, turning on the sonics to slow them down more.

“Don’t know,” I shouted back, “entering the avatar state or something?”

She glanced over at me as the fungus monsters began to seep mushroom goo, asking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

It could only have been at that moment that red light expanded outward from Amy in a blast reminiscent of a nuclear explosion, but better controlled.

We were unharmed, but the same could not be said of our opponents. Tendril monsters, prime clones, and blobbygators all died, hit first by the red light, but then by the same magic in Amy’s spear, a cold magic that dried the fungus creatures into pitted, leathery versions of themselves that then turned to dust before our eyes.

There was no comparison to what she’d done before and she wasn’t done.

She turned toward the vast number of tendril monsters coming down the ramp toward us in the big room and pointed her spear at them. Her eyes flashed red as her gems and then she opened her mouth and red light poured out, rolling upward toward the top of the ramp.

Feeling a whisper of power, I concentrated on using senses that Kee had been trying to teach me to use. It may have only been because there was more to see than normal, but it worked.

For the moment, I saw Amy untransformed, smaller, and without armor, standing in the middle of a scaffolding of dull, pitted metal tinged with the red of her gems.

The rolling red energy that issued out into the room came through a horn-shaped construct within the scaffolding. Where the energy came from wasn’t obvious, but a fuzziness around the small end of the horn hinted that it came from another place. More than that, the rolling energy wasn’t just going on its own. It seemed to be forming around a dark energy that Amy weaved with her hands.

I knew better than to assume this was literally true. It was a completely nonhuman perception of reality filtered through my brain’s need to make the world sensible—which didn’t mean it was untrue either.

Almost every tendril monster in the big room had been destroyed. The only exceptions were a few on the far end who’d been around the corner of the ramp.

It wasn’t just the tendril monsters either. We’d been fighting toward the side exit except our way had been blocked by prime clones and blobbygators. Izzy, Jaclyn, Prime, and Logan hadn’t been doing a bad job, but it had been slow going. 

The prime clones and blobbygators were gone too, their crisped bodies falling apart as I watched. Izzy, Jaclyn, Prime, and Logan stood in the middle of a sea of ash.

Amy groaned and leaned on her spear. I stepped toward her, ready to grab her if she stumbled. The red tinge to her armor was gone and the jeweled edges of her armor only had their normal glow.

Waving me off, she said, “I’m fine. Give me a second.”

Unseen through my helmet, I raised an eyebrow, “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said, nodding. “I got more energy out of them than I expected. It took the edge off, but I’m not going to be able to do it again.”