Fortunately, Thoth had enough neck movement to be able to twist it and give Cypress a blank stare. The Auran woman watched them both, raising her eyebrows.

“We’re on a date?” He asked, nonplussed. The penny dropped, visibly. “Oh. We’re on a date.”

He tried to pass off the statement in a factual tone, but it came out very unconvincingly. Thoth had never been able to tell a lie; his face and tone always gave him away. The woman just shook her head, pulling a small electronic device out of her pocket.

“Bright one, your boyfriend,” she observed sarcastically to Cypress, holding the device up. Thoth recognised it as a smart phone, similar to the one Mallos was always fiddling around with, but he had no idea what it was for. Mallos seemed to use his like a walkie-talkie, but also tapped the screen and pulled the backing off interchangeably. Feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, Thoth inhaled and concentrated, focusing on his power. This ability was on he rarely activated on purpose; rather, it tended to respond to his emotions. It was a relief when he heard the rain thrash harder against the walls and the distant crack of thunder. “We have a database of known individuals who have committed crimes against the Auran Church.” The woman continued smoothly, tapping at the phone’s screen. “If what you say is true,” she smirked, “then we will have no record of you, and you’re free to go with a warning. If you exist in our database, then you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Thoth give Danny a sideways glance. As the Auran Church’s number one most wanted, there was no way he wasn’t on that database. His brow furrowed as he concentrated on the gathering storm clouds outside.

The woman held the phone up to Cypress’s face and tapped the screen to make a shutter sound. She waited for a moment for the phone to connect with its database while Thoth scowled at the floor, trying to summon all of his anger. There was another, closer crack of thunder. The woman’s eyebrows lifted again sceptically at the screen as it flashed up a red negative logo. Shrugging at her partner, she moved over and held the phone up to Thoth’s face. He held his breath, focusing on the electricity on the atmosphere. The phone made its shutter sound.

From the swirling nimbus clouds outside, a bolt of lightning shot through the broken window and struck Thoth’s crystal trap at the base, shattering it. The force of the pure electricity, combined with the flying chunks of crystal, also caused Cypress’s one to splinter. It happened so swiftly that nobody could react fast enough; Thoth and Cypress both fell to the floor, along with the mystery woman, who was close enough to them to get struck by a piece of crystal. Wind and rain blew through the broken window, caught the tail of the curtains and scattered the paperwork, adding to the chaos.

Since he’d known it was coming, Thoth responded first. He was back on his feet before the Aurans knew what had hit them and had already summoned a glob of water twice the size of his own body by the time the man reacted. The man closed his hands into fists and snarled, shiny black metal growing up his arms from the tips of his fingers to the elbow. Before it could reach all the way up to the shoulder, Thoth hurled the glob of water at him and threw him off his feet and against the wall. Curling his hand around, Thoth bent the incoming rain to his will, using it to supplement the water and keep a constant flow which pinned the man against the wall.

On the other side of the room, the woman staggered to her feet, still clutching the phone in her hand. In spite of everything, she grinned. The screen flashed, displaying a green logo.

“Get the fuck outta my house.” Thoth growled. He thrust his free arm in her direction, sending a spiral of ice directly for her chest. She mirrored his action with a jet of fire. Twin blasts of red and blue met in the centre of the room, equally weighted for a moment, before the fire began to eat away at the ice. Scowling, Thoth turned his attention away from the water to reinforce the ice, freeing up the man. The male Auran gasped audibly, staggered to his feet, and made a beeline for Cypress. Thoth glanced at her, and in the second that his attention wavered, the woman blasted his ice attack and threw him backwards onto the four-poster bed.

She leapt forward. Thoth gritted his teeth and curled his hands into fists, encircling the bed in a low wall of dry ice. By the time the Auran woman had reached the four-poster, it was entirely obscured by fog. He felt the bed shift as she jumped on it and blasted a jet of water in her direction instinctively, which was a mistake. She grabbed his outstretched arm and looped something over it, but didn’t have the opportunity to do much else, since he swung a wild punch in her direction. There was a crunch which could have been her nose. Without wasting any time, Thoth scrambled forward and leapt off the bed, bursting out of the artificial cloud and back into the visible spectrum.

“You guys okay?” He yelled at Danny and Cypress, glancing down at his arm. An inactive hop loop winked back up at him, the digital screen blank.


MASTER OF THE ORBIS . MASTER OF THE WATER ELEMENT . SON OF AURA