Another fist-sized meteor of flames scorched overhead, making it necessary for Wren to drop behind a barrier and pancake herself against the floor again.

The floor, she had discovered, was cement. Cement is hard— a fact she’d always known, but never fully appreciated until now.

She had realized, from distant memories of childhood splats off her bike, that cement isn’t necessarily good natured.

But kids bounce.

Adults….really don’t.

She felt like a brittle wooden plane model that a child has attempted to fly, against their mother’s cautions, in a tiled room.

Her palms ached, and her knees were going to be every shade of sherbet she never liked. Probably the purple kind. She hated purple.

Rolling over with a groan, she shifted to a sitting position while shrieks and shouts and car alarms blared and echoed off the pocked (and now black streaked) walls of the parking garage. The muted roar of flames thrummed merrily along in a background accompaniment to the chaos, as another arc of flame splattered against an adjacent wall like a molotov water balloon, dripping liquid fire and dancing orange light onto the floor.

Wren shook her head slowly, gripping the bridge of her nose.

Smoke tickled her throat, delicate strands of the stuff curling lazily along the piped ceiling, inching its way closer to the ramp, as she probably should have been.

Urgh. Now her perfume was smothered in stale carpark and barbecue gone wrong.

Wren shifted stiffly, the cold, hard floor numbing her derrière, grit digging into the skin of her palms.

Her knees WERE purple.

She could see them.

Through the new holes.

In her new jeans.

Several smaller burn holes speckled across her thighs like tiny, smoking constellations, cheerfully branding a wasted 40 dollars she couldn’t afford.

Her nostrils flared, her eyebrows raising dangerously.

That. Was. It.

The last straw.

She’d had it.

With a flare of temper, and a rising growl in her throat, she heaved herself off the ground and spun to face the source of all the mayhem.

“COURTNEY!!” She howled, voice rasping from all the smoke.

A teen girl, rather beautiful, and hovering rather conspicuously above the ground, twisted in the air to face her, while the other harassed people in the garage took the opportunity to scurry away through distant exits or duck behind cars.

Wren didn’t seem to notice the scuttling bystanders. Or the hovering. Or the glowing eyes (very similar to her own), or the flaming, writhing tendrils of hair.

She didn’t seem even slightly discomfited by the blaze that seemed to swallow the girl’s arms past the elbow.

Wren. Had. Had. It.

She bellowed.

She bellowed gustily.

“DANG IT, COURTNEY! You ruined my JEANS! Do you know how EXPENSIVE clothes are?!! I have GROCERIES to buy!!” she hollered, wide-legged, arms gesticulating violently, like their Italian grandmama when she was cussing.

She raved on. “You are acting like a TWO year old! If you don’t KNOCK it off RIGHT now, I’m going to use a fire extinguisher!” she threatened, “After I throw it at you stupid HEAD!

IT WAS JUST A CUPCAKE! And yes! I ate yours! With relish!! Get over it!!”