It is good to be alive.

  Peter mutters this to himself, repeats it, talismanic, as he stares at the shelving in the CVS and tries to tell one bottle of pills from the other.

  He needs something for his head, for his arm. He thinks his encounter with the knight might have broken, or fractured, something in his right elbow, but he can’t quite tell. What he does know, with a throbbing, insistent certainty, is that it hurts like hell and that one of these pill bottles might make it go away.

  But which one? The names mean nothing to him. “Vitamin B12” is just as familiar as “Cialis,” as “Hydrocodone.” He’s able to piece together what “fish oil” might be from context, at least.

  A purple bottle catches his eye.

  (Don’t take too many, now. Doctor says. I know it hurts, buddy, but it’s a blood thinner.)

  He snatches the bottle, takes it up to the front desk with the bandages and Milky Way bar in his basket. He doesn’t know exactly why he takes these items here, but it feels correct.

  The man at the desk wordlessly accepts his haul and begins ringing them up. His scanner flashes with glares of phosphorescent, ultraviolet light, a shine Peter can’t see with his eyes but can feel with his Blessing.

  Ultraviolet. Another word he remembers from nowhere.

  “12.78,” the clerk deadpans.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’ll be 12.78. Card or cash?”

  “I…” it takes Peter a moment to realize what he’s asking, and a hot flush of shame follows quickly after the epiphany. He forgot about money. “Sorry. I don’t have any money.”

  The clerk raises an eyebrow. “Oh. Yeah. Pretty important part of the transaction.”

  Peter lets out a little groan of indecision as he looks from the pills, to the counter, to the shelves. “But I- I need these.”

  “I- well. Uh. Hey, Margie?”

  A woman in a red vest sidles over to the counter, stares through Peter to talk to the cashier. “Problem?”

  “Guy says he can’t pay.”

  “Then he doesn’t get the stuff. This is a business.” The woman turns to Peter now, frowns up at him, almost petulant. “Sir, this is a business.”

  “I- I know. I heard you.”

  “Goods and services cost money. We have a zero tolerance policy for shoplifting.”

  “It’s just advil,” the cashier interjects. “He’s clearly super beat up.”

  “You need medical help, call an ambulance.” The lady jabs a thumb toward the front door. “You need shit from CVS, you buy them with money.”

  Peter tries to keep his ignorance at most of those terms from showing too obviously on his face (ambulance? CVS?). His heart kicks up its pace. He wants out from this conversation.

  “I don’t know how to do that. I need these.”

  “What part of zero tolerance don’t you-“

  The whipcrack tone of her voice spikes Peter with enough adrenaline to force his decision. He pours the last remaining portion of energy hanging around in his Blessing into his feet and bolts from the store, clipping and shattering the glass front door with his shoulder as he flashes out.

  In a minute he is several blocks away, and he stumbled to a stop beneath a tree, his basket still clutched in his hands. He dumps out the bandages and chocolate bar, stuffs them into his pockets, shakes out a pill to swallow.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  No, two pills. Two feels right.

  His arm still hurts. He can’t remember how long the pills are supposed to take. He hustles back onto the street, missing the comforting weight of a battery pack on his back, the constant thrum of energy ready to be wielded. He feels naked, now, without anything much more than dregs in his Blessing. The streetlights aren’t on yet, so he decides he should track down an outside AC unit or breaker box, something to siphon power from without drawing any attention.

  As he shuffles down the street, he hears sirens. His heart leaps at this, but he doesn’t know why. He associates the sound with trouble. He remembers the woman at the store, her threats. Is someone coming for him?

  He hurries from the sidewalk and ducks into a store. A food store. No- a restaurant (“where do you wanna go, Pete? My treat. No Chuck-E-Cheese, though, that’s my veto). The word bubbles up, followed by another, more specific: a cafe.

  He smells something enticing, but can’t place the source (not today. Maybe when you’re older). The room is crowded, cramped with patrons. He feels bone-tired, the ache in his arm as persistent as it had been an hour ago. He slumps onto a stool by a counter and rests his head on his arms.

  He feels himself sliding suddenly toward sleep. A few minutes pass, and then a disturbance troubles him awake. Someone near him is guttering energy.

  He glances up. From what he’d felt with his Blessing, he expected to see someone shooting a jet of flame, or lifting a car. Some huge, constant, high-volume expenditure, very nearby. Yet all he could see was a small crowd of unassuming patrons, sipping at cups and typing on laptops. A couple baristas, ranging from small and wiry to big and tattooed, focused around their machines. A policeman outside, putting a ticket on a car. An old woman-

  An old woman peeking out the window, one hand clutched to her chest, the other craned behind her head, to rest over a space on her scalp just above her ear. He could see, now, just faintly, that she’d stuffed something there under her hair, and that whatever she’d placed there was only barely hiding a powerful golden glow emanating from behind it.

  Her Blessing is wide open, dumping out energy from that hole on her head at a firehose rate. Peter blanches, gapes at her. It doesn’t make any sense that anyone could maintain that kind of output for more than a few seconds and not run dry.

  He struggles with an impulse to leap over to her, bash her over the head, and take that bottomless well of power for himself. The urge lasts less than a second, but the weight and ferocity of it leaves him dizzy, shaking his head, nauseous with himself. Where had that come from?

  Now he wants to tell the woman to flee. To turn off that spigot if she can, and if she can’t, to get out of here as fast as possible. He widens his awareness, feels it now: another well of immense power, much subtler, standing still across the street.

  And yet another streaking through the sky, coming to a stop in the alley behind the cafe. He stands up, moves to warn her, but she’s already talking with the huge barista, already following him out the back.

  Okay. She has the right idea. She’s getting out of here.

  Should he? Is he in danger now too? Peter does a mental inventory of his Blessing: he’s leaking, sure, but most Blessed are always leaking a little bit if they’re not empty. He barely has any juice left, maybe enough for one or two big leaps, a strong punch, a brief jet of heat. He’s as close to undetectable as he can be without being fully empty, but part of him rebels at the idea of deliberately dumping the last of his reserves. He feels he might need it. He feels-

  The cafe wall explodes. A huge chunk of rubble caroms directly into him.

  His Blessing was already primed against kinetic force, a base state most Blesseds maintain at all times, and it saves his life. The chunk of rubble, nearly half as long as he is tall and made mostly of brick, deposits its entire kinetic load into his reserves at once before crashing, inert, to the floor.

  He’s stunned for a moment, startled out of his thoughts. The room is full of smoke and haze and debris, the inside of the cafe reduced to a musty cloud. Then the screaming starts.

  People push past him in their flight for the door. Peter hears cries, the word “bomb” floats out once or twice. Out by the back wall, the source of the explosion is an inferno of Blessings, energy crackling out in mammoth starbursts. It feels blinding, overwhelming.

  Peter staggers back, pivots to flee with the others, and trips over an arm. He pulls himself to his feet, sees the person who grabbed him: a young man, maybe teenaged, the bottom half of his body pinned to the ground by a massive chunk of destroyed wall. The boy’s eyes are already rheumy and distant, his face a greasy mask of pain (I’ll be okay. Just my heart again. The ol’ ticker’s sick. Don’t worry, Pete). He mouths something, some one-syllable word, coughs a throatful of blood onto the neck of his sweater, and passes out.

  A third has joined the fight outside, this one’s Blessing eerily familiar to Peter. A deafening explosion briefly banishes all thought, sets his ears ringing. Fire is creeping into the cafe, now, from the opening in the back wall.