The Titan

Lucius was no longer a man; he was a conductor for the city’s stolen lightning. White-hot arcs of electricity danced across his obsidian-etched skin, his body bloating as he funneled the skyscraper’s power into his own marrow. The air on the roof was a solid wall of ozone that made my teeth ache and the hair on my arms stand straight up.

"I am the storm!" Lucius roared, his voice a thunderclap that shattered the remaining glass panels of the penthouse floor below.

The roof groaned and buckled under his weight. He lashed out with a whip of pure voltage, the strike melting the steel strut inches from my head. I dove behind the primary relay, the heat radiating from the metal searing my shoulder through the tactical vest. There was nowhere to hide. If he touched the transmitter again, the resulting surge wouldn't just broadcast a signal—it would level the city.

I looked at the lightning rod towering at the far edge of the helipad. It was a spear of copper reaching for the bruised, violet clouds.

"Aria, the rod!" my mother’s voice screamed over the gale.

I saw the path. I had to lead the monster to the sky. I scrambled from behind the relay, the Obsidian Blade heavy and dark in my hand, the only thing on this roof not reflecting the blinding light.

"Over here, you bastard!" I shouted, waving the Blade.

Lucius turned, his eyes twin voids of electric blue. He lunged, moving with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for a form that large. Every footstep left a molten crater in the roof. I sprinted toward the copper spire, the wind trying to push me over the edge.

He swung a massive, glowing fist. I slid across the slick metal, the heat of the pass singeing my hair. I reached the base of the lightning rod and gripped the copper.

"You want the power?" I hissed, looking up at the titan of sparks. "Then take all of it."

Lucius reared back, his entire chest cavity glowing like a dying star as he prepared to discharge every volt he had absorbed. I didn't wait. I threw the Obsidian Blade with the last of my strength.

The Blade didn't strike Lucius. It struck the lightning rod, the jagged obsidian hilt wedging itself into the copper lattice.

Lucius’s strike hit a second later.

A blinding pillar of white light connected him to the rod. The Blade acted as a bridge, a bridge between a man who thought he was a god and the building’s massive ground wire. The sky screamed as the city’s electrical grid reversed, pulling the energy *out* of Lucius and slamming it into the earth.

The feedback was a physical roar. Lucius was silhouetted in a halo of blue fire, his mechanical parts exploding in a shower of molten sparks. He reached for me, his hand a skeletal claw of burning wire, before his form began to dissipate into ash and ozone.

The dome of violet light over the city collapsed. The hum died.

Silence fell, heavy and suffocating.

I slumped against the base of the rod, my lungs burning. My mother was already moving toward me, her eyes back to their natural shade, but she stopped. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the man in the wool coat who had appeared from the shadows.

He stood by the rooftop door, his face a perfect mirror of the father I barely remembered. He looked at my mother, then at me, and his hands were trembling. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook.

"It’s not over," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Eleanor... she didn't just want control. She was the one who signed the insurance policy in 1987. She didn't kill your father for the money, Aria. She did it because he found the second beneficiary."

I stared at the notebook, my stomach dropping. My father’s handwriting was on the first page, dated the day he died.

"The second beneficiary," I rasped, the violet veins on my wrist beginning to throb with a new, icy rhythm. "Who is it?"

He turned the page, and I felt the air around us turn to ice. There, written in bold red ink, was a name I had seen on every document, every legal filing, and every birth certificate in my life.

The second beneficiary wasn't a secret sibling or a hidden wife.

The name on the policy, the person who had been the motive for twenty years of murder, was me.