Warm Up

Warm Up is a Tor.com original short story set in the world of V.E. Schwab's Vicious, sitting at position 0.5 in the Villains series. It follows David, an ordinary man who survived a near-fatal avalanche and came back changed: his hands now burn anything they touch, an ability he has spent nearly ten months hiding from, alone in his house after his wife left and took their son.

Ready to reclaim some semblance of his old life, David finally steps back outside, determined to keep his volatile new power under control. What he finds waiting for him, however, is a threat far more dangerous than anything his own hands can do.

At fifteen pages, Warm Up is a stand-alone taste of the near-death-grants-power premise that anchors the Vicious/Villains series, told from outside Victor and Eli's rivalry and set before the first novel begins.