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I cocked my eyebrow at him. “What’s your damn point, Brandt?”
“Why not both?” he said, shrugging mockingly. Then, he added in badly mangled Spanish: “Porque no los dos?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, digging around in my pockets for a handkerchief, a piece of tissue, anything to dab away the blood already cooling on my skin.
“Watch this,” Bastion said. He held up one hand, his eyes vaguely staring at the air above his palm. Within seconds, with an extravagant whoosh, a ball of flame burst into existence.
“What the – you can do that, too?”
“How did you think I became a Scion?”
“Power, and being an asshole. You said so yourself.”
“Very cute,” Bastion said. “I mean, I’ve got a little bit of a grasp on basic elemental magic. Nothing huge. But I prefer my natural talents for obvious reasons. It’s what I’m good at. Why reinvent the wheel?”
I gazed at the perfect sphere of fire in his hand enviously. Kind of wasn’t fair, in my opinion, to be handsome, rich, and crazy talented at magic all at once, but Bastion was a special breed of mage.
Not as special as Herald, a voice in my head said. Of course not, I spat back. I scratched my hair, annoyed that I even had to remind myself, annoyed that some part of me could even begin to imagine that I would ever think less of Herald.
“Now watch this,” Bastion said, in the voice of a teenager about to show off some sick trick at the skate park.
A faint shimmer in the air around the fire showed that he’d contained the flames in a globe of his telekinetic energy. The fire burned on. As strong as Bastion’s shields were, I’d always known that they were still slightly porous, at least enough to let oxygen in. Otherwise he’d have killed as many people as he’d protected with his own force fields.
No, what was strange was how the fire inside the glassy globe not only continued to burn, but glowed even brighter, like it was growing even stronger.
“The hell is happening?” I murmured, leaning in for a closer look.
“I’ve contained the flames in this tiny space,” he said. “But I’m also feeding the fire with more arcane energy – so much of it that my power can barely hold it all. Now watch.”
Bastion pointed out a large rock. He spun on his heels and threw the globe directly at it – which promptly exploded into a fiery pillar roughly the size of a small tree.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“If you build up enough pyrokinetic energy in a compact space,” Bastion said, smirking to himself, “you can also learn to release it all at once. So instead of throwing fireball after fireball, you’re dumping all that magic into one convenient little package. An arcane grenade.”
The flames continued to burn, dying down steadily, but spreading in a slow pattern around the boulder as the fire sought out drier patches of grass. Bastion sauntered over with all the calm of a trained professional, then extended one hand, spraying a small cone of what looked like frost over the fire, promptly putting it out.
Yeah. So it wasn’t nepotism that put Bastion up on top as a Scion, but pure, raw talent. The guy could do way more than build shields out of thin air. I mean, that grenade trick was more than a little awesome.
And he looked pretty damn handsome doing it, too, the voice in my head said.
Shut up, I told myself. Shut the fuck up.
Chapter 21
“I’m not entirely sure how this helps me. So you’re saying I should combine the two things I’m good at?” I snorted. “And what, make shadowfire?”
Bastion shrugged, as if nothing I had said was out of the ordinary. “Why the hell not?”
“I’m not even sure how I would combine those two things. That’s like asking me to write with both hands at the same time. I’ve never tried.”
Bastion tapped the side of his nose. “That’s exactly it, then. Time to give things a shot, stupid.”
“That’s dumb,” I said. I squinted at him, frowning. “You’re dumb.”
“Totally uncalled for.”
Ten minutes in and I still hadn’t figured out what Bastion wanted from me. In terms of learning something new, I mean. The shadows didn’t have the same properties as his fine control of occult telekinesis. How the hell was I supposed to contain fire in – man, it sounds stupid just thinking it – in a shadow?
