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This wouldn’t be easy. I couldn’t shift my focus; I could barely string coherent thoughts together. I’d need to say the words out loud, because casting any spell with just my mind would be out of the question. I would need to be on the top of my game for that, and this hardly qualified as my best form.
“Air, hear me,” I whispered.
“What?”
I ignored him, hoping I’d be able to get through the whole thing before he decided to slit me open. “Earth, hear me.” I stared down at the still-wet spots my tears had left in the dirt and smiled. Never let it be said crying wasn’t good for you. “Water, hear me.”
“What are you saying? Are you praying?”
“No. But you should be.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The last words of the spell spilled out of me in a war cry. “Fire, hear me. Fire, yield to me. Fire, be my breath, be my touch. Fire heed me.”
My skin felt as if it might crack open like an aged blister and peel away at the lightest touch. I was coming apart, being ignited from the inside out. In the midst of the spell taking hold, I stopped being Eugenia, and I became the magic. I was no longer human, even on a small scale. I was pure; I was liquid energy. There was no body to contain me; I was time and emotion. I was the start and end of the universe. I was the molten core of the earth.
I was this motherfucker’s worst nightmare.
The rope holding me caught fire, burning up and
turning to smoke and ash. I should have fallen. I braced myself to hit the hard wood face first. Instead I floated up, the charred bits of my restraints hovering around me like blackened snow frozen in place, flecks of ember trapped in midair as if they were fireflies. My feet weren’t touching the floor, and I hovered near the rafters, bright red flames encasing my arms up to the elbows, licking outward. The heat was real, I could feel it around me, but I didn’t burn.
I would take time to be scared of myself later.
I would think about the fact I could apparently levitate later too.
First things first, I needed to make sure later was a reality I could count on.
“I gave you a chance,” I snarled. My voice gave me chills. It crackled and popped, words roaring like angry fire into a room. The space around us was filled with my words, as if they were tangible weapons I was spitting at him. “You could have made this easy. You could have walked away.”
“I-I… Wh-wha…” He eyed the door as if it was his last salvation.
The lucid part of my brain tried to imagine myself as he was seeing me. I couldn’t decide if I appeared more like I was demon-possessed, or like Jean Grey from the X-Men when she went all Dark Phoenix.
Either way, I hoped it scared the piss out of him.
He dropped the knife. “I’m sorry,” he sputtered.
You can’t kill him.
That stupid do-gooder voice in my head was back again, reminding me this wasn’t me. This wasn’t who I was.
But God I wished it could be.
I stared down at the floor uncertainly. Since I hadn’t willed myself to float up, I wasn’t sure how to control this new ability of mine. Was it just hovering, or could I actually fly? If it was the latter, that might be the coolest thing to ever happen to me. No one could fly. In spite of rumors to the contrary, vampires couldn’t. They couldn’t turn into bats, either.
I lowered myself down, feeling a rush when my feet hit the hard wood floor. Just standing was the strangest relief. When I’d been tied up, there was a small part of me, even for the briefest time, that thought this might be the end for me.
There’s nothing quite like being tethered to certain death to make you really really not want to die.
But I also wasn’t going to squander this opportunity to get the information I needed. If this guy was terrified, he might talk to me if only to save himself. If I could keep him scared long enough to find out what Deerling’s plan was, then maybe, maybe this whole ordeal would be worth something.
“Take off your mask.”
His hands trembled, but he didn’t argue. He lifted the mask from his head and dropped it to the floor, but kept his face lowered as if he was afraid to show me who he really was. He should be.
When he raised his head, I growled audibly.
