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Or swords. Swords were good. Blunt swords and fight dummies, no living things injured. But no, Iggy was determined to push me to uncomfortable places.
“If I wanted to kill you, that would be a logical next move in self-defense. If I can’t see you, I can’t strike you as easily.” Iggy made it all sound so practical, but the thought of blinding him made me cringe. He was my teacher, albeit not by my conscious choice, but still!
“What if I hex one of the dummies so you can still see that I c—”
“Don’t worry, poppet. I’ll still be able to behold your glory later. Unlike you, I can heal whatever you do to me . . .” Iggy grinned, looking at me with a sort of lecherous gaze that almost made me feel prudish.
I tried to send a stinging hex at his eyes.
“Basic, low-level,” Iggy grumbled. “Blindme. Or do you just like the sight of me in restraints? Does your husband know about this kink of—”
His words ended with a bellow of pain. Where his eyes had been now was only bloody gouges and empty sockets.
“Iggy!” I released the magic that was binding the plants, dropping Iggy to the ground carefully.
I cradled him in my lap, like a dying kitten. “Monkeyballs. Fucksycles. Dammit, Iggy! I didn’t mean to . . . Ugh! I’m not sure how to fix—”
“Hush. That was excellent work, Geneviève.” He sat up, wiped his hands over the vacant space, and chanted something in a language I didn’t know.
I watched in awe as his eyes grew back, filling those empty hollows with a slow shift as if he’d poured gel into a mold. I’d been beheading monsters since I was a teen, so this ought not disgust me, but it did. Layer after layer of gelatinous goo filled his eyes like pudding spooned into a desert cup.
I resisted gagging, but only with effort.
When Iggy’s eyes were back, they were startling ice-blue. He’d regrown his eyes in such a way that they were entirely new. “How . . .?”
Iggy smiled, ignoring my question, and exclaimed, “Nowthatwas how you hex, Geneviève. If I were Chester, that would be a great first volley. Could you target your excision hex? Lungs? Heart? Bollocks?
“Are you suggesting I cut out yourheart? Snip your . . .” I gestured. “Forgive me if I don’t think regrowing your heart is in my skill set.”
Iggy chortled. “Maybe we don’t practice that one on my heart. Hmmm . . .”
Before he could suggest we find a person—ordraugr–to experiment on, I held up a hand. “I can target it without needing to torture someoneifI’m not exhausted, but I’m not sure if goingsnip snip”—I made a scissors gesture—“is going to make Chester anything but enraged.”
Iggy shook his head. “It would hurt like the devil had his nethers in a vise. That’s what you want, Hexen. The goal is to evoke pain and make him pause, so you can escape.”
“Or kill him.”
Iggy sighed and reached out to capture my hand in his own slimy, bloodied grip. “We’ve gone over this. You must flee when you can. No killing attempts. He’s too strong. He killedme,Hexen.Do you think thatyouare trained enough when I was not?”
I scowled and shoved Iggy away. “Trained? No. I have threetypes of magical heritage, though. I might not have as much knowledge as you, but—”
“He’ll kill Eli,” Iggy says bluntly. His words were designed to hurt as much as his hexes did.
Few things take the wind out of my fight as that one can.
“Even if you lack self-preservation,” Iggy continues, “you care about Eli, don’t you? Chester will kill you, andthatwill kill Eli. If you learn no other thing that I try to teach you, understand this: youcannotkill Chester. Sheer luck and arrogance are not enough.”
I paced away from him, ostensibly to wash the blood from my hands.Hisblood. I’d been bound in a blood bond with Iggy a few months ago, so I wasn’t letting his blood on my skin a second longer than I had to do so. I trusted Iggy in ways—but I wasn’t fool enough to forget his ill-conceived plot to protect me against my will.
“That’s the way, Geneviève. Simply run from Chester the way you do when you see how much I care for you,” Iggy taunted.
The truth was that Iggy had noromanticinterest in me, and we both knew that. His care was friendship, maybe possessiveness. It wasn’t romantic or sexual. In truth, Iggy seemed to always flirt with no intent to deliver. I’d watched him flirt mercilessly at the bar with countless people since his resurrection, but he’d never acted on it. Never left with the women who gazed at him adoringly. As far as I could tell, he was basically living like a monk. Flirting was a reflex, possibly a hobby.
“Can you stitch my mouth shut?”Iggy asked, pulling me out of my mental meandering. “Quickly. Efficiently. It won’t stop all hexes, but it would limit a lesser hexen, and inconvenience even Chester.”
“Stitch your . . .”
“Like such,” Iggy said.
