He threw the flames at me but I didn’t slow, calling on my Dragon just enough to gild my skin in golden scales for a few moments so that they could deflect the heat and save me from the burn of his attack.
I grinned at the look of utter shock on his face, thanking my perseverance to learn that trick and glad of the hours I’d endured in Gabriel’s company to perfect it.
I burst from the embers of his attack with a challenging roar, swinging my axe for his head and he yelled out as he was forced to leap aside, ducking beneath the next swing of my axe and knocking it from my hands with air magic on the third attempt.
I pounced on him then, driving him down into the ground beneath me and slamming my fist into his face so hard I heard his teeth crack.
Lionel roared and thrashed beneath me, fighting back with all he had while I maintained my position on top of him through pure grit and determination, raining down blows on him over and over again until he finally managed to knock me onto my back with a blast of air.
An agonised roar rattled through the sky above us and I glanced up in time to see a grey Dragon hurtling through the air towards us, blood pouring from a savage wound on its throat.
I leapt aside and Father rolled away from me, the Dragon crashing to the ground between us with a resounding boom that made the hillside rattle before it shifted back into its Fae form and one of my father’s obnoxious cousins was revealed.
Ignatius screamed as he bled out in the dirt and I cast a spear of ice into my fist, slamming it down in his chest to finish him while holding tight to the memory of him walking in on my father beating the shit out of me when I was ten years old. He’d met my eye, arched a single brow and had apologised for the interruption before backing out of there and leaving me to the kicking I was taking. And as he met my gaze with his final breath escaping him, I hoped he was remembering that moment too and seeing the monster who was created in that house because of the things he’d witnessed and ignored.
Father regained his feet in the moment I was distracted by killing his cousin and he snarled a challenge as he moved to strike me again. I wrenched the spear of ice from Ignatius’s chest and hurled it at him with a furious cry, forcing him to lunge away and send an inferno of fire and air at me.
I dropped to my knees, shielding myself in ice and gritting my teeth as the dome of magic I held splintered and cracked beneath the onslaught of his power, my gaze fixed on the murky outline of his body which I could just see through the ice.
“Hiding from me, boy?” he taunted, just the way he used to taunt Xavier for trying to avoid him whenever he came home. But I’d never hidden. I’d always walked straight up to him with my chin high even when I knew I’d receive a beating, or when he had some cruel and unusual method of making me fight my fears in mind. I faced it like a Fae just the way I was facing him now.
“Just savouring the moment,” I called back, sinking my fingers into the dirt and taking hold of the moisture I found there before sending it spearing up and out of the ground beneath him in a series of razor sharp spikes.
Father howled in pain as they cut him, his attack faltering and allowing me time to banish my shield.
A dark and dangerous smile lit my lips as I found Ignatius’s charred skeleton before me, his body burned up in my father’s fire magic. His bones were laid out like an offering and the words of the dark magic Lance had been teaching me in preparation for this day sprang to my lips as I snatched a thigh bone into my palm and ran my fingers over it in well practiced movements.
“Chiedo al buio di disturbare questo corpo dalla pace e di mettere la sua magia nel mio sangue,” I breathed, the power of those words making a tremble run through my entire body and I sucked in a sharp breath as the magic stored within the bone was unleashed.
The bone began to glow with the power that was locked inside it as I wielded the dark magic to claim it for my own. My muscles bunched with the power of those words as thorny vines sprang from it, twisting around my fingers and slicing into my skin as the alien feeling of his earth magic drove its way inside of my body.
It fucking hurt as I absorbed the alien feeling of the earth element, like those thorns were clawing their way through every vein in my body and tearing them open, desperate to find a way back out again.
Father roared as he ran at me, his fists coated with fire as I dropped the bone and managed to cover my skin with my golden scales once more before his blow could land.
The crunch of his fist meeting with my jaw was swiftly followed by a roar of effort pouring from my lips as those thorn covered vines ripped their way back out of my body, gilded in the fire of my Dragon and ripping him off of me with such force that he was hurled away down the hill.