“I have enough,” she said, her heart still racing.
“Your incantation worked, but it was weak.”
She lifted her chin in defiance. “I managed to get away, didn’t I?”
“I was going easy on you.”
Her jaw clenched. He had been, with the darkness barely at bay. What was he doing that made it consume him? Could it be that it was unintentional, or was it the real him?
If only she had the strength to punch him back—to shove her fist into his face and break that perfect nose of his. But one day, if she kept this up, she would.
“You’re going to have to practice—”
“Don’t lay a hand on me again. You have no rights to touch me.”
As nonchalantly as someone might ask the price of a coffee, he told her, “Oh, Eva Kesaré, I’m not about to stop. Not unless you make me.”
He was older, and half valco, and a man. Besting him would be satisfying indeed.
“Until then, you’re little more than my minion.”
She cursed him.
“Didn’t you see this coming? You left your home with a complete stranger,” he said, clicking his tongue derisively. “You’re only remarkable in your own head, Eva Kesaré—”
“Don’t call me that—”
“But to me you are na?ve—”
“Don’t soil my name—”
“A little bit foolish—”
“Just shut up—”
“And soft, like a rotting banana.”
Eva glared at the smile that didn’t touch his eyes. Behind them the fire spat, the crackling a soothing companion to nighttime now that her brief bismuto high had faded.
He stepped closer, asking, “So, ready for galio?”
“What—”
But before Eva could finish her sentence, he reached for her forearm and slashed her across the wrist in the same motion with which he had slashed the man at the inn, as if his fingernails were made of steel.
Eva cried as hot blood spilled out in all directions. Fire sprouted from her wrist. She collapsed to her knees, then onto her ass. Javier was back moments later, waving the journal in her face. It was open to the illustration of a different incantation.
“Do it, and quick. Your blood is already scarce from the tiniebla attack.”
She thrashed her feet in his direction as her gash pulsed. She cursed his name and his mother’s and even his grandmother’s, well aware that each word took her closer to her expiration. Eva clamped her hand over her wrist, and still the blood poured out, angry and burning.
“If you lose enough blood, you’ll faint again,” he told her in his infuriatingly offhanded way.
Eva tried to seize the journal, but he moved it out of her reach.
“Don’t touch it with your filthy hands. Just do the hand motion already, and heal the cut. It’s not that complicated.”
“Malparido,” she snarled.
He laughed. “What would Do?a Antonia say, to hear one of her own have such a potty mouth?”
Hot tears pooled at the corners of her eyes, but she swallowed them down. Hatred was the only thing he deserved.
Eva let go of her wound and slapped her hands together for the incantation. The fingers of her sliced hand were like sticks. She forced them to obey her. In the heat of her pain, it was easy to transpose herself onto the millions of outer planes, to force the will of geomancia into her fingertips like a docile servant.
Threads of gold flitted from her middle finger rings to her pouring wrist, where they took hold of her skin. The glittering threads tugged the opened flesh, and Eva doubled over with a moan. She shut her eyes as the galio sewed the edges together. Then the pain was gone.
She took a heavy gulp of air when it was all over. Blood smeared the length of her wrist and forearm, but it was done fleeing her. A line of scarred skin was the only evidence of Javier’s abuse. It looked faded, like it had long since disappeared into the history of her skin.
“Regenerating blood matter is a far more complicated spell,” Javier said, standing over her all smug. “I know it, but it requires more galio than you have left. And I already spent too much of mine healing you from the attack. Try to preserve what little blood you have left, in case you decide to run into tinieblas again.”
Eva stood up, rancor burning through her nostrils, and immediately regretted it as dots of black blurred her gaze. She almost collapsed on her ass a second time, but Javier’s hand shot out and caught her.
“Steady now. Remember the blood.”
She shoved him away once her two feet found balance.
“You animal,” she spat. “You cut me, and all you can do is mock me? I’m sorry for suddenly realizing I don’t want anything to do with you.”
He didn’t seem fazed. “Were it not for the bleeding, you would have moaned and complained about learning geomancia. You may be a quarter valco, but you strike me as the type to need that extra push. Let’s just say… the traditional methods take too long.”
Eva reeled. This was the first time she’d heard him mention the extent of her valco heritage. Like he personally knew her more than she knew herself.
She bit down the questions, which would be better asked when she wasn’t fuming.
“Are you ready to learn iridio?”
“What, are you going to let a tiniebla loose on me? ‘Oh, what better way to learn iridio than to have a starving demon rip your bowels open!’” she mocked in a crude impression of him.
Javier smirked. Again, he moved so fast Eva barely registered him slamming the heel of his palm to her chest, where the iridio pendant hung from a chain.
The blow dislocated her soul, her essence. She was shoved into the vastness of the open universe, thrust into a darkness disrupted only by the faraway swirls of galaxies, hundreds and millions of them.
Every star and every planet was bursting with light energy. Vivid and hot and bright, boiling through clusters to suffocate her. The energy went into Eva. It impaled every inch of her body, filling her with starlight. Slowly the darkness and the vastness faded away. Eva was transposed in all those different realities again.
Meanwhile Javier was still talking. Though his voice was muffled, the tone was crystal clear. Condescending.
“Shut up,” she muttered. She was capsuled in a sack of hot air. Or energy. And beyond it, Javier went on and on.
“Just shut up,” she repeated, his stupid, condescending smirk clearer than ever.
The energy bottled into Eva as the black vastness faded. She was left in that bland campground, with nothing but Javier and the power inside her, yearning for an outlet.
He reached forward, like he was going to hurt her or force her into something against her will again. It didn’t matter; it rubbed Eva the wrong way.
“Come on, now. Don’t you want to do something with it?”
“Don’t touch me!” she roared. Despite her warning, his hand grazed her wrist, right where he had slashed her, on flesh that itched from the memory of his cut. “Don’t!”
She shoved him off with both hands, the motion bringing a burst of fire that sent him hurling across the campground. It was his turn to land on his ass.
The fireball roared right over him, missing him by slivers and incinerating a hole through the greenery behind him. It set the jungle ablaze.