On a Razor's Edge (4 page)

“Yeah, they do that. I give them life—accidentally, obviously—and they try to kill me. Ungrateful bastards.”

“Yo-yo.
Please.” He made a large sweeping motion with his hand, indicating I should move on to the next stage. He stepped next to me again.

“Okay, well, now we move into the more serious power levels.
Stefan and Dominicous, you might step closer. Things will probably get interesting…”

“Can she do anything right?” I heard to my far right.

The answer was no. I’d cried about that fact on Stefan’s chest so many times I couldn’t count. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I could follow the spell exactly, mimicking the teacher or student identically, applying power just the way it was described, and while someone else got a happy little dog that waited by a gate, and then ran to its owner with a magical message of some kind, I got a killer wolf trying to kill me. It wasn’t the power level, either. I still got a giant, man-eating dog when I used purple, the lowest level I could possibly use. Stuff just didn’t work right for me.

The overall consensus
was that my magic was weird because I was human. I had long started to agree, regardless of what Stefan said.

I took a clean
sing breath, trying to focus even though that blue-eyed stare could throw the most experienced off track. If the guy would just blink once in a while it wouldn’t be so bad. Or else, I dunno, move a finger or something!

“I am going to attempt…oh man, what do I want to attempt?”

I thought for a minute into the quiet of midnight. The darkness permeated my awareness, sifting through my fingers and sliding past my skin. I sucked in power, feeling the glow in my chest and the tingle in my limbs. “No one touch me.”

A long delicate pale finger slowly reached into my line of sight and poked my bare arm.
A blast of magic burst into Toa’s skin. A resounding, bone jarring shock rocked him backward. He made a, “Whooee,” sound as he shook his hand.

Not able to help my chuckles, I said, “I told you.”

“What just happened?” Dominicous asked, stepping forward and peering around a once again staring Toa.

“She electrified her skin somehow,” Toa explained in his music
al tone, leaning forward to look at my arm, his hands at his sides. “I’ve never seen that before. Fascinating. Her magic, or a new spell?”

“How did you do that?”
Dominicous asked, suspicious of something.

I
shrugged, still trying to think of something to try that wouldn’t result in a lot of crushed people. “I feel the darkness around me, and then my chest and limbs get hot. Physically hot, I guess, because whenever someone touches me other than Stefan they get a shock.”

Toa
’s stare found Stefan. “Why aren’t you affected?”

He shrugged, heat of a different kind filling our special link. “She calls to me, and I to her. I always thought it was because of that, somehow.”

“Proceed,” Dominicous said suddenly. “I am eager for this portion of the testing to be over.”

“There’s more after this?” I whined before I could help myself.

“Are you tired?” Toa asked softly, almost mockingly.

I looked at him in confusion, completely unsure why he insisted on talking at the very lower end of his volume level. He looked back—as usual—but this time his gaze was condescending.

I crinkled my nose. “Just wait and see Mr. Marathon.”

“Don’t do it, Sasha,” Charles warned.

“Yes, do it,” Toa challenged.

Fine.

Orange, a step above my default red. It wouldn’t hurt for very long.

I drew in a nice, big shot of air, mixed it with fire, added just a touch of earth so it would linger, and summoned up a thickening spell tinged with a furnace flare. The object was to solidify the air around an opponent to slow them down. Mine produced one hell of a shock as it did so.
It took a lot of energy to execute, like physically holding someone still that wanted to run, but in this instance, it would be worth it.

I left my hands at my sides, because I didn’t need those,
and flashed a grin in Toa’s direction. “Surprise!” I let the magic settle down onto him.

“Aaaeeeee!”
Toa convulsed for three seconds before the orange haze started crackling with white and disintegrated into the harmless air around him.

“Oooh
, you’re fast at that,” I commended, giving him a praising downward smile. It was also my thinking smile. I had no idea how he’d done it.

H
is stare had some of that left over voltage in it. I raised my hands in surrender, “You told me to!”

“When do
Stefan and I get to work?” Dominicous asked smoothly.

“Now.
I’m going to try the concealing charm and it always creates monsters. Large, fanged monsters.” I drew in my mix of charms, dreading this. I should have used this charm with purple, but I didn’t expect those danged beetles. They were hard to catch, and hurt when they tried to gnaw on your leg. After I’d figured out the goo, bugs weren’t such a problem, but I’d used up the lowest power in my demonstration so my legs didn’t have bite marks.

Six of one, half dozen of the other…

Eyes closed because I knew the feel of the charm, and what happened when I used it, I brought my fingers up and swooshed them back down, as if I were fanning a sheet onto the bed. Gold coated a sapling for a fraction of a second.

Nothing happened.

I groaned. Often, explosions were the safest results to charms and spells gone wrong. As I learned more spells and charms, though, mimicking their application perfectly, I got stranger results.

Always the same results if I did the spell
“properly,” though. So that had to be something.

“Here you go, boys,” Charles said with a grimace. “In three, two, one…”

The sapling started swinging wildly, branches flapping like wings, leaves fluttering. It started to grow, upward, twenty feet in the air. Wider now, a huge root stepping out of the ground like a leg, followed by five more.

“Now’s the time to cleave it,” Charles counseled. “It only gets angry from here on out.”

“You do this often?” Dominicous asked pleasantly, not bothering to watch the tree transform into a heinous creature.

“Unfortunately, yes. It’s why I try not to use the higher powers. You’ll see what happens when I get to white.”

That drew Toa’s attention away from the tree-animal, his gaze suspicious. “You can do pure white?”

“
Yes, though the effects are…unsettling.”

“Is this directly after you take
Stefan’s blood?”

I thought about it. “I dunno. I never mapped out his offerings.”

“But you do take his blood?”

“Yes. And he takes mine. Why? Was that supposed to be
a secret?”

“When was the last time you took his?”

I thought back. Then shrugged. “Must be a while now, I don’t remember. Stefan, do you—?ˮ

A howl cut me off. The monster was thirty feet
tall now with branch-like arms. A hole in the top suggested a mouth, but no teeth. Lucky for the boys.

Even still, I started to back away. This damn thing would come after me
, and by the look of it, it’d have a long reach.

“We haven’t ex
changed blood in the customary month before a visit such as this. She has no taint from me, nor I her.” Stefan stood with his neck craned, his face his usual stern leader’s mask, analyzing the monster.

Charles walked over, placing himself in front of me. Adnan stood off to the side. A couple of my sword fighting classmates sauntered
in, too. They’d all gotten really great at working together.

My God, I sucked at this. My heart sank.
Stefan would be lucky if I didn’t get kicked out.

“Easy, love,” he said in his low, deep voice, turning his back on the monster and facing me. “Have faith in yourself.”

I loved him more than words could express for believing in me, even though I couldn’t show worse if I possibly tried. I pointed behind him. “It’s about done growing. Things are about to get real.”

He winked. The man was crazy!

Another howl, and the monster sighted in.

“Here we go!” Charles crouched, sword out,
orangey-gold with my help.

A giant tree-trunk leg lifted in the air, smashing down on the ground ten feet ahead of it. People started to scream or groan, moving or running backward. A few people high-tailed it out of there entirely.

“Can
you not suck out the magic?” Toa asked over another catastrophic howl.

“I tried that once. I could only get half the magic back in before I got the warning pric
kles. When I released that bit of magic, I set fire to the whole thing. Which meant a huge bonfire monster chased us around for half the night.”

“But the magic came from you…”

“Yes, but as I release it, I’m pretty sure the draw isn’t cut off. I think I have to cut off the draw at a certain point, but I don’t know how. No one seems to think that is the right way. But…I don’t know, I suck at this.”

Another earth quaking step.
The monster was indeed heading my way.

Stefan drew his sword, burnished gold,
the power right under white. Dominicous drew his. Exact same color. Huh.

“What power do you throw after you take her blood?” Dominicous roared over the thick and low tree groans.

Another step forward, within striking range of the two guys.

They could have been having an idle chat over a cigarette for how concerned they were.

“White tinged with a golden hue. Not quite full white. White’s a big step up from gold. Even burnished gold, where I sit. I had no idea.”

“Hmm.
I am gold with white frost when I take Toa’s. Interesting.”

“So, it’s getting angry now…” Charles counseled.
“Just FYI.”

And it was. Black mouth gaping, still fangless, the beast howled again, shaking the bones of everyone there. People brandished their swords in shaking hands, just in case.

The monster bent to throw a huge, leafed fist toward Stefan. He danced out of the way, smooth and graceful, perfectly balanced. The bark monster howled in rage, throwing another fist, slamming it into the ground where Dominicous had been a moment before.

Stefan
rushed between the stomping feet, aiming for his prey. He slashed at the Achilles heel, then cut through half a leg. Dominicous was at the other leg, following Stefan’s example. The next stomp had the monster stumbling, but not falling. The root foot broke off, the beast now using a stumped foot.

“It is an actual tree,”
Stefan shouted, dodging the leafed fist. He slashed at the wrist, chopping some off before rolling out from beneath the tree’s next punch, and then dodging a stomp.

Dominicous jumped, tucking his feet and doing a cool flip. Unfortunately, he landed in the path of an already attacking tree-palm and got knocked to the side. He rolled against the forest floor, kicking up dirt and dust
, then hopped to his feet and ran back into the fray, his muscles bunching and releasing.

“I would prefer an axe instead of a sword, I think,”
Stefan reflected in a hum-drum voice, moving like a boxer within the swinging and thrashing of the tree-monster. He used his hands to rip away bark as often as he used his sword to chip away, debilitating the monster little by little.

Dominicous, for his part, did the same thing, h
is tattoos glowing alongside Stefan’s. His movements were jerky and vicious where Stefan’s flowed from one strike to the next in perfect, powerful harmony, but each took down the beast in his own way.

After about ten minutes, both men panting and sweaty, I was able to effectively draw enough power out to render the beast immobile. All that remained in its stead was firewood.
Which was a money saver come winter—I informed everyone of that fact.

You’re welcome.

Stefan yanked off his shirt and sopped the sweat from his chiseled, handsome face. His body glistened in the faint moonlight, his animal magnetism drawing me to him, having me rubbing my palm up his chest without realizing how I got there.

“
Thanks for the workout, love,” he said, glancing his lips off of mine. “I needed that. It’s been a stressful couple of days.”

“Two more power levels to go,” Dominicous said,
stripping his shirt and wiping the sweat off his own face.

I noticed a long, twisted scar up the side of Dominicous’s chest. White lines zigzagged across his back, as if he’d been whipped. He saw me looking, and let me. Battle wounds, or the reason he didn’t want to attempt emergence—or
re-
emergence, in his case—into the public eye?

I settled on both. I su
ddenly knew what he fought for. Which side he was on, and why.

“Which was that, gold?” I asked the growing crowd.
“So now white.”