Chapter 10 Xolotl #3
She laughs. “Doubt was a rather optimistic word, huh? She wanted to send my brother-in-law to get me, as if he could somehow break the bond you made.” She shakes her head.
“Look, you may not have a mother, but all humans do, and we all know something very basic about them. They will believe anything about their kids. They’re hard to dissuade, and they’re eternally optimistic.
I had to tell her it was pointless, even if she sent our richest, most powerful human relative.
Do you disagree?” She arches one eyebrow.
Put like that. . . I sniff. “No, you were right. It is pointless.”
She shifts, heading back outside. “Are you mad at me, because I didn’t tell you I wanted to call my family?”
Now I feel stupid. “Not mad. I know humans love their families.” Usually. Some of them hate them, but they do seem to create major emotions one way or another.
“Alright, well, if you’re not angry anymore, can we go find a place without lots of humans and practice my mastery of water?”
“You should try to use earth and water together.” I clear my throat. “And that woman has put out the fire, and she appears to be upset.”
It’s the store clerk. I’m guessing it was her phone that I melted. “You said you were borrowing my phone.” She glances down at it in dismay. “You destroyed it.”
“I mean, technically he did that.” Whitney releases my arm and points at me.
“I didn’t even touch it.” I walk past them and out the door.
Whitney hands the woman a wad of the money we stole.
She told me that sometimes humans don’t even require the exchange of paper.
Sometimes they do things, providing goods and services, for a simple change of numbers on a page.
It makes no sense to me, but then the new world often makes no sense after I wake.
I suppose that’s Whitney’s point.
How can I balance a world I don’t understand? How can I eliminate creatures I don’t know? They’re all things I’ve never before wondered, and doing so now is unsettling. Without even thinking about it, I let Whitney drive.
That’s a huge mistake.
I nearly crashed the Tahoe a time or two when I was learning, but she’s been living in this time her entire life, so she’s clearly just trying to kill us.
And she’s laughing loudly while doing it.
“That’s a tree,” I shout, as she zooms past the edge of the lake, where a tree that’s growing precariously sideways nearly takes off my head.
“You said you can’t be hurt,” she shouts. “And that I can’t be harmed either, not while you’re here.”
“Now you’re headed for rocks.” My hands clamp tighter about her waist. “This is very unsafe.”
“You can’t die!” She’s getting a little too excited about that.
“But I’d rather not spend unnecessary energy saving you.” I reach for the steering bars, but she slaps my hands away.
“It’s my turn for once.”
But before I can take control, we accelerate, then slow down, turn fast, and spray water in all directions.
There aren’t even any other humans around by now.
Apparently not many humans participate in water events when it’s this cold.
But being here with Whitney, the cool water, the warmth of the sun overhead, I don’t hate it.
It’s a little like the burger.
Strange.
Uninvited.
And surprisingly enjoyable.
It scares me a little bit how much I like it, because I’ve never liked things before. I’ve certainly never liked a human before. But eventually I regain control of my senses, and I stop her. “This is fine. You can stop now.”
She stops the jet ski near an out-jutting tree, and she shivers. “They weren’t lying. With the wind and the water.” Her mouth looks a bit blue.
I fix that immediately. “It’s a very simple matter to warm the air.” I stop. “Now, you try.”
She scowls at first, which is kind of cute, and then she shivers again as the heat I created dissipates. “I can’t.”
“You can.”
She clenches her fists, and I notice her hands are trembling. She grows cold fast. “It’s fine. I have the wetsuit.”
“This is why we came.” I touch her hand with one finger. “You’re cold, so fix it.”
She swallows, and then she inhales, and then she nods. And sets the tree nearby on fire.
I sigh. “You’ll have to put that out, of course.”
“No, you.” Her eyes are wide, and she paws my chest. “Come on, Xolotl. It’s going to set everything else around it on fire, too.”
“Then it’ll all burn.” I tilt my head, disinclined to stop her pawing, which I find that I sort of like. I can’t help a half-smile. “If it bothers you, do something.”
“But what?” She sounds frantic now, and she leaves off pawing at me, lamentably, and dives into the water. Watching her trying to splash water up onto the bank with her pitifully small hands is entertaining.
But it makes absolutely no progress putting out the fire.
And she seems to be growing more and more agitated as the fire spreads up and across the bank. “Xolotl!” She points. “Stop it, already. I can practice more later.”
“You don’t progress without pressure.” I shrug. “You seem to care about the sticks and trees, so try and save them.”
She scrambles her way up into the winter-dormant growth, dangerously making her way into the fire.
“You don’t need to be close,” I say. “Come back here.”
She ignores me, of course, and continues to lean down and try to splash water on the flames.
“You’ll never put it out that way.”
She turns back, screaming like a demon. “You didn’t even tell me what to do!”
“Pull on the water behind you,” I say. “Direct it to put out the fire.” It’s the least efficient way to stop a fire, using the most energy, but she would have to use her water powers, which might be more helpful.
They require a lot of power, and not as much control or finesse.
“Don’t use your physical body, but pull on the magic from the bond. ”
She shouts words I’ve never heard, but I gather that they’re exclamations of her displeasure.
And then, she finally directs a stream of water from Lake Tahoe toward the fire, extinguishing it. She drops to her knees then, and her body shakes. It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s crying.
I hate it, viscerally.
“Stop that right now.”
She shakes more.
“What’s so distressing?” I ask. “You put out the fire.”
When she straightens, she’s holding a half-charred stick, brandishing it at me like it’s a sword. Wisps of smoke waft from the top. “You’re a jerk. You let me almost burn this whole thing down.”
I shrug. “I thought you’d prefer that to humans dying. Who knew you’d find a small fire so upsetting?”
She leaps toward me then, landing ankle-deep in the water.
“You and your games and your nonchalance. I hate you.” She throws the stick at me, following it with all the weight of her righteous fury.
It hurtles straight at me, a very small stick, compared to my size, but it penetrates the muscle of my arm and lodges, the sharp tip stuck squarely in my shoulder.
I stare at it blankly. I should have thought about this before.
Her stabbing earlier, the other attacks she’s made, they shouldn’t have harmed me.
They shouldn’t have made me bleed.
But they did.
They were so small I didn’t concern myself with them.
And this projectile didn’t disappear into my body as it should have. Instead, it stuck, harming my physical form. It’s small, nothing I can’t easily repair, but it shouldn’t have happened, certainly not from an attack by my own dark-energy champion. Dark powers can’t harm me.
I can only bond someone who possesses dark power. I saw it in her on the day I emerged. It’s the reason I could bond her.
But the wound in my arm could only have been created by pure light that somehow pierced my defensive magic.
My angry champion possesses pure light energy, and because of the bond, my defensive magic doesn’t stop her.
She just pierced my impenetrable body with pure light.
Which means that not only could her death send me to sleep, but I’m actually bound to someone who can do me real harm.
I have no idea how that was even possible, but when I yank out the stick, my blood sprays across the water, and I can’t deny it.
My champion could, potentially, destroy me if she wasn’t so weak.
That’s really, really bad.
But what’s worse, is that I should kill her right now.
I should destroy her before she realizes that she could destroy me.
Who cares about a forced nap? Only, I can’t bring myself to do it.
I think it’s because, for the first time in my entire life, I like something.
A woman. A very small, very passionate, very angry woman.
If I can’t do what needs to be done. . .
Whitney’s actions from earlier give me an idea.
Sometimes when we can’t do what needs doing, we have no choice.
It might be embarrassing, and we may not want to do it, but we were given our family for a reason.
Before I have second thoughts, before I can talk myself out of it, I act.
I close my eyes, and I dig down deep, and I call for my brothers.