Chapter 21 Sparring #3
“Ignire aerem,” I snapped, not bothering to be quiet as I yanked harder on my sun primal. The air burst into flames in a long, darting line, straight for him, but extinguished a few feet from his chest. “Mastishk dhundhala…”
He deflected that one, too.
“Try something different,” he said, still impatient. “You’re not going to get past my shields that way.”
I felt my jaw harden, but didn’t speak the obvious.
I wasn’t going to get past his shields at all.
“Then try something else,” he said, biting out the words.
He started walking towards me, and for some reason, real fear caused my adrenaline to spike. I scarcely whispered another spell in Russian, using my primal to seek out anything living in the shed compartment apart from me or Bones.
I didn’t have much hope the spell would find anything.
Meanwhile, Bones glided closer, moving like he wasn’t in any hurry at all.
I backed up as he approached, but he easily closed the gap.
I jerked away when he reached for one of my wrists.
I aimed a left hook at his head, that time solely as a diversion, following it up immediately with a hard jab at his throat with my right.
He moved so quickly and effortlessly away from both, I couldn’t even track what he’d done with his body, and then he was behind me, using a spell that prevented me from turning around.
I started to speak another spell, but he murmured something else, and my throat locked closed, unable to move, or to finish the words.
He still hadn’t even touched me.
I managed to break free of the spell that forced me to face away from him, using a mudra and a hard yank of my primal, but I still couldn’t speak.
Just then, I heard a buzzing sound, and turned my head to see a swarm of some kind of flying ant mixed with beetles flying into his face. He neutralized them with a mudra and a silent spell, but he actually smiled, meeting my gaze.
“Tanets medvedya?” he asked. When I nodded, he smirked, and dropped the hold on my throat. “Clever, Shadow. But you should probably use that one outdoors, so you can summon something bigger than termites and beetles to come to your rescue––”
“Vanarpucchham,” I breathed, twisting my hand in a circular motion in front of my body, where he wouldn’t see it.
Whipping it around with a hard flick, I wrapped my new, prehensile tail around his ankle and yanked, hard, putting magic behind it, right as I murmured an unbalancing spell.
He moved fluidly with my yank without losing his balance, deflected the second spell first, then snapped the tail off right where it came off my spine…
again, somehow. I didn’t hear the countering spell, or see more than a flick of his fingers, and he never touched the tail with his hand.
It crumbled to dust as I watched, and, now actually angry, I hit him with a spell I’d never wanted to try on Alaric, worried I might actually hurt him.
“Exsanguinate,” I hissed softly, and yanked, hard, on my primal, throwing the spell with my arm and a mudra in a long curve, hoping to hit him on the back.
He stepped in front of the curse before it could get behind him. Without his lips moving at all, he bounced that one straight back at me with a flick of his wrist.
I barely got the “deflecto,” from my lips, jerking my hands to the left, before my own spell would have slammed into me and drained half the blood out of my body.
As it was, the charged streak of aether slammed into the wall, and exploded one of the lanterns.
Bones hadn’t yet moved back, so I let out an angry snarl and full-blown attacked him, swinging my fists at his face.
He slid easily out of my way, again moving inhumanly fast, and when I tried to attack him a second time, he used his leg in an odd maneuver to push me back.
I tried stomping his foot, then aimed a palm strike at his chest. I missed both when he moved his chest sideways, just out of my range, and blocked my foot with a shin.
Bending down, he grabbed my wrist and twisted, making me yelp.
Yanking my whole body backwards as I struggled to get free, I dug my nails into his hand, trying to break the skin, and when he grabbed that hand, too, I kicked at his shin, hard. He evaded the kick, but released me, and I threw a palm towards his nose, aiming upwards.
My hand hadn’t even reached the vicinity of his face when I felt his magic leave him in a hard pulse.
I flew halfway across the room.
I crash-landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me.
It felt like I’d been thrown by a giant from a great height, directly at the floor.
I couldn’t get my mind to work for a few seconds.
My vision blurred like he’d hit me with a brain blow spell, but I’m pretty sure I’d just landed so hard, I’d stunned myself on the padded floor.
I lay there, gasping, fighting to breathe past the pain.
I flashed back to my first year in Overworld school in England, the fights where I ended up in the dirt, where I didn’t have any clue how to fight back. I was back there again, feeling completely powerless, like I couldn’t do anything, like I was weak, pathetic, bloody useless.
Bones leisurely walked over to stand over me.
I started to speak another spell, but he held up a hand in a mudra I’d never seen. The air abruptly left my lungs. I fought to breathe, and for a moment, his face didn’t move. He stared at me like a spider might stare at a fly.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re stopping for now. Agreed?”
My body tried reflexively to suck in air but my lungs wouldn’t cooperate.
Every speck of oxygen had been yanked out by his spell, and now he held my chest in his fist, caught in a fixed exhale by whatever spell he’d used.
Somehow it reached my panicking, pure-survival-mode brain that he was waiting for my acknowledgement.
I nodded. Then, so there’d be no mistake, I hit my arm against the floor, tapping out.
He released the spell.
I sucked in a harsh gasp of air, choking on it, my lungs burning.
For a long-feeling few minutes, I could only lie there, pulling as much air into my lungs as I possibly could, my whole body hurting.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything else.
Tears streamed down my face as I stared at the dark ceiling, smelling smoke and blood that had to be coming from somewhere on my body, since I certainly hadn’t bloodied him.
“Good,” he said.
I turned towards him, still wheezing, sure it had to be sarcasm, or gloating, or some other means of mocking me, but he was only looking at me thoughtfully.
Stranger still, his eyes held a gleam of something that looked a lot like satisfaction.