“Are you alright?” Xander asked, as he helped Striga up from the ground behind her. Adriana winced as she pushed herself to stand, hating that Striga had fallen down, too. “Here, take my coat, let’s get you inside.”
“I am fine,” Striga laughed as she swatted him away. She pushed her wet hair off her face once she was upright again and threw Xander’s coat back at him. “Stop fussing, boy, I am perfectly fine. It was rather refreshing, actually!”
Striga continued to cackle as she took in Adriana’s similar wet appearance, her hand doing nothing to hide the snorts of laughter. Adriana wanted to apologise, but her great-grandmother’s joy only made her giggle in response. Striga had always had a way of doing that, of lifting everyone else’s mood and bringing them to join her in the delight in whatever it was that made her smile or laugh.
“What a lovely way to cool off on a late summer day, isn’t that right, my Adria?”
Adriana offered her arm for support as Striga stumbled her way over to her, still wobbling from her fall. As she watched her great-grandmother struggle to walk in her soaken shoes, Adriana felt mortified. It wasn’t just embarrassment or the concern that she could have seriously hurt her, but it was also the crushing weight of her repeated inability to master even the simplest of magic. She was meant to be a saviour, a protector, and instead she was a threat to the ones she loved.
Again,she thought to herself.I failed again.
“I am glad you think this is amusing.”
Adriana clenched her jaw and turned to see Xander staring daggers at her as small shadow wisps danced around his shoulders. If looks could kill, she knew she would have died a thousand times over from the way he was glaring at her.
“Whilst you are having fun with your pretty water and floral displays, the entire world is still at risk. Do you have any idea what it is like to see your friends, your family, torn apart from the inside? To watch the life leave their eyes only for their bodies to be used to house mindless dark creatures? Do you?”
He didn’t shout, he merely asked her as if he genuinely wanted to know the answer, the way Striga and Thomas used to scold her as a child. His words resonated within her, striking hard and true, and settling in with what she already knew about herself. But she’d had enough of feeling incomplete, of feeling inadequate. She gave herself enough of a hard time, she certainly wasn’t going to take it from a man, especially not from him.
“Xander,” Striga stepped in. “Do not speak to her like that, we have made great progress today.”
“Progress? And what progress was that?” Xander crossed his arms and stepped towards them both, looking down his nose at them, as if he sat upon some moral high ground. “I saw no progress, I saw you wasting your time with her, like you have every day since I arrived. You told us we needed a Luciferus, and she is clearly not one. She is hardly even an Incantrix.”
Xander tilted his head to smirk at Adriana as he finished his degrading speech. The anger bubbled inside her, she felt it boil and spill over. Adriana knew he could sense her feelings, he probably didn’t even need his Manipuli power to take one look at her face and know every insult she wished to hurl at him. And so when she watched his smile widen into a feral grin, she decided enough was enough.
She stepped around Striga and stopped in front of him, inches away from where he stood looking down at her. Her eyes were glowing with golden fury, her hands shaking with the urge to slap that stupid smile off of his face.
“You will noteverdisrespect her again,” she said coldly, her voice clear with confidence and thick with threat. “And do not disrespect me, not unless you want your tongue ripped from your throat. Do not vex me, Alexander Duran.”
Xander said nothing for a moment, his glee only stretching wider across his face as he looked her up and down. The shadowsaround him ceased their mocking dance, instead opting to peak over his shoulders as if they, too, were watching her.
“But vexing you is so fun,” he chuckled. “In fact, I think it might now be my favourite thing to do. And just look at what you can achieve when you let me.”
As he nodded to her shaking hands, she unclenched her fists and looked down to see what he was so pleased about. And then she saw it, the glow in her hands. It wasn’t fire, but a warm light. A golden, glorious light emitting from the very tips of each finger.
Almost immediately, she felt a prickle of heat at the bottom of the back of her neck. Her eyes widened as the pain grew, the faint stinging blooming into an intensely hot sensation, as if she were being prodded with a fire poker.
“It is alright, my darling,” Striga soothed, her hand softly stroking Adriana’s upper back. “It is your mark, the mark of the Sun. The mark of a Luciferus.”
Adriana broke away from Xander’s gaze to look at her great-grandmother. She saw the pride in her face, the joy at knowing her gift of light had truly been passed down and bestowed upon Adriana, just as she’d known it would.
Her throat tightened, her eyes stinging with tears as the pain intensified. Biting down on her lip, she fought the urge to cry out, not wanting to show any more weakness in front of either of them. Just as the pain became almost unbearable, an odd coldness fluttered up her back and settled across the top of her spine. It washed over the burning sensation on her neck, the touch gentle, like a thousand cold kisses.
As the burning dulled, she felt the strange coldness slide away and trail through her damp hair, before appearing before her. She couldn’t hold back her gasp as she realised it was a shadow, one that felt all too familiar to her.
It detached itself from her hair and drifted back towards Xander as he moved closer to her, settling in the open palm of his outstretched hand. Then, with a flick of his wrist, it vanished, and he leant down to whisper in her ear, his breath tickling the side of her face.
“You are most welcome.”
Adriana jumped back, scowling at him with as much distaste as she could possibly portray on her face. She could not believe, nor stand, the outrageous audacity of him—a man that Thomas and Striga had raved about for years, a man whose stories were told in tales of courage and bravery. She didn’t want to admit that he had helped her, that he had gotten her so angry, perhaps purposefully, that her Luciferus light had appeared for the first time. She didn’t want to thank him for soothing her pain or anything, not when she was so furious at him. Not when he evidently found it so delightful to irritate her.
The man before her was a far cry from the selfless Lamia leader from her great-grandparents’ stories. This man was still a self-righteous, arrogant prick. Infuriating, insufferable, and irresistible.
Xander laughed at her, making her realise how loud she had been screaming her thoughts at him. She pushed him aside and stormed towards her house, leaving Striga to loudly chastise him. She was too hotheaded to care about the scorch marks she left behind with each step she took, nor the lightning that zapped through the air.
She hated him, she hated the way he made her feel, she hated the way he distracted her. And she hated the fact that he had been the only one to truly help her.
Chapter seven
