“Force the fire.” His voice wound around me, urging me to obey. I soaked it in, taking courage from his confidence. “Sometimes the only way out is to gothrough. You can do it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and searched for the spark. The heat that felt so good when it rolled over my skin.
Darius repeated himself, his voice like that of a commander inspiring valor and true grit in his men before they marched unto the breach.
I could do this. Both powers were my birthright. Both could be controlled, I just had to figure out how to master this new one, and later, how to manage both of them in tandem.
Gritting my teeth, I tapped into the cold power, feeling every rock and speck of dirt circling me. Hearing the excitement of the neighbor’s thoughts, and the awe in Callie and Dizzy. But most importantly, I felt Darius’s raw, unyielding belief that I could do this. That I was more powerful than him, than even Vlad, and if anyone could handle a trivial matter such as a demon overthrowing one’s person, it wasme.
Sometimes the only way out was to go through.
Here goes nothing.
I embodied the full force of the icy power, felt it sucking me under and turning everything black. My thoughts rolled and my breath left me. I reveled in the dark majesty of the power thrumming within my veins.
A stray thought wound through my glory.
Make her proud.
Her.
Callie meant my mother.
Emotion surged up in me. And with it, fire.
My mother had always called me her flame. She’d coaxed it out of me. She’d helped me embody it.
Now she would save my life with it.
I yanked it up and wrapped it around the horrible coldness, defusing the edges. Chopping off the seeking arms. I pushed the cold down and packed it into a tight ball, the effect lowering me in the sky, making it harder for me to keep the rocks and dirt up.
But I did.
Balls of flame sprang to life, various colors, various sizes, moving through the debris around me, making the guy hiding in the bushes do a fist pump. I rose back up and drifted forward, feeling all that horrible blackness inside me surrounded by bright light. Ice wrapped in heat.
Fire rolled along my arms and legs, but the cold stayed like a cap on my head. I’d probably still lose my eyebrows, unfortunately. You couldn’t have everything.
The sweet air rushed back into my lungs. My fingers tingled with pins and needles, coming back to life. My heart fluttered, emotion surging back in.
Finally, I pushed it all back down, the fire and ice together, a knot in my stomach now, but the start of something. I’d fuse them together one day.
My feet bumped the ground and the debris in the air slowly fell. The fire winked out. The man in the bushes ran like hell.
“Someone should help him forget,” I said, glancing at his retreating figure. “He was too excited for his own good.”
I felt the others draw near me, but no one spoke. When I turned to them, Callie and Dizzy had their eyebrows up, as if they’d just asked a question.
Another wave of relief flooded me. “If you are thinking things, I thankfully can’t hear them.”
“I’m going to hate myself for saying this, but…not yet.” Callie adjusted her satchel. “You can’t hear them yet. But you will. We’ll work on that power to help you develop it. Then hopefully control it so you don’t do it all the time. I have some pretty stupid thoughts I’d rather keep to myself.”
“Me too,” Dizzy muttered.
Darius was staring at me with his hard face, but he didn’t speak.
“Right, then, one crisis averted. Now for the second.” I started toward the house. “We have to kill that demon before it can get to the underworld.”
“Do we know where the summoning site is yet?” Dizzy asked, hurrying to my side. “That’s probably where they’ll congregate to send the demon back.”
