“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.
