On the Verge (A Charmed Life Book 1) (28 page)

Tracy looked up excitedly.  “Send me!” she said, excitement in her voice.  “I can take him!”

Jacob nodded, gesturing towards her.  The vague shadow that had surrounded them to protect them from Pax's perceptions condensed into his own shadow, which swelled out to surround her.  Taking a deep breath to prepare herself, she took a step forward and felt the world twist around her, a brief nauseous feeling striking her stomach.  She turned quickly, knowing she'd be stepping out of Anthony's back, but found she was wrong.  Anthony was ready and facing her, his hands reaching for her while glowing with bright heat.  He had been practically standing in the fire while it was burning off the fog, heating his metal body into a red-hot weapon.

His hand seized her wrist and her shoulder, pressing her back, and she gasped in pain as she felt the intense heat around her wrist, heard the sizzling crackle of her clothing blackening and turning to ash at her shoulder under his intense touch.  The fire behind him flickered out as he brought this to a physical contest.

Anthony's other hand, glowing as much as the first, moved for her neck.  She automatically brought up her own hand to knock his attack to the side, then struck at the hold against the inside of his wrist.  She broke his grip with surprising ease and leaped back away from him.  Anthony didn't hesitate, pressing the attack rapidly, attempting another grapple immediately, obviously wanting to use his red-hot glowing form to force her into submission.

His movements were quick, though still slower than Grandmaster Lee's as he grabbed at her at the shoulder, at the wrist, at the waist.  She moved quickly to knock his hands away, continuing to circle back from him.  Her hands stung from the intense heat she had to touch every time she blocked his attacks, and she had to appreciate the strategy he was employing.  He never got a grip on her, but his hands still brushed over her sides, shoulders, and wrists, searing new black scorches into her already ruined clothes and stinging the stone flesh underneath.  Even a perfect defense would eventually lose to this assault without metal's own invulnerability.  He really was playing to his strength.

Or was he? Her mind raced quickly.  You heated metal to make it more malleable - is it possible that in giving himself this flaming weapon, Anthony had removed some of the invulnerability which was the metal body's greatest strength? Tracy balled her fist and threw a quick strike towards his stomach, landing it heavily.  He fell back, his breath rushing out of him, and Tracy followed up quickly, her strikes going high towards his face.  He smirked, and Tracy knew the trap even as she entered it.

Anthony's hand lightly flicked to block her attack to the side, showing a little more skill than she had expected.  It wasn't a familiar hold he tried to guide her into, but she recognized it coming all the same, and twisted away from it, bumping him away from her with her hip.  She realized his pants were metal, and wished that *her* pants were immune to flame too, her hip pained and visible through the long strip of ash where she'd pressed up against him.

Of course, this would be the normal strategy for earth-bodies to try to attack him.  Using their strength to its fullest - and he was turning greater strength into a weakness, a mental trap that he could exploit.  Tracy fell back at a new volley of grapple attempts, noting that even as he tried to set the trap, his movements were basic compared to the complex holds of Aikido.  His sequence of attacks slowed, and Tracy managed to get some space between them, falling back and panting heavily as she assessed the situation.

His holds were so easy to break, his attempts to grab her didn't have that edge from Aikido classes, and her simple blocks seemed to move him so easily.  He was playing with her, even with that trap.  Assessing her abilities.  Then a sudden burst of insight hit her.  No, this wasn't playing with her.  He was trying his best - the difference was that she was stronger than he was.

She had known, technically, that she'd be stronger, but it hadn't really sunk in.  All her life, she'd been no stronger than the women around her, and weaker than a lot of the other men and women.  She'd had to train all the harder, become all the more skilled, to be able to compensate for that.  As much as the kung fu movies would have you believe otherwise, it's really hard for a smaller person to beat a larger, stronger person.  She always had to be careful to wait for the opening, to guide them into a position of weakness, because she couldn't force that weakness by muscling them into it.

With realization came motion.  With his next attempt to grab her, she grabbed his wrist, pulled him towards her to bring him off-balance, set her shoulder against him, and threw him up over her to the ground.  She hadn't fully realized the extent of her strength until this simple throw almost sent him flying through the air instead of to the ground, his arm acting like a bungee cord to pull him back to Tracy.  She winced as she slammed him to the ground, knowing most people would be screaming in pain after their shoulder was wrenched like that, but his metal body kept him from feeling the pain as his shoulder was strained under the impact.

She pulled his arm back and fell over him, twisting his arm to its limit, ignoring the sharp, burning sting as she planted herself solidly against his glowing form.  She had to end this quick before Lord Pax got in on it, and before she burned herself too badly.  “Yield!” she yelled at him, knowing that most people would be immobilized with pain by this hold, but not Anthony.  As he said he'd do, he ignored her, forcing his way out of the hold.  She felt the bulge under her thumb as his shoulder popped from its joint, and then Anthony froze.

The scream of pain that came from him chilled Tracy to the bone, the intense pain as he ruined his own shoulder joint overloaded his metal body's pain resistance.  His skin rippled and flashed, then reverted to normal flesh.  The scent was horrific as the heat that had suffused his metal skin didn't leave along with his metal, and Tracy felt her stomach churn as she watched his flesh bubble and blacken.  Swiftly she took her weather charm away from holding the fog, directing it towards Anthony instead, and his skin frosted over as she stole the heat from his body, dropping his body temperature as quickly as she could.  He might get a little frostbite, but it looked like he already had second-degree burns in only a couple seconds.

Tracy stared in horror down at the red and black burns completely covering Anthony's body, her stomach roiling with disgust, her brain flailing in horror.  What had she done to him?!  The shoulder was bad enough!  Thank God he'd passed out from the pain, which would worry her except that she could see his chest move as he breathed, hear it rasping painfully in his throat.  How deep did the burns go? How could she have done that to him? She could have just stayed out of it.  She could have just surrendered instead of hurting someone like that.

“Tracy!” grunted Jacob with a pained voice.  Tracy was broken from her horrified self-loathing by the strained panic in that single word.  She turned to see another fight happening just a few feet from her, that she hadn't even heard happening in her focus on her fight with Anthony.  Jacob was pinned to the ground, his knife between the jaws of Anthony's wolf, barely keeping those jaws from his own throat.  His new armored vest was half-shredded, the fabric torn away from the ceramic plates underneath, some of which had deep gouges in them, others of which were almost completely shattered.  The wolf's scrabbling claws had torn into one of Jacob's thighs, bright red blood spilling out.  The silvery metal was just leaving the tips of the wolf's fur as Anthony lost consciousness and with it, his control over the magic, but the wolf was still dangerous.

Tracy took two quick running steps and snapped out an earth-powered side kick that caught the wolf in the ribs.  There was a horrible, sickening, cracking noise as she shattered bones and mangled flesh, and the wolf went flying some fifteen feet.  The wolf rolled to its feet, stumbled a single step before letting out a pained whimper, then collapsed into a heap on the ground, letting out a breathless little panting as it twitched and curled around itself, blood seeping from its mouth.  God, she'd done it again.  She'd hurt something without even thinking about it first.  Would either of the two she'd assaulted survive the day?

The water that had been the mist was settling down over everything, soaking the remains of her clothes, turning the ashes on her marble flesh into a black paste.  She offered Jacob a hand, pulling him to his feet as he sent the shadow into his leg to get rid of the horrible gash temporarily.  She could see the blackness flow across his skin and pool into the open wounds, then shimmer and disappear, leaving dark, purpling stains on the skin where only moments before there had been torn flesh and muscle.

Between one moment and the next, there was a horrible whining noise and she was suddenly staring up at the smooth, white-marked wall of the arena, and at a very odd angle.  What just happened?  She tried to turn her head, and everything rotated very slowly around her.  She was floating in mid-air, and she saw Lord Pax standing there, a furious expression on his face.  Floating near Tracy, but returning slowly to Lord Pax, was a crystal ball with a sawblade spinning around its center, bisecting it and making a terrifying whining noise.  She slowly became aware of a dull, throbbing ache in her lower back – he'd just tried to maim her, attacking her spine from behind.  She was falling in slow motion.  How much damage had he done?  She couldn't even be certain.

Her stomach roiled and she thought she was going to be sick.  No time for that now.  The ground was coming up to meet her, and time resumed its normal flow as she hit, rolling over the ground and instinctively using the motion to bring herself up to her feet.  Grandmaster Lee was right – so much repetition that you didn't even have to think about it.

As she watched, Pax gestured at the crystal ball and it flew at Jacob, who raised his knife to block it.  A horrible screech of metal against metal assaulted her ears as the sawblade met the knife again and again over the burnt body of Anthony.  Jacob somehow managed to follow the swift orb's path and block it time and time again - Tracy was impressed.  She hadn't known he was that good.  She'd have expected the spinning sawblade to rip the knife from his hands, the attacks to get past his defenses at least once.

Pax.  He could have just tried to bargain with them, trade with them, but no.  His first reaction was to intimidate them and fight with them.  If he'd been more civilized, she wouldn't have had to do that to Anthony.  She trembled with the sudden fury coursing through her system.  She'd been pushed to hurt Anthony, it wasn't her fault, she hadn't wanted to.  “This is all YOUR FAULT!” she screamed, lifting her hands and not even thinking about the magic as a spear of ice leaped from her palm towards Lord Pax.  Before it had even landed, she'd flung her other hand forward to make a second, smaller spear, then an arrow from her first hand.  The first couple giant icicles hit Pax's form and speared right through him.

Pax didn't fall to the ground in pain, didn't even respond to the ice sliding through him, his image rippling as the attacks pierced through the illusion.  Of course, fire and air.  It was just a mirage.

And of course, he'd be using both his charms.  His tech charm had been infused into his crystal ball, turning it into a weapon right out of a horror movie, and his mirage charm was creating illusions, confusing their eyes.  Jacob would be using both of his charms as well – the shadow charm was bandaging his leg, and his mind charm … of course!  That's how he was keeping up with the attacks!  He had internalized the mind charm, letting him see the attacks as they formed in Pax's mind.

Tracy's rage cooled down as she realized the danger they were still in.  Pax was a skilled charm wielder, and he could make them see things other as they were, project his image somewhere else.  If his image was standing still, though, perhaps he was too - it was just a moved image. 

“Tracy!” grunted Jacob as he blocked another series of attacks, “Corner of that block there!” he nodded with his head.

She couldn't throw ice from her hands anymore, not with that brief rage gone, but she didn't need to.  She had a new weapon now.  She lifted her palms and let fire ripple up from them, as if her hands had been coated in oil, and then blew across them, pulling on the air of her weather charm and the flame of her new metal charm.  The air picked up the fire and flung it across the intervening distance like a flamethrower, bathing the whole area in a crackling conflagration.  The image of Pax flickered and disappeared as he dove behind cover to avoid the flame, and Tracy wasn't sure if she'd gotten him.

Her instinctive attack stunned her, left her reeling.  What was she doing?!  Did she really want to hurt him that badly?  How could she have tried to burn him?  Hadn't she learned her lesson from Anthony?  The crystal ball left Jacob alone briefly as Pax ducked around behind cover, losing his sight of the battle, and Jacob pointed his dagger to indicate to Tracy which direction Pax was in.  How could she stop Pax without maiming him, she wondered?  It had been so easy to talk proudly of not hurting people before, but when her life was on the line … well, she wasn't giving up on trying to find a way.

The crystal saw-ball that flew at them was bathed in flame, now, whipped along with a fierce wind that let it move even faster than before.  It struck at Jacob, who just barely managed to get his knife up in time even with the mind token helping him along, then changed course to dive at Tracy, who lifted both arms up before her face and felt the fierce sting as it gouged into the stone flesh of her forearms with a horrible grinding noise.  Before she could react, it was striking at Jacob again, who had barely recovered from the first attack and stumbled backwards as he blocked this one, too.