one that me mum couldn’t deny.”
I suddenly didn’t like where she was going with this. She read my reaction on my face, but she drew a deep breath to tell me the rest anyway. And then she disappeared.
Not totally, like Beam me up Scotty, but in a blurry rag doll sort of flight that blasted her away in into a parked F-250 pickup that I think belonged to one of the guards. It was like a rope had been tied to the back belt loop of her jeans, the other end tied to a rocket car.
She hit the truck with a brain-jarring thud that left a dent in the passenger door and slid boneless to the wet icy pavement.
Spending four days training with Tanya Demidova is like a month of mixed martial arts fights in the middle of a SEAL BUDs camp. My shields snapped into place even as I jumped backward while turning to face the presence that was suddenly making my witch senses scream.
I landed six feet back, facing the threat. A slender woman wearing stained jeans and an even-more-stained grey Yankees hoody stood stock-still, staring at me through her bangs. Her long dirty blonde hair hung in greasy lanks over her face, almost hiding her pale blue eyes. Almost. Frankly, I could have done with having them hidden. She looked at me, chin tucked down, insane eyes locked on me like a brain-starved zombie about to munch down.
But the waves of power that leaked from her pores told me she was a witch. As did the book. The small, eye-warping, vision-twisting book that she clutched in her left hand. The one that was pressing on my senses, yammering for attention. Sorrow.
Her right hand flung out at me and a ball of pure kinetic energy flashed out.
I think my shields might have protected me, but my magic-fueled glyphs made the point moot. I jumped forward at an angle, closing the distance between us but avoiding the blast, which hit the flag pole behind me and smashed it flat. It fell into the lexan doors to Arcane, wedging them shut even as the two guards on duty tried to open them.
I sent a shock wave through the ground, hard enough to lift her off her feet, except she rode the earth tsunami like a world class surfer, her filth-covered shoes never leaving the asphalt.
Another blast came my way, which I dodged, but she was adapting as my dodge took me right into a Prius that she threw in my direction.
My shield reacted, blasting the car to a halt and throwing me hard in the opposite direction. Tanya had beat my reflexes into shape for this very event. I landed, parkour rolled to my feet, and flung out my own kinetic blast.
She brushed it aside, not bothering to dodge, then blew a hurricane wind under my feet, lifting me off the ground and away from Earth. Frantic, I threw fire her way, just to distract her, but she didn’t even react, letting the ball of plasma wink out when her own shields absorbed it. She chose instead to feed power to the wind that held me off the ground.
I couldn’t touch the Earth, what little heat was in the air had just been expended in my useless fireball, and she was working some spell to break my shields.
It was a bright, beautiful, pre-Spring day and this bitch was getting ready to suck me dry of power while the warm sun beat down on my face. I had to do something fast or this skank was going to zero me out. The sun gave me an idea.
Archemedes supposedly used mirrors to burn Roman ships. I didn’t have mirrors but the whole of the parking lot was soaking in the Spring sunshine, the black asphalt warm over about an acre. I took all that warmth and pressed it into a beam of light. The effect was almost immediate as her face blistered and her eyes seared.
Her scream shattered car windows all around me.
The column of air holding me up vanished and I fell eight feet to the hard asphalt, breaking my fall by instinct. I came up fast and rushed around behind her, focusing on her own shields. There was no time to draw any nearby power; I had to cancel this bitch now with my own reserves.
She held her right hand out toward where she thought I was, her left hand dropping the book and automatically covering her burned eyes.
My kinetic