really?” my aunt asked. “Mistress vampire, if ye’d be so kind as to vacate that wooden thing?”
Katrina disappeared from the top of the kung-fu dummy in a blur. The dummy was basically a round six-foot log of wood, polished and finished, set upright into a metal stand that had suction cups to hold it to the floor. A wooden leg came out about knee height and then bent down to brace on the floor. Three wooden arms jutted out of the front about shoulder height.
“Warlock, immolate that thing,” my aunt commanded me.
Immolation is very different from just starting something on fire. Throwing balls of fire or even streams is really inefficient and wasteful. Lots of lost therms going nowhere.
A good immolation starts from deep inside the target and then feeds upon itself as well as on additional outside heat. They’re tricky to pull off, but my mom had been a master with Fire and Earth, teaching me from an early age.
I started it deep inside the dummy, in one of the hollow spaces where the arms entered it. Extra oxygen is really good, at least at the beginning. The heat I pulled from everywhere; the ground, the air above the crowd of students, the furnace heating pipes in the walls, the flailing werewolf on the wall. Rolling it into a tiny, tiny compact ball, I pushed it deep inside, then fed it more as the first embers began.
The next part is tricky, reburning the smoke and gases that come from the initial ember, but it’s vital if you want a truly fast burn. All that extra fuel goes to complete waste otherwise, so rechanneling it back into the fire takes it to a truly spectacular level.
The effect was that nothing happened for like a second and a half, and then the air above started to shimmer. Suddenly, the entire top of the dummy disappeared in a white-hot light that was almost too bright to look at. Six seconds after I started it, the fire abruptly went out. Just the twisted metal base, all blackened, and part of the foot remained. There wasn’t even any smoke. Just heated air and I dispersed that across the room, back into the floor and walls and up into the metal beams above us.
“Ye’ve heard of spontaneous human combustion? Well, me family invented it and me nephew has perfected it, as ye can see. How would all yer combat skills do against that, wolf?” Aunt Ashling asked.
“Yer last name isn’t truly O’Carroll, is it?” Ryanne asked as Jenks was silent, staring at the ash remains of his equipment.
“No dear, it isn’t. I was born Ashling Irwin and me sister, Declan’s mum, was Maeve Irwin. Have ye heard of us then?” she asked with a small, tight smile.
Zuzanna, Britta, and Erika all took sudden deep breaths. Ryanne just smiled and nodded.
“Oh yeah, ye bet I have. The Irwins of Tipperary are famous. Me own mum used to tell me sisters and me tales of the Irwin sisters. Said she’d met ye both when she herself was a girl. Megan Flynn, well she would have been Megan Boyle then. Said yer sister was sumthing… as were you,” Ryanne hastened to add.
“Aye, we were all of that. And me boy here is as well. What he lacks in training, he makes up for in sheer power,” Ashling said. “So in that regard, the lass is right. He could have just snapped and we’d be having a different conversation. But why don’t we just call it a day, then? I’ll take me boy out of this… this madhouse and ye can go about bolloxing up young witches and the like without him?”
Leave Arcane? Somehow in all my planning, leaving the school had never really entered my mind. I only just got here. Sure, Jenks was a maniac and Delwood a bully, but now that the kid gloves were off, things should be different, right? Unless they expelled me.
“Now let’s not be hasty here. Does Declan really want to leave? Seems to me if he did, he would have right after the incident on Friday,” Gina said.
Ryanne snorted and my aunt lifted both eyebrows in disbelief.
“Surely you don’t think an Irwin would run away from a fight, now do ye? The menfolk of our Clan were bred to fight. Why, he’d be more like to stop breathing and die on the spot than to run away. No, ye boxed him into a corner, humiliating him that way. I can’t imagine