did you keep it?” she asked. “You like looking at pictures of dead girls, pendejo? Girls who can’t talk for themselves? You some kind of sicko?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said Asa, putting his hands up. “You’ve got me all wrong—”
“This is a picture of pain. Mine and Rosa’s pain. That’s a life we can never get back.”
My palms sweated. Things were going downhill fast. My fingers itched for my components belt.
“I’m sorry,” he said, blinking. “I—”
“So you set a trap, get me shot, and fawn over a picture of me and my dead sister,” said Olivia with venom dripping from her voice. “You know she was slow, right? You know what happened to her? Who I killed for her?”
My heart pounded. I’d never heard anyone admit to murder before. And what did she mean, what happened to her?
“I just thought it was a nice picture!” he said, as though that were a reasonable thing to say. “Really! That’s all!”
“That’s real easy to say now, isn’t it? You know that… that pinche gringo I killed made her life a living hell, right? And now you’ve got the nerve to…” Then she turned to Judith. “Let this guy go. I’m gonna fight him myself, right now, hand to hand. We’ll decide what to do with Morevna’s lackey later.”
Panic rang like an alarm in my chest, but I was powerless.
Judith kicked Asa in the back, and he stumbled forward.
“What would it take for you to just let me explain?” he asked, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He sounded calm, calmer than I would’ve been if I’d just been challenged to a fight by Olivia Rosales.
“A miracle,” she said, pulling a long knife from her belt.
“What if I win?” he asked. “If I win, will you spare us?”
“Pfft,” she said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“But if it does?” he said firmly.
Olivia smirked. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, chavalo,” she said. “But for now, get ready.”
She squared off, her legs bent, her eyes gleaming, her knife ready in her hand. Asa stood, slack-shouldered. If I didn’t know him for what he was, I’d have thought him a fool. But his eyes gleamed behind the broken spectacles, and I knew he must be up to something.
Olivia began to circle him; then, kicking up dust, she charged him, knife flashing in the sun. And Asa vanished beneath her knife. Olivia’s face contorted with rage and confusion. She swung behind her, but he wasn’t there. Instead, he appeared beside her, tapped her on the shoulder, then disappeared again as she swung at him again. Time and time she swung, and time and time he flashed away, leaving only a little puff of dust. And as he moved, the dust rose thick around Olivia, so thick that she pulled her bandanna over her nose and mouth again.
“It’s not fair,” Judith said as Olivia’s knife flashed again. “He’s being a coward.”
“If he was being a coward, he’d have just disappeared completely,” I said, squinting through the dust. Come on, Asa! I urged him silently. Come on!
Olivia stopped. I saw her stand still at the center of the dust cloud as the blur that was Asa flickered in and out of existence around her. Then her knife flashed out—a spray of red appeared in the air. Asa had been hit! He appeared for just a moment, bent over, clutching his arm with a blackened, scaly daemon hand, then darted away again.
“She’s got him now,” said Zo.
Asa continued to flash, here and there, behind her, in front of her, beside her. But it seemed then that Olivia herself became faster. She was missing him by less and less, and sometimes her knife took on the strange, blurred speed of Asa himself. She was fast, impossibly fast, as though she were copying him somehow, gaining his powers.
With a jolt of shock I realized that was exactly what she was doing.
“She doesn’t have any magic of her own,” Zo said to me, “but when she gets a little of your blood, she can get a little of your powers. Just for a moment. Your friend is good, but she’s as good as anybody. Literally.”
Again, Olivia lunged and a spray of blood flew out into the dust.
Asa’s disembodied voice said, “Argh!” and Olivia wiped her knife on her pants and readied herself again. Then she stumbled forward, cursing, as the back of her shirt ripped and a diagonal slash of blood appeared on her back. She stumbled to the