Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,40
over most of Omen’s past methods, which had included speeding toward me in a camper van and nearly torching Pickle in an attempt to terrify me. The majestic sprawl of the arena and the haze of the night sky overhead made it easy to leave any worries that’d been niggling at me behind and give myself over to the moment.
No matter what anyone said, the fire inside me was mine. I was going to figure out how to work with it or die trying… and we’d just ignore the fact that the latter possibility had sometimes seemed way too likely for comfort.
I narrowed my awareness down to the little white squares that caught the moonlight, the momentum of my body soaring from perch to perch, and the flames that rose in my chest at my beckoning. Out, out, out, just a little at a time, enough of a jolt of heat to set that slip of paper and the next one curling and blackening under a bright flare.
I didn’t quite manage a perfect run. My balance wobbled after one particularly long leap, and I had to stop and gather myself before I could incinerate the paper there and dash onward. But Omen was fully smiling by the time I reached him.
“You always do rise to the challenge, don’t you, Disaster?” he said in a tone warm enough that I had to restrain the urge to grab him by the shirt and see what else I could make rise.
“Maybe one of these days you’ll have to stop calling me a disaster,” I retorted instead.
He chuckled. “Don’t take it as commentary on your present skill-set. It reminds me of where we started.”
“And how far we’ve come?”
“That too.” He tapped my chin. “Tempest isn’t going to know what hit her when we unleash your powers for real.” Then he stepped back and sprang into the shadows again to reset his course, laying out more papers this time—because no matter how much he might like me now, I knew better than to expect he’d ever cut me any slack.
As I readied myself to race through the course again, a trickle of heat, maybe at the thought of Tempest and her sneer, prickled across my back. I smacked at it as well as I could over my shoulder. The little flames that had emerged nipped my fingers before they settled down.
Shit on a soda cracker. How was I supposed to stop the self-scorching side of my powers from emerging when half the time it seemed to come out of nowhere? If the trick was never feeling annoyed about anyone anywhere, I was screwed.
My frustration must have shown on my face when Omen reappeared. He looked me over with a particularly searching expression. “Are you good to go again?”
Asking rather than ordering—that was an improvement. I rolled my shoulders and dragged in a breath. I hadn’t really hurt myself, now or any time before. My shadowkind powers healed me up faster than a regular human would have, almost as easily as they burned me in the first place. If a few blisters here and there came with the territory, I could handle that, as long as it meant I was taking down the baddies at the same time.
“No problemo,” I said. “You can’t start a fire without a spark.”
“As you would know better than most. Get on with it, then.”
Even with the extra targets, I made it through that round and the next without faltering and with all the papers at least singed if not turned to ashes. I’d also scalded a couple more spots down my spine and the backs of my arms, but ignoring the stinging was working out okay. If I could hide it well enough that Omen wasn’t noticing, then that was some kind of improvement.
When I’d finished the last lap, I paused to lean against the railing. A yawn stretched my jaw before I could catch it. At least part of the reason I hadn’t outright burst into flames was the sweat now sticking my damp shirt to my skin.
“All right,” Omen said. “That’s enough obstacle-course running for one night. You’ve come a long way. There’s one more thing I think we should work on.”
“Sure. What’s that?” I shook the fatigue out of my limbs as well as I could, doing my best to tune out the tender spots my shirt rubbed against.
They’d heal. No big deal. I wasn’t letting nerves stop me from stopping that psychotic sphinx.