Wildfire Witch (The Cursed Coven of Spells Hollow)

14. Nix

NIX

Ceridor scoffed. “Foolish of him to challenge a wind fae in his element.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, gesturing to recall the wind holding some of my clothing. I grabbed my panties from midair and shoved them on, soon setting the rest of my clothes to rights too. “Can you keep me elevated separately from you?” I asked.

His silver eyes narrowed. “You will head down into the trees, where it’s safe.”

I shook my head, speaking more urgently as Benedict pushed himself to sprint across the sky towards us. “He’ll be trying to kill me, not necessarily you. A forest fire would do that more easily than him hitting a flying target.”

That seemed to convince him. “You will fall ever so slowly, but yes. Here.” He took me by the hips and held me outside of the bubble of magic protecting us from the wind. It whipped and howled past, threatening to rip me out of his hands for the few moments it took him to construct a second bubble around me.

Instead of letting me go, Ceridor pulled on the air element around us, shooting forward out of Benedict’s range. The dragon’s growl sounded like the roll of thunder behind us. Opening his maw, the back of his throat glowed orange, then white, before a superheated jet of flame shot at us.

Ceridor and I spun out of the way in a dizzying whirl. My breakfast threatened to arrive again, but I swallowed down the sensation. We propelled upward and Benedict ascended smoothly behind us, his flight muscles bulging with the effort.

“You can’t play keep away forever! I know where you’re going! Spells Hollow will know my father’s wrath even if you escape,” Benedict boomed.

Ceridor looked at me with disbelief. “How does he know of Spells Hollow?” he hissed.

“I, uh…” Goddess, that was too much to explain right now. Aodhnait’s well-meaning betrayal seemed like it’d happened weeks ago, even if it’d only been a day.

“No matter. Your secret dies with him,” he stated after a moment. Holding up his hand, his white wood staff spun out of nowhere into his palm. It would’ve been orbiting us somewhere unobtrusive, designed to spin on the wind no matter the elevation.

“Cer, wait, he’s still a dragon,” I protested.

He drew me forward by the shoulder for a quick kiss, before nudging me out of his bubble of magic. We parted and while he shot ahead in a blur of motion, my momentum faltered and I started to fall, an inch a second.

Ceridor was a streak of silver and blue, nearly one with the sky above as he angled straight for Benedict, staff spinning. The dragon’s slitted eyes dilated as the wind reversed course around him. Blades of invisible air slashed at his scales and, unlike Rusty’s tough armor, his were thin enough to pierce. A rain of molten hot blood fell from several cuts opened up along his flanks and neck.

The relatively small wounds only infuriated the dragon further, however. He beat the air into submission, even with Ceridor’s manipulations. Inhaling, he produced another white-hot throat full of flame, though it sputtered to smoke as soon as he breathed out.

I wrapped my fingers around my right hand, touching the symbol that represented my handfasting. Without touching Ceridor, I sought to find my magical connection with him. I closed my eyes and pawed around blindly with my own magic, until I found a cord of pure air motes tethering me to my fae husband.

I didn’t have a wand to write out a spell or alchemical formula. I braced myself for pain, but knew I couldn’t leave Ceridor to fight a fully shifted fire dragon without help. Pulling his air into my palms, I willed my magic to join it.

When I opened my eyes, fire and air were merging and coating my body in sparks that became chains of lightning that wound around my torso and limbs. There was no pain yet, only a harmonious blend of superheated air waiting to answer my command.

I pointed and the lightning unspooled from my body. A long chain flashed between me and square in Benedict’s chest. The strike location blackened, and aftershocks of static rolled over his scales while he screamed in agony. I joined him—in screaming, that is. My chest constricted and heat flooded my limbs, boiling my blood.

Oh, no. Oh, shit. One strike had erased all progress I’d made toward stability. I could practically feel the lack of air motes in my body; every one of them I’d borrowed had been turned into lightning.

I grasped for a trickle of new air from Ceridor. The connection was still there, but he was using his magic too, trying to slice the tough leathery membranes of Benedict’s wings. He stopped and turned my way.

While I latched onto the flow of his magic, Benedict recovered from the paralyzing blast of lightning and lifted his massive taloned hand. He slapped Ceridor with all the energy of a housewife with a flyswatter, shooting him into an uncontrolled freefall.

“Cer!” I shouted.

The dragon’s heated amber eyes turned my way, and he scooped air to shoot directly down and at me. Ceridor corrected his momentum and pushed off an invisible cushion of wind, also making his way in my direction. There was no way he’d get to me before the dragon did.

“Fly!” Aodhnait screamed. “Use your magic and fly!”

I knew I couldn’t control the air element like Ceridor, who’d had centuries of practice bending it to his whims. But I could produce hot air, which I did while aiming my palms towards the ground. I didn’t destroy the magic I borrowed from him this time, only combining one part fire with two parts air to create twin gusts from my hands.

I shot upward, narrowly avoiding the grasp of the dragon’s scaled hand. He twisted around to try again with his other hand, while the downward sweep of his wings disrupted my haphazard spell. The wind carried me away, and I flipped uncontrollably. I stopped the flow of hot air and tucked my legs, hit by terrible vertigo as the ground and sky mixed in an incomprehensible blur.

Strong arms caught me, and the spinning stopped. My ears rang with a shrill tone. “I’ve got you. You’re okay, firefly,” Ceridor said.

He tucked me into his body and shot skyward, narrowly dodging a wave of flame, which threatened to incinerate our shoes. Benedict roared in frustration as we circled just beyond his reach. “Quit playing games!” he boomed. “Surrender the vessel!”

“That lightning strike. You made it with my magic?” Ceridor asked, breathing in my ear so he would be overheard past the dragon’s bluster. I nodded, and he clutched me a little tighter. “Take more, then. You’ve wounded him worse than I have.”

I wrapped my palms around his arms, latching on to take from him directly while I could. He grunted, strain lines appearing up his neck and across his face. We were slowing—I was taking too much. There was a limit to the well of air motes I tapped within him, so I stopped and nodded to let him know I was finished. I had enough for one more strike, and that was all he could give me without endangering himself.

“I’ll make an opening for you. Aim for a wing this time,” he said, before we parted ways once more. He flew at Benedict and slashed the dragon’s long neck in multiple places with the power of the wind. As I dropped toward the ground slowly, Ceridor attempted to get under Benedict to slice at his more sensitive underbelly.

Benedict beat at the air constantly, trying to stay in the sky despite the wind betraying his wings. He tucked them and rolled, presenting the armor of his back ridges to the worst onslaught of Ceridor’s cutting magic. They spun together, and I watched my husband’s silver-blur figure try to orbit the huge dragon like a lethal moon.

I ignited the air within me, leaving a few motes untouched this time to help recover from the backlash once I fired off the rope of lightning winding around my body. It writhed over my skin like a living thing, eager to sail off and cause destruction.

My heartbeat thrummed in my ears as I waited for the opening Ceridor had promised. Benedict was slowing too, panting for a full breath between exertion and the way Ceridor had to be restricting the flow of oxygen around his head. The dragon was bound to make a deadly mistake while he stubbornly fixated on swiping and spitting at the fae needling him. His wings snapped back open, and he bellowed with pain when a few rips finally appeared in the membrane of the left one, opening wider with each flap.

Benedict lost elevation, his heavy body tilting to the left. I saw my opening, but so did the dragon, who lunged and closed his fanged mouth around Ceridor. Smoke billowed from the back of his mouth while my lips parted in horror.

I pointed, directing the lightning to rip from my body. It struck his undamaged wing in the crux of webbing where the leather folded into neat segments, blackening the cartilage and spreading paralyzing static through it. Benedict shook his head, savaging Ceridor like a dog, but released him with a scream of agony. He tumbled out of the sky, hitting a stand of trees at an angle and snapping them like matchsticks when his body rolled downhill.

Ceridor’s limp figure was flung in an arc, tipping head-down with his limbs lifting like a rag doll’s. I called on the air motes I’d left in reserve to keep my temperature stable, summoning a draft of hot air to navigate left, right, and back, until his unconscious figure struck me and we both fell too fast.

I wrapped my legs around his torso and aimed my palms downward, burning through motes one after the other, first trying to stabilize us so I knew where the ground was. My palms slicked and I sweated straight through my clothes as my body screamed with pain and heat. We approached a set of trees that looked like sharpened stakes from above, about to be skewered on their points.

We fell into the space between two trees by sheer luck as I navigated in a panic. Bare branches slapped us both on the way down, leaving behind stinging lines. The final pieces of my borrowed magic turned to hot air below us and I pushed , sending up sparks when I burned the last, tiny bit of air in my body naturally to soften our landing as much as possible.

I hit the carpet of leaves first with a bone-jarring thud, cushioning Ceridor, who flopped down mostly on top of me. His head rolled with the momentum and he remained motionless in the silence that followed. Not even a bird called in the void of noise that surrounded us. I gasped for breath, soaked through with a combination of sweat and my husband’s blood.

I fumbled one arm out from under him, feeling for signs of life. He was breathing shallowly. I made a soft sound of relief, though his torso was punctured and I could smell char from him being so close to a fire dragon’s throat that was heating a jet of flame. If I didn’t get him help soon, he could still die in the middle of this wilderness.

First, I had to recover enough to move. Agony wracked my body, so close to incinerating from within because of my curse. But our connection was still solid. One by one, sluggish drops of the air element dripped from him to me, the only thing left after the flood we’d shared earlier. It kept me from burning up and becoming his pyre, too. I grasped for every mote and sucked up the sparkling frost that coated them, coming down from the edge of an episode one heartbeat at a time.

I beseeched the goddess for a miracle and felt the edge of Ceridor’s back pocket. His phone was there and I inched it out slowly, unlocking it after a couple tries of pointing it at his face. My thumb landed on his contact list, which was so short I didn’t even need to scroll before touching Seth’s name.

He picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Cer. About damn time you called.”

“Seth,” I croaked.

“Oh, shit. Nix? What happened? Why do you sound?—”

I coughed and tried again, sucking in a little more air and speaking in short bursts. “Seth. Where are you? We need an EMT. We need you now.”