Anya Bast - Witch Heart

"And how jealous will Micah be that we got this information first?" Adam grinned and Theo grinned back.

Damn. The man was making progress.

Pain lanced through her, making Claire's vision dim for a moment. Wincing, she pressed her hands between her breasts and gasped. "Are you okay?"

She popped an eyelid open, "I'm fantastic. Peeling back the foreign magick seared to mine is tons of fun."

"Sarcasm isn't necessary."

Claire closed her eyes again. "Just let me work."

When she'd tried to go into one of the bedrooms to do this alone, Adam had forbidden her. He'd insisted on accompanying her even though she'd told him it could take her well into the night to accomplish this.

He sat on a chair, one long leg thrown over the arm, reading a book. She sat cross-legged in the center of the bed trying to separate the magicks. Theo was off being Theo somewhere. He was undoubtedly good in a fight and his power pulsed strong and palpable inside him, but she'd never met a more silent, gloomy man on Earth or Eudae.

Adam held up a hand. "Hey, that's great. Next time you turn white, gasp, and nearly pass out, I'll just leave you alone, all right?"

"Thank you."

Adam raised an eyebrow and went back to reading his book.

She closed her eyes again and returned to peeling apart the powers. It was, indeed, what she'd thought it was. Now that she'd had a few hours to fully explore it, she could tell. It was the elium. A mass of violent energy so great it was amazing she'd been able to absorb it all. No normal aeamon would have been able to do it. It was only because her magick had been tweaked and transformed by Rue that she'd been able to carry it.

And, oh, how she didn't want to carry it.

Now her goal was to extract the tendrils of it from her own power, to bunch it into a ball in the middle of her seat and build high walls around it. It was imperative that she regain control of her own elemental abilities, since she was more powerful than any aeamon on Earth. Her magick would be the most effective in coming battles. Truly, she was the only one able to fight the Atrika.

Two questions haunted her. Provided she was able to separate the magicks and bind the elium, would she be able to use any part of it as a weapon against the Atrika? Also, could she shed the elium and still live?

Claire was trying not to be pessimistic about either of those answers.

In fact, it was better not to think about it at all. Nausea having faded, she tried a new tactic. Instead of prying the magicks apart, she would call her magick away from the elium. Like to like. Focusing her attention deep into the Earth below her, she pulled directly from this foreign place itself. Dark and deep. Solid and strong. It filled her until her body became heavy and immovable as a mountain.

The magick came slow and sluggish since this was not the natural home of the aeamon. The magick of the elemental witches came from daaeman —from Eudae, not Earth. So it was harder to pull directly from the elements here.

Once she had a good draw on the earth below, the pulsing heart of Her, she moved to water. Casting tendrils of exploring power in a way no non-tampered-with witch would be able to do, she found moisture in the earth and tapped into the base source of its power. She pulled the essence of it within her until her mountain became soaked with dew — cool, life-giving, and refreshing.

Next she went for air. It was all around and easy to draw from, filling her with a lightness to counteract the mountain sensation of earth.

Last, she sent tendrils out to seek fire, usually the hardest of the elements for her to locate. Here, though, it was easy. The day was chilly and many people had fires lit in their hearths, just as Adam had lit one the previous night. She located one and trapped its unpredictable, destructive, fascinating energy and brought that, too, into her. It flickered to life in the seat of her magick, as warm and wonderful as she found a certain man who wielded it.

All four elements woven together mimicked her own special brand of magick. Tears slipped down her cheeks as she realized just how much she'd missed it. The elium had muddied everything, cut her off from her own power. It was like she'd been an amputee but now had miraculously regrown her missing limb.

Houses! She wanted the elium gone. If it couldn't be gone, she wanted it contained.

Using the borrowed power, she held it inside her, luring her own magick to it. Like to like. Bait to quarry. Nothing happened and Claire's hope sank to her toes.

Then, a flicker.

A pulse.

Like a great beast raising its head and sniffing the air for the scent of food, her magick took notice. And pulled. Hard.

The magicks began to separate. A blinding white-hot flash of pain — as if someone was skinning her alive — ripped through her. Her spine bowed backward under the force of it and her facial muscles contorted.

Underneath the agony, she vaguely understood that she could thrust the borrowed elemental power away and allow her magick to re-adhere itself around the elium. It would stop the pain, but she wanted the elium to lose its hold on her own power so badly that she held on to the bait and endured the separation. The pain was so great she couldn't even cry out. Her mouth opened in a soundless gasp of unbearable anguish.

Adam was there, but even though her eyes were open, she couldn't see him clearly. Claire saw only a dark shape. Strong hands eased her down onto the bed, stroked through her hair. He said things to her — soft, quieting, reassuring things — but it was like another language.

Darkness closed its fist around her. House-blessed nothingness… She sank into it willingly.

The special woodsy clean scent of soap and shampoo teased Claire's nose — the smell she'd come to identify as Adam. Her eyelids flickered open and Adam's face came into view. He'd bundled her in a blanket on the bed and tucked her against his body. She should have been toasty warm, but her whole body quaked with chill. The center of her chest throbbed dully and she remembered the peeling away of the magicks and shuddered.

"Hey," Adam said softly. "Okay?"

"I think so." She tried to get up, but he held her tight against him.

"Just relax a minute. You scared the shit out of me."

She frowned. That had to be just an expression.

"I was across the room and your entire body went tense. You tried to scream but couldn't and all the blood drained from your face." His voice took on an awed quality. "Your magick, Claire, it pulsed like the explosion of a tiny nuclear bomb. I absorbed the shock of it clear across the room. It shook the fucking walls. I got to you and a second later you were out like a light. What happened?"

She sighed, trying to organize her thoughts. Within her, her magick pulsed, just as it had done every day of her life before Rue had imbued her with the elium. A little to the left and up lay the elium itself in a hard little ball of ultimate power. A cancer within her. It was still connected to her power by snaky, sticky tendrils, but less than before.

"I pulled energy from the elements around me to coax my magick away from the elium." She swallowed hard and trembled, remembering the agony. "It worked better than I anticipated. It was fast and very painful."

"You've got your mojo back. I can feel it."

She concentrated, drawing the moisture from the air around her until she had a ball of it. "Yes." She smiled. "It is back."

"Fuck, Claire," Adam breathed, staring at the small, condensed orb of water floating above her hand. She kept it suspended there using air magick. "You're an earth witch. How the hell are you doing that?"

Kindling energy underneath the water, she engulfed the whole thing in a blast of white-hot flame, evaporating it. "I'm like no witch you've ever met, Adam."