She would stay awake until daybreak, then, and meet her fate under the sun.
So when she actually did wake up, blinking into pockets of sunlight breaking through the shadowed morning trees, it was with great disbelief. She was lying on her side, knees tucked into her chest.
Not ten feet away, Griffin leaned against a tree, watching her.
EIGHTEEN
Keko rolled to her feet before the sleep had been fully shoved from her head. There was no weakness in her muscles, no lingering rest or stiffness from unexpected sleep. Just power. Only alertness. And a fierce, focused glare, sharp as a blade, on the Ofarian man who watched her with infuriating calmness.
She’d been right. For once in her life she didn’t want to be, but Griffin’s appearance here—following her after he’d admitted to colluding with the Senatus to bring her in—proved he was driven only by his political motives. He was a liar. Nothing more. And nothing he could say would ever prove otherwise.
With a great leap she pushed out of the little cave and jumped down to the flat space among the trees below. The ground was squishy, cushioning her landing. Lowering her center of gravity, she circled around Griffin, arms pulled in and ready to do her fire’s bidding. Her chest filled with magic, her tongue and lips ready to unleash it.
A battle was coming, and this time she wasn’t sure if the loser would survive.
Griffin came away from the tree far too slowly, far too easily. His crossed arms dropped to his sides. A hunter’s gleam brightened his eyes. She knew that look well. He wore deadliness like invisible clothing.
Mist clung to the edges of his skin, blurring them against the early morning sky and the waving tree branches. It made him seem godlike, sprung from the atmosphere. She knew he’d dissolved his body and thrown himself to the wind, tracked her from the air. He carried nothing with him, wore nothing other than those black shorts with the side pockets. His chest and arms and face gleamed with moisture and she didn’t know if it was sweat or his magic. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter.
He was real now. Corporeal. Threatening. And he was coming for her. His legs made long strides across the dirt and mat of fallen foliage. The space between them halved.
Keko inhaled and showed the flame dancing at the back of her throat. “I’ll fucking burn you.”
“You would’ve done that back at the B and B. You wouldn’t have just left me.”
A pang of guilt hit her hard. It seemed he didn’t know what had happened after he’d left, how her residual magic had caused damage. She chose to say nothing.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, for the eighty millionth time. “You don’t have to fight me.”
She could feel her body heating up with frustration, could see the grass and bushes around her start to shimmer from the terrible temperature she was throwing off. Just let Griffin try to touch her. She’d singe him.
“My only other choice is to stop, to go back with you. That isn’t happening.”
He took another step closer, his shoulders bunching up, fists forming. “It’s not your only choice. If you’d only—”
“I’m not perfect,” she said, thinking about the fire in the B and B. “Neither are you.”
“Never said I was.”
He started to circle around sideways, taking his back away from the edge of the cliff . . . and trying to push her toward it. Wouldn’t work. Not on her island.
His fists released as he raised his palms to her. “Will you please just listen to me?”
She blew a sheet of flame down her arm. “I already did and I’ve heard enough. Now you listen to me.”
After a great pause, in which he rolled and licked his lips several times, swallowing whatever lying words he wanted to spew out, he finally crossed his arms over his bare chest and said, “Fine. I’m listening.”
She pointed the flaming arm, a short spear of sparking fire extending out to him in warning. “You won’t take me back to the Senatus. You will not deny me this chance to do one great thing for my people. I believe that if the Source is what feeds my people our magic, it will grant me access to it. It will give me what I need without the destruction Aya tried to scare you with. You can chase me all you like, Griffin, but I won’t be your trophy on your wall as you sit back and think about how you duped me. About how you used me to get what you want.” She drew herself up. “I’m not yours. I won’t ever be yours.”
“But I,” Griffin said, “am yours.”
“Don’t you dare say that again.”
She released the fire, a great scarlet and gold bomb that barreled toward Griffin. She lost his face in it, her magic consuming her vision. Her will commanded her mind—her will and her anger, her determination and her love. And as the fireball swung toward him, the flames stretching tall, a tiny sliver of her wanted to pull it back. The rest of her, submerged in his lies and his so-called love, pushed the bomb toward him with renewed force.
The fireball imploded. It died midair, sucking into itself, before it could take down Griffin in a blaze of skin and hair and death.
As the fireball shrank and shrank, it changed. Shifted. The air around it blurred in a way she recognized as Ofarian power drawing moisture from the atmosphere, then the whole thing started to harden. Shards of silver and white formed in its center, spiking out. Blades of shimmering ice burst out from what had once been fire, her greatest weapon. Now rendered inert. Inconsequential.
Griffin stood behind the rotating ball of magically forming ice, his expression angry but not malicious. She didn’t understand that. She’d just called his bluff, had just tried to destroy him. Where was his hate? His sense of justice?
Their eyes met over the hovering ball of ice. His wrist flicked and the ball shot toward her, breaking apart into a barrage of gleaming, sharp arrows. So fast, so deadly. She inhaled and sprayed flame across her body, melting what bolts she could, turning their water into harmless steam, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. Some of the ice arrows got through, slicing and stinging across her upper arms.
Then all was still. Even the relentless ocean winds seemed to have paused. Ofarian and Chimeran magic—fire and water, complete and utter opposites—crackled in the air. She didn’t have that Ofarian ability to sniff it out, and she could still feel it.
Griffin’s chest heaved, his arm still thrust out, his fingers curled into icy claws that thawed as she watched. His arm slapped to his side. “We are too evenly matched.”
Keko looked down at the hairline stripes of blood across her upper arms.
“I didn’t come here to fight you,” he said.
“You were just planning to haul me back to the mainland in one of those boxes my old captor—your kinsman—had made.”
“No. I want to help you, Keko. Somehow.”
That again?
The fact that he’d even opened his mouth and said something that ridiculous pissed her off even more. Maybe they couldn’t fight each other with magic because they’d just cancel each other out, but she sure as hell still had her body. She was a Chimeran warrior and this was her land. She knew where the Source was and she was physically stronger than the Queen had been when her time had come.
“You don’t want a fight?” she growled. Then she charged. Head down, thighs burning and toes digging into the dirt. Arms flung out, she slammed her shoulder into his midsection. Took Griffin’s lying ass down.
The sound of his surprise, just before his breath exploded from his lungs, was the greatest music she’d ever heard. She couldn’t stop the grin from splitting her face, though it probably looked like something evil, something animal and violent. Good.