Page 128 of Only Cold Depths
“Yes.”
And that was all she said. That one simple word. As though she had accepted the fact that Pollux was gone, and she had already returned to the problem at hand: how to amuse herself until she finally decided to kill me.
I’d known Esmina was ruthless, but for the first time, I realized howemptyshe truly was. The only thing Esmina had ever loved in the cold depths of her heart was herself. The other seer was remarkably similar to Nerezza in that regard.
“Pollux being dead might be for the best,” Esmina said in a thoughtful voice. “He reached his full psion potential a long time ago, and he’s been stagnant ever since. After I kill you, perhaps I’ll kill Kyrion and see if I can take his power. Increasing my own psionic abilities would eliminate my need for someone like Pollux.”
Another image shimmered in the air: Esmina cutting Kyrion’s throat and watching him bleed out on the rocky ground.
My heart froze in my chest. Somehow I knew that would be even more painful than Holloway siphoning off our magic. Esmina would pull the magic, life, and energy out of Kyrion all at once, just as she had done to Micah so long ago, and she wouldn’t care how much Kyrion suffered in the process.
I growled and rushed toward her, trying to take her by surprise, but Esmina just laughed and slid to the side the way she’d been doing all along.
“Haven’t you learned anything yet?” she called out in a mocking voice. “You can’t beat me, Vesper.”
For the first time, I realizedIwasn’t trying to beat Esmina—Kyrionwas. Or at least, the part of me that he had trained as a warrior was trying to beat her.
Kyrion’s fighting skills clearly weren’t working, and more and more blood oozed out of all the cuts on my body every time I tried to attack Esmina. It was time to change course and try something different.
It was time to use my own magic.
Esmina might have the power of a truebonded pair running through her veins, but in the end, she was still just a seer, just like me. No two seers were alike, and we all saw things differently, both with our eyes and our other senses and especially with our magic. All I had to do was see something she didn’t, just like I’d been able to fix the Techwave cannon when no one else had.
I’d told Kyrion to believe in my ability to keep myself safe. Now I needed to do the same thing—to trust in myself and especially in my magic.
I kept my sword up, but I backed away from Esmina, moving farther across the permaglass bridge and closer to the waterfall.
Esmina shook her head. “Running away won’t save you, Vesper. You don’t have anywhere to go.”
She was right—and wrong. I didn’t have anywhere physically to go, since the balcony was the end of the line in this chamber. But I could go anywhere I wanted to with my magic.
I kept staring at Esmina, but in my mind’s eye, I was in the round room of my mindscape. I ignored the memories and images flickering in the archways and sprinted straight into the Door filled with darkness. In an instant, I moved through the blackness, a silver light appeared, and I skidded to a stop beside my psionic nexus, the eye-shaped altar that was the heart of my magic.
Come on, I thought, staring down at the altar.Do something! Show me something! Anything to stop Esmina and save Kyrion!
The nexus remained still as always, although the lunarium eyes and arrows winked up at me from the sapphsidian table like silver stars. I was two minutes away from dying, maybe less, and I still couldn’t figure out how the blasted nexus worked or what, if anything, it actuallydid.
Fury roared through me, and I slammed my fist onto the table. To my surprise, the lunarium eyes brightened in response, and sparks shot off them like fireworks, matching the heat raging through my body.
I frowned and pulled my hand back. Verona had said my magic was a white-hot star, while Kyrion’s was a cold blue moon. Our powers ebbed and flowed, just like our emotions did, but our magic was always lurking inside us.
Maybethatwas the purpose of my psionic nexus, to be a visual reminder that my magic was always a part of me, always steady and sturdy and waiting here in the dark depths of my mindscape. Maybe I didn’t need more magic, more emotion, right now. Maybe I just needed to tap into what Ialreadyhad, what I’dalwayshad.
Instead of focusing on the lunarium eyes and arrows, I plunged my hands into the dark blue sapphsidian, as though I was trying to reach down and touch the very bottom of the table. A comforting coolness swept up my arms, and I pushed my hands even deeper into the table, letting more and more of that soothing sensation flood my body. For the first time, I recognized the sensation for what it was: calm, cold calculation.
In front of me, out in the real world, Esmina’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing, Vesper? Trying to call up even more of your seer magic to use against me?” She laughed, the mocking sound even louder than the gush of the waterfall. “How sad and desperate you are. I have far more power than you’ve everdreamedof, even with your precious truebond.”
I ignored her taunt and looked past her, still holding on to my psionic nexus in my mind’s eye.
One by one, colors sparked in my field of vision. The frothy white blur of the waterfall. The dull gray shimmer of the rocks. Even the transparent sheen of the permaglass bridge. I saw all those colors and a dozen more. Not just color but strength and energy and substance.
Esmina clutched her dagger a little tighter. The other seer practically burned with color, and a miasma of green and gold swirled around her head like jeweled comets spinning around and around. The same shades shot off her lunarium dagger, which was glowing so brightly it hurt my eyes to look at it.
I squinted past the harsh glare, still holding on to my magic. I still wasn’t quite sure what I was searching for, but I needed to stop overthinking and worrying and debating things to death. Trusting my own instincts and taking immediate action was the only way I was going to cancel out Esmina’s precognition, and right now, my instincts were whispering that the answer to defeating the other seer was somewhere in this cavern. Iknewit was, just like I knew I could always fix whatever broken appliance crossed my desk in the R&D lab.
The waterfall, the rocks, the bridge. I looked at them all again, but it wasn’t just colors I saw—it was also the absence of them.
Like the clear, tiny tendrils that were slowly snaking through the permaglass bridge.
