The Cave and the Eye 2

The Cave and the Eye 2
  When my palm met her skin, the contact was frigid. I wanted to feel her panic, wanted to see anything break through that mask of hers but it was growing clear that she wasn't wearing any. That was exactly how she felt about me, how much she thought about me.
  I didn't see it as a threat. I didn't warrant her anger. My throat began to clog, my head pulling me to countless nightmares.
  Becca giggled this time in a soft manner that seemed beyond her. It was infuriating. Her hands didn’t even flinch away from the scroll!
  “Will you kill me, Higan?” she whispered. “Go on, love. Try it but I want you to think of what happens next.”
  My grip trembled. I hated how light she felt under my palm as if I squeezed, she’d drift away as smoke and leave me here with the ruin she’d made of me.
  “You're so going to get what's coming for you” I spat, my forehead pressed to hers now and my teeth bared. “No one's going to save you, not even me when they get their hands on you. I'm sure Harlyn will tear you apart. All that power and yet your end is seemingly clear.”
  Her eyes narrowed, some flicker of actual heat slipping through her boredom. I was barely satisfied with that. I wanted to push further.
  “She can try,” she breathed out with a bite in her tone.“But I’ll take everything from her before she gets close enough to.”
  Her free hand moved too fast. All I saw was a flick of fingers across my ribs, Then pain shot up my side like hot iron shoved under the skin. I stumbled back, my claws tearing away from her neck. My breath rippled out in ragged gasps as I clutched that side.
  Becca rose smooth as poured oil standing above my crouched state. She looked taller suddenly, bigger somehow in this cramped cave mouth. So I stood up straight.
  “You think you're somehow escaping this?” She approached painfully slowly and stopped until her boots bumped mine. “Very soon, I believe,” she laughed as she uttered. “You'll come to realize that you're nothing in the grand scheme. You’ve always been.“
  Desperately had I desired to lunge at her frame again, to tear out her throat for the way her words curdled my blood. But that wouldn't hurt as much. No, it wouldn't.
  I glanced at the canvas where she’d left the eye. The scroll perched carelessly beside it. She’d moved too close to me and left her pretty prizes unguarded for a heartbeat.
  I met her hollow eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching as if she knew something I didn't but arrogance did funny things to people. I would know.
  The cave itself answered in my stead. We both felt the shift in the air and my chest tightened. Had they caught us already?
  A presence pressed down on us like wet cement poured over our heads. “Eevecina Geratine,” the voice demanded, striking the stone walls themselves to provide her. 
  It grew harder to breathe and I caught the manner in which Becca’s spine snapped straight. The hair on my arms bristled like static had crawled through my skin. Whoever they were, I wouldn't win, and neither would she.
  Out of nowhere, a figure stepped through. A Melbringer with more aura than the ones Becca tricked into town. This one radiated age and contempt, layered like old smoke.
  Her robes looked like they’d been dragged through dead fields and stitched from something that hissed where it moved. Her eyes gleamed the brightest shade of white and nothing, fogged but searing all the same.
  Becca stepped back, her lips curling into that delicate sneer she wore like perfume. The older lady's eyes raked over her, then darted to me and back like I was a smudge on the cave wall, barely worth noticing.
  I didn't mind this time, my focus had shifted to something else.
  “You cast away your kin,” the aged sorceress rasped. “You taint yourself with the company of these beasts and sniff at our covenant like it’s beneath you.”
  Becca’s jaw twitched. I watched it, hungry to see her crack. “The lupomancer is real!” Becca barked suddenly out of irritation, enough to make me flinch. “She’s real, alive, and you'll need me to break her before she breaks us—”
  The old Melbringer’s laughter crawled through the dark. “You have spoken your heresy aloud,” she said softly, with dreadful delight. “We do not break what Gaia has written. We cleanse. You included.“
  And that was it, that split second of pure unbridled chaos. The shadows and roots rolled in behind her like teeth but Becca’s dark twisted shadowy sorcery clashed against it. It was like green striking black. 
  For the first time in weeks, Becca wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t looking at anything but the lady who sort of got rid of her.
  I felt an excited pulse thud as my heart raced. I turned my gaze to the eye and the scroll. That was my only chance.
  Becca screamed something, a word that scraped my skull raw but meant nothing to me. The Melbringer’s vines recoiled, but only for a heartbeat.
  I moved pushing past my usual speed. I threw myself at the canvas feigning a dodge but quickly, my fingers clamped around the slick sphere joining it to meet the dry paper.
  My boots skidded on the loose gravel smoothly and just as I presumed, neither of them turned to see why. They were too busy trading damnation for damnation, and underestimating the capabilities of someone so insignificant to them.
  Perfect.
  My face almost split open as I shoved the scroll under my coat and the glass orb pressed to my palm so tight I could feel my pulse pounding on its surface.
   I slipped past the throat of the cave and into the cut of the mountain air. For once, I didn’t feel like the one running. I felt like the one stealing something almost invaluable. 
  Whatever it summoned, whoever those items held together, they answered me and I would put Ethan Stark down if it meant giving my soul to the devil himself.