The crimson witch

the Great Fire was well-remembered, in a land where the nuclear holocaust had happened a century or so earlier and where life had changed in its aftermath,..

Chapter Four: THE CRIMSON WITCH
        
        She settled through the last whisps of the storm's hair, the breezes fluffing her red robes behind her in the darkness, tickling her pretty face and dancing across the sleekness of her body. She stirred the air with her passage, making the thunder to go mute and the lightning to lose its ferocity so that they would not alert her prey to her coming. She alighted in a small copse to the left of the spot where the man and the dragon lay sleeping, head to head, the man with his feet braced against an outcropping of stone. Dropping to her hands and knees, she wound her way through the brush until she had reached a point from which she could watch her prey unobserved. They both were sleeping soundly only fifty feet from the lip of the gorge.
        The man's face was turned toward her, and she could not help but marvel at the blond mane and the way it fell so much like the mane of a wild animal, the way it framed his square, handsome face, his thin and cruel, yet somehow beautiful lips.
        She shook herself back into hatred, casting out the sentimentality.
        He had used her!
        She shifted her weight from one knee to the other, squinted her eyes, and mumbled the proper phrases to enact her Talents and get her magics into opera-don. She could not affect him directly, for she had tried and failed. Though he was not a Talented, he was somehow immune to her Talents. But perhaps she could stir the elements and affect him indirectly…
        She reached out and grasped the air with her Talents, toying with it, getting the feel of it, letting it run through her mental fingers and wet her mental palms. The air washed her. She lifted her real arms and hands to it in supplication and in demand. It threaded her fingers and wrapped into eddying pools in the cups of her hands.
        The wind babbled to her.
        The wind obeyed her.
        She caused the air to grow heavy above her head, to pile and pile on dark layer after dark layer, to compress into the small volume of space. Then, gently nudging it with her magics, she began to shuffle the layers, mixing and shuffling, making the wind ever stronger. Still, she contained it. She used some more of her magics to build a shield about it so that it could go nowhere, so that the pressure it was building was contained. The pools of air howled above her head, rubbing against one another, and she was forced to shush them lest they awaken her prey. When the pressure had reached a safety maximum and would any moment leap out of control and swallow her like the explosion of a bomb, she directed it at the man that slept only fifty feet from the brink of death.
        The wind screamed again, whipping away from her and scittering across the ground toward the supine form.
        Jake woke to the howling and started to raise his head.
        The wind hit him then, jerking him upright and off his feet. It swirled about him, raising a dust cloud that all but obscured him from her view. It lifted him off the ground and twirled him higher, higher still until he was twenty feet above the ground.
        She stood and came from the cover of the copse, laughing. Her dark hair flew about her head as her robes slipped tightly around her shapely body, clung to her, molded to her. Her green eyes flashed beligerance and triumph. “I couldn't touch you!” she shouted above the howling. “But the wind I made will carry you away.”
        He looked about, searching the darkness in hopes of catching sight of her.
        With another part of her mind, she lit the area around them like daylight so that he could watch her in his last moments, could see that it was truly she who gained revenge.
        The dragon stirred and lumbered to its feet. It moaned in panic and stumbled back and forth a moment before finally deciding to stay still and wait out the horror.
        “Let me down!” Jake bellowed, his hair wild and teased.
        “Like you let me go when you had me where you wanted me?”
        “Oh, for crissakes!”
        “What?”
        He spun about, whirling and tumbling as she maintained the shuffling of the layers of air, continually building the pressure needed to hold his hundred and eighty pounds.
        “What did you say?” she asked,