[Twenty-Sided Sorceress 01.0] Justice Calling

by Annie Bellet

  “Yes,” he said, flipping to serious mode. “It is. I have been assigned to this region. The Nine want a Justice around here for a while. I can help you, if you’ll let me.”

  “Even knowing what I am? Seeing what I did?” I bit my lower lip and held my breath. This was the conversation I wanted to have, but I dreaded it anyway.

  “Two weeks ago, I was sent a dream by the Nine. In that dream I saw a beautiful woman with hair like smoke and eyes full of fire. A giant crow soared above her and on one side of her was a pile of corpses shrouded in shadows as far as my eye could see. On the other side there was a sea of woodland creatures who laughed and danced in a sunny meadow.”

  “I think the humans have psychotherapy that can help with that,” I said, trying to diffuse the awkwardness I felt at his intense recounting.

  “Hush,” he said. “That woman was you, Jade Crow. But she was not you, also. That night, in the circle beneath the full moon, I saw you choose the sunlight, choose life. That is a strength I am happy to encourage. A woman I want to know.”

  Tears burned in my eyes. I was going to have to magically cauterize my tear ducts or something at this rate if I kept crying all the time.

  “But I killed him,” I said, curling my hands into fists in my lap. “And I don’t feel bad about it. At all. I’d do it again. I want to do it again. To Samir. I want to rip his heart out and destroy him forever.”

  “Good.” Alek wrapped his hands around mine and gently pried my fingers open, rubbing his thumbs over my palms. “Some people need killing. Not everyone deserves life. This is something they taught me at Justice Academy.”

  I squinted at him. “Wait, there’s really a Justice Academy?”

  He laughed, the sound deep and beautiful and clean. “No.”

  “Fucker,” I muttered.

  Then he kissed me. His lips were firm against mine and liquid desire raced from my mouth straight into my lady bits. I moaned as his tongue slid into my mouth and crawled into his lap as his hands wrapped around my back and tangled in my hair. After what felt like much too short a time, he pulled away. Looking into his eyes I saw only a warm summer-sky shade of blue—none of the glacial ice I’d always compared them to.

  “The food will get cold,” he murmured. “Do you care?”

  “Yes,” I said as my stomach growled in a very unsexy manner. “To be continued, okay?”

  “If you are staying,” he said, and I knew he meant more than just here, in this moment.

  “Yes,” I said. I could almost say it without feeling terrified.

  “I like when you tell the truth,” he said.

  “I’m a work in progress.” I pried myself off his lap. “Now we’re gonna eat. And then you, mister, are going to play a video game with me.”

  “Oh?” He stood up and pulled me back against him, nuzzling my hair.

  I could definitely get used to that. “Yep. I can’t date a non-gamer. It’s just not done. So we’re going to have to shoot some bandits and save the Borderlands.”

  “I’ve never played a video game,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I teased. “I’ll be gentle.”

  He bent down and bit my earlobe before whispering in Russian, “I won’t.”

  His words turned my legs into Gumby imitations, but I managed to stagger away from him toward the kitchen, ducking my head so my hair fell in a curtain and covered my blushing face. I might have brown skin, but I was sure I was scarlet at that moment. This thing between Alek and I, whatever this was, it was new to me. I hadn’t dated in years, choosing to keep my relationships in Wylde strictly friendship-based. After all, I really hadn’t shown great judgment in choosing boyfriends before.

  But here I was, about to share a meal with a sexy tiger shifter who knew what I was, knew the dangers I posed, and was still here. In my home. Not running.

  I knew then that Alek was right, damn him. I was done just surviving. It was time to live.

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  Turn the page to read the first two chapters of Murder of Crows, the second book in The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series.

  Murder of Crows

  Chapter One

  The battlefield was quiet in the summer sunlight. I heard only the hum of insects and a light shushing of wind. My back was sweaty where I pressed it against the bark of an oak, using the tree as cover from the enemy I couldn’t see or hear, but knew was out there across the meadow. The pile of ammo at my feet had dwindled down to a double handful. In the shade of the trees to my right, Harper’s brother Max lay prone, red dripping down his chest and staining the dead leaves beneath him.

  To the other side of me, Alek crouched among slender aspen trees, his arm useless, his leg oozing colors, his gun on the ground. He gave me a Gallic shrug and slight smile, the afternoon breeze lifting his white-blond hair off his forehead, his ice-blue eyes glinting with dark humor.

  A paintball burst on a tree trunk just over his head.

  “So,” he said. “We’re outmanned and outgunned.”

  “Maybe you should untie my hands,” I said.

  “That’s not the point of the game,” Max pointed out.

  “For a corpse, you are doing a lot of talking.” I glared at the kid, but he just grinned.

  Peeking around the tree, I surveyed the meadow. Ezee’s body was a dark lump in the grass. He was the only one I’d brought down so far, no thanks to the “help” on my team. I was pretty damn sure Alek and Max had gotten shot on purpose so that I’d have to figure out how to take down Harper and Ezee’s twin, Levi, on my own.

  We were gathered on this lovely summer Sunday out at The Henhouse Bed and Breakfast, where Harper and Max’s mother Rosie was letting us train. Three months ago, I’d saved her from an evil warlock, but exposed myself to an old rival. A man who would come after me.

  Kind of surprising he hadn’t already, really. Samir, my psychokiller ex, had restrained himself to sending cryptic postcards and had yet to show his face. I knew he would tire of sending messages and show up eventually.

  I needed to get my sorceress powers stronger before that happened. Much, much stronger.

  Hence the paintball game of ultimate unfairness. Ezee, Harper, and Levi were all accomplished paintballers as well as shape shifters, which meant they got super speed, strength, extraordinary senses, and great reaction time to go with their crack-shot abilities, and they were on the opposing side. That left me with Alek, who should have been good at paintball since he could shoot real guns just fine, and Max, who was more enthusiastic than skilled. Sure, my team were shifters also, and yet here they were, out of the game already without more than a couple shots fired.

  Leaving me, with my hands literally tied behind my back, to somehow win this thing. Magically. No gun. No hands. Just power. But the rules said I had to win by hitting my opponents with paintballs, so I couldn’t just wrap a shield around myself and go hunt them down that way. No shields allowed today, either.

  They’d taken away all my fun. By “fun,” I do mean crutches. Bastards.

  A green ball splattered on the tree trunk behind me.

  “Best two out of three?” I yelled.

  Another paintball, this one orange, smacked into the tree, misting paint onto my nose.

  “Guess that’s a no,” I muttered as I wiped my nose on my shoulder as best I could.

  “Perhaps if you sit here all day, they will get bored and come to you,” Alek said. He pulled a knife from his boot, using its point to pick at his fingernails.

  I considered telling him where to stick that knife bu
t decided to concentrate on how I was going to win this thing. I looked around the tree again. The meadow sloped slightly downhill toward the thicket of saplings and brush where Harper and Levi were holed up. They couldn’t cross the meadow, as Ezee’s suspiciously snoring body demonstrated, but neither could I go to them. I couldn’t even see them down there and I knew they’d be able to see me much clearer with their supernaturally enhanced senses.

  If only my spirit guardian, the wolflike creature I creatively called Wolf, was useful for this shit. She was lounging in the shade deeper into the trees in which I was currently hiding, her tufted ears perked as I glared at her and she swished her long and thick black tail. Wolf could only help me with magical attacks and problems. Not that she would help here anyway. She seemed to understand this was all play and was content to watch. Traitor.

  I twisted my arms a bit, testing the orange baling twine’s knots. They weren’t tied that tight—the purpose wasn’t to really restrain me but to keep me from using gestures to help me cast spells. I was much better at casting when I could use my hands to direct energy. It was another crutch. Truly great magic shouldn’t need hands. I needed my brain to be able to think outside the normal physical limitations of the world.

  It’s easy to pick up a couple rocks or paintballs with magic when you can just extend it as a gesture your body and mind are already used to. But visualizing having three or four or five hands? Tougher. The human brain isn’t used to being able to lift five things at once in all directions. In order to get my brain to do it, I had to break reality a little, starting in my thoughts.

  Break reality. I clung to that thought. I had been flinging paintballs at them like I was the gun, but there was really no need to do so. I didn’t need to conform to the physics of a gun when I threw. I could be like that one cheesy movie where they bent bullets and stuff.

  Theoretically.

  “You aren’t dead,” I whispered to Alek, “so get ready to help.” I didn’t have super senses, but I had someone who did.

  Alek’s leg and arm had been hit, but he wasn’t technically out, though he couldn’t shoot anymore. That was okay; I didn’t need his gun. I needed the tiger in him, his keen hunter’s senses and instincts. He was a freakin’ Justice, the shifter equivalent of Robocop, basically. Judge, jury, and sometimes executioner. He should be able to handle a little long-distance reconnaissance.

  “What do you need?” he whispered back.

  I told him. He started to laugh, but choked it back and nodded.

  I dropped down carefully to make room by the oak trunk for Alek, keeping my profile as low as possible. I closed my eyes and visualized the thicket Harper and Levi were hiding in. I heard the slight shift of clothing as Alek crept up to the tree I’d been hiding behind, felt his warmth as he crouched against my body. I was almost sad Max was lying right there, because suddenly I could think of a lot more interesting things to be doing in the woods on a warm summer day.

  Okay, focus. Paintball. Not licking Alek’s chin and begging for kisses. Yeah.

  I opened my eyes, keeping the image of the thicket in my mind as I looked down at the small pile of paintballs. One of the exercises I do, the only one I kept doing in my twenty-five years of running and hiding from Samir, was to lift multiple stones and form patterns into the air. The paintballs weren’t much different than the stones. About the same size, a little lighter.

  Usually, however, I had my hands to help me visualize things. I couldn’t even grab my talisman, the silver twenty-sided die around my neck, for a focus.

  I summoned my power, letting it stream through me in a shivering rush, and lifted one paintball, then another, and another, until all eight remaining were in the air. I sent them up through the trees, as high as I could without losing my thin tether of magic and control. I just hoped I could stretch my magic across the meadow. Too late now to back out of the plan. If this didn’t work, I’d have to surrender. No more ammo.

  “Ready?” Alek whispered.

  I nodded, not trusting speech.

  Alek whipped his head out from behind the tree, squinting down the field, his eyes probably picking out details in the shifting shadows of the thicket that I would never know.

  A paintball burst on the tree by his head; another whizzed by and splattered on the next tree in.

  “Send the balls, I know where they are,” he whispered.

  I sent my paintballs, still high up in the air, down the left of the field, hoping they would be far out of Harper and Levi’s lines of sight. Alek looked around the tree again, this time from the other side.

  “Harper is behind that bush with the dark green and white leaves. Levi is crouched behind those two saplings with the twinned trunks.”

  I peeked around the tree, picking out where he’d said they were. I saw nothing but slight movement in the leaves of the bush which could have been wind. If Alek was wrong, we’d lose.

  Fortunately, in the three months I’d been sharing my bed with him, I’d learned that Alek wasn’t wrong very often. And he hated losing almost as much as I did.

  In my mind, I gathered the paintballs into two groups of four, pushing on my magic to send one group over the bush where Harper was and the other group around behind the saplings. Their foliage wasn’t thick, the trees too young to have many branches. I guess Harper and Levi hadn’t thought about cover from above.

  Rule number one of horror movies? No one ever looks up.

  My magic was holding, though it felt like I had dragged hot wires out of my brain and my power was slippery in my mental grasp. I could see the thin tethers holding the balls in the air, which meant another sorcerer would be able to as well. I filed that information away.

  “Geronimo,” I said under my breath as I pooled more magic around the balls and shoved them downward as hard as my weakening control would allow.

  “Fuck!”

  “Holy shitballs!”

  The exclamations from the thicket were music to my ears.

  Harper and Levi stood up from their spots, their heads and shoulders running with a rainbow of paint colors. In the meadow, Ezee sat up and started laughing.

  “You two look like a unicorn took a shit on you,” Max yelled, getting to his feet.

  “Frag the weak! Hurdle the dead!” I yelled, heaving to my feet and running out into the meadow. I used a bit of power to burn away the baling twine on my wrists and thrust my sore arms out, making airplane noises as I ran in a circle through the grass.

  “What are you, an Argentinean soccer player?” Ezee said, still laughing. He brushed at his khaki shorts, though there was nothing to be done about the splatters of paint. Somehow he made them look artsy and cool. Ezee could make any outfit look nice.

  “Futbol, not soccer. Geez,” I said, grinning.

  Paint exploded onto my chest, the balls stinging madly as they burst. I fell backward into the grass.

  “Hey,” I said as Harper stalked toward me. “I won, no fair.”

  “Mom has tea ready. Let’s go get cleaned up.” Harper stuck her tongue out at me and walked toward the large house in the distance.

  “Sorry,” Levi called out. “Can’t trust a fox, eh? Good job with dropping those balls on us, by the way.” He offered a hand to his brother and they followed after Harper.

  “If only Harper felt the same way,” I muttered. “Somebody is a sore loser.”

  Alek swept me up into his arms and kissed my forehead. “Takes one to know one, eh?”

  Laughing, covered in paint and tired as hell, I pushed him away and followed the others to the house. Another lesson learned, I guess.

  I wasn’t laughing later when we got back to my place. Alek was still mostly living in his little trailer, which he’d parked out at the B&B at Rosie’s invitation, but we spent a lot of nights at my apartment above my game and comics store.

  My mail was stuffed in the box by my back door, and I saw the postcard even as I picked up the slim pile. Another missive from Samir. Awesome.

  �
�Want me to burn it?” Alek asked as I set the mail on my kitchen table and picked up the postcard.

  “No, safer to keep them in the iron box behind wards,” I said. Alek was the only one I had told about the postcards, mostly because he’d been there when the first arrived in the mail a mere week after the mess with the warlock.

  This one was like the others, only my address and name on it, no message. Just a stylized S. Creepy fucker. The first had been of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The next showed up a couple weeks later and had a picture of a canal in Venice. The third was another three weeks after that with a bunch of castle ruins from some place in Scotland.

  This was the fourth. It was just a photo of a bunch of trees, no small text on the back telling me where it was taken. It looked weirdly familiar, however. I pushed away the shiver that crept over my skin. There were conifer forests like that all over the world. No reason to think it was from around here.

  “Sometimes I wish he’d just show up and get this over with,” I muttered. I didn’t really. Samir would crush me. I was getting stronger, but I had no illusions that I could beat a sorcerer who’d been around since the days when Brutus stabbed a guy named Caesar.

  “Every minute he doesn’t is good for you,” Alek said. “You did well today; you are getting stronger, learning new ways to control your powers.”

  I smiled up at him. He always somehow knew the right thing to say, even if sometimes I wanted to punch him in the face for saying uncomfortable truths. It was Alek who had postulated that Samir hadn’t shown up yet because he was uncertain of me. Alek had a point. I had gone dark for twenty-five years, running and hiding and barely using magic. Samir had almost caught up to me a couple times, but I’d slipped away from him and stayed hidden.

  Until three months ago. Then I’d blazed onto the magical map. Alek pointed out that I’d appeared here, near the River of No Return wilderness which had one of the strongest networks of ley lines running beneath its millions of unbroken wild acreage, and living in a town full of shape shifters and other magical beings. From Samir’s perspective, this whole thing probably looked like some kind of trap. Why else would I stop hiding if I weren’t ready for him, right?