Fusion Magic

by Lucia Ashta

  “What do you mean to do with her?” Liana asked, but before the witch could answer, lights sparked out of nowhere, quickly coalescing into a large circle of blinding light. Every muscle within my body tensed as the circle sputtered and spit with magic, promising to deliver doom.

  14

  “Whatever offensive magic you have, I need you to use it without hesitation,” Mulunu barked gruffly while we anticipated whatever was about to emerge from the portal. “If you managed to kill a witch like Naomi Nettles, then you’ll be able to kill others too. Whatever you do, don’t hold back.”

  I stared at the dizzying, spinning lights. “How can we be sure they mean to harm us? Shouldn’t we talk with them first?” I was unwilling to murder indiscriminately.

  Mulunu laughed a cold chuckle that scraped against my nerve endings. “Trust me, they won’t be interested in talking, not unless it’s to attempt to manipulate you and Quinn into doing what they want.”

  I wasn’t sure I trusted Mulunu anymore.

  As if she sensed what I was thinking, she added, “I feel their intentions just as I’ve felt them coming. I’m right about this.”

  “Besides, don’t forget, lass”—Irving moved to Mulunu’s side, squaring his weakened shoulders against the still-invisible threat—“we’ve already seen those that pursue you and ma boy at that crazy witch’s castle. They’re not after you for a playdate, I promise ya that much. They blew up the place with people inside it. They trapped you deep underground before setting it on fire, though I doubt they realized the two of you were there because they want ya alive for your power.”

  At the fresh reminder of Lizbeth’s cruel tactics and all of her prisoners we’d been forced to leave behind, a wave of reckless abandon surged through me. Who did these bastards think they were? We were people—magical creatures—we weren’t anyone’s pawns to be rearranged on their game board of corrupt power and evil.

  Trina whimpered behind us, and I flinched at the fresh reminder of all the torment the former mermaid had been forced to endure. Just as soon as I assessed this new threat, I’d set her free. She wouldn’t linger in Naomi’s web a moment longer than necessary for the defense of all of us, hers included. I just couldn’t afford to be distracted when the portal finally spit out its passengers.

  Quinn settled at my other side, and Liana and Brogan—still in his bear form—lined up next to him. Though Quinn didn’t touch me, he was close enough that I could feel the heat of his body radiating into mine. I shivered from the sensation, but was unwilling to put any more space between us. With the imminent arrival of a threat outside of us, I refused to consider Quinn’s magic as my enemy. Everything within me was drawn to this man.

  The new rush of impending danger was guiding me to operate on pure instinct. Mulunu be damned, every intuition I possessed drove me to be with this man. In that moment, I no longer cared what she said. I didn’t care that I’d tried to distance myself from Quinn only minutes before. It hadn’t felt right, that was for damn certain.

  If my fusion magic had taught me anything, it was to trust in myself. I was unique, a hybrid unlike any other known to exist, which meant no rules easily applied to me. If Quinn and I went up in a burst of flames, then so be it. I was finished worrying about what might and might not happen, especially when I’d been hunted since the very minute Mulunu flung me onto land. I believed I owed the leader of the Kunu Clan my allegiance for eighteen years, but she’d proven to me now that she no longer considered me worthy of her protection.

  As if Quinn sensed the shift in me, he moved closer. We still didn’t touch, but it was impossible to deny the way his close proximity sent tingles rushing through every part of my body, making me feel more alive.

  This was what felt right. Quinn and I … we were magic.

  Another whimper from Trina had me wondering how long our enemies would take to step out of the portal already, and whether I’d have time to free her from the trap she struggled against.

  The first of our pursuers finally emerged, a tall, slender man whose features were pale, his hair so blond it was nearly white, and his eyes a faded green. In skinny jeans and a classic leather jacket, his natural elegance and overly swift movements suggested he must be another vampire. He sneered, revealing sharp fangs, and the tension that consumed our group ratcheted up a notch, tangibly vibrating through us.

  Survival rushed to the forefront, eliminating every other need. I had to get Quinn and Liana out of here alive, Irving and Brogan too, along with Trina. As for Mulunu … well, the wily witch had proven she was capable of fending for herself. I’d leave behind the person who meant to kill Quinn and me.

  I sprinted along the front of the others, drawing the vamp’s eye, and faced him off to the side, knowing he’d follow me, if for no other reason than vampires were predators. He’d be drawn to fleeing prey.

  As predicted, the moment he stepped free of the portal, he chased me.

  Refusing to allow myself to be distracted from my one task, I still couldn’t help but notice how many people were walking out of the portal. Panic hiccupped in my chest and I doubled down my attention on the vamp. The sooner I dispatched with him, the sooner I could help the others.

  Mulunu roared at the same moment; light blasted in every direction. I forced myself to push the rest of the threat away, zoning in on the eyes of the undead creature in front of me. Too much like Antonio Dimorelli, his eyes were cold and cruel amid a stunning face.

  That was all the warning I received before he was zooming toward me faster than thought.

  Right away, emotion swelled—fear, panic, desperation—threatening to muddy my mind. I gritted my teeth and focused on one thing only: vaporizing the vamp with the scary, come-hither look.

  Not daring to close my eyes at the real danger, I allowed my eyes to lose their focus. Dead, dead, dead. I pictured him permanently dead. As I’d done with Dimorelli, I envisioned him crumbling into ash.

  I screamed as the vamp reached me in a blink and sank his fangs into the jumping pulse in my neck. Abruptly, I cut off my cry, wrapping my hands around his head and wrenching him loose.

  His fangs released me, but also took a chunk of my flesh. Warm blood trickled down my neck, but I didn’t take the time to check how much. Looking at him only enough to track his movements,

  The vamp struggled in my hold, and with his increased strength, he nearly managed to escape. But I suddenly knew I contained the power to crush him.

  Believing in the limitless magic of the angels, I curled my fingers, pressing into his skull until a strangled scream broke free from him. Once I realized I could kill him this way, I released the image of him disintegrating into ash and funneled all of my concentration into killing him with my grip. I wasn’t about to be picky. Whatever got him dead the fastest worked for me.

  I sensed the power of the water and the air swirl within me, felt the earth pulsing her magic into me through the soles of my bare feet. The elements didn’t feel out of balance to me. Quite the contrary, they melded together to create a bomb of power.

  With a snarl of determination, I pushed my fingers into the vamp’s skull like it was a ripe melon. He emitted a sharp cry of pain before it strangled and abruptly cut off.

  “Take his head clear off, lass!” Irving yelled. “Ya gotta kill him all the way.”

  Flicking my gaze up, I registered a swarm of men and women, all in the midst of violent attacks. I didn’t have time for moral debates. Mulunu and Irving had been right. Our attackers weren’t interested in talking through a compromise. They’d come to take what they wanted without asking.

  Removing my fingers from the vamp’s crushed skull with a sickening squelch, I wrapped my arms around his head and twisted. His head snapped off, leaving a mess of flesh to drop to the ground with a thump. I scurried out of the way, only to discover that I was still holding on to his head. With a squeamish squeal, I tossed his head alongside his body on the ground, where blood didn’t pool as it would have with a normal body. T
he vampire was undead, which meant no pumping heart to circulate blood.

  Blinking rapidly, I stared at the two parts of the vampire for a few sickening seconds before I wrenched my attention to the rest of the fight. Blood continued to trickle down my neck, but I felt fine.

  Mulunu was facing off with two mages and one witch, trading blasts of light with alarming speed. The sea witch wasn’t moving her staff from its place on the ground, suggesting that she needed to continue drawing on the earth to supplement her depleted magic.

  Magic was finite. That was one fact I’d learned before being thrust upon land and into the biggest mess imaginable. Even the most powerful of all beings had a limit to how much they could expend before it became exhausted.

  Mulunu had been fighting—and hard—since Lizbeth’s castle. She couldn’t possibly have all that much left.

  As I watched, the enemy witch landed a searing blast of light from her palms, knocking Mulunu back a few steps. Though her shoulder was smoldering, a mess of seared, charred flesh, Mulunu didn’t even hesitate to fling a counterattack.

  The witch must have assumed landing a blow would have at least made the sea witch pause, because when Mulunu blasted a stream of arctic blue light from the opal crowning her staff, she hit her square in the chest. The witch stumbled backward, falling onto her butt. She sat up and stared wide-eyed at Mulunu for a few beats before falling back to the ground, where she didn’t move any more.

  The two mages resumed their attack with renewed vigor, and Mulunu screamed as she blasted them both, hitting the magical shields they threw up at the last second.

  A beastly growl drew my attention back to the others. At some point since advising me how to permanently dispatch with the vampire, Irving had morphed into a polar bear. His bear was even larger than Brogan’s gigantic bear, and together the polar bears roared and stomped, clearly frightening the two witches attempting to charge them.

  But our attackers brought shifters with them too, and a huge grizzly bear and two werewolves weren’t in the least bit cowed by the polar bears. The snarls and roars were loud enough to confuse my instincts, the ones that insisted that when an animal growled like that, I should run.

  Running wasn’t an option.

  Two vampires had cornered Liana, who was literally a fish out of water. On land, she had no magical powers. She struggled even to use the body that was so unfamiliar to her. Liana had probably spent a total of seventy-two hours with legs in her entire life, and vampires were ten times faster than the rest of supernatural creatures.

  Liana was trying to fight them off with ineffective slaps of her hands. The vampires could have killed her thrice over by now. But true to their nature, they were playing with their prey.

  My heart lodged somewhere in my throat at the sight of my friend so vulnerable and exposed, and tunnel vision directed me straight to her. Barely registering the shouts, snarls, and blasts of constant fighting, I ran around the others, evading the few blasts that were suddenly directed my way. Ducking and swerving, I jumped over a blast of orange magic that reminded me of flames before they shattered the earth into a small crater beneath me. I tripped but managed to skim over it.

  Dodging a werewolf as he tumbled nearly into me, I skidded to a stop next to Liana, hands at the ready in front of me, ready to tear the heads from these two vamps. My lack of hesitation would have made Egan proud.

  A sharp movement to my left dragged my attention in that direction. Lightning fast, Quinn was moving toward us, a mournful grunt making my attention skip over him to Trina.

  Quinn had just descended the steps from Naomi’s house, where Trina remained trapped in the witch’s spell. Only now she hung limply, her neck a messy pulp of battered and torn flesh. A vampire’s head lay at her feet, the vampire’s body a crumpled heap at the foot of the stairs. The vampire’s mouth was coated in blood, her eyes open and lifeless.

  Quinn wiped his hands against his jeans as he stalked toward me, leaving streaks of blood and gore. I had no idea where he’d found the strength to dispatch a vampire, but his abalone-colored eyes were a mixture of the feelings thrumming through me: the shock of loss, the desperation to overcome, the magic pumping through me like adrenaline, urging me onward…

  His angry stare locked on me for an instant, before rushing behind me, eyes and mouth opening to warn me of danger.

  Time sped up again, and I swirled back around to face the vampires. Only now there were three, and I had no idea where the third one had come from. I hoped like hell people weren’t still walking through the portal, which continued to crackle behind us, but there was no time to check.

  Liana screamed. In fear for me or herself, I couldn’t tell; her attention flicked between the vamps and me in a non-stop cycle.

  When one of the vampires, a female with long, blood-red hair, opened her jaws wide to clamp down on my best friend’s neck, I feinted left to avoid the two male vampires rushing Quinn and me, and charged toward Liana.

  I didn’t think, I moved. Willing myself there in a flash, I arrived, hands outstretched toward my target: those long tendrils of hair, and the head behind them.

  15

  When I went to wrap my fingers around the vamp’s skull, I realized with a start that she’d anticipated what I intended to do. So fast that I struggled to register her movements, she sped out from under my reach, swept behind me, moved my hair out of the way, and chomped down on the uninjured side of my neck. It all happened in a blink, and I cried out both in surprise and pain.

  At my cry, Quinn diverted his attention from the two vampires attacking him to check on me; that momentary distraction cost him. One vampire cinched his arms behind him in what appeared to be an unbreakable hold, especially in Quinn’s weakened condition, and the other male vampire kicked Quinn’s legs out from under him. Quinn fell with a thump, unable to brace himself against the fall.

  I gasped, then whimpered, as the vampire at my neck sucked with renewed greed, drinking the blood from my vein so quickly that I could feel it leaving my body. But it wasn’t just the blood she was stealing. I was weakening so significantly that I felt the loss of my magic in a tangible way. Vampires, especially those of a certain age, didn’t need to drink blood; there were other ways they could sustain life. Fianna had warned me, however, that often vampires would drink blood as a means to drain their victim’s life force. That was almost certainly what was happening to me. That surge of magic that had pulsed through my veins akin to adrenaline was waning so that I had to strain to feel it.

  I had to act now. It might very well already be too late.

  My gaze met Quinn’s desperately across the scant body length that separated us. Thrashing and bucking in the vampires’ hold, he tried to free himself, but his chances were slim; the vamp standing over him was widening his jaws to clamp down on his neck. Unlike Dimorelli, who’d attempted to get Quinn to shapeshift in order to drain his magic, these vampires seemed willing to compromise given the circumstances. By draining our blood, they’d also take our life force. Consequently, they’d also take some of our magic, that which was so ingrained as a part of us that it couldn’t be separated from our blood. But they wouldn’t be able to consume all our power as Dimorelli had wanted to. Regardless, the result would be the same: we’d end up dead at the hands of power-hungry creatures who valued their desires over everyone else’s.

  Liana zoomed into my line of sight, and before any of us registered her intentions, she ran up behind the vamp who loomed over Quinn, fangs at the ready, and clutched his shoulders as she slammed her knee up between his legs.

  Apparently, even vampires aren’t immune to the effects of the reliable maneuver.

  Thank goodness for all those hours Liana spent watching life on land.

  The vamp grunted and folded over himself, clutching at his groin, all while spinning to face Liana. When he turned, his greedy sneer took murderous to a whole new level, and I reacted, maximizing on the distraction that had drawn the eye of the remaining two vamps atta
cking us.

  I ripped vamp lady’s fangs from the side of my throat with little care for my flesh. I acted only to remove her from me as quickly as possible, trying to minimize the time for her to react and prevent what I was going to do next.

  Regardless, as I clamped my hands firmly around her neck and went to spin her head off, she growled at me and tumbled backward, taking me with her. To avoid falling and losing my advantage, I rolled with her, and when she slipped into a backward somersault and attempted to pop to standing, I yanked her down and continued the momentum until I’d rolled upright. In a flash, I released my hold on her to stabilize instead of following her down, and as she fell to the ground, off balance, I lunged after her. Grappling as she kicked, trying to stand, I managed to wind my arm around her neck, press into her chest with my shoulder, and place much of my body weight on her.

  I seemed to possess my own advanced strength since activating my angel magic, but still it wasn’t enough. I was relatively slim; we probably weighed about the same. She possessed the enhanced strength of a vampire. She bucked her hips and just generally tried to move in every direction to break my grip, and I bounced around with her, maintaining all my focus on keeping the upper hand. I was going to have to kill her as I had Naomi, but first I had to risk a glance around me.

  Quinn had capitalized on the diversion Liana provided, and while the vamp nursing his groin had vanished, Quinn was circling with the other vamp like they were wrestlers. Each had their arms extended, feinting in and out, looking for the opening to attack.

  Liana watched us all, including behind me, where I didn’t dare look. The redhead in my grip would throw me for sure if I turned. The nonstop explosions, sizzling blasts, and growls and snarls suggested that Mulunu, Irving, and Brogan were still going hard. I had to hope they’d win the fights all on their own; there was nothing I could do to help them now.