Controlled by a Fire Demon
The Owl Shifter Chronicles Book Two
Qatarina Wanders
Copyright © 2019 by Qatarina Wanders: Wandering Words Media
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To Ramy Vance, a kickass Urban Fantasy author and my first fiction writing coach. I hope to be as prolific as you someday soon.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Also by Qatarina Wanders
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About the Author
Acknowledgments
1
The darkness was absolute. The wind howled in from the south, bringing a terrible screech with it. It wasn’t the normal sort of screech, like you would hear from a crow or an owl with a particularly nasty case of throat inflammation.
No, this was a terrible kind of screech. The kind that caused your heart to pound at the furious pace of a mad stallion. It was the kind of screech that heralded horror unfathomable.
Emily sat on the edge of the patio, swinging her legs along the side, when she heard it. Her first instinct was to snap her head in the direction of the sound. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to make sense of the encompassing darkness and the swarm of clouds up in the high south.
By this time, her heart was already racing because she knew this night was no ordinary night. This night was special. This night was what determined if they won or lost.
Minutes earlier, she’d given her aunt—someone she was just finding out two days prior was a witch—instructions to heal her brother. Again, she just found out that Michael Winter—nasty schoolmate by day, supernatural-killer by night—was her blood brother (don’t even get her started on her weird family lineage).
Aunt Anastacia had made it clear to her that once she started the process, she had to complete it. She couldn’t stop halfway; otherwise, Michael would die. Also, she could do very little if their house was attacked by evil roves—warlocks and witches who had the ability to move from city to city and maintain their powers—and this was a high probability, seeing how Emily had probably destroyed the evil roves’ mansion up on Main Street in town (yeah, maybe let’s not talk about that).
Aunt Anastacia had told her to expect a war. In fact, not that she should expect a war, but that she had started one. The Alfreds would be coming for them, and she’d need to protect the house while Aunt Anastacia was working on healing Michael’s body.
It had taken everything in her to ask for Michael to be healed rather than the alternative, which was to go through the Adoption process (that would basically turn her into this owl shifter on steroids, but we will get to that). It made her more invincible and more terrifying to roves like the Alfreds. It basically guaranteed that she was a match for the evil coming after her.
It didn’t, however, guarantee that she would win. And when she found out that there wasn’t just one evil rove, but a family of them, she decided she needed a team. If she was going to fight the Alfreds and win, she needed help. The Alfreds had at least four evil roves (one mother and three children), and that’s not including the most evil rove of all time—Gregory Alfred.
Even though this was a man who had been responsible for attacking her father and crippling him—and sending her mysterious life-threatening text messages that scared her out of her wits—she had to quell her anger so she could build a team. No use going after a group of four warlocks and witches only to be imprisoned, or worse—killed.
So she’d asked Aunt Anastacia to revive Michael and get him back into fighting shape—Michael, as it turned out was a rove as well (surprise, surprise)—because if they were going to win this war against the forces of darkness, they could use all the help they could get.
Aunt Anastacia was already on their side, so that made them three. Dad was not a supernatural, but Emily knew he could use a gun. And her two friends—who were probably locked up somewhere under the burning house—if she could rescue them (she hoped they were still alive, that she hadn’t inadvertently condemned them to death), would make great additions to her team.
If all went well, she could have the team all set up and ready to take on the evil rove-family of the Alfreds. But that was a big if.
Everything would come crashing down if Aunt Anastacia was stopped. Everything would fail if Emily was unable to defend this house. If somehow the Alfreds decided they wanted payback immediately for what she’d done to their home.
If they came in force right at that moment, it was game over for her.
And, sadly, that was what it seemed like might happen. Out far in the southern sky, the swarm of darkness Emily had observed slowly began to dissolve as wave after wave of screeching blasted over the cottage.
Emily shot to her feet, a sense of dread clothing her like a cold blanket. She wasn’t yet sure what she was seeing. They looked like bats, only they were slightly bigger.
Now, Emily was an owl shifter. Owls had the best night vision of all birds. As a supernatural being, her Owl form had an inordinately better night vision than the average owl. Some of that ability translated to Emily’s normal human eyes. That meant, when she was human, she could still see with some of her Owl vision.
That’s how Emily could see the red-tinted eyes of the bats. There must have been thousands of them. Each bat had its fangs bared as though ready to snap flesh. Their talons were small, but they looked powerful. Maybe not enough to break a bone—unlike Emily’s Owl’s talons that were able to break wrought iron—but they were enough to claw out someone’s eyes.
It wasn’t even the fact that these bats had their eyes on her and the cottage (meaning they weren’t just planning to pass by); it was their number. Thousands.
The door behind Emily creaked open. Emily jumped at the sound, her senses already heightened by terror. She turned, hoping to see Aunt Anastacia coming to offer help, but it was Dad, and he had a long gun in his hand.
Emily looked at the pitiful object and almost laughed out of fear. How many did he want to take down with that thing? It looked like an ancient rifle, something that hadn’t even fired in a long time. Emily knew that Dad was an expert marksman, right from his days as a Marine special operative in Iraq and Afghanistan and some off-the-books covert operations that he couldn’t tell her about—but, come on—this was an old rifle, and he was up against maybe three thousand hellish bat-like creatures.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
John Davies slipped out of the house and onto the patio. He gently shut the
door and moved to stand beside her. He wore a tight-fitting vest and what looked like slacks. He had somehow scrounged up some old boots, which came up to his shins, where he then tucked his slacks into the boots.
“I’m not letting you go out against whatever is out there,” Dad said, scanning the southern skies where the horrible screech was getting louder and closer. His eyes continued to scan for what Emily could clearly see.
The swarm of death was still too far away to be seen by normal eyes. They were still probably miles away, but they were surely heading to Anastacia’s cottage. Emily wasn’t a good judge of distance and time, but she would wager that she had twenty minutes before they got there.
But what concerned her, aside from the number of bats, was what would follow. She could imagine the Alfreds sending the bats to keep Emily busy while they got ready to attack the cottage. Emily’s hope and prayer that they could survive this night without incident had already been dashed against the rocks.
Now she had to do damage control. She had to think fast; otherwise they would all be captured or killed by that swarm of death.
“Can you see what’s out there?” Emily asked, purely out of curiosity.
Dad scanned one more time, narrowing his eyes until they became slits on his face. It took him a good minute to shake his head. “Can’t see a thing. Just dark clouds and nothingness. I can hear the screech, though, so whatever is coming is still far away.”
Then he turned to her with a questioning gaze. “But you do see it, don’t you?”
Emily didn’t reply.
“That’s why you have that look of terror in your eyes, isn’t it?”
Emily still refrained from answering. She kept her eyes on the evil horde approaching.
Okay, maybe it’s not the best idea to stand idle and let them come too close. Selena’s voice popped into her head. It came so loudly that Emily flinched. Even after all the time she’d spent with Selena—the mental consciousness of her Owl form (go figure!)—she still hadn’t gotten used to the intrusions.
Yeah, well, if you keep standing there and gawking at the clouds, you’re not going to be alive long enough to get used to me, Selena quipped.
2
Why do you always have to be a buzzkill, huh? Emily thought back to her Owl form, Selena.
Because, apparently, you need someone telling you what to do; otherwise, you’ll get skewered into the ground, Selena replied haughtily.
Emily could imagine Selena doing an eye roll to go with her statement—if The Owl had eyes like humans, of course.
A smile crept across Emily’s face. Selena wasn’t wrong. The more she remained inactive, only looking at the swarm approaching her, the more likely it was they were going to get inundated. The best tactic was to take the fight to their aggressors. Emily’s Owl was the edge of the sword. So why not go meet them as far away as possible, so she could thin them well enough before they finally got to the cottage?
The only thing was, Emily didn’t want to go rushing into the face of danger. She knew little to nothing about what kind of bats those were. She didn’t want to make the same mistake she’d made earlier in the evening, when she’d gone with Rina and Joanna to the Alfreds’ house only to lose both friends in one day. And now they faced this swarm of bats because of the same decision.
Emily wanted to ensure that there weren’t better options. Maybe she could listen to her father this time. Even though Dad hadn’t really said anything against her decision to go after Michael that night (Aunt Anastacia had been pretty vocal about not doing so), it was obvious from the way he responded to Emily then that he didn’t like the plan. It even seemed as though he favored Aunt Anastacia’s plan, which, it turned out, was the better one after all.
Emily turned to face her father, wiping the smile off her face. “You don’t see it, do you?”
Dad looked away from the approaching swarm and faced her. He shook his head. “Just a dark sky is all I see. What’s out there?”
“I’m not sure what they are,” Emily admitted. “They look like bats, but they’re slightly larger. They also have bared fangs like vampires.”
Dad nodded. He didn’t appear to have been frightened by her explanation. He didn’t even look surprised. If anything, he seemed to know what they were dealing with. Emily knew her father had been through another supernatural war a couple decades earlier. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“How many?” Dad returned his gaze to the direction of the swarm.
Emily looked again to better judge their number. They were closer now. Maybe ten minutes. A lot more details were coming into view, like how some of the bats had rocks in their talons. Rocks she figured they intended to let loose on the house when they got within range. At that height and speed, the rocks would do great damage to the cottage. Emily began to wonder what defenses Aunt Anastacia had put on the outside of the house.
When she and her friends had snuck in two days before, they’d been attacked by a wind demon (she didn’t know what else to call it). They had been effectively pinned to the wall by invisible windy latches. It took Aunt Anastacia appearing in the living room and ascertaining their identities to release them.
If she’d put such a defense system inside her house, maybe she had put some external defenses into place as well. Why defend the interiors of your house and leave the exterior undefended? That would defeat the whole purpose.
So the question in Emily’s mind was: How strong was the exterior defense? Was it strong enough to withstand a hail of rocks? Was that even why the bats were bringing the rocks? Because they knew there was a defense system set up, and perhaps that was the only way to break it?
If there was such a defense system in place, was it not wiser for her to go inside and stay safe?
If that would cut it, maybe Aunt Anastacia wouldn’t have asked you to defend the house, Selena suggested.
Maybe she wasn’t expecting to be swarmed by a pack of bats, Emily thought back. Maybe she just wanted to get me out of the house and into the night where I can clear my head. After all, I wasn’t particularly thinking levelheadedly back there.
Selena’s emotion of surprise pranced through Emily’s mind.
What? Emily thought to Selena, wondering what had piqued The Owl’s surprise.
Just that you, for the first time, admitted to me that you’re not thinking clearly, Selena offered.
I wasn’t thinking clearly, mind you, Emily corrected. Right now I’m as clear as . . . as can be.
“It’s hard to tell how many there are,” Emily told her father. “But I would guess a few thousand.”
Emily watched as Dad’s shoulders slumped. He took one glance at his old rifle and hissed. There was no way the gun was any match for what was coming, and he was just realizing it.
“You don’t have to join me to fight them.” Emily tilted her head to the side. “I just want to know if you have any suggestions. They’re about eight minutes out. I’m thinking of taking them on all the way out there. Let me see how many I can destroy before they get here.”
“And when they get here?” Dad was now looking at the swarm. It still wasn’t close enough to see, but some of the early birds—a few dozen or so that were flying faster than the horde—could be seen by the naked eye.
“When they get here, it’s going to be hell.” Emily shrugged. “I mean, I’ll keep fighting them until either one of us is destroyed, but I was hoping maybe Aunt Anastacia—”
Dad shook his head, cutting her off with a wave. “She’s of no use to us now. Even when she’s done with Michael, she’ll be passed out on the floor, still as a rock.”
Emily thought the way Dad had said that was curious. He sounded like he knew a lot about Aunt Anastacia’s magic. Maybe even a lot about the supernatural. Emily shouldn’t be surprised, of course, because Dad was married to an owl shifter. But she had just assumed that Dad didn’t know. It wasn’t like they’d discussed much about Mom’s abilities or anything. Plus, Dad had been cursed by the evil rov
e, Gregory Alfred, so they hadn’t had any father-daughter pep talks after Mom’s demise.
Hearing Dad talk with such certainty felt odd. Like, how did he know so much about supernaturals? Was he some sort of supernatural and she didn’t know? Did he know Mom was an Owl and married her all the same? Supernaturals tended to marry their own kind. Maybe he really was a supernatural.
Staring at Dad and watching as he looked up at the sky, Emily realized, in retrospect, she knew little about her father. There were so many questions she hadn’t asked yet. Like why didn’t the evil rove just kill him? Why spare his life and cast a spell on his mind?
“I know Aunt Anastacia is going to be knocked out for a couple of hours.” Emily turned away from her father and looked around. “I was thinking maybe she had some sort of defense set up around the house.” She proceeded to quickly explain what she’d experienced when she and her friends had sneaked into the house.
Dad nodded. “Yes, she does have the perimeter secured with a couple of hexes and curses and spells. But I doubt it’d be enough . . .” Dad’s voice trailed off as his eyes narrowed in thought.
“What is it?” Emily was curious to know what her dad was thinking.
“What if . . . ?” Dad’s voice trailed off again.
“Dad, those things would be on us any minute,” Emily pointed out. “If you’ve got something, please let me know now.”
“What if that’s their plan?” Dad’s eyes were set straight ahead. “The perimeter defense Anastacia put in place will take out, say, a thousand of those beasts.”
Controlled by a Fire Demon: The Owl Shifter Chronicles Book Two Page 1