by Mary Hughes
Noah was no cat. He hit the ground hard and lay gasping on his side for what seemed an eternity.
Ivan pounced. Sophia struggled harder against the hands. Everyone in the pack seemed determined to keep her from helping her mate. Maybe they knew something she didn’t.
Noah managed at the last minute to suck in a breath, tuck his legs, and roll away, but he was slow and stiff. Damned poison.
Ivan spun on his paws, toenails scuffing up divots, and quickly shifted direction. He pounced again.
Noah rolled the other way. While Ivan scrabbled to change direction again, Noah creaked to his feet. He skittered to the side, but his limbs were awkward, and his whole body shouted his pain.
Ivan scrambled to come around. Even injured, Noah had more maneuverability, but Ivan had the greater reach. The wolf leaped again. Noah didn’t change directions so much as prance stiffly sideways, barely evading Ivan.
Sophia shook off the well-meaning hands by backing out. Once loose she ran around the circle, following Noah, her fingers pressed to her wolf so hard her skin dented. “Noah, it’s vital. What did your mother say?”
Ivan reared and spun on his hind legs, practically turning inside out before charging again. Noah shot one directed mental push at her before spinning to face Ivan.
Hide.
Ivan opened his jaws, fangs big as Noah’s face, and chomped him.
She screamed.
Noah wasn’t there. He’d dived between Ivan’s legs. Ivan followed him, trying to bite him, and threw himself into a somersault.
Sophia forced herself to breathe. Now she could break the top spell. All she had to do was get Noah to remove his medallion.
Which would reveal his wizard magic.
It hit her then, the question of why Noah’s mother had walled off his magic in the first place. That took a death sacrifice. What was so vital that she’d died to prevent anyone from knowing Noah was a wizard?
The answer stunned her with its simplicity. Its horror.
Rodolphe’s siphon. It pulled magic from shifters—just like the siphon invented by the evil wizard Phere Burgot. Worse, Burgot had created a second siphon, spell or talisman, no one was sure—but it sucked a witch’s power directly from her body.
Centuries had passed and Burgot was dead by now. But maybe another such evil wizard had risen.
Noah, a strong dual, having both innate magic and power?
He’d be an evil wizard’s wet dream come true.
Things rearranged in her mind. Noah’s original alpha fight, thrust on an immature alpha. This alpha challenge.
All to force him to reveal his magic?
No, impossible. Magic wasn’t detectible in a person, only on a thing or in a spell—and even that only while the spell was active. Even after Noah used his power, nobody could trace him by it…
Except his familiar.
Noah’s revealed power would call his familiar to him. If the evil mage followed the familiar… Damn it, she couldn’t remove the hide spell.
“Go, Ivan!” Bonnie shouted.
Ivan ran after Noah with jaws snapping.
Noah dodged, slower. He was tiring. Then one dodge was too late.
Ivan slapped Noah with a paw like a hockey stick. The small dog flew into the circle of pack, bounced and hit the ground. He staggered drunkenly to his feet. His wound had opened completely, blood spilling in pulses.
Sophia’s heart shot into her throat, pounding frantically. Her mouth went dry. It didn’t matter who was after Noah or even why—if she didn’t remove the hex, Ivan was going to kill him now.
She ran around the circle. “Noah, take off the medallion. Hurry.” She had to believe his Canidae could shed a necklace his human wore.
He growled, started wriggling. A moment later, the pendant popped out of nowhere.
In her head, a single bell sounded, the deep, resonant gong of prophecy fulfilled.
HEART begins to beat.
Awe flooded her. She trembled—then clamped down on it. Job to do. She snapped open her third eye.
And saw…nothing. No spell shimmered into sight over the hex. She’d expected, once the hide spell wasn’t continuously fueled, that it would become visible on the etheric. Whoever had crafted the spell was powerful and subtle. Even her third eye was blind.
She grabbed her wand out of her pocket, wound up, and hit Noah with a reveal. “Revoke Hide.”
She’d pulled power without regard. The final funeral seal reverberated with the spell. Waves of pain and nausea juddered through her, bending her double.
A halo sparked around the dog and showed…nothing.
Her temples were pounding. Great galloping ghosts, who the hell could cast a spell that wouldn’t reveal? Not even Gabriel could do that.
She was officially screwed. Without a way to see the hide spell she couldn’t break it. She couldn’t even weaken it.
Ivan pounced. Noah twisted but didn’t get away fast enough. Ivan bounded after and caught Noah’s rump with a swat, sending him stumbling.
Noah was definitely tiring now. Eventually he’d make another mistake, and then a fatal mistake.
Seeing the invisible was impossible, so what? She had to do it anyway, and she had to do it now.
A beam of sun hit her in the eye, dancing with dust.
An omen…no, a clue. Light beams were invisible, but dust revealed them. The hide spell might not be invisible if the loose blue chalk Mr. Kibbles had given her was magic.
She jammed her wand between her teeth and fumbled out the small box. Inside, a baggie with a twist tie confronted her. She untwisted, her fingers starting to sweat because it was entirely possible she was twisting the wrong way and actually making it more impossible to get at.
The wire fell apart. The baggie gaped. With a relieved huff she scooped out a handful of blue powder, sparkling in her Witch’s Sight. Magic chalk.
Ivan pinned Noah to the ground with one paw. Noah kept twisting, barely avoiding Ivan’s snapping jaws.
Heart hammering, Sophia threw the handful over the struggling pair.
“Hey,” Bonnie said. Sophia ignored her.
Fuzzy strands sparked blue around the dog. Added benefit, Ivan sneezed, his paw coming up.
Noah wriggled out, panting and wheezing—his bright red blood smeared along the crushed grass.
No time for subtlety. Nothing held back. What the hell. She should have died four years ago.
Time to go out with a bang.
“I sing silver, I sing gold.” She grabbed her wand out of her teeth and threw it at Noah. “Hide—revoked.”
She smashed her last dome.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sophia hit the funeral seal with the hammer of her will so hard the dome exploded. Her full power blared free. It sang forth exuberantly, streaming after the wand toward Noah.
The magic she’d used to confine it—the death sacrifice—flew back into her. The kick was so hard it folded her in two. All the air expelled from her lungs in a shocked gasp.
But that wasn’t where she felt the brunt of it. Head, hands—heart.
The death magic exploded directly into her heart.
Her chest crushed with dark pain. Heart attack. She had maybe a second of consciousness to grab back her released power and use it to try to save herself.
A second Ivan would use to kill Noah.
A flight attendant once told her why, in an airplane, if the cabin suddenly depressurized, people were instructed to put on their own air mask before helping others. “Don an air mask, help another, save two lives. Help another who can’t help you, and you’ve only saved one.”
But in a plane, she’d have a few moments before oxygen deprivation killed. She had a second or two at the most, and so did Noah.
Her or him.
She chose him.
Her magic blasted into the flying wand just as it struck the hide spell. The wand sliced cleanly through.
Frayed ends of spell popped up as she keeled over. She lay on c
rushed grass, gasping, unable to breathe. Black tunneled her vision. She was heading into unconsciousness.
But as she lay there a strange thing happened. A magic wind rose, catching the frayed hide spell and unwinding it. The wrappings fell away. The hex underneath started to unravel. Strip after strip came loose.
Golden light lanced out from underneath.
Like a beached fish, she gasped on the crushed grass, wondering what was keeping her alive but even more awed by what she was seeing with the last of her etheric sight. Golden light was heavy-duty power, not simple shifter magic or even the power wielded by most witches.
As strip after strip of hex unwound, more light bled through, brighter and brighter. Green hissed as Noah’s poison just burned away.
Her forehead broke out in beads of sweat. It looked like the mother of all primal magics was about to break free.
The hex tore. A blinding sheet of white light burst forth on the etheric. Colors danced in afterimage on her third eye, shards of blue and green and yellow.
With it burst a torrent of memory.
A small boy, dark-haired, stood in a warm kitchen. He had a cookie. He turned toward Sophia.
It was Noah.
He smiled. “This is great!”
A tall woman in slacks and a ruffled white apron appeared next to him. Her tawny hair descended in thick waves to the band at her waist. Her eyes were the same shape as Noah’s, her nose the same elegant length. Their hair and mouths were different but even with the distance of memory Sophia could see this was a shifter, and his mother.
Noah’s mother raised her head suddenly, her nostrils flared. “Simon.”
A robed man appeared behind them. Sophia’s last breath hitched.
It was a wizard prince.
His hair was black like Noah’s. His mouth…that was Noah’s sensual mouth.
“I hear,” the wizard said. He had Noah’s deadly stillness. “Take the boy out front…” His brows compressed and his eyes faded as if he was staring far into the distance. Then they snapped back to Noah’s mother. “No. They’re coming that way. Go out the back. Take the boy away, Hayley. Quickly.”
It was memory, colored with a child’s limited understanding. Witches had a technique to join memories with later adult perception, something like television captioning. With the last of her conscious will, Sophia synched up Noah’s for him.
“Mother/Hayley/shifter,” floated under the tawny-haired woman. “Hard man/Simon/wizard,” was under the man.
Noises came from outside. “Bad men,” the caption read. Then… “Wizards. Hunting.”
Hunting…oh God. They were hunting Noah.
Simon pushed Hayley to go, then ran the other way as Noah’s mother hustled Noah outside.
“Meeting the bad wizards,” read the caption.
It erased.
Slowly came, “Holding them off. Fighting.” The revised caption was dusted with surprise.
The memory played on. Wizards burst around the side of the house in a whirlwind of magic. Hayley grabbed Noah to her. The tightness of her grasp, the shaking of her body, told Sophia the woman knew they were dead.
Suddenly Simon appeared, wedging himself bodily between the attacking wizards and his family.
“Jumped,” read the caption, but Sophia knew that wasn’t right. Without training, Noah wouldn’t know his father had transported, a horrendous power suck and rarely done. Yet Simon had used it to get there in time, to get between the wizards and Hayley and Noah. By the way Simon staggered, Sophia knew it took almost everything he had.
Not only very powerful, he must have loved them very much.
Sparks filled the air around the wizards, the roiling fury of a mage-battle with heavy magic. Shadows shifted and foreboding filled Sophia. Even though this was a memory, she mentally urged Hayley to go faster.
A cawing cut the air. Flying through the cloud of battle magic was a black bird.
“Raven!” Noah struggled in his mother’s grasp.
Sophia thought at first it was Simon’s familiar. But no, a cat bounded out of the house and attacked one of Simon’s enemies.
Then a fourth enemy wizard followed the raven into the clearing. Unlike the dark-robed mages, he was clad in a shimmering pale robe with a thick white collar. The wizard didn’t join the battle but stood apart from the rest, his collar undulating around his neck…not a collar. It was a ferret familiar.
The pale-robed wizard pointed. The raven cawed—and flew where the finger pointed, back-beating its wings as if appalled, but at the same time irresistibly compelled.
The bird had been magically bound by the enemy wizard.
Simon’s face froze in an expression of despair so profound Sophia understood the truth.
The raven was in the power of the enemy wizard, and was the boy’s familiar.
Noah’s familiar.
“Raven!” Noah saw the bird and struggled free from his mother’s arms to run toward it. “Beloved pet/Friend,” was the subtitle. Even now, Noah didn’t know.
“No!” Simon’s arm shot out. The boy ran into a wall of air.
Simon swept his wand to point at the raven. A burst of magic pushed the bird up into the air, farther, farther, until it was a black speck in the sky. After Simon’s own bodily transport, Sophia knew it was a suicidal use of power. He wouldn’t have enough left to keep his family safe and his own life intact and still fight the remaining wizards and their familiars.
There’d be no happy ending here.
Simon’s familiar joined him, fighting back to back. The remaining black-robed mages circled them, wands pointed. The ivory ferret and his master watched with unholy glee.
Noah’s mother caught Noah, wrapped arms around him, and ran. Simon slashed at the enemy mages with wand and hand, covering their escape.
But as they ran, a ruby red beam of magic shot straight from Simon’s heart. It bathed Noah and his mother as they ran toward the woods.
He’d unleashed his life magic to protect them.
Simon died.
The last black-robed man pointed his wand at the still-standing corpse and hit it with a blast of fire. The corpse fell.
Slowly, the adult Noah’s mind captioned the frozen scene.
“Hard man/Simon/wizard,” it started. Then it erased, replaced it with one word.
“Father.”
Her heart contracted.
A couple coughs and it started beating smoothly.
Sophia opened her physical eyes. She was alive.
A wizard prince’s life magic, sent straight from the heart, had kept Noah safe. In turn Noah, wizard prince and alpha wolf, had given it freely to his mate. To her. It had burned away her death magic and kept her alive.
The ring of pack was blinking, blinded by Noah’s mage light ripping free, so brilliant even shifters could see. She gathered hands and legs under her.
Ivan stumbled around, snapping air.
A dark, horrible growl turned all their heads.
A huge black wolf, bigger and badder than anything, stood where only moments before the rat dog had been. His eyes were a brilliant gold, his body armored in a golden aura of magic.
Noah, finally made whole.
He stood there, their king, while their sight cleared. One by one they saw him. Awe filled their faces.
Hesitantly, one by one, they knelt.
Ivan was the last to see the haloed black wolf. In shock he whimpered and pressed his body close to the ground. He scuttled forward nearly on his belly and pawed entreatingly at Noah’s foreleg.
Noah snarled. Ivan cringed and groveled. Noah barked. Ivan rolled onto his back, baring his belly and throat to Noah’s huge tearing teeth.
Sophia couldn’t watch; she couldn’t look away.
Noah snuffled Ivan’s throat…then nodded. He shifted, fluid and perfect, into a man.
Mason stepped into the ring. “This Challenge is over. The loser’s penalty is death, but the winner may have mercy. What is your will for the challenge
r, my king?”
“Ivan.” Even Noah’s voice was golden, more resonant. “For your part in this, you are exiled from this pack for the rest of your natural life. You four.” He pointed at Bonnie, Clyde, Killer, and Attila. “Wait for me in the store. Marlowe, with them. We’ll discuss your roles in this later.”
As they slunk away, the rest of the pack slowly came to their feet. Howls rose from the circle, even the humans eerily wolf-like. Noah nodded once.
He nodded a second time to Mason. Mason came to his side.
Then Noah nodded to Sophia.
The ring of pack turned outward, toward her, and again knelt.
Noah opened his arms wide.
She should have hesitated. Thought it over. Wolves took their ceremony seriously, and her actions would have grave consequences. But she was too glad to have him whole.
She ran to him. He enfolded her in his arms and she clung to him in her relief that he’d survived. That she’d survived.
A sharp caw cut through her relief. Overhead. It was an echo of Noah’s childhood memory.
A black bird. A raven.
This was not memory.
* * *
That morning at sunrise, the raven landed despondently on a tree branch. He’d searched for days, starting at the first touch of dawn and not stopping until the last echoes of sunlight died from the sky.
This was the fifth morning since feeling his master’s power flare. The pressure on his skull was unbearable. His brain was nearly exploding out his ears.
This was the day he’d go insane.
Regret tightened his chest. He thought he’d have longer.
He looked at the ground, so far below. Calling to him. Cool, damp with dew. He’d go insane, then die. No one would know.
Or care.
No. He had to believe, somewhere, his master would care. His master would feel it.
He sucked in a hard breath. He couldn’t die. He was a familiar, damn it. Reservoir of magical wisdom. His master needed him.
He would not give up. Pain nearly killing him, he hefted himself from the branch and flapped awkwardly into the rising sun. He flapped without direction for what seemed like an eternity. Gradually the sun rose. His pain rose with it. Determination waned.