by Dan Wingreen
"No idea," Eallair said with a small shrug. "Visions are tricky, but first ones are usually the clearest anyone ever has. Doesn't mean it's about us. And even if it is, it doesn't mean it's gonna come true, or that we can't die until after it comes true. Prophecies are only possibilities. Slightly more likely to happen than the average possibility, but still just a possibility."
"Good," Aidan said firmly. "I don't like the idea of some vision telling me what I'm gonna do with my life. I've had enough of that from the DMS already."
Eallair smiled. "Look at you, didn't take you long leap feet first into the whole rebel thing, did it?"
Aidan rolled his eyes. "I'm not even gonna respond to that."
"I seem to remember a time when a certain wizard would throw certain words around when a certain sorcerer started talking like that," he went on, ignoring Aidan.
"I could still punch you in the mouth," Aidan threatened.
Eallair smirked. "You could try, but there are a lot better things you could do with my mouth."
And before Aidan could figure out how to respond to that, he was being kissed again. He thought about protesting. It was kind of annoying how Eallair kept doing that out of nowhere, but it was also very pleasant, and in the end, Aidan was enjoying it far too much to think about anything else. Especially anything that involved his mouth.
This time, I'm definitely staying shut up.
And, to his surprise, he actually managed to do it.
Chapter 2
"Now I know why they invented toilets," Barnes grumbled as he made his way back from behind a nearby rock formation. "Burning shit smells like…shit."
"Eloquent," Bryce drawled, brushing sand off his police uniform for what must have been the three hundredth time in the past fifteen minutes.
Noah Alexander watched as Barnes ignored his fellow officer and sat down roughly on the sand with a grunt. He, at least, was dressed appropriately for travel in an old, beat up t-shirt and jeans. Noah still had no idea why Bryce insisted on wearing his full uniform, especially since he consistently wasted too much magic cleaning both it and his hair. Not for the first time, he wondered how a man so meticulous in every other aspect of his appearance would allow himself to develop that much of a stomach.
"Focus on the crystal, if you would," Noah said, his syrupy voice quiet and contained. He sensed Bryce bristling at the reminder, but the officer said nothing in return. Noah approved. Maybe the man was finally learning his place.
Or maybe, as Noah's daddy liked to say, wishful thinking was a sport of fools.
The hunter pushed those thoughts out of his head, annoyed with himself for losing focus not even three seconds after scolding someone else for that very thing. It was the desert. He did not like deserts. Luckily for him, people were usually smart enough not to run towards one, so he very rarely had to deal with the sand, the heat, the need to deal with his own waste, and the constant threat of discovery from the self-exiled natives.
Such as the ones in the village they were currently surveilling.
They'd been lucky, coming upon it as they did. After painstakingly following tire tracks and footprints for almost the entire morning, they’d nearly tripped over the village in question, and in full daylight no less. Noah was still surprised they hadn’t been seen.
That had been several hours ago. Since then, they'd retreated half a mile to a conveniently placed hill-slash-dune and were planning their next move as they observed the shaman going about their lives.
Or, rather, Noah was. Bryce seemed content to concern himself with little else besides his appearance and his tri-hourly need to complain, and Barnes didn't seem to concern himself with anything. He just waited patiently for his orders. He was, Noah thought, a decidedly sensible man.
His daddy would have approved.
A tiny rivulet of sweat slid off Noah's forehead and into his eye. It stung, and he rubbed it away with a small scowl.
Yes, he definitely despised the desert.
Noah forced himself to ignore the heat and the way his clothing stuck to his body as he went back to studying the crystal ball. He was sitting cross-legged on the sand, the crystal in his lap and his overcoat neatly folded on the ground next to him. Noah knew all about desert nights and wasn't about to be caught freezing in his own sweat when the sun went down. A second crystal, held there by Bryce's magic, was currently hovering several hundred feet above the village, impossible to spot against the clear sky, and it relayed real time recordings back to the crystal Noah held. He tapped it, zoomed in, and directed Bryce to move his crystal to get different views. They repeated the process for hours, but he was still no closer to discovering if his prey was still in the village.
And they had been there, that much he was sure of. The tracks they'd been following led right into the damned village. Not to mention the air was still charged with the faint aftereffects of a magical battle, which suggested his prey and the shaman had fought. What he couldn't figure out was why they wouldn't just avoid the shaman all together. The man in black, at least, had to know it was certain death to be noticed by them. So why did they seem to walk straight into the village?
And where were their bodies?
There was a large scorched area off to the side of the village that suggested an unusually big, magical fire, but that made even less sense. Shaman buried their dead; they didn't burn them. Could they have killed Collins and the man in black and burned their bodies? It would make his job both easier and more difficult if they had, but more importantly it would also be supremely unsatisfying. While he was content with his place in the world, knowing only what he was allowed to know, he would be lying if he didn't admit he'd hoped to get a chance to capture one of them and possibly get some answers before killing them.
Well. He supposed it didn't really matter. Whatever had happened, he couldn't assume they were dead unless he saw the bodies, but since there was a good chance the shaman had killed them and most likely disposed of them somehow, that only really left one option.
"Bring it in," he said to Bryce.
"About time," the officer muttered under his breath. He gestured with his hand, and a few moments later the second crystal ball landed gently in his palm. "Did you find them?"
"No," Noah said, only half paying attention to Bryce. He scrolled through the recordings they'd made of the village, pausing here and there, memorizing the layout. He frowned slightly. The village wasn't particularly large, but there didn't seem to be as many people as there should be. That suggested either death, whether by natural causes such as an outbreak of some kind of magic resistant disease, or from a fight with a powerful magic user, or that everybody else was out somewhere. Such as, for instance, chasing down one of those powerful magic users they had driven off.
"So now what?" Bryce asked impatiently. "Are we just going to sit here until we die of heatstroke?"
Noah continued to ignore him, zooming in and mentally marking a few of the shaman as likely to have the information he needed. The boy with the gray on the shoulders of his vest and the old man with the cloak seemed like the best bets, but there was a woman and two other men who seemed to walk with an air of authority and confidence—
"He's ignoring me," Bryce muttered. "How childish."
"Childish," Noah said, looking up, "is asking a question and then whining about it instead of waiting patiently for an answer."
Bryce's eyes narrowed. Noah almost smiled. This one definitely wasn't used to being called out on his horseshit, as Noah's daddy would say. He raised an eyebrow when Bryce paused, then watched in amusement as Bryce tried to decide whether to let go of his wounded pride or risk antagonizing a man who could legally kill him.
Noah wasn't very surprised when prudence won out over pride.
"So, what are we going to do?" Bryce asked, slightly less churlish than before.
"The only thing we can do," Noah answered, getting to his feet and stretching. He needed to limber up before tonight. "We're going to go down there and
ask about our wayward terrorists."
◆◆◆
The moon was bright in the cloudless night sky, bathing the desert in a soft silvery glow. Noah had always liked moonlight. Seeing the moon full and unobstructed was one of the few things he enjoyed about his job taking him outside the comforts and confines of the cities. There was something ethereally beautiful about a full moon in a clear, dark sky, even if the light was less than helpful when he was trying to sneak into a village filled with people who would probably kill him on sight.
He went slowly, making his way across the desert by crawling along the ground using sparse bits of desert grass as cover when he couldn't find any small dunes or hills to hide behind. Bryce and Barnes had supposedly already circled the village an hour ago and should be waiting for his signal, but he had no way of knowing for sure. Noah's crystals were secured back at their camp, since he only had the two and they were too valuable to risk being lost or destroyed in what could turn very quickly into a combat situation. He hoped the lack of an all-out battle going on meant they had managed to stay unseen, and not that they had both abandoned him. They hadn't reacted well to his declaration, with Bryce screaming and even the stoic Barnes showing discomfort at purposefully engaging the shaman. He’d managed to calm them down by telling them his plan, or, at least, by impressing upon them that they had a better chance of survival if they didn’t go against him. Still, there was always the possibility that they decided to make the monumentally unwise decision of thinking for themselves once they were out of his direct sight and abandoning him to the tender mercies of the shaman. If that had happened, this assault might be over before it could even begin.
There was little point in worrying about “what if’s”, however, so Noah pushed those unproductive thoughts to the side. He slipped unseen into the outskirts of the village, relaxing slightly now that he had the strange tent-like structures to hide behind. It was the dead of night, about an hour away from morning by his best approximation, and the entire village was asleep. He could feel it in the air, a kind of stillness punctuated by the occasional sound of muffled snores or bodies shifting coming through the thin walls of the tents.
He paused; paranoia fine-tuned after eleven years of hunting the biggest dangers to society forcing him to consider this might be a trap. He quickly dismissed the idea. The exhaustion he'd seen through the crystal ball earlier wasn't easy to fake, nor was the sense of relief, of a broken siege, that seemed to fill the empty corners of the stillness. Something had happened here recently. Something terrible. Something that had sapped these shaman, shattered them nearly to the point of breaking. Something they no longer had to fear. And that was how he knew for sure he remained undetected.
They most definitely would have feared him if they knew he was coming.
He slipped soundlessly into the first tent he came to, one of the smaller conical ones, using his magic to still the air so any sound he might accidentally make would be dull and muted. The tent was homier than he would have expected, with two collapsible field cots pushed together on a floor covered with blankets and rugs, a small table with scrolls and a cup half filled with some kind of liquid on top of it, and discarded clothes in a pile off to the side. There were two shaman sleeping on the cots, a man and a woman. The woman had her arm across the man's stomach and her head buried in his chest. The man was on his back with his mouth open, drooling slightly on himself. The smell of alcohol pouring off the two was so strong Noah wondered if a small fire spell would have much trouble igniting them.
Not that he was there to set anybody on fire. Not right then, anyway.
He made his way cautiously over to the sleeping figures, taking care to watch where he stepped, an easy task with the moonlight seeping in through the flaps of the tent as it was. At the foot of the cots, he stopped. Hands were usually best since most people slept with them outside of their blankets, but he wasn't above using a foot, or two, when they were poking out the bottom. Gently he placed one hand on the skin of each shaman. The man didn't so much as get a hitch in his snoring, but the woman began to stir. Not that it mattered at that point.
It only took Noah an instant to probe into them with the smallest tendrils of his magic and lightly brush against theirs. They both lit up, visible only to his eyes but no less beautiful for it. They glowed with a deep blue that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, and Noah's eyes widened in a rare show of surprise.
They were both wizards!
It made no sense. He knew shaman could use their magic as well as anyone, but no sorcerer had that much magic just…sitting there. To him it looked like a bottomless reservoir of soothing indigo, swirling and shimmering in a tempting dance of power. An even rarer smile crept across his lips.
It was the easiest thing in the world for him to tear their magic out of them and take it for his own.
They woke up during, of course, but their eyes barely had time to open before he'd expertly drained them and they slipped, pale and limp, into the restless sleep of the nearly magic-less.
Noah's body vibrated with the sudden influx of power. He'd never felt so much! His skin felt tight, like it was stretched over two people instead of one, and his own magic swirled and leaped inside of him as it twined with the new energy, seeking a balance. That balance came quickly, but the narcotic feeling of strength and power never fully faded. No wonder these shaman were so feared, if this was the kind of power they had inside them. And now it was all Noah's.
He looked down at the passed-out figures in the bed, feeling a vague contempt passing through him. All that power wasted on two barely clothed, drunken savages living in the desert when they could have been using it for the benefit of society. A wizard who could actually use magic could do…anything. Terrorism and dissent could be wiped out within a few years. The country could finally know true peace, but instead, they hid out in the sand and the heat and selfishly hoarded their magic.
People like that didn't deserve power.
With a two fingered gesture Noah hardened the smallest bit of air to a razor thin edge and slashed it across their throats. He watched as the blood pooled and stained the bed and pillows underneath them with cold satisfaction. They bled to death without ever waking up.
He went from tent to tent repeating the same scene, draining and killing until his body buzzed and shook and he felt like he was about to split into a million pieces if he took another drop of magic.
After that, he just killed.
Noah was euphoric at having so much magic at his disposal, even if he knew stolen magic never lasted long, but it didn't do much to blunt the edge of his frustration. In none of the tents could he find any sign his prey had ever been here. There were signs something had happened. Several tents were completely empty, but obviously lived in, with clothes thrown around and, in some cases, half eaten food still sitting on small, fold-up tables. The air outside still crackled with the aftereffects of a large magical battle, but aside from the giant scorched area and the empty tents, he couldn't see any actual evidence of a fight. They hadn't cleaned anything up either because he'd been watching them almost the entire day and—
He paused as he left the most recent tent to receive his attentions and frowned. He had been watching them the entire day and, aside from some basic spells, he hadn't seen any magic being used.
So why could he still feel it?
Magic didn't linger for very long, not unless there was a very large discharge over a long period of time. Definitely longer than it would take for even two skilled sorcerers to be overcome by a village of shaman, let alone one skilled sorcerer and a wizard. Unless the shaman were a lot weaker than they seemed—which was impossible given the sheer amount of magic in Noah's body—or there had been several smaller fights instead of one, large one. Which, again, made little sense. Unless Aidan Collins and the man in black had laid siege to the village over several hours, at minimum. That scenario made even less sense, but at least it was something he could confirm.
He glance
d around to make sure the village was still sleeping, then closed his eyes and let tendrils of magic seep out of his body. Instead of sending them into a person this time, he let them out into the world where they meandered like barely visible wisps of blue smoke, tasting the air and the magic in it on a level even the most sensitive sorcerer wouldn't be able to accomplish without his specialized training. The 'images' it sent back to Noah never made much sense, magic didn't view the world through a human lens, but he'd been trained to recognize certain feelings and impressions, to view them as visible shapes and colors that could tell him more or less what kind of magic had been used and how often. So long as there were still magical remnants in the air, of course.
He recognized the color his mind assigned to sorcerers' magic right away, the soft blue threads weaving effortlessly through the world like a tapestry that covered everything, but obscured nothing. More surprising was the deeper indigo of wizard magic—usually so hard to spot outside a wizards' quarter, and even then it was almost always contained within the wizards themselves—splashed across the tapestry like wet paint. He should have been prepared for it, but seeing proof of wizards' magic actually being used in its most basic and primal form still took his breath away. The impossibility of it shook him to his core. How had his ancestors ever beaten a people who could call on a power so raw and unfiltered that it covered the very magical fabric that made up the world itself?
And that was when he noticed the third kind of magic.
He'd almost missed it, not just because of his distraction but because of the nature of the magic itself. It was subtle, hidden in the background of the tapestry and threaded through at seemingly random intervals so if someone were to notice it, they would think the discoloration a trick of the mind misinterpreting the signals their own magic was sending back to them. But once he noticed it, he couldn't imagine how he'd ever missed it.