Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Dark magic,” Billy yelled, nearby again. “The tattoos make him strong against human defense.”

  “Why?” Becca asked. “He’s already got one.”

  Billy shook his head.

  “Slow,” he scolded. As if now was the time for a lesson. He pointed.

  “Every one of them is possessed,” he said. “How do you think they’re getting across?”

  She nodded toward the cowboy hat and he gave her a quick nod back.

  “That’s the bad guy,” he said, then dropped his voice. “I talked to Colin,” he pointed, “and we’re going to try to let him through. If we can manage this lot separately, we’re a lot better off.”

  “Does his magic help him against ours?” Becca asked. Billy nodded.

  “Not as much as it would for possessing us, but our magic is pretty darned human.”

  Becca nodded, then they shifted, burying another set of crystals as the group of demons swarmed uphill again. Billy leaned close so she could still hear him.

  “He likes you. Thinks you’re a weak link. Want you to let him through, but only when he’s left a gap big enough between him and the rest of them for us to split him off. You got it?”

  “That’s really…” Becca started, but Billy had dashed away. She had been about to say ‘dangerous’, but on instantaneous reflection realized that was an absurd thing to say in light of what they were doing, anyway.

  She edged up the hill again as the man with the hat saw her and came after her again. She fell on a bit of ragged shrubbery and struggled to untangle her skirts, and he sped up.

  Well, that hadn’t been on purpose, but when she told it later, it was definitely going to be on purpose.

  She kicked at the bush and scrambled again through the dust, pinching more copper and drawing a line.

  This, at least, really had been on purpose - the copper was out of position and weak. The demon hit it and edged around it as if it weren’t there. She saw the one behind him hesitate, and she tried not to smile. He was too strong for it to stop him, but it was still just strong enough to halt the next one.

  And then he shot a line of black through the earth at her.

  She shrieked and jumped to the side as it rushed past her, marking the ground like it had turned to charcoal. He spoke again, and another blast of black came at her. She jumped, getting her feet off of it before it got to her, but now, when she evaluated where she was and expected to find the second defensive line of Makkai magic, she found nothing.

  Instead, when she slid her hand quickly along the ground to try to feel any of the pattern of magic there, she found herself completely isolated between two black wedges in the dirt, a sooty sunburst radiating out from the demon. He twisted his mouth to the side as he saw her realize what he’d done.

  She pulled another red copal out of her pocket and threw it, and he batted it to the side before it even got to him. She was still trying to get away, going uphill almost as fast as she could while forming a plan.

  Do something.

  The copper wasn’t going to stop him. Not without a field to work in.

  She had the tiny personal crystals that would have helped to form a network of information and defense, but there was nothing here, and on their own they were a candle against a storm.

  The emerald-ruby power structure hadn’t seemed to have any impact at all. She gripped her focus stone, looking at the pattern on his chest, his hat, the way he moved, and trying to remember everything she had stowed in her pockets.

  A goldstone.

  That was from her mother.

  It was mostly decorative - colored glass that, when her mother had formed it, actually had flakes of gold in it - but she remembered once as she’d been playing with one that her mother had said that demons hated them.

  Hated them.

  She took it out of her pocket and set it on the sun-baked clay, letting it go and watching as it rolled toward the demon.

  Behind him, there was mute chaos as the Makkai had cut off the rest of the demons, but between the two black wedges, there was nothing but Becca and the demon in the cowboy hat. The quiet was oppressive.

  He laughed and went to kick the goldstone, but when the brass toe of his worked cowboy boots hit it, it stopped dead, and he tripped.

  Becca squatted, making a quick pattern of the strongest quartz she had, working with the shape of the V she was standing in and the fact that there was no ambient magic in it.

  It was such a blank canvas.

  Usually when you form a pattern, you have to feel for the magic around you and conform the pattern to it, if you want it to hit peak power. It was one of the reasons casting was such a complex magic.

  Here, though, she could make perfect shapes, and they would work exactly right. If it weren’t for the fact that no one could help her, she would have thanked him for it.

  She saw Makkai working frantically to try to break through the black, but she shook her head, standing. The demon was still trying to get his foot disconnected from the point on the ground where he’d made contact with the goldstone.

  She signaled the loop she wanted, and Billy waved, passing word up and down the line of Makkai, and they got to work.

  The demon tripped and fell chin-first onto the ground, and Becca set the last crystal in the larger pattern, one that spanned the width of the V.

  She took a step in and set another one, out of quartz now and using topaz and garnet in the right places. It would weaken the effect, but she only had about six feet of width to worry about here. And she was only about fifteen feet from the point of the V that the demon had created.

  She barely had to go a foot to set the next boundary.

  Finally he took off his boot and stood, and she scrambled back across all three lines, standing to see what would happen.

  He roared and started to speak in his dark language, more loudly and with more enunciation, a clicking noise periodically interfering with the words, as if he were speaking a form of punctuation that was emphatic. Angry.

  Powerful.

  She felt with her soul and the soles of her feet that she couldn’t cross the black. It would kill her. And there was nothing she could do to get away. She’d set her best defense, and if his attack came straight through it at her, running would do her no good.

  So she stood her ground. She’d done what she could do, and he was trapped, so long as her lines held. Even if he killed her, if he couldn’t get across her lines, the Makkai would have the rest of the net set outside of his V, and he couldn’t get away.

  He got louder and began to speak faster, his arms coming up to point open palms at her, and she tried not to turn her face away.

  This was going to hurt.

  He drew breath for what she sensed was the final part of his spell, and then he got a funny look on his face.

  His head jolted to an angle, and he slowly slid to the ground.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said, wondering if it was her ears or the demon’s magic. Dawn threw up her arms in exasperation and Becca grinned despite herself as the little sister went marching off. Billy watched after her for a moment, shaking his head, then looked back at Becca. He jerked his chin at her, then nodded toward the man.

  He was her problem, now.

  She waited to see what she got when he woke up.

  Rick was actually a pretty nice man. He sat with his head hanging between his knees and his hat on the ground beside him for a long time.

  “I actually don’t remember much,” he said. “What day is it?”

  She told him.

  “Three years,” he mused. “I wasn’t supposed to live six weeks, and it’s been three years.”

  “What was it like?” she asked.

  “Having a hellbeast work my meat like a puppet?” he asked. “I think that’s why I forgot. Hurts like the dickens and I get the feeling I been eating things I shouldn’t a’ been.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know where you are?”

&nb
sp; He lifted his head and looked around.

  “No,” he said, then rubbed the sides of his head with his palms. “I get snatches, here and there. I been here a long time, I think. But I don’t remember why. Or how I got here. He was angry.”

  “I think that’s a demon thing,” Becca said. It was strange, playing the demon expert.

  “You think I could go lay down somewhere?” he asked. “Maybe get a drink of water? Or something a little stiffer, maybe?”

  “Once we figure out how to get out of here,” Becca said. He grimaced at the black.

  “That ain’t asphalt, is it, sweetie?”

  “Nope,” Becca said, watching after Dawn as she started across the valley to get to the last few stragglers. Why hadn’t she gotten the easy demons?

  Well, if fate had any malleability to at at all, because she hadn’t wanted them, but she wasn’t going to tell that to her bruised rib. As her adrenalin returned to more normal levels, she was finding it hurt to breathe.

  She sat down next to Rick and hugged her knees. Something like half the tribe was trying to figure out how to get her out. There were a lot of survivors to deal with, and she knew that their manpower was probably better spent making sure that they were all okay - they’d been terminally ill when they showed up here, after all, and there was no way they were all better, now. Demons didn’t do favors like that.

  Grant had started up the leveling slope, his head disappearing after a while as he hit the crest of the hill and kept going out across the flatter section above, looking to see how far the marks went. Becca knew the Makkia wouldn’t leave them there, regardless of how short they might have been. It was too dangerous to leave active black magic laying around like that, so as long as Rick didn’t need immediate attention, the tribe should have been seeing to the survivors and working on a counterspell, not trying to find a temporary way to get Becca out. As far as she was concerned, she was perfectly safe in here.

  Nothing Becca had done had convinced them otherwise, though, so she’d eventually stopped trying. Rick moaned again.

  “You okay?” she asked. He chuckled and lifted his head.

  “No, but I’m just remembering bits and pieces of what I done since I got that hellbeast in me. Bad stuff, kiddo.”

  She nodded.

  “I can’t begin to imagine.”

  “No, you can’t,” he agreed.

  “Suppose you don’t remember how to get us out of here, do you?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “I just came to, lying on the ground there. I got no idea how I got myself here.”

  She rubbed her nose and nodded.

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  She saw Bella walking up the hill and she sighed. She hadn’t intended to get herself snared so firmly that Bella had to come personally get her out. The woman talked with Jackson for a moment, then Jackson came and tried to sign something to her.

  “That a language you know?” Rick asked.

  “No,” Becca said glumly, shaking her head at Jackson. Someone turned up a receipt out of a pocket and someone else found the stub of a pencil, and Jackson turned the receipt toward her. She squinted.

  “This may sting…”

  She turned her head toward the point of the V as Bella jabbed a long purple crystal into the ground with both hands.

  That was all.

  She woke up to the sound of her ears popping. Shook her head and sat up.

  Bella was walking toward her, and it didn’t seem like anyone had moved much from where Becca had last seen them, so she hadn’t been out long.

  “You do get yourself into more than your share of trouble,” Billy complained, coming to help her up.

  “It was your plan,” Becca said. “Is Rick okay?”

  “Dawn will look at him when she gets back,” Bella said, looking into her eyes. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I got smacked in the face by something intangible and invisible,” she said. “What was that?”

  “Implosion of force,” Bella said. “Hit you harder than I thought it would. That was a strong curse.”

  “I lost contact with everything outside of it,” she said, looking past Bella. The purple crystal looked untouched, still sticking out of the ground. “What is that?”

  “That’s one of my secret weapons,” Bella said. “If she starts speaking a language you don’t recognize, let me know.”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” Billy called after her. “I don’t understand her half the time, anyway.”

  Becca blew air through her lips at him and he grinned back.

  “You did good,” he said. “We got ‘em all and we didn’t have to hurt any of them.”

  “I’m glad,” Becca said. “Why couldn’t you have done it?”

  “Told you,” he said. “He liked you. Thought you were his weak link to get out.”

  “Showed him,” Becca said sarcastically. “You got any booze on you, Billy?”

  Billy looked offended.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Go share with Rick,” she said. “I think you’ll be his new best friend.”

  Billy’s face lit up and he stood, going to sit next to the cowboy and pulling out a flask.

  Becca went to find a rock to sit on and rested her chin on her palm. She’d go help with the survivors in a minute, but she needed to breathe for a second before she did that. She looked over as Grant sat down next to her.

  “That was pretty epic,” he said. She snorted.

  “What, me one-on-one with the demon that Sam-from-New-York couldn’t kill?” she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “No clue what you’re talking about,” he said. “Those things went on forever. I don’t know what eventually got in their way.”

  “What makes you think something did?” she asked.

  “Because if they went all the way around the planet, I think our cell phones would all be going off right now.”

  She frowned, bobbing her head back and forth.

  “I’ll give you that.”

  “Bella shut it down?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Purple lightning rod for the win.”

  “Huh,” he said. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “For the record, you didn’t actually beat him,” Grant said. “Dawn did.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I get to tell the story.”

  He grinned.

  “Dangerous, letting people tell their own stories.”

  “Your dad?” she asked. He nodded.

  “You always get something a bit bigger than the truth,” he finished, and she nodded.

  “That’s what stories are for.”

  He grinned again.

  “You really scared me,” he said. “When you fell down?”

  “Totally on purpose,” she said. “I was the decoy, after all.”

  He looked like he believed her.

  Either way, she was pretty sure she would be more convincing next time.

  “Magic is in the world because the world is made of it and is contained by it. We should never be surprised to find it, nor be surprised by it. It is not a part of the Makkai tradition, and this story is rarely told, but there are in fact three magics in the world.

  “There is the light, used by God’s angels and by those humans who have the ability to reach it, there is the dark, used by the demons and those humans depraved enough to engage with it, and there is the natural, the magic of the world itself, in and around everything, simply waiting for the right individual to tap into it. Bad things can be done with light magic, and even good can be done with dark, but the natural magic of the world, it is as flexible as human nature is, capable of great and terrible things, and we respect the depth of responsibility that it represents to us.

  “Ah, yes, do we respect that burden.

  “There are many who use the other magics, though, and there are many who do not respect this gift of magic, regardless of w
hich type they use, and we are often called upon to bring accountability to them, because of who we are and because of how firmly we believe what we believe.

  “I would say to you that there was a point at which man learned how to use magic, that was the beginning of magic use among mankind, but men are as much a part of this world as magic is. Magic did not come into the world, as the world was formed of magic. Can water come into a sea, and thereby change the wetness of it? No. Water can be added to the sea, and magic can come into and go out of the world, but the world is formed of magic just as the sea is formed of water. The sea, without the water, would be something else and not a sea.

  “And so my story starts before the world. At magic itself, and as the world came into itself. There has always been light. This we know and this we believe. Some believe that in order for light to understand itself, there must be darkness, but we reject this as a lie. Indeed, for darkness to understand itself, there must be light, but the light exists of its own self and does not require that anything else exist.

  “And so the light existed. And, although it was not required to exist, so did the dark. We do not know why the dark exists, but we know that it does through the evidence of our own eyes. And in the midst of the light and the darkness there was formed our world, separate from both, touching each. And we were given the right to choose our own paths, our own magics. In the end, the magic of the world will be unraveled, and all that will be left once more is the light and the dark, and so we are a breath, and we must know and understand that light and dark are the true nature of the universe. The middle ground is simply the space given for a decision.

  “Not many men can touch magic. Not in a real, enlightened way. All men experience magic, and many manipulate it unwittingly, but not many can reach out and touch the fabric of the world in a meaningful way. The Makkai are the only known people who pass this ability down from mother to children; the rest of the world must discover their ability through luck or intentional search.

  “Of those who do touch magic, very few have real ability in more than one of the three magics. Good men may only have skill in dark magic, and woe unto them who must decide between purity and power. Does dark magic make a man dark? We are Makkai and we do not know, but we pity those who must choose, all the same.