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

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Oh? And how many people have you killed?” she asked.

  “None,” he answered honestly. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not expected to in this sort of situation.”

  “I thought you said this sort of thing has never happened,” she said with a frown.

  Stepping over to his desk, he found himself already shaking his head. “It hasn’t. But one of the first codes of a mage is to be prepared for anything and everything. Magic has always been a means of making the impossible possible, so we’re not supposed to slip into false securities.”

  “False securities like this not-city that I shouldn’t have been able to enter?” she challenged.

  “Good point,” Aderyn resigned.

  A long, uncomfortable silence passed between them as they both took a moment to absorb everything that the other had said. Then, clearing her throat, Analetta looked up at him, her rigidity giving way to something softer and her eyes reclaiming the flicker of hope they’d held when she’d first approached him back at the Sybii camp.

  “So?” she stretched the word so that it seemed to have three syllables.

  Aderyn looked up at her and resisted the urge to fold his arms across his chest again. “So what?” he asked.

  “Can you help me?” she pleaded, once again showing him the mark on her left arm. “Can you remove this curse?”

  Aderyn stared at the alien symbol, realizing that he didn’t recognize even a possible source for it. “Let’s hope so,” he groaned, “because if I can’t then we’ll either both be homeless, or we’ll both be dead.”

  Chapter 8

  “I feel like a bad late-night PSA, Mister Voivode,” Anthony Tybalt said as he took a sip from a small bottle of water, “but how do you not know where your own child is?”

  The voivode was too preoccupied with his own worry to pay much mind to the strange newcomer’s words. If he had, there was a strong possibility he’d have sent him and his many men and their black SUVs away and even considered putting a hex on the lot of them. But Analetta was gone and, stranger yet, so was Lash. And while Analetta’s absence was, all things considered, a painful convenience, her unexplained absence and the equally unexplained absence of the young man that had become something of a rising star within their camp reeked of something sinister.

  “You’re quite sure that neither of them are anywhere to be found?” he asked again.

  The answer remained the same.

  Behind him, Anthony Tybalt stood. “Where is your daughter, Mister Voivode?” he asked again, and the voivode realized how annoying repeated questions could be.

  “Now is not a good time, Mister Tybalt,” the voivode strained to sound calm around every instinct pushing him against it. “You and your…” he glanced back, taking in the expensively dressed men with their high-priced sunglasses, “friends should be getting on your way.”

  “Soon, Mister Voivode,” Anthony Tybalt said. “As soon as you tell me where we can find your daughter.”

  “Have you not been listening, sir? Have you not been paying attention?” the voivode demanded. “Since the moment you arrived—the very moment—it has been made more and more clear that no one knows where Analetta is. Now, forgetting that it is absolutely none of your business and that, while I’m quite curious as to your intentions, this all seems incredibly inappropriate, I’ll reserve all of my more demanding responses—none of them pleasant, believe me—and give you the same answer that you should have taken to heart hours ago. We do not know where Analetta is.”

  The air shifted around the camp as a silence fell upon them, one that seemed thick enough to choke on should any of them dare to breathe it in. Nobody breathed, though. None but Anthony Tybalt, who, after looking around the camp at the voivode’s advisors and elders, drew in a satisfied breath that seemed to taunt all those holding theirs.

  “Well then,” he raised his arms, palms out, in a broad, casual shrug. “I do believe we’re wasting your time then.” Turning away, he motioned to his men, who, all at once, turned and started at matching paces back to their SUVs. “I wish you well in the search for your wayward young man. Not so much for your daughter, though,” he glanced back and smirked, “but I think we both know why that would not be in anybody’s best interest. Adieu, Mister Voivode, and I do hope that this will be our last meeting. My repeat performances are so rarely as pleasant.”

  And then, like the sinking sun on the horizon, they slipped away and were gone. Leaving only darkness.

  “And good riddance, Anthony Tybalt,” the voivode spat the name—literally—and ground the bead of moisture into the desert sands to add to the insult.

  Tybalt’s waiting hand hung for nearly three seconds before the cell phone he needed was set into his palm. Spinning this so that the screen was facing him, he dragged his fingers in the thirteen point passkey pattern to unlock the device and selected the video—two minutes and thirty-three seconds worth—that had been recorded fifty-two minutes after their arrival to the Sybii camp. There were over a dozen phones like this one—each with their own sets of passkeys and each with over an hour’s worth of video from their time at the camp that afternoon—but this phone and this video, Tybalt knew, had the sole detail that might prove useful in tracking their wayward quarry.

  Tracking spells were such a timely and trivial affair, and he’d sooner avoid sacrificing one of his own men if he had the option.

  One minute and seventeen seconds into the selected video and he heard it. It was muffled, the speaker a bit further from the phone at the time of recording than Tybalt would have liked, and the amount of background noise was troublesome, as well. But it was there. One of the voivode’s crusty old yes-men muttering that the last time either of the sibyl teens had been seen was right before a trading caravan had left the camp.

  A caravan of mages, no less.

  “…say they headed north, off toward the nearest city…” the voice in the video repeated as Tybalt slid the timer bar back to listen to it again.

  “…toward the nearest city…”

  “…nearest city…”

  “‘Nearest’ isn’t near enough,” Tybalt sighed, handing the phone back to its owner and leaning forward by mere inches to address his driver. “North,” he instructed. “And have the men keep alert to any shifts in psychic wavelengths. They might be occupying a pocket.”

  “A pocket?” Ana repeated.

  The mage, who’d finally introduced himself as Aderyn, didn’t look up from the book he’d been scanning through as he nodded. “Mmhm,” he hummed, tracing his finger along the too-small writing on the too-large page. “It’s basically exactly what it sounds like, actually. There’s reality—the world that you and everyone else knows—which is a measurable area like the surface of…well, anything. Mages, however, can create pockets, some larger than others—obviously this one is quite large since we treat it as our own private city—and use them however they need.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ana shook her head, bewildered. “But you’re talking about pockets in reality as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, and I’m—”

  “Look,” Aderyn turned in his seat, “you’ve got a curse literally etched into your skin that was, according to you, not there yesterday; that has never been there until today. And, as it turns out, this mark is not only responsible for my immense headache—thanks again for that, by the way—my shredded car, and your inexplicable ability to waltz past mage security, but it’s somehow managing to present itself as an entirely independent series of thought processes that, if I’ve been hearing you correctly, seems eager to maim, murder, and otherwise manipulate with the same level of discretion as a fat kid locked in Willy Wonka’s personal candy stash.

  “In a very short time you’ve managed to break a lot of rules of magic, not the least of which being knocking me flat on my ass—which, though not exactly a rule, still shouldn’t have been as simple for you as it was—and, despite all of this, you actually want to talk to me about things that are har
d to believe? Well pardon the hell outta me, cursed sibyl-girl Analetta, but my peoples’ pockets is hardly the crown jewel of the weird shit I’m trying to wrap my brain around at this point in time. Now how’s about you explore those nifty little holes in your jeans—I think you’ll find the general principle somewhat similar to the phenomenon that’s got you so hung up right now—while I try to figure out how to fix that”—he pointed at Ana’s left arm—“so that maybe—should the blessings of the cosmos actually be working for us—we can get out of this nightmare with minimal pain and suffering.”

  Ana pursed her lips for a moment before stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans and looking away. “A simple ‘I’m busy’ wouldn’t’ve killed you, you know?”

  “And that would be one of the few things that wouldn’t kill me in this circumstance, I’m sure,” Aderyn groaned as he turned back to his book and began scanning through the page once again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Ana didn’t even try to hide her hurt feelings from her voice as she crossed her arms over her chest, mimicking the gesture that Aderyn had used earlier.

  This time, Aderyn didn’t turn to face her. “You ‘accidently’ threw me across the room and also ‘accidently,’ did that to my car.” He thumbed back toward the massacred automobile. Shaking his head, he said, “For a mage, spell-casting takes lots of energy—either taking a lot of time to build up safely or risking exhaustion or even injury to do it at once. Like you did.” He shook his head. “You didn’t have to even think to do it, though, and you certainly didn’t need to brace yourself. And, from the looks of things, it didn’t take a thing out of you. That’s not an accident, Analetta; that’s a child with her finger on a doomsday button. Worse yet, that power still has to be coming from somewhere, and if it’s not from you, then…” He shook his head again. “It’s not right, what you can do. To accidently wield that much power without any real control or repercussion is the sort of thing that gets people killed. Every moment I’m sitting here not finding a solution feels like a new moment that you might go sour again and start throwing me around the room again, and I have no guarantee that I’d survive, because it’s all an accident to you—you don’t even know how to turn it off. Magic isn’t supposed to work like that, but for you it suddenly does. It’s not right, and it’s not natural, and, quite frankly, it scares the hell outta me.”

  “You’re scared?” Ana’s vision was blurring with tears. “At least you understand some of this. Before today magic was a word to me. I knew it existed, sure, and I knew that there were some things in our camp that were magical in nature, but…I mean, I know what a television is, too, but that doesn’t mean if I woke up tomorrow and was told to go repair the things I’d come about it all naturally. And I only did that”—she motioned back at the car—“because I thought you were trying to kill me with that glowy ball-thing you had in your hand.”

  Aderyn laughed and shook his head. “That ‘glowy ball-thing’ was a sleeping spell. I figured it’d be easier to deal with you if you weren’t awake and carrying on and such—and, quite frankly, I still think that’d be true. Furthermore, the process of creating that did this to me.” He held up a hand and, though he was clearly trying to hold it still, Ana saw that it was trembling. “Still itches like crazy, too. You know, in case you’re interested,” he added before looking over his shoulder and challenging, “So, tell me, what did your concussive near-death spell take out of you?”

  Ana blushed and looked down.

  Nodding and letting out another laugh, Aderyn looked back at the book. “Thought so.” After another moment of scanning the page, he groaned, flipped through several more pages, cursed—a lot—and then slammed the book shut. “Like I thought, nothing. There’s no sign of anything that even remotely looks like that; nothing that even describes what you’re going through.”

  “What does that mean?” Ana asked, stepping over to him.

  Aderyn wiped his face and shrugged. “Either that you’ve been lying and this has all been some means to get into our pocket city—the ultimate ‘pickpocket’ setup, some might say—” he held up a hand to stop her as she began to protest that theory, “or, and this is what I personally believe, there’s no record of anything like this because nobody’s ever seen anything like it before.”

  Ana’s lip trembled at that. “What? What do you mean?”

  Sighing, Aderyn opened the book again and, after flipping through a few pages, opened it up to a page about a third of the way in. On the left page, though it was slightly faded, Ana saw several pictures of various objects—a necklace, a scepter, a pocket watch, a rune stone, a book, and a key. On the right page was more of the too-small writing. Aderyn pointed at a passage with his index finger, and, as Ana leaned in to read it, she found that the text was not only too-small, it was written in an unfamiliar language.

  “I don’t know what this says,” she confessed.

  Aderyn looked down at the alphabet for a moment before realizing that it was a fair source of confusion. “Sorry. It’s in Arabic. Guess I’ve gotten so used to reading it that I sometimes forget that others can’t.” He shrugged and leaned in to translate it for her. “Basically it describes the sort of spell that was on that ring I bought earlier.” He gestured toward the various objects illustrated on the opposite page. “Almost any object can be imbued with it, and, depending on the nature of the spell, it can either enhance magical potency or invert the effects. Obviously the ring was imbued with an inversion spell, which, because it reverses the intended purpose of other magic, deems it a curse to people. This entire chapter”—he gave the page a gentle pat with his palm as he looked up at Ana—“is dedicated to that kind of magic—spells that amplify, neutralize, or reverse other spells; magic that targets magic, in short—and, since that mark is, without question, amplifying magic within you to an unprecedented level, there should be something that at least addresses this type of spell or curse. But there isn’t.”

  Ana shook her head, frantic. “But why should that mean nobody’s seen anything like it before?”

  “Because this book exists to document every form of magic. Some of what’s mentioned is brief or obscure or even hypothetical, sure, but it’s at least there.”

  He nodded to the page again. “An item tainted with an inversion spell? There’s the solution.” He stabbed his finger at another passage in Arabic, and then flipped through the book at random. “A cure for an enchanted plague? Got it.” More flipping. “How to control minds, or how to escape having your mind controlled? Right here.” More flipping. “How to—ooh. This one might actually be useful.”

  He turned in his seat, rubbing his palms together before turning his topmost hand perpendicular against the bottom and muttering something under his breath. With a flash of light and a soft pop that Ana felt more inside her chest than heard within her ears, the torn and tortured car jumped—the ripped door of the trunk yanking free of the roof as if by a powerful magnet—and, in an instant, restored itself.

  Aderyn, looking suddenly pale and shaking, coughed out a weak-yet-triumphant laugh and then turned back to his desk. Resting on his elbows—he really did look so much more tired than before—he gave Ana a shrug in response to her worried look. “How to reverse damage to one’s belongings,” he said as though it explained how worn-out he suddenly looked.

  Then, breathing in deeply and seeming to shake some of the lagged appearance, he said, “It’s all in here, because it’s all things that mages have learned to control. But if I look through this book, I can guarantee that there’s no spell or incantation to use if somebody who isn’t a mage manages to slip into one of our pockets. I know this, because I’ve read this book cover-to-cover hundreds of times and,” he shrugged, “what you’ve done tonight is still boggling my mind. And if it’s not in here, then, even by the nearly unlimited mage standards, it’s considered impossible.”

  He leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. “So why wouldn’t your curse be in here? Becau
se either it’s not what you’ve been claiming—meaning you’d be lying, which I don’t think you are—and I’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Or it’s something that nobody, not even mages, has ever encountered before.”

  “But it is real. I’m cursed with this, and my people recognized it, so why wouldn’t yours have any record of it?” Ana asked, her voice cracking and coming out as a whisper.

  Aderyn looked up with a sympathetic-yet-stern gaze. “It sounds to me like you should spend less time blaming my people and more time blaming yours.”

  As if to punctuate his speech, a frantic barrage of banging started up again at Aderyn’s door. This time neither of the two had the energy to jump.

  “Ryn!” Tyler called from the other side. “You gotta get out here, man. They’re saying that a sibyl got through the pocket.”

  Aderyn’s eyes widened as the color drained from his face. “What? What makes them think that?” he called back.

  “Well, for starters,” they heard Tyler scoff from the other side of the door, “they caught him.”

  Ana and Aderyn shared a look.

  “Him?”

  Chapter 9

  Lash was way out of his element.

  After seeing Ana climb into the mage-punk’s car, he’d seen no other option but to follow. With the excitement around camp following the trading, he wasn’t sure that anybody else had even noticed her strange behavior and, should he have tried to go to someone about what he’d seen, there was no guarantee that they’d manage to get somebody on the road quickly enough to follow after the mages or ensure her safety. Though they were a mysterious lot, the mages weren’t the type to take kindly to finding an outsider hitching a ride without permission. This was, on the surface of his mind, at least, the driving thought that carried Lash as he worked his way into the backseat of one of the other mage’s cars and buried himself under a stack of several of his mother’s rugs. Concealed and nearly suffocating under the thick, finely woven mass, he’d found himself simultaneously thankful and resentful for his mother’s dedication to her craft.