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

by Margo Bond Collins

  Now if only she’d learn to work the thermostat with such dedication, he thought as the car rumbled to life and began to move, and I wouldn’t have to be replacing batteries before their time.

  All of this was, of course, only what existed on the surface of his mind at that time. He’d barely been aware of—nor was he ever really aware of—how his palms were sweaty at the repeated thought of Ana’s name, how he’d already mourned and rescued his friend over a dozen times in his mind, or how the homemade bracelet, woven from Ana’s own hair, that he worked with the fingers of his opposite hand seemed to calm all of it.

  Those buried-beneath-the-surface thoughts were, like always, not something he was willing to entertain.

  This had been about the wellbeing of his friend and, more importantly, a member of their camp.

  That was all.

  (Yeah right.)

  For quite some time he’d swollen his ego with heroic plots that were reinforced with his surface thoughts while he stayed off personal fantasies that wrapped themselves in the other thoughts as though they were blankets. Granted, they were warm thoughts; pleasant ones, even.

  No.

  He’d been dedicated and committed to what was best for Ana and for their people and, even as he stroked his bracelet absentmindedly, he would not be deterred from that focus. Even if he had to wield the Bowie knife at his calf—even if he had to use it—against an entire tribe of mages when they got to where they were going, he’d be—

  The sensation had been like crashing out of a hot summer’s day and into a frozen winter’s lake. One moment all was well and good—if not a little warm and stifling under all those rugs—and the next he felt the air in his lungs go still and every nerve in his body wailed. The air, as though the space between “back there” and “right here” had been the difference between Earth and the moon, was suddenly different. Wrong. Lash’s insides were frozen; his skin was on fire. He smelled through his eyes that his body was going wrong like rotting food, and in his nostrils he could hear every cell of his body pulling away from itself. White became black. Up was a long drop down. And life felt like dying over and over and over.

  And somehow, for whatever reason, he kept running the braided loop of Ana’s hair between his fingers.

  Then, feeling the familiar strands pass between his numbing digits, it was suddenly all gone.

  He’d made it through.

  At the time that had seemed such a strange way to think of it—“made it through”—but, more and more, it was beginning to make sense.

  Not that it making sense now was really going to help him in the long run.

  He was, after all, way out of his element.

  “Did you bring somebody else?” Aderyn demanded, feeling as though his heart was about to beat out of his chest.

  Analetta seemed insulted by the question. “Bring somebody? Do you realize how hard it was for me to bring myself to climb into your trunk?”

  “Then you’re denying it?”

  “Well of course I’m denying it.” She laughed nervously, “Because I did not bring anybody else.”

  “Then who in the hell is it that they’ve captured?”

  “How in the hell,” Analetta seemed to be working to match his tone but only managed to sound cartoonish for her effort, “am I supposed to know that?”

  “Son of a…” Aderyn began to pace around the limited space of his garage. “Another sibyl got in here. Two in one day? No. No. That’s not possible; not coincidence, at least. Not unless…” he glared back at her and turned on his heels, grabbing her by the shoulders. “You must know,” he accused, grabbing her arm and twisting it so that the mark was visible to them both. “Because this is how you got through, right? So it must be how you got them through.”

  Analetta yanked her arm away from him. “I don’t even know how I got myself in here, you conniving mage.”

  Aderyn paused at that, feeling a sting at the sibyl’s words—though more out of shock that she had said them and not what had been said—and realized, though unsure how, that she was telling the truth.

  Still breathing heavily from her outburst, Analetta seemed to hear something in the distance before shivering and looking down, blinking rapidly.

  “What is it?” Aderyn asked, finding himself reaching for her before forcing himself to drop his hands to his sides.

  “The…” Analetta seemed to wrestle with the next word before deciding on one. “The voice in my head—it’s saying that it only allowed me through.”

  “Well that’s clearly not the case,” Aderyn said, shaking his head. “So the voice is lying to you.”

  Analetta flinched and grabbed at her head, whimpering in pain. “I-it isn’t. It isn’t lying. It isn’t,” she cried out.

  As he watched her, Aderyn realized that she seemed to be saying this not to convince him but, rather, to appease whatever it was that was causing her the pain.

  Is this curse holding her hostage? he thought before finally stepping forward, setting a hand on her shoulder, and saying, “It’s okay. I believe you.”

  Though the heavy breathing and pained whimpers continued, whatever had been plaguing Analetta lifted at that moment. Slumping under the weight of the pain, Aderyn had to catch her before she outright crashed to the ground. Then, helping her to his desk chair, he began to think.

  “Sometimes,” he finally said, “when a mage is inviting another into their pocket, they’ll offer the other some personal effect—a piece of jewelry or something of that sort—that helps the other through. If your curse, this magic force or whatever it is, somehow was able to grant you passage through our pocket, maybe this other sibyl was carrying something on him that was personal to you; something that ‘tricked’ the pocket into seeing them as an extension of you.”

  “Would that really work?” Analetta asked.

  Aderyn shrugged. “In theory, I suppose,” he answered. “This is all uncharted territory, to be fair, but there certainly seems to be another sibyl that’s gotten in and only one real explanation for how that’s possible.”

  Analetta considered this and sighed, leaning forward and resting her arms against her knees.

  “So,” Aderyn knelt down and worked to lock his gaze with hers, “do you know anybody who might have something of yours that might have let them through?”

  She shook her head, and Aderyn knew she was telling the truth.

  Nodding, he stood and moved toward one of his desk drawers. “Then I’ll have to go see for myself,” he said, opening and retrieving something from the drawer. “Here,” he moved to secure a small leather charm around her wrist, “keep this on while I’m out, okay?”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s me,” Aderyn explained. “Well, my essence, at least. A bit of hair, skin, tears, my magic.” He shrugged and repeated “It’s me.”

  “But why is it calming down the dark thoughts?” she asked, her features already beginning to look brighter.

  Aderyn stared at her for a long moment. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t be doing that, really; it’s only meant to keep you hidden and safe from any mage detection spells while I’m gone.”

  Analetta blushed and looked down at it. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” Aderyn rubbed the back of his neck. “Guess mage magic calms down your curse, though,” he forced a chuckle and hurried to turn away. “Good to know. Guess we’re lucky to have figured that much out.”

  Analetta’s voice sounded uncertain behind him. “Guess so.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  A whip that appeared to be made of pure light crashed down on Lash’s chest moments after he was shoved to the ground. Blinding pain exploded around the brightness, and what appeared to be made of pure light proved to feel as hot and unforgiving as the sun, itself. Vision returned—slowly—and Lash more felt than saw that his shirt was torn open halfway down and a searing, red gash had been opened from the top of his left shoulder to the bottom corner of his right ribs. Instinct
ively he reached to touch the wound and, though his fingers met the familiar sting and tackiness of an open wound, he found that there was no blood.

  “H-how?” he stammered, more asking his own body than anybody else.

  The mage wielding the whip answered, however. “Cauterizes the wounds as it makes them,” he said, his voice carrying a great deal of pride in that fact. “But you’ll learn all about it.” Raising the whip for another strike, he bellowed, “How did you get in here?”

  “The car.” Lash was looking away—eyes clenched against the pain and light alike—and his hands held above him in an effort to protect himself. “The car,” he repeated, “the damn car. Gods alive and perished, you found me there. What sort of question is—”

  The whip was gone from the mage’s hand. This fact, sudden as it was, proved itself more by the suddenly empty palm raising and, with it, yanking Lash off the ground and holding him there, his feet dangling several feet from where he’d been lying a moment earlier. Then, with the first hand still raised—still “holding” him in place—the mage’s free hand rose. What started off empty was, by the time it had completed the journey toward its owner’s chest, suddenly occupied by a dagger-shaped beam of light that was aimed for Lash.

  “Let me guess,” Lash groaned at the sight of the magic-born weapon, “that’ll cauterize wounds, too?”

  “You think?” the mage sneered up at him.

  Lash sucked in a breath of air, wincing as his inflating lungs stretched his chest and, with it, the wound. “Fast learner,” he grumbled around the pain.

  “Doubtful,” the mage answered, squeezing his free hand and smirking as Lash whimpered at the crushing sensation it created within him. “A fast learner would’ve learned to watch his tongue and answer what he’s been asked. A fast learner”—he squeezed tighter with his holding hand and wagged the light-dagger with the other—“would not tempt me to think of ways to get that answer.”

  Lash glared at him, struggling to say “I already told you, I got here in the car you found me in,” around both his wound and the crushing in his lungs.

  “Do you think it wise to mock me?” the mage roared, squeezing his open hand tighter as, with a flexing of his left arm, he extended the light-dagger into something far longer and more deadly.

  A crowd of other mages had begun to form around them, whispering to one another and seeming to take some satisfaction in the torment their colleague was putting Lash through.

  “…shouldn’t even be possible.”

  “What do you think he was here to…”

  “…magic in those…”

  “…out quickly and kill him.”

  Then, among the whispers and jeers, Lash heard something that cut him even deeper than the mage’s light-born weapons.

  “Are there others? They should all meet the same fate.”

  Then they didn’t know that Analetta was there, as well? She’d somehow remained hidden?

  Lash flinched.

  Until now, that was.

  He’d given them reason to suspect others; reason to search for them; reason to find her.

  Had he just condemned Analetta to death?

  “I came alone,” he cried out, hoping to cease any efforts and buy Analetta the time she’d need to escape these people.

  “That,” the mage scowled and shook his head, “is a suspicious confession at best. Moreover, it is not the confession I am asking for.” He raised the light-sword and pressed the tip to Lash’s belly, letting the immense heat sear through the intact portion of his shirt and begin to burn the skin beneath it. “Now,” he spoke slowly, sounding like an increasingly impatient adult demanding, for the last time, an answer from a wayward child, “how did you get here?”

  Lash blinked and looked around, trying to get a better idea of where “here” was.

  It looked like any other city, he supposed—not that he was well-versed in exploring them; only ever having passed through them or taken brief excursions within them for specific needs—but something about it seemed off. The buildings, for one, all looked the same, not only in architecture, but right down to the very structure and setup. As though somebody had seen three buildings that they particularly liked, recreated them dozens of times over, and built an entire city out of them. And while streetlights burned brightly all around them, there didn’t seem to be any other source of light. Even the lights that shone from the buildings didn’t seem to stretch beyond the glass of the windows. It was as if they were painted, as if no rooms actually existed beyond them.

  And then Lash saw the sky.

  Or rather he saw what should have been the sky.

  It was black.

  Nothingness.

  He’d seen many forms of night in his life. Along with the rest in their camp, he’d slept under many different scopes of the sky. He’d seen the inky darkness adorned with starlight so bright it seemed to challenge the daytime light; seen a sky so devoid of anything but the milk-stain moon that he’d thought the heavens had died; he’d even seen the Aurora Borealis. Lash felt confident that, though he was young, he’d seen enough breeds of the night sky to at least recognize it when it was there.

  But there was no sky above him. The world—or at least the “here” that he’d somehow found himself in—was skyless. He couldn’t even trust the ground he’d been lying on moments earlier. Lash trembled, doubting everything around him. And then he remembered the moment in the back of the mage’s car when everything had gone wrong.

  …“made it through”…

  Suddenly the strange thought he’d had earlier made sense—but the question still demanded an answer.

  “I don’t know,” he cried, looking down at the mage who still held him aloft. “God help me, I don’t know how I got here.”

  “I might,” a voice called up from the back of the crowd that had formed.

  Lash strained to see the speaker as the group of mages shifted to allow them through, and the mage that held him turned, his light-sword vanishing as his hand dropped to his side.

  “Aderyn?” he said.

  Lash recognized the boy that Analetta had hurried after back at the camp; the boy whose car she’d snuck into when she thought nobody was watching.

  “You,” he heard himself whisper distantly and instantly wondered why.

  The first mage glared back at him, sneering, and then steered it toward the other mage—Aderyn—and growled, “You recognize this sibyl? He certainly seems to recognize you.”

  “Maybe because I’m one of the only mages that was present at the camp not borrowing their look from the 1920s, William,” he said with a sigh before stepping past and gazing up absently at Lash as though he was nothing but a piece of wall art he didn’t quite agree with. “Now put him down. He’s asphyxiating, and if you’re unsatisfied with his answers now I doubt you’ll be happy with them after he’s passed out.” He glanced back, cocking a brow. “Or would you rather choke him to death? Because there’s easier ways to do that.”

  With an angry snarl, the mage called William dropped his other hand to his side.

  Lash hadn’t even realized how long he’d gone without breathing, but, after crashing to the ground—it was a ground, wasn’t it?—he found himself fighting his own coughing fits to suck in as many breaths as possible. No matter how much air he drew in, however, it all felt as nonexistent as the sky.

  “You’d better get hold of yourself, sibyl,” Aderyn called down to him. Then, crouching down and sending a death glare at him that, for some reason, didn’t seem to meet his eyes, the mage added in a whisper that only Lash could hear. “Because Analetta’s not going to be happy with me if I let you die.”

  Hearing her name, Lash’s sense of what was real and what wasn’t became a distant concern, and his hand moved on its own to the bracelet of her hair at his wrist. Following the motion, Aderyn’s gaze came to rest on the object. His widened.

  “Well,” he mused, raising an eyebrow, “that explains it.”

  Chapter 10<
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  “I’d hardly say that explains any of this,” William spat at Aderyn, who only blinked against the barrage of spittle. With the older mage still panting with frustration and rage, his eyes darted between his younger colleague and the trespassing sibyl. “I mean, a bracelet? Really? Do you or do you not know what this is all about?”

  “I said I might know,” Aderyn defended before glancing down at the sibyl, whose face was finally beginning to shift to a healthier shade than chilled-blue. “Though, judging from the look of things, that’s still more than you or anybody else seem to know.”

  William seemed to grow a few inches taller at that. “I am not the only one who has had enough of your arrogance, Aderyn. Brash, conceited, constantly isolated.” He shook his head. “Do you think we don’t notice, or that we won’t care? Whether it’s your intention to insult us or defy us, we are not certain, but—”

  “And who is ‘us,’ William?” Aderyn demanded, rolling his wrist counterclockwise and reversing the growth spell, bringing him back to his regular height.

  Reeling from having his effort so easily reversed, William resorted to glaring. “Everyone, boy. Everyone has been growing more and more uncertain about you and your dedication to our—”

  “Before you go questioning dedication, man,” Aderyn rose over William as he cast the same spell that he’d tried against him moments earlier, “I suggest you ask yourself which of us has spent more time flexing and which has spent more time strengthening.” With that, he cast the very same light spell that William’s weapon constructs had been built of, willing it to surround his body until he stood nearly a foot taller and shining like a small sun over the stunned mage.

  “Enough of this!” a familiar voice boomed and, all at once, Aderyn’s height and light-armor were gone.

  Seeing that the situation was escalating to more than sheer curiosity was willing to hold over them, the onlookers quickly dispersed. Though all wanted to know the details surrounding the sibyl, the rising threat of infighting between two of their own and the arrival of the almaealij alkabir, the great wizard and exalted leader of their people, was a good sign that sticking around was not in their best interests. As the crowd dispersed, all offered their bows—an awkward and hurried gesture as they were doing so while fleeing the scene—and praise to the old man, who, despite his obvious years, moved with a catlike grace toward the three.