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

by Margo Bond Collins

  Aderyn cocked his head and, flicking his thumb across the side of his index finger, made a show of making Lash slip on nothing. “That’s why not,” he offered as he chuckled again—this time sounding more in control—and moved to help him back up.

  Tyler moved to follow him. “So if you’re not kidnapped, then why are you out here? I mean, you just left the city. In the middle of the night. While everyone was asleep.” He glanced over. “With them.”

  Aderyn frowned and nodded. “Yeah, Ty. I was banished.”

  “Banished?” Ana thought the Tyler-mage was about to choke on the word. “Like, banished-banished? Like banished, as in like-your-old-man type of banished? That sort of banished?”

  Aderyn gave him a hard look. “You know of many other kinds of banishment?”

  “No, I guess not,” Tyler confessed, looking back at the others. “So what do they have to do with it.”

  “Everything,” Aderyn chuckled again, then shrugged. “And nothing.”

  “Making as much sense as ever, I see,” his friend shook his head. “But at least you seem to be laughing more.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Aderyn nodded toward Ana. “That’s ’cuz of her.”

  “What’s she got to do with it?” Tyler asked, then his eyes widened. “Oh, are you two, like…” he nudged his shoulder against Aderyn and winked. “Y’know?”

  Aderyn stared at him.

  Ana blushed deeply.

  Lash sneered and shook his head.

  “You ever seen her around before?” Aderyn asked.

  “Umm.” Tyler studied Ana a bit and then shook his head. “No, I think I’d remember somebody like that.”

  “Right. Sort of hard, right? Her not being one of us and us, you know, living in our city—the city she couldn’t get in—right?”

  Tyler nodded. “Right, man. What’s your point?”

  Aderyn stared at him again. “How in the hell could we be doing anything then?” he finally asked.

  “Oh, right,” Tyler chuckled. “Guess that was pretty stupid, huh?”

  Lash blinked and glanced at Aderyn. “This is what can pass for a mage? How is it that he—WHOA!”

  With a motion similar to Aderyn’s, Tyler interrupted Lash and sent him slipping again.

  “Aderyn gets to make fun of me, got it, sibyl?” Tyler glared down at him, his dangerous bulk seeming to double to remind them that he was still not somebody to be messed with.

  Lash growled and shook his head. “This is a cute reunion and all, really, but there are folks on the roof over there that we think are trying to kill us. Is there any way we can continue this elsewhere?”

  Both Tyler and Aderyn glanced over their shoulders toward the building, their gazes targeting the source simultaneously and their bodies going rigid.

  “Weird,” Lash muttered.

  “Cool,” Ana admired.

  The two mages turned and gave one another a nod before starting around the pawn shop and away from the building.

  “When you’re right you’re right, Lash,” Aderyn said, patting him on the back. “They’ve got psychics and snipers up there. Don’t think they’re hunting for juice-stand mascots, either.”

  Ana’s eyes widened. “You don’t think they’re—”

  “Yes,” Aderyn said, grabbing her hand and pulling her along with Tyler not far behind. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  Lash was quick to hurry after, while Tyler called to Aderyn with “So why are you so giggly then?”

  Chapter 15

  “Whoa. Hold up there, home slice.” Tyler grabbed Aderyn’s shoulder and held him back while the others passed. He waited, holding the old, wooden door to the shop built into the basement of the crumbling building set dead-center in the arts district of the city before letting Aderyn through with him tagging close behind. “You’re telling me that the almaealij alkabir banished you because some cursed sibyl managed to slip through the pocket’s defenses in your car? It’s not like you knew she was in there, right?”

  “No, of course not,” Aderyn shook his head. “But I didn’t kill her when I did find out. And I was already working to help her when you showed up to mention the other one. And I stopped William from killing her friend when he found him in his car. And I wasn’t going to regret any of it or change my mind, either.”

  “And that gets you banished?” Tyler asked.

  Aderyn shrugged. “Rightfully so. I mean, if you’re not part of the solution, yaddah yaddah yaddah, you know the rest.”

  Tyler narrowed his eyes at him. “No. I don’t know the rest.”

  “Never mind,” Aderyn shook his head and followed Lash and Ana into the Library. He’d already explained to them to keep a low profile and avoid any areas that had many people in it. Luckily, looking around, he saw that there weren’t many there, and those few were preoccupied. “Watch my back, okay?”

  “Always,” Tyler said; the smirk he wore could be heard on his voice.

  “What?” Aderyn demanded, looking over his shoulder. “I know that voice. What are you thinking?”

  “Dude,” Tyler’s grin only widened. “You were laughing when I pulled up.”

  “So?” Aderyn challenged.

  “You never laugh. Like, ever,” Tyler pointed out before nodding ahead to Ana, who was a good ways into the shelves at the other side of the room, vacantly perusing the old, dusty volumes. “But a few hours with her and you’re—”

  “It’s not like that,” Aderyn defended, shaking his head. “She saved my life.”

  Tyler’s brow raised at that. “She saved you?”

  Aderyn nodded. “That curse she has—the magic that allowed her and the other one through the barrier—is, like, some psycho’s version of an amplification spell. It has—get this—no limits. She can keep casting and casting and casting, doesn’t even need to know the mechanics or nature behind the spell. She subconsciously got herself through the barrier, Ty; didn’t even realize her friend had gotten through, too. Think how much focus that’d take somebody who actually knew what they were doing. It’d put them in a coma if it didn’t kill them. But her? She simply”—he snapped his finger—“got her and her buddy through. Even had enough energy after to throw me across my garage and rip the trunk off my car. All without even getting winded.”

  “Okay.” Tyler stared off, blinking at all this new information. “I’m going to forget the part about your car getting totaled, ’cuz it looked fine when I was tailing you guys. I mean, not so much when I found you, but…well, whatever. Still, how’d she save you then? And why would you be laughing?”

  Aderyn folded his arms. “I was banished, Ty; I’m cut off from the communal magic pool. And when we came through the pocket, the defenses practically flipped the damn car. Naturally I fixed the thing then and there, and…” he shrugged, “I guess I didn’t have much left in the tank, ’cause the act sapped everything I had. My system started to seize—could barely keep my heart beating and my lungs working—and I—” he stopped, remembering the single burst of light that everyone had mistook for lightning shortly after their arrival—“I nearly died right then and there. Then a mage got close enough to keep me going.” He chuckled and gave his friend a playful punch. “You came through in the nick of time, buddy.”

  “I did?” Tyler looked up at him.

  Aderyn frowned, realizing it hadn’t been intentional.

  “I mean,” Tyler adjusted himself to look more confident, “I did.”

  “Nice try, Ty,” Aderyn shook his head and walked past. “Anyway, I was still pretty out of it, and the sibyl-girl, Ana, she found a way to let me piggyback on her curse’s bottomless well of magic potential.” He shrugged and looked back, “Guess it packed a bit of a punch, ‘cuz that’s what blew the windows out of the car and made all the mess that you drove into, but I came out of it feeling great.”

  Tyler frowned and chewed his lip for a moment. “But it’s a curse, Ryn. You sure it’s a good idea to be drawing energy from something like that.”

&n
bsp; “Better than being dead, Ty,” Aderyn defended.

  Tyler didn’t look so sure.

  “Look, man, it’s not like I’m thrilled with the way things are going, okay?” Aderyn wasn’t sure if he was agitated with the way Tyler was looking or the way things were going, but he was prepared to defend against either. “Back there, I was miserable,” he paused, realizing how right it felt to finally admit it to somebody. So he repeated “I was miserable,” before sighing, then he said, “I never felt right with them. You I got along with.” He chuckled and gave his friend a look, “Which I suppose says a lot right there, doesn’t it? That somebody got along with Tyler—the ‘hey, who wants to arm wrestle’-guy—should probably have been a dead giveaway.”

  Tyler laughed at that and shrugged. “To a lot of them, it was. I never told you, but a lot of them started asking me to talk to you about, y’know, being a part of things and whatnot.”

  Aderyn looked back at him. “They did? Then why did you never say anything?”

  “Because then you’d have probably listened. Then you’d be exactly like them,” Tyler said as though it was the simplest thing in the world, his hands running along the spines of a few of the journals that were on the shelves beside him. Shrugging, he glanced up and added, “I didn’t want to lose my friend.”

  Aderyn worked to swallow the lump in his throat. You already have. He gave him a nod and said, “I appreciate that.”

  Tyler shrugged. “Hey, man, who else is gonna get me the way you do, right?” He laughed and patted his shoulder. “Not like there’s anybody else out there I’d have taken the risk of coming out here for.”

  Stopping at that, Aderyn glanced back. “Hey, how did you see us leaving in the first place? The almaealij alkabir said he put the entire city under a sleep spell; assured us everybody was out cold and wouldn’t anything.”

  “The almaealij alkabir cast a…?” Tyler cocked his head for a moment, thinking. Then, with a grin birthing itself across his face, he laughed and nodded. “That’d explain why my grandpa was passed out on the kitchen counter.” Shrugging, Tyler pulled out one of the journals—“Enchanting Concubines to Pass the Time: A Study of Eroticism and its links to Chronology Manipulation”—and flipped to a random page. Tilting the book to one side and ogling whatever was inside, he finally said, “Sleeping spells won’t work on me. Not after you caught me in that one spell and I passed out in Cindy Larson’s lap on our first and only date. Granted, it was a good one—you got me good there—but afterwards I spent three days working on an inversion spell that’d keep that sort of thing from happening to me again.” He flipped through a few more pages, his eyes looking like they might pop out of his skull as he did, before shifting uncomfortably and putting the journal away. “So when I heard your car start up and head out, I took a gander out the window, saw the two Sybii in your back seat, and…well, I’m sure a smart guy like you can plug in the rest.”

  Aderyn stared at him for a long moment.

  Tyler shifted uncomfortably again, clearly not sure what to make of this.

  Finally, Aderyn crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow. “You worked an inversion spell to counter the almaealij alkabir’s magic?”

  “What do you think of all this?” Lash whispered.

  Ana looked at him for a moment then back toward Aderyn and his friend. Between them was what felt like miles and miles of books that contained, from what Aderyn had said, some of mages’ most powerful spells and detailed secrets. Somewhere on those shelves was the possible solution to her curse. On the other hand, any of the mages occupying that place might recognize them as not belonging there.

  Also, as Lash had pointed out, there appeared to be someone with a lot of manpower, magic, and weaponry out to kill them. Out to kill her, to be specific.

  What did she think of all this?

  We are so royally screwed.

  While they weren’t exactly her thoughts, they weren’t wrong, either.

  “What do I think about what?” she asked instead. “Which part, I mean?”

  Lash shrugged. “Any of it, I guess. The mage for starters?”

  Ana glanced back at the two again. “Which one?”

  “Take your pick,” Lash muttered. “Aderyn’s been acting out of it since you did whatever it was you did. The other guy…” he shook his head, “I’m not sure what to make of him. I thought all the other mages were supposed to be asleep. That’s what the old guy said, at least.”

  “You think the almaealij alkabir lied then?” Ana looked back at him.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t say that. Just said that, according to him, they should’ve all been asleep.”

  Ana shook her head. “I’m not about to try to make sense of all this magic stuff. The only magic I’m interested in is whatever magic can take this magic off of me,” she raised her left arm enough to refer to the mark.

  “Does it hurt?” Lash asked.

  The question, though a simple one, came as a shock to Ana, who’d only been responding to the mark and the magic it possessed based on what everybody else had been saying. Between the phuri dai’s initial reaction, the chaos between her father and his advisors, her impending banishment, and the almaealij alkabir’s “bad magic” speech, she’d had no reason to think anything more about it than “get rid of it.” But it hadn’t hurt her at all. Not once. It had reacted in an effort to save her father; it had worked to save her life; and it had stopped what she’d believed to be an attack on her life. With the exception of the violent thoughts—which, though annoying, she’d managed to stifle and suppress—it didn’t really seem to be the awful nightmare that everyone was making it out to be. In fact…

  Unlimited power that answered to her and turned every desire into a reality?

  Sure, that could be an awful danger in the wrong hands, but Ana had never wanted to bring harm to anybody. She’d never wanted to take anything or have control over anyone. She’d never even wanted recognition for any of the work she’d done. In the right hands—her hands—the power could do great things; she could cure disease, reverse disasters, and bring good fortune to those in need. She’d already saved Aderyn, after all, and even his own friend said he’d never looked better.

  “No,” she finally admitted, glancing down at the spot where the edge of the mark showed from under the sleeve of her shirt. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

  Aderyn struggled between working to hurry back to Ana and Lash without making a show out of it and getting them discovered in the process. It was, with everything on his mind pushing him to hurry, not an easy task. Even his calls of “Ana. Ana!” were tolling struggles, forcing him to be loud enough to be heard by her while being quiet enough to not be heard by anybody else. Behind him, giving him nervous reminders every few seconds that it was in their better interest to move slowly and quietly, Tyler followed.

  Finally, Ana looked up toward him. Her own worried face gave away that she, too, shared Tyler’s concern. Lash looked, well, like Lash: perpetually angry.

  Aderyn was beginning to wonder if maybe Ana’s magic was having an adverse effect on him.

  This thought, however, came upon him as he heard somebody a short distance away mutter, “Hey, should they be here?”

  “Sir, we’ve found them. They’re—”

  “I’ll track you. Don’t waste any more time. Get in there and do your damn job.”

  “Sir, yes sir.”

  Tybalt liked to consider himself a patient man. Granted, there were those whose definitions of “patience” likely differed from his own, and, yes, it was fair to say that most probably didn’t measure patience in nanoseconds or consider quick deaths over slow and painful ones as evidence of one being patient. Moreover, there were plenty who would argue that, patient or not, Tybalt hadn’t fit the role of a “man” in quite some time. Semantics and codes of morality and ethics aside, though, Tybalt had been patient. It had taken nearly an entire day to cross half the country and, after that, hours to pinpoint the loc
ation of a couple of teenagers.

  And a fourth teenager had somehow managed to further delay the operation?

  Unacceptable.

  Tybalt was a patient man, but that patience had run out.

  There would be a death in the next few minutes, and if it wasn’t one of theirs—preferably the anomaly—then he would, by his own hands, pay the toll with one of his.

  Well this is getting interesting.

  This is not interesting. This is awful.

  The Library had turned into a warzone in a matter of seconds. One moment somebody was asking about Ana and Lash—even seeming to do so in a quiet and polite tone—and the next there was chaos, screaming and gunfire and explosions and bursts of magic that threatened to take the entire building down.

  “Is this what your people do if somebody tries to sneak in?” Lash shouted as the four ducked behind a stack of books.

  If so, bonus points to the mages, huh?

  Stop it.

  “Not that I know of, but, admittedly, I haven’t been here in quite some time,” Aderyn said, not seeming to notice the noise around him—was he actually grinning?—as he worked to peek over the top of the shelf. Seeing this, Tyler yanked his friend back down, the surface of the shelf bursting into splinters as somebody leveled a weapon their way. Seeing the spot that his head had occupied moments earlier explode like that earned a chuckle and he glanced back at Tyler. “Good looking out, buddy.”

  Pretty boy’s got a death wish. We should probably kill all those guys, huh?

  No. No killing.

  “What’s with you, man?” Tyler demanded. “There’s being giggly and then there’s being wrong? What is that sibyl’s curse doing to you?”

  “You’d better not be implying that Ana did this on purpose,” Lash growled, moving his hand toward his Bowie sheath.

  Tyler, seeing this, tensed, and his shirt swelled as the muscles under it flexed.

  If we don’t kill those guys then these guys might kill each other.