Magic Blaze: an Urban Fantasy Novel (Shifting Magic Book 3)

by Catherine Vale

  A chill raced down my spine at the eerie calmness in his tone.

  To me, Aden had never been more frightening than in that moment. Utter serenity. Calmness. Not a tremor in sight, either in his voice or his hands.

  I knew that if he could have it his way, he would have ripped Jasmine to pieces with his bare hands.

  “Wait.” He had already started to disappear, spires of black and blue fog rising around him. I caught the sob before it left my throat, swallowing it with some difficulty. “Take Darius. She hit him with the artifact… Take him somewhere safe.”

  We both looked in my dragon’s direction, and I found him in human form. His left arm was a bloody, mangled mess—the forearm and wrist twisted a completely different direction from his bicep and shoulder, his skin shredded. He appeared to be trying to get up, to find his footing, and to watch him struggle—it broke me.

  “Please,” I pleaded. Jasmine was also clambering to her feet, and it wouldn’t take much from her to knock him down again. “Aden, I’m begging you…”

  The djinn disappeared in a cloud of dark smoke, a smoke that shot over to Jasmine, knocked her over again—hard, from the grunt she made—then sped to Darius. My dragon tried to swat it away with his good arm, shouting for me, but the smoke quickly consumed him.

  Then disappeared. Darius. Aden. Marie. All gone. I pressed my wounded finger harder against the protection stone, moving shakily to my feet. There was no one left on the mountaintop but Jasmine and me—and that was just the way I wanted it.

  The irritated fae pushed herself up, dusting the flecks of mountain from her hands, then wrestled herself out of her too-tight leather trench coat. Beneath, she wore a black tank-top and black leather pants. Her boots appeared military-grade, perhaps lined with lead for stomping on her enemies. But in that moment, she looked small. Abramelin had oozed power. When I saw him on the battlefield, battling multiple enemies with ease, I had known he was the kingpin behind everything. He was the puppet master, a god among men—all that crap. Jasmine was just… ordinary. Deranged, sure, but she wasn’t a god.

  Nowhere close.

  Destruction artifact clutched in her tight fist, she paced back and forth for a moment, looking very much like a caged animal—some uncontrollable wild thing. I had to give her that. She paled in comparison to Abramelin as the leader of this rebellion against the established order, but she radiated primal, raw energy.

  “Fucking… djinns,” she snapped, her hands trembling as she stalked to the edge of the mountain. With her back to me, I thought her foolish, but as my essence poured out into the protection artifact, I realized she was right to leave me to myself. In my effort to save the others, I was doing her job for her. I loosened my grasp on the artifact, hoping it was almost charged, and then willed a sliver of white magic to close the wound—but not heal it. I suspected I’d need it again soon.

  I drew a soft breath, deciding to take one short moment to offer her an out. “Jasmine, you—”

  “You might have protected your people,” she said, her voice carrying on the wind, “but mine outnumber yours. In time, their protection from the artifact will fade, and I will cut them down… one by one.”

  “You don’t have to,” I argued, but my words lacked conviction. Jasmine had made up her mind. A part of me wondered if I was only saying this, going through the motions, so I’d have no regrets when this was all over. Jasmine whipped around, her expression suggesting I’d insulted her. I shook my head. “That isn’t the way this all has to end. We can stop it. We can bring peace to the supernatural world once and for all. You are not your uncle.”

  “No,” she sneered, her ice blue eyes narrowing, “I am not. I know not to underestimate you. I will not be butchered by my own weapon. They all worship his memory, but I would never be so stupid.”

  Right. So much for extending the olive branch. I exhaled softly and placed the protection artifact in my pocket, zipping it closed to ensure I wouldn’t lose the precious stone.

  “I saw your worthless half-brother down there,” she admitted, stalking toward me like a predatory cat. “When I’m finished with you, I’m going to show him your broken body, whatever’s left of it, so that will be his last memory before he dies.”

  I knew she wanted me to think about Zayne—and, by extension, everyone who mattered to me out there on the battlefield. My father was somewhere in the skies, fending off gargoyles and dodging witch hexes. Leda and Hudson, the siblings I’d only just started to connect with, would be alongside him, fighting a war they wouldn’t have even been involved in if it wasn’t for me. Catriona. Quinn. Darius’s youngest brother, Hayden. All of them. Jasmine wanted to use my love, my friends, against me.

  But not today.

  I squared my shoulders, holding her cold stare as my hands hummed with magic. I could practically hear my inner voice smirking, if she had a face, a low rumble emanating from the depths of my soul. My very own battle cry. My very own dragon’s roar.

  “Are you ready, mongrel?” Jasmine demanded, bursts of neon light surging from her palms and wrapping up her arms. She cocked her head to the side, waiting, and I rolled my eyes.

  “Fuck you, Jasmine.” I called on whatever power I had left in me, ignoring how utterly drained I already felt from giving my life’s blood to protect the others. I could bounce back. I could do this. I could beat her. “This ends today.”

  “With you,” she growled before hurling all the energy she had building in her hands at me. Rather than forming a magical shield, I just ducked and rolled, feeling the heat of the magic, feeling the hate of it, grazing across my back. While the warmth made my heartbeat quicken, the magic didn’t hold. Instead, it slammed into the stone walkways between Darius’s home and his alpha hall, throwing chunks of gray and black up and leaving an enormous crater in its place. Jasmine fired again and again, and I found myself leaping, rolling, dodging, and calling on my fae speed to avoid the blows. While tiring, I knew I’d drain myself more producing a shield. With how I was feeling, conservation was key.

  At the sound of her shriek of frustration, I seized the moment and fired off several curses whose only purpose was to cut, slice, and maim. Although I usually preferred to simply render an opponent unconscious, Jasmine would find a way to keep sticking her fucking bigoted nose in my life, one way or another, whether she was imprisoned or not.

  The only way to stop Jasmine was to permanently silence her hate.

  It didn’t sit well with me, but when I thought back on all the vile things she had said about my loved ones, about how she had captured and drained a child, I knew I’d be able to deliver the final blow when the time came.

  While she deflected most of my magic, one sliver of a slicing curse managed to slip through her defenses and leave a nasty cut along her cheekbone. She lifted a quivering hand to it, her eyes narrowing at the smear of blood on her fingers before zeroing in squarely on me.

  “We don’t have to do this, Jasmine,” I told her. “We can end this without killing each other.”

  “You took my uncle,” she spat, and I barely managed to avoid the trio of bright pink hexes she sent me way, rapid-fire and scarily accurate. The third clipped my shoulder—like a rogue bullet, the magic seemed to pass right through me, and I gasped through the searing pain. Jasmine remained uncharacteristically quiet after the hit; I would have expected her to gloat. Instead, she just stared at me, her cheeks flushed. “You killed him like he was a human. No magic. No sorcery. Just a knife. You gutted him and left him to die.”

  “He was strangling me,” I choked out, and we engaged in a familiar dance for a few moments: spells and curses zinging back and forth between us, most missing, some colliding in the middle and exploding in a firework display of color and crackling power. When we both ceased fire, seemingly at the same time, I tried to catch my breath. “If I hadn’t done something, I’d be dead. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “Of course, I can,” she spat, her voice cracking, “because then he’d still
be alive—”

  “And thousands of innocent people would be slaughtered!”

  “Shifters aren’t people,” Jasmine stated, a sick sense of finality in her tone. “Neither are hybrids. The world would be a better place without them. I’m not sure where that traitorous djinn took Darius, but when I’m finished with you and your mongrel-sympathizing half-brother, I’m going to skin that dog alive for all his clan to see. A fitting ending to an enormous waste of space, I think.”

  “You,” I growled, my whole body quivering—the skittering feeling of movement under my skin returning as a rush of heat washed over me, “are never going to touch him again.”

  A vision of Darius in that blood-soaked field, crawling for safety yet dying alone, flashed across my mind. This time, Jasmine’s cruel laughter surrounded it, pervaded it, and my knees buckled. I fell forward with a cry, my hands slamming down against the mountain.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jasmine snapped. “I haven’t done anything yet. Or is that mongrel brain of yours finally turning on itself?”

  Something in my brain was clicking into place, something slow and dusty, new and unused. I blinked hard, trying to fight my momentarily shrouded vision, as adrenaline pounded through my body. My palms turned clammy. My heart hammered against its confinement, and for a few seconds there, I felt like I was about to die. Rushing, pulse-pounding anxiety ripped through me, akin to that of the worst panic attack I’d ever experienced—compounded. I cried out again at the sight of something slithering beneath my skin, creeping up my arms, until my elbows bent forward of their own accord, snapping into place. A dull pain radiated up and into my shoulders, and when I tried to cry out again—a guttural, familiar growl slipped out instead.

  “Kaye…” Jasmine’s voice sounded rather far away, so distant and outside of my own existence that I barely noticed it anymore. Instead, my body seized the moment, my bones bending and snapping, my skin turning ashen—then a brilliant green. My field of view went from staring at the ground to Jasmine’s knees, then up some twenty feet in the air, towering over her. The pain rocking my innards disappeared, and for a moment I felt as though I’d just been put through the ringer by a massage therapist. Everything felt stretched yet taut, almost pleasantly sore. I blinked, but I saw no fluttering red eyelashes. Black lashes swept down and over my eyes with each blink.

  The adrenaline faded. My heartbeat sounded slow and steady—and firm, if possible.

  I had shifted.

  All that pain, all that anxiety—it was the pain of rebirth. There was no more inner voice, for she was me and I was her. We looked through the same eyes, moved through the same body. Jasmine stood there, smaller than before, and stared up at me with an expression that suggested she was about to vomit. I huffed, filling my enormous new lungs and exhaling sharply, and noted that smoke rushed from my nostrils.

  If only I had a mirror.

  From what I could see, I was green and enormous. My scales were somewhere between emerald and pine green, and my toenails—claws—were solid black, onyx like the artifacts. I wasn’t sure what to move to make things work, but I extended and flapped my wings without trying, my new body responding on instinct alone. Taking a few seconds longer for myself, I looked back over my form, which extended a long way behind me. Like Darius, black spikes lined my spine, though I had a smattering of smaller spikes surrounding the large ones too. My tail reminded me of a porcupine. God help whoever was on the receiving end of that.

  Speaking of which…

  I crouched low, returning my unflinching stare to Jasmine. I saw the world more clearly now, even without my enhanced fae senses. It was like someone had put new lenses in front of me and sharpened the clarity to an insane degree. I saw edges, ridges and hems, no matter the distance, clear as day.

  And what I saw, clearest of all, was the fear in Jasmine’s eyes as she glared up at me. I snarled, noting the way she flinched back, and lowered my head to so that I could look her dead in the eye. Then, heat crawled up my throat, bubbling up from my gut—almost like a burp, embarrassingly enough—and when I tasted the flames on the edge of my tongue, I opened my snarling mouth to accommodate.

  A sea of black flame surged toward her. Black and beautiful and hot.

  Jasmine screeched and leapt out of the way, but only just. When the flames died in my throat, I noted the scorched path along the mountaintop stone, headed straight for her and stopping a mere foot from her current position. Knowing Jasmine, however, she wouldn’t be down for long, and I wasn’t sure if I had access to my magical abilities in this form. Not wanting to risk it, I charged. Even without magic, I had brute strength and an enormous weight on my side, not to mention four feet laden with sharp, black claws and a spiked tail.

  The fae attempted to get herself upright and fire off another round of destructive magical power my way, but she wasn’t successful at either.

  Trying to do too many things at once, I thought, chuckling in my head. Too bad I couldn’t verbalize any of my zingers. Still, my sneering sort of roar-bark seemed to do the trick. Jasmine’s cheeks darkened as she scrambled, boots slipping on the stone underfoot, and even her use of fae speed wasn’t enough to help her. Each of my steps was four of hers, and I effortlessly caught up with her—and trampled her into the ground before she could teleport. Each foot stomped over her, and I leapt to the side to see if my handiwork had finally done the deed.

  Gasping, Jasmine continued to flee, only this time she was crawling, one of her legs limp and twisted from the knee down. She had to realize by now that these were her last precious moments to convince me to spare her, to tell me that she was willing to change, that she could temper her hate and learn to live in a community that encompassed all different kinds of creatures, not just the ones she deigned acceptable.

  “Trust a dog to not l-look where she’s walking,” she sneered, and I let out a deep, long breath, smoke rushing down at her, my disappointment palpable—but not entirely unexpected. Blood dribbled down her nose, and I realized she was favoring her right hand, using it to drag her body down and away from the mountain peak toward the rest of the village. I followed, slowly, cautiously, assuming she wouldn’t just surrender without a fight.

  She made it to the somewhat steep hill leading down to the upper-most clan halls. While I had seen fighting on the way up, it seemed the bulk of the battles had moved into two distinct arenas: land and sky. The circling dragons had taken care of most of the gargoyles, but the witches appeared to be giving them a run for their money. Below, the lines between armies were murky, difficult to tell who was who. Dragon vision was clearer, sharper, than an average person’s, but I couldn’t zoom in as much as I could have as a fae.

  “I think you broke my back,” Jasmine spat, coughing up blood and letting it drip onto the ground. Slowly, she lifted her head, her teeth stained red, and laughed. “But it d-doesn’t matter, mongrel. It doesn’t matter if you kill me. My people will annihilate your people before the day is done. All those f-fools, above and below, are going to die… and it’s all your f-fault.”

  I stomped my front feet, growling, fire burning its way up my throat in protest, then willed myself to settle at her laughter. This was what she wanted. She wanted me to feel.

  Or, as I soon realized, she wanted me distracted.

  Bringing her wrist to her mouth, I watched in horror as Jasmine ripped into her tender, pale flesh with her teeth. Blood gushed in dark red spurts, as though she had severed a vein, and before I could stop her, she slammed the destruction artifact against the wound, as if forgetting her precious “pure” blood wasn’t the kind the artifact needed, flopped down on her side—and unleashed holy hell with her uninjured hand. A pulse of orange-yellow magic shot out from her palm, more powerful and more potent than anything I’d seen thus far. The last of the destruction artifact. All that it had left. Like an enormous strobe light, the kind search-and-rescuers used to cut through a raging storm, the destructive magic sliced through anything in its path: halls,
schoolhouses, trees, rocks. It then ripped across the battlefield, butchering all it touched.

  My cry of despair sounded throughout the valley. Trust Jasmine to drag down as many as she could on her deathbed. A fitting end—one that I decided to hasten. Summoning my fire once more, I showered her with black flame. Within seconds the destructive beam of light disappeared, but the screams from below filled my ears no matter how hard I forced the fire out. Her laughter died along with her, an intermingling of cries and cackles, short-lived, that would haunt my dreams.

  Dead, Kaye. My inner voice didn’t say it, but I somehow understood it to be true. Unable to sustain this form, this fire, for much longer, I stopped my flame and shifted back to my half-fae form. The shift back was less painful than the initial turning. Much faster, too. It felt similar to that moment when hovering between sleep and awake, then suddenly jolting upright because it felt like a fall into the abyss. My line of sight fell as my dragon body shrank into my fae body—and I wasn’t sure where it all went.

  Unable to hold myself up, I let my knees collapse, blinking hard in an effort to adjust from the sharpened sight to my usual, everyday sort. Naked, bleeding, gasping for air, I raised my head and found myself staring at blackened earth—and ash. Just as Darius had roasted her uncle to death, I’d turned my enemy to dust, a little bit of nothingness that caught in the breeze and scattered toward me. I closed my eyes, bracing against it, then threw myself forward and vomited everything that was left in my stomach onto the mountain.

  Shaking, I crawled forward, gritting my teeth as rock cut into my knees and palms I searched around the scalded ground for the destruction artifact. Moments later, I found it—totally unharmed. Eager for more blood. Ready to unleash more chaos. I shook my head and let it fall. No more destruction. I pushed up on unsteady knees, tears spilling down my face as I gazed at the valley of death and blood below.