But if there was one thing he’d learned about himself over the years, it was that he wanted to live.
Carl’s lip curled, and spittle dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away with his sleeve and then doubled over and hit the horn as he felt the sharp tug of his locator spell. The mark was close, and his heart pumped his sludgy blood furiously, making his head throb. He grinned through the pain.
Ah. Another stay of execution.
Not a moment too soon—he needed a taste so badly. He fumbled to lay the map out, seeing double as he poured what little magic he had left into scrying. The mark was on the western road, moving fast in his direction. Most likely in a vehicle.
He started the engine and peeled out.
He was in no shape for a fight. The element of surprise was his best shot. He arrived at the vantage point he’d staked out and did a half-assed job of concealing his car. Trudging through the woods was twice as difficult as it had been the day before, but he made it to the boulder he’d marked just in time to see a black Range Rover coming down the switchbacks along the side of the mountain.
As the Rover neared, he set up his rifle, thankful he’d brought the tripod. His hands were too shaky to get a clean shot, and he only had one chance. The other road would have been easier; it was flat and open. With this one, he had to stop the vehicle before he launched the stunning spell, or the car could drive right off the cliff. The mark was no good to him dead.
His knees protested as he lowered himself to the ground and hunched over the scope to get a better look at his quarry. There were two of them—a man and a woman. They came around a bend, then over a few small hills, and then his line of sight was clear. He exhaled and stilled over the rifle, sighting the front driver’s side tire as the distance between them closed. Two hundred yards…one hundred…fifty.
He squeezed the trigger.
Thirty yards out, the Rover jerked to the side, then corrected and skidded to a stop.
Carl calmly changed out the rifle for his retrofitted flare gun as the man got out and bent over the tire to investigate.
He loaded the spell pouch into it, held it up, and took aim with his pitifully weak arms.
The crack! of the gun echoed through the canyon. The male witch straightened just as the spell hit. A cascade of blue sparks settled over the Rover in a thirty-foot net of magic, and the man took one step back, then toppled down the dirt road’s embankment into a ditch.
Carl shuffled back to his car for what felt like an eternity, his nerves buzzing with excitement. He was about to get his first hit in over a week. The Grandmaster had explicitly told him not to touch the marked one, but it was near the full moon. Surely he could have a sip without anyone noticing. Besides, if he didn’t, he might keel over on the way back. It was a matter of necessity to complete his mission.
He left the car door open as he walked toward the Rover with his Glock out. Neither of them was going anywhere for hours, but experience had taught him caution. The blond woman was slumped in her seat, the belt the only thing holding her up. The male was facedown in the thick mud off the side of the road. Carl was thankful that wasn’t his mark. Getting him back to the car would have been impossible, even with a hit of magic. He looked to be about two-twenty of solid muscle.
He planted two bullets into the man’s back before he turned to the woman. He opened the car door, and the sweet ambrosia of her magic hit him like the first jolt of coke—sharpening his senses and strengthening the beat of his heart. He laid his hand on the crown of her head, and his emerald ring flashed with bright light. He took a slow, gentle draw, hissing in pleasure as potent power infused him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Audrey came to in an opulent office, staring across an expanse of polished wood at a forty-something Ralph Lauren model in an expensive-looking navy suit. She had control of her muscles, but her hands were cuffed behind her back. She tried to tap into her power. No dice. Where was she? Where was Corvin? The last thing she remembered, they had been on their way to see if they could tune into Lilly’s signal with the necklace again. They’d gotten a flat, and then…
She squeezed her eyes and shook her head.
“Welcome,” Mr. TV News Anchor said, cold eyes fixed on her.
Another body she hadn’t been aware of shuffled to her right. She didn’t need to turn her head to smell his reek. He was an old, decrepit man, and the sight of his jaundiced, sagging skin and the blood-red rings around his lifeless eyes made her choke back a gag.
“Yes, I’m afraid my associate is in a rather sorry state. That’s what happens to my faithful acolytes who disappoint me. I’ll let you imagine what I do to my enemies. So let’s make this quick and painless. Do you know who I am?”
She sneered and cracked her neck. Normally, under these circumstances she would either be defiantly silent or mouth off to push his buttons, but in this case she should save her strength for when she really needed it. “I think I know what you are.”
Sorcerers. The ones who had Lilly. She and Corvin must have been ambushed. Or had they found the trail and gotten into some kind of skirmish?
Why can’t I remember?
“Good, that will save some time. I’m very interested in hearing about your friends at the Synod. How many witches are in that fortress? How many immortals? When are their patrols?” He waved his hand like a bored royal. “That sort of thing.”
The other sorcerer shifted, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose, but Audrey held her head high and stared straight at the boss. He gave a barely perceptible head shake to his minion, postponing whatever suffering was in store for her next.
He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I have ways to make you tell me what I want to know, but they are very unpleasant.”
She fixed a bored look on her face and filled her voice with derision. “You’re not going to kill me. I’m a tenth-degree witch, and that would be a waste of a valuable commodity. And I know you won’t hurt me too bad either. I’m no good to you weak.” At least, she hoped that was all true. “Here’s what I will tell you—the Synod will come looking for me, and it won’t take them long to find me.”
Maybe Patricia wouldn’t waste resources to find an orphan girl or a rebellious novice who had been a thorn in her side, but she would for her son. And if not, Audrey still had an ace up her sleeve.
The sorcerer smiled back at her in a cold, empty way that made her stomach feel hollow. His eyes were such a light grey they were almost white. “I admire your pluck. You remind me of someone I once knew. She also made the grave mistake of underestimating me.” He stared at her for a long, held breath. “They have no idea where we are. If they did, they wouldn’t hesitate, and you’ve been missing for half a day.”
Half a day…Where was Corvin? Did they have him too? Had he gotten away? But she couldn’t ask, because what if they didn’t have him? She couldn’t give them anything to use against her, to make her talk. The entire fortress, the staff, the novices, all those people would be in danger.
This was all her fault. If she hadn’t guilted Corvin into stealing away with her…and now the Synod—and Corvin, if he was alive—had no idea where to look for her. She clenched her fists behind her back and ground her teeth in frustration.
Those ghostly eyes stared at her, studying. “Your position is finally sinking in.”
She steeled her expression and lifted her chin, a silent do your worst.
He sank into his seat, twirling one of several rings on his right hand. “Do you know, Audrey, that many years ago, we tried breeding Zyne for our own purposes? I was the first of my brethren to attempt it. Thanks to my ambition, forward-thinking, and connections, I’ve been able to establish an operation far grander than any sorcerer in history.”
“You must be so proud,” she drawled while scrambling inside her head. How did he know her name? Had they tortured Corvin for it? What else did they know?
“Unfortunately, it turns out that siphoning a female witch renders her barren. Th
e first of many obstacles.” He sniffed. “Even without the siphons, many could not or would not conceive under duress, and when they did, their children were born mundane. Useless.”
She scowled, foreboding blossoming in her chest like frost, making each breath come in small, painful sips.
“I had given up the cause. Hunting, though it came at a loss of men on occasion and forced us to stay hidden, was more efficient. And then, at last, about twenty-five years ago, a revelation.”
A door somewhere behind her whispered open, and she heard the clicking of high heels. The sorcerer looked over her shoulder, a wicked glint in his dead gaze as his lips curled up faintly. “It turns out, Zyne souls can only be reborn out of love,” the sorcerer mused. “An ancient magic—I should have known.”
A willowy woman in a crisp black skirt suit and shiny stilettos crossed the room on Audrey’s left. Her dark blond hair was silvering at the temples and arranged in a sophisticated twist. She walked around the desk and came to stand behind the sorcerer, placing her pale hands on his broad shoulders. She wore a black leather eye patch over one eye, and her thin mouth was compressed into an emotionless slash. But her heart finally froze solid when the woman’s good eye fixed on her, crystal blue and electrifying.
Recognition struck her like a bolt of lightning to the chest, shattering that block of ice into a million tiny shards.
No.
The face was the same. Older, thinner, paler, but the same. And hanging around the woman’s neck was a moonstone pendant—an exact twin to her own.
No. No. No.
“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Audrey.” The sorcerer nodded at the old man. “Welcome home.”
A hand palmed the top of her head from behind. Spikes of red burst through her vision, and then everything went black. It was not the peaceful blackness of unconsciousness. This was being trapped in a dark room while rats ate your brain, screeching and scratching with claws, grinding with teeth. She smelled fetid decay, and her guts curdled. She was blind and deaf, but could feel every muscle in her body locked solid, petrified in a spasm of pain, as her connection to the Conduit flared. The darkness flashed a brilliant white with her power, but she was still helpless to reach out and touch it. All she could do was watch as magic rushed past her like a waterfall.
She heard screaming but had no idea if it was tearing from her throat or just echoing in the hollow place inside her. Pain saturated her nerve endings to the point that it must have overloaded her brain and forced it to reboot.
When she came to, she was being carried by the old man, but he wasn’t old anymore. He was a fifty-year-old version of himself, with enough muscle to fill out his suit and to carry her with little effort. But he still stank like a butcher shop sewer drain.
She fought back a wave of nausea while trying to take in her surroundings without the blur of sensory input forcing her back under. She blinked through the dizziness. They were walking down a nondescript hallway full of doors painted a faded, institutional blue.
He stopped at one, entered a code into a keypad, and carried her in. They passed through a ward that glowed red as they crossed it, and Audrey cried out as the magic brushed against her sandblasted psychic nerves.
He dropped her onto a bare cot and squatted down to her eye level. He brushed a piece of hair away from her face in an almost tender way, and she recoiled but didn’t have the energy to fight him off.
“You were delicious,” he rasped, staring at her with a twinkle in his light grey eyes. “Rest up. I’ll be hungry again later.”
He left, and she curled in on herself, just trying to focus on each breath and pull the tattered pieces of herself back together. The effort of that was too much. The last bits of her energy seeped into the cold room as she lay there in a frozen ball with a single thought playing on repeat.
My mother works for sorcerers.
She puked her guts up a couple of times, then sat there shivering. The absolute darkness of the room closed in around her, but as the minutes ticked by, her thoughts slowly started to clunk into motion. And then she remembered—her ace.
Hope buoyed her up as she whispered into the shadows, “Sephrael?”
***
Corvin jolted awake with a gasp, and a web of pain wrapped around his chest and back, making his vision dim. He took another shallow breath and blinked his eyes open. “Audrey!”
His mother’s silhouette slowly came into focus. He was in the healer’s ward again, hooked up to an IV. His mother was sitting on his bedside.
“Where is she?” he ground out, adjusting to the ache.
A hand wiped the hair away from his sweaty brow, and his mother’s dulcet voice said, “Shh, don’t try to move. You’ve been shot.”
He relaxed into the bed and blinked at the worried frown on her face. “Shot?”
Roderic appeared over his mother’s shoulder. “You’re lucky you have strong bones. One lodged in your shoulder; the other shattered a couple of ribs on its way clean through.”
He glanced down at the bandages on his bare chest, then closed his eyes again as a swirl of dizziness assaulted him. That explained why it hurt to breathe.
“Where’s Audrey? Is she all right?”
Silence greeted him, and he pried his eyes open to find a look of sympathy on Roderic’s face, while his mother’s was schooled into cold, hard fury.
“A sorcerer took her.” She braced his shoulders as he tried to sit up.
“Let me go!” he shouted, struggling meekly. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, and his vision dimmed again. He heard Smoke’s panicked caw in the background, and the fight drained out of him.
They took her. They took her…
Because he was a fool. He’d known it was dangerous. He’d known that they shouldn’t leave the grounds. He should have pushed back harder, tried to reason with her.
You promised to protect her.
Hot tears of rage built in the backs of his eyes. He wanted to howl with it. He was so damn weak, but he tried to sit up again. Finally he understood that wild panic he’d seen in Audrey’s eyes about Lilly. This is what she had felt.
Sweat beaded on his forehead as his power swelled, making the room stifling hot.
This time, it was Roderic’s strong hands holding his shoulders down to the bed. “Easy. Easy. We will get her back. I swear to you, we will get her back.”
His mother hissed in a breath and turned away from them.
“Rest now. Let the healers do their work. You will need your strength.”
One of the healers stepped up to the other side of the bed and stuck a needle into his IV tube.
“No! Wait. Don’t. I have to…”
When he came to again, late afternoon sunlight was streaming through the windows of his mother’s office. One of the sofas had been made into an impromptu bed with soft grey sheets and a heap of pillows propped behind him. The IV was gone, and he could take a full breath without the stabbing pain, just a slight twinge. He cleared his throat, and his mother turned from her post at the window. Roderic roused from where he’d been dozing on the opposite sofa.
“How long have I been out?” he asked, his voice like gravel.
Roderic poured him a glass of water and passed it over. “Several hours.”
“Any news?”
He sat up, and his mother came to join them in the sitting area. Dark halos had formed under her eyes. She looked the oldest he’d ever seen her as she shook her head, a grim frown marring her normally lovely face.
“Tell me what happened.”
Roderic’s expression was stone. “The sorcerer was sickly. Probably desperate, otherwise he wouldn’t have attacked you. He shot out your tire, then hit you with a stunning spell and took the Rover with Audrey in it. We found his vehicle abandoned in the woods. Seemed like he’d been on a stakeout for a while. I tracked his scent all over the woods but lost it once he hit the highway in your Rover. I know he went north.”
Corvin’s heart gave a hea
vy thud. North, towards the sanitarium Audrey had escaped from. Was the one who attacked them related to the sorcerers who had taken Lilly? It seemed too much of a coincidence not to be. Had they somehow traced Audrey to their fortress? “But how did he know we would be there?”
The stoic guard shook his head. “Why don’t you tell us why you were leaving in the middle of the night without telling anyone?”
He’d rarely heard an edge of anger in Roderic’s voice. Guilt soured his stomach. “Audrey heard the girl, Lilly, telepathically. Audrey’s necklace had some sort of amplification spell on it. I thought perhaps with the full moon, and the spell, there was a chance the necklace would lead us to the sorcerers. Lilly said she was near the water. I was only going to take Audrey outside the wards to see if the necklace’s magic strengthened. We would have come right back and reported it.”
His mother and Roderic shared a concerned look. “Perhaps it was a trap.”
And he’d walked right into it. He remembered the desperation in Audrey’s eyes, the hope that was so fragile he hadn’t had the strength to crush it. Still, he should have been stronger. Smarter. For her own good. If he had— No. Regret was a useless emotion. He discarded it and latched onto anger instead, wrapping it like a cloak around him and hardening it like a shell, keeping all his fear and guilt trapped underneath.
“Do you remember the sigil of the spell?” his mother asked.
He nodded vaguely, and a moment later he had a pen and paper in his hand. He closed his eyes and envisioned Audrey’s necklace in the moonlight, the faint traces of magic woven into and around it like sparkling threads of stardust. He sketched it out the best he could and passed it over.
His mother squinted at it, turning it this way and that. “I will pass this to the guardians, along with the other information.”
Corvin sneered in displeasure, his instincts urging him to do something, to hurt something. He wanted justice. He wanted the sorcerers to suffer. And more than anything…he could not rest until he had Audrey back safe in his arms.
To Tame A Wild Heart: A Zyne Witch Urban Fantasy Romance (Zyne Legacy Romance Book 1) Page 21