Are we going on the boat now? Lilly chimed in.
Yes, darling girl.
Audrey searched the concrete loading dock before them and spotted a stairwell about a hundred yards away. Beyond that, a smaller dock extended out into the bay. A large yacht was moored there, but in front of the yacht was a smaller power boat. She squeezed Lilly’s hand tight and called a ball of energy to her other palm, holding it cocked and ready.
This is where I leave you, Esther said, her eye glowing a milky white like a miniature moon.
What? No, you’re coming with us. Audrey dropped her cloak and let her energy blast snuff out. Lilly sniffled beside her.
You cannot cross the ward unless I disable it, Esther answered. She knelt in front of Lilly and held her by the shoulders, speaking to her silently, then unclasped her moonstone pendant and put it around Lilly’s neck. Lilly nodded as tears tracked down her cheeks, then threw her arms around Audrey’s aunt. Esther hugged her tight, then stood and faced Audrey.
Besides, I have unfinished business here. Her eye flashed an electric blue in the gloom. She reached out to cup Audrey’s cheek, and the earth felt like it was dropping out from under her feet. She’d only just found the last bit of her family—her history—and now she was already saying goodbye? Esther’s thin mouth curved up in the hint of a smile. “She would be so proud of you.”
Audrey’s mouth fell open, and she wanted to reach out to her aunt, but Lilly clung to her side, rooting her in place.
Stay hidden until the ward falls, then run to the boat. The keys are in the ignition. Get away, and then send the Synod back for the others.
How will we know when the ward falls?
All hell will break loose.
Audrey swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. She projected a shield around her and Lilly like a bubble and reinforced it with invisibility magic as Esther turned to leave.
Her aunt took two steps into the shadows, and then bright light flooded their hidden corner, blinding them. Two tall, dark figures in suits appeared out of nowhere, flanking Esther. Gun clicks echoed from the rooftop overhead, and several armed guards flooded up the stairs that were supposed to be their escape route, like ants fleeing a disturbed sand hill.
Lilly made a small sound, and Audrey clasped her hand over the girl’s mouth as she called forth an energy blast and scooted them and their bubble a few feet back, silent.
Esther froze, her shadow casting a long, dark stripe on the wall behind her. The sorcerer who’d drained Audrey earlier approached Esther with a handgun pointed at her head. She didn’t fight him as he turned her around and bound her in handcuffs. He shoved her toward the head sorcerer, who stood in the middle of the floodlights, and then forced her to her knees.
The other guards closed in around them, and Audrey had nowhere to go. The head sorcerer stared in her general direction, his ice-chip eyes missing her by a couple of feet. “I can’t see you, Audrey, but I can taste your magic. You’ve nowhere to go. Let’s stop these games before someone gets hurt.”
Her shield couldn’t stop bullets, but she wasn’t about to drop it and lose her only advantage. Instead, she dragged Lilly a few steps closer to him. Hopefully his guards wouldn’t risk shooting their master. Sweat beaded at her hairline as she worked to control her breathing and keep a tight rein on her power. It still required focus for her to hold her shields, and that was in short supply with her emotions zinging every which way. She thought of all her morning exercises with Cian, the pool of stillness he’d helped her invoke. But then that made her think of Corvin, and that she might never see him again.
The sorcerer turned to face Esther, his handsome face twisting into a sneer as he gazed down at her. “It appears blood is thicker than power after all. How lamentable.” He caressed her cheek beneath her good eye, almost like a lover. “What am I going to do with you?”
To her credit, Esther stood as still as a statue.
Go now, she yelled in Audrey’s head. Run!
But running toward a wall of guns and away from someone in need of her help was so counter to Audrey’s instincts she stayed stuck in place. Lilly whimpered, and the guards nearest them adjusted their positions.
Think … think …
Run!
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and her hand holding her energy blast started to shake. She placed herself between Lilly and the head sorcerer—clearly the bigger threat, though he didn’t look it—and let go of her invisibility magic.
“Ah,” he said, whirling on her and looking her up and down with a smile, “there’s my girl.”
All thirty guns trained on her in a single motion.
The sorcerer held up his hand. “Do not harm her, but get the little one.”
Four guards closed in on her and Lilly. Audrey blasted the first one in the face and used telekinesis to knock the other two together. As they fell back in a tangle of guns and gear, the last tried to tackle her. She whirled on him and got in a solid punch to the side of his head, but he shook it off and took her down. She readied another energy ball and kneed him in the stomach. Lilly screamed as a different guard yanked her away, and Audrey threw it at him instead. Lilly got free, but it cost Audrey her advantage. The guard she’d been wrestling pinned her to the concrete.
She gathered her magic to force him off, but then the ground shook with a distant explosion. For a breath, everyone stilled, listening. A webbed dome of red lightning sparkled overhead like a million tiny stars dying as the ward disintegrated.
And then all hell broke loose.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A siren sounded, Lilly shrieked, and the guards scrambled in every direction.
Audrey closed her eyes and focused, and the guard pinning her went flying through the air into three of his comrades. She got to her feet and charged at the man holding Lilly at gunpoint.
He aimed at her, and with a flex of power, the gun yanked from his hand and skittered across the ground. She tossed a blast right at his head, and he flipped over backward and landed facedown on the ground. He did not get up.
Audrey grabbed Lilly by the hand and raised another invisibility shield around them, then took off at a dead run away from the fray.
A few bullets peppered the cement at their feet, and she lunged sideways.
The sorcerer was yelling over the din, trying to control his troops, but inside, more explosions and screams were erupting. Windows shattered. Gunfire broke out.
They were halfway across the dock when bright flashes exploded in a semicircle in front of them. Audrey skidded to a stop, blinded. As the smoke cleared, she faced six more sorcerers. Lilly clung tightly to her side, and Audrey stood in a defensive crouch with her chest heaving. She had plenty of magic left, but there were too many of them to fight at once—she just wasn’t that skilled.
One of the sorcerers flung a spell at them, and a net of magic fell atop her shields and sank into the earth, anchoring her in place. She had to focus all of her effort into pushing back, keeping her shields from collapsing inward on top of her and Lilly. Tears of frustration built in her eyes as she drew harder and harder on her connection to the Conduit.
Another explosion behind them shook the ground, and Audrey dropped to one knee. She let go of her invisibility cloak.
The sorcerers closed in, one of them casting another layer of spell work that slowly squeezed the magic she was pouring into her shields into a smaller and smaller space. It was getting hard to breathe, and her heartbeat was slowing down.
Lilly whimpered.
Don’t pass out, she thought, just as a whirling figure of shadow appeared between two of the sorcerers. A beat later, one of them twisted into a grotesque position that made Lilly gasp and hide her face. The other flew away into the dark sky, then a few seconds later fell and splattered where he’d just been standing.
The sorcerers turned their attention to the more immediate threat while Audrey remained pinned, using all of her focus just to keep the magic flowing and uncons
ciousness at bay. But like any tired muscle, her ability to keep her tie to the Conduit was threatening to collapse. It felt like an eternity for the bodies of all six sorcerers to pile up around them, while in reality it was only a few seconds.
Sephrael coalesced out of the shadows and stared straight at Audrey’s face. She gritted her teeth and silently begged for his help as spots danced in her vision. If there was ever a time for him to come through on his end of their bargain, this was it.
He reached out one hand and dusted his fingers along the edge of her bulging shield. Rainbow-colored sparks flickered where his fingers touched, and immediately the pressure on Audrey eased. He siphoned the magic—both hers and the sorcerer’s—with a gentle caress. It felt like the trickle of a river against her skin after walking miles through a sandstorm. As her shield disintegrated like a cloud of mist around her, Audrey fell back on her butt, nearly pulling Lilly down too.
A blink later, Sephrael was lifting her to her feet, and a jolt of energy spiked her blood. She gasped, gripping his forearms as her own magic flowed back into her, making her dizzy. Their energies danced back and forth, seeking balance. Stars popped in her eyes. Or maybe they were in his.
“The battle isn’t over,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper on the wind. He disappeared into a tornado of shadow and left her there, breathless.
“Audrey,” Lilly said in warning.
Instinctually, her shields snapped into place around them, as strong as ever. She whirled to see Sephrael cutting through an onslaught of soldiers like a blade made of darkness. But more armed men were pouring out from the building now, as were nearly a hundred witches. One end of the compound was engulfed in flames, and thick black smoke blotted out the sky. Flashes of gunfire and magic went off in pockets.
And then she saw him. Corvin was fighting his way around the side of the building, flashes of red magic shooting from the end of his staff and sending armed guards flying back. At his side, Roderic wielded a sword big enough to take down a tree with one swipe. The blade pulsed with supernatural light. No one dared come within striking distance.
Audrey’s heart stopped at the sight of Corvin alive and well, but it kicked back into gear when she looked behind them. Deep navy clouds were coalescing into a funnel in the sky, sucking in the black smoke from the fire and blotting out the moonlight. Lightning danced along the belly of the building storm, charging the air.
Corvin paused and zeroed in on her, as if some sixth sense told him exactly where she was. The hair on Audrey’s arms stood on end. From over a hundred yards away, their eyes met. A bolt of lightning zipped down behind him and struck the fence along the front of the building. The funnel in the clouds grew, widening its swirling dance.
At the opposite end of the dock, her aunt was being held at gunpoint as a small contingent of sorcerers stood between her and the angry mob of escaped witches.
Instinct screamed at Audrey to run to Corvin, but he was in the opposite direction of their escape. Their path to the boat was clear now. She had to get Lilly to safety first, then help Esther. Corvin could hold his own. She scanned the dock leading to the yacht and the smaller boat, then hugged Lilly tightly to her side and closed her eyes.
They stumbled when their feet hit the deck of the yacht. Lilly moaned and looked as if she might get sick, but Audrey grabbed her by the shoulders and guided her toward the nearest door. “Find somewhere safe in here to hide, and don’t come out until I come get you.”
“Wha-at? No, Audrey, please don’t leave me again.” Lilly clung to her arm as Audrey ushered the her into a lushly furnished living room.
“It’ll be okay. My friends are here. I have to go help them, so I need you to stay away from the fighting, okay? I’ll come back for you.”
Lilly started to cry, and Audrey halted and hugged her. “I know I failed you before, and I’m sorry, Lilly. I won’t leave you behind again. Don’t worry. This will all be over soon.”
Lilly held back her next wave of tears and nodded.
“Just stay safe until then. Lock every door behind you.” She pulled her moonstone pendant out from under her shirt and showed it to Lilly. “If you need me, call out for me through the necklace like you did before, okay?”
She nodded again and fixed a determined look on her face.
“Good girl,” Audrey said, hugging her once more. “Now go.”
She watched as Lilly rounded the corner of the hallway, and then found another route leading to a balcony on the side of the large ship. She focused on the dock, closed her eyes, and faded.
She hit the ground running full speed toward Esther and the last stronghold of the sorcerers.
To her right, Corvin’s storm had grown, the funnel cloud touching the ground and tearing everything in its path asunder. It seemed to move at his command, sucking up pockets of enemies and spitting them out fifty feet away. It never came near Corvin, Roderic, or the growing mob of witches that had joined their march across the dock. It just cleared their path.
The hired contingent of the sorcerer’s security force started to disband and flee.
Audrey faded a hundred feet at a time, closing the distance between her and her aunt in a few heartbeats. When the fighting around her got too thick to avoid getting entangled in hand-to-hand combat, she cast an invisibility cloak over herself and dove through the riot. Witches seemed to have the upper hand, but several had been bested, drained, and cast aside. She crossed one sorcerer draining one as she screamed — a bloodcurdling sound that chilled Audrey to the bone. She dropped her cloak long enough to toss an energy blast at his head and watched in satisfaction as he fell into a useless heap. Then she kept working her way toward the commotion at the center of the crowd, where spells were flying in all directions.
The guards had been disarmed and now cowered beneath the dome of wards the head sorcerer and his inner circle had cast around them. But there were other sorcerers on the outside of their leader’s protection who were now fighting for their lives against men and women they had held enslaved for years.
The head sorcerer stood in the center of his protective bubble with several of his acolytes kneeling around him, lending him strength as he closed his eyes, murmuring some perversion of magic stolen from their people — her people — and fueled by their pain and suffering.
For a second, Audrey thought maybe she had a hint of Corvin’s empathic powers, because she could feel the echo of that pain, their rage and hatred… all directed at one man. The man who had captured her mother, corrupted her, forced her to run for her life, then killed her anyway. The man who had been slowly torturing her aunt every day since out of some sick power trip.
The sorcerer lifted his arms overhead, then clapped his hands together.
A tremor ran through the ground at her feet an instant before a crush of energy, like a sound wave from a jet going Mach four, stole the breath from her chest and knocked her into the air. A kaleidoscope of bodies whirled around her, and her eardrums threatened to burst from the pressure. She held her breath and closed her eyes, focusing her mind on the ground at the center of the detonation. She couldn’t fade inside the sorcerer’s warded bubble, but as anticipated, she bounced off of it—as she had many times, trying to fade outside of the practice room—and used the momentum to land squarely on her feet.
She got her bearings and greeted the sorcerer’s awestruck expression with a feral smile.
He sobered and barked some orders she couldn’t hear over the angry mob. His followers scrambled to comply as he looked Audrey up and down with a proprietary air that made her want to strangle him. She choked down the desire to lash out and instead turned her back on him to survey the damage of his last blow.
The witches who hadn’t been tossed off the dock into the water and remained conscious through the destruction of his spell were slowly climbing to their feet. In the distance, Corvin’s storm was evaporating, and the bright moonlight fell upon the remaining Zyne like a healing balm.
Fat, he
avy raindrops started to fall as all sounds of battle stilled.
A collective sigh ran through the survivors. They’d won. They were free.
She turned and met the ghostly stare of the head sorcerer again.
The battle isn’t over yet.
As if conjured by her thought, Sephrael appeared at her side. He quickly scanned the situation. She didn’t need to voice her question. He took one look at her face and nodded. Yes, he could break this shield too.
The sorcerer glared at her as she said, “Do it.”
Sephrael’s arm became shadow, and he reached into the web of the sorcerer’s spell as if it were made of cotton candy. Sparks of magic flew wherever he touched the ward, and soon the magic wavered, like water streaming down a pane of glass.
Audrey summoned an energy blast to her palm and held it at the ready.
The ward popped like a soap bubble, and the head sorcerer’s voice echoed across the dock. He and his half-dead henchmen held Esther in front of them with a knife to her throat. He finished the last line of a spell and clapped his hands together, sparking an orb of black light.
The acolytes around him, including the one restraining Esther, tumbled to the ground, groaning as tendrils of that same dark magic tore from their chests and foreheads, streaming toward their leader. Their screams of pain echoed all across the dock.
Audrey loosed her energy blast, and it hit him square in the chest. He staggered back a step but then lifted his arms and spread them wide as that dark glow twisted around him, pouring into him through his eyes and mouth. Audrey called a fireball next, between both of her palms. She lifted it over her head, but froze when her aunt leapt into the line of fire, a blade flashing over her head. She rode the sorcerer to the ground, the knife digging deeply into his chest, following that flow of dark light straight to his blackened heart.
The sorcerer yanked Esther’s hair back with one hand and slapped his other palm on the crown of her head. Esther’s scream tore through the night, but still she dug the knife in to the hilt, until her hands were drenched in his black blood. She fell to the ground beside him, her face locked in a rictus of pain as the color drained from her skin.
To Tame A Wild Heart: A Zyne Witch Urban Fantasy Romance (Zyne Legacy Romance Book 1) Page 23