In Smoke And Ruins (Burned by Magic Book 2)

by Gina Shafer

  “I done told you. I’m the owner of this house,” she answers simply.

  “Right, but—”

  “We call her Rosie,” Elijah answers.

  “Rosie?”

  “That’s me, or at least that’s what you people been callin’ me for the last hundred years or so.” She laughs and pulls back the covers. Elijah clears his throat, glancing at Soren. His son gets the hint and makes a quick exit from the room with Willow.

  Rosie helps me sit by grabbing the back of my neck and putting another hand on my waist, giving me the counterweight I need to sit on my own. She starts by removing one sleeve of my black sweater, pulling my arm out of the fabric and resting the sleeve on the side of my injured shoulder. My breasts hit the cold air, causing my nipples to pucker, and immediately my gaze snaps to Elijah. He hasn’t seen my body in so long, I can almost feel his eyes roam my skin, hungry—no, starving.

  When Rosie pulls off the bandage, Elijah sobers at sight of the gunshot wound. I feel almost embarrassed as I look back to Rosie, who gives me a pointed look.

  “Elijah, hand me that salve, would ya?” she asks, thrusting her hand back toward him without taking her eyes off my injury. He places a dark amber bottle in her palm. When she pops the top, the strong smell of tea tree and mint reach my nose, only there’s something else there too.

  “You’re the one who makes these for the Sicarri,” I blurt out, knowing I’ve smelled it before. I remember rubbing it on Elijah’s shoulder not long ago. I never knew where the magical balm came from; I only knew it healed a person in about half the normal time.

  “Don’t you be tellin’ anyone that now. I like my privacy, and I like people not knowin’ if I’m alive or dead. You hear?” The sternness in her voice doesn’t match the tender touch of her fingers against my skin.

  “I won’t. I promise.” I grimace when she packs some of the salve internally.

  “Okay, all done. We’ll have to do that again in about an hour, and I don’t want no him-hawin’ ‘bout it,” she tells me, As quickly as she came, she removes herself from the room.

  “Wow,” I say. It’s not until I look down that I realize she never helped me right my shirt, probably figuring Elijah would do so. He returns to the bed, reaching for me. I wish more than ever I could wrap him up in my arms as tightly as possible, but my weak shoulder won’t allow it. At least the salve helped with the pain; it’s numbed to a dull sting, the way your palms feel if you scrape them on asphalt.

  “You’re beautiful, you know that? More than I ever imagined when I was sitting in that cell. I would try to conjure up images of you, and I could never get them right… could never capture your beauty like I can when you’re right in front of me. I thought… I never… I don’t know, Karina, I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again. I know you were trying, but so was Vara, and she was so so determined. When you were shot, I can’t begin to tell you how afraid I was. I had no idea you had all this power.” Elijah’s voice trails off towards the end, his eyes roaming over my body like he can actually see the magic that courses through me.

  I move to cover myself, but he stops me. “Please don’t,” He says. “I want to look at you all day, touch you, taste you. But I’m trying to be good.” He smiles like that’s the last thing he wants to be. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not though,” Elijah says. “I don’t want to hurt you, and I damn sure don’t want to take you for granted. You’re too precious to me.” His lips connect with mine, and I run the fingers of my uninjured arm through his hair, pulling him closer. I lean back, taking him with me, and as my nipples graze against the rough fabric of his Henley, I groan. In the next moment, his hands are on me, pinching and pulling on the soft buds, though the whole time he’s careful to avoid my gunshot and making me move too much.

  I slide my hand down the hard planes of his stomach, pull up his shirt, and touch the soft skin of his lower stomach. I feel a hard bump on the side of his abdomen, something that wasn’t there before.

  I break from our kiss, trying to get a look at my discovery. When I do, I feel lightheaded.

  It’s a dark pink raised scar that runs about six inches from his hip to his stomach. I pull back, my eyes roaming his face, questioning him without words.

  Did she do this?

  I ask him this with my mind, unable to give voice to something so horrible, and all he does is nod. She tortured him. It’s not like I hadn’t thought this might happen. But seeing it… that’s a whole other story. Elijah lays his forehead against mine, closing his eyes for a second as he places a kiss to the tip of my nose.

  He then lifts his shirt off, revealing six or seven more identical scars all over his torso. What the hell was she doing?

  I sit, ignoring the pang in my right shoulder, I press kisses to every scar I see marring his perfect skin. Some of them are old and have lost their pink. Some are newer, still angry and red.

  “I love you, you know,” I tell him.

  He replies by tapping my chest three times, right where my heart beats between my breasts. His hand lingers, gliding across my left breast until he finds my nipple again. In an instant, I’m laid gently on my back, and his tongue replaces his fingers. He draws it into his mouth, grazing his teeth lightly across my soft flesh, and I let out a moan, holding his head in place.

  Then he moves lower, kissing a path across my stomach leading down to the center of me. He pulls off my pants quickly and replaces the fabric with his mouth, kissing my thighs and leaving soft bites on my skin.

  “God, I missed this,” he whispers before he licks my pussy from top to bottom, his tongue flat against me.

  I want to scream, it feels so good. My head lolls back on the pillow. He grab hold of my hips, holding me in place as he dives deeper. His tongue swirls around in circles against my clit, and he doesn’t let up, only going faster, harder, and finally plunging his tongue inside of me. I grit my teeth, riding out my orgasm against his face. He sucks hard, pulling my skin into his mouth, making the orgasm almost unbearable.

  Before I get the chance to recover, he’s beside me, pulling me onto my uninjured side slipping himself inside of me from behind. He wraps his arm around me as he slides in and out of me, leaving a trail of wetness on my thighs every time he draws back out. I’m lost to the world; only full of soft sighs and moans as Elijah makes love to me. I come again, and this time it’s even more powerful. So much so that I feel like I’m floating, then sinking back down to earth like a feather in the still air. Elijah comes then too, burying his face between my shoulder blades and biting down, making me groan when he flexes inside of me as he releases.

  We lay there for a while as he softens inside of me, just breathing and running our fingers together as the light shines in through the window. This moment, it’s almost enough to make me forget the horror of the last few months.

  Almost.

  The words rush out of me in tiny breaths as I tell him about everything that’s happened since he’s been gone. I tell him about the children from my visions, the ones that overtake me so deeply that I can’t tell the difference from them and reality. I tell him about my fears, from him and Vara, to motherhood in general. And he lets me, he allows me to unload on him, and I’ve never been more grateful. After a while, I quiet, and that’s when he speaks.

  “I missed you. I can’t explain how much. It was like missing a part of myself. Longing for something I knew wasn’t there but that I desperately needed to survive.” His lips caress my temple. He tells me what Vara did to him inside that cell, the way she tortured him. Everything he can remember that she said, though it isn’t much. He tells me about his plan to escape, the nail he kept tucked in the waistband of his pants. He reveals his fears, the nightmares that plagued him, and most of all how much he loves me.

  I let his voice fall over me until his words come fewer and farther between.

  “We should get up,” I whisper

  Elijah nods behind me. He moves slowly, pulling himself from me and
moaning in the process. I bite back a moan too, wanting to go again and again, but my shoulder is starting to hurt again, and I know it’s almost time to get more salve.

  “How’s your arm? It is okay?” Elijah asks as he stands to dress. I tell him yes, though I’m sure he doesn’t believe me, because he’s extra careful helping me put my clothes back on.

  “I’m fine, I promise. It just stings,” I tell him when he eyes me as I pull my hair to one side. It’s longer than it used to be, and I guess I haven’t noticed that it’s gained a few inches since we met.

  “Come on. We still have a lot to talk about,” I tell him as we go in search of the others.

  “So you’re saying Karina and I are connected through magic?” Elijah asks.

  Rosie busies herself making cornbread to go with the beef stew she’s been supposedly cooking all day. I hadn’t smelled it until we entered the kitchen and then the warmth hit my nose like a battering ram. The spices and beef stock mixed together make my mouth water, and I wonder for a moment how long it’s been since all of us had a real meal.

  I glance around the kitchen, taking in the impeccable linoleum, shiny and clean with tiny blue flowers bordering every square. More yellow lives here, in the curtains at the window in the front of the room. Directly below it is the kitchen table, pushed against the wall and covered in vases of different-colored flowers, leaving barely enough room to eat. The tabletop is wooden, peppered with notches and grooves that expose the color before the stain, and the legs of the table and chairs are metal. Rosie has already smacked Soren for scooting his chair across the linoleum and leaving a scuff.

  “But I don’t understand. Soren, you have this too?” Elijah asks.

  Soren, Lincoln, and I have been trying to explain this connection between us, though it’s no easy task. Even Lincoln doesn’t claim to know a whole lot about it. Though the others have filled Elijah in on most everything that happened while I was out, we’re just now getting into the deeper stuff.

  “Yeah, though Lincoln says it won’t manifest until I meet the right partner,” he explains.

  Elijah’s eyes lock on mine. “So it happens to everyone then, so long as they connect with the right person?”

  “Wrong. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, At least not in anything I’ve found that correlates a certain aspect that triggers it,” Lincoln tells us. “It’s random, though there is one thing. It’s always between people with strong magical backgrounds. Powerful people. Once you have a good hold on it, you’ll be able to sense it in others.”

  “But will it always be one-sided?” I ask.

  Lincoln glances at Rosie. Her back tenses as she stirs the stew.

  “I only ever heard of it happenin’ to one other couple besides me and my Newt, and that man is sittin’ right next to ya.” She turns, tilting her head toward Lincoln, and he lets out a sigh.

  “My wife. We could speak our thoughts to each other, but McCade turned her against me. Told her it was my fault, that it was just a spell I was doing to keep her close to me. And when he killed her, I thought I lost a piece of myself. It wasn’t until he took my daughter that I realized what it felt like to truly be missing part of yourself.” Lincoln’s words bring us all up short.

  Willow whines from the floor, her head lifting and tilting slightly. I feel sorrow for Lincoln, now that I’ve had a small taste of living without someone I love. I couldn’t even dream of being in the position Lincoln is in.

  Though for some reason, in the silence of the room, a random thought pops into my head. “When McCade distracted me, when Elijah was taken, he used magic by uttering words in a different language. I’d never seen that before.”

  “You’re talking about fire magic,” he says. “I’ve tried to explain this to you before, Karina, but I don’t think I was clear enough. Fire magic is the magic that burns you, turns you into something inhuman; it’s what we’re all susceptible to. It can be mastered though, if you give yourself over to the burn. You go through bodies like they’re dirty socks, though. Especially in McCade’s case and the extent he goes to perform spells. Every fifty years or so, he has to shed his outer shell and slip into someone else. That’s why I didn’t recognize him right away. Vara on the other hand, she gets people to perform her spells for her. Never dirtying her fingers or using up precious magic in her stolen body. Lincoln explains.

  “But,” he continues, “ there’s another type of magic. One I like to refer to as light magic. It’s something you have to be born with, and it isn’t quite as common as it used to be. When fire magic came along, it burned up the world and took light magic with it. People forgot the simplicity of it, and now people are born with the power less and less.” He adjusts himself in his seat as Rosie pulls the cornbread from the oven, filling the room with the smell of sweet corn and milk.

  “I like to think of light magic like a muscle,” Lincoln says. “If you ignore it, it atrophies and therefore becomes obsolete. Though in some, it appears fresh and new. And in those who have it, they must work at controlling it. Light magic is powerful, and in most cases more commanding than fire magic. Practicing it doesn’t scratch the itch, like fire magic does once you’ve gotten a taste.”

  “How do you know all this?” Elijah asks him, and I sit closer to the edge of my seat in anticipation of the answer.

  “It was my fault that fire magic was ever created in the first place,” he says, as though he’s not dropping a bomb directly on our toes. “My brother… McCade. He came to my home one night extremely sick, and I didn’t know he was already poisoning my wife against me. She tried to convince me to do whatever I could to help him, but I refused. Instead, she sacrificed herself to give him power and bring back his life.”

  “Wow,” Elijah says, rubbing his palm over his face like he doesn’t know what to do with this information. “What happened to Cormac so long ago? I was on the way to save him. Why wasn’t he there?”

  Rosie pauses as she sets bowls of stew and plates of cornbread in front of us. Cormac was Elijah’s best friend, his confidant, his brother in arms. Elijah told me how he left the house the morning after Cormac called, leaving a frightened message on his answering machine. Elijah was taken that day held from the Sicarri for twenty years. When he returned he discovered Lincoln had taken over Cormac’s body.

  “Cormac,” Lincoln says, “was just a means to an end. And that end was finding my daughter. I thought the Sicarii might have some intel, so I posed as someone I knew could get to their center.”

  “So Cormac—”

  “I’m sorry, Elijah, but he was never real. It was me all along. On every mission, it was me next to you. Cormac was a lie,” Lincoln tells him.

  I fight back a gasp. Cormac was the epicenter of everything that caused this path in Elijah’s life.

  “The intel I tried to collect from the warehouse that day—”

  “It was all in the hopes of finding June. I had no idea what Vara had set up. I truly thought that I was sending you to get my research. When it all went down, I felt much regret, and I have ever since. That’s why I made myself known to Abe and volunteered to work with the Sicarri during the truce. I wanted to get you back, but I had a part to play, and I knew that Vara would always be watching.

  “It’s not something I’m proud of, but you have to understand that I did what I did with innocence in my heart. I had no idea fire magic would become the disease it has. And I hadn’t ever planned on becoming close with you.” Lincoln lets out a deep breath before continuing. “I called you there that day because I planned on telling you the truth, but Abe found me first. Made me join him, made me promise all these things, and told me if I complied I would get my daughter back. I should have known better,” he mutters.

  “I’m sorry,” Elijah bursts out, shoving back from the table and nearly smacking into Rosie. “This is all too much. Too fucking much.” He excuses himself from the room, his boots echoing on the wood floor as he returns to our room.

  Soren and I lock eyes, c
learly trying to decide which one of us should go after him. When Soren nods, I grab the vial of salve for my shoulder that Rosie hands me on my way out of the kitchen.

  I lightly rap on our door, looking over my shoulder at the hallway. A table stands at the far end, and beyond that is the front door, where Rosie keeps her shoes and gardening tools, and what looks like a bowl for her keys. Just above it is a hook on the wall where an umbrella hangs, along with a gardening hat.

  Everything here reminds me of my grandma’s house, and I realize I’ve been studying this place with a much finer eye than I normally would have if we were anywhere else. Oddly, after everything, I find comfort here, and I wonder for a moment if Lincoln could have known that.

  I open the door. He’s lying on the bed with the pillow over his eyes, seemingly blocking out the world.

  “Elijah,” I say, and he removes the pillow, looking confused. “I knocked.” I say, gesturing toward the door as I close it.

  “I didn’t hear you. And anyway, you don’t have to. There’s nowhere I go that I don’t want you with me.” He holds his arms out for me, but the pain in my shoulder stops me.

  “Time to administer.” I hold up the salve. I walk to the side of the bed and sit, pulling up my shirt. This time, I have a black tank top under my sweater, so I don’t have to get naked every time I put this medicine on.

  I take stock of my wound, doing it exactly like Rosie did the first time, and I’m not surprised to see it’s already feeling better. I’ve used this on a ton of Sicarri, and each time, it’s a lifesaver. Literally. Elijah rubs my back as I carefully lower my sweater. I can tell he’s itching to help, but he also knows me well enough to know that this is something I’d like to do myself.

  “Elijah,” I say again once I’ve righted myself.

  “I just—” he starts. “I thought that my best friend was killed by a demon, and I hated that demon for doing it. But it turns out that very same demon is my best friend, and was this whole time. What am I supposed to do with that, you know?” He laughs without humor.