Forbidden Magic (Stolen Magic Book 4)

by Jayne Hawke

  I leant down to the ground beside the statue and reached out with my magical senses, finding no significant source of water below me until you hit the water table. All I could do was play water witch and wander the yard in the general area of where a pipe probably was, and doing so required me to calm my racing heart and accept that this was going to eat a big chunk of my (possibly imagined) lead.

  Step by step I crept along the ground, pushing my senses to their limits. I caught a touch of water after a very, very long ten minutes and, moving towards it, found a long cylinder of water energy reaching beyond my senses in one direction. It had to be what I was looking for.

  I reached down to the area just beyond the water and found earth – calcium. A less magnificent member of the witching community would have just pushed on the water and hoped to break through, but that risked destroying the entire pipe, the statue at the other end, and my chance at finishing this task anytime soon. Instead, I gently and slowly shaved the calcification down into dust and let the water dissolve it, careful not to give the same treatment to the pipe itself. I soon felt the water slowly pushing its way through the blockage and heard it coughing ugly sludge into the pool below the statue for a few moments before the water ran clean.

  Risking a moment’s celebration, I watched the fountain do its thing and let myself wonder what on Earth – or rather, what on the shadow plane – this could possibly be doing to help anything. I suspected the only way I’d ever know is if a cupid statue flew in and started pissing calcium-rich fountain water onto the goddess of shadows.

  I gave the spectacle a shake of my head and slipped back to the car, crossing the fountain repair off my list and looking at the entry that followed. This, I suspected, would be my last of the night. I had to gather scaffolding from three different construction sites around town and line it up in a massive ring around a glowing fae park. I had no idea how I was even going to move the stuff, let alone move that much of it before dawn. At least it didn’t need to be reassembled to full height...

  An hour later, I was sitting in a flatbed truck in front of the first site.

  “Go big or go home,” I said out loud to myself, grinning as I climbed down and stared up at a four-storey mass of scaffolding.

  The megaminds had failed to give me any details on how to deal with any of it, but I felt confident. I knew it could be disassembled and reassembled, which seemed like the kind of thing I could do readily enough. A quick look at the joints showed it to be more complicated than I’d imagined, and even after a spell to sharpen my night vision it was looking unlikely I’d get anywhere within the time allotted. I climbed it up and down, as much to keep busy while I thought as anything, and what I realized was that it was much lighter than it looked. Even better, it had wheels.

  In a move that no doubt made a workplace safety inspector somewhere wake up in a cold sweat, I used life magic to coerce a mass of vines helpfully offered up by the building next door to drag it slowly and carefully to the truck intact. I used a bit more life magic on myself to up my strength and, with clenched jaw and fluttering stomach, pushed it up onto the truck, nearly sixty feet of scaffolding standing precariously on the flatbed a testament to the power of bad ideas. It was an accident waiting to happen. I strengthened and wrapped the vines tight around it, added some earth magic bonds to further discourage tipping, and then made the most careful mile’s drive in Brighton history over to the scaffolding’s new home.

  It shouldn’t have worked, not in a million years, but somehow it did. Not only did it work, it worked two more times. Maybe the shadows helped, maybe somewhere on the god plane a luck deity was stretching probability to the breaking point to keep the goddess where she’d been sent, but one way or another it was mere hours before the most baffling prank in Brighton history was accomplished. The scaffolding caught the glow of the park and cast a huge ring of quadrilateral shadows in every direction. This, I thought, was what a shadow war looked like.

  The clock in the stolen truck told me I had maybe an hour left before dawn. The very last task on my list was a nightmare, one I couldn’t imagine getting done in an hour. It was also going to be done in an hour because I just knew that somewhere Liam or someone was outsmarting their final herculean challenge and cheating me out of my prize.

  Brighton had its very own Taj Mahal, one of the stranger sights in a strange town. The strangest thing about it was its little-known problem with being almost a full foot too far east. At least, according to certain shadowy parties.

  I drove over there quickly but calmly, my mind whirring as I tried to come up with conceivable ways of coming close to moving the monstrosity. Even as buildings went it was big, and not moving eleven inches to the west was one of the things that buildings were, by and large, made specifically to do. It was specified that the building had to be intact and structurally sound, which should have been a hurdle in and of itself but made little difference to me since I didn’t have any ideas for moving it with or without breaking it.

  When I arrived, the light around me was starting to come alive. It wasn’t strictly dawn until the sun was visible, which meant I still had a little time, but it was a very, very little. I ran through what I knew about buildings and came up with very little. They had foundations, and without them they’d sink into the ground. That meant that there were underground parts that needed to move as well as what you could see. With enough time, I could shift the earth on either side to move it millimetre by millimetre, but that was the work of days or weeks. With a big enough construct, it could be scooped up like a seedling and put back down, but apart from the issue of that being far bigger than the biggest construct I’d heard of there was also the problem of moving it so precisely and of getting a new spot for it in the first place given that most of the building would overlap its current footprint. Enough water would liquify the soil, allowing it to move easily, but that would take a legion of witches to control at even the most general level.

  Sunrise found me sprawled out on my hood, running through increasingly improbable options in the waxing light. I decided to be satisfied with a good night’s work. The scaffolding alone was a masterstroke. The final tasks on each list were all things that seemed impossible. If we managed to get even one of them done, that was good. If not, we’d find something fun to do in case of a tie. That is, assuming I wasn’t the only one to get that far in her list... a girl could hope.

  I headed home at a sedate pace, watching the sunrise colour the city. When I arrived, everyone was in the kitchen eating pork chops with their hands and talking in that up-all-night bliss voice people get when they see the sunrise from the other side. Someone handed me a chop straight off the grill. It tasted like jerk spice and charcoal and the looks on everyone’s faces told me this was exactly what we’d needed.

  It turned out that Rex actually had finished his final task. He’d hung the list, all entries crossed off, on the fridge like a little kid’s drawing and stood by it, smirking, with meat juice dripping from his half-transformed jaws. His task had been to bridge a river – almost certainly an artifact of the fall – that cut a several-mile canyon through an inexplicable upshoot of red stone. Elijah and I had envisioned a suspension bridge or something. Rex had done a smash-and-grab at an alchemy shop and thrown everything destructive he could fit in his car at the canyon walls until they collapsed, jamming in the canyon and forming a makeshift natural bridge.

  Couldn’t fault his logic.

  We were all dead exhausted and headed to bed with promises of tales to be told the next morning. Rex shouted, “Giant monkey!” after us as we climbed the stairs, staying up to finish the last of the meat. Leftovers weren’t really a thing in the packhouse.

  I didn’t think I had it in me as I started up the stairs, but somehow by the time I made it to our room I was wrapped around Elijah with my nails digging into the back of his neck. Seconds later he was beneath me on the bed, and a gasping, clawing lifetime after that we were fast asleep with bruises in all the right
places.

  Eighteen

  "I don't think the goal of the night was to pretend you're a magpie," Elijah said drily as Jess emptied out her bag onto the kitchen table.

  "So, it's ok for Lily to steal an awful painting and some costume jewellery, but I can't take things of actual value?" Jess huffed.

  I spotted three tea pots in the mix. Jess had apparently become obsessed with the damn things since she'd discovered they went for a lot of money sometimes. Of course, she hadn't put in the effort to figure out which ones were worth lots of money.

  She picked up a hideous green tea pot that looked as though it was formed of some awful fungus and cooed at it.

  "It's so ugly, it must be worth a lot!"

  "I don't think that's how it works," Liam said with a frown.

  I had to agree with the fox. There was a market for ugly things, there were people who collected ugly masks and mugs, but tea pots struck me as something that people usually wanted to be pretty. Then again, I knew fuck all about ceramics, so I wasn't going to get involved.

  Next, she pulled out a selection of stamps. Normal postage stamps.

  "Let me guess, you think they're worth something too," Elijah said.

  "Some people pay a fortune for stamps!"

  "I'm pretty sure you can get those down at the post office," I said.

  Jess narrowed her eyes and looked more closely at them.

  "It can be hard to tell with stamps. Sometimes it's the really small faults that make them priceless," she said with false authority.

  "I think we need to limit your time spent watching documentaries, cat," Elijah said.

  Jess sighed and went to raid the fridge.

  "You know, I could make us a fortune one day from all of this," Jess said as she waved a baguette at her stolen items.

  I didn't even know where the baguette had come from. She might well have stolen than from some poor bastard's breakfast.

  "What you'll get is the lord breathing down our necks for breaking the laws in stupid, foolish ways," Elijah said.

  Jess narrowed her eyes before she took a bite out of the middle of the baguette.

  "The important thing is that we made real progress last night. We're all exhausted, we don't know what's on the horizon, but we did as much as we could," I said.

  "That sounds like we're about to die," Liam said.

  This entire thing was not going how I'd pictured it.

  "He's not wrong. I vote we let Elijah do the motivational speeches," Jess said.

  "Hey, I can do good motivational speeches," Rex said.

  "No, it has to come from a leader. That's how it works," Liam said.

  "Says who?" Rex asked as he crossed his arms.

  I felt like I was supposed to step in and say something as the kind of co-alpha, but I was too damn tired to give a damn. Let them argue over weird shit. There was a quiet comfort to be taken in it, the familiarity.

  "Says all of the movies," Liam said.

  "Movies aren't real life," Jess said.

  "You don't say," Liam said sarcastically.

  It wasn't often that the pack started getting truly snippy towards each other. The exhaustion and frayed nerves were really starting to show. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that we'd barely even begun this little adventure.

  "Movies reflect how people view and interact with the world. They provide a lens from which to understand," Elijah said.

  Everyone turned to look at him. The comment had come completely out of left field. Who was he and where was my big bad wolf?

  Elijah simply shrugged and went back to his coffee and phone.

  "The alpha's spoken," Liam said.

  "So, we're all in agreement that Elijah's going to give us a moving motivational speech right before we charge into battle?" Jess said.

  Elijah raised his eyebrow at her.

  "I don't recall agreeing to either of those things."

  "Well, we can't just stand there and let everything come to us, it lacks gravitas," Jess huffed.

  I frowned at the cougar shifter. Did she know this was real life? Did she think that we were living in a really intense video game? I began to wonder if she felt fear, or what connections she had to the real world.

  "Cats," Rex said with a shake of his head.

  There it was. I'd been considering her a person, but really she was a cat in a human skin. That explained everything when you actually pointed it out and framed it that way.

  "We will go into whatever fight emerges in the way that best allows us to win," Elijah said.

  "And look like complete badasses," Jess said with a grin.

  "You do know no one's going to be filming it, right?" I asked.

  "But they might! You never know with all of these camera phones," Jess said.

  Elijah frowned.

  "There will be far more important things to think about if people are standing around with camera phones."

  "He doesn't mean how to steal said phones," I added.

  Jess's face fell.

  "So, no costumes? Or uniforms?"

  Elijah gave up. His shoulders slumped, his frown deepened, and he just gave up on the cougar. There was only so much energy you could put into her, and he had officially reached his very last scrap.

  Nineteen

  After that night, we called the shadow tasks good and started focusing on final preparations. There was no way to know when the goddess would get there, but it felt soon and that was all we had to go on. I promised Rex his monkey when all was said and done, and he accepted it with only a little grumbling.

  We slept as much as possible while mentally and physically preparing to take on a goddess. Rex and Liam slept first while Elijah and I kept our ears to the ground and trained. We swapped at midnight and the other pair watched until morning. Jess had gone entirely nocturnal, living in cougar form and rarely coming into sight. What she was doing we didn’t know, but cats were cats. Contacting her through the shadows got back nothing but ice-cold certainty. It was the first time I’d ever seen her serious, and if she had a plan it was probably important. I suspected the megaminds had contacted her directly, put on her the goddess’ trail, but there was no chance to ask her. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure whether they could talk to anyone but me in the first place.

  In that way we rotated through, always at least one person awake and ready to wake the others should it be needed. We went days without any real news, and we started swapping around the scheduling so I could do shadow work with each of them in turn. There were rumours and conspiracy theories flying across social media about what was going on with the weirdness. Statues moving, bridges collapsing, furniture being glued to ceilings and other bizarre acts. Yet we saw nothing of actual concern, thankfully.

  That was, up until Elijah and I were relaxing in the garden enjoying the sunset and taking what small moment we could for ourselves. Three people casually strolled into our garden as though the security system and general personal boundaries didn't exist. My sword was in my hand before I'd even fully stood.

  The megaminds sent through a very loud word of caution, and I lowered my blade enough to defuse tension, without actually disarming. Apparently, the god touched had been sent to keep the status quo. I supposed it made sense. For that matter, it was kind of weird that they were only coming forward just then. Doubtless the gods knew plenty we didn’t, but I didn’t care for the ifs and maybes.

  The discussion with the god touched was brief and terse. The megaminds said they were allies, but that didn’t make them friends. Their manners and sense of boundaries left something to be desired, clearly, and it was quickly apparent that they had very little respect for the rest of the world. They lived at the side of the gods, and we lived under the heel of the fae. They brought power, and we needed power. As far as they were concerned, they were solving someone else’s problem and we should have been grateful for the help.

  And so it was that we would be fighting amongst gods. God touched at our side, and a fall
en goddess our enemy.

  The Bast god-touched, a desert-tanned woman with long pitch-black hair and sharp golden-brown coloured eyes watched with a faintly amused smile. I wasn't sure how I felt about having another cat around the place.

  "Shani," she introduced herself with a small nod of her head.

  There was a lilt to her voice, something not quite human. From what I'd read, Bast was a protector, so this woman before me had a good chance at being a useful ally. Even if it did mean putting up with feline eccentricity.

  The two male god touched stood further back, assessing. Where Shani was in black leather pants and a long-sleeved black shirt, they were brighter, more eye-catching. I was reasonably sure the one dressed in shades of white and gold belonged to Apollo. I wondered how they felt about the idea that they belonged to a god. What was it like to have said god whispering in your ear and nudging to control your life?

  I'd heard that Aphrodite was something of a nightmare. Her god touched were all made stunningly beautiful right before she placed a porcelain mask on their faces to cover it up. She was a jealous goddess and couldn't allow even those she'd formed to stand and be beautiful for risk they might draw more eyes than herself. Personally, I thought that was ridiculous, but when you got down to it a lot of what the gods did was ridiculous.

  The olive-skinned man dressed in white and gold finally stepped forward.

  "Adrian. I'll be your archer."

  His voice was softer than his powerful body would have had me believe. He was lean, but pure muscle and almost as tall as Elijah. There was a sharpness to his eyes. He'd experienced far more than I had in life. And there I stood as a contract killer.