Magic Fire: an Urban Fantasy Novel (Shifting Magic Book 1)

by Catherine Vale

  We ate breakfast in an amicable silence, me checking work emails on my phone and Darius occasionally asking questions about the building—which I did not know the answers to. Just because I’d lived here for almost six years didn’t mean I actually knew anything about the overall building. There was a laundry room on the first floor and a really shitty gym on the second. Half my utilities were included and I’d never had a plumbing issue. I’d been incredibly fortunate to never have loud neighbors, but every year there was always the risk of that changing.

  After, I fought him on doing the dishes, but he insisted that he wanted to be useful. Only a crazy person—so unprofessional of me, I know—fought for longer than necessary to hand wash breakfast dishes, so I left him to take a quick shower and get ready for the day. When I emerged from my bedroom twenty minutes later in a black pantsuit that I always thought made my (rather flat) ass look stellar, he was waiting in the living room with the TV on. Lips pursed, I twisted my wet hair into a knot on top of my head, going for some half-assed ballerina bun thing, and then grabbed the remote.

  “Hey,” he protested when I turned it off.

  “I have to go to work,” I said, hoping he would just get the hint. When he stared up at me, I crossed my arms, not once breaking eye contact. “And you’re not staying here while I’m out.”

  Was this all some elaborate scheme to find a place to live? Darius didn’t strike me as homeless, but there were all sorts in the city, and I wasn’t one to judge. Still, he looked and smelled clean, so I hoped I was way off base with that theory.

  “I wasn’t just going to lounge on your couch and watch TV,” Darius argued, sitting up a little straighter. “I had planned to ask for a key so I could run home, get my things, and come back while you were out to set up my protection devices—”

  “Like hell I would let you dig around my apartment while I’m not here!” I sputtered. I mean, he was gorgeous as sin and charming to no end, but that didn’t mean I was ready for him to snoop through my unmentionables while I was at work. “No way, Darius. You gotta be kidding.”

  “Kaye, I know you think everything is fine, and you’re not in danger,” he said, either oblivious to my bristling annoyance or just not caring, “but I’ve been in this business a long time. Shit always hits the fan when you least expect it. I’ve seen it happen many times before. I’ve seen clients refuse my help and then things go south while I’m gone.”

  “So you’ve had dreams about other people and then spent the night—”

  “I’ve had consultations,” he stressed, this time sounding more frustrated with me as he stood. The distance between us made the height difference a little more manageable, but I had no problem glaring up at him if I had to. He crossed his arms, biceps bulging just enough to catch my attention.

  No, Kaye. Focus, for fuck’s sake, and rein in your damn libido.

  He took a step toward me, but I held firm, wondering if he wanted me to shy away. Fucking alpha men. Always had to be the biggest cock in the roost.

  “And were you this insistent about it before?” I demanded. “You always push yourself on people this way, like a maniac?” A look of indignation flashed across his face, which made me sigh. “Look, I’ve been really open and accepting of all this, but I’m kind of reaching my limit. You’re a nice guy, Darius, from what I can tell, anyway, considering I don’t know you that well. Yeah, you’ve been open, honest, and kind to me from the day we met, but that doesn’t mean you can just barge into my life and expect me to pry open every nook and cranny in return for you to ogle. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “I’m not asking to know your deepest, darkest secrets,” he said after a few beats of tension had passed. His voice softened, and suddenly I just felt tired and my suit felt tight and I wanted to crawl back into bed. Instead, I went for my shoes, and my ears twitched at the soft footfalls padding after me. “I just want to keep you safe, Kaye. Something feels wrong, and I know that isn’t enough for humans, but you should understand that we get feelings like this. We notice shifts in the air. We feel the presence of another shifter or supernatural. I just… That’s what’s happening around you. I feel it, and I’d never forgive myself if something were to happen because I let you bully me out of here.”

  I looked up sharply, unable to hide my smile. “I’m not bullying you. I’m being very mature and logical.”

  “Calling me a maniac isn’t bullying? You’re a terrible psychologist.”

  “Fuck you.”

  We both grinned at one another as the tension eased away. I was still exhausted—the conversation was so draining and I had six more draining chats to have today with clients. How was I going to get through it? No idea.

  “Okay, that was unprofessional,” I said as we faced off, “but I’m not required to be professional in the privacy of my own home.”

  “I, on the other hand, have been totally professional with you,” Darius said, his voice taking on a rumbly growly quality that made my knees weak. “And I’m still here. Fighting with you. Because I believe in what I’m saying. I know you don’t know me well enough to trust me, but I’m asking you to go out on a limb here.”

  “You’re not staying inside of my apartment or getting my key while I’m at work,” I said frankly. “Let’s get that straight. Nor,” I raised a hand to silence him when he drew a breath, lips quirked into a smile, “are you coming to work with me, following me to work, or doing anything remotely stalkerish. You’re just not, Darius. I want to trust you, but you need to give me something to work with.”

  “How about this?” he said slowly as if mulling over what he had to say in his head for a few seconds first. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  I perked up a little at the mention of a deal, then instantly hated myself. Deals were huge in fae culture. I just couldn’t help it. And Darius seemed to notice how he had caught my attention, which only made his smile bloom, much to my embarrassment.

  “Ah, that’s what I thought.” He chuckled. “You fairies. Deals are like catnip to you.”

  “What is it?” I demanded before pointedly checking my watch. “I need to go open the practice soon.”

  “I’ll leave you alone for today and tonight,” Darius stated. “I won’t follow you to work or stake out the building across the street from your office. I won’t loiter in front of this building like a creep. I won’t harass you once an hour to tell me that you’re safe.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Wow, really selling your services there. This all makes me so thrilled about wanting to work with you.”

  “If I successfully back off,” he pressed on, fixing me with a slight glare, “then you will agree to take my help—until the job is done. I will be your personal protector until I can be sure the danger is gone and you’re in the clear. What do you think?”

  Biting my lip, I went for my purse and pretended to check through things, then did the same with my work bag. To me, this phantom danger wasn’t a thing—it just wasn’t. Clearly, it mattered to Darius or he wouldn’t be this adamant about it. If it was all a lie and this was just an excuse to see me, kind of intimately and creepily, then he had some serious mental health issues and I would probably have to hire my own personal bodyguard just to keep him at bay. But from all I had learned about him in the last, oh, fifteen hours, I suspected that wasn’t the case.

  That wasn’t to say there wasn’t still something there. He could have elements of paranoia and obsession in his personality, but I wasn’t in the space to decide whether they were a detriment to himself or others. For now, those habits were just annoying.

  “Fine,” I said once I had my keys in hand and was practically out the door. “Fine. I’ll take that deal. You have to be out of sight, gone, until tomorrow morning. No calls. No texts. No watching me from the street corner and following me. You have to fuck off completely, then I’ll take your help until the danger—” I put air-quotes around the word to show him how seriously I took the issue. “—is gone.”

  “Deal.�
�� Darius held out his hand to me. “Shake on it.”

  That made me hesitate. Deals were sacred. Fairies didn’t enter deals lightly.

  But the danger wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. He was blowing smoke, and after a night on my own, he would realize just how crazy this all was, and get this protection thing out of his mind.

  At least if I made the deal, I was guaranteed to see him again. Outside of all of this your-life-is-in-danger-let-me-be-your-superhero crap, I actually kind of liked the guy.

  So, ignoring the niggling voices at the back of my mind telling me to stop and reconsider, I slid my hand into his and squeezed.

  “Deal.”

  A bolt of electricity shot through both of us, like a static zap after shuffling your feet across the carpet. His eyes widened and I hastily pulled my hand away, rubbing the still tingling palm.

  I’d never made a deal before. Not a real one, anyway. Apparently, my magic knew the difference.

  “Well. That’s over with.” I pointed to the door, trying to ignore the way my body hummed. I was seeing the world more vividly than before, but like blinking away the swirling colors on your retinas after a flash of blinding light, it faded away within moments, bringing the world back to its regular, dull ordinariness.

  The after-effects of making a deal. Totally unexpected—and I wasn’t comfortable with Darius watching me process these feelings. “You’re fun to look at, shifter, but I’m going to be seriously late for work if you don’t get the fuck out of my apartment…”

  Chapter Five

  Darius kept his word. Not once did I see, hear, or catch a whiff of him for the entire day. Not while I was at work. Not on the subway home. And not around my apartment building. He had upheld the stipulations of the deal—which meant the deal was on. I had awoken to a text from him this morning, well within the rules, in which he told me he would be by after work today to start setting up legitimate protection crap around my apartment. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea, but a deal’s a deal, and he had every right to help in whatever way he thought necessary.

  Still, I wasn’t looking forward to finding out exactly what he planned to install in my home. In such a chaotic city like New York, where there were days when just existing drained me to a pulp of mush, I wanted my home to be my sanctuary – my peaceful place where I could just relax and not worry about having to be on for people. Sure, it was just a one-bedroom apartment, but it was my one-bedroom apartment, and I loved it. I had always felt safe there. It wrapped itself around me like a big, cozy cocoon during terrible storms and after awful, heart-wrenching days at work.

  I guess, most of all, I just didn’t want Darius to ruin that sanctuary with whatever he had in mind to fight off the “danger” that he seemed to believe was on its way to my doorstep. I’ll be honest; I spent most of my day worrying about it—then feeling insanely guilty for not giving my clients as much of my focus and energy as they deserved. Tomorrow, I would be better. Once I knew how this dragon was going to alter my home life, I might actually be able to concentrate again. Until then, I was a twitchy, irritable wreck, despite my deeply buried excitement over the thought of seeing him again.

  I arrived home shortly after 5 pm, which was standard on a day where I wasn’t swamped with clients and Karen wasn’t out sick. My weary bones, worn out mostly from worry, were heavy as I dragged them through the lobby and into the elevator. I only had maybe forty minutes before Darius planned to waltz back into my life, which was just enough time to shower, put on something comfortable—my skirt waistline was just digging into my stomach—and take a few minutes for myself to breathe.

  As the elevator doors swished open, I shuffled out into my hallway—and came to a sudden stop when I spotted something in front of my door. A large box. Head cocked to the side, I reached out into the ether with my magic, testing the area for darkness. With a blink, my vision turned near x-ray, fueled by my innate magical ability, allowing me to see anything beyond the mundane floating around my hallway. When nothing presented itself, I blinked the power away and proceeded toward the box with caution.

  I half-expected to see Darius’s writing scribbled all over it, but much to my surprise, it was blank. No writing anywhere, not even my address. Frowning, I crouched down and touched the cardboard hesitantly. It felt like… regular cardboard. I glanced down the hall in either direction, feeling a little silly. Paranoid, even. Apparently, Darius had infected me, but with all his talk of danger and now the sudden appearance of a strange box in front of my door… Coincidence? I couldn’t be sure.

  Teeth gritted, I tapped into my magic again, eyes closed but able to see more than any human ever could. Now that I was closer, I noted a faint pulsing yellow light around the box, which must have blended with the cardboard at a distance. I probed it carefully but found it unyielding and taut. Magic. Someone had placed an enchantment around the box. My frown deepened. It wasn’t typical fae magic either; something more potent. When I opened my eyes, I found them watery and my nose runny, the effort it took to poke the magical shield a bigger drain on my abilities than I cared to admit.

  At the sound of a door opening down the hall, I scooped the package up, grunting a little under its weight, and brought it inside. No need for my human neighbors to see me crouched over a box, hands up like I was feeling for auras, or whatever.

  Once I was inside, however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I did not want this thing in my home just yet. With a steadily tightening knot churning in my gut, I headed straight for the balcony and placed the box outside. Then, for good measure, I locked the sliding glass doors and stepped back with a firm nod. There. Try to get at me through those babies, box!

  My arms slumped to my side. Right. This was stupid. The box might not even be for me; it wouldn’t be the first time a mailman got the wrong unit and didn’t care. But that would require there to be an address written somewhere. As far as I could see, there was nothing, not even a tiny bit of scrawl to fuel the magic encasing the package.

  So, after changing out of my work clothes and into a pair of black yoga pants and a slouchy dark gray T-shirt, I settled on the armrest of my couch, still in view of the box, and searched around on my phone until I found Clara’s number.

  Clara, an old friend, was one of the city’s most respected mages. Unlike witches, mages dealt primarily in elemental magic. In a way, I always thought they were more hardcore than other supernaturals, using their bodies to channel their craft in ways that could destroy them. Witches played with the fabric of the universe. They used their gifts to control what was already present, creating spells to weave the magic for their use. Mages were conduits. Their bodies were their wands, and water, fire, air, wind, and spirit crafted their power.

  At least, that was how I understood the difference. There were so many supers in this world, and the next, that it was hard to keep everybody straight sometimes. All I knew was that Clara Brighton had a lot of tattoos, baked killer cupcakes, and lived in a house crawling with ivy, the sheer number of potted plants inside stifling. Clearly an earth mage. Still, she was one of the few people nearby who I could consult on this, so I clicked around until I found her number, then hit the call button.

  As the phone rang, however, I realized how absurd this all was. I could figure this out on my own. A box was just a box until it wasn’t, and Clara had a busy life.

  So, as soon as she answered, I did the small talk thing and invited her out to lunch, insisting we hadn’t seen each other in too long. She agreed. Now we had a lunch date for next Saturday, and the knot in my stomach wasn’t any smaller.

  Nibbling my lower lip, I wandered back to the sliding door in front of my balcony to study the mystery box with a frown. What if it was a gift from someone I knew—maybe Catriona?—and they cloaked it in magic to keep me from spoiling the surprise? No. If that was the case, they would have written something on it to clue me in. This was something…else.

  I jumped, and let out a pretty embarrassing gasp when my phone started shri
eking and vibrating in my sweaty hand. Heart pounding, I checked the screen; it was the number for the building’s intercom system. Darius must be waiting for me to let him in.

  “Hello?” I said, somewhat breathlessly as I turned away from the balcony and sauntered slowly across my small living room.

  “What’s wrong?” Yup, suspicions confirmed: Darius had arrived.

  “Nothing. Are you here?”

  “Yeah, let me in.”

  I pressed the number 9 key on my phone, alerting the system to open the door to the lobby. Just as I was about to hang up, the glass doors behind me shattered. This time there was nothing embarrassing about my scream. I whirled around, eyes wide in a panic, as a grotesque stone gargoyle clambered through what was left of my balcony door, its eyes a sickly yellow, like the magic shield I’d seen around the box, and fixed on me.

  My first response was to hurl a flash of bright white light at it, hoping that the appearance of sunshine might send it scrambling—but then I remembered it wasn’t a troll and sunshine had no impact on gargoyles. Fuck. It surged toward me, its great stone wings carrying it across my living room, and I dove out of the way with another strangled cry, scrambling into my kitchen and searching for a weapon.

  And then realizing, in my panicked state, that I was a weapon.

  Give me a break. It’s hard to think straight in a life or death situation!

  The gargoyle followed, faster than I would have liked, slamming into my wall and leaving a mammoth dent right down to the concrete. I hurled whatever dishware I could find on the counter and in the drying rack, but that only seemed to make the big hunk of rock angrier. Its roar rattled the whole unit—probably the whole building. While I managed to skirt out of the way when it made another lunge for me, I knew it would start cataloging my movements and anticipating my defense.