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

by Catherine Vale

  Speaking of a shifter in Alfheim… We did get some odd looks from all sorts of creatures as we had strolled through the Core’s main streets and side alleys. Supernaturals could sense you in a heartbeat. They all knew I was fae—and they all knew the company I kept. I’d kept my head held high, refusing to let their stares affect me, one way or another. It had been good for Darius to have my support, just as I had his while we’d searched for this mysterious fairy named Z.

  A week of searching hadn’t turned up much. Most of my contacts merely knew of the name, had heard rumors and whispers, but no one could point to anything definitively. Each day Darius and I asked around—discreetly, of course—and each day, we turned up nothing.

  I couldn’t imagine that today would be any different, but we would still make our rounds, and try to uncover this mysterious fae.

  As I gently closed the door to the guest room where Darius slept, I made a mental list of other things to do: get breakfast from the market, take Darius exploring in the elvish village on the outskirts of the Core like I promised—and when we were there, press them for information about Z. There was a nymph-held production in the amphitheater near Belladonna’s five-story apartment building this afternoon, which I thought would give us a nice opportunity to study the Core’s inhabitants in a subtle way. Then dinner. Then stargazing on the wraparound balcony. Then… wherever the night took us.

  After swapping my sleeping attire—which was nothing more than an oversized t-shirt that I left in the apartment for when I visited—for a golden yellow sundress, I slipped on my shoes and made my way to the street below. The doorman, a dryad with skin like bark and hair like moss, swept down in a low bow as he held the door open, to which I smiled awkwardly at.

  The morning market was just a few blocks over. One might think the streets would be set in a logical pattern, but for the most part, the streets in the Core were like ivy branches: they went whatever way they damn well pleased, winding around each other, and back again. At least by now, I knew the streets by heart, and my feet didn’t lead me astray. Hell, even if my eyes were closed, the sounds of the morning market chaos would be enough to guide me to the right place.

  The market spanned two blocks and all the streets, nooks, crannies, and awnings within it. Sellers sold meat, grain, and handbags all in one area. There was no sense of cohesion, no logical, organized placement for different types of goods and services. The merchants simply set up their stands in the morning, just before dawn, and fought for the best spot each day.

  I wove through the crowds, on the hunt for very particular sellers. A little gremlin—literally—cut me off at one point, darting in front of me and whipping open his trench coat like he was in a cheesy eighties movie.

  “You wanna buy some angel feathers?” he demanded, wriggling his eyebrows at me as I stared on in horror. Fluffy white feathers lined his coat—some still with blood rooted to their base. He coughed, a smoker’s hack if I’d ever heard one, and added, “Genuine feathers. Freshly plucked. Loaded with the ability to make you soar, baby girl.”

  “You’re absolutely disgusting,” I spat angrily, then purposefully strode around him, knocking roughly into his arm on the way by. I heard some incoherent grumbling behind me, then seconds later the same spiel was prattled off to another unsuspecting victim, and I found myself cringing, repulsed by it all.

  Not all the sellers in the Core were as good as the guys I bought my breakfast supplies from.

  All my food was iron free, purchased directly from fairies in the community. Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Bacon. Everything was Alfheim-grown and cured. As much as I’d wanted to ask about Z, a crowded market where anyone might be listening just wasn’t the place. So, I forked over my silver coins—which I’d had converted from American dollars my second day here—and headed back to the apartment. Three silver coins amounted to roughly forty US dollars in the human world, something I always forgot about when I visited. It was so easy to just toss a coin here and there, especially when the price of goods looked so cheap. One silver coin for a pound of my favorite Kitchen Witch brand of cheese? Yes, please. I did it all the time, every visit, without fail. Alfheim just wound me up too much—and then I’d realize I’d dropped three or four hundred dollars in a day, and suddenly my spending budget was sliced in half.

  That had happened on our second day when I bought Darius a hilarious Hawaiian-themed shirt and forced him to wear it, unable to help myself.

  Twelve silver coins later, the purse strings tightened.

  I arrived home, my arms filled with my bounty. Just as I was locking the front door, I heard Darius call my name from the bathroom over the sound of running water, obviously taking a shower. I called his name back, distracted by the mail that had been pushed through the door, sitting in a pile at my feet. All for Belladonna and her girls, of course. I snatched it up from the ground, filtering through the junk mail and envelopes, checking to see if there was anything important I should set aside for Belladonna, as she had requested of me the last time I was here. Much to my annoyance, one of the flyers decided to spontaneously combust when I tried to throw it away.

  Apparently, if you weren’t interested in being a customer of Witch’s Brew Emporium, you deserved to have your eyebrows singed off.

  Darius called my name again, and I set our breakfast goods down on the kitchen island with a huff. “What, Darius?”

  “Come here!”

  I bit my lower lip for a moment, then padded across the expansive apartment to the guest bathroom. It seemed unlikely he was about to ask me to join him since he was, you know, so focused on duty and what was appropriate for a “client”. I was in the middle of a huge eye roll just thinking about it when his head popped out of the doorway—and, embarrassingly enough, I jumped and cried out in surprise.

  “Damn it, Darius,” I muttered as he laughed. “Did you call me over here just to scare me?”

  “No.” He motioned for me to step into the insanely humid bathroom. Dragons and their scalding hot showers. Seriously. Shower sex was getting less and less appealing the more I learned about him.

  “So, what is it? I can go to a sauna with the ice elves if I wanted—”

  “Did you write this?”

  I frowned. “Write what?”

  “The message.” He stared at me hard for a moment. “On the mirror.”

  I blinked—it was like trying to see through sticky, invasive fog in here—and so I moved closer to look.

  I HEAR YOU’RE LOOKING FOR ME

  “Yeah, I definitely did not write that,” I told him, trailing off as I studied the writing. It looked like a man’s writing, honestly, lacking the loopy, fatness most women’s writing had outside of the medical professions. “When did it appear?”

  “It wasn’t there before I got into the shower,” he replied, shrugging. His voice had lost some of its joking edge, hints of concern now seeping through. Just as he was about to say something further, the writing vanished, and I gasped as more, new writing started to appear—like we were watching someone write it. I lashed out around the sink, trying to feel for a spirit or a disgusting invisible man who liked to hide in people’s bathrooms—but sensed nothing. I then switched to my second sight, but beyond the colorful pulses of the standard magic one might find in a fairy’s apartment in Alfheim—again, I found nothing.

  “What the hell…” I squinted at the new message.

  FIND THE GRAVE MARKED WITH THE SUN

  THERE WILL YOU FIND ME

  - Z

  “Well, looks like he found us,” I stammered, a rush of prickling anxiety coursing through me. “Z.”

  “Or it’s a trap,” Darius countered, and we exchanged a quick raised-brow look with one another. It could very well be a trap. Maybe someone caught wind that we were looking for a fairy rebel and wanted to stop us before we joined his ranks. Maybe Abramelin liked fucking with his prey before he killed it—which, given his past actions, would strike me as odd. Sending assassins to kill me, twice, was a pretty
straightforward way of doing things.

  “We aren’t going to see the elves today,” I said softly. When I reached out for the mirror, curious as to whether the lettering would feel like anything familiar, the words vanished and were quickly replaced.

  KAYE. HURRY.

  My eyes widened, anxiety spiking in an instant. Z knew my name. He knew me.

  “No,” Darius remarked, totally oblivious to my internal freak-out at the name drop. “Apparently we’re going to visit the dead instead.” He paused as I gawked at my name, heart pounding. My dragon then gave a curt exhale, something that sounded like a cross between a groan and a growl. “Fantastic.”

  * * *

  “You see anything yet?”

  I blew a few recently fallen dark red locks out of my face, not wanting them to stick to my sweaty forehead. “Nope. You?”

  “Not really, no.”

  I groaned softly, then brushed away the dirt and weeds from yet another gravestone. Nothing about the name indicated a sun, a relation to the sun, or even sunshine. I hadn’t so much as seen a single you’re the light of my life on any of these things. Most of the stones were just names, many in runes well outside my vocabulary, which only made things harder.

  After breakfast, Darius and I had made our way to the Core’s only graveyard. It was on the outskirts of the city, closer to the scarier magical forests than those full of elves and nymphs, and the like. Scary trees. Scary dark shadows. Scary noises and whispers I could have sworn sounded like my name. Just… scary overall.

  The graveyard itself wasn’t scary, and it shouldn’t be, given the fact that we searched through it in broad daylight. Z hadn’t given us anything else to work with besides the vague sun comment, so we initially thought that maybe some beam of sunlight would wash over a single tomb or grave marker.

  Of course, it could never be that easy.

  We’d been at it for two hours and hadn’t seen a soul—living, or otherwise. Centuries worth of dead supernaturals lay beneath our feet. Those that didn’t turn to ash or stone, or whatever when they died, ended up here, near their kin, if possible. And throughout our searching, I’d seen more fae runes on graves with young fairies buried beneath than I could have imagined.

  The sun was unrelenting today, not a cloud in the sky, which made for hot and exhausting work. I was on the verge of calling it quits, with the plan to go grab some lunch and regroup, maybe contact Noris again to see if he had any suggestions, when something caught my eye. It happened in passing. I wasn’t even looking at the headstone, but my brain processed the shape and stopped me in my tracks.

  It was a headstone with no name, in the middle of a row of clan-less supernaturals. No name—but instead, a small sun insignia carved into the corner.

  “Darius!” My voice echoed across the lot, and he hurried over, carefully making his way around the graves.

  “What?” He looked just as sweaty as I did, which made me feel a little better. I pointed to the carving, before wiping at my forehead.

  “A sun.”

  His head bobbed up and down. “So it is. You think that’s it?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Touching it didn’t seem to do anything. Both Darius and I tried to push, pull, and prod the carving into doing something. Each failure dampened my spirits just slightly, but it didn’t extinguish them. This was the first sign of something meaningful we’d found all day. It had to be something; it just had to be.

  “Wait.” I managed to stop Darius from straight-up punting the gravestone across the row, noting the way his forehead crinkled in frustration. “Wait. Let me try something…”

  Maybe this was another bigoted portal. Maybe it needed a supernatural blood sacrifice for us to cross through.

  I pricked my finger on the sharp edge of the gravestone, then pressed my bloodied tip to the center of the sun. Seconds later, the ground under my feet started to rumble and vibrate, and Darius yanked me away, just as the earth disintegrated beneath me. Arms wrapped tight around my waist, he set me down behind him, then peered inside.

  “Stairs,” he said, and I darted around him. Sure enough, a set of stone stairs awaited us, a little dirty, but otherwise stable. Torches illuminated the way down, and I let out a shocked laugh.

  “An underground world in an underground world,” I said, sighing, and shook my head. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “Let me go first,” Darius insisted, and just as I started to protest, a figure stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs, shutting us both up—but for different reasons, I suspected.

  Because standing there, peering up at me, was a man who reminded me of my father.

  But he wasn’t my father.

  He was my brother.

  My heart seemed to split in half, flying up into my throat and plunging down into my stomach at the same time. It was hard to swallow, to think, to stand.

  “Zayne?”

  He grinned up at me, and maybe it was just a trick of the flickering torchlight, but I swore he looked just as he did the day he left me all those years ago. “Hey, sis…”

  Chapter Twelve

  For a split second, I felt like a little girl again. I threw caution to the wind and flew down those stairs, barreling into Zayne so hard that I sent him stumbling back. What hit me immediately was that he smelled the same as I remembered. Smells are hard to describe, but you are immediately transported to a memory from your childhood when a familiar, nostalgic one hits you. It creates that warm glow in your belly and forces a smile across your lips, no matter your mood. Zayne’s scent hit me right away, hard, like a punch to the gut, and I held tight, breathing him in.

  We had the same dark red hair, and he had let his grow shaggy and wild down to his shoulders. In the history of the fae, patriarchs and matriarchs tended to wear their hair wild, like the bigger and rattier it was, the more power they’d absorbed from the elements. I grasped the back of his head, that hair impenetrable as we hugged, and I felt him do the same.

  We both trembled in one another’s arms, and when I finally pulled back, despite every fiber of my being protesting the distance, I noticed the tears in his eyes—they mirrored the ones in mine. We both wiped them away, sniffling and grinning like idiots, and in that moment, all my anger with him, all the baggage he’d dumped on me when he left me all alone, was gone.

  The psychologist in me knew it would rear its ugly head soon. It would have to be dealt with if we had any hope of moving forward, but for now, I just wanted to look at him, to hug him.

  “Zayne…” I pressed a hand to his cheek. While mine had retained some baby fat well into my adult years, his had grown sharp and hard, cheekbones defined and lips thin, just like our dad. I blinked hard when sad memories began to surface, then cocked my head to one side. “Wait, are you… Are you this Z character?”

  He nodded. “I am. I didn’t want to involve you in any of this, but when I heard you were looking for me, I knew there had to be a reason.”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely a reason. Abramelin tried to kill me,” I told him, noting the hardening look in his eye and the way his grip on my arm tightened. “I was told to find Z, that I couldn’t take him on alone.”

  “No, you couldn’t,” my brother agreed. His voice had gone soft, contemplative, and behind me I heard Darius’s slow, hesitant footsteps coming down the stairs. “It’s good that you came to Alfheim.”

  “Is this… still Alfheim?” I asked, gesturing to the sprawling landscape around us. It was the first time I even processed where we were, and the only thing I could compare it to were the old paintings of dwarven halls from the ancient days. Modern dwarves still mined deep into the mountains, both in our supernatural world and the human world above, but no one had great halls like this anymore—the kind where you couldn’t quite see the ceiling, and the great stone pillars glittered like diamonds in the torchlight. Over Zayne’s shoulder, I spotted a handful of men and women waiting. I frowned. Did my brother have an entourage?

&nb
sp; I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, my big brother, the guy who used to be frightened of the furnace in our aunt’s basement, was leading an underground militia, hell bent on stopping a psychopathic ArchMage, and his minions.

  Why shouldn’t he have an entourage?

  “Yes, we’re still in Alfheim,” he told me quickly, “but the door is sealed… It only opens for fae blood.” When I tried to ask yet another of my thousand questions, all of them swirling around in my head like a hurricane, he gave me a little shake and dipped down to my eye level, frowning. “Kaye, I know you must have a million questions for me, and I promise I’ll answer them all when the battle is over.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “The…battle?”

  “It’s coming,” he insisted, eyes sparkling with a manic energy I’d never seen before. I swallowed hard, not liking what I saw, as he continued, “My sources are never wrong. We need to get you armed and ready. There’s a whole host of new spells I can teach you to better defend yourself, but make no mistake, Abramelin is coming for us. We’ve been attacking his forces for months now. I think he considers us flies, buzzing around a larger predator, but I’d like to think we’re a spider drawing him into our web.”

  I gawked, unsure of what to say. A part of me had known that once Darius and I found Z, we would probably have to fight in some way. After all, who would offer us sanctuary without expecting a little payment in return? This was an unofficial militia, after all. Still, I hadn’t expected to be thrust into all of this so suddenly—especially after only just reconnecting with Zayne.

  “We’ve been building up our numbers with supernaturals from all over the country,” Zayne told me, finally appearing to calm himself. I couldn’t blame him. Clearly, he was passionate about defeating a psychopath and keeping our world safe. It was just… It was an odd feeling to look at the man in front of me, a man I grew up with, and not really know him anymore, despite the familiar face and nostalgic scent.