Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1)

by Lauren Harris

  I avoided thinking about Mom. The fight was no longer just about me and my desire for freedom or revenge.

  I organized spells in my head by type, and when the boys came back inside, cheeks red with cold, we broke for food. Tension kept us quiet, and by the time dawn came again, my back and neck were knotted. I settled into bed next to Jaesung, but could only bury myself against his back. He didn't push for more. It seemed imperative right now to run scenarios, prepare for the worst even as my heart ached for some sliver of hope. I held onto him, an anchor in the chaos.

  I don't know when I fell asleep, but when I shifted up onto my elbow, amber streaks of sunset painted the wall. Jaesung stirred and turned on his back toward me. Heavy, sleepy arms drew me into a kiss. I lingered, savoring the unguarded sweetness of his sleep-clumsy mouth on mine, then slid into the chill of the room.

  I showered, rinsing away sweat, soapy hands working at the knots in my neck and shoulders. There was nothing I could do about the nausea, or the anxiety buzzing over my skin like a low-level electric current. I dressed, stretched out my aching back, and pulled my damp hair into a braid.

  My own eyes looked back at me from the mirror—hazel and sunken in sockets much deeper than they'd been a few days ago. I was too thin—the effect of magic, probably, though I'd only flirted with it around the edges of the mandalas. I pulled the ring from my bag of toiletries. Jaesung had cannibalized an old cowry necklace he'd gotten on a trip to California and given me the cord. I tugged it over my head and dropped it down the front of my shirt, where it settled cool and heavy against my sternum.

  The house was silent. I slipped down the stairs, my hair smelling of Mrs. Park’s flowery shampoo.

  The drawn curtains glowed with the sunset, letting a muted suggestion of light slip across the living room. Isaac's head was silhouetted over the back of the chair, hair nearly the same color as the light peeking in.

  It took two steps for me to realize that the room was too quiet.

  Just as I thought it, I smelled something rich and metallic. Alarms went off in the back of my head, and my fingers curled into fists even as I identified the scent of blood. And the silence was wrong because Isaac, skinny as he was, snored like a broken cello.

  "Isaac?" I whispered. A frisson of horror slid down my spine. I stepped forward, wanting not to look.

  Isaac's eyes were open. Blue and staring at the far window, as if surprised by the sunset. His skin was gray down to the open gash in his throat. Below that, red. His shirt was dark with it. The color pooled in the creases of his jeans, sunk into the upholstered cushion below. His arms, tattooed and freckled, hung stiff against the arms of the couch.

  I stifled a gasp of horror, stepping back. That gash was deep and wide, made with a single firm slice. The blade would have been sharp and substantial. Like a hunting knife.

  My senses blew wide with fear. Where was Jaesung—still upstairs? Why hadn't Isaac's wards worked? Where was the attacker? Who?

  But I knew the answer to that last question, even before the broad figure came barreling out of the darkness. Morgan ducked around my kick, and I turned just in time to avoid his left hook. He slammed into me, and we fell back against the stairs.

  I screamed, wild as an animal, and clawed at my cousin's face. His hands were rough as he struggled for purchase. His intent was capture, which would have given me the advantage with anyone else. But this was Morgan; I couldn't fight to kill. I struggled to call up a mandala, but only vicious ones sprang forward. Wind. What was the wind one?

  It popped into my mind. An instant later, a gale ripped Morgan away from me. The gust sent him crashing into the back of the chair, spilling Isaac onto the floor as it overturned.

  Breath knifed into me. I struggled to my feet even as Morgan lunged for me again. I ducked sideways, crashing to the floor, and came up on one knee to see him struggling to right himself on the stairs.

  This time I was ready with the mandala, blasting him back into the kitchen.

  Morgan. Jesus, Gwydian must have sent him in when no one else could get through Isaac's wards. It had to be something about Morgan's lack of magic...

  There was no more time to think. Morgan withdrew something heavy and dark from behind him, and I had only an instant to move out of the way.

  A gun. A familiar black Beretta, which I’d last seen when I handed it to Morgan in the warehouse, months ago.

  I hurled myself to the carpet just as the shot fired. Something punched my thigh, and an instant later, the pain hit. I screamed, Isaac's blank eyes looking on from under the chair.

  There's no pain like being shot. It differed from being stabbed or punched, or even from breaking a bone. I'd done all three, and nothing could have prepared me. There was no way to hold back the scream. The burn of it was almost as bad as anything else—everyone is so focused on the punctured flesh that they don't stop to think about the fact that bullets are hot. They sit against your bone and sear into you without mercy. At least, this one did.

  Panic sent me struggling to my hands. I dragged myself forward, painting a bloody streak across the carpet. Behind me, Morgan stalked forward. The look on his face burned as much as the bullet.

  His expression was stony as ever, but behind that grim mask, his gray eyes were alive with horror. He lifted the gun.

  I had to stop him before I lost too much blood. Before the shock I could already feel working its way into my core took away my ability to cast. I lifted my hand, calling up the mandala for knives of ice. His hand shook. He was fighting the enslavement spell.

  “Morgan...." I choked on his name.

  And then I saw the shadow on the stairs. A second later, a hockey stick slammed into the side of Morgan's head. A bullet streaked past my shoulder. I heard glass shatter.

  "Jae, NO!" I shouted. "Run!"

  But there wouldn't be time. Morgan staggered upright, blood streaming from his temple. Jaesung swung again, but there was no world in which he was a match for my cousin.

  Morgan caught the stick and twisted, jerking Jaesung toward him. It took a split second. He kicked, and I heard the grinding crack of bone. Jaesung let out an animal roar and went down. Morgan lifted the gun.

  This time, I didn't hesitate. I blasted the spell straight at the gun.

  It sliced through the barrel, through the chamber, and the long finger on the trigger. Those slicing blasts slammed back into the wall, the energy sizzling through.

  Morgan turned cradling his bleeding hand, and something in his face shifted. I knew that look—the gleam in the gray eyes that meant he'd had a revelation. Something in the order's interpretation gave him an opening.

  He ducked, heaving Jaesung to his feet. I watched in horror as he locked an arm around his neck and hauled him toward the garage.

  "No..." I said, and shoved myself onto my knees. My leg screamed, but I forced the pain into the back of my mind. He couldn't take Jaesung. Gwydian would kill him. Gwydian would hold him hostage like he had me and my mother. And I would go.

  Damn Isaac, this was the entire reason I'd wanted to leave Jaesung behind. Damn me, for letting him come anyway.

  I made it two steps and fired off a wind spell that slammed several pictures off the wall but did nothing to stop Morgan. The next moment, I was on the linoleum floor, arm outstretched toward the door.

  "Jae!" I screamed, dragging myself after them, desperate to get to him. His leg was broken at the knee, dragging behind even as he scrabbled at the door frame, trying to hold on.

  "Helena!" It sounded like a warning, not a plea.

  I didn't care. I pulled myself up on the island and scrabbled for the knife block. My vision was going dark around the edges. Morgan shoved Jaesung's head hard into the door frame. He dropped, caught only by my cousin's powerful arm. "Morgan, no. No!" I screamed. "This is worse! NO!"

  My clumsy hand hit the knife block. It toppled to the floor, scattering blades across Ms. Park's spotless kitchen. I was too far gone for fine movement. I threw myself at Morgan's ba
ck, hit the edge of the closing door, and crashed backwards into darkness.

  A slap across the face drew me from the black. I swam for a moment, drowned in the deep bottom of a chill sea, and contemplated staying. I didn't want to face what waited for me at the surface. Broken moonlight, a world much less restful than the slow-shifting sand and cold oblivion of unconsciousness.

  A second slap, and I groaned, waving an arm through the chill current, pushing away the shark. It didn't matter that I could breathe—of course I could. The bottom of the ocean was where I lived. Where I belonged, with the rest of the creatures that had never known light.

  "Shock her."

  Fire lit the water, branching through my veins. I sat up with static in my hair and a shriek on my lips, smelling blood and ozone. Strong hands grabbed my shoulders before I could fall back, and I opened my eyes to terra-cotta skin and fierce golden eyes. Deepti. I tried to twist away, but found a forest of legs circling me. I looked around, wild with anger and desperation, and counted twelve Sorcerers, including the Guild Mistress herself.

  "Where are they?" I said. "How did he get through Isaac's wards? How did you get through... what-" I lifted a hand to my head, which swung around in dizziness. Deepti steadied me with a hand.

  "Isaac's wards died with him. As far as we can see, he set protections for only those with magic. The one who attacked was not a sanguimancer, but a man."

  "A spellhound," I corrected. "Morgan. My cousin."

  Deepti's brow furrowed. "Your cousin?" For a glimmer of a moment, she looked hopeful.

  "Oh my mother's side," I said, angry that, even now, she was more worried about my genetics than my humanity. "He took Jaesung. He knew I'd..." I twisted around, and this time I did heave up everything I'd eaten. Deepti combed back my hair, holding it aside as I coughed and expelled a second stream of watery bile onto the floor. When I looked up, eyes watering, the Guild Mistress was making subtle hand signals to some of the Sorcerers behind her.

  "We've got a tail on them," she said. "You're very lucky."

  "Lucky?" I choked on the word.

  "Yes. The bullet nicked your femoral artery. You would have been dead within minutes if Eric had not been near enough to stabilize you."

  "Too bad Eric wasn't near enough to keep me from getting shot in the first place."

  A deep voice behind me grunted, and I heard the creak of fabric as the owner of that voice knelt at my back. "Your cousin's good, Martin. I think you know that."

  "Eric was an officer before he joined as a Guild Enforcer," Deepti said.

  "Yeah, well, there are some shitty officers," I snapped, prodding gingerly at the bandages around my thigh.

  "I am adept at healing," she said, motioning for Eric to take my shoulders. "But I fail to see why I should bother at this point. You are compromised—Gwydian has your cousin, the boy you love. Like your father, you would give yourself to him to save their lives. The only clear course of action on my part is to see you restrained."

  I bared my teeth as if threatening to bite her and even lunged forward. The hands on my arms restrained me. "Fuck you!" I jerked against the grip, kicking out with my good leg as I tried to kick the woman before me.

  "Miss Martin!" she called, forcing her voice out louder than my impotent growls. "I am prepared to bargain!"

  "Of course you're fucking prepared to bargain, you bitch! You've got all the power!"

  "Says the woman who can cast spells with her mind."

  I stopped writhing, breath coming fast and short. Seven separate mandalas flashed into my mind, every one of them deadly. Bodies around me tensed, the hands on my arms went tight. I glared up at Deepti, hesitating only because I knew, with a sinking sense of dread, that I could never save Jaesung and Morgan, let alone kill Gwydian, without her help.

  But the deal she had offered me was only marginally better than Gwydian's. Let the Guild mark me, keep track of me. With a kill switch on me, they could demand anything they wanted, and I would have to do it. It was almost worse, to make compliance a choice rather than a compulsion—if they asked me to kill, it would be me.

  "What do you want?" I growled.

  Deepti's lips tightened, but there was no triumph in her golden eyes. "Make me an offer."

  My nostrils flared. "I'll give you two years. I'll work for the Guild."

  "Ten," she said. "It will take me three to train you."

  "Five. Three to train, two to work. After that, you take away the kill switch and leave me the fuck alone. Forever."

  She crouched. Blood stained her knees, soaking into the camel-colored trousers. It streaked up over the delicate bones of her wrists, lingered under her fingernails.

  Mine, or Isaac's? I shuddered.

  "Five," she agreed. "And the enslavement spell. We must subdue Gwydian.”

  Breath whooshed out of me, half laugh, half disbelief. I stared at her, the refusal trembling on my lips, even as a dreadful certainty spread in my mind. If I said no, she would make good on her threat to lock me up, far from any hope of saving Morgan and Jaesung. She'd told the truth, when she'd said I had surpassed them in importance, but that didn't make them any less valuable to her. She'd never given up on those spells.

  I saw my mother's face all over again, slack in surprise, going gray in death. The blood seeped into her hair, her bright eyes cold and empty.

  To say yes would feel like a betrayal.

  But Morgan was still alive, and Jaesung. I almost felt his hands in my hair, his mouth on my neck. His laugh vibrating my chest, where a length of cord suspended the heavy silver high school ring with Isaac's protection spell.

  "If I give it to you," I said, heart thudding in my throat, "you have to swear that the first priority—more than killing Gwydian—is to get Jaesung out alive. He was never a part of this."

  Deepti rolled the idea around a moment before nodding. "Very well. Taking Gwydian, dead or alive, is our second priority. Your cousin is too dangerous to guarantee."

  It hurt to nod, but I understood. Morgan had nearly killed me. He'd kill any of the Sorcerers that got close enough to let him.

  "And you will give five years to the Guild. Three as my apprentice, and two in the field."

  It felt like closing shackles around my ankles, but I nodded. "Fine."

  She stretched out her hand, and the circle of Sorcerers moved, passing her a familiar sketchbook. When I took it in my fingers, I left rust-colored smudges across the cover. I opened, flipping past the pages of mandalas Isaac and I had drawn. It smelled like sharpie and powdered sugar.

  "Does he have family?" I asked, accepting a slippery pen.

  Behind me, the low voice answered. "A sister. She's with him. She's a Guild Tracker too."

  I lowered the sketchbook into my lap and swallowed back an unexpected surge of pain. I hadn't even liked Isaac, but he'd been trying to help me. Given time, I might have gotten past his abrasiveness and actually….

  I choked back a sob and opened to an empty page.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Naked branches stretched across the windshield like fissures, spilling in light from Orion, Taurus, and Canis Major. I traced over the shapes to keep myself calm, ignoring the crackling static from Eric's police radio along with the spaceship's worth of computers and blinking lights in the front seat of his cruiser.

  I sat on the passenger's side with my legs pulled up, chin on my knees. The floor was a mess of balled up hamburger wrappers, plastic soda bottles, and other artifacts of our three-hour drive to southern Illinois. My leg throbbed, despite the rudimentary healing job Deepti had done, and my body felt drained even with another bag worth of transfused blood.

  I stared at the trees, willing myself to see far enough through the winter-stripped trunks to find Gwydian, and therefore Morgan and Jaesung.

  Fortunately, Eric was a man of few words. Nothing I said would make the waiting easier, so silence stretched between us as if by mutual agreement.

  We'd pulled off the side of a highway onto a snowy
shoulder by the edge of a thick pine forest. The forest, belted in by a five-foot wire fence, came up as a privately owned campsite on Eric's GPS. It was to here that Deepti's people had followed Morgan, confirming his presence with a photo of Jaesung's truck parked in the campground's abandoned lot.

  I'd been surprised to find Deepti receptive to my ideas. Apparently, my evasion of her people over the past months had been sufficient proof that I could handle myself. Plan in place, we'd split into teams of two and scattered around the campground's perimeter, waiting for the confirmation that Gwydian himself was in the camp.

  "This would be a lot easier with a drone," Eric mumbled.

  I snorted. "Because that wouldn't tip him off."

  He shrugged, and the movement displaced the bullet-proof vest under his uniform. Eric was a big man in his thirties. Not tall as Morgan or Jaesung, but broad-chested and padded out with the muscle I'd learned not to expect from a Sorcerer. Then again, given the number of burger wrappers he'd chucked at my feet, he had to eat four times the amount of a normal man just to stay his size. The uniform itself was black, with gray accents and a gold badge proclaiming him a Sheriff's Deputy.

  We weren't in the right county, but I doubted anyone would question him.

  The scanner crackled and squealed, letting out barely intelligible words and numbered codes. The static filled the car, setting my ears to vibrating. I wanted to get out.

  "Amelia will be back soon," he said, as if reading the tension in my posture. "In fact..."

  A ripple at the edge of the trees had me lowering my feet to the floor, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. A sparkle of light along the snow seemed to zip open around the edges of a mandala, which faded under the footsteps of a petite woman. She couldn't have been any older than twenty, with a chin-length black-dyed bob and a pixie thin frame. She hurried over to the police car, breath puffing out from the fur-lined hood she'd pulled tight to her face.