“Keep an image of being human in your mind. Two legs, two arms, standing upright. I’m going to change at the same time. Are you ready?”
Alcippe nodded. Nic was sweating. He remembered his first change and he’d have done anything to take the pain for her. But she had to get through it on her own. As a horse, she lived only half her life. The rite of passage would make her wholly Diomedan, the best of both species.
And so it began. He waited for the waves of power to recede, then changed. When he opened his eyes again, they were both human. And both nude.
Alcippe the woman was stunning. It didn’t surprise Nic because every woman in his family was stunning. They weren’t always gorgeous, but every one of them was eye catching.
But this woman had it all. Long, lean legs, slender hips, trim waist. Her breasts were high and firm. Not large, but definitely there. Her entire body was that of an athlete. Well-defined with muscle, and just enough body fat to make her feminine. Atalanta reborn.
Her face reflected the delicacy found in the beautiful Andalusian mare she’d been. Carved out cheeks and a straight nose complemented her almond shaped eyes. Waves of golden hair cushioned her shoulders. Her full lips were slightly parted and he gathered her close.
“Alcippe, wake up.”
She opened her eyes. She smiled. And Nic’s heart flipped over in his chest.
Alcippe moved her legs and the rattle of the chain broke the spell. She propped herself up on her elbows and Nic moved to kneel at her feet. The manacle slipped right off.
“We’re out of here,” he said, offering her a hand. Wobbly as a newborn foal, Alcippe leaned on his shoulder, learning how to operate her new legs as they made their way to the elevator.
The doors dinged just before they parted and Nic pushed her back into the shadows.
Fritz stepped out, bringing the scent of evil back to the stables.
“Stay back,” Nic whispered. He had to keep her away from Fritz at all costs. She deserved the freedom that had been taken from her and he meant to see her run with the wind in her mane. If the gods were kind, he meant to run beside her.
Fritz muttered to himself as he charged past the niche where the two hid. Something about his ungrateful daughter. Nic’s lip curled. He had a daughter? Hera help him if she was the vicious counterpart to her father. But one problem at a time.
The wizard pulled up short outside the now-empty stall, his shoulder rising in tension, though his voice was smooth.
“Well, well, Mr. Hippotakis. I see you managed to teach Alcippe to speak. Where is she? I’d like to see her…in the flesh, as it were.” Fritz eyed Nic up and down. “Didn’t you have clothes on the last time I saw you?”
Nic grinned, unashamed of his nudity.
“Hey, we’re all naked under our clothes, Fritz. But I think the lady and I would rather leave now.”
He stepped forward and the wizard moved back, his eyes shifting uneasily to the black space beyond Nic.
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. This day hasn’t gone quite as I’d hoped and I simply can’t let my favorite breeding program slip away without a fight.”
Nic knew that if it came down to a fight, he’d lose. In this human body, he had no real power against a wizard. But he could at least keep Fritz occupied while Alcippe made a run for the elevator.
Fritz was reaching for something in his jacket pocket when Nic felt the air crackle with familiar electricity. From out of the night, a golden equine bolt of light shot forward, knocking the wizard off his feet. Alcippe pawed the air in righteous fury.
“You wanted to hear me speak, old man, so listen closely. I am Alcippe. Descended from the wild mares of Diomedes. My fore-dams ate the flesh and drank the blood of the man who enslaved them. What makes you think you’ll escape his fate?”
The midnight chill of her voice reached into Nic’s heart and drew out the hot thrill of victory. She was a goddess in her own right. The dank closeness of the stables fell away and Nic smelled only her heat. And the wizard’s blood.
Her teeth flashed in the darkness and Fritz screamed, his fear adding to the delicious scent of prey. Nicolas Hippotakis was as the gods had made him. He and his mate. Together, they visited the doom of Diomedes on the man who had tried to bend them to his puny will.
Nic trumpeted his victory to the world as Alcippe screamed her own cry in the night. They were covered in blood and Fritz was no more. As the wizard’s life drained away, the stones themselves heaved under their hooves, giving up the ghosts of those who had been imprisoned here before.
The sound of the elevator door brought them back to themselves and Nic watched with pride as Alcippe effortlessly reclaimed her human form.
A voice reached into the darkness.
“Mr. Hippotakis?” Amanda Bast’s pupils were widened to make use of all the light available. Alcippe retreated behind Nic and the feel of her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades caused an involuntary reaction below his waist.
“Right here, Amanda.”
She looked around. “Mr. Fritz?”
“No more Mr. Fritz,” he answered.
“No big loss. Business will be better without him.” She shrugged, a lithe movement, as insouciant as her namesake goddess.
“Amanda, you’re the best casino hostess I’ve ever known. But you need to work on your timing.”
“Seems to me I got here at exactly the right moment. The words ‘hung like a horse’ seem appropriate. I think the Deathly Buzzings Marital Aid company might like to talk to you about modeling for one of their products. I think it would be a best-seller.”
Nic flushed. There had been a time in his life when he’d have taken her up on the invitation in her eyes, but Alcippe pressed her teeth into the top of his shoulder. He grinned.
“I don’t think so, Amanda. We’d like to get out of here, though.” He covered Alcippe firm flanks with his hands as the elevator rose to the Lobby level. “How’d that ParaPleasures Expo go for you guys?”
“Huge hit. I think we’ll definitely be doing it again next year. After all, even the Dunvegas crowd can use some shaking up every now and again.”
“Forgive us if we don’t show up for it. I think we’ve shaken up Las Vegas enough for one year. Anyway,” he said, turning to give Alcippe a hug, “I feel the need to get out in the fresh air.”
The doors opened and Nic let the rush of magic overtake him. Beside him, Alcippe tossed her mane and trotted out through the crowd of humans and not-quite-humans alike.
The desert called as he and his mate turned east toward Colorado. Time to let his NightMare live out her dreams.
(Return to Table of Contents)
Vegas Magic
By Ember Case
Rain was pouring from clouds every bit as dark as her mood when Mia Tarone dashed through the heavy doors into Dunvegas. Bright flashes of lightning were answered with snarls of thunder. The storm had sprung to life in an otherwise clear Vegas night sky when she was only feet from the entrance, triggered by any one of the many paranormal battles being waged for fun and sport inside the resort.
With demons and druids, witches and warlocks, shifters and succubi all sharing the convention grounds, there was no way for her young mage senses to tell what forces from this world or any other had triggered the meteorological outburst. She would have to take down her meta shields to tell, an act akin to bathing in blood before dining with a vampire. Going unshielded into the ParaPleasures Expo would be literal suicide for her.
Mia was many things—desperate, unschooled, furious, and at times over the past year she’d flirted closely with the idea she might not be totally sane. Suicidal had not yet appeared on her radar.
Shaking the water from long, black hair dampened by the downpour, Mia paused by the matched pair of shockingly green hell hounds frozen statue-like by spell lock at the front door. They looked pissed, a natural state for a hell hound even if he weren’t currently decorating a lobby. Their irate expressions were probably due
to the unsophisticated attempt at Emerald City humor someone had forced upon them.
She bit back a grimace and murmured a phrase in the ancient tongue. Letta heluta.
The hounds’ skin shimmered faintly, and the green color bled to deepest black. Mia saw a glow of what she hoped was gratitude in their crimson eyes. Briefly she considered freeing them from their stone-like prisons.
“You were always a soft touch. Kept you from being the top baccarat dealer that your hands could have made you.” There was both affection and scorn in Amanda Bast’s voice. The curvy blonde had snuck behind her on quiet cat feet.
“I was the top dealer on the Dunvegas staff for two years. I’d still be here if—”
“Still thinking in if’s and could-have-been’s? I thought you’d had that scared out of you months ago. I never would have called you to let you know Xin Li had checked in if you hadn’t convinced me you were past that kind of thinking, Mia.”
“No worries, Amanda. Momentary lapse.” Mia forced herself to hold the unblinking gaze of the suddenly doubtful hostess, hoping that she was managing to look more sincere than pissed. And that the smell of her lie wasn’t even now being picked up by Amanda’s sensitive shifter senses.
An uncomfortably long moment later, Amanda nodded. “All right, then. But don’t let your anger rule your actions, little one. Mr. Li was not in a peaceful mood when he checked in this evening. He’s not a man I’d like to see the bad side of.”
“I’ll be careful. I don’t have nine lives to try to get this right.”
She was rewarded for her attempt at a joke with a sultry chuckle. “You only need one life if you play your cards right. Xin was entranced with you a year ago. I’ve never known him to look twice at a woman when he’s here on a trip, before he laid eyes on you. He’s shut me down more than once.”
Even knowing the hostess could no more help her sensual nature than she could avoid an attraction to catnip, the very thought of the passionate, demanding lover she’d known so briefly passing a night with her very sensual friend brought a snarl to Mia’s lips.
Amanda gave her an unapologetically seductive smile. “I’m just saying. Deal him a straight hand, with no deceptions, and there’s no reason to think he won’t be able to answer your questions, Mia.”
Mia bit back a snort of disgust. If there was anything she had learned in the last year, it was that mages never played anything straight. She was putting an awful lot of trust in what had been a one night stand with the powerful fifth level mage. “I have no doubts about exactly what Xin Li is. What I need to know is what I am, what I’ve become. And I know with complete certainty that I won’t last another year if I don’t get some answers from Xin Li before he disappears again.”
If she didn’t get on the good side of Lady Luck soon, she’d be lucky to last another week.
~*~
The employee access card Amanda slipped her, along with a spell of distraction, allowed Mia to slip unnoticed into the staff corridor. Quickly she followed familiar halls to the elevator bank, careful to use a repetition loop to disguise her presence on the security cameras. Her magic might still be mostly wild and dangerously unpredictable, but she had learned the basics of defense and deception the hard way—do or die. So far she’d kept death at bay.
Minutes later, she stepped off the elevator onto the thirty fourth floor and stopped in front of the oversized closed door. Xin had been given the Jade Suite, one of the half dozen high roller accommodations the resort kept for its most preferred guests. Her stomach clenched at the memory of her only other visit to the room.
One year ago, during the Fourth Annual ParaPleasures Expo, she had done the unthinkable and allowed herself to be seduced by one of the guests. Or maybe she'd been the one doing the seducing. Either way, her life as she'd known it had ended. One truly earth-shaking night had changed her forever.
When she’d walked away from the baccarat table after her shift a year ago, she had thought nothing of her future. Caught up in the power of the moment, she had thrown every personal principle and Dunvegas employee rule to the winds and jumped for what she’d thought would be a fleeting taste of paradise.
Instead, she had landed in a hellish world she’d never dreamed she would be a part of. A world where she was hunted for her power, where only her wits and a bit of luck had kept her ahead of the mages who would drain her of both life force and magic force and think nothing of it after the act was done.
Now Xin Li was back in Vegas. She had every intention of making sure he tasted a bit of her personal hell before this night was through. He had been her ticket down to the depths; because of him, she’d spent weeks walking the edge between sanity and dementia, afraid of every shadow. If Amanda hadn’t found her cowering in the Dunvegas maze one desperate night, she’d likely have ended up dead long ago.
Amanda had been hiding her from the power hungry mages who’d flocked to the city for months now. Slowly Mia had learned to hide her powers, even if she couldn’t quite master their use. Now Xin Li was going to give her back her life or give her a damn good reason why he couldn’t.
Whatever Xin had done to change her, there had to be a way to fix it and make her normal again. Human again. Damn it, she couldn’t even get close enough to another mage to ask a basic question such as, “Is it possible to get rid of these powers besides dying?” without ending up running for her life. She’d never met such a greedy, grasping, murderous bunch before—and that was saying something, considering the vamps and death demons that used to literally haunt her table in the card room.
With one last check of her mental shields, she straightened her shoulders and took a deep, centering breath. Hand raised in the air to knock, Mia felt the brush of power as the double doors swung open before she could make the first touch.
Xin Li. He stood framed by the open doors. Tall and slender, his body was a lean mass of muscled perfection.
Gorgeous. Mia’s breath froze in her chest. For an instant, the memory of how that skin had tasted rushed through her senses, a haunting symphony of mouthwatering spice flavored by the slightly bitter tang of salt. Nothing had ever tasted so sweet on her tongue.
He was built like a runner, with not an ounce of fat to mar the sculpted lines of strength. Dressed in nothing more than a pair of black trousers that rested low on his hips, it was all too easy to picture the body beneath. The taunt skin of his abdomen teased Mia with its smooth hollows, and her fingers itched with the hunger to trace delicate lines across the silky surface.
She barely had the impression of shocked gray eyes before she heard the spell he had whispered. Ganla draumela.
It hit the walls of her shields and passed through with the ease of a sword cutting through a silken veil. In the space of a heartbeat the world faded to black, leaving nothing but the taste of defeat and the fear of death to follow Mia into the darkness.
~*~
Xin Li sat at the foot of the oversized bed, waiting.
It was a skill he had perfected in the past half millennium. Rising to fifth level, the apex of mage power, had taken centuries of study and practice, as well as a strong desire to live. More than one rival had died simply because Xin Li had out-waited him in the spell circle, finding victory through self-control.
Now his patience was gone. Evaporated into the stormy night and replaced with an eagerness that he’d never felt before.
“Mia. Come back to me, elgri. I’ve been looking for you for so long.”
The beauty in his bed didn’t answer. Her long, black hair stayed still against the snowy pillows, the tangled strands inviting his fingers to straighten them. Her eyelashes were heavy shadows on the pale cream flesh of her cheeks, hiding the brilliant blue depths he remembered every night in his dreams. The twin arches of her lips were a pale pink bow, the perfect fit for his own.
He tried not to notice how still her body lay in comparison to how he’d last seen her. His hands itched to touch her, to reassure himself that her slender, firm body still
surged with life.
The passing of a single year might seem only a drop in a bucket to one who had lived 544 of them, but every day that had passed since he’d been ripped away from her had seemed to last a decade. How many times had he cast the foreshadow spell, searching for the woman he’d been torn apart from? Never seeing more than a shadow in the crystal, enough to let him know that she lived, but not enough to even sense what part of the world—or on which world—she had disappeared into.
Those shadows when he searched for her made more sense now. A year ago, she’d been human. Breathtaking, sensual, unforgettable, and human. Not the slightest flavor of magic had clung to her skin last year. He would know; he had tasted every delicate inch of it. Her mind had been as innocent of deception and beguilement as only one who had never experienced the allurement of sorcery could be.
The Mia who had stood outside his door tonight had been a whirlwind of power, hidden behind an almost perfect shield. It was that near perfect ward that had given her away. His defenses had sensed a void where there should have been none, an astral gap that had set him on alert. The spell had been on his lips even as he opened the door. How close he had come to casting the spell of draining, instead of a spell of sleep. Only by shifting the subtleties of tone and syllabics had he kept from taking her life.
Who the hell was playing him? Humans did not just “become” mage. Not in a night, and not in a year. A mage was born, not made. He came to his feet, fingers ruthlessly combing his hair as he paced the length of the bed.
And snarled as the revelation struck.
“Father! Damn you, you meddling old man.”
Raiji. With the simple spell, a wide wall of windows that had opened on the expansive view of the Vegas Strip became a mirror to the great library in Xiayang. The province had been his family’s seat of power for generations. As he expected, his father was transcribing one of the many parchments that covered his desk, taking on the time-consuming work of transcribing ancient scroll to modern bytes.
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