by Mary Hughes
Breathe, Sophia.
“Breathe deep to immerse yourself in the now.”
Gabriel’s slouchy college sweater vest, canvas slacks and deck shoes were totally at odds with his six-five frame and shoulders that filled doorways. “Magic is a distance technique.”
“Right.” Sophia snapped her wand at him. Gouts of flame shot out, engulfing him.
When she released the flames, not a hair on him was scorched. But more, his vest was clean.
Mock duels were like paintball. Hits scored blobs of color. She hadn’t even touched him.
He hit her with a powershot that knocked her off her feet. She went flying onto her butt.
She blinked up at him. “Why didn’t my fire score?”
Gabriel shrugged. “I shielded.”
Her whole body, on the other hand, looked like a bottle of ketchup had exploded on her. “Stars and comets.” She scrambled to her feet. “What did I do wrong?”
“First off, you should have breathed. Then shielded.”
Or she could be sneaky. She whispered, “Kat!”
Her familiar, in her favorite form of a tall, buxom redhead, her painted-on black catsuit dripping armament, drew two knives lightning fast and shooped them at Gabriel.
A foot from him they clanked like they’d hit a steel wall and dropped.
“Shield, remember?” Gabriel said. “Guns and knives are good, but they need to be bespelled to get through.”
“Fine.” Sophia flicked her wand at Gabriel’s familiar, a panther in his animal form. The panther was fast and agile but she used bullet magic, tight bursts of power, almost impossible to avoid.
The magic splattered like raindrops an inch away from his skin.
“Aw, come on! Familiars can’t cast shield.”
One dark brow rose. “They can wear amulets.”
Which of course was when the panther leaped onto her, too fast to avoid, and the match was over.
“Your magic is better,” she grumped. The panther was sniggering, a very annoying, self-congratulatory sound.
Gabriel helped her up. “It’s not about magic, sis. It’s about breathing. And preparation. Oh, and refusing to lose.”
Sophia stood in the field, facing Rodolphe and breathed as she readied her wand. Refusing to lose, hell yeah.
Noah stalked between Rodolphe and her again.
With a throttled noise of exasperation, she grabbed his shirt and tried to tug him out of the way. Like pulling on a cliff. She gave up and bonked her forehead on his back. Asshole alpha. Though potentially powerful as the son of a wizard prince, he had no training.
Rodolphe laughed. “Hide, Sophia. You never had the stomach to do the hard jobs. You hid behind rules and regulations then, and you’re hiding behind a wolf now. You haven’t changed. Oh wait, you have. You’re out of practice and even weaker. I’ll beat you easily.”
Her fingers clenched her wand. Was he right? As a university student she’d been an overconfident, dogma-ridden witch, easily tricked. She’d gotten past that, but had she merely become a self-righteous mundane, hiding behind her bankerly pumps and pearls?
Hiding, while Noah fought her battles?
Not. Happening.
A growl of her own roughening her throat, she tore out of her conservative suit coat and dropped it to the grass. She kicked off her heels and pushed up the sleeves of her white blouse. Too bad Kat was in the Bahamas. But in a way, this was better. Now she’d prove to everyone, including herself, that she wasn’t hiding behind anything. That she had the guts to do the job.
Fighting was about breathing and refusing to lose.
Free of her mundane carapace, she breathed better than ever. She moved out from behind Noah, her hand relaxed on her wand. Refusing to lose to this loser.
She was vaguely surprised when Noah didn’t stalk between them, but whirled toward her, eyebrows raised.
“Wait.”
“Noah, stand aside. This won’t be over until he’s neutralized.” Her eyes did not leave her enemy.
“Will it be over even then? Think. He doesn’t know about my past.” Noah pointed at the raven familiar, still standing there, staring obsessively at his hands. “If Rodolphe wasn’t following Bram, who was?”
She’d thought of that, but one thing at a time.
Problem was, shit didn’t come in gentle showers. It came in storms. Behind Bram, an ivory-robed man had appeared.
“Bravo. The father’s son is worthy.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The man looked ordinary, like an accountant—except for a very dangerous glint in his winter-pale eyes. He walked around the still-absorbed raven familiar, his calf-length robe far more utilitarian in the long grass than Rodolphe’s. Quite plain for a wizard, except for his fur collar. That fur collar… When he raised his wand, it was without the ornate swoops and tells Rodolphe loved.
Without another word, he shot a bolt of magic straight at her and Noah.
Sophia hadn’t done magic in years. Unsure of herself, she swept up a side-shield that would deflect rather than confront. The bolt of magic skittered off.
The unknown mage motioned to his neck, then to Sophia’s right. His furry collar uncurled itself, jumped down and ran like a humping millipede to where the man had pointed.
A ferret familiar.
Memory flashed. The ivory robe, collar detaching… This was the evil wizard chasing Noah, who’d tagged the raven familiar—who’d killed Noah’s family to suck Noah’s power into himself.
He was so going down.
She slashed up her wand. Shouted “Sword”, and skewered him with a blazing blade of flying magic.
He smiled.
A chill shuddered through her, blood-curdling, the likes of which she hoped never to feel again.
He wanted her to hit him.
Just before her blade hit, he swirled his wand, spinning a vortex before him like the maw of a small tornado. The magic blade shot into it—and disappeared.
His vortex had eaten her magic.
She tried to breathe through it, tried to figure out what to do next. If he could steal her magic, how the hell could she slam him where the sun didn’t shine?
While she stood frozen for that tiny sliver of time, he flicked the wand. Flecks of power, glittering a malignant red, emerged from the vortex and floated backward along the line of her thrown spell, like the smoke trail of a snuffed candle, leading flame back to relight it…tracing back to her.
She inhaled in shock. The bits went up her nose.
Dozens of tiny barbed hooks sank into her brain.
The ivory wizard flicked the wand again. Blood entered his smile.
A swarm of flecks released, headed for her. He meant to eat her magic. More, he meant to suck the power from her very being.
Heart pumping in panic, she blew the air from her nose. “Out.” Not even a spell, she threw up a hasty mental image of the exploratory hooks blowing out with the air. Red hooks floated out before her face.
With a slash of will she sealed off all her power, walling it off behind a mundane facade that was half hope, half desperation.
Then she stopped breathing.
A cloud of hook magic pummeled her in the face like a swarm of buzzing, angry hornets.
She stood oh-so-still, steeling herself from flinching against the ping-ping-ping.
The cloud hesitated. Shuddering, it gathered and returned to its maker.
She shuddered. Sucking power, life. She’d read about it, studying Burgot. But she’d never dreamed a mage could actually be that evil. With that vortex he could take her power and not only leave her unable to defend herself and Noah, he could use it against Noah.
How could she fight that?
To buy herself time, she flashed the tip of her wand down, kindled it to flame with a word and
burned a quick protective circle around Noah and herself.
The ivory wizard’s smile quirked into an “Oh well”. He motioned Rodolphe to Sophia’s left. He flicked a finger at Rodolphe’s buzzard and pointed behind her.
She didn’t like his complacency at all. He was too confident, too relaxed… She was hit by a horrid suspicion. His name…how could she find out?
Rodolphe gave the ivory wizard a black glare. He never liked being ordered around. But he moved into position, and she and Noah were surrounded.
Four trained antagonists circled her, an untried wizard, and a familiar who’d just grown his big boy legs and stood gazing at his hands like they were the eighth wonder of the universe. Hell, even she wasn’t much better; the mock-duels in college had been regulated non-fatal.
Okay. Start small and hope for the best.
And if that didn’t work, cheat.
“Hey, ivory robe. Who the hell are you?” She pushed power into her protective circle. A shield rose from the ground, a cylinder of earth magic twinkling gold in the hot sun. Not much, but the best she could do on such short notice.
The wizard smirked. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
She grinned back, all teeth. The great thing about evil was, the pool of henchmen was shallow. And peed in. Rodolphe was smarting from being ordered around, and she could use that. “Hey Rodolphe. Is that your boss?”
“No.” Rodolphe’s sneer said, Me, have a boss? Please.
“Stop,” the ivory-robed wizard said.
“He is my colleague.”
“Say nothing!”
Rodolphe’s operatic baritone rolled right over the ivory mage’s thin voice. “Of course you’re too stupid to recognize him. My colleague is—”
“—shut—”
“—Phere Burgot the Great.”
“—up.”
Good fuck. This was the Burgot? He was strong, subtle, and, if he was alive all these centuries, it must be through stealing wizard and shifter lives, which meant he had no conscience. Siphoning magic, sucking lives…it jolted her like a cut power line.
This was the real Hungry Ghost. She wasn’t swimming in the evil pool, she was splashing in the shark-infested septic tank.
She trembled.
“Steady,” Noah murmured. He aligned himself to her spine, to fight back to back.
His heat, his strength, ate through her shock. She managed, “You need a wand.”
“I’ll shift.”
“Could you take four riflemen? Powerful as your wolf is, you can only be in one place at a time. Magic is a distance technique. Unless you have a gun or throwing knives—and even those have to be spelled to get through a magic shield—you won’t reach them all before they mow you down.”
“Shields, hmm? The familiars?”
“Amulets.”
“Ah.”
Rodolphe started blasting with his wand at the earth outside her shield. He was a water mage so she didn’t like that at all.
“Bram!” She shouted to get the familiar’s attention. “Your master needs a wand—hell.”
Rodolphe whipped out a spray of water. It hit the churned ground and rebounded, carrying a load of dirt. Somehow he’d learned to mix elements since she’d seen him last. Burgot’s doing, no doubt. And maybe that power sucker.
Mud magic splashed her shield. The shield glittered angrily as it burned the mud off. “Bram! A wand.”
“What?” The familiar looked up from his hands. His eyes glowed emerald green. Intelligence sharpened in them. “Where?”
“My aunt’s store. Mason.”
“Here!” Mason’s deep voice boomed from the garage, barely heard over Rodolphe’s next explosion of mud. Her protective column hissed angrily.
“Show Bram my aunt’s store—”
“Done.” Mason morphed into his wolf and took off.
Bram leaped, melded into the raven and flew after Noah’s big lieutenant. Burgot shot a bolt after Bram, but the raven dodged easily, as if he’d anticipated it.
“Noah.” She tossed her words over her shoulder. “I know you haven’t done magic, but you have to try now.”
“But magic killed my mother. Orphaned me. I can’t…I won’t…ah, fuck.”
“Explode!” Burgot snapped his wand at them, unleashing a thunderball of magic so big it hit her protective cylinder like a battering ram. The ground-deep shudder threw her to the earth.
She landed with her butt outside the circle.
Noah leaped over her, landing in front. He stood between her and Burgot, outside the circle, quivering with rage. “You want me, Burgot. Leave her alone.”
Burgot only laughed. “What I want is your dual magic. I want you alive but docile, easy to drain—completely broken. Her death would do that nicely.” He shrugged. “Besides, Rodolphe wants her dead for some reason.”
He cocked his blood-red wand over his shoulder, preparatory to annihilating them both. “So dead she’ll be.”
Noah recognized the deadly glint of intent in Burgot’s pale eyes. The ivory wizard was primed for what even Noah recognized as a killing stroke.
Noah was shocked by how strongly he needed to do one thing—protect Sophia. His wolf came forward with a snarl.
But even as his body automatically started to morph, he held it off. His wolf was supernaturally fast, but Burgot and Rodolphe were on opposite sides of the field. No matter how quickly he dealt with one, the other would be free to kill Sophia. Not to mention the two familiars, potentially as dangerous.
Sophia was right. The only way to come out of this alive was with magic.
For years he’d hated and blamed his wizard father for the death of his mother. She’d made Noah promise never to use his magic. How could he ignore all that? How could he become a wizard, the very thing he’d railed against, vowed never to be? It felt like the last step to damnation.
How had it come to this? He was his mother’s son. When had he slid so wholly over to the dark side? When he’d first seen Sophia, and was attracted to a witch? When he’d actually mated her?
Or when he’d realized his father had actually fought to save his mother and himself? When Noah had finally, after decades of pain, forgiven him for leaving them?
Didn’t matter. Protecting Sophia meant acknowledging…using…embracing his wizard’s nature.
That decided him. He’d do whatever it took, for her.
He sought the sparkles, the magic, that he’d suppressed for most of his life, tapped only briefly to deal with the treachery of the old alpha.
He couldn’t find them.
His body iced. Had his magic somehow unraveled with the hide spell?
Count the steps, son. Down, down… Noah relaxed and went to the cool, unemotional place where the hard man—his father—had taught him to go.
And there it was. The tail of power twitched, just barely, in the center of his being, his navel. Relief welled in him. He touched his navel, reaching for his magic to fight.
What came forth was not a child’s prickle of magic but a wizard prince’s mature power. The torrent gushed like a river. He filled his hands with it, pure magic, overflowing his palms, streaming like a blast of windswept golden ribbons.
His deliberations in the cool place had taken fractions of a second. Burgot was just now snapping the blood-red wand forward.
Noah stood there, magic overflowing, and realized he had no idea what to do.
The shaft of killing magic, powerful as a cannon shot, barreled straight toward them, jarring Noah into spontaneous response. His arm was already coming up when he figured out what was happening.
No training, but he knew how to fight. Block hard with soft. He threw his arm out, releasing his ribbons in a soft, fanning arc.
Burgot’s hard shot hit the ribboned power like a cannonball caught by a stream
er of woven silk. Noah’s magic redirected Burgot’s like a sling. It flew harmlessly to one side.
Squawk! Not quite harmlessly. It cannoned straight into Rodolphe’s buzzard. The bird blasted into a puff of feathers.
A grim smile flashed across Noah’s lips. Now it was two against three.
The golden-robed Rodolphe was bombarding Sophia with mud magic, but her blocks were precise and economical as she scrambled to her feet. He wondered why she didn’t just return Rodolphe’s blasts in kind, when she threw a fist of magic from her own wand, tossing Rodolphe onto his ass. She flung over her shoulder, “Noah! Don’t use your magic directly against Burgot. He can suck power from spells and worse, use them to hook directly into your power—yow!”
Her high-pitched shriek was filled with pain and anger. He spun. She stood there, wand down, hand clutching her shoulder. Blood dripped from under her fingers. She slowly uncovered her shoulder. A burn charred the cloth and had ripped ugly and raw across her velvety skin.
Rodolphe was smirking. Smirking. Noah’s rage rose from deep inside his heart.
He called up his magic…as Rodolphe pointed the pink rod at Noah. “Bye-bye, wolf.”
Burgot shouted, “Wait!”
The beam lanced out. Noah felt the thing hit him, try to latch onto his very cells.
But he’d already called up his father’s heritage, and his mage power grabbed the beam instead. Inch by inch, the cord of magic connecting him to Rodolphe turned from red to blue. Noah thought the wizard magic was pushing the sucker’s magic back.
Until the blue reached Rodolphe. The siphon itself changed colors, from pink to blue—and power washed the other way.
Rodolphe’s power flooded Noah. It hit him so hard it shoved him back. Squinting, he fought against it, planting his feet and leaning into it like fighting a hurricane.
Suddenly, it stopped. Noah opened his eyes.
Rodolphe’s deflated husk dropped with a whisper to the grass.
Noah was horrified, but his training was already spinning him toward Sophia. He pressed his palm to her wound. His power rose again, more than even before. He didn’t know how to use the magic but let his heart guide him, intuitively healing her as he’d heal himself.