by Sadie Moss
“What did you…? How did you get her to believe that? She was too smart to trust one of the Gifted. She hated you.”
He cocked his head, the gap in his front teeth showing as he smiled slightly. “People become surprisingly stupid when it comes to the ones they love. As to how I convinced her I had truly found her daughter, well, I used Marielle’s excellent services. I was able to track down someone who knew Christine in her younger years and extract enough memories from them to give Christine details only her ‘daughter’ should know. And she wanted to believe. It’s truly a pity she had to go. She worked very hard for me with the right motivation.”
My stomach turned. I’d known the Gifted politicians all wore masks and had lamented how hard it was to get a real read on any of them. But this was beyond anything I’d imagined. Nicholas and Victor were sick fucks, but Rain had them beat, hands down.
He was just better at hiding it.
It had always been Rain. He was the man behind the attempted hit on Akio, the one running all those tracking spells I’d destroyed. The man responsible for Gerald’s death, and Rat’s… and Beatrice’s. Working within the government to go after the Resistance, and working outside it to conspire against his own kind.
Turning his deep-set brown eyes on me, Rain walked slowly toward the cage I was trapped in.
Unconsciously, I took a few steps back, a shiver rippling over my skin.
He stopped a few feet away from me and rapped gently on the bars of my prison.
“But enough about what Christine did for me. Let’s talk about what you can do for me, Miss Lockwood.”
Chapter 28
“I’m not doing anything for you, you crazy fucking asshole!”
My voice was gaining some of its usual strength back, although my declaration still sounded pitifully weak to my ears. I searched inside myself, willing the spark of magic to appear again.
Rain adjusted his tie. “I’m sorry to say you won’t have much choice in the matter. The bars surrounding you are enchanted with a powerful magic suppressing spell, so you won’t be able to use your magic to stop me. And the help I want from you isn’t the kind you need to give willingly.”
He smiled at those last words, and my blood ran cold. I screamed for Fenris in my mind again, knowing it was hopeless. We didn’t have the same kind of mind-link when we weren’t both in wolf form, and I wasn’t sure the link worked over great distances anyway. I didn’t even know where I was.
My fingertips itched to summon a fireball and throw it at Rain’s head, to watch his smug expression morph into pain and terror. But the itch was an empty promise; no magic rose at my command.
I hadn’t realized how much my newly discovered powers had become a part of me until now. I felt naked without the comforting glow of magic burning inside me—vulnerable and exposed. Jae had told me it would take time for me to adjust to having magic at my disposal. Well, I finally had, just in time for it to be taken away from me.
No. Not taken.
Rain had said “suppressed.” That meant my power was still inside me; I just couldn’t access it right now.
The thought unclenched the vice around my heart a little bit, and I was able to breathe and think more rationally. Being without magic didn’t make me powerless. It hadn’t for the first twenty-four years of my life, and it wouldn’t now.
Rain cocked his head at me, watching my reaction to his statement with a pleased expression. His eyes flickered down my body, and I resisted the urge to cover myself. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing his gaze felt like spiders crawling over my bare skin. Instead, I locked my arms, keeping my hands at my side. My fingertips brushed the hilts of my twin daggers and—
Oh, fucking gods. Lana, you idiot.
In my panic over losing my magic, I’d forgotten I did have another weapon with me. Two, in fact.
“So, what do you want with me then?” I asked, edging closer to the bars of my cage.
It was a question I wanted an answer to, but I asked it more to distract Rain than to glean information. There’d be plenty of time for that later, once I got out of this fucking cage and had him tied up someplace where I could interrogate him properly.
“Not one to beat around the bush, are you? You’re very like your father in that way.”
Rain took one more step forward as he spoke, and I moved. Darting forward, I drew one of my daggers, reaching through the bars to grab a fistful of Rain’s shirt. I hauled him toward me, aiming the dagger at his heart.
As soon as my body touched the bars of my cage, pain blazed through me. I gritted my teeth against it, forcing my muscles to work through the agony, but my mark went wide, the dagger lodging in his shoulder.
With a grunt, he yanked himself from my grip, hurling a blast of wind at me. It threw me back, slamming me into the bars on the other side of the cage. Pain sang through my body again, but I leapt forward, drawing my other dagger and throwing it at the mage. He dodged, stumbling to the side, and the blade missed his eye by an inch, leaving a long cut across the side of his face.
Rain leaned against the stone steps several yards from me, his hand outstretched as weak gusts of wind burst from his fingertips. I could tell he was holding himself back from killing me, and it seemed to be taking a supreme effort.
But whatever he wanted me for, he must need me alive, because he pulled the magic back into himself when he saw I was out of weapons. He used his good hand to pull the dagger from his shoulder, letting the blade clatter to the floor. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a small vial and pulled out the stopper, and then poured the contents into this mouth.
We stood in silence for a few moments, watching each other warily as we both caught our breath. The cut on Rain’s face began to heal, the flesh knitting together slowly. The same thing must be happening to the wound on his shoulder, although his shirt and face were still wet with blood. It made him look even more deranged than he had before.
The daggers had been a gift from Jae and were enchanted to return to their sheaths so I wouldn’t lose them. But would the magic work while I was in this cage? I glanced down at my sheaths. Both were still empty. Maybe it took a while for the recall spell to kick in.
“If you’re hoping your blades will come back to you, I’ve got bad news, Miss Lockwood.” Rain straightened, regaining some of his smug demeanor, although his raspy voice was strained with anger. “Whatever spell you have on them won’t work. The magic repressing spell cuts off all charms and enchantments.”
I shrugged, affecting nonchalance even as my heart raced. “Well, can’t blame me for trying.”
He stalked toward me again, although his pace was slower this time, his eyes more wary.
“Oh, I most certainly can. Still, I respect your efforts. It takes persistence to get what you want, and I can see you’re a woman who doesn’t give up easily. Your father would be proud.”
My chest squeezed, anger overriding my fear. “Don’t talk about my father! Did you even really know him? Was anything you told me fucking true?”
Rain stopped, his eyebrows rising slightly as if in surprise. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to mop up some of the blood on his face. “Of course it was. The most effective deceptions always have a kernel of truth. And the truth is, I did know your father. We weren’t the best of friends, but we were friendly. Until he tried to get in the way of my life’s work.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rain’s dark eyes gleamed. “Do you know why precious metals and gemstones are considered so valuable, Miss Lockwood? Because they’re rare. The same could be said of magic. The more rare it is, the more valuable it is. And thus, the more power those who have it wield. Did you know that before the Great Death, interspecies breeding was becoming so common that more magic users were born every year than non-magic users?”
I swallowed as disgust and a creeping, dread-filled anticipation soured my stomach, forcing bile up my throat. “So?” I whispered. “W
hy is that a bad thing?”
Rain frowned. “I just told you. More people with magic means magic itself loses value. I looked around the country, and I saw the end of pure magic. People who were ‘part this’ and ‘half that’ being treated as if they were of the same status as someone whose entire family line was magical, stretching back for generations. It seems to me that magic shouldn’t be a right, but a privilege that must be earned. Not everyone is worthy of this power.” He dropped the blood-soaked handkerchief at his feet. “It wasn’t right. So I decided to fix it. Your father tried to stop me, which was disappointing. I never should have shared my vision with him.”
“You…?” I forced the words out through dry lips, shock numbing my limbs. “You caused the Great Death?”
For a moment, something like guilt flashed across his face, but his features smoothed over quickly. “I didn’t mean for people to die. I do truly regret that. It was an unfortunate side effect of the magic pull. I only meant to take their powers, but despite extensive testing, there were negative effects when I performed the spell on a large scale.”
“Negative effects?” My voice rang out in the large space, almost a scream. “Thousands of Gifted people died! And then thousands of the Blighted after them! How could you do that? How could you let everyone think we had done it?”
In my distress, I grouped myself back in with the Blighted, but it only seemed appropriate right now. At the moment, I had no magic at my disposal. And I’d spent almost my entire life living on the edge of poverty, pushed aside by the Gifted and the Touched, forced to do their dirty work at the expense of my own well-being—all because of this man.
The enormity of his what he’d done staggered me, so overwhelming my mind couldn’t comprehend it.
All that loss.
All that suffering.
On all sides.
Because of one single person.
It shouldn’t be possible for one man to have so much blood on his hands and still look human. There should be some outward marker to signify the utter blackness of his soul.
But there wasn’t. He was just a middle-aged man with a thin face, gray streaks in his hair, and wrinkles around his mouth.
Those wrinkles deepened as his lips turned down. “Why would I want to step forward and claim responsibility? I saw what the surviving Gifted did to the Blighted. And besides, the deaths were an accident. I lost people I cared about as well.”
“Breaking a vase is an ‘accident.’ Killing thousands upon thousands of innocent people is genocide, you fucking Gifted psychopath!” I lunged forward, body straining less than an inch away from the bars of my cage, my teeth bared like I wanted to tear him to pieces. I did. Hell, I’d even do it in my human form.
Rain’s expression stiffened. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been refining my spell. My next attempt should pull magic without any loss of life.”
“Your… next attempt?” My voice was low and halting.
“Yes.” He grimaced. “Another unfortunate side effect of my first siphoning spell was that, while I successfully extracted magic from a large portion of the Gifted population, that magic was rendered unusable in the process. My aim was to take magic away from some and give it to others, thereby making those who wield it even more powerful. I’ve built a device that can do this and have tested it successfully on a small scale. But it will need to be powered by a great deal of magic to run on a large scale. I’ve been taking magic individually from the Gifted and Touched in the Capital, like our friend Gerald. It’s been a slow process. I couldn’t move too fast or I’d draw suspicion. But I’m very close now. I just need the magic of a few more powerful mages.”
There it was.
That was what this sick fucker wanted with me. He wanted to draw the magic out of my body, probably leaving me as deranged as poor Gerald, and use it to power a spell that would pull magic from people en masse.
But isn’t that what you wanted? a dark voice whispered in the back of my mind. Fewer Gifted and Touched in the world?
Tears stung my eyes as I shook my head. No. It wasn’t.
Maybe I’d once thought so, but that was before I met more magic users, came to love three of them, and realized people couldn’t be broken up into such neat little categories. Since that day at Akio’s house, when the world as I knew it came crashing down around my ears, I’d had to face my own prejudices. And now I had to accept responsibility for the harm I had done.
I didn’t want a world with fewer Gifted—especially not one where all the power was concentrated in even fewer hands. What I wanted was the world that Rain had described before the Great Death. The one where lines weren’t drawn in the sand and people weren’t split into groups of “worthy” and “unworthy,” each side taught to hate the other.
Rain took two steps closer to me. He was almost within reach again, but I didn’t make a move for him. The bars of my cage were still enchanted to dampen my magic and cause blinding pain whenever I touched them, and if I was going to get out of here, I needed to be smart. I needed to conserve my energy.
There were four men out there who each held a piece of my heart, a piece of my soul.
And there were hundreds of thousands of innocent people who would suffer or die if Rain succeeded in performing another large-scale magic pull.
I would find a way out of here.
For all of them.
As if reading the determination on my face, Rain shook his head and smiled. “Get some rest, Miss Lockwood. We’ll start soon.”
The Gifted man turned away from me, the smudges of blood on his face glinting in the light as he walked toward the stairs. I clenched my hands into fists as I watched him go, trying to see past the shape of a man to the devil underneath.
“Hey, Rain?”
He stopped, one foot on the bottom step, head tilting toward me. “Yes?”
“Just so you know. I’m gonna fucking kill you.”
His laughter followed him up the stairs, cutting off only when the door slammed shut.
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Consort of Rebels
Magic Awakened #3
Chapter 1
Three small slivers of light cut across the dark floor.
They disappeared momentarily as I blinked my eyes shut, my heavy lids unwilling to rise again.
I dragged them open, forced my eyes back into focus.
Stared at the three narrow lines of yellow light.
Ten days. That’s how long I’d been stuck in this fucking dungeon cell.
Or maybe it was seven… or fourteen… or twenty. I had no natural light to judge by and couldn’t tell when the sun rose or set. I’d been trying to keep count of the meals Kate brought me, but her visits didn’t seem to come at regular intervals, and I was pretty sure if she found me sleeping, sometimes she just left without delivering any food or water. That would explain why I felt so weak.
Then again, several things could explain that.
I was underfed, hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time in days, and had festering injuries from the fight with Christine and her Touched backup at the warehouse in the Outskirts.
My magic was also still suppressed. But even without being able to feel the flicker of power deep in my belly, I could tell somehow that it was agitated, searching for the four men it was bonded to. If it wasn’t repressed, it probably would’ve exploded all over this little cell by now. That seemed to be its usual reaction to stress.
The three sharp lines of light on the floor flickered again. But this time it wasn’t because of my drooping eyelids.
A figure had passed in front of the door.
My head cleared a little, becoming more alert as I strained my ears. The effort of focusing caused a headache to flare like a starburst in my brain, but I ignore
d the throbbing pain and lifted my eyes to the tiny window in the solid wood door of my cell. Two thick metal bars spanned the small window vertically, and the light peeking around them cast the three long lines on the floor.
“How is she?”
It was Rain. I’d recognize that fucker’s raspy voice in my sleep by now. In fact, I heard it in my sleep almost every time I managed to doze off. He’d supplanted my father in my dreams, starring in pretty much all my nightmares now.
Just another reason I wanted to kill the asshole.
“Weak, but alive,” another voice answered. Softer. Female. Kate.
“Good. Keep her that way. I’m almost ready to perform the magic pull on her, and she’s no use to me dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
I scoffed under my breath. No use to him dead. Not until he’d stolen my magic anyway. Then I had a feeling my usefulness, dead or alive, would plummet to less than zero.
That had to be why he hadn’t bothered healing my wounds or even bandaging them. Why he hadn’t given me clothes or a blanket to ward off the cold that permeated the stone walls of my cell. Once he was done with me, he’d either kill me or let me die.
I thought back to Gerald’s slack face and half-focused eyes the day I ran into him on the palace steps, and a shiver ran down my spine. If that was what I had to look forward to after Rain pulled the magic from my body, maybe I’d prefer death after all.
No. Don’t think like that, Lana. Remember your promise.
The day Rain captured me, before he’d knocked me out and moved me from the large room with the metal cage into this dungeon, I’d made a vow to myself. I’d promised I would make it back to my four alive.
I could picture each of them as clearly as if they were here in this room with me, and the thought of them simultaneously soothed my soul and sent a piercing pain through my heart. My abduction would be driving them out of their minds with worry. What were they doing now? Were they trying to find me? But how could they? They had no idea Rain was behind any of this.