Magic Hunter (The Rover series Book 4)

by Amelia Shaw

  When I hesitated at the top of the stairs, Fin came up against my back. “You don’t have to come. You can stay up here and relax while we do this.”

  I knew he wouldn’t feel the least bit ashamed of me for balking right now.

  It gave me the strength to continue. I walked down the stairs, catching up with the pair as they entered a room. This one was lined in brick from floor to ceiling. No carpet, only concrete under our feet. A firepit sat in the center and I caught the sound of a fan whirring from somewhere, but I didn’t see the vents.

  At my questioning look, Melinda waved at the floor. “It’s built to keep the heat from becoming too strong.”

  Even with the fans, the temperature of the room pressed around me, at least twenty degrees hotter than the surrounding hallway.

  Helix closed the door behind Fin and we stood near the firepit until Melinda led us to a smaller area with a wood platform off on the far side of the long room. On it sat several cushions, and Fin maneuvered onto the platform to sit on a cushion as she took her own. Helix stood at the edge of the platform, no doubt attuned to any danger. I matched him on Fin’s side. The fact that he wasn’t behind me with a knife told me that Melinda must have spoken to him and relayed some level of trust for us. At this point, did any of us have a choice?

  Melinda produced a knife from somewhere and motioned for Fin to scoot closer to her. They ended up knee to knee. The tension between them was thick. Fin’s guilt was a thick sludge in the back of my throat. Her jaw looked so tight it might pop off at any moment. I hoped her feelings about him, however they went, wouldn’t interfere with whatever she needed from Fin. If she hurt him, I’d have to kill her, and we’d be screwed.

  She drew the knife across her palm in a line, and then did the same to him. A bright slide of red welled up against his pale skin. Then she pressed their hands together and closed her eyes, taking his other hand in hers.

  His spine went rigid, at the same time a wall seemed to go up between us. I realized this anchoring caused him pain and he was trying to protect me. Seconds ticked by and I risked glances at Helix who watched the two of them with an indifferent sort of frown.

  Fin shuddered, sweat beading on his temples to slide down his cheeks. She looked unfazed by the heat, but she shuddered, her hand flexing around his as if she had to maintain the grip on him for her life.

  I poked at the wall he built, fascinated by it, until a bright shot of fire lit down my spine. I gasped, doubling over at the pain. If this was just a fraction of what they felt, then he’d done me a kindness by trying to keep me out. But the wall slowly failed, cracks turning into holes shooting white hot pain through my senses.

  I breathed through the pain, crouching down in case I passed out. The agony came in waves, some small, some fast, and they weren’t easily predictable, as if whatever caused it wanted to inflict maximum damage.

  My strength wavered as tears slid down my cheeks. I couldn’t go on much longer. How the hell were they still dealing with it? Especially if this was simply a fragment of what he felt right now.

  I took one step forward. “Stop, please, we’ll find another way!”

  Neither of them even looked like they heard me. Helix stood a couple of paces closer to me, watching me warily.

  I waved him off. “I’m fine. I can just feel it through the bond. It’s intense.”

  “It should be over soon,” he said.

  “They need to stop. I can feel it and neither of them are strong enough to endure this kind of pain. It will kill them.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not your choice. They already made theirs. To intervene now would mean disrupting the magic and probably killing all of us.”

  Okay, Mr. Doom and Gloom. I glared at him while I tried to breathe through another wave of pain, that cut like a sword up the length of my spine from ass to ponytail.

  I kept my eyes on them, watching, waiting for a gesture or any movement that might indicate Fin wanted to stop. My knees turned to jelly and I had to fall back on my ass to give myself more stability to get through the onslaught.

  “How much longer?” I asked Helix.

  “I don’t know. We couldn’t exactly practice this part. It will take as long as it takes.”

  Him and his fucking pragmatism were starting to grate on me. “Says the man who doesn’t have to endure this.”

  He cut me a glance. “Who says I can’t feel it? Just because you can’t see it on my face doesn’t mean I don’t. It’s excruciating. There’s no use dwelling since we can do nothing about it.”

  Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious. I rolled forward to keep from lying down on the ground and whimpering outright.

  Each new wave of pain brought a fresh slice along with it, and a few minutes into the ritual I tasted the sharp tang of metal on my tongue. Like blood, but I didn’t bite myself, nor was either of them bleeding except on their entwined hands.

  I didn’t trust what I saw, or Helix, standing there watching them like he didn’t feel like someone was trying to turn him inside out. Maybe he lied to fuck with me. That thought made me feel better. He felt nothing and lied to get under my skin.

  On my hands and knees, I crawled toward the platform intent on making the pain stop. My brain had short circuited somewhere in the last sixty seconds and all I wanted was for it to end.

  One hand in front of the other. One knee shifted forward on the hot floor. So hot under my palms it broke through the haze for a flash of a second. I slid my hand a little closer to the platform, and my legs followed. Nothing else entered my head except one little inch closer to making it end one way or the other.

  An iron bar wrapped around my waist and lifted me clean off the floor. Helix’s arm held me hard, my back against his chest. I kicked and scratched, but it didn’t make a difference through his jacket sleeve, and he seemed unfazed by the impact of my feet against his shins.

  I gripped his thumb and twisted hard enough that he released me with a sharp curse. Once my feet hit the floor I stumbled forward, trying to get to the platform. He grabbed me again, locking my hands behind my back, his hand around my throat.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Zoey. I’m not trying to, but you can’t interrupt or you could get them both killed,” he whispered in my ear.

  I couldn’t form words; all that leaked out were whimpers.

  “I know it hurts. Breathe through it. Focus on your breathing and count. It’ll help. Also try to keep your shields up. You might be able to block some of it if you push back against it.”

  His words reached me through the pain, and I tried to follow his directions. I shoved back at the pain, corralling it toward Fin and Melinda. Incrementally, some of the searing fire eased, enough that I could think a little bit clearer.

  “You can let go of my neck,” I said. “But keep hold of my hands. I don’t know if I can stay in control.”

  His fingers eased off my neck, nothing but business in his touch. His other hand tightened around my wrists. Some of the fire slipped through the shield I tried to erect between it and me.

  I gasped, losing my grip inch by inch.

  “Hold it,” Helix said in my ear. “Don’t let it win.”

  A whimper poured out again and I hated the sound. I especially hated when other people heard me make it. If he ever brought this moment up again after we walked out of this room, I’d maim him.

  Another wash of fire and his hold tightened enough to bring a different kind of pain into the mix. I’d take the ache of his bruising grip over the slashes of fire any day, but my body or my mind had reached its limits. My magic surged up inside me .

  Helix sucked in a sharp breath and released my hands with a shove. All I could feel was the sharp fire, bearing down on me, breaking me in a way I didn’t understand. Breaking me in a way I needed to protect myself from. I gathered the magic inside me, pooling it at my center, trying to use it to staunch the pain.

  But my magic didn’t do anything against it.

  I stumbled f
orward and crashed down on my knees, hitting the hard floor with a crack I felt vibrating in my bones.

  A dull aching pain radiated up from where I’d fallen, doubling through the pain from the magic. I shoved my magic out of me, pushing it as far and as fast as I could, intent on stopping the assault on my nerve endings.

  Helix cursed from behind me, taking a step forward, and grasped my ankle. I hadn’t even realized I’d almost crawled up onto the platform. He tugged me back, but I kicked out. He pulled harder. His strength overpowered my pain addled brain and he succeeded in ripping me away from the edge of the wood, my nails leaving scores on the edge.

  I fought him until my magic took over, shooting out of me to coat the room in a white glow. The pain shuddered, and I got the tiniest flash of peace from it, so I pushed harder, farther, until the pain stopped again, a blink this time. It gave me a little more strength to my magic, a little more incentive.

  The room spun around me, as the magic poured from my body into the room. Then everything went dark, Even the fire banked to nothing on the other end of the room.

  Helix released me to collapse on my knees, and I lay face first in a heap on the hot floor, my entire body aching.

  Groans came from the platform and I moved enough to turn my face to look. Helix scooped Melinda into his arms and cradled her unconscious form on his lap.

  Fin lay sideways, his hair fanning out toward me. I crawled to reach for him. The bond inside me was dull and quiet like an empty hole in my chest. A sob threatened to escape as I kept crawling until my fingers brushed the soft tendrils of his hair. He stirred, rolling over onto his stomach to lift up his face, his eyes seeking mine.

  The sob came out, and this time I didn’t stop it. He dragged me forward, so I slid belly first across the hot floor up over the lip of the platform and into his arms. I’d have bruises from one end of me to the other, but it didn’t matter, not with him whole and holding me.

  Melinda stirred in Helix’s grasp as Fin sifted his fingers over my hair. I could only watch as she woke and then gently shoved off his chest to sit on her own.

  When she seemed recovered her gaze sought mine. “What did you do?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I have no idea. Something happened and I could only think of stopping the pain.”

  She nodded, but the tension in her jaw told me she wanted to berate me for my interference. “I don’t know what happened to the knife. Your magic interrupted something, or did something, and there’s no way to know what happened without getting a hold of it ourselves.”

  Guilt washed over me. I hadn’t been able to control myself and I may have ruined our one chance at negating Esteban’s blade. No doubt he knew something had occurred and would be trying to fortify against it if we tried again.

  “It’s okay,” Fin whispered into my hair, clutching me tighter. “It’s my fault. I should have known you would have felt the pain and tried to intervene. I should have put up a better shield or maybe kept you out of the room.”

  I snorted, wrapping my arms around his waist. “As if you could keep me out of anywhere I really wanted to be. What do we do now?”

  Everyone focused on Melinda who shrugged.

  “Obviously, we can do nothing right now. My magic is depleted.”

  I reached out to mine and Fin’s magic and found it gone too.

  Helix grumbled from beside Melinda. “Mine is gone as well.” He looked at me. “Whatever you did sucked all the magic from every single one of us.”

  His tone had a bite that said he didn’t appreciate being left vulnerable.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did. Everything in me was focused on stopping the pain at any cost. I didn’t even know I could affect someone else’s magic.”

  “You can’t,” Fin said. “It’s my magic that can, and since we are bonded you were able to use it in sort of a brute force way to take everyone else’s magic and short circuit the ritual.”

  That was something to consider later. Right now, we needed a game plan.

  “If I know the Black Mage, and I like to think I’ve got some kind of handle on the way he thinks,” I said, “he’ll be tracing the magic we just did back to us.”

  Helix cursed and clutched his head. “The wards are down. All of them. Without my magic, I can’t keep them up.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I ROLLED OFF FIN’S lap and let him help me sit beside him. “We need weapons. I assume you have some kind of armory here?"

  Melinda waved at Helix. “Show them where it is. Since they got us into this mess, they can help us out of it.”

  On that vote of confidence, I shoved up to my feet, my knees wobbling and aching. I remembered hitting the ground hard enough to crack something. Once we got our magic back online, I’d have to be healed, but for now, I couldn’t focus on the dull aches and bruises.

  I hobbled forward as Helix stood and fixed his jacket. The bastard. He led Fin and me out of the room and down the hallway to a room on the opposite end. When he flipped on the light, I gasped. It was almost... almost as beautiful as Fin’s armory. The difference was Melinda had likely crafted many of these weapons. They all had slight curves and an elegant design to them that made me think of the fae in the old fairy tales.

  “These are beautiful,” I whispered, running my thumb down the edge of a short sword. “You keep it all honed ready?”

  Helix grunted. “I try to. She makes weapons when she needs to think and so I end up with hordes of them. Many I’ve sold over the years to pay for her estates, but these were the ones I couldn’t sell or decided to keep for protection. You never know when a stupid mage might shut down my magic.”

  I spun to glare at him as Fin took a menacing step toward Helix.

  I waved him off. “No, he’s right. I shouldn’t have stayed in the room if I couldn’t control myself. It was a stupid move.”

  Guilt clawed into my gut with a fresh slice. If I ruined our chances of getting Esteban, I would never forgive myself.

  A loud crash came from overhead. We all glanced up and Helix bolted for the door. Fin and I strapped weapons to our bodies as Helix charged out of the room. Just as we finished loading up, Melinda rushed into the room followed closely by Helix.

  “I’ve closed the doors on the upper levels. They are steel and the magic is built in, but they won’t hold out for long.”

  I waved at Melinda. “Can you fight?”

  She nodded, but the look on her face said she preferred not to. Helix stripped out of his suit and tie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing row after row of tattoos up his forearm. I wanted to ask about them, but now wasn’t the time.

  After he strapped on his own weapons, he pulled Melinda to the side and slung a sword over her back. “Stay by my side at all times, got it?”

  She nodded, fear bracketing the lines in her eyes. I turned to Fin who watched them both warily, no doubt trying to figure out their relationship the same way I was.

  I cupped his cheeks bringing his attention to me. “Are you all right?”

  He framed my hands on his face. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  We nodded at each other, all the words we needed to say but didn’t have the time for in those small movements.

  I turned to Helix and Melinda. “Is there an exit out of here?”

  Helix waved toward the door. “Down the hall, there’s a hatch that leads to a tunnel to get out, but it takes time to open since it’s as locked as the front doorway.”

  “Any way we can see where the attack is coming from? Where the attackers are?”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t want to install cameras because someone could hack them, and it might create a greater security risk.”

  I sighed and put my hands on my hips, running through scenarios. “What are the odds Esteban is out there? And do we think magical goons or the normal flavor?”

  “He’s not out there,” Melinda said. “I can feel him, and I would know if he stepped foot over my threshold.”

/>   That was handy, and also probably the result of serious trauma. “Okay, that helps since none of us can rely on our magic right now.”

  A crash came from outside the door, down the hall.

  “I think that was the basement door,” Helix said. “We need to get out of here before we are trapped away from the exit.”

  We hurried toward the door. Fin took the lead, with me behind him, Melinda behind me, and Helix at the end of our weird little conga line.

  The lights flickered in the hallway as we exited.

  “To the left,” Helix said.

  We crept down the hall as another crash echoed down the hallway. The sound of boots rushed down the stairs. Fin broke into a run, the rest of us right on his heels until he reached the hatch in the floor. Helix had said it was bolted up tight, and we didn’t have the time to unlock it with goons bearing down on us.

  Helix took the first goon with a knife to the gut, throwing him into the four more that came down with him. I shoved Melinda behind me for Fin to guard as I launched forward at the next two. It took seconds to bring them down. Melinda’s weapons were perfectly weighted and sharp as hell.

  Helix dispatched the last one.

  “So non-magical goons then,” I said, kicking one of the said goons as I headed back to the door. “But I don’t think this is all of them. Seems silly to send so few and the noise we heard at the doors couldn’t just be these guys.”

  As if right on cue, more goons poured down the stairs.

  “We can’t stay here,” Melinda said, from between the wall and Fin.

  We hurried to the first open door along the next hallway, shoving Melinda and Fin inside as Helix and I took up sentry outside the doorway.

  I let out a long exhale, clearing my head from all the fear and worry of the last few hours. Helix led the attack at the next round of bad guys. Maneuvering was difficult in the narrow hallway, and we both had to stick to knives for each strike.

  Several of the goons fell, but more came down. One of them got past me as I parried a strike from another.