Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem Book 2) Read online

  I swept my gaze around the area, searching for anyone left standing. Debris and bodies were littered all through the field, unmoving. Three people were still on their feet.

  A sob choked me and tears of unbelievable relief rolled down my hot face. I couldn’t believe it.

  Reagan and Emery were two of the three. I was the last.

  We’d done it.

  The three of us had gone up against a host of nearly two hundred or so mages and mercenaries, and somehow, we’d survived.

  As I continued toward the ruined warehouse, I caught sight of Reagan swaying on her feet. She pulled down the lingering fire, completely in control of it despite her empty power tanks.

  We would’ve never been able to do this without her. Not with all the vampires, shifters, and mages who were friendly to us in New Orleans. She was our ace in the hole. More powerful than anyone in the Brink, I had no doubt.

  And the only way we’d have a prayer of taking down the Mages’ Guild permanently.

  Emery and I owed her our lives and our freedoms, and if we made it out of the next leg of our battle with the Guild alive, we would be forever indebted to her.

  My mother’s haunting words came back to me:

  Her path has been set. Her journey is in motion. He will complete the pyramid of power. The curse breaker will join the oath takers and forge a bond in blood. It is in this union that the way forward shall be writ. That they shall all learn their highest level of power, and balance the kingdom.

  Reagan’s was the path that had been set, because it was my journey in motion. Emery completed our pyramid of power.

  I stopped and scanned the field littered with enemy bodies.

  Emery and I were still learning to work together. We hadn’t even boosted our power by officially joining as a dual-mage team. Reagan, too, was still learning, if what she’d said earlier was true. And together we’d downed an army.

  Shivers coated my body. Pyramid of power, indeed.

  Reagan fell to her hands and knees.

  46

  Emery made it to Reagan at the same time Penny did, so he stepped back, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. Weariness made weights of his limbs, dragging at him. He could barely keep his spine straight within the bone-weary fatigue.

  Penny, not looking nearly as ragged as he felt, knelt next to Reagan and put her hand on the other woman’s back. “Are you okay?”

  “Tired,” Reagan said, her head drooping. “Very tired.”

  Penny nodded and took a knee, looking out at the deathly still fields around them. It was an eerie comparison to the flurry of activity that had come before.

  Emery staggered back another pace and Penny’s gaze fell on him. He could tell she was assessing the damage. How she could still function was beyond him. But then, his brother had always said women were stronger in the field, their strength of will hardier than the roots of an oak, pushing them past their own distress to help those around them.

  “That’s why God gave the gift of birth to woman,” his brother always said, “because he could trust in mothers the most.”

  “Just…so I’m on the same page,” Penny said, dropping her other knee and sitting on her heels. “You’re the one who created that false reality and those weird elephant creatures, right?”

  “Yes,” Reagan said. “Neat, huh?”

  “No. It was awful. I hated it.”

  “Never go to the underworld.”

  “Well, that’s the plan.” Penny bit her lip. “And you did that…why? I mean, because you probably could’ve just fire-bombed the whole place.”

  Reagan sucked in a deep breath before twisting around and sitting hard on her butt. Emery joined them and took a knee, still in absolute shock. His brain had yet to process the strange alternate reality. The battle. The hard-won victory.

  “I had a few options,” Reagan said, looking out over the field before her gaze landed on the wall of the warehouse, resting haphazardly on the crushed car beneath it. “Darius will never let me near one of his cars again.”

  Penny followed her gaze. “But, I mean…that’s fair, I feel like. You ruin every one of them.”

  Reagan sighed. “We need to get a cleanup crew out here.”

  “Yes. But you were saying, about the mind chaos?” Penny said, her voice carrying an edge.

  “Mind fuckery, yeah. Well, I could’ve just stopped at the walls to keep people in, but since they were invisible, people would’ve tried to get out, run into them, and bounced off. Once they realized it was magic holding them in, they’d work to bring it down. Which would drain my energy and steal my focus.”

  “Hmm. Mhm.” Penny’s agreement didn’t sound convincing. Emery had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t really want to understand Reagan’s incredible magic, which was so far above and beyond what she was already struggling to understand. Emery honestly didn’t blame her. He was more or less used to what magic could throw at him, and yet…Reagan had created an entire alternate reality. And not just an illusion! Those strange flying creatures had come to life. They’d killed and maimed.

  “But, with that wall, I could have just fire-blasted everyone, like you said. See what I’m saying?” Reagan said. Penny shook her head, her eyes glazing over. Reagan ignored it. “So that made the wall an attractive option. But there are dried grasses all around us, and I worried the whole place would catch fire. So then I’d need an additional wall to suck out the flames, right before the solid wall. See?”

  Penny didn’t even bother shaking her head this time. She just stared blankly.

  “That would all have been doable, but let’s be honest, I know those parts of my magic pretty well. This was a great opportunity to practice my less-used powers. I figured I’d go for it. Fool the brain with the eyes, further confuse the brain with solid walls they could no longer see, trapping them in, then kill them with the fire dragons—”

  “Dragons?” Penny asked, finally coming back alive. “Those were supposed to be dragons?”

  “Yeah. I missed the mark a bit there.” Reagan climbed to her feet, followed by Penny, ready with a stabilizing hand. “But the rest of it looked pretty cool, didn’t it?”

  “The water didn’t make things wet. It didn’t, like, splash.” Penny braced her hands on her hips and half bent, finally showing her fatigue. “It didn’t account for people walking through it. I couldn’t see the ground. No, it wasn’t cool. And people disappearing and reappearing and—”

  Emery put his hand on her shoulder to keep her from flying off the handle, trying to keep back chuckles as he did so. A lopsided smile crossed Reagan’s face.

  “Definitely don’t go to the underworld, you’d—” Reagan’s head jerked around, her eyes narrowing at Penny. “Did you try and cut out the illusion?”

  Penny’s eyes rounded and she put up her hands. “No, I swear. Emery, tell her. I thought about it for only a second. But I didn’t act on it. I still can’t believe you didn’t warn me!”

  “Hmm.” Reagan tapped her mouth as she slowly walked to the edge of the warehouse. “I wonder if you could. We’ll have to try.”

  “No, thank you,” Penny said quickly.

  Reagan sighed and looked around at the gruesome tableau. “My warehouse is gone.” She squinted up at the sky. “Should we check for survivors, or just make sure there aren’t any?” She lowered her eyes to Penny and quirked an eyebrow. “Should we show Emery what the people down under can do?”

  “What? Australians?” Penny backed up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t include me in your crazy.”

  “Too late. Your mother said I should.” Reagan held out her hands, palms up. Floating fire sprang above them, hovering. No magic connected the flame to her palm. No streams of energy flowed through her fingers or from the elements around them. She’d called it up from nowhere.

  “Annnndddd…” The flame disappeared. She moved her hands through the air toward the field. Fire sprang up there, growing when she raised her hands, crawl
ing across the already burned ground and over the bodies.

  “No, no, no, no.” Penny slapped one of Reagan’s hands out of the air. That didn’t affect the fire in the least. “No! We need to identify them. Find out if they were Guild, not Guild, where they came from—you can’t just destroy evidence. I swear, Darius must want to throttle you at least ten times a day. You and he are nothing alike.”

  Reagan’s smile, which had sprouted when Penny slapped at her hand, grew. “You get me.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. You get me.”

  “I don’t even get what you’re talking about. I just stated facts. And asked questions.”

  Without any movement from Reagan, the fire rose off the ground. And so did Penny.

  “What the—”

  She bumped down a moment later and Reagan shook her head. “I’m too tired. Fine, you win. Let’s get cleanup in here. Or get the shifters to section it off until Darius can send in his guys and look everyone up. I’m tired. I need a bath.”

  “Training is going to get a lot worse now that she can show all her powers,” Penny mumbled.

  “See?” Reagan took her phone from her back pocket. “This is why I love Penny. I create a huge illusion, with fire-spitting dragons—”

  “More like Dumbo’s un-talked-about uncle—” Penny mumbled.

  “—move fire through the air, lift her in the air, and all she can think about is how I’ll torment her in training.”

  “That’s a strange reason to love someone.” Penny heaved a deep breath. “It’s over, then, right? That wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part? We won.”

  Reagan’s laugh was low and humorless, and Emery knew exactly what she was going to say. So he did it for her.

  “It’s far from over,” he said, connecting eyes with Penny. “Either we keep running, or we do forcefully what my brother tried to do delicately. Either we spend our life in the wild, or we stand our ground, ask our friends for help, and claim the ultimate vengeance for our loved ones.”

  “We tear down the Guild,” Reagan said with fire in her eyes. “Those filthy bastards.”

  Penny looked between Emery and Reagan, but her gaze stuck on him. And what she said shocked him.

  “It isn’t the ultimate vengeance. It’s doing the right thing. We have to tear it down, yes, but so it can be rebuilt. We have the power to do it, and the scars to make it personal—those things make it our responsibility.” Penny shifted, her stance widening. Magic whispered around them, blending in with the breeze. “This time, they came to us. Next time…”

  Reagan smiled.

  “We go to them,” Emery finished, feeling Penny’s infectious fire running through him. “We harvest the spells we planted when we were first in the Guild compound.”

  That weird brown rock with the stripes of color—Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, Penny had called it—pulsed from the other side of the ruined warehouse.

  “Stupid power stone,” Penny muttered.

  She was on board. She wasn’t even fully trained, but she was ready to storm the Guild again.

  But was he?

  47

  “What do we have to expect from this, Penny?” my mother asked from the small table in Reagan’s kitchen.

  She’d taken the first flight out of Seattle after speaking to me. When she hadn’t found us at Reagan’s, she’d gone to the Bankses’, where she’d been greeted by Callie and Dizzy’s magical group, minus a few players.

  A good few.

  Those few would never be going back, either, because they had never left the fields around Reagan’s destroyed warehouse.

  Only two people hadn’t been accounted for at the warehouse or the gathering. One of the defectors utterly shocked everyone. High in power, lots of ambition, and so ridiculously entitled that he had probably danced to the Mages’ Guild’s tune the moment they promised him power and riches, John had disappeared. I was the only one not gobsmacked.

  And the other had people clucking their tongues and nodding their heads. Of course she had gone back to the dark magic, they said. Wasn’t it what she was used to?

  Mary Bell.

  Callie had verified that Mary Bell’s presence in the bar the day of the first attack was unusual. Paired with her interest over my movements, it indicated she’d up and joined the Guild. The fact that she hadn’t returned just cemented it. Though old, she was still a high-powered mage. The Guild could find a use for her. Of that, Emery was certain.

  Still, it didn’t quite ring true to me. Everything she’d said to me painted a picture of a more rounded individual than the others in the group. A person on a different path, who had learned from her mistakes. Grown from them. I didn’t buy that she’d gone back to the Guild.

  But she’d certainly gone somewhere. Her rental was vacated and her phone number disconnected.

  It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.

  My mother had been staying with the Bankses for the last week. She’d ordered me to join her and leave Emery behind, and for once in my whole life, I’d told her to shove it.

  I had literally said, “No. Shove it.”

  A very tense thirty seconds of silence had ensued, during which everyone present stared at my mother, waiting to see what would happen. But all I got was a “Good girl.” Then, to ruin the moment, “Do not get pregnant or I will kill you. With my bare hands.”

  “We expect to get a very large apology,” I said to her now, finally answering her question about what we should expect. I leaned against the counter. “We will trust in the safety of numbers, and leave the house with no extra holes in our bodies.” I watched my mother tap the elegant invitation sitting on the tabletop between the wine glasses.

  Darius had invited us to dinner.

  Needless to say, I was a little nervous.

  “Is that old vamp going to be there?”

  I knew my mother was talking about the extreme elder. “Yes. She has fully recovered from her injuries, and from centuries of idle nothingness, from which she is extremely relieved to have woken up.”

  “You created a monster.”

  “No, Mother. I woke up a monster. There is a difference. And it wasn’t my fault. It was Darius’s fault, which he fully admits to. Which is why he is inviting us to dinner. And now we’ve come full circle.”

  “Don’t sass me, missy.”

  I sipped a glass of wine as movement caught my eye.

  Emery filled the archway, clothed in a tailored suit that fit his wide shoulders before reducing down to his trim hips. Smart black dress shoes peeked out from his pressed gray slacks. His hair was done up in a messy style, short on the sides and long on top.

  He straightened out his arm and adjusted his cufflink with the other hand, very GQ. He might’ve spent the last several years rolling around in the dirt in various parts of the wild, but when he wanted to, he could really clean up.

  My heart fluttered and I shrugged for no particular reason.

  “Penny Bristol, you look beautiful,” he said, his blue eyes soft.

  I felt my face flame (my mother looking on with a hard scowl made things awkward) and I shrugged again, still for no particular reason.

  “That Marie has good taste for young women.” My mother nodded as her gaze slid down the red silk dress that hugged my slight curves and showed a bit more cleavage than was probably prudent. “Why she was trying to dress me, I have no idea. I don’t have anyone to impress. Waste of time, in my opinion.”

  “You have Marie to impress.” I smoothed my shimmery dress down my thighs, suddenly shy and embarrassed and acting stupid. I’d been living with Emery for a week, and usually things were easy between us. He handled my crazy with laughter, and I ignored most everything he did unless it pertained directly to me, because I was used to ignoring my mother. But now, when we were dressed up, and he was looking at me like that, and I was remembering the feel of his hands…

  “Emery, how do you plan to earn money?” my mother asked, capable of ruining any mo
ment with gusto.

  He sauntered toward me with his confident swagger before reaching around me and into the cabinet. When he reached forward for an empty wine glass, his heat fell across me and I shivered. “I’ve promised my spell-working services solely to Darius. For now. He pays extremely well.”

  “What sort of harebrained world traveler promises exclusivity to an elder vampire?” my mother asked.

  Emery glanced at me before pouring himself a glass of wine. “A desperate world traveler worried about the woman he was leaving behind.”

  Warmth filled my heart and a smile played with my lips.

  My mother huffed. “Well, now you’re at his mercy.”

  He wrapped his lips around the rim of the wine glass, and a different part of me filled with warmth. After he took a sip, he grinned. “That was before he put her in mortal danger, messed up, and made her fend for herself. For now, it’s wise to keep the attachment. He’s an elder, yes, but he’s the best of the lot. He’ll give me plenty of wiggle room. In the future, I have an easy out and plenty of room for bartering.”

  “Worst case, we’ll just sic Darius’s girlfriend on him. She’ll be more than happy to ruin his life.” I edged my hand along the counter like a high school kid on a first date and bumped it off his hip. I was nearly twenty-five, but I was acting like a besotted teenager.

  He wasn’t. He slid closer and wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

  My mother huffed again.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Reagan is going to meet us there, correct?” my mother asked for what seemed like the eight hundredth time.

  “Yes. And Callie and Dizzy. We have lots of backup, Mother, relax. If that old vampire goes crazy, we’ll be fine. Which you know, because your cards told you so.”

  “Those cards aren’t always right, you know that.”

  “They aren’t ever right for me. But if they’ve ever failed you, you’ve never mentioned it.” Suddenly, all those near misses in Seattle were called into question.

  “Come on, love,” Emery whispered softly, sliding his hand to my back. “We don’t want to keep the vampire waiting.”