The Horned Mage: Books 1-5

by Hayden Harper

  Were we ever going to have sex without some kind of an audience?

  Chapter Eight

  It wasn’t quite dark out when I snuck out of the house, leaving Lexus asleep and still naked in my bed. I’d paused to admire her nude form, my seed coating her sex and thighs, and been tempted to simply climb back into bed with her. The slight jiggle of her pert breasts with her every breath was especially enticing. But no. There was something I needed to do.

  In the memories I had seen while we were having sex I saw what Bullet and Dicario had done to her earlier, how they’d hurt her and stolen her great grandmother’s necklace. I was going to get it back. Her memories running from them weren’t exactly a clear montage of directions, but I found myself able to backtrack her path with surprising ease. I’d taken a flashlight and a backpack with a multi-tool and some Poptarts, figuring it would take me the better part of the night to find my way back to Dumb and Dumber’s meth lab.

  Despite being on foot and needing to go off road to get to it, I made pretty good time. It only took me around two hours to get to it. They had set up in a hunting lodge at the back of an elderly couple’s property. The couple either didn’t know that their old lodge was being used for something illegal or didn’t care. Either way, short of calling the police every time they thought that some hooligans were out messing around there wasn’t much they could do about it. Not unless they wanted to bust out their own guns and take care of business—always a possibility in Texas.

  I still circled around the property so as not to alert the property owners that I was there, cutting through a thick growth of forest to stay out of sight. I’d never been much of a hiker before, but it seemed to me that I moved quicker and more easily than I should have. I had vague memories of getting caught on every branch and briar when walking through the underbrush before.

  Now though? I seemed to instinctively know where to step for clear and quiet travel, and found myself not using the flashlight at all. I couldn’t see in the dark any better than I used to, but the moon was out and bright and since I was stepping right anyway there didn’t seem to be much point to using it, other than risking getting shot of Dicario or Bullet were out at their lab and eager to protect it. Thinking of them made me bare my teeth.

  I should have been scared. I guess I was, but it wasn’t the kind of fear that I would have experienced last week. Last week if I had learned that there were a pair of psychotic drug dealers out for my blood I’d probably have tried to go into hiding or to the police. Exactly what the police would do for me I couldn’t say. Give me a guard? That would last for maybe a week and then the nut jobs would come after me when the cops left. And hiding? I couldn’t give up school. I’d worked too hard to get myself here. And sure, I’d already broken my curse but this was my chance at a college education and I could actually cast some spells now with ease.

  More than ease.

  I hadn’t done a lot with my green fire but it had answered my call when I’d childishly started playing with it, using my magic like a lighter or something, flicking the flames on and off again. Just knowing that I could summon them was its own special kind of high. I mean, there wasn’t really a big call for fire magic in my daily life but hey—fire! And it just might come in handy tonight if I had to use it as a weapon.

  That thought occurred to me as I neared the edge of the woods where the lodge rested about twenty yards away, in a spacious clearing with a path leading up to it from a different part of the property, the tall grass worn smooth and flat by the continuous passing of truck tires. But it wasn’t the lodge or even the truck parked in front of it that brought me up short, but my own thought. Okay, yeah, I’d thought of my fire a bit as a weapon. But I hadn’t ever seriously considered burning someone beyond that one encounter with Dumb and Dumber in my house.

  More disturbing still, the thought of burning them to a crisp didn’t actually bother me in and of itself, and I knew that it should. I had never been a violent person. I had also never been the kind of guy who would sneak into a meth lab to retrieve a stolen necklace for a girl knowing that the whack jobs who ran it wanted to kill me. And here I was having barely given a second thought before taking action.

  I swallowed and felt my heart pounding in my chest. I clenched my fists and my jaw. I could do this. Who I’d been before…I could acknowledge now that that boy had been weak. I wasn’t him anymore.

  I crouched low and snuck through the tall grass, moving as fast as I could while still keeping quiet, which turned out to be surprisingly fast, and I found myself pressed against the outer wall, listening just outside a window.

  Dicario and Bullet were inside. They were speaking loudly and I couldn’t tell if they were arguing or just drunk. The stink of cat piss and rotten eggs wafted through the window even though it was closed and made me gag. I’d never smelled a meth lab before but I’d heard that they stank. This definitely seemed to be meeting with the stereotype.

  Another thing that I’d heard about labs like this one were that they were highly combustible. The men who had hurt Lexus were inside, along with a whole lab’s worth of badness, and I was sitting right outside of it with the magical equivalent of a flamethrower. I almost reached for my magic to set the whole place ablaze before catching myself.

  What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t kill people. I did not just blow things up. And yeah, this place probably should be blown sky high but while people were inside of it? Who the hell was I that I’d even had that kind of thought, let alone been about to act on it. Scarier still, I knew, somehow knew, that killing Dicario and Bullet would not weigh upon my conscience at all. These thoughts and actions were becoming a dangerous habit—what the hell was wrong with me? I was so distracted by the thought that if it hadn’t been for the sound of the door closing I might have been caught.

  Both Bullet and Dicario had come outside, still talking loudly, and loaded something heavy into the back of their truck. I crouched low in the tall grass, leaning to the side so that my stupid antlers wouldn’t be sticking up to give me away. I could just see one of these dumbasses thinking I was a deer and taking a shot at me. Hell, they might take a shot at me even if they thought I wasn’t a deer.

  Their truck roared to life and the headlights swept over me. And then they were away.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, caught a taste of the foul air wafting from the lodge on my tongue, and wished that I hadn’t. I pulled my shirt up over the lower half of my face and made my way to the entryway as soon as the lights disappeared from sight. The door was locked but made of a weak, rotten material that made a cracking sound when I pushed and swung inward, spilling moonlight into the lodge.

  It was too dark to make out much, so I finally pulled out my flashlight and turned it on, sweeping it across the room. I had no idea what all I was looking at, but it seemed to be mostly jars and jugs and tubes and an oven and more tools and guns than I could count. Sweet Christmas who needed this many guns or rusty hammers? A bird cage rested at one end of the table with jugs on either side. I briefly wondered what was inside of it before moving on and discovered a squat, heavy gun safe against the wall opposite the bird cage. A clean square on the floor next to it suggested that there had been another safe here before, probably what they had loaded up in the back of their car.

  Given that these morons had guns strewn about the place I was assuming it held something else entirely. I made my way over to it and stopped, realizing that it needed a combination and that I had no freaking clue what it could be. I didn’t even know enough about my erstwhile drug dealers to hazard a guess. I began searching the place for a sticky note or something that they might have recorded the combination on. Nothing turned up.

  I briefly considered trying to burn my way into it, and scrapped that idea as soon as I had it. This place was probably a powder keg ready to go boom. No way in hell was I setting it off while I was still inside of it.

  And damn if the safe wasn’t too freaking heavy for me to
move on my own. It had sounded like those guys had been struggling to lift out just one on their own. Hell, it was probably heavy enough that they didn’t want to ruin the suspension on their truck by carrying more than one at a time. Given that I didn’t see a lot of other options though, and no sign of Lexus’ necklace anywhere else, I began trying to tilt it over.

  “If you want into the safe, I know the combination,” said a high-pitched voice behind me.

  I jumped and instinctively conjured a ball of emerald flame in my hand.

  “Put that out!” the voice shrieked. “Are you trying to blow us both up?”

  There was no sign of the speaker, which did not reassure me, but I let the flames die and lifted the flashlight, ready to use it as a club if need be. “Who’s there?”

  “Me, of course. Who else?” said the voice.

  “Nobody likes a smartass missus invisible,” I said. The voice was so high pitched that it was hard to tell its owner’s gender, but it somehow felt like it belonged to a woman.

  “I’m not invisible. I’m right here, Dumbass,” said the voice, and this time it was accompanied by a bell-like sound. I swept the light around until it came to rest on the birdcage.

  I’d thought that it was empty before, but that had been because its occupant had been laying down. I blinked several times, my mind struggling to process what I was seeing.

  Finally I asked, “How the hell did those morons capture a pixie?”

  The hand-high woman with gossamer wings standing in the cage brought her hands to her mouth and giggled. The sound chimed in the disgusting building, completely out of place.

  “You’re funny, hunter,” she said. “I haven’t laughed since I was captured. And no, not by them. Their Lady captured me, the tricksy bitch.”

  I blinked at her. Dicario and Bullet had a lady? Surely she didn’t mean Lexus.

  “Right,” I said, trying to process that. “You said something about opening the safe.”

  She cocked a hip and smirked at me, though it was hard to tell in the dim light. I drew closer as she answered, noting her bright violet hair and the rather sorry shape of her wings. It looked to me as if they had once been possessed of color in my flashlight’s beam I could see that it had been washed out.

  “That’s right,” she said. “And I’ll tell it to you if you let me out of here.”

  I frowned at her. The fae were supposed to be sixty kinds of tricky and seventy kinds of slippery. It was why they had entire collegiate courses dedicated to dealing with them. A course I might add, that I hadn’t taken. But I couldn’t just leave her in there. A thought occurred to me. I might have no intention of leaving her in that horrible bird cage, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “That’s all your freedom is worth to you?” I said and pointed at her wings. “You don’t look so good there. What have they been doing to you?”

  Her wings fluttered and created an angry shrilling sound. She stamped her foot on the barred floor of her cage and puffed up her cheeks. “They are stealing all my pixie dust. It’s my dust to make and give—not theirs! And they put it in their poison. Poison!”

  Dicario and Bullet had been lacing their crystal meth with pixie dust? Damn. That had to be some special kind of high. No way either one of them were smart enough to have thought this up though. It had to be this “Lady” the pixie had mentioned.

  She stomped around her cage, beating her wings for a moment before stopped and pointing a finger at me. “You want to deal? We’ll deal. And no tricks or I’ll bite your eye out.”

  Now that was a mental image. “Okay, let’s deal.”

  “You let me out and restore me,” she said. “And I will offer you a boon.”

  I crossed my arms. “You mean, like telling me the safe combination? That’s right where we left off. No deal.”

  She fluttered her wings and looked away, cheeks reddening at having been caught.

  “And you asked for two things from me this time,” I said, recalling her words. How exactly did one go about “restoring” a pixie to health? “You are the one in need, so you should be offering me more than I am offering you. That’s two things you want from me, so I want four boons.”

  “Four!” She beat her wings and bounced around her cage. “Four, the nerve of it! You’d leave a little thing like me all helpless and alone at the mercy of those monsters?” She stopped leaping around to fix me with a pair of puppy dog eyes.

  No, I wouldn’t, but I made myself hold a scowl in place instead of breaking down and opening the cage there and then like I wanted to.

  The held up a hand with three tiny fingers. “Three boons! No more, no less. Three is a fine and fair number.”

  That was still one more act in my favor than acts in hers. “Deal.”

  “Deal and done.”

  Something whooshed from the cage, reached inside of me to touch deep inside my magic, and rebounded upon the little pixie. She let out a little sigh as it entered her and sagged against the bars of her cage.

  “Give me the combination,” I said and she did, slowly, as if just waking up from a good long nap.

  I opened the safe to discover a cardboard box stuffed with cash, jewelry, and some things that I recognized as belonging to my roommates. Lexus’ necklace had to be in there somewhere but those goons could be back at any moment. I opened my backpack and dumped the box’s contents into it without checking them, and then zipped it back up.

  “Now free me,” the pixie demanded. “We have a deal.”

  I nodded and lifted the door to the cage.

  She zoomed out, glowing with a purple light as she streaked around the lab, knocking over jugs and bottles with abandon before careening into the oven. She stopped there and began fiddling with the knobs. I realized what she was doing a second later and raced for the door.

  I leapt through just as the lodge exploded into a fireball. I was not nearly far enough away to escape and threw up my hands in a futile effort to shield myself. Emerald flame leapt from my palms to form a barrier between me and the explosion. Even as I was knocked off my feet, not a single tongue of orange-yellow flame touched me.

  I landed on my awkwardly on my back, the contents of the backpack digging into me, and brought myself up onto my elbows. The lodge was a towering pillar of fire.

  Oh shit.

  Chapter Nine

  As I lay there in stunned silence watching the lodge burn a purple streak circled the flames and came to alight upon my belly. The little pixie collapsed in a heap, tiny body dripping with sweat and for the first time I became aware of her nudity. She had a great figure for someone who couldn’t be taller than the length of my hand.

  She gave me a wicked little grin.

  I did not return it. “What the hell is wrong with you? I was still in there!”

  And that wasn’t even touching on whether or not the place should have been blown up or not. Never mind that I had been considering it just a few minutes ago, the fact was that I hadn’t acted upon the urge. Certainly not when I’d known people were inside the damn thing!

  She shrugged. “You got out, didn’t you? Big tough mage like you, hunter, I’m sure a little fire wouldn’t phase you.”

  And if I’d happened to die in the flames she’d have been free of the remaining two boons she owed me. “Crazy pixie bitch.”

  Her grin turned to a scowl. “You owe me restoration.”

  In the firelight I could see that the color in her wings was all but gone. It must have taken a lot of whatever magic she had left in her to knock the oven over—the little psycho.

  Over the roar of the fire I could distantly hear the sound of approaching vehicles. I looked down the dirt-road to see a pair of headlights turning to come down it. They were a good distance off but closing fast.

  “Shit.” I grabbed the pixie, leaped to my feet, and raced for the woods.

  “Restore me!” The pixie demanded as I sprinted through the tall grass.

&
nbsp; I made it into the woods and nearly crashed into a tree. What little night vision I’d had before had been ruined by the fire and while I managed to avoid getting tangled in anything, for the moment I was left blind. I leaned against a tree, praying I was far enough inside the tree line that they wouldn’t be able to see me, and held my breath.

  The pixie beat her wings and squirmed in my hand. “Restore me! That was part of our deal!”

  Dammit, she was going to give us away. Her wings and voice carried like bell chimes through the woods, and no doubt, all the way to the burning lodge. If she kept this up when that truck finally got back there was no way Bullet and Dicario wouldn’t hear her.

  “Okay, okay,” I hissed. “I’ll restore you, just keep quiet unless you want them to catch you again.”

  That seemed to shut her up but she still squirmed out of my hand. In a much quieter voice she said, “But you will restore me. Here. Now. No tricks.”

  “No tricks,” I promised, wishing I knew how the hell I was supposed to restore her.

  The pixie grinned and dropped from the air in front of me to land at the waistband of my jeans. In short order she had them undone and dropped around my knees.

  “What the hell?” I demanded then slapped a hand over my mouth as the truck finally arrived, screeching to a stop in front of the roaring fire.

  My boxer shorts followed next and my cock sprang up before the pixie, already hard and erect. I scowled, realizing that I had been hard for some time and hadn’t noticed. For how long though? Since I’d started hunting for Lexus’ necklace, I realized, and then stopped thinking altogether as the pixie ran her naked body down the length of my shaft, pussy and breasts rubbing against me.