The Horned Mage: Books 1-5

by Hayden Harper

  I pulled her face back from my chest so that she was looking me squarely in the eyes. “You are not bringing more of him into the world. Do you understand me? This is our child. Your baby is just as much mine as Reagan’s is. I’m scared, we all are, but I promise you right now, that I’m going to be the absolute best father that I can be to our baby.”

  She grinned at me through the tears, giving me the ugliest cry I had ever seen her give. She had never been more beautiful.

  Someone started to open the door and Victoria stepped in the way, pushing it closed. “We need a few more minutes in here.”

  The nurse or doctor on the other side started to say something and Victoria yanked the door open just wide enough to peer through. She snarled something too quiet for me to catch more than the note of menace in her voice and then closed the door. She turned around and leaned against it to make sure that it stayed closed.

  I gave her a grateful nod.

  She shrugged and jerked her chin at Sarah. I held her and let her cry and process. This was only bad news because we’d been told that we had a different deal. We were no worse off than we were a few days ago, at least as far as our baby’s health was concerned. Nothing had changed. I still loved her and still loved our child.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was getting late.

  The plan was to meet up with Lexus and Jadeite at their mother’s house after the hospital. We’d been there for the better part of the afternoon, trying to figure out what the hell were should do. I’d gone through every book I had and every article I could find on tracking fae. I hadn’t started on anything to do with demons yet because, frankly, that was a hell of a lot more dangerous magic. Not all fae were hostile, but every demon sure as hell was. No pun intended.

  I picked up the phone to call Lexus when it rang on its own and her face popped up on my screen. I answered and was about to ask her where she and Jadeite were but she beat me to the punch. “Get up to your school, now. Quick as you can. Bring everyone.”

  I debated bringing Sarah. She’d had a hell of a tough time at the doctor’s but when I went to tell her and Victoria what was going on, both girls were dressed to kill. Literally. Victoria was all bikered up in leathers and thick denim while Sarah was wearing her service jacket and combat boots. We didn’t have guns or knives—they could breathe fire and rip peoples’ throats out with their teeth—otherwise I was sure they would have been armed.

  “That was Lexus on the phone,” I said.

  They nodded.

  “We got the gist of it,” Victoria said. “The house is way too quiet.”

  Sarah held up a hand to forestall me. “I’m pregnant, not an invalid. And if this is our child then that’s our child too. I’m going. And if you try to make me stay so help me I will find a way to make you regret it.”

  And that settled that. We took Sarah’s car and parked a block away from the school. Actually trying to find parking in the lots would have added half an hour to our commute. I called Lexus when we had parked and were on property and she directed us to one of the school’s landmarks, a massive clock that rang an even more massive bell every hour on the hour and every five minutes before the hour. I guess they wanted students to know when their classes were about to start at every corner of the campus.

  I spotted Lexus and Jadeite right away. They were with someone whose back was too us. A tall, slender someone with long, ink-black hair. I froze a good thirty yards away when I recognized her.

  Deirdre She turned around and regarded me with cold, passionless eyes. I’d never really put together exactly how serpentine her figure was before, but right then she looked like nothing so much as a snake curled back and ready to strike.

  And like an idiot I rushed forward. She was between me and Jadeite and Lexus—there was no way that I could get to them before she did anything. But maybe, maybe I could keep her attention on me and they could get away. With all of us here we might be able to take her down, but we’d definitely be hurt. We couldn’t afford that now.

  Deirdre casually lifted a hand—except that there was nothing casual about the gesture, I’d seen her do something similar and with a flick send an angry werewolf flying through the air with a jet of water so powerful it made a firehose look like a squirt gun. I poured on the speed.

  And Jadeite stepped between us.

  She put a casual hand on Deirdre’s upper arm and offered her a smile as she held up a hand at me in the universal sign for “Stop!” Then she turned to look at me and that soft smile turned into one of unadulterated frustration. It was amazing how easily she could convey that I was a complete and utter idiot and had better not screw things up with only her eyes.

  Lexus stepped around Deirdre next and I instinctively understood it to be a sign of peace. If she’d stayed where she was, it would have kept her at Deirdre’s back, the optimal place to strike from. Apparently we weren’t here for a fight. Which was good. Very, very good. But then what the hell were we here for?

  It was then that I took in what the girls were wearing. I hadn’t known that Lexus or Jadeite owned suits, skirted or otherwise. Lexus wore one in dove grey while Jadeite’s was more of a charcoal. Deirdre wore a pantsuit that was clearly tailored to show of her slender build. What on earth? Were they having some kind of a business meeting?

  “Caleb,” Jadeite said, a note of warning in her voice. “We are not here for a fight. We are here to negotiate.”

  Negotiate? With a drug dealing, human-trafficking snake?

  “I have some questions for you,” Deirdre said. “I believe you may have some for me. Perhaps this discussion can prevent us from further stepping on each other’s tails.” She smirked as she said that last bit. Hardy-freaking-har.

  “And then we can complete our contract,” Jadeite said.

  Contract? What contract—oh. Jadeite wanted to be a contractor mage like her father, making deals with powerful magical creatures for their allegiance. I didn’t really get how it all worked but her first contract had been with Trixie, who I had actually rescued from Deirdre. And now she wanted to make a contract with Deirdre? How the hell was this supposed to help us? In all honesty, the only reason I hadn’t tried to take Deirdre out was because she scared the living shit out of me. And that was before taking into account that she was up to her scaly neck in the local criminal element.

  Another thought occurred to me. Had Jadeite figured out that Deirdre had eaten her father? The man had held a gun to his daughter’s head but that was the sort of thing that you didn’t just get over.

  Deirdre gave her a small smile. “Of course. But as you all have me outnumbered, perhaps your…alpha…can begin.”

  Alpha? Oh, right. We were a lot like a werewolf pack now, I guess. I was as much a part of their pack as they were my wyld hunt.

  Jadeite turned to look at me again. “Of course, he’d be happy to. You ask your question first, then I will ask a question, and we shall trade off until we are all satisfied and the terms of the contract can be agreed upon.”

  Deirdre looked at me over Jadeite’s head and asked, “Why did you burn down my operation and steal my pixie?”

  Jadeite scowled and then cocked her head at me. Right, guess I’d never exactly told her where Trixie had come from.

  “The pixie burned it down, actually,” I said. “And I didn’t mean to steal her. I needed into Bullet and Dickhead’s vault. They’d attacked Lexus and stolen her necklace. So I went to get it back and the pixie knew how to get to it. We made a deal. I freed her, she helped me get into the vault, and then she went nuts and burned the place down. Nearly blew me up, actually.”

  Deirdre’s eyes narrowed and she flicked out her tongue as if tasting the air. Maybe she was. “Truth,” she said.

  “My turn,” I said, before Jadeite could say anything. “Why did you eat them?”

  Lexus made a small choking sound.

  Deirdre shrugged. “They were scum. I was trying to reverse the effects
of meth, or at least cure the addiction, using pixie dust. They thought we were just trying to take over the local trade. It behooved me to let them believe that. They would have tried setting up another lab and without a pixie there wasn’t much point in letting them do that.”

  I stared at her. “Wait. You expect me to believe that you were trying to cure meth-addiction by holding a pixie prisoner?”

  She shrugged.

  Jadeite started to say something but this time Deirdre cut her off. “What is your involvement in our local human trafficking ring?”

  I rocked back. “Involvement? Me? None. We were looking for some friends who went missing and stumbled onto that hell hole where they were keeping the girls. Threw down with a poltergeist and burned the place to the ground.”

  “And Crimson Rush?” she asked.

  “He was Jadeite’s father. We had a sort of falling out when we realized what he was involved with. What about you? You were meeting with him at that track meet.”

  “I was warning him of the consequences of bringing his business into my town,” Deirdre said. “I don’t like pedophiles and flesh traders.”

  Jadeite flinched.

  “Wait…so this whole time, you’ve actually been trying to keep Woodhurst safe?”

  Deirdre crossed her arms. “It is my turn to ask a question. What are your intentions for my town? As soon as I helped you break your curse you set about building a harem-army. Are you planning a criminal takeover?”

  Good God, was the giant snake-lady some kind of vigilante?

  “Why does everyone keep saying my girls are a harem? They’re hot and they’re badasses but they’re not an army and they sure as hell aren’t my…” I swallowed and made myself say the word, “harem. They’re my…my pack and my wyld hunt. I love them.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Deirdre said. “What are your intentions toward Woodhurst?”

  “I don’t have any intentions,” I snapped. “Dammit, I’m just trying to make sure we all get through all this crazy okay. Ever since my curse broke things have been crazy. I want our kids to be okay, I’d like for Jadeite and me to finish our degrees, but that’s it. I don’t want to take anything over—I just want a safe place for my girls and our kids.”

  Deirdre’s tongue flicked out. Her eyes turned to Sarah. “She’s the only one here who’s pregnant.”

  Jadeite nodded and finally managed to get a word in. “She is. But my mother is also carrying his child.”

  Deirdre’s eyes glowed with a threatening light as they turned to me and I swear they looked more serpentine than human. “You slept with their mother?” Definitely more than a note of accusation there.

  “Caleb and my mother were both raped when my father was here,” Jadeite said. “It…it wasn’t either one’s fault. Just my father’s.” Something shifted in her when she said that, as if a huge weight she had been carrying around was suddenly dropped from her shoulders. “It’s not Caleb’s fault. It’s not Reagan’s fault. It’s just the way things happened.”

  Deirdre considered Jadeite for a moment, then looked around at all of us, stopping for a moment to take us in individually before her gaze once again settled on me. “You really have had a shit time of it this semester, haven’t you?”

  I gave a weak laugh and a shrug. “Sort of. But these awesome girls have helped me get through it.”

  Deirdre nodded. “And now you need my help to get back your unborn child and your lovers’ mother?”

  I sighed. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “And you have no ambition to take over this town?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  She grinned. It was a victorious grin and it should have looked vicious, but suddenly she looked exactly like the girl I’d first seen her as when I’d started taking class with her.

  “Excellent. That gives me a wonderful position in our negotiations, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked Jadeite.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “It was when Jadeite said that thing about binding herself to you,” Lexus said. “It got me thinking about her contracts. How she binds creatures to her. And the scariest damn thing around has got to be Deirdre and she knows a ton about magic, right? I mean, she’s got to. Anyhow, I figured, Jadeite makes a contract with her, she’ll help us find Mom.”

  We were sitting in the food court, several tables away from where Jadeite sat with Deirdre negotiating the terms of their contract. I don’t know how long it took for her to negotiate with Trixie but it couldn’t have taken this long. What exactly was it that they were discussing? I’d never paid much attention to contract rituals. Maybe that had been a mistake.

  “And it never once occurred to you how dangerous this could be?” I asked, glaring at her over my Pepsi. I don’t know why the school had a deal with Pepsi instead of Coca Cola but we were sitting in probably the only place within a hundred miles that served the one instead of the other. In Texas all soda is “Coke.”

  Lexus threw up her hands. “It was the best I could come up with and she’s our Mom. I saw a chance to get her back and I took it. Just like Jadeite did.”

  My stomach sank. What if that was the only reason that things had gone the way they did last night? Would Jadeite have eventually chosen to bind herself to us on her own or would she never have made that decision? I know for sure she never would have chosen to lose her virginity the way she did. Speaking of… “And how long have you been wanting to be with your sister.”

  Lexus looked away and flushed. “Stepsister,” she muttered.

  Sarah and I gave her pointed looks but Victoria didn’t seem the least bit surprised. I looked from Lexus to her and then back and forth several times as realization dawned. “You knew?”

  Victoria sighed and placed a gentle hand on my thigh. “Sweetie, we love you. And…I think we love who you love. I know that I’ve been…wanting Jadeite, for almost as long as we’ve been bonded.”

  Sarah slowly nodded. “I think I have too.”

  I stared once again at Lexus. Oh no. What had I do—

  A soda-soaked ice chip hit me in the face. “You knock off whatever thought you were starting to have right now.” Lexus demanded. “Right now. I am not letting you ruin last night or what we’ve finally got with your guilty circular introspection bullshit that gets us nowhere. I wanted last night to happen and she wants to be with us. And she is with us. So focus on the problem at hand. Please.”

  I took a sip of my drink. We would have a long talk about this later. But for now she was right. We needed to focus on the problem at hand. Except that the problem at hand was that we were stuck waiting for Jadeite to finish making her deal with the devil.

  “All done,” Jadeite said and I nearly knocked my drink over.

  Deirdre raised an eyebrow. “How on earth did I think you were some sort of criminal mastermind?”

  “Mastermind?” I laughed. “Yeah, so, so no.”

  “Deirdre knows a spell to get us to the Summer Lands. Let’s go set it up and then we’ll do your hunting spell,” Jadeite said.

  I looked from her to Deirdre and back. “You’re done? I thought you had to do some kind of spellwork?”

  “We did,” Jadeite said. “We sealed the contract in salt.” She held up a torn packet of salt, the kind they slip into paper bags with fast food.

  “And that’s it?” I asked, eyeing Deirdre cautiously. “She’s not going to stab us in the back or try to eat us?”

  Deirdre rolled her eyes. “No.”

  “What are you anyway?” I asked.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what you are. I’m pretty sure I’ve got it figured out but still, I want to hear it from you.”

  Fair enough. “I’m a changeling cambion. My father is a horned hunter, my mother is some kind of grifting sociopath who let him and a pair of demons knock her up to see what would happen. Your turn.”

  She shrugged. “I’m a snake.”

 
I twitched, waiting for her to qualify that with something. What kind of snake? A dragon snake? A naga? Something with a long and unpronounceable name? But she didn’t say anything else.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  She nodded, and seemed to be fighting down a smirk. “That’s it. Just a very old snake.”

  I blinked. Slowly.

  “Did you ever hear the story of Lady White Snake?” Jadeite asked.

  Deirdre rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “No,” I said.

  “Look it up,” Jadeite said. “Short version, sometimes animals learn magic and when they do they can get really powerful and live for a long time. Maybe they’ve got an affiliation for humans or something. Anyway, Deirdre here is a Chinese water snake who has been around for a while and learned a lot about magic. Probably even more than Eleanor.”

  How long exactly was a really long time as decided by a magical snake? And why the hell would one choose to set up shop in Woodhurst of all places? They’re arcanology department was one of the younger ones in the country, which was probably why I’d been allowed in in the first place.

  As if reading my mind, Deirdre said, “I like the national park and the lakes. Plus I get to study humans and your magic. Here’s as good a place as any.”

  Why not?

  We made our way off the campus and into one of the nearby wooded areas after a quick stop by Deirdre’s office. It was so weird to think of a snake having an office so that she could meet with students and grade papers in between eating criminals.

  When we finally stopped in a clearing surrounded by woods to cast the spell, the sun was beginning to set. Deirdre looked at it and grinned. “Perfect timing. That will go a long way.”