“They attacked us!” he shouted at me without taking his eyes off the gathered crowd.
“They attacked me and I said drop it!”
The warlock ignored me, keeping his focus on his spell. A sharp crackling filled my ears and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Cursing him and the rock thrower, I gave Gideon a hard shove, knocking him off balance just as the energy was leaving his fingertips. The blast of energy flew wide, cutting through the bare limbs of a nearby tree. People screamed and scattered as debris rained down on the street.
Gideon swung around, turning nearly black eyes on me now that his initial targets had beaten a quick retreat. I fought the urge to grab my wand, knowing that the sight of it would only escalate the matter. My heart was pounding so hard I could taste it in the back of my throat.
“Protecting them only gives them courage!” the warlock roared, waving a hand back at the empty spot where the people had gathered.
“There’s no reason to kill more people! They’ve been through enough!”
“Enough? They haven’t been through enough if someone dares to throw a rock at a warlock!”
“Are you saying we haven’t earned it?” Stepping forward, I got up in Gideon’s face, my temper shredding each word I spoke.
I could feel the weight of my own past with the Towers come crashing through my pain like a rhino. Broken bodies, screams echoing through the long, lonely nights, and the blood on my hands that would never wash off—it was all there in vibrant Technicolor in my brain.
Even after I had left the Towers, there were more deaths I had done nothing to stop. Dolan had been tortured before me because he’d been cutting into the Towers’ magical-ingredients supply with his drug trade. Part of Low Town had burned when members of the Towers tried to lure me out. I was sick of it all and ready to rip into anything I could get my hands on.
A cold grin spread across Gideon’s lips as he glowered at me and I knew I wasn’t the only one. “Let’s do this.” The warlock clapped a hand on my shoulder and the world went dark.
Chapter 2
The vast flat plain was filled with knee-high grass and weeds, while the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, painting the cold winter sky alternating shades of pink and orange. Gideon had been kind enough to move us at least a few time zones west for a little privacy. The warlock gave me a hard shove away from him as he whipped his wand from his left sleeve.
Stumbling a couple steps, I regained my balance and fought through the wave of nausea that hit. The travel spell, combined with the head wound, was doing a number on my stomach and equilibrium, but I was still too pissed to pay any of it much attention. Rather than grabbing my wand, I held my hands open and out to my sides, my fingers slightly curled as if they were dug into globs of magical energy just waiting for my use.
“I’ve been waiting so fucking long for this,” Gideon muttered under his breath as he slung his first spell at me.
Yeah, me too. We had been at each other’s throats for the better part of ten years. Ten years of this asshole harping about not using magic. Ten years of listening to how the council wanted to remove my head because I was a worthless excuse for a warlock who didn’t deserve the air in my lungs.
Pulling up the energy around me in the form of a shield, I blocked his attempt to turn me into a box turtle and reflected it right back at him in the hopes of cramming it down his throat. The warlock brushed the spell off and came back with a second before I had a chance to formulate my own offensive strike.
“Why fight back?” Gideon taunted as he began weaving another spell. “This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? You want to be the whipping boy for the Towers.” A trio of long thick icicles formed in the air around him, dancing in the air like crystalline daggers. With a flick of his wrist, the first one whistled through the air before shattering against my shield.
“You want to be a martyr, dying for the sins of the Towers.”
A second icicle sliced through the air, exploding in a fine mist just inches from my heart.
“Dying might ease your conscience but it won’t save a single soul.”
The third icicle screamed through the air and stopped in the air just an inch from my forehead. It had gotten through my defenses because I’d let his words distract me. I gasped, my heart freezing in my chest as I stared at the weapon that very nearly killed me.
“Time to get off the cross, Gage, and find a real answer to our problems.”
I wanted to scream. In that moment, I hated him, but I hated myself more. Rage pumped through my veins, but Gideon didn’t give me a chance to unleash any of that anger on him because he quickly continued his assault. Each time, I managed to block his attack or unravel the spell, but each one was growing more and more complicated.
Any idiot would have known that I would be outmatched if I had to actually fight Gideon. He had more training, more experience dealing with other warlocks, making him better equipped. But instead of calling a truce, I was becoming more frustrated with each spell as his words hammered against my brain.
There was no question that I was skilled when it came to using magic. I could pick apart charms and curses I had never seen before in a matter of seconds. There was a part of my brain that simply understood the workings of magic even if I didn’t entirely understand the why of it all.
Yet, when it came to a fight with magic, I couldn’t just go on gut. A wrong move on my part and I was dead. Or Gideon. Or some innocent bystander four towns away who was just trying to get to his first cup of coffee of the day.
Damn it! All this raw potential and I couldn’t fucking tap it!
With a shout, I tore apart Gideon’s last attack and tossed a blast of energy at him, rocking him back on his heels. The warlock blinked, looking stunned. Running the short distance that separated us, I plowed my shoulder into his sternum, tackling the taller man to the ground.
While he might have been surprised by the physical attack, it didn’t take him long to recover. My fist slammed into his jaw, snapping his head to the side before he brought both of his fists down on the top of my head. Stars burst before my eyes while sharp pain sliced across my brain. I nearly crumpled. My stomach tried to eject its contents then remembered at the last second that it was already empty, leaving me choking for air.
Gideon rolled away from me, pushing to his feet first. The bastard tried to give me a swift kick to the ribs, but I caught his foot. With a hard jerk, he landed on his ass, disappearing in the high yellow weeds.
Pushing to my feet, I swayed but remained standing. The warlock sat up, frowning at me. I smiled as I kicked him, catching his chin so that his head snapped back. “That’s for ten years of kicking me around,” I shouted.
“That the best you got?” he snarled, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth.
“Fuck no!”
Magic forgotten, we were back at each other in a heartbeat, exchanging kicks and punches like a pair of teenagers in the schoolyard. I don’t know how long we went at it, but when I was finally on my back, my body an intricate web of aches and pain, I noticed that the sun was now fully above the eastern horizon but was doing little to remove the deep chill from the air.
Slowly, I pushed myself into a sitting position, a low groan escaping from my split lips before I could catch it. Looking around, I noticed that in our struggle we’d managed to flatten most of the high grasses close by, so that I could now see Gideon’s long body stretched out just a few feet away from me. His chest rose in short little gasps as if taking a deep breath was too painful. I thought I had cracked a couple ribs when I slammed my knee into his side.
“Fucking asshole,” I mumbled, but it was missing the heat I had felt earlier. Right now, all I could feel was pain.
The warlock pushed into a sitting position as well, deep lines of pain cutting through his lean face as he moved. A sharp hiss of air sq
ueezed through his clenched teeth and he pressed on hand to his side. Yep, I’d broken a rib or two. Man, his wife was going to kick my ass.
A bark of laughter jumped from my lips at that errant thought and I followed it with a groan as new pain lanced through my temples.
“What’s so funny? You look as bad as I do,” Gideon said. He tried to glare at me, but he was failing miserably since one eye was already swollen shut and the other wasn’t far behind it.
“Yeah, but I was just thinking that your wife is going to kill me when she sees you and I’m more scared of her than I am of you.”
Gideon snorted, his shoulders moving slightly with silent laughter. “It would serve you right.” But even as he said it, he called his wand to his side from where he’d dropped it in the tall grass. With the oak wand lightly held in his right hand, he whispered a healing spell over and over again while moving the wand from his feet slowly up his body to his head. As he did it, I could see cuts close, discoloring fade, and swelling reduce as if I were watching time spin backward. By the end, his body looked loose and comfortable again, while his voice had regained its usual strength and tenor.
Taking my own wand in hand, I started to repeat the spell Gideon had used. I had never used it before. The healing spell I had always relied on was far cruder and couldn’t do much to reduce pain. It was simply something to keep me from dying so that my body could finish naturally healing on its own.
“No!” Gideon said sharply, halting the words in my throat.
I stared at the warlock in surprise. Was he really going to stop me from using magic to heal myself? Sure, it was technically against the rules, but I was pretty damn useless as I was and we still had to finish our investigation in Charlotte.
To my utter shock, Gideon rolled to his feet and squatted down on my right. Carefully, he adjusted my hold on my wand, corrected my pronunciation of the spell, and even changed my breathing pattern for optimal use of the spell. He taught me magic.
In all my years at the Ivory Towers, not once had anyone taken an active role in making sure that I knew how to properly replicate a spell. It was monkey see, monkey do at the Towers. You learned to mimic what you saw if you wanted to stay alive. It was only after you survived your apprenticeship that you went back to try to understand why the things you did and said worked.
Under his guidance, I managed to easily replicate the healing spell he used, wiping away cuts, fractures, bruises, and pain. When I was done, I felt better than I had in a long time and a little sad. How many kids would be alive today if they had been taught magic with patience and care? The faces of so many dead zipped across my mind for a second that I thought I was going to drown but I pushed them back into the shadows for another time.
When I looked up at Gideon, there was a sadness in his own expression that made me believe a similar thought was crossing his mind. Which style of teaching had guided him through his apprenticeship? Or worse, which style waited for his daughter should she prove to be magical in nature? Of course, that was assuming he found a way to hide the fact that he was her father.
“I wasn’t going to kill them,” he said as I stood again. His voice was dull and flat. He refused to look at me. Gideon was hurt by the unspoken accusation, though he’d choke before he admitted it aloud.
I opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t thought that, but I quickly shut it again with a click of my teeth. The truth was that I didn’t know what the warlock was going to do to the crowd. I hadn’t really thought about it. The only thing I had been sure of was that he was using magic on people and it wasn’t going to be the nice fluffy bunnies-and-rainbows kind of magic.
“They’ve suffered enough,” I simply said.
“I agree.”
“Then why?”
Gideon finally looked down at me, frowning. “What would have happened if Simon Thorn had been hit with a rock?”
I cringed at the thought of that crowd striking back at my old mentor. “Fuck,” I whispered as horrible images of death and smoldering carnage flickered through my brain. I could think of any number of gruesome and painful spells that he would have used to slowly kill each of them, and then it was likely he would have leveled most of Charlotte to teach the rest of the area that he was not to be disrespected.
“Exactly,” Gideon said as if I’d spoken. “If they strike at one of us and we do nothing, then it could give them the courage to strike at another. The only problem is that the next one could be like Simon. You scare them. Give them what they will consider a close call and it should stop them. Otherwise, you’re guaranteeing they will die the next time.”
I nodded, hating it but recognizing the truth behind his words. I had fought Reave and sacrificed my own future to crush the same kind of hope that Gideon was talking about. The dark elf had gotten information on the locations of the Towers, hoping to spread it to the world so that a war would start. But a frontal assault on the Towers would lead only to catastrophic death. The witches and the warlocks couldn’t be beaten like that.
“So we continue to take away all hope?” I said miserably. Some of the frustration I had lost in my fight with Gideon was starting to seep back into my voice, leaving me clenching my teeth.
“No.” Gideon paused, waiting until I looked up at him before he continued. “We let them have the hope that if they avoid us, they will live. We let them have the hope that they can live most of their lives without ever encountering a witch or a warlock. They have to understand attacking a warlock will end in death because that’s how most of the Towers see it.”
I shook my head, knowing that he was right, but it didn’t help solve my bigger problem: convincing Trixie that I could keep her safe. “Nothing changes that way.”
“I don’t think the outside world has a chance at stopping the Towers. The change has to come from within.”
“That’s not fast enough!” I snapped as I jumped to my feet. Pacing away from him, I clenched both my hands in my hair. There had to be another answer, something that we were overlooking that would flip the switch, topple the Towers, and let me live a normal life with a girl I loved and a good job. But even as I thought that, I knew there wasn’t a quick fix and what fix there was required years and a lot of death.
“What’s happened?”
I flinched at his question and swallowed my first impulse to tell him my latest bit of news. “You mean other than the fact that the world is being worn away by the Ivory Towers? Or that people are scared and desperate? Or beside the fact that there’s a monster out there killing vampires and reanimating their corpses to use as guard dogs?”
A mocking smirk lifted one corner of Gideon’s mouth and I could see some of the playful youthfulness that Gideon kept locked down at all times. “Yeah, I mean other than all that.”
“Trixie is pregnant,” I whispered, closing my eyes as the words left my lips. “She’s leaving me because I’m a danger to my own child.”
Pain crushed my heart and lungs, making it impossible to breathe. It was crippling. My brain just went around in useless circles trying to find ways that would make her and the baby safe. Were there places we could escape to? Spells that would hide her and the child for the rest of their lives? Anything so that I didn’t have to watch her walk away.
Minutes ticked by and I slowly became aware of the wind as it flew across the field. The tall grasses bent and swayed like golden waves in the sun. I breathed deeply and slowly. In and out. The pain tumbled away, steadily becoming more manageable.
“I understand,” Gideon said.
Not I’m sorry or Congratulations. No false wishes or hopes.
I understand.
If there was anyone in this world, Gideon was possibly the only person who could understand. We both wanted a different world, and this man had taken several big chances in trying to attain that goal. Gideon had broken one of the Towers’ most basic rules. He fell in lo
ve and got married. He’d even taken it a step further and dared to have a child. Every day he had to be haunted with the terror that if his wife or daughter were discovered, they’d be executed, but only after extensive torture.
The idea that Gideon understood my dilemma helped more than I would have expected. I wasn’t alone.
“Let’s get back to Charlotte and finish up,” I said, glancing over at him. “I’ve got better things to do with my day than to freeze my ass off in the middle of Nebraska.”
“Idaho,” Gideon corrected, coming to stand next to me.
“Whatever.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, but the world instantly didn’t blink away as it had before. The warlock stood beside me, staring forward at the sun rising above, in a sky laced with thin white clouds. There was an unexpected look of peace on his face.
“I’ve been meaning to thank you for having your little chat with Mother Nature this past fall,” he said out of the blue. “It seems it had farther-reaching implications than anyone could have foreseen.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a cold chill already crawling up my spine.
Gideon looked down at me, a wide grin stretching across his face while joy filled his eyes. “Ellen is pregnant as well.”
If the man felt any fear about their newest little one, it did nothing to cloud his obvious happiness. There were no worries about being discovered by the Towers or about his daughter developing powers. There was only the promise of a new little life that would one day join his family.
“Congratulations,” I said in a rough voice.
He nodded. “I think this one will be a boy.”
And for a brief flash, I envied his sense of peace and acceptance.
Chapter 3
Upon returning to North Carolina, we stopped at the house that belonged to the vampire nest. Our return caused the police who had cordoned off the area to retreat as we resumed our investigation. They didn‘t look pleased by our arrival, but no one spoke as we slowly picked our way across the lawn to the massive, three-story house. Not surprisingly, law-enforcement agencies around the globe quickly learned not to oppose the Towers when something interested them. They simply stepped back and waited for the Towers to leave.
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