Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  Aeden lunged and his sword tapped his opponent’s abdomen before a desperate twisting parry with one of the sticks forced the blade away from him.

  Two jabs with the sticks toward Aeden’s face and throat—which he easily deflected with his blade—and three lightning-fast strikes toward Aeden’s head, and Greimich had regained his balance. He tried to move forward, forcing Aeden to give ground, but the clan chief’s son would not yield an inch.

  Instead, Aeden moved a step to his left and transformed a block into a horizontal cut from the left to the midsection. He morphed that motion into another lunge to the belly. He circled his sword to deliver a downward diagonal strike from the upper left, and then quickly changed direction to strike from the upper right down to Greimich’s neck. It all happened in the blink of an eye.

  The other boy batted away or deflected all four blows, but Aeden hadn’t expected any to land. The true purpose of his attack became clear to all as Aeden used the rotation from the last strike to throw his right foot out and sweep Greimich’s left leg.

  Aeden’s friend’s eyes went wide in panic as his leg flew out from under him and he began to fall. As his opponent fell, Aeden continued his spin, brought his left leg out with all the momentum his turning had generated, and connected with a downward spin kick—like an ax chopping wood—right on top of Greimich’s nose.

  The other boy hurtled toward the ground and struck hard, one stick flying from his grasp. He expelled a grunt that sounded like all the air left his lungs.

  This was the tricky part. Aeden followed his opponent to the ground, lunging in once again with his sword. He grunted for emphasis as he drove it into Greimich’s neck, just below the jawbone under his ear. His foe’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

  Aeden stood there in a lunge, right knee at a perfect square angle, left leg straight behind him, his sword making a clean line with the rest of his body. He didn’t move for two seconds, waiting to see if Greimich would move to get up.

  He didn’t.

  Finally, Aeden straightened, put his sword vertically in a salute to his opponent, turned and saluted Tuach, and waited, standing at attention with the back of the sword resting against his arm.

  The crowd was silent. Aeden could hear the labored breaths of some of those close to the training ring. A light breeze caressed his ear. There was a faint sound of retching and liquid splashing, but Aeden couldn’t see who the source of the sound was.

  “Done,” Tuach said, eyeing Aeden with suspicion. “Clear the ring.”

  Aeden dropped his sword and went toward his friend. Though Greimich was bigger than Aeden—by a little bit—the smaller boy picked up his friend and carried him out of the ring. As the spectators moved to allow him to go through, he caught sight of his parents. His mother had a horrified look on her face, almost as if she would cry—though Aeden knew she wouldn’t. His father’s face was impassive, but there was the slightest bit of surprise and maybe a little respect in his eyes. His barely perceptible nod as Aeden passed warmed the boy’s heart.

  His father knew. He knew, and he approved.

  Chapter 5

  “What?” Greimich’s eyes snapped open as if he was having a nightmare. “What happened? Oh!” The whites of his eyes showed as his pupils rolled upward. He looked like he was going to be sick.

  “Take it easy,” Aeden told him. “You’re going to be dizzy for a while, maybe sick to your stomach. It couldn’t be helped.”

  Greimich closed his eyes and took a slow breath. “Aeden?” He spoke more slowly this time. “What happened? Did you kill me?”

  Aeden chuckled. “No, but I had to make it look like I did. I just knocked you out. Really far out. It’s been over a day. I was afraid I permanently injured you. It still remains to be seen if you are mentally damaged. More than you already were.”

  “Owww,” Greimich said, putting his palm to his head. “I feel dead. What did you do?”

  “The only thing I could think of on such short notice. You know how the practice swords are. They are heavy and hard, but the point is blunt.”

  “Yeah,” Greimich said.

  “Well, I’ve been looking at some of the old texts. You know, the ones on hand-to-hand combat, the way it used to be done hundreds of years ago?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, the other day I found a book about pressure points. There’s one just here,” he pointed to where he had jammed the practice sword. The skin there was brown, yellow, and purple with bruises. “If you strike it correctly, it will instantly make your target unconscious. I kind of jabbed my sword into it. Hard. It’s meant for fingers or a thin rod, but all I had was the sword.”

  “You stabbed me in the neck with your sword?”

  “Yes,” Aeden said, feeling his face go warm. “I sort of had to. I couldn’t think of anything else that would satisfy Master Tuach but didn’t permanently harm you.”

  “Oh. I guess it’s good you read about that pressure point, huh?”

  “I think so. It was either that or hit you so hard I had to chance paralyzing or killing you.”

  Greimich was quiet for a moment. “Thank you, Aeden.”

  “You’re my friend, Greimich, my Braitharlan. Clan or not, you are my friend, closer than family. Rest now. I have to get back to training. I’ll see you when you get out of here.”

  Greimich waved his hand weakly at Aeden and closed his eyes. He was asleep before Aeden had even left the room. Aeden tried not to think about what his friend would have done if their roles had been reversed.

  Three of the trainees received injuries so severe that they would never fight again. Because of the manner in which they were injured, they were afforded some honor and allowed to take jobs they could perform—menial things, mostly—instead of simply being killed ritually in the Daodh Gnath. One girl had refused to fight and was executed. That brought the number of trainees to twenty-two, though nearly half of those were recovering in the healing tents.

  Aeden and Sartan never mentioned what both knew happened, but from what they did speak about, Aeden knew that his father understood what he did and he approved of it. There were no blatant outward signs of this, just a glimmer in his father’s eyes. After Sartan had explained it to his wife, though, she smiled at Aeden every time the subject of the combat came up. She didn’t hide her pride in what her son had done. She even whispered to him once that he had defeated a centuries-old tradition in the most honorable of ways. It was a beginning worthy of a hero story, she said.

  Life became a never-ending cycle of combat, education in other important aspects of clan life, and physical training. Aeden grew stronger and taller and his muscles continued to get larger. He would never be a bulky man, but he was beginning to take on the cast of an agile, supple warrior. He moved like he was dangerous, and he truly was.

  When Aeden was twelve, a group of the clan’s warriors, his father one of them, took him nearly a day’s travel away from their village. When they stopped in a clearing, he was made to strip off his clothes and give them to the men. They left him with instructions to return to the village in no less than a week’s time. There was no reason to blindfold him or obscure their trail. The test was not of tracking, but of survival in the wild.

  The highlands grew very cold in the winter, and in those months, snow covered the land. Fortunately for Aeden, the trial occurred in mid-summer. Or maybe it was not fortunate. Humidity and heat reigned, and the sun beat down on him relentlessly. Insects swarmed everywhere. Still, it could have been worse.

  His first priority was making a weapon. The warriors left him nothing, not even a knife, so he had to make do with what he found.

  He found what he needed at a nearby river. A hard, brittle piece of flint almost as long as his forearm and some other rocks he could use. It took him the better part of a day, but he crafted a primitive knife by striking the long piece of stone with the other rocks, chipping bits off. When he finished, he held up his handiwork. It was a long, jagged piece of gray rock. I
t wasn’t much to look at, but its sharp edges made it a fine tool.

  Aeden recited in his head the things he had been taught about survival. Water, shelter, and food were his top priorities. There was plenty of water around, and he found a small clearing near a stream. He selected a site far enough from the water to prevent undue attention. Predators coming to drink would be all too happy if they chanced upon a convenient meal.

  It was long, hard work, but he cut and shaped branches from nearby trees with his new knife to make a lean-to where a tree was crowding a fair-sized pile of rocks. Until he made clothing—maybe he could weave them from some of the vegetation—he would need the windbreak the rock, tree, and his branches would provide. He could cut some of the moss hanging from nearby trees to use as a makeshift blanket, if necessary, but he would see what the nights held for him first.

  Water and shelter taken care of, he concerned himself with food. He foraged for a few hours and found some ostrich ferns, mushrooms, and a few wild onions. Aeden detested onions, but he didn’t have much of a choice. He would eat what he could find.

  Aeden tamped down some of the vegetation in front of his makeshift structure. Then, using his knife, he dug a rough circle and lined it with stones he found near the river. Luckily, he also found other, smaller, pieces of flint. Unluckily, he didn’t have anything made of steel. He put the flint pieces aside in case he could use them later for starting a fire.

  There was some deadwood on the ground amongst the trees, but he had learned a better way to get wood for a fire. Aeden took his knife to a string tree. He couldn’t remember the correct name, but he had always referred to the plant as a string tree. The sharpened stone made short work of it, sawing through the base to sever it from the ground. Once it had fallen, Aeden dragged it to his campsite.

  With some difficulty because of the crude nature of his knife, Aeden sliced the tree open, used a stick as a wedge, and peeled it back, exposing its fibrous insides. He made an incision at the trunk of the plant to free a fiber, then pulled it along the whole length, liberating a thin, tough strand from the plant. Each fiber pulled away from the plant easier than the last one.

  Cut, pull out a length of the thread-like material, set it aside, repeat with the next piece. It took him almost two hours to unravel the plant. When he was done, he had a pile of fibers, each close to six feet long. He began tying them together into a long rope.

  Once he had a section of rope twenty feet long, he attached a heavy stick—about as long as his hand—to one end. He spotted a tree with several dead branches.

  Aeden held the rope a few feet from the stick at the end and swung it around in a circle. The woom, woom, woom was pleasant to his ears, almost hypnotic. A smile flickered onto his face as he let the rope slide through his fingers, launching the stick toward the dead branches.

  His aim was true. The rope slapped the dried wood and, because of the weight of the stick, wrapped itself around the branch. Aeden picked up another stick and wrapped the rope around it at just above head height. With a quick, strong movement, he jerked the rope downward with his handle. The branch made a satisfying crack as a large section of it broke off and crashed to the ground a few feet away from him.

  He unwrapped his rope from the firewood and started the process over again. Between the branches he pulled down and the ones he found on the ground, he soon had enough firewood to last him for at least a full day, maybe two. He coiled up his rope and hauled his tinder back to camp.

  Aeden broke the larger branches into sizes that would fit in his fire pit. He found some dry moss, small twigs, and dead leaves to use as kindling. All that was left was making the fire. He wished he could do it like heroes in the stories he liked to hear. They had magic and could snap their fingers and will fire into being.

  He would have to do it in a more mundane fashion.

  Aeden tied small sticks to a short length of his fiber rope. He found a suitable twig, about as thick as his thumb and a foot long. Finally, he picked out a chunk of hardwood he had found lying near a tree that had been struck by lightning. It was as big as his outstretched hand and as thick as his fist.

  Into this, he carved a small notch with his knife, approximately the same thickness as the stick he would use. He put the bowl—that’s what he would call the chunk of wood—in his fire pit and sat down in front of it. Wrapping the rope around the shaft of his stick and putting the end of it in the notch on his bowl, he was ready.

  It took him a few minutes to figure out how to keep the stick vertical; he had always done this with a helper in the past. He settled on sitting in front of the bowl, his feet together above the bowl, holding the stick upright, and either hand holding the handles on the rope. He packed kindling around the notch on the bowl and started pulling on the rope ends, turning the stick rapidly.

  It only took a few minutes for his consistent turning of the stick in the notch to get hot and start to smoke. When red embers appeared in the smoke, Aeden smiled. He blew gently on the smoldering moss, and a tiny flame came to life. He patiently fed more fuel to the fledgling fire until it was big enough to dump into the pit without going out. The bowl he removed for later use. In a few more minutes, he had a cheerful fire burning.

  The nights weren’t too cold that time of year, but the warmth of the fire felt good on his naked skin. Satisfied with his day’s work, Aeden nibbled on some roots he’d found, stared into the flame, and wondered about the next day.

  Chapter 6

  Aeden’s first morning dawned as most did in the highlands, with a cool mist that burned off as the sun cleared the horizon. The coolness would give way to the heat of the day, he knew. With nothing but time until he could go back toward the village, his thoughts turned to better ways to get food, and then to exploration.

  First, he created snares from saplings and the rope of plant fiber he had harvested. He set up a handful of them where he saw slight depressions in the underbrush, lower than undisturbed foliage that would have been pushed aside by large creatures. He knew these to be runs for smaller animals. The ones close to camp he made so they would kill the rabbits or rodents they captured. The ones a little farther away he built so they would merely trap the creature and not kill it. He would make a habit of checking them daily and resetting them if necessary, but he didn’t want his game spoiling before he got a chance to dress it.

  There were predators in the highlands—bears, highland cats, and worse—and he did not feel adequately armed with his one stone knife. Aeden found a long, straight branch on a nearby oak tree, stripped it of bark, and smoothed it with his knife first, a handful of rough pebbles next, and finally handfuls of sand until it was smooth, straight, and about six feet long. Then he securely fastened his knife to the end with the plant fiber to make a spear. If predators came calling, he would want to keep his distance while killing them.

  Propping his spear up next to his shelter, he set about making another knife out of a large piece of volcanic glass he had found. He thought it was obsidian, and he shaped it the same way he had the other, by holding it in a handful of leaves to keep from cutting himself and knapping it with stones. When it was done, its two sharp edges were even sharper than his first knife. He rigged up a sheath for it with the plant fiber and some flexible bark he stripped off a nearby tree.

  Checking his snares, he was happy to discover that one of them had caught a lean, stringy rabbit. It was one of the close traps, so the animal was dead. Parasitic bugs had not yet infested it, and he hurriedly skinned it.

  Aeden made an incision in its belly and pulled out its entrails. He threw them in the river to be washed downstream so they wouldn’t attract scavengers to his camp. Using two sticks he had sharpened with his knife, he put the rabbit over his fire and let it cook while he scraped the flesh from its pelt and washed it in the stream. By the time the meat was cooked, he had formed the skin into a new sheath for his knife by wrapping it around the blade and then winding the fiber rope around it over and over again. He set it on
a rock in the full sun to dry.

  After eating all the meat he could pick from the rabbit’s bones, he set out with his spear to survey his surroundings. He would choose a different direction each day so he would get a good overall picture of the land for seven or eight miles each way.

  That first day was uneventful. He found two more snared animals, another rabbit and a squirrel. He killed them, tied some of the rope he brought with him to them for easier carrying, and reset the traps. He also found a section of a fallen tree that had broken off. It contained a hollow within that would serve nicely as a bowl or tub for bringing water from the stream to his camp.

  The first day, he traveled generally north, based on the movement of the sun. The land was consistent with that of his camp, forested, but not heavily, with slopes and dips. He crossed two streams as he explored. Water was plentiful, but it was the dry season so he saw no sign of rain all day.

  Aeden was still naked. He had thought off and on about clothes. He could weave some with the plant fiber, drape larger leaves over him, or save the pelts from his food to eventually sew them—he would have to make needles and slice the fibers thinner for that to work—into some kind of garment. It wasn’t crucial because even at night, the temperature didn’t reach freezing. Still, it would be nice to be able to keep the bugs off him. His skin was covered in bites. As he ate his dinner of roasted meat with foraged roots and vegetables, he thought about what else he needed to do. The ordeal hadn’t been tough at all, and he was almost two full days into it. Maybe it wasn’t worth making clothes for only a few days’ use.

  His exploration of the surrounding area revealed more landscape similar to where his camp was. He continued to find wild vegetables to eat—onions, leeks, parsnip, and some tubers—and snared more rabbits, but there was nothing new until the fourth day of his trial, when he traveled to the northeast to explore.

  To the northeast of his camp, he found a bog and stepped into it to test the footing. His foot sank into the marshy ground with a slurping sound, and he pulled it back out despite its best efforts to keep him there. There would be no going through that.