Renegade Magic (Legacy Series Book 3)

by McKenzie Hunter

  “How did you like your vegetarian entree?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’ll go take down a buck on the way home and get myself a proper meal.”

  His voice was even, without a hint of humor, and I wasn’t sure whether or not he was joking. An easy smile settled on his lips, which didn’t help me determine if he was being facetious or not.

  I took a sip of the wine and immediately figured out why Savannah was so excited. It was good—very good—and I was sure it had to be way out of our budget.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “Hmm. You should tell your face that. You seemed to have enjoyed it.”

  “I like it. It’s a wonderful choice.” It was time to play nice with Gareth, who just made it more difficult than it had to be.

  “See, you can be amicable when you really set your mind to it.”

  The glare I shot in his direction just pleased him even more.

  “What happens next?” I asked after moments of silence. “With the Council,” I specified when his brow rose.

  “We wait for things to settle with Conner and then—” He stopped for a moment as if he was choosing his words carefully. “Harrah thinks it’s a good idea for you to come out, publicly. You’ve been out front and center handling some of the most chaotic occurrences recently. The agents at the SG hold you in high esteem and so does the Council. It would be a good choice for you to be the Legacy who comes forward.”

  “I’m also riddled with scandal.” I pointed out that I’d been charged with murder at one time. “I think most people will only remember that about me.”

  “It never made the news, Harrah made sure of that.”

  I knew that; Savannah had told me that before. I was looking for an excuse. I didn’t want to be the Legacy poster girl and be paraded in front of the cameras as the innocuous version of my predecessors. A neutered version of what we were. And with the Trackers out there emboldened to murder us with the support of the SG, I didn’t want to be a walking target.

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “I didn’t say I agreed with her. I told you what she wanted, and she will press the issue because it’s what she wants.”

  “What do you want?”

  Again, the devious smile emerged, and he gave me a once-over. His tongue ran lightly over his lips before he bit into them. I doubted it was to bite back any more innuendos.

  “What do you want me to do regarding coming out?”

  I appreciated that he considered the question for an extended period of time. “I don’t agree with Harrah that it’s the right time to do this. I think you should locate the others and talk to them, get an idea of what they want. You can’t speak for all Legacy. The people that know about you—or think they know about you—will be ridiculed because the story won’t be corroborated by anyone else.”

  “There are people who will believe it.”

  “The ridicule is going to happen no matter what we do. There were always people who suspected there were still Legacy, and they weren’t all part of Humans First or Trackers. They’re the people who still claim to have seen Nessie and Bigfoot. To the general population, they are conspiracy theorists and nutjobs and won’t be taken seriously. The Magic Council is now tasked with mounting a believable case that Legacy exist and managing the death of the head of the HF and several of their members"—he paused for a while—“among other things.”

  I assumed under the umbrella “among other things” were concerns that they had a leak and someone who was colluding with Trackers in the SG. I was absolutely sure that “among other things” were cleaning up the situation with HF: the dead members, the arrests associated with members having kidnapped me, and the disbanding of any remnants of the organization. There wasn’t any doubt that magic, strong and illegal, would probably be involved. Magic was banned among the general population, but used by the SG and the Magic Council.

  Gareth’s lips were pulled into a thin, taut line and I didn’t expect to get any more information from him, but I still tried. “Have you spoken with your cousin about how the Trackers found out you apprehended Conner and the others?” I squeezed out the question through clenched teeth as I broached the subject that was the point of contention between us. A crisis of conscience had caused him to leave the Guardians of the Order, known to me as Trackers, but he’d remained linked to them through his cousin who was an active member.

  “Yes, we are discussing the matter,” he confirmed coolly. The baleful glint in his eyes and the dark shadow that was cast over his face were reminders that beneath all that Gareth presented to the world, he was a predator. A dangerous one.

  “Where is he?”

  “I have him in custody.” His tone had become dark and ominous. A subtle hint for me to drop it. If only I could quiet my curiosity. “In custody” was a vague answer. I felt the poorly controlled anger that emanated off him. He’d been betrayed by his cousin, that I was sure of, and I didn’t think he was handling it well—or legally.

  “Your cousin, is he in custody at the Haven?”

  “I didn’t say he was in SG custody. I said he was in custody.” He stretched out on the chair, linking his fingers together behind his head.

  “What? Is he locked in your basement being waterboarded?” I asked, half-jokingly. The stern look that overtook his features didn’t make me feel confident that he wasn’t.

  “When do you want to start looking for the other Legacy?”

  I see what you are doing. He’d not only changed the subject but invited himself on my excursion.

  “Let’s start next week.” I had every intention of starting before that week, without him. It was an unknown situation, and I wasn’t ready to do it with a partner. It was bad enough that I was probably going to have to sneak out so that Savannah didn’t volunteer to go, weighted down again with her “quest” bag.

  He nodded. “When you start looking for them this weekend, should I just tail you or are you going to ‘fess up now and invite me along?”

  I inhaled a sharp breath.

  “I can hear the changes in your breathing and the increase in your heart rate. But we can continue pretending that I can’t.” In a graceful wave of preternatural movement he came to his feet and closed the distance between us. He leaned down until he was at my eye level. “I personally enjoy the game of cat and mouse,” he said before he walked out of my room. I took another drink from my glass, hoping that Savannah had left more wine in the bottle.

  CHAPTER 3

  Focused on getting to work on time, I simply looked down at my phone when it rang. It was an unknown number, not Gareth’s as I’d been expecting. It had been two days since he’d shown up at my apartment for dinner. Since I had no intention of him accompanying me to find the other Legacy, I hadn’t seen the point of taking his many calls. I figured it was only a matter of time before the threat of arrest was sent or maybe another cadre of badass SG officers teeming with magic and frustration ready to make me comply with Gareth’s demands and try to convince me to stop being a pain in his butt. Just before I could retrieve the message left by the unknown caller, a sedan darted out from a side street, blocking me. An SUV pinned me in from the rear. Craning my neck, I looked for other cars. I always took back roads to work to avoid traffic, and the very reason I loved them was the very reason I might be in trouble: no one was around. I could maybe count on a car or two to pass but I wasn’t sure how long that would be.

  When a woman jumped out of the SUV behind me, I grabbed my sai. A rust-colored shifter ring danced around her eyes, but I focused on the scowl etched on her face. I did a quick assessment. She had me by at least three inches, and being a shifter she had extraordinary strength and agility that gave her an advantage. But hubris caused her to approach me without a weapon, which wouldn’t be beneficial for her.

  For a split second, I wondered if she was SG, but I didn’t see a badge. The two men that hopped out of the car that had b
locked me from the front wore the same scowl as the shifter, along with similar looks of contempt and disgust. Trackers for sure. I remembered that look, it never changed. Abhorrence was woven so deeply in their thoughts and emotions that the very sight of us evoked their hate. I considered maneuvering to drive off, when another car crept along, coming from the other direction. I was completely blocked in. There wasn’t enough space to navigate between them, and my car wasn’t powerful enough to push the SUV behind me out of the way.

  The men approached me with caution. The moment the woman was close, I opened my car door and sprang out. I jammed the left sai into her thigh. She howled in pain and dropped to her knees, grappling to pull it out. Four against one didn’t afford them restraint. They’d planned to kill me, and I planned to send a message to the Trackers to leave me the hell alone. I punched the right sai into the neck of the shifter Tracker before she could remove the first one. After that I withdrew the sai from both her neck and thigh. She choked a breath. Her eyes widened as she reached for her neck. Her hand came away crimson and wet with blood.

  I didn’t turn fast enough to get to the other two. I was hit hard with a blast of magic. It smashed into me, heat spread over my body, and sharp aches of pain shot through me as I moved. Mage. I turned to move away from the other one, who lobbed another ball of magic in my direction. Damn. I didn’t want to deal with two magic wielders. I pushed out a wave of magic, the powerful kind I usually reserved for Conner, but I didn’t care. The stronger and deadlier the better. They both went back, hitting their car with a thud, their heads rebounding against it. I went to the car that was blocking me on the side; when I was just inches away, the female driver sped off. I looked at the license plate, trying to commit it to memory.

  I spun around. The mages were trying to come to their feet, and I kept them pressed against the car with another wave of magic. Sunlight gleamed off the blood-soaked blades as I approached them with the twins in hand.

  They struggled against my magic, trying to pull themselves from the car.

  “Now you’re the ones captured,” I said in a low drawl. Feeling the surge of magic as it wrapped around my hand, I contemplated what I would do to them. I took in the rage; how confident they must have been knowing they had caught me and were just going to kill me, four against one. They wouldn’t have given me mercy, and I wasn’t prepared to offer them any.

  Flashes of the blank map overtook my thoughts and I couldn’t shrug them off.

  “I don’t mind dying for our cause. You will prove what we’ve all thought of you. You all are murderers, unable of being anything else,” one of the mages spat.

  The hypocrisy enraged me. I’d killed one Tracker, the one who had killed my parents. I’d only erased the minds of the others I’d encountered, making them think they’d killed me. I had shown mercy to no avail. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, they had none to give me. They had orchestrated an assassination. I got a glimpse into the window of the mages’ car. A small arsenal of weapons was in the back: blades, firearms, magical objects, vials, large manacles. If they hadn’t killed me here in the middle of the street, there was no telling what they would have done to me.

  “Do your worst,” he challenged.

  I smiled; dark, cold, ruthless. “Thanks for your permission. I plan to.”

  I studied them as the many ways to die from stab injuries ran through my mind. I glanced at the other fallen Tracker lying faceup, eyes still widened in shock, lips parted slightly in death’s awe. I drew back. Stabbing someone when the adrenaline was high was admittedly easier. It made things a blur, the act nothing more than reflexive, the body’s need to survive at all costs. This was intentional, and there was a part of me that was a little concerned that my conscience was silent, on a hiatus, prepared to give me a pass on this behavior. Perhaps the voices of anger and umbrage were too loud, drowning out my conscience. I drew back, prepared to deliver the killing strike into a neck. Mages could heal themselves so I’d need to inflict enough serious wounds that they wouldn’t have enough magic to counter them all. The first mage had depleted some with his initial assault on me.

  “Levy, stop,” I heard Gareth command from the distant left. He was too far away; his voice carried in the wind. Even with his preternatural speed, he wouldn’t reach me in time to stop me. When he called my name again, he sounded closer. I shot a look over my shoulder before releasing the mages from their pinned position against the car. They dropped forward onto their knees. I relaxed the sai down at my sides.

  As I knew they would, instead of surrendering, they attacked. The one closest to me drew his hand back first: magic twirled around it but stopped and quickly withered away when the blade of my sai sank into his stomach. I jammed the other one into his partner’s neck and he met the same fate as the shifter. My hands and shirt were covered in blood. When I turned, it took me a moment to meet Gareth’s intense gaze. The blue of his eyes was barely visible as they narrowed and homed in on me like a scope. For a few minutes he stared at me in weighted silence. Eventually he allowed his gaze to rove over the three bodies lying in the middle of the street in broad daylight. I glanced up at the sound of an approaching car from the side street. Moving at snail speed, the occupants looked at the bodies in the street and my blood-covered weapons.

  “You could have moved away from them,” Gareth offered.

  “That wouldn’t have stopped them.” For a moment I felt indignant. They had come after me. I’d protected myself.

  Before I could inquire why he’d tracked me, he said, “I wasn’t looking for you, but we received a call about this. A. Call. You were seen by a human.”

  “I used magic, nothing different from the mages’.” I didn’t mean to sound so indifferent, but that’s the way it came out. Callous and cold.

  “To observers, a supernatural just killed someone in the street. That’s what you did to the ‘woman.’ That’s what they reported. The shifter ring can’t be seen from a distance by most humans. But throwing spheres of magic and pinning someone to a car without touching them is a dead giveaway.” His tone became rougher with each word, blistering and stern, and his eyes remained on me.

  “They blocked me in, I had no choice.” Once again, my words sounded flat and apathetic.

  His lips disappeared into a line as he assessed me. “Of course,” he delivered with the same disbelief evident on his face. He pulled out his phone and made a call. Minutes later SUVs and official cars had surrounded me and the bodies. Some of the agents were in uniform, some in protective equipment as they took pictures of the scene and assessed the situation. I couldn’t ignore the glances in my direction. They knew what I was, and I wondered if some of them held the Trackers’ view that I deserved to be hunted and killed. One look around the immediate area and I saw how they could think that. How they could see me as the very monster that the history books had depicted us as.

  Gareth’s arms remained crossed over his chest, and a pondering look shrouded his features. A man with gloves and shoe covers approached me with a large red bag. “I need your weapons.”

  I looked in Gareth’s direction. His expression hadn’t changed, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any assistance from him. Slowly he started to pace the small area, answering calls as they came in. Surely this can’t be that big of a deal. That initial thought quickly vanished: there were three dead bodies. A human had seen me use magic and then murder at least one person they thought was human. This was a crapstorm and I couldn’t imagine how it was going to play out. I watched as people moved around me, clearing away the bodies, cleaning the area. It became such a disturbing distraction that I didn’t see the two agents approaching me with cuffs.

  Again, I looked in Gareth’s direction. “She’ll go on her own, no need for those.”

  Their brows rose, and they both had the same look of anger and dissension. I had already caused enough problems. I extended my arms out and let them put the cuffs around me. They weren’t the typical iron cuffs. These were t
he ones used on the Legacy a few days ago, large iridium manacles. In silence, they escorted me to their car. When we drove away, I looked back at Gareth, who was still on the phone.

  I paced the small room that I’d been escorted to. Each time I moved, I was aware of the blood that encrusted my shirt making it stiff. The metallic smell of it wafted in the air, and I could still feel dried blood on my face. They’d given me a damp towel to wipe it off my face and hands, but it required more than that. I needed a shower.

  Magic strummed through me and was worsened by my increasing anxiety. I felt caged as I replayed everything over and over in my head. I wanted to feel remorse, to have just a hint of regret that I could display when I was questioned. I delved deep into all the emotions I had and kept coming up empty on the ones that I needed to show if I was going to get them to show the slightest amount of leniency in this situation.

  Standing in front of the two-way mirror, I was aware that someone was probably watching me. I probably looked horrid, covered in blood, unable to control the magic that curled around my fingers, and pacing the floor while occasionally taking a moment to look at the mirror. I was happy for the bright colors that spiraled around my finger and hands. It was the only life in the drab room. White walls, long white desk, and small wooden chairs that looked more uncomfortable than they actually were.

  When the door opened I expected Gareth; instead Harrah walked in with an SG agent. His cropped hair was just a few shades darker than his eyes, which watched me carefully. He had a short-sleeved button-down, his slacks crisp and his demeanor distant, professional. A kind look was something he wouldn’t give freely.

  “Hello, Levy.” Harrah greeted me with the smile and gentleness that the agent couldn’t manage.

  Harrah was camera ready, as she always appeared to be. Her eyes were lightly lined, making them look wider, entreating, and kind. Bowed lips had just a hint of peach and complemented the gentleness of her smile that welcomed people into the supernatural world and suggested it was a lot less scary than they’d imagined. Her voice had an ever-present delicate timbre that lured people into trusting whatever came out of her mouth. I’d learned not to believe most of anything that she said. Because of her, I didn’t believe what was reported in the news about incidents that involved supernaturals. I knew that she’d bleached and sanitized the situations until they were unrecognizable. As a fae, she had the gift of cognitive manipulation. Just as I could wipe and implant new thoughts and memories, so could she. But fae could manipulate them as well, and compel actions. Did someone really commit a crime or suicide, or was there a fae nearby urging them into that behavior? It was illegal to do, and punishment for it was severe. When it came to handling the optics of a situation and changing the narrative so that it was palatable for humans, the SG and Harrah seemed to skate over those little restrictions that were in place to protect those same humans. Harrah’s unyielding desire to maintain the illusion that supernaturals were all innocuous peddlers of magic and the extent to which she would go to maintain that impression made her untrustworthy.