“Just like this is,” Darius growled. He grabbed my arm. “Kaye, this is bullshit.”
“Think what you want,” Aden remarked with a dismissive shrug. “All that matters to me now is rescuing my daughter. That’s all that has ever mattered. Your aim is to stop Jasmine… destroy her if you must. Our goals align.”
“That’s what you said last time,” I grumbled, and the djinn sighed at me.
“I’d thought she would let Marie go in exchange for the artifact,” he stated. “I thought she would send other goons after you, but I was mistaken. It won’t happen again.”
“A lot of people underestimate Jasmine’s cruelty.” I paused, giving the situation some thought. When my inner voice didn’t express her concern, I had to go with my gut and trust Aden one last time. If he sullied that trust, I’d find a way to kill him once and for all. But if his daughter was in Jasmine’s grasp, I could excuse some of the lying. “So, what’s this plan of yours?”
“We’ll return to her camp as though I’ve captured you—”
“Not happening,” Darius snarled, his hands falling to my shoulder.
“Together,” the djinn continued, “we’ll use your blood, just a bit of it, to activate the destructive power of the artifact and eliminate Jasmine once and for all. I will leave with Marie. You can return to this…” He glanced around, lips pursed. “…mountain paradise and avoid a potentially costly battle. A true win-win for everyone involved.”
Except Jasmine, of course, but that was kind of the point. I glanced up at Darius, taking in the anger, the distrust, then looked back to Aden.
“Go on then,” the djinn said. “Talk it over with your mate. Just know that this will work. I’ll not leave my daughter with that foul creature one more day.”
Which also suggested that even if I didn’t go along with his clever little plan, Aden still might put it into action anyway. By force, if necessary.
“Darius, a girl’s life is in danger.”
Darius pulled me aside, scowling. “You know I won’t let you go alone.”
“Well, you’ll probably want to stay to rally the troops anyway,” Aden interjected. “Jasmine mobilized some of her army this morning, headed straight here. They’re coming, but we could, in theory, annihilate them before they arrive. It all depends on you… and how long you want to stand around debating this.”
Fuck me. All this information made my head spin, but it was glaringly obvious we didn’t have time to wait. Swiping Darius’s pants off the ground, I shoved them into his hands and told him to go warn the others.
“When you’re done, we’re going to finish this,” I told him, ignoring the way Aden did a little celebratory jig in my peripherals. “Together.”
“Or not at all,” he growled. He then dragged on his pants, glaring daggers at Aden as he went, and stalked out of the hall.
“Nice guy,” the djinn said, grinning when I scowled back at him. “Seems like a real peach.”
I exhaled, slowly closing my eyes, and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Just shut up, Aden…”
Chapter 15
When Aden and I had traveled to Alfheim before, we took more traditional transportation methods. Walking. Driving. Portal hopping. Today, however, there was no time for any of that. Today, the situation was dire enough to warrant a bit of djinn teleportation.
“It’ll feel just like going through a portal,” Aden had insisted, planting a hand on both Darius’s and my shoulders, then grinning. “Well, maybe a little harsher. Hope you had a light breakfast.”
And then, before either of us could protest, he whisked us away from the Sanctius clan’s mountains, where we left Quinn and Catriona behind, along with my father, to organize a counterattack against the troops Jasmine had supposedly sent marching our way at sunrise.
Teleporting with a djinn was nothing like moving through a portal. One moment we were standing there, minding our own business, and the next it felt like someone had tied a rope around our midsections and yanked with all their might. Footing gone. Bearings lost. The world blurred, but there were no rainbows to keep us company, no visions of the cosmos like we saw inside magic-powered portals. It was all a black and gray blur, until suddenly it wasn’t. Until our feet landed hard, the impact shooting up our legs and hips and back, and suddenly we were somewhere else—fighting the urge to vomit everywhere.
I staggered away from the djinn, my hand over my mouth as I battled the nausea. Collapsing beside an unfriendly prickle bush, I dry-heaved as my eyes watered. Coughing, retching, I fought the desire to spew my very small eggs and bacon breakfast I’d had less than fifteen minutes earlier. An unsteady hand fell on my back, the palm hot, and although I knew Darius was just trying to comfort me, I waved him off, needing to come to terms with things on my own.
“’M fine,” I muttered, wiping around my mouth. A quick glance up told me he wasn’t faring much better: his face pale and clammy, his eyes teared, and he looked on the verge of fainting. Aden, meanwhile, appeared right as rain, dusting off his brown trench coat, cocking his head to one side as he appraised us. My eyes narrowed. “You couldn’t have given us a bit of warning first?”
“Time is of the essence,” he said snippily. “I think I gave you enough while you feasted—”
“A hardboiled egg and two slices of bacon from the camp is hardly what I’d call a feast,” I fired back, my inner voice expressing her distaste for the djinn with a noisy gnashing of her teeth.
“Let it go, Kaye,” Darius insisted softly. “We’re here. We’re alive. Just… Let it go.”
“Okay, Mr. Black Pot.” I accepted his hand when he offered it, my legs trembling under my body’s weight once I was fully upright. He shot me a look, clearly not in the mood for snark, and I shrugged. “Sorry. You’re right.”
Hand-in-hand, we returned to Aden’s side—only to survey what once appeared to be a thriving army’s camp. Now? Not so much. Debris littered the open field. Smoldering mounds that must have once been bonfires continued to smoke, black spires rising up to a clear blue sky. A lone tent stood far in the distance, totally undisturbed—a tent whose walls matched those we’d seen in the black mirror.
“Have they all gone?” Darius demanded. “Every last one of them?”
“Well, yes, that’s what I said earlier, but you—”
“Where are we?” I demanded. If the army had left, I had to assume they were within walking distance. “The landscape doesn’t look all that much different from the range.”
“That’s because it isn’t,” Darius growled, stalking forward and taking in the sights—the young trees littered across the field, the flattened, yellow-green grass kissed by a faint summer drought, the gentle rolling hills beyond the tent. “We’re near the mountains. I could have flown us here in under an hour.”
“We didn’t have an hour to spare,” Aden hissed, grabbing Darius’s arm when my dragon blitzed by him toward the field. Darius tried to wrench himself free, but this time the djinn had no issue in showing his full strength. I crossed my arms, biting the insides of my cheeks, as I watched him drag Darius back as one might pull a small child away from the store he must visit at the mall. Scowling, Aden thrust Darius toward me, and I managed to keep him from stumbling, then tightened my grip around his waist when he tried to lunge back for a second round with the djinn. Aden’s scowl intensified. “We don’t have time for any of this! Jasmine instructed me to meet her here, and I’ve ten minutes to go before my time is up. So, let’s save this pissing contest until we’ve killed the bitch.”
“You know I don’t want to agree with him,” I reasoned when Darius looked at me incredulously, “but I do. We’re running on a time limit on every front here, Darius. Let’s just… do what we came here to do.”
As the pair glared at one another, I brushed my forearm over my chest as subtly as I could, ensuring that the second artifact, the copy-cat of the one in Aden’s possession, was still securely in my bra. I’d been hiding it in different places since I return
ed to the Sanctius clan, and even though I wasn’t sure it actually did anything, now seemed like the opportune time to find out.
“Jasmine will think that I’ve kidnapped Kaye,” Aden stated when the snarling calmed down. His hands shimmered blue for a moment, producing a thick rope. “I need to make it look authentic.”
“Absolutely not,” Darius snapped before I could get a word in. “You can walk her in with a hand on her arm.”
“Darius.” I exhaled my frustration out. “I can do this. Ropes can’t stop me from defending myself.”
“Well, this might.” When I glanced back, Aden had a knife in hand and a hapless look on his face. He shrugged when my eyes narrowed. “It needs to look real.”
I could feel my dragon’s temper flaring—hard—once again, but I managed to persuade him to take cover in the field. There were a few places he could situate himself in without being seen, though I knew the second I went with Aden, Darius would be following at a close distance. I couldn’t fault him for that.
So, begrudgingly, Darius stalked off to hide himself. My inner voice expressed her palpable discontent at him leaving, but I ignored her. After we had… bonded last night, my inner voice was all about doing it again. As much as I would’ve rather been in bed with a naked Darius right now instead of allowing Aden to tie me up and hold a knife to my throat, there were more pressing priorities.
Being a mature adult sucked.
“Ouch,” I hissed, flinching back when the tip of the knife poked a little too deeply into my skin for comfort.
“Sorry,” the djinn muttered, holding it about an inch away from my throat as we stumbled across the field together. If Jasmine was watching at this point, I did my best to make it seem like I was struggling to free myself.
“Just… try not to make me bleed, okay?”
“It’ll look better if you’re a little roughed up.”
“Not happening, Aden.”
“It’s just a suggestion.”
I bit my cheek to keep from responding, priming myself to play the pissed off captive role as we drew nearer to the tent. An eastward wind cut across the field, forcing the door of the canvas tent open just enough to reveal a table inside. My heart skipped a beat. This was it. This was the tent we’d seen in the mirror. As we passed through the opening, Aden’s grip tightened, and I sprang into action, thrashing about and demanding to be set free. He shoved me forward, and I collapsed in a heap on the floor, the scent of grass filling my nostrils as I gathered my bearings.
I froze at the sound of Jasmine’s laugh.
“Kaye,” she sneered, the tips of her boots coming into view as she strolled right up to me. “Always a pleasure.”
At this point, I didn’t need to act like I hated her, like I didn’t want to be there.
“Go fuck yourself, Jasmine,” I growled right back, then, for good measure, spat on her boots. She leapt back with a cry, as if my saliva ate right through the leather and burned her.
“You couldn’t have put a muzzle on her?” she demanded. “You think I want to hear the mongrel speak?”
Fingers twined through my hair and wrenched me upright. I flinched back at the cold, biting metal of Aden’s knife against my throat. His hands shook slightly.
“Look, you wanted her here, and I got her here. It doesn’t matter if she’s muzzled or not,” he said, his voice unnervingly steady. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why. Across the tent, behind Jasmine in the corner, sat a little girl in chains. Her eyes were red and dirty tracks ran down her cheeks, like she’d been crying and no one had bothered to clean her—for days. She had her father’s black eyes and long, lustrous lashes, but her hair was a sandy reddish brown, perhaps courtesy of her mother.
He hadn’t been lying about her. Marie, his little girl, was most certainly Jasmine’s captive. My heart went out to her, to both of them. No one deserved to be in this situation, even if Aden was an assassin-for-hire beforehand. Kids ought to be off-limits, but with psychos like Jasmine, that was rarely ever the case.
“She’s here. Now, give me Marie, just as we agreed,” Aden ordered in the silence that followed, and although I refused to look at her, I could feel Jasmine’s cold, penetrating stare wandering over me. Did she think I was an imposter? I kept my gaze on Aden’s daughter, hoping that if she met mine, she’d know she didn’t need to be afraid anymore. We were here to get her out. The little girl, however, couldn’t stop staring at her dad—and I didn’t blame her. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, and even though I knew I was supposed to be struggling, to be foaming at the mouth and cursing Jasmine to the high heavens, all I really wanted to do in that moment was to wrap Marie in a big hug and apologize for whatever that psychopath had put her through.
But that wasn’t my job.
The djinn who held me “hostage”, the one who had lied and tricked and deceived—he was the only one who could make Marie’s pain stop.
Jasmine studied Aden for a moment, her purple-painted lips pursed, then sighed. “Fine. Take your brat back. She’s terribly boring, you know. All she does is cry for you. Worryingly codependent, djinn.”
I winced as Aden’s knife dug into me, but he quickly pulled back, as if catching himself letting too much emotion slip. Jasmine stalked toward a cowering Marie, and with a lazy flick of her hand the chains around the little girl disappeared. Just as Marie’s chains vanished, the rope bindings around me fell slack too. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Aden removing the true artifact from his pocket, his hand trembling again.
“Come here, sweetheart,” he urged, and Marie all but flew across the tent, darting around me and crashing against her father. I seized the moment to stand, the ropes falling free, and savored the look on Jasmine’s face when she turned back and found me free.
“What are you—”
“We have a parting gift for you,” Aden growled as he positioned his daughter behind him, then extended his arm and showed off the artifact. Jasmine’s thin brows furrowed, her confusion evident, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“Aden gave you a fake artifact,” I told her. “We thought it fitting to test its destructive power on someone who actually deserves to be destroyed.”
Her hands curled to shaking fists, but before she could spit anything foul from that awful mouth of hers, I sliced my finger across Aden’s blade, then pressed my bleeding tip to the center of the artifact. The onyx rock, once smooth and fine, blistered with power, as though my blood was filling unseen pockets. When I yanked my hand away, the artifact hummed with a soft white light—which gave me some pause. White tended to be a healing color, used for kinder magics and softer spells. Hardly a color of destruction…
Aden raised the artifact, and with a pulse of his natural power—the kind that sent me stumbling into the table—a surge of white light fired across the tent and slammed into Jasmine. The fae flew backward into the tent’s canvas walls and brought the whole structure crashing down. Grabbing his daughter, Aden made a beeline for the exit, and I followed at his heels, pushing the plummeting thick tent material out of my way as we scrambled outside.
Darius was already jogging toward us, and I rushed forward to greet him, easily falling into his arms and hugging him tightly.
“Is it over?” he asked in my ear, his husky voice giving me chills. “Did you get her?”
“We got her,” I whispered back. Over his shoulder, I spotted Aden clutching his daughter close, his hand on the back of her head and his eyes clenched shut. As much as I disliked the djinn for all that he had done to me, that moment between father and daughter almost made all his tricks worthwhile. Almost. He still had some serious apologizing to do.
Our moment of quiet victory was cut short when sharp, barking laughter erupted from inside the tent. We all whirled around to find a figure fighting her way out of the fallen canvas, and moments later Jasmine reemerged, unharmed.
“You fools,” she spat, arms wide and hair askew—eyes crazy. “You cast the wrong artifact!”
&n
bsp; Aden strode forward, bursts of magic cracking across the field from each djinn-blue hand. His spells hit true, nailing Jasmine directly in the chest, but she just kept laughing, totally unaffected. Frowning, I joined in, hurling whatever hexes and curses I could think of in the moment. They all landed—but none of them stuck. The echoes of our spellwork carried on over the field, sounding up into the hills. When they finally faded out, Jasmine cocked her head to one side, glaring at us, and then disappeared with a dainty little pop. Not only did she have fae speed on her side, but she must have mastered the art of teleportation. Aden and I looked to each other, my heart racing, and then spun back at the sound of another little pop.
Jasmine reappeared behind us, this time dragging a screaming Marie into her arms. She hoisted the girl up, an arm around her midsection, the other hand wrapped firmly around her thin neck.
“Your partner deceived you, djinn,” Jasmine cackled, those cold blues darting between us. “The hybrid would have discovered two artifacts in the inner sanctum of the trials. There have always been two. One for destruction, and one for protection.”
Unconsciously, my hand went to my chest, and I snapped it back down to my side, my cheeks flushed when I realized Jasmine had spotted the movement.
“I know you have it, mongrel,” she sneered. “I only want that one. Give it to me, and I’ll let your fellow abomination continue to draw breath.”
“I will kill you, fae!” This time it was Darius who caught Aden as the djinn rushed forth, knowing Jasmine wouldn’t hesitate to harm Marie—even if the outcome wasn’t death—just to prove a point. My dragon pushed the djinn back, a hand against his chest, throwing himself over the magical hand grenade before it wiped all of us out.
“You don’t have to do this, Jasmine,” I said, knowing she was beyond reason but also knowing that I had to at least try. “You’re not Abramelin—”
“Tick-tock, mongrel,” she fired back in a sing-song voice. “Her neck is like a twig… So pliant. So easily snapped.”
Magic Blaze: an Urban Fantasy Novel (Shifting Magic Book 3) Page 14
