Marked: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 2)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Wait, you came with my sister?” he asked as I put my finger to the cage.

  “Resero,” I said, glad I didn’t have to try to blow the cage open with hellfire. There was a very good chance things would get very messy if I did. There was a minor flash of light, and the door swung open. Instead of coming out, Bobby stood there looking at me like I’d just had sex with his puppy on the grave of his grandmother.

  “Mac, please tell me Ricky didn’t come here with you,” he said, taking a wobbly step toward me.

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly extraordinarily concerned.

  “Pierce has been trying to add Ricky to his harem for the last six months.” He shook his head. “That’s why he put me in here.” He gestured to the cage. “He was trying to use me as leverage so he could force her into becoming his seventh wife. If that happens, her strength as Alpha will be added to his own. We have to save her before he succeeds.”

  A surge of rage I couldn’t rightly explain surged through me. I didn’t know a lot about werewolf culture, but the combination of Bobby’s distress and the idea of Pierce forcing himself on Ricky, made me want to kill the guy even more. I hadn’t even thought that was possible.

  “Do you have any idea where the zombies who chased us would have taken her?” I asked, moving toward Bobby so I could offer him my support. Admittedly, I felt a little bad about leaving everyone else here, but there was no way in Hell I was letting Pierce add Ricky to his harem against her will so he could absorb her Alphaness, and there wasn’t time to deal with hundreds of people right now.

  “Yeah, I can take you there,” Bobby said right before he decked me full in the face. My nose broke with a crunch, and I fell sprawling backward. As the back of my head cracked against the cement floor, the last thing I saw was his fist coming down.

  Chapter 23

  I wish I could say waking up after getting knocked unconscious was new, but really, it felt pretty “been there done that.” As my eyes fluttered open, I realized I was locked in Bobby’s cage in the lab. I was also strapped to his bed and wearing a vest made from dynamite, C4, and connective bits. The bomb seemed like an overly hazardous precaution because it would probably destroy the facility or at least a huge part of it, and as far as I knew, Pierce had no reason to do that.

  Then again, this vest was likely the one Bobby had been wearing since I doubted he’d had the time and material to fashion something from scratch. He was a werewolf, and werewolves, as I knew from experience, were notoriously hard to kill. For all I knew, this would have given Bobby little more than a flesh wound. Why Bobby had locked me up and strapped me into his suicide bomber vest was a mystery, but not one I couldn’t beat out of him once I got free. You know, assuming I didn’t go with the Mac Brennan standby of shooting things that annoyed me in the face.

  As I tried to wiggle free, the vest began beeping angrily. That didn’t seem good, so I stopped, and much to my delight, so did the beeping. Okay, vest, we understand each other, struggling is bad.

  I let out a long, slow breath and tried to figure out what was going on as I glanced around the room. Some of the other cages were open, and if I had to guess, I was pretty sure those cages probably belonged to other werewolves. I mean, I was just guessing, but here was what I think happened. Bobby, being the dumbass he was, had brained me and put me in his cage for some stupid reason that probably made perfect sense to him and him alone. After that, he’d rescued the rest of his pack mates and left everyone else behind because they weren’t werewolves.

  To be fair, it wasn’t a bad plan if you had the humanity of a sociopath, but then again, for all I knew, the other people in here were bad news. Being locked in a vampire’s wine cellar didn’t mean you were a good guy, it just meant someone worse had found you and wanted to eat you. No, this place was like that scene where the mugger who stole the purse from the old lady in the movie gets shot by the assassin who was the movie’s real villain.

  In spite of myself, I struggled again, and the vest beeped at me. The sound grew shriller with each movement. I stopped and the vest once again stopped beeping. Stupid vest.

  “Any help right now would be great,” I said to no one in particular.

  “You know, you do have a spell specifically designed to unlock things,” the cat demon purred, and the sound reverberated across my mind like a fading drumbeat. I shut my eyes and concentrated on her, but all I got was the vague impression of her licking her paw before using it to clean the hair out of her face in the way cats do. “Just saying. It might be worth a whirl. What’s the worst that could happen? You blow up?”

  Despite the cat’s stupid mocking tone, a surge of hope exploded through me. Her plan wasn’t half-bad. I called upon my power and mumbled the word to my unlocking spell. “Resero.”

  The bindings holding me to the bed opened like, well, magic. I muttered a nearly silent thanks to the demon. It shrugged smugly at me and vanished back into the ether of my mind.

  I started to sit up. The movement made my vest let out an earsplitting shriek, so I did what any self-respecting person cursed by a crazy cat demon and locked in a cage would do. I stopped moving, and very carefully loosened the straps on the vest. It wasn’t very difficult since it was mostly just draped over me.

  Bobby probably hadn’t expected me to get free, which was stupid since I’d used the exact same spell to free him, but he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer. Once the last of the straps were pulled loose, I started to slide out from beneath the bomb, careful to keep my motion to a minimum.

  After what felt like forever, I managed to slip the device off and found myself standing on the floor. The bomb was mostly a mass of wires hooked into a big chunk of C4. A couple red lights blinked ominously, but it didn’t seem to have any kind of timer. There were also a couple sticks of dynamite, probably to prevent me from just incinerating the thing with hellfire. C4 probably wouldn’t have exploded in that scenario, but dynamite sure would have.

  “Alright, Bobby. This time when I find you, I am stabbing you,” I muttered, making my way to the cage’s door and opening it with magical ease. He had taken both my hunting knives and my empty guns, but thankfully, I still had the knife in my boot. I pulled it free and made my way past the cages. Part of me wanted to try to free people, but the last guy I’d freed had broken my nose and strapped a bomb to my chest. I wasn’t getting fooled twice. No, when this was over, I’d consider calling in a tip to local law enforcement. For now, I had some guys to go kick in the balls. Repeatedly.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened without me having to use any magic, and even better, there were no zombies. There were, however, pieces of zombies, and from what I could tell, a decapitated, partially-transformed werewolf, but the battle was long since over. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, but I wasn’t betting on hours since the brainless werewolf was still warm to the touch.

  “Bobby must have rallied the troops to bust through the zombies,” I said aloud and couldn’t keep the smile out of my voice. If my enemies wanted to murder each other, well, I was all for that. Now, I just needed to find Ricky and Pierce. How hard could that be?

  That was also when another thought struck me. What would happen if a room full of crazed monsters were let loose in the facility of an evil madman? Would they go all Cabin in the Woods and kill everyone in an apocalyptic bloodbath? I wasn’t sure, but I was definitely inclined to find out.

  I spun on my heel and looked back through the door. I very slowly raised my right hand and called upon my power. “Resero!”

  A wave of scarlet swept out from my hand. Wooziness filled me, and I stumbled, partially collapsing against the door’s frame as my magic struck the first of the cages. Doors swung open, and as they did, blood began to drip from my nose. Screaming filled my ears as hundreds of monsters began to stir within the now open cages. My vision went spotty, and my stomach lurched violently. The cheeseburger I’d eaten earlier came rushing up out of me as I collapsed to the ground.

&nbs
p; My muscles seized and cramped in a way that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I tried to push myself to my feet, but as I did, my tattoos winked out. I’d only managed to open about a third of the cages, but even that had been too much for me. I shook my head, trying to clear my vision, but I almost wished I hadn’t. My right arm had blistered and my tattoos had faded so much, they were barely visible on my ashen skin.

  Well, this had been a stupid plan. Now I was exhausted outside a room full of awakening, uncaged monsters, and I’d drained my magic. I pushed myself onward trying to ignore the spots flashing across my darkening vision. As I stumbled forward, leaning against the blood spattered wall for support, an inhuman shriek exploded from the room behind me. My spider sense went absolutely nuts as I whirled to see a decayed, emaciated woman with hair like a basket of live rattlesnakes coming straight toward me.

  Maybe releasing all the monsters had been a bad idea.

  Chapter 24

  The crazy shrieking bitch hit me dead center in the chest and passed straight through me like I wasn’t even there. Cold unlike I’d ever experienced exploded across my torso, and my next breath came out in a cloud of white mist as she continued past me.

  My teeth chattered in my skull as I spun in a slow circle, still using the wall for balance and watched her disappear down the hallway. Frost had spread out along the front of my T-shirt and trench coat, and as I tried to follow her, I realized my fingernails had turned blue.

  I swallowed a breath that tasted like the first hint of a blizzard after a heavy snowfall and shivered. More sounds erupted in the room behind me, and this time, instead of looking, I shambled forward as quickly as my frozen legs would take me. A muffled boom ripped through the air, and the shockwave threw me forward. I struck the ground as bits of black goo that smelled like expensive root beer splattered across the walls.

  “Definitely a bad idea,” I mumbled, crawling to my feet and moving forward. The entire room spun as I stumbled along, one shoulder propped against the wall for support. As I rounded the corner, I saw two men wearing body armor and wielding M16s, and after my heart stopped trying to crush itself against the inside of my ribcage, a smile crossed my lips

  They were frozen into statues, presumably from the weird girl because she was standing just behind them, one hand against a shiny silver door. Its surface was covered in fast spreading frost.

  “Hey,” I called because I was pretty sure startling her would result in me turning into a Macsickle.

  “Stay back, or I’ll freeze you too,” she said, barely looking at me before turning her attention back to the door. It was covered in a thin sheet of ice that crept off the frame and onto the walls and floor. “I’m warning you.”

  “Hey, I just want to follow along behind you. Consider me Anna to your Elsa,” I said, moving up to one of the frozen guards and leaning on the wall next to him. As I pried the M16 from his cold, dead hands, I realized I was probably responsible for his death since I’d let the ice queen free.

  I sighed. While I wasn’t above killing a few guards myself, something about them dying at her hands annoyed me on an intrinsically human level. I was getting really tired of the supernatural using regular guys as target practice. It was probably why I’d gone and made a deal with a devil for power. If I’d never taken the job to go after the most powerful shifter in the state, I’d have never needed that kind of help. Pierce Ambrose would just be dead, and I’d be sipping drinks on a beach somewhere.

  Instead, I’d indebted myself to a demon so I could get enough power to take him down, and in the process, had lost all my memories and gotten my sister and her son kidnapped. It was unfair on too many levels for me to fathom. After this was over, I was going to make sure normal people never had to deal with this sort of thing again. I wasn’t sure how, but if I lived through the night, I was definitely crossing that bridge.

  The girl with the ice didn’t even look at me, but I think that’s because the door shattered inward in a shriek of tortured steel. Chunks of shattered metal hit the ground all around her, and she paused, glancing at me for a second before disappearing up a flight of stairs.

  I followed behind her because the only other options were to head back toward the whale tank or stay with the monsters I’d unlocked. Neither sounded particularly helpful, especially since I had no idea where Ricky was. I knew only one thing, they’d brought Ricky in here, and presumably, Bobby had gone after his sister. If I held those two hypotheses as true, well, I ought to keep going forward.

  As I moved along, I spotted a hallway filled with an icy sheen. The ice queen had to have gone that way. Part of me wondered if I should follow after her, but as I took a step toward the hallway, something exploded in my brain like a firecracker. My head snapped to the left. A door practically glowing with scarlet light filled my vision. I wasn’t sure whether the light was real or not, but I made my way toward it anyway. It wasn’t like I had a better plan after all.

  I reached the door a second later and pushed it open while keeping my M16 at the ready. As I did so, a guard inside spun toward me. I lurched sideways as he fired, dark spots flashing across my vision. His bullets struck the door as I pulled the trigger on my own M16. The two-second-long burst of fire caught him in the chest and throat.

  He stumbled backward over a chair and collapsed to the ground in a slowly spreading pool of crimson. I might have gotten lucky, but at least he could say he hadn’t been killed by the supernatural. Okay, I was supernatural, but the bullets I’d used on him weren’t. In this particular instance, he’d just been too slow, and somehow, that made things better in my head.

  The smell of formaldehyde wafted over me as I staggered farther into the room. It was filled with giant vats of amber-colored liquid. Creatures in various shapes and sizes floated within, sort of reminding me of a combination specimen collection room and chamber used to grow embryonic aliens. To be honest, I wasn’t sure which was worse. I kicked the door shut with my heel so anything coming at me from behind would hopefully have to open it before coming after me.

  A low, annoyed muttering caught my ear, and I turned, finger already on the trigger. A guy in a white lab coat was hunched over something on a metal examination table. He didn’t seem to have seen me or heard the gunfire, or at least, if he did, he didn’t care much about it. I had half a mind to shoot him and move on, but something about his nonchalance confused me. What was he up to?

  “Hey,” I called, pointing my gun at him. “You’re aware I just shot your guard in the head, right?”

  I raised an eyebrow at him, and he stepped to the side to block the thing on the table from view. It was just as well. Near as I could tell it was black and glistening, and at the moment, I was having trouble standing. If it’d been a baby or something, the resulting rage might have made me try to burn him to ash, and I got the strange impression my body wouldn’t deal well with the whole hellfire-flinging thing right about now.

  “Yes, but he was kind of a jerk.” The man pushed his flop of dark hair out of his face, and turned back toward the table, dismissing me. “If you don’t hurry and eat something, your body is going to start shutting down. You need to replenish the sugar in your bloodstream, give yourself some energy to replace what you burned up doing whatever magic you did.”

  “How do you know so much about me?” I asked, trying to decide whether or not I could trust him.

  “You are far from the first Cursed to visit my experimentation room,” he said, not even looking at me. “Just pass on through, I won’t stop you.”

  “How kind of you,” I replied, moving toward him. It was harder than I expected since I could barely walk in a straight line. Every step made my vision fade in and out.

  “Look,” he said, exasperation filling his voice. “You need something to eat, and there’s food in the next room. Go away.” He looked up at me with weaselly black eyes and an annoyed sneer on his thin, chapped lips. He had one of those too pale white faces that suggested he almost never saw the sun,
and even when he did, the two weren’t exactly friends. “Just go get a sandwich or something, and you’ll feel better. I don’t have time to deal with this sort of interruption. I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”

  Despite him brushing me off like an insignificant insect, the whole not dying thing seemed like an excellent plan, assuming I could trust him, which I probably couldn’t. Then again, he’d barely even noticed me. He was way too wrapped up in whatever nefarious research he was conducting in the same facility that also housed a vampire winery and was owned by the brother-capturing Pierce Ambrose. Even if he thought he was trying to create something great for the world, the more likely outcome would be him creating a giant two-headed, man-eating monster. That wasn’t happening on my watch.

  “Hey, is there a code or something to get the food?” I asked as I made my way through the creepy, half-grown bodies, and leaned against the door on the far end of the room for support.

  “No, there’s just a fridge and shelves of snacks.” The scientist looked up at me and wiped his brow on one loose shirtsleeve. “There’s no lock. Just take what you want.”

  “Awesome,” I said, punctuating the word with a quick squeeze of the M16’s trigger. The bullet caught the scientist in the forehead, pitching him backward across the room while his life dissipated into a fine mist. I felt no remorse though. No, I felt justified in shooting him because now his research would hopefully die with him.

  I spun, and pushed the door open, and as I did so, all thoughts of the dead scientist vanished completely. The room was filled with virtually every kind of snack food I could ever want, and as I laid my eyes upon the rows of salty, sweet goodness, my stomach rumbled like the ocean. I leapt forward before I could stop myself, tearing into a package of Twinkies with my teeth and swallowing one in two bites. I could almost feel it traveling down my throat and settling in my stomach.