Ancient Magic (Stolen Magic Book 2)

by Jayne Hawke

  I had to pause and think about that for a moment. I just couldn’t imagine putting that kind of thought into something. Sewers were nothing like storms in their shape, but I supposed if someone wanted something badly enough they’d find it.

  I began looking for some clean clothes and felt Elijah’s lips against the nape of my neck.

  “We don’t have to rush down for work, you know,” he whispered as he wrapped his hands around my hips.

  I was sorely tempted to take him up on his offer.

  “Bring back my tea cakes, you thieving asshole!” Jess shouted.

  “Should have been quicker, sweet cheeks!” Rex shouted back.

  And the moment was broken. Pack life wasn’t always idyllic.

  Elijah groaned.

  “You wouldn’t believe they’re in their twenties.”

  “So, you’re not in a rush for kids, then?” I teased.

  “Do you want kids?”

  And that was a step too far. It was one thing teasing about screwing him, and dancing around being in a relationship. Kids were a whole other thing.

  Elijah laughed and nuzzled against my neck before he walked away.

  “I wish I could have caught the expression on your face on film,” he said with another laugh.

  I began to breathe again. The bastard had about given me a heart attack.

  Twenty-Nine

  “Seriously? The sewers? Again?” Jess huffed. “Can’t we put down some bait and ambush them somewhere above ground?”

  “What are we supposed to bait them with? A giant piece of cheese?” Rex said.

  “I don’t know, I’d travel across the city for the right lump of cheese,” Liam said.

  Jess gave him a high five and Rex glowered.

  “Yes, the sewers again. We’ve established there’s a Huracan cult down there and they’re our most likely bet,” Elijah said.

  “Be glad that they’re the abandoned sewers. They’re dry and clean as that sort of thing goes,” Castor said.

  Jess curled a lip and crossed her arms over her chest, apparently unimpressed.

  “We’ll split into two groups. Jess and Lily are with me. Castor, Rex, and Jess, you’ll go in through the entrance near the Narrows. We’ll go in from the beach,” Elijah said.

  Our ‘sweep the sewers’ plan had seemed a lot more exciting when I envisioned actually finding the cult. As it was, Jess, Elijah, and I had passed through what felt like three Brighton’s worth of narrow tunnels in the dark and now had graduated to the far more exciting slightly-less-narrow tunnels in the dark. The temptation to just start chatting while we walked was growing, but of course that defeated the purpose. We weren’t looking to destroy cultist infrastructure, here. If they heard chatter and then packed up their gear and bolted before we saw them, this was even more pointless than it seemed.

  I’d expected the shifters to be in animal form, but they were confident in their combat abilities as humans and wanted the chance to practice their stealth. So far, it was quite competent. I caught a footfall out of place from Elijah now and again, but stealth wasn’t his default mode so that was to be expected. Jess had the silence of the cat she was. As long as we didn’t find another Tyche god touched and stumble into a pile of half-empty paint cans or something, it looked good for getting a few free kills in before the cultists could respond.

  As we walked, we heard the sound of music, starting almost imperceptibly and picking up until we reached an opening into a wide passageway that had shadows playing on the walls, flickering in the light of fires we couldn’t see and dancing with weapons held high. We shared a look. It was like we’d walked into the middle of a cult headquarters starter pack.

  Jess crept forward and peaked out, making a series of gestures with her hands that gave me exactly one piece of information: I needed to learn whatever gesture language they used in situations like this. Elijah nodded at her and moved forward, drawing the longsword that was his standby as he made a quick and quiet entrance into the room. Jess was right behind him, leaving me alone in the tunnel with a sense of exclusion as justifiable as it was unreasonable.

  I leaned out to check the room myself and counted fourteen cultists. Each carried a macuahuitl, a Mesoamerican weapon composed of hyper-sharp squares of obsidian set into the outer edge of flat, rectangular wooden clubs until they looked like buck-toothed slap and tickle paddles. They were sized to be held in two hands and were far more dangerous than they looked. There was nothing that could make wood and stone a good replacement for steel, but macuahuitl had the benefit of being sharp, light, and easily underestimated. Unfortunately for them, theirs were crude, cheap-looking things that looked likely to fall apart at the slightest provocation.

  The firelight was being cast by half a dozen braziers that probably started their lives as 50-gallon drums but which were then carved into web shapes and flattened to resemble one of those recycled art projects as done by a bower bird. The smoke was being drawn out through a spiral staircase leading, presumably, up to the surface, and I couldn’t help but think that we could’ve cut out a lot of patrol time if we’d not given the cultists so much credit for subtlety and had just driven around above ground looking for inexplicable plumes of smoke.

  Still, they moved well with their weapons, their dance as much rhythmic katas to music as anything. I couldn’t see where the music itself was coming from, but it was masking the footsteps of my comrades quite effectively. Once they looked poised to strike, I grasped onto the fire on two of the nearby braziers and began feeding that magic into the one at the farthest corner of the room, not missing the irony of having gone to great expense in bringing along fire magic only to have it provided on site. The brazier exploded with flame, drawing the attention of the entire room. As the distraction took effect, Jess struck with her glaive at the same moment Elijah did with his sword, two cultists down in the span of a second. I continued to grow the flame, pulling at the magic in it to expand the fire outward until it caught the clothes of the nearest worshippers aflame and send them screaming. Their fellows merely continued to gape.

  Jess and Elijah moved through the group with practiced grace, their movements in time with one another. I watched out of the corner of my eye as a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth enemy dropped silently to the floor, their deaths drowned out by the screaming of the cultists I was barbequing at the far end of the room. By the time the cult realized they were under attack, or rather that they were under attack by something above and beyond a very angry modern-art demon, the crowd of fourteen was down to a party of five.

  Heedless of the change in numbers, the five of them charged the shifters with their weapons at ready. I decided to hold back and watch, allow Elijah and Jess to do their work and step in only if needed. There was much to be learned by studying the way the cult fought, and we wouldn’t have a safer, more controlled situation to study in than this one.

  Their attacks mimicked the dance katas they’d been practicing before, a series of vertical strikes that formed Xs in the air paired with elbow strikes and shoulder checks. The wood that made up the majority of the weapon made it far lighter than a similar weapon of steel or bronze would have been, and the speed caught the two of them off guard. For the first several seconds, they were on the back foot, fending off quick, aggressive attacks as the cultists pushed forward against them with clockwork precision. Jess initially attempted to use feints to throw them back, forcing them to dodge, but their unrelenting style meant that they simply made a haphazard attempt to dodge the weapon while maintaining a forward press. They had all the recklessness of the zealot combined with a weapon the wood construction of which meant they had no chance of parrying. If their enemy didn’t die, they would. I didn’t relish the idea of fighting these people en masse.

  The problem was, they didn’t know anything more than the katas had taught them. The weapons were more than just strangely shaped axes, but that was the extent of the cultists’ knowledge. Before long, the shifters had caught the pattern of
the thing, and the fight was over. Elijah waited for the shoulder check to come and simply drove his sword through the arm and into the chest cavity, a death blow he could repeat on as many cultists as happened in front of him. The cultists’ move would have worked against an opponent that was off balance or distracted, but the cultists simply executed it when it came up in the dance, regardless of whether it made any sense at the time. Jess, on the other hand, dropped into a ninja-esque pose with one leg extended and pointed forward while she crouched on the other before lunging forward and impaling her opponent. It was a pretty move, one I’d have liked to see attempted against a more challenging opponent, and it was utterly effective there. She then changed tack, likely more out of creative impulse than any sort of tactical consideration. She engaged the last opponent and allowed him to reach a huge overhand chop, a move that would have been prohibitively slow with a heavier weapon but which was executed quite quickly with the macuahuitl. Swinging her own weapon in a much lower arc, she caught his on the glaive’s head and splintered it apart before following through on the strike to drive the weapon’s tang through the head of the final cultist.

  When all was said and done, the two of them turned to me and bowed theatrically, picking up a macuahuitl each to play with when they got home. We surveyed the damage, finding little else of any use or interest, and after smashing what turned out to be a bona fide tape player playing the temple music we climbed the stairs, only to find ourselves in a crumbling ruin that looked to have once been a castle.

  Thirty

  Turning in a slow circle, I assessed the situation around us. The grass was a vibrant lime green, cut short and carefully maintained. The huge stone blocks were a pale slightly blueish grey. The ruins formed into large rooms with walls ranging from six feet up to twenty feet tall.

  “I thought this place was a myth...” Elijah said.

  We were standing in one of the fae toys. It was a small area that moved around the city and was notoriously difficult to map and find. The sky above us was stained lilac. I had a feeling that no good would come of us staying there much longer. Without a word, we all jogged across the neat grass through the archway and stepped out onto the streets of Hove.

  We’d travelled a few miles in the blink of an eye.

  “How the fuck did they gain access to that?” Elijah asked.

  I had no answers. I hadn’t felt any special magic around the stairs we’d walked up. Surely the fae weren’t involved in the cult? They had no love for any of the gods. Given that the gods wanted the fae eradicated and/or enslaved, I didn’t blame them.

  Everything around us looked as it should. The houses running along the main road not too far from the coast were all bland. Small gardens sat in front of each house, a tiny patch of nature enclosed behind a small brick wall. A pair of net curtains twitched as someone watched us standing there looking bemused. The castle had moved on. The fae only knew where it’d be next.

  Elijah pulled out his phone.

  “The others must still be down in the tunnels, they’re not answering.”

  “I hate taxis,” Jess said immediately.

  “Would you rather walk?” Elijah challenged.

  “I might.”

  The sky was quickly turning dark. The breeze picked up, and the temperature dropped. It wouldn’t be long before the rain came.

  Jess idly turned the macuahuitl over in her hand, looking at it in the broad daylight.

  “This is really poor workmanship. I’m pretty sure their god would be pissed if he knew about it.”

  Elijah was ignoring her and instead called us a taxi.

  We’d killed a few of the cult, but we were no closer to getting the pot than we had been. I should probably have stopped the shifters from their delighted killing spree so we could ask some questions. There hadn’t been any sign of the pot, or anything really serious about Huracan.

  “Are we sure they were part of the Huracan cult? Where were the rest of them?” I asked.

  “I don’t think there’s much chance of there being multiple Mayan god cults down in the sewers,” Elijah said.

  “Where was the pot? Why were there only a few of them?” I pushed.

  “Maybe the rest of them are guarding the pot?” Jess asked.

  I paced back and forth. It didn’t seem right. Why would that section of the cult be separated from the rest like that? Why wasn’t the space covered in Huracan-related stuff? Something just wasn’t adding up.

  We regrouped back at the office with a mountain of pizzas.

  “Did you find anything? Other than the pizza place,” Rex asked.

  Jess had piled a slice of pizza from every type of pizza we had and was glaring at Rex as he approached.

  “We found a few cultists using these old Mayan weapons, but not much else,” Elijah said.

  I grabbed a slice of sausage and ham thin crust before Jess could eat the entire thing.

  “Don’t forget the fact the stairs led up into the moving ruins,” I said.

  Castor quirked an eyebrow at that.

  “We went up a set of stairs from the vault they were running katas in. They led us out to the moving ruins, the fae thing,” Elijah said as he handed me a slice of goat’s cheese and apple pizza.

  Rex picked up Jess’s macuahuitl and looked it over with a look of increasing disdain.

  “Did they make this out of scrap wood and gravel?”

  “It’s certainly not on the level of the real thing,” Castor said.

  I glanced over at him. He’d never told me how old he was, but he’d certainly hinted at dealing with the gods for a good long while.

  “So, what did we get out of all of that?” Rex asked.

  “A new weapon for my collection,” Jess said around a mouthful of pizza.

  “A few dead cultists. The world will be better for that,” Elijah said.

  “And some concerning news. We stumbled into a shadow being. It wasn’t one of Lily’s. This was a construct. It was made from the shadow plane shadow, too,” Castor said.

  “Can you put that into normal people talk?” Jess asked.

  Castor stole a couple of slices of pepperoni and olive pizza. Jess grabbed the box with the remaining slices and tucked it behind her so no one else could have any.

  “It means that someone has bound the shadows tightly enough that they’re working in a form dictated by someone else, like making a living, breathing chicken out of ground beef. It also means that person has access to the shadow plane, and some sort of control over the shadows there. This being is potentially very dangerous,” Castor said.

  My first thought was how pissed the shadows locked into that form must be. They’d hated when I’d tried to direct them into any sort of animate form.

  “How much of a problem is this? Are we talking army of shadows taking over the city?” Elijah asked.

  “I can’t be sure yet. The construct might just have been part of a security system. We tried to get past it and failed,” Castor said.

  It sounded like I needed to speak to some of the shadows and see if we could come to some sort of arrangement regarding a security system.

  Thirty-One

  I’d voiced my concerns about not having found what we needed yet. Elijah agreed and promised to keep at least one of the cult members alive this time for interrogation. That meant it was time to go back down into the sewers. Jess had tried to get out of it.

  “Liam needs my help,” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I’m afraid of the dark.”

  “Since when?” Elijah asked.

  “Two minutes ago.”

  “Get your ass down in the sewers else you’ll lose your cut of the pay,” Elijah said wearily.

  “Fine,” she said with a huff.

  We decided it would be best to split up and cover more ground. Elijah and I were going down into the section beginning in the Narrows. Jess and Castor were going over to an entry point near my office. That left Liam and Rex with an e
ntry on the edge of Hove. We’d be too far away from each other to act as back up if we needed it, so we’d be depending on our awesome ass kicking skills.

  I’m just saying that the shadow construct is classic bad guy behaviour and could come from Seth

  Jess had texted me while we were driving over towards the Narrows. I wasn’t disagreeing with her, I just hoped that his construct wasn’t going to cause a lot of problems for us. There was a chance that whoever had made it had more, and I knew from personal experience that the shadows could be incredibly dangerous. Sometimes I wondered if I’d done the right thing listening to Castor and allowing the overminds to run free through the fae forest. I hadn’t heard about any massacres in the area, so that was something.

  “Where’s your head at?” Elijah asked as he parked.

  “I’m just trying to pull everything together.”

  “You’re convinced Seth’s a bad guy?”

  “Maybe? I don’t know. We need to figure out what those other jaguars are doing in the city and where they’re hiding out. Someone formed that shadow construct, and they’re the most likely culprits. How many people might die from it? And if they do, will it start a hunt of shadow weavers and walkers?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I think it’s best that we focus on the evidence that we have and try to get the pot back into safe hands.”

  “And how do we know they’ll be safe hands?”

  “We can do some more research before hand it over. What else is there for us to possibly do? At the end of the day, we were paid to do a job. There are always risks with these type of artifacts,” Elijah said as he squeezed my hand.

  I’d never really sat and thought about the ethics of the jobs I took on before. The Cameron situation was clearly rattling me. That, and the fact I hadn’t had to worry about the fate of the entire Isles before. Rubbing my temples, I pushed it all aside. Elijah had been right, I needed to get my head in the game.