“Who knows,” I said sadly. “Maybe on another world, you found your fortune and glory. Although, maybe you found it in this one, too. That relic is priceless beyond measure.”
I laughed, a short bitter sound, and wiped away a tear. “And you can be proud in the knowledge that you’re the first man to ever reach the summit of Mount Kailash. What greater glory is there than that, even if no-one ever finds out?”
Zoe put an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go,” she said. “I think we could both do with a stiff margarita, umbrella optional.”
“Great,” I said. “Sounds like a plan.” It had to be cocktail hour somewhere close to a ley line intersection.
~
~ The End ~
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Meet Jamie Oxford, wizard and magical relic hunter.
How much is the power to kill the world worth?
Jamie is sure that a magical relic in the hands of non-magical Ordinaries is not going to end well. When Pandora’s Box is discovered, he takes it upon himself to make sure it is protected as it ought to be – with magic.
His plan backfires spectacularly and Jamie finds himself on the run from the law, without the box, and completely isolated.
Pandora’s Box is gone, and Jamie can no longer be sure who is friend or enemy as he hunts for it before it falls into the wrong hands… hands that could open the box, unleash the powers within upon the world, and end humanity.
Can one rogue really stop that?
Rogue Guardians is Book 2.5 in the Relic Guardians series - enjoy it before you read book 3, Cursed Magic!
Fans of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones will enjoy this fast-paced urban fantasy adventure series filled with magic, action and kick-ass characters.
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Cursed
Magic
Relic Guardians Book Three
Meg Cowley
Victoria DeLuis
Buy Cursed Magic
What would you pay for the key to death?
Zoe and Jamie are in a race against time to recover Pandora’s Box before the unthinkable happens; it is sold to the highest bidder, and the apocalypse within is unleashed upon the world.
Zoe is furious to learn that Jamie Oxford has stolen Pandora’s Box, which she has only just recovered for safekeeping, from under MI5’s nose… and lost it. Determined to make him redeem himself for his mistake, she drags him across the world to track it down in the hands of the infamous Magicai Cleo and her team. They have an inside man, an Ordinary, clueless of the danger he is in; can he help them reach the box in time, without risking his own life?
As they struggle to keep up with Cleo and her shady business deals to sell the box for a fortune, a terrifying demonstration of the box’s power shows just how great the peril is. The stakes could not be higher, but Zoe and Jamie are too distracted by their own bickering to work effectively. Their chance to reclaim it is slipping away.
Can Zoe and Jamie avert humanity’s destruction and recover Pandora’s Box before it disappears forever?
~ A Preview ~
~
Chapter 1
My long overdue study on translation runes and the power of tongues over the past month had paid off; using my spells, I could decipher every word on Pandora’s Box. Or rather, the copy of them I had taken. I might have been in the most secure archives in London where few were permitted to tread, deep inside the London Magicai Library, but it would have been more than foolish – catastrophic, even – to bring Pandora’s Box through the heart of the city. It was secure, where it belonged, at the Great British History Museum.
The tension in my stomach did not ease, however.
No, it brought me no joy to translate these glyphs. My skin was cold as I read them, though it was warm – stiflingly so – down here. They foretold doom, should the box ever be opened; plagues upon the world, of sickness and ravages against all good and whole, until the earth lay in ruin and wreck.
Thank goodness, I had got to it in time. Thank goodness, I had recovered it before it had opened. Thank goodness, I had been able to stop it. I hated to think that anything might be locked away from the world, never to be seen again, but this object, Pandora’s Box... if ever an object deserved that, it was this.
I remembered how it felt to hold it in my hands, as if the malevolence inside leeched out and bleached the life from me, poisoning me.
I shuddered. I was really glad it was no longer in my care to say the least. I knew as I sat there researching it, my boss Duncan would be placing it under wards beyond my ken that would keep it safe, secure, and most importantly, unopened.
Or, I thought he would be, but at that moment, my phone rang, and his name flashed up on screen. I answered the call within a second; as much to silence the loud ringtone in the silent archives as to find out why he called.
“Duncan?”
“Zoe. I need you back here now.”
“What’s up?” I said, startled by the shaking of his voice. Not fear, not upset… anger, it seemed.
“We have a problem – a huge problem.”
Icy fear plunged through me. “The box… it’s not?” I breathed into the microphone. I didn’t dare say it. Open.
“No,” he said quickly, and a huff of relief escaped me. “Not open. Not yet. But it’s in danger.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Is everything alright?” Hayley said. I started. She was so quiet, absorbed in the ancient texts, that I’d almost forgotten she was beside me. She shouldn’t have really been allowed in this part of the archives. However, she was so interested in learning more about the Magicai and magical artefacts now that she was one of us, and I thought she could use the distraction after everything that had happened in the past few weeks with the Cintamani Stone and Ben, that I’d pulled a few strings.
“Um, no, not really. The box I just recovered? There’s a problem. I gotta run – are you ok here?”
“Yeah, sure.” She smiled and waved her hand at the giant stack of thousand-year old texts in front of her. She did seem genuinely happy to be here, and that was good to see. I’d been worried that after everything that had happened, that she might need some help to process things. She still got that haunted look every now and again, and I knew she was thinking about Ben; how she’d killed him. Had to kill him. To save us both.
I smiled back, but mine was tight,
too stressed to be genuinely happy. “I’ll see you soon.”
I bundled the texts into a stack with a wave of my hand, dumped them on the archive keeper’s rack to re-shelve, and raced through the archives, up the never-ending stairs and out into the bleak sunshine of London city centre.
Outside, I was surrounded by Ordinaries; non-magical folk. They swarmed everywhere, unaware that around them, magic pulsed bright and strong, and close by, a small, innocuous box which could signal their doom awaited.
The archives were too close to the museum to bother with public transport, so I continued to run, darting through crowds and across pedestrian crossings until my lungs flamed, already burnt out from jujitsu practice that morning.
Ten minutes later, I took the museum entrance steps two at a time and slowed momentarily to grab my staff pass, which I waved at the security guard for clearance. And then into the bowels of the building I dove, until I reached my department; artefact reclamation and preservation.
Police officers swarmed, and security officers in full black outfits with tactical gear and huge guns barred my way.
“Can’t come this way, love,” said one. “Matter of national security.”
I flashed my badge at them. “Zoe Stark. This is my department. My boss just called me in.”
“No deal, love, sorry. Orders.”
“Duncan!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. Mr Tactical stepped back at that. I suppressed a grin.
Duncan’s head popped out of his office. “Let her through, she’s with me.”
I beamed sweetly at Mr Tactical and his friend and swept past them, into Duncan’s office, just as a Mr Suit walked out. Mr Suit looked like death warmed up. His skin and his hair were as grey and lifeless as his two piece jacket and trousers.
I flattened myself against the wall as more men in tactical gear crammed into the corridor behind him, with a clear bio-hazard box carried between them, that had a small white cube nestled within it, just about the same size as a certain ancient box filled with doom.
Oh no. It couldn’t be… surely.
“Duncan?” I edged into his office, my eyes not leaving that box until it rounded the corner. At last, my attention switched to him, and I halted.
I don’t think I’d ever seen him look so angry. Sweet Duncan. Kind Duncan. Firm Duncan, sure. But never angry Duncan. And now his face was white, and his jaw was clenched, and his fists shook by his side.
“It’s gone,” he growled. “Bloody MI5!” he slammed a fist on his desk.
“Can’t we get it back? I don’t understand – what’s happened? Why have they taken it?”
Duncan shook his head, scowling. “Out of my hands – out of all of our hands.”
I waited for him to elaborate, not daring to speak.
“Marc bloody Nowak got involved the moment he heard we had it.”
Marc Nowak; I recognised the name. He wasn’t on my list of friends, put it that way. An Ordinary, and a jobsworth. My lip curled.
“He’s confiscated it on grounds of national security. National security!” Duncan spluttered. “Ordinaries, thinking they can do a better job than us!”
“Yeah, but to them, we’re nothing more than a stuffy museum filled with bones and rocks, remember?” I sighed.
Duncan glowered.
Sometimes, being Magicai was a pain. Our power was a secret from the entire Ordinary world; and at times like this, we had no way to convince them we could protect artefacts like Pandora’s Box better than they. To convince them, we would have to break the Magical Order of Secrecy and reveal ourselves, and the consequences of that would be catastrophic.
Sometimes though, in cases like this, it seemed silly to keep our secret; the fate of the entire world was at stake. One slip and humanity could be wiped out, just for Magicai pride and secrecy? It didn’t seem right. But then, I was a nobody in the grand scheme of things, and in no position to judge.
“I’m guessing that’s the problem,” I said glumly.
“Yes. Our protections are inadequate.”
I snorted. “Their protections are inadequate, more like. How are they even going to contain it?”
“You saw the bio-hazard box.”
I scoffed. That was how highly I thought of their bio-hazard box. “How can they protect a magical relic of such power? If you didn’t finish sealing Pandora’s Box, then it’s not protected by our magic. One slip, and it could be opened. We can’t let them keep it. The box will be opened by accident, and probably sooner rather than later. Let’s get it back! Can’t you put in a call to the Prime Minister?”
Duncan glared at me. “You mean, the PM, who shouldn’t know who I am, who calls me on a nearly weekly basis, and who I’m still grovelling to about your latest incidents in Mexico? Tell me, how will that conversation go? ‘I’m a completely normal museum curation director, but pretty please can you give us back our incredibly deadly, dangerous relic, because we can do a better job than MI5?’ Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to wash.”
I sighed. “No, maybe not. So, what do we do?”
“For now, nothing. Our hands are tied.”
“We can’t give up, Duncan!”
“I didn’t say anything about giving up, Zoe. We can’t take the box back, but we can still try to protect it.”
Sometimes, I forgot to give Duncan enough credit. He could be devious when he wanted to.
It was time to visit the archive again, and possibly make a phone call. I had to research casting spells over long distances since there would be no chance of getting close enough to cast spells on it from the same room now. And ask a particularly crafty acquaintance for his help – if I couldn’t find another solution, that was. I’d do a lot to avoid this particular friend.
'Friend' was probably not the right term for Jamie Atticus Oxford.
Chapter Two
Hayley had already pulled a stack of books on just the kind of spells that might help by the time I returned to the archives. For a moment, I wondered why I hadn’t initially liked her. She was clever, resourceful, and she was beginning to stand up for herself in a way I understood. “Thanks, Hayley.”
“So, what’s happened?”
I filled her in as briefly as I could, already pulling books from the pile and skimming through the pages.
“Wow. That’s… that’s pretty crap.” She pulled up a chair and grabbed some books to help.
“Tell me about it.” I told her what I was looking for, and we sat in silence until our hunched shoulders ached and our mouths were dry with dust and dehydration.
~
At last, I had to give up. I uncurled myself and my spine cracked as I flopped back in my chair with a sigh. “It’s no use. There’s nothing here that we’re going to be able to learn to do in a day or two.”
Here was the disadvantage of being a young Magicai; and Hayley was even younger than me, if I thought about it. I was twenty-seven, and I’d been raised with magic. Hayley wasn’t even one in Magicai terms; she’d only had magical powers for a matter of weeks. She was doing a great job of pretending to be absolutely fine with her new ‘normal’ – even though at times I caught her in a glazed state of shock – and dive into training herself, but neither of us were miracle workers.
I was going to have to make that call after all. I sighed again, long and hard, with resignation, distracting Hayley from her book. She looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
“Come on, let’s eat. I’m famished.”
As we left, I dialled the number I had wanted to avoid.
“Hey, Jamie?”
“Zo! Long time no see. You never did take me for that drink – I forgive you, but only if you buy me two to make it up to me, of course.”
“Jamie, you know I hate it when you call me Zo. It’s Zo-EE.” I gritted my teeth. “Look, I need your help.”
“Ooh..?”
“I can’t talk on the phone. Meet me tonight?”
“Zo-EE, anytime. Your place or mine?” His sultry, smug voice wa
s laced with a smile that I’d slap off his face if he dared wear it to meet me, but I bit back my retort. I needed him, just on the vague off-chance he could help.
“Neither,” I snipped. “Let’s meet at Nando’s, near Gloucester Road station.”
“Not very romantic,” Jamie sniffed, “but sure. Seven?”
“Seven’s good, see you then.”
“See you-”
I hung up before he could make any more smarmy comments.
“Who’s that?” Hayley asked.
I stopped grinding my teeth and unclenched my jaw. It took a lot of effort. Jamie had that effect on me. “That was Jamie Oxford. We go back a long time – I’d call him a friend, but he’s more of an ass. He’s really good at finding things, which is why I put up with him. Mind, if he spent half as much effort trying to find things as he did trying to get in my pants, he’d be even better.” My voice had a sting of annoyance, but Hayley giggled.
“One to watch out for, then?”
“Definitely,” I growled. “Don’t touch him with a ten-foot bargepole. He’s a mess. He does what we – what I – do, I suppose.” I wasn’t sure what Hayley’s place in this all was yet. “He finds magical artefacts too. Only he works freelance, and not exactly above board when it comes to the law. He’ll go the extra mile to get the job done, even if it’s a little illegal.”
Hidden Magic: A Ley Line World Urban Fantasy Adventure (Relic Guardians Book 2) Page 8
