Forbidden Magic: The Complete Collection

by Anya Merchant

  “More steam!” yelled Kiara. “Use your scarlet aura again!”

  Victor aimed his free hand behind them, palm extended toward the ground. He almost tripped as he focused on binding his aura, and was pulled back to balance by Kiara. The woman was hot on their heels.

  He bound his scarlet aura, and flames shot out from his hand, spraying behind them like the explosive jet of a rocket. He traced it in diagonals across the snow, and steam filled the air. The violet woman let out a furious snarl and Victor lost sight of her.

  The two of them kept running even after they’d left the forest. It was mid evening, and the snow had intensified to the point where it did enough on its own to limit visibility. Victor let out a sigh of relief as they made it through the park and into the city, finally slowing to walking speed as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked the question through gasps of cold, precious air.

  “That,” said Kiara, “is what we’re up against.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Victor stumbled after Kiara, his bruised body fumbling through movements that would normally be second nature. They were headed away from the forest, and that, at the moment, was all that mattered to him.

  I was useless against her.

  “She isn’t the one we’re looking for,” said Kiara.

  “What?” Victor frowned at her and lengthened his strides against the groans of his muscles. “She admitted it, and it’s pretty clear from the way she fought that she could do it easily enough.”

  Kiara shook her head.

  “I don’t doubt that she killed the women,” she said. “But there’s no way it wasn’t at someone’s order.”

  Victor looked over at her. He saw her face, and noticed a cut above her eye, swollen and dripping blood toward her temple.

  “You have a cut on your face.” Victor reached out his hand and gently touched it with his finger.

  “And you look like you were in a car crash,” said Kiara. “The kind where you get thrown out through the windshield. Come on, we’re almost to my-”

  The nearby street lights went out, all of them flicking off in unison and leaving the two of them in darkness. Kiara frowned and looked up at the falling snow, which was coming down even harder than it had been before.

  “That’s odd,” she said.

  “Are power outages typical these days?” asked Victor.

  “No.” Kiara’s frown deepened. “But I’m not paranoid enough to take it as an omen, or anything other than coincidence.”

  The two of them continued forward. The snow on the sidewalk almost seemed to give off a crystalline white glow of its own. They rounded the corner and headed down the street, stopping once they’d reached Lucy’s apartment complex.

  The silence was eerie. Even the automobile traffic in the city seemed to have dwindled, and each footstep Victor and Kiara took up the stairs to the second floor crunched against the snow. They walked to the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Kiara slipped in a key.

  “Hello?” She poked her head into the complete darkness of the blacked out apartment. “Lucy?”

  There was only silence in response, at least for a moment. Victor saw the light before he heard her voice.

  “About time.” Lucy walked out from her bedroom, carrying a lit candle and wearing a thin, somewhat revealing night robe. “I was starting to worry. What happened?”

  Kiara looked over at Victor and then back to her sister.

  “The murderer was still hovering around the crime scene you sent us to. We barely made it out alive.”

  Lucy was still for a moment. She slowly set the candle down on the living room table and crossed her arms.

  “Are both of you okay?”

  Kiara waved a dismissive hand, and Victor nodded. Lucy walked over to the door and pulled him into the apartment by the arm.

  “I can only stay for a minute,” he said. “It’s going to be a miserable walk back to my place with the power off, and I don’t want to have to rush to beat the snowstorm.”

  “You’re staying here tonight,” said Lucy. Victor opened his mouth to object, and Kiara raised an eyebrow, but the look in Lucy’s eyes stifled all of their concerns.

  “Lucy… We’re up against something serious, this time,” said Kiara. She sat down on the couch and relaxed her muscles, the tension visibly melting out of her body language.

  “Did you get a good look at the killer?”

  “She wasn’t human,” said Victor. “I don’t know what she was. She was purple, and…”

  He trailed off, feeling strangely bashful.

  She was also naked.

  “No, she was human,” said Kiara. “Just genetically modified, what the researchers at Monteiro call biospliced.”

  Lucy’s frown deepened.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” said Kiara. “She was stronger, faster, and bigger than any woman I’ve seen before. And like Victor said, the skin tone was a dead giveaway.”

  “That means that there has been another theft,” said Lucy. “Or worse. That someone inside the company is sharing the technology with dangerous people.”

  “You said it yourself that Monteiro was corrupt, didn’t you?” Victor looked at Lucy, and then Kiara, who didn’t seem shocked by his words.

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “And that most definitely has something to do with how Night Angel ended up with her powers. But this suggests that the leaks are happening on either a larger scale than I’d suspected, or with some kind of purpose that we just can’t see yet.”

  “The police would have been massacred if they’d found her first, Lucy,” said Kiara. “There’s no way they can take this one on, not even with heavy firepower. At least not without casualties.”

  “It’s just one woman,” said Victor. “I’m sure they could-”

  “We only saw one woman,” corrected Kiara. “She has help. I’m sure of it.”

  Victor didn’t say anything for a second.

  “How do you know?” he finally asked.

  “The other women, the victims, were modified, too,” she said. “Call me crazy, but I feel like that suggests something bigger than what we’ve seen. We have to follow up on our leads tomorrow, and fast.”

  Lucy let out a deep sigh and turned her mouth up into a slight smile. She lit another candle using the wick of the first one, leaning over the coffee table and letting her robe slip open slightly. Despite everything that had happened, Victor’s hormones were apparently not taking the night off.

  “Let’s all try to get some sleep,” said Lucy. “Kiara, can you get Victor a blanket and a pillow from your room?”

  Kiara pursed her lips at her sister and scratched her head.

  “He said he was all right with walking home.” She shot Victor a look that he had trouble interpreting. “It’s really not that far.”

  “He’s staying,” said Lucy. “And that’s final.”

  Kiara glared at him, and Victor blinked a couple of times at her, completely baffled.

  What the heck is inspiring this reaction? It’s not that big of a deal.

  Lucy walked over to him while Kiara dragged her feet into the other room to get the stuff she’d asked for. She let her eyes examine him, her gaze slowly rising up his body. It made Victor feel a little uncomfortable, and strangely excited.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I already told you, I’m fine,” said Victor.

  “I don’t just mean physically,” said Lucy. “I mean… are you all right with everything that’s happening to you, and around you?”

  Victor shrugged.

  “I haven’t been all right in a good while,” he said, after a moment of thought. “But it has to do more with my life being uprooted than anything that’s happened since coming to Undercliff City.”

  “You’re risking your life.” Lucy took a step closer to him, and Victor became acutely aware of how beautiful and how exposed she looked in her tiny robe, lit only by flicke
ring glow of the candles.

  “I’m helping people,” said Victor. “Or at least, I think I am.”

  Lucy smiled at him. She gingerly reached one of her hands out, setting it first on the edge of his shoulder, and then tracing over toward his neck.

  “Your father used to say the same thing.”

  The air in the room was loaded with potential, emotion, and at least by Victor’s measure, a good deal of arousal. Lucy was gorgeous in every sense of the word, a woman in her sexual prime that could make even the most platonic words and gestures into seductive overtures.

  And she’s also my dad’s old assistant, my old babysitter, and totally off limits, now and forever.

  His eyes somehow met hers.

  “Lucy.” His voice was soft, and he took a step in, bringing his body within inches of hers. Lucy didn’t move, though the shadows of the blackout hid her face and reaction.

  And then Kiara cleared her throat from the hallway.

  “Got the blankets.” She walked over to the couch with heavy, intentional steps. “And the pillow.”

  “Right, of course.” Lucy glided back to the center of the room and straightened her robe. “Thank you. Victor, the couch is yours.”

  “Thanks, Lucy,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Lucy walked over to her room and shut the door. Victor turned to say good night to Kiara, but she’d already disappeared. Only a single candle remained on the coffee table, and it was almost burned down to the wick.

  That’s how I feel. Totally burned out.

  CHAPTER 15

  The night was sleepless, at least for Victor. He stared up at the ceiling while a dozen different bad thoughts battled for supremacy.

  I’m still not facing the truth. I’m using this crisis as a distraction, as an excuse to avoid thinking about it.

  The first time Victor had been in Lucy’s apartment, he’d found the ambiance to be comforting. Maybe it was because of who Lucy was, or at least who she used to be to him, but being around her allowed him to set down his burdens. But now, the walls were closing in, and even thinking of Lucy wasn’t enough to stop them.

  I have to tell someone.

  Footsteps came from the hallway. Victor looked up and saw Kiara standing in the doorway of the living room. It was too dark to make out her face or even most of her body, but the soft, alien blue aura surrounding her profile was an instant giveaway of active aura binding.

  “Hey!” whispered Victor. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The glow disappeared. Kiara slowly walked across the thick carpet over to the couch. Victor’s candle had long since burned out, but enough moonlight came in through the window for him to make her out in detail.

  Kiara was wearing an oversized t-shirt that was all but a dress on her, hanging down to mid-thigh and preserving only a bit of her modesty. Somehow, the fabric seemed to cling tightly to her chest, her medium sized breasts pushing out and demanding the attention they deserved. Her butt was half exposed underneath the bottom hem, and her legs were bare and enticing.

  “It stopped snowing a while ago,” said Kiara, dryly. “You can go home.”

  “How about you answer my question?” Victor tried to keep the anger from showing in his voice. “What were you doing with your azure aura, just now?”

  Kiara’s body language sharpened and she took a step closer to the couch.

  “That’s none of your fucking business, Victor.”

  “Like hell it-”

  “None of this is your fucking business.” Anger spilled out into Kiara’s voice, the quiet sort of anger that cuts like a scalpel. “The investigation, Monteiro, my sister. It’s none of your fucking business and you’ve somehow deluded yourself into thinking that it is.”

  Victor glared at her, though he had no way of knowing if she could even see the expression in the darkness.

  “Do I threaten you, Kiara?” he asked. “Is that what this is about? Are you scared that you won’t be everyone’s go to problem solver now that I’ve arrived on scene?”

  Kiara’s laugh was bitter and shrill.

  “You’re just a little boy,” she said. “Playing at being a man. Trying to fill daddy’s big shoes.”

  Victor gritted his teeth. He felt his scarlet aura flare up automatically, as though fueled by pure emotion.

  “And you’re just a scared little girl,” he said quietly. “Scared of being irrelevant… and scared of the dark.”

  Kiara stiffened, and Victor knew he’d struck home. Her scarlet aura flared up too, strangely. Victor sat up on the couch, and Kiara leaned in toward him. The two of them were close enough for the glow of each of their auras to spill over onto each other’s bodies, and it took only a moment for Victor to understand and feel what that meant.

  Her aura is affecting me, whether she means it to or not.

  Victor stared at Kiara, drinking in the way her short blonde hair framed the nape of her neck. Her chest heaved up and down with every breath, and her breasts moved as though she was waving them in front of him. Her nipples were hard, and Victor realized that he, too, was, harder than he’d ever been before in his life.

  “You don’t understand.” Kiara’s voice took on a new tone, sensual and unintentionally seductive.

  “I do understand,” said Victor.

  He felt himself moving toward her. They sat side by side on the couch, facing each other, their bodies only inches apart. He was on fire, and his erection ached painfully as he stared at the face of the Kiara, his appointed partner, the other aura binder.

  “No.” Kiara leaned back from him and abruptly shut her scarlet aura off. “You don’t.”

  She stood up and walked back over to the doorway of her room. Victor watched her go, and could have sworn that she was intentionally swaying her hips a bit more than usual, letting the oversized shirt ride up enough to give him small flashes of her butt and panties.

  With a force of will, Victor powered down his own aura and collapsed back on the couch. His cock was painfully erect, and his mind swam with images of Kiara and Lucy.

  CHAPTER 16

  Eventually, he did manage to get to sleep. The morning came too soon. Lucy and Kiara were both dressed and buzzing around the living room by the time he’d forced himself up. The power was back on, and Victor could hear the hum of the TV across the room.

  “Good morning, Victor.” Lucy passed him a granola bar as she walked by, heading for the door. “I was wondering whether you’d wake up or not before I left.”

  “Yeah, uh…” Victor rubbed his head, remembering a bit of the night before. “I had trouble sleeping.”

  Lucy frowned at him. She was wearing a gray jacket over a black skirt that was a bit reminiscent of something a stewardess might wear.

  She would kill me if I told her as much.

  Victor watched her lean forward to slip into a pair of high heels, her jacket billowing open and offering a heavenly view of her breasts pushing up against her blouse. He could all but feel his scarlet aura acting up and bit his lip in annoyed, horny frustration.

  “Can I trust you to get along with Kiara today?” asked Lucy.

  “What? Yeah, of course.”

  “I spoke with her earlier this morning.” Lucy frowned at him. “Whatever differences the two of you might have, please try to set them aside to focus on the investigation.”

  Victor nodded.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Lucy smiled at him and then headed out the door. He started munching on the granola bar, and a few minutes later, the door to Kiara’s room opened.

  She walked out slowly, watching Victor out of the corner of her eye. Kiara had on tight leather pants, a white v-neck blouse that was cut low enough to show a hint of her bra, and a leather jacket.

  She looks ready for business.

  Victor tried not to feel outdone as he pulled on his dirty sweatshirt from the day before. Kiara had also done her makeup and something to her hair, and flicked a few gloss
y blonde strands out of her face as she came over to him.

  “We’re going to head across town to the Undercliff Congregational Church, see if that lead pans out,” she said. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “Uh…” Victor scratched his head awkwardly. “We aren’t going to talk about what happened last night?”

  Kiara smiled at him as though he’d just said something amusing.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize. I’ve already let it go.”

  “I don’t need to apologize? Kiara, you were the one instigating!”

  “I’ve already let it go, Victor,” she said, each word enunciated with cold accuracy. “We were both tired, cranky, and our auras were acting up. That’s what happens when you don’t, well, you know.”

  She blushed slightly, and Victor felt the better part of his anger fade away. She looked cute when she was flustered.

  “Is that why it happened?” he asked. “Because we were using our auras more than we were getting laid?”

  Kiara’s face turned an even deeper shade of red and Victor chuckled.

  “We don’t have to talk about it any more than we have to talk about other unpleasant things,” she said. She sounded a bit like a teacher attempting to regain control of an unruly classroom.

  “Sorry,” said Victor. “Gotcha. No sex talk.”

  Kiara rolled her eyes at him and sighed. She pulled on a pair of girlish black boots while Victor slipped into his sneakers, and then the two of them headed out.

  The sky was overcast and lit uniformly by the sun. It was cold out, but not that cold, which made the thick layer of snow coating the sidewalk sticky and moldable. Victor moved so that he was ahead of Kiara, kicking through the ankle deep flakes and letting her walk in his wake.

  “It’s not far from here,” she said. “Take this next right.”

  The snow plows had cleared the streets early in the morning, pushing snow out of the way of the cars and into the way of pedestrians. The snow collected, forming a chest-high wall in between the sidewalks and the streets. At crosswalks, sections of it were knocked out from where people had forced their way through. Victor carefully stomped through one sunken section, feeling the snow overflowing into his sneakers.