From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series

by Jennifer Ashley

  Splinters of their spells ricocheted and arrowed toward the rest of us. Many crackled to nothing against the glowing tubes, but the rest came at us like flying shards of glass. Nash unfolded himself from under the rock to step in front of them, letting his null magic cancel them out, and I deflected the others. At the pickup, Gabrielle swatted at the spell remnants with her magic, whooping and laughing.

  Bear, who’d remained motionless throughout all this, suddenly raised her arms. She pointed both hands high into the sky and let out a screaming chant in a high-pitched voice, the kind achieved by the best traditional Indian singers.

  The sound echoed up and down the canyon, bounced from the tall mesas along the river valley, and rang up to the stars. A small rumble shifted my feet, the merest vibration, the ground answering.

  Bear was calling the spirit of the canyon, the thousands of years of life and people and what they’d left behind. Wind sprang from a circle around her, and I heard the first rumble of thunder.

  She was awaking the canyon, and bringing on the storm.

  I laughed. Bear went on chanting. Though she sang in a language I didn’t know, the words took shape in my head.

  She sang of the creation, of the first three worlds far beneath us, which had been filled with gods and magical beings. She sang about First Man and First Woman, about life emerging through the cracks in the world Beneath to this one, the fourth world, the world of light.

  I knew the story, had heard it many times. Bear added to it the tale of the pot she’d shaped, fired, and imbued with god magic. As Elena had told me, she’d presented it to the shamans who’d lived in this canyon long before what now stood in ruins had even been built, then she’d left them. The shamans had tried to use the pot, but they’d become greedy for its power, and it had started to destroy them. Other shamans, drawn by the magic, had fought to possess the pot, and in a conflagration of magic, the entire tribe had vanished from the land.

  The pot had lain hidden here in the places of the dead, undisturbed for years. Other tribes had come and gone, but they’d never touched the graves. Then new people came, digging up the land and stealing from the dead, selling the pottery and artifacts they found to those who paid vast sums of money for them.

  Now Bear had returned for her vessel. She would use it to stop the mages and the evil, then she’d take it and go.

  I stood, mesmerized, listening to her. So did Nash. Gabrielle had gone quiet, and Grandmother and Elena watched, motionless, from the truck.

  Pericles and Emmett paid no attention. The air around them was thick and black but shot through with wild colors. I heard screams among the magic, sounds of agony as well as snarls of rage.

  Bear chanted on, and the storm built. Its tingling consumed me, and I turned in a circle, arms outstretched.

  “What are you doing?” Nash demanded.

  “Storm,” I said. “It’s a big one.”

  “How big?”

  “I’d say, take cover.”

  Nash let out a string of swear words. He crawled beneath the slab of rock again and huddled there, tucking the pot beneath him.

  Bear’s song went on. The mages fought. The dragons screamed and fired, Colby joining their battle.

  Nash made no move to nullify the magic ring around us, even with Colby gone, and I was fine with that, because the barrier shielded us against the backlash from the mages’ spells. Emmett wasn’t being nice to us—when he was done with Pericles, he’d turn his attentions to us and the pot his barrier had protected. Very organized, was Emmett.

  The storm came on. I smelled dust and dampness, and saw the wall of dust rising above the cliffs around Chaco Canyon to blot out the stars, the disc of the moon, and even the clouds themselves.

  The dirt wall filled the horizon from end to end and rose a mile and more into the sky. It came fast, swallowing everything before it—buttes, the canyon walls, rocks, trees, and all light. It swallowed the sky itself, and the wind raged.

  Haboob, such storms were called. They were thick, miles deep and miles wide, and could reach two miles high. Its winds blew everything before it—dirt and debris, which the desert had to spare, sand loosened by sudden rain after days of no rain. All gathered into one giant storm, and that storm poured down on us now without mercy.

  The canyon whirled into darkness. Emmett’s spell lights glowed feebly, and by them I could just see Nash hunkered under the rock five feet away. Nothing else.

  I stretched out my arms and embraced the storm.

  I’d been in bad dust storms before, but this one was different. Whether Bear’s magic had called it, or the magic battle in the valley had enhanced it, or somehow it sensed the pot’s magic, I didn’t know. But I felt the demons in the storm, beings drawn to the magic, and to me.

  I grabbed the winds. I heard my own laughter, wild and strong. I was free.

  My body rose with the wind, but I felt no terror. I rose on the haboob’s waves, and my Beneath magic, ironically, kept me grounded.

  “Woo!” Gabrielle shouted from where she stood on the hood of the truck. “Look at Janet. Go, big sis!”

  The demons in the wind fell back before me. I commanded them—they’d bend to my will. The storm was mine.

  The mile-high wall went straight for the dragons. “Mick!” I screamed. “Get out of the way!”

  Mick, my smart boyfriend, had already seen, already comprehended, and was already moving. He shot away in front of the storm, angling to the south and east, out of its path.

  Drake went right after him. Colby hesitated, wings pumping the air, already hampered by his injury. I reached up with my magic and gave him a shove, and he flapped reluctantly away.

  I turned with the storm toward Emmett and Pericles.

  I hit them with two tunnels of wind, breaking their spells. Black, fragmented magic danced down the canyon, exploding against the walls in brilliant colors, like washes of fireworks.

  Both mages swung to me. They were panting, sweating, covered in blood and dirt, Emmett’s glasses broken.

  They no longer wore the guises of ordinary men they showed to the rest of the world. I could see under their skins, the evil but beautiful things they truly were. They’d once been men, but the power they’d studied, or stolen, and hoarded for years had made them as cold and perfect as marble statues. Flawless. Deadly.

  Emmett hissed. From his mouth issued a darkness so black that it sucked in and destroyed any color or light touched it. I knew death when I saw it.

  I grabbed the wind, shaped it into an arrow, filled it with Beneath power, and shot the death out of the sky before it could touch me. Emmett’s spell shattered like porcelain on concrete.

  I’d never done this before. Usually, I drew on a storm’s power—wind, lightning, rain, snow—mixed it with my natural magic, and let it out again.

  This time, I was inside the storm. It was me, and I was it. I was flying, cradled in its power.

  My awareness expanded with the storm. I stretched fifty miles across the desert, seeing the little towns and pueblos from here to the Colorado border. Sheep huddled together, worried shepherds among them. People rushed home and closed windows and doors, peering out at the giant wave of sand with frightened eyes.

  The dragons fought south of here, almost to the slopes of Mount Taylor, which marked the traditional boundary of the Navajo lands. I saw Drake whirl to face Mick, then the two dragons began to battle, swiping with wings, claws, teeth, tails.

  Colby reached them, but to my amazement, instead of attacking Mick, he turned on Drake.

  I thought for a second that he’d managed to break his binding spell, but with my vision enhanced by my bath of magic, I saw the dark wires of the spell still wrapping him. He was fighting despite his bondage, helping Mick. And it hurt him.

  Mick roared down at Drake, mouth open, claws ready to maul. Drake danced aside, but one of Colby’s back feet managed to rake across Drake’s chest, drawing blood. Drake fired at Colby, and Colby shot out of the way. Mick took adv
antage to get in a shot of fire across Drake’s back.

  Drake shrieked, his hide burning, but he whipped around and struck, full force of body and tail. Not at Mick—at Colby.

  Colby couldn’t dodge in time. He almost managed to dive out of the way, but Drake’s long, barbed tail caught him under one wing.

  The wing tore in a crackling of cartilage, and Colby rolled like a fighter plane shot out of the sky. Fire burst from his mouth as he fell and caught Drake on the belly. Drake screamed and winged higher, trying to let the wind put the fires out.

  Mick was on Drake in an instant, but Colby plummeted from the heights, straight toward rocky ground.

  I shot out a cushion of wind to try to help break his fall, but the problem with being part of such a huge storm was that its strength dispersed the farther I moved from its heart. The dragons were fighting on the very edge.

  I slowed Colby’s descent a little, but still he tumbled end over end until he crashed into tall grasses and rock. A billow of dust shot up from his landing place, then Colby lay still.

  Mick saw, but he had Drake on him. My attention was jerked back to the canyon, to Pericles and Emmett, who’d both decided that the biggest threat they needed to take down was me.

  I whacked away the tubes of light surrounding Nash’s truck. As reluctant as I’d been to touch the tubes when they’d first appeared, I now dispersed them with a flick of my fingers.

  “Grandmother!” I called. “Colby needs help.”

  Elena started the truck. “Where is he?”

  I pointed, unable to explain. Elena gave me an annoyed look, but they were magical women—they’d sense the fallen dragon’s aura and find him.

  Gabrielle rolled off the truck and came to her feet as Elena drove away. “I’m not leaving. Bring it on, mages.”

  They did. I left the barrier up around Nash to protect both him and the pot from physical injury. He sat in the middle of it, arms around the pot, and watched.

  “Can I dust them, Janet?” Gabrielle turned her face up to me. “Please?”

  “In this case? Sure!”

  She whooped, and I felt her burst of Beneath magic as she rose into the air beside me. She somersaulted once in midair, laughing. “And people say sisters don’t do enough together.”

  The two mages faced us in silence. Whether they’d discussed working together or just realized it was expedient, they’d put aside their differences to tackle us. Emmett and Pericles locked hands, raised them, and each sent one half of a spell at us.

  The spells combined into a furrow of darkness. My newfound clarity told me that the darkness was designed to get past our magic and rip into our bodies. Neither Gabrielle nor I was immortal. We could die, and with us, our power.

  Gabrielle gleefully whacked at the spell with a shaft of Beneath magic, then she screamed. The darkness wound onto her magic like a sticky web and started crawling toward her outstretched hand.

  I sliced down with my own power, not onto the dark web, but to Gabrielle’s magic just above it, cleanly cutting off the white shaft. The web found itself wrapping around nothing and it drew back, pausing like an animal scenting the wind.

  Then it reared up and it came for me. I flew upward, rolling out of the way as quickly as any dragon. I came down again, landing on the earth outside the barrier surrounding Nash.

  The mage’s web of darkness followed me down. I swatted it with a swirl of wind, but as it had done with Gabrielle, it tried to cling to my magic and follow my own power back to me.

  I realized that I couldn’t fight the spell itself—I had to fight the mages. I had to release myself from all the restrictions I’d put on my use of magic in the past year, and go for the end game.

  I closed my eyes.

  I might have been born with goddess magic deep inside myself, but fortunately for me, my father had come from a line of shamans who carried strong earth magics—powers bound to this world, not the worlds below.

  Grandmother, by making sure my latent evil didn’t destroy me from the inside out, had given me the strength to steady myself against the Beneath magic that threatened me every day. My father, with his silences and the quiet composure with which he approached all things, had shown me the value of patience and endurance.

  Jamison, the man I’d fought so hard this afternoon, had taught me to calm myself, to meditate and control the impulses that raged inside me.

  Then Mick, my first and only lover, had taught me spells to help balance and hone my storm magic into an efficient, controlled power.

  I’d learned so much from them—family, friend, lover—and now their lessons let me hold the storm, center myself, and marry the storm with my Beneath magic.

  I opened my hands and filled my palms with the winds. The web of dark magic still watched me, waiting for me to strike, but I ignored it.

  Instead I gathered the dense cloud of dust and swept it around myself and the two mages, blotting out everything and everyone but us. I heard Gabrielle’s snarl of frustration, but I didn’t want to let her in here. She was strong, but not strong enough.

  I couldn’t see the mage’s faces now, only the white shafts of their true selves. They threw another collective spell at me, this one designed to squeeze all the breath from my body and leave me flat.

  I sent the winds into the spell to pull it asunder. As it shattered, I snaked the storm between the two men and flung them apart.

  The mages fell, but were up again at once. They stopped trying to work together and just started throwing spells at me.

  I laughed as I smacked down spell after spell. I left the ground again, laughing, joyous, pounding the two mages with the wild mix of my magic as quickly as they shot their spells at me.

  Bear had stopped chanting. Through the dust, I saw that she now stood with her hands at her sides, her head bowed, the bearskin on her back shrouding her body.

  I didn’t have time to wonder what she was doing now. That is, until I felt the weight of the auras of the canyon.

  The larger magics of Emmett, Pericles, Gabrielle, and the storm, had shielded me from the auras that usually drove me crazy. But now that Bear had sung to the spirit of the canyon —its collective aura—I felt them with a vengeance.

  The auras swirled together like those I’d awakened from the artifacts in Richard Young’s collection room. They gathered around Bear, joining together like a dark cloak around her. She’d tried to help them, she’d caused them sorrow, and now she’d come to awaken them and protect them.

  I felt the crush of the auras start to weaken me. Bear was on their side, and I knew I’d be foolish to assume she was still on ours.

  I had another worry. I was drunk with power, riding this wonderful storm, but storms don’t last forever. This one would disperse when nature had finished with it, and I’d be left with a bad magic hangover and only Beneath power on which to draw. Beneath magic was strong, but these mages, especially together, were the equal of it. And with no storm to steady me, I might end up destroying the entire canyon.

  I kept sending bursts of storm at Emmett and Pericles, and they shot things back at me—death spells, fire spells, ice spells, spells designed to eat my organs from the inside out, spells intended to separate my physical self from my magical one.

  The last one made me cold, even as I kicked it aside. I hadn’t realized spells like that existed.

  The glow of the golden tubes flashed and went out. For a second, I had no idea what had happened, then I realized that Nash had approached one of the tubes of light and reached out to cancel its magics.

  When it went down, all the others did too. Nash disappeared into darkness, but I saw his silhouette against my next burst of lightning.

  Nash held his Glock in his hands, and he aimed it and shot Pericles straight through the heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Pericles shouted, stumbled, fell.

  I knew that a powerful mage like Pericles probably had spells to safeguard him from even a bullet in his heart, but the
impact did slow him down. He dropped out of the fight, and now only Emmett remained.

  Nash lined up another shot for Emmett, but Emmett shot a black spell that rushed at Nash like a javelin, and Nash took the impact straight through the gun. The spell vanished as it hit Nash’s magic absorption field, but the shock made him drop the pistol.

  I heard Nash curse as he lost the gun in the dark, but I had to turn my attention back to Emmett.

  He knew some nasty magic. I hoped to all the gods that I could wring out of my body any spell that touched me, because with my heightened awareness, I saw that these spells could linger and affect my offspring.

  The wild thought flashed through my head—Can Mick and I even have offspring?—when more immediate concerns interrupted me.

  One was the auras surrounding Bear, which were now spreading wide like the dust storm. The other was a crazed Nightwalker who rushed out of the shadows for the fallen Pericles.

  Pericles started up—so Nash’s shot hadn’t killed him after all—but then Ansel was upon him.

  “Ansel! Stop!”

  Not that I cared at this point whether Ansel sucked Pericles dry, but I feared what Pericles’s magic might do to Ansel. The blood of a mage could be deadly.

  “Gabrielle, get Ansel!”

  But Gabrielle wasn’t where I’d seen her last. She was now in front of Nash, struggling with him for the leather-covered pot. Nash was trying to subdue her without hurting her, but Gabrielle beat on him with one fist while she tried to rip the pot from him with her other hand.

  I couldn’t do anything about her right now. The wave of ancient beings Bear had awakened engulfed Pericles and Ansel, swirling around them and blotting them from sight, then they took Emmett. And now they were coming for me.

  I drew on my storm power, but found myself beating off streaks of darkness that dove at me like angry flies. The cuts on my face bled and stung, I lost hold of some of my power, and I hit the ground with both feet—hard.