Reaped from Faerie: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Stolen Magic Book 2)

by WB McKay

  And a witch. A witch? I was going to have to do some serious research to figure out what a witch thought they were going to do with a scythe. Of course, no amount of research ever accounted for someone being misinformed. But as completely out of the norm as this whole crime scene was, it had to have taken a clever witch to pull it off. They probably had some idea what they were doing.

  The hairs rose on my arms, and I looked all around, searching out what had alarmed my senses. The other agents were busy with friendly chatter—oblivious. I caught Hobbs' eye, opened my mouth, and—

  The sound didn't register until I was flat on my back, blinking up at a sky obscured by dust and falling debris. I promptly sat up—too promptly—and the world spun beneath me. Beyond the ringing in my ears, the world was eerily quiet. The lake rippled as the dust coated its surface. The incubus flapped about in the water, but I didn't see any blood. Hobbs pushed off the tree he'd been thrown into, barely looking rattled as he brushed his suit clean. The others were tossed in various directions, and they looked about as stunned as I felt.

  The ground that used to hold the dead bodies was gone. The bottom of the five foot deep crater pooled with water. I looked everywhere—the lake, the trees—but there was no mistaking it.

  The bodies were gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Owen was grabbing my arm.

  "I told you to stay in the car," I hissed at him. Whispering didn't keep Hobbs from hearing me, but it was the best I could do.

  Owen shook my elbow until I looked down at it and then pointedly up at him. Releasing me, he asked, "Are you okay?"

  "Not if I lose my job I won't be."

  He laughed, incredulous, and then smirked like it all made sense to him. "This isn't the first time you've implied that your job is more important than your life, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing."

  "Go get in the damn car before they think you're the one who blew the place up."

  He snorted, but did as I said. Hobbs pointedly wasn't looking my way, so I guessed he wasn't going to say anything about the professionalism of bringing a civilian to a crime scene. At least, not now. Maybe he'd bring it up if I screwed up later. Not that it was likely. I was Sophie Morrigan, after all.

  "Witch magic," the incubus agent hissed. He ran his hands down the arms of his suit, wiping away the excess water. He rolled his eyes at the crater, and then spat in its general direction. "That was meant to clean the scene. It was likely supposed to go off before we got here, but you know. Witches." He spat again for good measure.

  The other agents guffawed at the ineptitude of the magic going off late, but I found no reason to smile. We had no clues, and now no crime scene. They hadn't even finished processing it yet. Daphne's body was gone—something else I was going to have to tell Belinda. And on top of all that, the agents I was working with weren't going to be any help to me at all.

  No, I wasn't laughing.

  "The glyphs are gone." I pointed at some of the places they'd been, where the ground was now collapsed. The agents before me had gotten pictures already, but it wasn't the same as being able to study them in person.

  Hobbs growled a little.

  "Shit," the incubus said.

  Shit was right. I didn't think any of us were used to seeing magic we couldn't make sense of.

  It was time to go see Belinda. From what I'd picked up from the others' chatter, the agents had asked some of my sisters if they saw what happened or anyone leaving the scene, but none of them had thought to ask what the banshees had seen.

  It was as professional a reason as any to go and check on my sister.

  I waved goodbye to the others, who didn't ask where I was going. They were debating whether to call in human agents first, or to go interrogate the local covens themselves. Both ideas were premature in my opinion, but nobody asked me.

  I returned to the car and flopped on the seat with a huff. "Can you take me to the gym?"

  "Of course, madame," Owen said in a snooty voice that brought to mind every chauffeur character I'd seen in old movies.

  A growl rumbled my throat. "I didn't ask you to bring me out here in the first place. If it's too much trouble to take me to the gym, I can get a ride with one of the bumbling idiots back there calling themselves agents, and you can go do whatever it is that playboy nightclub owners do during the day."

  Owen growled in return, an impressive sound that shouldn't have been possible from a human throat. I'd only heard him do it once before and the argument had ended with us both laughing until we couldn't breathe. It wiped away my crappy mood and left me with a hint of a smile tugging at my lips. "Good," he said, his own smile practically lighting up the dark interior of the car. He put the car in drive and headed toward town. "Your eyes sparkle when you smile."

  I hunched in the seat, pretending not to care what he thought about my eyes, especially since I was sure no part of me had ever sparkled. I was in the middle of a case, and one of my sisters was dead. It was not an appropriate time to be amused or to blush. I should be serious when I talked to Belinda.

  Owen drummed on the steering wheel as he drove and sang along with the radio, even singing the guitar solos. I caught him looking my way a couple of times when he was looking or sounding particularly ridiculous. He was putting on a show for me, and damned if it wasn't working. He'd been so dark and broody on our trip into Faerie. Where had that guy gone?

  We pulled up to the gym a few minutes later, and I was surprised to see Owen get out of the car when he turned off the engine.

  "You don't have to come in. I can get a ride home with one of my sisters. I'm sure you have more important things to do."

  "More important than finding out what a whole town of banshees does at a gym when one of their sisters dies?" he asked, raising a brow. "Not likely."

  I shrugged. "Fine, but if anyone asks your opinion on a call, even if you have an opinion, you keep your trap shut. You'll make an enemy of half the crowd."

  "Call? Enemy?" asked Owen, his other brow raising to join the first. Now he looked really confused. "What's going on in there? Shouldn't they just be wailing?"

  I shook my head and sighed. "I thought you read all about The Morrigan? Shouldn't you know about banshees?" His face was still blank. "No, of course not. It's not like banshees could possibly have anything to do with The Morrigan. Just like in The Life of the Phantom Queen, her daughters are probably little more than footnotes in all the books you've read." He nodded, color rising to his cheeks. I guided him into the gym and toward our destination. "Before a death happens, there would have been wailing, or keening, as we usually call it. That's a call to take heed of what the banshee says afterward. Her next words will be prophecy about a death." I pushed open a set of double doors and was assaulted with women's voices raised in cheers and jeers. "After that's all done, we play basketball." I almost corrected myself on the "we", but I was given at least three welcoming smiles before I left the doorway and decided maybe I was still enough a part of the "we".

  "Basketball…" said Owen, his wide eyes taking in the scene before him. "That's… unexpected."

  I tried to catch Belinda's eye, but she was busy at the moment. Her arms flailed and she slid across the floor. "Foul," she cried. One of her teammates in red pulled her to her feet. The referee shook her head, setting Belinda off on a cursing tirade.

  The referee put her hands up in the shape of a T. "Technical foul."

  "I'll give you a technical foul, Courtney," spat Belinda. "I changed your fucking diapers, you blind shit. I took an elbow to the face. How is that not a fucking foul?"

  The rest of her team pulled Belinda back from Courtney when she threw up another T, and said, "Ejected from the game."

  The crowd's boos and cheers grew to a deafening level when Belinda took her seat on the bench.

  "Wow," said Owen. "She's a firecracker."

  "That's Belinda," I said, voice bursting with pride.

  I walked over and sat down next to her; Owen took the
seat beside me. Without once looking my way, Belinda wrapped an arm around me and pulled me close. "Hey," she said.

  "Hey," I replied.

  We were a verbose pair.

  "You didn't really take an elbow, did you?" asked Owen, leaning forward so he could catch Belinda's gaze.

  My mouth dropped open. "Owen, what the hell did I tell you?" Both of them ignored me.

  "Are you calling me a liar?" asked Belinda, a rough edge in her voice.

  The surrounding area grew quiet, and I could practically feel the weight of expectant gazes.

  "Not at all," said Owen, his face turning a couple shades paler. "I think you were keeping the ref on her toes. She looks like she's paying close attention now."

  Belinda's fierce scowl turned into a sly grin. "You caught me. Yes, I lied. I wanted an excuse to sit down with my girl." She squeezed me tight and then held out a hand. "And I decided to make sure Courtney was paying attention while I was at it. Pleasure to meet you, Owen. I'm Belinda."

  Owen shook her hand, his face slowly returning to its natural shade. "The pleasure is all mine."

  "So, how long have you two been dating?" asked Belinda, finding exactly the most infuriating thing to say. Ever since I was five years old and she'd announced to every one of my sisters who would listen that I had a crush on a boy on TV. She'd made it her personal mission to make sure I had a healthy romantic life. Banshees weren't interested in romance, or sex, and all the books she read said I needed healthy examples of romantic relationships or I'd never manage to have one of my own.

  The whole thing highlighted another way in which I was different from my banshee sisters and served to turn me into something of a science experiment for them. They'd bring me to events with other children and ask if I liked that one, or that one, and why not that one. Eventually Belinda made the rest of them back off, but Belinda had never stopped worrying over who I was or wasn't dating and why.

  I'd been careful never to bring home anyone I dated because of it.

  "We're not dating. I ran into Owen at the market when I got the call about Daphne. He gave me a ride out here."

  "That was very kind of him," said Belinda, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

  "Yeah, it was nice," I said, gently pinching her leg.

  Owen watched the game, looking smug.

  Belinda took the hint and steered the conversation where she knew I wanted it to go. "I suppose you'd like to hear about the visions for Daphne." Her strong voice cracked a little on the name.

  "Yeah, but it can wait until we get home," I said, leaning into her and sighing at the comfort of her embrace. I was a badass professional agent, except when my sister was next to me. "Let's watch the game for now."

  I could feel Belinda's smile against the top of my head. "You haven't called my house home in quite some time. It's nice to hear."

  That was a whole conversation in itself, so I said nothing and enjoyed the game. Belinda was part of the red team, and even without her, they were cleaning the blue team's clock. I had played for the blue team for a year before I left Wailing Lakes. I had been by far the youngest person on the team, though none of my sisters looked much older than my current twenty-four years. I didn't know most of their ages because talking about age was something my sisters never did. They found the whole idea of counting your years to be silly in itself. With a life expectancy measured in centuries, fussing over the measurements of a year must have been like pointing out an eighth of an inch in a mile stretch.

  No one ever talked about what my life expectancy might be. For a while I'd been so aware of the question I thought they were avoiding telling me, but eventually I realized they thought it didn't matter, and I decided they were right. Banshees lived in the present. Whatever the future might bring, it would bring. Being present for the time you had was what counted, not how many years you had.

  It was a comforting thing to remember with Daphne's death fresh in my mind.

  I watched the game, barely registering the blue team's come-from-behind victory until Belinda shot to her feet as the buzzer beating shot arced through the air. It dropped through the hoop just as the timer hit zero. The whole crowd erupted in cheers, jolting me out of my thoughts. We might have cheered for different teams throughout the game, but in the end we were sisters and we celebrated each other's victories. I clapped and cheered with the rest of them, letting the unadulterated joy of the crowd flow through me and ease the ache of Daphne's loss.

  Owen grinned and clapped beside me, a look of understanding on his face. "So this is why you play basketball on a day like today," he said, when the noise died down and the stands started to empty.

  Belinda answered before I could. "Though death takes what it will, family and joy can still be found, if you are brave enough to reach for them."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Before I could insist that Owen head home and stop babysitting me, Belinda asked him to drive us home and join us for dinner. I thought it was closer to time for lunch until we stepped out the door of the gym and found it was dusk. The day had slipped away. I was exhausted, but tense. I had never planned on Owen and Belinda meeting. Belinda had plenty of embarrassing stories to share about me, but she could tell them all through dinner if it kept Owen from opening his mouth.

  I had mostly caught Belinda up on our adventure in Faerie. We went, I saw The Morrigan—a fact she'd snorted at but refrained from commenting on—I came back to Earth and things were fine. What else was there to say?

  Owen and I talked about our time in Faerie rarely, only in the way that we referenced in-jokes about how I didn't want to eat salad or how hungry a giant bird looked. Mostly, we avoided the topic. It was nice being around someone who knew I'd recently been imprisoned and killed a large part of a room full of men who'd tried to kill me first. He didn't look impressed, and he didn't say anything if I seemed a little twitchy. There was no lingering cloud of unasked questions hanging in the air between us. He just got it.

  One of the things we hadn't discussed was my death light. I hoped he would just assume that was normal enough, and not really a secret. Both him, and Greta—the other dragon we'd saved from over five years of imprisonment—had seen me use my magic, a beautiful orb of white light that killed on contact. Neither of them knew that wasn't common knowledge. I figured the best way to keep it quiet was for no one to have any reason to bring it up.

  I didn't know if it would be a big deal to the rest of the world, but it wasn't something I was interested in sharing.

  It would probably be a big deal to Belinda. It would especially be a big deal that I'd never told her.

  It would be just my kind of luck for Owen to sit at our dining room table and say, "Well Sophie could just zap 'em with her death light" or "Sophie can take care of herself. I once saw her kill dozens with her sword and that magic orb thing she does." And then Belinda would say "What?" and Owen would say "What do you mean what?" and then they'd both look at me until I… well, I sure as hell wasn't going to explain. Maybe I'd shift into a crow and pluck out Owen's tongue.

  Don't ever let it be said that I was one to overreact. I never overreact. This was the perfect level of reaction. Once Owen relearned how to communicate, minus his tongue, I was sure he would agree.

  Owen pulled into the driveway, and I turned my anxiety toward making a preemptive plan. I could corner Owen and tell him to leave Wailing Lakes and never come back because… because reasons. Of course, I'd probably end up saying something awful to convince him to leave and then I'd have to live with that for the rest of my life—that was kind of how these things typically went for me. Or, I could corner him and ask him not to mention it. Or I could continue watching the two of them talk and wait for it all to inevitably blow up in my face.

  Belinda hopped out of the car, and before I could do anything, Owen climbed out after her. I scrambled after them, and like a complete and total adult, decided to do the mature thing, and text him.

  Sophie: Hey. Don't say anything to Bel
inda about my magic. And don't ask why. Okay?

  Proud of my brilliant solution, I watched Owen go through the front door, without ever hearing his phone go off. He must have had his phone on silent, like some kind of polite gentleman. The bastard.

  I walked in behind them and considered my options. How was I going to tell Owen to check his phone without alerting Belinda? I knew we'd be headed for the living room, so I casually stepped around the two of them so I could make the seating arrangements work to my benefit. Thankfully, Belinda hadn't rearranged the furniture since my last visit. The big comfy chair she always sat in was pointed toward the entrance they would walk through and away from the hallway that led to the bathroom. I positioned myself on one side of the couch and hoped Owen would sit at the other end.

  Belinda and Owen entered the room seconds later, chattering about the house. Belinda sat in her comfy chair and Owen sat right where I wanted him, giving himself a perfect view of the hall.

  I counted to ten in my head and then stood. "Excuse me, I have to use the bathroom."

  I stepped into the hallway and turned around, pulling out my phone. I turned on the screen and waved it at Owen until I caught his attention. I pointed at the screen and then at his pocket. Without faltering in his conversation, he checked his phone and gave me a gentle nod.

  Heaving a sigh of relief, I turned and went to the bathroom. Now that I'd relaxed, I actually had to go. When I returned, Belinda had left the room. All that work and I could have waited two minutes and just told Owen out loud.

  "She's making dinner," said Owen.

  My stomach let out a gurgle. "Good, I'm starving."

  Owen watched me as if pondering something and then did exactly what I'd asked him not to. "So, why don't you want me to talk about your magic with Belinda?"

  I blew out an exasperated breath. "My text message said that you couldn't ask about it, and you agreed."

  "I nodded," he said. "There's a lot that can be said with a nod. Mine was acknowledging receipt of the message, not agreeing to its request." My mouth opened to protest, but he continued. "I won't talk to Belinda about your magic, but you will have to tell me why."