Steel for 5 (Mags & Nats Book 3)

by Stephanie Fazio

  Ma had been cooking for two days straight in preparation of the feast, and she’d been ordering the rest of us around like a drill sergeant. I had done so many dishes in the last two days, I’d needed to turn my arms titanium before my skin actually fell off.

  “What’s your rush, cariño?” Diego asked me, chuckling as I pulled on the off-the-shoulders sweater dress Yutika had made me for tonight.

  “We’re half an hour late.” I scowled at him. “Everyone’s totally going to know what we were up to.”

  “They will with that hairdo,” he replied, grinning as he helped smooth out my bed hair.

  “This is all your fault,” I grumbled as we hurried downstairs hand-in-hand. “I’m implementing a rule that you can’t walk around shirtless within an hour of any important engagements.”

  “Are you saying you wouldn’t have mauled me if I’d been fully clothed?” he asked, clearly missing the gravity of the whole situation.

  “I did not maul you,” I hissed as we cut through the empty house and headed for the backyard.

  I kind of did.

  Diego wrapped an arm around my waist as we walked through the open French doors.

  “Ohmygod,” I breathed as I took in the sight before us.

  “Wow,” Diego said.

  Yutika and A.J. hadn’t let anyone into the backyard for the last day-and-a-half, and now I knew why. The place had been transformed.

  A rainbow-shaped tangle of branches hung over the longest table I’d ever seen. Pink roses and white lights were interwoven through the branches. Candles and small bouquets of roses lined the center of the table, which was covered with so much food there was barely room for the plates. Instead of chairs, there were long, wooden benches.

  Fortunately, everyone was in the process of sitting down and didn’t notice Diego’s and my late entrance.

  It was a cold, clear night, and so Yutika had set up heat lamps around the table. She’d also created tiny fires in glass jars that lined the table as added centerpieces. Paper lanterns hung from the large trees in the yard, and more white lights were artfully draped over the bushes. It was like I’d stepped into some kind of fairy world.

  Diego and I grabbed seats with the rest of the Seven in the middle of the table.

  “Where have you two been?” Yutika asked, waggling her eyebrows at me.

  “Shh,” I ordered her, and then glared at Diego, who was looking inordinately pleased with himself.

  The two of them were silently conspiring to say something that was bound to make me blush, when Michael tapped Yutika on the shoulder. He pressed a sealed envelope into her hands, letting his fingertips linger as they trailed over hers.

  Yutika slipped away from the table, holding the envelope to her chest. The next time I glanced around for Michael, I noticed he had disappeared, too.

  Somewhere down the table, I heard my dad’s deep-belly laugh that was coming out more and more now that our family was back together. Brent had Lilly on his knee and his arm around Sarah’s shoulders. He lifted his wine glass to me in a toast, grinning from ear to ear.

  The crew team was making enough noise for at least three times their number. Whatever they were saying had Kaira’s cousins doubled over in laughter and Grandma Tashi scowling.

  A.J. and Sir Zachary were holding court across from me. They were wearing matching tuxedos with red bowties.

  Smith sat on my other side, grumbling about all the security threats that came with inviting so many people for dinner.

  “I don’t think anyone here is a threat,” I told him, reaching over to yank a plate of turkey out of Sir Zachary’s reach before he dove in.

  “Minus the fifty hellions,” Smith muttered, nodding his head in the direction of the Super Mags.

  As if on cue, one of the Super Mags made all the nearby kids’ hair stick straight up in the air with his electricity magic. The little girl sitting next to him began to cry when she couldn’t flatten her hair back down.

  Diego leaned back on the bench and made eye contact with the perpetrator.

  “Hey Simon,” Diego called out to the Super Mag, who immediately released his magical hold over his friends’ hair. “What did I tell you?”

  “Don’t be a pendejo,” the Super Mag replied, sinking glumly back into his seat.

  “Are you serious?” I gave Diego an incredulous look.

  “What?” he replied.

  The rest of the Seven just snickered.

  The Super Mags had taken to Diego more easily than I would have guessed. It turned out that none of them had liked the four kids whose magic Diego had stolen. In fact, rumor had it the four kids were bullies with serious anger management issues. The rest of the Super Mags had been secretly relieved when their magic was gone. And Emory had been more than happy to cede his position as the Super Mag leader to Diego. With an actual adult to look up to who was one of them, the Super Mag kids had fallen into line mostly without protest.

  Michael and Yutika rejoined our group. They kept glancing at each other, and I even caught a few hesitant smiles being exchanged.

  “Is everyone here?” Graysen asked, looking around.

  “Yuppers,” A.J. replied. “Time to get this party started!”

  “Not so fast,” Graysen said, exchanging a look with Kaira. “Kaira and I have an announcement to make.”

  “Why do there always have to be boring speeches,” Desiree complained, staring morosely into her glass of sparkling grape juice.

  Cora elbowed her in the ribs. “Don’t be a pendejo,” she whispered.

  Graysen chuckled. “Well then, I guess we’d better keep it short.” His turquoise eyes gleamed in the candlelight as he turned to Kaira. “Tell ’em, babe.”

  Kaira’s entire face lit up. She laced her fingers through Graysen’s before announcing, “We’re pregnant!”

  For several seconds, we stared dumbly at her as those words sank in. And then the table erupted.

  Kaira and Graysen were mobbed. There were tears, laughter, and shouts of joy. Ma was crying as she hugged the two of them at the same time.

  Sir Zachary zoomed around, leaping in and out of various people’s arms. I noticed a leg of turkey disappear from the table during the confusion.

  “Twins,” Oliver said, amid the ruckus. “A boy and a girl, if I’m not mistaken.”

  A worry that had been gnawing at the back of my mind evaporated. Ever since the night Oliver pulled Kaira aside to talk to her, I’d noticed Graysen being even more protective.

  Now, it all made sense.

  A.J. was jumping up and down, shouting, “I’m gonna be an uncle!”

  As soon as their family moved aside, the 7.5 gathered together into a giant group hug. While I hung onto Kaira with one arm and A.J. with the other, I looked over at Diego. His gaze was already locked on me.

  I stepped back from Kaira, opening up a space in silent invitation.

  Diego swung his legs around the bench and came to join our group. He leaned in to kiss me before taking his place between Kaira and me, wrapping an arm around each of us.

  Our circle was whole and complete. And so was I.

  THE END

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  Thank you for reading my book. Because reviews are so important for a book to be successful, please consider leaving a brief review if you enjoyed Steel for 5. Many thanks!

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  OF

  The Prince’s Chosen

  StephanieFazio.com

  PROLOGUE

  18 YEARS EARLIER

  Their “little miracle,” as they had taken to calling her, was only a day old.

  They swaddled her, folding and tucking the pink blanket around her just like the nurse had shown them. The setting Texas sun bathed their fields in fiery oranges and golds, and there seemed to be no better time to give their baby a tour of the far
m.

  The man and his wife stepped out onto the porch. He carried the pink bundle like she was made out of glass and might break. The rich brown of his wife’s hair stirred in the breeze as she smoothed the blankets. They sat in the wicker rocking chairs and gazed out over the cattle grazing peacefully.

  “Welcome to paradise, little one,” the man said.

  Looking down at his perfect baby girl, his little miracle, the man felt happiness in a way he never had before.

  His wife hummed in contentment, echoing his satisfaction.

  His eyes were still on the baby when he felt a change around them. The cows went still, some of their heads still lowered to the grass. The wind stopped rustling the tall weeds that he hadn’t gotten around to mowing. The air felt heavy, the way it did before a storm broke. It was as if the land around them had inhaled in preparation of a great breath. Or a scream.

  And then the sky tore open.

  There was no other way to describe it. There was a terrible ripping sound, like the golden-hued sky was pulled apart at its seams. It was like someone had taken a carving knife and sliced a line from the top of the sky down to the bottom. The grass shriveled and died in the place where the tear met the earth. And from the torn sky came…people….

  Lots of them.

  They stumbled out of nowhere and onto the front lawn. Some were moaning, others crying.

  His wife grabbed his arm as she uttered a strangled shriek. “What in the—?”

  “I—I don’t know,” the man replied, clutching the pink bundle tighter to his chest.

  Some part of the man on the porch registered the inhuman beauty of these newcomers, with their rich copper skin and long, black hair. Even blood and flames couldn’t hide the loveliness that radiated from these people.

  A boy came through the tear, limping and clutching his side. At first glance, he seemed no older than sixteen. But he seemed to age before the couple’s eyes. He grew haggard and stooped. With a groan, the boy, who was now an old man, fell to the ground. His heaving chest stilled. And then, he disappeared in a puff of blue smoke.

  The man blinked. Had that boy really just disappeared?

  He looked at his wife. His own incomprehension and fear were reflected in her too-wide eyes.

  A young woman fell to the ground where the boy had been moments before. She was weeping. The man could hear her choked, agonized sobs from here. There was no one to comfort her. Everyone else on the scorched ground was too full of their own suffering to notice hers.

  The man’s throat burned in sympathy for these strangers’ pain. He stood, meaning to go down and help. But he couldn’t make his feet move. He was just a simple cattle farmer, and this was…Armageddon?

  The mayhem reached a fever pitch as a whole group of the Others fell through the tear in the sky. Even amid their obvious terror, they surrounded two people at their center, protecting them from whatever horrors they were all fleeing.

  The ones being protected both wore crowns on their heads. Almost as soon as they had appeared, they ran back through the gathering crowd to the seam in the sky. They reached back through the bottom part of the tear, their arms and legs disappearing from view as though they were crossing some invisible boundary. They seemed to be pulling at something on the other side of the barrier.

  The queen—for there was no doubt that was who she was—released a cry as her hand found whatever she had been searching for. She was pulling something through the tear, or at least, she was trying to. There was some force on the other side of the invisible barrier that was fighting her. The king wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and gave her a great tug.

  They tumbled back onto the scorched grass. A wailing baby was now clutched in the queen’s arms.

  The man on the porch gripped his own baby tighter at the sight of the infant in the queen’s arms, who was covered in blood. Everyone on the porch and on the ground seemed to have the same realization at the same moment. The baby’s left arm was gone…torn off at the shoulder.

  The queen was screaming. The king was trying to staunch the wound with clumsy hands.

  “What’s that?” the man’s wife gasped, pointing to something wiggling around in the tall weeds on the edge of the mayhem.

  The man on the porch felt his muscles unfreeze as he awoke from his stupor. He thrust his daughter into his wife’s arms.

  “Call 911!” he shouted to his wife.

  The people who were crying and bleeding and putting out fires didn’t even notice the man who had run down the porch stairs to help.

  He turned back at the sound of his wife’s shout. His wife was cradling their daughter in one arm and pointing up with the other. The man stopped.

  The two halves of the sky were peeling away. He shaded his eyes as a ball of blue fire blazed through the tear.

  It moved at impossible speed, and it was heading straight for the porch.

  CHAPTER 1

  ADDY

  Addy climbed onto the tractor. The sun was setting behind the young green stalks of sweet corn, making their color look a little brighter and healthier than usual. The breeze stirred her long hair and surrounded her with the smell of fresh earth and unripe corn. She turned the key, feeling the familiar rumble of the tractor’s engine beneath her, and pressed the throttle. She maneuvered the Benz—the name Addy had made up for the old tractor when she was a kid, thinking herself terribly clever for coming up with the ironic name—onto the path carved from years of tracing this same route around their property.

  By the time Addy finished surveying all two-hundred acres of corn fields, the Benz was groaning and shuddering in protest. It sounded like the fan belt was going again. Addy made a mental note to ask Fred to take a look at it the next time she saw him.

  Fred was the dairy farmer’s son from next door, if you could call five miles of separation next door, and had been her best friend since she was three. He could fix anything in half the time as the mechanic whose shop was forty-five minutes away. Plus, he never charged them, claiming there was a “Deerborn discount” that applied for any of her family’s repairs.

  The Benz creaked into the shed, and Addy killed the engine. She hauled fresh water to their one old cow, Ginny, who was the only reminder of her parents’ past life as cattle ranchers in the middle-of-nowhere Texas. Addy had been born in Texas, but she didn’t remember it because her parents had moved to a corn farm in the middle-of-nowhere upstate New York soon after. Her only memories were of corn fields in the summer and snow in the winter. Their town was called Nowell, and had a population of 15,000. When she said the name, she pronounced it so it sounded like Nowhere, New York.

  She shooed Cluckers Numbers 1-5 into their henhouse. All she got in return for saving them from the fox that had been prowling around lately was a mouthful of feathers and a shrill protest from Cluckers Number 4.

  Addy washed her hands and face in the mudroom sink. She kicked off her muddy boots and shed her windbreaker. Even though it was June, it had been an unseasonably cool week. It had her dad in a tizzy over the corn.

  “Everything alright with the corn?” her mom called out. She was peering into the oven, appraising the pot roast inside.

  “Yes, everything’s fine,” Addy replied. “Not a stalk out of place.”

  There never was. Everything was always fine…because nothing ever happened. It made her want to set something on fire or blow something up, just to see people’s reactions. But she didn’t think her parents would accept impending death by boredom as a valid excuse for vandalism.

  Addy’s mom poked a fork into an apple pie on the counter. The smell of cinnamon wafted across the kitchen.

  “Addy!”

  Lucy, the youngest of Addy’s four sisters, came skidding across the linoleum floor of the kitchen in her fuzzy socks. Even though Addy had only been gone for a few hours, Lucy acted like they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. Grinning down at her baby sister, Addy picked her up and spun her around in a circle.

  “Wheeee
e!” Lucy squealed as she waved her short legs in the air.

  “Be careful with Baby Lucy,” Addy’s mom said as she put a casserole dish full of cheesy potatoes into the oven.

  At three years of age, Lucy wasn’t a baby anymore, but everyone still called her Baby Lucy anyway. Lucy didn’t seem to mind.

  Addy put her sister down. When her mom turned back to the oven, Addy reached across the counter and broke off a flaky piece of pie crust.

  “Adelyne Deerborn!” her mom scolded when she saw the evidence of Addy’s theft.

  “Wha’?” Addy gave her mom an innocent look as the cinnamon and sugar melted on her tongue.

  When her mom turned back to the oven, Aunt Meredith, who was visiting from Texas, gave Addy an ahem. Addy stole another piece of pie crust and tossed it to Aunt Meredith. Her aunt caught it and stuffed it in her mouth just before Addy’s mom turned back around. Her mom frowned at Aunt Meredith.

  “You’re as bad as the girls,” her mom tsked.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Aunt Meredith winked at Addy.

  Aunt Meredith’s face was tan and a bit leathery from so much time spent outside. Even when she wasn’t on the farm, she wore her cowboy boots and cowboy hat and said ya’ll.

  Before she had become a cattle rancher, Aunt Meredith had been a volunteer in the Peace Corps. Addy loved hearing about all the places she’d gone and the people she’d met. Aside from being born in Texas, which didn’t count since she didn’t remember it, Addy had never traveled farther than a few towns over. When she laid in bed at night, she tried to imagine what it would be like to travel the world like Aunt Meredith had before she retired to the ranch.

  Addy wanted to see everything, go everywhere. It was some twist of irony that she’d been born into a family whose big yearly outing was to the mall an hour-and-a-half away.

  The rest of Addy’s sisters came through the swinging door to the kitchen in a tornado of laughter and good-natured arguing that was the constant background noise in the farmhouse.