Hidden Magic Trilogy Box Set

by Jayne Hawke

  He burst into a brilliant grin.

  “Oh, Kit, it’s amazing. My mentors, Jack and Ruth, are just incredible. The things they can do with alchemy! I haven’t done much practical stuff yet, but I’ve seen some of their work. Did you know that they were the ones who captured the very first youth potion? And Ethan let them keep the rights to it! He didn’t make a penny off it. He’s a seriously cool guy. I think I want to specialise in offensive alchemy, though, the stuff that can help keep you safe.”

  “You’re my baby brother. I’m supposed to keep you safe,” I said.

  He wrinkled his nose.

  “You’re out there fighting with rogues and assassins. I want to help.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” I said.

  And I meant it.

  “You should get a shower. We can talk about it more when you’re clean.”

  “Are you saying you don’t like the stench of whatever-this-is?” I said with a laugh.

  “Can anyone like that?”

  He had a point. The smell of rotting meat, putrefying cheese, and a hefty dose of ammonia was enough to get to anyone.

  As I stood under the hot water, I tried to piece together everything we knew and everything we were missing. Thus far, the victims had been fae and completely drained of blood. The highborn fae had seemed as though it was a hit for some incredibly potent blood. The mongrel’s blood wouldn’t have had that much magic, though. At best, they were a half-breed, but even then the fae had developed ways to inhibit half-breeds’ magic. They hated impure fae. There were even those that rallied against the fae mixes, those who were the offspring of puka and a sidhe or what have you.

  I dried my hair, relieved to see that I looked normal and smelled like violets. We were missing something big here. The mongrel could have been convenient, but there hadn’t been any other convenient murders with that M.O.

  The murderer clearly didn’t just like easy kills, given the difficulty of the first one. The mongrel wouldn’t have had much of anything to offer. Maybe they just pissed the murderer off and so the murderer took the blood because they could. That put us back to them being an enemy of the highborn fae. The list was agonising long, from fellow highborn fae through to witches and god touched who wanted to remove fae from the earth plane.

  Groaning, I knew this meant that I’d be spending my afternoon researching and digging. Maybe there was some of that wonderful dark chocolate left to make it a little easier.

  SIXTEEN

  I couldn’t get the idea of Mom’s grimoire out of my head. She must have had one somewhere. There was a whole life that she’d hidden from me. I was still coming to terms with that. When I really thought back to my childhood with her, I realised that she hadn’t worked normal hours. Sometimes, she hadn’t come home until the early hours of the morning. Of course, I was a little kid, I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.

  There had to be somewhere that she would hide the grimoire, and a reason my father kept that all hidden from me. Was he scared of what I’d become? We hadn’t done anything with Mom and Dad’s room. It remained bare, waiting for them. I hadn’t stepped foot in there in a couple of years. I needed to, though. I had to see if there was any trace of Mom’s grimoire, of her secret life.

  She was a blood witch; what if she was tied into this whole blood-draining thing? I mentally steeled myself and headed up the stairs. The door was so innocuous. It was just a plain door like mine and Matt’s. Yet my heart hammered against my ribs and my throat went dry when I reached out to the handle. It felt as though I was violating their privacy, but the time had come. I needed answers.

  Exhaling slowly, I opened the door. The room inside made my chest ache. I remembered scrambling onto that bed and cuddling with mom on rainy Saturday mornings. We’d watch the cartoons together while Dad made us breakfast in bed. Now it lay barren and silent. It felt as though a grey film lay over everything. The bed was nothing but a bare mattress on a simple bed frame now. The simple white linen with little blue flowers along the edges that Mom had loved so much was long gone.

  Stepping through the doorway took effort. Once I was inside, something clicked within me. I needed to do this. Walking across the small space, I began with the chest of drawers that sat next to the bed. It had been covered in a beautiful baby-blue cloth once. Now it looked almost ghostly where the sunlight had bleached the pale wood. I opened the top drawer, unsure what I expected to see in there. A note. The grimoire. Some painful memory.

  It was empty. There was nothing but a thin layer of dust. I ran my hand over the smooth wood to check for a false bottom or compartment and found nothing. The same was true of the two drawers below it.

  I couldn’t shake off the band around my ribs making my breathing short, or the weight in my limbs as I tried to be cold and logical about everything. The wardrobe was next. We had donated all of their clothes to a local charity once we knew they weren’t coming home. We had waited a long, agonising year before I had made that journey. It had taken everything I had to stop the tears from falling as I handed over the bag of clothes.

  Once again, I checked for false compartments and false bottoms. There was nothing. Not even a thread of magic to give me some idea about Mom’s own magic.

  I moved back to the bed and dropped onto my stomach so I could search under there. It was a tight squeeze, but I made it. I sneezed thanks to the dust under there, but I wasn’t finding anything. I was ready to crawl back out when I spotted a handwritten note with a faded address on it.

  The handwriting was Mom’s. I recognised the elegant looping script. The address was near the river and said ‘perfect!’ beneath it. My hand trembled as I read it again and again. It was the very last piece of her that I had. That address could hold the secret life she’d hidden for so long.

  Did I really want to know what lay there?

  I had tucked the slip of paper into my pocket. It had felt as though it was burning through my jeans while I tried to focus on digging into the fae. My mind kept skipping back to possibilities. She was a blood witch. She could have been some awful being that tortured people. I remembered the dealer that had the decaying bodies in his bathroom. What if I found something like that, or worse, at Mom’s address?

  Of course, there was a good chance that the address would be taken by someone else now. There hadn’t been anyone to pay rent or maintain the place in years. I didn’t know if that would be better or worse, though.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asked as he put his tome on alchemy down.

  “I went looking for Mom’s grimoire. I found an address,” I said.

  “Are you going to check it out?”

  “I think so? I don’t know yet.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I handed him the slip of paper.

  “It’s down by the river. One of the bigger places, I think.”

  “What if she wasn’t the amazing, warm woman I thought she was?” I asked softly.

  “She’ll always be your Mom. The way you and your Dad talked about her tells me she was amazing no matter what her magic was like,” Matt said with a gentle smile.

  “I don’t want to ruin my memories of her. They’re all I have left.”

  “When you’re ready, I’ll go with you. You’re not in this alone.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I tossed and turned again. I woke up hoping that Ethan was going to bring another one of those magically enhanced coffees. To my surprise, the sound of cooking was coming from the kitchen. It was still firmly dark, and Matt wasn’t an early riser if he could help it.

  I padded down the stairs in my favourite old hoodie that was soft from years of wear and my least flattering pyjama bottoms.

  “You’re up early,” I said blearily as I walked into the living room.

  Frowning, I noticed that the man standing at the stove cooking pancakes had blond hair. I grabbed the closest thing to hand, a frying pan near the sink. The elf turned around and greeted me with a brilliant smile.

  “I wa
sn’t sure if you’d be up in time,” he said.

  I swung the frying pan at his head. The cursed assassin was in my kitchen cooking pancakes as though we’d known each other our entire lives. He ducked and frowned at me.

  “The pancakes are almost finished. You are hungry, aren’t you?”, he said as he side-stepped and ducked beneath my next swing.

  “What are you doing in my kitchen?” I snarled.

  “Making pancakes,” he said gesturing at the pancakes.

  “Why?”

  “Everyone likes pancakes.”

  “You’re an assassin.”

  “Why can’t assassins like pancakes?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. It was far too early, I hadn’t had enough sleep, and there was an assassin making pancakes in my kitchen.

  The elf went back to the stove and served the pancakes on a plate with lashings of maple syrup.

  I glared at them. There wasn’t any magic in them, but who knew how many poisons he’d slipped in there?

  “I don’t poison people. It’s undignified.” He sat down opposite me. “Anyway, if I was going to kill you this morning I’d have done it by now.”

  The pancakes did smell amazing. They were perfectly golden, and the syrup was drowning them. I tentatively took a bite. They melted on my tongue in a pool of maple syrup and fluffy vanilla. Damn him.

  “So, why are you here?” I demanded.

  He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms.

  “You’re an oddity. I wanted to explore your life a little more.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “You broke into my home...”

  “You really should work on that.”

  I gripped the fork really tight and debated if I was quick enough to stab him in the eye.

  He leaned forward with a smirk, daring me to try.

  I lunged forward, but he’d already ducked away before I got anywhere near him. Cursed elf.

  “Is that how you thank everyone who cooks you breakfast? I can see why you don’t have any company.”

  “Kit?” Matt asked from the doorway.

  I glared at the elf. If he so much as looked at Matt funny, I was going to rip him apart at the molecular level.

  “I thought you were with Ethan...?”

  “I... that’s, well, yes, I guess I am. This is some asshole elf who broke in here to make pancakes,” I said.

  “Why would you do that?” Matt asked the elf.

  The elf grinned.

  “It’s fun.”

  “You have a really weird idea of fun,” Matt grumbled.

  Wakefulness slowly spread across Matt’s face. The half-lidded eyes slowly opened, and his mouth puckered into a deep scowl.

  “Are you the elf that spied on Kit while she was sleeping?”

  “Are you really going to make out that I’m the bad guy when she threw a book at me?” the elf asked in a wounded tone.

  “How am I possibly the bad guy in that situation?” I demanded.

  “You threw a book at me... and then you tried to hit me with a frying pan and stab me with a fork. You really need to work on that.”

  I threw myself across the table with plans of wrapping my hands around his throat. Matt had his phone in his hand, I hoped to ring someone and not just capture the moment that I landed in a tangle of limbs on the floor where the elf had been seconds previously.

  My magic began bubbling up. I could feel the sparks in his blood. It sang to me with a stunning chorus of notes. If I could get a little of that, I’d be unstoppable. The elf frowned at me.

  “Now that really is a step too far.”

  Suddenly a pair of short swords were in his hands and he had me pinned against the wall. I drove my knee into his lower abdomen and called on my war magic. Shock spread across his beautiful face when I pinned him by his throat.

  “I do like it rough...” he purred.

  I jerked away.

  “What is wrong with you!?” I demanded.

  “You’re the one that keeps trying to hurt me.”

  “You’re the assassin!”

  “And have I hurt or killed you?”

  “Why haven’t you done that?”

  He gave a small shrug.

  “I’m weighing up my options.”

  “What options?”

  A squeal of tyres came from outside. Ethan and Dean ran into the kitchen with murderous expressions on their faces. Dean’s teeth were bared, and his dark amber eyes looked more canine than human. Ethan held a broad knife in his hand and advanced on the elf with careful strides.

  The elf sighed.

  “Why are you all so melodramatic?”

  EIGHTEEN

  “You’ll note that I haven’t touched your girlfriend,” the elf said pointedly to Ethan.

  “Why are you here? And don’t say you wanted to make pancakes,” Ethan snarled.

  The elf began to grin.

  “You’re one of the Morrigan’s sons... well now, I didn’t expect to get two for one this morning.”

  The elf backed up against the stove as Ethan took another step closer with his knife aimed at the elf’s throat.

  “My name is Sin. I came here with a proposition.”

  “Sin? Seriously...?” Dean said incredulously.

  Sin narrowed his eyes at Dean.

  “And I assume your name is far superior. Dog.”

  Dean bared his sharp hound teeth at Sin.

  “What proposition?” Ethan growled.

  “Well... I knew that Kit here is powerful in her own right. Therefore, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe she’d be able to contest my lord’s bond over me.”

  Ethan and Dean laughed. Cold harsh laughs.

  “You thought the woman you were sent to kill would want to own you?” Ethan said.

  “I had believed that she might be willing to make a deal,” Sin said coolly.

  “Why would I do that?” I asked.

  Sin smirked at me.

  “Everyone would be better with a talented assassin on their side.”

  “You’re insane,” I said.

  This elf was completely unlike anything I’d been expecting. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to deal with him, or if this was some weird game before he tried to kill us.

  “Now I’m here, I believe the son of the Morrigan is in a far better place to challenge my lord,” Sin said to Ethan.

  “Because it would be such a good idea to have an elf bound to me,” Ethan said drily.

  Sin glanced past the cu sith and gave a little wave.

  “That’s my cue to leave. I left you with a gift, some fun to remember this morning by,” he said before he darted out of the front door.

  His ‘gift’ turned out to be a pack of dobhar chu – gigantic river otter-canine hybrids also known as king otters – with a spriggan heading up the little outfit. I cursed myself for killing the hag that had probably been on spriggan duty to prevent just such an outcome and resolved to be more conscientious about the long-term consequences of my choices.

  I thought over everything I knew about spriggans, and I was almost sure their only use in the world was being a nuisance and guarding cairns, and the threats to big piles of rocks in modern Yorkshire was hopefully not so great that the local police couldn’t handle it. The dobhar chu were probably out of my hands either way. Ethan had turned into his dog form, perhaps an inch shorter than them at the shoulder but radiating death energy that seemed to devour the visible light like a sea of tiny black holes. I counted five of them and knew they’d be dead in five minutes or less.

  The spriggan, who until that moment had been riding one of his charges like an adorably monstrous hobby horse, leapt free of the melee as dog met water dog jaw to jaw. He did a little front flip in the air, and by the time he landed he’d gained about four feet of height and was still growing.

  Knowing this wasn’t going to get any easier the bigger he got, I put my weight behind a shoulder check that was only partially successful. He did go down
on his back, his balance still off as he grew, but his barklike skin was as hard as granite. That bruise was going to hurt more than anything Sin – still happily perched on a nearby fence as his little show played out – had managed to land.

  I reached into the magic hat that was my mercurial and only moderately cooperative war magic and tried to bring out the arm blades I was still resolute on getting one way or another. What I got, naturally, was a pair of medieval-looking one-handed war hammers, their heads nothing more than a couple pounds of squared-off pounded metal with a flat on one side and a spike on the other.

  They would do. I was starting to enjoy the variety. The spriggan had returned to his feet, nimble even at eight feet tall now that his size had stabilized. His huge green eyes stared into mine, more bemused curiosity than anger or fear. I swished my hammers around in the air, testing their weight and balance. I wondered what he’d been told about this job, warming to him even as I prepared to crack him open. I silently hoped that he would grow back or something as his gnarled, branch-like hand swept down at me.

  I sidestepped to my right and drove a hard, thudding hammer blow into the bark on the right side of what sufficed for his head, a big, irregular hunk of hardwood that looked like it had tried to grow around something big but been taken away before it could finish. I felt the vibration down the handle of the hammer and had a strong feeling my hands were going to suffer at least as much as the spriggan.

  Spinning the hammer in my right hand to be spike out, I raised the left to head height, prepared to punish the next hand that tried to swing down at me. Not one to oblige a lady, his next strike was flat-handed thrust with sharp-looking fingers fully extended.

  He was faster than he looked, but I was faster still. I made a quick, firm strike with the right hammer and drove the spike through his arm. The wood started to crack quickly, and I knew I only had him for a second or less. Dragging the arm towards me and out past my right side, I swung the opposite weapon down onto a weak-looking spot in the irregular wood of his arm and heard it crack as the weapon passed clean through with momentum to spare, leaving him with... well, a stump.