Rise of the Arcanist Series: Books 1 - 6

by Elizabeth Kirke

  “I will… kill you!” the minotaur roared.

  Forget stealth! Dani and I sprinted to the hall; the ground shook and the cavern echoed with the minotaur’s thundering screams of rage. His hooves slammed into the ground behind us, growing closer and closer with each pounding step.

  We reached the door and raced through, bellows echoing behind us as we miraculously reached the room with seven exits.

  “Skata,” Dani groaned, collapsing on the ground.

  “We still have to get out of here,” I said, tugging on his arm.

  He staggered to his feet, wiping away blood from his nose. “God, my head is killing me.” He let out an almost hysterical giggle. “Literally!”

  “Dani!” I gasped in alarm. Yeah, he had a morbid sense of humor, but something about the laugh seemed off.

  “Sorry.” He groaned and rubbed his temples. “I’m… starting to feel kind of out of it.”

  “Then let’s get out of here and get you back in some water.”

  “Which uh… which door?”

  “The one with five stones!” I said, looking around for the first time.

  I expected it to look just like it did before, but it didn’t. One of the doorways was blocked by a pile of sand. I looked around and didn’t see the doorway with three stones on the first step anywhere. That must have been the one that led to the island; the one Alaria had ordered him to seal.

  I spotted the staircase with a bottom step made out of five stones and dragged Dani to it. “Come on!”

  We went up, as fast as he could manage. Then, the stairs stopped and opened into a long, stone corridor. Despite my night vision, it still looked dark.

  “What the…” Dani breathed.

  “This isn’t right,” I gasped. “It’s supposed to be the park!”

  An eerie feeling washed over me. Something was wrong. I realized that I could feel Rak; we were out of the labyrinth, but he was far away… very far away. I turned to go back and my heart skipped a beat. There was a solid stone wall behind us.

  “Dani, the doorway is gone!”

  He cursed.

  We both looked down the corridor, then stiffened as the sound of footsteps began to echo. A shadow appeared on the far wall; someone was coming! If it was a blood caster we were dead.

  He may have been fighting just to stay on his feet, but Dani drew a knife and stepped protectively in front of me. As the footsteps grew louder, he pushed me toward the wall. I drew my wand, ready to fight and put a foot farther behind me to brace myself. I expected to feel the wall, but instead felt a strange, heavy sensation. I turned to look; my foot was in the wall! I leaned back and my leg sank in too.

  “Dani, the wall!”

  He turned to look and his eyes widened. We looked at each other for a moment, then, just before the approaching figure would see us, we grabbed each other and flung ourselves into the wall.

  We nearly stumbled down the stairs, but we were back in the labyrinth! Just to be sure, I tried to sense Rak. Nothing. We rounded a few corners and were back in the room with seven doorways.

  “The minotaur said five stones,” I said, confused.

  I knelt down by the first step to take a closer look while Dani slumped against the wall with a groan. Embarrassment coursed through me; the sand from the blocked doorway had drifted onto the step. This had six stones, not five. My carelessness almost got us killed.

  Suddenly, the room began to shake. Dani forced himself up and moved in front of me again.

  “Dani, you’re hurt!” I started to protest.

  “Trust me on this one,” he said. “You want me first.”

  A rush of water suddenly came gushing down one of the staircases, followed by crashing rocks and sand. I turned and covered my face as the water slammed into us, throwing me against the wall. Dani managed to slow it enough that it didn’t completely overpower us. Luckily, the deluge only lasted for a few seconds; soon, the entire entrance was blocked, leaving us standing waist-deep in slowly receding water.

  “The island,” I murmured. “The ritual site must have collapsed too.”

  Dani reached down and pulled up a handful of water to taste. “Yup,” he said. “This is Caribbean. Thankfully, without blood magic. Give me a second.” He sat down, going completely under for a minute before standing back up. “That’s a bit better already. Now what?”

  “Five stones,” I said. “You can see underwater, right?” I was more concerned about his earlier bout with blindness, but totally butchered the wording.

  He looked at me like I was insane. “No, the inner lid is just for show.”

  “Inner lid?”

  Dani pointed to his eyes. “This one?” His eyelids twitched like he was trying not to blink, but something seemed to drop down over his eyes like a contact lens for a moment. “Which of us has the head injury?”

  “You have two sets of eyelids?!”

  “Yes,” he chuckled. “It’s not the only thing I have two of.” He waited a beat and then added, “Please be sure to tell Tom I said that; I get so few chances to make that joke."

  “Feeling better?” I teased.

  “Actually, yes.”

  Dani walked over to one of the staircases and dropped down. He was up again in a moment. “We have a problem.”

  “What?”

  “Some of the rocks cracked it. It’s impossible to tell how many stones it had before.”

  I heaved a sigh. I hoped, at least, the others made it out. I waited while Dani checked the others.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s one of these two.”

  After a moment of debate, we chose the one on the right and headed up. We rounded just one corner and found a wall of collapsed rocks.

  “Three doorways came down?” Dani said in surprise.

  “Where was the third?” I asked. “Do you think there were three on the island?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “This one is drier than the other two. No sand either.”

  “Guess we try the other doorway,” I said.

  “Let’s hope it’s the right one.”

  We went back down, then into the other one and ascended the seemingly endless spiral staircase.

  “Jen!”

  “Danio!”

  Thomas caught me in a hug as Charlie crashed into Dani.

  A surge of elation from my bond hit me as Rak rejoiced. He was so close I couldn’t believe it.

  We were back.

  Chapter Ten

  Jen

  Even after a week, the novelty of Rak curled up in my lap hadn’t worn off. I pet him absently behind the ears as he purred like a motorboat, radiating contentment that I was back safely. I leaned back in my seat as Thomas, TS, and I drove to Dani and Charlie’s house.

  We took several days to recover and just sort of recharge. All but a few traces of the blood magic had faded; Dani still had a few darker lines scattered across his face and the veins in Charlie’s hand were too dark as well. It was harder to see on Thomas, but I was sure his veins were all still more visible than they should have been.

  The day after we first vanished Jon was able to launch his massive investigation and turned up nothing. We decided the minotaur must have closed the doorway once we stumbled inside, so there would have been nothing for Jon to find. Now that we knew the reason magics were vanishing, he decided not to try and investigate again, not just yet – we still couldn’t trust anyone. Jon was shocked and appalled by our description of Alaria’s abilities but, like us, was at a loss for where to go from here.

  There was no question we had to find her and stop her. Somehow. The first step was to figure out where she had gone, then we could work on a plan to get her. I just hoped, wherever she was, we had temporarily delayed her awful sacrifices.

  Although I couldn’t deny that I could see some of the appeal. Certainly not the part where she was killing people, but the idea of being able to swim like a water elemental or even turn into an animal, assuming that would happen if she sacrificed a shifter, was
admittedly something I had fantasized about before. Sure, I spent a lot more time daydreaming about magic before I found out I was a witch, but I did sometimes envy the abilities of other types of magics.

  My thoughts were interrupted by our arrival at Dani and Charlie’s house. Thomas and I exchanged a smile as he parked. TS got out and we all headed in. Instead of stalking off to hunt like he usually did, Rak stuck close by my side.

  Ember was inside, arranging some familiar piles of paper on the coffee table and I suppressed a sigh. We had put off our investigation for long enough, it was time to get back to our search for Alaria. We were hoping that by going over all of the files again, we’d be able to find something new now that we had seen some blood casters and knew more about the island. I wasn’t hopeful, but we were going to look for Taylor and Burton in the database in the hopes that their files might have other clues that could give us more information. We had already tried to find Alaria with no luck. She either was using a different name or had somehow managed to be deleted from the database entirely, or never entered in the first place. It was a frustrating, albeit not unexpected, dead end.

  Ember had been furious we had left her at MES to find Thomas, but grudgingly came around when we told her the horrors she had been fortunate enough to miss. After Thomas described his experience on the endless beach, she admitted she was glad she had stayed behind. She hadn’t wanted to worry Callie by telling her we were missing, so while Charlie had a few annoyed calls from his sister, she hadn’t had a chance to freak out.

  Shannon heard us arrive and joined us downstairs as we were settling in on the couch. She ended up staying with Ember while we were gone. She also fielded several frantic calls from Rachel, who I was still trying to smooth things over with. Together, Ember and Shannon had worked with Jon to try and figure out where we had ended up. Thanks to Rak they knew I was alive, just incredibly far away.

  I looked at the papers, feeling torn between wanting to hope we’d actually find something and not wanting to get my hopes up, in case it was yet another dead end.

  Charlie joined us and, to my relief, so did Dani; it was the first time I had seen Dani out of the water since we returned. We all made some awkward small talk; it was clear nobody wanted to start yet another review of the files.

  “Your mail is here,” Thomas commented as we procrastinated by taking way too long to decide what we wanted to order from Erin’s.

  “I got it,” Ember said, practically leaping up. She jogged out of the room and was back in a couple of minutes with a huge stack of mail.

  “Um… I may have forgotten about it all week…” she confessed, letting it spill out on the end table by Dani.

  “In fairness, you were only alone for a couple of days,” Dani said. He picked up a flyer and examined it. “It’s all junk mail anyway.”

  Ember held up a bridal magazine. “I think Yia-yia subscribed you to another one.”

  “God help me,” Dani groaned. “Char, burn it.”

  Charlie chuckled and shook his head. “They taste bad. Besides, you know your mother will ask you if you read it.”

  Dani rolled his eyes and reached back toward the pile. I thought he was going to get the magazine, but instead he grabbed an envelope. “Oo, a credit card statement. This is much more interesting.”

  I cast a glance at the files from the database and leaned back, grateful that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to put it off. TS offered to place our lunch order, so we all settled on what we wanted and told him, then he went off to make the call. Mariana arrived and I knew we didn’t have much longer to delay.

  “Hey!” Dani cried. I thought he had just been pretending to read the credit card statement, but he obviously actually was. “Which one of you spent six-hundred dollars on clothes last month?!”

  “It wasn’t me!” Ember squealed instantly.

  “What did you buy?!”

  Ember shrugged. “Just stuff.”

  “Why don’t you have your own credit card yet?” Dani mumbled. “You’ve got a job, get your own.”

  “It has my name on it,” Ember said.

  “Then why am I paying it off?” Dani returned to the statement, muttering and humming under his breath in mock annoyance.

  Charlie started hissing and clicking to Ember in Sadehic. Based on her grin, I suspected he was asking what she bought.

  I laughed weakly at the normal and yet so not normal day. It had been nice to forget it all for a few days, but now it was back to work, facing an even more daunting task. Worse, we still couldn’t risk trusting anyone else with what we knew. Now that we had seen how ruthless Alaria was, there was no question she’d come for us if she knew we had escaped the island.

  “Holy shit!” Dani suddenly gasped.

  “Whatever it is, I didn’t buy it!” Ember said.

  “No, it’s…” Dani half-stood, staring at the credit card statement with wide, churning eyes. “It’s a charge from CVLR…”

  “What?!” Mariana demanded.

  “You’re joking!” gasped TS.

  I could feel my heart pounding and my eyes were drawn to the mass of papers on the table. One of those piles was magics who all had a charge from a place listed as CVLR on their credit cards. Every single one of them was missing and some were dead. Nobody could figure out where or what CVLR was.

  “It was…” Dani sucked in a sharp breath. “It was the day we went into the labyrinth!”

  “How is that possible?” Thomas said. “Where did you go?”

  “How much was it for?” Mariana asked, scrambling for the CVLR pile to compare.

  “Um… $19.28,” Dani said. “And it looks like… oh hell, that’s my card number. Where the hell did I go?!”

  Thomas jumped to his feet. “That’s the year you were born!”

  “Thanks? That sounds creepy in light of all this,” Dani said, gesturing to the stack of CVLR files.

  “That’s what you said,” Thomas said, shooting him a meaningful look.

  “What are…” Dani trailed off. “Oh my god… what the hell was that place called?”

  “What place?” Charlie demanded.

  “We stopped for drinks on the way back from the farm,” Thomas said. “The total was for $19.28.”

  “Cavaliers!” Dani practically shouted. “It was called Cavaliers. And it’s magic owned.”

  “Do you know where it is?” TS asked.

  “Yeah, I could find it again,” Dani said confidently.

  Thomas nodded in agreement.

  “But we don’t know if CVLR, I mean, Cavaliers, is connected to any of the blood casters,” Mariana said.

  “Then, I guess we have to find out,” said Dani.

  Ember sat down and pulled out her laptop. “Let’s get started.”

  With a sudden renewed vigor, we each grabbed a notepad and a stack of files. True, it may not have had anything to do with Alaria, but it was a new lead in one of our frustrating cases. It was something anyway.

  At least, for now, we were all together again and safe. Almost as if he was reading my mind, Thomas caught my eye and flashed me a small smile. I returned it, then picked up my first file and got to work.

  ~~~***~~~

  Magic Conquered

  Rise of the Arcanist

  Book Four

  A More than Magic Serial

  Elizabeth Kirke

  Copyright 2020 Elizabeth Kirke

  Cover by T.M. Franklin

  Editing by Rachael Riches

  Formatting by EK Formatting

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  Chapter One

  Connor

  Considering it was supposed to be a special interest meeting, the night hadn’t been at all interesting so far. In the stool next to me, Fik arched his back in a satisfying-feeling s
tretch, before sitting back down, curling his tail around his legs.

  “Do you want another?” said the wizard behind the bar. “Last call.”

  “Already?” I asked in surprise.

  “Things are getting started soon,” he said.

  “Well, it's about time,” said an impatient voice. A vampire woman sat down in the stool on my other side. Her nostrils flared in the direction of my coffee as the bartender slid it across the counter to me, followed by a bowl of cream for Fik and my bill, the silly little musketeer logo at the top of the paper felt really out of place when I knew why I was here.

  “Let me get one of those,” the vampire woman said. “How many shots of blood did you get?”

  “Three,” I told her.

  She shot me a look that was part flirtatious, part challenging, then smiled at the bartender. “I'll have four. Olivia,” she added, extending a hand to me.

  “Connor.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Olivia looked around and after a moment commented, “I don't know about you, but I was expecting a lot less humans.”

  I nodded; I had been expecting that as well, seeing as the restaurant was hosting a group of like-minded non-humans this evening who were feeling dissatisfied with the way witches and wizards ran things. I glanced over at the wizard behind the bar. It was interesting that he seemed to have an idea that something was going on here, but he couldn’t have known what we were meeting about. Surely he wouldn’t have been content working here, knowing the bar was hosting people who didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Truth be told, I didn’t personally feel that slighted by humans. I did get the occasional side-eye for being a vampire, but it didn’t bother me that much; I was more interested in the relaxed feeding laws and hunting games that this group promised. I didn’t feed without permission and I stayed registered with MES, but it would have been nice to not stress about it so much. I also couldn’t deny the idea of getting to hunt like vampires were meant to was somewhat appealing.