Forgotten Magic

by Jayne Hawke

  “Part of my magic manifests with the ability to see beyond all glamours, illusions, and so on. That means that I can see the full extent of all magic.”

  “Well, that does sound quite useful,” I said drily.

  He needed to get on and start the real blackmail. This charade was boring me.

  “Your magic is incredibly complicated. I can see so many layers, and so few explanations for them.”

  “You’re clearly just not as well read on witch magic as you seem to believe you are,” I said sweetly.

  “I’m sure that’s at least part of it, you’re right, of course.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and I glanced over wishing the food would hurry up. Every gold-edged plate that passed by drew my attention, and I struggled not to stare at them to avoid looking at him.

  “I must admit that I find it interesting that the rumours were about you. Out of all the witches in the city, you were the one that people became most curious about. Why do you think that is?”

  I laughed.

  “Because I’m everything they wish they were.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “That makes sense. Of course, it’s all just rumour and conjecture. Still, it’s interesting to look at these things. Sometimes the truth is hiding right under our noses.”

  Food arrived, giving me an excuse to not talk for a little bit. It was over-priced, the flavours weren’t as well balanced as they should have been, but I’d eaten worse and it gave me a moment to think. He’d clearly been digging, and he had his suspicions. He was going to continue digging and hold whatever he found over my head. My temptation was to silence him permanently, but that would only lead to more questions.

  “Finfolk are very rare, and I’m sure you’re aware that a finfolk breeding with a sidhe is unheard of,” James said.

  “I would have thought it ridiculous, had I not felt the magic for myself.”

  “You think this finfolk is responsible for the thefts?”

  I had to give him something. He was never going to give me what I needed if I kept dodging his questions.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That is interesting. You’ll have to give me a piece of their magic once you’ve caught them.”

  There was no question there. It was a demand for payment.

  “I’ll certainly try, you know I can’t promise.”

  He nodded, unsatisfied.

  “Do be careful, Lily. Whoever is looking into that Inverness coven is talented. They won’t stop until they have whatever it is they’re seeking.”

  I smiled and pushed my plate away, having eaten all that I could stomach, and he continued in a tone that was almost but not quite conciliatory.

  “Don’t worry yourself, I have no connection. I’m merely curious as to why someone would start putting so much work into it all now.”

  “Of course. Curiosity is something that should be encouraged. It is, after all, how we’re so good at what we do.”

  I smiled indulgently.

  “If I find anything on your finfolk, I’ll let you know. Next time, we’ll do dinner... at my place,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I stood up.

  “Thank you, I look forward to it.”

  There wasn’t a chance in Hel that I was going to step foot near his place or engage in an exchange like that again. I was going to have to seriously consider removing him from my contacts list. Or all the contact lists. He was proving to be a bigger risk than he was worth.

  “Give Elijah my best. Oh, and Lily, what was your birth name?”

  I leaned in and kissed his cheek.

  “You know you have to earn information like that sweetheart,” I whispered in his ear.

  He gripped my wrist in a vice-like grip.

  “Be careful, Amelia, not everyone will be willing to walk away from a story like yours,” he whispered back.

  Forty-Nine

  “He knows,” I said.

  Elijah strode over to me from his desk. Liam had earbuds in and hadn’t noticed I’d entered the office; the others were out in the city somewhere. I paced around Elijah’s desk.

  “Who knows what?”

  “James. He knows I’m the surviving witch from the Inverness coven.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I looked at him.

  “He called me Amelia.”

  How could this have happened? I’d been so careful. I knew that James wasn’t the one who’d been sending me notes. He wouldn’t be able to fake the witch magic. No, two people knew.

  Elijah growled.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Not explicitly. He told me to be careful, but he’s a fae. He’ll be using this as leverage for a deal at a later date.”

  “Jess is very good at what she does. No one will be able to tie it back to you.”

  I sat down on the seat opposite Elijah’s desk.

  “No. It’ll be too obvious, and he’s the type to have a security plan in place. If he’s taken out a few hours after he meets with me, there’ll be consequences,” I said wearily.

  Elijah scooped me into his arms and sat down with me in his lap. He held me gently.

  “What do you need from me?”

  I sighed and leaned my head against his shoulder.

  “I need the stalker found and killed. Then I need the other creep to meet the same painful end.”

  The number of enemies was stacking up an alarming rate. My carefully constructed life was at risk of crumbling around me.

  “We know the stalker is at least half finfolk. He won’t be able to hide from us for long now. As for the other one, Liam’s doing his best.”

  The storm was building around us, I could feel it. Things were going to come to a head soon, and I just had to hope that the only people who died were the bad guys.

  Castor and I moved in with the pack properly. We hadn’t discussed if it was a long-term thing, but everyone felt better with us all under one roof. Elijah had given me the room next to his. I was growing protective over the pack, and the closer we got to this stalker situation the more danger they were in. That, and I enjoyed seeing how much happier Castor was for spending time with his own kind.

  “Remember, you can just walk into my room at any time,” Elijah said.

  “I fail to see why you don’t just stay with him,” Castor said from his own room opposite mine.

  He’d taken the news about James far better than I’d expected. I was beginning to think that the goddess was whispering things to him far more regularly than I’d realised. He had the certainty of a plan unfolding, and I wasn’t allowed to know anything about it.

  I chose not to dignify his comment with a response. The room was beautifully done with a comfortable king-sized bed and a view out into the forest. I should have felt safer with the pack around me, but I was more anxious. If the stalker decided to make a move, then the pack was in more danger.

  The security around the pack house was the best on the market. I’d added in some of my own fire and earth magic to make myself feel better. If anyone managed to get into the house with any ill intent, they’d find themselves rooted to the floor and slowly burnt to death. It was messy and agonising, which seemed fitting.

  Closing my door, I walked to the centre of the expanse of open space at the end of the bed. Slowing my breathing, I closed my eyes and began running through my katas. I needed to be prepared for anything. After half an hour of katas, I was calm enough to move on to my shadow magic. I kept it to the familiar things, pulling pieces of shadow from the shadow plane and pushing them into blades. They were quite happy to wander around the new space as a reward for their compliance before I returned them whence they came.

  Exhaustion had finally settled in well enough for me to climb into bed and allow sleep to take me. We were getting closer to resolving the stalker problem. I could feel it.

  Fifty

  It felt like I’d been asleep for the blink of an eye when I woke with a start. Something had formed a rip
ple in the magic within the pack house. I reflexively formed a shadow sword and padded to my door with my focus on my witch senses. The ripple was slowly moving towards Elijah’s room.

  The security system hadn’t been activated, which meant whoever it was had bypassed it somehow. There were stories about thieves who could bend the magic around them, forming a temporary hole in security systems. I’d thought it was only a myth, but feeling that ripple made me reassess that thinking. My next thought was how to learn that trick for myself.

  Opening the door slowly, I looked out into the hallway, unsure what I expected to see. The rest of the doors were closed, and darkness enshrouded the landscape viewable through the window at the far end of the hallway. Castor’s door inched open. His gaze was focused exactly where mine was.

  At first I didn’t see anything, but then a foot appeared. The foot became a leg, and I caught the full signature of the bastard that had just invaded the pack house. The stalker. He was well hidden as he was pulling the darkness of the night around him. I could feel him, though, and his magic was slipping, hence the ability to view his leg. It was an odd sight, a leg slowly creeping down the hall apparently unattached to a person.

  I edged out as I pulled my own shadow tight around me. It was denser and would act as armour should I need it to. The stalker was heading to Elijah’s room and hadn’t shown any sign of noticing either Castor or me.

  Castor had his signature shadow-formed sai and kama pairing in hand, and he raised the sai as if to make a kill stroke to the back of the stalker’s neck. I waved him off. There was no way I was letting him die that easy. I was going to wring every ounce of magical knowledge out of him and then kill him with my own bare hands. In the meantime, I was going to take that creepy leg.

  I silently crept down the hall behind him, mimicking his footfalls to hide my own, and when he paused for a moment to check his surroundings I struck out with my sword at the only part of him I could see. I came within a centimetre of having the first entry in what would doubtless have been a storied leg collection, but he pirouetted away at the last second, spinning into the visible world like a matador.

  Bare chested beneath a poofy white tunic, he drew what appeared to be a fencing foil and swept it around experimentally, a look of triumphant bliss on his face like he had just stepped on stage. I could feel water magic rolling off him and even more from his sword. I didn’t know what the story was with it, but it wasn’t a competition plaything.

  He leapt towards me, hand over his head, thrusting directly at my heart. I fell reflexively into fencing mode, my shadow blade metamorphosing into a familiar fencing sabre as I slapped the strike aside and waited for an opening. Fencing was a hobby I’d picked up very briefly and immediately discarded but which had nonetheless left its mark on my style. Sabre fencing wasn’t exactly the same as foil, in that it was better in every way. That said, with enough magic or skill you could make a baguette into a murder weapon, and despite his pretty boy looks and flouncy attitude he had the grace and balance of a gifted swordsman and the magical ability of a fae lord.

  It’s always best to watch your opponent’s eyes to predict his next strike, but as I stared into them I found myself drowning in them, losing track of what I was supposed to be doing. I fended off his blows with as little effort as possible, made half-hearted ripostes where I could, but it was barely foreplay. His eyes were the most beautiful yellow green I’d ever seen, radiant burnt-orange lowlights that made me want to know him inside and out.

  “Lily, you’re falling for an illusion,” Castor’s voice came from somewhere in the irrelevant area outside our matched gazes. “Do you want to be a knocked up fae castoff? Because this is how you become a knocked up fae castoff.”

  Castor had been standing aside to let me take care of this myself ever since I first waved him off, but his voice was starting to carry tension. I felt that tension down the familiar bond, and it was enough to make me question what I was seeing. The moment I did, the moment I started to poke at my perceptions with my magical senses, it became clear what had been happening.

  I was beyond pissed off, at myself for falling for it and at this flouncy shit for casting it in the first place. I went on the offensive, shadow blade growing as my anger did, becoming a bastard sword and then a claymore as I struck at him again and again, driving him back, overwhelming the foil with weight and power. I screamed out my rage at him, from the first moment I knew I had a stalker until this final insult with the love spell, and he fell back again and again as his inferior weapon, inferior physique, and inferior skill left him on a permanent defensive that ended in exactly one way.

  In my rage, I was blinded to the truth of what was happening, helped along by another illusion of his, and just when I thought I was going to land my final blow he simply disappeared. My senses cleared, and I heard the sound of a wolf yelping in pain. It was coming from behind me, from Elijah’s room.

  It was coming from where my opponent had actually been for the last several seconds.

  I sprinted back towards the door and found Elijah in pitched combat with the sidhe mudblood, bedclothes piled everywhere. Our fight must have been magically isolated, there was no way the pack would have missed the song of our swords, let alone the berserker scream of me fighting my imaginary stalker.

  I moved to assist Elijah, out of breath but with enough fight left in me to finish it. Sword uplifted, I looked for an opening, a moment where I could safely strike with certainty of disabling my stalker without injuring my... boyfriend?

  Before I could land the blow, the rest of the pack burst through the door in unison, all three of them in animal form, and leapt at the invader in unison, fangs and claws poised to kill with no desire to keep their prey alive.

  Seeing that the fight was beyond retrieval, he called on his finfolk side and swept water from some hidden place then used it to redirect the charging pack before dropping back into invisibility with a flourish even as they were making an agile landing and preparing to make another assault. The last I saw of him was a wink of his disappearing eye, and then he was off and running. I followed the sound, tried to find a gap in his magic to exploit, but I was no magic breaker. He was gone.

  Fifty-One

  The pack was pissed.

  “How dare he come into our home! I’ll tear him apart,” Rex roared.

  “Not before I gouge his eyes out for trying to hurt our alpha,” Jess snarled.

  Elijah was calm as he looked over the mess that been caused by the fight.

  Liam and Castor were out trying to follow the scent of the bastard. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to get very far with it. Given his ability to bend magic around him, he was likely screwing with any possible trail he might have left behind.

  My phone rang. I ignored it. It really didn’t seem like the time to be worrying about some rude client. The sun hadn’t even risen yet. Rex paced around in a circle, occasionally glancing at Elijah while he waited for the alpha to give his next order.

  A pack’s house was a safe haven free from any fears or concerns of outsiders. It was where everyone could truly relax without any worries. The stalker had stolen that away from them, a group of skilled predators. I wondered if he understood the wrath he would suffer due to his hubris. The arrogance of the stalker to believe he could come into the Sentinels home and take out their alpha was far more than I’d originally credited him for.

  Admittedly, I’d been tempted to take on a wet work job to take out a shifter alpha, but I had the magic of a goddess running through my veins. My mind stopped. What if he wasn’t half sidhe; what if he was part fallen god? The fallen gods screwed around just like anyone else. It was said that they were close to infertile, but offspring were produced sometimes. I’d heard about a demi-goddess up in York.

  That would explain his proficiency with magic. It would also make him even more dangerous than I’d initially thought.

  My phone rang again. Then again. I picked it up.

  “What
?!?”

  It was far too early in the day to answer politely. After all, no one with any manners or dignity rang before sunrise unless it was an emergency. And anyone I might care about an emergency with was near me.

  “That’s no way to speak to the love of your life,” a man chastised.

  It was the stalker. I didn’t know how he’d managed to get my number. The calm control that Castor had instilled in me wasn’t present. I had nothing but rage at the violation of the pack house.

  “You’re a delusional prick,” I spat.

  “You’re upset, I get that. I’ll make this very easy for you. Remove the wolf from your life before I do,” he said soothingly.

  I laughed.

  “Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got?”

  I shouldn’t have been taunting him, but it felt pretty good to vent.

  The pack had gathered around me. I trusted that they were hearing every word.

  “He is just a weak mutt. You deserve a real man, someone who sees what an incredible woman you really are. The world deserves to see just how talented, beautiful, and courageous you are. They will. I will put you upon a throne and they will worship you, as is your right.”

  “What is wrong with you? You’ll put me on a throne? Have you heard yourself?”

  He sighed.

  “The wolf has clearly been playing with your head. That is a shame. He would have made a good guard dog, but I have no choice now.”

  I rolled my eyes. He’d just failed at killing Elijah and yet he was still acting as though it was a simple thing.

  “Just tell me who and where you are.”

  “My name is Zach,” he said brightly.

  “And your address is?”

  It was worth a shot.

  “No, no, the time isn’t right. I need to make further preparations. The wolf must go. Yes. The wolf will go, and then I can finalise everything.”

  He hung up.

  I tossed the phone on the bed, feeling more frustrated than I had a few minutes prior when the bastard had escaped.