Magic Edge (2 page)

“And?”

“And what if they rip it out of your hands and poke you back?” he asked. “You need some long distance attacks when battling things faster and stronger than you.”

“I have a slingshot.”

He snorted. To his credit, it was a very posh snort.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “I thought you had a flight to catch.”

“I did, but then I heard you got it into your head to be foolish again. I had to save you from yourself. You’re human, not a mage.”

So he thought.

“And yet you believed you could take on a gang of vampire elves with only your sword? You need to fight magic with magic.”

“Magic like that from a first tier mage summoner such as yourself?”

“Naturally.” His smile was far more modest than he actually was. “It’s a good thing I came here to save you from becoming a vampire’s snack.”

“I had it under control.” She swayed sideways.

“Alex?”

She tried to speak, but the words came out all garbled. Sweat soaked her face, dripping down her neck, where it burned against the blood bubbling out of her wound. The yellow and purple splotchy light show returned with a vengeance, and then the world went dark.

CHAPTER TWO

Paranormal Vigilante

THE GENTLE SLURP of water over rocks whispered in the distance, and sunlight warmed Alex’s cheek. She cracked an eye open. The world had stopped spinning—for the most part. Black blotches solidified into jagged spikes of hair. Marek stood over her, the relief on his face quickly hardening into annoyance.

“You are out of your bloody mind,” he said, throwing up his hands. “You know that, right?”

The ground shifted like a bowl of jelly beneath Alex as she tried to sit up. She forced her eyes the rest of the way open. She was lying on the waterbed in Gaelyn’s guest room. The old immortal often waxed poetic on the revitalizing magic of water. That’s why he had a house on the lake and kept a waterbed in his guest room. Sooner or later, anyone working for him got hurt.

“Did you carry me all the way here?” she asked Marek.

“I carried you to the train. You’re heavier than you look.”

Alex sat up. “It’s all muscle.”

“Yes, Wonder Woman. I know. I once made the mistake of training with you.”

She winked at him. “What happened on the train?”

“I put you into the seat next to me. A few of the passengers asked what had happened to you. I told them you’d passed out on account of your being pissed.”

Drunk before sundown? Nice. “Thanks.”

“Unfortunately, one of the passengers recognized you as the ‘Paranormal Vigilante’.” He gave his eyes a long, slow roll. “She was pretty excited. She even wanted your autograph. Her squeals attracted others. They wanted your autograph too. A few of them poked you for luck.”

So that’s why she’d dreamed of being squeezed like a bag of rolls at the supermarket.

“I reminded them that you were unconscious. They persisted. Then I told them if they didn’t sod off and leave you in peace, I’d set the lot of them on fire.”

“And did you?”

“I didn’t have to. They turned out to be smarter than they looked.”

“You’re too hard on people,” she said.

“When humans stop running into the middle of mage duels to capture video clips for their Youtube streams—or collecting debris from the battlefield for their junk collections—then I’ll stop being hard on them.”

“They didn’t run into the middle of my fight with the vampire elves,” she pointed out.

“A miracle of epic proportions.” He set his hand on her forehead. “You’re running a fever.”

“It’s the vampire venom,” said Gaelyn, rolling a cart up to the bed.

Dressed in a set of beige robes and a matching hat that covered his long white hair, the world’s oldest immortal was rocking the ‘helpful and kind old wizard’ look; maybe he’d been the one to invent the look in the first place some six thousand years ago. The tip of his waist-long beard tickled the top of his belt, from which hung a jagged dagger that looked more decorative than practical. Alex wouldn’t have wanted to try to saw the head off a vampire with that garish thing.

“You’ve been poisoned, Alexandria. That’s why you passed out,” he said, handing her a cup of orange juice. “Drink this. You lost a lot of blood.”

Alex lifted her hand to her neck. Her fingers rubbed over dried blood, but the wound was gone. She looked at him in surprise.

“Yes, your wounds have mended themselves. There was no need to heal you with magic.”

Marek leaned in for a closer look, hissing as he saw her neck. “She’s turning into a vampire?” He drew back, stretching out his hands to warm them up. Pink lightning sparkled on his fingertips.

“No,” said Gaelyn. “I don’t think so.” His gaze shifted to Alex. “From what I can tell, your body appears to be fighting the vampire infection. It’s eating it up, not the other way around. Remarkable.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Marek said, the tenor of his magic shifting with his mood.

Magic was a funny thing. For someone like Alex—someone who could sense magic—it could be seen and smelled and heard. It could be felt and even tasted. Every type of supernatural shared a common magical song. Vampire magic, for instance, popped and pounded like a heavy pulse. It was hot
and
cold. It slid and stroked like a river of crimson silk. There was something seductive about it, while at the same time repulsive.

At least this was true of the shapeshifting vampires and the demon-powered vampires. Each of those two breeds had magic that resonated a little differently than the other. On the other hand, the third type of vampire—the so-called ‘common’ vampires—were hardly more than monsters, mere shells of their former selves. They served as the vampire elite’s foot soldiers and reeked of rot and death. After any encounter with them, you had the sudden and immediate urge to shower.

“What exactly are you?” Marek asked her. “You claim you’re human. But no human can take a bite like that and rise again. At least not rise again as one of the living.” Suspicion flooded his magic.

Marek was a mage: a summoner and an elemental. His magic was firmly first tier, amongst the most powerful. He was currently ranked at #29 of all elementals worldwide and at #14 of all summoners. The #14 was because he could summon dragons—big, building-sized ones. There weren’t a whole lot of mage summoners who could do that. It was considered the pinnacle of summoning magic.

First tier mages tended to come with egos to match their magic, but Marek wasn’t all that bad most of the time. Like any member of a magical elite dynasty, though, he tended to be suspicious of things he couldn’t explain. And Alex’s body munching down on vampire venom wasn’t something even she could explain.

“I’ve been bitten by a vampire before,” she said.

“Really?” Waves rippled across the bed as Gaelyn sat down on the edge. He folded his hands together, his eyes intrigued. “When was this? What happened?”

“It was a couple of years ago. My sister Sera and I were working a job for Mayhem. A nest of common vampires had holed up in an old factory building. We went in to take them out. Sometime during the fight, one of them bit me. He didn’t hold on very long. I knocked him right off again. But it did sting.”

“Did you run a fever? Pass out?” Gaelyn asked, his questions spilling out quickly.

“Yes to fever. No to passing out.”

“Fascinating. Perhaps that small dose of venom allowed your body to work up some immunity to it. Like a vaccine.”

Or maybe her Dragon Born blood, that which the Magic Council called an abomination, made her immune to vampire venom. There weren’t many books that went into any great detail about the Dragon Born mages, and those that did were hidden away behind a million layers of ‘restricted’ signs at the library. The only way to read those books was to get a permission slip from the Magic Council. Yes, permission slip. Like they were all living in a freaking high school.

Alex wasn’t going to ask for their permission. That would tip them off to what she was. And then they would execute her for the crime of being born.

“Yeah, vaccine,” Alex said. “That could be it. Imagine if you could find a way to distribute a vaccine against vampire bites.”

“Indeed. We could do those poor human victims a lot of good.” Gaelyn’s face was half mad scientist, half gleeful child. “I’ll need to take some blood samples from you so I can research this further, Alexandria.”

“Uh…”

“Yes, by all means, take
samples
,” Marek ground out. “Why don’t you invite the heads of all the nearby magic pharmaceutical companies to come over while you’re at it? As though we don’t already have a crisis on our hands!”

“Crisis?” she asked, grabbing onto that distraction for dear life. Gaelyn was old, and if she was lucky, he’d forget all about his blood samples by the end of this conversation. Prominent immortal studying her weird blood equaled Magic Council squat team breaking down her door.

“Yes, crisis,” said Marek. “Someone wants to annihilate every supernatural in the city.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Orbs of Essence

ALEX THOUGHT IT seemed awfully nonchalant of her to grab a snack while the city was in peril, but a girl had to eat. That went double for girls getting ready to hunt down criminal masterminds. Based on her eight years’ experience as a mercenary, she’d probably end the day splattered with blood and waist deep in monster goo.

“Ok,” she said, sitting down at the bar opposite Gaelyn’s kitchen.

They’d moved their little party into the enormous open living room. Light flooded through floor-to-ceiling windows on every wall, bathing her in warmth. It felt nice, like snuggling up to a soft, fuzzy blanket.

If the sun was still a friend to her, she probably wasn’t turning into a vampire. Good. She was screwed up enough already without adding vampirism into the mix.

“Spit it out, guys,” she said, biting the tip off her croissant. “Who wants to annihilate every supernatural in the city, and how will they do it?”

Marek exchanged glances with Gaelyn before he spoke. “I had a little chat with the pair of vampire elves you stapled together. After I made sure your wound had stopped gushing blood, of course.”

She tipped her glass to him. “Appreciate it.”

“You’re lucky you’re so odd, Alex. The bleeding stopped almost immediately. That wound was vile. It looked like a hell beast had torn a sizable piece out of your neck. Anyone else—even most mages—would have died from the blood loss. You just stopped bleeding.” His dark brows drew together. “It was a good thing too. I’m a horrendous healer.”

When Marek tried to heal someone, he ended up opening up new wounds as often as he managed to seal the existing ones. That’s what happened when mages drew on magic outside of their core powers. Marek was one hundred percent a destructive mage. Even when he wanted to heal someone, his magic refused to go along with it.

About a week after she’d arrived in Zurich, they went to deal with a showdown between winged centaurs. Hybrid beasts had been popping up all over the city lately; that’s one of the reasons Gaelyn had hired her. She had experience fighting freakish monsters.

During this fight of the winged centaurs, a woman had gotten caught in the crossfire, and Marek had tried to heal her. Her screams had only grown louder. Thankfully, they’d managed to get her to Gaelyn in time. But only barely.

“I mean this with all due affection, but don’t ever try to heal me,” she told Marek.

“I don’t need to apparently. Not with your bizarre super healing.”

Alex had magic. Legend said the Dragon Born had once been the most powerful mages in the world—well, before they were hunted to extinction. But she’d spent her whole life concealing her magic. She wasn’t even convinced she was that powerful, no matter what those tall tales said. And she’d certainly never possessed super healing.

“So what did the vampire elves at the station tell you after you threatened to heal them?” she asked.
 

He stuck his tongue out at her. The tip of it was pierced. Ouch. That must have hurt.

“They said their gang stole the Fairy Orb from that jewelry shop,” he said.

“Fairy Orb?”

“Think of it as a library of fairy magic,” Marek said. “But instead of books, the Fairy Orb contains samples of every known fairy power.”

Gaelyn handed her a weathered sheet of paper. Faded and wrinkled, it looked like it had spent a few weeks taped to a lamp post. “It’s not just the Fairy Orb. A reward has been put out for the Orbs of Essence.”

The paper sagged in her hand. She had to use both to hold it up. “The Fairy Orb, the Blood Orb, the Sorcery Orb, and the Otherwordly Orb,” she read the names.

“The other three are the equivalents of the Fairy Orb for vampires, mages, and the otherworldly,” Gaelyn told her. “Combined, these four orbs make up the Orbs of Essence.”

“And what can you do with the Orbs of Essence?” she asked.
Please don’t say ‘summon the apocalypse’. Please.

“Summon the apocalypse,” Marek said.

Fantastic.

Gaelyn gave him a stern look. “Let’s not exaggerate. Yes, long ago the Orbs could be used to hurt anyone with magic. That was millennia ago, though, and magic fades with time. Plus, it all depends how much the person wielding the Orbs knows about magic.”

“And if they know a lot about magic?” Alex asked.

“Then they could wipe out the entire supernatural population of Zurich. Or one segment of the supernatural population. All the mages, for instance,” said Marek. “The Orbs could be used to do the same to other cities. Bigger cities.”

“In theory,” Gaelyn amended. “And only worst case.”

That ‘worst case’ sounded pretty damn grim.

“How can you stand there and act so calm?” Marek demanded, pacing.

“I got all the angst out of my system millennia ago,” he replied.

Marek muttered something incomprehensible—but likely rude—under his breath.

“So who’s after the Orbs?” Alex asked quickly, before he could say something he’d regret.

Usually, he and Gaelyn got along just fine, but Marek’s heart was clearly back in London with his family. And when his heart revved up, his brain shut off and his mouth started running.