Mercenary Magic (9 page)

“Before all that. I wrote to them back outside MRL, demanding to know where the hell they were while we were doing their job. This was right before Olivia arrived on the scene.”

“Olivia? Was that the third telekinetic?”

“Yes.”

“You know her?”

“She’s a member of the Sage Dynasty.”

Another of the prominent magic dynasties. Their line wasn’t quite as old as the Drachenburgs, but it was old enough. What was a Sage doing helping a group of magical misfits break into Magical Research Laboratories?

“She is being controlled, just like Finn,” he answered her unspoken question. “I could see the strange glow in her eyes.”

“The drunk-on-magic look.”

“That’s the one,” he said.

“The incidents are related.”

“Yes. Whatever Finn was trying to steal, I’ll bet Olivia was after the same thing. An attack on the same facility in the span of just a few days by mages with glowing eyes not acting like themselves—that’s no coincidence. It’s a pattern.” He made his final cut, turning her jeans into capris. “Do you have anything to sterilize the wounds?”

Sera shot the ruined strips of denim a despondent look, then met his eyes. “Of course. I come prepared.” She slid a tiny bottle out of a pouch stitched seamlessly into her belt and passed it to him.

“Happen to have a bandage too?” he asked as he took the bottle.

She reached down and slid a roll of gauze out of a second pouch. Kai took it, his hand lingering on hers. For some ridiculous reason, that made Sera’s pulse jump. Probably hormones. Those pesky little things were an annoying bunch.

Sera drew her hand away from him. She shouldn’t have let him touch her in the first place. The closer he got, the easier it was for him to get a lock on her magic.

“You really do come prepared,” he said, cleaning her cuts. “Are you all right?”

Sera winced. “Fine.” She’d dropped the wall, allowing the blocked pain to wash through her body. She had to do it sooner or later anyway, and right now the pain was keeping her sensible. It was keeping her from thinking about how magnificent he looked with the sun at his back, lighting him up in a golden halo.

Argh…or maybe not.

“They’re not glowing.” She pointed at the glyphs etched into the ground. They were fading fast, right before her eyes.

“They pulsed briefly as we fell out of them and have been growing fainter ever since,” he told her.

“Have you tried hitting them with magic like the lightning mage did?”

“Yes. While you were busy sliding down the hill, I hit them with a few spells. Nothing happened. Maybe this is just the exit ramp, and the glyphs here are nothing more than a magical residue created by our journey.”

“Yeah.” She watched the last remnants of the glyphs vanish, leaving behind no evidence that they’d ever been there. She didn’t even feel their magic anymore. “We need to get back.”

“Yes,” he agreed, rising from a crouch. “Ok, you’re all set.”

Sera looked down. Her best jeans were cut off at the knees. Below that, he’d wrapped up her legs with practiced precision. Not a single bit of gauze was wasted. This wasn’t his first time. And that made him unique amongst the mages of the legacy families. Most of them had the first aide skills of a five-year-old. When you had a team of healing mages ready to swoop in every time you stubbed your toe, you tended not to learn the basics of wound treatment.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

“German military.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, a military background totally makes sense for you. It definitely explains your penchant for barking orders and just expecting everyone to follow them.”

Something flashed in his eyes. Annoyance? Amusement? The sudden urge to make her his afternoon snack? Did dragons really eat people? The stories said that they did. Sera decided not to think too hard about that. He wasn’t a real dragon anyway, just a mage with a dragon’s personality. Somehow, that wasn’t very comforting.

“So what did you do? In the military, I mean.”

“Let’s just say I played with tanks.”

‘Played with tanks’? Yeah, she could totally see that. It fit Kai to a t. Hard-headed. Indestructible. Powerful. A few years ago, there’d been a weapons manufacturer who figured out how to load magically-enchanted ammunition into tanks. It took only one demonstration for all the world’s governments to agree on something for a change. Within minutes, there was a worldwide ban on any and all magic ammunition. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a black market for the stuff, but it was really expensive. And if its price tag wasn’t enough to deter most buyers, fear was enough to deter the sellers. The Magic Council frowned upon the sale of unlicensed magic. And you
really
didn’t want the Magic Council to ever frown at you.

Sera stood. “Ok, if the glyphs are out, then we’ll have to walk it.”

“You want to
walk
all the way back? That will take hours.”

“Well, what do you want to do? Hitchhike?”

“Walking is not necessary. Nor is hitchhiking. Follow me.”

He didn’t wait for her to say anything. He just started power-walking down the trail, and Sera had to scramble to catch up. They followed the path to its end, where it spilled out into an open lot bordered on one side by a long brick building. He hurried past the building toward a concrete box that hadn’t yet decided if it wanted to be a house or a shed. Inside, he swiped a card through the reader beside the door, then they took the staircase down a level to an underground garage.

The garage could comfortably park twenty cars, but most of the spaces were empty. Two sports cars—one red, one yellow, both egregiously expensive—were parked side-by-side at one end. There was a humble silver minivan somewhere in the middle of the garage. And parked closest to the stairwell was a black SUV that was pretty sleek considering its aspirations to be a tank. Sera wasn’t surprised when Kai headed straight for it. The car beeped in greeting.

“It’s lucky you happened to park your car right here.”

He opened the passenger door for her. “It’s not luck. This building belongs to me. And I keep a car in the garage of every building that belongs to me.”

Sera climbed up into the car. By the time she had her sword sorted—she didn’t think Kai would appreciate her puncturing his upholstery—he was in the driver’s seat.

“So, just how many buildings in San Francisco belong to you?” she asked as he turned on the engine.

He drove across the garage and sped up the ramp to shoot out onto the street. “A lot.”

And from the look in his eyes, he wasn’t even kidding.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Priming Bangles

CHAOS REIGNED BACK at Building Six of Magical Research Laboratories. A dozen men in plain black uniforms surveyed the scene, talking into their headsets as they stepped over pulverized concrete. A few of them were clustered around a metal mesh carpet—all that remained of the chain-link fence the telekinetic psychopath had ripped from its posts. As Sera and Kai passed them, she heard them debating what they were going to do about it. Maybe when Olivia regained her senses, she’d offer to magic the fence back on for them.

Kai stopped in front of the guard standing before the doorway to Building Six. “What happened?” His tone was level, but in his eyes brewed a storm of epic proportions. “Where were you while we were doing your job? Oh, let me introduce you to Sera, the only person right now who’s earning what I’m paying them.”

Since he was clearly having a moment, she didn’t mention that he hadn’t actually paid her anything yet. She did, however, extend her hand to the poor guard he was barbecuing with his glare.

“Sera, this is Dawson,” he continued as Dawson shook her hand. “Now explain why you didn’t come running up the stairs the moment the facility was attacked.”

“We were stuck.”

“Stuck?”

Dawson had turned a tad green. “Yes. Someone melded shut the door to the guardhouse. It took Gin half an hour to melt a big enough hole in it for us to climb out. By the time we made it upstairs, the fight was over. The mages were gone. And so were you.”

“We fell through some glyphs that transported us to the other side of the bridge,” Sera told him.

He chewed that over for a moment, then said, “I didn’t know that sort of magic exists.”

“Today is a big day for firsts,” Kai cut in. “Like my guards getting themselves locked in. Did you at least see something on the security feeds from there?”

“Yes. After you disappeared, Olivia Sage and several others stepped into Building Six. And then all the feeds went blank.”

Sera looked at Kai. “Just like during all your other break-ins.”

“From the look on your face, I take it they made it past my security measures. What did they steal?” he asked Dawson.

“The Priming Bangles.”

Confusion loosened Kai’s tight jaw, chiseling away at some of his anger. “Why would they steal those?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“What are Priming Bangles?” Sera asked.

“Two pairs of gold bracelets.”

“And this is what whoever is behind all this was after? This is why they’ve broken into so many of your company’s facilities?”

“I don’t know. The bracelets are pretty. And they’re made with gold, rubies, and sapphires. So they’re quite valuable from monetary perspective,” said Kai. “But they’re not especially magical. Very low grade magic.”

“What do they do?”

“They help young or inexperienced mages focus their power. For centuries, children in the Drachenburg family have used them during their early years, when their magic was starting to blossom.”

“Did you use them?”

“No.” He looked offended. “They’re for our underpowered and undisciplined children, the ones who need a jolt to bring forth their magic. The child wears one pair, and a more experienced mage wears the other, using the bracelets to help the child direct his magic.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Our set is the only one of its kind,” he replied. “But I still don’t understand why someone would go to so much trouble to steal it. We created the bangles to deal with mages of feeble magic born into the family line. We had to find some way to give them a boost. We couldn’t have any Drachenburg weak mages running around.”

Sera frowned at him. “Yeah, because that would be totally embarrassing.”

“It would be dangerous. Being a weak mage born into a powerful family makes you a target of that family’s enemies. Or pirates and scoundrels looking to make their fortune kidnapping members of wealthy families.”

“Oh.” Her hands slid down from their perch on her hips.

“But here’s the thing. The bracelets don’t give a mage power he doesn’t possess. They just teach him to draw on every bit of magic in him. Most mages can access only a fraction of their total magic.”

“How much?”

“Under half. Usually a third or even a quarter.”

“And these bracelets allow mages to draw on all their potential magic?”

“Not quite. It’s not a panacea for low magic. A mage can’t put them on and suddenly have access to all this magic he couldn’t get to before. It takes years of conditioning, and you have to start young, ideally before puberty,” he said. “Any one of the other dynasties would love to get their hands on our bangles to use them on their own unpowered children, but they wouldn’t go about it so directly. And it’s not thieves after the bangles because by now whoever is behind this has spent more money trying to steal them than they are worth on the black market.”

“What if something else was stolen too?” Sera suggested. “What if they weren’t after these bracelets at all?”

“But used that to cover up something else they’d stolen.” He turned to Dawson. “Are you sure the Priming Bangles were the only item stolen?”

“The team that took inventory said everything else is still there,” replied Dawson. He’d looked happier back when Kai was ignoring him.

“Do it again. You personally. Start now. I expect a report by the morning.”

Alone, that would probably take him half the night, but he didn’t protest. He didn’t say a word. He just nodded, turned, and walked down the stairs into the underground building. Sera waited until he was out of earshot before telling Kai off.

“You could’ve had someone help him. It’s not his fault the guard house was sabotaged.”

“I’m not punishing him,” he said. “I want him to do it because I’m not entirely sure there aren’t spies and traitors amongst us. I can’t afford to trust the other guards.”

“But you can afford to trust him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” she asked, even though she was sort of—uh, make that really, absolutely certain she didn’t want to know.

Kai just looked at her, saying nothing.

“That bad?” 

“Let’s just say that Dawson has seen what happens to people who betray me,” he said, cold fury in his eyes.

A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, blasting a garbage can clear across the parking lot. As it fell, flames consumed the metal, melting it into a shapeless blob even before it hit the ground. Wow. And, oh yeah, holy shit.

“Should I be worried that you’re going to set me on fire?” she asked him.

“It depends. Are you going to betray me?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Good. I’d stick to that plan if I were you.”

The look in his eyes told her he wasn’t joking. If she did something he saw as a threat, he’d barbecue her on the spot, no questions asked, no mercy granted. The problem was that her very existence was something he’d see as a threat.

“Let’s go,” he said, heading toward his car. “We have one more stop to make before we can call it a day and start again tomorrow.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

She tried not to let the delighted grin on his face worry her.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Dragon Born

WHERE DID EGREGIOUSLY wealthy dragons get their grub? From posh restaurants that verified your bank account balance at the door, of course. Ok, not really, but it was pretty damn close.