Malignant Magic Page 14

  “She served the Dark Council,” Gran said.

  “No. She didn’t. Barden said—”

  “You would take the word of a dark mage over that of your grandparents?”

  “What reason does he have to lie about this? Why wouldn’t he claim they were the ones responsible for summoning a demon king? Wouldn’t that only serve to strengthen their position?”

  Gran stood and grabbed my hands, squeezing with more force than she needed. “Think about what you’re saying, Katie. You question why he would lie about this? Your responses are exactly the reason why he would do so. The Dark Council seeks to sow discord. And with you, they have succeeded. They know of your connection to us, which means they know of your connection to the council.”

  Gran might believe that, but that wasn’t the sense I had from my interactions with Barden. And knowing that Derek was a dark mage made it even harder to believe that dark mages were somehow evil. Gran and Gramps must have believed that they weren’t all bad at one point, especially since they had recruited him to help.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “They weren’t willing to help.” I looked at Aron and then John. “But we need to. If Ariel only has a little bit longer, we need to go and see if we can rescue her. Will three mages and whatever I am be enough?”

  Getting into the shifter lands was one thing, but it was more than that. We needed to get in and rescue Ariel and then still escape. And then we needed to help remove whatever danger there was to Ariel so that she could reestablish her position as alpha.

  But could she?

  Now that she’d been defeated, was it even possible for her to reestablish herself?

  I imagined it would take a challenge in order for her to do so, and knowing nothing about challenges within the shifter world, I had no idea what she might face. From what Aron and John said, she was magically powerful, enough so that she shouldn’t struggle against most challengers, at least those who weren’t somehow cheating and borrowing power from the Great Ones.

  “If our intention is simply to rescue her, we should be able to do so. It will be difficult, but the councilor and the archer are powerful enough mages, they should be able to conceal our presence.”

  I grinned at Gramps. “I guess you and I don’t really count.”

  He smiled at me, but his grin faded when Gran turned back to him.

  There was something else that might help, but I had the sense that none of them really wanted to hear about trying to reach out to Torn. None of them believed he would be able to help, even if we managed to reach him, but I had seen him, and I had the sense that he could help, whether or not he would.

  “Do you need to rest before we go?” Aron asked.

  “I’m not sure that we have time for me to get any rest. We need to go after Ariel and get there before anything else happens.”

  “Going at night poses some dangers,” John said. “Shifters have the advantage in that we are able to see clearly at night, at least much more clearly than what mages might possess.”

  “It’s practically morning anyway, Katie. We should just wait. Not risk it.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m going to go sit with Jen.”

  I left them to converse without me, knowing they would talk about me after I was gone, and joined Jen in the living room. She sat with the TV on, flipped to some reality show I didn’t follow. When I joined her on the couch, I held out my hand, reaching for the bottle of wine.

  “That kind of conversation, huh?” she asked.

  “I get to deal with crap at work with people like Locks and Roberts and then I get to deal with crap at home with my grandparents.”

  Jen smiled at me. “At least now I believe they are your grandparents. I’m still not convinced that you’re not in some sort of sex cult.”

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled. “Listen. I don’t understand everything you’re up to, and I don’t claim to fully understand everything about this world that you’re a part of, but I do see that your grandparents care about you.”

  “I’m not saying they don’t care about me.”

  “Then trust them.”

  “Jen—“

  “I’m not saying you ignore your gut and what you’ve experienced, I’m just saying trust that they are coming at things from a perspective of concern for you. It doesn’t mean they’re right. God knows we’ve seen enough people who think they’re doing something for their loved one and end up hurting them more, but at least they care about you. I saw a kid this morning who came in with a spiral fracture of his humerus. Things like that disgust me, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than report them to child protective services. At least you didn’t have to grow up with that sort of abuse.”

  She was right. I had grown up with my grandparents caring about me, and had dealt with their attempts to train me, wanting me to master my magic, recognizing I would need to have some ability to understand it—even if it were dark magic—so that I could have control over it and not accidentally reveal it.

  Despite that, I still had revealed myself. After everything they’d done to try to protect me, I was the reason my magic had been discovered by members of the council, not them.

  “So… You guys are going to go off and try to rescue some queen of the shifters?”

  “She’s not the queen so much as she’s what they call the alpha.”

  “I thought alphas were men. At least they are in the kind of books I read.”

  I shrugged. “She’s nontraditional.”

  “At least tell me she’s got some hot beta she’s with.”

  “From what I can tell, she used to be with Aron.”

  “As in your Aron?”

  “He’s not really my Aron.”

  Jen glanced back toward the kitchen. “If that’s what you believe, then you haven’t been paying any attention to the way he looks at you. That’s okay, Kate. Given your track record and how infrequently you’ve been laid, I wouldn’t expect you to pick up on things like that, but I see it. He might be older than you, but he sure doesn’t look it, and a guy like that with experience…” She whistled softly. “Yeah, that’s not the kind of thing you pass up.”

  I would argue with her, but there was something appealing about Aron, as much as I had tried to deny it at first. And now that he knew about my magic, there wasn’t the same threat of him exposing me to the council. If anything, all I’d seen from Aron had been his willingness and desire to protect me. There had been nothing to make me think he would do otherwise.

  “We have to survive all of this first.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  “It could be.”

  Jen twisted so she could look at me. “Then don’t go. I know that you probably think you have to go, sort of the same way you think you need to go to traumas when they roll in, but sometimes you just have to let someone else handle the fight for you. Especially when it’s something like this where you could end up dying. I don’t want to lose my best friend.”

  “I don’t want to lose mine, either.” I looked at her for a long moment. “Are we going to be okay?”

  “You mean because of all of this?” She swirled her hand in the air, motioning toward the kitchen. “Yeah, we’ll be fine. It would’ve been nice had you decided to share with me earlier, but I kind of get why you didn’t. I mean, it is pretty strange to think about. Then again, I would love for you to blast Roberts with some spell. Is there some reason you can’t?”

  “Trust me, as much as I might want to, I don’t think blasting Roberts will do anything for us.”

  “It’ll probably make us feel a whole lot better,” she said, smiling.

  “Probably.”

  I took a drink of the wine and handed the bottle back to her. I leaned back, resting my head for a moment, and awoke with a start, light streaming through one of my windows.

  Jen was gone.

  I found Aron watching me from across the room, sitting on one of my kitchen ch
airs that he had brought out. “Were you just watching me sleep?”

  “Someone needed to,” he said.

  “I’m not sure whether I should be thankful or creeped out by the fact that you thought to watch me while I was sleeping.”

  “I wanted to keep an eye on you.”

  “You know, you don’t have to do this.”

  “And what am I doing?”

  “All of this. I don’t know how much of this you feel like you have to do, but I don’t want you to get involved for that reason.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Is it because of Ariel?”

  “Ariel and I have not been anything for quite some time.”

  I knew it wasn’t that my grandparents had asked him to watch over me. They weren’t thrilled with the fact that I had an archer with me, even if it was Aron. There was some issue between them and him, though neither side said anything.

  Aron slid his chair closer to me. “Kate. You should know the reason I’m here. It’s the reason I’m willing to come when you called. It’s—“

  “Good. She’s awake.” Gramps leaned toward the kitchen and hollered, “Cyn. She’s up. It’s time for us to get going.”

  I looked over at Aron, wishing that we had a little more time for us to talk, but maybe that wasn’t to be. I might want to hear what he had to say, but things kept getting in the way. He had responsibilities within the magical world, and when all of this was over, I had responsibilities within the non-magical world, and I doubted either of us would ignore them.

  I got to my feet when Gran and Gramps stepped out of the kitchen, followed by John. “Is it time for us to go?” I asked.

  “It’s morning,” John said.

  I looked over at the empty couch cushion where Jen had been.

  “She got up and had to go to work,” Aron said.

  I sighed. “God, I wish I could be there too.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Katie,” Gramps said. “You could stay here. Let the four of us take care of it.”

  Maybe that would be the safest, but I had the sense that Ariel had wanted me to be involved. I didn’t entirely know why, but it had to do with me and whatever magic I could use that mages could not.

  “I think I have to be a part of this.”

  When we left my place, sealing the door closed, I felt a moment of worry. Would I be able to return to my condo? We were heading off to face a threat that might be greater than any that I had encountered, and while it was nothing more than a rescue mission, I still worried I wouldn’t be capable of participating all that well. The last time I had been up in the shifter territory, two shifters had almost been more than I could manage. If more than that attacked me, I wasn’t sure what I would be able to do.

  But this time, I would have my sword with me the entire time.

  We headed outside and Aron led us to a boxy Mercedes SUV. “Not a BMW this time?”

  “We needed room,” he said.

  “It’s probably not nearly as fast as your other toys.”

  Aron shrugged. “She’ll be fast enough.”

  We climbed in and took off, whipping out of the residential areas and onto the interstate. The SUV rumbled along, moving far faster than I felt comfortable with while sitting within a vehicle like this. I would have been more comfortable in Aron’s BMW, but that wouldn’t have fit all of us. The others still weren’t convinced this was a good idea, but I didn’t know that we had any other choice.

  I looked over my shoulder. Gran and Gramps sat in the backseat, neither of them saying anything. Behind them sat John, his dressings now removed. He wore a leather jacket and jeans, clothes that looked straight out of Aron’s wardrobe.

  “Can we talk about what happened last night?” Aron asked.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I’d gotten a little sleep, so felt refreshed enough to realize that it was probably best we hadn’t tried to do this last night. This way, I could watch the city as we zipped out of it, heading quickly toward the shifter territory.

  “You shouldn’t have gone alone,” Aron said.

  I chuckled to myself at the thought that this was the first thing he’d said to me since we had gotten in the car to head north. Gran and Gramps still hadn’t spoken to me, and I could feel their irritation. Sleep hadn’t done anything to change that. I knew them well enough to recognize it—and had learned to ignore it.

  “Did you know?” I said it loud enough so that everyone in the car could hear me.

  “Know what?” Aron asked.

  I could practically feel Gran and Gramps leaning forward, listening.

  “About the Dark Council. The reason the gorgon could feed on them. It all fits with what Solera said.”

  Aron squeezed the steering wheel. We reached the edge of populated areas, moving quickly into more remote land. It wouldn’t be long before we reached the Northwoods and the shifter territories, so whatever time we had was limited. We needed to get through this now, deal with it before it festered.

  “You can’t even be sure you’re right,” he said.

  “I’m not sure that I’m right, but what Solera said—”

  “Solera said what she did in order to get a reaction out of you,” Gran chided from behind me. “We have had enough interaction with her over the years to know that she has her own agenda.”

  Turning in my seat so that I could see her, I put on my sternest expression—the one I saved for patients who were trying to scam me out of narcotics. “You have your own agenda, too. Just because she has one doesn’t mean what she shared is incorrect.” What was more, what Solera had told me fit with what I had seen. Dark magic users weren’t evil, and they weren’t bad people, at least not exclusively. There were plenty of dangerous people within the mage society my grandparents protected.

  “There has been no reason to believe the Dark Council has Unseelie magic,” Aron said softly.

  I recognized the quiet within him. Aron was troubled, as he should be. There had been a time when he had served as a knight, and in doing so, he had been responsible for gathering dark magic users and bringing them before the council. I still didn’t entirely know what that involved.

  “Who is responsible for burning magic off dark magic users?”

  “That information is restricted to the council,” Gran said.

  “And what if the council is making a mistake?” I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I had to argue this with my grandparents—and Gran in particular. She might be stubborn, but it wasn’t that she was hardheaded. She had always been willing to keep something of an open mind.

  That was part of the reason she had never turned me into the council.

  At least, so I had thought.

  “Cyn, we need to at least consider what Katie is telling us.”

  She silenced Gramps with a hard look.

  “It doesn’t matter. They won’t come,” I said.

  “And they shouldn’t,” Gran said. “If they were to come, they would only interfere and we would end up needing to fight them off nearly as much as we will need to fight off whatever’s happening with the shifters.”

  I had a hard time believing the Dark Council would renew their attack. Everything that I’d seen suggested they appreciated the treatise between the mage council and the Dark Council. They didn’t have to fear attack. They didn’t have to fear losing connections to their magic. That was valuable to magical users. As someone who had lived the entirety of her life knowing about magic and fearing what would happen if others discovered it, I recognized what it meant to the Dark Council.

  “If you didn’t want to come, you could have said no.”

  “We weren’t going to leave you to this yourself, Katie.” Gramps took Gran’s hand and squeezed it. I was left hoping that she might tell me that she would help, or that she somehow would decide she’d been making a mistake, but I wasn’t so lucky.

  “We should’ve talked about all of this before we left,” I said. “We don’t even know how w
e’re going to find Ariel, other than knowing that she’s up there.”

  “I will be able to find her,” John said.

  “Because you can smell her?” I asked.

  “Because I will be able to feel the attempt to send her across the Veil.”

  “You do that, and I’ll do what I intend to do, then.”

  Gran leaned toward me and grabbed my shoulder. “What’s your plan?”

  I debated how much to tell her. It was possible she would try to prevent me from doing what was necessary. “My plan is to get up there and see if we can’t find Torn.”

  “You won’t be able to find him. He has remained elusive for many years,” John said from the back of the car. “Ariel has had us search for him for years, and we’ve tried, and failed. Torn does not want to be discovered by our pack.”

  “He’s not going to be discovered by your pack. He’s going to be discovered by mine.”

  We took an exit off the interstate, having crossed more miles than I would’ve expected already. Aron was driving quickly, and as we went, I had to believe there was something magical about the way that we traveled and got tired of not knowing.

  “What sort of spell are you using?”

  “No spell,” he said.

  “No. There has to be something. I’ve seen the way we’re moving. We’re making a drive that should take an hour and a half in less than twenty minutes. You’re not going that fast,” I said, craning my neck so that I could look at the speedometer. I couldn’t easily see it, but it didn’t feel as if we were traveling over two hundred miles an hour, and I had a hard time believing even Aron would be willing to drive that fast.

  “It’s the car,” Aron said.

  I shook my head. “Fine. Don’t tell me.”

  He whipped around a corner, sending us onto gravel. I recognized the path, but when he turned again onto nothing more than a narrow dirt path, I gripped the sides of my seat while half-expecting to go crashing into a tree at any moment. He was moving far too fast for my comfort. And then he skidded to a stop.