Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem 2)

Penny didn’t even bother shaking her head this time. She just stared blankly.

“That would all have been doable, but let’s be honest, I know those parts of my magic pretty well. This was a great opportunity to practice my less-used powers. I figured I’d go for it. Fool the brain with the eyes, further confuse the brain with solid walls they could no longer see, trapping them in, then kill them with the fire dragons—”

“Dragons?” Penny asked, finally coming back alive. “Those were supposed to be dragons?”

“Yeah. I missed the mark a bit there.” Reagan climbed to her feet, followed by Penny, ready with a stabilizing hand. “But the rest of it looked pretty cool, didn’t it?”

“The water didn’t make things wet. It didn’t, like, splash.” Penny braced her hands on her hips and half bent, finally showing her fatigue. “It didn’t account for people walking through it. I couldn’t see the ground. No, it wasn’t cool. And people disappearing and reappearing and—”

Emery put his hand on her shoulder to keep her from flying off the handle, trying to keep back chuckles as he did so. A lopsided smile crossed Reagan’s face.

“Definitely don’t go to the underworld, you’d—” Reagan’s head jerked around, her eyes narrowing at Penny. “Did you try and cut out the illusion?”

Penny’s eyes rounded and she put up her hands. “No, I swear. Emery, tell her. I thought about it for only a second. But I didn’t act on it. I still can’t believe you didn’t warn me!”

“Hmm.” Reagan tapped her mouth as she slowly walked to the edge of the warehouse. “I wonder if you could. We’ll have to try.”

“No, thank you,” Penny said quickly.

Reagan sighed and looked around at the gruesome tableau. “My warehouse is gone.” She squinted up at the sky. “Should we check for survivors, or just make sure there aren’t any?” She lowered her eyes to Penny and quirked an eyebrow. “Should we show Emery what the people down under can do?”

“What? Australians?” Penny backed up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t include me in your crazy.”

“Too late. Your mother said I should.” Reagan held out her hands, palms up. Floating fire sprang above them, hovering. No magic connected the flame to her palm. No streams of energy flowed through her fingers or from the elements around them. She’d called it up from nowhere.

“Annnndddd…” The flame disappeared. She moved her hands through the air toward the field. Fire sprang up there, growing when she raised her hands, crawling across the already burned ground and over the bodies.

“No, no, no, no.” Penny slapped one of Reagan’s hands out of the air. That didn’t affect the fire in the least. “No! We need to identify them. Find out if they were Guild, not Guild, where they came from—you can’t just destroy evidence. I swear, Darius must want to throttle you at least ten times a day. You and he are nothing alike.”

Reagan’s smile, which had sprouted when Penny slapped at her hand, grew. “You get me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do. You get me.”

“I don’t even get what you’re talking about. I just stated facts. And asked questions.”

Without any movement from Reagan, the fire rose off the ground. And so did Penny.

“What the—”

She bumped down a moment later and Reagan shook her head. “I’m too tired. Fine, you win. Let’s get cleanup in here. Or get the shifters to section it off until Darius can send in his guys and look everyone up. I’m tired. I need a bath.”

“Training is going to get a lot worse now that she can show all her powers,” Penny mumbled.

“See?” Reagan took her phone from her back pocket. “This is why I love Penny. I create a huge illusion, with fire-spitting dragons—”

“More like Dumbo’s un-talked-about uncle—” Penny mumbled.

“—move fire through the air, lift her in the air, and all she can think about is how I’ll torment her in training.”

“That’s a strange reason to love someone.” Penny heaved a deep breath. “It’s over, then, right? That wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part? We won.”

Reagan’s laugh was low and humorless, and Emery knew exactly what she was going to say. So he did it for her.

“It’s far from over,” he said, connecting eyes with Penny. “Either we keep running, or we do forcefully what my brother tried to do delicately. Either we spend our life in the wild, or we stand our ground, ask our friends for help, and claim the ultimate vengeance for our loved ones.”

“We tear down the Guild,” Reagan said with fire in her eyes. “Those filthy bastards.”

Penny looked between Emery and Reagan, but her gaze stuck on him. And what she said shocked him.

“It isn’t the ultimate vengeance. It’s doing the right thing. We have to tear it down, yes, but so it can be rebuilt. We have the power to do it, and the scars to make it personal—those things make it our responsibility.” Penny shifted, her stance widening. Magic whispered around them, blending in with the breeze. “This time, they came to us. Next time…”

Reagan smiled.

“We go to them,” Emery finished, feeling Penny’s infectious fire running through him. “We harvest the spells we planted when we were first in the Guild compound.”

That weird brown rock with the stripes of color—Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, Penny had called it—pulsed from the other side of the ruined warehouse.

“Stupid power stone,” Penny muttered.

She was on board. She wasn’t even fully trained, but she was ready to storm the Guild again.

But was he?

47

“What do we have to expect from this, Penny?” my mother asked from the small table in Reagan’s kitchen.

She’d taken the first flight out of Seattle after speaking to me. When she hadn’t found us at Reagan’s, she’d gone to the Bankses’, where she’d been greeted by Callie and Dizzy’s magical group, minus a few players.

A good few.

Those few would never be going back, either, because they had never left the fields around Reagan’s destroyed warehouse.

Only two people hadn’t been accounted for at the warehouse or the gathering. One of the defectors utterly shocked everyone. High in power, lots of ambition, and so ridiculously entitled that he had probably danced to the Mages’ Guild’s tune the moment they promised him power and riches, John had disappeared. I was the only one not gobsmacked.

And the other had people clucking their tongues and nodding their heads. Of course she had gone back to the dark magic, they said. Wasn’t it what she was used to?

Mary Bell.

Callie had verified that Mary Bell’s presence in the bar the day of the first attack was unusual. Paired with her interest over my movements, it indicated she’d up and joined the Guild. The fact that she hadn’t returned just cemented it. Though old, she was still a high-powered mage. The Guild could find a use for her. Of that, Emery was certain.

Still, it didn’t quite ring true to me. Everything she’d said to me painted a picture of a more rounded individual than the others in the group. A person on a different path, who had learned from her mistakes. Grown from them. I didn’t buy that she’d gone back to the Guild.

But she’d certainly gone somewhere. Her rental was vacated and her phone number disconnected.

It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.

My mother had been staying with the Bankses for the last week. She’d ordered me to join her and leave Emery behind, and for once in my whole life, I’d told her to shove it.

I had literally said, “No. Shove it.”

A very tense thirty seconds of silence had ensued, during which everyone present stared at my mother, waiting to see what would happen. But all I got was a “Good girl.” Then, to ruin the moment, “Do not get pregnant or I will kill you. With my bare hands.”

“We expect to get a very large apology,” I said to her now, finally answering her question about what we should expect. I leaned against the counter. “We will trust in the safety of numbers, and leave the house with no extra holes in our bodies.” I watched my mother tap the elegant invitation sitting on the tabletop between the wine glasses.