Magic claims, p.1
Magic Claims, page 1
MAGIC CLAIMS
KATE DANIELS: WILMINGTON YEARS
BOOK 2
ILONA ANDREWS
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Also by Ilona Andrews
Acknowledgments
About the Author
This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Magic Claims
Copyright © 2023 by Ilona Andrews
Ebook ISBN: 9781641972567
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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http://www.nyliterary.com
1
“Well, of course it blew up, Kate.”
It was a beautiful September morning. I sat on a big log cut from a beached tree. A fire blazed in front of me, laid out in the firepit on the beach. Beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean lapped at the sandy shore. The water was an opaque aquamarine, the sky was a beautiful blue, and the flames in front of me were ruby red, fed by the mix of herbs and magic. About two feet off the ground, the fire faded into an image of my aunt.
The Rose of Tigris reclined on a carved wooden chaise decorated with lifelike Catalina mariposa lilies. Her white gown cascaded over her large body in artful drapes, setting off the warm golden tones of her bronze skin. I resembled her, but everything about her was…more. I was five foot seven, muscular, and strong, and she was over six feet, more muscular, and stronger. Our faces were very similar, but her eyes were darker, her lips were fuller, and her features were bolder. Her glossy brown hair spilled over one shoulder in a luxurious mane, clasped by a golden cord. She looked like a living painting that had blossomed from the ruby flames of the fire call, an ancient empress in repose.
We hadn’t spoken for two months. She had been occupied with something she couldn’t or wouldn’t share. It wasn’t the first time she’d vanished from my radar. Once she was gone for nine months, while her subordinates made flimsy excuses, and when we finally reconnected, she told me that I was an excellent mother. Not that I didn’t appreciate the compliment, but it came out of nowhere.
Since we finally got to talk, I decided it would be a great opportunity to clear up the exploding cephalopod issue. I had accidentally blown up a kraken. It had been… unexpected.
“Karsaran targets the highest concentration of magic within a living organism,” Erra said.
“Yes, which for vertebrates would be bone. In the absence of bone, it will target blood, which has the next highest concentration of magic. I understand all that.”
“Then what’s your question?”
“Why did the kraken explode? I expected it to split, maybe to burst, but it detonated like it had swallowed a land mine, and then it rained kraken for about ten seconds.”
She laughed softly.
In the distance, about five hundred yards out, a swimmer cut through the waves, moving fast, parallel to the shore.
“Oh great and powerful aunt, please enlighten this stupid one…”
“It exploded because you don’t practice. You’ve been playing house for what, six years now? Seven?”
“I do practice. I practice every day.” I had incorporated working on my bloodline powers into my exercise routine.
“Not in combat, you don’t. You have no idea how much power you need to feed into a command to gracefully split a kraken along its blood vessels, and therefore it ends up exploding and landing on your face.”
“So what do you suggest? Hunting down some krakens to calibrate?”
“Yes!”
“Seems cruel.”
Erra gave me one of her patented ancient power stares, reached over, and slapped an invisible ball in front of her.
“Is that you smacking my head?”
“You are playing a very dangerous game. You’ve been trying to hide from who you are. First, you tried to do it in Atlanta, and now you’re trying to do it here.”
“You know why we left Atlanta,” I said quietly. The city had slowly smothered me. I felt like I couldn’t even breathe there, much less raise Conlan. “I wanted to give your grandson a chance at a normal life.”
Erra waved her hand. “I do. I agreed with your decision then and I still agree with it now. Atlanta was too complicated. Too messy. Too many eyes and too many powers screaming bloody murder every time you sneezed. You needed to start fresh, away from all that. But you haven’t exactly hit the ground running.”
I counted off on my fingers. “Property cleared and warded, house repaired, Conlan enrolled in school…”
My aunt leaned closer. “You’re puttering around on this beach, fixing this ruin, and trying to lull yourself into a false sense of security. Do you honestly think that you’ve solved your problems, child? That if you just stay in this little fortress on the edge of the continent, the world will forget about you, and you can have a quiet life? Even if you ran away to the most remote peak in the Himalayas, it wouldn’t matter. Sooner or later, they will come for you, and you won’t be ready.”
A familiar discomfort rolled over me. “Why would anyone come for me?”
“For your power, for your blood, and for your son. If they take the boy, they can control both you and your husband. If they kill even one of you, they can make a name for themselves. And it won’t be a run-of-the-mill enemy. It will be the kind of power who thinks they can take you.”
For the past few years, a small voice in the back of my mind kept nagging at me. It started the day after I banished my father. I’d woken up to a sun-filled morning. Curran lay next to me, warm, sleeping peacefully, his muscular arm draped over me. Conlan was in his crib, making little growling noises in his sleep. I opened my eyes, looked up at the white ceiling, and thought, “Who will I have to fight next to keep us safe?”
I’d punched that voice back down, because I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Still, over the years, it kept piping up here and there. I thought it would go silent once we were out of Atlanta, but it only grew stronger.
“It’s not just your enemies you have to worry about,” Erra said.
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“One of the men I loved had a war dog,” she said. “He was this huge drooling, farting, foul-smelling beast, bred for combat. Ugh, I hated that dog. I never hurt him, but I didn’t want him near me, so I would stomp and shoo him when he got near. A surprisingly cowardly dog. He’d gone up against lions and men in battle, but he’d see me and run.”
A six-foot-six woman built like an Olympic athlete wearing full armor and filled with roiling, terrifying magic. I’d run away too if she stomped at me.
“Is there a point to this story or did you just want to share your disturbing hobby of tormenting loyal dogs?”
Erra grimaced. “You take great advantage of my love for you. Anyway, the dog was only afraid of two things: me and thunder. Every time lightning split the sky, I would find him shivering by my bed and no matter how much I stomped and yelled, he wouldn’t leave. He just sat there, shaking, until the storm passed and then he’d slink away.”
“Aha.”
“I finally asked Leo why the dog did that, and he told me that I was the most frightening creature the dog knew. When the thunder came, he ran to me because I was so terrifying, I would scare away the thunder and keep him safe.”
I laughed.
“Listen to me, you insolent brat! People are the same. Whether you like it or not, you married a First.”
My laughter died.
“And yes, I know that your love is the greatest love there ever was under the sky and he left his Pack for you, but he took the reins of power when he was fifteen. He grew up being the Beast Lord. It wasn’t just his identity; it has shaped his way of thinking. And I don’t need to tell you that his successor isn’t faring well.”
No, she didn’t need to tell me that. We’ve been hearing rumblings. Nothing concrete, just hints that things weren’t going as well as they could be.
“Eventually things will fall apart in Atlanta. Perhaps this year, perhaps in five years, but in the end the Pack will destabilize. When that happens, the shapeshifters will panic. They will run from that thunder to the scariest person they know, expecting that he will make them safe. Do you think he’ll be able to turn them away?”
The swimmer turned toward the beach and slid through the ocean, devouring the distance in fast, measured strokes.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Your face tells me that you do know.” Erra fixed me with her stare again. “And even if he somehow decided to say no, you would say yes. All it would take is one vulnerable, helpless person with a sob story and you’ll trip over y our feet to take them under your wing.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m retired.”
“You need territory, a defensible base large enough to house many people, money, powerful allies, and connections to the local government to make it all work. Do you have any of those things?”
“No,” I squeezed out.
“Then you should get busy, shouldn’t you?”
“Thank you, dear aunt, for once again listing all of my failures.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive. If you want someone to tell you how special and wonderful you are, go see your father. He wants you to fail so you’ll be forced to run to him and beg for his wisdom.”
“What happened to the dog?” I asked.
“He sired many puppies and lived to a ripe old age. I kept a pillow by my bed, and I would drape a special blanket over him when the storms came. I buried both the pillow and the blanket with him when he died, so he wouldn’t be scared in the afterlife. Give your husband and your son my love and get to work.”
The fire went out.
I didn’t see Julie. Again. She used to fire call every couple of weeks, and then, about two years ago, the fire calls stopped. We still talked on the phone, but a long time had passed since I’d seen her. Too long.
Curran came out of the ocean, the hard muscles across his powerful frame slick with water. Oh wow.
My husband started across the sand toward me. At night he swam naked, but since it was morning, he wore blue swimming trunks and somehow that made him even hotter. But it wasn’t his body that pulled me in, although it didn’t hurt.
Looking into Curran’s eyes was like coming face to face with an apex predator. There was steel will there, raw power, and confidence bordering on arrogance to back it up, but most of all there was love when he looked at me. Erra was right. He never stopped being the Beast Lord. He was the man who could dominate thousands of shapeshifters with a single look, and he was also the man who stayed up all night with a child who’d eaten some poisonous herbs in the forest and spent twenty-four hours throwing them up. One couldn’t be separated from another. They were all aspects of Curran, and I loved all of him.
The Curran I knew was done with packs and shapeshifter hierarchy. A few years ago, Mahon came to him with this harebrained proposal of starting another Pack several states over, and Curran had shot him down flat. When Mahon demanded to know who would keep our family safe, Curran did his alpha stare and informed him that he was all the safety we needed. And yet if the Pack came to him now, desperate for his help, I wasn’t sure what he would do.
Try as you might, you cannot change who you are. A son of Jushur, my father’s former spymaster, told me this two months ago when I ran into him at the Farm. I didn’t want to change who Curran was.
I didn’t want to change who I was either. It would take a hell of a lot more than a sob story to force me out of my retirement. I’d earned my peace and quiet, and I would be keeping it.
Curran reached me.
“How was the water?”
“Invigorating. You should go for a swim.”
“No thanks.”
I loved swimming, but I liked my ocean to be right about the temperature of bath water. Our slice of the North Carolina coast was nicely swimmable in September, hovering around the upper seventies, but we’d had three days of storms and the water temperature dropped to the high sixties. I had no desire to get into it.
Curran leaned over and kissed me with cool lips. “What’s the matter?”
Land, connections, money… “My aunt has given me a laundry list of things we don’t have and need to get right away.”
He laughed softly.
Connections would cost us our anonymity, and land would cost us money, which we didn’t have. Curran and I owned a chunk of the Mercenary Guild. It paid quite well, but not well enough to finance us on the kind of scale Erra was envisioning.
“Do you think it was a mistake to move to Wilmington?” I asked.
“I have my smoking-hot wife, my troublemaker son, my fort, my beach... What else can a man want?”
“I’m serious.”
“I can see that.” He scooped me up off my log.
“What are you doing?”
Curran spun around and sprinted to the water with me in his arms. The beach flew by.
“Stop! Curran! Cu—”
He threw me. I hurtled through the air and splashed into the ocean. The water closed over my head.
Aaaa!
I flailed, broke the surface, and gasped. Curran locked me into his arms, his gray eyes laughing.
“You said invigorating, not fucking freezing. Let go of me!”
“Let me warm you up.”
“I’ll warm myself up!”
His smile gained a wicked edge. “Even more interesting.”
I smacked him, kicked him in the chest, and launched into a frenzied freestyle, trying to warm up. I stopped about a minute later. In a calm lake, I would’ve ended up one hundred yards from where I started. In the ocean, against the current, I made it to about fifty.
Curran floated next to me, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. It’s good to be a werelion.
“Hey, baby.”
“You are too much.”
He pulled me closer, and I wrapped myself in his arms. We floated in the water.
“About what you said earlier,” he said, his voice a deep rumble in my ear. “I enjoyed this summer. Conlan loved it.”
They both loved it here in the fort. Erra was right—it really was on the edge of the continent, in a place where the land ended and the ocean began. We could get cornered here, squeezed between an angry sea and an enemy. If we were talking about safety only, I’d felt better when we were in Atlanta, hidden deep inside the subdivision where every neighbor was a friend. But Atlanta wasn’t an option.
“Do you like it here?” Curran asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it works for now. It’s simple, baby. When we stop liking it, we’ll do something else.”
Maybe it was that simple.
Three weeks later
The beach was an excellent place to work out because the sand was soft and conveniently powdery.
Curran threw me over his hip. If I had let go, I would’ve landed on my back, but I had a death grip on his neck, and as he flipped me, I went with it and threw a handful of sand into his face. It bought me half a second, which I used to kick his feet from under him and get a triangle choke in place. Unfortunately, choking a werelion was a lot harder than subduing a regular opponent. A non-shapeshifter person would’ve tapped out. Curran got up, lifting me in the air while I hung off his neck.
I was about to punch him in the head when he tapped my thigh. His eyes were fixed on the fortress behind us.
I released him. He caught me, helping me to the ground, and I turned to look at the fort.
After the Red Horn gang attacked our home, Curran and Conlan decided to erect a flagpole. It jutted from our fort’s tower, bearing a gray flag with stylized black stripes that looked either like tiger stripes or claw rips. When something happened, we raised a second flag below the first, an early warning system, green for shapeshifter, red for danger, and so on. When we left this morning, the gray flag flew alone. Now there was a blue flag under it.
Human visitors. Not from Conlan’s school either. The lone time they came to visit after school started, he flew a ghastly orange to announce the occasion.
“Are you expecting visitors?” Curran asked.
The renovation crew had finished five weeks ago, and we were all paid up. The grocery delivery wasn’t due for another two days.
“No.” I scrambled to grab my shoes.
We found our visitors in the courtyard. A young Black woman with a wealth of hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun and a well-dressed older Black man. Our son had let them in, guided them to our outside lunch table, served them iced tea and cookies, and then parked himself on the side to keep them company. I could tell by Curran’s face that a father-son conversation would be in Conlan’s near future.
