The trouble with wizards.., p.1
The Trouble with Wizards and Old Enemies, page 1
The Trouble with Wizards and Old Enemies
A Cary Redmond Novel, Book 6
Kat Simons
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Thank You
The Trouble with Death and Demon Gods
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Books By Kat Simons
About the Author
Trouble with a Vengeance…
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In her seventh year as a magical Protector, Cary Redmond has faced down more world-ending, life-or-death situations than she cares to remember. And now that she’s discovered she’s not as ordinary as she thought, finding ways to not die is getting even tougher. Especially with all the enemies she’s collected while saving good guys from bad guys.
So when her latest job forces her to confront too many of these old enemies, Cary desperately wants to refuse. Unfortunately, walking away is not an option, thanks to more of that world-ending trouble so common in her life.
With the help of her leopard shifter mate, Cary once again faces overwhelming odds in a quest to save the world.
And hopefully not die.
THE TROUBLE WITH WIZARDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Copyright © 2022 by Katrina Tipton
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Cover design: Evernight Designs
Published by: T&D Publishing
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T&D Publishing: https://www.tanddpublishing.com
Kat Simons Website: https://www.katsimons.com
Kat Simons Newsletter: https://bit.ly/KatSimonsNewsletter
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All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
* * *
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
To my whole family.
Who made these last few years not just bearable but full of love.
Even occasionally fun. Thank you for standing by me on this journey.
1
Cary looked up at the ceiling of the dojo and groaned. She really ought to be used to this view by now. That faint water spot that Lucy had never gotten around to getting painted. The inset lights that felt entirely too bright in her face. The white textured panels that made up the ceiling.
She’d stared up at that ceiling from her back so frequently over the last ten months it was like looking out her living room window into her backyard. Very very familiar.
“You’re still overthinking,” Lucy said from somewhere off to Cary’s right.
She rolled onto her side and looked up at her best friend and current worst enemy.
The petite redhead had her hands on her hips, her mouth turned down in a disapproving scowl. For their training sessions, Lucy wore a simple white gi, the top crossed over her stomach, with an ordinary black belt wrapped around her waist, the uniform flexible and easy for any contingency. She looked like a cute, harmless woman with her smattering of freckles across her nose, her curly red hair pulled up on top of her head in a loose bun. She even sounded a bit like a child with her high-pitched voice.
But after more than thirty years of training, Lucy was not harmless. She had multiple black belts in more than one martial arts discipline, and Cary had personally seen her kick the ass of men twice her size, more than once.
“I don’t know how to not think,” Cary grumbled as she pushed herself back up to her knees, working to catch her breath.
Lucy kept her dojo spotless, which ensured it almost always smelled like pine cleaner and faintly of incense. Right now, all Cary could smell was her own sweat—which was significantly less pleasant than Lucy’s lovely frankincense sticks burning near the front desk by a miniature brass statue of the Buddha.
At least the dark blue mats beneath her hid the blood.
Not that Lucy had made her bleed. In fact, Lucy was a superb teacher and had never once actually hurt Cary during training. But given how often Cary ended up flat out on her ass, or in some sort of bound position, she kept expecting blood. A nose bleed at the very least.
“You have to let the muscle memory take over if you want to handle shifters who can move significantly faster than you can,” Lucy said. “You can’t pause and think about what you’re doing. You just have to do it.”
“I did manage to do that once, you know,” Cary said defensively.
Okay, it had been while she was protecting and she would have been safe anyway. Still, she’d reacted exactly the way Lucy had trained her to and managed to disarm someone with a knife! She’d done it on her own without the magic her bosses gave her. She’d considered it a big deal.
Lucy had congratulated her. And then increased her training sessions by an extra hour a week.
“Besides,” Cary said as she climbed to her feet, slowly, trying not to groan aloud, “it’s not shifters out to kill me.” Right now, anyway. “It’s a wizard. And he’s vanished. Since that vampire incident, he hasn’t made another attempt. Maybe the vampires killed him.” The previous Master of Portland wouldn’t have hesitated if he thought it expedient.
“His protégé, who you thought was dead but who isn’t dead, is still out there,” Lucy reminded her without missing a beat.
Cary scowled. “Yes, but apparently I drained him of all his magic.”
All this mess with the wizard out to kill her—she still didn’t know his fucking name—had started with Sheldon, a teenage wizard who’d been killing shifters in an attempt to steal their bodies.
Sheldon—and her former mentor Jaxer—were responsible for Cary meeting her mate, boyfriend, future king of the leopard shifters, Deacon Jones. So she supposed she should thank Sheldon for that. She had grown to love having Deacon in her life. Even if their future was filled with potential…difficulties.
She’d thought Sheldon had died during her confrontation with him, but turned out he hadn’t. And thanks to his enraged mentor, she’d discovered she absorbed magic and wasn’t the ordinary human woman she’d thought she was before being tricked into becoming a magical Protector.
The last few years had been really complicated.
“Magic or no, he killed shifters and he can kill you,” Lucy said. “He knows what you are. His mentor knows what you are. You can’t rely on your Protector magic to protect you.”
When Cary had become a Protector years ago, she’d been an ordinary human woman rethinking her career goals. Her bosses, the North American Fae who made Protectors—whom she’d dubbed the Nags because they were—and her faery mentor Jaxer had sort of tricked her into the job. The Nags had imbued her with the ability to channel their magic and keep good guys safe from bad guys. And that had been her job ever since. They even paid her for it.
The problem was that when she wasn’t channeling that magic, she was still an ordinary woman who could be killed as easily as any other. Unless she was protecting someone, she was vulnerable. All a bad guy had to do to kill her was want to kill her and only her, and not be any danger to anyone else.
That last part could be tricky, though. Bad guys by their very definition were usually dangerous to someone else besides her. It was all in the intentions of the moment, which made it more difficult to kill her than some bad guys thought because…well, they were bad and intended bad things.
But if a bad guy knew how to kill her, knew what she was, they could manage it.
Sheldon’s mentor had come close to killing her a couple of times before siccing the vampires on her. He’d figured out that trick. If he could do it, others could as well.
And now that she was in the last part of her seventh year as a Protector—a test year she had to either pass and come into her full powers (whatever that meant), or she’d die and her family would be compensated—she felt even more vulnerable to these issues. Too many people now knew what she was, despite her best efforts. She’d made a lot of enemies in her time as a Protector. Turned out, bad guys hated th e person who stopped them doing whatever the hell they wanted.
Who knew.
“You have to learn the stuff I’m teaching you,” Lucy continued emphatically. “And you have to have it in your bones. You have to be able to react. Not think.”
“I swear, this is the first time in my life I’ve been accused of thinking too much.”
“Ha! Want me to list the other times.”
“No.” Cary lowered her chin and gave Lucy a look.
Lucy returned it with a grin. “I have a surprise for you.”
Cary groaned. “I’m going to hate it, aren’t I?”
“Depends on if you can stop thinking or not.”
Cary watched Lucy’s back as she disappeared into one of the two back rooms the students used for changing. She came back out followed by a man large enough Cary had to crane her neck back to look up at him.
He was six foot nine if he was an inch, wide and thickly muscled, dark brown complexion, clean shaven, his dark curly hair cut close and tight to his head. He wore a navy blue gi with a black belt circling his waist, the two colors blending together so well it was hard to tell the belt’s color unless she looked close. His expression when he stepped onto the mat was serious and fierce.
And Cary’s pulse kicked hard.
“Cary,” Lucy said, smiling up at the man who was two and half times her size, “this is Brandon Hawthorne. He’s a bear shifter.” Lucy met Cary’s wide-eyed gaze. “And your new sparring partner.”
Brandon grinned.
Oh boy.
* * *
One hour later. The ceiling again.
That water spot was spreading. She’d better warn Lucy to have the landlord look into it.
“Can you breathe?” Brandon asked, his grinning face coming into Cary’s view overhead.
She took a test breath just to make sure. “Give me a minute. Just a minute.”
Brandon, as it turned out, was a delightful man. Happy and friendly and easy with a joke. And he did not pull his punches even a little bit. Or well, he did in that he kept them to human tolerable levels. But he didn’t give her a break from tossing her around on her ass.
“I am never going to keep up with you, you know?” she said, still prone on the mat. It seemed safer down here. The minute she stood up, Brandon and Lucy came at her again.
They’d been tag teaming her for the last hour. And while Cary could see Lucy when she moved, she couldn’t seem to avoid the hits. Brandon, she couldn’t even see most of the time. She’d blink, he’d be in front of her, he’d flip her onto her back. And she’d stare up at the ceiling for a few minutes catching her breath.
“Lucy’s right,” he said, offering a hand to help her to her feet.
She took the offer gratefully, groaning as he easily lifted her to a standing position—without her having to put much effort into the process. Which was good because she was exhausted and only stubborn will kept her from tumbling back onto her face onto the mat once Brandon released his hold. She straightened her gi top in a bid to delay the inevitable next attack.
“I’m always right,” Lucy said, her little girl’s voice smug.
Cary snorted.
Brandon’s smile widened. To be fair to the bear who kept knocking her on her ass, the man had a really charming smile. Broad and open. He was one of the most laidback shifters Cary had ever met. His movements, when he wasn’t tossing her around the dojo, were all easygoing grace, almost lazy and slow. And he laughed easily.
He was extremely careful of his strength, too, gentle with her fragile human body, despite flipping her onto the mats repeatedly. She knew without having to be told he could break her in half with his pinky finger. Even if he wasn’t a bear shifter, he’d likely be able to do that. But he didn’t seem inclined to exert any of that power. Given all the shifter power plays Cary had witnessed—and been the focus of—over her years as a Protector, his seeming uninterest in showing off that strength struck her as extremely refreshing.
“Sensai’s arrogance aside,” Brandon said, winking at Lucy. She rolled her eyes at him. “She is right about your overthinking. You’re trying to see me. But you will never see a shifter move. You have to act on instinct and stop relying on your ordinary senses.”
Actually, she could see shifters move when she was protecting someone. But she took his point. “I don’t know how to stop relying on my ordinary senses,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t know how to stop trying to see you.”
“Instincts take time to develop,” Lucy said, rubbing Cary’s sore shoulder. “That’s why I asked Brandon to help us. You need to get used to acting, just moving, without worrying about everything else. And you need to learn how to do that with someone like Brandon.”
“I’m here for you,” he said with a friendly nod. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you there.”
Cary finally let out a long sigh and smiled. “Okay. If you’re willing to put in the work with me, I’ll try my damnedest to stop thinking so much.”
“Good girl,” Lucy said.
Cary was about to comment on the condescension when a new voice called from the front of the dojo.
“You two done yet?” Marianne said. She stood at the edge of the mat, hands on her hips, shaking her head at them. “Angie’s expecting us soon. The restaurant won’t hold our reservation all night.”
Marianne was a seamstress extraordinaire and a magical weaver. She created most of Cary’s clothes now—all with magic pockets that kept Cary from losing her keys and wallet all the time—and she was one of Cary’s best friends.
Dressed in a casual, sexy pearl gray pants suit she’d made to fit her curvy form perfectly and complement her dark skin, Marianne looked almost her old self. She’d returned to the short, soft afro she’d kept for most of the years Cary had known her, after a brief stint with long braids. Her makeup was understated except for a bright plum lipstick which was a powerful pop of color. She looked both indulgent and annoyed that they weren’t ready to go. And her smirk and raised brows said clearly she wasn’t waiting long if they didn’t move their asses. That was Marianne in every way.
Which made Cary’s heart happy to see.
Marianne had gone through a very rough breakup a few months back with her longtime girlfriend, and Cary was still worried about her. Marianne had decided not to move back to New York City, which was frankly a relief, but she hadn’t really returned to her pre-breakup self yet. And maybe she never would. But Cary, Lucy, and Angie had been making an effort to keep her busy and distracted so she could at least try to get back to some level of peace.
She waved at them. “Move it, ladies. We don’t have all night.”
Cary grinned. “You’ve just saved my poor, sorry self from another ass-kicking and I will be forever in your debt.”
“I will take you up on that debt later when you buy the wine.”
“Deal.”
Marianne’s gaze flicked to Brandon and she raised her brows again at Lucy, the question clear.
“Sorry,” Lucy said. “Brandon Hawthorne, this is Marianne Johnson. Marianne, Brandon. He’s helping me train Cary now.”
“Nice to meet you,” Marianne said. “Try not to hurt our girl too much.”
“It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you too, Marianne Johnson,” he said.
Cary gave him a look. His voice had dropped at least half an octave, to a pretty sexy base rumble. And he was staring at Marianne with an intensity that could have been intimidating if he weren’t offsetting the look with his most charming smile.
