Natural Dual-Mage (Page 13)

“She’s bad at people,” Reagan said, and Emery coughed into his fist, trying to hide his chuckles.

“I turn into a Kodiak,” Rex said in a growl.

“Right. Standard animal, then,” I said softly.

“That is Rex Keel,” Unnaturally Handsome said, trying to restore a sense of decorum in the meeting. “He is the Alpha of the European Union.” His gaze shifted to Roger, clearly trying to keep things moving.

The shifter didn’t skip a beat. “For those who don’t know me”—I got a glance—“I’m Roger Nevin.” Another glance. “A wolf. I’ve been following the situation in Seattle closely. My people are in a tight spot there, but we don’t have the resources to combat the issue. While it is no secret that I would rather not work with vampires, I can see no alternative in this one instance. That is, if we have enough manpower to settle this. I do not intend to send my people to their deaths.”

Roger shifted his intense stare to me. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Penny,” he said. His stare softened my bones and scrambled my stomach in nervousness. A song of wolves drifted into my mind’s eye, and the smell of evergreen trees on the night air infused my senses. It was lovely, don’t get me wrong, but the guy was intense. There were no two ways about it.

“And, Miss Bristol, my name is Vlad. It is lovely to make your acquaintance.” Unnaturally Handsome’s velvety gaze stroked across my skin.

Vlad. That name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.

Before I could give it more thought, Rex had pushed forward and banged down his forearms on the table. “Time’s a-wasting. What’s in this for us?”

9

An hour later, Rex hadn’t gotten any more likable. The opposite, in fact, if that were possible. What he had gotten was more intense. With each perceived (or outright) slight toward him, he magically flew off the handle, slamming the room with his aggressive magic while staring hostilely at whoever had set him off.

He wasn’t the only one misbehaving. The room was like a swamp of prickly egos, and they were all barely trying to get along. Since the Redcap goblin, I seemed to be able to feel the magic of others more strongly, and surges of it kept rolling over me from all directions. Everyone seemed to want something for helping. It wasn’t enough that they were ending a very real, very terrible threat—they wanted a say in how things got remade. And, in the vampires’ case, they wanted to actually be in the Guild. To make decisions.

Over my dead body.

I blew out a breath as yet another wall of magic smashed into me, this time from Vlad. He gazed at Rex, and the look was entered onto my never ignore list, under the subset of when you should run like hell.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Reagan held out her hands, just as worked up as everyone else. “Do we even know which elder is siding with the Guild? And the size of his or her faction?”

She was talking about the revelation, some months ago, that the Guild was no longer working alone. Their vampire allies had infiltrated Darius’s group and blocked an SOS call from me when Emery and I were cornered by mages in New Orleans. Darius had been blindsided, and shifters had saved Emery and me.

Darius steepled his fingers. “No. We don’t know who is giving the orders. I’ve extracted two vampires from my faction that I had thought were loyal to me. Sadly, they went to their eternal grave before I could get sufficient information. I know only that it is an elder pulling the strings.”

Vlad’s hard stare beat into Darius. “You had a breach of loyalty?”

I cocked my head to the side. Was it just me, or was Vlad a little too anxious about Darius’s breach of loyalty?

“Yes,” Darius said. A new wave of ferocious vampire magic swirled through the room, the first time Darius had come close to losing his cool. “I would look into your people, Vlad, if I were you. The breach was…wholly unexpected.”

For a moment, the unnaturally handsome mask peeled away from Vlad’s face, and I knew that no matter how lovely he looked, he was a ruthless killer. A predator of predators. Shivers coated my body.

“So let me get this straight,” Rex said. He braced a huge hand on his knee. Sweat beaded his brow. “You’d be going up against a host of some four hundred mages or more, at least one natural, and an unknown number of vampires, one of whom is an elder?” He paused to look around the room. “And you’d do this with only one more untrained natural, a bald bounty hunter, and one more elder, who I wouldn’t trust with my worst enemy’s life?” He laughed, shaking the table. Roger watched him silently. Angry, potent magic from everyone else slashed at my senses. “No wonder you are desperate for our help. They got numbers and the home field advantage, and you’ve got a losing battle. I mean, look…” He tapped his finger on the table, his grin implying we were all idiots. “It’s pretty obvious they’d wipe us out. I get the issue, but—”

“Do you?” Reagan leaned forward against the table and speared him with a hard stare. A challenging stare.

Rex’s magic blasted me again, slicing into my body and jabbing at my energy.

Rip. Kill. Tear.

“How in holy hand grenades are you in charge of anybody?” Struggling to breathe, already on edge and barely holding it together, I squeezed my eyes shut and clasped my hands together, the desire to jump to Reagan’s defense so strong I could barely think.

“What did you say?” He swiveled toward me slowly, his eyes on fire. Emery stiffened next to me.

I rubbed my temples, my mind hazy from the constant battering of powerful magic. My filter was long gone. “When someone argues with you, your first inclination is to rip them apart. It’s so second nature that it seems like it must usually work for you. You’ve learned brute force ends arguments. But you haven’t stepped up once tonight. I can only surmise that it is because you are, at heart, a coward. Here, among these powerful people, you know you’ll lose. You are the worst kind of leader. The worst kind of person to have power at your disposal.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose, his new blast of magic suffocating me. The desire to lash out at him boiled my blood.

“We have but a small collection of mages,” Darius said, somehow unruffled by the fuss and clearly ignoring me, “but their power and experience is vastly superior to anything that will be thrown at us. And I can’t imagine I have to tell you the power Vlad and I can summon. We each have vast resources at our disposal. More so than any other elder.”

“Their natural is nothing,” Reagan said, tag-teaming with Darius (while also ignoring me). “Emery is indisputably the best mage in the world. He is above everyone else…save Penny. Together, they are better still, as we’ve said. The Guild’s natural might be as powerful as each of them individually, but she will not stand a chance when confronted with Penny and Emery together. Not a chance.”

“Says the bounty hunter?” Rex pushed.

“Yeah,” Reagan said, her eyes glittering menace, her magic flirting with mine. “Says the bounty hunter. Don’t play dumb. I know you’ve heard of me. Your shifters give me a wide berth. Why do you think that is? Because I smell weird?”

Rex scoffed and turned. “Look, Roger, I get why you’d want to bring me in on this. Two elders and two naturals? It sounds great on paper. But this”—he gestured around the table—“doesn’t add up. Not compared to what they’re up against. It isn’t our fight, but it would be our deaths. And for what? We’d be pushed out of the end prize.”

“You are only this flippant because you have no idea what the Mages’ Guild is doing,” Reagan said, frustration ringing clearly in her voice. “You said you had some bad mages filtering into your area. Just a couple, you said, right? Well, that couple has run you ragged. What do you think a host would do, and you powerless to stop them?”

“We’re stopping it before it starts,” Rex bit back. “They won’t get a host in. We’ll kill them before they do.”

A wave of dizziness overcame me. “He’s the wrong sort.” I shook my head, power pumping through my middle. I exhaled and wiped my eyes, but it didn’t help dislodge the strange feeling of disembodiment. “We don’t need all the help; we need the right help. And he is not it. If there is anyone in the world I wouldn’t want to go into battle with, it is that man right there. Oh good, there’s another blast of magic. I was worried he’d suddenly learned to control himself.”

“You okay?” Emery asked quietly.

“No. I don’t know. I don’t feel right. But one thing is certain—he won’t step down from leadership. He craves the power. We can all see that. And clearly, none of the shifters can, or will, tear him down. How many people is he squashing with his rage? How many people have been killed because of his ego and small-mindedness?” I shook my head, and a wave of vertigo had me leaning forward. “Wow, I need a breather. But before that…I can help. We want the shifters to help us, so we should help them. It’s only fair. I can help…and I should. Right?”

Confused silence descended, and I struggled to piece together coherent thoughts. I couldn’t think past what I knew, in my heart of hearts, needed to be done—the right thing, which only I could accomplish. But I couldn’t stop to analyze my own thoughts. Shifter magic was shoving me. Rolling me. Yanking me. It was like I was trapped in the rolling, surging tide, no idea what direction was up.