Burned by Magic (The Baine Chronicles #1)(3)

Instantly the tremors receded to slight vibrations, and his breath came a little easier. A huge wave of relief rushed through me, and I wanted to sag against the couch. Instead, I fed him the rest of the antidote, drop by drop until the entire vial was gone. Even so, the symptoms did not completely subside – his lips were still blue, his skin ice-cold.

“Sunaya,” Roanas croaked in a voice like crushed gravel. He shifted his head in my lap, his black mane of tiny braids sliding against my legs.

“Shhh,” I soothed, sliding my arms beneath him so I could lift him onto the couch. His dark cotton shirt was soaked in sweat. “Don’t speak. You need to conserve your energy.”

“No… point…” he said with a weak chuckle. My leg muscles flexed as I rose to my feet with Roanas cradled in my arms. I carefully deposited him atop the couch, then sat down next to him and pulled his head into my lap again. “I’m dying.”

“No,” I said firmly. I ran my hand through his braids, pushing them back from his clammy forehead. “You just feel like you’re dying. Which is perfectly understandable since you just experienced silver poisoning, but –”

“The antidote… wasn’t enough.” He wrapped his long fingers around mine, and a tremor went through me – his grip, normally so strong, was as weak as a newborn babe’s. “Too much silver… too fast. Not… going to… make it.”

“What the f*ck is that supposed to mean?” I snarled, tightening my grip on his hand. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. Roanas was only eighty years old – not even close to middle-aged for a shifter. He had a long, full life ahead of him, at least another two hundred years or so. Fuck, he was supposed to meet me tomorrow afternoon for a sparring match. Dying was not on the agenda.

“How could this happen to you?” I choked out as the tears spilled down my cheeks. “You... I… you’d never be so stupid as to accidentally poison yourself with silver!”

Shifters are hypersensitive to silver, so if it’s within fifty yards of us we’ll catch a whiff of it. The only reason I’d been burned by the coin earlier was because I’d been distracted. There was no way Roanas, who could hit a moving target with a chakram a hundred yards away – thirty more than my personal best – would miss such a thing.

But the empty glass lying on its side on the carpet told me that Roanas had done exactly that, and I couldn’t understand why. Leaning over, I picked up the glass and sniffed it, certain I would catch the scent of silver.

But I scented absolutely nothing except the burning stench of liquor and a hint of saliva.

“What… how?” I gaped down at the glass as if it were a foreign species clutched in my palm, and to me, it might as well have been. “Why don’t I smell anything?”

“The silver was mixed… with some kind of chemical… that masked the taste and scent.” Roanas panted the last word, his voice edged with pain. My heart ached at the sight of his pale skin and strained expression. “That’s why none of the others… detected it either.”

“There are others?” My throat tightened. “As if it isn’t bad enough you’re dying.” My voice broke on the last word.

“Please, Sunaya.” Roanas’s fingers curled around my jacket collar, pulling me closer. Even though he was sinking fast, his tawny eyes burned with a ferocious intensity. They cut through the fog of tears and pain in my brain, demanding my attention. “You must find out… who did this. There are other shifters… being targeted. Not just… about me.”

“Targeted?” My eyes narrowed as my brain tried to catch up with the implications of that. “Targeted how? And why?”

“The facts… are in my case file…” Blood spilled over Roanas’s lower lip, and I blinked back tears. “The Enforcers have been slow… to put the different cases together… but they are related.” His voice strengthened. “I was investigating… and so they’ve taken me out. You must connect the dots, Sunaya. Find out who did this. Stop the killings, avenge me, and… and…”

“And what?” Shards of ice scraped along the walls of my insides, the fear inside me painfully sharp. I gripped Roanas’s hand hard enough to grind the bones against each other, holding on for dear life. I never wanted to let him go.

“And… be careful.”

His face went slack then, the life gone from his eyes. And as he slid from this world to the next as silently as the hot tears rolling down my cheeks, I vowed not to rest until I caught the bastard who did this.





Chapter Two




By the time I left Roanas’s house at seven in the morning, every last tear in my body had been burned away by the seething fury in my heart. I’d called the Enforcer’s Guild using the telephone in Roanas’s kitchen to report the murder, only to have two Enforcers show up at the doorstep – several hours later, the lazy f*cks – and start interrogating me.

Yeah, okay, I get it. I was with him when he died, so I couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect. Even though I’ve only worked on homicide cases a handful of times, I’d done enough to know that this was part of procedure. But what really pissed me off was that they’d brushed me off, when I’d asked about similar cases.