Origin of Magic (Dragon's Gift: The Protector #3)(57)
The man raised his hands. “Hey, hey. No need to get feisty. You three sisters?”
I glanced doubtfully at Nix and Del, with their dark hair that was so different from my red. We might call ourselves sisters—deirfiúr in our native Irish—but this idiot didn’t know that. We were all about twenty years old, but we looked nothing alike.
“Go away,” I said. I had no patience for dudes who touched me within a second of saying hello. “Run along and flirt with your hand, because that’s all the action you’ll be getting tonight.”
His face turned a mottled red, and he raised a fist. His magic welled, the scent of rotten fruit overwhelming.
He thought he was going to smack me? Or use his magic against me?
I lashed out, punching him in the throat as I’d wanted to earlier. His eyes bulged and he gagged. I kneed him in the crotch, grinning when he keeled over.
“Hey!” A burly man with a beard lunged for us, his buddy beside him following. “That’s no way—”
“To treat a guy?” I finished for him as I kicked out at him. My tall, heavy boots collided with his chest, sending him flying backward. I might not use my magic, but I sure as hell could fight.
His friend raised his hand and sent a blast of wind at us. It threw me backward, sending me skidding across the floor.
By the time I’d scrambled to my feet, a brawl had broken out in the bar. Fists flew left and right, with a bit of magic thrown in. Nothing bad enough to ruin the bar, like jets of flame, because no one wanted to destroy the only watering hole for a hundred miles, but enough that it lit up the air with varying magical signatures.
Nix conjured a baseball bat and swung it at a guy who charged her, while Del teleported behind a man and smashed a chair over his head. I’d always been jealous of Del’s ability to sneak up on people like that.
All in all, it was turning into a good evening. Watching a fight between supernaturals was fun.
“Enough!” the bartender bellowed, right before I could throw myself back into the fray. “Or no more beer!”
The bar settled down immediately. I glared at the jerk who’d started it. There was no way I’d take the blame, even though I’d thrown the first punch. He should have known better.
The bartender gave me a look and I shrugged, hiking a thumb at the jerk who’d touched me. “He shoulda kept his hands to himself.”
“Fair enough,” the bartender said.
I nodded and turned to find Nix and Del. They’d grabbed our beers and were putting them on a table in the corner. I went to join them.
We were a team. Sisters by choice, ever since we’d woken in a field at fifteen with no memories other than those that said we were FireSouls on the run from someone who had hurt us. Who was hunting us.
Our biggest goal, even bigger than getting out from under our current boss’s thumb, was to save enough money to buy concealment charms that would hide us from the monster who hunted us. He was just a shadowy memory, but it was enough to keep us running.
“Where is Clarence, anyway?” I pulled my damp tank top away from my sweaty skin. The jungle was damned hot. We couldn’t break into the temple until Clarence gave us the information we needed to get past the guard at the front. And we didn’t need to spend too much longer in this bar.
Del glanced at her watch, her blue eyes flashing with annoyance. “He’s twenty minutes late. Old Man Bastard said he should be here at eight.”
Old Man Bastard—OMB for short—was our boss. His name said it all. Del, Nix, and I were FireSouls, the most despised species of supernatural because we could steal other magical being’s powers if we killed them. We’d never done that, of course, but OMB didn’t care. He’d figured out our secret when we were too young to hide it effectively and had been blackmailing us to work for him ever since.
It’d been four years of finding and stealing treasure on his behalf. Treasure hunting was our other talent, a gift from the dragon with whom legend said we shared a soul. No one had seen a dragon in centuries, so I wasn’t sure if the legend was even true, but dragons were covetous, so it made sense they had a knack for finding treasure.
“What are we after again?” Nix asked.
“A pair of obsidian daggers,” Del said. “Nice ones.”
“And how much is this job worth?” Nix repeated my earlier question. Money was always on our minds. It was our only chance at buying our freedom, but OMB didn’t pay us enough for it to be feasible anytime soon. We kept meticulous track of our earnings and saved like misers anyway.
“A thousand each.”
“Damn, that’s pathetic.” I slouched back in my chair and stared up at the ceiling, too bummed about our crappy pay to even be impressed by the stonework and vines above my head.
“Hey, pretty ladies.” The oily voice made my skin crawl. We could just not get a break in here. I looked up to see Clarence, our contact.
Clarence was a tall man, slender as a vine, and had the slicked back hair and pencil-thin mustache of a 1940s movie star. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on him. Probably because his stare was like a lizard’s. He was more Gomez Addams than Clark Gable. I’d bet anything that he liked working for OMB.
“Hey, Clarence,” I said. “Pull up a seat and tell us how to get into the temple.”
Clarence slid into a chair, his movement eerily snakelike. I shivered and scooted my chair away, bumping into Del. The scent of her magic flared, a clean hit of fresh laundry, as she no doubt suppressed her instinct to transport away from Clarence. If I had her gift of teleportation, I’d have to repress it as well.