Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem #2)(102)

“Did you talk to Red this morning?” Emery asked as they parked, trying to hunt out any glimmering spells around the area. Nothing jumped out, but wards without additional spell work woven in would be invisible.

“Yeah, that good-for-nothing dog turd.” Reagan parked and pushed the door open. “He’s thinking the mage count must be in the eighties.”

Emery’s joints stiffened and fear bled through him. Suddenly, he couldn’t seem to force himself to open the door. He had his hand on the handle, but it refused to move.

“Are you okay?” Penny asked softly.

“What are we doing, Penny?” he whispered, his body starting to shake. Eighty? That was madness. Madness! Last night he and Penny couldn’t defeat a comparatively tiny host.

Eighty? It was impossible. They would never make it out.

She would never make it out.

After his parents had died, he’d loved exactly three people in his life. Real, honest-to-God love. One as a brother, one as a surrogate son, and now Penny.

He’d lost his brother. He’d helped kill his surrogate father after the man betrayed them.

He could not lose Penny. He couldn’t send her in there to die. It wasn’t in him.

“We need to leave now,” he said, taking his hand away from the handle. “We need to run.”





42





I stilled in the back seat, never having seen Emery like this. Even in the dire situations, when all hope was lost, he hadn’t once panicked.

For some reason, that calmed me. Chased away my own panic.

“What’s up?” I asked, reaching forward to lay my hand on his shoulder.

“Even with Reagan, we don’t have the power to go up against eighty people. It’s impossible.”

“It could only be fifty. Red must have been guessing.”

“Or it could be a hundred.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “My mother is backing this idea. That means there is a real chance we’ll come out ahead. And your foresight didn’t go off— Wait, did your foresight go off?” He shook his head, his face pale. “Right. There you go. It does sound impossible, that’s true. But look, you have your new power stone, and it has faith in you. And a lot of power, actually. We have Reagan. She’s incredible, she really is. And we can get hundreds of casings stored up. She brought a bunch with her from her secret stash at home, remember? Some are probably even ours. She stole them from the vampires.”

“Why are you going along with this?”

“Because…well, because everyone around me is pushy, and you all seem to think this is the right way to do things. But if you think about it, all these people are in town for us, and they were going to come for us sometime. At least this is on our terms.”

He deflated and shook his head.

“Come on.” I patted his shoulder. “Buck up. We can do this. We have a future. I mean, my mother basically foretold it. It was gibberish and only made a mild amount of sense, but it was a future involving Reagan’s…secret. We should trust in that.”

“I foretell futures all the time. It’s how I avoid them.”

I didn’t have an answer for that one, so I said, “Sure, yeah,” and got out of the car.

“There was a tripwire over here,” Reagan said, standing off to the side next to a few trees. “It ran over there.” She pointed across the small parking lot. “We drove through it. I took it down, but it’s too late. Someone with midrange power knows we’re here.”

“Think they’ll drive in?” I asked, walking around the car to get Emery.

“Well, they certainly aren’t going to take camels.”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes and knocked on Emery’s window. “Come on. The first step is the hardest.”

“Your turn to play strongman, huh?” Reagan wrinkled her nose and put up her hands. “There is something else out that way. Do you see it?”

“What do you mean, my turn to play strongman?” I waited by his door.

“Dual-mages.” She waggled her finger in our direction. “You switch off the different hats, right?”

“We’re not a dual-mage.”

She put up her hand to block the sun. “Not yet, but something changed after you left the bar. You’re acting like the Bankses. I can see it. Hell, I can feel constant shifting between you. It’s pleasant. I like when your rage shifts around. That’s the most fun.”

“But we didn’t do anything different.” I remembered the feeling when we’d created the concealment spell together in the gap between the houses in the French Quarter. We’d blended our weaves into and through each other to make the kind of comprehensive, tightly packed spell I’d never achieved on my own.

We’d merged, in a way. The balance I’d always felt with him had become more grounded. Our roots had dug deeply into the ground, entwining as they did so, and our energy had reached into the sky. Oneness.

I wondered if the dual-mage situation would boost that effect again, as it boosted the magic of Callie and Dizzy.

“You’ve got all the essentials lined up,” Reagan said, walking toward the warehouse with her hands out. “Becoming a dual-mage pair would be a natural next step. Of course, that means forever. Scary stuff.”