Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem #2)(65)

All the peacekeepers looked around at each other. The captain said, “We were running in, readying our spells. Last I saw, it was chasing her. Then my people showed up with their spells.”

Reagan’s movements slowed down and she braced her hands on her hips. My small hairs stood on end and I edged away. This was a bad sign. It meant heads were about to be kicked in.

“Captain, why do you think I was hanging out back there?” She gestured behind her.

“Because you’re a coward,” Garret said.

“Shut up, Garret, or you’ll walk away with another broken nose,” the captain said.

“Because she had it. She was in the zone. She’s new, so sure, she needed to run off the jitters, but when she did, she locked it down. I mean”—Reagan threw out her hand at the spot where the banshee had been—“since when do banshees stand idle, waiting for mages to throw spells at them?”

The captain shifted and looked around at his crew. “Is that true?”

“Why does it matter?” I asked, ready to go home. “I trapped it; they killed it. Justice served.”

“Your role remains to be proved,” Garret said.

“Well?” the captain pushed.

The woman with fuzzy hair and the man in his forties both shrugged. The others shifted and looked at their feet. With all the commotion, adrenaline and (I guessed) no small amount of fear, their brains had been in overdrive. No one had noticed.

“It’s fine, let’s—”

“It’s hers,” Reagan said, cutting me off. “It’s hers.”

The captain started nodding until Garret said, “No way. She’s not even a legit part of this operation.”

The captain stilled before nodding again. “He’s right. This goes down as a group win.”

“What?” Reagan said, incredulously. “You couldn’t get it done either time you tried before, but suddenly it went easy on you, and you don’t think it had anything to do with Penny?”

The captain shrugged, looking at the place the banshee had stood. “You were hired. She was not, something I made clear before we started out. Had you bagged it, you would’ve gotten the tag. As it is, it was a group win. Sorry, Penny. Next time, get on the books.”

“I got the kill shot,” Garret said, wiggling his pointer finger like the captain had a book out and was writing in it. “Did you hear me, captain?”

“Explode him, Penny. He’s earned it,” Reagan said, shaking her head and turning toward the cars.

Garret flinched and jogged backward, his wide eyes on me.

The guy was extremely annoying, no doubt about it, but my dog wasn’t in this fight.

I turned and hurried up to Reagan. “You intentionally didn’t engage? When that thing was chasing me?”

“Well, I would’ve engaged at first, but you ran away from me. I figured that meant you wanted a little more time. So I gave you a little more time. Then I thought it would overtake you, but I would have needed to get closer to use my magic. By then, you were running away from me again. Honestly, if you need help, running away from your partner isn’t the best idea.”

“Hindsight.”

She scoffed. “Well, anyway, by the time I was thinking about helping again, you were facing it. Great work, by the way. Why didn’t you kill it, though? That would’ve been easier than trapping it. And we wouldn’t have had to deal with this nonsense.”

“It didn’t feel right.”

“Then why not just banish it and let the other side of the veil sort it out?”

“What?”

She turned to me with a confused expression before a look of understanding crossed her face. “Ah. Right. You didn’t know that bit. My bad.”





28





“Is this why you don’t have partners? Because you only give them enough information to get themselves killed?” I asked, amazingly calm in the car on the ride back to Reagan’s house.

Reagan hadn’t even waited to give the others a proper farewell. She’d walked straight to the car, gotten in, and taken off.

“I usually don’t have partners because they are ineffective, and I need to do a better job of hiding my magic. But you’re basically in the crew now, and are quite hilarious to watch, so I’d consider adopting you.”

“No thanks. And I still don’t know a thing about your magic.”

“You say that now, but wait until you get even a little more experience and miss the thrill of making shit up. You’ll definitely want to be my partner to keep things interesting. And you know plenty about my magic. We train together, for feck’s sake. You’re just slow at piecing things together.”

“How am I slow?” I asked, outraged. “I know next to nothing about the magical world, and while you tell me plenty about your magical issues, none of you have told me squat about your actual magic. Or even what sort of magical person you are. Or anything!”

“You’d make a terrible detective.”

“You’re a terrible…” I grasped for something witty.

“What’s that?” she badgered, grinning at me. “Was there a cutdown coming?”

“Shut up,” I muttered, looking out the window. My palms itched and a strange expectancy filled me. “Something this way comes.”