Magic to the Bone (7 page)

“So I just have to click my heels together and think of home?” I looked at Ash with as much skepticism as I could muster given that I was a dragon, in a pocket of unreality, talking to another dragon. Still, teleportation seemed kind of dangerous to me.

But… I wanted to be back with Alek and my friends. I wanted to know they were all right. I wasn’t sure I was ready to face Samir again. I
wasn’t sure I’d ever feel ready. I guess part of being a big damn hero is that you do things anyway, no matter how scared you feel.

“Visualize a place you know well. It will be the quickest way back,” Ash said.

We were standing in the open field by the cabin. I looked around and sighed. It would be so simple to stay, to put things off another week or two. Time wasn’t passing much outside here,
or so Ash said. Would another week mean the difference between winning and losing? I had no way to know.

“Everywhere I knew is gone,” I said. My shop was burned. The Henhouse B&B was burned. I had no idea if Alek had his trailer with him or where it would be. Had he left Wylde? If my friends were smart, they would have gotten the hell out of there. But no, the druid had said they were hiding
out in the River of No Return wilderness. “If they are in the woods, how will I find them?” I vocalized my worries.

“You could try going to a person and not a place, but it is less accurate.” Ash folded his arms across his chest, his red-flecked eyes fixed on my face.

“Why can’t you just drop me off in Wylde?” I asked. He’d explained why he couldn’t come with me; that he had to stay in the Veil
and become guardian to the cracked Seal again. Him being fully in the real world would be one dragon too many, apparently.

“Holding this pocket has been tiring enough,” Ash said. He shook his head. “The Seal weakens. I cannot leave the Veil again. I’ve played chicken enough with the Oath for one lifetime, I think.”

It was interesting to have my very existence referred to as playing chicken,
but I let it go. Things were tense now that I was leaving. He’d accepted my promise not to kill Samir, but I had a suspicion that Ash was perfectly aware how thin that promise was, and that if push came to dying horribly, I’d break it in a heartbeat.

A person. Not a place.

“I can do this,” I muttered. “Good-bye, Ash. Thank you,” I added. He didn’t offer a hug and I didn’t ask. Ash nodded at
me and smiled. I decided to pretend his smile was less sad than it looked.

There was only one person I wanted to be with if I got right to the core of it all. I closed my eyes and let all awareness of the field and my father slip away. Instead I pictured Alek. Tall, strong, ice-blue eyes, soft, pale skin, lips curving in a smirk that said he could see through all my bullshit. My tiger, my rock,
my mate. I let my magic flow through me and focused all my will on being with Alek, on feeling his arms curling around me again, on the wild, musky scent of him.

Then I clicked my heels, because why not.

“There’s no place like home,” I whispered.

Turned out there was no place like home. There was fucking cold air, shitloads of snow, and my damn friends about to get themselves killed.

I popped out of the Veil and ended up standing on the roof of an SUV in the middle of a big clearing. There was snow everywhere and my thin flannel shirt felt like nothing against the below-freezing air. I gasped for breath and squinted to look around in the dimming light. I barely had a moment to register that Harper was here and alive. The damn fox was about to get herself killed. Samir’s
magic coated this place like sugar on Frosted Flakes. It was writhing all around a paddock formed of silvered barbed wire, and radiated out in a spiral from there. I couldn’t tell what the spell would do once triggered, but I couldn’t imagine it was anything good.

There was a two-story farmhouse to my right with a huge white tiger crouched by the porch. Alek. Alive, for the moment. His blue eyes
met mine and I held up my hands in a stay-put gesture.

“It’s a trap, stop!” I called out to both of them. How the hell Harper hadn’t triggered it yet I didn’t know, but I could puzzle that out later. Provided later wasn’t too late, of course.

The fox turned and looked at me. Her mouth opened and then shut. It was almost comical except for the dire circumstances. I gave her a thumbs-up. Fox-Harper
didn’t move, staying frozen in place. Tiger-Alek shifted to human, but also stayed where he was.

“Jade,” he called out. “What is it?”

I rubbed my thumb over my talisman, using my newfound skills to examine Samir’s spell. His power smelled honey sweet and sickened me. I forced myself to remain calm. Destructive magic. Coming into the area hadn’t triggered it. The spiral looked like a whirlpool
of power, pulling in toward the center. It encompassed the house, the paddock, even the area I was in.

“Jade?”

I turned my head as Ezee shouted from across the field, his voice another balm on my worried soul. He and Levi stood at the edge of the clearing, just outside the spell’s range.

“Stay back,” I yelled to them. “Stay at the tree line.” The last thing I needed was for two more of us to
be caught in this.

“What about the unicorn?” Levi yelled. “We’re here for it.”

I looked back at the dome of glowing wires over the paddock. For a moment I saw the white horse, but something about it seemed off. Samir’s magic colored it as well. I summoned more of my power into myself and really stared. The unicorn seemed to melt away, leaving a grotesque construction of silver wires, a white
horse hide, and chunks of carved wood behind. The spiral of magic was anchored at the center, buried inside the construct.

“It’s an illusion,” I said. I had a feeling that touching that thing would have caused the spell to trigger, but I doubted that was the only way to set this off. It was too elaborate, thrown too wide across the clearing.

Alek cursed in Russian. Fox-Harper started to move
away from the paddock back toward Alek, being careful to stay in her old tracks, and the spell shivered in response, the honey-thick magic rising. The magic clung to her fur, outlining her in a glow apparently only I could see.

“Harper, no,” I called out. “Don’t move.”

Her movement had confirmed my second assumption. The spell was a trap with multiple triggers. It was open right now, waiting
for one of those trapped within to try to leave it.

I looked down at my own legs and feet. The car wasn’t covered in magic. The spell was focused along the ground. I followed the spiral and began to pick out small points of concentrated power. As Ash had said, Samir was going with his comfort zone. He’d anchored the spell along the arms of the spiral with ensorcelled stones. I hadn’t touched
the ground, so I wasn’t caught in the spell yet. The spell was designed for people who had to be in contact with the earth.

I didn’t think I could dispel it without triggering it. That left getting Alek and Harper out quickly. Samir was predictable in that he would probably have rigged the effect to be some kind of explosion. He liked explosions. Messier and showier, the better. Plus if this
trap was designed to catch my friends, he would have made sure it would do lots of damage. No guarantee of killing a shifter otherwise.

I shoved away that thoroughly unpleasant thought.

“Okay,” I called out. “I have an idea. Ezee, Levi, back out of here. Like way, way back.”

They must have picked up on how deadly serious I was, because they disappeared into the trees with little more than a
worried look in our direction.

“What do you need?” Alek asked me.

“For you and Harper to hold really still. This might feel weird. Harper, I think it is safe for you to shift.” It would be easier to do what I wanted if everyone was human since we might need to hold on to each other.

Harper shifted to human but stayed in place.

“Holding still, got it,” she said.

“I’m going to yank you guys
to me and then fly us out of here. When you get within reach, grab a hold of each other. This might be kind of explosive. Ready?” I pulled on my magic, letting it sing in my veins. I’d been training for weeks. This was just two little spells at once, with the two people I loved most in the world’s lives on the line. No biggie.

“Ready,” Alek said.

“Let’s do this,” Harper said.

Throwing my arms
wide, I snapped out two long coils of power and wrapped them around Alek and Harper. In my mind I drew the shield, summoning it around me as I yanked them into the air and across the field. I was already rising, towing them along like action heroes being dragged into a rescue helicopter. Only instead of a helicopter, they just had a giant glowing sphere of shield magic. I hoped it was up to the
task.

Alek’s hand closed on my forearm first, warm and solid. Then Harper slammed into us as Samir’s magic reacted and his spiral unwound in a spectacular burst. I slammed my shields closed and let the wave of Samir’s magic throw us into the air like a punted soccer ball. Wind streamed past my face, whipping my hair free from its braid. I leaned into Alek and held on to my spell, pouring everything
into the shield.

Then we were free from the explosion, sailing high above the trees. I opened my eyes and looked down with tear-blurred vision. Below us the clearing was blackened and cratered. The house was gone. It looked like a meteor had hit, the trees around all bent and broken in a circle leaning away from the point of impact. There was no fire, just destruction. I hoped the twins had gotten
far enough away from the edge.

I let go of the shield and wrapped us in magic so we wouldn’t plummet to our deaths. I’d never flown with someone else clinging to me, much less two someones, but I managed a more or less graceful descent toward what looked like another clearing. Open ground seemed better than trying for a forest landing.

We crashed less than gracefully into the snow, Alek twisting
at the last moment and catching me so I landed more on him than anything else. We just lay like that, Harper next to me, her hand still gripping my arm, my body sprawled half over Alek, and caught our breaths.

Alek’s arms came up around me and squeezed me hard enough that I had to squeak in protest. Then his mouth was on mine, and for a moment I forgot everything. This was what I had fought for.
This was what I had missed, had craved.

“You two want to get a room?” Harper’s voice pulled me back to reality.

I let go of Alek and turned to look at her. She was sitting up in the snow. Whole. Healthy. She looked tired and her eyes had dark circles below them, but she wasn’t looking at me with that haunting glare of utter betrayal. I ignored a twinge of guilt. I didn’t have to tell her about
not being able to kill Samir yet.

“I thought you were dead,” I said as I crawled off Alek and wrapped my arms around her.

She hugged me back, burying her head in my neck. “I ain’t so easy to kill,” she said. Her words were flippant though her tone was anything but.

“I’m sorry, furball,” I whispered into her snow-caked hair.

“Jade!”

I let go of Harper reluctantly and looked up to see Ezee
and Levi stumbling through the snow toward us.

“When you said way, way back, you meant it,” Levi said with a grimace. His coat was torn across his chest and fresh blood stained the ripped material.

“Are you all right?” I got to my feet. The snow coating my shirt was starting to melt and I was getting colder and colder by the second.

“Just a scratch from some branches I didn’t dodge,” Levi said.

Ezee stopped a couple of feet from me. He, too, looked tired. They all did. Tired and more careworn than I’d ever seen them. I had a sudden and uncomfortable suspicion that more time had passed than I realized, or than Ash had said would. I hoped Ash had merely been wrong and not lying to me.

“So, what did I miss? What happened to you guys?” I said with an only half-forced smile.

“Mercenaries,”
Ezee said, returning my smile, his white teeth flashing brightly in the dimming light. “What happened to you?”

“Training montage,” I said. “Is everyone else safe?”

“Mom is back at camp guarding Yosemite while he tries to contact Brie and Ciaran. Junebug is keeping an eye on the road. We should probably find her. I can’t imagine she missed the giant explosion.”

Junebug was alive? The last thing
I remembered was her being shot. Relief was truly a tangible thing when it was this strong. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d buried all my worries about my friends until just now. I felt like someone had removed a thousand pounds of iron from off my shoulders.

“Good, gang’s all here,” I said.

“Except Max,” Harper said behind me.

I had no response to that.

“Let’s get back to camp before Jade
freezes, yes?” Alek said. He pulled off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders.

“Don’t you need this?” I asked, trying to be polite even as I shoved my wet arms into the warm sleeves.

“I have fur,” Alek said.

Good point. I pulled his oversized coat around me and felt marginally better.

My friends shifted to their animal forms and led the way. I followed Alek’s tiger, my brain already working
out how to tell my story. I owed them all a lot of explanations. They deserved the truth from me, about everything.