Raised in Fire

“No magic,” I said, nearing the end. Dread pierced my gut. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Just up here there is an emergency…thing. I can’t make out what kind, though.” Callie pointed ahead.

“Darius, go get the—” A faint feeling of magic tingled my skin as I neared the end of the cargo area. “Wait.”

“I feel magic,” Penny said, just a little behind me. “Evil magic.”

I glanced back at her, surprised.

“There is no evil magic. Or good magic. Just magic,” Callie said in a hush. “It is the caster’s purpose that defines the spell.”

“The caster makes this magic evil,” Penny amended. “It is dark and clingy and…sticky.” She wiped at her arms.

I peeked around the corner. A large space existed beyond the cargo lots before the land became industrialized again. To the naked eye, it was empty but for a small building that sat near the edge of the graveled area. A small, out-of-the-way shack that didn’t seem maintained. Next to it, however, was a moderately sized area cloaked in a heavy invisibility spell, shot through with spider webs of different kinds of eye distractions.

“Holy crap.” Relief and fear washed over me in turns. This had to be it. This had to be the site we were looking for.

And that meant I was about to confront a really powerful demon for the second time.

“Someone put a lot of time and effort into this collection of spells,” I said in a hush.

“What kind of spell?” Callie whispered.

“Invisibility and multiple types and power levels of distraction spells. It has all the bells and whistles. What I don’t understand is how come no one missed the loss of a structure this large?”

“How large?” Dizzy asked. “Does it fill the whole space?”

“About three-quarters of it. You can see where people have been walking around it.” I pointed at the lines of foot traffic in the gravel. I doubted the humans even knew why they didn’t make a beeline to their destination, instead arcing around what they thought was absolutely nothing.

“The moonlight isn’t bright enough to see whatever you’re pointing at,” Callie said. “But a distraction spell would make the fact that something used to be there, and now isn’t, slip by the brain for a while. Something of this magnitude wouldn’t fool people for long. The mages have probably taken down and put up the spells several times, which explains the need for a few mages, even if the summoning didn’t.”

“Whatever the reason, there it is, and we need to get going.” I patted my various weapons. “Where to start?”

“Rip that spell off like a Band-Aid,” Callie said, pulling out items from her satchel. “Then we’ll take the mages and you work on the demon.”

It would take too long to slice through each of the components with the sword. No, this required my fire.

“But it’ll take time to get the various parts of that spell unraveled. Otherwise it’ll blow up in our faces,” Penny said, picking at a button on her shirt while studying the spell that she could clearly see. She was one in a million as far as mages went, which worked out for me. She wouldn’t think I was horribly unique. Not for a while, anyway. And hopefully by then I’d be out of the public eye again.

“First I have to kill that demon, though,” I said to myself.

“What?” Callie asked.

I shook my head. “Give me a screen, Callie. We don’t want anyone to see this.”

“It is highly volatile.” Penny was still picking at her button, analyzing the spell. “They did a good job with it.”

“Take one last look, because it’s about to go boom.” I nodded to Callie, who plucked at Dizzy. They walked a ways to the side and started muttering, pulling items out of their satchels.

“Should we get closer so they can make their spell smaller?” Darius asked.

I judged the distance before glancing at Penny. “No. You can withstand the heat, and I won’t feel it, but my fire shield after it takes the spell’s energy would be too hot for Penny if we got closer.”

“Shield?” Penny asked, blinking those luminous eyes.

“Do we need to do all sides?” Callie asked as Dizzy muttered an incantation. A rudimentary sheen of red tumbled down from the sky like a curtain—a unique and somewhat on-the-nose way of enacting that particular spell—blocking the view and probably any sound from the other side.

“No. Just where humans might be wandering around.” Fire filled me in a rush, spreading heat into my limbs. For now, I ignored the pulsing coldness deep in my gut. I would be confronted with that soon enough. “In reality, he did us a favor by putting this thing way out here.”

“We’re sure it’s him?” Darius asked.

“Nope. But we’re hoping for the best.” I waited for Callie and Dizzy’s spell to meet the ground before moving my hands through the air, fingers spread.

Fire licked the gravel around my feet. Penny inched back.

I pushed my hands forward and the fire responded to my unspoken command, crawling toward the structure before pausing at the base. The spell was well rooted.

“This mage definitely knows what he’s doing,” I said, the words no more than a whisper in the hush. “Get ready for some potent and aggressive attacks.”

“I’ve been working on it since I saw you in New Orleans and I can’t seem to come up with a way to make fire do that,” Penny said, having inched up again. “I’ve tried everything I can think of.”

“It’s my cousin,” I said quickly. “In Canada. Experimental spells.”

“Cousin?” Dizzy asked.

“Oh yes, he is crazy, her cousin,” Callie said. I heard Dizzy grunt. He’d probably gotten an elbow to the side. I hoped so, at any rate. “Never does the same thing twice. Totally unpredictable. Don’t try to duplicate that; it could kill you. Reagan lives on the wild side.”

“But you don’t have a casing.” Penny pointed at my empty hands.

I lifted said hands, making the low-heat fire coat the outline of the spell.

“She started with the casings.” Callie cleared her throat. “I’ll explain it all when you come for training. It’ll be fine. Let’s just focus on the here and now.”

I half smiled, because Callie clearly needed some time to come up with a good lie. My humor dripped away, though, as I felt the vibrations of the spell turn angry.

“Here we go.” I increased the heat, crackling through the spell. Like snapping strings on a violin, pieces of it kept breaking away. Pop, pop, pop.

I threw up a curtain of fire in front of us for protection. The protection and concealment spells sizzled violently, unraveled or eaten away entirely by my power. Without warning, they burst, reacting exactly as Penny had predicted. An explosion of magic slapped against my wall of fire. Sparkles of color spread out across the flame curtain before I ripped it to the side, exposing a medium-sized warehouse with blackened windows and a plain door.

The door flew open and a shock of magic blasted out at us.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I caught the attack in fire and ate away the spell, making the mages’ eyes go round in astonishment. My return fire was exactly that: a thin stream of heat-intensive flame directed right at them.

It hit the first mage dead-on. He screamed and patted at his black robe before running off the steps and onto the gravel. Clearly he had forgotten the stop-drop-and-roll technique. The flame grew, about ready to burn him alive.

Gross.

I tore the fire away and jerked my head. “Darius.”

The vampire was there in a moment. Two strong hands wrapped around the mage’s head. Penny flinched at the crack that followed.

“What are you?” one of the mages yelled, staring at me with a slack jaw. Next to him, a female mage bent to her hands, her lips moving. They’d shut the door behind them.

A blast of green shot from the female mage, headed for Dizzy. He didn’t have time to counter, but a sheen of black rose up in front of him like a net, catching the mage’s spell like my fire might’ve. Unlike my fire, however, the sheen of black didn’t eat away the magic, or even unravel it. Instead, it wrapped around the spell, making an outline like a comet. It looked about ready to implode.