Wilder Mage (30 page)

Something borne of the sun teased the edges of her senses with flares and beads of light. It grew and crackled like that of a spitting fire, sparks without heat radiating from every direction. They gathered as one and the rotating mass shot to the north.

North, the route Justus had taken.

In that moment, she felt a wizard’s signature unlike any she had ever touched before. It tasted of ash, but not like that of wood burned cleanly. This was like the greasy touch of burnt carrion, foul with old blood.

She gagged and bowed under the psychic rain, the invisible malice bearing her to her knees before the essence abruptly cut off. Sable panted, her eyes squeezed shut until her senses returned, and she struggled to her feet.

Justus. The plan to infuse the stone must have backfired and he was in trouble.

She slammed through the back door just as the entrance door opened and Wesley stepped through. He stopped short, then his face broke into a grin.

“Well, hello. Thought you might be here. I went by the house, but…”

She cut him off with one hand. “No time to talk right now. I gotta go see about something. See you later, okay?” She started to pass him.

“Oh, wait, I’ve got a message for you, something a friend wanted you to see,” Wesley said.

“Message? What message, and who are you talking about? Is it Justus? Did he call?”

Wesley’s chiseled face turned blotchy with patches of red. “No. Nothing from him,” he said through his teeth. “But a woman, a mutual acquaintance. Kind of a friend. She wants you to see something.”

“Wesley, I do not have time for this. What is it? Show me and then get the hell out of my way.” Sable felt the first stir of her emotions and magic began to crackle around her.

He grinned. “Here, look at it in the light. Stand here in the sun coming through the window and see it properly.”

Wesley led her to the display window with the quartz crystals and held out his hand. A broad gold ring was on his middle finger.

“See? I got this from a friend.”

The broad gold band was old, the metal worn. It had a dull black stone like onyx. The black set in the ring reflected no light. It was as if a hole into the depths of the earth had opened up on his finger.

“Neat, huh.” He pulled his hand back and looked down at his hand. “Kind of a promissory ring.” Wesley laid his ringed hand on her arm and squeezed it roughly. A spark like static electricity passed between them, leaving her skin tingling.

Sable stiffened and pushed him away, instantly furious. He laughed again, his face triumphant, and pulled her into a bear hug. Both arms around her, he pinned her to his chest. Sable struggled, but his arms held her tight.

“What’s wrong, sugar? Don’t you like me? Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t like squirrelly bitches like you either. Unless they are flat on their backs.”

Sable gasped, then struggled to free herself.
Emotions, keep your emotions under control,
she thought. “You greasy bastard, let me go.”

He grinned and shrugged.

Like he’s waiting for something, wanting me to fight
, Sable thought. She growled and reached for her magic.

Nothing.

She didn’t understand, and he laughed harder and tightened his grip. Her arms throbbed with the blood pooling in his crushing hug. Sable tried to touch her magic again.

Nothing; like stretching her hand blindly in a dark room, nothing met her groping fingers. No wall, no obstruction, an absence of sensation. She tried again, panting with the effort.

Wesley laughed harder. “What’s wrong? You got a funny look on your face, as if you lost something. Is that it? Did you lose something?”

Panic began to overwhelm her, and she fought in earnest, trying to pull away from him. One blow hit his belly and he grunted. He released her and she stumbled back. Again, she reached for her magic, for anything, for just one of the elements she knew she had.

But she felt nothing.

His face turned into an unrecognizable mask. Wesley doubled his hand into a fist and slammed it into the side of her jaw. Sable dropped to the ground, hitting the shelving holding figurines, and they showered down on her. Inside her head, confusion warred with questions, nothing making sense. He clutched her hair and dragged her up, and she saw again the ring on his finger. The black stone looking like an endless well, an empty hungry maw devouring everything in its path.

Magic, fixed magic, triggered by the touch of a wizard, by her. It ate magic like a starved beast. And it looked hungry still.

He stood over her, his face twisted with malice.

“She’ll take you now, you snotty little bitch. And there ain’t nothing you can do about it.”

He threw her roughly over his shoulder.

“You ain’t so much now, are you?” Darkness swirled around her.

Chapter Twenty-Three

M
acy huddled on the hard wooden chair, her legs drawn to her chest. Dayne pulled her into his arms, and she trembled like a frightened animal. Her response to her surroundings remained minimal after the unknown wilder had exploded, and Dayne’s worry for her increased by the minute.

“Hey, sweetie, we’ll catch him. Really, don’t worry, honey,” Dayne said. Anxiety coursed through him again when she shivered harder.

She tightened her arms around his neck, pulling him into her, and didn’t speak.

“You know we’re strong enough. If Tiarra can find him, we’ll combine our strength and collar this guy.”

When the massive signature of the strange wizard had whirled into their consciousness, it shocked the Imperium complex into chaos. It still shook him to think of all that unbridled, untamed power that made the air hum in its wake. His heart had skipped a beat after they sensed the gather of elements. The scope of energies they felt from the wilder made his talent insignificant by comparison. The direction of the wilder was obvious, and immediately, Dayne pulled his Fire element from around him and sent it as a locating device to the wild mage. He would have found the wilder too, if it hadn’t been for Tiarra.

She had been livid when she realized her gathered magic had disrupted theirs. Like a jet moving through the vapor trails of another plane, her hysterical response to the wilder disrupted the locating magic of all the other mages.

Macy sat on the chair while Dayne yelled orders at subordinates and spoke to an enraged Tiarra over the phone. In all that time, Macy remained mute, but her scream at the distant wilder when the magic exploded still rung in his ears.

The signature of the wilder was like nothing he had ever sensed, enormous with strength and talent. It swarmed into the sky like a massive cloud, towered over them, and then fell back to earth, collapsing like a fountain that had lost its source of water. No wonder Tiarra obsessed over finding every person with potential for magic. Here was a dangerous wizard, not only to humans, but to the Imperium as well. He could be a madman, bent on tearing the world apart on a whim. It could not be borne. They had to find and restrain or kill him by every means necessary.

“Macy, are you all right?” Dayne said.

“Yes.” Her words muffled against his chest.

“Why did you say that stuff?”

He hadn’t meant to ask, not yet. But it burst out of him.

“You said…you
screamed
those words, and I don’t understand. Why did you do that when the wilder revealed his magic? You scared me shitless.”

She stilled her shuddering at his first question, and now she straightened and twisted out of his arms to level an even look at him.

“I don’t know what you mean. Why shouldn’t I react? It was a shock. A wizard’s magic made everyone’s guts turn inside out. Including yours, mister. Why shouldn’t I react?” Macy said.

Her jaw turned stubborn, and on a distant level, Dayne felt his worry relent in a small measure with the return of her usual self.

“You yelled at the wilder to stop. ‘You don’t know what you are doing.’ That makes no sense. You acted like he could hear you, like you were warning him. I don’t understand why you did it, is all. Just…I just want to know if you are okay, if it hurt you in any way, the flood of elements that hit us.”

Macy pursed her mouth and turned away. Her words were low, nearly inaudible. “I am all right now. It was just a shock.”

He stared hard at her back, noting the tension in her neck and shoulders. “You are hiding something from me.”

She didn’t reply.

The sound of a discrete cough interrupted him.

“Excuse me, Imperator; you have another call from Tiarra on the line.”

He waited for Macy to respond for a little longer, but she nodded to the cell phone the man was holding. “You’d better take that,” she said with a thread of anger in her voice.

She moved away and walked to the window looking out over the street.

Dayne hesitated, noting Macy’s crossed arms, her stiff frame. He took the cell phone from his assistant. The man’s palpable relief in releasing the phone hardened Dayne’s sense of unease.

“Yes, Tiarra,” Dayne said.

“You and your woman convene with me as soon as I can arrange a meeting place.”

Quick and to the point, Dayne thought. “Has the wilder’s position been triangulated?”

He heard an irritated sound. “Yes. Somewhere approximately three hundred miles from your
tener unus
. You are in the vicinity.”

“Close. Huh. What do you want done about the surveillance on Sable?”

“Sable.” Tiarra’s voice sounded guttural, uttering the name like a curse. “The
tener unus
is being dealt with. She is no longer your main concern.”

“Dealt with? What do you mean?”

“She is being escorted even now to a rendezvous point so that I may take her myself.”

“How? I told you she has some magic now. She could zap someone and defend herself. It isn’t like she is without the means to escape.”

He heard her laugh. “That has been taken care of. Take my word for it, the
tener unus
is under control and even now is being held without harm to my operative.”

“What about Sable? Has she been hurt?”

Again, he heard her chuckle, with real humor this time. “I am sure she is fine. My operative will contact you with the time and location of the drop off.”

The line went dead.

For a moment, he stared blindly at the opposite wall. When he looked at Macy, her narrowed eyes were on him, judging and assessing his conversation.

“You heard?” he asked.

“I heard enough,” Macy said. “She had someone pick Sable up, take her against her will, and is transporting her to a location to be delivered directly to Tiarra.”

“Yeah, I’d say you caught the gist of the conversation,” he said wryly.

A shadow crossed her face. “This isn’t right, taking that girl like this. What kind of people are we, allowing a despot like Tiarra to control every aspect of our lives?”

Dayne stepped back from the hard look on her face, stunned by Macy’s fervor and passionate words. Was there something to it?

A thumping ache began in his skull, and he automatically rubbed his temples. Macy seemed unaware, lost in her own anger. Her eyes came up to his and her face cleared. Macy’s vehemence smoothed into concern.

She rolled her eyes as she patted his arm. “Don’t worry about me; it’s just my way of dealing with all this.” Macy swept her arm at the chaos around the room.

“Hey,” Dayne said. “Why don’t you get something to eat? I’ve got to meet with my team, and I want you there when I do.”

“Did you want me to bring you back a sandwich?” Macy asked.

“Yeah, that’d be great. I can make some calls, and we’ll picnic right here in the meeting room.”

She cast a dubious eye around the paper-strewn area, laptops and folders scattered among adepts answering cell phones. In the midst of the smell of burnt coffee and stale pastries, it had been a madhouse in their motel suite since the eruption from the wilder. They had fielded panicked calls from other adepts, asking the same questions.

“Who was that?”

“What are you doing about it?”

Adepts with the ability to calm agitated people manned the phones. Their abilities were more of a human quality than magical, a soothing voice and manner.

The Imperium’s wizards had clawed for their phones to call in the wilder. Every one of them believed no one but they had sensed the outlawed use of magic. It worked as a tips hotline for wizards who were out of control. But it was narcissistic to a degree. His staff answered every call, recorded, tabulated, and pinpointed the adept calling.

Macy gestured at the subdued chaos. “Picnic. Really.”

He was happy to hear her laugh. It was one less problem to worry about. She glided past the organized bedlam and out the door. Only later did he realize his headache had eased away as well.

By late afternoon, after their sandwich and chips on the sofa, the turmoil had slowed. Dayne stretched, easing the ache in his stiff back muscles, his joints cracking as he did. Three mages remained in the meeting room coordinating different locations, but clearly, the day was winding down.

Macy tapped her fingers on the low table, her eyes far away. After their earlier light conversation during their impromptu meal, her mood had shifted to something darker, pensive. Waiting, he decided, holding secrets. Even as this thought came to him, his cell phone rang and Macy pounced on it.

A silent snarl transformed her face as she listened without speaking, the cell phone pressed firmly against her ear. He stretched his hand out to take it from her, but she shook her head and pulled out of his reach.

“Fine,” Macy told the speaker and then cut the connection.

Her hard face surprised him.

“It is Wesley. He is Tiarra’s operative,” Macy said. “That piece of shit took Sable. He’s holding her, and we can’t do anything about it.”

A fierce stabbing pain shot through his skull as Dayne tried to make sense of Macy’s words.