Demon's Vengeance The Complete - Jocelynn Drake Page 0,1

my eyes so I could focus my attention on my other sense—the one that was tuned toward magic energy—but I caught myself. Since becoming a guardian, Gideon had been working as something of a mentor to keep me alive while quietly expanding my magical knowledge. Closing my eyes to focus on magic left me vulnerable to attack. Gideon had been kind enough to show me just that on more than one occasion. The bastard took too much pleasure in knocking me around.

“There’s something here. Faint.” I reached out my right hand to feel the air in front of me. A faint tingling pricked my fingertips as if I could actually feel each individually charged electron as it spun about, charging the air. “There’s definitely a magical energy, more organized than just the usual latent energy, but it’s not actually organized into a specific spell or a ward that I can identify. More like a heavy residue left from a massive spell.”

“Good. Can you tell what the caster was?” Gideon’s voice dipped low, as if he were afraid that someone would overhear his comments, not that there was another soul within a hundred yards of us.

“What do you mean?”

“Was the spell caster human? Elf? Pixie? Leprechaun?”

My eyebrows bunched together as I concentrated harder on the feeling hanging in the air. With each passing second, the energy grew a little fainter, making it harder to pick out details, leaving me more with just a vague feeling. “Not . . . fey,” I slowly said.

The fey—elves, pixies, faeries, brownies, and all of that dangerous nature-based lot—had a distinct flavor to their magic. There was almost a sugar-sweet aftertaste in my brain from fey magic. For an incubus or succubus, it was sort of musky, while a phoenix was, unsurprisingly, like burning wood from a campfire. Warlocks and witches created a fresh, clean scent like a spring rain when they used magic.

Outside the apartment building, it was . . . different. Different from anything I had ever encountered before. “It’s different.”

“Which is why we’re here.” Gideon reached inside the black robe he wore over his dark charcoal-colored suit and pulled out his wand, adding to a buzz of energy in the air. “Two nights ago, the New York Tower detected an explosion of magical energy. It could be described only as something different, something we couldn’t remember encountering before, but it was powerful. Despite its initial strength, it faded quickly and we had some trouble tracking it.”

Reaching inside my jacket, I pulled out my wand as well. It was new, after my first had been broken by Reave. The hawthorn wand gave me excellent control with a nice boost in power, but we were still becoming adjusted to each other. With every wand, there was a breaking-in period, and considering that I didn’t go out with Gideon often, there weren’t many opportunities to break in my wand.

“Could it have been a New One?” I asked.

Gideon shook his head. “This was too much power for a child, even for a late bloomer of twelve. And like you said, this is different.”

Most humans revealed their natural talent for magic between the ages of seven and twelve. Referred to as New Ones by the Towers, they were quickly swept off for training upon discovery. It was the safest, though unhappy, thing for everyone.

“What about a hybrid or half-breed? Human mother and fey daddy?”

The dark-haired warlock motioned toward the building. “Does that in any way feel fey to you? Or even partially human?”

“No, but what else is there?”

Gideon’s face was blank as he walked toward the building, but I saw his hand tighten on his wand. “Maybe it’s something that we thought was dead.”

For a moment, my feet were stuck to the cracked concrete sidewalk as I stared blindly after him. My heart thundered in my ears while my mind tried to sort through that comment. “Are you talking about someone from the Lost Peoples? Are you fucking kidding me?” I jogged after him, catching him as he pulled open the glass door to the small, grimy lobby.

“What else could it be?”

“Damn it, Gideon! Are you suicidal? I’m not going in there if we’re walking into the lair of the last fucking dragon on the planet,” I said in a harsh whisper, which was stupid, because if this was a dragon, the creature definitely knew we were there.

“It doesn’t have to be a dragon,” Gideon replied in a blasé voice, as if facing down dragons in their own