Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,103
seen when he fought the drummer and the wolves. My whip wrapped around his arm, crackling with power that seared the air. It should have cut him to the bone, or lopped his arm clean off.
Instead, he grabbed it and held on. His eyes flared bluish-silver. Some kind of magic I didn’t know blazed up my whip and stung my hand.
“Look,” he said, holding my earth magic whip inches from my nose. “You see those black threads? That’s black magic. Sorcery. You think I don’t know how you got that?” He released my whip, almost throwing it back in my face. His face was cold, his eyes like a thunderstorm. “Blood magic. Sorcery. Travel not just between realms, but between worlds.” He set his cup on the table. He hadn’t spilled a drop during our scuffle. “I hunt things like you for a living.”
That did it. “Things like me?” I raged. “What about you? You’re far from human. You watched us fight for our lives against the gravelings and didn’t lift a finger. We nearly died. You think I want to die in this nightmare world? You think I wanted this black magic that’s killing me, and is probably eating away at the soul of the man I love while I’m trapped here chasing the only thing that can get us back home? You don’t know a damn thing about me, you self-righteous killer for hire. What gives you the right to judge me, or anyone else, for that matter?”
My chest heaved—not with exertion, but with the force of my anger. The dark magic surged in response. I shoved it down and let my own magic crackle on my skin. “What gives you the right?” I repeated, more quietly.
We stared at each other.
“You didn’t nearly die.” His voice was even.
I blinked. That was not a response I’d expected. “What?”
“When the gravelings attacked. You didn’t nearly die.” He took my crumpled cup from my hand and tossed it in a trash can. He went back to the bathroom and returned with another cup. He poured moonshine into it and held it out to me. “You fought with courage and resourcefulness, and like someone who’s fought for her life against the odds many times. Your wolf revealed she has other forms and fought with you, as did your little pūķis.” He nodded at the cat-dragon, who’d watched our dust-up with bright green eyes but hadn’t moved from her pillow. “You had no need of me. If you had, I would have joined you.”
“Sure you would have.” I belted down the cup of moonshine. On a nearly empty stomach and after three days with close to no sleep, it hit me like a wrecking ball. I steadied myself against the table. “What do you want?”
“I want to find out why your wolf and the little witch Torryn think I should join your merry band.”
“You talked to Torryn?”
“She was waiting for me when I came through her territory. We talked.” He poured more moonshine into my cup. “Now I want to know how you got here, why you’re here, and what it will take to get you home where you belong.”
“My dark magic had nothing to do with how I got here. Back in my world, I’m one of the rare kind of blood mages who have enough earth and air magic to use mirror travel.”
He refilled his cup with tequila. “That’s the how. What about the why?”
“I bartered my gift of mirror travel to a vampire in return for her help saving someone’s life. She sent me here to chase someone who stole something from her and bring it back.”
“And how will you get back, once you’ve found your prize?”
“The same way we got here. But why do you care? What happened to me being a thing you hunt for a living?”
“Just now, you had every reason to strike out at me with that black magic, but you didn’t. You used your own magic instead, and you did so without thinking.” He tapped his cup to mine once again. “That means the evil hasn’t taken hold of you yet. Once it does, you’ll have to force yourself not to use it. You won’t be satisfied with the magic you were born with. You won’t mind if it eats the soul of the man you love. None of that will matter. You won’t even care if you die from it.”
I drank the moonshine in my cup, trying not to let on how much I