Sorceress, Interrupted - By A. J. Menden Page 0,32

was patted on the back by her teammates. A tall man wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans came over and gave her a big hug. A pretty, blonde-haired woman in jeans and a T-shirt with the team logo joined him. I half expected them to hoist her up on their shoulders and carry her along the field singing “For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow.”

Cyrus turned away. He saw me eyeing him. “Don’t look at me like that. I thought you were hard-hearted enough to be beyond pity.”

“I surprise even myself,” I said. “But I’ve never seen anyone try to hurt themselves in this fashion.” Actually, I had. But eventually even I learned my lesson. “Why in the world did you come here, Cyrus?”

“She’s still my daughter,” he said, his voice barely a growl. “I may have given her up, but she’s still part of me. I still love her.”

“And she wouldn’t know who you were if you walked right up to her,” I said softly, intentionally without malice. “You gave her up when she was a baby.”

“She was eighteen months old!” Cyrus said, like that made all the difference. “And it’s not like I wanted to give her up. You know that, Fantazia. I was going to jail. I just didn’t want her lousy mother to have custody.”

“I know, I know,” I soothed. And I did. This was why Cyrus owed me. He’d come to me with the police and several superhero teams knocking on his door with enough evidence to finally arrest him for all of his crimes. He’d just had a custody fight with the child’s mother, whom he “wasn’t stupid enough to marry,” although he’d questioned that decision afterward.

I think he made the right move. His ex was a villain groupie: she’d been with plenty of them before Cyrus and had quickly moved on to Syn. Which terrified Cyrus. Syn was a notorious magic-user—a soul-eater, as we call them, and scarily was in the same group of dark magic as the current crisis we were facing. He was one of the few who’d figured out how to feed on a person’s energy. The more innocent the soul, the more power he could gain, and children were the best. If that wasn’t enough, there were rumors that Syn’s interest in children went far deeper than their souls. Cyrus wanted to make sure Syn couldn’t hurt his little girl, and also that her mother’s predilection for evil men never endangered her, so he’d asked me to make sure Sabrina’s mother lost custody. For good.

So, that’s what I did. Cyrus has a younger sister, Amanda, one who turned her back on him and his life of crime but who gladly took his child. I pulled some strings using some nonmagical connections I had—not everything has to be done with magic, you know—and Cyrus’s sister and husband took custody of Sabrina. Then I made sure that Cyrus’s ex and Syn could never find her. Ever. That was what took the magic. Powerful magic. The spell had laid me low for two weeks, but Cyrus’s ex would never see her daughter again—literally. If she walked by her child in the street, she wouldn’t see her. If someone called out her old name, she wouldn’t hear it. Sabrina was a permanent blank spot to her mother, one that she would never recover. She knew she’d had a daughter, but that was all. No one connected to her would be able to find Sabrina either.

It was a mean spell and a very powerful one, but it had ensured that Sabrina would have a good life. A normal life. It wasn’t like everyone forgot who she was or forgot her existence or anything; the spell just made her undetectable by her mother. She was like a permanently unlisted number. I had permanently separated a mother from her child.

I permanently separated a mother from her child, I thought again. Even though her mother had bad and dangerous taste in men, I was sure she still loved Sabrina deep down. How could she not? And there was always the possibility that one day her love would have been the key to bringing her to her senses, leaving the bad boys behind and becoming a great mother. I’d taken that possibility out of the picture. Well, Cyrus had made the decision, but I was the one who had pulled the trigger.

Well, it didn’t bother me one damn bit. No guilty feelings or anything. I do what I