Page 10 of Magic Betrayed (The Shifter of Sheridan Avenue #2)

TEN

Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge was a thousand acres of marshland and swamp that bordered historic Route 66 on the far west side of Oklahoma City. After the text from Grandma Pearl, I searched it on Callum’s phone and learned that it contained a maze of trails, woods, and waterways mostly used for hiking, kayaking, and birdwatching. However, it was apparently best known for its many reported Sasquatch sightings, a fact that probably would have delighted me if our errand weren’t so urgent.

My search confirmed that there was a parking lot for hikers near where Grandma Pearl’s drone had found the abandoned van, so I plugged the address into maps and then tried to distract myself by browsing through an online forum dedicated to enthusiastic eyewitness reports of Bigfoot encounters, alongside equally enthusiastic posts by Bigfoot debunkers.

My scrolling got me through the small municipalities of Warr Acres and Bethany, but once the city ended and we found ourselves nearing our destination, I turned my attention to peering through the windows instead. Not that I could see much. There were few streetlights, and once we turned off Route 66 and began making our way towards the trailhead, even the cars thinned out, until there were no other headlights to be seen.

It was nearly nine and completely dark, the road liberally marked by ruts and potholes and overhung in places by bare trees. Even though we were technically still inside the city limits, it felt as if we were miles from anywhere, surrounded by wilderness that might vomit something monstrous at any moment. Maybe even Bigfoot, though after exploring the many alternate theories proposed by skeptics, my money was on bear shifters fishing in the Canadian River.

But whether Sasquatch was real or not, it helped my nerves when I glanced over and remembered there was a literal dragon driving the car. Whatever was out there, he could probably eat it.

During the day, I might have driven right past the parking lot and never given it another thought. It was little more than a small, paved loop with a sign proclaiming “Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge.” On one side of the lot, a dirt road that was probably the hiking trail made its way off into the trees, and parked there on the margin of the road was a white van with a blue and gray logo that said “Restoration Electric.”

I let out a silent sigh of relief. Our lead had not disappeared.

Callum pulled into the lot, parked near the entrance to the trail, then turned off the engine and the headlights.

“Give me a couple of minutes,” he said quietly. “I’m going to see what I can sniff out without shifting.”

I decided not to argue. As an actual shifter, his nose was far better than mine in human form, and any clue, no matter how small, could make a huge difference.

Once he left the SUV, Callum approached the van cautiously, stopping every few feet to watch and listen and scent the air. He was using the flashlight on his phone, so I could follow his progress, heart pounding as he circled the van and then returned.

“Seems safe,” he reported. “I was afraid they might have set a trap—rigged it to explode, or worse—to keep anyone from following, but there’s no sign of magic, and I don’t smell anything that suggests explosives.”

I glared at him as I unbuckled my seat belt and reached for the door handle. “So you actually went out there thinking you might get blown up.”

He shrugged and grinned. “I heal fast.”

Apparently, even though they existed at the top of the Idrian food chain, dragons still found ways to take ridiculous risks.

“You need to stop putting yourself in danger because of me, Callum-ro-Deverin.”

If anything happened to him…

But he just looked me dead in the eye.

“You’re worth the risk, Raine Kendrick.”

I froze, my gaze fastened on his with a vulnerability that terrified me. There was no time to hide my feelings. No chance to conceal what his words did to my heart. It cracked yet again, and the widening gap in my walls threatened to unleash a pain I hadn’t realized I could feel. Memories I’d forgotten. Hurts I’d buried so deep I believed them dead. Gone. Past revisiting.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “Okay to feel. Okay to fall. But there’s no hurry either. Just remember—I’m not going anywhere, and I regret nothing.”

I swallowed the feelings that surged up—feelings I couldn’t even begin to name—and nodded. I didn’t have the bandwidth right now to process what his words meant, but I knew I would hear them over and over again in my memory, and wonder…

Did I believe him? What did it change if those words were true? And when would we have a moment of peace where I could allow myself to be vulnerable enough to find those answers?

Certainly not tonight.

With a single, tremulous nod, I slipped out of the SUV and moved towards the van at Callum’s side.

As we approached, he used his phone to take pictures from multiple angles, then tried the passenger door. No surprise, it was locked, but that, at least, was something I could fix.

“Don’t!” I yelped, as I saw Callum’s hand clench around the handle and his shoulder muscles bunch in preparation. I’d already seen a dragon pull the door off a car, so I knew it was possible. It just wasn’t necessary.

“Why do you dragons seem to think tearing things apart is always the answer?”

He looked down at me, eyebrow tilted in amusement. “Are you actually going to complain?”

No, I was not, given that the last time, Ryker had used this particular technique to prevent us both from burning to death.

“Watch and learn,” I insisted, and thankfully, in spite of my nerves, managed to pick the lock in record time.

It would have been unspeakably embarrassing if I’d failed after those smug assurances.

Once it was open, I let Callum lean inside first. After a few breaths, he turned around, his expression grim.

“Whoever they are, they were prepared. It smells like a perfume factory in there. They obviously anticipated being followed by shapeshifters and didn’t want to risk leaving a scent trail. Might mean we’re on the right track.”

“Can we get in the back?”

He nodded and leaped inside, dropped into the driver’s seat, and pressed a button somewhere on the left side. I heard a click as the locks released and raced around to open up the rear doors.

The space was clean and empty. No matter how hard we searched, there was nothing to indicate that the vehicle had ever been used by a genuine electrician, but no signs of serial kidnapping either. No blood, no hairs, no rope. No scraps of cloth or smudges of makeup. Only the bare floor and the overwhelming scent of something sweet and flowery.

“We’ll need to get it towed back to my place.” Callum stood by my shoulder, a frustrated glower tugging at his mouth. “Looks like they were careful, but there’s bound to be fingerprints or DNA that we can match to Kes and the kids if they were in here.”

“Can you actually pay someone to do that kind of thing on demand?” I probably sounded skeptical, but I knew all too well the indifference of human law enforcement to the problems faced by Idrian citizens, so it wasn’t like we could ask the police for help. “Do Idrians even keep fingerprint records?”

“We don’t, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be compared.” He shot me a reassuring nod. “I’m sure we can find someone to take prints from your apartment and the van, see if anything lines up.”

After a quick text, he shut the rear door and snapped one last picture. “I’ve asked Faris to send out a tow truck. All we can do now is wait.”

It was frustrating to be forced to wait for answers yet again, so I headed back to Callum’s SUV and turned the headlights on, using them to illuminate a path from the parking lot towards what appeared to be the promised swamp. It was probably seventy or eight yards through patchy brush to the edge of some seriously murky looking water. According to the map, this was just a dead-end offshoot from the main river, so the ground was soggy and much of it muddy underfoot.

I wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last rain, but once I left the pavement and headed towards the water, I noticed several sets of footprints, some of which were dried around the edges, but a few that were not. In fact, when I bent down to feel the depression left by someone wearing boots a fair bit bigger than my own, I noted that the entire print was still sticky, with a freshly broken twig crushed into the tread-mark.

Someone had walked here quite recently.

“Callum, come take a look at this…”

I heard a thud from behind me, like a body hitting the ground. Then a slight squelch from somewhere ahead in the darkness, accompanied by a whispered curse. My hunch magic screamed in warning, so I threw myself to the side just as a brilliant orange ball of fire flew past my head.

Not dragon fire, I recognized grimly, as I kept rolling and came up in a crouch. That was elemental fire, and it was followed by a roar that sent me scrambling backwards on hands and feet.

Again, not a dragon.

A burly mass of dark fur charged out of the darkness into the beams of Callum’s headlights and roared again, with lips pulled back from a mouthful of teeth meant to rend and tear. Not Sasquatch, thankfully, but a bear shifter. Smaller than Yolande—who’d fought beside me at the Symposium—but big enough, and it was not alone. It was flanked by one, two… four humanoid companions.

One, I guessed, must be the fire elemental who’d already made his presence known. His hand was raised—ready to call more fire—and his lips were curled in a completely irritating smirk. One of the others was tall and slender, with long limbs, mottled gray skin, and green hair that tangled wildly around his face. Like Faris’s bouncer, Oliver, he was a drus—the male counterpart of a dryad—and would have significant physical strength, as well as possessing power over the trees that loomed in a dark mass on my right side.

Great. Just great.

One of the remaining two was clearly fae—a woman with gray skin and silvery hair—and the last appeared to be a goblin. His skin and hair were dark, but his eyes gleamed gold in the darkness as he looked down on me with a patronizing sneer.

Was this the trap Callum had been looking for? Had the kidnappers used the van to lure us in and now intended to ensure that we never lived to report on their identities?

If so, it was a strangely diverse group of kidnappers, and all of them were Idrian.

Unless…

“The van is ours,” the goblin said. “We found it first. But we’re in the mood to be reasonable, and since there’s only one of you, we’ll show mercy and allow you to leave unharmed.”

Wait, what did he mean only one ?

I risked a glance over my shoulder, expecting to see a certain auburn-haired dragon shifter preparing to unleash the fullest extent of his wrath.

“If you’re looking for your hulking friend, he won’t be joining you,” the fae woman said smoothly.

I somehow managed to conceal the ripple of fear that shot down my spine when I spotted the huddled shape lying limp in the middle of the dirt road behind me. It was too dark to see details, but it had to be Callum. What had they done to him? Why wasn’t he moving?

“Why do you even want the van?” I kept my voice small and a little whiny. Couldn’t afford for them to figure out how desperate I was.

“Same reason as you,” the fire elemental retorted. “There’s a big fat bounty on that half-fae woman, and we plan to be the ones to collect.”

They were following Kes’s trail. Which meant that either they’d been at our apartment that night and seen her get into this van, or…

Grandma Pearl was selling information to whoever was willing to pay for it.

Siren magic or no, my hunches insisted it was the latter.

But now I was stuck—confronting five determined Idrian mercenaries, with no backup and not much idea how to use my own magic to defend myself.

The wisest course of action would probably be to back down and let them have the van. But how could I let them leave with my only link to Kes and the kids? How could I give up when I knew someone was hurting Kes and this might be my only chance to find her?

There had to be something I could do. Some way to stall the mercenaries while I figured out what they’d done to Callum…

Water. We were surrounded by it—in the river, the nearby lake, and even underground. When I reached out with my elemental magic, I could feel it pooling beneath me, like a sleeping giant, wide and deep and shimmering with potential.

“I don’t even want the money,” I protested, only half my attention on the enemies in front of me. “Maybe we could work together? I bet I know some things you don’t.”

The fae woman didn’t bother to hide her derision. “Like what? And if you don’t want the money, why are you out here ankle deep in the mud in the middle of the night?”

Ankle deep…

“The target has something that belongs to me,” I complained, staying crouched close to the ground, my profile low and my posture submissive. “I just want it back.”

But even as I crouched there with my hands in the dirt, I reached deep, deep beneath the surface and stretched to the fullest limits of my senses. Threw a silent call into the darkness, pulling the sleeping giant towards me in a slow but inexorable rise, forcing the ground water higher and higher—letting it soften the dirt and seep into cracks in the rock as it came.

There was so much of it. A bit of panic crept in as I realized what I risked should I lose control, but it was too late to stop now. The mercenaries were eyeing me with a combination of suspicion and greed, and I had to hold their attention.

“I know that the person who took them is a human,” I blurted out, only for the fire elemental to let out a burst of scornful laughter.

“What would a human want with this bounty?” he scoffed. “How would they even know it existed?”

“I don’t know.” I was practically babbling now. But the water was still rising, and I sensed faint movement beneath my feet. There wasn’t much time left before my opponents noticed, and I needed to get closer to Callum. Needed to be able to pull him to the relative safety of the parking lot in case I lost control.

“But I know other things too! And I’ll help you, if you’ll just let me go with you when you find where they took her.”

The group exchanged glances, and the moment their attention wasn’t fully on me, I moved. Faster than I’d ever moved before, darting towards the dark heap of Callum’s unconscious form while simultaneously reaching beneath the ground to the swell of water forming under our feet. It had seeped in and filled every available space, forcing its way through every crack and crevice, splitting rocks, turning earth to mud, and mud to a quivering jelly.

Like weeks of flooding rains in the space of a few moments, I’d saturated every inch, and now that it had reached the bursting point, I pushed…

…and the ground beneath my enemies’ feet vanished.

I heard cries of anger as the five mercenaries plummeted at least a half dozen feet downward, into an unnatural sinkhole that yawned wider and wider—a sucking pit of mud that threatened to expand all the way to the river itself.

And as they scrambled to keep themselves from being swallowed up by the mire, I was kneeling on mostly solid ground at Callum’s side.

Or at least what I could see of him, given that he was completely covered in tree roots.

The drus had ambushed him.

Luckily, I already knew a thing or two about repelling this type of magic, thanks to Blake’s attempt to use it when he attacked the Symposium. The only question was, could I divide my attention enough to do it without losing control of the water I’d used to form the sinkhole? I’d pushed the biggest mass of water away from us, but if I failed, it would come rushing back, potentially pulling us both into the sinkhole, or washing away the very evidence I was trying to protect.

Once again, I cursed my own hesitance to practice, and promised myself that if we survived this, I was going to throw every bit of my spare time into learning. Whether for defense or attack—I would embrace every possible use of my power. Never again would I find myself feeling helpless in the face of my enemies.

After a deep, stabilizing breath, I took hold of a part of the water I’d pushed away and brought it hurtling towards me, forming it into fragments of ice as it flew.

I heard shouts as the frozen missiles sliced through the air near the mercenaries still floundering in the mud, and saw a flare of blue as the fae woman began to gather her own magic.

I had only seconds, but if I was fast enough and strong enough, a few seconds was all I would need.

The ice came to a halt in front of me and I shaped it into a ring of wickedly pointed shards that encircled Callum’s position, hovering points-down above the ground.

Now for the trickiest part—dividing my focus yet again.

Reaching deep into my core, I called up the glow of my fae power and pulled a strand of it out into the darkness.

My hold on the water was weakening. It wanted to rush back in and fill the hole, and I could feel it trembling with eagerness to be free. So, of course, that’s when the fae shot a blast of magic in my direction.

I flung myself flat on the muddy ground, getting a mouthful of dirt and feeling the cold and the wet seep in through my shirt, but somehow I hung on. The strand of blue still hovered before me, and I gritted my teeth, forcing it towards the shards of ice inch by agonizing inch.

Pain spiked through my temples, but I did not let go. I used that chain of fae magic to string the ice together like a necklace—every floating shard glittering with power—and just when I felt a warm trickle of blood burst from my nose to cross my lips and drip down my chin, I finally let them fall.

They slammed into the ground and plunged deep—spikes of ice infused with fae magic—and the imprisoning roots recoiled with a silent scream of pain. I heard a hoarse cry from the drus, right before I collapsed.

The mass of water surged towards us before I managed to regain my grip, and I heard splashing from the bottom of the newly formed sinkhole, followed by an enraged roar from the bear. If any of them figured out how to escape this, I was a sitting duck. And the fire elemental… He might not need line of sight to fry me where I sprawled on the cold, wet ground, eyes squeezed shut against the agony throbbing between my temples.

The earth beneath me rippled—the sinkhole preparing to expand—and I gasped in panic, praying I hadn’t set off a disaster I could not contain. One that would devour not only my enemies, but me and Callum as well, along with the abandoned van, and possibly even the parking lot.

But my strength was ebbing, and I could no longer divide my attention. Wasn’t sure I could shield myself if the mercenaries attacked, let alone both me and Callum.

“Raine.”

The sound of my name in that deep, furious voice was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

Callum was free. He was awake. And he was very, very angry.

“Keep your eyes closed,” he bit out grimly, and with my head still throbbing in pain, there was no danger of me ignoring the request.

I covered my head with my arms and threw every particle of my remaining strength towards holding back the water. But my sensitive shapeshifter hearing caught the whisper of clothing being removed, and I managed to plug my ears just before the roar of a pissed off dragon split the air—shaking the ground, and drawing cries of alarm from the mercenaries.

It was one thing to laugh in the face of a single nameless enemy. It was entirely another to be up to your knees in mud and facing a furious dragon.

“Be careful!” I called, as a new fear hit me… The weight of the dragon could easily collapse the unstable ground beneath us, leaving us trapped in the mud alongside our enemies.

Somehow, he seemed to understand my warning.

A fierce wind blasted me as his wings beat the air, and I opened my eyes in spite of myself, just as a jet of flame exploded into the night with savage brilliance.

I caught a single glimpse, an image that might be seared into my memory forever—that gargantuan bulk of scales and claws, hovering on nightmare wings, wickedly fanged mouth agape as dragon fire scattered the darkness.

He could have crushed them in an instant. Could have incinerated them without thought. But instead, his fire shot over the mercenaries’ heads like a warning.

Run, or else.

And run they did. Or maybe floundered. Swam. Back towards the river. Anywhere that might get them away from the winged terror they’d awakened.

Relief swamped me, and as it seeped into my bones, I released my grip on the water, bit by bit, letting it ease back into its former channels and pools. The tension drained from my body, leaving me limp and aching. Unable to rise. Barely able to keep my eyes open. Callum had been right—the process of healing earlier in the day had taken too much of my strength, and now I was nearing the edge of collapse.

The dragon watched our enemies flee, and when the sounds of splashing finally died away, he seemed satisfied and settled back to the ground. Turned towards me…

And that’s when a final blast of elemental flame came hurtling out of the night. Not towards me, not towards Callum, but towards our only lead—the one piece of evidence that might help us find Kes.

As if the fire elemental had thrown everything he had into that single shot, it impacted with a whoosh and blazed up—brighter than the dragon fire, fierce as a tiny sun.

I screamed—a desperate, heart-rending sound that echoed in my own ears like the cry of a stranger—and tried to grasp enough water to put it out, but I had nothing left. And the dragon…

He whirled towards me, planted his feet on either side of my body and crouched close, shielding me with those leathery wings as an explosion rocked the night—the van’s fuel tank venting its fury to the sky.

And all I could do was lie there. Feeling utterly safe… and utterly devastated.

Our only link to Kes was gone.