Page 5 of Wrongfully Magicked
Metal sizzles against the cement before sinking into the floor. A shudder goes through my feet, then deep fractures arch and spider across the floor, cracking from the intense heat. With a good yank of my arms, the brittle chains shatter and fly across the room, peppering the walls and embedding themselves a good inch in the concrete.
The cuffs flicker under the strain of my magic, but they remain clamped around my wrists like a vise. As my fire wanes, pain shoots to my shoulders like every nerve ending in my body is being pinched.
Once it reaches my chest, it will infect my heart, killing me instantly.
The cuffs were designed to contain the threat no matter the cost.
I drop my magic, but the flames are reluctant to obey. They want to consume and destroy everything in their path until nothing and no one stands in their way. The muscles in my neck seize like a giant fucking charley horse, and pain streaks up my neck, wrapping around my skull.
When I whimper, my magic reluctantly gives up its quest and retreats. The punishment from the cuffs is slow to recede, and damn if my bones don’t feel like they’ve been hollowed out with a piping brush of rusted steel. The cold slowly invades my soul. My heart rocks in my chest, as if struggling to remember its rhythm, and my breathing turns ragged as I battle to stay conscious.
The silence around me is absolute for a few seconds, then the world comes rushing back in a cacophony of noises. A siren sounds in the distance, and I release a defeated sigh before slowly dropping to my knees, repressing a wince when one of the cracks in the ground hits a nasty bruise on my leg.
But good news—the fire bath healed the majority of my scrapes.
From experience, I know most of them are now just bruises that look days old.
I lift my hands in the air, my shoulders protesting the strain, and grimace when the broken chains dangle down my arms.
MID is going to be so pissed.
That’s my last thought as the two guards from the hall burst into the room with their guns and magic trained on me.
I give them my best snooty, prim and proper smile, trying not to breathe wrong and give them a reason to shoot me. “I would like to speak to your supervisor.”
CHAPTER TWO
PORTER
As I duck under the showerhead, the ground beneath me rumbles. I brace my hands against the wall as scalding water cascades over my head, and I still when vibrations go through my palms and shimmy up my arms.
With a heavy sigh, I turn off the water and straighten. Just as I’m stepping out of the shower, wrapping a towel around my waist, the alarm blares. My shoulders slump, and I stifle a growl, debating whether or not to ignore it. We just returned from a ten-day stint in the borderlands, tracking our quarry to the area where many creatures of demonic origins dwell.
The twelve-block radius at the edges of the city is where people go to score drugs, women, and outlawed magic—a place many consider the edges of civilization.
Very few people dare venture beyond the borders. The magic is wild and dangerous, and the predators who live there often deadly. We can attest to that fact, since we barely got out alive.
Our fugitive wasn’t so lucky.
Instead of going to jail, he chose to run and died a horribly painful death, if the way his body was practically turned inside out was any indication.
With his death, we lost out on our full bounty. Even though we retrieved the dead body, we only get paid half our fee.
Like it’s our fault the guy was an idiot and got himself killed.
Yet something about his death still bothers me.
The way he died is too similar to the last three jobs we were assigned.
Someone was killing beastlings and mages alike, and I was curious why MID wasn’t investigating. It’s possible different agents were investigating the other cases, but something in the back of my mind niggled at me.
A sense of wrongness to the deaths.
The area where the murder occurred repelled my senses, both demanding I fix it and run away before the same thing happened to me or my men.
As the siren continues to blare, I curse then drop the towel and grab my pants. I just pull them up my hips when I step into the hallway of the barracks I share with my three teammates and find the rest of the men are in a similar state of disorder.
Cassius had obviously been sleeping, his brown hair standing up every which way. The white highlights make it look like he shoved his fingers into a socket. I’m not surprised Soren went for food, the man gnawing and ripping into a whole turkey leg nearly the size of his forearm. He’s still wearing most of his bloody, ripped tactical gear that smells vaguely like pegasus dung, but that doesn’t deter him. Darby took my route and cleaned up, wearing nothing more than sweatpants and a white T-shirt.
