“Very rare, that trait,” Callie said softly. “Very rare. Only a handful of mages in the world have that talent. You got it from your father, right?”
I bristled. She was right; it was a very rare trait. And yes, I did get it from my father. He wasn’t a mage, though.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said calmly, despite my frantically beating heart. “I never knew him.”
“Of course not.” She looked like she was about to go on, but her eyes flicked to Darius again, and her mouth shut with the click of teeth.
Fear such as I’d never known washed over me. I glanced at the hilt of the sword she was holding, ready to take it up should she move to capture me, because I was almost positive this woman knew who my father was. Not the story my mom told strangers, but the real man. He’d been the love of her life until she realized that love wasn’t real. That it was mostly magic. Magic, a handsome face, a delicious body, charm, and great sex. But as soon as my mother learned there was life in her, my father’s draw on her dried up. The love of her child took over, and she kicked his ass to the curb.
She’d admitted all this to me on her deathbed, sexual ability and all. I’d had no idea how to take the news. Talk about awkward farewell speeches.
I’d vowed to achieve what my mother had died for—a long life of freedom. And it had been going fine, until these danged vampires had gotten involved.
“No wonder she was hiding you,” Callie said, her eyes shining despite her bulldog expression. “Didn’t want the Mages’ Guild to get a hold of you.”
I scoffed, watching her body language, and monitoring Dizzy to make sure he wasn’t working on a spell. “Right. Like they have a pot to piss in.”
She barked out a laugh. “They create more bad mages than good, I’ll give you that. They can push their weight around when they see trainable talent, though.”
“I’m not trainable.”
“Of course you are.” She scowled at me. “Curse breakers are headstrong, but they can still be taught.”
Chapter Twelve
The tension that had surrounded me like a bubble deflated. I relaxed. “I’m not a curse breaker. I don’t even know what a curse breaker is. I think you’re remembering the wrong person.”
She made a sound like “pouf” and waved me away. “Dizzy, less magic. Almost none. Get the old sword.”
“Which old sword?” He accepted the reject sword she handed back to him and then paused in the entryway of his shed.
“The old sword. The black one.”
“Which black one?” he yelled.
“The one with silver in the hilt. The red hilt, with silver—”
“That’s the red one!” He grunted and stalked into his shed.
“The man needs a better system. Trying to talk to him is a nightmare.” Callie wiped a hand across her face. “I swear, I want to wring his neck. He gets me so worked up.”
My grin was probably rude, but I couldn’t get rid of it. “Are you both mages, then?”
“You know we are. You can feel our magic, can’t you?”
“It’s polite to ask.”
She waved me away again as a sound like a metal avalanche filled the shed. Swear words rode the breeze, but finally Dizzy emerged. His shirt had three new rips, his arm had a line of red an inch long, and his leg was bleeding.
“He doesn’t have a ladder in there,” Callie said, crossing her arms over her chest. “He piles the swords on a shelf, so when he tries to get one down, he drops them all on his head. Men. They never learn.”
“How often do I get these down?” Dizzy demanded, a sword in hand. It sounded aggressively rhetorical. He stopped in front of me with a sheen of sweat on his forehead, breathing heavily. “This is the one. I can feel it.” He held it out.
The sword was absolutely gorgeous. A delicate line of silver shot through the red leather hilt, curled around onto the black blade, and then straightened into a line toward the point.
“He got that one from a garage sale,” Callie said, standing beside me and staring at the blade. “Or was it a swap meet?”
“EBay.” Dizzy wiped his palm on his shirt. “Great stuff on eBay.”
“Yes. He prepares them with the fundamentals of magic, and I weave in the spells.” Callie motioned me toward the blade. “See if it will work. No one else can even touch it. Except us, of course, because we made it magical.”
“Why can’t anyone else touch it?” I asked, holding my palm over the blade.
“Too hungry. In the field, we call these types of swords magic conductors, but they aren’t. They feed off your magic, then store it for your future use. They’re magical lockers for certain types of magic. Storage. Did the person who made your last sword take your magical measure before making it?”
“Yes,” I said. “He is one of the best.”
She huffed. “Maybe for your paycheck. That instrument, which we have, of course, only accurately gauges certain types of magic. Witches and mages would mostly get accurate readings. But even though you’re similar to a very powerful mage, your power is fundamentally different. You would simply register as high power. You probably had to push your magic into the sword he made you because it wasn’t hungry enough to siphon it out of you.”
“I have heard of instruments that siphon power.” Darius stepped closer and leaned into my space protectively. I tried to push him back with an elbow. He nudged my elbow out of the way. “They are dangerous. That is not why we are here.”