“Remember your mother,” Darius said softly. I somehow heard him over all the noise of my destruction. “She, too, kneeled before you. Remember the stories you’ve told me in the quiet hours we’ve spent together. She would’ve given her life for you, as I will. Remember her.”
Memories crowded in, of my mother on the bright green grass in front of me, her head bowed, telling me to either end her life or fight for my own. Her again, this time decked out in leather and sweating as the forest around us roared with flame. More images, of a similar battle I had fought with myself, trying not to lose myself to the lure of my power. To the feel of my magic.
That had been with the fire.
Now I battled with the ice.
“It is within you, Reagan. Your strength far surpasses your power. Come back to me.”
Emotion welled up. Using it, I internally grabbed at the fire magic and yanked it up from my depths. Like ink in water, the two halves of my magic feathered around each other, but they would not merge.
Balls of flame sprang to life throughout the warehouse. I dropped a few feet in the air. Any rocks I hadn’t yet thrown dropped with me, becoming ten times heavier. The rage receded and the agony of heat rose until the two were nearly the same potency.
I inhaled a lungful of sweet air, sighing it out in relief a moment later. Both halves of my magic throbbed, equally functional but not very strong. It was all I could manage.
“Can you rise higher?” Darius asked me, standing in jerky movements. He clearly hurt something awful.
A pang of guilt hit me. The rocks around me plunked down onto the concrete, becoming too heavy for me to keep afloat. The fire kept on, though, moving lazily through the air.
Wanting to make his sacrifice worth something, I focused on the dull ache of cold and tried to push myself higher. Instead, exhaustion came over me and I sank. An echo of his thoughts twirled, just outside of my grasp.
“That’s it, I think.” I let the fire wink out. “That’s all I’ve got.” I shook my head, the guilt intensifying. I half wished I couldn’t remember the things I did under the influence of the cold power. “I’m sorry about…you know.”
A furrow creased his brow as he stiffly walked toward me. “You have learned to cap your fire magic.”
I frowned as he stopped in front of me and feathered a thumb across one of my eyebrows. I may not have gotten enough of a hold on the ice magic to stay sane, but at least I could use it to prevent the fire from making me look weird. You had to look at the silver lining.
“A cap?” I asked, surprised. I’d thought he was going to comment on my apology. He usually told me not to be absurd.
“You hold back. You don’t give yourself to it. Just now, you pulled back the ice magic until it was manageable, like your fire magic. When it is manageable, it is also greatly diminished. You are trying to find a happy, safe medium with the ice as you did with the fire. It lessens your power.”
“Ah. Well, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I nearly killed you just now. With the fire, I burned half of a forest once. A forest. I’m not safe. I have to find the happy medium, as you said, so the power won’t destroy me or those around me.”
He shook his head. His thumb was now tracing the edge of my bottom lip. “I don’t think that’s it. I think you need to find another way to deal with the power.” He dropped his hand to my shoulder. “I need to get dressed. I want to talk to the dual mages.”
“To get healed faster?” I asked, limping after him. Now that I was back to normal, each injury was trying to pull the diva act so I’d notice it.
Callie’s head, still covered in the helmet, poked in through the doorway. When she saw us walking toward her, the rest of her body made an appearance, decked out in another classic sweat suit. If “classic” meant fluorescent green velvet and obscene messages scrawled across the chest.
“Is it over—” Her eyes widened as she looked past us. “Holy bluebells, Reagan.” Her gaze traveled to the ceiling, then the row of open loading docks. “You’ve never destroyed the place like this. And here Darius worried you weren’t improving.”
“She isn’t,” Darius said. He was great for honest answers, though I rarely wanted to hear them. “She needs near death to enact the other half of her magic, and then she loses herself in the power. Callie—”
“Good God, Reagan, look at this.” Dizzy stepped into the doorway, staring like Callie was. “We heard the commotion, but I didn’t realize all this was going on.”
“Didn’t you see the rocks going through the walls?” I asked.
“Going through the walls, no. I saw the thing with the door and figured it was time to hide behind a tree. I’m glad we did.” He looked in through the door. “This is something.”
“Callie, did you ever meet Lucifer?” Darius asked.
Chapter Two
Shivers slid down my arms as I followed Darius out of the gaping doorway. The way he said my dad’s name was so blasé. Like it wasn’t a big deal that my father was the lord of the underworld, something magical people called the Dark Kingdom.
“I met him, yes.” Callie turned and followed us, leaving Dizzy inside. “Why? And I hope you’re putting on clothes now that the training is over. There is only so much skin a person needs to see.”
“Did you ever see him use his power?” Darius asked, ignoring her comment.
“He unraveled a couple of my better spells. At the time, I thought he was using a counter spell to do it. I assumed he was a mage, one of the more powerful ones I’d ever met, much like Reagan’s mom, Amorette. Other than that, he seemed like a completely normal man. It wasn’t until we tracked Amorette down after she tried to disappear that we learned the truth.”
Darius paused beside his extremely expensive sports car, staring at a dent in the passenger door. His gaze slid mournfully to the rock lying in the dirt below it, then to the hole in the warehouse that the rock had flown through.
“Sorry,” I said quickly.
His lips tightened as he gave me a flat stare. He might not care about any harm done to his person, but I happened to know that he did care about his cars. He took great pride in some of them.
Without a word, he crossed to the other side and took out his clothing. “Did Amorette ever describe how Lucifer acted after he used his power?” he asked.
“Let’s not throw his name around willy-nilly.” I glanced at the wide-open space around the warehouse. Two spots of light traveled along the highway in the distance, a car passing by. “Vampires have those cloaks that make them nearly invisible.”
“We are alone,” Darius said as he stepped into boxer briefs. “No one knows where I am. I was not followed here.”
“You might have a tracker on your car or something. Vlad is wily. You can’t trust him.”
“A great many vampires are wily,” Callie said. “And no, you can’t trust any of them.”