Magic Freed Read online

  Magic Freed

  Alexes Razevich

  Contents

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Also By Alexes Razevich

  About the Author

  As always, with much love to Chris, Colin, and Larkin Razevich.

  Cover art by Ravenborn Covers

  Copyright © 2019 Alexes Razevich

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidently and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Requests for permission should be sent to [email protected].

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter One

  Aiden’s hand brushed mine as I passed him the butter during breakfast. He shot me a smile. “Thanks, Piper.”

  I nodded acknowledgement but didn’t smile back.

  Once I would have thrilled at that light touch and his smile. But that was before he’d been part of tricking me into accessing my innate magic. Magic I never thought I had and now, awakened, ran riot in my body and mind.

  He’d thought he’d been doing me a favor. He and Stella, Max, and Geo—people to whom I’d been grateful and had trusted; people sitting with me now around the long wooden table casually eating scrambled eggs and toast in the large kitchen at Heart Mountain Academy. They’d dragged two of my best friends into their scheme as well, and so far not one word of apology had passed any of their lips. With time, the bright, hot anger I’d felt that day had faded to a cold detachment. All I cared about now was what they could do for me, what new magic I could learn from them to carry away into a new life far, far away from here. That, and keeping my friends safe.

  Stella cleared her throat. “The judge is coming the day after tomorrow to see how you all have progressed in using your old and new magic.”

  You all meaning my best friends—Seph, Jack, Turner, and Will—and me. The four friends with whom I’d escaped from Salvation Home, a place where minors showing magical ability were sent to keep them separate from ‘proper’ society. They were sitting at the table, too.

  The judge being the bitch dressed all in black who I now knew had been the prime architect behind the charade of Seph’s abduction.

  “Does the judge have a regular name?” I made my voice sound merely curious. I was damn good at hiding my resentment. Most of the time.

  Stella nodded. “She does, but she’d rather you didn’t know it quite yet. When the judge is ready, she’ll tell you herself.”

  I glanced at Jack, who sat across from me. His black eyes caught my gaze. He ran a hand over his tight black curls. Pale Seph, Jack’s visual opposite with her wheat-blonde hair and green eyes, caught my gaze as well.

  They, along with Turner and Will, were probably thinking the same thing I was. If the judge was coming to Heart Mountain Academy, it probably meant we were getting close, or at least closer, to the day when we’d invade the Las Vegas bubble and attempt to change life there forever by restoring magic to its rightful place. It was what we were training for. It was a purpose Stella had forced on us, but which we’d each embraced with our whole hearts.

  “Sweet,” Will said drawing the word out while shooting multicolored sparks into the air from his fingertips. “The mystery of her true name and the reason for her coming—both are sweet.” He grinned his gap-toothed smile. “Is it like that Who, Where, and What game? Judge Jinglehimer in the Vegas bubble with magic?”

  Turner, who sat next to Will, elbowed him in the side—a nudge to tell Will not to be so flippant, but you could no more stop Will saying whatever popped into his head than you could stop a storm with a straw.

  Turner considered himself the alpha male of our small pack—the one designated to keep order.

  He was a gray wolf shifter, which showed in his human form in the strength of his chest and shoulders, his amber eyes, and his silvery gray-brown hair. At the Home, the guys had to keep their hair shorn nearly scalp short. Since we’d escaped that hellhole, Turner’s hair had grown out some and its striking color had been revealed.

  Will was djinn. He’d always had control of heat and fire but, like the rest of us, had learned to make anything he could imagine real. He sent a second geyser of multicolored sparks into the air. I grinned at him, approving his display. He had a good sense for when things needed to get a little silly to lighten a somber mood.

  Not to be outdone by Will, Jack used magic to conjure the sound of a bugle playing a call to arms. Seph beamed at him. They were openly a couple now, something that never could have happened if we’d stayed in the Vegas bubble and lived the life society had planned for us.

  Jack and Seph were proof of the saying that opposites attract. Jack was an eagle shifter, a predator in his magnificent bird form and confident in his human form. Seph was all about life and rebirth, a natural master of earth magic, but not as bold of character as Jack. Somehow, together they were the perfect couple.

  Watching them made me a little sad that the same thing could never happen for Aiden and me. Maybe once, but not now. Not since he’d been part of tricking me.

  Aiden set his glass down on the oak table just hard enough to get everyone’s attention.

  “Okay, you wise-asses. Enough with the cheap magic at the breakfast table. If you’re done eating, clean your dishes and get ready for today’s lesson.”

  “What’s today’s new trick?” Turner asked.

  Aiden scowled. “I don’t teach ‘tricks.’”

  But you tricked me, I thought.

  “I teach magic,” he said.

  Turner grinned. “So, what’s today’s magic.

  Aiden sat back and casually announced, “Levitation.”

  Chapter Two

  Will eyed five pockmarked balls, each about the size of a fairly large crabapple, lined up on the gymnasium floor. “What are those things?”

  “Golf balls,” Aiden said. “I thought we’d start with something small and light. There’s more to levitation than just imagining them rising into the air.”

  Will scratched his head. “What are they for?”

  Aiden scowled. “What are what for?”

  “Golf balls,” Will said. “What are they for?”

  Aiden blinked. The question surprised him, I thought.

  “Golf. It’s a game where people hit balls like these with clubs and try to get them into a small hole in the ground.”

  Jack snickered. “That seems pretty stupid.”

  “Takes a lot of skill, actually.” Aiden said.

  Will raised his eyebrows. “You ever played it?”

  Aiden hesitated. Call it intuition or call it logic, but I was willing to
bet that he had. Which meant that even though Aiden was clearly magical, he hadn’t been sent off to live in some damn Home the way we had.

  I’d wondered more than once about his background. Stella’s, Geo’s, and Max’s, too. Where had they come from? How had they found each other and banded together? Were Aiden, Geo, and Max former students here at the academy? Stella once said they’d been arrested and imprisoned together. When was that?

  Aiden clapped his hands. The sharp and sudden sound brought my thoughts back to the here and now.

  He clapped his hands a second time. “Today you will attempt to levitate these golf balls.”

  I heard the thoughts ringing around in Will’s and Jack’s minds—how was levitation different from moving the cans?

  I’d always been sensitive to people’s moods and could often decipher their thoughts from their faces or body language. No magic in that. Since the fake rescue, things had changed. I knew now exactly what thoughts flittered through another’s mind because I heard them. Scared the crap out of me the first time it happened. We were learning a new spell and suddenly Turner’s frustrations, opinion of Aiden, and curse words were so clear to me that I spun to look at him, surprised he’d say such things out loud. He was focused on trying to get the spell right and didn’t notice me looking. His voice kept commenting in my head, but his mouth never moved.

  It didn’t happen all the time, and I couldn’t do it at will. I was fairly sure Aiden knew I was hearing people’s thoughts, or at least suspected. I’d caught the look of studied interest he’d given me that first time. Since then, when someone’s thoughts burst into my head, I did my best to hide it and never commented or called someone out for what they were thinking.

  Hearing someone’s thoughts was different from the unknown voice that told me things and pointed me in certain directions. I still hadn’t figured that one out.

  I focused my thoughts back on the subject at hand. Levitation. Moving cans had been the first bit of magic we’d learned. I didn’t see much difference between the two either. Since neither Will nor Jack seemed to want to ask the question, I did.

  “Different how?” I said.

  A fast smile crossed Aiden’s mouth and vanished just as quickly as it had come. His thoughts never burst into my mind, which was probably just as well.

  “It’s harder and takes some spellwork along with imagination to work.” He glanced at Seph. “It’s a lot like what Seph does with her earth magic.”

  I thought of the intricate dance Seph’s hands did when she did her natural magic.

  “The basis of the magic we do here is to see what you want in the world and make it real,” Aiden said. “But past a certain point, you don’t want to be drawing that much energy from yourself, not if you want to stay healthy and sane. You need help from other sources. The earth is an excellent source for extra energy. Today I’m going to teach you how to tap into and use the earth’s magnetic field to generate energy for yourself.”

  “Damn,” Will muttered loudly enough that we all heard him. “This sounds like physics. I sucked at physics. Will there be a quiz?”

  Aiden chuckled once under his breath. “Luckily for you, one doesn’t have to understand how it works, only how to do it.”

  How to do it turned out to be a combination of imagining the desired effect while making very specific hand motions. I didn’t understand why those particular motions let us draw up energy and Aiden didn’t explain it—probably to spare Will’s brain from exploding—but after several hours of effort we could all raise our little dimpled balls into the air and direct them around where we wanted them to go.

  Of course Seph mastered the movements first. I got it second. It wasn’t all that hard and I liked the feeling of energy rushing up from the soles of my feet and filling my entire being. Of course, once the guys figured out how to do it, they started trying to knock each other balls out of the air. Aiden let it go on for a while, and then ended it by holding out his hand and gently closing it into a fist. All the balls froze in midair for a moment and then turned and came to ground at his feet.

  “Piper,” Aiden said. “You figured this one out pretty quickly.”

  I nodded. I liked making the hand movements. Learning new magic had gotten a lot easier since my innate magic had begun to surface. I liked grasping a new magic quickly. Every new thing I learned, every new power or ability made me feel more at home in myself. For someone like me who’d been powerless all my life, it was heady stuff. It was the reason I pretended the betrayal didn’t bother me.

  Part of me knew I should be grateful to Stella, Aiden, and the others for helping unleash the magic within me. But here I was, two months later, and it still rankled that they‘d tricked me. I was pretty sure they could have found an honest way to do it.

  Aiden leaned casually against the wall at the front of the gymnasium. “Let’s try it with something a little bigger.” He straightened and took a step toward the door. “Follow me.”

  We dutifully followed him like ducklings from the gymnasium, down the hall, and into the classroom. The five desks we’d been using since coming to the academy were still lined up as usual. It was a funny thing how every time we were in the classroom, we each went to the same desk we’d sat at the very first day.

  “I want you to lift your desk, slowly and evenly, to exactly your head height,” Aiden said.

  Ah, I thought. He wants us to learn control. I started forming the visual of lifting the desk in my imagination.

  “But not all together,” Aiden said. “One by one. Turner, you go first.”

  Why one by one, I wondered. Did he have some trick up his sleeve? Some humiliation planned for one or all of us?

  I didn’t like having thoughts like this but how could I not, considering what Aiden and the others had done?

  Turner’s amber eyes narrowed, and he bit his bottom lip in concentration. I heard his thoughts as he formed the idea of slowly lifting the desk up even with the top of his head while also trying to remember exactly how the hand motions went.

  I smiled at him in what I hoped was encouragement. He smiled back and the desk began to slowly rise. And kept rising, not stopping until the desk bumped noisily against the ceiling. Jack quietly snickered.

  “Put it down,” Aiden said.

  Once the desk was back on solid ground, Aiden clapped Turner on the shoulder, “That was pretty good, if a touch enthusiastic.” He glanced at the rest of us. “Sometimes we can get so lost in the technicalities of the magic that we lose sight of where our bodies are in relation to what’s going on. That’s not good, in case you wondered. You never want to lose awareness of yourself in the midst of the magic.”

  We all nodded.

  “Okay,” Aiden said. “Jack, you’re next.”

  Jack did better than Turner, but Aiden still found things to criticize. Will did better than Jack, and Seph did better than Will. Each step of the way, we learned from our friends’ mistakes.

  When it was my turn, I was determined to make no mistake. I thought through the lessons learned from each of the previous tries, felt where I stood in relation to the desk, my friends, Aiden, and the room. It was a lot of things to think about all at once.

  I formed the image in my mind of a slow, smooth ascent and made the hand gesture. The desk began to rise, but it wobbled in the air. So much for smooth. I focused, and stopped the wobble. I continued making the hand gestures that both fed Earth energy into me and controlled the desk’s rise. Sweat beaded on my forehead. My eyes burned from not blinking as I concentrated on keeping focus on all the pieces of how to do this thing. I brought the desk above my head and watched until the bottom of the legs were exactly where I judged the top of my head to be, and held the desk there.

  Seph let out a little squeal. Will’s mouth dropped open. Turner and Jack grinned. I knew I’d done it perfectly.

  I lowered the desk back to the floor and beamed while my friends congratulated me. I’d spent so many years being the girl without magic
, feeling lesser because of it. I’d earned my little moment of glory.

  Aiden nodded slightly. “Not bad, Piper.” He clapped his hands. “Right. I have something a little more challenging for you all outside. Follow me.”

  Chapter Three

  We followed Aiden out of the building and across the lawn toward the trees that helped hide Heart Mountain Academy from anyone who might be poking around in the area. Not that people did poke around, the place being very much in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest bubble.

  Looking back, the very isolation of the academy should have been my first clue that Seph’s abduction was faked. In the months that we’d been here, no one had come to visit, and no one had wandered in by mistake. How would those supposed bounty hunters who’d supposedly snatched Seph have known about the academy, not to mention knowing that Seph was here? They wouldn’t, unless someone had told them and drawn them a map.

  One thing that was here, certainly, was magic. I couldn’t think of any other way the five huge boulders, each taller than Turner, who was the tallest among us, had gotten here. But there they stood—big, craggy boulders lined up like giant schoolchildren about ten feet in front of the forest of Spruce pines that surrounded much of the academy.

  Behind me, Will, having figured out our next assignment, chuckled nervously under his breath.

  “Awkward,” Turner murmured, and I nodded, agreeing.