Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Night Rises

  Soul Forge Book Two

  Leslie Claire Walker

  Contents

  Get a Free Book

  Also by Leslie Claire Walker

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  About the Author

  Get Your Free Book

  More in the Awakened Magic Saga

  Get a Free Book

  Also by Leslie Claire Walker

  THE AWAKENED MAGIC SAGA

  THE SOUL FORGE

  Night Awakens

  THE FAERY CHRONICLES

  Novels

  Hunt

  Demon

  Faery

  Story Collections

  Faery Tales: Volume I

  Faery Tales: Volume II

  Acknowledgments

  This story, like its predecessor, was inspired by Michael Klaas, Miles, Brandon, CJ, Zack, and Claire. Thank you for excellent company and long, action-packed afternoons. To Jo Anne Banker, T. Thorn Coyle, JC Andrijeski, and Danielle Rivera, thank you for reading the draft manuscript and for your always-excellent suggestions.

  Special thanks also goes out to the members of Awakened Magic: Aaron, Richard, Kandice, William, Ashley, Rebecca, Paula, Fiona, Nadine, Amber, Jannetta, Kathleen, Brandi, Ron, and Ravyn.

  Much love.

  Chapter 1

  I OPENED MY eyes wide, fisting my hands in the down comforter on my bed. The rush of my own blood roared in my ears, my heart racing. The textured white ceiling above rocked back and forth for an uncanny moment before it stilled.

  The warmth of the bed made it clear that the recurring nightmare had released me. I was no longer at the bottom of the churning river, struggling to reach the surface, but home, in the here and now. The ribbed black tank I’d worn to bed hugged my curves. The edge of my panties had ridden up my right cheek during the night.

  Dust motes floated in the air, backlit by the morning light that streamed in through the wooden slats of the window blinds. The sage-green walls looked soft and welcoming. On the wall opposite the bed, the burnished bronze frame and mirror glowed. The scent of baked potatoes and barbecue beef—last night’s dinner—perfumed the air.

  Yep, home.

  The sounds inside my head subsided, leaving the patter of December rain on the glass and the deep, steady breathing of my lover, Red.

  Breathing deep, but not asleep.

  He whispered in my ear, his voice gravelly, with a touch of East Texas. “Another one, Night?”

  “Same one,” I said. “Third time this week.”

  He raised up on one elbow and leaned close. His halo—the field of life force around his body—shone grass green and earth brown. He even smelled like grass and earth. Steady. Strong. It was a reflection of his magic, so different from my own.

  He studied me with sharp green eyes, their corners crinkled with concern. His white skin still held onto the barest kiss of the summer sun. Shaggy, salt-and-pepper hair framed his face, with a shaggy mustache to match.

  His hair had started to turn at the age of sixteen. He’d had a shock to the system. The shock had been me.

  He’d lived next door to my family in Houston, and witnessed the aftermath of what happened the night my parents were killed. He’d taken me in—a brown girl splattered with blood and stinking of smoke. He’d hidden me, saved my life, and lost me, all within the course of a single day twenty years ago.

  I’d been twelve years old, scared and alone and wounded to the depths of my soul. The Order of the Blood Moon, a secret organization of magical assassins, had plucked me from the street where I lived and taken me in. They’d trained me to use my magic for their ends. I’d become one of them. They were my family. My home.

  All that changed the night they’d sent me to kill a family.

  No one had left the Order and lived to tell about it—until me. The magical assassins demanded that its operatives obey or die, but I’d broken free, and the Order had been hunting me ever since. I never wanted to place another person in the Order’s sights.

  Unbelievably, Red had volunteered.

  That we’d found each other again couldn’t have been an accident—it had to have been fate.

  I’d arrived in Portland, Oregon, on the run, with my daughter, Faith, in tow. I’d applied for a job at Justice Gym, which he owned, and he’d given it to me, no questions asked. It wasn’t that he’d recognized me—I’d changed too much. But he’d used his magic to read me, and whatever he’d seen had been enough to allow for trust. Afterward, when danger had rained down in the form of the Angel of Death, he offered his help. All the while, too, he’d offered the promise of his love.

  I was still trying to figure out what that meant. Opening my heart meant a kind of vulnerability that I’d never been very good at. Loving me also made the person I cared for a target.

  “What’s the dream?” he asked. “Which test?”

  It was always a test. I was always terrified I’d fail, that I’d never be good enough. That I’d never be enough.

  I took a deep breath and blew it out slow and steady. That simple act took my nerves down several notches. “Water survival during my early training with the Order. I nearly drowned. Sunday and I made it. Our friend Miguel didn’t. We were thirteen.”

  Red didn’t press for more details, for which I felt profoundly grateful. I could still taste muddy water and electric fear, and I didn’t want to dive back in. What he did say made me want to pummel him with my pillow.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “What makes you think there’s something else?”

  He raised a brow.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know you,” he said. “Besides, I see it in you.”

  That was his magic, untainted and untrained. He’d had it from birth, and unlike my gift, it had always belonged to him and him alone.

  Red saw into people by gazing into them, marking who and what they were. He could tell good from bad, and truth from lies. He could see the spark of potential—all the possibilities in a person’s path. He used his magic to build people up, to convince people of their shine.

  And to call them on their bullshit.

  “The ghost of my memory,” I said. “The one I repressed the night my parents died.”

  His brow furrowed. “I remember.”

  “It was a warning,” I said. “The ghost said, He’s not what he seems.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Nothing ominous about that.”

  I sighed.

  The “he” in the warning was the Angel of Death, the one from the Book of Revelations. He’d shown up a month ago, real as—well, death. La Muerte. He’d arrived in search of a human body, a vessel, in which to walk the world. He had a job to do, what with kicking off the Apocalypse, and the time had come. I had the juice to carry him.

  He’d gone after me with everything he had, intending to subjugate my mind to his will. His plan had backfired spectacularly. I carried him inside my mind now, sleeping and waking—at every moment.

  I didn’t know how long I could hold him, only that it couldn’t be forever. And I sure didn’t want to know t
hat the Angel of Death was not what he seemed. Not without a more detailed explanation.

  “You feelin’ all right?” Red asked.

  I met his gaze. “Aside from the nightmare? Yeah.”

  “No strange sensations? No hallucinations? No signs that the Angel in your mind is breaking free?”

  I bit my lip. “You know I’m worried about that.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “No. No signs that I can tell. Everything feels the same as it has since that night. Like he’s locked up tight.”

  Red mulled that a moment. “You want me to wake you next time?”

  “No.”

  “You sound sure about that.”

  I felt sure. “If there are messages coming through, then I need to hear them.”

  “Or memories,” he said. “More things floating to the surface.”

  I’d had only the one repressed memory in my life, not a dozen. I opened my mouth to say so, then closed it. There were plenty of things about my life before the Order that I didn’t remember. Things about my parents and the rest of my family. The Order had taken my culture and given me theirs. The missions I’d undertaken had destroyed me further. Who knew what else I might be missing?

  My mind was a wonder of magic and power. It was also a goddamn mystery—one I needed to understand.

  “Promise you’ll let whatever happens in my dreams play out,” I said.

  “Cross my heart.” He leaned closer, holding my gaze.

  I poked him in the chest, my fingertip running up against a streak of silver hair and a whole lot of muscle. “How do I know I’m not still dreaming? How do I know you’re not a hallucination?”

  His lips curved. “You want me to prove I’m real?”

  I lifted my head to kiss him. He met me halfway, reaching with his free hand to cradle my head.

  I closed my eyes, breathing him in as his lips moved gently over mine, the fall of his hair shading my face from the morning light. For a moment, the brush of his mustache along my lip and the sandpaper roughness of the shadow on his cheeks and the salt taste of him became my whole world. When I looked at him again, the spark in his eyes ignited a fire inside of me.

  He saw it before he felt it. I read that on his face, in a flash of wonder that he tucked away almost as soon as it surfaced.

  He lowered my head to the pillow again, tracing a finger along the line of my cheek, then down my arm, stopping to trace the lines of my scars. The souvenir from a knife fight, white against my light brown skin. The half-moon below my elbow, darker and much older. I didn’t even know how I’d ended up with that one.

  “How much time have we got?” he asked.

  I didn’t need to check the electronics to answer, not with the quality of the light. “Not enough.”

  He sighed. “I’ll get the coffee started.”

  I nodded.

  He planted a kiss between my eyebrows, then rolled out of bed, reaching for the faded jeans he’d tossed onto the floor last night. He stood tall and pulled them on over his beautiful, boxer-clad butt.

  I felt a twinge of regret, not being able to appreciate him properly, but duty called. I slid out from under the comforter, the chill in the air turning the skin of my bare arms and legs to gooseflesh. An icy feeling, a flash from the nightmare, settled over me again.

  Red glanced over his shoulder at me. He saw what I felt. He didn’t say anything. He just made his way out of the room, zipping his jeans along the way. His footfalls echoed across the bamboo floor of the skinny hall that led to the kitchen. From down that way, I heard the door to the freezer open and shut. He’d grabbed the coffee, as promised. Then in the usual succession, the sluice of water from the kitchen faucet filling the kettle. The soft clang of the kettle being set on an electric burner. Sudden heat sizzling stray drops from the kettle’s bottom.

  Some things, we couldn’t do anything about. The nightmares I had. The sense of foreboding. Those things were born from my experiences, my fears. Unless—or until—they manifested, they were only ghosts. If the Angel of Death was responsible for them rising in me? Nothing to do but keep an eye on it.

  The one thing we could actually deal with—whatever lay between us—we didn’t talk about, as if by unspoken agreement. We spent time together. We slept together. We blew off steam. We played. There was more to it than that, but we tried not to take it deeper. To invest more felt like a greater risk than either of us was prepared to take right now, in the breath before the storm descended.

  Our shared history complicated things. Beyond that, my past presented a serious obstacle. It wasn’t as if I’d just been a normal person who’d made some bad decisions. I’d been an assassin. There was so much blood on my hands, I could drown in it.

  So Red and I engaged with each other as best we could, and if both of us kept defenses up to guard the tender places in our hearts, neither of us intended to breach them. Not yet.

  I sighed. Then I pulled on my own jeans and curled my toes in the pile of the champagne carpet. I squared my shoulders and pushed away dread and worry. Holding on to it wouldn’t do any good. Better to eat and caffeinate and take a look at it wide awake. Develop a strategy. Make plans. Carry them out. Thought and action versus fear. Fear could not be allowed to win.

  That was who I was. What I did.

  I padded into the hall, casting a glance to the right, toward the darkened bedroom next door where my daughter usually slept. She’d spent last night with friends—a good thing for her, even if it seemed strange after so long on the run to let her go her own way. Faith was a teenager, and staying over with friends was what teenagers did.

  We had as many things to worry about as we did before the Angel showed up on our doorstep. Back then, the Order chased us from one place to the next. Faith and I spent years finding new hideouts, creating new identities, looking over our shoulders. Our vigilance kept us alive.

  When we’d arrived in Portland, something shifted. We’d found people we cared about. We’d made a start at a real home. The Angel of Death coming after us changed things, too. We might be able to outrun the Order, but the Angel? How could anyone hide from a being like that? So, we’d agreed to make a stand.

  I worried about Faith when she was away from me, but I couldn’t keep her by my side twenty-four seven. She and her group of friends all had their fair share of magic, and they had each other. They knew to ask for help if and when they needed it. That was all I could hope for.

  The doorbell rang, a huge, startling sound that gonged through the apartment—Faith’s way of breaking up whatever shenanigans Red and I might be up to before she used her key. She’d caught us kissing once and had turned several shades of red.

  She’d pointed out to me that Red had feelings for me before I’d seen it. She’d seemed cool with it. She’d said as much. But no way did she ever want to accidentally run into us doing something worse—her words, not mine.

  I was, for all intents and purposes, still her mother.

  She turned her key in the lock and wrapped her hand around the doorknob. No alarm sounded. The only magical people allowed to enter the apartment were those with a standing invitation. The spell laid into the knob would shock any other magic user hard enough to knock them out.

  My family and I were here to stay in Portland. That was no excuse to be careless.

  The door swung open on creaking hinges, flooding the entry with light, highlighting the thin layer of dust that overlay the small, teakwood table and the hall tree that hung above it, half of its silver hooks and peacock-feather paint job hidden by Red’s and my coats and scarves.

  The light streamed far enough to illuminate the living room. TV tucked into the corner. A painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, starry-cloaked and crowned in fiery gold, hung over the white-painted brick of the fireplace. Outdoor snowflake lights, strung across the mouth of the hearth, glowed Christmas colors. A scarred oak coffee table held down a denim-blue rug. Beat-up denim sofa. Scr
atched and dinged black dining table pushed against the wall closest to me.

  Faith took a careful step inside. She met my gaze with soft brown eyes. Her voice had a foggy, stayed-up-half-the-night ring to it. “Y’all decent?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  She shook her head. “That’s my silent line you’re stealing, Night.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said.

  Her halo shimmered its usual deep silver, though this morning its edges tended toward a somber gray. She dropped her backpack on the floor, toed off a pair of black hiking boots that she hadn’t bothered to lace in the first place, and unzipped her silver down parka, shrugging it off and hanging it on a free hook on the hall tree above the table.

  Her ruby-red V-neck sweater and black jeans looked like they’d gone ten rounds with her friend Corey’s white kitty. Faith had managed a shower, and she still smelled like pinion-scented shampoo and soap. The ends of her long, dark, waves were curled and damp. A closer look showed a set of lightweight luggage under her eyes. The corners of her mouth turned down. Not enough to make a frown, mind, but definitely enough to telegraph that she had something she didn’t want to tell me.

  “Y’all have fun last night?” I asked.

  She dropped keys on the entry table. They landed with a musical clink. “We did divination.”

  Fortunetelling. “About what?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  “And?”

  “You’re gonna need coffee first.”

  On cue, the kettle on the stove began to whistle. Red lifted it off the heat. He’d heard every word, of course.

  “Five minutes,” he said. “Or is the world gonna end any earlier?”

  Faith cleared her throat. “Morning to you, too, Red.”