Page 71 of Shadow's End

“Finish it, blah, blah, blah,” Jaqueline cut in, in a bored sort of tone. “It is no truer on this plane than it is in real life.”

I called to the inner wild magic and imagined myself standing in front of Jaqueline, inches from her face. Before I could even blink, it happened. I reached out and wrapped a hand loosely around her throat. My psi talents roared to life, and I caught a glimpse of a street, a building, a room. Of her, lying in bed alone, though the dented pillow beside hers suggested that until very recently that had not been the case.

Grabbing her by the neck definitely wasn’t subtle, but it had certainly worked.

“Well, well,” she said, her voice even despite the startlement that briefly flickered through her expression. “Aren’t you full of surprises.”

“More than you will ever know.” I let my hand drop and stepped back. I had what I needed. Now I just had to keep her from realizing that. “What do you really want, Jaqueline?”

“As I said, I’m here to pass on a message, but not, as you presumed, to my mother.”

“Then to whom? Because really? These little tête-à-têtes that do nothing more than give me warning not to interfere are getting a little tedious.”

“Then you will be pleased to know this will be the last of them.”

“Oh?” I raised a casual eyebrow even as alarm ran through me. “Have you finally accepted their uselessness?”

A vicious light ignited in her eyes, and the alarm boiled over to fear.

“No. They simply end because you will no longer exist to call onto this plane. Enjoy your final minutes on this earth, Elizabeth Grace.”

And with that, she flung me off the plane, back into my body.

Straight into chaos.

Chapter

Nine

Iwoke with a gasp and sat bolt upright in bed. Aiden wasn’t beside me, but I could hear him speaking in the living area, his words urgent but barely audible against the cacophony of sound coming from the street beyond the café—alarms, explosions, and screams.

I flung off the sheet, climbed into my shorts and a T-shirt, and then ran out, barely avoiding Monty as he stepped from Belle’s room.

“What the hell is going on?” His gaze shot toward the glass sliding doors, where the night sky burned bright with smoke and fire. “Ah, fuck.”

“Yeah.” I ducked past him and ran into the living room.

Aiden was on the phone but swung around as we entered. “The station was hit by a fireball. Apurplefireball.”

Meaning it was mage fire, not regular. “Anyone hurt?”

“Don’t know. Ric had patrol duties tonight, but it’s close to knock-off time, so I have no idea if he was there to sign off or not.”

Ricardo Pérez was the newest of the reservation’s rangers and had come here under the reservation’s exchange program—a program designed to prevent inbreeding—as a replacementfor Byron, who’d been murdered by one of our “monster of the month” invasions.

It would be the mother of all ironies if Ric had also been killed by one of them.

I moved past Aiden and headed for the glass sliding doors and the patio beyond, Monty and Belle two steps behind me. The night was stinking hot and filled with not only the acidic scent of burning plastic but the foulness that came with a spell created from blood. I stopped at the balustrade and stared in horror at the chaos in front of me.

It wasn’t just the ranger station that had gone up in flames; half the damn block was little more than fragmented bits of burning rubble. And visible through the sweep of smoke and fire were the broken remnants of a spell.

Even without knowing mage fire had created this mess, those remnants were evidence enough this hadn’t been an accident.

Monty stopped beside me. “Why on earth would they hit the damn ranger station?”

I glanced at him grimly. “I think you’ll find they believed they were hitting the café.”

“But why—” Belle stopped abruptly. “The pin. They thought it washere.”

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