Page 36 of Magic Forsaken

I straightened and limped out of the shelter of the stairwell, heading as swiftly as possible towards the exit.

But I didn’t get far.

Something darted out of the darkness and clamped around my arm.

An enormous weight hit me from the side, throwing me against the wall.

My ribs creaked. The breath was knocked out of me, and I gasped for air, while scrabbling to throw off the vise that gripped my bicep.

Magic surged up, hot and potent, flooding my limbs, begging to be used. I gritted my teeth against the pressure, felt the heat of it climb up my neck and prickle against my scalp. Every hair seemed charged with electricity, and my eyes… The soft glimmer that sometimes lurked in their depths was probably a raging inferno.

I let out a pissed off snarl and launched myself at whoever tried to cage me.

Whoever it was had human hands, and they were much bigger than me, so they were likely male… And that meant they had certain vulnerabilities, so I went after them with knuckles, elbows and knees.

I heard a deep grunt of surprise, felt soft fabric beneath my fingers, and then I was falling forward to land with a yelp on top of my attacker.

And that, wouldn’t you know, was the exact moment when the power decided to come back on.

NINE

Most embarrassing momentof my life, bar none.

“Raine?” The deep, familiar voice rumbled from a broad, solid chest that bunched and rippled beneath my fingers.

Yep, I was laying full length on top of the wide-eyed king of the shifters, who released my arm and rose on his elbows to look me in the eye, his face only inches from mine.

It took at least three breaths to recover from my shock and roll away from him. Another few seconds of shutting my eyes and cringing in horror before I felt sufficiently recovered to struggle to my feet. Brush off my clothes. Paste a perfectly normal expression on my face and turn to look at the man who had so recently offered me a job.

“What are you doing down here?” He was already in full glare mode, somehow re-clothed in that same t-shirt and jeans, and still not wearing any shoes. “You were supposed to stay safe on the roof.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” I muttered, still suffering from a serious humiliation hangover. “Safe? On a roof? Most of us don’t have wings. We can’t just fly down to safety if someone attacks.”

He digested that for a moment. “I told you to stay because I was coming right back.”

“Oh, and I was supposed to get all that from you pointing emphatically?”

I should mention it was a known weakness of my personality that helplessness or embarrassment made me belligerent enough to argue with people who could kill me. It was a big part of how I survived captivity. But back then I’d had a certain amount of immunity—I’d known that no matter how annoying I was, they weren’t going to end my life. I was too valuable.

Callum-ro-Deverin might be a completely different story.

His mouth opened again. He took a step towards me, and then stopped.

“You’re right.” He glowered at the ground for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”

I almost fell over. That was thesecondtime.

And I was about to conclude that there was nothing sexier than a man who knew how to apologize when he turned from his contemplation of me to push through the double doors into his newly renovated space.

It was fortunate that the construction crews had already left for the day, because the stench of smoke and plaster dust filled the air, mitigated only by the water that was pouring from a pair of sprinkler heads in the ceiling.

Glass littered the floor, from fallen light fixtures that had shattered on impact. Strangely, unlike the top floor, the ground-floor windows were completely intact, and I wondered what we would find on the intervening levels.

Had our attackers known where we were? Intended the blown out windows specifically to frighten or injure us enough that we couldn’t pursue them?

Callum swore fiercely under his breath and started across the wet floor, murder in his eyes, and some instinct led me to reach out before he stepped on a pile of glass shards.

“Don’t!” I tugged at the back of his shirt, but it was like trying to stop a freight train with a feather duster. He just kept going, oblivious to the trail of blood he left behind as he crossed beneath the useless spray from the sprinklers to approach the eastern wall of the main floor.

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