Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Kierse McKenna’s magic is bound to a man she hates―one who has spent lifetimes fighting the man she loves.
To end this binding, Graves―her winter god, her monster―will stop at nothing. He discovers that the only hope of freeing Kierse is to locate a stone relic of legend, rumored to lift any curse.
The only problem? The stone has been missing for a century.
And the Oak King is on their trail.
Now Kierse is trapped at the heart of a centuries-long battle while the rest of the world comes unraveled. The Fae Killer is hunting. The peace with monsters is fracturing. And as the very rules of their myth start to shift, escaping the Oak King’s hold may demand more than stolen artifacts and clever heists.
For Kierse and Graves, it may mean risking the only thing they have left to lose
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Part I
The Raven
Chapter One
New magic sputtered in her veins. Sputtered, sparked, and then ignited. Finally.
“We’re a go,” Kierse said into her earpiece.
“Let’s stick to the plan, shall we?” Graves said, his crisp British accent coursing through her.
A smile came to her face. “I always stick to the plan.”
A scoff was Graves’s only reaction. Kierse was known to improvise. She’d had enough marks go south to know that she hoped for the best and planned for the worst. This was no different.
The plan itself was simple: steal a Celtic artifact—the Stone of Fal—from a Scottish warlock.
After a tip from one of Graves’s many old apprentices, they discovered it was being held in an underground vault in Edinburgh. The warlock-in-question’s main ability was evocation, which meant he could call spirits and demons and monsters to do his bidding for him.
Not so simple.
“George?” Graves asked.
His driver cleared his throat. “All clear out here, boss.”
“Walter?” Graves prompted.
“As soon as the tour leaves, you’ll have five minutes,” their tech guy said, calm and emotionless.
Five minutes. Kierse hoped that was enough time.
She shifted in position, feeling the weight of the Spear of Lugh at her back. A dangerous, powerful weapon forged by the gods themselves. And a last resort in all scenarios since the thing liked to whisper murder into her mind.
“Starting now,” she whispered.
She pushed aside the buzzing in her ears as she ignited a blue light in her palm. The pixie light was teardrop shape, and when she concentrated, it split into two and then two more. A handful of little lights buzzed excitedly, ready to do their job. Hard to believe these little ones were typically depicted as wisps in fiction, with their lights leading a person to their destiny or off into the darkness of a swamp to their death.
The strain of her new magic made her grit her teeth, and this was the easiest of her abilities.
But her old Fae magic was still tied up by Lorcan Flynn.
While the cauldron had seen a loophole and given her these new powers outside of her magical binding with Lorcan, her original powers that she’d had full control over—time manipulation, glamours, and the ability to predict a score—were all gone. It left the most dangerous of her magic—absorption—passive after everything she’d done to train it this summer. She even had to learn how to do her hair differently to mask her pointed Fae ears from the general population. It was a pain in the ass.
After three months, neither she nor Graves figured out a way around the binding, so she buckled down to begrudgingly train what the cauldron had given her. Other than the pixie lights, magical intuition allowed her to see who had magic and what kind. And the last two powers “in theory” were—persuasion and portaling.
Kierse leaned forward and blew against her palm. The pixie lights flew away from her like dandelions on the breeze. They approached the ghost tour that had just entered South Bridge vaults where Kierse had hidden after sneaking off from her own tour. Blue lights flickered around the heads of the tour guide and the twenty tourists trekking through the dripping, low-ceilinged underground.
The tour and its guide’s faces suddenly went blank. Then with a dead-eyed look, they all followed the lights out of the room, leaving Kierse alone. Lure complete.
“They’re out,” Kierse said.
“Five minutes starts…now,” Walter said.
Kierse watched the magic spark to life at the door to the vault chamber. Walter was an apprentice-level warlock with force-field magic. After working with King Louis for a time, Graves recruited him for the cauldron heist. Now he trained the young warlock, who he had previously dismissed as unworthy. Kierse liked having a tech genius that no one could touch—well, except her, thanks to her always-on absorption magic—on their side.
“Showtime,” Kierse muttered.
As she removed her picks from the inside pocket of her leather jacket, a new smile graced her features, this one a little wild at the edges. Her thieving smile. The one that said she liked this part a bit too much.
Kierse went to work on the lock, fitting her tools into the old iron door and keeping her hands clear. Her Fae half still didn’t much like iron, but at least it didn’t hurt her as bad as it could.
The plan was simpler than the problem. Kierse would break into the underground vault, use her absorption abilities to bypass the warlock’s wards, and steal the stone. Walter would run surveillance and use his force fields to keep the tunnels clear for her. Graves would be the distraction this time, a fun change for him. George, as always, was the getaway driver.
The problem was Archie Blair. He was the premier warlock of Edinburgh and had lived on Blair Street off the Royal Mile since the late 1700s. Warlocks were territorial, and while lesser warlocks could be in their cities, they almost exclusively had one master.