Broken Sorcery Read online

  Broken Sorcery

  Natalie Grey

  Contents

  Also by Natalie Grey

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The Dragon Corps

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Also by Natalie Grey

  Original Series

  The Dragon Corps

  Set in the Kurtherian Gambit Universe

  Bellatrix

  Challenges

  Trials & Tribulations

  Vigilante Chronicles

  Writing as Moira Katson

  Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1)

  Daughter of Ashes (Rise of Aiqasal, Book 1)

  Mahalia

  Prologue

  The sounds of carousing filtered through the night air; druids, celebrating the return of their long-lost leader, and the death of their enemy. Druids, I had learned, liked to get impressively drunk and sing very badly. After years of viewing them as straight-laced, it was both amusing and gratifying to see this side of them.

  Especially since I was going to be joining them for a while.

  “We can have a house here, you know,” I said softly. “I’ll be training for so long. It might be worth building a little house, hmm?”

  “That,” Daiman said, “is a very good point.” He had wrapped his arm around my waist as we stood alone together, away from the hall, and now he dropped a kiss on my nose. He was just tipping my face up to his when crashing footsteps nearby had us both whirling around, hands up to cast magic.

  “Don’t—don’t shoot!” The man was blood-streaked, half-dead, but unmistakable.

  I dropped my hands. “Lawrence?”

  Daiman gave a groan and dropped his head into one hand. “Every time,” he muttered.

  I threw him a look. “What happened?” I asked Lawrence.

  “The Acadamh,” he said. “And … everywhere. They knew where to find us. They came for us. They….”

  “They?” I wanted to tell him that Philip was dead, but that didn’t matter. If this was his work, then his death was clearly no impediment to what he’d built.

  “Humans,” Lawrence whispered. “They know about us. I don’t know how many, but the ones who do—they can fight us now. And they came for us. They took Ari.” His face crumpled. “Please. Please, you have to come back. You have to help.”

  “I….” I looked toward the ruined hall.

  “Did they strike here, too?” Lawrence asked.

  “No, this was something else.” I ran my hands through my hair. “I don’t know if—”

  “Please.” I’d never heard his voice like this before. “We need you. We need someone to go get them back. They’re being taken apart like machines. Please.”

  I closed my eyes. I had earned a nice, quiet life, hadn’t I? A few decades of druid training and a house with a peat fire?

  Apparently not.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at Daiman as I nodded.

  “All right. I’ll do it.” I squared my shoulders. “Where are we going?”

  1

  It took longer than I hoped to leave. Daiman wouldn’t go without telling Merlin. “If there’s someone coming for all of us,” he said urgently, “he has to know.”

  I could hardly argue with that, so I packed my few possessions and then paced while Daiman spoke with his leader. To his credit, Daiman didn’t ask any of the hundreds of questions he must have for Merlin. He concluded their business quickly, however long each moment must seem to me. When he came out of the Arch Druid’s chambers, it was with a small stone orb clutched in one hand.

  “So we can communicate,” was all he said, and he made his way through the back corridors quickly, a bag slung over one shoulder.

  He didn’t even speak to Lawrence when we emerged into the darkness, just set off at once, and I felt a jolt of guilt. I had been pacing inside, worried and anxious. How much worse had it been for Lawrence, who had just seen his friends slaughtered?

  But I didn’t know what to say. I nodded towards Daiman’s retreating form and Lawrence nodded numbly and followed, as if in a dream. I should have gotten him cleaned up, I thought. Maybe I should have gotten a meal into him.

  Too late now.

  At least the journey didn’t take very long, not within the domhan fior. Our passage to the coast was quick, and we slid across the water in what seemed to take no time at all. Daiman was silent, which did not surprise me.

  So was Lawrence. That did surprise me. He had always struck me as very young—by our standards, he was. I remembered him as full of bravado, headstrong and impulsive. I expected him to speak of the horrors he’d seen. He didn’t, though. He just walked in silence.

  We arrived near morning. The sun was just rising as we made our way through the forest that hid the Monarchist hideout. The sky had been lightening for some time while we walked in grim silence, and the birds should now be making a veritable storm of noise.

  They weren’t.

  In fact, nothing was stirring in the forest at all. When I sank into a brief druid trance, it showed me that the few animals left in these woods were huddled tight in their lairs, trembling with fear. Daiman and I exchanged a worried glance. I didn’t need any words to know that he was thinking the same thing I was: we weren’t going to like what we were about to see.

  We’d been brought here by Lawrence, a Monarchist from a cell that had once sheltered me. He’d pleaded with us to come help, saying the cell had been attacked not by Philip or the Acadamh, but instead by humans.

  How humans had found a Monarchist hideout was my first question … but, of course, Lawrence wasn’t interested in answering questions.

  Sunlight was warm at our backs, flooding through the trees behind us, when we emerged into the clearing. If you didn’t count the eerie silence, it should have been a beautiful, peaceful sight—once there had been an old, tumbling-down down stone cottage here, the sort of place that radiated go away vibes to everyone but the most desperate runaways.

  The stones were scattered across the ground now, and covered in soot. Inside, a wooden archway was all that remained: the portal to the labyrinthine paths within the domhan fior where the hideout truly was.

  And there were bodies everywhere.

  I found my hands clenched. As battlefields went, it wasn’t the worst I’d seen—but then, that wasn’t saying much. I sank down into a crouch, staring at one of the human bodies. The man was young and clean-shaven, his face one of the few things that was visible under his black uniform. A heavy black vest with bulky innards, covered by strange cloth straps, seemed to be some kind of armor. His hands were still clutching his gun.

  “They’ll come for the bodies soon, I think, unless we hide them.” Our presence must have tripped some switch, because an old man appeared out of nowhere to stare at us.

  “Harry.” I stood to nod at him.

  Harry was human, nearing the end of his life, but he wasn’t overawed at all to be in the presence of magic users. He’d spent most
of his life in the Monarchist cell, and was now its de facto leader. That humans figured so prominently in the new Monarchist movement was an irony not lost on me. I had been the one to start the movement centuries ago, and at the time, it had advocated the genocide of non-magic-users.

  It was something Harry and I never talked about.

  He looked around himself, and for a moment, he seemed startlingly young despite his grey hair and his beard.

  He was young—to me, at least. A magic user learned to judge people’s ages by the look in their eyes, and Harry was still quite a few years shy of a full century. He was practically a baby by our standards, just like Lawrence was.

  He looked lost in the middle of this carnage. “You came,” he said, but it was reflexive. He wasn’t really paying any attention to me.

  I nodded. “Lawrence told us what happened.”

  “Did he tell you about the Acadamh, too, then?”

  Daiman made a strangled noise. Once, he had been the Acadamh’s most feared hunter—a druid who tracked rogue sorcerers across the globe and never, ever missed his target.

  I had changed all that, not least of all because my reappearance in the world had been living proof that the Acadamh’s leader was a consummate liar. Over time, even as I had come to have more respect for the Acadamh’s mission, it had faded in Daiman’s estimation.

  Still, he had known almost everyone there. He would never be able to hear that it was attacked, and feel nothing.

  “What is it?” His voice was rough. “What happened there?”

  “They’re finding all of us.” Harry shook his white head.

  Daiman and I exchanged a quick glance. The Acadamh was as well-protected as any magical place could be—and filled with young sorcerers. The thought of this devastation spread throughout its grounds gave me a stab of fear.

  “It’s gone?” Daiman asked. I was impressed by the steadiness of his voice, but his whole body was rigid. “It’s….” He gestured at the ground in front of him. It’s like this?

  “No one knows.” Harry looked at Lawrence, who was trailing around the edge of the clearing with a lost expression on his face. The man’s old, lined face looked sadder than I had ever seen before. He focused back on us with an effort. “There were reports that they were hit by some sort of projectile from … no one knows where. Something high-powered, new technology. They’ve hidden themselves somehow, none of us can find them.”

  “Satellites,” I said, through numb lips. “Philip said he’d wanted access to their satellite systems. But I don’t understand—how would anyone be able to find them in the domhan fior? The Acadamh is hidden, isn’t it?”

  Daiman’s face was bleak. “We thought so. But I have no idea what their technology can find now.”

  “It isn’t just human tricks.” Harry nodded to the bodies. “I’d bet you anything they had magic users working with them.”

  “Why do you think so?” I was alert at once.

  That Philip’s operatives were infiltrating human groups, I had known. That they might have been truly working with those groups….

  That part was new.

  Or maybe these weren’t Philip’s people at all. I really had no idea what I was dealing with here.

  I hated that.

  “Anyone can use the portals into other worlds.” Harry nodded at the doorway. “The humans in these cells are proof of that. It’s easier if we’ve got a magic user with us, but it isn’t necessary. So I suppose they could have been all human. But I don’t think so—they had someone into the cell and out, with Ari, before we even had a chance to react.”

  “So they knew the layout.” Daiman’s voice was surprisingly calm. “They were able to get past the portal and into the corridors without setting off alarms, and then get her out.” His eyes narrowed, staring at some place not in this world. “It can’t have been easy,” he added, half under his breath.

  For years, he had tracked humans. Now he was using those years of skill to figure out, backwards, how these people had done what they’d done.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about this reminder of who—and what—he was. I hadn’t always agreed with Daiman’s cause, and I hadn’t agreed with all of his methods, either. On the night we met, he had killed my protector, and I still grieved her death.

  He was oblivious to my tension, though, for which I was glad. “And she wasn’t using her magic,” he murmured to himself. “So they bound it somehow … or they convinced her they were friends.”

  As he might have done, not so long ago at all. I looked away.

  Harry, blessedly, seemed to have forgotten that for the moment. He snorted. “Oh, she didn’t think they were friends. The only way we knew they were here at all was her screaming. I wonder … if they let her.”

  His voice had gone tight with grief, and I felt fear settle, cold, in the pit of my stomach. “What does that mean?”

  “It means she was their first target,” Harry said quietly, “but they wanted to deal with the rest of us, too. When we got out here, they were waiting.”

  I looked around at the bodies and felt a chill. “How many did we lose?”

  “Four.” It sounded like he hadn’t thought of anything else since. Perhaps he hadn’t. “Four taken. And three killed. And the ones who were killed were all human, the ones who were taken were all sorcerers. Why … I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I looked around myself with a frown. “They’re humans, they’re curious about magic, they’re abducting people for experiments. Why not take everyone they can get?”

  Daiman cleared his throat awkwardly. When we looked at him, he flushed.

  “They want allies,” he said quietly. “That’s what I’d guess. It’s usually not worth it to take adults. We learned long ago at the Acadamh that adults don’t change their loyalties so easily. An adult is smart. They’ll trick their way free, they’ll remember grudges. A child won’t.”

  Well, if the Monarchists here hadn’t remembered what he was before, they sure as hell did now. Harry was staring at Daiman with open hatred, and Lawrence, for all his despair, looked like he’d gladly kill the druid just as soon as he found the energy to move.

  I tried not to sigh, and rubbed at my forehead distractedly. I needed to keep people focused on the problem. Which was….

  “Wait.” I looked at him. “You think they want her for an ally?”

  “Someday.” Daiman nodded. He inclined his head to Harry, carefully not meeting the man’s furious eyes. “It fits, doesn’t it? We have evidence, it looks like, that they have magic users among their ranks. They must believe they have something to offer the adults, that they can gain their loyalty somehow. How, I don’t know.”

  I bit my lip. They would try to ensure the adults’ good behavior with Ari’s life. It was obvious—to me, at least. I just didn’t want to say it aloud.

  Luckily, Harry spoke before I had to find words.

  “It fits,” he said. His voice was heavy. He bowed his head. “So they come back as our enemies,” he said, to no one in particular. “Or they die in a laboratory.”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence. All of us knew it, and all of us felt too guilty to say it aloud: I don’t know which I’m hoping for.

  He jerked his head to the portal: “We should go inside. Just because they’ve gotten in before doesn’t mean we need to make ourselves sitting ducks out here.”

  It was a solid point. I watched him haul Lawrence up, and the two of them waited at the portal for us.

  “We’ll follow in a moment.” I gave a strained smile.

  “Right.” Whatever Harry thought of that, he didn’t care enough to voice it. Once, he would have thrown a fit about Daiman coming into the hideout at all. He would have asked me what we were going to talk about that we didn’t want them to hear.

  Now, he’d lost the will to care about any of it. That was frightening.

  I watched them disappear and looked over at Daiman. “I wish you hadn’t
reminded them what you were.”

  “What I still am,” Daiman said quietly. He lifted his shoulders at me helplessly. “Maybe. I don’t know. But … figuring out what happened is more important than them liking me, isn’t it? If I held back information and Ari died because of it, I wouldn’t forgive myself for that. Besides.” He gave a strained smile. “I’m used to not being liked.”

  He would be. After his years with the Hunters, Daiman was practically a legend—and one of the people the Monarchists hated most.

  “Is it worth even trying?” I asked him honestly. “To get them back, I mean.”

  “I don’t know.” He was honest about it, at least. “I could assess our chances against other magic users. But someplace like where she is now, a human hideout? I don’t know. I don’t even know how to guess.”

  “This is a nightmare.” I sank my head into my hands. I felt his arms come around me and I relaxed against his chest. “We were actually going to have some peace, finally. We were going to have a cottage and study magic and … and I know I shouldn’t care about that right now, but I do.”

  “Do you want to go back?” Daiman said quietly against my hair.

  “No.” My answer was instant. I pulled back enough to look up at him. “No, I don’t. When I think of Ari, of how scared she must be—”

  My throat closed in horror. I had been imprisoned before. I had been held in chains. They used iron to cut off my magic and the things they made me watch still haunted me, even if I couldn’t remember all of them. I had lived through it, and so would the other adults they had taken—most likely, anyway.