Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews

I didn’t want to change who I was either. It would take a hell of a lot more than a sob story to force me out of my retirement. I’d earned my peace and quiet, and I would be keeping it.

Curran reached me.

“How was the water?”

“Invigorating. You should go for a swim.”

“No thanks.”

I loved swimming, but I liked my ocean to be right about the temperature of bath water. Our slice of the North Carolina coast was nicely swimmable in September, hovering around the upper seventies, but we’d had three days of storms and the water temperature dropped to the high sixties. I had no desire to get into it.

Curran leaned over and kissed me with cool lips. “What’s the matter?”

Land, connections, money… “My aunt has given me a laundry list of things we don’t have and need to get right away.”

He laughed softly.

Connections would cost us our anonymity, and land would cost us money, which we didn’t have. Curran and I owned a chunk of the Mercenary Guild. It paid quite well, but not well enough to finance us on the kind of scale Erra was envisioning.

“Do you think it was a mistake to move to Wilmington?” I asked.

“I have my smoking-hot wife, my troublemaker son, my fort, my beach... What else can a man want?”

“I’m serious.”

“I can see that.” He scooped me up off my log.

“What are you doing?”

Curran spun around and sprinted to the water with me in his arms. The beach flew by.

“Stop! Curran! Cu—”

He threw me. I hurtled through the air and splashed into the ocean. The water closed over my head.

Aaaa!

I flailed, broke the surface, and gasped. Curran locked me into his arms, his gray eyes laughing.

“You said invigorating, not fucking freezing. Let go of me!”

“Let me warm you up.”

“I’ll warm myself up!”

His smile gained a wicked edge. “Even more interesting.”

I smacked him, kicked him in the chest, and launched into a frenzied freestyle, trying to warm up. I stopped about a minute later. In a calm lake, I would’ve ended up one hundred yards from where I started. In the ocean, against the current, I made it to about fifty.

Curran floated next to me, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. It’s good to be a werelion.

“Hey, baby.”

“You are too much.”

He pulled me closer, and I wrapped myself in his arms. We floated in the water.

“About what you said earlier,” he said, his voice a deep rumble in my ear. “I enjoyed this summer. Conlan loved it.”

They both loved it here in the fort. Erra was right—it really was on the edge of the continent, in a place where the land ended and the ocean began. We could get cornered here, squeezed between an angry sea and an enemy. If we were talking about safety only, I’d felt better when we were in Atlanta, hidden deep inside the subdivision where every neighbor was a friend. But Atlanta wasn’t an option.

“Do you like it here?” Curran asked.

“Yes.”

“Then it works for now. It’s simple, baby. When we stop liking it, we’ll do something else.”

Maybe it was that simple.





Three weeks later





The beach was an excellent place to work out because the sand was soft and conveniently powdery.

Curran threw me over his hip. If I had let go, I would’ve landed on my back, but I had a death grip on his neck, and as he flipped me, I went with it and threw a handful of sand into his face. It bought me half a second, which I used to kick his feet from under him and get a triangle choke in place. Unfortunately, choking a werelion was a lot harder than subduing a regular opponent. A non-shapeshifter person would’ve tapped out. Curran got up, lifting me in the air while I hung off his neck.

I was about to punch him in the head when he tapped my thigh. His eyes were fixed on the fortress behind us.

I released him. He caught me, helping me to the ground, and I turned to look at the fort.

After the Red Horn gang attacked our home, Curran and Conlan decided to erect a flagpole. It jutted from our fort’s tower, bearing a gray flag with stylized black stripes that looked either like tiger stripes or claw rips. When something happened, we raised a second flag below the first, an early warning system, green for shapeshifter, red for danger, and so on. When we left this morning, the gray flag flew alone. Now there was a blue flag under it.

Human visitors. Not from Conlan’s school either. The lone time they came to visit after school started, he flew a ghastly orange to announce the occasion.

“Are you expecting visitors?” Curran asked.

The renovation crew had finished five weeks ago, and we were all paid up. The grocery delivery wasn’t due for another two days.

“No.” I scrambled to grab my shoes.

We found our visitors in the courtyard. A young Black woman with a wealth of hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun and a well-dressed older Black man. Our son had let them in, guided them to our outside lunch table, served them iced tea and cookies, and then parked himself on the side to keep them company. I could tell by Curran’s face that a father-son conversation would be in Conlan’s near future.

“Don’t bristle,” I murmured as we crossed the yard.