Wings and Shadowthief by May Sage
Daughter of Sand
What the fuck was that?
He wasn’t surprised by Gwen’s display of magic, of course. He’d always sensed the potential of the destructive power within her. That she’d used it against him wasn’t a shocker, given how utterly pissed she was. Her visible fury was a red-hot living thing. And in all honesty, seeing her surrounded by magic, glowing with confidence and fury as she gave in to the power she’d always repressed made him hard as steel. He would have bent her over and plunged into her depths if she’d been even remotely interested, regardless of his commitment to keeping things simple at Oldcrest.
His desire for Gwen was so intense it bordered on insanity, but he couldn’t bring himself to care overmuch.
The one thing spooking him right now was what he’d felt when he’d touched her smooth brown skin. What he’d seen.
Just flashes, but that had been enough.
As clear as day, he’d seen her in his arms. Heard her moan and throw her head back, saying his name over and over.
“Hunter!”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, triple fuck.
Jack couldn’t believe he might have gone there with her and forgotten about it.
How fucking unfair was that? If Gwen hated him because of it, at least the universe owed him the courtesy of letting him remember fucking the hottest woman he knew.
“Dammit!”
No wonder he was in trouble. Jack hadn’t ever been discourteous to Gwen—when in control of his body, at least—but he certainly hadn’t treated her like one might have expected from someone who knew what her pussy tasted like.
He was in so much shit.
Huntsmen busted out of the line of trees along the back of the Institute moments later, thankfully providing a much-needed distraction.
He had prizes to distribute, jokes to make, friends to drink beer with.
Then he could try to hire a witch to dig inside his brain.
“Ican’t see anything.”
Jack sighed. Blair was the eleventh witch he’d asked for help, and like all her peers, all she gave him was an apologetic smile.
“It’s not that I can’t access your memory—you’ve opened your mind, so I can. But there’s a block over that day. It feels like a brick wall. To go past it, I’d need to hit it with the mental equivalent of C4. That’s the kind of thing we only do to enemies. It could mess up your brain.”
He nodded, having heard the same thing often over the last week.
Everyone was telling him what he already knew. If he wanted answers, he had to go to someone who had been there with him that day.
Gwen.
1st of November 2157
If the werewolf writhing under her care didn’t stop snapping his teeth threateningly, Gwen was going to give him a reason to see her as the enemy.
“You have to stay still,” she snapped, her frustration rising.
Restorative magic was supposed to be natural to her kind—water witches—but the only thing that she found natural was causing storms, snowfalls in July, and the occasional downpour on a sunny beach. Healing anyone was hard enough without having to deal with growls, snaps, and flailing.
She sighed. Who had died and made her the chief healer in this place?
Her gibe wasn’t even close to funny, given the fact that the official head healer of Oldcrest was currently out for the count. Vincent wasn’t dead, but his condition had been touch-and-go for a moment. After the chaos of the latest battle, she was doing her best to keep the inhabitants of her home alive, like every witch here.
Gwen remembered a time when her life had been boring. She’d remained stuck inside her home most of the time, as her magic was too volatile for her to walk around unchaperoned. Here in Oldcrest, a territory ruled by vampire royalty and harboring a pack of ancient werewolves, dozens of witches, and hundreds of young sups who had no idea how to control their powers, she might as well have been a kitten. The authorities didn’t consider her dangerous.
She should be terrified of this place, these powerful, unhinged people around her, but she wasn’t. Oldcrest felt like home. Everyone here was family.
The werewolf male flashing his fangs definitely wasn’t her favorite honorary cousin, but she was going to help as much as she could nonetheless. He—along with most of the members of the pack—had come to their aid when they’d been attacked. Without the werewolves, the battle could have ended differently. There was a chance more of her friends could have been hurt, or worse. It was the least she could do.
Her heart still hadn’t stopped thundering in her chest, although the self-appointed queen’s followers had been killed or beaten back outside of their borders. She was safe. Most of her friends were safe.
It didn’t feel like it. Not when her closest friend here had almost died.
That wasn’t right. No almost about it.
Chloe had been dead. Cold and still as ice.
She shook her head, not allowing herself to dwell on it.
Gwen let her magic coat her fingers, willing it to remain in her control, and to do as it was bid. All she wanted was for it to heal the wolf’s broken shoulder and the two puncture wounds on his neck.
In her exhaustion, Gwen had dropped most of her physical and mental shields, as well as the complex spells she’d used to make herself faster and stronger during their fight against the vampire enemies who’d wanted to destroy them—destroy her friends, and the current rulers of Oldcrest—to establish their dominion.
Oldcrest may be a small stretch of land in the wilderness of Scotland, but to the supernatural world, it represented far more. It was a seat of power for the seven greatest vampire families—the first ones ever created, turned directly by Ariadne. And though the rest of the supernatural creatures didn’t like to admit it, vampires ruled them, too. They were immortal, physically stronger, and could often wield magic. Pissing them off wasn’t smart for any race, any clan, any coven.
Now six of the seven houses on Night Hill were destroyed. The black Eirikrson manor stood alone at the summit.
Gwen wasn’t entirely certain what had occurred, how the fire had stopped—how the air had suddenly cleared. She’d figure it out eventually. For now, her one priority was making sure that their allies saw another day.
As energy transferred from her palm onto the rough silver-gray fur, the wolf shifted on his flank, pain evident on the animal’s features. With her adrenaline still running high, she saw the mouthful of fangs opened wide, closing in on her slower than it might have approached. Seeing it didn’t mean that she had time to do anything about the oncoming threat. Damn her mortal strength, her human speed.
She closed her eyes and flinched in apprehension, imagining those long, curved fangs sinking into her skin. She couldn’t blame the wolf. Healing was a painful business. When the wound was consequential, it itched and burned with such intensity that patients often passed out.
Pain never came.
“Stay.” The low, domineering command held so much strength it could only have come from an alpha, but she knew that voice. It didn’t belong to anyone who was part of the First Pack.
Cracking her eyes open, she found familiar silver-blue eyes fixed on the beast at her feet.
Jack Hunter.
He was…a friend of a friend? He and Chloe were pretty tight—he had smiles and nicknames for the hot vampire blonde Gwen had clicked with since their first day at Oldcrest. Though they ran in the same circle, Gwen couldn’t remember exchanging more than a few words with Jack Hunter in the space of a year.
She was confused to find him here, so very close to her, exuding the kind of commanding aura wolves always responded to. If he’d been a beast, there was no doubt that Jack would have been an alpha.
He must have worn a shirt at some point today, because she could see what remained of it—ribbons of fabric barely hanging over his tanned, ripped chest. He had a number of wounds—his chest, his arms, his face, his legs all seemed to have been either bruised or cut—but they were superficial, and nonthreatening. Still, she itched to reach out and heal him as best as she could.
Jack was holding the werewolf down by throat with one massive, muscular hand.
The werewolf whined plaintively, all aggression gone. He was submitting to Jack.
Damn, that was hot. To say that she had trouble redirecting her eyes from the tight abs to her patient was an understatement, but she did so anyway.
She painstakingly applied as much healing energy as she was able to, until blood stopped pouring out of the wolf’s punctured neck. The wolf went limp, passing out now that fear and pain weren’t keeping him awake.
She sighed in relief.
Managing a weak smile, Gwen lifted her gaze to Jack. “Thanks.”
He remained silent, his cold eyes boring into her with an intensity that might have made her shiver, if she had the energy to care. “What are you doing?”
Gwen frowned at his tone more than his words. What she was doing seemed obvious: keeping their allies alive. The question was, why was he pissed about it? “Helping.”
Jack’s jaw ticked. “You’re barely holding on. You could die if you overtax your magic.”
He wasn’t wrong; there was a limit to the amount of power any witch could use, and if they blatantly ignored that limit, they paid a price. Witches learned that lesson before any other.
Gwen wasn’t at her limit—not when it came to her power. She was exhausted, true, but it was because of her physical state. Her metaphysic energy was just fine.
In her one year in the Academy of Supernatural Studies, her primary task had been to find out her own limits. That was witch 101, something she should have a good handle on by now, but her home hadn’t been a great place to experiment with that sort of thing.
Gwen was of Tuareg descent. The tribe was nomadic by nature, but they’d stuck to North Africa for hundreds of years. During the European colonization, when most of the African empires were taken over, they retreated into small villages shielded by the magic of their witches to avoid getting kidnapped and sold across the seas. Then the colonizers more or less retreated, and once there was no fear of slavery, their people decided to get in line with the rest of the world about despising witches.
Her clan became nomads again, traveling the world in search of a safe haven. In her twenty-four years, she’d lived in Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Austria, and now, in the UK. She spoke five languages fluently and was half-decent in three more. Gwen didn’t have a true mother tongue, a true home. Hell, she wasn’t even sure where her coven was at the moment.
Half of the world hated witches, and the other half never spared her a glance because of the color of her skin. She wasn’t the kind of person who got second chances when she messed up.
From the moment she was born, Gwen had been expected to be perfect, because when she made mistakes, her entire coven paid the price. They often had to move after a spell went wrong, a pissed-off neighbor accusing them of one thing or another.
Despite trying her best, Gwen had made mistakes. Many of them. Her magic was hard to contain, and harder to control. If she tried not to use it, it exploded in the middle of the night. If she attempted to water a garden, she could accidentally change the weather forecast of an entire country.
Each time, she was punished. She still had the scars to show for it.
Oldcrest was her last chance at becoming something other than a bomb ready to explode. Her family sent her here to teach her to control her magic. If she didn’t learn, they’d have no choice but to do what anyone did to faulty weapons.
She’d expected this place to be another prison, but it hadn’t been. Oldcrest felt like her first home. She had friends here, true friends she loved more than any family. Hence why she intended to defend this place against anyone threatening it until there was no breath left in her lungs.