A Bone To Pick
The magic to save lives – it’s what everyone would kill for.
For Adrian Corbin, not every case begins with fighting pyromancers or crawling through catacombs of terror. Sometimes it’s safeguarding one budding magician and his friends.
One who holds the secret of healing.
No magic could be more precious, for Adrian’s mission to make up for the lives he’s cost, or for the forces that begin to stir at the rumors of this new power. Protecting a healer means being ready for anything – even the petty grudges and lies that could send his charges running straight into the grasp of the flame-throwing Duvals.
Or the crime bosses that have begun to notice his work.
Or the woman who turned his life upside down.
To save a healer… Adrian Corbin knows how many people could die.
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Sample
Ian said “What’s that mean?” but I looked past him and let the Pulse fill me. The same thick stew of the clinic’s emotions flooded in, nothing new… but a familiar, fiercer rage like a hot coal came closing in on the clinic’s door. And some other harsh presence, back well behind that.
A headache squeezed around my skull: so many emotions, and that unique anger that might come from fire magic, or just from the Duvals being who they were.
I grabbed Ian’s arm. “Come on!”
At least Ian kept up, as I half-dragged him toward the medical rooms knowing how fast the threat was closing in. He tugged weakly against me, and muttered in confusion, but we made it through the door. Lucy came right behind us, eyes wide.
The door had barely closed when the first murmur of change came from behind it. The first low but certain sounds of people suspecting they were in the presence of danger.
A middle-aged woman in white, the same doctor who’d almost caught Ian before, stared at us. “What do you think you’re doing—”
I could try monitoring the emotions behind me, but the receptionist’s window was just a few steps away. I slid over and leaned out past the startled man to sneak a look back at the waiting room.
Willard Duval stood in the middle of the room, the familiar mass of muscle and the harsh, nearly hairless face. His head glanced around, searching. No sign of his cousins, Sybil and Dom.
I took too long. Willard’s gaze landed right on me.
I ducked back, but an instant with the Pulse told me the worst. That fury was closing in on me.
The doctor said “I’m waiting for that explanation,” but her words were slower now, as if she knew something bigger was in the air.
I stepped in front of the doorway.
Willard shoved through it to look right at me.
“My lucky day,” he rumbled. “You left us back there, Corbin.”
Sure, I’d left them with the police—when most of the Duvals already in handcuffs and the Eye was stalking us.
I met his gaze. “And you want to wind up back there again? You keep stomping around and it’ll happen.”
The doctor stepped around me. “What is this—”
Willard shoved her. Brutally fast, with the strength to send her stumbling back toward me. Somehow she caught her balance before she crashed into me.
Willard looked around, at the corridor, the doors, at Ian and Lucy and the other shocked and gaping figures in view. Trying to guess the healer he’d come for.
Back in the waiting room someone gasped “Is that a gun—”
For one instant an outcry began to rise, but then Jason’s voice called “Just a toy! Really, sir, you shouldn’t bring toys like that here…” Trying to keep the room calm.
But what sprawled over Willard Duval’s face was surprise, real surprise.
What the hell? I sidestepped and leaned back toward the reception window. Two men, one mid-sized and one tall but nothing like a massive Duval, were crowding around Jason.
What was this, a whole other group probably here after the same thing? Jason looked to be stalling them for now.
Willard said “Looks like I speed this up.”
The words, the blunt willingness behind them, spun me around. No!
But a stack of papers on the reception desk began smoldering.
Their fire, Willard really could torch another building and start sick people screaming just to grab what he wanted in the chaos—
I was diving at him, headlong with my hand lashing out before he could turn. My hand clamped down over his mouth, and the touch let the Pulse slam down with its true strength: crushing fear.
The colder-than-winter blasted through me into him, and all his brute strength went weak, scrabbling clumsily to pull away as I tipped him back against the wall. The fires flickered out.
I whispered “You know why I grabbed your mouth?”
His wild, darting eyes focused on me then. He knew, he knew, what more of the power would feel like.
“Because there are guns out there,” I hissed. “Do I have to make you keep quiet?”
The huge head twitched, tried to shake against my fingers.
I twisted away, to Ian. “Is there a back way out?”
He only stared at me. The doctor gasped “You can’t… you can’t…”
“The back exit’s stuck.” Lucy scrambled up to me, voice a whisper. “Something’s jammed it.”