Roll the Bones
Fire before them – a phantom enemy behind them.
Only his fear magic can save them.
Adrian Corbin thought he was ready, for his first case against the darkest threats and the most dangerous arcane secrets in his city. Until the mysterious Maya comes to him for help against the pyrokinetic thugs that are stalking her – and an invisible, unstoppable enemy orders him to steal Maya’s own hidden magic.
Everyone he knows could pay the price, if he refuses to betray her.
Now Adrian fights through burning streets and forgotten archives, wielding the frightful power he won from the cursed tunnels that still haunt his nightmares.
To keep Maya safe.
To learn why she’s hunted.
To protect both her and the people in his own life… and discover who the greatest threat may be.
He thought he was ready. But you’re never ready, for when all the lies and the secrets of magic go up in flames.
The thrilling Corbin Cases urban fantasy series is about to begin.
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Sample
I had the door locked, I know that. But she swung it right open.
“I need your help.”
The woman’s hushed voice was a poor match for how she walked boldly into the little library room, as if she were the one who’d put her name on its time slot.
A dull green coat hung over her, and a shapeless old hat hid most of her dark hair. Her face was pale—too pale, like makeup trying to soften the contours of her beauty and make her look barely eighteen. Nobody that young walked like that.
The song line came to me again, A face that takes all in… This time I heard it as A face that glides away from all, but that would only make the song harder to finish. And I was writing it about Helena, not this stranger.
I nudged my tablet on the table as she closed in, nudging it next to my bike jacket and blanking the screen from her. Two new reports of strange phenomena had been peeking out there, along with my database of possible allies for the Plan. Officially I was just here for some privacy to help the library with their website.
“It is Adrian Corbin, right?”
Her eyes flicked over the jacket and the tablet, the room I’d gotten at the library. I waited for her to ask if I’d been out of college long enough for detective work, but then she took a closer look at my face.
“I said I need your help. Two men have been harassing me—as in, threatening to set things on fire.”
Two men… It couldn’t be the Duvals, not yet…
I rose to my feet before she could settle herself in one of the wooden chairs. My height gave me an edge there.
“Sounds like you need the police.” I could hand her the card for one cop I knew, simple. Except, if this was magic, it was exactly what the Plan was for.
“Sure I need the police.” She flashed a sharp, rueful smile. “And sure, Jericho’s Finest need a solid crime before they can step in. I don’t have time for that, so I had to track down someone who could help me.”
“Flattery?” She looked too thin, too hunched under that coat, to have any guess what kind of danger she could be under.
I wished my magic could read her. But of course the Bones were sealed away in their thick box in my pocket, and I could barely feel their cold. Instead I watched her sink into a chair, soft as the library’s murmurs outside the door.
She watched me as I sat back down. “You made Jan Reynolds’s boyfriend back off. You tracked down a witness about the library water’s contamination last year… or that’s what I think Ms. Travers was hinting at.”
She talked to Helena? I kept my eyes on hers. None of that proved she actually was dealing with the Duvals, not while the Plan was still coming together. This could be a simpler threat.
And Helena sent her here because she expected I could handle it. The thought brought a curl of warmth inside me… and then a more cramped side of me added, Or Helena’s noticed my interest in her, and she thinks helping this woman will distract me.
I frowned. “Just what are you asking me to do? I’m not a PI, or a bodyguard—”
“I want you to fix it,” she said. “The way it’s getting, it’s not safe for a girl to do magic anymore.”
A card skittered over the table toward me, but her hands never lifted from the wood—
I jerked back, the sudden word magic ringing in my ears—
That card. Beside the bright red name Maya Grant, it featured a shower of multicolored ribbons erupting from a classic top hat.
She added “Sorry to startle you. I’ve worked hard on that one.”
And she, “Maya,” brushed both her thumbs against her middle fingers, and the card twitched on the table again before I saw hair-thin strings sliding free of her hands. I’d never seen a trick so flawless.
“I may be a victim of my own success,” she went on. “I’ve built up a whole set of techniques, sleight of hand and escapes—”
“Like opening locks.” I waved at the door behind her.
Maya tilted her head to the side, studying me. “Mr. Corbin… tell me, if you ask someone for help and they say they can’t do it, what do you do then?”
“Then? I try to ask them something they can’t turn down. But after that…”
“You find another way,” she nodded. “From what I hear, you’ve been finding ways for a while now. Helena Travers doesn’t seem like a woman who’d hire just anyone. But those two men are stalking me, and they seem to be stuck on the ‘asking louder’ approach. Twice now they’ve come to one of my gigs and said they need me for something. And they keep saying it with fire.”
Her voice caught, just for an instant before she pushed the word out of her throat. I could feel that fear, even with the Bones boxed up in my pocket.
Of course it was the Duvals.
But I had to ask, “What fire?”
“It’s their signature. They’ll push in close, like—”
Maya leaned in. The pale-washed lines of her face sharpened into a scowl of warning at barely a foot away, as she brought up her hand between us.
“Then there’d be a tight burst of flame, right there,” and she gave her fingers a sharp snap, and finally leaned back. “In fact I still have a professional interest in how they do that. But they said they ‘have a job for me’—I could almost hear the offer you can’t refuse part.”
“And I’m the one to fix that?”
I wasn’t ready, not for them… but I felt the eagerness starting to build in me. This was still the Duvals, not the Eye.