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He got up from the bed, muscular and perfectly sculpted, and walked to the window without attempting to cover up.
“What is it?” I asked. “Are they here for me?”
Ash frowned. “I… don’t know. I thought they would be, but this feels different.”
“Different?” I asked. “What do you mean? What do you feel?”
Ash turned back to me. He had a strange expression on his face.
“Magic,” he said.
ChapterThirty-Two
Ash
“Idon’t understand,” Lorraine said.
I gritted my teeth, irritation flaring up inside me. It wasn’t fair of me to be irritated with her. She didn’t know anything about this world, she’d only just become aware of the magic that lived here. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know, didn’t understand.
Gods, I wasn’t good at explaining any of it.
Especially not the things I didn’t understand either.
Like why the fuck whatever was coming at us now had magic. The guys who were after her were human. They were low-life scum, fuckers who didn’t care about anything other than what they wanted out of life, but they were still just humans and they did what humans did—they destroyed, they were selfish, they did what they had to do to gain something.
They couldn’t be more than they were, and they didn’t have any magic that helped them. It was what had put us at an advantage so far—I’d been able to protect Lorraine, to keep her hidden with the help of magic, because those sons of bitches didn’t have magic to work with.
This thing that came toward us had magic—and a lot of it. I felt the power in the air, crackling like static on my skin. When I focused on my own magic and watched the vale from the vantage point of my tree, I could feel the power coming toward us, rolling like a thick cloud promising a storm.
I walked to the living room to find my clothes and got dressed quickly.
“Where are you going?” Lorraine asked.
“I’m going out there to see what the fuck we’re dealing with,” I growled. “Get dressed. You don’t want to get caught naked in the middle of a war.”
“War?” she asked in a small voice.
I didn’t have time to explain. I marched out of the cabin and onto the porch. It would have been better to get Lorraine out of here, but it was too late. Whatever was out there was already here.
The magic crept in. Thick, dark clouds moved before the sun, blocking out the light so that everything had a dusky feel to it. The wind picked up, blowing in a different direction than usual, and an ominous feeling filled the atmosphere around the cabin.
I heard footsteps—the first non-magical thing I could hear since the moment I’d become aware of the magic.
A man appeared at the entrance to the clearing where I’d built my cabin.
I frowned. He was nothing more than a human.
Behind him, another man appeared, and then another and another. I recognized two of them as the men who’d taken Lorraine, and the third as the guy I’d fucked up when I found him snooping for her around the forest.
They had weapons with them—guns and bats, and one of them had a medieval-looking spiked ball that he must have dug up from around here somewhere. Shit like that didn’t really exist in the human world anymore.
They were all human, but the magic that surrounded us wasn’t human at all. And it was coming from them.
Where the hell had they found magic? Somewhere, a magical creature in our realm was helping them.
“Took you long enough to get here,” I said in a tone that was almost bored. “I thought I would be in for a fight, but getting Lorraine back was a piece of cake, so… are you going to make it a little more fun for me now?”
“Give her back, and no one has to get hurt,” one of the men said, and he loaded his gun.
