A familiar magic, p.1
A Familiar Magic, page 1
a familiar magic
E.M. Rinaldi
CHBB Publishing
Copyright © 2022 by E.M. Rinaldi
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To my readers,
For taking this new journey with me
contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
chapter one
This party was such a bad idea. I kept a wary eye on the rowdy teenagers dancing perilously close to the bonfire and wrapped my arms tighter around my middle. I tried to ignore my growing anxiety, but no amount of stale beer or loud music could hide the subtle change in the air. The glow of the once vibrant, summer evening rapidly faded as if the very life was strangled out of it. I hadn’t noticed at first, but now it was impossible to ignore. The ocean breeze pushed against my skin in urgency, howling a warning that I couldn’t decipher. My toes dug deeper in the sand, trying to claim the last bit of fading warmth from the sun and I shivered again. Being alone out in the open no longer seemed like such a great idea, but sitting by the fire wasn’t an option, though it would be safer. Joining the crowd would be seen as an open invitation for someone to come talk to me, and I’d rather face whatever lurked past the fire’s edge than subject myself to even more torment. I thought that in coming tonight I could prove I belonged, that I wasn’t so different. I was a normal teenager. Thirty minutes into tonight’s festivities and I knew I could never be like them.
Braxton would call it being difficult—had called me that at least three times already tonight, but what did he know? He was nothing but a privileged boy from South Miami with unlimited access to daddy’s money. He had no clue of the nightmares that stalked the shadows of this city; none of them did. Not for the first time, I rolled my eyes at how gullible humans were. They find a dead body with a torn-out throat and label it a robbery gone bad. An abandoned house filled with bloodless corpses? That had to be a cult. They got demon possessions right but were blind to a majority of them and had no idea how to properly exorcise the spirit. How their species managed to survive this long was beyond me.
A strong breeze taunted the burning driftwood until it collapsed in on itself, sending ashes and embers dancing across the sand. I tilted my head and sniffed, recognizing the scent of something other on the wind. My heart skipped and then took off as I tried to pin down the source of the smell. My nose burned from the stench of something charred and rotted and I pushed away the small voice in my head that begged me to run. My pupils dilated as I allowed enough of the change through my iron control to see in the dark. The murky corners and recesses of the beach came into focus with that small shift, but no monsters jumped out at me, only severely drunk teenagers. Another ocean breeze fanned the bonfire, and someone called out for more driftwood.
You’re being paranoid, Kaya.
I berated myself and ducked further into my hoodie, hiding all but my face and a few wisps of my white hair. The moon reflected off those free strands and I watched them glow like a beacon. Frowning, I tucked them away and turned to face the approaching footsteps. Only a few inches taller than me, Braxton made up for his lack of height with cute looks and an ample amount of muscle. His blonde hair reflected off the firelight with an orange hue, and a dimple appeared on his right cheek when he caught me staring.
“Did you see how long I held that keg stand? No one’s gonna come close to beating my record.”
I threw on my fakest smile and gave him an over-exaggerated thumbs up. “Your parents must be so proud.” Seriously, what had I seen in him?
He grinned and stepped closer, missing my sarcasm entirely. “I care more about what you think,” he whispered, snaking an arm around my waist.
I pushed my hands against his chest when he got too close and tried not to cringe at the acrid stench of beer on his breath. Now was one of those times I wished I didn’t have enhanced senses. What possessed me into thinking this boy was cute?
“Braxton, I want to go home.” His nuzzling my ear was more annoying than sexy, and I pushed harder against his him until there was enough space between us for him to see I was serious. “Braxton. Home. Now.”
His face crumpled in what I’m sure he thought was an adorable pout. “Aw come on, babe. You haven’t even finished your beer.”
Said beer still filled half a cup and was nestled in the sand by my foot. I wrinkled my nose at his use of a pet name and kicked the cup over.
“There, no more beer. Let’s go.”
I brushed past his stunned expression and headed toward the parking lot. I kept my chin down against the stinging sand, but my eyes still scanned the shadows. Braxton’s annoying advances were distracting enough, but they couldn’t hold up against instinct, and mine told me that something other mingled in the crowd tonight. I had no plans to stick around and see what it was. I held my flip flops in one hand and tried to brush the sand off my feet with the other. Braxton’s shiny GTO sat right where we parked it, but its headlights were dull and its engine silent.
I held in a few choice words as I swung to face the brown-eyed boy that was one second away from seeing me seriously pissed off. Braxton leaned against the lamppost with a half grin and I tried not to shudder as his eyes raked over my bare legs. Growling, I pulled my hoodie as low as I could, but it made no difference.
“Braxton,” his eyes lifted to mine and I didn’t like what I saw there. I’d been told alcohol made humans susceptible to their own inner-beasts, but this was the first time the focus was on me. My lip curled at the challenge. “Braxton, give me your keys. I’ll drive us home.”
My eyes darted to the key ring hanging from his pocket and I took a step closer, my hand slowly reaching, fingertips shaking—not from fear, but as a reaction. The animal inside me sensed the other being and the growing danger made it harder to keep her in check. Any closer and whatever was out there would be able to sense me too.
I wasn’t prepared for how fast he moved, and that was stupid on my part. Sensei always warned me to be on my guard and I’d failed my first test. Braxton’s hand engulfed my wrist entirely, his fingers overlapping and leaving no soft point to break out of. That didn’t stop me from trying, though.
“Let go!” I demanded, putting as much authority into my tone as I could. It worked on my students at the dojo but didn’t seem to have an effect on him.
“They said you’d play hard to get, but I didn’t listen to them,” Braxton laughed and yanked me against his chest in one swift pull. His muscles strained against the sleeves of his shirt and rather than be attracted, I saw them for the danger they represented. I brought my free hand up to slap him, but he caught it before it could make contact. “I told them you were just shy, that once I had you alone, you’d want what all the other girls did.”
I didn’t have to ask him who he meant by them—Avry and Zeke. The three of them had younger siblings that I taught at the dojo, that’s how I’d met them. With no other friends my age and no company besides Sensei, I jumped at their invitation to go to the party tonight.
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
Was I so needy and starved for attention that I threw all my common sense out the window? The answer was apparently yes, because I ignored all my instincts and all Sensei’s teachings and jumped in the car without a look back. Now I was paying the price.
“So what do you say, Kaya? Let’s have a little fun like I know you’ve been dying to do, and then I’ll take you home. Scout’s honor.”
Braxton had never been a scout a day in his life, but he was about to earn his first badge in getting his ass kicked. I closed the last few inches between us and pressed my hips tightly against his. I bit back my smirk at his sharp intake of breath and gave him a coy smile instead.
“I never thought I’d be doing this,” I purred, and his heartrate kicked into overdrive.
“Oh yeah?” he relaxed his grip on my wrists and I wrapped my arms around his neck.
I wound my fingers deep into his hair and gave a gentle tug until he groaned and let my breath ghost over his ear as I spoke again.
“I can’t believe it.” I leaned away and he let me, watching me with half-lidded eyes to see what I’d do next.
“Can’t believe what, babe?” he asked.
My fists tightened in his hair seconds before my knee met his crotch. The air left his lungs with an audible whoosh as he curled down to cup himself.
“I can’t believe you were stupid enough to think you could get away with assaulting me. I teach your little brother karate, you dumbass!”
Braxton was curled into a ball on the blacktop and I worried that I might have hit him too hard; humans could be fragile. Then I remembered he deserved it. A chilling howl pierced through both the street traffic and music from the beach party. The shrill note caused the hair on my neck to stand on end and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I’d run out of time. Braxton’s delay had cost me and the animal inside me knew it too.
She quietly paced and waited for the demon to show itself, her growl a challenge I fought to keep behind my lips. My pupils widened, and my nostrils flared, but I didn’t allow any other aspects of the change. My fingernails ached with the pressure of my claws behind them and my skin broke out in goosebumps as I fought to keep myself in check. Another howl, closer this time, and my body shook with the sheer will of holding back. Dammit, how did it find me?
Think, Kaya. Think!
I spun and reached for Braxton, who was still crying on the ground. I dug through his pockets, ignoring his curses and cries of pain, as I looked for his car keys. My hands shook, and my fingers fumbled, but I felt the cool kiss of metal against my skin and almost wept with relief. The keys jingled like a mini dinner bell as I ran to the car. One after another they each failed until even the last key wouldn’t open the door. With a frustrated cry, I hurled someone’s keys out into the sand and knelt back down beside Braxton.
“Where are your keys, Braxton?” I held him by the front of his shirt and shook him so hard his head looked like it would snap off. Dropping him before I accidentally broke his neck, I stood and walked a few paces away to see if he’d dropped them when I broke his nuts. “Shit,” I whispered, the whine getting stuck in my throat.
This was bad, very bad. I wasn’t ready to take on a demon by myself! With every passing second, I could feel the demon grow closer and my animal half was about to lose her shit. The giant bonfire looked inviting and safe, especially with all the humans still gathered around it, but that was the very reason why I couldn’t go over there. Whether or not I was ready, and whether or not I was fully trained—spoiler alert, I wasn’t— it was my responsibility to protect humanity from the demons. It was literally my birthright, the sole purpose for my being on earth. The problem was, I didn’t know what kind of demon was out there, and the stupid boy next to me didn’t deserve my protection.
“Get yourself together, Kaya. You can do this.”
My little pep talk did nothing to calm me down, but I forced my feet to move anyway until I was on the opposite side of the parking lot and far away from the juicy, but still shitty human. The honking horns of Miami’s night traffic blurred the lights to my right, and the ocean lapped in a picturesque calm to my left. Before me was a small copse of trees that I knew backed onto a private neighborhood, and that’s where the demon came for me. At first the shadows hid all the attributes I needed to see, but the stench couldn’t be dulled by darkness and I knew the demon arrived heartbeats before I saw it.
I’d only ever seen a demon once before in my life, and that was a night I preferred not to think about. Still, my body couldn’t help but react in much the same way it had when I was thirteen, pure terror. My knees trembled, and my palms grew damp as the fear wound its way through my body. I gasped when my lungs demanded oxygen, only to hold my breath again as the stench of the demon wafted closer. A wolf was the first thing I saw, its teeth brighter than my own hair and larger than my hand. Smoke curled around its snout as fire dripped from its mouth.
I wanted to close my eyes and pretend that monsters didn’t exist. I didn’t want to see the rest of the demon, didn’t want to confirm what years of stories and teachings told me I was looking at, but it kept coming. Stepping from the shadows, the massive canine body morphed into a serpent’s tail that arched over its back, the rattles filling my ears with their deadly drone. It was a motherfucking Amon demon.
I was so dead. It took two fully trained warriors to bring one of these guys down and I was nothing but a teenaged runaway. I wasn’t trained, and I’d only ever completed a full shift once. Without a witch’s magic, I couldn’t even stun the demon long enough to cut off its tail, which surprisingly was the only way to kill it. The Amon demon sniffed the warm air like the scent of my fear was a delicious appetizer, before licking its chops and hissing at me.
“What are you doing, little familiar, so far from home?” Its raspy voice scraped the inside of my head like nails on a chalkboard and I clenched my jaw against the pain. The demon took another step closer and inhaled, “How loud will you scream for me, as I tear the flesh off your bones?”
Any closer and the demon’s fire breath would burn me to a crisp. I wasn’t sure if the demon liked his dinner raw or well done, but I wasn’t going to stick around and find out. I tapped into the speed and strength of my animal half and bolted from the parking lot. With every step, my animal demanded I let her lose, but a large cat would quickly stand out in the city and I didn’t need to be hunted by more than what was already on my heels. My bare feet slammed against the concrete sidewalk, but I barely felt the pain. The demon wasn’t far behind and had the added luxury of being invisible to humans; I didn’t see this cat and mouse game lasting very long.
Knowing that a full shift was my only hope at surviving, I made a last-minute turn into the Oleta River State Park and lost myself amongst the trees. The undergrowth and ferns grew thick the further in I ran, and I used every bit of the shadows they offered to gain more distance between myself and the Amon demon. I could hear its heavy steps behind me, and the rattling of its tail told me I wasn’t as far ahead as I hoped. The change wasn’t something that came easy to me, no matter how hard my animal was fighting to get out. I’d spent the last six months fighting with every fiber of my humanity to keep my other self tucked away, to not lose control around the humans, and all those walls I’d built weren’t easy to break through now. Even though I desperately needed to. I called claws to my hands first and used them to slash at the branches and small trees blocking my path.
I tried to call forth the rest of my animal, but my fear and pounding heart made it too hard. My thoughts swirled with panic, mental cries to run faster, to shift, to hide—they all blocked the path I needed to find the doorway in my mind that led to my change. A serpent’s tail slammed into the tree above my head and I cried out. The broken branches crashed from above with jagged teeth and I threw myself to the side to keep from being crushed. I scrambled to my feet, slipping on rocks and mud and watched the demon stalk closer. With a canal at my back, I had nowhere else to go and I couldn’t even get a patch of fur to sprout on my skin.
This was it, without shifting I stood no chance and my seventeen short years flashed before my eyes in a wave of color. My clawed hands felt heavy, like any second they would sink to the ground in defeat. But the thought of giving up stoked an inner fire that lay dormant since the last time I faced a demon.
“Poor baby familiar,” the demon crooned. “Will you cry for me? They taste so much better when they cry.”
My eyes stung with moisture that I refused to let fall. I didn’t want to die, but I’d be damned if I’d go out a coward; the demon didn’t deserve the satisfaction. I locked my knees and fisted my hands at my side, waiting for the inevitable death I knew I couldn’t outrun. Maybe if I timed it right, I could duck beneath its swinging tail. Or would it attack me with its teeth first? I met its stare with a wild grin and brought my claws up, ready to at least try.
“Well? Come on then!” I taunted. “What are you waiting for, an invitation?”
With a heated snarl, the demon pounced… and then recoiled, shaking its head. Red sparks flickered in the corner of my vision but when I looked, I only saw the fire dripping from the demon’s maw.
