Magic Reclaimed (Society of Ancient Magic Book 6), page 1
MAGIC RECLAIMED
SOCIETY OF ANCIENT MAGIC, BOOK SIX
FIONA STARR
USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Magic Reclaimed: Society of Ancient Magic, Book Six
Copyright © 2021 by Fiona Starr
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.
Cover by: Raquel Lyon, Crooked Sixpence
Created with Vellum
SOCIETY OF ANCIENT MAGIC
Three wolf shifters tormented by a deadly secret.
Two worlds torn by a twisted legacy.
One girl determined to choose her own fate.
Fall in love with Joely and her men!
Book 1 - Dark Arts
Book 2 - Over Hexed
Book 3 - Witch Wars
Book 4 - Cursed Souls
Book 5 - Broken Spells
Book 6 - Magic Reclaimed
Series Complete!
Dear Reader,
Thank you for coming with me on this journey of love with Joely and her men.
It’s been such a pleasure sharing this with you!
xx
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
About Fiona Starr
Also by Fiona Starr
CHAPTER ONE
JOELY
Where is she?
I can feel my wolves running toward me like their fur is on fire. Their collective energy surges, washing over me in invisible waves, growing in intensity as the four of them get closer. Even this far away, their separate essences are easy to pick out. They caress my skin and move through me, as familiar as my own breath.
Angus is solid earth. Van is cool water. Marco is warm and gentle air, and Tobias is a roaring fire. My four men. My everything.
My only chance.
Joely, are you all right? The hive mind is buzzing with their worry.
Tobias breaks away from the pack. He’s closing in faster than the others, which is saying something because dire wolves are huge and very fast in their own right. But Tobias runs much faster in his human form, where he can use his vampire speed.
Wait! It’s a trap!
I send them my thought through the hive mind, even though everything in me wants to scream it into the night. But I can’t do that without alerting all the people gathering for the ceremony in the field behind me. I can’t call out and I can’t move, because every tiny shift of my body turns the magical web I’m trapped in into shimmering silver that glows like a beacon in the night.
“What are we going to do?” Quinn Allbright’s voice is tight with fear. “My brother’s going to come looking for you as soon as he gets to the stage and sees that you’re gone.”
Tobias will be here any second now.
“Try not to move. They’ll see us,” I whisper.
“I can’t help it. My arm is twisted. What is this stuff? I’ve never seen magic like this before.”
I know exactly what it is, but I’m not sure Quinn really wants to know. And if I’m being honest, I would rather not spend time explaining the horrific things her brother is doing to create this magic. Sebastian has taken on the work of the late Professor Helspeth and is stealing magical soul coils from mages. He’s using that energy to work some seriously dark magic. But that isn’t enough for him and his people. The Society of Ancient Magic wants more. And they will take whatever they want in order to get it.
And right now, what they want is dire wolf blood.
From my men.
And they used me as bait to lure them in.
So far, his plan is working because here I am, literally caught in his web while my men race to my rescue.
Tobias. I’m here. Just north of the bend in the stream. I’m stuck. Be careful. I send a flash of my view to the hive mind, hoping they see it and can find their way to me without running into this barrier that’s got me and Quinn completely trapped.
“I’m here.” Tobias appears in front of me in a blur of motion.
“What the…” Quinn sputters, clearly surprised to see the speed of the vampire.
Something about his dire wolf being mixed with the vampire makes him even faster than a regular vampire. It takes a moment for the brain to catch up.
“Oh my god, Van! Thank you god! Get us out of here.” The wall of magic glows bright as Quinn wriggles and fights against it.
Tobias takes one look at the shimmering silver magic all around us and I see it when understanding hits him. The emotions move across his face. I can feel all of it as he does, and it makes my heart squeeze. First there is sadness for the fact of it. Then horror for the enormity of it. How many mages had to die to give them this much magic? The entire property must be covered in it.
Then it’s the memory of the pain Tobias felt when this was done to him. The cruelty it took to rip his coil from his body. The violation of it. And the cavalier way Underwood, Helspeth, and now Sebastian and his people are destroying others for their gain.
And that’s a big part of it now—before it was just Underwood doing this in secret. But it’s out in the open among the Society now. Everyone knows that the magic being used here has been stolen from mages. The Society members are in on it. They are complicit—willing partners in this atrocity.
Even my sisters, Kate and Eliza.
I watch all of it move through the features of Tobias’s face, behind his eyes, and in the lines at the corners of his mouth. He’s thinking about all of it and feeling every moment of his own pain in the process.
I remember the way his essence felt when I first met him, before we knew that his soul coil was missing. Before we knew what they had done to him, what they had done to hundreds of others.
Without his magical soul, Tobias felt brittle and edgy and sharp. Nothing at all like the smooth, silky flame he is now.
His demeanor shifts in an instant. The pain and anguish are gone and the ache in his eyes shifts to anger.
Tobias looks up at me where I am suspended in the web. “They are going to pay for this.” He reaches out to touch the shimmering wall of magic.
“Don’t! You’ll get stuck!” I warn him but it’s too late.
His fingers move through it, parting it like butter. It sticks to his fingers like frosting, but it doesn’t hold him the way it holds me and Quinn.
He pushes the magic away from my hands and then my forearms and little by little, I can move.
A giant white wolf bursts through the trees and stops short behind Tobias. A second later, Van morphs into his human self. “What the fuck is this?” he asks. He’s naked and his skin is pale in the moonlight.
“Help me get them free,” Tobias whispers.
Quinn looks from Tobias to Van and back to Tobias. “I didn’t know you had a twin,” she says, gaping and doing a bad job of ignoring the fact that Van is built like a god and standing here completely naked.
Tobias takes a step to my right and starts to work on freeing Quinn. “Nobody knows. I’m Tobias. Nice to meet you.”
Quinn gapes. “Hurry, Tobias. We need to get out of here fast. My brother—”
“There she is!” A voice calls from the woods behind us. “Up here!” Branches snap and trees rustle as people hurry through the woods toward us.
“There’s two of them!” a man calls out. “Oh, shit! Sebastian! It’s your sister!”
“Oh, no!” Quinn squeaks. “He’s going to kill me.”
“Hurry!” My mouth has gone dry.
Van watches how Tobias is scooping the magic away from Quinn and moves to do the same, but as soon as he touches the glittering wall, he freezes, unable to move.
Van pulls his arm back. “Fuck! I can’t get it off. Tobias, how are you doing that?”
Angus arrives like a wall of gray fur, parting the branches of an evergreen like something from a movie. Marco appears at his side, looking like Angus’s shadow with his all-black fur. They shift into their human forms as they stop running and crowd in behind Van and Tobias.
“Stay back. Don’t touch the magic,” Tobias says.
“How come you can?” Angus asks, reaching out his hand. He pulls back before he makes contact with the shimmering field.
“No idea. But Van is locked in it just like the girls.” He lifts Quinn away from the shimmering web and places her on her feet next to Marco, who is also one-hundred percent naked.
Quinn takes in his tattoo-covered torso with wide eyes.
I can’t see the color of her skin in the moonlight, but dark flushed patches appear on her cheeks in that tell-tale way… just like Kate. The small resembla
Marco and the guys are so used to being naked in front of each other and in front of me, they don’t have any sense of embarrassment about nudity. But Marco sees Quinn’s discomfort and he drops his hands to kind of cover himself for her sake.
“A little help here?” Van says, trying to force his hand out of the magic.
Angus and Marco grab hold of Van and try to pull him free. His hand is the only part of him that’s trapped, but nothing they do seems to make a difference.
With Quinn free, Tobias moves back to me and gets to work on the remaining threads holding me. His eyes flicker as if he’s spotted something happening over my shoulder. He moves faster.
“What is it? Are they coming?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer me. He just triples his pace and moves with vampire speed, cutting me out of the glittery wall.
Marco quick! Tobias orders him in the hive mind as he cuts through the last of the magical web.
A moment later, Marco is there to catch me as I drop into his arms. “I’ve got you,” he whispers with a small smile as he slides me down until my feet are firmly on the ground.
Tobias gets working on Van’s hand.
A blast of energy hits the wall of magic right next to my head. It misses me but the overspray from the impact sizzles on the back of my neck like a tiny bead of acid.
“What the fuck?” Angus jumps out of the way as another blast shoots through the hole where Quinn was only a moment ago. He lets go of Van’s arm suddenly, throwing Van off balance.
Van bounces back toward the magic wall, and the whole side of his body gets stuck “Shit!”
“Hang on.” Tobias gets to work freeing Van, his hands moving too fast to follow with my eyes.
More shots of magic fly at us, some hitting the magic wall and others sailing through the holes and crashing into the trees like silver glitter bombs. Angus, Marco, Quinn, and I have no choice but to watch and wait as Tobias cuts Van free.
He slides his hand down Van’s thigh, parting the magic like it’s made of clay. Van is almost free.
A shot of silver magic finds the space vacated by Van’s body and it flies right through, slamming into Van’s side in an explosion of silver-white light. Van screams as the magic clings to his bare skin, crackling and sizzling as it burns him.
Van’s eyes roll back in his head and he crumples, dropping into Tobias’s arms in a heap, his foot still enmeshed in the trap. Tobias kneels down and cuts him free and lifts Van onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“Let’s get out of here.” Tobias races off in a blur.
“Get on my back,” Marco says to Quinn.
“What?” She barely gets the word out before Marco shifts into his wolf.
He crouches down so she can climb on.
“Oh. Okay,” she says through her dazed surprise.
Quinn has no idea how to mount a dire wolf, so as soon as Angus shifts, I climb on his back.
“Like this,” I say to Quinn, leaning my body down onto Angus’s neck and grabbing handfuls of thick fur. “Squeeze with your thighs and stay down.”
She crouches low on Marco’s back and grabs hold. “Like this?” she asks.
Before I can answer her, Marco takes off into the woods with Angus right behind. We run for a few minutes, heading for home.
Whoa. Marco pads to a stop about a mile away from the house.
Shit! Angus says.
What? I ask in the hive mind.
There. Angus crouches low, staring out into the distance.
“What’s going on?” Quinn whispers.
“I don’t see anything,” I say.
Angus flashes a picture in the wolf mind of what he’s seeing. In his wolf form his vision is so much better than a human’s. I can see what stopped them immediately.
You see those people? Angus asks.
“Wow. Yeah. Quinn, look. All the way past the valley on the other side of the river. On the edge of that rise.” I point to show her the way. “There’s a group of people.”
Quinn squints and shakes her head. “I don’t see anyth—oh, wow. How did you see them while we were running?”
We stare at them a moment longer and then Quinn looks at me. “What are they doing?”
They’re setting up a high-powered rifle. Angus lets out a deep growl that makes the blood drain from Quinn’s face.
“What’s wrong?” Quinn’s voice is shaking.
“They are wolf hunters,” I say.
Another group on the next ridge. Marco says, flashing us the mental image of that group, who look to be setting up another big gun.
“What are they aiming at?” I ask. I know we’ve been through every inch of these woods in the months since I’ve been here, but we’re too deep in the trees for me to have any sense of direction.
That’s the hill we can see from Van’s bedroom. The one beyond the lake. Angus says.
How far is that from the house? I ask.
Close to half a mile, I bet. Definitely within the range of those guns. Especially if they’re aiming for the trails behind the house. That’s even closer. Marco veers off deeper into the woods. Come on. Safer to approach from the east side. Joely, can you cloak us when we get near campus?
Good idea. I say.
Angus turns and follows and pretty soon, we are deep in the thick, untended part of the National Park that borders the main campus of Blakeborne University. The wolves are running again, and now heading away from the house.
All these changes with the Society and the fact that the wolves have been outed publicly have given rise to a bloodthirsty mob of people out for wolves. Most of them are oblivious to the history—just like I was. They want to kill them, because wolves are lesser creatures, and they had the audacity to infiltrate a mage community in disguise.
But some others—those who know about the dire wolves—they want them alive. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago when Angus woke up and found himself in a cage, hooked up to machines to take blood from him like a tap.
There is a very good reason dire wolves live in hiding. Regular wolf shifters aren’t part of the mage community either. They keep to themselves, and the mutual understanding allows for peace in general. But dire wolf blood has something that every mage wants… more power.
The world races by in a blinding series of trees and leaves and branches and sky as we fly through the forest. I close my eyes and hug Angus tight, my mind reaching out for Van.
But I can’t feel him.
Tobias? How’s Van?
He’ll be okay. Marco tries to sound reassuring and fails.
Guys? Tobias’s call hangs in the air between all of us.
We are on our way. Angus says. Spotted fucking hunters on the ridge behind the house.
Tobias is quiet for a beat and the hive mind fills with his loaded pause. I try not to give it any meaning, but I can tell that it’s serious without him having to say it.
The burn on the back of my neck still feels like it’s eating away at my skin, but it’s like an angry paper cut compared to what happened to Van. And the way Van passed out… I didn’t want to think about what he was feeling.
Please let him be all right.
Please.
I see them. Get home. Tobias says finally. Be careful. But you need to hurry.
CHAPTER TWO
JOELY
Marco and Angus stop at the edge of the trees bordering our house. Quinn and I slide off the wolves and stand together as the men shift. Angus grabs my hand and Marco puts an arm around Quinn and me, holding us all close together so I can cloak us from anyone who may be watching. Huddled together, we hurry to the front door.
