Green Mage, page 1
part #2 of Mackenzie Green Series
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Any unauthorized reproduction or sale of this work may be subject to legal prosecution.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are a product of the authors imagination and not based on real events. Any resemblance to people, places, and things in real life is purely coincidental.
Green Mage – Mackenzie Green Book 2
Copyright © 2022 by JS Kennedy
Cover art by : Original Book Cover Design
All Rights Reserved
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the author, except in case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles or review.
Contact author at: J.S_Kennedy@yahoo.com
Join her mailing list @ jskennedy.ca
To all those lost before their time.
Mackenzie Green Series:
Green Gryphon
Green Mage
Green Shadow – coming soon
Contents
City Map – GreenRiver
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
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Bonus Scenes!
Acknowledgement
About the Author
Glossary:
City Map – GreenRiver
Chapter 1
Life sucks hairy donkey balls!
That was the thought that blared through my head as my foot squished into another pile of muck. I say muck because my brain simply didn’t want to process all the nasty and potentially diseased crap making up the soup-like grossness.
My latest hunt had brought me to the underbelly of the city. Not the nice underbelly—the Warrens, where the vampires made their home. No, this was one of the few tunnels that existed below even that.
Of course, that meant two levels of whatever people happened to toss into the streets ended up here. And I was currently standing in it. Yippee!
I held up a chunk of quartz that blared to life with light. My eyes scanned from side to side, investigating the shadows. Come out, come out wherever you are.
I huffed my annoyance into the air. This was a job worthy of a first-year Lifer, not someone of my skill, but Curtis, my Guild Master, was treating me with kid gloves. Since I’d almost died a couple of months ago, twice, I knew I should humor him. That charitable thought lasted until I hit a puddle deeper than my boots, and the foul muddy liquid seeped down into my socks. Urgh!
Looking to the left, I could see scratch marks on the wall. I sloshed over and ran my fingers over the groves. They were fresh. My prey wasn’t far away.
I wandered down the tiny laneway, cursing the fact that the walls were so close together. In the limited space, my web, a magical radar-like construct that gave me a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of any living thing it encountered, was useless. Since the web could only project out of me in a circle and I hadn’t figured out how to make it pass through solid walls, wasting the energy to maintain its current six-foot diameter was dumb. Luckily, I wasn’t completely defenseless. I did have my shields layered just on the outside of my skin. I might not have been able to see what was coming, but I would sure as hell make it hard for them to hurt me.
A glob of something cold and slimy dripped down from the ceiling and hit the back of my neck. I wiped away the grossness before it had a chance to travel down my spine. This was one hunt I wouldn’t be sharing at the breakfast table tomorrow. There was no way I could glorify this into something worth sharing, and it would annoy my siblings to no end that I got stuck in a place with no one and nothing to watch my back. Especially now that, for the first time ever, I had a partner. But Quinn was away, so my shields would have to do. Though, I was pretty sure my brother, Alec, would have a litter of kittens if he knew. That was simply who he was.
A yowling came from somewhere ahead and I paused. I was at a junction where three tunnels met. The noise was no doubt the item I’d been hired to find, but the reverberation of the tunnels was making it hard to determine which tunnel it was down.
I studied each entryway looking for other clues. On the third one, I hit the jackpot. Or, more accurately, the jackpot hit me.
As my light shone down the last tunnel, a giant paw reached out from the darkness and thumped me upside the head.
I fell, filthy water drenching me, and I fought the urge to gag. By the Old God, that’s nasty.
Rolling to my feet, I pushed myself up against the far wall. Blindly, I placed my shining rock on a ledge, unwilling to take my eyes off the creature slowly entering the light.
And what a creature he was. The cat-like being was massive. If I let him come close enough, his shoulder would touch my waist. His tail whipped behind him—make that tails. Two appendages emerged from his hind end. They moved independently of each other, and from the way they moved, I had a feeling they were prehensile.
The cat-thing opened its mouth and yowled again, the deep bass of its voice overwhelming in the small space. Four-inch fangs curved down, overlapping its bottom jaw. Ears, that were longer than usual for his size, swiveled back and forth, catching any hint of noise. Its fur was like a meld of leopard and tiger, except, instead of the usual coloration, it was a mix of blacks, greens, and tans. This stupid cat would easily blend into the forest and no one would see it until it was crushing their head like a watermelon.
What the hell had those mages been messing with?
The Mage College had hired me to track down a missing experiment. When prepping me for the gig, Curtis explained that the lead man had described the beast as a green, tan, and black calico cat, a little larger than average and sweet-tempered.
Bullshit. I was going to make those mages eat dirt when I found them… If I lived long enough to find them.
The beast got tired of waiting for me to do something and lunged forward. I grabbed my tonfas out of their sheath and dodged to the side. I managed to bop the cat on the nose as I got out of the way.
“Bad kitty. No biting.”
Well, it didn’t try to bite me next, but it did try to make my insides my outsides with its massive claws.
I wasn’t fast enough this time, and the beast's dagger-like claws raked over my torso. Or at least they would have if my shield hadn’t gotten in the way. On the bright side, I wasn’t bleeding. On the downside, since my barrier was my soul projected outside my body, anything that hit my shields felt twice as bad as if it had hit me for real. The only thing that made the damn thing worth using was that the pain faded quickly, and I had a lot of practice fighting through pain.
“Now, Mr. Tigger. That wasn’t nice. Can’t we talk about this over a nice bowl of fish? Maybe a steak? If you like bread, I know a great little pastry cart in the south market.” I kept up the montage of nonsense as I dodged and struck.
I didn’t have much room to move, and I was aiming not to kill the damn thing. My ongoing commentary became peppered with curses. This would’ve been so much easier if I was a Reaper instead of a Lifer. Then again, if I was a Reaper, I wouldn’t have gotten this job.
I already had too much blood on my hands. As a child, I’d killed on someone else's command. No more killing. No more taking lives that weren’t mine to take. Now, I only killed if I had no other option. It was the only way I could live with myself.
The cat thing—I decided to call him Saber, short for saber-tooth-tiger-monster-cat-thing because, other than the fur and tails, he was the spitting image of the prehistoric beast—backed off panting. I took a moment to catch my breath as well.
Saber glanced to the side and I knew he was thinking about escaping down one of the side tunnels. I was proving to be more effort than I was worth, and his instincts told him that running was his best option.
My magic flared inside me, reaching out to the beast. I’d never felt this particular strand of energy, but I recognized it for what it was. A new aspect of my power was emerging. I had a similar feeling back when I learned to talk to trees.
Talking to animals fell under the umbrella of earth magic. As an elemental with the potential to harness every power associated with my core, I should be able to do that too.
Taking a chance, I reached for the new energy and brought it forward. Sending it out, I tried to latch onto Saber’s mind.
It was surprisingly easy to do. Saber was intelligent—almost human intelligent—and he was young. I could feel the potential in him to be just as smart as me. What the ever-loving hell?
“Hello,” I tried, sending the message out loud as well as through the nascent bond I’d forged between us.
“It’s okay. I don’t want to hurt you.” I put my tonfas away and held up my hands.
Saber cocked his head to one side as if to say, “Yeah right, lady.”
I crouched down and pushed harder with my magic. Though he still looked at me warily, he’d stopped backing up. I could feel my power brushing against his mind, searching for the pathways to forge a connection. When it did, I almost fell on my butt.
“What the hell is she saying? Why the hell would she put her weapons away? Does she not see my claws?” As if to demonstrate his point, Saber sat on his ass and showed me his impressive toenails.
“Not to mention my impressive teeth. I could break this chick's arm with them.” The yawn gave me a great look at Saber’s tonsils. I almost laughed at his varied vocabulary.
“I was trying to put you at ease.” I whipped my weapons from their holsters in a blink. “I would have had them back out well before you could have done any damage.”
The big cat blinked, and I realized his tail wasn’t the only weird part of him. His eyes were, for lack of a better term, mesmerizing. His pupils were slit like a regular feline, but they were a deep vibrant purple instead of black. The iris was a crystalline turquoise with a shattering of red expanding out from the center.
“How the hell can I understand you? The other monkeys kept gibbering at me, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were saying.” Saber stood again, his dual tails twitching in agitation.
“They must not have an animal mage on staff. I’m pretty sure, if they did, you could have communicated easily. You seem fairly intelligent,” I said, hoisting myself out of the muck, then frowned as glop slid off me and back into the murky water. Urgh, there wouldn’t be enough fresh water in the city for me to feel clean after this.
“I’m pretty sure you’re nuts, lady.”
“Well, you’re talking to me, so what does that make you?” The immature response was out before I could sensor it. I was supposed to be bagging and tagging this cat for the bounty, not trading snarky quips.
“I’m hoping this is all a dream.”
“You dream of disgusting sewers often? Sucks to be you.” I put my tonfas away again and propped my fists on my hip. “Look, Saber—”
“Who the hell is Saber?”
I paused, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of my nose. I must have been more off than usual because I didn’t usually slip and use my silly nicknames out loud.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to keep calling you cat/beast/mutant cat/him in my head, so I gave you a nickname. Do you have another name? What should I call you?”
It was amazing how a person could go from dodging claws and hoping not to get shredded to ribbons one moment to having a civil conversation and exchanging names the next.
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it, and I couldn’t understand the squawking of the other two-leggers to tell if they had one for me. What is a Saber?”
I sighed. “It actually has two meanings in this context. I intended to shorten saber-tooth tiger—a prehistoric cat that you resemble—but a saber is also a type of weapon, a sword, lethal and graceful.”
The cat preened. “I find that name acceptable for now. What do I call you?”
I didn’t resist this time and pinched the bridge of my nose. This hunt was fast becoming more complicated. “My name is Mackenzie. My friends call me Kenzie or Mac. I’m fine with either.”
“Hmm, I shall think on it. You gave me a strong name. I should return the favor. Maybe.”
By the Old God, a cat was going to give me a nickname. I couldn’t wait to see what he came up with. If he came up with something. Cats weren’t know for their attention spans.
“Okay, Saber. The lab you came from hired me to track you and bring you back.”
A low growl emanated from his throat, and his eyes hardened. “I don’t want to go back.”
I held up a hand. “Yeah, I didn’t figure you would.” It was criminal to keep such an intelligent animal in a cage. “Do you know anything about why they were keeping you?” I didn’t have high hopes, especially if he referred to the mages’ chatter as squawking, but I had to ask.
The cat shook his head. “No. Until my escape, I had never seen the outside. My earliest memories are of the metal bars and the ones in the coats poking and prodding me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Saber’s story was eerily similar to mine, except I still had vague recollections of my parents and my life before the facility.
“Well, that makes things more challenging. If they brought you in from somewhere, I could use a technicality to get you out. As it stands, you have two choices.”
“You let me go.”
I shook my head. “No. If I did that, they would simply hire someone else to get you. Someone with less of a moral code.”
Saber nodded. He was so young and trusting for a predator. How the hell had he not lost that innocence?
“The way I see it, you have two choices. One, you allow me to bring you back in. I’ll break you out in a couple of days and get you to a safe place—somewhere wild, where they won't find you.”
He cocked his head to the side, his ears coming forward. “What is my other option?”
I chewed on my bottom lip. Do I really want to go down this path? I had to. The cub deserved to know his options.
“The second one is a little more complicated.” That piqued his interest. Damn cats and their curiosity. “Mages of all levels can bond with animals. The animal gains intelligence, a longer lifespan, and a natural immunity to magic. You already have the intellect, but I can feel the animal side of you. You would be compatible with a familiar bond.” I gave him a moment to absorb the information. “Most bonds happen naturally. It's similar to the bond shifters share with their mates. The mage feels the compatibility and initiates the bond. The animal usually gets no say since they are dumb beasts. But you are smart. You get to make a choice.”
Saber dropped his head to stare at the water. “Do you feel the compatibility?”
I shook my head. “I’m a little different than your ordinary mage. I’ve been compatible with every animal I have encountered, even the ones already bonded. If I wanted to, I could take another mage’s familiar from them.”
“Would you?”
“No, unless they were treating it poorly. I can sever the bond later. You will not be stuck with me forever if you choose to leave.”
“Why should I trust you?” Saber narrowed his eyes.
“You shouldn’t. You should have run while you could. Why did you stay?” I challenged.
“My instincts told me I can trust you, but I don’t know if I can trust them. They led me to the sewers, after all.”
I couldn’t help the bark of laughter that erupted. Saber’s eyes narrowed again and his ears pinned back. His lips curled, and a short growl erupted from his throat. I waved a hand, trying to tell him that I wasn’t laughing at him. It was the tone of his mental voice when he’d spoke of this rotten, festering muck hole that set me off.
His attitude changed to indifference, and in a true cat-like move to prove it, he lifted his paw to clean. The disgusted furrowing of his muzzle set me off a second time. Priceless.
I finally managed to get myself under control. Slightly out of breath, I said, “And those instincts were spot on. You can’t be tracked by smell down here. There is virtually no traffic, and if you had stayed ahead of me for another hour, you might have found the right tunnel to dump you at the edge of the woods.”
“But you cannot simply let me go?”
I gave him a sad smile. “They will have a gryphon shifter question me. It was in the contract. I won't be able to lie to them, and they will know where you went. They will send someone else after you.”
Saber’s eyes turned vacant as he thought about everything I’d told him. If he were only a bit older and had some training, then he wouldn’t have had any problem evading capture. But he was a kid and likely to make mistakes as one.
Look at me trying to pick up more strays. My family was going to freak.
“You said it could be a temporary thing. Will they force you to give up the bond?” Saber eventually asked.
It was a fair question. I shook my head. “No one surrenders the bond easily. It's painful for the mage and can be fatal. I’m a bit different. It wouldn’t be as bad. But the Archmage doesn’t know that, so he won’t force it unless I neglect you.”
