Magic Unchained by Jessica Andersen Read Free Book Online

that.
    “Why not ask someone else? There are plenty of others who are closer to their
winikin
than I am.”
Hello, understatement.
    “Because you also worked with JT down south, and you got along with him as well as anyone outside of the rebels has, which gives you connections in both camps. And besides”—a ghost of a smile touched Dez’s lips—“Reese and I agree that if Rabbit is our loose cannon, you’re our wild card. We have this feeling that you haven’t gotten to the bottom of yourself yet, and that if and when you do, big things could happen.”
    “Big good, or big bad?”
    The smile got real. “That’s the ‘wild’ part.” The king paused. “Do you gamble?”
    Sven thought of winter nights, a fire in the hearth, and an ancient wagering game spread out on the kitchen table: the
patolli,
which was an ancestor of the modern Parcheesi, with rolls of the dice, figures moving around the board, and strategies of defense and offense. Carlos had used it to teach him war games; Cara had used it to win her way out of chores; and her mom, Essie, had just liked having the four of them together in one place.When the memory threatened to hit the nostalgia button, he set it firmly aside and shook his head. “Not for a long time.”
    “Well, maybe it’s time to give it a shot.” The king stood. “Think about it and let me know.”
    But as Sven strode away from the royal suite, with Mac at his heels and no real destination other than “away,” he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do. If there was a problem—or worse, a traitor—it needed to be dealt with, and fast… but if there wasn’t, and it came out that he’d been getting close to Cara and Carlos to spy on the
winikin,
it wouldn’t be worth trying to fix those relationships. In fact, if that happened he might as well just hit the road and keep on going, because they—and especially
she
—would never speak to him again.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    “Lame, lame, boring, meh, lame…” Near dusk on the day of the funeral gone awry, in a dark corner at the rear of the long, narrow stone room that housed the library, Rabbit rifled through yet another box of carefully labeled artifacts. The brain trust had culled the pieces as being more or less related to the boar bloodline, so he was going over them in the hopes that he’d get a vibe. So far, though, there was a whole lot of nothing going on.
    Okay, the artifacts themselves were pretty cool—he had come across a set of spear-thrower missiles that were made out of intricately carved peccary-tusk ivory and weighted with slivers of stone, and he had been tempted to swap out the ceremonial knife he wore on his belt for a longer, thinner blade made of pale green stone and carved with repeating boar motifs. But a MAC-10 loaded with jade tips—or better yet a fireball—kicked ass over a spear-thrower any day, and the knife he wore had been his old man’s. And although Red-Boar had been a miserable son of a bitch, tradition said you used the weapon that got handed down, like it or lump it.Besides, he wasn’t browsing for some “ooh, shiny” shit to take with him just because it appealed. The magi all had boxes to go through, because the Nightkeepers badly needed some new tricks.
    “Boring, boring…” He paused to pick up a weird-ass clay statue that was about the length of his forearm and covered with a red pigment that had faded to Pepto pink. Although the glyph incised on the bottom was a boar, the thing itself looked like some sort of waterbird. Eyeballing it, he muttered, “Shit, glad you’re not giving me any tingles.” He could just picture himself going up against the dark lords wielding a Death Flamingo, or whatever the fuck it was.
No frigging thank you
. He shook his head and put it back down. “Sissy, boring, lame, lame…”
    Gods, there was a ton of stuff from the boar bloodline. Then again, the boars had been the royal bloodline prior to the jaguars, reigning during the first