Magic Unchained by Jessica Andersen Read Free Book Online Page A

millennium, when the library was established, so he guessed it made sense they would figure heavily in the archived material. And he didn’t mind some quiet time alone in the library, really. It was peaceful, and he’d been pretty damn short on peace lately.
    The cluster-fuck with the
xombi
virus had taken something out of him, plain and simple. He had gone down there thinking he, Sven, and the others would be able to handle the outbreak, save the villagers, and block the magical pipeline that was causing the problem. Instead, he’d found himself razing the very villages he’d gone there intending to protect, then helping Sven track and kill the
xombis,
napalming dozens of them, hundreds.
    He still woke up pretty much every morning with the stink of it lodged in his sinuses.
    “No buzz, no buzz, boring, boring…” He moved to anearby rack, stopping at a carved bone miniature of five warriors wearing ceremonial garb, toting spear chuckers and stalking a wild peccary. Beside that was an incense burner painted to show a boar-bloodline warrior offering his heart to a woman who turned her face away.
    That one pinged, though not because of any magic.
    Damn it
. He rubbed the heel of his hand over the center of his chest, which had suddenly gone hollow and achy because of how things had been between him and his human girlfriend, Myrinne, lately. He loved her one hundred percent—he’d kill for her, die for her, and anything in between—but he wished he could get her to stop pressuring him to experiment with the other half of his magic. More, he wished that it didn’t feel like more and more that when she said,
I love you,
it really meant,
I love you when you do what I want.
Especially when what she wanted him to do went against the king’s orders.
    Last year, a dying Xibalban shaman had named Rabbit the “crossover” and said that his mingled blood made him the key to winning the war using both the light magic of the Nightkeepers and the dark powers of his Xibalban half. But not long after that, their enemy Iago had managed to break Rabbit’s connection to the dark magic—and since then, pretty much every time he’d tried to make a real impact he’d just wound up making things worse, until Dez had finally ordered him to stop trying to reconnect with his darker side. These days he was doing his damnedest to follow orders and be a good mage, a good soldier. And that was driving Myrinne up a freaking wall.
    “Shit.” Letting go of the big, weighted-down box he’d just been about to open, he launched to his feet, suddenlyneeding to pace off the restless energy that came from inside the hollow place in his chest, along with the sly inner voice that said he was a lucky son of a bitch to have her and he’d better do whatever it took not to fuck it up. Once he was on his feet, though, he swayed and had to slap a hand out to steady himself against the nearest wall. “Whoa. Vertigo.”
    Sweat popped on his forehead and crawled down his spine, and a rush of nausea filled the hollows. He swallowed hard, then blinked to clear his eyes when they threatened to fog.
    Shit, maybe that third chili dog had been a bad idea. He’d needed to recharge his batteries, but maybe he should’ve gone with nice, safe pasta instead of five-alarm pig by-products and extra pepper jack.
    Except
… His head whipped up as logic made it through the spins, reminding him that the magi didn’t usually get pukey from stuff like food poisoning. Which meant this was something else.
    Like something in that box, maybe?
    Backtracking, he dropped to his heels and tugged on the cross-folded flaps to open the box. It was more than half full of flat stones that had been carved into all sorts of weird shapes. The inner flap was labeled in Lucius’s crabbed writing:
Eccentrics for our favorite eccentric
.
    “Nice,” Rabbit muttered. Lucius—the Nightkeepers’ head researcher and an ass kicker in his own right—might’ve rolled his eyes a little at his