The Magician's Mistake (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 1) by Katherine Sparrow Read Free Book Online Page A

small part noticed this was the best magic I’d faced in centuries. Interesting. I jumped up to standing, wide-legged and pissed off.
    All around me, women applauded my levitation and fall. They chanted louder. More damn power flowed up to Jennifer. Here and there, across the wide room, women collapsed. Fainting and seizing. Crying out and then going still and silent. She wouldn’t kill them, would she?
    “If it’s power you seek, free them and I will give you mine. All of it. It is yours to take. I vow it if you let everyone go.”
    “Oh, Morgan. You always did love coming to the rescue of commoners. That is, when you weren’t poisoning the world with your nasty magic, destroying men, and stealing my boyfriend.” Dozens of more women fell across the room. Lila cried out in pain.
    I blinked. Stealing her boyfriend? My memory had holes in it, but … I would remember stealing another witch’s boyfriend, wouldn’t I? Stealing lovers was not really my style. I’d always found there were more than enough men to go around.
    “You’ll have to refresh my memory. Do I know you?” I asked.
    I felt her boiling rage above me, bright and hot.
    “Give me time, and you will. You will come to understand that I am here to destroy you once and for all.” Jennifer cackled witchily.
    “Words, words, words,” I muttered. I looked down through the cage’s bars and saw that Lila and Adam’s auras looked much, much dimmer.
    I slitted my eyes in the dusky light and stared up at Jennifer, willing myself to remember, to have any context at all as to what was going on. As I studied her, power from the amulet began to pulse out from it and snake up the witch’s arms. The stolen magic covered her body in lines of shining, bright light. The brightness illuminated her, and I saw the ancient lady become merely old, and then middle-aged, and then younger still. Years fell off her face as I watched.
    “You steal their lives to lengthen your own?” I said. “That’s vile. Reprehensible.”
    All around the room, more women fell to the ground. Some of them cried out before losing consciousness.
    “Nothing to worry about,” Jennifer said loudly. “Everyone here is getting blessed with the magic of the full moon. Some find it overwhelming.” Her voice echoed across the room.
    Lots of women nodded. They wanted to believe, and so they did.
    It was long past time to end this. “Gadael,” I yelled, as I threw up my oaken protection spell. It could protect them all for a short time. It hung above me, and the doorways were no longer spelled, and the witch above us could not take any more of their magic or hurt them in any way. “Cofio,” I called out, and kissed my pointer finger. I spun in a slow circle, pointing at the different henchwomen manning the doors. Remember, remember, my spell whispered to them as confusion and then anger fell across their faces.
    “Leave. All of you. Morgan le Fay, child of the Isle of Apples, sister to Arthur and subject of none, commands it. Flee, I say!” My voice was not spelled, but it was used to being obeyed.
    The Center House emptied within minutes. I jumped off of the cage and worked on unlocking it as the women left. The spell on the lock was a tangled knot, and try as I might, I couldn’t undo it before my protection spell faded above us.
    “Now. Come to me, Jennifer. We finish this.”

 
     
     
     
     
    10
    A Dark Magic
    “Let them run,” Jennifer said. “I took more than enough magic from them to best you.” She came to the railing on the second floor and jumped over it. She floated slowly down. As her feet touched the spell which had kept me from getting to her, the spell wrapped around her body. Layer upon layer of the protection covered her entire body.
    She held up the pulsing amulet in one hand. Strands of magic swirled out of the amulet and into her as she grew younger and younger. “Some of us do not have the luxury of Grail magic for our immortality. Some of us have done what