Wedding Bells, Magic Spells by Lisa Shearin Read Free Book Online Page A

used as a workroom in the past.”
    “Does it have a mirror?”
    Mychael sighed. “Not exactly.”
    Now it was my turn to be tense. “There’s a lot of dislike in that ‘not exactly.’”
    “Before Tam returned to Regor, he told me the warding spell he was using so I could get into the room if I needed to.”
    “Why would you need to?”
    “To unblock the Passage door inside the room.”
    My suddenly nerveless hands dropped from Mychael’s shoulders. “A Passage door?”
    He nodded once.
    “I’d rather chance running through a mirror with a tentacle monster,” I said.
    “Me, too.”
     
    *
     
    The director of elven intelligence had been mirrored to death and barely brought back to life. The ship carrying the elven ambassador had been attacked by assassins on the high seas, the ambassador had been killed, and the rest of his staff taken captive. Fortunately, they had been saved by pirates who, thankfully, were related to me. One of the staffers was now the ambassador, and she was related to my fiancé.
    And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
    The Guardians were responsible for delegate security and safety during the peace talks. To say security and safety had gotten off to a bad start would be the ultimate understatement. Though technically, none of the above had happened on the Isle of Mid, so there was nothing we could have done to prevent it, that wasn’t how a lot of the delegates would see it. As soon as word got around—and it would—the peace talks would be the talk of the Seven Kingdoms, and not in a good way.
    Now, two of the most important people in the goblin delegation would be arriving via a Passage door.
    There was bad—and there was worse.
    The Passages were worse.
    “Passages” was a misnomer. For those who weren’t savvy about all things magical, the word “passage” simply meant a way to get from one place to another.
    Problem wasn’t with the Passages themselves; it was what could be in there with you.
    The Passages were the areas between dimensions. Their boundaries flowed fog-like around our own reality. Where a Passage touched our world at one place could be just a short distance from where it touched our world in another, even though physically those points were far apart. From Mid to Regor via sky dragon was a three-day flight. Via a mirror, two steps. Via the Passages, about a mile.
    A mile chock full of things waiting to kill and eat you every step of the way.
    A Passage door was an opening between our world and the Passages. It could be naturally occurring, or it could have been torn by a mage. Dark mages practicing black magic were usually the only ones who would want to.
    When it came to mirror magic, elves were the undisputed experts. The best mirror mages were elves, and it was through their research that mirrors had replaced the Passages as the preferred method to quickly get from one place to another.
    There were things living in the Passages, and those things considered elves, goblins, and humans quite tasty.
    And after what Mychael had told him, Tam and Imala had decided to take their chances with a run for their lives. I’d wondered why they hadn’t taken a sky dragon, but Mychael said considering the circumstances of Markus’s attack, Tam didn’t believe we had three days of flight time to spare.
    That made me feel all kinds of better.
    I’d been living in Mermeia when Tam had come to town two years ago. He was a duke and a primaru, or mage of the royal blood. Primaru Tamnais Nathrach was the ex-chief mage of the soon-to-be-assassinated goblin queen and a grieving husband of a recently murdered noble wife. Rumor had it that Tam leaving the goblin court and his wife’s murder were connected. Tam arrived in town as a goblin of wealth and influence. He purchased the palazzo of an old but impoverished Mermeian family and transformed it into Sirens—the most notorious nightclub and gambling parlor in the city. Before coming to Mermeia, Tam had already opened a Sirens