Magic Born

A
fter the death
of her parents, Kat Thomas retreated from college life into an online fantasy game.

But what if the game she plays is closer to reality?

When a panther shifter named Alex knocks on her door one night, he delivers a message and a package. Kat's birth mother was a powerful mage who has just been murdered…and now the killer is after Kat. The package contains her mother’s talisman: an amber necklace that latches onto Kat’s neck and attacks anyone who tries to remove it. Before she knows it, ice is shooting from her hands and she’s on the run from an assassin.

Kat must navigate a world of magic and intrigue, fight the forces who want her dead, and protect her friends from becoming collateral damage—all while coming to terms with her new identity. She’s heir to a powerful legacy, but only if she lives long enough to claim it.

A
web
of green vines exploded from the hand of the imp facing me. Maniacal laughter erupted from her purple lips as I dodged her attack by activating my concealment spell. She jumped from foot to foot, her long green limbs flailing as she goaded me. I was in no mood to fight, but I needed to get by her to retrieve the scroll the Circle of Sorcerers had sent me to fetch. It contained the instructions for the next part of my quest, and I’d tracked it for days. If I had to, I’d kill the imp for it, and it looked like I had to.

The decision made, I unleashed a rain of hellfire on her head. The spell drained me of all my magic, but I didn’t anticipate needing more any time soon, and I didn’t want to mess around with lesser spells. The imp fell to the ground, her three-foot frame consumed in flames. I ran past her to the tree that held the scroll and stabbed the unveil charm into the trunk. Directly below the charm, the bark melted away to reveal a compartment. Inside sat the scroll I’d spent all day searching for. As I pulled the scroll out, a giant black cloud descended and took the form of a demon.

“Shit.”

I didn’t even have time to see which spell of his killed me before the load screen of
Wizards and Fae
, my massively multiplayer online game of choice, mocked me with its familiar art of giants, elves, and wizards that looked way more impressive than the actual in-game graphics. The graveyard appeared, and I claimed my body. There wouldn’t be time to make another attempt at the scroll. There was only a five percent chance of the demon spawning when the scroll was removed, and he had to appear on the one time I wasted all of my magic on the stupid imp.

No time to wallow. I wasn’t just Kat Thomas, college senior. I was, more importantly, Serafina, Dark Sorceress, and if I didn’t get a move on, my guild would give me the boot. I teleported Serafina to my guild’s meeting place and joined our voice-chat line.

“Hey guys, Serafina here. Sorry I’m late.”

“No problem, we’re still waiting on Hector.” The voice of Jabberwocky, the guild leader, sounded in my headset.

No surprise. Hector got away with everything, including showing up late. The fact that he gave his avatar such a mundane, human name was a turnoff, like giving a human name to a dog, especially since it was a female elf—talk about squicky. But he was the best tank in the game, so we all put up with his foibles. It was his job to take the hits from all the bad guys we fought while the rest of the group and I tried to take them down. And, of course, he did all this while wearing armor that amounted to a metal bikini. Gotta love those authentic details in a game created by a guy. I cast some long-lasting enhancement spells on the rest of the group and snagged a soda from the fridge.

With soda within easy reaching distance for a quick swig between fights, I folded my legs up under me and settled in for a long night of gaming. A private message appeared in the lower right-hand corner of my screen.

GreyMist was the healer of our group and my best friend in the guild.

This was game time, time for me to hack away at some baddies, not think about life and the future. Two minutes later, Hector made his grand entrance, and our raid on the light fae castle commenced.

During the fourth major encounter, a series of knocks on the door startled me enough to make me miss my target.

“Damn, sorry,” I told the group. The knocker would go away. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had someone over. I regrouped and focused a barrage of lightning onto the giant we were systematically taking down.

The knocking continued. When would this guy get a clue? After a few more knocks, it changed to banging. I muted my microphone and turned my head to the door as much as I could without taking my eyes off the screen. “Go away!”

We almost had the giant down, only ten percent health left. His armor got a boost when he was that low. It would take concentration to make sure I did enough damage without running out of magic.

The banging intensified. “Hello?” A male voice sounded from the other side of the door, but I didn’t let it bother me. We’d been working on this castle for weeks, and I couldn’t let my team down. My most powerful spell finally finished charging and I cast it, holding my breath to see if our combined effort would be enough to bring him down. I didn’t have enough magic left to cast another if it didn’t work. The giant wobbled and then fell over. The entire group cheered as we healed up and readied to fight the next boss.

Bang, bang, bang.

“I’ll be right back. Someone’s at the door.” I removed my headset and opened the door to a delivery guy with a package in his hands about the size of a shoebox. Yay for persistence. This had to be the new wireless headset I’d ordered.

“Oh thanks, I wasn’t expecting this so soon.” I snatched the package and shut the door. Too bad we were already in the middle of a raid, or I’d set it up. It’d be nice to not be tethered to my computer by a cord anymore. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen on my way back to the computer. Everyone would be taking a short break now, and I at least wanted to take a look at this beauty that had arrived a day early.

The knocking on the door resumed. With a few minutes of break left, I decided to go ahead and get rid of this guy now rather than risk him disturbing the next fight.

“What is it?” I glared as hard as I could up at the dark-haired delivery guy when I answered the door, hoping he would get the message and leave, only to be taken aback by the strangest pair of dark yellow eyes I’d ever seen.

“I need to talk to you. It’s important.” His voice had a smooth accent I couldn’t place. Definitely not local.

“I don’t even know you. Go away and leave me alone.” Right as the door was about to close, he pushed it open. Now that he had my full attention, he didn’t strike me as a delivery guy, and I didn’t see a truck idling in the parking lot behind him. He appeared older, not a student, maybe late twenties or early thirties. The black jeans and T-shirt fit the tall frame of a guy who hung around the gym more than the guys I knew.

“You don’t know me, but I know you, sort of. I have information about your mother.”

His dark yellow eyes peered so earnestly at me I decided I could give him a second of my time. This had happened a few times, but I thought it would have stopped by now. A lot of victims’ families from the plane crash that had killed my parents sought each other out. I didn’t understand it, but people in general tended to baffle me.

“Look, I’m kind of busy, and I’ve already made peace with my parents’ death. Maybe you should check out the support group. If you need the information, I can get it for you.” He should have it already, but I didn’t mind giving it to him if it would get him to leave.

“No, I don’t mean her. I mean your real mother.”

Ice slithered down my spine. I’d given up looking for my birth mother years ago. It seemed disrespectful to my parents. A couple months after they died, I picked up the search again, but quickly abandoned it. Nothing good could come of it. I already had parents, and they were dead. Nothing I might find would change that.

“My mother’s dead. Leave. I don’t want to see you again. Don’t make me call the cops.” I put the full weight of my body, all one-hundred-thirty pounds of it, behind the door and secured the deadbolt before he could stop me. Game night with the guild had no place for creeps.

Settling back in my chair and putting my headset on, I tried to push the entire thing from my mind. “I’m back. It was just some jerk at the door.”

“You okay?” GreyMist asked.

“Yeah, I think he finally got the message I’m not interested. So are we ready to move on?”

The next fight did a great job of driving the strange incident from my mind, but during the next break, I opened the package. An amber necklace stared back at me. “What the fuck?”

I shoved the necklace, complete with packaging, to one corner of my desk, and finished playing with my guild. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the nagging feeling that this wouldn’t be the last time I saw that guy.

A
solitary blouse
and skirt ensemble hung in my closet amid the jeans and shirts. My mom had gotten the dark purple and gray outfit a couple years ago for me to wear to a scholarship banquet. It couldn’t have been easy for her, a prim and proper lady, to have a daughter who couldn’t care less about makeup and fashion. To her credit, she never once made me feel bad for it. Whatever interests I had, she always loved me for exactly who I was. So it had been worth it to don the dress and let her do my hair and makeup to see her beaming back at me with pride.

I really didn’t have time for this sentimental indulgence. I took a deep breath to suppress the mistiness that had descended on my eyes and pulled the outfit from the hanger. I had to be out of the apartment and on my way to campus in less than fifteen minutes in order to make it to an interview to determine if my scholarship would continue through my last semester despite my falling grades. All my classes were purposely scheduled after nine-thirty so I wouldn’t have to deal with this morning rush, but the scholarship committee had wanted to see me at eight for some unknown reason.

The blouse and skirt fit as perfectly as they had the day Mom got them for me. My dieting secret was simple: it was easy to forget to eat when I binge played
Wizards and Fae
. After the plane crash, I’d started spending even more time in-game. It wasn’t the healthiest way to cope, but it was probably better for life expectancy than alcohol or binge eating. That was me: always focusing on the upside.

An unused bottle of hairspray fell as I rummaged around under the bathroom sink until I found my discarded makeup bag. I could count on one hand the number of times I had used it since coming to college. I really should have planned ahead for this. The foundation was a definite no-go. Not only did it smell sour, but it had acquired an orange tint. A quick application of some blush added a little life to my face. All that was left was my eyes. I had exactly one eyeshadow duo, the same color combination I’d been wearing since the first time I ever put on makeup: a subtle combination of nude with a slightly pink tint and nude with a slightly brown tint. I opened the little eyeshadow palette and cursed. I must’ve dropped it at some point: all the eyeshadow was in crumbles. If I even tried to apply it, I would only end up getting it all over my clothes. Who was I kidding? No one would notice even if I had used it. The mascara passed the sniff test, so I curled my eyelashes, darkened them with the mascara wand, and called it good. The one lipstick tube I had was most definitely rancid. Strawberry lip balm would have to be red enough.

Curling my hair was out of the question, so I twisted the dark auburn mess up into a bun. Staring at myself in the mirror, I looked ridiculously plain. I put on the black strappy heels Mom had bought to go with the outfit and rushed out of my room with my bag. As I ran past my computer desk, my eye caught the necklace from last night. The ensemble needed something, and the necklace would do. I snatched it and my keys and ran out the door.

A bright orange flier fluttered in the wind underneath one of my wiper blades.

Going into the woods alone or otherwise was never a possibility. No Wi-Fi: no Kat. I crumpled the flier and tossed it on the passenger seat.

My little red, two-door clunker stalled twice on the way to campus. The hills in the area were too much for her, and she couldn’t cooperate even this once. My baby needed a long, flat stretch of asphalt to be at her best—somewhere I could let loose and push her to the fifty-five miles-per-hour limit at which she started to shake so hard she could double as a carnival ride.

By the time I pulled into a parking space across the street from the administration building, I had only three minutes to sprint in heels to my interview. This was shaping up to be a great day.

* * *

A
fter an exhausting day
, even my car wanted to get away. She didn’t stall once on the drive home.

The interview with the scholarship committee hadn’t gone well. When they’d asked what my plans for the future were, I didn’t know what to tell them. Given my status as a full-ride scholar at the school, they expected me to regale them with exciting opportunities I was pursuing. That probably would have been me had Mom and Dad not died, but they had, and I coped the best way I knew how. Despite what they had thought, perhaps I wasn’t meant to be extraordinary. Earth was filled with ordinary people leading ordinary lives and being ordinarily happy. I was fine with that.

As I stepped onto the sidewalk that led to my building, I pulled off the heels. Blisters had formed where the straps lay. Bringing a pair of comfy shoes to change into would have been wise. On the way to my apartment, I checked the mail and thumbed through it as I climbed the stairs to my second-floor unit. One white envelope stood out among the junk. In the upper left-hand corner, the Stapleton University logo stared back at me. It would be an answer about the political science master’s program I’d applied for. Good reason to kill a tree when a simple email would have sufficed. I hadn’t decided if I wanted into the program or not. I hadn’t decided anything yet.

When I got to my door, a folded piece of paper stuck out of the side. Probably some stupid flier or take out menu. Turned out, it was neither. After I let myself in, I read the handwritten note.

His phone number appeared underneath the signature.

“Some guys never give up.” I crumpled the note and tossed it in the kitchen trash along with the junk mail. My keys landed on a little table inside the entry to my one-bedroom apartment. I walked past the kitchen on my right and into the bedroom, throwing my overflowing messenger bag onto the unmade bed. The smiling picture of my mom and dad on the bedside table looked over the state of my room in silent judgment, but I didn’t care. I’d only come to Stapleton University, nestled against the Rockies in freezing Montana, so far from my Arizona home, to make them happy. Caroline and Nick Thomas had met while in the political science program at this same university, and the thought of their only daughter attending their alma mater and majoring in the same program had overjoyed them. I’d excelled in school to get scholarships so they wouldn’t have to pay for it, did everything I could to be the perfect daughter so they would never regret adopting me, but they’d been dead six months, and I was left with this messy apartment and no idea what to do with the future they’d always told me was so bright and shiny thanks to my hard work. An international relations textbook peeked out of my bag, urging me to work on the paper due next week, but it would have to wait. More urgent matters weighed on my mind.

I unzipped my skirt and discarded it on the bed, then tossed the shoes in the closet. Everything else I could take care of later. An alarm sounded from my bag, and I retrieved my phone. Shit, I was later than I thought. I slipped into a pair of comfy, green plaid pajama pants and grabbed a toaster pastry from the pantry, no time to heat it. GreyMist would be wondering where I was.

“So you are coming. I thought you might have gone to that party instead,” GreyMist said when I joined a private audio chat with her.

“Ha ha, very funny. The only reason to go would be for the free food to avoid cooking.” Some guys in my complex were throwing a party centered around some sporting event. Football? Baseball? I had no idea. If my day hadn’t been so crazy, I probably would have popped in for some free wings.

“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to actually make an effort, have some real friends outside the game.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I never understood the appeal of other friends. Bonding with other people invited disappointment and heartache.

“And cook?” Thick disbelief coated Grey’s voice. “I didn’t realize toaster pastries qualified as cooking now.”

I couldn’t allow her to demean my skills. “Hey, you can burn a toaster pastry. If you can burn it, it qualifies as cooking.”

“You clearly missed your true calling as a home economics major.”

“Do they even have such a thing?” It sounded slightly horrifying in a Stepford wife kind of way. “Hey, do you mind if I do my daily first? I don’t want to forget.”

“No, go ahead. I’ll be here killing forest pixies until I’m fifty at this rate.”

“Thanks. I’ll be quick.” Each day players got a random daily quest to complete. They were usually simple, if annoying, and the rewards definitely exceeded the effort put forth. The game awarded bonuses for maintaining a streak, and I was up to a two-hundred-forty-seven-day streak. I didn’t want to blow it by losing track of the time as GreyMist and I talked.

I retrieved the quest from my in-game mail and read through the instructions.

These elemental magic quests were getting boring. I’d already had this one a few times.

A wave of shivers went over my body and goosebumps emerged on my arms. The power of suggestion had me realizing I needed to turn up the heat in the apartment when I finished the quest. I equipped the ice spell in my spell bar and teleported to Western Ridge.

“Which one’d you get?” GreyMist asked.

“Fighting off some fire monsters at Western Ridge.”

“Oh, so it should just take a minute then. In chat, people are saying the drop rate is pretty good today.”

I hoped so. When I arrived in the area of the flame monsters, a scroll popped up to let me know that I’d reached the zone for my quest. One of the more annoying features of these daily quests was that players couldn’t start blasting right away like normal. The spell locked for a few seconds, probably to force players to read the scroll.

As I read, cold enveloped me. Nausea churned in my stomach and my head ached. Had that chicken at lunch been bad? If so, did salmonella really hit this fast?

The instructions were repeated in the strange fictional, universal language of the game. Some fans went so far as to learn the language, but my interest lay more in killing and collecting loot. As my eyes scanned over the foreign print, my teeth chattered with the chill. What was happening? I looked down to my chest where the cold concentrated around the amber medallion. The skin around the amber stone had turned purple from cold. What the hell? The heater must have broken again and jewelry stayed cold, making it feel like the source.

I read the last line of the scroll while waiting for the spell to unlock. Little bits of frost formed where my hands sat on the mouse and keyboard—actual little ice crystals. This wasn’t an issue with the heater. “Shit.”

“What is it?” I jumped at the sound of Grey’s voice. “Some rare spawn giving you trouble? Do you really need my help on a daily?”

Crap, I’d forgotten I was on an open chat line with her.

”No, sorry. I just forgot about something. I’ll be right back.” I muted my mic. Be right back? What on earth made me say that? What could I possibly do that would make this better in a few minutes? I had ice coming out of my body, onto my computer. No time to think about potential water damage now. It was too little to do any harm anyway. I took a hard look at the stone resting on my chest since it seemed to be the epicenter of the cold that had taken over my body. It didn’t appear to be anything special or out of the ordinary, just an amber stone connected by a little setting to a gold chain.

I felt my way around the chain, searching for the clasp. Removing it would test my hypothesis that the necklace caused the cold. My fingers didn’t find a hook, and the chain was too short to draw over my head. Pulling with all my strength against the thin metal only resulted in little chain-link imprints in my palms.

This wasn’t right. Either this necklace somehow caused my body to form ice or I was hallucinating it. I honestly didn’t know which would be worse. All I did know was that Alex had some serious explaining to do. I fished his number out of the trash and gave it a call.

The number rang and rang and rang. He must not have set up his voicemail. That was his problem, because I was getting answers if I had to let the phone ring all night.

“Hello?” The mysterious accent sounded over the line.

“Yeah, is this Alex? The creep that showed up at my door stalking me?”