Marked: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 2) (23 page)

“It’s not okay,” I wheezed, pointing my right hand up toward the parachute. There was no way I was going to let her die. Blood oozed from a hole in the right side of my chest. Was that why I couldn’t breathe? I pushed the thought out of my head and concentrated. If I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be from a gunshot. That was for sure. “Hang on.”

“What are you doing, Mac?” Ricky cried as my black skin went bone white and my tattoos faded to near obscurity.

“Saving you!” I murmured, but my words were lost in the torrent of the wind whipping around us. Flames leapt from my fingers. Hellfire danced in my palm directly beneath the open part of the parachute. Three hundred feet.

The air above me superheated, and we slowed. The flames in my hand flickered into dying embers as darkness encroached upon my vision from all sides. Still, I held onto that flame. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. The only thing I felt was Ricky’s hand clutching mine as we fell, and still I poured every ounce of strength into that flame in my palm, trying desperately to slow our descent by turning the parachute into a makeshift hot air balloon.

“Mac! You need to stop!” Ricky screamed, but her panic-filled voice sounded so distant I could barely hear it. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me to stop, but it didn’t matter. There was no way I was going to stop now. I was going to save her if it was the last thing I did.

“No!” I whispered, but as the word left my lips, I felt something else. The ground. Everything inside me seemed to splinter into indescribable agony before being extinguished by unending darkness.

Chapter 29

“Wake up, Mac!” Ricky sounded distant as she shook me like a Polaroid picture. My head was throbbing. Why wouldn’t she leave me alone? “Don’t you die on me!”

“Die? Why would I die?” I tried to murmur, but I couldn’t make my mind or my mouth work. The last thing I remembered was trying to keep us from crashing into the cement after our impromptu skydive. If she was shaking me it meant one of two things. I’d succeeded, or I’d died. And if she was asking me if I died, well, I must be alive. As that realization settled over my cotton-filled brain, my heart leapt into my throat. That meant she was alive too! I’d saved her! Thank God!

“Mac!” Ricky cried, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me to her chest. The warmth of body pressed into me, and as my eyes opened, I realized she was next to me on the cement, pulling me against her.

“Didn’t you get shot?” I asked, horror flooded into me as I tried to sit up, only I couldn’t. I could hardly move at all.

“Don’t talk, Mac. You’re in a really bad place.” She moved up next to me and kissed me hard on the mouth, filling me with the taste of blood, and something else. Power. She tasted of power. “You need to take some of my strength to heal yourself.”

“But you got shot, and Pierce… where’s Pierce?” I moved and stars flashed across my vision.

“Mac, Pierce is dead.” Ricky laid across my body, so a lot of her skin was touching my bare chest. A wave of relief crashed over me as warmth filled me. “Now lay down.”

“How do you know?” I whispered, settling back down, mostly because she was pushing my head back. The sky above was very blue. She pressed herself against me again. I couldn’t tell you why, but the skin to skin contact made me feel a lot better. Was she forcing power into me somehow?

“I know he is dead because after I dug out the two silver bullets out of my stomach with my bare hands, I ate him. Well, most of him. I skipped the liver.” She smiled at me, baring her teeth. Bits of meat clung to her braces. “He was already dead when I ate him though because he fell out of a plane. Even the most powerful werewolf in the state doesn’t survive that kind of fall.” She gestured down her body. “I’m only alive because you saved me.” She pressed her head against mine and reached out to intertwine her fingers with mine. “Now stop being a hero and take some of my power so you can heal yourself before you bleed out.”

I wanted to argue with her, wanted to ask a million questions, but the look on her face made me stop. I’d seen a look like that before. It was the same look Ricky had given me when she had spoken about her abducted brother. That look told me one thing. Ricky would give anything to save me. What did that mean? Maybe there really something to this whole imprint thing.

“Okay,” I said, gripping her closely, and just touching her was enough to make me feel like I could have fought off an army. “Sorbeo.”

Strength and energy exploded through me, magnified tenfold by our full body contact. My flesh mended itself in an instant, and my vision snapped back into focus. Power and energy surged up inside me too fast and too furious for it to be good. Ricky’s body convulsed as she drained into me, and I didn’t stop. As her eyes slowly shut, and her forehead fell limply against my chest, the only thing I could think was, “I wanted more.” No, not just more. I wanted all of her. Every last drop. I would drink her dry.

“No!” I cried, forcibly ripping my glowing hand away before I could tear every ounce of life from her body. The scarlet light surrounding us faded away, leaving us lying there on the asphalt in a pool of sticky crimson. Ricky’s eyes fluttered open, and she flashed me a tired grin.

“You didn’t eat me. Thanks,” she whispered, smiling at me as she got to her feet. “So you want to hit the hotel before or after we see Duane? I’m voting for both, personally.” She held her hand out to me, and there was a strange edge to the look on her face, like she was trying to play off the fact she was really worried about what Duane would tell us, that everything I felt was just a result of her imprinting on me.

As I opened my mouth to tell her not to worry about what Duane found with his stupid druid tea, something in my pocket buzzed. We both turned our gazes toward it, and I realized it was my radio. I wasn’t sure how it had survived the fall, but I reached down and grabbed it. There was a blue light flashing, and it buzzed again. I hit the call button.

“Hello?” I asked, confusion filling my voice. Both Todd and Pierce were dead. Who could be calling me?

“Mac, I have someone who wants to speak to you,” Todd said, and I marveled that he was still alive. He had more lives than a cat.

“Okay?” I asked, trying to figure out who it could be. “I thought you were dead.”

“Oh, I didn’t die. As soon as those guys shot me up, well,” the voice changed to that of the black clown who had seared the number into my brain. The one responsible for taking my family hostage. “I showed them my true form.” Laughter filled the line. “You did well, Mac. I have it on good authority from Death himself that Pierce is dead.”

“So my part of the deal is done then,” I replied, still trying to make my mind work. This was way too much for me to deal with right now. I just needed to lay here for a bit and get my bearings, and then I could deal with him. Still, this was my chance to get him to release my family, and I wasn’t going to squander it just because I’d fallen out of an airplane.

“Indeed it is,” he paused ominously. “But here’s the thing, Mac. You possess a very particular skill set which will cause me a great deal of trouble if I do not have the appropriate leverage. I’d offer to keep your family safe in exchange for you continuing to perform dirty jobs, but somehow I think you’ll tell me to go fuck myself.”

“You’re very astute. And if you harm even a hair on their head, I will find you, and I will kill you,” I told the radio, hoping he wasn’t going to renege on our deal. Not after everything I’d been through. It hardly seemed fair.

“Oh, I believe you,” the voice said. “That’s exactly the problem.”

“Um, Mac,” Ricky said, and I glanced at her to see her pointing into the sky over the theme park. A helicopter very similar to the one I’d punched out of the sky was heading toward us. Fast. The only difference between then and now was that this one appeared to be filled with zombies.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed into the radio.

“Oh, you’ve seen the welcome party.” The guy chuckled into the radio. The sound chilled me to my core. “Don’t worry, Mac. After they kill you, I’ll let your family go. Devil’s promise.” The line went dead.

“What do we do?” Ricky asked as we got to our feet. We had less than a minute before they were on us.

“We run,” I said, grabbing her hand, and looking for cover. There was an overpass not too far away. If we could get to it…

“And then?” she asked as we sprinted past where what remained of Pierce Ambrose was splattered across the asphalt like a bad piñata.

“Then I punch a helicopter in the face, and we kill us a demon in a clown suit, I said as the M5s on the helicopter began spitting out bullets. “Do you think you can throw me that far?”

The street exploded into fragments of debris, and I knew for certain, even though it was only ten feet away, there was no way we were going to make it.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to make it because a frigging bolt of lightning erupted out of the cloudless night sky and blew the helicopter to smithereens. As it exploded in midair and pieces of debris rained down all around us, Danton stepped out from beneath the overpass and dropped his cigarette to the ground. He smooshed it out with the toe of his work boot and looked up at us.

“Why if it isn’t my old friend, Mac Brennan,” he said, holding his right hand out to me. “I hear you’ve got a demon problem.”

Thank you for reading 
Marked
,
 If you wouldn't mind, please leave a review.

Want to know when my next book is available? Sign up for my new release e-mail list 
here
. If you do, I'll send you my short story, 
Alone in the Dark
, for 
free
.

Visit my blog at 
JACipriano.com
 for all the latest updates.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29