Read Justice Calling (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 1) for Free Online Page B

anybody could use a ritual any more than a kid could open up the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Guide and cast Magic Missile. Magic was everywhere, in everything, but it was like sunlight or carbon molecules. If you don’t have the tools to use it and the ability somehow to even tap in, there’s no way you can make it work just by trying.
    To work a ritual, you’d need knowledge, time, a power source you could access, the right ingredients and foci, combined with a strong enough will to bind it all together. It wasn’t those kids, not working alone. Jimmy, the dead one, he’d been on the phone with someone. Someone who had tried to kill both boys using their medallions.
    “You are thinking very hard for someone who pretends to know nothing,” Alek said, interrupting my half-conscious train of thought.
    “I don’t know anything, not really. It’s all speculation.”
    Cat-quick, he bent over me and slid his large, warm hand into my shirt. When I pictured him groping my breasts, it wasn’t exactly like this. He pulled the medallion out of my bra and dangled it over me. I made out a pattern of circles on its stained, black surface and it looked to be molded from clay.
    “You pictured me groping your breasts?” he asked and he had that smirk I’d seen a million years ago this afternoon, before everything went to hell on the handbasket express.
    Clearly, I’d spoken aloud. “Blood loss talking,” I said. I swiped at the medallion. “Give that back.”
    “Tell me what it is,” he said, standing up out of my reach.
    “I don’t know.” I gave him a smile to show that hey, I could tell the truth sometimes.
    “But you can find out.” That wasn’t even a question. No fair.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Not tonight. I’m kind of in heal mode here. Why don’t you go away? I’m rescinding your invitation.”
    “I am not a vampire.” He cocked his head, those ice chip eyes of his narrowing as he looked me over. “You can’t order me out.”
    “Vampires don’t exist,” I muttered. I blushed and wondered I had the blood left in my body for it. I was lying in a bathtub with half my pants missing and only a scrap of black panties covering my girl bits. I wished I’d worn nicer underwear. Or shaved in the last two days. He was a shifter though, maybe he preferred his women furry.
    Ho-kay. That was definitely the blood loss talking.
    I looked down at my hip. The wounds were mostly closed, looking a lot more like a bad abrasion than a bunch of stitch-worthy cuts. Time to get out of the bathtub and find if I had any Band-Aids.
    “Still here?” I said. “Help me up.”
    He pulled me out of the tub as though I were no bigger than a kitten. I lost the scrap of panty but managed to yank a towel over myself as I leaned heavily on the bathroom counter.
    “Okay, I need to clean up here, and you really need to leave. Maybe that kid will wake up and tell you what’s going on.”
    He caught my chin in his hand and tilted my head toward him, leaning in close. He smelled like vanilla and sun-kissed hay. “I will come back tomorrow. And you will tell the truth, Jade Crow.” All trace of smirk was gone from his face.
    “Fuck you,” I said, jerking my head away. Mistake, that. Red and black dots swum over my eyes and the headache vise tightened another notch.
    “I thought you had revoked my invitation,” he said, and just like a freakin’ Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was smirking again.
    “Do they train you to be this annoying at Justice Academy, or does it come naturally?” I said as I turned carefully around, deliberately not looking in the mirror, and pulled open the medicine cabinet. I did have Band-Aids. Score.
    “It runs in my family.” He set the medallion down on the counter and pulled open the door. The silvery shield he’d cast on the room dissolved. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.
    Harper lurked near the door and ducked into the bathroom as soon as Alek left.
    “He managed not