Gypsy Witch: A Paragon Society Novel (Book 2) Read online

  GYPSY WITCH

  A Paragon Society Novel

  David Delaney

  Copyright © 2018 David Delaney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanically, including photocopying and recording, taping or by any information retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of a brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.davidadelaney.com

  Cover Art Design by: Twinartdesign

  For my mom, who taught me to dream big

  And of course Shelly

  CHAPTER 1

  The fireball exploded directly in front of my snout. The heat was intense—not that I was worried about getting burned or even singed, but the bright flare of light was distracting. Fire created by magic is insanely bright, almost like a mini-sun, so a fireball aimed at my face was super distracting.

  I shook my massive head in a vain attempt to clear the light flares dancing across my vision. I dropped my focus away from the fight, just for a second, but that was a second too long. A kinetic spell hit the metal barrels that I hunkered behind, shattering them and enveloping me in a blast of razor sharp shrapnel.

  Ouch.

  My thick hide shed most of the tiny bits of flying metal, but enough of them got through to annoy the hell out of me. It was like a thousand bees stinging all at once. I growled my displeasure. With my vision now slightly impaired and my frustration growing at the multitude of steel bits peppering my skin, the fight was over. I just hadn't accepted it yet.

  But I was the Ollphiest.

  I was unstoppable.

  I refocused, trying to get my head back in the game. Another fireball hit my giant bear rump. It didn't hurt, but it did what all magic does when it encounters my weird aura: it slid around for a moment, looking for a way through the energy shield that protected me, and then it just fizzled out. I whipped my monster-bear body, with a speed that my size shouldn't allow, in the direction of the attack. That was my last mistake.

  The pointy ends of two very nasty daggers appeared in my peripheral vision. Their lethal needle-pointed tips now hovered just millimeters away from my eyeballs. The smallest of movements would gouge my eyes from my head. Had the daggers been normal non-magical blades I might have taken the risk, counting on my strength, healing ability, and speed to save me, but these were Lucy's daggers—the only weapons that so far in my short existence as a shape-shifter had hurt me.

  I slowly shifted my field of view, taking care not to tilt my head and poke my own eyes out. Lucy lay on her back underneath me, a wicked grin on her face and a twinkle in her dark eyes. Apparently, she had used my distracted state to power slide along the floor and skid to a stop just below my head, placing her in the perfect position to blind me – if she desired.

  Not fair.

  I chuffed.

  "Don't you grunt at me, you overgrown teddy bear," Lucy said, pulling her daggers safely away from my eyes and rolling out from under me.

  She shrugged out of her leather jacket, slipping her daggers back in their sheaths at the small of her back. Lucy was a stickler for making our training sessions as real as possible, so she always insisted on suiting up every time we sparred. As a battle mage she always tried to go into a fight clad in her head-to-toe leathers, she called it her modern-day armor – leather wouldn't stop magic, but it did wonders against some edged weapons and the nasty talons that her enemies sometimes sported. The leather pants and jacket, paired with the steel-tipped boots she wore gave her the appearance of an outlaw biker. Well, a miniature outlaw biker, because Lucy only stood five-foot-four (five-foot-six when you included her spiky, black hair), but anybody or anything that made the mistake of judging her by her height would live to regret it. Trust me.

  "That's three-zip. Orson, you are totally sucking balls," Wyatt called out, pushing up the glasses that habitually slid down his long nose and flicking back a lock of his red hair. He was perched up near the ceiling, lounging on an exposed beam, and watching our training session with amusement. I walked to where my clothes were lying in a pile and shifted back to human form. I quickly pulled on my sweats, not wanting to hear Lucy complain again about me standing around with my 'man bits' hanging out

  "I'm the size of a car when in bear form. How the heck am I supposed to stop you from sliding under me?" I whined. I didn't like losing and that's all I'd been doing during our training sessions.

  "Seriously?" Lucy asked. "You have to learn how to protect yourself from every kind of attack – above, below, and sideways."

  "It's the daggers. I know what they can do, and it messes with my head. But, in a real world situation, I won't have to worry about magic knives," I insisted.

  "Really? And how do you know there aren't more magically modified weapons out there?" Lucy waved her hand toward the walls of the old theater and the world beyond. "Just waiting for you to come along and get your teeth kicked in."

  "The Society says that enchanted weapons are rare," I countered.

  "Oh, the Society says," Lucy, mocked me. "Orson, the Society isn't all knowing, even though they'd like to think they are. My daggers aren't supposed to exist. There was nobody more surprised than the members of the Society when I showed up with them."

  I put up my hands up in surrender. I had heard all this before. Permanently enchanting any kind of weapon was next to impossible. When Lucy had first explained that fact, I had been confused. I had pointed out that the Kellys had a cabin in the woods with a magic jail cell in the basement – before I had gone all Mr. Destructo on it that is. So, if enchantments weren't permanent, how did the cell function?

  Lucy had explained that the cell was grounded to runes etched in the floor and that they provided a constant flow of power from the earth. Handheld weapons, by their very nature, couldn't be grounded in the same way.

  "So, what your saying is there's no way to build . . . like . . . a portable magic battery?" I had asked.

  Lucy had rolled her eyes at me, something she did a lot, and said, "It's a little more complicated than that, but . . . yeah . . . essentially, weapons can't be charged with a permanent spell."

  I had learned that Paragon Society histories included the knowledge that such weapon enchantments were possible, but none of the records explained how the process worked. Even though some members of the Society were centuries old, that particular piece of arcane knowledge was ancient, even by Society standards. There was actually an entire team of researchers at Society HQ that spent their days working on only that problem, but a solution continued to baffle them.

  Lucy had stumbled upon her daggers while on a mission for the Society. When I'd asked her about them, she hadn't been completely forthcoming with all the facts. I'd noticed she didn't like to talk about the past – and even more specifically about her past. The only thing I'd gotten out of her was that she had taken the daggers off a dead blood mage. The only thing Wyatt had been able to add, when I had asked him about it, was that whatever the mission was, it had all gone down back in the 1980s sometime.

  Thirty years ago.

  Lucy looked like she was only a few years older than I was, but I had to constantly remind myself that she was old enough to have been an active member of the Paragon Society back in the Eighties. She was older than my Aunt Tina and old enough to be my mom. I had only made the mistake of askin
g her age once. The training session we'd had after that conversation had hurt – a lot.

  I still wasn't sure how I felt about the whole immortality thing. Living forever – or at least being super-long–lived – is one of the major side effects of magic. It had something to do with physically harnessing magic energy; it rejuvenated the body at a cellular level. This meant that every single time I shifted, my body repaired any damage, including aging.

  This train of thought led me straight to the memory of Mrs. Kelly and how she had died from a death magic spell that had ravaged her body so much that even shifting couldn't heal her. The thought of her loss still hurt, and of course I couldn't think of her without thinking about Elyse. It had been just over a month, forty-two days, since Elyse and her family had left L.A. for a shifter compound somewhere up in the mountains of Northern California. Due to a complete lack of cell phone service – the place was the dead zone of dead zones – and an erratic Internet connection, our communication since then had been limited to exactly five emails.

  I closed my eyes and purged my brain of the thoughts of Elyse – her face, her touch, her smell . . . I couldn't afford to think about her. I needed all my focus on the task at hand. I needed to become the perfect battle machine, a task I was currently failing miserably at.

  "You're right," I said to Lucy and Wyatt. "My fighting ability sucks balls, but I'm trying. I promise."

  Lucy let out a long breath, "I know you are. And trust me, when I first started training I was just as—"

  "Horrible," Wyatt offered.

  Lucy shot him a look. I stifled a grin.

  "I was going to say unskilled," said Lucy. "The big difference is that your natural abilities are off the charts. I had to learn how to use my magic from scratch, with one skill building upon another. You, on the other hand, are the magic equivalent of a neutron bomb. And that's your problem: you think you're invincible."

  I started to argue, but was able to snap my mouth shut before I said something stupid. Lucy arched an eyebrow at me. I nodded.

  "You're right." What else could I say? I had gone toe to toe with three blood mages the very first time I'd shifted. I had ripped one of them to pieces and sent the other two running for cover. Trust me – that kind of experience tended to inflate a person's ego. Oh, man, I was a loser.

  I threw my hands up, "I'm a total idiot."

  Wyatt laughed from his perch, "Dude, you're just now figuring that out?"

  In a blink, Wyatt vanished from the overhead beam and teleported around the room in a disorienting rapid succession of blinks, as he called them. Even with my super-senses, tracking him was hard. Wyatt re-materialized behind me, a wet-willy firmly planted in my ear.

  "Argh! That's gross, dude!" I said, rubbing at my ear.

  Wyatt let out a triumphant whoop and blinked behind Lucy for protection, peeking over her shoulder at me. I laughed. The kid cracked me up. Of course, the kid was also able to run circles around me during training sessions. Wyatt would just stand casually in the middle of the room, his custom made electric baton (imagine a cattle prod for people) held loosely in one hand.

  The first time Wyatt had shown me the baton, I had seriously geeked out. The thing looked like a Storm Trooper's Battle Baton: it was about two-and-a-half feet long and glowed with electric energy. But there was no magic involved. Elon-Freaking-Musk and his team had accidentally discovered the technology that powered the baton while working on the original Tesla. When the Defense Department heard about it, they had swooped in with a pile of cash and a non-disclosure agreement as thick as a dictionary. How Wyatt came to possess the baton was an interesting story that involved the President of the United States.

  It turned out that while the Paragon Society was secret, there were members of the Society everywhere – politicians, billionaire CEOs, military leaders, and even a few big name Hollywood celebrities. This fact allowed the Society to keep control of who knew what about its existence. The President wasn't a Paragon, but some of the people who surround him were. Therefore, whenever a little magic could help fix a situation, the Society was informed and action was taken.

  Anyway, when the kid and I sparred, I would shift and charge at him full speed – and as I've said, shape-shifters are fast. But it didn't matter how fast I charged. He would blink, reappearing only long enough to zap me with bone rattling voltage. Over and over again, he'd pop up around me, always on my blind side, just long enough to zap me.

  Blink, zap.

  Blink, zap.

  Blink, zap.

  It was infuriating.

  There was nothing Wyatt could do to take me permanently out of a fight. His zaps, while painful, didn't do any real damage, but the point of the exercise was clear – he could keep me spinning in circles indefinitely. And since Wyatt never went into a magic fight alone, once he had me completely frustrated and distracted, Lucy could step in with a killing blow.

  I remembered how stunned I was to learn that Wyatt wasn't a battle mage – or any type of mage, for that matter. He had exactly one ability and that was teleportation. Granted, teleportation was super-awesome, but Wyatt's came with some weird limitations due to how he had acquired the ability.

  "What do you mean you're the product of a Frankenstein experiment?" I'd asked, when Wyatt had first explained his unique situation.

  "Just what it sounds like, dude. You see, there was this group of blood mages—"

  "Coven," Lucy had interjected.

  "Whatever," Wyatt said, pressing ahead. "These jerks decided to experiment on high school kids, trying to force Paragon abilities through genetic manipulation."

  "What!" I was floored. "Is that a thing? What am I saying? Of course it's a thing. You're standing in front of me as living proof—"

  "Keep your panties on, Orson," Lucy chimed in again. "It's not a 'thing.' It worked exactly once." She pointed at Wyatt. "And all the bad guys involved are no longer with us."

  Wyatt nodded emphatically in agreement. "Yeah! We dusted all of them."

  It seemed like a harsh way to describe the deaths of several people, but those people had been blood mages and had been dabbling in child experimentation, so I wasn't that upset.

  "But, in the end, you ended up with one of the coolest abilities around," I said. "I mean, you could blink the three of us to Paris for brunch or something, right?"

  Wyatt frowned. "I wish. I'm only up to a hundred yards."

  "That's your limit? A football field?"

  "Right now, yes. But I started out way worse than that. I've worked my way up – increased my distance – but I've been stalled at a hundred yards now for a while." Wyatt was unable to mask the disappointment in his voice.

  "Yes," Lucy said. "But your ability is inexhaustible. You can cover miles in a matter of seconds, without even breathing hard. There isn't another living Paragon that can do what you can. You're unique and awesome."

  Wyatt had beamed at her praise. The kid really looked up to Lucy. Even now, as he used her as a human shield, afraid of my retaliation for the wet-willy, I could read the love and respect he had for the petite, oftentimes grumpy, battle mage.

  I held up my hands. "Truce. I probably deserve all the wet-willies you can dish out for my lack of humility. But I promise, going forward, I'll do better. It may take a while because I'm a slow learner." I crossed my eyes. "It's all the time spent surfing. Salt water melts the brain."

  Wyatt snickered.

  "Are you two finished?" Lucy asked impatiently.

  "Yes," said Wyatt, trying not to smile.

  "Yes," I agreed.

  "Thank you," Lucy said. "Let's get cleaned up and get some dinner."

  "Pizza!" Wyatt shouted, running toward the doorway of the large screening room, instead of blinking away. Wyatt considered it bad form to blink when the rest of us were relegated to walking – unless, of course, he was rushing for the front of the line to buy tickets for the latest Marvel movie. Then it was every man for himself.

  Lucy and Wyatt had turned an ol
d United Artists movie theatre into a kind of hideout, a safe house sort of place. It was nestled in a not-so-great part of North Hollywood, but the Society didn't know its location and Lucy had warded it with a butt-load of protection spells. The theatre had six different screening rooms; the one we used for a training room had had all the seats removed and Lucy, using her magic to lift the pieces into place, had constructed a series of scaffolds to create a training ground with multiple levels. She had also added various items that could be used as cover or as weapons, like the barrels she had blown up in my face earlier. It sort of reminded me of the crazy courses in that TV show American Ninja Warrior. It was low tech as far as training facilities went, but it got the job done.

  One of the other screening rooms had been set up with couches, tables, and even a small camp stove – basically, a rudimentary family room and kitchen. Wyatt had been able to assemble a simple water faucet that was a foot-pump activated. With the water and few wet-wipes, the three of us were able to clean up enough that we wouldn't get kicked out of Pieology, the local design-your-own pizza place.

  * * *

  "The Society has asked me to go on a recruiting run," said Lucy, before taking a bite of her pesto-chicken pizza concoction.

  "What's a recruiting run?" I asked.

  Lucy finished chewing her food and took a sip of soda. "Well, it's interesting that you ask, because you'll be going with me."

  "What?" I asked, surprised.

  The Society had forbidden me to leave the L.A. area. Seriously, they had issued a formal decree as they called it, stating that 'Orson Reid will not venture past the boundaries encompassing the greater Los Angeles area' and they had sealed the decree with magic. That meant – in theory – that it would be impossible for me to physically pass beyond the agreed-upon boundary. Of course, most magic doesn't work on me, but I promised Lucy I wouldn't test it out.