Bloodmagic (Blood Destiny 2) Read Online Free

some faded gold inlay around the edges, but when I picked it up something about it felt different.  It wasn’t a buzz exactly, or a hum, or a physical vibration, but my fingers tingled and I was opening it to flick through before I’d even realised what I was doing.
    There was a beautiful illustration on the first page with vibrant colours that belied the book’s age.  It was of a landscape, with rolling hills and a dark turquoise blue river.  I could just make out a structure that seemed to be painted to appear as if it were stone in the background, and what I took to be a pomegranate tree in the foreground.  I gingerly turned the page, trying to avoid disturbing the old paper too much, and in the next instant threw all caution – and the book – away from me as if it had scalded me.  Because the next page, the title page, wasn’t written in English but instead proclaimed itself loudly with a single Fae rune.
    My heart was suddenly thudding.  A Fae book?  Here? In the depths of rural Scotland?  I stared at it now lying on the other side of the room as if it might rise up and attack me and tried to think.  It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that it had ended up here by accident.  This was a bookshop, after all, and it housed old, in fact ancient, books within its walls at that.  And it probably wasn’t that unusual that it was here in north Scotland either; what with the Celtic connections and everything, there were bound to be Fae creatures lurking around.  I swallowed, trying to avoid the fire inside me rising in increased ire and pushing away the unwelcome thought that if I hadn’t been trapped inside a faerie ring back in Cornwall whilst my home was being attacked by Iabartu’s minions then Julia, and the others, might still be alright.  And Anton wouldn’t be in charge, and I’d still be there and…
    Enough.  I tampered down the flames and watched the book warily as if it might suddenly attack me.  Did Mrs Alcoon know what it was?  Did she even know it was here?  There had definitely been something off about the way she’d seemed to read my mind.  Perhaps it hadn’t just been the uncanny wisdom of someone with experience at reading others.  Perhaps she was…
    “A witch?” A smooth voice asked from above me.  “Or worse?”
    This reading of my mind trick was becoming tiresome, I briefly thought, and then instinct took over and I was on my feet in a heartbeat.  I’d stopped sheathing my daggers to my forearms – it would have been a bit difficult to explain that away in the bar where the uniform had been a white short-sleeved t-shirt and I’d just gotten out of the habit – but I wasn’t completely complacent, or stupid, and I used sharp silver needles to hold my hair in place at the back.  Flipping them out with a flick of my wrist, I poised to stab them somewhere, anywhere, in the direction of the voice.  The front door of the shop hadn’t jangled so whoever this was they hadn’t entered by any conventional routes - and they were making my skin crawl.  This was most definitely an otherworldly presence.  It was wearing a trilby hat that covered most of its face, although I could just make out a dark smooth skinned jaw, and overcoat.  This was the thing that had been watching me from the side of the road the day I’d been fired by Arnie.  It had been stalking me.  The bloodfire that I’d controlled just moments before suddenly raged inside me, licking up my stomach and chest and throat.
    “Whoa,” the suddenly clearly male voice stated without a trace of tension, “you might want to calm down there a little bit, Red.”
    The old nickname registered briefly and, hot blood thudding in my ears, I suddenly lashed out.  The figure leaned back in a blur of effortless motion and completely avoided my furious swipe.
    “Have you become rusty since leaving the Pack?”
    So the nickname had been no coincidence.  But this was definitely no-one I knew from my former