Magestorm: The Reckoning Read Online Free Page B

into place.  Instead he stood silently, lost in thought as the hot water rushed over him.
    “Cassandra...”
    Looking to the other witch, Samantha was holding the glass and looked pale , as though she may be sick at any moment.  Cassandra walked over and looked down.  Inside there were fourteen vampire teeth.  The two vampires they had found in the room still had theirs, so where did these come from, they all wondered.  She was not going to let Dhane get away with not talking about it.
    “Can you two give me some time alone with him?”
    Amber and Samantha both nodded and headed off to the other cabin.  After twenty minutes, the shower turned off and Dhane walked into the room to find new clothes.  When he didn’t begin an explanation right away, it was time for his former teacher to start grilling him.
    “ Dhane, what happened?”
    “The vampires found us, so I had to put them down.”
    “And?  Where did you go after the fight here?  What’s with the vampire teeth?”
    “Oh, those.”  He couldn’t keep from smirking about that as he put on a pair of jeans.  “When I killed the ones that showed up here, I realized that more would come.  So, I found other patrols out East and extinguished them.  They’ll investigate those first, being more of their kind missing.”
    Cassandra stood and walked over to him.  They looked into each other’s eyes, the connection they had always shared was still there, and his smirk left.  She still wanted to know about the teeth, which was an atrocious thing to do to a vampire, especially since they had been alive when he did it to them.  He knew he had to tell her something, so he went with the truth.
    “Revenge , for Lila.  And I will feed them to Charles before I kill him.”
    The coldness in his voice gave her a chill.  Fear began to fill her, fear that the spell pages he’d been studying had changed him.  He was on the path to becoming another Algernon; that had to be it.
    Calmly and sincerely, he smiled and put his arms around her and held her against him.  He knew what she was thinking, and she was wrong.  Despite everything, he was firmly in control.
    “Don’t worry, I’m not becoming him.  I have you to help keep me grounded.  But this is not over, and Elisabeth, Heather, Sebastian, they will all pay for the friends they’ve taken from us.  Just have faith in me, as you’ve always had, and I will not let you down.”
    She closed her eyes and returned the hug.  Relief replaced fear after hearing his honest words, spoken with warmth in his voice.  Now, her thoughts of worry for him were replaced with anger towards their enemies.  And if Dhane could so easily dispatch this many vampires in a night, maybe they really did have a chance to overcome.  Just maybe.

 
     
     
    8
     
     
     
    Two werewolves in human skin stood in an alley shaking their heads.  Before them were three vampire bodies, stuffed into a dumpster.  It was odd that they were hidden in this way, because it left evidence of their demise.  Leaving them in the sunlight would’ve cleaned things up nicely.  There would have been nothing but ashes, likely to have blown away in the wind by now.  But then, there was another oddity about the bodies.
    “Ever hear of someone pulling the teeth out of vampires?” the man in the Braves baseball cap asked.
    “ I heard a rumor about someone doing that a long time ago.  He’s dead though, at least he’s supposed to be.”
    “Don’t even say that name.   It’s obvious who did this.”
    The man with a ponytail and goatee turned to his sports-fan friend and cocked a smile.  It was only to try and hide his nervousness.  The great wizard was long dead, but it appeared his son could be taking up the mantle now.  If that was the case, it wasn’t a good proposition for anyone, least of all those who had driven him into hiding.
    “We need to report b ack immediately.  Sebastian will want to see this first hand.”
    They closed the