Mages Unbound: Book 2 of the Fifth Mage War Read online

  MAGES

  UNBOUND

  Book Two of the

  Fifth Mage War

  LAURA ENGELHARDT

  The book’s story and characters are fictitious. The setting and certain places, businesses, and long-established institutions are mentioned, but their depictions are not intended to be factual. Any resemblance of the characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Laura Engelhardt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written consent of the author. Requests for permission should be emailed to [email protected]. Join the Fifth Mage War reader list at https://lauraengelhardt.com/ to receive a FREE short story.

  ISBN: 9798678023056 (Print)

  Cover design by: Rena Violet

  Editing by: Lottie Clemens

  Print Layout by: Booknook.Biz

  Special thanks to my fabulous beta-readers, Carol, Jannie, & Mark.

  This book is dedicated to the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose Sword & Sorceress anthology launched the careers of dozens of female fantasy authors, and inspired many more of us to write. We stand on the shoulders of those who come before.

  Published in the United States of America

  November 2020

  Welcome New Readers!

  Mages Unbound begins where Sirens Unbound left off. If you haven’t read Sirens Unbound, you can either:

  • Dive in anyway. You’ll catch up :)

  • Get Book One here: https://lauraengelhardt.com/books.

  • Skim the summary: https://lauraengelhardt.com/sirens-unbound-summary.

  The Cast of Characters in the Appendix will help you get all the people sorted out.

  Hello Again Loyal Fans!

  If it’s been a while since you finished Sirens Unbound, and you want to refresh your memory before diving in, check out the summary on my website (https://lauraengelhardt.com/sirens-unbound-summary) and/or skim the Cast of Characters in the Appendix.

  Join my Reader List at https://lauraengelhardt.com/, and I’ll send you a FREE short story set in the world of the Fifth Mage War!

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend,

  Nor services to do, till you require.

  Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

  Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

  Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

  When you have bid your servant once adieu.

  Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

  Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

  But like a sad slave stay and think of nought

  Save where you are how happy you make those.

  So true a fool is love that in your will,

  Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

  Sonnet No. 57, by William Shakespeare

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 2 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 3 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 4 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 5 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 6 ~ The Coral Sea, Australia

  Chapter 7 ~ Boston, USA

  Chapter 8 ~ Boston, USA

  Chapter 9 ~ The Blue Hills Preserve, USA

  Chapter 10 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 11 ~ Boston, USA

  Chapter 12 ~ Boston, USA

  Chapter 13 ~ Somewhere over the Atlantic

  Chapter 14 ~ Ascension Island

  Chapter 15 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 16 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 17 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 18 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 19 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 20 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 21 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 22 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 23 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 24 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Chapter 25 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 26 ~ Brisbane, Australia

  Chapter 27 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 28 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 29 ~ On the Pacific Ocean

  Chapter 30 ~ On the Pacific Ocean

  Chapter 31 ~ New York City, USA

  Chapter 32 ~ Canberra, Australia

  Chapter 33 ~ Townsville, Australia

  Chapter 34 ~ Brisbane, Australia

  Chapter 35 ~ Atlantis & Boston, USA

  Chapter 36 ~ Washington, D.C., USA

  Chapter 37 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 38 ~ Atlantis

  Chapter 39 ~ Lancaster, California

  Chapter 40 ~ Lancaster, California

  Chapter 41 ~ Atlantis

  About Notes

  Appendix

  More by the Author

  About the Author

  Chapter 1 ~ Washington D.C., USA

  Many consider it cruel for sirens to maintain a parental relationship with their latent children. Because of Morgan le Fay’s geas, latent sirens can’t comprehend what sirens are, and once latent sirens reach puberty, they are as susceptible to the siren spell as any fertile human. Breaking with your children while they are still young enough to recover is widely considered less harmful to their development than sending them away in their early teens. Transitioned siren support groups now meet in every siren city to help you deal with this and other aspects of your transition.

  – Sirens: An Overview for the Newly-Transitioned, 3rd ed. (2015), by Mira Bant de Atlantic, p. 109.

  Mary decided she didn’t actually care what the neighbors thought and opened the windows of the rooftop conservatory wide. It was a hot, sunny day with barely any breeze. September in D.C. was typically warm, but today was especially humid. She might have been more comfortable keeping the room hermetically-sealed with the climate control carefully set at sixty-eight degrees, but today she needed to feel the world outside. To know that there was a real world out there.

  She walked over to the file cabinet in the corner of the overly-bright space. Mary had still been performing when they’d bought the townhouse, and so had decided to turn the rooftop conservatory into her music room. But it had been a long time since she’d really come up here; she’d stopped practicing a couple of years ago when she let her solo work slip completely.

  Today though, she wanted to see the sky while she sang. She knew she had to try something other than drinking to help her come to terms with the bombshell of truth Thomas had dropped on her last week.

  Why did Mike insist I take personal leave? Mary thought, not for the first time. Everyone needed some structure in life, and the lack of routine was making this whole situation worse. Despite what Mike thought, being busy with the choir wasn’t why she refused to schedule an appointment with the therapist he’d found.

  Mary wondered for a moment if she should call work and tell them she’d be back tomorrow. But after taking last week off to handle her latest “family crisis,” she wasn’t sure what she’d say when she got back. Still, she had to do something. Today was the first day since Tuesday that she’d even gotten fully dressed.

  And in truth, the only reason she’d done that was because the mage-technician was finally coming to fix the garbage disintegrator this afternoon. That small event and four Advil made all the difference.

  “Oh, you’re up there.” Mike’s voice sounded faint against the louder sound of rush-hour traffic wafting up from the street, and Mary listened as Mike started up the stairs.

  Mary felt a slight pang of guilt. He was
worried about her. She’d told him not to hover; that didn’t help. Today, she wanted to sing; singing would help.

  “I’m practicing, Mike,” she called out, hoping he’d just go to work. But Mike kept coming up anyway, pausing when he reached the top of the stairs. Mary didn’t look up from the open drawer, even though she could feel him staring at her, appraising her, wondering if it was safe to leave her home alone.

  She paused for a moment, enjoying the uncertainty he felt. Fair penance for making her stay home till she could “sort things out.” But then immediately felt guilty: none of this was his fault, and he was trying to be helpful, as heavy-handed and awkward as it was. Mary sighed and turned around.

  God, she had married a handsome man! Honey-dark hair, still, even at fifty-six. Mike had the same solid form that he had when she first met him: blue eyes, framed by heavy eyebrows that made him look Greek, with a strong jaw and broad shoulders. But today, he seemed haggard.

  “You haven’t practiced in years,” Mike said, with the look Mary recognized as him testing the air for a lie.

  But Mary wasn’t lying. She wasn’t going to jump out the window, and she wasn’t going to drink herself into oblivion after he left for work like she had all week. The disintegrator repairman was coming this afternoon, after all. And she hadn’t spent over three thousand dollars on the platinum service plan just to throw herself out the window when it came time to take advantage of her foresight.

  “I feel like singing, Mike,” Mary said and turned back to the file cabinet. She wasn’t being fair to him. “I’m not going to make an appointment with any doctor until I’m ready. I need to sing — I don’t need a therapist.”

  Mike didn’t need to be a truth-teller to taste her truth. Mary was done drinking her feelings into numbness; now she just wanted to pretend for a while that everything was still the same. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to some stranger.

  She rifled through the hanging files, searching for the piece of music she had been hearing in her mind since she woke up with a pounding head. She wasn’t usually drawn to Mozart, but last night she’d heard a Mozart aria in her dreams: “Vendetta ti chiedo, la chiede il tuo cor!” Over-the-top, of course. But that’s what opera was. And now she was a character in her own opera.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Mary?” Mike asked, taking a few hesitant steps in her direction.

  But Mary was too familiar with Mike to fall for his truth-testing gambit. She looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m as well as I can be, Mike,” Mary said, turning back to the files. “I need to sing now.” She added a little force to her tone, and perhaps that persuaded Mike that she could safely be left alone.

  “All right,” he said. “But if you need me — for anything — just call.”

  Mary nodded but didn’t turn around. If she gave him an opening, he’d try to comfort her again, and Mary didn’t want a hug. She wanted to sing angry songs. Vengeance songs. Songs of betrayal. Songs of rage. Because this morning when she woke up, Mary decided that she wasn’t going to be sad, she was going to be angry.

  The morning flew by. While she hadn’t practiced like this in years, it wasn’t like she hadn’t sung at all — she did direct the choir after all and often sang bits with them when they rehearsed. Still, it was a relief that her voice didn’t seem to have lost as much power as she’d expected. The body was an instrument, and age took its toll on singers, especially out-of-practice singers.

  Mary worked on Donna Anna’s Don Giovanni aria well into the afternoon before realizing she needed to eat. Her heels clunked loudly on the uncarpeted stairs as she tromped down to the ground floor. She was glad she’d never been able to pick out a runner because the noise was rather satisfying.

  Satisfaction was a much better emotion to feel than despair or even the half-hearted rage she had tried to conjure with her singing. Even if she hadn’t really been able to feel any anger this morning, at least she’d discovered how little of her operatic voice she’d lost. Mary frowned slightly as the thought crossed her mind that her unusual stamina may be a result of her siren ancestry. She felt her stomach churn, hating the idea that she would have to think about her own self differently now that she knew her real family history.

  Damn them all, Mary thought, the profanity lingering in her mind as she stomped into the kitchen. She took a glass from the cabinet and opened the freezer to see if, by some miracle, there was any vodka left. Though there was no miracle about it. Vodka wasn’t her first choice, so there was at least an inch or two left in the bottle. Mary poured her drink, then paused.

  There was no point in putting the bottle back with almost nothing left. She emptied the rest of it into her glass. At least she hadn’t been reduced to drinking from the bottle. Mary started to toss the empty bottle into the disintegrator when she remembered why the technician was coming in the first place.

  “You can’t put glass in a garbage disintegrator,” the Danjou Enterprises customer service representative had lectured.

  “I’ve done it before,” Mary countered, feeling oddly defensive. Surely dropping a little glass into the machine couldn’t really cause it to smoke like that?

  “Well, glass is made of silica, and putting glass into the disintegrator upsets the silica-salt balance of the machine. Readjusting that requires mage sight, so we’ll have to send a mage-technician, and they’re hard to schedule.”

  “I have the platinum service plan—” Mary began, but the representative cut her off.

  “The manual clearly explains that you can’t throw any silica-based compounds, especially glass, into the machine, or you void your warranty. Everyone knows silica-salt can’t be enchanted.” The representative’s tone implied that she thought Mary was an idiot.

  But Mary had never read the manual. She never read appliance manuals. They reminded her too much of her mother, typing away late at night, supposedly writing appliance manuals on a contract basis. But that, too, had been a lie.

  Thinking about Mom had made Mary start to cry. Her mother, supposedly dead for thirty years, was alive. Mary had actually spoken to “Mom” only a few weeks ago when she’d pretended to be the home health aide sent to help Amy.

  Her mother, who had missed her Milan premiere, missed her wedding, never even met her grandchildren … was alive and well in Boston, of all places.

  This stranger could call herself, “Mom,” all she wanted: real family showed up. And “Mom” hadn’t shown up for her in decades. Mary’s real mother never would have abandoned her. This resurrected “Mom” no longer had any right to call herself that.

  But “Mom” had shown up for Amy, and as far as Mary knew, she was still in Amy’s apartment. Worse, Thomas and Cordelia had known Mom was still alive and said nothing. Nothing! For thirty years! And so, Mary had spent the past week crying. Crying, drinking, and throwing up. But at least all her blubbering had made the customer service rep take pity on her, and she’d adjusted the mage-technician’s schedule so they’d be here this afternoon.

  It was three now, and the window was one-to-four. They had better show up. So stupid that such an expensive machine could be ruined just because you threw a glass bottle into it. Well now that Amy was a mage, she’d probably be able to explain it to her.

  Not that Mary cared. She finished her drink and put the glass in the dishwater. Mary didn’t want to care about anything. The taste of vodka was bitter on her tongue, but Mary didn’t feel it. She should have just gotten a bottle of water.

  Sirens. Mages. Curses. ‘Not Mom’s fault,’ Thomas had claimed. No one’s fault. It didn’t matter if there was no one was to blame; Mary was sick of being sad, and the vodka wasn’t helping her get to the point of blissful numbness it had before. If she had to feel something, she wanted to feel angry. Anger would be a nice change.

  If only composers wrote angry arias for sopranos. Instead, they wrote them for tenors who’d been tricked into believing their innocent lovers had betrayed them. But Mary didn’t want tortured ope
ratic plots. The truth was simple: her mother had abandoned her. Abandoned her and Amy to be with Thomas and Cordelia instead. The songs written for abandoned sopranos were songs of despair, not rage. And while that might be more realistic, Mary didn’t want to feel like this anymore.

  Her heels clicked loudly on the wood floor as she climbed back up the four flights to her conservatory. She didn’t usually put on shoes when she wasn’t planning to go out, but then she didn’t usually practice arias like she was still performing. Getting fully dressed made her seem less depressed, though. Fake it till you make it, Mary supposed.

  She puffed a little at the top of the stairs, looking out the windows before opening the bottle of water she’d brought up. You couldn’t see the whole city from here — there were lots of buildings in D.C. taller than their townhouse — but they had a corner lot, and the light was brilliant.

  Mary didn’t even feel the vodka anymore. She must have built up too much of a tolerance over the past week. Something she should perhaps worry about, but instead, she just walked over to her file cabinet of music to find a lied to fit her mood. If arias wouldn’t suit, she’d find a German song. German always sounded a little angry.

  She flipped through the files rapidly, searching for something that wasn’t love or madness or despair. Her hand hesitated. There was a sheet pushed in between the hanging files, quite out of order. She’d performed it in high school: Die Lorelei. Another story song, another song that didn’t fit her mood. But her hand hesitated: she hated disorder. She could at least put it in the correct folder.

  Die Lorelei. An 1820s Hesse poem about a siren indifferently combing her hair as she reaped destruction. The music didn’t fit her mood. Or maybe it did — she’d have to sing it to find out.

  She sat down at the upright piano near the open window. Mary knew it was stupid to leave the window open — bad for the instrument — but she liked the connection to the outdoors. She hadn’t sung this song in such a long time that she played the melody through twice before trying to sing it. The A-flat above middle C stuck a bit. I’ll need to get the piano tuner in as well, she thought before starting to sing.