Fire of the Sorceress: Immortal Sorceress, #1

By Krista Walsh

After 900 years, you'd think I'd have cleaned this place up.

 

Believe me, I've tried, and the only thing I've achieved in protecting the balance between magical and mundane is massive burnout.

 

My magic has waned, my motivation is in embers, and my social graces are… let's just say they're lacking.

 

Not helping at all is my ex, the servant of Death binding me to existence. The man I crave with every breath but whose presence in my life risks losing him forever.

 

I'm ready to swear off this world. But when a blood mage with troubling ambitions sets his sights on the city's covens, the voices of my past refuse to let me sit by and do nothing.

 

To stop him, I'll need to dust off decades of indifference, gather whatever allies I haven't driven away, and tap into my forgotten power.

 

It's time to remind myself what I'm capable of. The monsters better start trembling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krista Walsh
• Release date: Feb 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781999492397

Book preview

1

Katerina

I summoned magic into my leather-clad palms and shot a ball of flame at the fleeing harpy. She ducked beneath the hydro electricity wires and veered towards the trees.

Damn screeching vulture. I tore after her, melting a path through the knee-deep February snow.

She disappeared among the maples and birches off the hiking trails of Bridal Veil Falls, and I sprinted over the rocks and fallen trees, dodging the low-hanging branches.

If she’d been smarter and kept to herself, I would have let her go about her business, but she’d cleared more than a few wolves from the area, attacked a group of hunters, and frightened away most of our birds.

A menace to the community, and now a pain in my ass.

For that reason alone, I wanted to set her tail feathers on fire.

She thought she was being sneaky, blending into the bare branches and cedars, but she stood out clear as day to my trained eye. Still, I was almost tempted to leave her.

Years of going after creatures like her had worn away the thrill of the hunt.

I was here out of duty, not passion. That had died decades ago, as had my drive to run around the world dealing with magical problems. And my hiatus was showing. My muscles felt stiff, my magic sluggish and weak, and this harpy was pushing my limits.

For eight hundred and seventy-seven years, I’d done the dirty work, hunting pests of the magical variety, and I was done with keeping a promise that didn’t matter to anyone but myself. I hadn’t asked to become immortal at twenty-four years old. I hadn’t asked to be the sole survivor of a ritual that massacred my entire community and threw me into a never-ending world of confusion and heartbreak.

After this, I was retiring for real. No more dragging my feet through the snow, ruining the soles of my favourite leather boots with slush and mud. No more leaving the house at the ass-crack of dawn or staking out forest and field for my quarry to come out of hiding.

Northern Ontario was supposed to be my escape. I’d moved to Manitoulin Island ten years ago looking for a nice quiet place to rest my bones until my lack of aging forced me to move on.

Unfortunately, the harpy had thought it an equally serviceable refuge.

As I passed under the boughs where she was oh-so-stealthily lurking, I rested my hand on the trunk of the tree. Heat surged under my palm and crept under my elbow-length, fingerless gloves. The runes etched into the leather helped me release my magic in slow, steady waves so I didn’t lose control. But instead of pressing my fire outwards, I reversed the heat and drew it into myself, warming my blood, my bones, my flesh, until I was as warm and toasty as if I stood under a blistering July sun.

The tree, on the other hand, looked like it had endured a harsh winter in an ice field instead of a cozy season guarded by its coniferous neighbours. Frost crept in laced patterns up the trunk into the branches, the leaves turned to white crystal.

The harpy, standing out amid the ice with her ratty black-brown feathers and wrinkled, disturbingly human grey face, glared down at me, her hands frozen to the perch beneath her. Ice crawled over her fingers and up her wrists, over her feet, and around her ankles. Frost sparkled on her heavy wings. She bared her pointed teeth and hissed at me before hawking a red-yellow blob of spit that landed next to my left boot.

I crossed my arms and stared up at her, undaunted by her fury. I did ask nicely.

Why couldn’t you let me be, sorceress?

She spat the term as though it were a dirty word. To be fair, to her it probably was. I’d hunted her across the island and trapped her in a tree when all she wanted was to continue her life of murder and mayhem.

Which, of course, answered her question.

I’ve heard of you. Her raspy voice vibrated in my ears and grated down my spine. The once-mighty warrior, feared the world over for her feats in keeping magical creatures in their place. The wind tells us you’ve lost your way. Weakened. Wavering. Why not let me go?

The harpy’s taunting left a bitter film in my mouth, and not because she was wrong.

On the contrary, the bitch spoke the truth.

A few centuries ago, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The moment she’d eaten her first hunter, I would have turned her into fried harpy and my freezer would have been stocked for months.

Not actually. Harpy meat was stringy and disgusting. Not recommended.

She would, however, have been dead—a single blast of fire from my well-trained fingertips without all this running through the muck.

But I wasn’t the sorceress I used to be. Life had worn me down like water smooths rocks in a river, leaving me filled with so much blah even the people around me lost motivation. I’d gone from being able to summon infernos and creating lightning storms to being lucky if I could get my fireballs to hit their targets before they fizzled out.

The weight of my unending life had created a rut so deep I wasn’t sure I’d ever dig my way out. The purpose that had driven me for so many years was threadbare. I had nothing to spur me on, nothing to make it worthwhile to roll out of bed in the morning.

Despite that, here I was, tracking this oversized chicken to ensure my community remained safe. If she wasn’t about to respect the lengths I was willing to go to, that was her mistake.

Fine, she said when she realized I wasn’t about to back down. I’ll leave your territory and hunt elsewhere. Will that satisfy you?

She asked the question as though she hadn’t royally pissed me off. Back in the day, she never would have dared. Her feathers would have been aquiver with terror.

It was time to show her I wasn’t the complete wash-out she thought I was.

Nope.

I summoned more fire into my hands and sent it after the bird woman above me. The flames should have consumed her, but the moment the ice had melted enough, she broke free of the restraints and launched herself off the branch.

Goddammit.

She flew high, hiding herself in the harsh glare of the muted sunlight breaking through the thin blanket of snow clouds. I cursed.

It seemed it wasn’t only my magic that had grown rusty over the past decades of non-exertion—my instincts were a mess as well. I’d come out here thinking this would be some good wake-up exercise, home in time for breakfast, but I’d underestimated how out of practice I was. In a few short years, I’d regressed all the way back to my skill level growing up—to when I’d been a failure to my teachers and a disappointment to my parents. Go me.

I raced down the bank and followed the frozen stream in the direction she’d flown, leaping over the rocks jutting from the ice. The speck of dark harpy faded into the grey clouds.

Just as I resigned myself to losing my quarry, swallowing the bitter shame of having to call in the Hunter’s Guild to deal with a single stubborn creature, a shriek cut through the air.

I whirled around in time to duck as the harpy swooped at me, talons extended from her twisted black fingers.

While I didn’t begrudge my second chance, I was mystified by her stupidity in returning after her escape. With all the rumours she’d heard, had she missed the part about me being incredibly difficult to kill?

She released another eardrum-rattling screech and darted in for an attempt at my face. I drew fire into my palms and twisted where I stood to follow her with the fireball. It soared past her and the snow-laden incline. Snowmelt tumbled down and filled the path ahead. She’d thrown herself to the left to dodge my magic and now recovered to attack again.

I spun away from her, but not quickly enough. The edge of a razor-sharp claw sliced my cheek.

Even as I hissed through the white-hot pain, I grinned. Nothing like stirring my motivation by making things personal.

With another surge of magic, I let a small flame hover over my fingers and waited for her to come back around.

The successful strike must have boosted her confidence because the cocky pigeon flew in with more speed than I’d ever seen a harpy show and grabbed my shoulders with her clawed toes. The talons pierced my flesh deep into the muscle, and my feet lifted off the ground. For a few metres, she carried me higher, and as soon as we were well above the escarpment, she let go.

A scream of shock lodged in my throat as I hit the first tree, my arms, legs, head striking every branch on the way down. I landed at the top of the escarpment, but not even the dense snow was enough to slow my slide over root and rock towards the pool at the bottom. The ice cracked beneath me, and I dropped into the waist-deep water.

The cold left me gasping, and I summoned my fire to warm myself. Unfortunately, the heat wasn’t enough to dry my soaked clothes, and my black T-shirt and leather pants clung to my skin with an uncomfortable itch.

All right, that’s it.

This ugly chicken wanted to play? We’d play.

I dragged myself out of the pool. Pain screamed at me from every bruise and laceration and likely a few fractured bones. But the minor injuries had already begun to heal in all their prickly, brutal splendour. By tomorrow, I’d be good as new.

Extending my arms out at my sides, I pulled the energy from the frozen ground into myself. Heat bubbled up my legs, through my core, and down my arms, until flames wrapped around them from elbow to fingertip, encasing my gloves and dancing across my palms.

As soon as she came into view again, I formed another fireball and crouched, ready for her to fly within range.

Once upon a time, I could have sent up two massive columns of flame and caught her in a blaze as bright as the sun.

I was a shadow of what I once was, but I’d show her it was enough.

I released the fire in two separate blasts. The first one sailed over her right shoulder, but as she lurched to miss it, the second caught her left wing. The flame jumped from feather to feather with a speed that surprised me as much as it obviously did her.

She screamed, twisted in the air, and hurled herself towards the snow. Before she made it, the fire spread, filling the air with the stench of cooked bird. Her body crashed through the frozen waterfall, hit the rocks behind and rolled into the pool. The ice melted where she landed, and she sank beneath the water. Steam rose into the air, the sun catching the mist in a spray of sparkling diamonds, but no harpy emerged from the bank.

I stood, arms outstretched, palms open, waiting. My shoulder pulsed, and my left hip and ankle throbbed as they bore my weight. Blood dripped into my eyes from what must have been a nasty gash on my forehead, and I dragged the back of my forearm across my face to clear my vision. The heat I’d absorbed spilled through my feet into the ground, and the snow melted into puddles so deep my boots sank into the half-frozen mud. I glanced down at the mess.

Son of a—

Stepping to the side, careful not to slip and fall on my ass to really make this day a winner, I wiped my soles in the snow and returned my attention to where the harpy had crashed.

I walked forward, grimacing as my foot slipped and wet slush spilled over the top of my boot, and approached the steam drifting towards the sky.

Black amid the white, the charred corpse lay curled on its side with not enough left of her to make out many details. Thankfully. Almost nine hundred years, and taking lives still wasn’t my favourite part of the job. Though the whole trying-to-kill-me element certainly made it easier.

I brushed my hands together to mark my task complete. Not the worst day’s work. Not my cleanest, either. Far from it. Kind of a mess, really.

Seriously, I was finished with this thankless work.

The thought had barely entered my head when my phone rang. I pulled it out of the tight pocket against my thigh—I really needed to start wearing men’s clothes to hunt—and registered my housekeeper’s face on the incoming video call.

Maera?

Kat, you’d better get home.

She shifted the camera towards her son, Rhys. He was sitting on the floor, his right side covered in blood from his red hair down to his fingers, his bright green eyes shrouded in a milky white.

A visit from his second sight.

Maera released a shaky breath. It started a few seconds ago, and I think you’re going to want to hear it.

2

Katerina

I trekked back to the parking lot, cursing with every step, and hauled myself into the car. My joints and muscles were getting stiffer by the second. I longed for a hot meal and a hotter bath, but by the words spilling out from between Rhys’s pale lips, all I was about to get was more trouble.

Is he all right? I asked, prepared for Maera to tell me the ambulance was on its way.

He overturned the pot on the stove, she explained. Fortunately it was only just heating up, so he’s not burned.

My chest released its furious grip on my heart, letting me breathe. Not blood all over him, then. Which explained why his mother was concerned but not panicked.

Not for the first time, I reminded myself he wasn’t my son, but that little detail didn’t matter to the long-neglected maternal region of my brain.

I crushed the threatening memories into the back of my mind and focused on the living young man on my phone screen.

Blood. His voice was detached, as empty as his eyes, but beneath the eerie flatness was a tinge of fear, as though he spoke from the depths of a horrible nightmare. So much blood. Rivers of it.

I set the phone on the dashboard, started the car, and pulled onto the road.

Rhys’s breathing came faster, more urgent. The witch seeks history. He rises. They fall. Time is running out.

On a final gasp, he went silent, and I took my eyes off the road long enough to watch him take a breath as he slumped against his mother’s arm.

Well done, my boy, Maera murmured against his stew-slick hair. She shifted the camera towards herself so she could see me, and I focused on the sharp turn up ahead. Any idea what he’s talking about?

I scowled. It could be anyone. So many power-hungry leeches lurking in those covens.

Witches—modern-day sorcerers without any innate, elemental magic—were all that was left after centuries of my people getting killed off by creatures, time, and a decreasing population mixing with mundane bloodlines.

Anyone with a hint of magic in their blood could learn the basics of witchcraft, with their spells and potions, books and knick-knacks, but only the strongest were able to cast anything as remotely powerful as a spell circle.

For the most part, I ignored them as I did any other magical. If they left me alone, I left them alone. But it often happened that a witch grew unsatisfied with the power they had and sought to gain more. Usually at the expense of someone else.

If enough violence was on the horizon to trigger one of Rhys’s sporadic visions, it had to be someone with enough power to make an impact. A short list, but not short enough for me to narrow it down without more information.

I’m about twenty minutes away, I said. I’ll think it over while I drive. Hopefully by the time I’m home, I’ll have an idea.

Should we call the witch hunters?

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. Let’s hold off on that. I’d rather not start a panic if we can avoid it. Call me back if Rhys has anything more to say when he wakes up.

Of course.

I’ll be home as soon as I can.

Maera ended the call, and I beat my hand against the steering wheel.

As I always did when Rhys’s magical ability came out to play, I warred with myself on whether I was more frustrated or relieved that it didn’t show up more often, or prove more reliable when it did.

On the one hand, him developing his ability would help me navigate these magical waters I was so tired of paddling. On the other, each vision dragged him closer to my side of the world. And for good reason, Maera had reservations about her eighteen-year-old son making that shift.

As far as we knew—and I’d known four generations of Maera’s family—Rhys’s second sight hadn’t passed down his mother’s bloodline, which suggested the ability had come from his father. But Jack Byrne had died long before Rhys’s first vision, and we had no way of knowing how often it popped up, what the side effects were, or, well, anything useful.

So far, the visions didn’t cause Rhys any obvious harm besides shaking him up and leaving him a bit dazed and exhausted, but Maera worried. Already he seemed to have stalled in life. After graduation this past year, he’d closed in on himself. What friends he had were mostly online, and what jobs he’d managed to get he couldn’t seem to hold on to. While he didn’t say as much, Maera and I suspected the unpredictability of his second sight made it difficult for him to spend time with people not in the know.

The only interest he showed in anything was his frequent request to join me on my hunts, which did nothing to put his mother at ease.

Everything about the situation convinced me it would be better to walk away from my sole purpose in life. The more distance I put between me and the things that went bump in the night, the less likely Rhys would be drawn into the dangerous side of my world… in theory.

In reality, I worried the nature of his visions would pull him in regardless of where I stood. If they grew intense enough, or if the balance of the world shifted again, it was possible there would be no safer place for him than by my side.

Not something I would ever tell Maera until I had to.

Unfortunately, the lack of detail in what he’d Seen meant I had no idea what sort of problem we now faced.

A witch gaining power at the expense of others was par for the course, but the rivers of blood? That stepped well outside the norm. Was it a spell gone wrong? An external threat closing in on the covens? One mad witch?

The other question, of course, was how much did I care?

The habit of centuries pushed me to look into it and do everything in my power to prevent those red rivers from running. I talked a big game about leaving the hunt behind me and had repeatedly told Maera my intention of following in my vampire bestie’s footsteps—feet up, book open, watching the world go by.

But in all honesty, the idea of drifting through life terrified me.

What would it mean if I gave up my only reason to keep breathing? Without some sure course, I suspected I would part ways with my sanity in a few short decades. How long could someone twiddle their thumbs without going squirrelly?

Beneath that more existential line of thought, my pride nagged at me. Was I ready to give up my reputation as a magical fixer and let someone else step in?

I appreciated what the various hunter organizations—these mixed-magical-mundane groups that had popped up over the past few centuries—tried to do. They’d taken a load off my plate as their reach had expanded. Even so, I did my best to stay away from them. My vow was to maintain the balance between magical and mundane; their aim seemed to be to police it. As a rule, I wasn’t here for that. Grey was not a bad word in my book, and based on the ever-shifting policies in theirs, the magical world was split between dark and give me an excuse.

I didn’t want that mentality seeping into the roots of my community.

But if I struggled to take down one shrewish bird-woman, what were my odds against a powerful blood witch?

My old promise to my dead family pulled me in one direction, my rusty magic in another, and I was left in the middle asking myself where the hell I stood between the two.

The complications of my life tripled in a heartbeat as the temperature in my car dropped. I slammed on the brakes as a soft white mist obscured my view through the windshield then pulled back on itself. My heart slammed against my ribs as I bit back on my growing anger and deep, soul-splitting longing.

When the mists faded, I was no longer alone on the empty stretch of highway. Standing in the middle of it was the last man in the world I expected to see today. Or ever again.

After seventy-five years of me running, turning the other way, and stubbornly avoiding him, Death had finally chosen to break his