Marked For Death: A Dark Urban Fantasy Novel Becca Blake (fiction novels to read .txt) 📖

the hall to the enchanting room. A shelving unit with glass doors along the back wall held a myriad of tools and vials with strangely colored substances, the contents of which I couldn’t even begin to guess. Five metal disks of various sizes hung from the ceiling, surrounding a pedestal in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. The disks were covered with symbols that I didn’t recognize as part of any human language.

A mounted rack held a variety of weapons, and I picked mine out from the lineup.

Ed took it from me and turned it over in his hands, examining it for several minutes before he set it on the pedestal. “This is a fine blade. It will serve you well.”

He retrieved a small packet from a drawer and replaced his glasses with a thick pair of golden goggles. Without stopping to ask my permission, he cleaned off my arm with a small wipe and punctured my skin with the needle from the packet.

I yelped in surprise and jerked my arm away, but the damage had already been done. He handed me the rest of the packet, then hurried back to the center of the room with my blood. He clicked the syringe into a metal case and added a thick red substance from another vial. Using the device as a pen, he drew a circle and strange runes around the blade with the mixture.

“The wonders of modern medicine!” he said while he worked. “No more dirty blades to the palm like they used to do for these rituals. A dreadfully painful place to make a cut, by the way. I never quite understood that. But we have these sterilized needles now—much better!”

“What was that for?” I found a cotton pad in the packet and held it against my arm to stop the bleeding. “I didn’t have to do this for my last enchanted weapon.”

“Oh, this isn’t typical.” He stayed in constant motion, bouncing up and down on the soles of his feet, even when he stood in one place. “I don’t do this for everyone. Mostly the commanders and Council members.”

“You don’t do what, exactly?”

“A soul binding. This will bind the blade to you, help it guide your strikes—very useful trick in combat.”

With the remaining blood, he drew more intricate details within the circle to create symbols similar to the ones on the disks above us.

I inched closer. As annoyed as I was about the invasive blood draw, curiosity about the process got the better of me. I knew next to nothing about how alchemy worked. “Where did you learn how to do all of this?”

Ed removed the empty syringe from the metal case and tossed it in the trash can, ignoring my question. He closed the door and dimmed the lights, then paused his work for the first time since we entered the enchanting room.

“Ms. Collins, do you know why humans can use magic?”

“Of course,” I said. “Controlling our emotions lets us harness the energy—”

“No, no, no. No. Not how. Why. Why we have the ability to channel that energy in the first place.”

It had been years since I learned the fundamentals of magic in training, but I’d never wondered why humans could use magic. We’d only been taught how, and since that was all I needed to know to do my job, it had never crossed my mind to ask for more details.

“Of course you don’t.” His grin looked devilish in the low lighting. “No one talks about it. It’s not a secret or anything. People just don’t care about the ‘why’ of it anymore.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. I was sure he was putting on a show for dramatic effect, but that didn’t make it any less creepy.

“Magic is not native to this world,” Ed continued. “It can’t be found naturally on our plane of existence. It all comes from elsewhere. The magic we use as Arbiters, the dark magic used by Oathbreakers and cultists—it all shares the same origin: dragon blood.”

“Dragon blood,” I repeated. It didn’t sound any less ridiculous coming from my own lips. This had to be an elaborate prank.

Ed ignored my skepticism and nodded enthusiastically. “When the rift to our world was first opened in ancient times, the dragons came through first. Before the demons. They could change their shape to look like us, to live among humans. And as you can imagine, some of them were… curious.”

“Curious?”

He chuckled like a middle school boy who just told a dirty joke. “Yes. And their blood has been passed down for thousands of years. At this point, most humans have at least a little. You can’t do anything with it without training, of course. Like a muscle you don’t know you have unless you’re shown how to use it. But the ability is there for just about everyone.”

“Assuming that’s all true, what happened to the dragons?”

“Gone. Dead. Left. Doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is that we have their blood, and no matter how diluted it gets, it gives us their magic. They were the ones who showed us how to enchant our weapons and fight back against the demons once they arrived.”

I was starting to regret asking him for details. Not ten minutes ago, the man had been trying to get rid of me. Now, he was taking the time to tell me fairy tales as though they were a history lesson.

“What you’re about to see here today is a rare gift. I don’t take the time to show this to many. Hope you’re ready.” He dusted a sparkling powder over the pedestal and turned the lights all the way off, flooding the room with darkness.

A shudder rippled through my spine as the alchemist began chanting in a language unlike any I’d ever heard. The noises were sharp and rasping, sprinkled with guttural grunts. An echo followed his voice.

I gradually became aware that the echo was my own voice, somehow forming the same strange noises. Horrified, I tried to stop speaking,