Fate Forged Read online

  Fate Forged

  Bound Magic: Book 1

  B.P. Donigan

  Fate Forged

  Bound Magic Series™

  Red Adept Publishing, LLC

  104 Bugenfield Court

  Garner, NC 27529

  http://RedAdeptPublishing.com/

  Copyright © 2018 by B.P. Donigan. All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: November 2018

  Cover Art by Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  The sweet smell of vanilla and sugar drifted on the crisp night breeze. Inhaling deeply, I surveyed the dark factory across the street as I considered my options. For the past week, the scent of fortune cookies had drenched my waking thoughts and transformed them into nightmares after dark. At first, I’d convinced myself they were just meaningless bad dreams. Then they started happening every night, each one becoming more vivid and real, until I couldn’t sleep. Every morning, I woke up screaming and shaking in my bed.

  The completely unexplainable pain from the night terrors left me unable to function for hours after I woke. I missed my shifts and under-the-table cash I couldn’t afford to lose. I had rent to pay and a life to live. Boston was expensive. If I didn’t get a handle on my brain malfunction, it wouldn’t be long before I would be sleeping on the streets again. The damn nightmares had finally driven me all the way across town in the middle of the night with a half-formed plan to break into the old factory and prove that they were just bad dreams.

  My internet sleuthing had revealed that the warehouse across the street was the only place in New England that baked and distributed the fortune cookies. That meant it was the one chance that whatever the hell was wrong with me didn’t require a soft, padded room or an emergency lobotomy.

  A reasonable person would’ve probably gotten a brain scan. At a minimum, I should’ve waited until daylight when the factory opened. But I couldn’t take even one more night of the terrible nightmares, and I knew a brain scan wasn’t going to explain anything. I wasn’t particularly superstitious, but I just couldn’t let go of the realness of the nightmares, not to mention the pain in every single dream. Whatever was happening to me was somehow tied to this factory—I knew it in my gut.

  I glared at the warehouse. In the nightmares, I was always tied to a chair in a cold basement—the sweet, thick smell of fortune cookies filling my nose. A blond man with pale skin and flat blue eyes asked questions I refused to answer. Then the torture started. Sometimes he didn’t even ask questions. He just used knives, fists, and pain. The unimaginable agony of multiple nights of torture had transformed me into a desperate woman willing to do anything for a peaceful night’s rest. A little breaking and entering wasn’t going to stand between me and stopping the night terrors.

  An icy breeze slapped me in the face as I crossed the street and approached the small parking lot on the east side of the building. I pulled my hoodie up and moved toward the warehouse, careful not to draw attention to myself as I threaded through pockets of shadow between the streetlights. After dark, the empty lot transformed into a sea of temporary cardboard shelters. The pungent smell of the homeless camp mingled with the cookies in a toxic, cloying scent. A chorus of coughs, squabbles, and incoherent muttering carried through the night as I picked my way around the sleeping bodies.

  Tonight, most were huddled down, buried under whatever they’d scrounged to protect themselves from the cold, pre-fall Boston air. A small knot of men gathered around a glowing metal barrel, their faces hard and eyes glinting under hoods and blankets. I gave them a wide berth. I could defend myself if I had to, but the people weren’t really a threat as long as I followed the rules. I wasn’t challenging them or drawing attention to myself. It had been a dozen years since I’d slept on the streets, but I knew how to blend in as just another person seeking shelter from the cold.

  Checking to make sure I wasn’t followed, I adjusted my backpack, pulled my long, braided hair free of my raised hoodie, and slipped into an alley at the side of the factory. I hurried forward, sending rats scampering behind garbage bins, until I reached two smallish windows at ground level. The thick glass windows were clear holdovers from the warehouse’s 1900s origins, and they hadn’t been covered with bars. It would be a tight fit, but I was tall and slender, with more lean muscle than curves. I could squeeze through.

  Squatting, I checked each one. Both were locked with no alarms. Satisfied that the old building had no tricky security, I donkey-kicked my heel through one of the panes. The sound of shattering glass echoed into the quiet night.

  My ears ring with the tinkling of broken glass. Zip ties dig into the bloody skin around my wrists as I strain my fingers closer together. Every twist of my numb hands brings me closer to freedom. A relentless chill curls inside my bones from the damp, cold basement.

  A shiver runs through me. Everything hurts.

  Another blow lands without warning, and air escapes my lungs in a forceful huff. I gasp and double over until only the restraints hold me to the chair.

  Pain. My whole world is pain. Tangy, hot liquid coats my tongue, and I realize I’ve bitten it. The taste and the thick, cloying scent clogging my nostrils makes my empty stomach heave, and I gag. I gulp in air and try to straighten. I won’t let them break me.

  “Go to hell!” I spit at the blond man looming over me.

  His upper lip curls on one side. A twitch of his fingers brings another man toward me with a broken glass bottle.

  The vision ended, leaving me on the ground, cradling my head in my fists. Several minutes ticked by while I rocked back and forth, dragging air into my lungs as I tried to manage the pain. The episodes were getting worse, coming more often. I couldn’t handle this anymore. I had to know I wasn’t making up the visions—that I wasn’t going insane. I needed to see the factory basement. I had no idea what I would do then, but at least I w
ould know if I was crazy or not.

  I reached through the broken window, unlocked it from the inside, and slipped carefully through. The small storefront had a peeling Formica sales counter stretching along one side of it and shelves lining the walls, full of various fortune-cookie offerings and custom T-shirts.

  The thick, sweet scent inside the building made my stomach rumble. I could almost taste the cookies, reminding me that I’d skipped not only my shift at the shelter, but with it, my dinner. My attention snagged on a metal shelf filled with bags of fortune cookies for sale beside the register. I snatched one up and stuffed it in my backpack. I paused, shook my head at how much I’d changed, and tossed a dollar bill on the counter as I passed to the employee side.

  Behind the sales counter stood a single door, which led to a tiny back office. Papers littered the surface of a small desk, along with an ancient desktop computer, and behind that was an unmarked door. That had to be the basement. I opened the heavy metal door and found a wooden staircase leading down to a pitch-black floor.

  A pulse of fear stopped me, and I paused, chewing on my lower lip. Someone should cue the horror movie soundtrack. Despite my desperate state, I knew going downstairs was a bad idea. Even if I headed down there and found the exact basement from my nightmares, it wouldn’t prove anything. It wouldn’t necessarily stop the nightmares either. And the sound of the breaking glass could have caught someone’s attention earlier—cops could be headed my way at that very moment.

  The fear didn’t stop me for long. At that point, I would have done anything to make the visions and torture stop. And if I was right, the episodes had something to do with this basement, where the smell of fortune cookies made my mouth water and my insides clench with remembered pain. I pushed my doubts aside. I needed to see what was down there in the dark, scary basement from my nightmares.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out a flashlight and my knife. The familiar hilt fit perfectly into the well-formed calluses on my hand. The weight and balance of the weapon was comforting. When I was sixteen, I’d found it at a pawn shop and worked for weeks hustling enough cash to buy it. A skinny teenage girl spending most of her nights sleeping on the street needed a knife in her hoodie pouch. It was one of those large utility knives used by World War II vets. The pawn shop guy had called it a Mark 2 Ka-Bar. I’d named it Ripper.

  Ripper had a solid seven-inch blade and a long history. When I was old enough, I’d spent countless hours hopping around bars and winning impossible bets. Ripper was my constant companion and, on a few occasions, the only way I’d made it out of some janky situations.

  I propped open the door with my backpack and peered into the dark mouth of the basement. I just needed to get down the creepy stairs, see the basement that my nightmares were made of, and get the hell out.

  The stair creaked on the first step, and I froze. Sweeping the flashlight from side to side, I tried to chase away the dark edges, but the beam lit only a narrow path in front of me. Shadows lurked all around. The back of my neck tingled. Fear spiraled down my spine as scenes from slasher movies flooded my mind. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run.

  Not excited about the idea of an emergency trip to the hospital, I forced myself to take the stairs slowly, one at a time, until I reached the cold cement floor. A bare light bulb hung in the center of the room over an upended chair. I pulled the string, and light flooded the basement.

  Light flares from above. I squint. Swirls of dust float down from the exposed insulation in the ceiling, glowing like fireflies as my eyes adjust to the new brightness.

  Fresh fear pounds through my veins. A line of men descends the creaky stairs, their bodies draped in long robes, and my stomach twists in fear. The shadows masking their faces claw a path toward me like demons coming to steal my soul. The men stand shoulder to shoulder in a half-circle in front of me. Their auras flare with violent magic, and the dark glow is tangible around them, like heavy fog lifting from the ground.

  The leader steps forward, light reflecting off a full head of blond hair. I stare into his ice-blue eyes.

  Blood pounds in my ears, and heat prickles against my skin as I bare my teeth, wishing I had some way to strike out at him. But he has already taken everything from me. I’m powerless and completely at his mercy.

  A smile twists across the blond’s face. With confident ease, he flicks open a small knife and slices swiftly across his hand, filling his palm with blood as crimson as his aura. Energy pulses within the thick liquid.

  I twisted in a full circle, reeling from the vision that overlaid what I currently saw. The stairs were in the same place, and the ceiling had the same exposed insulation. The men in robes stood over by the wall, chanting. A surprising word bounced through my mind: Magic.

  This isn’t real. Magic isn’t real.

  Another episode pushed through more forcefully.

  My stomach throbs. There is a hollow, piercing ache in the center of me. I’ve lost something important... magic. The magic is gone, and it hurts. In its place, they’ve left questions I refuse to answer.

  Utter terror grips me as I realize that at some point, I will break. They’ll wait for my magic to return and start again. They’ll rip the life energy from me over and over as I endure round after round of soul-searing pain.

  He’ll never stop.

  I can’t. I can’t do it again. It’s only a matter of time until they break me. And when I tell them what they want to know, not only will I die, everyone I love will too.

  Straining my fingers, I pull hard against the sharp plastic zip ties around my wrists. Through swollen eyes, I glare at the circle of men and their leader. I hate him with every ounce of my soul.

  Finally, my fingers reach a sigil on the inside of my wrist, and I channel a spark of magic from it. They haven't taken everything yet, the bastards. A small metal charm lands in my palm—an access point to my source.

  It’s not a lot, but it’s enough for what I need to do. Hope flares wild in my chest, and I try not to let it show on my face.

  I cast my mind away from my surroundings. Double vision hits, and I see a young woman with long auburn hair, holding—of all things—a mop. Her hair is tied back in a braid, and she dances around a wet linoleum floor, earbuds and an ancient Walkman providing music I can’t hear.

  She looks happy.

  “What the actual hell?” I cried out, my voice shaking.

  I saw... me. The woman pushing around a mop at the hospital was me. I’d just seen myself through someone else’s eyes!

  The realization hit me—those were someone else’s memories. The torture and murder plaguing my nightmares had happened to a real person. His name popped into my head with complete clarity: Marcel. I didn’t know how—maybe the name came with the memories. All of the crazy was straining my brain. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

  I whipped my gaze around the room with new realization. Tossed carelessly on its side, the chair held no sign of Marcel, the men torturing him, or anything tying my visions to reality. Other than the panic gripping me, everything seemed normal.

  “What’s happening to me?” You’ve lost it, Maeve. You’re completely batshit nuts.

  The empty basement had no chance to answer before a vision grasped me again and pulled me under.

  The blond grabs a fistful of my hair in his bloody palm and wrenches my head backward. His calm is gone, and menace flies from his lips. “You can’t hide anymore.”

  I gather every bit of magic coiled within me and shove it outward.

  An electric storm explodes in the room. Magic power rips through my captors. They scream in agony. Their red-black magic twists away from them, obeying the call toward me.

  “No!” the blond yells, lunging forward.

  A harsh wail of pain and pleading rips from me. “Remember!”

  The blond slices his knife into the flesh of my neck, ending all the pain.

  With shaking hands, I scrubbed away the sting of the blade from my ne
ck. The double sense of the vision and my current surroundings sent my heart pounding in a staccato rhythm so fast, it felt as if two organs were beating inside me. Sweat plastered my clothes to my skin as I tried to sort out how I could’ve possibly been experiencing someone else’s memories.

  I searched the room, desperate for something to anchor me to reality. This was more than I bargained for. I didn’t know how this was even possible. A glint behind the chair caught my attention, and I reached for the small, round piece of metal. It was partially covered in blood, but I resisted the urge to drop it and wipe my hand on my jeans. Rubbing my thumb across the surface, I discovered something etched into the charm—two overlapping triangles, each a mirror image of the other, with their bases looping out to the sides.

  My fingers shook. The design matched the tattoo on my arm.

  Chapter Two

  The bus pulled away from the cobbled sidewalk just outside Downtown Crossing in Boston, leaving behind a cloud of gray exhaust that floated in the cold evening air. Riding around the city for the past hour with the charm squeezed tight in my fist, I’d tried to figure out if I had completely lost my grip on reality. I still wasn’t sure.

  I forced my fingers to relax. The round face had a hole at the top where a small ring could be placed. I wondered if Marcel had worn it like a necklace or perhaps a bracelet. I had no idea why it had the same symbol as my tattoo. I’d never seen the mark anywhere else. But I also didn’t really know where mine had come from. I’d had it since I could remember, and my birth parents weren't around to ask. Thank God. I didn’t want to meet the type of idiots who tattooed a toddler. Clearly, I’d been better off without them in my life.

  The round, smooth metal seemed unusually warm in my hand as I walked through the dark, empty streets of the city just past midnight. I was stalling. I needed to go home and get some sleep before my shifts the next day—I’d already missed two nights at my restaurant gig—but my tiny basement apartment was two buses and a transfer away. Besides, sleep was a distant reality that would definitely end in more nightmares. I headed away from bed and back toward the city, needing space to clear my head.