Hectic (Arcane Mage Series Book 2)

  Hectic

  Arcane Mage Series - Book 2

  T.S. Snow

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1. Bastille

  2. Bastille

  3. Charisma

  4. Theo

  5. Charisma

  6. Charisma

  7. Charisma

  8. Charisma

  9. Blaze

  10. Charisma

  11. Theo

  12. Charisma

  13. Charisma

  14. Charisma

  15. Charisma

  16. Charisma

  17. Charisma

  18. Charisma

  19. Andres

  20. Charisma

  21. Andres

  22. Charisma

  23. Charisma

  24. Charisma

  25. Andres

  26. Charisma

  27. Charisma

  28. Andres

  29. Charisma

  30. Bastille

  31. Charisma

  32. Blaze

  33. Logan

  34. Charisma

  35. Charisma

  36. Charisma

  37. Blaze

  38. Charisma

  39. Charisma

  40. Charisma

  41. Andres

  42. Charisma

  43. Charisma

  44. Charisma

  45. Bastille

  Epilogue

  Also by T.S. Snow

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Hectic by T.S. Snow

  Copyright © 2020 by T.S. Snow. All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. They are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design: CJ Romano @CoversbyCJRomano

  Proofreading: Lorie Collins

  Formatting: AC Wilds

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  To Gatti,

  For all the hours on the phone brainstorming.

  I love you,

  But Andres still isn’t getting a top hat.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a Reverse Harem romance. That means a hell lot of dicks to one girl, and she doesn’t have to pick a favorite. Hectic is book two of the Arcane Mage series and needs to be read in the correct order.

  That being said, dear family, thanks for buying my book, now please forget it exists and go read something else. There’s sex. And cursing. And have I mentioned sex?

  Trust me, you don’t want to read this.

  Don’t make it weird.

  Prologue

  Logan

  Charisma was dead.

  I stared down at the phone in my hands as my grip tightened more and more, until the fucking thing shattered in a puff of black electronic dust. Blood welled in my palm from where the cracked bits of the screen broke my skin, but I felt nothing.

  There was no pain, just raw anger coursing through my veins like molten lava.

  Charisma was dead. Blown to bits, just like that.

  My vision tunneled and blackened, and I lost control of my magic. It snapped like a tethered string, taking with it all my carefully laid plans.

  Darkness descended in my office as orbs of dark matter appeared one after the other. They started to spiral around me like a hurricane, wreaking havoc inside the room as they broke everything they touched. I heard the sound of glass shattering, furniture flying around, but I was too far gone to care.

  Weeks of planning, fucking months.

  All gone in a puff of smoke.

  All gone with her.

  I didn’t know what to do. I’d have to start over from scratch, find another Magical Engineer who would be good enough to help me, who would ally with the Nightshades. How much more time could I waste on this search, though?

  How much more powerful would he become? How many more people would he hurt while I went back to searching for someone who would be competent enough to help me take him down?

  Charisma had been perfect. She had been more than a little crazy and messy, but even I’d been forced to acknowledge how brilliant she was when it came to developing tech. Didn’t hurt that she was also a walking wet dream when she wasn’t driving me crazy and wasting my time.

  I grabbed my pocket watch, the one she’d “tweaked”, as she called it. The one she had made so much better in no more than a few minutes. She’d given me so much hope that I’d succeed with what I’d planned.

  How dare she get blown up when I needed her to ensure my carefully planned revenge took hold?

  How dare she get my hopes up and then just… die?

  She was supposed to be better than that. The wards in her training room alone should’ve been enough to contain any explosion.

  So how could she have just gone and gotten herself killed?

  An accident; that was what my informant had said. Somehow, I very much doubted that.

  She’d been murdered; I knew it with the same certainty I knew my name.

  My fist tightened and my lips thinned as I stuck my MET back in my pocket.

  I would kill whoever had murdered my Magical Engineer and I wouldn’t let anyone stand in my way.

  1

  Bastille

  Adrenaline pulsed through my veins as I carefully made my way down the street, using the cover of darkness to set my plan into motion. The building I had my eyes on had yellow police tape blocking the front exit, so I turned to the alleyway that would lead to the back entrance instead.

  My hands were sweaty, so I rubbed them against my jeans. I was nervous as fuck, but I couldn’t lose my cool. Nerves would cause stupid mistakes, and I couldn’t afford to make a single error.

  The consequences would be too high.

  The alleyway smelled like piss and mold; a terrible combination if I ever saw one, and I was a Necromancer. I literally took power from the dead.

  I quickened my pace, sending a silent prayer to the Goddess that at least there was this entrance to begin with.

  The aftermath of the explosion had been so bad, I was shocked there weren’t guards throughout the whole perimeter of the street and the building. Human police and the Arcane Mage Intelligence Agency were slacking, but their error was my gain. Although, considering humans thought this had been a gas leak, it was mostly AMIA who was lacking.

  Didn’t mean I had a lot of time to pussyfoot around here. I had to go in and out, fast, before they came back.

  I could not afford to be caught.

  Sweat beaded my forehead as I opened the back door to the building and carefully made my way through the dark corridor. I wanted to reach into my pocket, grab my phone and use my flashlight to illuminate the way, but I didn’t dare try.

  Coming here tonight had been a crazy risk, but I owed it to Char to find out what had truly happened. Most importantly, to find out who did this to her.

  My best friend.

  My Charisma.

  I clenched my fists at the sudden burst of anger, evening out my breathing to stay in charge. I had to do this, for her.

  I’d already failed her once. This was the least I could do.

  And then… Maybe… maybe I could say goodbye to her. Maybe I could talk to her just one mor
e time, hear her voice.

  I needed the chance to see her again, even if all I saw was an echo of who she used to be.

  It would give me some closure before I allowed myself to grieve.

  Part of me refused to believe she was truly dead. Charisma had always been so crafty, so full of surprises. She was one hell of a Magical Engineer and mage in general—I didn’t care what the stupid Arcane community thought of her. Being a strong mage wasn’t only about your power level, but about how you used your resources, how your actions and spells impacted others. Brute force took you nowhere. Casting was all about finesse, about knowing how to accomplish big results with as little magic as possible.

  It was one of the things that separated Necromancers from the other branches of magic. Because we dealt with the dead, we learned the importance of making every second count, every little bit of power.

  I opened the door to the stairs, wishing I had one of the Magically Enhanced Technology Arcane Battle Mages liked so much. If I did, I could cast an orb of light that would allow me to see the way without risking someone else seeing it. It’d make getting caught harder.

  At least most of the street had been evacuated, so the risks of me being seen were minimal. Or so I hoped. Hanging around a blast site the same night there had been what the human authorities had called a gas explosion would be pure stupidity.

  Unless you were a Necromancer trying to raise the mortal remains of the woman you loved so you could try to use the echo of her memories to find out who had murdered her.

  I might not be a Soulbinder or have the ability to conjure souls and speak to the dead, but I could use someone’s remains to see an echo of their final moments.

  I knew the odds of me finding enough material amidst the rubble of Charisma’s apartment that would allow me to do this spell were very low, but I had to try.

  She couldn’t be dead. My heart refused to accept it, even if my brain kept trying to push this truth.

  Until I saw her remains with my own eyes, I would not accept her death. Not fully, anyway.

  Mind made up, I silently made my way up the stairs, to her floor, or to what was left of it. Her building was a mess, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful for the darkness preventing me from truly seeing the damage or to curse it because I had to keep a painfully slow pace.

  A noise from outside had me freezing in my tracks.

  Shit. That was it. This was how I died.

  Almost without wanting to, I turned my head in the direction the noise had come from, and only breathed easily when I saw a mouse.

  Fucking rodent scared five years off my life.

  Without wanting to risk another close encounter, I rushed the rest of the way up, and reached her floor, where I had to carefully make my way through what was left of her corridor.

  I hoped this was close enough for my spell to work.

  I closed my eyes, visualizing how Charisma had been the last time we’d seen each other, focusing on her energy, her spark of life. I pictured her crazy pink strands that almost overtook the dark strands of her hair; her silver eyes that held so much intelligence in them. The way her body had felt against mine when we’d hugged. I pictured what her skin had felt like against mine, and I started chanting the spell.

  I let my magic flow free through my body, going out and seeking the pieces of Charisma that would for sure be all around the apartment.

  Flesh to flesh.

  Blood to blood.

  Bone to bone.

  Anything and everything that held the essence of her, I needed to track it and link to it so I could hear its echo.

  I’d never tried to reanimate remains that had suffered this much damage, but I was a Tumba; the leader of my people. I’d spent years studying my craft, learning from our elders.

  If anyone could do this, I could.

  I pictured my purple magic spreading through the room, then the apartment, searching for those pieces of her that would heed my call, but I found nothing.

  Oh, there were some remains alright, but they were bugs and insects; nothing substantial, nothing human.

  Frowning, I tried to expand my magic even more, trying the entire building... but I found nothing.

  I released the magic of the spell, stopped my chant, and watched as the purple magic circle that had spread across the living room slowly faded and then vanished.

  This made no sense. Even if I couldn’t have reanimated her remains or at least seen the echo of the trauma, I should’ve been able to find something.

  Unless...

  Maybe she had been further away from the blast which would’ve left her body intact enough to be taken to the morgue for an autopsy.

  Fuck, I couldn’t just break into AMIA’s morgue. If coming here had been risky, breaking into AMIA would be downright suicidal.

  There had to be another way for me to reach her, to contact her.

  That was it! I could contact her! If she had truly died, then there should be a way to reach her spirit. Her ghost.

  And I knew just the person to help me do that.

  2

  Bastille

  ”Are you sure about this, child?” My grandmother asked. Her white, milky eyes stared unseeingly in my direction.

  It had been two days since I’d received news of Charisma’s death. Two days where I’d tried my hardest to find some fucking answers as to what had happened and why. I’d even hacked into the Silverstorms’ personal computers to see if they had been responsible for her death, but other than a lot of compromising pictures that Cara Silverstorm seemed to collect on her phone which had left deep mental scars—sex tape videos of her and a bunch of high ranking Arcane members—I’d found nothing.

  This meant that as much as her family was composed of egotistical bastards who weren’t even organizing Char’s funeral, they weren’t responsible for what happened.

  That had brought me back to square one, and with zero leads, I ended up having to use plan C: My grandmother.

  My grandmother should have belonged to the Soulbinder branch; she had the gift of sight, which allowed her not only to see the souls of those departed and control them, but she also saw auras. She could tell a lot about a person just by reading their aura, and that made her incredibly valuable. When she was a teenager, she’d even been engaged to one of the Soulbinder heirs, but grandma had always been rebellious, and she’d refused her arranged marriage, escaping from her family.

  That was how she met my grandfather. They’d fallen in love with each other even though she had been raised to believe Necromancers were evil, and even though he had been meant to marry a Necromancer, as was expected of the head of the Tumba family, to ensure the line would continue and our magic would stay strong.

  Grandma had never looked back, even after my grandfather died, a victim of the war between Arcane Mages and Necromancers that lasted decades. In the end, she raised their various children, six in total, with no support from her own family.

  She was the strongest Spirit caster in our family tree, which would’ve made her perfect for the job if not for the fact she was known for meddling.

  One would think that raising six children and marrying them all off, then helping raise her grandchildren would’ve made her tired, but no. She had more energy than almost anyone I knew, and her favorite pastime was to focus that energy on her grandchildren.

  So, asking my grandmother for help was my best shot at getting answers, but it also meant I had to explain the entire story to her, and I’d be willing to bet all my saved game data that by the end of the day, she’d have filled the entire family in on what was going on.

  Nothing spread faster than gossip at the Tumba windmill.

  My family was in desperate need of a new hobby.

  My grandmother squeezed my hand, and I brought my eyes back to hers, remembering she’d asked me a question.

  Was I sure about this? No, no I wasn’t.

  But I’d do it anyway. For Charisma, I was willing to do anything, even if it
meant I had to come to terms with her death.

  I doubted I’d ever be ready to deal with her death.

  I released a deep breath, begging the Goddess for guidance, and squeezed my grandmother’s hand in silent affirmation.

  “Alright, then. Let’s begin. Since you don’t have anything of hers, we’ll have to do this differently. I’ll need you to clear your head and focus only on her. Bring all the memories you can to the forefront of your mind, but focus on the traits that are uniquely hers. Physical appearance means nothing in the world of spirits; it is what we carry inside that matters: our souls. Since our powers are complementary, two sides of a coin, I’ll link myself to you temporarily so we can bring her forward together. No matter what happens, no matter what you feel or see, don’t lose focus. Let me be your guide, and together, we will guide her.”

  My grandmother hesitated for a second. “Just keep in mind, she might be very different from the girl you knew. She might not remember anything at all. Spirits that suffered horrible deaths can be unpredictable. They tend to have a lot of anger and confusion bottled up.”

  “Not Charisma; she won‘t have changed. Charisma was different, she was special. Even death wouldn’t have dared change her,” I replied before I did what my grandmother said, evening my breathing out and thinking of Charisma. Of how much fun we used to have playing online, of how she’d constantly end up in embarrassing situations that seemed almost impossible for a normal person to face. The memory made me smile.