Free Taken by Charlotte Abel Page A

ricocheted off his shield.
    Someone screamed. Josh hoped it was the mage that had cursed him. It wasn’t.
    The man was on Josh before he could click his feet out of his clips. He pinned him to the ground and pressed a knife against his throat.
    “If you so much as twitch, I’ll slit your throat. And if you try to curse either of us, the other’ll shoot ya. Got it?”
    Josh nodded.
    “Now, lower your shield or die.”
    Josh dropped his shield.  
    A blast of power, like a hammer to the brain, knocked him out cold.
    When he came to, Josh was tied up and propped against a tree stump in front of the fire. Two men were arguing. He recognized the mage that had attacked him and assumed the other guy was the one that had been hit by his deflected curse. He shut his eyes and pretended he was still unconscious.
    “He might be one of them Kerns.”  
    “He’s dressed too rich to be from around here. That hard-hat he’s wearin’ is worth more than everything you own. He ain’t no Kerns.”
    “He might know something about ‘em. We have to at least interrogate him.”
    “If anyone does any interrogating, it’ll be me. The less you know about him the better. I don’t want you to let something slip when we get back. If the Queen finds out we caught a stray mage and didn’t haul his ass back to Kentucky so she can interrogate him, she’ll kill us both.”
    “Then we should take him back.”
    “And leave our post? If the Queen cain’t get no useful information out of him, she’ll kill us for dereliction of duty. Either way, we’re screwed. We have to kill him.”
    Josh focused on controlling his breathing, but he couldn’t do anything about the trembling.
    One of the men said, “Hey, he’s awake.”
    Josh opened his eyes.
    A thin man in dirty jeans, broken down cowboy boots and a scraggly red beard studied him from across the fire. He scratched the hair under his chin then spit a stream of brown fluid into the fire. Chewing tobacco. Gross.
    The man said, “Good morning, sunshine. Who might you be and just what’re you doin’ in this neck of the woods?” So much for not interrogating him.
    Energy pulsed in Josh’s power-well, but before he could even try to curse him, someone hit him from behind. Not hard enough to knock him out again, but hard enough to turn his vision grey around the edges. Waves of nausea vied with pain for his attention.  
    The tobacco spitting man said, “None of that, or I’ll just have to let Jimmy here have his revenge. He ain’t too happy with you for cursing him.”
    “I didn’t curse anybody. All I did was raise my shield. It’s not my fault he’s too stupid to shield himself during a fight.” Josh’s head pounded with every beat of his racing heart. What was he thinking? Insulting these men when he was at their mercy? Talk about stupid.  
    The man threw back his head and laughed. “Jimmy? Shield hisself? That’s a good one.”
    “Shut up, Ryder.”
    Ryder spit another stream of tobacco juice, hitting Jimmy in the chest.  
    Jimmy scrambled to his feet, calling Ryder all sorts of nasty and creative names, but he didn’t do anything about the insult except wipe the nasty stuff off his coat with a dirty red bandanna.
    “Jimmy here ain’t much of a mage. But he’s a damn good tracker and a helluva good shot with a pistol. Lucky for him, his tracking ability manifested at an early age or his momma would’ve put him in a gunny sack and drowned him like a sick dog.”
    “You shut up about my momma. You don’t know nothin’.”
    “I know she don’t want you hangin’ around reminding folks of her weak bloodlines while she’s trying to marry off your ugly sisters.”
    Josh wouldn’t have minded if Jimmy and Ryder dueled it out, but he didn’t want to get caught in a crossfire of magic and bullets.
    He said, “Look, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. Why don’t you untie me and we can start over?”  
    “What clan you belong to boy? And what’s your