Free Heartache (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 5) by Annie Bellet Page A

deeper. “But the roads aren’t good, and besides, I can’t just leave the crime scene.”
    I stopped, shivering in the cold air. My coat was still hanging inside Joyce’s house.
    “You saying you won’t get me there? You won’t help me? Don’t you want to catch the killer?”
    “Jade,” Salazar said in a hushed voice, glancing around. No one was still lingering in the cold now that the body had been removed. We stood alone in a tomb-quiet sea of white. “We can’t. We’re no match for a sorcerer. I’ve been ordered to spin the story for the humans, and then back down.”
    So. He was saying it wasn’t their fight.
    Well, fuck them. They were right. It wasn’t their fight.
    It was mine.
    And I didn’t need a damn car. I gathered my magic, power filling my blood, racing along with all the strength of my fear and anger.
    I was a motherfucking sorceress and I was going to fly.

I’d never managed to fly before. I could leap and glide, sort of an extended long-jump where I just refused to touch the ground for as long as I could suspend my disbelief and trust my magic to hold me aloft. But flying had been out of my grasp.
    No more. I shot into the air a good fifty or sixty feet, Superman-style, one fist thrust ridiculously in front of me, the other clinging with total terror to my D20 talisman. Tears streamed from my eyes and froze to my cheeks until I shoved magic out in front of me, pushing a shield out to block the worst of the wind and the cold.
    The landscape was black and white from up here, houses zipping away beneath me as I hurtled through the air in the general direction of the Henhouse B&B. With the snow covering roads and landmarks, I could only go by the sun and my own sense of direction. The Henhouse had a bright red roof on it, with enough of a slope that I figured some red would show through even with the heavy snowfall.
    Horror pictures flickered through my brain. Rose and Junebug strapped to a giant bomb. Samir torturing them. My friends arriving before I did and being cut down by screaming men with giant machine guns. Images of me arriving and finding only silence and everyone dead, bodies laid out, throats open, eyes staring blank and cold at the sun.
    I shoved those thoughts away, shoved them into my power, gathered my anger and my fear, and fed it all into the magic. No one was going to die. Only Samir.
    A giant plume of black smoke drew my gaze as I soared over the trees. I corrected my course, heart in my throat. The Henhouse was on fire.
    I tried to drop down near the clearing where the buildings were burning, but landing proved harder than it looks in the movies. I didn’t so much glide down out of the sky as plummet like meteor into the snow.
    Fresh powder snow? Not as soft as it looks. Shivering, the wind half knocked out of me, I climbed to my feet and ran toward the burning house. The roof had caved in and taken most of the second floor with it. Acrid smoke, tasting of ash and the sickly sweetness of Samir’s magic, filled my nose and mouth. I plunged through the door, yelling for Rose. Paper curled with heat and caught on the walls, the curtains burned, and a huge burning beam dropped as I charged into the entry, cutting off the stairs and living room. I sent my magic out like a wave, trying to feel for life, for anything. Only fire.
    “Jade!” Harper’s voice reached me through the roar of the blaze and I stumbled free of the house as something else crashed behind me. More beams. The whole place was burning to the ground with a vengeance.
    Harper, Ezee, and Levi had just arrived, Levi’s four-wheel-drive still steaming in the parking area, his tire chains packed with snow. I stumbled toward them, going for Harper as she tried to rush past me.
    “They weren’t in the house,” I said, remembering. “No one is there.”
    I hoped I wasn’t lying. The house had felt like no one was alive—no one, not even a shifter, could live through that kind of blaze. If Rose or Junebug