Free Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) by E. William Brown Page A

chairs of the little sitting area and I claimed the other.
    “I can’t believe how fast these wards are going up,” Cerise was saying. “Two days for comprehensive curse barriers? That normally takes months. I’m loving this endless power thing.”
    “Glad to hear it,” I chuckled. “Are the new amulets working out for everyone?”
    After the attack on the city I’d finally gotten serious about equipping my coven, and the amulets were the first step of that. Each of them acted as a self-contained power source, with an automatic healing enchantment and a substantial energy battery the wearer could draw on if she needed to cast something big in a hurry. Not that they were likely to need that anytime soon, since the output of the power source was more than enough to run any normal level of spellcasting. But it was good to prepare for the future.
    The healing effect had been a lot more troublesome than I’d first expected, because none of my girls were human. Each amulet had to be tuned to the specific biology of the wearer in order to work properly, and getting them to handle things like pregnancy and shapeshifting gracefully had taken some serious thought. A targeted healing spell was one thing, but there were a lot of ways an always-on healing field could have undesirable side effects. Fortunately my flesh sorcery had been up to the task.
    “I love it,” Avilla said. “Yesterday I just fell asleep when we finished our work. Now I can feel the fatigue melting away.”
    “Mine is helping me hold my shape, just like you hoped,” Elin told me. “I can feel it activating to restore my proper features whenever I start to change. The control interface is a bit complex, but I believe I can master it easily enough.”
    “Control interface?” Cerise asked. “Mine just lets me turn the healing field and mana feed off and on. What does yours need controls for?”
    “In theory I can designate what shape I wish the amulet to consider normal,” Elin explained. “It’s quite an impressive enchantment, especially since it operates entirely via intent control.”
    Cerise whistled appreciatively. “Intent control? That’s some serious wizardry there.”
    “Metamagic sorcery,” I explained. “I’m cheating shamelessly. If I had to figure out how to make that work on my own it would have taken years.”
    “It’s not just the sorcery thing,” Tina objected. “You’re scary smart too. Anyway, mine feels really nice. I can’t do much with the magic, but I think it’s good for the baby.”
    I didn’t ask how she knew. The stupendously buxom former maid didn’t know a thing about magic, but I could see that the divine blessings Bast had laid on her were being fed by her amulet now. The ancient goddess had been very grateful to Tina for agreeing to be the mother of her rebirth, and her magic was surprisingly clever about adapting to opportunities.
    My own flesh magic had made Tina a catgirl, but that had been a relatively simple transformation. Some cosmetic changes, a few biological enhancements like improved senses, and a little magical boost to some of her physical abilities. Bast’s magic was working deeper changes on her, gradually turning her into a rather formidable supernatural being. She was probably going to end up with physical abilities on a par with Cerise at this rate, and there was no telling what other powers she might manifest. I think Avilla was already a little jealous of the way she could step into a ritual and instinctively weave her part of the magic without having any idea what she was doing.
    I would have been more worried about the whole thing, except that so far Bast had been relentlessly benevolent in all of her dealings with us. She’d been effectively dead for several centuries, and if I hadn’t playfully tried out that catgirl transformation on Tina a week ago she could easily have stayed that way. I wasn’t sure what kind of existence ‘dead’ gods led, but considering the depth