Free Master of Smoke by Angela Knight

overwhelming magic of the Magekind. That fear had become an obsession, eating at him for centuries, until he’d known he could let nothing stop him in his quest for power. Even if it meant doing the necessary but distasteful. Even if Merlin would not have approved.
    Merlin, after all, was gone. Warlock was the one left to clean up the Celt’s mess—unnecessary wars that could have been prevented, starving children, racial and religious hate boiling over into violence. If the Celt had only had the balls to use the power at his disposal, so many lives could have been saved. But Arthur didn’t have the stomach for the job.
    Warlock did.
    He just had to get Arthur out of the way so he could do it.
    So he’d fathered sons, attempting to create magic-using partners, but one by one they’d become a threat, and he’d had to eliminate them all. More recently, he’d gotten a daughter on a woman of the Chosen, reasoning that since she was a female, she could be no real threat.
    The grandsons she’d give him would not have the talent to be true competition, while still providing the magical assistance he’d need to go up against Arthur’s witches. It would take decades to put such a plan in motion, but since he was immortal, he had all the time he needed.
    Now he’d suddenly acquired the power he’d craved for so many centuries. And it was everything he’d ever dreamed of, as intoxicating as any drug.
    It was delicious being a god.
    As for the alien memories that came with that power, he’d realized he needed them. Otherwise he wouldn’t have the experience to shape all that wild magic.
    I’m not going to give this up. Not any of it .
    The Demigod had to die before he could take his powers back. Because he would. Eventually Smoke’s spirit would call the magic back to him, and it would answer that call. Only the cat’s death would allow Warlock to keep his stolen abilities.
    Should I do it myself? It would be easy. Stripped of his magic, Smoke would be unable to defend himself.
    But what if proximity allowed Smoke to draw on his powers? What if they jumped back to him when Warlock got within killing range? Now that he’d tasted the cat’s magic, he knew he definitely didn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.
    So, no.
    Fortunately, he had plenty of killers at his disposal. Handpicked murderers he’d bitten to create Dire Wolves. Those men feared him so much they would do anything for him.
    Even kill a god.
     
     
    Miranda Drake sprawled on her belly on her pink lace canopied bed, reading Guilty Pleasures for something like the fifteenth time. Whenever she got particularly depressed, she liked to read about Anita Blake kicking monster ass. Especially since kicking any kind of ass was something Miranda was never allowed to do.
    Thus the whole depression thing.
    She supposed it could have been worse. The house she lived in was a thirty-room Gilded Age mansion with high walls of cream stone and a low-pitched roofline. It had been home to Drake werewolves since 1898, and it was drafty and pretentious as hell. Miranda’s very pink bedroom was better suited to a tween than the twenty-four-year-old she was.
    But at least she had books.
    Anita was locking horns with Jean Claude when her mother tapped on the door. “Miranda?” Without waiting for permission, Joelle walked in. She paused with one nervous hand on the doorknob, a too-thin, perpetually wary woman in a Vera Wang tank dress. Its flowing emerald silk contrasted with the flaming red tumble of her hair. All that color only emphasized her pale skin and the dark hollows under her green eyes.
    Miranda looked up, frowning in surprise. Her mother normally had more respect for her privacy. Unlike her stepfather, who usually barged in like a man hoping to catch her at something.
    Her surprise became unease when Harold Worthington sauntered in at her mother’s heels, an expression of ugly anticipation on his handsome face. Worthington was a big man, tall and