Southwest Nights (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 1) by Kal Aaron (large ebook reader txt) 📕

avoid speeding, but the caller wouldn’t have contacted her if he wasn’t close. She’d been riding for about an hour, and she knew she was almost there.

More importantly, she hadn’t brought Jofi, instead packing a similar-looking 9mm. It couldn’t handle enchanted ammo, but it would do in a pinch if she needed to shoot someone in the head.

The problem was the spirit could hear and see near his physical form, even through walls. This was one meeting she couldn’t risk him overhearing. As far as she could tell, less than twenty yards was his normal range.

“Jofi?” she asked to be sure. She wasn’t surprised by the lack of response.

The stray thought of an ambush came into her head. Without her regalia, her sorcery was far more limited, but her combat training and experience remained.

“It’s the anniversary, huh?” Lyssa scoffed. “Try and take down two different Cortis on the same day?”

Why was she thinking like that? Her brother wasn’t dead. It wasn’t like her family was cursed. Her parents had died on different days.

This had nothing to do with her brother. The code word Chartreuse had confirmed that. She went weeks at a time, sometimes months, ignoring where she’d gotten Jofi and why, but that didn’t mean it had changed. The man who’d contacted her was interested in the spirit.

A jade necklace was snugged securely under her white leather jacket. She’d grabbed it from her safe before heading out. While she wore it, she intuitively knew the right way to go.

She was getting closer to the target. I-17 fed into a state road, and an exit was coming up soon.

Lyssa took the exit, not spotting anything notable other than a sign warning her of no services at the next stop. That warning wasn’t unusual in this part of Arizona. More than a few ghost towns dotted the highways between the major cities. The desert didn’t forgive the weak.

She kept driving, and the necklace directed her toward another side road. After slowing, she continued for a couple of minutes.

The side road gave way to a dirt path no one would call a road. She didn’t worry. Her fancy racing bike might have problems if she tried all-terrain driving without sorcery too often, but it would survive for a couple of minutes. She all but coasted, following the path of a dry creek bed until she stopped.

Her chest tightened, and the enchantment on the necklace kept her focused on the center of the creek bed. There was nothing there, and nothing seemed wrong, other than the increased pressure in her chest marking sorcery.

She stopped the bike. A man appeared out of nowhere.

No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t that he’d appeared; more that he’d been there all along, and she’d just noticed him. She’d encountered that kind of spell before from this same man.

The Sorcerer stood in the road in full regalia, green and red robes with elegant dragon figures stitched up the sides. The man wore no mask, but an elaborate golden headdress topped his head.

She knew he didn’t need a mask, although she couldn’t be sure she knew his true appearance. She thought he was a shaven-headed Chinese man in his mid-forties. At least, he had the skin of a man in his mid-forties, but trusting one’s senses around a Sorcerer with a mind essence was dangerous.

He currently wore the Imperial Sage regalia. Embodying the concept more completely might have included having other people see something more appropriate for tenth-century China than twenty-first-century America.

Lyssa lowered her kickstand and slid off her bike. She nodded at him before pulling off her helmet and setting it on the seat.

“It’s been a while, Lee,” Lyssa said.

“Yes, it has been, Miss Corti.” He watched her with a faint look of disapproval. “Some things came up, but since I was in the area, I thought it would be best to check with you directly. You should have anticipated that your move from San Diego would result in an earlier visit.”

“I moved because Samuel told me to.” Lyssa shrugged. “But getting down to business, Jofi’s secure. You didn’t need to come all this way if he’s what this is about.”

“It, not he,” Lee replied. He folded his hands behind his back. “As a reminder, I represent all the relevant parties in this regard. What I say is the unified voice of many. You don’t always appear to understand that.”

Lyssa snorted. “I get it. I don’t see the problem. I’m doing my part to keep Jofi’s seal intact, just like I have been for the last six years. You do your little mysterious visiting stranger thing every few months, and it’s the same every time. Don’t you ever get tired of it? If you were anybody else, I’d think you were getting off on it, but you’re as annoyed with it as I am.”

She’d only participated in the ritual to seal Jofi because she’d been ordered to by Samuel. At the time, he and the others had insisted it was for the safety of the world.

“Yes, annoyance covers it well.” Lee narrowed his eyes. “I was tired of it a long time ago, Miss Corti. Your involvement was a fluke, and I remain undecided about whether that’s a good thing. However, your unusual traits were useful at that time.”

“But what about the others?” Lyssa grinned, injecting all her sarcasm and defiance into the expression. “If you all came at me seriously, I couldn’t stop you. To be honest, I used to worry about that. Worry that I’d screw up somehow by your standards, and the next thing I’d be doing was fighting off a half-dozen Sorcerers bent on killing me.”

“We have no wish to harm you. Don’t misinterpret my distrust of you as a steward as a desire to hurt you.”

“But you would hurt or kill me if necessary.”

“Yes, if necessary.”

They watched each other in silence as a light breeze blew grass and twigs down the arroyo. Farther up it, blackened ground marked the edge of recent summer fires.

“As