Close Quarters Charms: An Action Packed Urban Fantasy Thriller (Faerie Protective Services Inc Book 7) by McKinney Robert

Author:McKinney, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McKinney Can't Press
Published: 2021-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The item inside didn’t look like much. Or at least it didn’t if you were unaware of what it was.

It was maybe ten inches long, cylindrical, and about as thick as my two thumbs held side by side. Jet black for the most part, though a series of rust red designs had been etched into its surface. The swirling lines on it were so dense but I was still able to make out some of its less intricate details from all the way across the room. More than anything else, it looked cold, as if the mere sight of it was able to chill the sweat on my skin and set my breath to misting.

I swallowed hard, trying and failing to shove down some of the nauseous dread creeping into my throat

It was a rod of power. And I barely survived the first time I’d encountered one just a few months before. Though I still didn’t know enough to understand the depths of its secrets, I’d learned a thing or two since then. For one, these rods of iron were the closest thing to a magic wand that I’d ever encountered in Faerie. From the very little I’d seen of its power, I knew it could raise undead, rotting hordes to fight in the holder’s name, or cause all the magic in an area to go quiet with little more than a swish and flick.

It was a weapon quite unlike the earth shattering magics used in Faerie, and depending on who wielded it, could have the power to shift the balance of power in a very big way.

Seeing one of those things here made me wonder just how hard finding one must be if a pair of fae I’d never heard of had gotten their hands on one. I also had to ask myself why these two would expose themselves in an auction when they could have just sold privately, and even just how many of these goddamn rods were still out in the wild. I knew of two people who had one. One was the Erlking, who believed that the rods of iron were too dangerous to use despite living every day with enemy nations at his door.

The other was my mother, and I was long past the days where I’d consider trusting her judgement.

No small part of me wanted to just get up, stride forward, and snatch the rod of iron up for myself. I wasn’t concerned with the power that something like that could give me, personally. I just knew that despite the ugly nature of its magics, it was an edge that the various goblins, orcs, and half-bloods such as myself were in dire need of in carving out an existence for us in Faerie.

Something about what I’d learned in the last few months, however, gave me pause. I thought of the sheer wrongness I felt the last and only time I tried to lay hands on one of those rods for myself. More than

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.