The Rogue Shapeshifter (Izzie Berens: The Arcane Enforcer Book 1) by Martha Carr & Michael Anderle

Author:Martha Carr & Michael Anderle [Carr, Martha & Anderle, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2024-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Izzie rubbed her eyes. She’d been sitting on the floor surrounded by books for far too long, at least a couple of hours. She hadn’t suffered through this level of dry, old, magical academic pain since her school days. Even the more modern journal articles overflowed with painful jargon and annoying references to texts and people far older than half the countries on Earth. She was beginning to appreciate Gareth’s academic style compared to many of his field’s contemporaries.

Her combined jasper and light elven heritages always made magic a far more instinctive matter for her. The complicated theories and techniques her wizard and witch friends relied on never weighed her down as much. An incantation and wave of her hand there, and she could get what she needed, even if she didn’t always have the finest low-level understanding of all the magical principles involved. She controlled the magical energy. That was enough.

Magical scholarship had grown into a foreign world to her. When she was on the run from the Seventh Order, she valued straightforward, pragmatic magic that protected her and destroyed her enemies. She hadn’t worried about the esoteric concerns of scholarly magicals who devoted their lives to broadening the scope of what people believed was possible with magic.

On a certain level, Izzie wondered if that had made her abilities stagnate. Her baseline power was higher than many other magicals when she truly let loose. Her current job let her employ spells she’d mastered over the years for battle.

Her magic wasn’t as strong as her mother’s, but it served her well. It had kept her alive long enough to sit on the floor reading the most boring books of two worlds with a frightened academic and her partner.

Gareth hummed under his breath. He’d long since stopped trembling. He no longer cast nervous glances at Izzie and Rafe. He pored through the texts, taking notes, and occasionally offered cheerful advice to the two as if they were graduate student assistants and not agents investigating a dangerous shapeshifter’s links to the mysterious Arcane Syndicate.

The dark thoughts about magical stagnation fed another more immediate worry. They didn’t have infinite time to find the shapeshifter before another attack occurred.

“There has to be something we’ve missed.” Izzie shook her head. “Something obvious. I doubt this shapeshifter and the Arcane Syndicate have a bunch of professors working for them doing low-level research.”

Rafe looked incredulous. “You don’t believe an ancient group of evil magicals doesn’t have somebody who’ll take the time to look for power?”

“You know what I mean.”

“True scholarship rarely is obvious, Agent Berens.” Gareth was still perusing his latest book. “That said, I don’t know if we’ll be able to accomplish what you want here. Combining threads of lost history and knowledge can be a difficult, unrewarding task that requires significant levels of careful, applied effort. It could take months or years to yield something useful, if I’m being honest.”

He set his book down. “I only agreed to this because I was terrified out of my mind earlier.

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