Power Mage 4 Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Hondo Jinx

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Power Mage 4 is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by eBook Launch

  Edited by Karen Bennett

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Also by Hondo Jinx

  1

  Without a word, six men armed with stubby bullpup rifles rose from the roadside brush and jogged toward the RV. They moved smoothly, a compact unit with a professional and lethal manner.

  On the hazy eastern horizon, the morning sun burned like a huge, fiery eye.

  The men hurried without excitement. Their weather-beaten faces showed only alertness. Beneath their body armor, the men were lean and hard, built more like endurance athletes than powerlifters. Their steely, close-set eyes were narrowed, a habit from decades spent fighting in the world’s harshest deserts.

  A seventh man rose unarmed from the scrub and stumbled after them. His name was Davis Beecham, and he did not want to be here. But Beecham was, like so many people who find themselves in places they don’t want to be, all out of options.

  “Wait,” Beecham called after the men in a strangled whisper. His eyes bulged from his red, sweat-streaked face. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”

  The men ignored him.

  Fifty yards from the Winnebago, four of the mercenaries angled toward the roadside ravine into which the targets—a man and four women, all naked—had plunged.

  Moving with robotic precision, the remaining pair of mercenaries raised their weapons and approached the vehicle. The passenger door hung open, rocking gently in the morning breeze.

  Beecham paused, full of panic. He swiveled his gaze back and forth between the two groups.

  “Guys?” he hissed. “Guys, wait. Seriously.”

  The pair investigating the RV disappeared inside.

  Beecham groaned, filled with a clanging certainty now. This was bad, bad, bad.

  As the other four mercenaries reached the edge of the ravine, Beecham groaned again. Only this time, the groan had nothing to do with his squawking danger sense and everything to do with the same old urges that had driven him from bad decision to bad decision, ultimately leading him to the place of reckoning.

  He had always yearned for beautiful women. But he lacked the courage, confidence, and charisma necessary to attract those women. Which was pure madness, since he was a decent Seeker. But if he didn’t believe the pseudo-truths he was spouting, women never would.

  Hence strippers. And cocaine. And the long chain of bad choices and unfortunate circumstances that now littered his wake, as glittering and sordid as a trail of discarded rhinestone G-strings.

  The naked woman rising from the ravine put every woman Beecham had ever ogled to shame. She outshone every stripper. Every high-priced call girl. Every nervous, well-scrubbed virgin Beecham had purchased in poverty-stricken shitholes around the world.

  This woman was calling back into the ravine and didn’t see the mercenaries approaching.

  Beecham froze in place, paralyzed by her perfection.

  Then the quartet of killers opened up on her, firing short, controlled bursts.

  The woman cried out. Her lovely body jerked. Divots of flesh leapt away riding geysers of blood. She collapsed, obviously dead, and tumbled away into the ravine.

  The men charged into the gulley. Half a second later, gunfire erupted.

  A terrible sound—half snort, half bellow, skewered by a sharp, piping note of pure rage—drowned out the gunfire.

  Run! Beecham’s intuition demanded. That noise. That noise!

  The animalistic cry of rage shattered Beecham’s resolve, conjuring from his very marrow an ancient terror that harkened back through the ages to lost epochs when distant ancestors had huddled around midnight campfires, wisely fearing the beasts hunting the darkness.

  Beecham deserted his team. “Tried to tell them,” he gasped, sprinting away.

  Behind him, a horrific cacophony of sounds rose from the ravine. Gunfire. Screams. And savage, animalistic rage.

  “They wouldn’t listen,” Beecham whimpered, reaching the nondescript van. He threw open the door, clambered into the driver’s seat, and pulled down the visor.

  The keys dropped.

  Beecham made a grab and missed. Bending over, he saw someone fly out of the ravine. The figure slammed into the berm and lay still and misshapen like roadkill.

  Beecham’s internal alarms shrieked madly. He cried out and scooped the keys from the floor.

  Sitting up, he heard the deep rumble of an approaching engine.

  Which made no sense. The road was blocked.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw a big motorcycle approaching.

  No. No. No.

  It was the buxom beauty, the green-eyed brunette with the round ass, returning.

  With shaking hands, Beecham jabbed the keys at the ignition. In his terror, he fumbled the keys and dropped them again.

  He retrieved them as the motorcycle drew up behind him. His eyes flicked to the rearview, and he groaned, struck by the woman’s beauty as she rose from the Harley, pulling something from a saddlebag.

  “No,” he cried, seeing the large wrench.

  Moving with desperate speed, he shoved the keys home and twisted them with a thrill of triumph. The engine growled to life.

  He dropped the transmission into drive.

  And the engine cut off.

  He twisted the keys again. Nothing.

  Frantically, Beecham pumped pedals and checked the transmission and twisted the keys over and over.

  The engine was dead.

  His window exploded.

  Beecham cried out, turning from the spray of shattered glass.

  He opened his eyes and turned back around just in time to see the dark blur of the onrushing wrench.

  His sweaty head jerked backward, filled with pain and sparks of bright light. For a second, his consciousness winked.

  When he came to, he was being dragged from the vehicle.

  Beecham’s body wouldn’t work right. He hit the ground hard, incapable of breaking his fall.

  A kick rolled him onto his back.

  “Who are you?” the beautiful woman demanded, her green eyes flashing wildly as she cranked the wrench back over her shoulder. “What have you done?”

  Beecham was still rocked from the first blow and jacked u
p on the adrenaline, cortisol, and lactic acid flooding his body. His survival instincts were kicking in as they had in so many tight situations over the years.

  He had to stop her. Had to pull it together and mold her perception.

  He smiled up at the green-eyed beauty as if she hadn’t just leveled him and WWIII wasn’t raging a hundred yards down the road. “Hi,” Beecham said, releasing a torrent of juice. “It’s great to see you. I—”

  But he cut off, stunned by the sight of the raging nightmare beast that shot out of the ravine like a demon from hell.

  Then the woman’s remarkably beautiful mouth twisted into a snarl, and she swung the wrench again.

  2

  Minutes earlier, while the mercs still crouched in the weeds, Brawley rushed from the RV. He felt like he’d been doused in gasoline and engulfed in flames.

  Callie’s exclamation echoed in his ears, Get outside, Brawley! You’ve unleashed your beast! You’re shifting!

  He hit the ground running.

  Running where, precisely, he didn’t know.

  Away. That was enough. Away from the women he loved.

  The beast had been raging in him for a long time. His whole life, he reckoned, to one degree or another. Of late, it had quickened.

  But this… this was a whole different rodeo.

  His bones, suddenly hot within his swelling flesh, stretched and thickened, tearing the surrounding muscle.

  He lost his footing and tumbled into a roadside ravine, bouncing and spinning, and slammed into the dry basin.

  Even in his pain and confusion, his first impulse was to check his weapons. But he wasn’t armed, wasn’t even clothed.

  He sat up, and a tremendous spasm struck him. For several seconds he was lost, borne upon an erupting geyser of pain and pleasure.

  He fought against bewilderment, telling himself to ride the moment. But he couldn’t find his balance. The forces raging within him were so powerful. There was a sense of coming untethered from himself.

  He writhed on the ground, changing. His head, full of pressure and pain and the pounding stampede of a million hooves, cracked and swelled.

  But there was also pleasure. A river of pleasure welling up out of him. An ocean. A world.

  He snorted with consternation. His skull cracked and stretched, spreading his eyes and canting them at strange angles.

  Power flooded him, supercharging his expanding body. Dark fur burst from his skin.

  Euphoric agony consumed him.

  He felt a sharp pang of poignant loss. But the pain died away, replaced by the surging joy of becoming.

  Then there was only elation and power and pride.

  He had transcended human weakness to unite with his true self. He had tunneled back through decades and centuries and millennia. Back and back and back. Beyond the age of hearth and home. Beyond the time of great ice.

  All the way back to another epoch, to his time, the Pleistocene Era, where this other part of Brawley had roamed a vast range yet untrodden by mankind.

  Across this wide open land, Brawley’s beast had ruled supreme, surrounded by a massive harem. Hundreds of females, his and his alone to breed.

  Brawley’s inner beast melded with him now in body, mind, and spirit.

  Brawley lay huffing on his side. He tried to stand, but it was difficult given his new body and great size. He rocked back and forth, snorting. Finally, he got his legs beneath him and rose, thrumming with insane power.

  He was a mountain of meat and bone and fur suffused with the power of prehistoric megafauna.

  And yet, he was still Brawley. He and the beast were one.

  Brawley gave a snort and turned his shaggy head toward the slope of the ravine, remembering everything.

  He saw his women. Recognized them.

  Though they were small. So very small. Small and weak and naked and emotional.

  With a sweep of his great head, he read their expressions.

  Nina was afraid, worried for him.

  Sage studied him with fascination.

  Remi barked laughter, fiercely amused and unabashedly impressed.

  Callie beamed, radiating love and pride and deep contentment.

  Brawley stepped forward, his tail swaying behind him. He flexed his powerful muscles experimentally, drunk on prowess.

  He lifted his head high. Despite being on all fours, he towered nine feet in the air. He was much larger than the biggest bucking bulls.

  He rocked his head from side to side and snorted with approval, feeling the weight of his massive horns, which curved away in the fashion of a Texas longhorn and stretched to a width of over eight feet, tip to tip.

  He was a bull.

  But not a bucking bull. And certainly not a barnyard bull.

  No, Brawley’s beast would have smashed any rancher’s fence. And no rider in history would have lasted eight seconds on his mighty back.

  He was a bison. Not a modern bison or the hulking buffalo settlers had hunted to near extinction.

  He was a super bison, sometimes called the longhorn bison, the largest bull to ever roam the Earth.

  “Um, babe?” Nina called. “You okay?”

  Brawley couldn’t speak. But he nodded.

  The girls laughed in a chorus of relief and shock and awe.

  Callie rushed forward and threw her arms around his muscular leg like a tiny girl hugging a great oak tree.

  Next came Nina, crying as she buried her face in the dark hummock of fur armoring his chest.

  Remi started forward, too. “Handsome, you are officially the world’s biggest showoff.”

  But then Sage called out, her voice full of concern. “Trouble! People coming.”

  And Brawley felt it, too. His Seeker senses clanged within his massive skull.

  People coming. People up on the road. People coming for him, his women.

  Brawley snorted, instantly burning with the purest, hottest rage he’d ever felt. His usual protectiveness blazed now with the wrath of a great bull defending his harem against the depredations of yesteryear. Predators, weak yet numerous and clever, had come for Brawley and his females.

  Brawley would destroy them.

  Remi charged uphill in a blur of Carnal speed.

  Brawley parted from Callie and Nina and starting rushing up the slope.

  Remi reached the top and turned back down to them. “Let’s go, slowpokes!”

  Then came a rip of gunfire. Several rifles fired at once.

  Remi jerked with impact, struck many times. Mushroomed bullets blasted from her body, punching fist-size holes through her lovely back, spraying blood and pitching away hunks of flesh and bone and organ tissue.

  Remi fell and tumbled brokenly into the ravine.

  Brawley thundered past her, hammering up the hillside, boiling over with rage. All that he was, all that he had ever been, focused on a single task: destruction.

  The men poured over the edge, lurched to a collective halt, and opened fire. Their movements were smooth and fast and deadly, and their bullets slammed into Brawley’s flesh. Rounds burrowed into his chest, tore through his lungs, ricocheted off his thick skull in smears of lead, and skipped from the stony boss where his gigantic horns met.

  Had the head shots nailed him at a different angle, they would have penetrated the great skull and killed him. But they hadn’t. So fuck these guys.

  How dare these puny humans challenge me? Brawley thought, racing toward them. How dare these flimsy sacks of piss and guts shoot Remi?

  He lowered his head, bugled a bloodthirsty promise, and surged forward.

  The men held their ground, firing. At the last second, they tried to dodge. But they had underestimated his speed and agility, deceived by his great size.

  The heavy mantle of Brawley’s horns slammed into one of the men.

  The man’s body split, parts of him rushing free in an explosion of bone and blood and burst organs.

  Even as the dead man tumbled away, Brawley tossed his head skyward. It
was an old trick of that age gone by. For the beast’s tricks were Brawley’s now. And this finishing flip of the head was instinctive. The head toss was meant to expose the soft belly of much larger predators like dire wolves, Smilodons, and cave bears, allowing the bull to disembowel them with his great horns.

  But the human was so tiny he simply flew through the air, out of the ravine and out of sight.

  Brawley’s head twisted rapidly, driving one wicked horn through the space where the man had been. The tip jammed into the crotch of a fallen enemy.

  The man’s pitiful scream only stoked Brawley’s rage.

  Brawley shoved forward, skewering the man from balls to crown.

  With the corpse impaled upon his horn, Brawley whirled, lowered his shoulder, and trampled a man just getting to his feet.

  Brawley felt the man’s body snap to the ground beneath his stomping hooves. He slammed to a stop and hammered his hooves, popping the man’s skull and churning the ground into a froth of blood and mud and steaming brains.

  The remaining man retreated with discipline, firing his weapon.

  In his primordial rage, Brawley barely registered the damage.

  Bullets punched holes in his flesh, fractured bone, and tunneled through vital organs.

  But Brawley’s Carnal strand burned bright pink, repairing damage instantly and magnifying the supernatural strength of his unchained beast.

  The man fired another blast and lunged to the side. But he was too slow, too weak, too fucking pitiful to save himself.

  Because Brawley was strong and fast and huge. The tip of his sweeping horn slashed the man’s midsection.

  The man fell to the ground, a heavy flow of blood gushing from the hole in his ruined body armor. He lay on his back, mortally wounded yet still defiant.