Mercy Strange Read online

  Mercy Strange

  Legal Magick 2

  Alisa Woods

  Check out all of Alisa’s bestselling Paranormal Romance...

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  READING ORDER

  Dot Com Wolves

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  Claiming Mia (Book 1)

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  Saving Arianna (Book 2)

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  A Christmas Wish (Book 3)

  Riverwise Private Security

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  Jaxson (Book 1)

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  Jace (Book 2)

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  Jared (Book 3)

  Wilding Pack Wolves

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  Wild Game (Book 1)

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  Wild Love (Book 2)

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  Wild Heat (Book 3)

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  Wild One (Book 4)

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  Wild Fire (Book 5)

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  Wild Magic (Book 6)

  Fallen Immortals

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  Kiss of a Dragon (Book 1)

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  Heart of a Dragon (Book 2)

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  Fire of a Dragon (Book 3)

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  Chosen by a Dragon (Book 4)

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  Seduced by a Dragon (Book 5)

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  Touched by a Dragon (Book 6)

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  Loved by a Dragon (Book 7)

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  Marked by a Dragon (Book 8)

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  Claimed by a Dragon (Book 9)

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  Of Bards and Witches: Leonidas’s Story (Book 10)

  Fallen Angels

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  Tajael (Book 1)

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  Oriel (Book 2)

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  Asa (Book 3)

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  Razael (Book 4)

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  Micah (Book 5)

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  Tempted: Tajael’s Story (Book 6)

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  Kiss of an Angel: A Christmas Story (Book 7)

  Legal Magick

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  Ever Strange (Book 1)

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  Mercy Strange (Book 2)

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  Verity Strange (Book 3)

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  Mercy Strange (Legal Magick 2)

  Copyright © 2019 by Alisa Woods

  June 2019 Edition

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. For information visit: Alisa Woods

  Cover by BZN Studio

  Mercy Strange (Legal Magick 2)

  Some Talents are too dangerous to keep.

  MERCY STRANGE—Genetic Research Lead, Strange Medical Technologies

  There’s a madman who calls himself a scientist… and I have to stop him. Never mind that his med-magick drugs might be the key to my own research. Never mind that his red-and-yellow pill tempts me with the promise of turning off a Talent I’d give anything to erase. The madman developed his med-magick with an illegal drug trial, performing experiments on people like my father—and using my own family’s company to do it! The madman will pay for that, even if I have to hunt him down myself. I’ll train the FBI’s insanely sexy field agent to go undercover after the killer, but when this is done, I’ll be taking that pill… and finally destroying the part of me that’s too dangerous to keep.

  SWIFT PAYNE—FBI, Science and Magick Lab

  This is just another job. I keep telling myself that, but Mercy’s emotional soundscape sings to me like no other. There’s so much she’s hiding, just under the surface. She doesn’t know what I am—few people do—and it needs to stay that way. Because I’m not just following leads to find our serial-killer-by-drugs—I’m investigating her. And if she’s dirty in this, I’ll have to march her out in handcuffs. Or get yanked from the case. Or get sent back to the military work I barely escaped. Mercy’s dangerously tempting, but I can’t go back there again. Yet I can’t seem to tear myself away from the music of her oh-so-brilliant mind...

  Someone’s developed a drug that can erase magickal Talents… and they need to be stopped before they kill anyone else. Swift’s Talent is secret, and Mercy’s secret is her Talent. But they have to work together to find the mad scientist with the killer drugs… before he unleashes them on the streets of Chicago.

  Mercy Strange is the second book in a new paranormal romantic suspense series from bestselling romance author Alisa Woods. The first three books in the series (Ever Strange, Mercy Strange, Verity Strange) follow the three Strange sisters, each powerful witches in an influential magickal family embroiled in a mysterious plot to change everything about the magickal world. Part urban fantasy, Legal Magick takes place in an alternate Chicago where High Magick returned in 1859 and is now integral in every aspect of the legal—and illegal—world. Each book is a standalone romance.

  Chapter One

  Genetic data lied all the time.

  It claimed that 99% of a human’s genome was the same as a chimpanzee’s—depending, of course, on how you counted it. It said every human was 99.9% the same, and that 99.95% of Mercy’s genetic code was the same as her father and sisters. But sprinkled among her three billion DNA molecules there were thousands, even millions, of sequences that were not identical. Maybe only by a single base pair. And somewhere in there was a key sequence, or maybe a half dozen, that told the truth. Tiny, genetic truth bombs.

  And they whispered, Mercy Strange is different.

  Only she knew just how much.

  The screen in front of Mercy displayed her own genome, a blinding mass of data displayed in 3D that allowed her to see the whole thing then zoom in on a particular sequence. The software interface was custom, as was the artificial intelligence behind it that searched, analyzed, and tested the expressions of genomes to help in her work. She was on an endless genetic egg hunt for the sequences that made all the difference in the expression of Talents—not just her own, but the full profusion of possible magick abilities, as complex as the intelligence that drove it. She could have all the data in the world, but without the key to decoding it, all of it was useless. Except now she’d been handed a key—an illegal gen-magick drug created by a madman—and even after two days of banging her head against the data, she still couldn’t unlock the code.

  The letters of the base pairs in front of her were blurring. She’d been at her screen too long. Mercy closed the file and pushed away from her desk, rising up to pace her office. Which was no small feat, given her long, black-lace skirt had two layers over the chiffon that rustled underneath. She’d forgone the heavy lace veil that accompanied it because that simply wasn’t practical in a modern genetics laboratory. The ensemble was the latest in her Victorian Death Couture collection, and she adored the way it felt dangerous—not just because funeral wear was, of course, tinged with death, but because witches widowed in the Victorian Era were considered unpredictable and possibly deadly in their grief. The clothes were a warning as much as mourning. Mercy lifted her death-skirts and worked her way around her piles of Genetics and Magick Today, finally reaching the window of her corner office on the 20th floor that overlooked the skyline of Chicago. The morning was brilliant, the sun glittering off Lake Michigan and the mirrored skyscrapers, but all that vibrancy wasn’t what drew her.

  It was the box.

  The bookshelves lining her small office hel
d mostly binders of research reports, medical journals, and old-fashioned paper books. She had a thing for paper—the texture and smell and weight in her hands—so reports and books crammed every horizontal surface, including the floor. But tucked at one end of this particular shelf, buttressing all the modern paper knowledge, was a small talisman box. Originally, it stored 19th Century amulets, small stones imbued with harmless charm spells, and it still held two—one for good luck and another for pleasant dreams. Those weren’t what drew her, either—for the tenth time in two days, not that she was counting—to prop open the box and gaze inside.

  A red-and-yellow capsule was nestled in the faded velveteen fabric. The charms had very little magick, but the medicine in that pill contained an impossibly powerful amount. The ability to destroy magick. And supposedly to create Talents for the simples who had none. But it was the destructive power that tempted her. This pill was the holy grail of gen-magick research… and it had been created by someone who had no problem with human experimentation, killing people, destroying their magick, and terrorizing a city. It made perfect sense to her that a monster would discover the answer she’d sought for years. She was still analyzing the genomes of the victims, pulling apart the medicine’s gene editing proteins, figuring out how they could sniff out and render impotent the sequences of DNA that created magickal Talents. But she kept coming back to the box and the one pill she’d stolen from the recovered stash, wondering when she’d work up the courage to—

  “Taking a break?” a male voice said behind her.

  She startled so badly her hand flailed against the box—it banged shut, and she quickly turned around, heart thudding, praying she hadn’t knocked the pill out of the box in the whole awkward and slightly terrified motion.

  It was just Quill. “Sorry.” He stepped into her office, the amused look on his face tainted with worry. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She sighed. “What scares me is that I might never figure this whole thing out.” She forced her hands to relax—they were half curled, reflexively trying to conjure, even though her Talents were mainly in the healing arts with fine motor skills, not combat.

  “You’re kidding, right?” He gave her a half-smile. “You’re our resident genius. If you can’t figure it out, we’re pretty well screwed.” Quill Thacker was her personal IT specialist—at least that’s what she called him, in her head, and to his face as well. And he was here to help her wrestle with the vast mountain of data she’d collected and use his AI Talents to piece it into a story that made sense. Before anyone else got hurt.

  Mercy squinted at him. “If only flattery could be harnessed to power scientific discovery.”

  “You mean it can’t?” He grinned wider. “I thought the entirety of medical research was powered by ego. Present company excepted, of course.” He tipped his head to her, and she felt the flush of recognition. He was flirting with her. Again.

  “Maybe that’s what I need. More ego.” She smiled, hoping that would dispel the tension, but she kind of fumbled it, still flushed with the leftover shock at being caught with the box wide open. Had Quill seen it? She didn’t think so. Mercy lifted her skirts over the piles of journals on her floor, edging toward her computer station again, but gingerly traipsing past him just brought her closer, which was exactly the wrong signal to send.

  Quill held her elbow, helping her balance on her high-heeled boots. “I like you just the way you are, Mercy Strange.”

  Shit. Did they have to do this now? Quill was smart and sweet and nice to look at—smokey-grey eyes and a square-carved jaw that was clean-cut gorgeous—and if her life wasn’t so freaking complicated, she’d entertain the idea of sex. A long, hot-and-hard weekend of sex would actually be a fabulous distraction. Sex was easy—it was relationships which were hard. And someone like Quill would definitely look for both.

  Only she was no good for both, and he couldn’t ever know why. No one could. “Quill…” She gave him a look like please don’t make me say this…

  He grimaced. “I’m talking about the new outfit, of course. Very, um…” He was struggling.

  “Impractical?” She eased her elbow from his grasp, but gently, trying to soften the rebuke. “One has to make sacrifices for one’s art.” She squinted at him, teasing, but she also leaned back, putting some distance between them again.

  “Don’t give me the death glare.” But he said it lightly, thankfully. There was only a fleeting trace of hurt in his smile. “I’m halfway convinced your makeup is a hex all its own.” He gestured to the elaborate spiderweb she’d painted around her eyes, today’s version in purple to match her lips and the streaks she’d put in her hair.

  “Not a hex,” she sniffed dramatically. “A warning.” Then she resumed picking her way around the stacks of papers toward her computer.

  “Duly noted.” His smile faltered like he couldn’t decide if she were joking.

  It was no joke, but she couldn’t say that, either. How did the saying go? Tell the truth: no one will believe you. In truth, her makeup telegraphed the same message as her dress. Warning: dangerous witch ahead. Her truth was more painful than any lie, so she painted it on her face and let the world make its own assumptions.

  Time to change the subject. “Please tell me you’ve got that new AI protocol for me,” she said as she swept her skirts to the side and plopped down, rather gracelessly, into her seat.

  “I have.” His voice was back-to-business, thank magick. He came up behind her seat. “I just uploaded the revised version. It should have propagated by now.” He reached past her to tap up the program. He smelled nice—a woodsy scent that could be cologne or just him—and she was painfully aware that meant he could also smell her antique perfume, the kind Victorian witches wore in their mourning to signal their status as dangerous and available.

  She made a mental note to throw out that bottle.

  “Have you sequenced the new dead guy?” Quill asked as they waited for the program to load. He meant the body the FBI had found two days ago—another victim, another experiment by the lunatic behind this—which had come back with the note, YOU CAN’T STOP THIS. Which was definitely an asshole thing to do—not that serial murderers and illegal human experimentalists were nice people—but Mercy was worried they might be right.

  “That brings us to three bodies returned,” Mercy said, “and another dozen dead kidnapped victims from the asylum where they were doing the experiments, plus seventeen victims who are still alive, so a total of thirty-two genomes to analyze for clues as to how these gene drives work.” Thirty-three including her own, but she’d run that analysis separately. She and her father already had their own extensive private research to draw on. The gene drives were the key part—buried inside the red-and-yellow capsule was a second, magick-stabilized pill that held live gene-editing proteins. She was still figuring out the exact mechanism by which the gene drives turned off magick, but the stakes were clear from all the dead and magickally-defunct victims—a drug like this on the streets would be devastating.

  Quill gave her a soft look. “Hey, how’s your dad doing? It’s good to see him in the lab again.”

  She nodded, a little too much. “He’s okay. Good. Thanks.” She looked back to the screen, waiting for the damn program to load. It was still hard to talk about, the terror she felt when her father “died”—an overdose that was a cover for human experimentation. She’d shut down entirely when it happened. Her brain just couldn’t process it. Not only the normal grief she imagined anyone would feel at losing a parent, but she’d always revered her father in a way that was hard to explain. He was good. Honest, kind, and above all, with the purest ethics of anyone she’d ever met. He was her guardrail—he kept her on the right side of things. They worked together on the gen-magick research that Mercy prayed would one day alleviate the problem only she knew about—the one thing no one, not even her father, could know—and when she thought he was dead, it wasn’t just her father that was gone from her life. It was any hope of
ever having a normal one of her own.

  “Mercy.” Quill’s voice was gentle, but it snapped her back with a jolt.

  “Sorry.” She blinked, and her thickly-mascaraed lashes felt wet. Shit. She’d thought she was done with the random crying—and she sure as hell didn’t want to do it in front of Quill. “What have we got here?” she asked of the screen, blinking away the incipient tears.

  “It’s okay to still be… affected by it.” Damn him for being sweet.