Phoenixfall: A Reverse Harem Romance (The Rogue Witch Book 2)

by KT Strange

  I sat down and stared at the pile of bacon which, while Chelsea had exaggerated slightly, it was still substantial in human terms maybe. With five wolves invited to breakfast, it was barely enough. Not that Chelsea and the Glory Rev guys knew what we were. They seemed to have healthy appetites as well, and Chelsea even gave me a run for my money when she challenged me to a bacon-off.

  “How many pieces of bacon can you eat in two minutes?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at me. Aaron gave her a look that I could only describe as absolutely besotted. Lucky bastard. The woman he loved was right there, in the bus with him. Even though she had a busy tour schedule of her own, she’d taken time off to be with him and the rest of the band. It said a lot since she probably had TV appearances she was putting off to be on tour with him.

  It made my heart hurt. I got up with a muttered excuse of needing a cigarette despite the fact I didn’t smoke.

  Once I was outside the bus and around the back of it, I fished out my cellphone. I needed to hear her voice. I sighed and dialed Darcy’s number. The new phone didn’t have it programmed in, but I had it memorized. It rang for a long time and then…

  “Hey you’ve reached Darce. I’m on the road with Phoenixcry right now, so if this is about band business please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible!”

  Fuck.

  I paused, and ended the call, leaning back against the bus. God, hearing her hurt but it was almost worse not to hear her. I closed my eyes and hit redial without looking.

  Ring…. Ring… ring….

  “Hey you’ve reached Darce. I’m on the road with Phoenixcry right now, so if this is about band business please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible!”

  I softly let my head thud back against the bus again. I wanted her there with me, curled in my arms. I wanted to feed her bacon. I wanted the promise in her eyes that I’d seen when she looked at the other guys to finally come to fruition. I wanted her to be ours.

  A shaky breath escaped me, and I hit redial again.

  “Who is this?”

  I froze.

  “Hello? Who is this? I can hear you breathing.”

  It was a man’s voice, deep, and unpleasant.

  “What is it darling?” A soft, musical voice in the background called out.

  “Someone is calling Darc—" the man’s voice cut off as the call ended.

  Someone’s calling Darcy. That’s what he’d been saying.

  Someone had the phone, who knew her name.

  It wasn’t Max, Willa had told us that Max had no idea where Darcy was.

  Things added up in my brain in a sickening way.

  I dialed her again, heart slamming in my chest like it wanted to break through my ribs.

  “Hey you’ve reached Darce. I’m on the road with Phoenixcry right now, so if this is about band business please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible!”

  Right to voice mail. They’d turned off the phone. Or it was a bad connection. I called again. Voicemail. And again. Voicemail. I lifted my arm but remembered the unholy fury on Charlie’s face. If I smashed this phone, I wouldn’t be able to call Darcy without the guys knowing.

  And I couldn’t tell them what I’d heard… they’d be pissed with me for chasing her down…

  But did that even matter?

  “Hey man, you okay?” Aaron’s voice cut through my thoughts and I reacted badly, spinning on him as he appeared around the corner of the bus.

  “The fuck! You know I’m not!” I snapped at him, all my pent-up rage and sorrow unloading like a cannon. Aaron held up his hands, and his voice dropped a step in an effort to calm me down.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not watching out for her more,” he said, hesitation in his every word. “We didn’t… we didn’t think it would impact her so much.”

  “What?” The words he was saying confused me to the point that I wasn’t tempted to throw that punch I’d been saving since I first found out he’d ‘lost’ Darcy.

  Aaron looked uncomfortable, but I didn’t feel bad for him in the slightest. He cleared his throat.

  “You’re a werewolf,” he said flatly. All my muscles went tense and my mind blanked out for a second. I nearly laughed, but he looked at me with such pure understanding and intention that I knew he knew. How he knew…

  “You’re not the only supernatural creatures in a band,” Aaron added, his voice lilting a little as if he wanted to chuckle but couldn’t quite muster up the energy. I stared at him, unblinking for a long moment.

  “Wanna… wanna explain?” I managed the words. Aaron shuffled his feet again and shook his head, as if brushing away thoughts.

  “We’re… Glory Rev, Chelsea, we’re… like you, but not,” he said. I inhaled deeply but couldn’t scent anything on him. He didn’t smell like he was a witch, there was no thread of power in him like that… “We’re a glory of unicorns,” he said, and when he lifted his chin, a proud gleam in his eyes, I couldn’t even doubt him.

  It was so fucking ridiculous, but I knew he was telling me the truth.

  “Seriously?” I asked, even as my heart screamed at me the this was the reason Chelsea had always slightly unsettled me.

  “Mmm,” was all he said for a long moment and then he sighed. “Chelsea… she’s the strongest of us, and sometimes… there’s something about her presence, that can drive people to be a little, well, impulsive.”

  The blocks clicked into place in my mind.

  “Darcy.”

  “She’s a witch, which obviously, you know.” Aaron shifted his weight again, from one foot, then back to the other. I realized he was exactly like a horse. Oh, fuck, I wanted to call him a horse so bad, right then and there, see if it got him all uppity and pissed off. It was petty but I didn’t give a shit. “Witches are more…”

  “Susceptible to magical creatures,” I murmured, finishing his sentence. Aaron coughed.

  “Yeah. They can’t sense us.”

  “I thought all the unicorns were dead.” My words were blunt, but Aaron’s expression didn’t change into one of offense.

  “Well… there’s not as many of us as there are of you,” he said. “Chelsea’s ours.”

  My eyebrows skipped up my face. The way he’d said ours… yeah, I got it. Right.

  “So,” I said. Aaron looked away, shaking his head again.

  “So now you know,” he said. “No more secrets.”

  “Right.”

  “And we’re sorry. Sometimes… yeah, we didn’t expect that. We don’t spend a lot of time around witches, but Darcy was a sweetheart. I could see the power, right under her skin, but it was dull, just a flicker. It was weird.”

  “She didn’t use her powers much… at all, ever,” I answered his question. At least he deserved to know that much, after what he’d admitted to us. Werewolves and unicorns had never fought. They were sort of on a different level of ‘magical creatures’, more myth than fact. I’d never seen one before. I’d thought they were all dead. No wonder I couldn’t smell them. When you don’t believe in something, you won’t see it even if it’s right in front of you. I was starting to get a small scent, something pure, wholesome, more of a feeling than a smell, coming from him.

  “Well, for what it’s worth, Finn, I’m fucking sorry. So is Chelsea. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive herself if Darcy doesn’t—" he stopped myself. He must’ve seen the grief on my face.

  “She’s coming back,” I insisted. Because she was. Some time. Some day. Aaron reached out and grabbed my upper arm, squeezing it almost affectionately.

  “You keep that in your heart,” he said, his eyes determined. “And one day she will.”

  Eight

  Darcy

  I slept late and woke up with a sour taste in the back of my throat and my hair clouded around my face. I’d been left alone, in the quiet, and had fallen asleep after I’d been certain Creston wouldn’t come roaring after me.

  Sun streamed
through the windows, where I hadn’t thought to close the curtains, and there was a glint on my dressing table. Another silver tray, with a slip of paper on it. My heart dropped at being summoned again to an audience with my mother. But when I got up to look at the invitation that had appeared on a silver tray, it was written out in my sister’s elegant handwriting.

  Meet me in the blue gardens at noon for tea.

  Eva

  I stared at the cream paper for a few moments, and then went about making myself presentable. Seeing my sister last night for the first time in years had been… well, any joy I could have felt had been overshadowed by Creston’s assault on me. Because that was what it had been and there was no other word for it. He had assaulted me. I stared at myself in the mirror, twisting my fingers through my curls to freshen them up and getting them to not look so disheveled.

  My place wasn’t in this grand bathroom, anymore. Even though I’d always been a bit of a misfit with wonky powers that didn’t work as well as they should have and a desire to listen to punk-rock instead of classical and baroque music, I’d never felt… unsuitable. Because that was really the only way to put it. I might have been a Llewellyn in name, but I never would be one of them. I got dressed in the plainest clothes I could find, a flowing t-shirt that was probably a silk blend, and a navy skirt that fell to my knees. There were no jeans and my tour clothes were nowhere to be found.

  Making a face at the selection of shoes (everything had heels, right down to the sandals, really, Mother?), I found a forgotten pair of pink flip-flops at the back of my wardrobe. They were dusty and they didn’t go with the rest of my outfit, but that was someone else’s problem. If nobody liked the look of me, well, they didn’t have to look at me.

  I made my way downstairs and tried not to notice the studious way the maids, who were out in the hallways doing their daily clean of the house, avoided looking at me. A shiver ran through me. The shunning had begun, if it hadn’t been already ordered of them before I’d woken up my first day back.

  When we did something wrong, although Eva never seemed to be one of those to behave badly, the entire household would ignore us for a time except our mother. She would dispense our punishment tasks to us while the rest of the world moved on and pretended we didn’t exist. When I was little, I’d dreaded being shunned by the whole house, so much that I’d have nightmares for months after a punishment that had called for it. There’s nothing like feeling like a ghost in your own home. Now I was a ghost in someone else’s home.

  Except for my sister. Well, maybe now that I was grown, the rules of my penalty had shifted. I walked the halls on light feet, not wanting to summon my mother out of whatever closet or room she was hiding in, and pushed open the door that lead to one of the many gardens around our house. The blue gardens, aptly named for the twisting wisteria bushes that clambered all along the boundaries of it, got enough sun to be comfortable and the scent was always something that had relaxed me.

  Too bad I was so on edge now. My sister sat in the middle of the gardens, a great sun hat on her head that shaded her bare shoulders. She was dressed in an un-dyed linen apron dress, pleated at the back. It was very Eva. She looked up as I came around the delicately laid table that had been set up for our tea, a table-cloth made up of embroidered handkerchiefs pieced together. I recognized the work of a maid who’d been in her teens when I had left and I wondered, briefly, how Tenille was doing. She’d been a sweet girl.

  “Darcy,” my sister said with a placid smile which did nothing to calm my churning stomach. “Sit. Let’s have tea. It’s been some time.”

  It’s been some time.

  She said it like it had been a few months or I had been off on some little adventure, like a summer camp, or something. I sat and ignored the way she stared at my pink flip-flops for a moment before her fingers hovered over one of two teapots.

  “Green or black?” she asked. “Father brought the green in from Japan just last week, and I thought we could try something delightfully foreign.”

  I stared at her. Seriously? Delightfully foreign? I’d never had the patience for the artifice the other council families indulged in, and Eva had always been a little more on the side of ridiculous than normal, but she was really pushing the envelope now.

  “Black’s fine,” I said. She poured me a cup and I loaded it with too much sugar and cream to really be polite. I could tell she was wanting to say something about the way my spoon clinked on the inside of my cup, or my pink sandals, from the way she practically was vibrating in her chair.

  I took a big gulp of tea and sighed gustily.

  “That’s rad, thanks,” I said. She made a face, her mouth screwing up for a moment.

  “I know you believe that rules do not apply to you since you… frittered off to play with the mundanes,” she said, finally unable to contain her criticism any longer. “But that behavior will simply not be accepted amongst the Hailwards. We’ve always understood that you were… different, Darcy, but you must learn to school yourself into proper manners and immediately.”

  I set my teacup down with another clink and she winced. Maliciously, I hoped that the saucer chipped.

  “Yeah, Creston talked to me last night about his big plans,” I said flatly. “Marry me, get me with child or whatever, and take over the council seat once our dad bites it.” Eva’s wince grew into a full-on face scrunch.

  “Darcy Evangeline—"

  “Please, don’t,” I snorted, lifting the teacup to my lips, one pinky raised just so and took another mouthful. It was good tea, at least. But it was nothing like the stuff that Max brewed on cold winter mornings in our dorm after we’d pulled an all-nighter together. It didn’t have the love steeped into it, I guess.

  “Creston is impulsive and he feels he was denied a birthright when you left,” Eva said, and I could hear the hand-wringing in her voice.

  “Oh, poor Creston.” I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes, or from being sarcastic. Eva made a soft noise, almost a growl, and she slapped her open hand down onto the little tea table. Our cups jumped, clinking loudly. It startled me, and I stared at her for a moment before swallowing hard.

  “You will marry him, and he will sit at council when Father is gone, yes. It has been foretold,” she whispered the last word like it carried the weight of fifty elephants.

  “Uh huh,” I said, not even bothered. Seers had been foretelling shit for a few centuries, and rarely got it right. Not because the Sight was wrong, or didn’t work as far as witching powers went, but more that personal bias got in the way. At least that was my opinion.

  “The Llewellyn will lay bare and bring forth a child. Such might will pass through her as to rend the council into to new heights,” she whispered, reverently.

  “So, I’m going to get naked, give birth, and then through the powers of my uterus, Creston is going to somehow remake the council into something new and greater,” my voice was flat, and her cheeks pinked up with anger.

  “Really, must you be so crass?” she demanded.

  “Do you have to be so fucking blind,” I snapped back, not caring that she looked as if I’d hit her with the curse word. “That asshole may be my brother-in-law, and maybe once, I liked him, but he tried to hurt me. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Eva opened her mouth to reply by didn’t say anything for a long moment. Her eyes cast downward and she sighed, a full body motion that I swear made her toes crinkle in her little, kitten-heeled sandals.

  “Creston has been imprudent in his behaviors,” she said, but I cut her off.

  “And the fact he’s drinking. Him, drinking! Did he want to bring down the Llewellyn family home around our ears last night? Cause if he sets off his powers and can’t control himself, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.” I glared at her, waiting for her to defend that particularly bad life choice he’d made. She didn’t say anything but poured herself more tea with shaking fingers. When I noticed her lips were pressed together so tightly that they w
ere white, I realized she was mad.

  “You have a duty to this family, whether or not you’ve frittered away three perfectly good years where you could have been wedded and rearing the next generation of Llewellyns,” she said, her words scrunched together so that they barely escaped the tight muscles of her lips.

  “Yeah, I know I should’ve been a son, blah blah blah, trust me, Father never let me forget it.” I glared at her. “The only person who never made me feel bad for not being born with a dick was Grandma. Do you think she’d be super thrilled with the family plan of ‘marry Darcy off to a would-be-rapist’?”

  “He is no such thing,” Eva gasped, mortally offended as if I had called her the r-word. My lips parted in surprise. What was wrong with her?

  “He tried to force me last goddamn night!” I shouted, pointing at the house behind her. “Did it look like I was coming back from a hot makeout sesh when I ran into you in the hallway? Did I look like a girl delirious in love from the sweet-nothings her boyfriend had just whispered to her? He is a fucking monster, and I don’t know how to say it to you so you get it through—"

  Crack!

  Her hand struck me across one cheek as she leaned forward, half out of her seat.

  We fell silent, both of us, staring at one another. Her hand was still raised, and my face hurt where she’d slapped me.

  Her fingers went to her lips, berry-red, and trembling.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, her eyes wide.

  “Fuck off,” I said, getting to my feet. I couldn’t stomp in flip-flops, but I’d do my best.

  “It’s just that you are so very ungrateful,” her voice pitched up a notch. “Creston is the best of us, all of us, and if you cannot see it…”

  “Why don’t you marry him then, if you love him so fucking much?” I demanded. She blanched. “Yeah, I thought so. It’s fine to sell your sister off to the little monster, family honor or whatever, but you wouldn’t even dream of a life under his care for yourself.” I shook my head. She was still quiet. “I can’t even believe you,” I said.