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

by KT Strange

  She licked her lips.

  “It has been foretold,” she insisted, not getting up from her seat. I took a step away, and she stared at the tea-set, a little plate of untouched cakes still remained. They’d taste like cardboard in my mouth anyway at this point. Any appetite that had been brewing in my stomach was long gone.

  “Yeah, well whichever seer thought that up can kiss my ass,” I said, and stormed off. I wasn’t willing to listen to any more of her crap. I stalked into the house, feeling like a thundercloud was looming over my head with every step. Walking into my room, I startled a maid that was fixing my bed-sheets. She turned to look at me and then shrieked, falling backward as If I’d burnt her.

  “What?” I demanded, not in any mood to be polite.

  “Miss,” she whispered, and pointed down at my hips.

  I looked down. My fingers and forearms crawled with blue-white, jagged lines of power. They crackled softly and were almost up to my elbows. I’d never been able to call the lightning like that before, ever, and it was even greater than when I’d gotten all worked up when I was with Phoenixcry. I took a deep breath, turned and slapped my hands against the side of my wooden wardrobe. There was a loud crack and the lightning vanished. I pulled my hands away.

  The thin, powdery-gray outline of my fingers and palms remained, etched into the varnish. The maid let out a soft moan of fear.

  “Go,” I said, my voice husky. “I’ll clean my own room.”

  She grabbed her bucket of cleaning supplies, and ran out the door, not bothering to shut it behind her.

  Nine

  Ace

  Finn had been in a bad place since Darcy had left and there was nothing any of us could do to shake it. Even Eli couldn’t get his twin out of the shitty mood he was in. In the end, it was all we could do to just drive from show to show. Even finding out we weren’t the only magical creatures on the tour, which had made me pretty excited, wasn’t helping. Maybe to humans werewolves were mythical, but to me, to us? Unicorns were the same way. I kinda just wanted to spend all day talking to Aaron and asking him questions, but Eli kept us apart from them, saying that ‘knowing what they are doesn’t give us permission to stare at them and talk their ears off’.

  Killjoy.

  Finn was doing his best up on stage, and even if his heart was only half in it, he still performed better than most lead singers did on a good day. Finn, at his worst, was miles away from other guys at their best. That was the only thing that kept Eli from taking Finn out into the bush and having a rip-roaring fight with him to get him out of his sour mood.

  Still, it was unsettling to have Finn curled up at the back of the van, his headphones in and eyes closed as he tugged Darcy’s blanket around him and tried to inhale what little of her scent was left.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t feel her loss too, and we missed her, but not as acutely as Finn did.

  I was beginning to… well, suspect.

  “You look like your head’s hurting from all that thinking you’re doing, kid,” Charlie said as we stopped for a bathroom break and to stretch our legs. Sitting in a van all day was not the ideal environment for a wolf, even if we weren’t in our shifted forms. I stretched my arms up, leaning against a long fence post that cordoned off the pet area from the rest of the grass.

  “Just wondering how long he’s gonna be like this,” I said, jerking my head toward where Finn sat on the bumper of our van. His head was down, a lighter between his fingers. The flame flicked on and off as he stared at it.

  “Until she comes back?” Charlie shrugged. “If she comes back. You know how we are. When we mate, we mate for life.”

  “He’s slept with other girls before,” I pointed out. Charlie cleared at his throat and I glanced at him funny. “What?”

  “Sleeping with someone and mating are two different things,” he said, voice gentle. My ears and cheeks burnt.

  “I know!”

  “Yeah, well, start acting like it then. He bonded her. That’s when her scent started to shift. She started to smell more like us, didn’t you notice?”

  I stared hard at Finn.

  “How do you know?” I felt put out, but then I’d never been old enough to know what a person smelled like pre- and post-bonding. There’d been so few unbonded females when we’d… when our pack… I cleared my throat and tried to not think about it.

  “I wasn’t whelped yesterday,” Charlie said. “He bit her neck when they were… doing the do. I guess that was enough, even if he didn’t break the skin like he normally would.”

  I made a face and he laughed.

  “That’s gross. Making someone bleed so they’re yours forever is gross.”

  “You’re such a fucking kid,” he said and then slapped me on the back. “C’mon let’s go see what’s in the vending machines and if this place has one of those old lady volunteers that we can charm some free coffee from.”

  “You’re kind’uv a dick.” I followed him anyway, looking back at Finn once. “So, what’s this bonding thing then? Like you guys have mentioned it a few times, but… yeah…”

  “We’re doing a bad job of raising you.”

  “I’m already raised, Chuckles,” I said, and Charlie made a grumpy face at the stupid nickname everyone used to call him. We crossed the grass, thick and lush around the soles of our shoes, and I lifted my nose up to the air. Charlie was going to be disappointed. There was no scent of brewing coffee on the breeze, which meant no old lady for him to grin and wink at in exchange for a cup of his liquid drug.

  “Yeah, well, I think we missed some stuff in your education. Bonding is… well, when we take a mate, we bond her. It’s not like, a telepathic link, but it’s more of a subtle scent mark. Warns off other guys, lets them know that we belong to her and she belongs to us. It’s like going steady on steroids,” Charlie said and grunted as we turned the corner of the rest stop’s forecourt to see a line of vending machines. “Ugh. Fine. Dr. Pepper it is.”

  “Did he ask her?” I wondered as we walked up to one machine. “That sounds like it’s a pretty serious thing to do without asking someone.”

  “Uh…” Charlie stopped and looked at me for a moment, his expression stuck between confused and unsure.

  “Seriously, did he ask?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Does she even know?”

  “I… uh…”

  “Charlie!” I glared at him. “For fucks sake! Did Finn mark her with his scent without her even knowing?” He shuffled his feet.

  “It goes away,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “If she doesn’t come back, eventually it goes away, and yeah, maybe it’ll linger for a few years—"

  “Seriously?!”

  “He didn’t mean to,” Charlie snapped, finally getting irritated. “He and I talked about it. It just… happened. Instinct took over.”

  “Instinct?” Anger was boiling up inside of me. What the fuck did that mean? “We’re not animals!”

  “Well some of us are,” he snarled and shoved me hard. I stepped backward, shocked. Charlie never lost it, not with me. Guilt crossed his face. “Kid… I didn’t mean—"

  “Well you did,” I growled at him. “You did, and Finn marked her without her even knowing. So, she’s wandering around, out there, somewhere, with werewolf scent all over her. Hunters are out there too, rambling around, looking for anyone who smells like a werewolf—”

  Charlie went white, so pale under his normal tan from spending a lot of time outside, and he turned on his heel. He walked a few steps, before he broke into a sprint.

  “What?” I yelled, running after him. He didn’t answer me. We bolted through the picnic grounds and back across the grass. A few picnicking families stared at us and I waved, trying to look like everything was fine and Charlie wasn’t freaking me the fuck out.

  “Finn,” Charlie’s voice was nothing more than a growl as we came around the van. Finn looked up, from where he was sitting, just in time for Charlie’s fist to connect with his face. I yelped as Fi
nn’s head snapped back and slammed into the rear doors of the van. He was up in a moment, nose bloody, blue eyes glittering with anger. He grabbed Charlie by the throat and twisted on his feet, shoving Charlie into the van.

  “What the fuck,” he snarled. A car door slammed and Cash came running from where he’d been waiting in the car. Eli was probably still in the bathroom.

  “Did you know,” Charlie choked out, fingers balled into fists beside his hips. He didn’t even try to get Finn’s hand off his throat. “Did you know that you’d be putting a target on her back when you bonded her?”

  Finn’s expression went from murderous to crestfallen in a heartbeat. He let go of Charlie and stepped back, his chest heaving. Cash sighed and ran his hands through his hair.

  “This is a conversation that needs to happen,” Cash said, his hand wrapping around my shoulders. I didn’t shrug him away, but leaned into him, eager for the warmth and comfort. Everything was falling apart around us. “But it needs to not happen in front of a bunch of people trying to take a piss and eat their road-side hotdogs.”

  Finn swallowed, and his lips parted like he wanted to say something.

  “You didn’t,” Charlie whispered, and Finn just shook his head. He looked like he wanted to cry.

  “I didn’t mean to do anything to her, not to hurt her, not anything… it just happened. One minute I was fine, and the next minute I was… my teeth were on her throat, and it was happening,” Finn said, his voice hollow. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest.

  “Why didn’t you say something to us?” Charlie’s tone had softened.

  “How? How could I tell you?”

  “Guys?” Cash interrupted Finn’s confessional. “Seriously, we’re getting stares.”

  Eli’s boots thudded on the ground as he walked up to us, a frown on his face.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Feelings,” I answered. Cash squeezed my shoulders.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pulling away from me. “I’ll drive.”

  “What?” Eli glared at him. Cash glared back and glanced significantly at Finn. Eli followed his gaze and nodded. “Right,” he murmured. We piled into the van, Eli sitting at the back with his twin, their heads together. Eli was murmuring quietly to him, and the rest of us politely ignored them, putting on some music. Cash sighed as he got on the road.

  “Last thing we needed was someone getting the wrong idea and calling the cops on us,” he said as the highway stretched in front of us and behind us. I was in the front passenger seat, playing with the dog-eared corners of my Sudoku book.

  “So, what’s going to happen to her?” I asked as my fingers ran along the edge of the pages. I almost was hoping to get a paper-cut, something to remind me I was real. I didn’t feel very in my own body right at that second.

  “They’ll figure out she’s not a wolf. It’s pretty obvious,” Cash said, and I had a feeling he was listening in closely to what Eli was saying to Finn. “It’s pretty obvious she’s not, and we don’t even know if they track us by scent anyway. They’re humans, so it’s not like they have enhanced senses like we would.”

  I sighed and let my head fall back against the head rest.

  “So, they’ll just… let her go?”

  “We’re talking hypotheticals,” he said sharply. “Darcy is not going to get caught.”

  “We’ve already had a hunter at one of our shows,” I retorted, my voice just as sharp.

  “That could’ve been a coincidence. They like music, I’m sure, just as much as they like murder.”

  Charlie snickered from behind Cash’s seat. I glared at him.

  “What?” He rolled his eyes. “It was funny.”

  “Alright, enough of that talk,” Cash interrupted, sounding more like a dad than my pack-mate and friend. I sighed and pulled down my mirror to look at the back. Finn’s eyes were closed, although he looked more relaxed. Eli’s arm was around his shoulders, and my heart gave a little jump. We weren’t able to do it in this tour van, but previously, we’d just laid out a mattress in the back and all squished in as much as we were able to. It always felt better when we were in one bed together. That closeness? We needed it. We weren’t pack animals just in name, even if we looked human. The urge to den, or nest, in with my pack-mates was strong. I flipped the sun visor back up, so I wouldn’t have to feel twitchy as I watched Finn and Eli do the equivalent of man-snuggling.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Darcy, back with us again, and a big mattress laid out in the back of the tour van, so we could all surround her with our bodies and our scent. It was the perfect daydream. Too bad it’d never come true.

  Ten

  Darcy

  I didn’t go down for dinner, or for breakfast the next day. Meals were left on a tray outside of my room. I guess, to them, it was worse than being shunned because not even my mother was coming to see me. But for once, I actually relished the freedom. My family were monsters, more than I’d realized.

  There was no question; I was an idiot for having come back here and I needed to get out. I’d spent one afternoon staring at the puzzle that was my window, nailed shut. I’d used a butter knife to pry at the nails, but no matter how I worked it, trying to wear down the wood, I could never get a grip on a single nail.

  I was almost beginning to suspect that the nails, brass, weren’t just nailed into the wood frame, but magicked in as well. That made me feel nauseous and I’d retreated to my bathroom for a long hot shower. They could have just sealed up the window without the nails.

  The nails were a message to me, directly.

  We know you’ll try, but you may as not well bother escaping.

  That’s what the nails meant. An open acknowledgement of my rebellion, and how futile it was.

  I’d have to go out one of the first-floor doors or see if I could escape out through one of the other second story windows. The only one I knew that had a trellis beneath it was my own, though.

  The other thing that was bothering me was leaving my cellphone behind. Witches felt tech was… beneath them, although I was sure my father knew how to get a cellphone checked for information if he really needed to know what was on it. But searching for the phone would mean exposing myself to being possibly caught by my parents or the maids. My sister would have returned to her home with Kenton, so running into her wasn’t much of a risk.

  I let the hours slip by, mentally going over the map of the house in my head, trying to figure out the best time. At nine, the maids had all retired except for the one who was on call to make things my mother felt necessary for the night. When we had great parties and events, the staff stayed up much later, but on a regular night, by nine they were off to their own quarters in a little house off the back yard.

  I’d thought for like, a hot minute, about asking my mother if I could call Daria, but I wasn’t sure how much I could trust my old friend after she’d given me up to my family so quickly. I wasn’t even mad about it. Being back at home, I remembered how oppressive this place was and Daria’s house was no better. Really, I’m not even sure why I was mildly surprised she had talked. Anyone would, after growing up how we did.

  The sun set, and the great clock down the end of the hall called the time. Nine o’clock passed and then ten, then eleven… the house creaked and fell quiet. It was time. My body tingled with nerves as I slipped into the clothes I was going to wear for my escape. I’d found a pair of my old Chucks in purple, shoved under my bed so far that even the most diligent maids had left them. They were better than high-heels for making a quick escape. The only kind of pants I had available to me were yoga pants, meant strictly for working out and then changing immediately after, if my mother had any say in the matter. I wore the black stretchy pants, and a black, pullover sweater. Hopefully I could look like a shadow when I escaped, and no one would see me.

  The only other thing I needed was money. I had my ID tucked into the small pocket of my yoga pants. Money was the last thing. That problem was actually pretty s
imple to solve. For as long as I could remember, my father had kept cash in the desk of his downstairs office. It’s not like we’d ever wanted for anything growing up, and it was there as sort of a petty-cash situation when deliveries arrived and somehow the maids were all too busy to accept it. That had never actually happened, but my father liked to be prepared. I’d grab whatever I could, and then I’d sneak out the window of his study and into the garden.

  My door opened silently and I took slow, hesitant steps as I made my way down the hall of the second floor. My parents’ rooms were on the third floor, so there was no way I’d be meeting them at this hour. I didn’t bother with a bag. There wasn’t anything at home I wanted to take with me, anyway, and they’d grabbed my duffel from me and probably burnt it along with all its contents.

  The halls were dimly light, the sconces every few feet turned low and barely lighting up the textured, gilt wallpaper. For the second time in my life, I was running away from home. I promised myself it was going to be the last time.

  I came to the edge of the stairwell and took a breath, listening for any sign of life. It was quiet except for the soft tic-tic-tic of the clock that had stood at the far end of the hall since I could remember.

  My foot landed on the first step. It creaked, just slightly, and I froze.

  My heart thudded in my ears.

  Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic…

  I let my foot on the stair take all my body weight. Then I moved to the next step. Slowly, I descended each stair, holding my breath and not even wanting to run my hand along the bannister in case the sound of my skin on wood made too much noise.

  My eyes closed as I came to the bottom of the steps. I snuck over to the door of my father’s study. The heavy metal doorknob was cold against my skin as I turned it. It swung open without a sound, and I mentally praised the ever-diligent staff who kept the house in excellent shape.