Torment: Dark Paranormal Romance (Eclipse Warlocks Book 1)

by Ellie Cassidy

  COPYRIGHT

  Tormented

  Eclipse Warlocks Book 1

  (Dark paranormal romance)

  Published by Ellie Cassidy

  Copyright © 2021 by Ellie Cassidy

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or resold in any form or by any means without permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for non-commercial uses. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author.

  All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or otherwise, is purely coincidental. If real, names, places and characters are used fictitiously.

  What you don’t know can still kill you…

  There’s nothing special about me. I’m just an ordinary girl, doing my best to live an ordinary small town life. Then they came to Shadow Horn and everything changed.

  From the Eclipse

  The Moon and Sun is Born

  One of Light

  One of Dark

  One to Walk Between

  It’s impossible to keep a secret in this town. Everyone knows that.

  Of course, that was before.

  Now I have secrets coming out my ears. Demons walking the earth. Gorgeous guys with angel blood. That kind of thing.

  Dark. Twisted. Steamy. Magical.

  It all started with Lexan Delacotte, the dreamy boy who walked right into my heart as if I’d left the door open. Then there’s Gideon Crest, sex and sin all wrapped up in one black heart.

  Eclipse Warlocks.

  How the hell will I survive them?

  Or am I really destined not to?

  Whenever a great magic is created, the natural order of the universe demands a balance. Sun and Moon. Warlock warriors and mortal enemies forged in angel blood and magic to vanquish demons and doomed to destroy each other.

  And wouldn’t you know? There’s always an unintentional consequence. Three guesses who that might be.

  So here we are. Me and my two Eclipse Warlocks who may be just as devilish as the monsters they’re duty-bound to vanquish.

  One to love.

  One to hate.

  Apparently the natural order of my life also demands a balance.

  Then again, maybe not. As it turns out, they don’t just want me for my body or my charming personality.

  They don’t want me for that at all.

  Eclipse Warlocks is a dark, thrilling and sexy paranormal series perfect for fans of The Vampire Diaries and The Marked Saga, and anyone who likes their romance steaming hot and twisted with an anti-hero or two. If you love urban fantasy, paranormal, fated mates, magic, avenging warlocks and demons and bad boys and dark romance, then welcome to the world of the Eclipse Warlocks.

  1

  SAGE

  @hawk

  I’m the poster child for parental negligence. I see my father once a year where he presents me with a gift and two hours of his time. When I turned four, it was a rocking horse and a play session at Fun Sam. My eleventh birthday was a silver locket and chili dogs at the brackens. Sweet sixteen was a diamond pendant and dinner at The Pavilion. My seventeenth birthday—well, that was a disaster. Tonight he didn’t bother showing. No big loss. I couldn’t wait to get to the lake for my real party anyway. A girl only turns eighteen once. You’ll forgive me if I got absolutely hammered.

  Sandy was still pissed at me for arriving late for the lunch shift, but my head had finally stopped pounding like a runaway train. There was that. Now it just felt stuffed with wet cotton balls.

  Leaning over to wipe down my last table of the day, my sluggish brain doggedly counted down the minutes to the end of what had to be the longest shift in the history of mankind. That’s when I caught sight of them.

  Kenzie and Grant.

  The town square was a patch of grass with a couple of trees and benches and Kenzie was leaning back against the old elm. Grant was leaning into her, one hand pressed to the trunk beside her head. They weren’t doing anything, not really, but I could practically feel the heat from their body language all the way across the street and through the thick window glass of the Shadow Grill.

  Shit. “When did that happen?”

  Two tables over, Haley glanced up from her phone. “What?”

  “That.” I knocked my chin toward the scene outside the window.

  A short pause. “Oh, last night…at the lake. You don’t remember?”

  “I didn’t remember my own name last night,” I commented dryly. “Thanks to your damn birthday present.”

  A bottle of tequila with a gross, fat worm coiled in the bottom that definitely gave it that extra bite. I didn’t even want to know how Haley had managed to procure it.

  “You’re welcome.”

  My attention remained on the couple across the street, my two best friends aside from Haley.

  Grant Ashton, quarterback and captain of the Black Horns. Blond hair, blue eyes, sun-kissed skin and a heart of gold.

  And Heather MacKenzie a.k.a. Kenzie, a.k.a. that girl. She flicked her sunset curls over her shoulder and tilted her head, smiling her trademark bewitching smile. Poor Grant didn’t stand a chance.

  “What the hell is she up to?” I muttered.

  “It takes two to tango,” Haley said. “Don’t stress, they both have the mileage to handle it.”

  Grant was a player (forgive the pun) and Kenzie liked her relationships short and sweet. But this was different.

  Tucking the cloth into the waistband of my apron, I moved to settle in at the banquet table across from Haley. “Handle what?”

  “One last summer fling?” Haley tossed out lightly. “If ever there was a time…”

  …this would be it. Grant was off to California on a football scholarship at the end of summer. Kenzie and Haley were off to East Glades University in Atlanta. Thousands of miles to separate them from the fallout. Hundreds of new experiences before they returned home for Christmas and had to see each other again.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Understand what?” Haley said, her nose wrinkling delicately.

  My mouth twisted as I fought around my next words. Haley, Kenzie and Grant were family, the only family I had. Our friendship was sacred. Not to be messed with. And dammit, Kenzie was particularly careless when it came to boys’ hearts and her relationships always blew up spectacularly. Grant’s track record wasn’t much better.

  “Understand what?” Haley asked again.

  “When this fling blows over,” I said, “it’s going to blow up, you realize that, right? Blow up in all our faces.”

  “I hear you,” Haley said, not sounding nearly as worried as I would have liked her to be. “But what are we going to do? It’s a free world. We’ll just have to deal with that when it happens.”

  “Why are you so calm about it?”

  Haley shrugged, her wide brown eyes dipping to her phone.

  I watched her, waited with a growing feeling of uncertainty. “Haley!”

  She blew out a noisy sigh and put her phone down. “It’s just… Sage, I don’t know,” she hedged. “I just…”

  “Spit it out.”

  “With us all going off to college, things are bound to change,” Haley finally started straight talking. “I guess I’ve just accepted that some of our friendships are going to loosen a bit no matter who does what.”

  “Loosen a bit?”

  “Maybe you don’t get it, but—”

  “Because you’re all expanding your horizons while I’m stuck here in my s
mall town mentality?” I supplied, totally getting it. “So what? You’ve already written me off?”

  “Don’t be dramatic. I’m talking about Grant, not us. Kenzie and I are only an hour’s drive away, but he’ll be thousands of miles across the country. And I said loosen. No one’s dumping anyone.”

  My mouth opened, but my retort got caught in the thickening of my throat. Because I felt it, too, this looming sense that everything was about to change. “Except for Grant,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, he’s definitely dumping Callie,” Haley said with a smirk, referring to the girl Grant had started dating at the beginning of summer break.

  My gaze slid off Haley and came up against Sandy bearing down on our table with purpose. I checked my watch, relieved to note my shift had officially ended. Besides, it was what Sandy called the shadow hour—after the last of the lunch stragglers and before the early diners. The only customer was a lone man nursing his drink at the bar counter.

  Sandy was a burly bear of a man, white-haired with a weather-beaten face and a body that carried a little extra weight and plenty of extra muscle. He owned the Shadow Grill and wasn’t a terrible boss, but he had his days.

  Apparently today was one of them.

  He stopped at the head of our table, scowling at me. “I’ve got two new waitresses starting and you’re training them. They’re waiting for you in the back.”

  “My shift is over,” I protested.

  “You owe me forty-five minutes.”

  “I was only half an hour late.”

  “And you’ve been parking on your butt the last quarter hour.”

  “Dock it off my wages.”

  “If I wanted to dock your wages, I would have docked your wages,” Sandy said bluntly and walked off, back to tend the bar.

  “What the hell?” I glared accusingly at Haley. “Am I the only one ‘parking’ off at this table?”

  “Hey, I arrived on time,” Haley said. “Besides, Sandy doesn’t want me to train them. I’m not going to be here when he needs to shout about how badly trained they are.”

  “If he’s not careful,” I ground out, “I won’t be here either.”

  Haley’s brows perked. “Does that mean you’re reconsidering East Glades? There’s still time for late registration.”

  That had always been the plan, the four of us going off to Atlanta together. Then Grant had gotten his scholarship and as for me…well, I couldn’t explain it to anyone, least of all myself.

  It had started as a slow build from vague doubt to disturbing conviction as we’d gone through the college application process. East Glades was too far away. I couldn’t leave Shadow Horn. Which was ridiculous, considering I had no family to stay for and my friends were all leaving.

  I shook my head at Haley, a firm, No. Not reconsidering. This wasn’t about reason. It was an itch on my brain. I quite literally—physically—cringed from any thought of East Glades and Atlanta the same way I cringed from the screech of chalk drawn across a blackboard.

  Maybe I had a cancerous tumor rotting there. At this point, I was open to all and any ideas.

  Meanwhile, when all my friends went off to explore new beginnings at the end of summer, I’d be stuck at Nottingham, the local college that was all of a ten minute walk from the top of Main Road.

  @hawk

  Could this day be any more crappy?

  I wasn’t totally delusional. I didn’t believe in spirits and visions and spidery feelings, but something was definitely going on with me. I felt like I was being held captive by a premonition of some terror that would befall me if I went off to college in Atlanta.

  That, or I was in the middle of a psychotic break.

  Most days, I leant toward the latter.

  Blame the (grossly unfair) extended shift, blame my overly tender head, but today I needed to cut myself some slack so I was open-minded to the premonition theory—some higher form of sixth sense that was trying to protect my sweet ass like a guardian angel.

  My mouth tweaked around a smile as my feet pounded the pavement, past the familiar storefronts and diners and the bell tower.

  On the corner of Main and Primrose, I paused, not ready to go home to an empty house. Instead I kept on Main to the junction. Left was Nottingham, the local college I’d signed up for. I hugged the opposite corner, my feet taking me to the brackens, a picnic area that was also the town’s entrance to the bordering National Forest.

  Shadow Horn was cradled beneath the Horn, the mountain outcrop that cast the small, sleepy town in its shadow. The population wasn’t that small that I could boast I knew each and every face, but the moment I spotted him, I knew he wasn’t a local.

  He was sitting at the base of an ancient oak, leaning back against the gnarled trunk with one knee pulled up to support his sketchpad. His hair was tones of burnt honey, thick with a gentle wave that fell over his sculpted face as he scratched on the pad with a piece of charcoal and the intensity of a self-absorbed artist.

  He looked up, catching me out in a full-on stare as my footsteps faltered.

  I didn’t blink away.

  Didn’t even think about.

  The soulful depths of his honey eyes, a shade darker than his hair, grabbed me, locked me in and faded out the world around us. My pulse ticked over into a slow, throbbing beat.

  He cut the connection first, his gaze dropping to his sketchpad.

  I remembered to breathe.

  Suddenly self-conscious, I averted my eyes and smoothed a hand over my hair, intensely aware of not exactly looking my best after last night’s bad behavior and oversleeping and a six hour shift at the Grill.

  Gassemar Forest was popular with its waterfall hiking trail and lakes, and today was no exception with the summer heat still baked into the late afternoon air. Crowded picnic tables, small kids buzzing around, groups of older teens hanging out in the dappled shade, plenty for my eyes to pick over and not look his way again as I joined the back of the short line by Snack Hut.

  The pull to look back, to sneak another look over my shoulder, strained at the edges of my will-power as I pointedly fixed my stare on Arran MacLeod, the ridiculously hunky Scotsman who owned and ran the wood-slatted caravan that operated as the Snack Hut. He looked like a medieval warrior, totally out of place behind the counter, totally out of this timeline with his long blond hair tied back and his chiseled face, biceps bulging beneath his t-shirt and that cuff of ancient symbols inked to his left upper arm.

  “Hey, Arran,” I greeted when my turn came up, peering around his broad shoulders into the recesses of the interior. “You alone today?”

  “Aye, the lass isn’t feeling herself today,” he said, his deep baritone reverberating with the thick brogue.

  The lass he referred to was his wife, Jessica, and not a day under thirty.

  “I hope Jessica feels better soon,” I said sincerely.

  His smile sunk vertical grooves into each cheek. “The usual?”

  He turned from me to the expresso machine without waiting for confirmation. A minute later, he handed over my cappuccino, and a second paper cup. “Double expresso for the lad over there.”

  “Since when do you offer table service?” I asked, following his line of sight to the eye-bait propped against the tree. Oh.

  “I don’t,” Arran said and moved on to serve the next person.

  Well, this is about to get interesting. Gathering both cups, not really minding at all, I cut a wide swathe around the picnic tables, coming at him alongside the tree line. He glanced up, as if sensing he was my target, his gaze tracking my approach as he slowly rested his head back against the trunk.

  A smile touched the corners of his sensual mouth.

  I nearly stumbled from the impact. God, he was beautiful. Heat crept over my skin as I came to a stop before him and returned the smile. “You ordered a double expresso?”

  His brow quirked. “I did?”

  Crap. “Courtesy of Arran then, I guess.” I shot the culprit a scowling look over my s
houlder, but he was busy with his customers and determined not to notice. “You’ve obviously done something right in his books.”

  “He doesn’t just hand out free coffee to all his regulars?” he said, smoothing over the awkward moment. Then not. “Or is he the local matchmaker?”

  I swallowed a lump of mortification. “Arran? No! Sorry…” I leant in with his coffee. “This is so random.”

  “Lex,” he said, giving his name as he took the cup, the fleeting brush of his fingers over mine rippling awareness through me. “I’m not complaining.”

  “Sage,” I said breathlessly, slightly flustered. This was crazy. It’s not like I was some never-been-kissed sophomore.

  His gaze trailed to my mouth, lingering for a heartbeat that left me flushed from head to toe. The wash of warmth felt strangely natural, as if my body were already familiar with this instant, insane reaction.

  His eyes met mine again, burnt honey, intense. “Sit, please.”

  I couldn’t resist.

  My legs folded beneath me, dropping me into a cross-legged position across from his drawn-up knee. “Are you a day hiker?” Wait, he’d said something about being a regular. “Oh, you’re camping at the park?”

  “The Stables actually,” he said. “Not camping. I’m staying there.”

  “The Mackeson place?” I said, surprised. The old manor had been standing empty for ages, ever since Jonas Mackeson had gone into care and then finally passed away two years ago. “Last I heard, the family were refusing to sell.”

  “Gideon can be very persuasive,” Lex said.

  “Your dad?”

  “Family friend.” He removed the lid on his cup and sipped. “He bought the manor a couple of months back.”

  That raised a dozen more questions, each one more personal than the next, far too intimate for a casual encounter in the brackens. I bit my lip and went with, “You draw?”

  He flipped the pad one-handedly and hung it over his knee, right-side up for me to see. I rocked forward, peering at the artwork that filled the page.

  The woman—angel—was clearly naked, one magnificent wing folded over her front to obscure her most private areas with reaching feathers. The other wing hung loosely at her side, the feathered bony tips draping to the ground as if useless, battered, defeated. Creatures rose up around her feet, demonic little monsters with warped features and gnarled bodies, clawing at her limbs and torso like a demented inferno rising from the bowels of hell.