Auctioned To The Werewolf Princes
Daniella Wright
Contents
1. Patch Work
2. An Unexpected Visitor
3. Three Strikes
4. A Trip to the Market
5. Witches and Wolves
6. Making Nice
7. Biding Time
8. Star Pupil
9. Alone Again
10. Playing Prisoner
11. Stress Relief
12. Finishing Touches
13. Controlling the Uncontrollable
14. A Better Future for All
More By Dany
Auctioned To The Armitage Brothers
Four Daddies’ Secret Twins
Copyright
Chapter One
Patch Work
The man had greasy hair and a patchy beard that looked like the last time he’d shaved it, he had used a hacksaw. He was leaning over the counter, breathing down Eden’s neck as she tinkered away at his busted and ancient laptop. She undid the last of the tiny slightly rusted screws and pop, the plastic cover on the underside of the computer came off and she could access the motherboard. A few of the connections had come loose and it looked like there was some water damage.
“Where’d you get this piece of shit anyway?” Edan asked. She bent over and blew some of the dust out of the fan guard.
“I bought it from some guy,” said the guy. “What’s it to you?”
“It’ll be five hundred to fix.” She straightened up and held her hand out. “I’ll need half up front.”
“No way!” The guy looked at her wide-eyed. “Five hundred is nuts. I could buy a brand new laptop for that much.”
“Then do that,” she said, picking up the laptop and its cover. “I’ve got a lot of other paying customers whose busted electronics I have to work on, and I don’t have time to haggle with someone who probably stole this laptop from some old lady.”
The guy yanked the laptop from Eden’s hands and sneered. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, talking to me like that, but I have half a mind to come back here with my boys later and teach you a little lesson in manners.”
Eden smiled and tilted her head to one side. “I’m sorry,” she said sweetly. “Did you just threaten me?” She emphasized the “threat” part of the word and the silver-dollar sized disc which sat in the center of her belt buckle sprouted tiny metal legs, a metal head, and a couple of two-inch-long attacks. The guy watched, slack jawed, as the small robot scurried up Eden’s chest and rested on her shoulder. “You hear that, Cricket? We’ve officially been threatened. Initiate lockdown procedures and have a call sent into the security system operators.”
The bug hopped off and landed on the counter. It scuttled over to the wall next to the front door of Eden’s repair shop and climbed up to the control panel for the security system. With two of its spindly steel limbs it opened the plastic cover and started punching in a series of numbers.
The sound of metal scraping on metal indicated that Cricket had remotely locked the back door. “He’s got a few more numbers to press before the rest of the exits are locked,” Eden said to the guy. “I suggest you get out while you still can. The cops will be here any minute.” The guy ran towards the front door and ripped it open just as Cricket pressed the last number which would have locked it.
“Cricket!” Eden said. “False alarm. Reset everything.” The robot went to work resetting the lockdown procedures. There was no reason to send a new signal to the security operators, as there was no way they actually called the cops. Eden’s shop was located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Twin Glades, and the people in this area had been long forgotten by the local officials. Really Eden only put on that little show to demonstrate she was not such an easy target. A lot of people in the area underestimated her, and her shop had been broken into on more than one occasion. Nobody ever got away with anything, seeing as Eden had the place wired, bugged, and booby-trapped. Of the few burglars who were lucky enough to get in, only one of them ever managed to get back out.
But that didn’t really count, as Eden liked to say to herself. Because that burglar had been a witch. Sort of like the only thing strong enough to break a diamond is another diamond, the only person who can outsmart a witch is another witch.
In the backroom of her shop, Eden got to work on a piece of equipment a client of hers had dropped off the day before. The man’s name was Isaac and he had been coming to Eden’s shop for years. They had a mutual agreement. Isaac wouldn’t bother her with small talk, try to flirt with her like some of the other men do, and in return, she wouldn’t ask questions when he showed up with a bunch of black market tech and paid her in a combination of cash and old parts. This time he’d brought her an old cell phone that he was hoping she could make work again, and for her payment he’d brought along $30, all ones, wrinkled and rolled up into a thick, slightly damp wad, and some junky supplies he got from a guy who sells old medical equipment.
From the looks of it, she had a monitor from an old x-ray machine, back-up batteries for an MRI machine, still in their original packaging, and beeper. For now, the monitor and beeper were useless to her, but she threw them in her keep pile anyway. It was the battery she was really excited about. Powering up one of those massive body scanning machines would take a lot of juice, which is exactly the amount of juice she would need to power her experimental machine. That is, assuming she ever got finished building the damn thing.
Pushing the batteries to the side of her desk, out of the way of her work space, Eden got to tinkering on the cell phone. Isaac was supposed to drop by later that night and Eden took great pride in finishing her work on time.
She pried open the back panel of the cell phone and was surprised to find all the parts in great condition. It looked like the phone had never been used. She popped the battery out and shoved it into the body of a different phone she had around for just that sort of thing. That phone turned on and its screen lit up, worked fine. She then checked the tiny processor and found that it had somehow been damaged.
“Damnit,” she said under her breath. She had really hoped the issue wouldn’t be with the processor. She had a massive bucket in the corner, full of these processing chips, but finding one to fit the phone could take her hours. The whole night even. Eden had never been afraid of hard work, but she absolutely despised tedious work. Another witch, who’s magic training focused more on the discipline her old professor used to refer to as “inter-connected magic,” probably would have known a spell that would help her find the right chip in a matter of seconds. Eden, on the other hand, had focused her efforts growing up on becoming a master of what they called “wave magic.” They called it that because the discipline was centered around the art of controlling the different scientific waves; i.e. heat waves, energy waves, light waves, sound waves, etc. Eden was best at using energy waves, but those skills were not going to help her now.
She pushed away from her desk and pulled her thick, tight-curled hair back into a small bun on the top of her head. She had been growing it out recently, trying to wear it like her mother used to- in a big, dark brown afro. Keeping the hair-do looking nice, however, was starting to take up too much of her time. She was thinking about shaving it down to her usual cropped length.
She sat down on the floor next to the bucket, then stretched her arm out to the second shelf of the supplies rack next to her and grabbed an empty bucket to throw the ones that didn’t fit into. The sun was just barely setting when she got started. It was pitch black by the time she found one that fit. When the phone turned on and the screen lit up, Eden held her hands up over her head in triumph, then collapsed into her
desk chair and took a nap.
The bell above the front door of her shop woke Eden up an hour or so later. She called up to the front room, telling Isaac she would be out in a second. She was halfway to the bathroom, which was adjacent the shockingly cluttered back room when she heard a moan and a crash. She ran to the front room and found Isaac on the floor of her shop surrounded by a pile of parts from a container he seemed to have taken with him on his way down. He was holding his side and Eden could see blood soaking into his light grey shirt.
“Oh my god!” She rushed to his side. “What happened?” She put her hand on top of his and pressed down, applying more pressure to the wound.
Cricket, who was programmed to constantly monitor Eden’s heart rate, popped out of his nesting place in her belt and crawled up and down her arm. He was collecting more information, recording how much she was sweating and waiting for a verbal cue. “Cricket, it’s fine,” she said and the robot stopped pacing. He was still monitoring her vitals, she knew that, but at least this way he wouldn’t randomly call her an ambulance.
“It was a group of demons.”
“Conscious or instinctive?” Those were the two categories the people of Twin Glades had for the monsters who were crawling out of the gates. Conscious demons were more human like. They often formed gangs and were responsible for most of the crime that went on in the city. They were hard to identify. They blended in with a lot of the shifters who lived in the area. The instinctive demons were much easier to spot, but also far more dangerous. They looked sort of like bears, but without fur and with dark green skin, not unsimilar to an alligator’s.
“Instinctive.” Isaac sucked in a short breath and winced. “It was just three of them, I think. I had my gun and was able to kill two of them, but I ran out of bullets and didn’t reload before the third one pounced on me. He scratched me up pretty good, but then there was a loud noise in the wooded area of the park and it ran away.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t tear your throat out,” said Eden. “You need to go to the hospital.”
Isaac scoffed. “They make you pay up front and you know I don’t have any money. Besides, it’s not that bad, I just need a few stitches.” He looked up at her and smiled. “Your mother ever teach you how to sew?”
Eden shook her head but didn’t verbalize her hesitancy. There wasn’t time to argue. She got to her feet and wrapped one of her arms around Isaac’s back. “On three,” she said. “One, two—”
He let out a loud, low pitched yell as Eden helped him to his feet. She brought him into her back room and pointed to her mattress which was shoved into the corner opposite the bathroom. “You can lay down. I’ll go see what I can find in terms of needle and thread.”
He bent his knees and she helped guide him down to the bed. “I’m going to stain your mattress,” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said. I have a cleaning spell lying around here somewhere.
Eden looked on her shelves, fairly confident she was never going to find what she was looking for. She turned and glanced at Isaac, wondering how distracting the pain was. Maybe he wouldn't notice if she just did a quick, totally causal suture spell. She turned back to the shelves and saw a half-drunk bottle of gin sitting on its side. She grabbed it. “That oughta’ do the trick,” she said to herself.
She gave Isaac the bottle and prompted him to keep drinking while she pretended to search for her non-existent sewing kit. “It will help with the pain.”
“Yeah but I thought alcohol was a blood thinner,” he said. “I don’t know if I should be—”
“Fine,” she said. “Let yourself be miserable and feel every second of the procedure while I pinch your exposed flesh together and stick a hot, blunt needle through it every few seconds.”
Isaac didn’t say anything more. He was too busy sipping away and slowly passing out. She watched his eyes flutter closed and quickly grabbed her spell book from the locked drawer in her desk. There was no key to unlock the door; it was a mental spell lock, personal to Eden, that way no one could ever open it.
She flipped through the early pages of the book, to the spells she logged back when her parents had still been alive and her mother took her camping every summer. Her mother was insistent that Eden learn at least the basics of survivalist magic, which was her mother’s specialty, even if it wasn’t going to be her focus. She found the magic suture spell and said the words a few times to herself and practiced the hand gestures that were drawn below. Once she was pretty sure she had the words and the gestures down, she opened up Isaac’s shirt and examined the wound.
There were three deep gashes, where it appeared three of the beast’s claws had gotten him. The bleeding had slowed, but not stopped. She guessed they were deep but that they hadn’t pierced any vital organs. As her hands hoverer over the man’s torso, she said the spell.
“I call upon thee, mother of trees, giver and taker of life.” She closed her fingers into fists and spread them wide in a repetitive motion. “Close this wound, heal this flesh, and restore balance to this body.” She pressed her hands gently to the wound and felt warmth in her palms. It was working, the edges of the wounds started to close. She repeated the words and the gestures twice more and with that, the skin was closed and all that remained were three, skinny pink scars. She didn’t have the energy to worry about what Isaac might make of the scars instead of stitches, that was future Eden’s problem.
Because survival magic was not Eden’s strong suit, it took a lot out of her. By the time she finished healing Isaac, her head was swimming and her vision was starting to blur. Without thinking of what awkwardness there might be in the morning, Eden crawled over Isaac’s sleeping form and laid on the bed next to him. She was lulled to sleep by the sound of Isaac’s heavy, deep breathes, and the feeling of Cricket running up and down the length of her arm, scanning her vitals and making sure she was okay.
There was no sign of Isaac when she woke up, save the blood stain on the bed next to her, and a note on her desk where his cell phone used to be. The note was scribbled in thick, black marker and appeared to be written by a hurried hand.
“Thank you. I owe you one. Not sure when I’ll be back. I have some markets to hit outside of the city, but don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.” There was a smiley face next to the note, which had one eye closed as if it was winking at her. Below the face was a crudely drawn mage symbol. The symbol was supposed to look like a tree trunk with leaves from different types of trees adorning its branches. Isaac’s version looked like a stick with other sticks jutting off and a few circles drawn to symbolize the leaves. It used to be something only witches used to communicate to other witches what they were without raising any red flags with humans or shifters. Later, the symbol was adopted by anti-magic groups. They would put it on the signs of their establishments, letting people know that witches were not allowed to patron their shops or restaurants.
Eden was born right around the time the witch burnings started to once again become popular. That was why her mother never had Eden register as a user of magic and why she had homeschooled her by a bunch of her friends instead of sending her to one of the big, well-known magic schools, which had all since been shut down.
Eden crumpled up the note, threw it in the trash, and used a simple mental spell to light the whole container on fire. Once everything inside was burnt to ashes, she extinguished the flames with a different mental spell and twisted her mother’s ring around her finger.
“Sorry, mom,” she said, staring down at the soot-stained trash bin. “I was just doing what I thought you would.”
Eden’s parents died a few years after the first portals started cropping up. Nobody knew what they were at first. They were hard to see, and even harder to close, and for a while it seemed nothing bad was coming from their existence. Every once in a while, someone would accidently fall through one, but they always found their way back to Earth. Then, one day, a spirit walked out of one of the portals in a town not too far from T
win Glades. It had wandered out of the spirit world and into theirs without realizing it. But once she did realize it, once she did understand that her spirit had somehow traveled back to Earth, she immediately started stirring up trouble. Her first stop was to her ex-boyfriend’s house. According to the legend, she blamed him for her untimely death. She had been in a car accident, which she said was his fault because she was driving over to his house in a fury having heard from one of her other friends that he was cheating on her.
Whether or not the rumor of his infidelity was true, Eden never knew. The version of the story she heard only mentioned that the spirit arrived at the boyfriend’s place and spent the next week mentally torturing him until he went mad and jumped off a bridge. Spirits could only physically manipulate small things, and some weren’t even strong enough to do that. The ones most consumed by vengeance and anger, like the first spirit to cross over, were able to move pictures and knock things off of shelves. They were agents of chaos, which was infuriating but they weren’t a direct threat to one’s physical safety. Mental warfare— that was their chosen form of battle.
The demons were who you really needed to look out for. Whether they were conscious or instinctive, the creatures that crawled through these portals all shared one thing in common; bloodlust. Some of them, the conscious ones, were better at using their aggression and dismissal of human life to their advantage, whereas the instinctual demons were predators, in the most basic, animalistic sense of the word.
Eden’s father had been one of the most famous scientists during this time. A committee was put in charge of figuring out what these portals were, how they came into existence, and what exactly could be done to close them. Kurt, Eden’s dad, was hired to help them. He was a physicist who had invented a smaller version of a machine called a Hadron Collider, which he believed could be used to get rid of the portals. During one of his tests with the collider, there was an explosion. He was too close to the blast, and he died right there on the floor of his laboratory. Eden’s mother, Nora, was never the same after she lost her husband. At this time Eden was in her twenties, although she still looked like a teenager. On the second anniversary of Kurt’s death, Nora lost it and ran through a portal. She thought there might be a chance she could find her husband’s spirit and they could live together in the spirit world for the rest of eternity.
Auctioned to the Werewolf Princes Page 1