Order of the Akasha: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (Complete Series)

by E. M. Moore

  “Since when do people wait in line for Madame Serena?” Travis asked.

  Oh no, my heart went out to her. She’d been so happy to be at the medium’s too. I hadn’t even asked her why she was there. I just remember she’d had a picture clutched in her hand. “Since never,” Randy said. “Norah told me there was some bereavement group there. One of the members said Madame Serena connected her with her dead husband.”

  “So, that woman was there,” Liam said. “Now she’s here, dead.”

  I gulped, turning away from the scene. It was hard to look at her and not see the life in her eyes from earlier today when she’d been so excited. It made my stomach roll. “I don’t know if she got an appointment with her or not. There was a line and people were writing their names down.”

  I sniffed the air, the smell of the rotten meat turning my stomach again. Liam pulled on my hand. “Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing we can do for her now.”

  We all sulked back to the Jeep, taking care to erase our presence from the house. Randy edged the car away from the curb as we rolled away. No one would know something awful had happened in that house. It looked so quiet and unassuming. The flowerbeds were brimming with little saplings. It was Spring after all.

  Randy made a few more turns and then stopped outside a diner. “You guys want to sit here and talk?” he asked, motioning toward the front windows.

  We all agreed and got out. An older waitress sat us and gave us menus. We were silent until we ordered and she brought our drinks. It was Liam who spoke first. “None of this is a coincidence. Forgive me for saying this, but like the others, I’m sure the coroner is going to find sexual activity. That woman was old. It looked like she lived alone. I’m guessing her sexual activities would be slim to none lately.”

  “She was at Madame Serena’s. I just kind of assumed her husband was dead.” I didn’t think I thought that at first, but it worked in the scenario now.

  Liam pulled his phone from his pocket and started typing into Google. He brought up listings on a page as Travis stirred milk into his coffee. “All the recent deaths were predeceased by their spouses,” he said. “Do you remember anything else from this talk with the lady, Norah?”

  I closed my eyes and thought back to the conversation. “She said a lady from her bereavement group was able to contact her husband through Serena. Martha,” I said, finally remembering the name the lady gave. “She said a woman named Martha was able to contact her husband, told the group about it, now they all wanted an appointment with Madame Serena.”

  “Are we really trying to tie together a medium, and a sex crime?” Gabe asked, his expression doubtful.

  Randy was worryingly quiet. He sat back and sipped his coffee, his expression grim.

  “We have to do something,” Liam said. “We’re just bringing all the facts together right now. It doesn’t mean they’re all going to make sense. Let me look up Martha and bereavement groups in Salem.” He typed into his on-screen keyboard again. “Bingo. I’ve got a last name. Let’s search for an address…” He paused as he worked his magic. “He flipped the screen toward Randy when it displayed.”

  Randy nodded. “As soon as we’re done here, we’ll get to it. Put a tracking spell on the lady. Maybe we’ll be forewarned if something happens to her too.”

  “We’ll figure this out,” Travis said. It was to the whole table, but it seemed mostly for Randy’s benefit. He wasn’t taking this well at all.

  When the food came, the waitress asked if we wanted Tabasco sauce and I almost came out of my chair. I waited for her to leave, so I wouldn’t sound like a freak and then turned toward the guys who looked at me expectantly. “Granny,” I said, sliding the Tabasco sauce from one hand to the other on the Formica. “She came to me in a dream tonight. She told me Madame Serena tried to get in touch with her.”

  Randy’s face turned red. “You’re just saying this now?”

  “I just remembered,” I said, sliding the Tabasco sauce back into the center of the table where the waitress had put it. It was one of Granny’s favorite things to drizzle over almost anything. Nothing was ever spicy enough for her.

  “I don’t like this,” Randy said, chewing the rest of his food, and then swiping a napkin over his lips. “Madame Serena’s suddenly very popular. She’s trying to contact Norah’s dead grandmother. What could it mean? It seems related.”

  He looked at Liam and again, Liam processed the information in his brilliant head. “It doesn’t make her guilty of anything. It could just be a coincidence, but we need to watch her, too.”

  “She suddenly has powers,” Randy said. “You know she was a fraud. Now she’s connecting people with their dead loved ones? Contacting Granny?”

  “Or she could just be pretending to do that. She’s been pretending to do that for a long time. Maybe she was just really convincing with this Martha lady.”

  “But Granny,” Randy insisted. “She poked at the realm.”

  “Granny came to me, too,” Travis said. “I’m no medium.”

  Randy swore under his breath.

  Liam placed his elbows on the table. “Listen, we’re not saying you’re wrong. We’re just looking at things from all angles.”

  “What we need to do is stop this shit from happening. Those people are innocents. Even if she’s not killing people, she’s guilty of getting these poor people’s hopes up.”

  My chest constricted. Wasn’t Serena doing exactly what I was doing? Selling people an idea? Granted, hers seemed much more cruel than mine, but still. I hadn’t realized Randy was against it as he was.

  Gabe gazed around the table. “Have you checked on our buddy Seth recently, Travis?”

  “Yeah, he’s been doing a whole lot of nothing. Right now, he’s…” He shut his eyes and then immediately peeled them apart. “You don’t want to know. He hasn’t been anywhere near these victims or Norah or any one of us.” He shivered in his seat before downing the rest of his coffee.

  Randy put his mug down shortly after Travis. “Let’s get into Madame Serena’s. I want to check her records to see if any of the other victims show up in her clientele file. If they do, I say we mark her. Let the Akasha do its thing to find out if she’s really to blame.”

  “The Akasha?” I’d read a little about it in one of the books Liam gave me, but not enough to know what Randy was talking about.

  Gabe peeked at Travis and opened his mouth to tell me, but Travis started talking first. “When we mark someone, it’s so they can be put on trial. We perform a spell in the pentagram at headquarters and the Akasha works its way through the person to see if they’re truthfully good or bad. There’s no guessing about it. If they’re bad, we strip them. Sometimes we strip the witch completely of their powers depending on how severe the case, sometimes just one power.”

  He swallowed when he finished, and I knew he was thinking about the past in that moment.

  “I like the idea,” Liam said. “If we get the evidence, we mark Serena and have the Akasha take care of her one way or the other. If she did do something to those people, she’ll pay, Randy. It’s what we do.”

  21

  Liam’s words didn’t actually seem to help Randy at all. Travis took over driving, which was a bit of a relief, but the Jeep still vibrated with Randy’s leg bouncing up and down with nervous energy. I wanted to help soothe him, but I wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t as if we could start a deep conversation in front of everyone. Especially not with the closed off look on his face.

  With Liam’s cell phone GPS, we made it to Martha Giles’ residence. As if on cue, all of us shut our eyes and searched for what we hoped would be nothing. She hadn’t been one of the victims yet, and we wanted to keep it that way. I was the first to open my eyes. I didn’t feel anything negative going on in the surrounding area, but I was also considered a newbie in all this, so I waited patiently until the rest of them opened their eyes and all nodded at one another.

  “All of us don’t need to go in there,” L
iam said.

  “You better go,” Travis said. “You’re better at tracking spells, and I’m already tracking someone.” He shifted his gaze toward Randy as if to express his opinion that Randy shouldn’t be doing anything right now. We could all agree to that. Agitated wouldn’t even begin to describe what was going on with him.

  “I’ll go with you?” I offered.

  Liam nodded, and we headed for Martha’s house, his fingers entwined with mine. When we got to the front step, he pulled me to a stop in front of the split-level ranch that looked like it had been kept in a time capsule since the seventies. “I’m going to make us invisible, so we can slip inside undetected. When we find her, I’ll go ahead and put the tracking spell on her, but I’ll tell you when I do. Feel the magic, search for it through me as I do it. You’ll have to learn how to do this yourself.”

  “What did Travis mean about him already tracking someone? Can we only track one person at a time?”

  Liam shook his head. “No, it’s just that the magic can start to thin if we track too many people at one time. We’re usually not stretched this far. If we think something’s going on, we watch the person, and then when we have real evidence, we mark them.”

  “With the Akasha?”

  “Exactly.”

  A trickle of magic spread through me, starting first in my fingers that interlinked with Liam’s, then spread up my arm, through my chest, and down my extremities before tingling my other fingertips. I brought up my other hand to my face. “You just made us invisible, didn’t you?”

  He smiled and gave me a playful shrug. Reaching out to open the door in front of us, the lock slid out of place just before he twisted the handle. Damn. He was good. We walked in, careful to be quiet. The magic that left us undetected wouldn’t make us silent.

  Creaking noises in the dark? It could very well be us scouring through your house.

  We found Martha Giles in an upstairs bedroom. As Liam requested, I closed my eyes and felt the way his magic worked. I smiled as he did it, not just because it felt good, but because I understood the magic he used now. It was like inserting an unseen GPS device onto her that one could access at any time. As he worked, I bit my lip, imagining the same magic coming out of me, manipulating it into a spell that would track someone, that would tell me where they were whenever I needed them. Feeling the way Liam had done it helped tremendously.

  “Ready?” he whispered.

  I nodded, the smell of sugary sweet seafoam lingered in the air. Martha shifted in bed and Liam and I backed away slowly. We left the house, Liam taking care to lock her door back up for her before we headed back to the Jeep. When we got there, Liam opened the back door for me and I slid inside. He hopped in after. “Done.”

  “I can tell,” Gabe said, his nose twitching. “It smells like Smarties in here. Like Smarties at a beach party.”

  Travis laughed and pulled away from the curb to head toward Historic Salem. The day was still very early. Very few cars were on the road, and we needed to get to Madame Serena’s before she did. Since she always got there before I did, I wasn’t sure what time she usually opened her shop. Getting across the bridge and maneuvering down the streets took us only as long as a few red lights and some stop signs.

  Before long, Travis parked the car on a side street. “Alright, here’s the plan. We go in, we look for her client records. When we find them—”

  “I’ll take pictures on my phone,” Liam said. “That way we’ll have them, and then we can just take it from there.”

  “If she’s there,” Randy said. “We’re marking her.”

  “We’ll mark her when there’s evidence,” Travis said, his gaze shifting toward the passenger seat.

  In Randy’s mind, she was already guilty. It wasn’t a far-off stretch. We just needed to be sure. Walter, and their—I guess, our—other superiors probably wouldn’t like it if we went around marking people who weren’t actually guilty.

  At that, Randy pushed his car door open and we all filed out, making the short trek down the street to Madame Serena’s shop. Taking the precautionary steps Liam and I had at Martha’s, we went into the shop. I headed straight for the area near the cash register as Gabe and Travis went to the back to check for a backroom. I sniffed the air, unable to stop myself from trying to see if there was evil magic around. It left an awful smell, but at the moment, all I could smell was the incense Serena used during her psychic readings.

  I pulled the clipboard off the desk that I remembered everyone writing their names down on and handed it to Liam. “This is what they used the other day. Hopefully there’s something else too,” I said, kneeling and opening the cabinets on the backside of the counter. That would only have new clients on it, not old clients. My heart thumped in my chest, and my eyes kept darting toward the door. If she was a psychic, wouldn’t she know we were here? I kept expecting her to walk in and be very pissed that we were going through her stuff. Then again, we were supposed to be invisible right now. I hoped that meant for those with power too. The guys must’ve been mistaken when they said she didn’t have power before because she had power now. Unless she somehow gained power recently, which seemed unlikely, though, not unheard of. Not everyone was born with power, some nurtured it through ways such as Wicca.

  My hands touched a manila envelope. I pulled it out and opened it. The tab on the file folder said, ‘Christmas Card List-Clients’. “Got something,” I said, standing up. I held the envelope up and pointed out the tab to Liam.

  “Great,” he said. “With that, and this,” he said, taking a picture of the page he had in his hand, “we’ll be able to see who sees her and crosscheck the names from the victims.”

  Randy came up behind him, reading the names on the list.

  Gabe stood at the door. “Guys, we should probably go. If you got what you need, let’s get the hell out of here. People are starting to walk by the store.”

  Even though he was invisible, he angled himself out of the way of a man carrying a briefcase, his shiny black shoes skimming the cobblestone at his feet.

  “I didn’t take pictures of what Norah found,” Liam said, angling his phone over another sheet, the flash lighting up the area we were in.

  “We’ll just take it then,” Randy said. He picked it out of my fingers and opened the folder, scanning down the names.

  “Good. Let’s go,” Travis said, waving his arms toward the exit. “We got what we need.”

  Liam took one last picture and then turned and headed for the door. I bent down, making sure everything was where it was when I got here, except for the folder we were taking. Hopefully she wouldn’t be looking for that until next Christmas. Once I was satisfied all the drawers and cabinets were closed, I came around the counter and hurried toward the door. Travis was the only one left standing there. He still waved his hands toward the door like a traffic cop, and Gabe reluctantly left. When I passed him, his arm touched my shoulder as if he was going to help lead me out, but a zap of electricity passed between us as soon as he touched me. He yanked his hand away and stuffed them in his jean pockets. I rubbed the spot he touched, expecting there to be a mark with the force of the electricity behind just that little brush. Damn.

  Not daring to look at him, I walked out the door and headed toward the Jeep. In front of me, his head bent toward the file, Randy stopped. His hand came down, the file folder crippling in his massive grip. Gabe ran ahead after giving me a concerned look. “What is it?”

  “The names,” he said. He shoved the folder into Gabe’s chest. “They’re on here. All of them. We need to get this bitch marked.”

  Liam, after hearing Randy’s gruff voice, turned and headed back toward us until we were all surrounding him.

  Travis took the folder from Gabe and searched for the names himself. When he saw them, he sighed. “Something still just doesn’t seem right. There was no trace of negative magic in that shop. Nothing. How can she do that if she’s doing these other things?” he asked, waving the folder around.


  “I don’t need to know everything right now,” Randy said, turning back toward the shop. “We need to mark her and try her. The sooner the better because I’ll be damned if another person dies because of this lame ass bitch.”

  We all just stared after Randy as he stalked away. “Where are you going?” Liam finally asked. “She’s not there. We were just there.”

  “I’m getting her address.”

  Liam looked at his phone and then shook his head. When he looked back at us, he shrugged. “No sense in arguing with him right now. He’s just going to do it his way, anyway. Looking it up online would be a lot quicker—”

  “And safer,” Travis said, shaking his head at Randy’s retreating figure.

  I cast a wary gaze at Liam. “He seems to be taking this one particularly hard.”

  “The whole birthday card thing set him off. And now there are actual dead victims who had no power to fight back. I think it’s just sent him in a downward spiral.”

  “A downward spiral?” Gabe asked. “He’s freaking lost it, Mate. We’re going to have to get him calmed down because he doesn’t think clearly when he’s in this state. It’s not good for any of us.”

  My eyes were on Madame Serena’s shop that Randy had disappeared inside of when I saw the burst of midnight blue light. The ground rumbled at our feet, and I had just a moment to look at the panicked faces of the rest of the guys before we took off toward the shop at a dead run. There was another witch in there. Randy’s magic was green. I remembered seeing it encompass his hands before he moved the earth when we practiced together. It was far from blue.

  We skidded to a stop when the front window’s glass shattered outward, spraying us. I put my hand over my face, and Travis, who’d been running right next to me, stepped in front, taking the brunt of the explosion. Magic whipped and cracked inside. I turned, seeing a spark of green light. Hope surged in my chest, but then there was an overbearing blue that lit the room in waves. I squinted at the blinding light, taking a step back as a figure with blue licking flames stepped into the frame of the window and then jumped down into the street in front of us. “Did you really think we wouldn’t protect our asset?”