by E. M. Moore
Liam’s fingers grasped my hips and moved me down and forward. Both of us moaned. “I just can’t get enough of you lately,” he breathed.
I knew exactly how he felt. Romance in new relationships was supposed to be hot and heady and necessary all the time. Multiply that by four. I was amazed I even made it out of the bedroom to fight Dupre and run the shop and—
A vibration filled the room. Liam and I both stilled. The floors and walls stood still. It wasn’t that. It was like the air moved at a different frequency. “Liam…”
He sat, moving me off him. The front of his pajamas still tented, but his concentration was elsewhere now. His brows furrowed as he looked around.
The hair stood on my arms, and the vibration in the room worsened. Randy’s hulking form moved, his shoulders turning so he lay on his back facing the ceiling. His eyes were still shut, but the look on his face pulled in, troubled even in his sleep.
The air became oppressive. It moved in thick like a physical monstrosity, weighing on us.
“Bloody hell,” Gabe said. He sat up, his hair going every which way. “If it isn’t you guys trying to snog, it’s…whatever this is.”
Travis tensed now, too. He moved to grip my calf, his eyes still hooded with sleep. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked around. His eyes flicked to each one of us and then finally to Liam. “The wards.”
“The wards?” I asked, putting a little, if not desperate, emphasis on the word. As in the wards that were keeping us safe? How could he just say it nonchalantly like that? “What is it?”
“Someone’s trying to come through uninvited,” Liam said.
I turned to Randy as the rest of them scrambled up from their places, pulling on clothes. “Randy,” I whispered, shaking his shoulders.
“There’s no time for that, Love,” Gabe said, using his outside voice.
He was right. I didn’t know why I tried to wake him gently when there was evidently someone on the property who was trying to get at us. We were stronger together. “Randy!” I said, shaking him.
I did it a few more times, and finally, he woke. He blinked his eyes open and then looked at me. “Why is your shirt wide open?”
Ah, shit. Instead of answering, I said, “Get up. Someone’s trying to get in.”
He moved at that. Quick and graceful despite his size, he threw his feet over the side of the bed and stood. The athletic pants he wore hung low on his hips, giving me a peek of his massive, sinewy body. It made my nerves thrum just watching him.
Travis held a shirt out to me, interrupting my thoughts. “You should probably put this on.”
I took it, smiling a thank you at him and then got off the bed myself. I found a bra on the floor, pulled it on, then yanked the shirt Travis gave me over my head. My pajama bottoms were loose around my hips, so I scoured the floor for some other pants and found joggers left there from the other day. I pulled them on and looked up.
My coven stood by the door, all eyes on me as they waited to descend the steps together. Randy held his hand out and I took it. His grip was large, making me feel small. At least the magic in me was big. As Liam had said, it had only grown since he’d come back. The guys had control over a few of the elements and though we didn’t know what mine was yet, we were just waiting for it to surface.
Gabe opened the door and Travis went through first, his eyes scanning the hallways that were just now being filled with the day’s light as if they were waking just as we were. At the top of the steps, Gabe and Travis went down first, followed by Randy and I with Liam taking up the rear. The frequency downstairs was worse as if the epicenter was getting closer.
Liam threw up a visibility spell. Orange magic swirled around us until it crept up the walls, making them shimmer behind them until they became see through like pure glass. Five bodies strode up the walk. They’d breeched the front gate, walking in a v pattern like migrating geese. “Who the hell is that?”
The attributes of the lead guy came into focus. His distinct dark hair with gray streaks. His formidable shoulders. I’d never seen him standing up before, but I recognized him from the glimpses I’d gotten of them through the laptop screen when they had their Order meetings.
Yes. Walter and his coven were walking toward the house just now. It wasn’t a scheduled meeting, and they’d just broken through the protective wards of the estate, which alerted us right away.
This wasn’t a friendly visit. This was something else entirely.
Randy pulled on my hand. He started to move toward the back entrance, but Travis’s voice rang out loud and clear. “What do you think they’re here for, Randy?” He turned, staring at the both of us. His shoulders were straight though they sagged a little with the understanding. “They know about Norah.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Why else would they come?” Liam asked, speaking up now. “I knew it was a stretch to have them believe that we’d taken out Dupre without a fifth. I’d hoped they were too caught up in their own stuff to investigate it further, but they know, Randy. You’re not going to get very far. We might as well just all stay and see what they have to say.”
“What happens if they say something we don’t want to hear?” Randy barked. “Have you guys thought about that?”
“We’ve all thought about that, Mate,” Gabe said. “That’s why we kept her a secret to begin with. I vote we don’t say anything about what my grandfather said. Walter doesn’t like him anyway, so let’s just keep hush about that.”
“Agreed,” Travis said. “Let’s let them figure this out on their own. We don’t even know if what Gabe’s grandfather thinks is the truth, anyway. Let’s just all calm down and act cool.”
I raised my eyebrow at him. “Act cool?”
His face fell as his gaze finally focused on mine. He moved closer. Randy still had a strong hold on my wrist. He wasn’t letting go, and I knew that if one of his superiors came for me, they’d have a hell of a fight on their hands. Randy let Travis in though. He moved forward, his face intense, but sincere. “We’re in this together. You’re our fifth. There’s nothing they can do about that. There are no mistakes when it comes to the fifth.”
“If that’s the case, why didn’t we just tell them from the beginning?”
No one said anything, they all just looked through Liam’s spell, watching the five older men as they approached. We didn’t want to say what was on our minds. Maybe they didn’t want to say anything because it went against everything they had been taught about the Order. Me? I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want it to be true. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, but I wasn’t supposed to be here either. It made perfect sense when you thought about it. I belonged here, but I didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to be here even though I belonged with these guys—my guys.
The superiors were almost to the house now. I took a deep breath as they climbed the last steps up the walk. Liam pulled his spell down and Travis moved for the door. Just before they opened, I sent a prayer up. Whatever happened, I didn’t want them taking it out on my coven. Take me away, make me pay, but I wanted them left out of it. If they wanted the opposite, they’d have one hell of a fight on their hands.
2
Walter and his coven were greeted as they always were. Smiles, formality. Each of their superiors’ eyes grazed upon me and then moved forward. It still felt as if they were staring at me though, their eyes dissecting my soul, searching through all the different parts of me, and for all I knew, it could’ve been a spell and they were doing exactly what I felt like they were doing—sizing me up.
We all walked toward the living room. My knees shook. If I wanted to be a member of the Order, I certainly hadn’t started off on good terms. Doubts and second guesses ran though my head the whole time as we proceeded to the seating area. What would’ve happened if we’d just told them when I’d first shown up? So, what? I was a girl. What did that matter? There were girls everywhere. Literally, everywhere. It didn’t matter ho
w many times I tried to rationalize it though. It still felt wrong to tell them. Even now, my heart beat away in my chest like a mad hummingbird. Wings flapping furiously, making me jittery.
Walter sat in the middle of the couch facing us. He moved to the edge of the cushion, his elbows on his knees and his fingers interlaced in front of him. “So, we were correct. You have a fifth.”
Travis took on the leadership role for our coven. Randy certainly couldn’t be trusted to speak right now, and Liam and Gabe were like coiled snakes in the background. How terrible that it had come to this. We were supposed to trust our superiors. “We do,” Travis said simply.
A gentleman on Walter’s right cocked his head. “Interesting that we weren’t notified as soon as this happened. Why is that, Mr. Shaw?”
Travis lifted his chin in the air. I once found the move pompous, but it worked well in this situation. He was the perfect person to speak on our behalf because he was nothing if not confident. He didn’t bow down or make excuses. He told them the way it was for us. “As you can see, Norah is female. We had never heard of a female Order member, so naturally, we weren’t even sure if her pull to us as the fifth was legitimate or not.”
“And now?” the gentleman asked.
“It is,” Travis stated simply. “Her powers fuse with ours beautifully. She makes us better.”
“Once you felt complete,” Walter said. “Why, then, did you not tell us the truth about having your fifth?” Without giving anyone a chance to respond, he kept going. “I did think it was odd you still got the call, but I told myself it was nothing because the Order in Salem has always been special. I wasn’t sure what might happen once we’d taken your fifth out of the equation when we stripped Jax. Not much is written about an Order member getting the mark and being found unworthy. We’re in uncharted territory when it comes down to that.”
“We still are in uncharted territory,” Travis broke in. “Norah, as far as we can tell, is the only female Enforcer ever.”
With Travis’s use of that term, all the superiors’ gazes locked onto me. They didn’t seem to like my name used in the same sentence as an Enforcer. Oh well. They’d just have to deal. I did.
“If she’s your fifth, you’d be right about that,” Walter’s coven member ventured.
“She’s our fifth,” Randy said, barely leaving the growl out of his voice.
I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine right back until I felt as if my bones would crunch if he gave me even the tiniest bit more pressure.
Walter stood. “You are aware then that as soon as you receive word of your fifth, you are supposed to relay that information to your superiors.”
“We are,” Travis said, not giving the older gentleman an inch.
“But you did not.”
“We didn’t,” Liam said. He stood now, too. His face was the same sweet face I’d laid eyes on from the beginning. “We knew we were supposed to, but we also weren’t sure what to do because Norah’s a she. We know she’s our fifth, but we also didn’t know how the Order would react to that fact because we couldn’t find any information regarding there being another female Enforcer, even throughout history.”
“It’s natural that you feel protective of your fifth,” another coven member said.
Walter nodded, still glaring at me.
The other guy seemed reasonable. Why couldn’t he be the one talking?
I couldn’t take this anymore. I just couldn’t be quiet why they sat around and discussed me. I stood and approached Walter, holding my hand out to him. “My name is Norah Darbonne. I was called here all the way from New Orleans where my ancestry follows the female line. My grandmother was a Voodoo Priestess.”
Walter took my hand and a surge of electricity flowed through me. His gaze narrowed, and he tried sending one again, but I put a block up. Stop.
His eyes widened ever so slightly. You are strong then.
Holy shit. I’d just heard his thoughts in my head. Did I? Definitely. I’d never heard a male’s voice in my head, it was only ever my own talking nonsense at me. This felt like an alien voice that came from the outside, not from within.
I let Walter’s magic seep inside me just a little. It searched through my limbs, testing the bonds inside. There were pieces of me that linked to Travis, Randy, Gabe, and Liam. Together, they made up a whole entity, but their bonds were individual within me and he went right through them. He tested their strength, and I didn’t even try to harden them because there was no way he would be able to do anything to those bonds. They were the most precious possessions I had, and they were strong as galvanized steel. Not even someone of Walter’s magical ability would be able to destroy them, and that’s not even what I felt his prodding was. It was just that, a look inside to see what he was dealing with. To see if I was, in fact, the fifth.
What is your relationship with them?
My lips thinned as I thought about his question. Why didn’t he speak it out loud? None of your business.
This made his eyebrows raise into his hair, and finally, he pulled his hand away along with all his magic. It retreated from me as if being snapped like a rubber band. My eyes widened as it whiplashed out of me, leaving me with a hollow feeling that my own purple magic swirled to fill.
Jackass. What he’d just done was almost like the mental equivalent of a bitch slap.
He merely smirked at me as if he’d known exactly what he did.
“You know it’s true now,” I told him. “I’m their fifth.”
The rest of his coven stared up at Walter, waiting for his response. “It’s true,” he said. My guys relaxed, but they certainly didn’t just come here to see if I was their fifth. That much must’ve already been evident since we’d taken out Dupre and gotten the pull. There must’ve been some other reason why they were here.
Liam stepped forward, the quizzical look I loved so much back on his face. “She’s the first female Enforcer, isn’t she? I’ve looked through all the books and I can’t find reference to a single other one. She has to be.” Liam peeked up at me reverently and it made my heart sing to know just how much he loved me when I felt the same exact way.
Walter’s coven all looked at him, and he only shrugged in answer. “That’s not the reason for our visit. We’ve come to place the Salem Order on suspension. Until we know how the new Enforcer affects you, we forbid you to continue to use your Enforcer abilities.”
“What?” Travis snapped. When Walter whirled to look at him, Travis skewed his face back to a professional one. “For how long?”
“Until we know how she affects your abilities. I believe I just said that.”
“We know how she affects our abilities,” Gabe said, speaking up for the first time. “We took out Dupre, didn’t we? And you can’t strip us of our powers when there’s still another threat.”
“You must be referring to this Jay. This threat has not made itself known yet,” Walter answered. “You only have this information from the threat that you took out. For all we know, he could have fictionalized this character in his head to support his own actions.”
“He was there that night,” Travis said. “We all felt him.”
“Our word is final,” Walter said, not even hearing them out. “Maybe next time you’ll be more forthcoming with information when you are required.”
“You can’t hold that against us,” Randy said, his voice tense with restrained anger. “The coven is everything. You know that. You taught us that. We felt a threat, and therefore, kept the fifth a secret.”
“From us.” Walter said. “That’s where the problem lies. Keep the fifth a secret, but not from us. We’re your superiors and need to know what is happening with all the Orders.”
The tension in the air thickened again as if the wards were warning us there were intruders. It was almost suffocating. I hated to see how upset my guys were. Especially Gabe. The coven was everything to him.
Travis sighed. “What do we do if we hear from the other threat?”
>
“You will call us in like you were supposed to have done when the fifth came to you. Do you think you can manage that this time? Or, should we send in another Order like we were going to? Except we didn’t because we trusted you.”
My jaw clenched and even I felt the offense of that. Any instinct we’d had to defend ourselves had just been taken away.
Properly chastised, we stood there quiet. “When we get more information on how a female Enforcer affects a coven, we’ll lift the restraint,” Walter said. He made a move toward the door and the rest of his coven stood. Standing in front of us all like that, the power leaked from them overshadowing everything else in the room. They were a force to be reckoned with. No wonder why they were the superiors, and we were just the peons. They walked toward the door and we all followed them. At the last moment, Walter turned around. “I do hope you will remember not to keep things from us. We’ll find out anyway, and we wouldn’t want things to end up like this again, would we? Remember, we’re on your side,” he said, staring at Travis.
Travis nodded, and the elder coven left without another word. They moved down the sidewalk, past the gate and then disappeared.
The heaviness in the house dissipated just like that. I sagged a little on my feet, not realizing I’d been putting up a lot of barriers just to keep myself standing. “You okay?” Gabe asked.
I nodded. “I’m so sorry guys. This is all my fault.”
“No, it’s not,” Travis said, scratching his chin. “We all decided to keep you a secret.”
I smiled up at him. We hadn’t actually given him a choice in the beginning when he was being all standoffish. Our votes outnumbered his, but since he pulled his head out of his ass, he’d been on board.
“On the bright side,” Liam said. “We can take a little break.”
“There is no bright side,” Gabe said. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “They just took our ability to Enforce away from us.”