by T. S. Bishop
RENEGADE WITCH (SANCTUM OF WITCHES BOOK 1)
Copyright © 2018 T. S. Bishop
All rights reserved. Names, characters, and incidents are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The author acknowledges the trademark owners of various brands, products and corporations referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Prologue: Part I
Prologue: Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Bonus Scenes from ‘Renegade Witch’
Book 2- Rebel Witch
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Prologue: Part I
Five years ago
Evanston, Illinois
Water dripped from the ceiling in a dark, damp and cold place. There wasn’t even a chink of light to help me see.
I stretched out my hands and felt only air. I looked down and couldn’t see my body.
“Hello?” I said uncertainly.
I stepped forward, feeling out the way carefully. The ground was uneven but solid, like I was on hewn rock. I didn’t want to trip on something and fall—bashing your knees on solid rock was a painful business.
“Anyone there?”
“Who’s that?” a different voice called.
I stopped, heart beating rabbit-fast.
“I’m—I’m Grace,” I said, “I’m not sure where I am—I might be lost.”
“Liar,” said the voice, sounding lightly amused. “You’re lying—you’re no Grace. Although I suppose even having a poor liar for company is better than nobody at all. How did you get here?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, “I don’t even know where I am. The last thing I remember…was falling asleep. So this must be a dream.”
The voice laughed mirthlessly.
“This isn’t a dream,” it said, “If it was, I’d have a chance of leaving when I wake.”
“Who’s keeping you here? Are we sharing a dream?”
“No, fool. You’ve clearly brought your mind here in your dream state. This is my reality.”
“No need to get snippy with me,” I said, annoyed. This guy was rude as fuck. “And no offense but this place kind of sucks. What did you do to be trapped here?”
“I’m Jude,” the voice said. I was sure it had avoided answering my question on purpose, “Who are you really, little dreamer?”
“I don’t introduce myself to people whose faces I can’t see,” I replied.
The voice chuckled. “You want me to use one of my matches? You’d better be easy to look at, I only have six of these left.”
I heard a scrape and then a crackle of flame bursting into life.
I saw a figure, a few feet away.
“You’re real,” he—because the voice belonged to a man’s figure—said, sounding blank with shock.
“And so are you,” I answered cleverly.
I walked the dozen or so feet that lay between us and crouched down to where he sat.
No, I realized, once I could see better—he wasn’t sitting, he was chained. There were metal teeth digging into the flesh of his ankles. The skin there was red and inflamed, cracked and oozing pus. I let out an involuntary cry of disgust.
“Not pretty, is it?” he said, with a twist of his lips, seeing the direction of my gaze, “It’s my punishment.”
“What did you do?” I asked again.
“Aren’t you scared?” he asked, and the flames flickering on his face made his features twist and morph oddly, so that one moment he looked like the devil and the next he just looked like a man.
A very, very beautiful man, if I was going to be honest.
His eyes were coal-dark and the flame from his match was like a spark next to the flame-like intensity of his gaze. It burned me. It stripped me down. I felt naked and bare. And it held an old pain, the remembrance of horrors that I couldn’t begin to guess at.
His hair was black as well, the black of true night, and long and shaggy. He probably hadn’t had time to get it styled in the years he’d been imprisoned, I thought with a mental snort.
His face was a puzzle. If he was in the outside world, people would probably trip over themselves in the street to get a better look at him.
Let me put it this way: people always said the devil was beautiful, because he was an angel once.
Well, this man looked like a fallen angel. His beautiful lips had a cruel tilt, his eyes were cold and indifferent.
You couldn’t be friends with this man. You could love him from afar, hopelessly and helplessly, but he was without warmth.
“Scared of you?” I said, finding my voice, “No, I’m not afraid of a chained man in a cell who hasn’t seen sunlight in years.”
“Well, at least I have someone to keep me company now,” he said.
I flicked a glance towards him. He was still watching me in an assessing manner.
“My name is Sophia,” I said, to distract him from whatever he was thinking. I didn’t like his expression. It was too scheming.
“Sophia,” he said in his smoke-dark voice. It drifted over me like velvet. I shivered lightly.
“That means ‘wisdom’ in Ancient Greek. Did you know that?”
“My Ancient Greek’s a bit rusty,” I said. “Why do you think I’ve been sent here?”
“I don’t know,” he said simply, “Perhaps to impart wisdom, Sophia? Although if you are a figment of my subconscious to alleviate the boredom of my captivity, you wouldn’t be able to tell me anything I don’t already know.”
“You talk a whole lot,” I said, annoyed, “I’m definitely not a figment of your imagination. Would your imagination know about…reality tv? Because I watch a hell of a lot of it! Huge fan of Hot Mess Housewives and Tramps vs. Cowboys. Are you?”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean,” he said, sounding fascinated and revolted at the same time. “So you really must be from the outside world. Forgive my rudeness. As I said before, my name is Jude.”
“Hey Jude,” I said, but that got no reaction from him. Huh. Not a fan, I guess. “Very pleased to meet you.”
I sat down cross-legged near him.
“You don’t cast a shadow,” he observed. I looked down, and saw that he was right.<
br />
“What does that mean?” I wondered, “Am I a ghost?”
“Perhaps,” he mused, “Maybe you’re a spirit sent to torment me.”
“Hey!” I said indignantly, “I’ll have you know that I’m a fucking delight! Maybe I should just leave you to your boring cell and your important thoughts and your four remaining matches!”
“You’re a little touchy for a spirit,” he said, sounding rustily amused. “Where are you from, Sophia?”
“I’m not going to answer that,” I said, “I’m not going to tell you any real life stuff about me, actually. Just in case.”
“Cleverer than you look,” he said, “But I suppose it would be impossible not to be.”
“Pissing off your only visitor, who also happens to be the only person who could possibly help you, seems to be monumentally short sighted and idiotic to me,” I said, provoked into an uncharacteristic torrent of words.
“Were you going to help me?” he asked keenly.
I met his eyes with mine. They were like pools of endless night. His expression abruptly changed.
“Something’s happening to you,” he said sharply.
I looked down at my hands. They were blurring, growing transparent.
“I think I might be—“
I started up from my bed and looked around stupidly, blinking. I was in my room, still in my bed, in the exact position I’d fallen asleep in.
“—waking up,” I finished.
“Sophie?” asked a sleepy voice. I looked over to see the face of my foster sister, Grace. She was eight years old, a sweet kid who stuck to me like glue.
“Yeah?” I whispered back. I didn’t want to wake Eleanor, who was our foster mom. She worked as a day nurse in a nursing home and not getting any sleep made her cranky. She’d sometimes take it out on us by throwing all the food out so we couldn’t eat until she wasn’t mad at us anymore.
“Were you talking in your sleep just now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Was I?”
“I thought I heard something.” She yawned and turned away. “But I guess it doesn’t matter.Hey Sophie?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Are you excited to go to the new place?”
I was being shipped off to a new foster home in a few days, and it was all any of the other kids in the house—there were five in total—could talk about. They didn’t tell me much about the couple who lived there, but I knew they had a daughter.
“I don’t know,” I said, humming in thought, “I think I’m nervous.”
“Do you think they know about—you know?”
‘You know’ referred to my little ‘issues’ that nobody liked to address head on. The doctor I went to sometimes called them ‘hallucinations’, Eleanor called them ‘attention-seeking’, and I called them ‘things that are there but only I can see them’. I guess you would need to add ‘and dream about people who are in some kind of magical prison’ to that too. I wasn’t freaked out about that happening, somehow. It just seemed like the kind of thing that tended to happen to me.
“No, Gracie,” I said, looking blankly at the dark ceiling, “I don’t think they do. Or they wouldn’t have agreed to take me.”
“Can’t you just pretend not to see them?” asked Grace plaintively. Over the months that we’d been living together, she had somehow become my fiercest defender, even though I was five years older than her. She tried to get between the kids who sometimes bullied me—which was unnecessary, since I was born scrappy—and distracted Eleanor when she knew I was seeing something bad. She was a good kid.
“I can try,” I sighed. “We’ll see.”
“I have a good feeling about this new place,” said Grace, sounding pleased as she drifted back to sleep.
Well, that made one of us at least.
Prologue: Part II
3 years ago
Highland Park, Illinois
“Hello, Sophie,” said the counselor pleasantly. Her name was Helen, which matched the rest of her nondescript personality. She bared her teeth in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
Her office was no different from the rest of the counselors’ and therapists’ offices that I’d been to before, and there’d been many over the years. It was decorated in shades of sea green, with a soft brown sofa and mismatched Moroccan pillows. A breeze came through the open window and gently ruffled the lace curtains.
“Hello,” I mumbled, looking away from there. There was an imp on her shoulder, whispering things and pulling faces and laughing. It was grotesque, with five eyes and sharp, serrated teeth. She didn’t notice anything. I frowned at it.
“What are you glaring at, Sophie?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly, “I thought I was going to sneeze, that’s all.”
“I see,” she said skeptically. “Your parents tell me that you’re talking to yourself again these days.”
“Was that a question?”
“Let me rephrase,” she said, still pleasant and unruffled. I wanted to break one of the lovely vases she kept on display just to see if it would shatter her composure. “Your parents are concerned that you might have relapsed. Did you stop taking your medication?”
“I’m still taking it,” I said, gritting my teeth. “It isn’t helping. I can still see all the things I used to see, because they’re real.”
“You have to know that’s not true.”
“All I know is that the things I see are real.”
“Your erratic behavior is hurting your parents quite a bit. And your sister Lily is very worried about you as well.”
I see that we’d progressed to emotional blackmail now. Right on schedule. So far, Helen was disappointing me. I was expecting something more subtle. I’d been through these sessions with so many psychiatrists, behavioral therapists, pediatric psychiatrists and neurologists that I was really just craving a challenge. Someone who could convince me that there was something really, truly wrong with me. Helen definitely wasn’t going to fit the bill.
“I’m not hurting anyone. Why does it matter if I see things nobody else can see? It’s nobody else’s business!”
“Hallucinations and paranoia are often symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Oh boy. We’d skipped over a few steps of the dance along the way, I guess Helen wasn’t in the most patient frame of mind. Get it?
“I’m not schizophrenic,” I said acidly, “And if I were, what could you do to help me? The drugs I’m on right now definitely aren’t doing the trick. I’ve been on nearly everything available, on and off label for BPD, schizophrenia and every other disorder they thought they could slap on me and call it a day. None of them have worked.”
“We’ve been talking about getting you some more intensive help,” she said carefully.
I straightened up, heart thudding in my chest faster now. So this was it. I’d sort of been expecting them to spring something like this on me. But I’d always secretly hoped that I’d be able to graduate from high school and turn eighteen first.
“You’re talking about institutionalizing me, just to be clear,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. We both knew what she meant, but I still wanted to hear her saying it.
Her smile evolved into an expression more somber and sympathetic, to convey that she knew exactly what I was going through. Ha.
“I believe you could greatly benefit from an environment that provides more intensive care,” she explained, scratching notes on her notepad as she spoke to me. “The one I’m thinking about isn’t too far from here. Your parents and sister would still be able to visit on the weekends, and they’ll be able to monitor your medications better.”
“You mean they’ll do strip searches and go through my room to make sure that I took my meds, like the last place my foster parents sent me?”
“That’s an unfortunate practice but necessary to ensure compliance in more erratic patients.”
“I’m not sure I appreciate the implication. Anyway, I’ve been to one of those plac
es once and that was plenty. I’m not going to go another time.”
“I want to help you understand the gravity of the situation you’re in,” Helen said, leaning forward. Her face lost the expression of pleasant concern entirely. She looked cold and disapproving now.
“The principal at your school has had several conversations with your parents about your behavior, and it’s starting to affect other students. You’ve convinced them that the school is filled with malicious ghosts and demons—“
“It is!” I said, struggling to control my temper, “And it’s not all bad—did they tell you I managed to get a message, from that poor girl who killed herself, to her parents? They were really happy!”
“I think that incident, more than anything else, convinced us that you pose a danger to other people,” said Helen, ignoring my noise of outrage. “Preying on grieving parents and rumor mongering are very concerning behaviors. To be honest Sophie, even if you don’t go to the wellness center—and your parents certainly will make you go—the school isn’t prepared to let you go back after this latest stunt. They’re willing to say you left of your own volition instead of having an expulsion on your record, but that’s as far as they’re going to bend on this.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Helen inspected her notes, ignoring the tears running down my face that I scrubbed away angrily.
“Well,” I said, my mind going at a mile a minute trying to think of ways to get out of this cage I’d found myself in, “I guess I don’t have a choice.”
As Helen smiled and said, “I thought you’d see it out way,” I barely stopped myself from snarling, “Over my dead and rotted corpse you putrid asshole.”
But I didn’t. I was proud of my self control. But I had more important things to focus my energy on.
Like collecting all the food, cash and clothes that I could pack without arousing suspicion and getting the hell out of dodge tonight.
Chapter 1
“I’d give you a good offer for that necklace you wear around your neck.”
“I told you, I’m not selling.”
“Good price for it, I’ll tell you that. You’d be mad not to take it.”