Renegade Witch: An Urban Fantasy Reverse Harem Romance (Sanctum of Witches Book 1)

by T. S. Bishop

“It’s complicated,” Dominic sighed, rubbing his forehead tiredly with his glasses, “We usually keep very good records of pregnancies and births, but we have nothing in the books to account for you. I’m sorry, Sophia,” he said gently, for the first time showing some sympathy towards me.

  “It’s fine,” I sighed, blinking away the tears that were building in the back of my eyes, “I mean, they left me at a hospital for nurses to find. They weren’t going to get any parenting awards anyway, I suppose.”

  “If you agree to stay at the Sanctum,” Adrian said, leaning forward, “We promise to help you find your parents. Like Noah said, they might not be—they might be alive still. And we don’t know why they had to give you up. There’s dozens of possibilities.”

  His eyes blazed with determination and belief. Noah was looking hopeful, and Dominic was looking back at me with an impenetrable look.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “I think that Adrian and Noah believe what they say,” he said, steepling his fingers, “But I believe that those happen to point down the easiest path for the three of us. If you were to join the Sanctum, we would have access to your power and be able to fight invading demons. It would bring prestige to our families and cement our value. What exactly do you get? A vague promise that we’ll look for your parents at some point, and the promise of putting your life in danger. You don’t know anything about the Sanctum and you don’t owe us anything. You would be putting your life in danger—and believe me, getting attacked by demons is no walk in the park—for little gain.”

  “We’re trying to get her to stay, Dom, not run away screaming!” Noah said, dismayed.

  “It’s okay, I’m glad he’s telling me the truth. What you’re telling me is that I wouldn’t care about demons attacking the city. Well, I do,” I told him, “I care very much. I’m not just out for myself. So I’m going to help you guys. Even if I don’t get anything out of it.”

  “Yes!” Noah said triumphantly, “I told you she’d help us!”

  “Well said,” Adrian said.

  I looked at Dominic, who had a secret smile in his eyes.

  “Did you...? You did! That was all a trap, wasn’t it?” I said, outraged, “You played me into agreeing to join you guys!”

  He flushed unexpectedly, and dropped his eyes.

  “You might be the first person to call Dom out on his scheming,” Noah grinned, “Don’t worry, you get used to it.”

  “Don’t pull something like that on me again,” I warned him, “Or I’ll figure out how to turn you into something nasty.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Dominic said sincerely, over muffled laughter from Adrian and Noah, “You terrify me far too much.”

  Chapter 8

  “Some food would really hit the spot right now,” I said, “Getting kidnapped really works up a girl’s appetite.”

  “Tuesday night’s pot roast in the commissary. I could take you there,” Noah said, batting his eyelashes hopefully.

  “We’ll all go,” Adrian said, crossing his arms. Dominic looked between Noah and me with an amused expression on his face.

  “This ought to be good,” he said slyly, avoiding a kick Noah aimed in his direction with ease.

  “Yeah okay, cool,” I said, confused at Adrian’s reaction.

  Noah was just teasing me by pretending to have a crush on me. I would need to have a word with Adrian later about overreacting to things.

  Noah bounded alongside me, excitedly talking about the history of the Sanctum and pointing out ancient artifacts that had been taken from enemy witches and demons in the past.

  “That’s the room where Erycah the Astonishing first signed the treaty that established the Sanctum,” he said, “And over there is the helmet of Ancalvicon the Destroyer, the most powerful demon to take human form—they say even regular people could see him and feel his power. His aura made their crops wither and their cattle died from fear.”

  “Did they defeat him?”

  “Vyvara the second tricked him into giving up his helmet, the source of his power—which is something people don’t like to talk about, by the way.”

  “Yeah, it makes having the higher moral ground a little questionable when your tactics are the same as your enemies,” Dominic agreed from behind us.

  “But the helmet, is it a replica?” I asked, looking at it.

  It was a misshapen, dented thing. It must have been monstrously heavy and old. But the odd thing was that it didn’t have any kind of glow around it. I might have assumed it was just some kind of antique, if Noah hadn’t pointed out its significance to me.

  “No, that’s one hundred percent genuine,” Noah said, sounding proud. “Actually, I worked in the Archive the year they decided to dig it out of storage and display it. Testing it for malicious energy and hexes was a pain, let me tell you.”

  “But—oh, never mind,” I said, shrugging. Real or fake, it wasn’t any of my business to question old wives’ tales.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” called a woman’s stern voice from somewhere behind us.

  “Damn,” I heard Adrian curse, low and guilty.

  “Shit,” Roan agreed.

  We turned around as a group, to see a short woman with cropped hair and a grim expression marching towards us.

  “Hey Adele,” Noah said, waving feebly. His smile wilted under her glare.

  “I thought I made my instructions extremely clear, Marchmont,” she said, directing a piercing look at Adrian, who shuffled his feet.

  “I, uh, wanted her to meet Noah and Dom,” he said looking embarrassed, “They were really looking forward to—“

  This was a woman who could apparently make grown men act like guilty schoolboys. Clearly not someone to be trifled with.

  “I’d hate to have deprived you of a joyful introduction, but some of us actually believe the safety of our HQ would be worth delaying it for an hour or two!”

  “What could be the harm in letting Sophie meet us?” Dominic asked in a soothing tone. He spread his arms in a placating manner. “Look, we’re all in one piece and—“

  “Did any of you bother verifying her identity?” ‘Adele’ snapped, “Did any of you check if she was an impostor or an enemy agent? No? I didn’t think so. An astonishing display of outright fucking incompetence!”

  “I’m not an enemy agent or an impostor,” I volunteered, breaking the silence that followed. Her eyes snapped in my direction, and I immediately regretted my rashness.

  “I couldn’t possibly accept your word for it,” she said, not unkindly to my surprise. “I want to believe you,” she added, “But we need to run some tests first. Follow me.”

  “That went better than I expected,” Noah said, sounding relieved, as we trotted obediently behind her. She moved very quickly for such a small person. Even Adrian’s long legs were struggling to keep up with her. “She must like you!”

  “Is that what she’s like when she likes someone?” I muttered to him out of the corner of my mouth, “What does she do with her actually enemies then?”

  “Nobody’s ever found their bodies,” Dominic said lightly, as the rest of us snickered quietly.

  “I heard that!” she called back.

  We shut up immediately.

  She led us to a room that was outfitted like a lab and a clinic in one. The walls had posters talking about magical diseases, and the tables contained neat rows of tools and implements that didn’t look like anything I’d seen before in a doctor’s office.

  “Don’t the four of you have anything you should be doing right about now?” she snapped at the boys, moving to slam the door in their faces, unmoved by their puppy dog eyes and pleading expressions.

  “See you guys later,” I said nervously. I caught a glimpse of Adrian at the end, and he shot me a reassuring smile and an encouraging nod.

  “Sit here,” she directed me to a stool next to a bed that looked like it was meant for patients.

  I perched there nervously as sh
e collected syringes, gloves, a mask, stethoscope and a jar of amber-colored ointment.

  “All right, let’s have a look at you,” Adele said briskly.

  She examined me in a quick, impersonal way which put me at ease. She had a shy, blonde assistant who jotted down notes and followed her around like a shadow.

  “Blood sample,” Adele explained, waving a test tube and a needle at me.

  “Go crazy,” I said, holding out my arm. “Wow,” I added, as the blood in the tube turned green, “Was not expecting that. Am I dying?”

  The blonde girl giggled and ducked her hair. Adele laughed shortly.

  “Fairy dust lines the insides,” she explained as though that should have meant something to me.

  “Fairy dust turns magical blood green,” the girl explained to me kindly.

  “Thanks. So I really have magic?”

  “If you mean, ‘am I a witch’, then yes, you most probably are,” Adele said looking at me over her spectacles. She went back to her sheaf of notes, frowning and tapping it with a pen.

  “Something wrong?” I asked the blonde girl nervously.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, following Adele curiously with her eyes. “I’m Hannah, by the way,” she added.

  “And I’m Sophie,” I said, shaking her hand.

  “I don’t understand this,” Adele interrupted, shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your blood is clearly magical, but there are no traces of you ever having used magic in your life.”

  “Ha! I knew it!” I said triumphantly.

  “But—you don’t know how strange that is,” Hannah said, eyes huge and surprised, “Witches can’t just not use their power. It would be like—like not breathing or eating!”

  “I know,” Adele said suddenly, snapping her fingers at me, “I need you to strip.”

  Under their watchful eyes, I stripped down to my underwear. What followed was quite embarrassing. They carefully searched every bit of my skin for anything that could explain my ‘block’.

  “So what are we looking for exactly?” I asked, wobbling on one leg as Hannah carefully looked between my toes.

  “Oh, piercings, jewelry, any other magically imbued adornments,” Adele said, “Now let me check your teeth.”

  Ten minutes later, and they still hadn’t found anything.

  “There’s only one thing left to do,” Adele said grimly, “We’re going to have to leech you.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I said, “What does it mean?”

  “Literally what it says,” Hannah said, “We put leeches on you, but they’re sorcerous, so they feed on any magical artifacts that you might have on you.”

  “Do they feed only on that?”

  “Well…they also feed on blood. Like regular leeches,” she said apologetically.

  “No way,” I said firmly, shuddering at the thought, “That is the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

  “If it has to be done--” Adele began firmly, when an exclamation from Hannah stopped her.

  “I think I found something!” she said, parting my hair and peering at my scalp. Adele went to stand next to her.

  After a moment, I heard an indrawn breath.

  “Well done, Hannah,” she said with evident satisfaction.

  “What? What’s on my head?” I asked, craning my head around, though that obviously didn’t help me see anything.

  “You have a Mark,” Hannah said in a hushed voice. She sounded revolted.

  “Is that normal? I mean, judging by your reaction it’s most definitely not normal, but what is it?”

  “It means a demon put a curse on you,” Adele said, stripping off her gloves. I felt the cool touch of her finger on my scalp.

  “Not reactive to human touch,” she said.

  She and Hannah began muttering to each other in tones too low to make out.

  “Wait, so are you saying that a demon cursed me so I wouldn’t be able to use magic?”

  “That’s the most reasonable solution I can think of,” Adele said.

  “Only I’ve never heard of that happening—ever,” Hannah said, biting her lip. “I’ve seen death Marks and pain Marks, but never Marks to block the use of magic. It’s so…specific. It’s really delicate work, I don’t know how or why a demon might have done that.”

  “Not just that,” Adele added, pacing back and forth restlessly, “It’s almost…benign. Apart from not using magic, do you have any chronic illnesses?”

  “No.”

  “Any complaints like allergies, deficiencies--?”

  “No, I’m fine. I had the chicken pox once, I guess.”

  Hannah and Adele exchanged a glance.

  “So you’re saying,” I said slowly, “That this was done by a nice demon?”

  “There’s no such thing,” Hannah and Adele said almost simultaneously.

  “Right, but—okay, why would the demon have done this to me?”

  “That,” Adele said, looking worried, “Is a question I have no conceivable answer for.”

  Chapter 9

  “Adele’s right, there’s no such thing as a nice demon,” Adrian said flatly.

  Noah and Dominic nodded at me without speaking, their foreheads wrinkled with tension. Adrian began attacking the mountain of mashed potatoes on his plate, but I could tell that he was still listening to our conversation.

  “And don’t go saying stuff like a ‘nice demon’ put a curse on you,” Noah advised, drumming his fingers restlessly on the table, “You’re going to make yourself unpopular if people know you as a soft hearted pro-demon propagandist.”

  “Damn,” I said, stunned, “Doesn’t that seem a litte harsh?”

  Dominic smiled at me crookedly. “Noah’s right, any whiff of pro-demon sentiment would have you hauled up by the Council for sedition. Ask us about what happened in the sixties some other time.”

  “So you don’t even think it’s possible?” I asked, “That maybe the demon wasn’t trying to hurt me?”

  “I don’t think there’s even a remote possibility that the demon wasn’t trying to hurt you,” Dominic said at once, shaking his head, “I think the demon might not have had the time to complete its curse and left it halfway. You don’t know the stories about demons, Sophie, the things they’ve done to witches and people in the past. It’s not pretty, it could give you nightmares. And the one thing they’ve never been known for is mercy.”

  “Sophie,” Adrian added, “This is the creature that most probably killed your parents. Do you really think it could be capable of showing mercy?”

  “I…hadn’t thought about that,” I said, sinking back into the sofa.

  I could see Noah glaring at Adrian out of the corner of my eye. He made a gesture of surrender and folded his arms.

  “It’s okay,” I said blankly, “I’m fine. I just hadn’t thought about that. I guess I always believed that they still might be alive somewhere.”

  “Well, we don’t know anything for sure,” Dominic put in. “Did they manage to lift the curse?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, brightening. “I wanted to show you guys—look at this!”

  I stretched out my arm and pushed my sleeve up so my forearm was exposed.

  Familiar swirls and patterns met their eyes. Almost simultaneously, their hands went to touch their own marks. The marks that now we all shared.

  “That’s amazing,” Dominic said, firelight reflected in his hazel eyes.

  They all seemed caught up in the mark that I was displaying. Noah’s eyes looked almost luminescent in the light, but Adrian was looking at me.

  Which made me drop the raised sleeve abruptly. I cleared my throat.

  “I still can’t do any magic, though,” I said.

  “You’re a beginner,” Noah said apologetically, “I think you have to go through extensive training and tests before you can do anything really impressive. Although trainee witches are allowed to go on demon hunts, because it isn’t nearly the most m
agically challenging part of the job.”

  “Oh,” I said, deflated. I touched my mark through my shirt, and thought it gave a friendly pulse.

  “It was still really good that you have the mark though,” Adrian said, coming over to put a hand on my shoulder, “And now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s you.”

  “When do you start training?” Dominic asked. The boys exchanged glances.

  “Tomorrow, Adele said. Why?”

  “Because we’ve been waiting for ten years to kill demons,” Noah said, grinning, “So we kind of can’t wait for you to start.”

  A few moments later, I felt a headache coming on and excused myself, saying that I needed some air.

  We were in a part of the Sanctum that was deserted, or close to it. My quick footsteps echoed in the corridors, all of which looked exactly the same. The only difference was in the portraits that lines the walls, which seemed to all be of solemn looking men in powdered wigs, which was a style I had only seen in history books.

  Eventually, I gave up looking for a good, private place for myself and sat down at the base of a statue of a man with a constipated expression, holding what looked like a lantern in one hand and a fat book in another.

  ‘Percival the Explorer’ said the inscription, ‘He was the first man to identify the deadly swamp spirit, the bolotnik. His fate reminds us that we must never mortally offend beings who possess the power to torture us for all eternity, lest we are turned into a warthog as he was. Fate: unconfirmed, possibly hunted and eaten by the King’s court.’

  Damn.

  “Well, Percival,” I said, “We’re both people who could have made better choices in life, that’s for sure.”

  I scuffed the floor with my shoe, thinking about my weird and fantastical day.

  Noah, Adrian and Dominic all seemed like people I’d be able to get along with, which was important if we were really going to be some sort of magical crime-fighting, demon-slaying team.

  Another unexpected problem with being whisked away into a secret witch’s hideout in the middle of the city was that I had no idea where I was supposed to sleep. I wouldn’t have minded going back to my apartment, but I suspected that we were somewhere in the Loop—as ridiculous as hiding a giant church and garden in the dead center of the most crowded and tourist-ridden part of the city sounded—and it would take me a couple of rides on the L to get home. I was, of course, too broke and careful with money to think of taking a cab seriously.