by Mary Martel
Tyson
An Ariel Kimber Novella
Book 4.5
By: Mary Martel
Copyright © Mary Martel September 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Mary Martel, except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
1st Edition Published: September 2018
Cover Design by: Mary Martel
All Rights Reserved: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction in whole or in part, without express written permission by Mary Martel.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
The Dream
“Where are we?” I heard one of the twins ask from somewhere behind me. I didn’t bother looking to see which one had asked. While only the one had spoken the question out loud I knew the other had been thinking the same exact thing, so it didn’t really matter who had actually asked. They were two different people, but weirdly the same. When we were little boys it used to get on my nerves. I had long since gotten over it.
“What the fuck is going on?” Damien growled irately. “I fell asleep in bed beside my girl, with her naked and wrapped all around me. And, now I wake up here? I fucking told Quint not to mess with my dreams anymore. They fuck with my head and I always wake up disoriented and not knowing where in the hell I am. I wish he would have never learned how to enter dreams. Fucking asshole.”
He grumbled something under his breath that I couldn’t quite make out, probably more obscenities hurled at my Uncle.
I hummed under my breath in agreement with his last two statements. Uncle Quint learning how to enter dreams had been an absolute nightmare and invasion of privacy for the rest of us. Not to mention just knowing he could do it when it was such a rare talent left Quint a smug bastard. Until I learned how to do it, that is. At first, he was pissy and acted like I had done something to personally offend him. Then he was all about bragging on me and how us Alexander’s were the best of the best when it came to our craft. Him lumping the two of us together in anything was more than enough to push me further away from him for a while.
Don’t get me wrong, I did not hate my Uncle Quint, I loved him. He was my annoying older brother who liked to boss me around and always claimed to be right and knew more than I did about every fucking thing. He drove me nuts, but I loved him.
What I didn’t love was his constant smugness and endless drive to be better than everyone else. I hated that shit. Especially when it came to our own coven. We needed to be a single, solid unit, not compete with each other over every fucking tiny thing.
“What in the fuck is going on?” Julian snarled. “That asshole Quint fucking swore to me on his dead mothers’ grave that he would not pull this bullshit on me while I was sleeping anymore. I told him what would happen if he did this to me again. He’ll pay for this shit.”
Julian made me grin. Poor Uncle Quint, Julian always found a way to put my Uncle in his place.
“Wasn’t me,” Quint growled in a deep, highly annoyed voice. “Can’t you feel it? It’s her.”
Her?
Her who?
What the fuck?
We were shrouded in blackness, waiting for the dream to take hold of us and plunge us into whatever world the creator of the dream had weaved for us.
I had never been sucked into a dream by anyone other than my Uncle Quint before. I had done it myself, but still did not understand how it worked entirely.
“Look,” Dash murmured quietly, jerking me out of my head.
The darkness was fading and there she was.
My breath caught in my throat at the sight of her.
Jesus.
Fuck.
What was this?
She lay on her side on a twin sized mattress on the floor. The mattress was covered in a thin black blanket. The room we’d appeared in was small, and, outside of the bed and a small stack of clothing on the floor, the room was barren, empty and all too depressing for my tastes. The dirty wallpaper on the wall was old, cracked in places and peeling. Even though it was coming on summer and getting really warm outside, the room held a chill to it, like the cold had seeped into the dirty walls and now it was a permanent feature in the room.
I studiously avoided looking at the girl on the bed, looking at everything else but her. And it wasn’t because she was pretty (and from the small sliver of her face I could see, which wasn’t much, she looked like she could be pretty) and watching a maybe pretty girl sleeping, a girl I had never seen before in my life, was creepy. No, it wasn’t that at all. I avoided looking at the girl because outside of the chill the room gave off, there was something else in the air and it was coming off of her. Something I was all too familiar with because my brothers gave off the same vibe, it was that something extra special I had grown up with and around my entire life.
And it was coming from that girl on the bed.
A goddamned girl.
A girl in a shitty, cold room sleeping on a mattress on the floor. A room with dirty walls and stained, grey carpet. The floor was marked with cigarette burns and dark stains that I wouldn’t have the guts to walk across on my bare feet. I shuddered in revulsion as I looked around the room, taking in the only window and noting the mold covering the wooden frame.
“How is this possible?” Quinton whispered in horror.
I knew he wasn’t speaking directly to me, but I shook my head all the same, just as horrified as my Uncle sounded. This was not right, in fact, the whole thing was completely fucked.
“The Council should be notified immediately,” Julian said. “They will pull her out of here so fast and set her up somewhere she belongs.”
I wanted to agree with him, but I wasn’t the Council’s biggest fan and I would never, not ever, turn some helpless girl over into their greedy, grasping hands.
“Nobody is saying shit to the Council about her,” Quint growled in a harsh voice. It was deeper than normal, agitated. Julian’s words had successfully pissed him off. “Why do you think we’re here when I didn’t bring us here and Tyson’s not capable of dragging us all along for the ride? So how the fuck did we get here if it wasn’t Ty and it wasn’t me? Can any of you explain that to me?”
When no one answered him, his voice went lower, guttural, and I winced at hearing it. “We’re here because of her. She pulled us here with her magic. She can enter and manipulate dreams but there’s something blocking her. I don’t understand it, but there’s some kind of block around her. She has no idea what she’s doing.”
He was right about the block, I could feel it.
“We don’t know dick about this girl,” Damien grunted. “So she might be a witch and she might have been what drew us here. Who gives a fuck? I don’t. I say we get the hell out of here, wake up in our own goddamned beds and forget this chick even exists.”
I tuned out their bickering (it could go on and on for hours) as I turned to finally face the girl in question.
At the sight of her, my breath left me in a rush.
She was pretty, seriously fucking pretty.
Straight, light blonde hair that looked soft, so soft I had to curl my hand into a fist and press it into my thigh in order to not move closer to her so I could reach out and touch it, run its softness through my fingers, landed just below her
chin. It was short but still fucking pretty. Her eyes were closed, hiding their color from me. I desperately wanted to know the color of this girl’s eyes.
And I fucking hated her for it.
Most covens would kill to discover a girl and I wanted not one single thing to do with her. The only thing she would bring my family would be trouble and pain, that was all women who held magic inside of themselves were capable of. They were all selfish, self-centered bitches and the last one we had met had tried to destroy our entire family and she had used me as her tool to do so.
If I got myself a girlfriend she would not be a witch and she would have not one single thing to do with magic. She would be sweet, innocent in all things and she would never, not ever, be introduced to my family. She would have no part in my real world. This was the only acceptable way to ever allow another female into my life.
This girl, whoever she was, had no part in my life and I absolutely did not want to be standing in some run down, piss poor excuse for a bedroom that could be anywhere in the known universe.
“We should go,” I muttered and wasn’t surprised to hear the heat in my voice.
“In a minute,” my Uncle Quint said as he cracked open the door and slipped out of the room.
No one commented on his departure and I wasn’t really surprised. We had long since given up asking after his actions. There was no point, Quinton did what he wanted when he wanted to and he never stopped to explain himself to anyone and no way would he start now. And, if you were to ask him he would snap at you and bite your head off. Not worth the effort.
“She looks sad,” one of the twins remarked and I kind of had to agree with whoever had spoken.
Then again, it could have simply been the room that was sad, and she only seemed that way because she was sleeping in it.
“How in the hell can you say that?” I asked. “She’s sleeping. For all we know she could be the happiest girl to ever exist.”
Julian looked around the room pointedly. Yeah, I got his meaning loud and clear.
I glanced at the bed once more to see the girl had pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. And she was still sleeping.
For the first time since the darkness left us, I noticed what she was wearing. A thin, pull over hoodie covered the upper half of her body. It was dark grey, but I think the color had originally started out as black but had faded to dark grey with age and having been washed so many times. There was a gaping hole at one elbow, leaving her skin bare and exposed. The jeans covering her from hips to feet were faded, looked to be far too large on her slender hips and had seen better days. They were so faded they were almost white and both knees had long since blown out. Her pants were a size and a half too large for her body and the hoodie looked to be two sizes bigger than what she needed to cover her too thin frame.
Her hair had shifted when she pulled her knees up to her chest and I was surprised to see her lobe and the entire curve of her ear were covered in silver hoops and studs.
My eyes roamed over her sleeping figure to the neat stack of clothing on the dirty carpet, then they moved to the gross walls. If this girl was happy I would swallow my own goddamned tongue and choke on it.
Julian must have felt the same because he said, “This place is a shit hole. No one living in a shit hole is ever really happy. Besides, if she has magic then she belongs amongst her own kind. We know she’s not amongst her own kind because we don’t know who in the hell she is and we’ve met every known female witch in this country and she is not one of them. Do we agree that none of us have ever seen her before?”
I watched as Abel and Addison both nodded their heads together in unison, no big surprise there. Damien’s mouth was pinched in an unhappy scowl as he nodded begrudgingly. Dash’s eyes were riveted onto the girl and he looked extremely unhappy as well, but he still managed to jerk his head up in a rough nod. I nodded in agreement along with my brothers.
I wanted to reach out and touch her, see if she gave off the strange heat that came with being blessed with having magic, just to be sure.
I did no such thing.
I couldn’t touch her, wouldn’t.
Instead, I thought of Annabell and didn’t even try to fight my lip curling up in disgust. I had thought Annabell was going to be my one and only. I’d lost my virginity to her and I hadn’t minded in the least when she’d started sleeping with two of the others. Honestly, I had hoped with everything I was worth that she would infatuate the others as much as she had me. It hadn’t worked out how I had hoped. In fact, I’d say it went the exact opposite as to what I had hoped for. Not only had she turned out to be a screaming bitch but she had tried to dismember my entire family. Uncle Quint had retaliated and dished out some harsh punishment as payback that, had he bothered to ask me before hand, I would have pleaded with him to simply let it go and leave her alone. Now every time I was forced to be in her presence her face was a permanent reminder of how she’d played me, played my brothers. Being anywhere near her and taking in her face was an all-new blow to the ego and crushed just a little bit of my soul.
The thought of having another girl with magic mixed in with my family had a ball of dread curling in my stomach and a sour taste slithering up my throat. Bitter, I was so very bitter.
I looked down at the too thin girl on the bed in ill-fitting clothing. All I knew of her was that she looked to have some seriously soft blonde locks that I desperately wanted to run my fingers through, an insane number of holes in her ears (or, at least in the one ear I could see), and she lived in a damp, beat-to-shit apartment.
And she had magic.
She was a witch. Like me, like my family.
And, if not for the beautiful fact that she had magic, I might not have been openly opposed to having anything to do with her.
Fool me once and shame on you. Fool me twice and…
Yeah, girls with magic weren’t for me. Not ever again.
I shielded my heart, brick by brick I built the wall surrounding the organ that caused me so much pain when I let it take the lead, and I turned away from the sight of her in time to see Uncle Quint silently reentering the dimly lit bedroom. An envelope crinkled as he folded it in half and shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans. From what I saw of the front of the envelope before it disappeared from sight it looked like some kind of bill. If I was correct and it was a bill then there would be a home address, a billing address, front and center on the envelope with a name of whoever she lived her with. The sneaky son of a bitch had left to find out where we really were, to find out where she lived. So he could come back.
One look at him and the steely determination he wore on his face like it had been etched into stone and I fucking knew. I knew my Uncle better than anyone else, so I was able to read the look on his face with just one glance. Uncle Quint was not going to walk away from this witch and this pathetic, probably roach infested place without ever looking back. No, that look on his face said he’d just found a map that lead to the most beautiful, exotic treasure that ever existed in this whole freaking world and he was bound and determined to find it. All without ever having seen the other half of her face, or her eyes open so he didn’t have any clue as to what color they were, or hearing the sound of her voice.
Fuck.
You either prepared to die or you got the hell out of Uncle Quint’s way. I had to figure out if this girl was worth fighting with my Uncle or not.
The girl shifted slightly, and a whimper escaped her.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as both twins stepped forward as if unable to help themselves after hearing her make that tiny sound.
God damn it, they were both ready to rush to her side and neither of them knew the color of her eyes or the sound of her voice yet, either.
God fucking damn it.
I would have to fight them on this too if we were going to live our lives without her and leave her in peace to her own shitty one.
“Time to go,” Uncle Quint insist
ed. “We need to go before she joins us in her dream and realizes what’s going on. We aren’t ready for that.”
We weren’t ready for anything the draw of her implicated. I didn’t want any part in anything having to do with this girl. In a way, I hated her for making me feel anything at all, even sympathy for her.
“But, Quinton,” one of the twins said cautiously, “she clearly needs us. We can’t just leave her here.”
We sure as fuck could.
“We may be leaving her for now,” Quint said quietly, “but I promise you, it isn’t for good. You need to trust me on this, we aren’t gonna contact the Council, but we are gonna handle this situation. I give you my word.”
Masculine grunts echoed throughout the room, bouncing off the cold, barren walls. They all trusted Uncle Quint to handle the situation and take care of the nameless girl.
I wanted to put my fist in every single one of their faces in protest.
I was going to fight them on this and from the looks they were giving her I knew they weren’t going to be happy with me.
“Brace,” Quint said as he held his arms out at his sides and closed his eyes, concentrating.
I knew what to expect before I felt it.
The room around me darkened until no light remained and I felt like I was standing alone in a black tunnel.
I stood there in silence, counting. I made it to fifty-eight before my world shifted again and I sat up in my own bed, gasping, disoriented.
And I did it angry.
And I also did it not knowing that the beautiful girl we’d left in that shit hole apartment would soon become everything to me and my very reason for breathing.
Hindsight, they say, is always twenty-twenty.
Chapter Two
Six months later
I looked down at the phone in my hand in disbelief as I tightened my grip around it painfully. I could feel it biting into my hand and knew there’d be red marks left behind but didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything.