Claimed: Faction 3: The Isa Fae Collection

by Heather Hambel Curley

  Claimed

  Heather Hambel Curley

  Dedication

  To Billy and the boys: my luckiest stars

  To Mom: Just skip those parts—you know what I mean

  To Rachel Hibbs: I thank God for your friendship and sisterhood!

  And as always, to Dad: I love you.

  Claimed © copyright 2017 Heather Hambel Curley

  Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  One

  When the Age of Man was balanced on a crumbling precipice, the covens shattered and we returned to the woods.

  We’d fled to the forest a week before my nineteenth birthday and now, a year later, we were still here. My mother’s precognition abilities were first rate, but even she had to admit her visions had changed. The End was less certain now. There was still a finality to everything—to man, to Earth, to the lives we’d grown stagnant living—but she couldn’t tell us how it was going to happen.

  Or when.

  I flexed my arms, forcing my body weight down on the mortar to grind the corn into a fine powder. When we’d left our house in the city, my father insisted we retreat as far from civilization as we could. That meant felling our own trees and building our homestead by hand; we harvested our own food and sought out clean water. Clean was turning out to be a relative term. When my parents weren’t looking, my younger sister would cast a purification spell and we dragged the buckets back to the lodge.

  I dragged my wrist across my forehead, blotting away beads of sweat. A year. We’d been tucked in the hills for over a year and still weren’t allowed to use our powers. No magic. No spells or telekinesis. Before the war, we’d kept our abilities to ourselves—unless under Coven sanction—but now? We were alone. There was no one to panic that we were writhing with the devil or causing all the world’s problems with our abilities. No one to grit their teeth and spit at us. Witch. Their fear of the unknown, the things they didn’t understand, always spewed out as hate.

  Leaning back against my heels, I arched my back in an attempt to ease the searing pain from my spine. War was everywhere. You can’t rely on power alone, my parents drilled it into our heads like there was a chance we might forget, you need to take what you have and survive. Thrive.

  I crouched over the corn again, slamming the pestle against the kernels. I wouldn’t call this thriving. This was hard work: this was waking up early and going to bed as soon as the sun set. This was the shit I’d read about in history class when I’d been in school. It was no way to live.

  “I’m so tired of cornbread.” My sister, Soleil, set a large bucket on the ground and settled down next to it, reaching in and pulling out the skeleton of a basket. Pushing her sleeves up, she started weaving the reeds together. “For once, I’d love one of those yeast rolls Nana Gumm used to make when we were kids. Remember?”

  “Well. Find me yeast, flour that doesn’t turn rancid in this godawful heat, and bring Nana Gumm back from the dead.” I threw my back into the grinding, trying to force the kernels to break up on my sheer will alone. “Then you can have yeast rolls.”

  “With melted butter? Remember?” She grinned, her smile punctuated by her dimples. “That was always the best part of dinner. I could have eaten a dozen on my own.”

  “She’s been dead almost thirteen years. I’m surprised you remember.”

  “I remember everything.”

  She was right. Soleil was only sixteen, but it seemed like she’d honed in on her abilities far better than I ever had. Part of me hated her for it: her abilities to commune with nature, to properly and efficiently cast a healing spell or circle spell. She couldn’t master divination and her telekinetic abilities were almost nonexistent. At least I had that over her.

  Her hands made quick work of her weaving; again, something else she was better at than me. She was silent for several, fulfilling moments, but then spoke. Her voice was contemplative; she was in one of those moods again. “Do you think that things will ever go back to the way they were?”

  My pulse throbbed in my skull. It felt like the start of a headache; the pinprick stab into my temple like a shard of glass had penetrated my skin. “I don’t know anymore. At first, I thought maybe it was just another war, like all the other wars men have started. This one…I don’t know, it feels different.”

  She nodded, brushing her wavy blonde hair back from her face. “I feel it, too. I’d just like to know why Momma and Pa aren’t honest with us.”

  “They’re protecting us.”

  “We’re not blind, Wren, we can see what the war is doing. Do you remember how it started?” Her blue eyes—our only shared, inherited trait—were wider than normal. It was like she’d been thinking about this for a while. “It’s because—“

  “It’s because of greed. And hate.” I wanted to reach out and shake her. My sister was wise in many ways but she too often romanticized what had happened before the fall. “It was mortals who demanded control and power and who stopped and nothing to get it.”

  “Some were good.”

  “Soleil,” I sighed, shoving my black bangs out of my eyes, “I never said they weren’t. We had a lot of mortal, human friends. But they weren’t the ones in charge. It was the politicians who started the war; it was the soldiers who fought it. And the ones who took over countries? The ones who devastated nations and killed children and ripped apart the foundation of modern society? Those are the bastards who dissolved the Constitution. They conquered monarchies and installed corporations founded on greed and the love of money.”

  “Now there’s two sides: them and us.”

  I snorted. Shaking my head, I leaned back over to continue grinding my corn flour. “No. There are the Western State and the Regent’s Block. And then, scattered between them? There are the immortals. I’m not going to pledge allegiance to any of them.”

  She flinched, her eyes focused on her weaving.

  I groaned inwardly. Before the fall, before we’d received the panicked transmission from our coven and fled our home, my sister had been in love with a classmate. His name was Grant; he’d been tall and lanky, with a shock of blonde hair and an innocent face that made him look like he was about thirteen years old. There’d been a massive influx for males to join the Western State armed forces and Grant had been an early recruit. Even before we’d fled in the night, Soleil had lost contact with him.

  Our mother’s second sight couldn’t see what happened to him.

  My brain tossed around words to say to her. She was just a kid when she’d lost Grant; it was something I’d never experienced in my life. I wasn’t innocent, by any definition of the word, but my relationship with males—human or immortal—had been a give/take relationship. They’d give me sex and I’d take it. Desire and pleasure over connection and love. I wasn’t interested in that; I just wanted physicality and be done with them. And that was yet another rea
son why my sister and I were more like strangers thrown into the same family than actual blood relation. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. “Just because I refuse to conform to men’s rules doesn’t mean that Grant was any less than he was. He was true. Pure, I guess.”

  She shrugged, flicking her hand across her cheeks. “He lied about his age.”

  “It’s not an unforgivable sin, Soleil.”

  She laughed, but even from where I kneeled, I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. My sensitive sister. Maybe that’s why she’d always be the better witch: she was in-tuned to everything. I cared less. My reactions were more based on need and impulse than thinking things through.

  I turned my attention back to my work. Fine. It was a dead end conversation anyway.

  We worked in silence until my father emerged from the woods, his arms heavy laden with cut timber. “Eyes on the sun, ladies.”

  I cursed under my breath. He was obsessed with living off the land; it didn’t matter that Soleil could cast an illumination spell or that I could conjure a spark out of empty air. He was determined that we only use kerosene lamps and candles. There was no electricity in the lodge. The only heat came from the massive iron cook stove he’d salvage from a burned out cabin. “I’m almost done grinding the cornmeal. I’ll jar it tonight and bake it into loaves tomorrow.”

  “You need a better system, Wren. That puts you behind tomorrow.”

  I clamped my teeth down on my tongue until I tasted blood. I wanted to tell him how ridiculous this was; how we could be doing all of this in a half of the time by using magic or spells or abilities. But no, we were sweating and hurting; bleeding and crying. “Yes, Pa.”

  “Can you finish that basket by tonight, Soleil?” He trudged on towards the covered wood corral he’d built to keep logs dry. “I’m counting on you.”

  “Yes, Pa.” She glanced up at me and smirked. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Good. We can start picking those apples at the far end of the orchard in the morning.” He reached into his pocket and consulted his tarnished pocket watch, then looked back at us. “Wren. I’ll need you to take the wagon into town tomorrow. Can I trust you to do it right this time?”

  My lips twitched to a snarl, but I drew it back before I straightened and looked at him. “Yes, Pa.”

  “I want you up and headed in at first light. No later.” He disappeared into the wood corral and, no doubt, took more time than he needed to stacking the split logs. It was always by size and width, the smaller twigs and split saplings bound with reeds and tucked in small baskets woven by my sister. He was obsessed with order and efficiency. Control was his way of holding onto his freedom.

  But, I hadn’t messed up the last time I’d gone to town. He was just mad I’d done it my way.

  Once he’d situated the wood and retreated back to the lodge, I ran my fingers through the cornmeal. It was almost fine enough—and I was sick of grinding. I was sick of my back hurting and my knees left raw from kneeling on the ground.

  “What did you do last time?” I could feel my sister’s eyes on me, glaring at me as she wound wet reeds around the basket frame.

  “Nothing.” I set the pestle on the ground and lifted my hands up, focusing my energy on the corn kernels. Invisible molecules around my palms popped and sizzled: the feeling of telekinesis—my power—felt like the rain of sparks against my flesh. The cornmeal shuddered; it skittered and then, it imploded on itself. Fine, evenly crushed cornmeal remained in the mortar. “I stopped to see Vaughn on my way into town. And, so I didn’t spend longer away from home than Pa felt necessary, I made the decision to use my craft. It was a good utilization of time, I felt, but Pa thought I’d risked our lives and myself and the coven and, honestly, it’s the same shit he always says and I’m sick of it.”

  Done.

  I sank back onto my ass and brushed the dirt off my pants. “Don’t look at me like that, Soleil. You use your craft to cut corners all the time.”

  “You risked us so you could sleep with a farmhand?” Her eyes had widened and were locked on me, but her fingers kept flying over the reeds. “Wren.”

  “If you’d fucked Vaughn, you’d understand. He’s worth the presumed risk.” I shrugged my shoulders. Vaughn Sterling was tall, tan from working long hours in the sun, and muscular. He knew exactly what to do to make my body respond. But that was about as far as my affection for him went; there was no emotional attachment for either of us. We liked having sex. That was it.

  Soleil clucked her tongue, shaking her head in obvious disapproval. Of course she’d think that; my sister had primed herself to be the favorite child since she was old enough to crawl. Dimpled, petite, blonde, wavy hair and blue eyes, she was the physical and elemental opposite of me: I had straight black hair and was taller and stronger than my sister. She could coo and the entire forest would come to a halt. I could crush corn kernels with my craft.

  Sometimes, I felt like we made better strangers than sisters. She always seemed to look down on everything I did; judge every decision I made. Soleil was the better witch and she knew it. I knew it.

  And my parents, if they had to choose, would always pick her.

  I lifted the mortar and positioned a glass jar beneath it, carefully pouring the cornmeal in while using my free hand and an energy burst to funnel all the meal in without spilling. There was enough to fill three jars, which was good. I wouldn’t have to go through this torture for another…three or four days.

  Soleil was still staring at me.

  I shook my hair loose from the elastic band securing it at the nape of my neck and glared at her. “Do you have a question or something? Because if you’re taking Pa’s side on this—“

  “No. No, I was just…” she set the basket down and swirled her index finger in front of it, murmuring words I couldn’t quite understand. The reeds wove themselves upward, binding and twisting simply based on her craft and on her voice. She looked at me again, her eyes inquisitive. “Vaughn Sterling. I’ve heard things about him…about…his body.”

  “Are you asking me?”

  She looked uncomfortable, breaking her gaze from mine. The nod of her head was barely a twitch.

  “Whatever you’ve heard, Vaughn exceeds.” I stood from my position on the ground and flicked my index finger at the jars. “Remissas.”

  On command, the jars lifted in the air. I plucked them like fruit from a free and then turned back to my sister. “In fact, he exceeds so much that I’d suffer through another of Pa’s whippings just to have him again. And again.”

  Her jaw dropped and she quickly closed her mouth with an audible plop, as if I couldn’t read the shock in her face. She was just like my parents: prim. Straight-laced. So pure and sweet.

  I turned away, trying to hide my smirk. It felt good to stir her up a little bit. Even though I wasn’t necessarily straight-laced and definitely not pure, if enjoying sex was my only sin, then burn me at the stake.

  “Does he know you’re a witch?”

  I hesitated. Vaughn and I had been fooling around together since we were fourteen. Still, it had only been physical. I knew he was a farmhand and he knew I was from the wrong side of town; distant and dark, the kind of girl people whispered about. He’d never cared.

  Turning back, I ran my tongue across my bottom lip suggestively. “What I give Vaughn—he’s been too happy to ever ask.”

  Two

  I awoke well before dawn. The air in our upstairs loft was cold, the iron cook-stove’s fire no doubt having gone out hours before. The stove was the only source of heat in the Lodge, hence the loft sleeping area. There was no privacy anywhere in the homestead. Even the “privacy wall” Pa built in between where he and Momma slept and where Soleil and I slept was only waist high.

  He was always too damned paranoid. Even if people knew we were out here, they wouldn’t care. There were more problems in the world than a wooden building inhabited by four witches who weren’t bothering to use their powers anymore.
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  My clothes were on the floor next to my bed. I leaned over and pulled the pile under the blankets with me, trying to warm everything up before dressing. We didn’t keep track of the days anymore—for whatever reason—and instead were forced to monitor the seasons by the stars. This was my father’s forte: he knew the stars and their movements; he could feel the change of season and time within his body. The only thing I knew, or rather cared about, was that we were probably in late summer or early fall. It was cold in the mornings and sweltering by afternoon.

  I planned on stopping at Vaughn’s on my way to town, so I dressed for the occasion: black, leather pants with silver rivets down the front, a black tank top with heavy black belt beneath my breasts, and tattered black and gray fingerless gloves. Since it was still crisp outside, I paired my outfit with sturdy black boots and a heavy, double breasted brown leather coat.

  I picked my way across the loft, being careful to step over planks that squeaked, and climbed down the ladder to the first floor. The ground floor of the lodge was draped in darkness. I fumbled for a few moments, pawing at the air around me, until my fingers grazed a beeswax candle. It was horribly misshapen and jammed into a forged iron holder, but it would do. I flicked my finger in the general direction of where I’d felt the mottled stick, murmuring, “lux” into the dark.

  The candle sparked to life.

  It was a weak light, but enough to illuminate my path to the kitchen. Kitchen was a loose term for what Pa had installed in the house: there wasn’t actually running water or refrigeration unit. There was the cook stove and a washbasin. Anything that needed to be kept cold was stored underneath sawdust in the cellar.

  Setting the candle on the table, I grabbed my leather satchel from the hook beside the door and flipped it open. There wasn’t much I had to bring along for the trip. Pa had left out a small pouch of gold coins and a neatly lettered list of the items I need to pick up. I jammed the list into my bag, but tucked the pouch in the inside pocket of my jacket. It wasn’t paranoia like my father succumbed to—it was just street smarts.