Realms and Rebels: A Paranormal and Fantasy Reverse Harem Collection

by C. M. Stunich

  Without another word, I turn and take off down the street.

  This time, I don't make it half a block before I run into a group of people ... all of them decorated with demons.

  3

  I'm losing my mind.

  That's literally the only explanation for what I've seen today.

  My feet skid on the pavement, still damp from yesterday's summer shower. The world smells like hot concrete and cloying flowers, and the sun is bright and cheerful. Yet, I've never been more terrified in my life.

  The people standing in front of me are dressed in normal clothes–tank tops and jeans, floral dresses, for fuck's sake, they're wearing khaki–but there's nothing sentient left in their gazes. Like dad. Like mom.

  I close my eyes and ball my hands into fists.

  This is all bullshit. I'm fucking crazy. I've been told I was crazy since I was a kid.

  When I open them back up, I start forward, ready to push through the crowd and back onto the street. But as soon as I get close to them, their hands come out to grab me, and Staff Guy's weapon slams down on their knuckles, cracking bones and drawing blood.

  The people in front of me don't even react. Instead, the monsters on their shoulders shudder and cackle, eyes glowing. There's one that looks like a gator, smoking a pipe. Another has rabbit ears and goat eyes. As different as they are, they all share one attribute: they're excited.

  "Are you stupid? Did you not hear me: we need to swap worlds." The blind man spins in a circle, whirling the shiny wooden staff around and cracking the knees of the people closest to us. "Unless you want to hang around and wait for these peons to call their master. Soon as he shows up though, he'll rip your eyes, ears, and tongue off. Sound fun?"

  "This is all in my head," I whisper, but even as I'm saying it, I know it's not true.

  This is real. That, or my meds were switched out for placebos, and I'm being attacked by an angry mob that I'm only imagining is covered in demons.

  Either way, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I'm following a murderer anywhere.

  With Staff Guy distracted by the mob, I take my chances, turn, and run like hell. Again.

  This time, I do manage to get around the corner and onto a street populated with normal people. I don't stop running though, shoving my way through a thick, early evening crowd and into a bar that I've been in before. In the back are steps that lead up to a Thai restaurant, and then from there, I take the elevator that leads up to the apartments. I went to a party here. Once.

  But it seems like a safe place to hide. If even I don't know where I'm going, how the hell is Staff Guy going to find me?

  Since I don't know anyone in the building well enough to knock on their door and ask for sanctuary from fucking demons, I hit the last floor running and take the stairs to the roof.

  Panting, I stumble to the stone half-wall and sit my ass down, putting my head between my hands and sucking in long, deep breaths of the steamy evening air. It smells like tar and car exhaust up here, but at least I'm alone.

  "Running from me isn't going to do you any good."

  My head snaps up, and there he is.

  Staff Guy.

  "What the fuck are you?" I blurt, trying and failing to stand up. My legs are shaky from running, from adrenaline, from watching a man be murdered right before my eyes. If this asshole can follow me up a hundred stories, then what's the point of trying to outrun him again?

  Also, I meant to say who are you, but ... what does seem more appropriate now that I think about it anyway.

  "I'm your Eyes," the man says, which is sort of ironic considering he's blind. Or at least, it looks like he's blind. He doesn't act like it. I sit there as the man bends down in front of me and adjusts his shades, pushing them up into his hair. His eyes are solid white, but when he kneels down and lets me look into them, I swear, I can see the whole universe. Just having him this close to me sends my pulse skyrocketing, making me hyper aware of every breath, of my tongue gently sliding across my lower lip. I don’t even mean to do it; it just happens. I can’t take my eyes off of his, and yet, it doesn’t escape my notice that his face is all hard, perfect angles, his mouth full and lush, his body chiseled and strong. "And we need to hit a portal and bounce."

  "Bounce?" I ask, because ... wow, slang? From a guy who wields a magic staff and has the whole world in his white and gold eyes?

  "If we don't leave, the oni will pass their message along to their master, and we'll end up with a boss battle on our hands. Not something we can handle on our own, especially not with you untrained and raw as fuck."

  The man takes out a cigarette from his tight jeans, and lights up.

  The smoke is red, not gray-white. I don't even want to know what he's puffing on right now.

  "What's your name?" I ask, running my fingers through my hair. The red-brown strands dance in the wind as traffic crawls by below us, the happy sounds of a Friday evening crowd punctuating the quiet rooftop space.

  "Trick," the guy says, and then he smiles, like that's some sort of joke. "Name's Trick, I mean." He stands up then, swiping his palm down his perfect, inked abs. In his other hand, he clutches the staff, fingers tapping the wood in a rhythmic pattern. "And you're Rayne Ayu. Nice to meet you, salutations, and all that jazz. Now, you ready to skip this joint or what?"

  "You killed a man right in front of me," I whisper, rubbing my hand down my face. "And you want me to follow you? Sorry, dude, but I'd rather hop off this building. At least then I'd know death was imminent and not preceded by torture."

  Standing up from the wall, I smooth my shaking hands down the front of my jeans and try to step around Trick. He swings his staff out, blocking my path. My glare might be lost on him, but I level one on him anyway.

  "There are fucking demons taking over your fellow Eugenians, and yet, you're willing to sit there in denial? What kind of horse shit is that?" Trick moves his staff out of my way and paces behind me to the rooftop door.

  Aaaaaand, it's locked.

  Talk about cliched. Did not think that kind of thing happened in real life.

  I put my forehead against the metal door and do my best to breathe in and out, nice and slow.

  "Don't worry about that lock," Trick says, swirling his cigarette around in a circle. The red smoke trails after his hand and then coalesces, forming a shimmering circle in midair. It reminds me of kids on the Fourth of July, dicking around with sparklers and drawing shining circles with the burning tips.

  Unlike an illusion of fireworks however, this circle turns into something real.

  In the center of the smoke, the air shimmers and the tar roof disappears, revealing a dark room with stone floors and bloodred walls. There are machines with flashing lights, and smoke of all colors trailing through the air. It looks like a fucking casino.

  I take a few steps back, wondering how far, exactly, my delusions are going to take me.

  "Hop worlds, outrun the bad guys. It's pretty much that easy." Trick stubs his cig out on the wall and tucks it into a leather satchel on his belt. It's black with a silver skull and crossbones on it, more like something you'd see in a Hot Topic than on a mystical hero's belt.

  As I stand there looking between the ... portal and Trick, he gets a little huffy and tucks his fingers in the front pockets of his jeans.

  "It's not like you won't be back. Give it a ... week or two, and I'll drop you right back off at your apartment. Oh, and I fed your cat, too, so no worries."

  "You what?" I ask, blinking and focusing on the handsome asshole as he pulls his shades back over his eyes.

  "Dumped a bag of food on the floor, filled up the bathtub with water, and left your roomie a note. We're golden, so let's get the fuck out of here before a master shows up and rips your eyes from your skull."

  "is that what happened to you?" I ask before I can stop myself. Trick's face falls for a moment, and his full lips curve to the side in an awful sort of frown.

  "No," he says, and then I swear to god, he l
ooks right at me. "You happened to me." He spins his staff in another circle and then taps the purple orb on the bottom against the ground. "Now, let's go before we get ambushed again. If they know what world we've hopped to, they'll be on us again before I have a chance at a drink."

  "World hopping ..." I start, and then huff a breath. I was born different, that's for sure. And I've seen a lot of shit in my life.

  I've never seen anything like this before.

  "I would've called it coendescing, but I was trying not to be cryptic." Trick flashes a smile that's just ever-so slightly off-center. "Don't you hate that? In books and movies and shit, when the new characters refuse to explain shit to the MC? Drives me up the wall." Trick takes a few steps backward, and into the portal, stepping over the smokey edge like it's a wall. He rests one foot on it and leans down, holding out a single, tattooed hand. "Look, I'm your Eyes which means ... basically, I'm tied to you. For life." Trick holds out his wrist for me to see, and the image on it takes my breath away.

  He has a small tattoo of a face there that looks disturbingly similar to the birthmark on my own wrist. When I tilt my arm to make the comparison, I realize that the brown splotch I've looked at my whole life, that only vaguely looked like a face, now truly is one. It's a dead ringer to the one on Trick's arm.

  "You die, I die. Sucks, right?" Trick stands up and steps back, but he leaves his hand out for me to take. "And besides, if I really wanted to, I could've killed you already." He shrugs and then lets his hand drop, turning and walking into the dark cavern beyond the smoke ring.

  It takes me all of two seconds to decide to follow after him.

  I've been shit on my whole life, fighting between embracing my delusions and running from them.

  This, this looks like an adventure, and I'm taking it.

  I pull my phone out, shoot a quick text to Daniel and one of my co-workers ...

  And then I step through the portal.

  4

  The cavern beyond the portal is sticky with heat, the air thick with smoke. I'm not two steps into the place and already I'm certain that this is indeed a casino of some sort.

  That's my luck: hop worlds and find myself in a casino of all places.

  How ... mystical.

  "Where are we?" I ask, pulling another handful of pills from my pocket and stuffing them between my lips. I figure if this is a hallucination, more medication could help get rid of it. If it's not, well ... at least I tried.

  "Some shitty oni hangout," Trick says, walking past rows of slot machines with bright colors and flashing lights. Almost every machine is taken ... by a demon. The monsters sit perched on spinning stools, cigarettes and pipes tucked between gaping lips, drinks in their clawed or furred hands, liquid sloshing onto the stone floor beneath our feet. It smells ten times worse in here than the seediest bar I've ever seen in my life. And trust me, I've seen some seedy ass places in my time.

  "If ... oni," I start, trying out the new word. It's vaguely familiar to me. Pretty sure it's Japanese. "If the oni are out to get us, then why are we here? How is this safer? They're fucking ... everywhere."

  Panning my gaze around the casino, I pick out several familiar looking creatures. There's a millipede-like monster with the head of a black cat and long, clawed fingers tugging at the handle of a slot machine. It's not the same creature that possessed my mother, but it's close enough to make me shiver.

  "Without a host, they're useless. Less than insects," Trick says, pausing next to the bar and curling up the edge of his lip in a vicious snarl. "Go ahead and try to possess me," he growls, putting the orb at the end of his staff against the throat of a demon with a horse face and the body of a chubby baby.

  That thing ranks up there in the top five creepiest things I've ever seen.

  "Sorry, Trick. I was just playing, you know?" the horse-thing says in a deep, scratchy voice. Then it throws its head back and laughs before downing the drink in its hand. Without bothering to respond, Trick reaches down and curls his warm fingers around my hand.

  A shock travels through me, and not like a romance novel sort of ooh-la-la shock, but something else, something akin to sticking my finger in a light socket. The energy shimmers along my skin, drawing goose bumps, raising the hair on the back of my neck ... and pebbling my nipples into hard points.

  I suck in a sharp breath as my muscles down below clench tight. Of course, Trick notices everything.

  "I'm your Eyes," he says, and then maybe he realizes he's being the cryptic side character because he adds, "well, technically speaking, you are my eyes." Pausing next to an empty blackjack table with a seriously wicked looking scorch mark in the center, Trick lifts his hand and points across the room, toward a rowdy group of demons, each one on the shape of a different dog. Of course, in real life, dogs don't have horns or wings, but close enough. I think one of them might be a poodle or something. "See that group over there?"

  "Yep," I say, my hand still clenched in his big, warm fingers. I want to pull away at the same time I want to stay like this forever. And I don't mean in a romantic sort of way. No, there's just ... something like energy coursing through him and into me, like a shot of caffeine straight to the heart, a rush of adrenaline.

  "Now, close your eyes and focus on letting me in."

  "Letting you in?" I ask skeptically, because it's starting to sound like Trick is spouting cheesy, romance novel lines. Let him in. Please. To where? My vagina, I bet. That's where.

  "Let me see through you," he continues, and I think if he hadn't been wearing shades, and if he had irises and pupils, he'd be rolling his eyes like crazy. "You did it before, back in the alley."

  "Did I now?" I ask, narrowing my own eyes and trying not to think of those solid, glossy black demon eyes he'd been sporting. So very Supernatural of him. "And how did I do that?"

  "Let your natural power go. You're clenched down on it tighter than a–" Trick pauses, and I get the sense that he's just held himself back from a really nasty metaphor. My dirty mind fills it in, of course. Clenched down tighter than your mom last night.

  Pretty sure I'm starting to go loopy from all the excitement.

  "Might be the meds," I say, because operating under the assumption that this is all real is what will keep me alive. If I am crazy, I'll end up in a padded cell either way. If I'm not, then I better figure out if I can trust this Trick guy–and quick. Why not see if what he's suggesting might work? "I just took another handful."

  "What kind of meds?" Trick asks, getting serious all of a sudden. I answer without words, pulling out a bottle of Clozapine and handing it to him. He reads the label–antipsychotics, great–and then unscrews the cap. As I raise a brow, he takes one pill out, pops it in his mouth and chews. With a small growl, he snatches both a blue drink and an empty glass from a passing waiter's tray. He spits the remains of the pills in one and then chugs the other.

  "That's not Clozapine," he tells me, like he's a fucking pharmacist. "That's a curse. A mild one, but a magic suppressing curse nonetheless." He levels his shades on me, but it feels more like he's get a sense of me rather than looking at me. Which, of course, he is. "How long have you been taking these?"

  "Since I was fourteen." In fact, I've been taking anti-psychotic drugs since my fourteenth birthday. To the day. Yup. That's where my parents took me to celebrate: a psychiatrist's office.

  "Jesus fucking Christ," Trick whispers, shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. "You've been self-cursing for eight years?"

  "How do you know it's been eight years?" I whisper, feeling a thrill of dread sweep through me. I yank my hand back from Trick, and it's like shutting off a hot water faucet. My skin feels suddenly wet and cold; it takes everything I have in me to keep my hand to myself. "How do you know how old I fucking am?"

  Trick curses under his breath in another language, something guttural and weird and ugly.

  "I've been tied to you by magic since the day you were born." He rakes his fingers through his hair and then scowls
at me. "I was ten. Thanks for that, by the way."

  "Being born?" I scowl as Trick licks his lips.

  "Pretty much."

  "You're a prick, you know that?" I grumble as Trick grabs another drink and shoves it in my hand. He wraps his fingers around my wrist and tugs me along after him, steering me in the complete opposite direction from the group of dog-like demons.

  "Talk loudly about how empty this place is," he says as he steers me through the casino in a pattern that seems to deny all logic. "In fact, ask me ... demand that I explain why you're in an empty casino." He pauses and spins to look at me. Since Trick can't currently see, I make an educated guess that he went blind later in life. According to his story, maybe around the time I was born? "Your life literally depends on it."

  I could argue. It's tempting. But I'd rather not draw the demons' collective attention.

  "Why is this place so fucking empty?" I growl, throwing back the drink and closing my eyes. I can't imagine the purpose of this exercise, but what the hell do I know about any of this?

  The demons around me chuckle like I'm the funniest goddamn thing they've ever seen in their ... lives? Are demons even technically alive at all?

  "What's the point of all this?" I grind out through my teeth. I really hate having all these things looking at me. I'd hate it even more if they knew I was looking at them. My best guess is that they don't know I can see them at all. That's the only reason Trick would ask me to pretend that I think the place is empty, right?

  Because rule number one for my whole life has been to keep my eyes to myself.

  "You'll learn soon enough," he grumbles, lifting a finger to signal the bartender. He's wearing a look of grim satisfaction though, like everything's going to be okay ... for now. He definitely doesn't have that happily ever after look on his face. I sense more trouble coming my way.

  Heaps and heaps of fucking trouble.