Realms and Rebels: A Paranormal and Fantasy Reverse Harem Collection

by C. M. Stunich

  “No,” he said, pulling my dress up over my breasts. “I’m not.”

  16

  My wrists were bruised and scraped as I tugged at the knotted vines, trying to break free. Robin could no longer feel my magic, and though he should have been sleeping, he was chirping in alarmed confusion instead. Efrain had taken pity on me when I started bawling at the thought of leaving my familiar, and he’d gently placed the bird on my shoulder, though it pecked at him and beat him with its wings. Now, I stumbled forward through the woods, Efrain guiding me as the moon slipped into the last sliver of the earth’s shadow.

  How could he do this to me? Tears stung my eyes as he marched me towards a fate I didn’t understand. How could I have been such a fool? I’d wanted an adventure, and I’d done what I had to do to get it. I’d trusted these men, and they’d turned their backs on me. Not only turned their backs, but set me up. It was all a lie. Every minute of the best night of my life was a freaking lie. They’d only flirted with me to gain my trust, to flatter me, to toy with me. All along, they’d been planning this betrayal. The pain of it took my breath, sharp and raw across my newly blossoming heart.

  “Listen to me,” I begged, but Efrain was deaf to my pleas, as hard and unfeeling as a mountain. If only I could find Granny, she could explain. I could almost bear all of this if I knew it would save her. Where was she? I knew she was not that mouse. There was only one person in our valley who could do that, and it wasn’t my granny.

  It was Yvonne, the busy-body, nosy, youth-obsessed witch.

  “Please, that’s not my granny,” I said desperately. “But I might know who it is.”

  “I don’t give a damn who it is,” Efrain said. “I owe her, and I’m paying my debt.”

  Worst of all, I could do nothing. I was helpless—pathetically devoid of power. I wanted to scream in frustration, to rip the necklace from my throat like a hot coal. I could feel its strong, blanketing magic all over my body, smothering my pores, my breath, my life. My own magic was writhing, panicking in claustrophobia. But it could do nothing, trapped under the weight of the cursed stone, useless, as blocked as the full moon above was blocked from the sun’s path.

  It hung huge above us, shadowed with red like an evil eye watching over the grim proceedings. Terror clawed up my throat as Efrain pushed me towards the clearing in this red dress, as if I were dressed for a sacrifice. Was this his plan to get back into the pack? Was I the blood sacrifice?

  Suddenly, the fire was blazing in front of us, just a few steps across the grass. People were undressing around the fire, and a girl with white hair was struggling in the pack leader’s arms. Was this an exchange? Me for the white-haired girl?

  Efrain pushed me roughly into the clearing, and I stumbled, my feet catching in the dress. I fell, unable to stop myself with my hands bound.

  “Efrain, no,” I said. And then, with the clarity of a seeing stone, I saw the futility of my protests. As he spoke above me, my purpose crystallized. He wanted me to marry this man I’d never met in my life. I should have found it ironic. I’d fallen for Efrain and his brothers in a day, and yet, the shock of being told I was to be claimed by this handsome stranger made my head swim. Their words lost meaning as they negotiated my marriage above my head, without my consent.

  Hysterical, furious words slammed through my head like waves. I wanted to scratch Efrain’s eyes out, to blast fire out of every magic outlet in my body, to smash him under a giant boulder and leave him as struggling and helpless as I was. But I had no magic, no power whatsoever.

  Efrain was telling them I was a shifter, and I realized then my mistake. I’d naively assumed that because I cared about them, they cared about me. But they hadn’t cared. I was just a pawn in their game, their turf war with the wolves. Not only did they not care about me, they didn’t even know who I was. They thought I was someone else, a shifter, the granddaughter of a mouse.

  I could no more bring about a marriage alliance between their warring tribes than a regular human could. With horror, I realized this must be how humans felt. This was how Granny Golden must have felt when they took her away. I felt so small, so helpless. It had been one thing to feel that way in Nelson’s strong hands the night before, when he was intent on pleasing me, and another thing entirely to be so pathetically devoid of defenses.

  I focused instead on something I could control—my hands. Working my raw wrists against the vines, I began to loosen them while Efrain was busy with the alpha wolf. The world around me seemed to slow, expand, and then shrink. And then it snapped.

  My wrist came free.

  Without bothering to free my other hand, I ripped away the stone. The moment it was off my body, I erected a shield around myself. Robin plunged through and dove into my hair, rubbing his feathery body against my head, and relief washed over me. I was safe. I had my magic and my familiar, the only thing that could come through a shield.

  Around me, shifters were emerging from the woods. I’d guessed right, but too late. This was just another battle in their ongoing war. Wolves and shifters lunged at each other, intent on killing, just as they’d told me that afternoon. A boar ran past me, and a cry caught in my throat. I shut my mouth tight before it could escape. It was none of my business what happened to them. They had used me, and when their plan failed, they had no more use for me. And I had no use for them.

  I sat in my shield, watching the chaos as if it were a movie. I watched a bear rip a wolf’s head from its body. Another boar—Oral—ran to me, but I wouldn’t let him in. My shield was an impenetrable fortress, just like my heart. I would never let them in again. They could go be eaten by wolves for all I cared. I wanted nothing to do with them.

  I met Oral’s sad little pig eyes, and I didn’t feel a thing. Not even when I saw the pleading in them. He pushed at my shield, and I pushed him back with the shimmering wall of magic. “Go away,” I said. “You chose your side, and I’m not on it. Witches are Switzerland in this war, Oral.”

  He pawed at the ground and tried to puncture my magic with his tusk. But my magic was smarter than my heart, and it refused to be breached by the kindness in his eyes.

  “Good luck,” I called as he turned away. “I hope you don’t die.”

  And then the head, shoulder, and neck of a stag landed beside my shield, smearing down the side of it. I screamed and scrambled back, my concentration broken. For a second, the walls around me shimmered. That wasn’t just a deer. It was a person. A human being. A man who might be loved or feared, who had experienced his own anxieties and adventures, bravery and betrayal.

  I choked back a gasp, my last words to Oral scrolling through my mind like a prophecy. I didn’t want him to die.

  But I couldn’t let myself care. I couldn’t. He and his brothers were pigs who cared only about themselves. He hadn’t stopped Efrain. When I’d needed him and Nelson, he’d turned his back on me. I was just giving them a taste of their own medicine.

  I turned my focus back to my real task. I had to find Granny. If she’d had magic, my own magic could have called out to hers. I didn’t know if she’d ever been here, though. If she had been, she was gone now. She was still missing, still out there waiting for someone to find her. For the first time since Efrain had told me she was gone, I realized how big this was.

  Once this battle was over and the blood had been shed, someone would notice what I was—that I wasn’t a shifter at all. That I had magic that they could use and exploit in their battles, just like my mother had warned. Whichever side won, they would want me to join them. And if I wouldn’t join by choice, they might do what Efrain had done and make me join by force.

  Never gonna happen.

  I raised my head, gathering my magic, and looked at the big red moon. Wolves were howling in the woods. Animals were whimpering around me. I was in a world so far from mine I could not comprehend the brutality. Not wanting to see more, I closed my eyes. Lifting my hands, I shot a blast of magic like a beacon into the sky.

  17


  Within minutes, my mother and several of my fathers were standing outside my shield. Fox knelt at the edge and held out a hand to me. “Cayenne,” he said firmly. “Let us come in.”

  “Dad,” I whispered, choking on my relief when I saw the concern in his soft brown eyes.

  “Drop the shield,” he said.

  “We’re trespassing,” Mom said. “We should hurry back.”

  Back to the First Valley. The thought had never seemed to sweet. My shield fell away like a wall of water crashing to the ground, and I dove to my feet, burying myself in my mother’s arms. “You were right,” I blubbered. “It’s horrible out here. I’m so, so sorry, Mom.”

  She stroked my hair behind my ear, holding me while I clung to her. Two of my dads joined our circle, their arms wrapping around us protectively.

  “Where did everyone go?” I asked at last, lifting my head. Bodies were spread over the clearing, some of them human and some animal. In the distance, I could hear the wolves howling. I didn’t know if that meant they’d chased the shifters out or the shifters had chased them out. It didn’t really matter.

  “They must have taken the fight elsewhere,” Quill said.

  Fox cracked his knuckles. “It’s been too long since I had a proper fight.”

  “No,” Mom said. “Let’s go home. Cayenne needs to recover.”

  I tried not to look at the corpses, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from searching. At the far side, I spotted a boar, its bristles gleaming faintly in the firelight. I couldn’t tell who it was, but my stomach heaved. I bit back a scream, lurching in that direction.

  “Cayenne,” Quill said, stopping me with his firm tone. “This isn’t our fight. You should never have been here at all.”

  “He’s right,” Mom said, her tone gentler. “You can’t help them now. They’re gone. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “No,” I whispered. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.

  I could have let Oral into my shield. If it was him, I was to blame for his death. And even if it was Efrain or Nelson, I could have protected us all. I could have put them all in my shield if I hadn’t been so stubborn.

  Another howl sounded, this one closer and full of anguish. Wolves had died, too. One lay bleeding not far from me, whimpers escaping its muzzle with every breath.

  “We need to go,” Mom said. “It’s not safe here. There are too many wolves and not enough of us.”

  I knew she was right. I remembered Efrain’s words when he’d lured me out of my grandma’s cottage. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is run. And even though he’d turned out to be a lying bastard, he’d made himself believable by mixing in words of truth.

  It was time to run. Time to get help. Time to stop believing I could defeat anything. In the end, I’d been defeated by something worse than an enemy. I’d been defeated by myself—my pride, my stubbornness, and my stupid, vulnerable, blind heart.

  My parents had to support me, half dragging me away, leaving my heart behind. I’d lost it to three pig-men, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get it back. My legs refused to move, to carry me further and further from my heart with every step.

  “You want to tell us what you were doing here?” Fox asked cautiously when we reached the top of the mountain that formed the border between our valley and that of the wolves.

  “I thought they had Granny Golden,” I said, closing my eyes for a second. The ache behind them had not subsided since leaving the clearing.

  I could have saved him. Maybe I couldn’t have saved Granny, but I could have saved the pigs.

  “Why did you think that?” Mom asked.

  “She wasn’t home,” I said. “And one of the shifters told me the wolves had her.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Quill said, patting my back like I was a little girl again. “Not tonight, anyway.”

  “We have to find her,” I said, pulling away. “She’s in danger. I’m sure of it. It looked like she’d been gone for a while.”

  Quill frowned. “I was going to the cottage this evening to get you both, but one of the other witches said she was going that way and she’d deliver a message.”

  “Who?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

  “Yvonne,” Mom said, her brows furrowing.

  “We’ll look into it,” Quill said. “You just worry about getting some rest and cleansing your magic.”

  “But I have to find her.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t. You need to go home. And that’s an order from your father, young lady.”

  And even though I wanted to find Granny so bad it hurt, to tell her everything and have her weathered old hands stroke back my hair, have her tell me in her faltering way that it would all be okay and that she’d seen worse—even though I would have given anything to find her, for once I was glad to have a small army of parents to order me around.

  18

  Three Days Later

  My concentration, which had already been full of fissures, broke completely when I heard a deep, desperate cry rip from the crowd. My heart was born and died again in that moment, sure that I’d heard the impossible. The ball of magic between me and Malik fizzled and spit as it fell to the ground and spun out its energy.

  “Cayenne, no,” Efrain said, lurching through the front of the crowd and coming to a halt in front of us. My parents, who stood at the front of the coven, shifted and glanced at each other. But one of my dads gripped Mom’s shoulder when she tried to step forward.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed, narrowing my eyes at the man who had tricked me, who had got me all turned around and twisted inside out and then used it to his advantage.

  “I—I know where your grandma is,” he said.

  A donkey-like snort escaped me. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  He seemed to notice our audience and his voice faltered. “At least…I think I figure it out.”

  “Do you really think I’m stupid enough to fall for that again?”

  “You’re not stupid,” he said. “I know where I went wrong. That wasn’t your grandma at all.”

  “You think?” I asked through clenched teeth, fury boiling inside me. My hands clenched, holding back the sparks that threatened to burst into flames in my palms.

  “Who’s this?” Malik asked quietly.

  “This is Efrain,” I said. “The guy who tried to sell me down the river to the wolves.”

  Malik took a step forward, his own hands curling into fists. “So you’re the reason Caye’s been crying for days?”

  I wanted to fire blast him for saying that, but Efrain’s brow furrowed with confusion and…concern. “No,” he said, his eyes searching my face. “Tell me that’s not true.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “I’d never cry over a pig like you. Now why don’t you go find your precious Violet and tattoo her face on your other ass cheek.”

  “I don’t care about Violet,” he said. “I made a mistake, Cayenne. Let me make it up to you.”

  My fury broke through the dam holding it back.

  “Make it up to me?” I screamed, throwing a punch. “You lied to me from the moment we met, tricked me and led me into the middle of a slaughter, and offered me up as a sacrifice.”

  As I screamed the words at him, the pain swelled in me like I was reliving the awful moment, the moment I’d realized that I was nothing to him. My fists pummeled his back and shoulders, but he barely flinched. He covered his head with his hands but didn’t step out of the way or try to stop me. He was a wall of muscle, unyielding under the flurry of blows. Rage washed over me, coloring my world red as blood, black as my magic. I jumped onto his back, raining blows on his head. I wanted to kill him, to destroy him like he’d destroyed me.

  I couldn’t even find joy in my wedding because of him. Because how could I trust anyone when I’d been so wrong about him? Because how could I be happy knowing that three quarters of my heart lived over a mountain, inside a bunch of pigs who had stolen it and gobbled it u
p as easily as apple droppings?

  Before I had spent my fury, I felt myself being lifted, heard the ripping of fabric as Efrain shifted. He charged forward, skirting the crowd. I heard Malik call my name, but I was lost in my own fury. “Put me down,” I yelled, slapping the stallion’s side.

  He only charged forward faster, racing through the woods. I grabbed at a branch, came away with only leaves. I threw them at his head, then ducked, flattening myself when he dove under a branch. He galloped up the mountain, climbing and sliding. I grabbed at another branch, coming away from this one with a scraped palm and a torn, thin branch. Slapping him with the makeshift switch, I bit down on my tongue, tasting the salt of my tears. I didn’t know when I’d started crying.

  It hadn’t dispelled my anger, my hurt. I twisted one hand into Efrain’s mane and swung the flexible branch, burning it into his flanks. “What are you going to do now, tie me up and force me on a man I’ve never met?” I asked, whipping him with the stick again and again. “Oh, wait, you already did that. How about steal me away from my own wedding? Right, you did that, too. You could always pretend to give a shit about me while all along planning to sell me into captivity for a couple acres of hunting grounds. Is there anything you haven’t done?”

  Efrain stopped abruptly at the top of the mountain, and I nearly flew off his back into the clearing around the lighthouse, where we’d first met. My breath caught in my throat for a second, and then I slid off his back, breathing hard.

  “Is this your attempt at reminding me of our sweet first encounter?” I asked, the switch still clutched in my hand. “Because it wasn’t sweet, Efrain. You were a bastard from the moment we met, and you’ll never be anything but a cold-hearted, greedy little pig.” I could feel blood squeezing out of the cuts I’d gotten tearing the switch from the tree, but I only tightened my grip, relishing the sting.