Realms and Rebels: A Paranormal and Fantasy Reverse Harem Collection

by C. M. Stunich

  “Then you’ll come in after me and save us while she’s distracted.”

  I cocked my head at him, perplexed. “That’s also a terrible plan. That’s worse, which I didn’t think was even possible. It’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s the worst plan you’ve ever heard? How many plans have you heard?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I could hear thousands and it would still be the worst.”

  “Have a little faith in yourself, Fi.” He winked. “I do.”

  “How is that even possible?” I asked. “You don’t know me. You don’t know if you can trust me.”

  “I’ve known you since we were kids,” he said.

  “You left nine years ago. You don’t know who I am now.”

  “Are you really trying to convince me not to trust you?”

  Sometimes, Case left me speechless.

  “No,” I finally blurted out. “But I don’t know how to save you. Or anyone. When it comes to my mother, I barely saved myself—”

  “But you did,” he said. “You’ll improvise. That’s what Hunters do, we improvise.”

  “Don’t Hunters suffer from an awfully high mortality rate?”

  He lifted one of those big shoulders again in a lazy shrug.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “You make up the plan then,” he said. “I won’t know what we’re dealing with until I walk in there. So improvising is all I’ve got.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. I was frustrated because I was scared. Not for me, but for Case and Hayes and Nick. “I need for all of you to be okay.”

  “You’ll see,” he said as casually as if he were promising me I’d enjoy one of his beloved kung fu movies. “This isn’t the first witch-baddie we’ve dealt with. It always works out.”

  48 Highrock was out in the country. It was one of her old labs, one I thought she’d shut down a long time ago, but she must have reopened it to make Power X. What she wasn’t making in her own basement.

  My mom’s usual labs were bustling, efficient, but when we drove past 48 Highrock, there were no cars. Her Lexus would be parked in the barn if she was true to her usual MO.

  “Pull over and get out,” Case told me. “I’ll drive up to the house. You go around the back.”

  “My mom will have magic alarms all over—”

  “You know how to bring them down,” Case said. “Just give me ten minutes first. I’ll distract her.”

  “What if she shoots you the second she sees you?”

  “Girl, I’ve met your mom before. I know she’s a monologuer. I can buy us some time.”

  “You’re taking ridiculous risks.” But I still pulled over. I unbuckled my seatbelt and swung out of the car into a cool, clear night.

  “Nah.” Case put a hand on my hip, looking into my face intently, but he didn’t kiss me. He just tucked a stray strand of hair back behind my ear. “I trust my instincts.”

  Overcome by emotion, I stared back at him. Case started to get into the driver’s side, but then he turned around. He smacked my ass. “Get moving, girl. We’re counting on you.”

  Just like that, the spell was broken.

  “Jackass,” I said, and he grinned just before he swung up into the driver’s side and closed the door behind him. He turned around on the quiet country street and drove back up to the house,. I swore and headed across the dark field.

  The house seemed silent, empty. It always seemed deserted, except for the cars that would park behind the house, slightly sheltered from the road.

  This was the house where I’d had my accident. I wondered sometimes if my mother, for all her faults—like being a cold-blooded murderous sociopath—felt a bit guilty about my face, enough that she finally let me go when I ran away. I’d always thought she would kill me before she let me walk out on her.

  When I felt the first teasing threads of my mother’s magic, drifting in the air, I froze. I listened as the wheels of the truck rolled over what gravel was left in the threadbare driveway. The lights were bright against the wall of the barn, and then Case turned the car off. The driver’s side door slammed.

  Now, while my mom was distracted, I reached out for her magic. I gathered each thread gently, winding them in a spool around my fingers before I tucked them into my pocket. Hopefully she was distracted, and she didn’t notice the faint tug on her mind.

  When the yard was clear, I walked across the dew-soaked grass toward the back door. Low clouds drifted across the sky, blocking out the stars. The night was deep; there were no lights illuminating the yard. The basement windows were all boarded up, but I knew the lights were on down there. the lab was bright and sterile and completely unlike what you would expect from the haunted look of the exterior.

  The siding was peeling, and the storm doors down to the basement looked like they were caging the monster in a horror movie. My mother was a monster, but those rusted metal doors would never hold her back.

  I pressed my hand to the back door and felt for the magic; it stretched like a band across the door, and I peeled it off gently. Normally, if the lab were operating fully, this door would be open so the workers could come out and take breaks. My mom closed this place down after the blast, worried the authorities would be back. I could still remember fading in and out of consciousness in the back of a van. The van had fishtailed, trying to get away before emergency vehicles arrived. As we jounced over the gravel driveway, trash bags of drugs and manufacturing equipment that had been cleared out in a hurry had tumbled over my legs, and I’d glimpsed flames out the back window of the van. The last time I was at this house, I’d been sure I was going to die.

  Now the siding was darkened, as if by soot and ash, but the building still stood.

  My heart hammered in my chest as I turned the knob and eased the door open. Once the door was cracked, I could hear Case’s low rumble of a voice.

  “I came like you asked. What do you want from me?”

  “I have a deal for you,” my mother said.

  Case hesitated. “I’m listening.”

  “Let’s go downstairs and make ourselves comfortable,” she said. “I’d like to talk to your friends too.”

  My mother’s one maternal gift: she could be talking about murdering someone and make it sound like a sleepover, and she could try to make a deal with Hunters about poisoned drugs and make it sound like she was going to order a pizza.

  The two of them moved across the floor. I knew the layout of the house well once upon a time. I could picture where they were from the sound of their feet. Hayes’ boots were heavy on the stairs, and then there was the soft click of my mother’s heels.

  I slipped in the back door, into the old kitchen. The room was dark; the windows were boarded up. I took careful steps, feeling my way across the floor, making sure I didn’t bump into the table that probably still stood in the middle. I found it with my sweeping hand as I shuffled toward the dim outline of the doorway.

  Then the light turned on.

  My mom smiled at me. Case stood beside her, and for a second I thought I’d been betrayed. His wide eyes stared at me, horrified, and he made a desperate sound through his closed lips.

  She’d sealed his mouth.

  I took a step back and my hip bumped into the kitchen table. This was a new spell; she was more powerful than ever.

  My mother was unarmed. With her blonde hair curling around her face and a floral wrap dress clinging to her petite frame, she looked harmless. But her hand was pressed against Case’s abs below his chest which fluttered with his quick breaths, and that was an old spell. I’d seen my mother gut several men who’d made the mistake of crossing her.

  “Hello, honey,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her not to hurt him, but that would make it more tempting for her to disembowel him in front of me.

  Her fingernails were long ovals, perfectly painted a bright shade of pink. Her hands were beginning to wrinkle, giving her age away even though her face was unlined; she l
ooked like she could be my sister. Case’s t-shirt had been yanked up—his mistake was letting her get close enough to touch skin—and her fingernails bit slightly into his leanly ridged abs. A thin red line cut low across his waist, like a wound held closed.

  “I always knew you’d come home again,” she said. “Let’s go into the basement.”

  Case’s plan that I would save them all must have seemed as ridiculous to him now as it seemed to me. Feeling strangely detached, I led my mother down the stairs. She walked with her hand pressed against Case, holding him together.

  When I was eleven, one of her dealers was robbed. He’d tried to run because he couldn’t pay her back for the drugs he’d taken. I remembered my mother smiling at me over his shoulder while she was behind him, her hand pressed to his waist like she was touching Case now. “Don’t look away, baby,” she’d told me. “Don’t grow up weak.”

  Then she’d raised her hand with a dramatic flourish. He collapsed in half, his guts spilling out into a sloppy pool. As he stared up at me from the ground, blood on his mouth and his eyes wide in horror, my mother had reached down to touch the hem of her dress. “Damn it. Splatter.”

  My feet were quiet on the stairs. Hayes and Nick didn’t even look up; they sat against the wall, staring forward with glossy stares. I would know those looks anywhere. Their hands and feet were bound, but that didn’t matter; she had her polished pink nails wrapped around their brains.

  I was the cavalry. I had to figure out how to get us all out of here. And yet, it all felt distant. There was the table in the corner where I was doing quality control on a drug called Wonderlands when the place blew. There was the spot at the base of the stairs where I found myself lying on the floor, my mouth full of iron, before I faded out. For a long time after the accident I had panic attacks, but now, my lungs kept filling and my brain kept working, and that felt like a small miracle.

  I reached the bottom step. Hayes and Nick sat below the storm doors. Behind me, my mother walked with her arm locked around Case, careful and solicitous to avoid spilling his guts.

  I had to protect Case first. I had to heal him or get my mother to, because he could die in a split-second. Then I could work on saving us all.

  Our one small advantage was that my mother was strung thin. The magic she used to bind Hayes and Nick was complicated; it gave me a headache to use magic like that, magic that touched someone else’s mind. That kind of dark magic weighed on you. And a killing magic like the one she was using on Case? Most witches wouldn’t attempt it—of course, most witches were nice people and not malicious murderous thugs in heels like my mama—but even fewer could manage it. Each bit of magic took up space in my mother’s mind. She was strong, but she was at the edge of her limits.

  “Mom.” I had to distract her, but how did I get inside the head of the woman who’d always gotten inside mine?

  My mom smiled. “She speaks. How long has it been, Fiona?”

  Despite everything, I glanced over at Hayes and Nick. They stared forward without seeing me, their eyes blank.

  Then Hayes winked.

  It was a quick flicker of his long, dark lashes. So quick that even as I turned back to face my mother, I wasn’t sure I really saw it.

  Maybe I wasn’t alone after all.

  “It’s been a few months.” Sometimes my mother came into the bar to see me, and every time, it filled me with dread. I was always waiting for her to ask for some terrible favor, and I was always afraid of the cost if I said no.

  “Have you missed me?”

  I turned my back on my mother, even though it made my spine itch, and wandered toward the table under the stairs. That was where I was standing when the explosion cracked my skull and lit my t-shirt on fire. I ran my hand along the surface; it wasn’t a sterile room anymore, and the faintest dust clung to the tips of my fingers. “It’s hard for me to say I missed you when you’re holding my ex-boyfriend’s guts in your hands, Mom.”

  “But have you?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Any girl would miss her mom.”

  Or at least, any girl would miss the woman she wished her mom had been. I traced the table’s edge, closing the distance between us but hopefully making it look unintentional.

  “I’ve missed you too,” my mother said. “I know we haven’t had the easiest mother-daughter relationship, but I always hoped it would end better than this.”

  I turned and smile, taking a step toward her. “You hoped it would end better than a kill-or-be-killed fight in the same drug lab where you almost got me killed years ago?’

  “Stop right there, honey baby.” My mother’s voice was soft.

  I took one more step and then stopped. My mother swiveled to face me, which meant her back was turned to Hayes and Nick. Nick raised a finger, making a small motion from left to right. He remained otherwise motionless, his eyes staring ahead as if he was still hypnotized.

  But the thin red line that curved between Case’s hip bones healed to pink.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this, Mom,” I said. “We could all just walk out of here. Go back to normal.”

  “I wish we could. You came into my house, my lab. You came looking for something, and now you wish you hadn’t found it.”

  “Why are you poisoning the Weres?”

  “They’re overpopulated. It’s no different than hunting deer.”

  The stories I’d heard flashed through my mind. Innocent people, kids even, writhing in pain as they shifted, over and over until their bodies couldn’t hold it together anymore. “Says who?”

  “If the Were population keeps growing, they’re going to be found out. And then what? Once people discover werewolves are real, they’ll keep digging. They’ll find out that witches and vampires are real, that most urban legends are true—”

  I stared at my mother in shock. “That’s not a reason to murder people. Because you think something bad might happen. Even by your standards.”

  My mother made an impatient gesture with her free hand. She still had one hand pressed over Case’s abs. His eyes were wild as they met mine, although I could tell he was trying to stay calm. His breathing slowed to near-normal, a distinct rise and fall in his chest.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” my mother said. “But they’re Hunters. There’s not much hope for them.”

  I visualized the threads of magic that I unwound from around the house, the threads still linked to my mother’s mind. I could feel them trembling against my hip, eager to return to her.

  “Hunters are pretty hopeless as a general rule,” I agreed. “Hopeless to make a life with, I imagine.”

  Her lips curled into a faint, surprised smile. “You thought you were going to make a life with these ridiculous men? These men that think they’re going to save the world from all the things that go bump in the night? You’re one of the things that go bump in the night.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But they think I’m cute anyway.”

  “Only because they see your fake face,” she said. “Do you want them to see your real one, before they die?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s getting old, Mother.”

  She quirked an eyebrow, inviting me to expound. She thought that she had all the time in the world. That she was in control and nothing could go wrong.

  Even though she was awful, part of me felt sorry for her. She was so lost in her own arrogant world that she’d missed out on the real one.

  Alight. I wiggled my fingers down by my side, looping the threads of her magic around them. I felt the heat singe my palm as the spell lit fire, and then I hurled the threads at her.

  My mother jerked her hands up, and even as she pushed back my magic, stopping the threads in mid-air, she glanced to her left at Case. Case, who should be stumbling, his intestines spilling onto the toes of his boots.

  Case cold-cocked her.

  My mother’s face was all horror and surprise as she stumbled back. And despite all the magic, it was the fist in the face that destr
oyed the last of her concentration, that strung out her magic too far. The threads snapped toward her. She screamed as the flaming strands lit her hair and clothes.

  Case’s mouth opened as her magic dissipated. For a second, it looked as if his flesh was tearing open, and then his lips formed clearly again, and I saw the quick flash of his teeth. He ran toward me. “Fi, are you all right?”

  I stared up at his face, glad he was back to talking, glad the wound across his abs was nothing but a pink scar now.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” Nick shoved my mother out of his way—ignoring that she was on fire—and reached out to grab my hand. “Thanks for the save, krasotka. Let’s move; there’s flammable magic in here.”

  Hayes clapped Case on the shoulder. “Glad you made it. I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show.”

  Together, the four of us sprinted up the stairs and burst out of the house. We made it onto the dark lawn before there was a crack and a roar behind us. The roof caved in, eaten by clouds of black, acrid smoke.

  This time, my mother’s magic didn’t douse the flames.

  We left the house to burn.

  10

  Fiona

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” I said when we were all back together in my house. Agnes flopped her head in my lap, her tail in Hayes’ lap as he sat next to me on the couch. Hayes absently scratched Agnes behind the ears. “I’m still confused.”

  “Can’t you be confused until morning?” Nick yawned. “I’m exhausted.”

  “We all are.” Magic was exhausting. I had my mother’s power, but not her practice, and I was wrung out from the efforts of the day.

  “Then drop the mask.” Nick leaned back on the opposite couch, throwing an arm over the seat back. “That must be an exhausting, steady draw.”

  My lips parted in surprise. Well, that was direct. “I’m used to it.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” Case muttered, clearly perturbed by the mask I wore.

  “There’s no point around us anyway.” Hayes brushed my hair back behind my ear. The gesture was tender, but it revealed my bad side—not that they could see it. I smiled at him before I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling it back down to cover part of my jaw and cheek.