Darkness Bound: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Witch's Rebels Book 2)

by Sarah Piper

  A fool’s hope, perhaps, but one I’d still held close.

  Ronan was still paying my rent, and he’d been checking in on the place regularly during his shifts, making sure it looked lived-in and cared-for so it wouldn’t become a target for vandals. At some point I’d planned to sort through Sophie’s things—to set some of her artwork and clothing aside for Haley, maybe pick out a few things for Jael. Sophie would’ve wanted me to donate the rest of her art supplies to one of the local schools, and her clothes and shoes to the women’s shelter down near the precinct.

  I’d thought about selecting a few of her favorite things to keep with her ashes once we got those from the funeral home—maybe a piece of jewelry, a knickknack or two—at least until I was able to make that trip to Colorado to scatter them.

  I’d even decided to keep her annoying fox clock; I wanted to think about her and smile every time it chimed.

  But the clock had probably melted, and her clothing had probably vaporized, and now I’d never have the chance to do any of those things I’d planned.

  Maybe it was a stupid thing to get upset over when I was sitting here in this beautiful cabin with people who cared about me, fed and clothed and warm, unharmed, a solid roof over our heads, but it broke my heart just the same.

  In so many ways, losing the house felt like losing her all over again. Like I’d disappointed her all over again.

  “How… How did it happen?” I finally asked. “Electrical or something? Old wiring? Gas leak?”

  “This wasn’t an accident, Gray,” Emilio said, taking a seat next to me. “It was arson. Somebody set that fire.”

  Somebody set that fire.

  “Gray?” Ronan sat on my other side, his brow furrowed with concern. “You okay?”

  “She’s in shock,” Emilio said.

  “Just breathe, baby.” Ronan rubbed my back. I was dimly aware of his soft murmurs, of Emilio’s hand on my thigh, of Asher coming out of his bedroom to find out what was going on.

  But all I could smell was smoke. I tasted it on my tongue. Felt the heat of the flames consuming my house. Heard the hiss and pop of the wood as it finally gave in to the destruction.

  My eyes glazed with tears, and I closed them, trying to catch my breath. To swallow through the lump in my throat. To calm myself.

  Asher had told me I needed to stop hiding under a blanket and crying every time things didn’t go my way. I’d taken his comments to heart. I hadn’t cried since that night—not once.

  I didn’t want to cry now, either. Not in front of Asher. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t hold back the dam.

  It poured out of me in a heaving sob, my body shaking with it, my tears falling like a rainstorm.

  Asher took one look at me, then turned around and grabbed his helmet off the island where he’d left it, heading right for the front door.

  “Asher?” Ronan called, but the incubus didn’t stop.

  “I can’t watch this,” he said.

  “Really?” I glared at him, shocked at his cruelty. At his heartlessness. “Sorry if my tears are annoying you, demon. Instead of teaching me how to fight, maybe you should teach me how to turn my heart into a block of ice.”

  The words burned my tongue on the way out, filling me with shame. I hated myself for speaking to him that way, but I was hollowed out inside, broken and defeated, every piece of me in agony.

  Asher glared right back at me. “You think I don’t feel things?”

  “No, I think you’re a master at dealing with your emotions. That’s why you spend your nights drawing ghosts in your sketchbook and pushing everyone who’s still alive away.”

  Asher scoffed and shook his head, his eyes saying what his mouth wouldn’t.

  He couldn’t stand the sight of me.

  Not that I blamed him. Not after what I’d just said. The realization sent forth a fresh tsunami of tears, and I closed my eyes, trying to find the words to apologize. To explain. To take it all back.

  “Asher?”

  Ignoring me, he turned on his heel and marched out the door. Seconds later, the roar of his motorcycle rattled the front windows.

  It felt like my heart was chained to the back of that bike, dragged along behind him for hundreds of miles as he sped away into the night.

  “It’s okay, Gray,” Ronan said softly. “We’ll get through this.”

  Emilio cupped the back of my head and I buried my face in his chest and let the two of them wrap me in an impossibly tight hug, the warmth of their bodies the only thing keeping me from shattering into a million unfixable pieces.

  Twenty-Seven

  GRAY

  I doubted any of us would sleep tonight, but when I finally emerged from Ronan’s bedroom an hour later, all was silent.

  I stared blankly at the cold fireplace, strangely drawn to it.

  Even after learning that a fire had taken the home I’d shared with my best friend, even after it had destroyed my childhood home, even after it had burned my mother’s body and everything I’d ever known, I still wanted to make another one. To stare deep into the flames and feel the heat licking my face, knowing that it hadn’t gotten me. Not yet.

  I knelt down at the hearth, adding a few logs and kindling, coaxing a new fire to life.

  The flames flickered and danced, and my mind went to Jonathan.

  Tonight had been his doing—I felt it, deep in my bones. I was also certain he’d known I was no longer living there. So what could he possibly have hoped to accomplish by burning down an empty house? Was he just trying to unsettle me with a reminder of the fire his family had started in my home a decade ago? Did he think his actions might sufficiently weaken my mental state and make me an easier victim?

  Or was this some clue, some piece of the larger puzzle we’d yet to figure out?

  Keys jangled in the front door lock, startling me from my churning thoughts. I looked up just in time to see Asher walking in, cradling his helmet against his chest as if it were full of water he wouldn’t dare spill.

  Sweat and grime coated him from head to toe, his face smudged with black streaks. His boots thudded heavily as he walked across the wooden floor to join me at the fireplace.

  “Hi,” I said, getting to my feet but unable to meet his eyes. I hated fighting with him. Hated that I was taking everything out on him. Hated that no matter how close we’d gotten, something always came right back between us again.

  “Gray,” he said softly, “I shouldn’t have—”

  “No.” I held up a hand to stop him. “I was out of line. I had no right to bring that up—especially not like—”

  “I hate that she haunts you, too. I know she does. It’s killing me.” His words were a whisper, and I finally met his eyes, my heart squeezing at the pain I found there. I wanted to tell him it was okay, that it wasn’t his fault—the woman’s death or my nightmares—but when I opened my mouth to say it, Asher shook his head, silently begging me once again to let it go.

  Frustration burned in my gut. If we could talk about it together, maybe we could help each other through it.

  But I wouldn’t add to his pain. Not tonight.

  “You went to the house, right?” I asked, but I didn’t need him to confirm. He reeked of fire, and his boots were coated in wet ash.

  “I’m sorry.” Asher cleared his throat. “I tried to salvage…” He trailed off, holding out the helmet for me to look inside, but now I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his eyes, red-rimmed and defeated, so vulnerable it hurt to look at him.

  “I looked and I just… I couldn’t,” he went on. “Everywhere I turned it was just rubble and ash.” His voice broke, and he turned his head and coughed into his shoulder. I moved to touch him, but he shrunk away from me, holding the helmet between us like another barrier, never letting me get too close. Not when it really counted. “Just take it, Gray. Please.”

  Nodding, I finally accepted the offering, peeking inside to see what he’d found.

  Three smooth, palm-sized
stones sat at the bottom of the helmet, their carefully crafted designs and sweet messages no more than a multicolored swirl of paint that bubbled and curled at the edges.

  But they were still hers. Sophie’s. My breath caught, and I reached inside and pulled them out, pressing them to my chest.

  The house Sophie and I had shared for so many years had been destroyed tonight. Before this moment, all I had of my best friend were her book of shadows, her tarot deck, and memories so beautiful they hurt to look at.

  But now I had these, the very last of her creations.

  I looked into Asher’s ocean-blue eyes, tears slipping down my cheeks, my heart cracking wide open, and I nodded. It was all I could manage.

  “I’m so sorry, Gray,” he whispered again, setting down the helmet so he could cup my cheeks. He caught my tears with his thumbs, pressing a gentle kiss to my forehead. “This was all there was. Please don’t cry.”

  The helmet no longer between us, I leaned against his chest.

  “You can never really know love until you know yourself,” he said, running a hand over my hair and down my back. “It was written on one of the stones—I saw it the night you did my cards.”

  I remembered the exact stone, turquoise and white and lavender, the words painted in Sophie’s tiny, perfect letters.

  I couldn’t even speak.

  He pressed his lips to the top of my head, whispering into my hair. “Tell me how to make this better.”

  I shook my head. The tears kept falling, but not for the reasons Asher thought.

  It wasn’t the fire or the loss of Sophie’s things. It wasn’t the way her beautiful art had been reduced to a smudge of paint on the rocks he’d brought back for me.

  It was that he’d brought them back for me at all.

  Twenty-Eight

  GRAY

  The dirt was cool and damp beneath my bare feet as I picked my way through the tangled path. Since my last visit, the flowers had become so overgrown it was nearly impossible not to crush them.

  “Sorry,” I kept saying. But they never said anything in return, and eventually I made it to the meadow and the lake, the water nipping at my bare toes.

  The brambles were gone.

  I hadn’t meant to come to the realm. I’d fallen asleep on the couch next to Asher, and somehow, I ended up here.

  I wasn’t afraid, though. Jonathan’s presence was gone—at least for now. There was just me and a million stars floating in the fathomless lake of my unconscious mind. I tried to count them, but I kept losing my place.

  “How many times have I told you,” a familiar voice said, “you won’t find the best rocks on the shore? You have to wade in there. Work for your art, girl!”

  Sophie…

  My heart swelled, and I turned around to see my dearest friend, her red hair shimmering in the starlight, her smile bright and contagious.

  “Are you going to hug me, bitch, or is this about to get super awkward?”

  I laughed, throwing my arms around her and pulling her close. The scent of her strawberry shampoo washed over me, so real it brought tears to my eyes.

  “I miss you,” I said, squeezing her a little tighter. I knew it wasn’t Sophie—not her form, not her soul—just an image my magic conjured up because I’d fallen asleep thinking about her. About our home. About everything we’d lost.

  But right now, none of that mattered. She was my best friend. Her death didn’t change that. It didn’t end our relationship. A part of her would always live on in my soul, so who was to say this image, this memory, this mirage wasn’t any more real than her physical form had been? Who was to say she wasn’t communicating with me on some level?

  Stranger things had happened in the realm.

  “Can I sit with you?” she asked. “I brought my cards.”

  I beamed. “Of course you did.”

  We found a comfortable spot on the shoreline, close to the water’s edge. The water was warm and dark, rippling gently every time one of us dipped our toes in.

  “So, what’s new?” she asked brightly, and my smile faltered. I didn’t want to tell her about the house. About everything we’d lost tonight.

  But somehow, she already knew.

  “It’s just stuff, Gray.”

  “I know. But it reminded me of you.”

  “As if I’d ever let you forget me.” She rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue, her funny faces slowly coaxing my smile back to life.

  Sophie shuffled the cards—the same deck she’d always used—then laid out five cards in a row between us, face down.

  “Are these cards about me or about you?” I asked, stopping her from flipping the first one. “I’m asking in advance so you don’t make me guess after the fact.”

  “Nice try, Gray.” Sophie grinned. “The cards work in mysterious ways. Who are we to question their methods? When the universe has a message to share, the intended recipient is always revealed at the intended time, no sooner, no later.”

  Now she was starting to sound like Liam. I opened my mouth to tell her as much, but changed my mind. Liam, Death, the unknown quantity… You kind of had to meet him in person to understand.

  I realized, with a shudder, that maybe she already had.

  “Ready?” she asked, and I nodded, half expecting the Death card to appear.

  But the first card she turned over was the Six of Swords reversed. In it, a creature escaped a burning city in a hot air balloon affixed to a boat with six swords. The impression I got from the reversal was one of being trapped.

  “Way to kick things off, universe,” I mumbled.

  Sophie turned the next card. This one was upright—Seven of Swords. With his legs in the air, a harlequin balanced a sword on his feet, another dangling from the end by a frayed rope, perilously close to falling into his open mouth. Five additional swords lay around him.

  “Someone is trying to trick us,” I said. “A cunning, dangerous foe. I don’t know—I just get the feeling that this guy is sitting here doing these death-defying tricks, all the while distracting us from what’s really going on.”

  “That’s my feeling, too,” she said.

  “Coupled with the poor guy trapped in the burning city, I’m already not liking where this is going.”

  “Let’s look at the rest,” she said, and I nodded, gesturing for her to turn them all over at once.

  She flipped the Eight of Swords next, followed by the Nine, then the Ten.

  A shiver rolled across my scalp and down my back. Every instinct inside me was telling me to bolt. Escape. Get out. Run. Leave.

  The Eight had turned up the night I’d seen Reva in the flames, and that night, I’d felt like someone was trying to force her to do his bidding—likely the hunter. Clearly under the influence of some other force, the woman on the card was a breath away from falling out the window to her death, impaling herself on the eight swords below.

  The Nine was the nightmare card, featuring a creature riddled with anxiety sitting upright in bed, gnawing nervously on her own hand as an imp gnawed on her shoulder. Behind her, nine swords hung on the wall.

  The Ten in this deck was particularly creepy, and it always unsettled me a bit when it turned up. But tonight it felt downright terrifying. It had turned up in my reading for Asher the night he’d crashed at my place, and I’d thought it was referring to something in his past that he’d yet to release. Now, it felt like another imprisonment, a man shoved into a tiny wooden box, his body run through with ten swords. He tried to stop them with his hands, to resist the sharp blades, but he couldn’t. The end was inevitable.

  Something was coming to an end, but unlike a peaceful transition or a necessary release to make way for the new, this one was going to hurt.

  Imprisonment. Trickery. Coercion. Nightmares. Painful endings.

  Everything about the reading made me itch to flee.

  “What do I do?” I asked. “What is this about? The witches?”

  “I don’t know, Gray. But judging from your
reaction, I’d say this message was intended for you.”

  I jumped to my feet, no longer able to sit still.

  Run, a voice echoed in my head. A breeze rolled in across the lake, raising goosebumps on my arm. Get out now.

  “But I’m not trapped here!” I said, though I had no idea who I was speaking to.

  The message in the cards put me on edge, but there was no danger in my realm right now. Everything was at peace. I was sure of it.

  “I’d better go,” Sophie said, packing up her cards.

  “But you just got here.”

  Sophie smiled, but she was already fading. Fresh pain blossomed in my chest. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Don’t leave me. Not this time.”

  “You are going to be okay,” she said calmly. It was the same thing Calla had said to me before she’d bound my magic, saying goodbye for the very last time.

  “Don’t,” I tried again, reaching for her hands. “Not yet.”

  “I have to,” she said. “And so do you.”

  “But I want to stay with you.”

  “You can’t,” she said softly. And then she was gone, her final words floating on the lake breeze. “Don’t lose your way, Gray.”

  It felt like I’d been walking for hours, yet I still couldn’t find the path that would lead me out. Somehow, I must’ve ended up on another path, one I didn’t recognize, choked with sharp, treacherous vines that cut my bare feet as I wandered through the dark.

  I hoped they weren’t poisonous,

  Unlike the soft, cool earth I was used to on my usual path, the ground here was rocky and uneven; it was a wonder anything could grow in it at all. Somehow, the trees were even larger here, with huge black trucks wider than cars and branches that blotted out the night sky. The longer I walked, the darker the woods became.

  Mist crept in among the tree trunks, slithering around my ankles. But instead of the cool touch I’d been expecting, this mist burned my skin, seeping into the cuts in my feet and setting my nerves on fire.