by Eva Chase
Consort of Pain
The Witch’s Consorts #3
Eva Chase
Ink Spark Press
Consort of Pain
Book 3 in the Witch’s Consorts series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2018
Copyright © 2018 Eva Chase
Cover design: Cover Reveal Designs
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-10-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-13-0
Created with Vellum
Contents
Free Story!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Next in the Witch’s Consorts series
Claimed by Gods excerpt
About the Author
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Chapter One
Rose
I woke up on a padded bench in a small white room, and my body immediately jerked upright, tensing to defend myself. Then I realized I couldn’t have managed that even if there’d been anyone in the room to defend myself from.
Fat spongy mittens encased my hands, holding my fingers still—so I couldn’t weave any magic with them. A thin but sturdy chain held my shackled wrists a few inches from each other, and my ankles were bound the same way. The chains clinked when I tugged at them, the cool shackles digging into my skin. All the usual movements I might have made to call forth a spell were closed off to me.
This room was a prison cell.
What had happened to the guys? To my consorts? My heart lurched. Fractured memories of my last moments with the five of them swam through my head.
The Witching Assembly’s enforcers had burst in so suddenly, and so many of them—I couldn’t even remember what the woman who’d been leading them had looked like other than an impression of mousy brown hair. I’d whirled around, snapping my arms up in a quick magicking, but she and the other witches with her had already been hurling paralyzing spells at me. At least three of them had crashed into me at the same time, knocking me to the floor.
I could remember her voice, sharp and brisk as she’d informed me of my crime. Rose Hallowell, you are now under arrest by the order of the Assembly for the use of psychoactive magic on parties Conwyn and Hallowell. You will return to the Assembly for justice.
What had the guys been doing while she’d spoken to me? They must have been frozen by magic too. Or… the enforcers might have killed them. That was what at least one sect of the Assembly’s Justice division had done to a witch and her unsparked lover, according to a secret report that Kyler, my computer whiz consort, had uncovered.
Panic washed icy cold through my veins for an instant before another scrap of memory surfaced in my head. Just as my mind had been fading out with a knock-out spell, one of the enforcers had asked, Should we dispose of the others?
And the leader had snapped, Think! Our orders were clear—no irreparable harm to her. We don’t know which of these are her consorts.
I closed my eyes and dragged in a breath, as slowly as my shaky lungs would allow. I shouldn’t need to move to feel the magical bonds between myself and my four consorts. If they were at all nearby…
Relief trickled through me as I touched one and then another of their presences. Kyler’s bright and buoyant spirit was down the hall, maybe a couple rooms from me. Damon, fiercely defiant as ever, was just a little farther. Seth’s unshakeable energy reached me from the floor below us, with the more languid impression of Jin’s right next to him.
And Gabriel? We weren’t magically bonded yet. He’d come back into my life later than the others, and we’d only just confirmed the strength of our feelings for each other. My brow knit as I concentrated on his essence: all that steady confident charm, the glint of his bright blue eyes, the smell of him like forest moss laced with something faintly sweet.
There. I felt him, like a distant shiver, beyond Damon in this row of rooms. Fainter than the others without the consort bond, but present. All five of them, the boys who’d been my dearest friends in childhood, who’d become so much more since I’d returned to my family home a few months ago, were here and still alive. The quiver of life that reached me gave me hope.
No irreparable harm. For whatever reason, the Assembly hadn’t wanted to simply destroy me. Maybe because it would be harder to cover up my death than that of some low-standing witch living away from witching society on an isolated island?
They’d realized I must have taken a consort—or consorts. But they hadn’t known who, at least not then. How much had they already figured out? They’d clearly determined that I’d only formed that bond recently. If my connection to the guys was severed in any way, including death, this early in our consorting, it would wreck me, mentally and magically.
The bigger question was how they’d known about any of that in the first place. What had the lead enforcer said in her accusation? Parties Conwyn and Hallowell.
Hallowell would be my father. They couldn’t know for sure that I’d orchestrated the spell that had made him attack his colleagues with a magic artefact—that spell should have disappeared as its effects wore off—but they must have guessed after getting to Derek. Derek Conwyn, my former fiancé, former consort-to-be. The guy who’d conspired with my stepmother, and through her my father, to trap me in a consorting ceremony that would have put him in control of my magic and made me a virtual slave.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the Assembly’s investigators might track Derek down. The spell I’d put on him to prevent him from sharing what he’d learned about me would still have been active. As soon as they’d detected it, they could have lifted it off him. And then he could have told them straight that he’d seen me casting magic, that I’d told him I’d taken at least two non-witching men as consorts.
Which had brought them straight back to me.
I lowered my head to my covered hands. For just a few hours, I’d thought I’d gotten everything in place. I’d thought the guys and I could live a somewhat normal life, free to be together, even if I had to keep my magic secret from the rest of witching society. Pretending my spark had died with my twenty-fifth birthday, unkindled by any witching man, wouldn’t have mattered to me one bit if we could have had more time like that last afternoon. Our little interlude in the house Seth had fixed up for us to share.
Now I’d be lucky if any of us made it out of this alive. The Assembly, or whatever part of it had been involved in enslaving other young witches like me, might want me living now, but who knew how long that would l
ast? Maybe the investigators just wanted to question me to find out what else I’d done before they snuffed out my spark and my life.
A jitter ran through my body, emanating from the impressions I had of the five guys around me in the building. I straightened up and narrowed all my attention onto that sensation. An uneasy prickling ran down my back.
They were being magically prodded. Kyler and Damon, right now. The investigators would come to talk to the others soon, though. And they obviously didn’t care about any policies around magical coercion when it came to unsparked people.
My fingers twitched inside their imprisoning mitts, but I couldn’t move them enough to cast a spell. I took another deep breath and focused even more intently on those glints of life I held so dear.
There was already a magical connection between four of them and me, and all kinds of emotion if not literal magic between me and the fifth. I shouldn’t need much effort, much motion to send my magic to them as a little shield against the investigators’ influence.
I rolled my shoulders and shifted my head from side to side. The magic condensed around the flare of the brilliantly lit spark in my chest. At my mental push, some of that energy streamed in little threads toward the guys, latching on to them and filling them with a protective glow. It flowed quickly and smoothly to the four who were my consorts, through that tight bond between us. For Gabriel, I tipped my head again, a little extra push, a little extra energy. Maybe not as great an effect, but as much as I could give him.
No one was hurting my guys—not on my watch.
Philomena blinked into being on the bench beside me. Her appearing out of nowhere wasn’t much of a surprise, because she was imaginary. I’d had few enough witching friends that I’d gotten in the habit of picturing the main character from my favorite historical romance as a conversational partner, and after several years she tended to pop up without even asking.
Now she looked as worried as I felt, her usually smooth forehead furrowed and her hands clenched in the folds of her immense skirts. “This is a nasty jar you’ve found yourself in,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it,” I said. Phil knew all the best old-timey slang.
She peered at me, looking sad but fond at the same time. “It’s not really me you need, is it, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have them.” She nodded toward the door. “And you’ve got your imagination. You can bring them to you just as easily as you brought me.”
I could. Maybe the images I created wouldn’t really be my guys, but I knew them well enough to know what they’d say, what they’d do, didn’t I? Maybe having them here even that way would help center me so I could figure out what to do next.
Philomena waved goodbye and winked out of sight. I summoned up my guys in the room around me. They appeared as abruptly as Philomena had, exactly where it made the most sense for them to be. Seth sitting beside me, his strong arm hooked around mine. Jin at my other side, tracing patterns as if with paint on the back of my wrist. Damon stalking back and forth in the middle of the room, his dark blue eyes at full glower. Kyler bending over by the door to study the locking mechanism.
And Gabriel in the midst of them all, standing still and calm, his gaze fixed on me.
“What are we going to do about this mess, Sprout?” he said.
The childhood nickname brought a lump to my throat. Snuff my spark, I wished he and the rest of them really were here, not trapped apart from me in this prison.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to figure out something. I got you all into it, so I have to get you out.”
“We’re standing by you because we wanted to,” Seth reminded me, his arm tightening around mine. “And there’s nowhere we’d rather be.”
“Actually, I can think of a whole lot of other places I’d like to be,” Damon muttered. He swiped a hand through his spiky hair and shot a softer glance my way. “But I don’t blame you for a second, angel. It’s these bastards who’ve been trying to control your life this whole time.”
Jin leaned in to kiss my cheek, his familiar tangy smoky scent drifting over me. “We’ve worked our way out of a lot of jams before this. And whatever happens, it’s been a wild ride. You know I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
Kyler shook his head, sending his tawny curls into disarray. “I can’t hack my way through this—yet. You’d better believe I’m working on it.”
He probably was, as well as he could, in his own cell. “I’m doing my best not to let them hurt you,” I said. “I’ll send all the magic I can. I—”
The voice in my head fell silent at the very real click of the lock disengaging. If I’d thought for even a second that my vision of Kyler had somehow managed to crack its code after all, that idea vanished along with the imagined guys a split-second later as the door swung open.
Three members of the Justice division walked in. The man who came to a stop directly in front of me I guessed was an investigator. The two women who flanked him wore the loose casual clothing of enforcers, designed to allow full freedom of movement if they needed to cast quickly. In other words, the exact opposite of my current bindings.
The woman at the investigator’s left had a blunt bob of mouse-brown hair. She stared at me with a hard glint in her eyes, and I was abruptly sure she was the lead enforcer who’d taken me in. What did she have to look so pissed off about? I’d never done anything to her.
By all that was lit and warm, I’d never done anything to anyone who hadn’t tried to do a hundred times worse to me first.
The jittering I’d sensed through my consort bonds shifted. I kept half my attention on the figures in front of me while adjusting the streams of my magic with an intake of breath. I couldn’t let myself be distracted from the protection I needed to provide.
“Miss Hallowell,” the investigator said. He didn’t invite me to stand up to face him, just kept standing there looking down at me. I had the feeling he liked that position of superiority. “Do you understand why you’re here?”
“I’ve been accused of unlawful magic,” I said. “I wasn’t given many of the details before your people carted me off here.”
His lips curled into a smirk at my tart tone. “You’d already proven yourself quite resourceful and stealthy, Miss Hallowell. We needed to take appropriate precautions. The list of charges is rather extensive. Not just unlawful magic but also unlawful consorting. I’m sure you were not unaware of the expected proceedings when it comes to taking a consort.”
“Self-defense,” I said. “Does that count for anything? I found out my consort-to-be and my parents were planning to pervert the consort bond so that I’d be in pain if I didn’t follow his commands. But I’m going to guess if you got assigned to my case, you already know about that and don’t care.”
His gaze didn’t even flicker. Oh, he knew, all right. He had to be part of the faction within the Assembly that had supported my father’s actions, had apparently arranged for similar consortings for other young witches. The idea of it turned my stomach. Kyler and I had uncovered conversations between my father and a high-ranking Assembly member named Charles Frankford, but there was no telling how many of the people in the governing body over witching kind were part of that plot.
“So much for ‘justice’ then,” I added. “Their unlawful magic doesn’t count? You’re supporting people who ignore their own sanctions. Who approved of witches being enslaved. I hope you’re really proud of yourself.”
I didn’t know if going on the attack was the smartest move ever, but I obviously wasn’t going to overcome these people with physical or magical force in my current condition. How much had the faction’s lower members even thought about the schemes they were helping enact?
“We’re going to focus on you for now,” the investigator said smoothly. Okay, he didn’t care what I thought of him. “To begin with, do you admit to using psychoactive magic on Derek Conwyn and your father?”
; I couldn’t see how admitting to any details directly was going to help me. Did he really think it was going to be that easy? I sat in silence, staring back at him.
He folded his arms over his narrow chest. “Have you magically compelled anyone else, witching or otherwise?”
My lips didn’t budge. His eyes narrowed. Now I was getting a reaction.
“You understand that you can be compelled to give a response to these questions, do you not?” he said.
“Try me,” I said.
He gestured to the mousy-haired enforcer. I braced myself with a twist of my body on the bench. A fresh flare of my magic shot up through my body to shield my mind the same way I was protecting my guys.
The enforcer stepped into a complex form, her arms and hands swiveling so quickly I couldn’t follow the gestures. An instant later, a prickling of magic spread across my forehead. It dispelled against the barrier I’d constructed.
I might not be able to cast anything outside my body, but I could still work the magic inside myself as well as through the connections already in place.
The enforcer frowned and moved to try her coercive spell again. The investigator held up his hand.
“No point in wearing yourself out. We have time. It won’t be long before at least one of them breaks—or her magic depletes itself.” He smiled thinly at me. “Until we see each other again.”
He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, the enforcers right behind him. I sagged against the wall as the door thudded shut. But my gut was tied in knots.