by KT Strange
Phoenixburn
#3 in The Rogue Witch: A Reverse Harem Romance
K.T. Strange
Copyright © 2018 by KT Strange
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Stay in touch!
1. Cash
2. Darcy
3. Darcy
4. Finn
5. Darcy
6. Ace
7. Cash
8. Darcy
9. Darcy
10. Cash
11. Darcy
12. Darcy
13. Darcy
14. Cash
15. Darcy
16. Darcy
17. Cash
18. Darcy
19. Darcy
20. Darcy
21. Darcy
22. Cash
23. Darcy
I love you. Live with no regrets.
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About the Author
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One
Cash
November 1944
Hürtgen Forest, Germany
They called it the death factory. They weren’t wrong. The snow was all around us, coming down thick and coating our clothes. The cold wind slipped down the back of my neck, turning the flannel of my shirt stiff and unyielding. Finn was to my left, fifty feet away. The snow was so heavy that I could barely see him through the trees. My breath puffed up in front of me, over and over as my feet set down, one step after the other. The scent of damp wood and the crisp, biting snow was almost overwhelming, but underneath it? We could smell death, the three of us. Even when we couldn’t see the bodies, we knew they were laying out there, under the snow and rolled into the brush. Thankfully we weren’t sweating through the sweltering heat of summer that would bloat up the dead.
How many men had been swallowed up by the forest? Only the paper-pushers back at base knew the exact numbers, and even then they didn’t tell us out of fear they’d murder our morale right alongside the Krauts murdering our squad-mates.
If the cold wasn’t going to get us, the Germans might, although we were the last three standing from our unit four times over and had survived so many skirmishes into the heart of this forest that the guys back at camp called us The Invincibles.
I wish they were right. It’d been four years since we’d been at home, close to our heartstone, with the pack. I could feel it too; each injury took longer to heal, and the cold was starting to bother me. We could still shift, but it left us tired and groggy. At least my hearing was good, my sight even better.
Something up ahead shifted; a vague shadow flitted through the falling snow. My heart pounded in my ears and I threw myself behind a tree, an arm over my eyes.
BOOM!
Dirt, rocks, wood; debris sprayed everywhere as a mortar hit the ground, halfway between me and where Finn had been. The tree I was behind took the worst of it. Off to my right, I heard Elias grunt, and another mortar hit, further away from me. I ducked down, squinting, trying not to cough as the acrid scent of burning wood overwhelmed the area of forest we were moving through.
The forest was silent for a moment, the sound of emptiness so great that it rang in my ear. A soft whistle broke it, Finn’s call, checking in to see if we were all right. I held my breath. Elias whistled back. Relief flashed through me and I peered around the edge of my tree. The mortar had cut a swath through the forest, upending trees and leaving fresh, stark strips of exposed wood where branches had ripped right off the trunks.
I whistled once, knowing the other two would be worried and dying to abandon their positions to check on me. Elias let out a short, low howl and I nodded. Move forward, that was the command. We had a hill base to capture, and in the spirit of the men who’d died minutes before behind us, we’d rout out the Germans no matter what the cost.
It was the three of us now, and we could fall back onto old habits of communication. Even when not shifted, our calls would carry through the woods and unnerve any listening Germans.
Were they bombing wolves, or were they bombing men? They wouldn’t know until Finn’s knife was in their throat, or my gun had put a bullet between their eyes. They definitely wouldn’t see Elias, coming in quick from behind, his foot sweeping their legs out from under them. The twins were more the close-combat type. I was better at bringing up the rear.
The snow fell on top of the destruction the war was pouring down over the woods and on us. I looked up to the sky as the flakes turned gritty and small. The wind was picking up.
I pressed forward, moving from cover to cover. I could shift if I wanted to, but I’d be naked when I shifted back, and I didn’t want to risk running into a German with nothing but my fangs and claws to defend myself. There was only so much a wolf, even ones as powerful as we were, could do when in shifted form.
If the map in my head was right, the base was over four hundred feet in front of us, and another five hundred feet up in the air on the top of a hill. It dropped into a cliff at the front, hence the reason we’d been sent in to capture it. Our superiors thought that this was a job only The Invincibles could pull off, and he was probably right.
I hoped we weren’t going to die trying. It would be a shitty thing to come all the way to Europe, live years through the war, only to die here, in the middle of this god forsaken place. We had more bases to capture, the Germans to push back, and POWs to rescue.
The 500, as we had come to call the base since it was up so high, had been in Ally hands until a few days ago, when it’d been overrun by the Krauts. We knew they had some Brits in there, some Canadians, some French, and definitely some Americans. I wasn’t going to let those guys die in the cold, in squalor and at the hands of the Germans. Neither were Elias and Finn.
The ground started to slope around me, and I looked over to where Finn was walking, hunched over, slowly moving up the side of the dirt mound. All around us the trees were becoming more emaciated and skeletal.
I moved as quietly as I could, straining to hear the noises of the soldiers above. A howl rent the air, the sound of a wolf’s cry that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I turned toward it—Elias’s cry, and then a growl, echoed out through the woods.
There was a flurry of snow beside me, Finn, as he raced toward his twin. Gunfire followed him, shattering the already broken calm of the falling snow. My heart was thumping in between my ears and my instincts demanded that I follow Finn, to find the leader of our little splintered pack, and fight.
But getting us all together? Herding us like sheep? That was what the Krauts wanted. I needed to push onward. Finn would call if he needed help. I had to trust him.
I grunted, diggin
g my feet in, and continued the climb, ducking through the brush and being grateful that the trees continued to cover my advance. With every step, the slope became sharper. The sounds of Finn and Elias’s skirmish echoed back to me, driving me on. They were fighting, and winning, I could tell, as a man’s cry, his voice foreign and rough to my ears, broke into a sob and then silence.
Getting on my hands and knees to keep going as the hill started rising into cliff territory, I climbed and listened.
At last Finn and Elias went quiet, their enemy defeated. The gunfire paused. The Germans had lost my pack-mates in the woods. Good. Let them be afraid of us; the three of us had advanced on them for hours, never having been pushed back or killed yet.
Rock slipped under my fingers, dirt coating my gloves as I dug my toes in and pushed through the lowest branches of the trees. The snow was thin on the ground, barely clinging to the soil where the trees crowded out the sky. I fell into shadow, and looked up.
A grimy, frost-studded wall of rock was ahead of me, not even ten feet.
I’d made it.
The shivering sound of someone’s nervous breathing above me, and the scrape of booted feet over stone, made me hold my breath and pause.
There was a soft metallic click, and again. Then again. A Kraut was playing with the trigger of his gun, probably a Schmeisser if he was like any low-level grunt. I could smell his fear, bitter on the air as the cool breeze wafted down over me.
This was it. The calm of the hunt fell over me, and I tensed, tracking the German with my ears. A few paces to the left, he was alone, unprotected, prey.
With a snarl, I launched into the air, scrabbling up the wall. The stone was cold through my gloves, but in a moment I was up and over the waist-high rail.
The whites of the other man’s eyes flashed, and he flailed, hand swinging around to bring up his gun. I had him. The urge to shift roared up inside me as I tackled him to the ground. I ripped my knife out of my boot and slashed down, across his throat. His death was a near-silent gasp, his fingers clawing at my legs, as the blood sputtered out, across my face.
I grabbed my knife and got to my feet, rolling his body over so he was face down on the ground. He was a lone guard, in a base that should have been swarming with Krauts. I licked my lips, the familiar metallic tang of the kill on them, and I whistled.
Finn’s whistle came immediately back. The twins were fine, better than, and had two kills at their feet. I hunched down and waited for them to join me.
The scrape of their boots and huff of breathing as they climbed up over the rails after me didn’t distract me from scanning the base. It was a small, square building, the ground around it uneven so that one story was exposed on one side, and two stories were exposed on the other. It was made up of old stone, and newer poured concrete, enhancements from the Germans determined to win the war.
The four sides framed an open courtyard in the middle. I could see straight down to the bottom when I looked over the edge of the inner railing. Pockmarks of gunfire peppered the cement, chipping the stone. The windows were blown out of each room down below us, and there were no lights at all. The men we’d been hoping to find, our POWs? Not there. Silence greeted us instead.
“Three,” Elias growled. “Three? Only three of those bastards have been holding this base? They should have had at least four squads, plus our troops in chains. Where the fuck is everyone?”
Finn wandered over to the edge of the inner railing, peering into the courtyard below.
“Not here, is where. Maybe they marched them away? Thought that it made them too big of a target to keep our boys here?” Finn’s shoulders were tense, although his hand rested on where his knife was strapped to his hip. We’d all left our long guns back with the fallen; now that it was the three of us, we’d fight with knives, or pistols if we really had to. We were best at close combat anyway, and no man alive had the strength to stand up to us.
“And leave only three behind?” Elias asked. Finn held up a hand and Eli fell silent.
The snow continued to gather on the ground around us, and I wondered how long it would take for it to cover the corpse of the man I’d killed. I glanced at him.
When I’d been ripping him open I hadn’t even thought about how old he might be, that he might have family back at home, waiting for him. I steeled myself against that thought. We had pack as well, and while packs might fight one another from time to time, no pack had gone about the wholesale extermination of another pack.
Finn made a low noise, and I cocked my head.
Then I heard it.
The thin, silvery, sobbing cry of a child.
Elias inhaled slowly.
I glanced at him.
“Three soldiers, alone, in a heated battle zone, and a child?” he murmured. “Finn!” was the next word hissed out of his mouth, as Finn headed toward the staircase that would take him down a story into the heart of the base’s courtyard.
I glanced at Eli and shook my head before following Finn. Elias growled and tagged after me, muttering under his breath so quietly I could barely make out all curse words he was leveling at his brother.
The base was empty, though. We’d have heard if it wasn’t. Our hearing was as good as any natural wolf’s, good for miles, and even being half-deafened in the battlefield from gunfire hadn’t changed that yet.
The staircase was open to the snow, the steps thick with white, as I followed Finn down them. They opened down onto the middle floor, which was lined with crumbling walls and blown out windows. I swept my gaze from one end of the long, open corridor, across all three other hallways that let the breeze in and the light from above. In the distance, the crackle of gunfire went off.
It wasn’t close though, and it wasn’t closing in on us. It was someone else’s fight.
Finn ducked into one of the rooms off the open corridor, and I followed him, Elias at my back. A swift wind kicked through the long, empty hall in front of us, and at the far end was a pair of double-doors, metal, braced against entry. Light leaked in around them. This would be the back of the base that opened onto the lower side of the hill.
None of us said anything, but we looked around. Elias opened the drawer of an old, weathered desk and pulled out a stack of papers, but nothing more.
The child’s cry came again, a soft, hiccuping sob that echoed up toward us. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. The sound was coming from below the first floor, the one sunk fully into the dirt with no entrance out to open space and air.
Finn motioned with his fingers to us and pointed at the stairs that continued, by the front doors, to down below.
Quietly, fingers on knives and ready for anything, even though our senses told us that there was no one alive here but us, and what was probably a lost, bereft child, we walked down the stairs.
The crying grew louder, echoing down the hall. The ceiling was lower here than up above, and the windows mostly boarded up.
I’d never been so grateful to see in the low light before. On one wall was sketched out a drawing of a flame in chalk, and below that, a pile of wood and tinder lay, ready to be put into a stove or turned into a campfire. The building was cold, though, so I wasn’t even sure of the last time someone had visited the woodpile. It was strange, too, to see wood being kept inside a building and not out in a lean-to.
Silence broke over us for a moment and Finn froze, Elias brushing up against me from behind.
The cry came again, warbling, rising and falling, sobbing breaths of air.
It was the next room over.
Finn crept up to the open doorway, his hand back to us to keep us away, to keep us still. My skin was prickling, the scent of burnt wood, wet snow, gunpowder, blood, and my pack-mates overwhelming me.
He looked around the edge, and inhaled sharply.
Two
Darcy
Present Day
It was a scene right out of my worst nightmares. Maybe if the person being attacked had been one of the guys, I wouldn’
t have been as horrified or scared, but it was Max. Tall, gentle, loving Max. Innocent, broken Max.
The hunter was taller than her, broader in shoulder, his hair slicked back, and a snarl ripping out of his mouth that made acting first and asking second a natural reaction.
The lightning ripped out of me, crackling over my skin, and before I could breathe again, it had struck him once.
My eyes closed instinctually against the brightness, the burning blue criss-crossing my sight and dancing across his clothes.
His snarl turned into a howl, and he stumbled back for half a moment. Max’s cry cut through the rumble of thunder and the snap of lightning. I opened my eyes. The hunter had shaken off the strike, and was lunging back toward her. His fist was stained red, knife gripped tight in his fingers.
My vision tunneled, going cloudy and smoke-black around the edges. I could see the line of blood down Max’s pale skin, the arch of the hunter’s back as another streak of electricity escaped me and hit him square in the spine.
His scream shorted out, cut off as he jerked and his fingers spasmed around the hilt of the knife he was holding. He stumbled back, hitting the other wall of the hallway. He slid down it and I spared him a glance. His eyes were half-closed, his body twitching.
He was out for the count, hopefully. For now at least.
I ran to Max as she sagged to the ground, her trembling fingers rising to her neck. My arms wrapped around her waist and I held her close to me. The metallic, iron-scented air around her made the rage rise up in my throat.