by Cate Corvin
Roses and Revenants
The House of Mirrors Book 1
Cate Corvin
ROSES AND REVENANTS
THE HOUSE OF MIRRORS BOOK 1
CATE CORVIN
All Rights Reserved © 2019 Cate Corvin. First Printing: 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Cover Design by Melody Simmons
Author's Note: All characters in this story are 18 years of age and older, and all sexual acts are consensual. This book is a work of fiction and liberties may be taken with people, places, and historical events.
Created with Vellum
To readers: this book was the first one I wrote in 2014 where I had the inkling that reverse harem existed. I’m glad I found you and could continue this story without choosing just one in the end; I’m glad you found me, because it might never have been finished without you to read it.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Past: 7 Years Old
Chapter 7
The Past: 13 Years Old
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Past: 16 Years Old
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Past: 17 Years Old
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
The Past: 17 Years Old
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Also By The Author
1
“You’ve reached Bell, Book, & Candle Paranormal Investigation. This is Morena Bell, what can I exorcise for you today?”
I listened to the hiccupping voice on the end of the line, making small ‘mm-hmm’ noises at appropriate moments. The back of the junker van was cramped, but I made a makeshift table out of a storage box and started taking notes so rapidly, my cursive was a scrawl.
Whatever. I didn’t need every detail to be legible; when you came from a long-ass line of mirrorwalkers, everything you needed to know was already crammed in your head.
I did catch her name. “Cecily Cole,” she said, choking on a sob. “Just hurry, please.”
I assured her we’d be there as soon as possible, then clicked my ancient flip-phone shut. “This one’s gonna be a doozy,” I said cheerfully to the man who was just climbing into the driver’s seat. I climbed into the front passenger seat next to him. “Corporeal revenant, intelligent haunting, the works. Ooh, coffee.”
My human servitor, Eric Shields, glanced at me and frowned. “Put on your seatbelt, Mor. We’ve been ticketed five times for this.”
He looked especially delectable today, his black tee shirt stretched across a broad chest and powerful shoulders, dark jeans fit snugly over narrow hips. A sandy beard, just touched with salt, covered his sharp jaw under a strong nose, high cheekbones and chocolate-brown eyes.
The dark lines of protective occult tattoos swirled from his fingertips, up his arms, and under the tee. I yanked my eyes away before my imagination could carry me away.
“We’re not even driving yet.” I tapped the notebook against my leg and took the Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee from him, taking a long sip. It was hot as hell and as black as my soul, just the way I liked it. “Did you hear? Corporeal. Revenant. It’s about time we had something more entertaining than imps.”
He swigged his own coffee, yanked the door shut, and started the van. “We’re driving now.” I gave him the address to Cecily Cole’s house, blowing on my coffee as he pulled us onto the highway.
“You have no idea how excited I am right now. I was starting to think we’d have to move just to find better business. She was freaking out so it must be pretty bad. Might even be exciting for once.”
Eric’s lips curved down. His sandy-brown hair was pushed back by a restless hand, crow’s feet cutting deep lines in the corners of his eyes. Skin tanned by years in the sun was only just now beginning to show age. Sometimes it was hard to believe he had grown up with my father. “That’s not a good thing, Mor.”
I stared at the open eye tattooed on the back of his left hand in bold black ink, the elemental sigils on his knuckles, several runes encircling his wrist in rough slashes. “Sure it is. We need the money. Besides, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Applies to mirrorwalking and vaginas.”
A moment later, I could’ve sworn I heard something about him putting it to good use, but that was probably just my wishful imagination.
For a human, Eric Shields was steeped in the occult just as much as I was. He had essentially grown up in Bellhallow, our ancient covenstead, right alongside my father. He became the coven servitor when he was only fifteen years old, just after my father had completed his basic examinations.
Servitors existed between worlds: entirely human, yet the cornerstone of a functional coven.
But the job paid well, and still did through the coven’s private network of lawyers and accountants. I refused to partake in my own stipend, preferring to make my own money through Bell, Book, & Candle.
Eric couldn’t send spirits back to the deadside without the bells and whistles like me, but he could see them as well as any witch, and sense when the aura surrounding a place was off.
“The number of intelligent hauntings stirred up lately has been… extremely unusual, to say the least. Especially clustered around you. It’s almost as if the dead are aware of your presence here.”
I shrugged, running a hand over the beads resting on my collarbone. My mother had given me the double-strand of black tourmalines, a protective stone that would let me know if spiritual incursion was happening near me. They were warm now, heated by my own skin, but if a spirit came near me, the beads would ice over.
“I doubt it has anything to do with me specifically, but I’m sure it’s nothing I can’t handle. I’m the best mirrorwalker we know. And we haven’t come across anything too sinister lately.”
Well… except for the spirit of the angry murderer last month, which had kept me waiting on the deadside for nearly four hours before making a dramatic appearance. It had broken my little finger and beaten me thoroughly black and blue before I’d sent it back to dust.
Or the revenant lurking in the basement of a corporate HR office… the woman who had called me had done so on the downlow, paying out of pocket for me to exorcise the thin, pale humanoid that slunk over walls like a spider and stared at the employees that dared breach its domain. Spirits rarely had the energy to take on such a corporeal form on the liveside of the world. I still suspected that someone in HR had been feeding the specter with their own blood. Maybe an angry accountant? An indignant intern? A murderous manager?
Eric stared forward, his lips set. I felt his disapproval like a palpable presence.
“Okay, so things have been slightly more hostile than usual,” I said. “That doesn’t change the fact that I’m a Bell witch. It’ll take a lot more than a simple intelligent spirit to scare me off. Humans are afraid of their own shadows- Cecily is probably just wimpier than most.”
My servitor glanced back at me like he couldn’t resist another look, his eyes roving
over my face.
I settled back in my seat, adjusting the shirt that pushed up my bust to a nearly-explicit limit.
In the last few years, as I’d slowly climbed out of a hole of grief in which I’d eaten hardly anything, I’d drastically filled out when my appetite returned, going from a lanky teenage body to a curvy adult one. I could barely wear a tee shirt without a warning label plastered on the chest. Now, at twenty-two, I was quite comfortable in my skin. Especially since it seemed to make my servitor so uncomfortable.
Eric’s gaze lingered on the cleavage that threatened to spill over before he forced his attention back to the road. His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel, and I fought to hide a grin. Score.
Sometimes I wondered if he saw John Bell when he looked at me. I’d inherited my father’s thick, curly, ink-dark hair and his powerful affinity for mirrorwalking.
My mother, Rosalind, had given me her green eyes and slight build, and it didn’t hurt that she had also been a strong mirrorwalker. It wasn’t a bad combination as far as witch genetics went.
Hopefully dying prematurely wasn’t a predisposition as well.
But the fact that he’d been having a hard time keeping his eyes off the rest of me lately meant he probably didn’t think of my parents at all, which I was perfectly fine with. I’d spent years trying to get his attention. If the tight shirts and jeans were what did it, I’d fill my damn closet with them. It had been Eric’s temporary speechlessness the first time I’d stepped out of my apartment, poured into a shirt with a built-in bustier and leather pants, that had prompted me to ditch my old tees and holey jeans.
Since the makeover, business had picked up as well, mostly from men. Surprise, surprise.
“‘Slightly’ is an understatement,” Eric said. His voice was deep, sexy, the kind of sound that could lull me into doing almost anything. “Even around John and Rosalind, I’ve never seen this level of hostile activity before. Something has the spirits riled up and it’s been building for months now. You can’t ignore the signs, Mor. And with the statute of covenstead abandonment coming up...”
I stared out the window as the edge of the city rushed by, chewing my lower lip as he trailed off. The Bell coven had always been powerful exorcists in high demand. Eric, then as now, had been the mediator between us and the mortals. Now forty-three years old, he had spent most of his lifetime either in training or serving as the Bell coven’s servitor and my father’s anchor.
Now he performed those duties for me, in addition to setting the stage with smoke and mirrors for skeptical humans. The man groaned every time we had to buy a new bulk order of sage. It was a complete waste of Bell, Book, & Candle’s meager income.
He was right. Everything had been building to a head over the last few years, and I had only months to make up my mind; stay or go. Take control of my birthright, Bell coven, or remain in the human world as an outcast.
A little over five years hadn’t been enough time to come to terms with the destruction of my family. My mother and father were gone, and Eric and I were all that was left of what was once a great covenstead. “We’ve still got time. I’m not ready to go back yet.”
“I’m just saying I have a bad feeling about this, Morena,” he said gently. “Intuition, premonition, whatever you want to call it. I can’t lose you, too.”
I looked away, a lump in my throat. “You won’t lose me. Come on, Eric, you’ve got my back everywhere we go.”
He had the natural gift of seeing spirits, and I’d be willing to argue that his ‘premonitions’ were driven by his own intrinsic power; there was a strong possibility there were a few drops of witch blood in his family lines, with his ancestral roots buried so deeply near a covenstead. We’d had a nearly identical conversation before the spirit of the murderer had broken my finger.
He hadn’t been smug about being right, not when the incident had resulted in me getting hurt, but the undertones of protectiveness he usually displayed were becoming overtures more often than not. Too many times, I’d gone home with dreams of those overtures becoming seductions, only to be disappointed. I should have known by now it would never really happen.
I examined Eric’s handsome face as he drove. He was the only person I wanted to see from my former life, the only person I really needed.
But he was scarred by our last hours in Bellhallow, his fear manifesting as endless worry for me… the fear that he would once again fail the witch he served.
“Do you think you could just be a little more cautious for once? Look before you jump in? One of these days, you’re going to come across a spirit too strong to take on alone, and it’s going to do something a lot worse than knock you on your ass before you kick it back through the mirror.”
I could be as cautious as he wanted, but the rent still needed to be paid. I’d be damned before I cut into my coven’s coffers after having turned by back on it for so long. I could survive without it.
And really, when your job involved walking into Death and spitting at the natural order of things, being cautious didn’t pay.
“I’ll be careful. I promise,” I said, but the promise was an empty one. “Every precaution. How bad could it possibly be?”
“This is bad,” I said, staring at the dainty little cottage across the road. “Really, really bad.”
I slid from the van, my combat boots thumping solidly on the pavement, the weight of the silver-and-rowan sickle at my side comfortingly heavy. The black tourmaline beads I wore had iced over as soon as we’d turned onto the next client’s block.
141 Azalea Street.
At first glance, the sunshine-yellow cottage was as cute as a button, surrounded by a white fence and an immaculately pruned garden bursting with lavender and begonias. A windchime tinkled peacefully on the breeze, the colored bits of glass flashing rainbows.
Eric stood next to me, the duffel bag of equipment slung over his shoulder. “There’s no point in setting this up,” he said, his eyes fixed on the kitchen windows. “I’ll just bring the candle.”
“We’ll need salt for a circle,” I said absently, rubbing the goosebumps that had cropped up on my arms. A blue-jay screamed from a tree next door, and a gray cat sat near a fence down the street, watching me serenely.
The yard around 141 Azalea was completely devoid of life. No birds in the trees, no squirrels scampering across the yard… even the light around it seemed gray and dusty compared to its neighbors. Leaves dropped listlessly from the bushes. It was immaculate, charming, but flat, like a scene from a worn magazine.
Psychic tendrils of pure malevolence coiled towards me, brushing against my wards like searching fingers, making the primitive human instincts in the back of my brain scream in fear of the creature in the dark.
My witch instincts pushed forward, raring to fight and destroy the transgressor.
Something in the house was looking back at me, and it wanted me gone.
“Morena,” Eric said softly, reaching for my arm. I wouldn’t be sidetracked or dissuaded. Eric was right: this one might get ugly. Thank Hecate I’d caffeinated first.
“Let’s go,” I muttered, pulling away from him and striding across the street. I didn’t want any distracting bodily contact before facing down the spirit within.
As soon as my foot made contact with 141 Azalea’s front porch, the power of the hatred seething within exploded over me with an almost-physical force. My stomach flip-flopped from the sheer psychic blast of it.
I rapped on the pristine white door several times, swallowing back the nausea.
After several long minutes, it swung open. A mousy woman stared back at me, her wide blue eyes like glassy marbles, hair an unbrushed mess.
“Morena Bell,” I said promptly, holding out my hand. “And my servitor, Eric Shields. Are you Cecily Cole?”
The mousy woman swallowed hard and reached out. Shaking hands with her was like shaking hands with an icy mannequin. I had to resist the urge to wipe my palm on my jeans afterwards.
“She didn’t want me to call you,” Cecily whispered, her eyes somehow growing even rounder, which was disconcerting. “She… she took Dumpling when I did.”
I smiled reassuringly, even as the hair on the back of my neck rose. Invisible eyes roamed over me from inside the house.
“We’re here to make sure she doesn’t bother you anymore,” I said, trying to sound as soothing and confident as possible. “If you let us in, we can get started.”
Cecily cast a frightened glance over her hunched shoulders, as though expecting someone to strike out at her. Finally, she stood back and jerked the door open wider. “Desperate times,” she muttered, her hands trembling.
Entering her home was like stepping into a meat locker. The temperature plummeted almost thirty degrees as soon as I crossed the threshold. The spirit was manifesting its power over every board and nail in the house; a wisp of white breath flew from my mouth. No wonder Cecily was cocooned in an overlarge sweater that looked ridiculous on her tiny frame.
She motioned for us to sit but I remained standing, taking in the lay of the battlefield. It was a small and airy house, the kitchen and living room divided by a single wall, with a short hallway leading back to the bathroom.
An enormous mirror dominated the space over the mantelpiece, and I kept a wary eye on it as I circled. A vase of wilted flowers sat on the coffee table before it. The faintest scent of rotting meat lay under the astringent odor of cleaning products.
“Miss Cole, we felt a presence in your house as soon as we turned onto this street.” I was going to have to be blunt about the situation. “We’re not going to bother with equipment or testing. I’m going straight to the source here.”