Phoenixheart: A Reverse Harem Romance (The Rogue Witch Book 7)

by KT Strange

  Finn swallowed, and Eli looked like Wolfe was promising him something that he never thought would have come true.

  “That’s too much for us to ask,” Eli said, “the world isn’t the fair. And this is just a trial. It’s Darcy that’s on trial, not the witch’s council.”

  “The last time a star-speaker came to us, we nearly lost the council entirely,” Wolfe said, “so hard were the truths that the stars revealed to us through the speaker, it nearly destroyed us.” He seemed to relish the thought, taking pleasure in it. I swallowed hard.

  Well, it wasn’t like the witch’s council were doing a lot of good. Maybe he was right to fantasize about it all coming to an end.

  “I’m not picking up what you’re putting down,” Finn said, “can you explain, in damn english, what this means?”

  “The pieces of the puzzle have been laid down. Myself, immortal and dead, my magic strong enough to teach Darcy but never enough to create another heartstone, a star-speaker who can bring the council to heel, and a pack of wolves who will stand by the side of their mate while she upends the powers that be and roots out the evil that has taken the council once and for all.” He took a deep breath, eyes fluttering shut. “And a phoenix. I haven’t seen a phoenix in far too long. She is a portent, a good one.”

  “We saw her too, years ago,” Eli said softly, “we saw her. It wasn’t Max as she is now, but it definitely was her.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  Eli didn’t meet my gaze, instead looking directly at Wolfe.

  “We saw her when she was little, in Germany. Diidn’t realize it at the time, but seeing her again, yeah, this isn’t the first time that Phoenixpack has had their phoenix close to them.”

  “She’s followed you through the years, although she wouldn’t know it. All of it, every single piece is falling into place,” Wolfe said. “Victory is within snatching distance, and we shall have it, if we are brave enough to make our stand here.”

  “Are you seriously talking about me taking down the whole witch’s council?” I asked, my voice shaking. He couldn’t be…

  Wolfe glanced at me.

  “You were born for nothing less,” he promised me, “I am sure of it.”

  Four

  Darcy

  “It was always an absolute scandal that great-great-grandfather went off to fight against us,” Luka said the next morning. We were sat in a rather modest serving kitchen, with a table tucked against the far wall. My wolves, and me, were being treated to a breakfast, although my nerves were fizzing so badly I wasn’t sure I could eat. I’d barely slept, in the fine rooms of Luka’s mansion, a place so grand and opulent it made him seem even smaller and out of place. “Your father is angry because one of the other families will take the Llewellyn seat at council now, that there’s no Creston Hailward in existence for you to marry.”

  I stabbed my fork into a plush pile of french toast liberally sprinkled over with powdered sugar and glanced across the table at where my guys sat, like blond bookends. They could bookend you… my mind supplied, ever helpful and focused on the business at hand. My cheeks warmed and Finn caught me looking. He winked slowly, and licked a few crumbles of powdered sugar off his lower lip. It’s like he knew what I was thinking, or something. What was it about near death that made me unendingly horny in the days afterward? Was I going to spend the rest of my life throwing myself out of planes or something equally adrenaline-pumping to get in the mood?

  Eli nudged Finn and shook his head, mouth pressed into a thin line.

  Luka cleared his throat.

  “Am I… interrupting some sort of werewolf mating ritual?” He asked. “My pardon. I don’t know much about wolves, and I was unaware that there was some protocol about eye-fucking over breakfast.”

  I choked on my mouthful of french toast, and Wolfe made a noise of protest as he entered the bedroom.

  “Luka,” he sounded scandalized, “do not speak so plainly about-”

  “About our sex lives?” Finn asked, stretching his arms up and tucking one behind his head, leaning back in his chair. “What’s wrong, bloodsucker? You look pale.”

  I swallowed hard, breathing in a full lungs-worth of air.

  “Oh my god, can you not,” I pleaded. Finn shot me a sneaky grin before looking past me to Wolfe.

  “He’s blushing.”

  “You just said he was pale-”

  “Is it in the nature of werewolves to ply their mate with food before a mating to insure a successful breeding?” Luka asked Eli. Wolfe and I made identical, pained whines. “He’s gotten all fatherly.” Luka waved around a bite of french toast on his fork. “It happens when he decides to adopt someone into his little menagerie.”

  “You know quite a bit about me, whelp,” Wolfe said, pulling out a carton of orange juice from the fridge. He twisted the top off and took a long swig.

  The kitchen went quiet as we watched him, eyes wide.

  “What is it?” He demanded, shoving the orange juice back into the fridge.

  “Uh. So,” Finn said, his words so casual I was almost fooled into thinking he wasn’t as freaked out as the rest of us. “You just eat normal food?”

  “I seduced a serving maid a few minutes ago into giving me a nip of her blood, but I think she’d eaten tuna recently, quite a bit of heavy metal, I needed something for the tang,” Wolfe demurred with a flap of his hand.

  My eyebrows went skyward. Eli put down his fork.

  “Well there’s my appetite gone,” he said with a heavy sigh.

  “About that breeding,” Luka continued.

  “Nope,” I said, putting my fork down too. “I think we’re done with this nice chat. Can we get back to heavenly portents, and why we think that we’re going to take down the witch’s council? I’m still not sold it’s a good idea to even try.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  Truthfully… the thought of bringing down something that had seemed so immutable, so concrete? At first I’d laid in bed, almost shivering over it. Not even when Eli had rolled over, his arm slinging over my waist and pressing me down with the weight of it had calmed me.

  But in the darkness, listening to Finn and Eli’s heavy, sleepy breathing, I realized that they deserved this, more than anything. They’d lost everything because of the witch’s council, a group of humans that had waged war on werewolves for centuries. What if that future that Wolfe had painted for us was within our reach? Didn’t the boys deserve that? I wasn’t very hungry anymore.

  Finn seemed to notice the change in my mood and reached over to take my hand. I met the deep blue of his eyes with my own and took a shaky breath. He smiled.

  “Whatever you want to do, whatever it is you’re thinking about, I’m on board.” His gaze never wavered as he spoke. I swallowed down a lump in my throat and blinked back sudden tears. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. I wasn’t supposed to be sitting in some opulent mansion, eating French toast prepared for us by servants, about to discuss ending the most powerful organization in the magical world that I even knew of. We were supposed to be on the road, the boys playing music, every night filled with their love.

  But I knew deep down, right in my heart, that we had to make this happen. I had to pull the world down around my father’s ears, or we would never be safe. We would never be free.

  “I think we’ve gotta make their world burn,” I said. A grin cracked across Finn’s face. Eli reached for one of my pieces of French toast, forking it onto his plate. “Hey!”

  “You weren’t gonna eat it,” he said. “So I figured why let it go to waste.”

  “Don’t you have anything to say, about…”

  “Not really, I think you know what you’re doing by now, you’ve been alongside us for this ride, you’ve seen exactly everything that your people have done, and if you want to be the one to bring them to justice? I figure they’ve made you suffer just as much as us, in a different way.” Eli sat back in his chair, giving me a long
stare. “Let’s make them pay.”

  Wolfe let out a soft whistle, and I glanced at him.

  “What?”

  “I never thought I’d see a pack of wolves bow to a witch,” he commented, then reached into the fridge again for the carton of juice.

  “Pour yourself a damn glass,” Eli said with a shake of his head. “Goddamn animal, you are. And I’m not bowing. It’s a partnership.” I felt my cheeks heat as his hand found mine, under the table, his fingers looping around my palm, his warm touch rough and calloused. “Maybe you never found the love of your life, and if you did, you’d get it.”

  “Yeah, don’t be a… what’s that word you like, a cunt,” Finn said, a happy grin on his face, his tone more teasing than Eli’s had been. Luka’s eyes cut back and forth between all of us and then he sighed.

  “If we’re planning on taking down the witch’s council, we’re going to need a little bit more help. I doubt they will, the phrase escapes me… oh yes, I doubt they will go gently into that good night,” Luka mused.

  “Lord they sound alike,” Finn said under his breath, and smirked when Wolfe glared at him.

  “Help, what kind of help?” I asked. It was like herding cats. How we were ever going to stage a magical coup was beyond me. It had to happen. I just needed to think positive thoughts. And not murder my mates. Or Wolfe. Luka wasn’t on my shit list, he reminded me way too much of Frank.

  “Your phoenix, for starters, and the little witch, Daria. An illusionist would be of great help,” Luka said.

  “Sentinel will sign on,” Wolfe said. Luka raised an eyebrow.

  “Your duo of brawling demons?”

  “Those demon douchebros? Eli told me all about them,” Finn growled. “They sound like fucking bad news.”

  “They’re powerful, and demons don’t, as a rule, like witches all that much,” Wolfe pointed out.

  “I wonder why,” Eli said, cutting his french toast into polite, neat, small pieces.

  “Could be the mass attempts at genocide,” Finn offered.

  “Or the fact that witches enjoy enslaving demons to their bidding on the regular,” Luka said so causally that I blinked at him.

  “We what?” I asked. “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

  “You really don’t,” Luka agreed, an amiable smile on his face that made me shiver. How deep did the rabbit hole go? How dark was it, the underbelly of the witch’s council and the entire witch’s community?

  Dark enough that murdering a whole group of people was just fine by them, my brain offered up, then the thought shuddered away as I tried not to think about it too hard.

  “The only reason there’s a witch’s council at all is merely a fabrication. There are hedge witches all over the country, and beyond the borders, that don’t obey the call of any council, or bow to its power. Sowing dissent among the ranking families who aren’t high enough to hold a seat might be one place to start,” Wolfe said, his thinking face on. “Why should they have to obey any master? They’re witches, limitless power, almost unchecked wealth.”

  “There’s a good reason that a star-speaker comes from an un-elevated family, one that’s never sitting at the council,” Luka said, “it gives the lesser ones a reason to think that their family might one day be of note, at least the witches who are obsessed with that sort of thing. The rest of them are just trying to secure good marriages for their daughters and sons, hoping to get more favor and influence.”

  “How very Pride and Prejudice,” Eli drawled.

  “You read Jane Austen?” I asked, surprised.

  “Before you were alive,” he said and then cleared his throat. “They’d send us books, in the army. You’d tear ‘em in two so one guy could start the book and you could finish it, then pass it off to him as he passed off the first half to someone else. It was… a way for us to stay sane, get a bit educated.”

  “War stories are fun,” Wolfe said “but they require more darkness, more campfire, and more hot chocolate.”

  I sighed and rubbed my temples; a headache was building in the back of my head.

  “Okay so we need some additional fire power. And-”

  “And you’ll need to go to some social events. With myself accompanying you of course,” Wolfe said, with a wicked grin. “And one of your good dogs on your arm. Let’s show these witches how human werewolves are, and also remind them that the prodigal daughter has returned, and she is not, in any way, pleased with them.”

  Five

  Darcy

  The rest of the pack was coming to join us. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but Luka’s mansion, far removed from my father’s, and secluded in its own way, gave me a little bit of comfort. Wolfe was with us, and with Wolfe around, what could go wrong?

  Remember when Creston set a whole forest on fire to get to you, just because he could? Wolfe wasn’t there then.

  I swallowed hard.

  But Wolfe hadn’t been expecting the attack. Now, at any time, we knew we were at risk. Guards were up, as it were. Wolfe said he’d be calling in favors. Demonic favors. That gave me mixed feelings too. Did I really want Sentinel or whatever, who’d turned Max into a shadow of her former self, hanging around when Max was going to be here too? There was so much swirling in my mind, that I almost didn’t notice Finn walk into the bedroom.

  “I could hear you thinking from down the hall,” he said, “I was talking to Wolfe. This place is pretty fortified, not just by the walls that surround the ground. The whole place is spelled for protection, magic in every stone. Y’know…” He paused, glancing out the large windows, floor to ceiling, that gave an expansive view of the manicured gardens beyond the house. “If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable surrounded by this much witchcraft and magic.” His voice was soft, hushed, as he stepped close to me. I reached for him and his arms wrapped around me. I felt his steady breathing as he buried his face in the top of my head, his fingers threading through my curls. “I think we can really do this, sweetheart.”

  I melted, resting against him. Finn believed. Even after everything we’d been through, the scars that magic had left on him, he believed, trusted, that we could change things for the better. Maybe one day he wouldn’t have to be afraid of who he was anymore, that just being a wolf would get him killed some night when he wasn’t expecting it.

  “It’s not going to be that damned easy,” Eli’s voice cut through the moment, slashing it down and making both of us jerk apart. When I looked at Finn’s twin, I was shocked to see how angry he looked. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

  “What?” What the hell had changed from breakfast until now? He’d been off talking to Luka for most of the early afternoon. I’d taken a long bath, trying to reconcile all the different things I was feeling. He’d seemed 100% for whatever we were doing earlier…

  “You having a temper tantrum?” Finn asked his brother, reaching for me again and tugging me against him. “Something to share with the class?”

  “That star-speaker is fucking looney toons,” Eli replied. “Had a nice chat with him. He thinks we can level the whole damn witch council compound, blow it up or something, and take out the old bastards inside of it as we do, without, somehow, getting ourselves blown up in the process.”

  “Wolfe mentioned something about that being part of the plan. They’re not going to go down without a fight, at least the most stubborn of them won’t, so…” Finn held me tight. “Kaboom.”

  A sour taste rose in the back of my mouth.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that-”

  “Well I’m sure,” Eli cut me off. “We go back to the pack, now. We’ve been fine so far-”

  I growled and he glanced at me, guilt on his features for a moment before the stubbornness descended.

  “We’ve been fine? Seriously? Is nearly dying, so many times that I’ve run out of fingers to count them on, your definition of fine? Because, shit, I dunno, for me it’s kind of the opposite.” I cro
ssed my arms over my chest and leveled him with the hardest glare I could muster. “It’s not fine, Eli, it’s the furthest thing from it. This is our first chance, maybe our only chance. I don’t want to be cheeseball and say the stars are aligned but that sure as shit is what it feels like right about now.” I was arguing for something that I didn’t 100% believe in, but something inside me was pushing me along. Was it fate? My bad habit of making shitty decisions? Whatever, I needed to live in the moment. The future was far away and right then and there we had something floating on the tips of our fingers.

  Freedom. We were fighting for our freedom to live how we pleased, to love how we pleased, to never look back behind us for a hunter or some other monster sent by witches to wipe us from the planet’s surface.

  Eli took a breath and I held up my hand.

  “Nope. No. Don’t even try it. You’re scared? You’re worried this isn’t going to work? Me too. I’m losing it right now. But running from our problems isn’t going to work. Creston kept coming, and guess what? Now he’s fucking dead,” I spat the words, it felt like vindication and rage all at once. Creston was dead. That feeling, a sort of unholy power, shivered through my body. I’d killed him. He’d come for me and I’d taken care of business.

  I’d do it again too. To protect the pack, to protect every pack out there that needed protecting. That reminded me, I needed to ask Wolfe about Dragonpack…

  “We need to be together,” Eli said, but his argument was weak and he knew it from the way he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I bit my lip.

  “Well there’s one way that’s going to happen for real, buddy.” I stepped up into his space and poked him, index finger, right to the middle of his chest. He met my gaze, his eyes wavering. The tension was radiating off of him in waves. He wanted to run, take the pack and run. That wasn’t right. Wolves were predators, not prey. The fact that they’d been driven underground, hunted as if they weren’t apex predators, made me ill. No more. Never the fuck again. “If you want this pack together so bad, then why haven’t you made it complete?” That nagging feeling of self-doubt that had been clawing at me for days started to solidify into something else: bravery. He kept passing up on chance after chance to run his teeth down my neck and bite, claiming me once and for all, making the pack whole. Something in me was screaming that it had to happen, that it was important in some way.