The Witch's Consorts: The Complete Series, page 109
Gabriel answered for Rose, with the unassuming confidence that had always marked him as the leader of our group even when we were kids. “Rose’s stepsister told her she’s coming by the house to pick up some old things of hers, but she doesn’t know where they’ve been stashed since she moved out—and neither do we.”
Rose’s mouth tightened. “I’ll have to talk to my father. He has at least one storage unit in Portland, and maybe other places too. It’d be easier just asking than spending weeks on a hunt.”
Easier in terms of time. Maybe not for her emotional state. Rose and her dad had been awfully close… until Rose had discovered he was part of a faction of witching men manipulating their daughters’ and wives’ powers for their own ends. Feeding their magical energy to demons, to be exact.
Maybe it sucked watching the women get to perform all the supernatural voodoo while you could only fuel it, but I didn’t have one iota of sympathy for those bastards, Mr. Hallowell least of all. My only regret was that the demon his people had allowed to escape hadn’t eaten him before Rose had managed to seal it and the rest of its kind away. But no, he’d been safely locked up in the Witching Assembly’s jail while the worst of it went down, and he was still there.
A shiver of inspiration shot through me from beneath the more caustic feelings the thought of him stirred up. Since he was sadly still alive… maybe he could bring himself to be useful. If I could tackle the problem that’d been gnawing at me without ever having to disturb Rose’s hard-won peace, it’d be worth having to interact with that asshole for a few minutes.
“Send the girl to dig through it all herself,” Meredith suggested in her no-nonsense way.
Rose grimaced. “She never liked me much, and she likes the family even less since her mother died. I don’t want her having access to all our things—who knows what else she might take or damage. It’ll be a quick call—not worth a face-to-face visit. I’ll speak to the Assembly to arrange it.”
Since they didn’t exactly let him hang onto his phone in that prison cell where he was rotting.
“Let me handle talking to him,” I said, a little too abruptly.
The other guys blinked at me. Rose looked startled too. I clarified as smoothly as I could, holding Rose’s gaze. “You shouldn’t have to put yourself through a conversation with him over something like this. It’s a simple enough question. When you get the Assembly to approve it, I’ll handle the call and write down the answer if he gives one.”
Jin’s eyebrows had arched beneath the fine fringe of his hair, the black currently streaked with purple. Our resident artist found something to be amused by in just about any situation. “Are you sure you’re the best person for that job?” he asked in a teasing tone.
All right, so I wasn’t exactly known for my even temper. I might have let out that temper in not-entirely-legal ways here and there in the past. But that was in the past. I’d been on my best behavior the past year, for Rose. For the future I didn’t want to ruin.
I glowered at Jin. “I think I can manage to ask a few straightforward questions without blowing up. And it’s not as if I can do much to the guy over the phone anyway.”
“I’m sure Damon is up to it,” Gabriel said. “Give him credit for volunteering.” He smiled at me, but the warm glint in his bright blue eyes rubbed me the wrong way too. It wasn’t as if I needed his approval. We were all supposed to be on equal footing now.
During the past catastrophe, I’d thought I’d come to peace with where we all stood with Rose and how our lives had played out since the childhood days when I could have said without hesitation that these guys were my best friends. But I could only give them the benefit of the doubt if it went both ways. Lately they’d all been getting on my nerves with comments that suggested they still didn’t see me as a real equal after all.
I held back my annoyance—best behavior—and simply tipped my head. “Thank you. You can get the Assembly people to go for it, can’t you, Rose?”
Even though none of her consorts had been part of the witching world, the Assembly had granted us honorary status and officially recognized our consort bonds with her after everything we’d done to help fend off the demons. That supposed respect had better extend at least to making telephone calls.
Rose hesitated just for a second—I wanted to think because of worries about how her dad would behave, not about my self-control—and then a small, soft smile returned to her lips. “All right. He definitely can’t get any personal leverage over you the way he’d probably try to manipulate me. I’ll tell the Assembly you’ll be handling the conversation and give them your number.”
She stepped into the living room to make the call—calm murmurs broken here and there by a slightly sharper tone that told me the Assembly representative was being less than fully cooperative—and returned tearing a page from a notepad she’d pulled from her purse. She held out the paper to me.
“Here are the things Evianna told me she’s looking to collect that I’m not sure where to find. The Assembly officer said you’ll get the call in about an hour.”
As I stuffed the list into my jeans pocket, the twins came in, already grinning in anticipation. Technically identical, the two didn’t share much more than their imposing height and the same tawny hair and gray-green eyes. Kyler the eager brainiac was skinny as a stick, his face clean-shaven and his messy waves nearly reaching the tops of his ears, while stoic Seth packed an enviable amount of muscle onto his frame, his jaw shaded with scruff and his hair cropped short.
They were both equally enthusiastic to see our consort back home, clearly. Ky bounded over to pull Rose into a kiss, and Seth approached behind him, giving her a long hug when his twin released her.
“How’s the new contract going?” Rose asked Kyler, and he started chattering about the job he’d gotten setting up a new network for some company in the same town where Seth was now working on getting some kind of architectural certification at the local college. Seth hefted the suitcase Rose hadn’t had the chance to move from the hall. As the other four guys headed upstairs with her, I trailed behind, my hand passing restlessly over the phone at my hip.
We were all together again, like it’d been when we were kids and Rose had to sneak out to play with us while our parents worked for her dad, except now we didn’t have to hide the love we shared for her. I shouldn’t have had a single thing to complain about. But as I reached the second floor, a prickling sensation flowed through my skin from beneath the studded leather cuff I’d taken to wearing.
I had to stop in my tracks and grit my teeth against the urge to dig my fingers beneath it and scratch at the silvery mark etched into my forearm. Had to clench a fist to keep from jerking that arm through the air with the need to slam it into something—anything.
The rest of them kept talking and laughing away. As far as I could tell, they’d moved on from the chaos of the past year completely—new work, new projects, newfound happiness. I was happy too… some of the time. Other times, at random moments, memories of the demon that had dug its claw into my flesh to leave that mark still flashed through my mind with a lurch of my pulse.
Sometimes I lay in bed with Rose and often one or more of the other guys, and a sense of deep-seated, stomach-twisting dread trickled through me, like the sensation that had come over me when I’d looked at the portal into the creatures’ hellish world.
Why could everyone else get over what we’d been through so much faster? I’d been through plenty of hell before—I should have been strong enough to put this behind me if they could.
I wasn’t strong enough to heal from that basic wound, though. Over the months, the prickling had come more often and more piercingly. The manic impulse to lash out somehow had been heightening too.
And now and then in the last few weeks, when I’d dared to unclasp the cuff to check the mark, the silvery lines had been glowing.
When the wound had first been healing, I’d promised Rose I’d tell her if anything about it seemed off. I’d thought about bringing the recent weirdness up with her… but every time I considered it, an echo rang out in the back of my head of the cry of pain she’d made when she’d broken the spark of her magic.
I wouldn’t be another problem for Rose to solve. She’d given up so much—most of her magical power—to stop the demons before. How could I let myself turn into more of a liability than a lover? The situation might be weird, but it wasn’t serious. I had to do everything possible to figure it out on my own before I laid anything on her.
And her prick of a dad would help me.
The call came at just five minutes shy of an hour. I ducked into the bedroom Rose had given me when I’d moved here from my shitty basement apartment in town, closed the door, and locked it.
“Call for Damon Scarsi from Maxim Hallowell via the Assembly Justice division,” a clipped voice said when I answered.
“This is Damon,” I said. “Put him on.”
There was a pause and a click, and then Mr. Hallowell’s voice, flat and dry and with a tinge of exhaustion I had to admit I liked the sound of. “The Scarsi boy. What do you want?”
After the dismissive, almost disgusted way he’d talked about me the one time we’d been in each other’s company since my childhood, his rancor didn’t surprise me. The asshole could think whatever he wanted of me while he rotted away in that cell. It was his daughter’s opinion that counted.
“I’m calling on Rose’s behalf,” I said with an evenness I felt was impressive. “Your former stepdaughter, Evianna, wants her to turn up some things she left with her mother after she moved out. Rose figures you’d know where they are.”
The older man sighed. “And why should I bother?”
My scar prickled again, and a flare of annoyance shot through me. “I don’t know,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “Maybe because as far as I know no one’s bothered to investigate you for your second wife’s death yet. You’re hoping to get out of that place eventually, aren’t you?”
We didn’t know for certain that he’d been involved in orchestrating Rose’s stepmother’s fatal accident, but Rose was pretty sure. The threat seemed to hit home.
“Well, I wouldn’t want you to have to go through all that hassle,” her dad said, sounding twice as weary now. “What is she looking for?”
I went through the list, and Mr. Hallowell gave curt but seemingly complete answers for me to jot down. I got the impression he’d decided that getting this conversation over with was preferable to stalling any more. The whole exchange took less than five minutes.
After the last item on the list, I paused, debating how to continue.
“Is that all?” Rose’s dad shifted with a rustle on the other end. “If so, I’ll take my—”
“Hold on,” I broke in. “I— There’s something else I need to ask you about.”
“Spit it out then.”
I could only barrel onward now. Might as well get straight to the point. “The demons. You and the rest of your group had ways of controlling them and their power. What did you use on them to keep them in line?”
He was silent for a moment, long enough that my skin started to creep. “Why do you ask that?” he said finally.
“Just in case. For the future. Who knows what could happen thanks to the shit you all stirred up.”
I thought that was a reasonable enough answer, but a thread of humor came into Mr. Hallowell’s tone that suggested he didn’t entirely believe me. “I see. For the future. Well, Mr. Scarsi, the best thing I can tell you is that you don’t have a hope in hell of wielding any influence over those fiends. From what I hear, Rose and a full contingent of Assembly enforcers barely managed to contain one. If you don’t want whatever’s got its talons in you to wrench you apart completely, your only real hope is to figure out what they want and give it to them as swiftly as you’re able to.”
My hackles rose even as a punch of hopelessness hit me in the gut. “You have no idea what you’re talking about or what I’m capable of. There’s got to be more to it than that. Just tell me—”
“If I have no idea, then I certainly can’t help you. Good luck, unsparked boy. You’ll need it. And I look forward to learning how badly you fall.”
With a clack, the line went dead.
Chapter Two
Rose
The tang of the lemon polish I was rubbing on the table made my nose itch. I paused to swipe at my face, and Meredith peeked into the dining room. She crossed her arms over her chest and tsked.
“You pay people to do your cleaning for you—and me to boss them around into doing it. What’s got you so worked up that you’re putting us all out of a job?”
I rolled my eyes at her jokingly chiding tone, but I also straightened up with a sigh. “I just need to do something while I’m waiting for Evianna to get here. And you know she’s going to look down her nose at anything she can.” My family might have been of higher standing in witching society than hers, but from the moment my stepmother had moved in with her two daughters to Evianna’s moving out of our Portland home seven years ago, the older girl—well, woman now—had made it clear she saw her new circumstances as a trial.
Meredith shrugged. “What of it if she sneers? Ignore her and see her on her way. I’d take ten of you over one of her any day.”
The corners of my lips twitched upward. Our housekeeper had been with us long before my father’s remarriage and long after, the closest person I’d had to an actual mother since my birth mother had died when I was too young to remember, and she wasn’t fazed by much. But her comment didn’t totally settle the jittering of my nerves.
“It’s not just that,” I admitted. “The last few months, the feeling has kept creeping up on me that something isn’t quite right, that I’m missing something… Maybe it’s only baseless anxiety getting the better of me. But the past couple weeks I’ve had trouble tuning it out.”
“Wrap yourself up in those saucy books you love,” Meredith suggested with a sly grin.
I did have an extensive collection of romance novels that had long been my favorite escape, but… “Those don’t quite do the trick anymore.” Maybe because I had so much actual romance in my life now. Although even spending time with my consorts hadn’t erased the inexplicable worries.
“Well, if there is anything wrong, you’ve proven you’re more than up to tackling it. I have every faith in you.” Meredith tilted her head at the chime of the doorbell. “That’ll be Miss Priss now.”
I couldn’t restrain a laugh at the nickname as I followed her to the front door.
Evianna stepped inside all haughty airs and cool expression. I hadn’t seen her in ages, not since before her mother had died, and it struck me all over again how much she took after Celestine. The same pale blond hair, the same icy blue eyes… the same hint of disdain in the curve of her mouth when she rested her gaze on me.
“I don’t want to make this a real visit,” she said in a similarly cool tone, as if I had any illusions about us making friendly. “You found everything?”
I motioned to a case I’d packed that was standing by the wall. “All the documents you were looking for and the smaller items like the jewelry are in there. The footstool you mentioned—I wasn’t sure exactly which one it is. We seem to have a bit of a hoard in the attic. You can come up and take a look.”
Evianna let out a faint huff, but she tramped up to the second floor and then the pull-down steps to the attic without any other remarks. I’d dragged the footstools I’d found over to the area around the top of the stairs for easy access. I had no idea where any of them had come from or what significance the ones that were Hallowell-owned had to the family—as far as I was concerned my stepsister was welcome to any of them.
Watching her examine each of them in turn—it appeared she wasn’t completely sure which had once resided in her bedroom either—dredged up slivers of memories in the back of my mind. The glares and furtive kicks at the dining table. Her chuckling when her mother had found something about me to criticize. Her satisfied smirk when we’d been packed into the car to speed off to Portland, back when my father and her mother had forced me to leave behind the guys who’d been my only real friends.
Eleven years I’d gone without them because of Celestine’s strict ideas about witches and unsparked folk mingling. Not that my father’s attitudes had been much better…
I shook myself out of the uncomfortable reverie. Dwelling on the past didn’t help anyone. But the hollow in my stomach remained, images and emotions stirring in the back of my mind. I meandered deeper into the attic as if I could escape them on foot.
My eyes caught on a shadowed structure I hadn’t noticed when I’d been focused on footstools before. In the far corner of the attic, a rectangular wooden frame with carefully spaced slats and railings carved with flowers stood under a layer of dust.
A crib. My crib, I had to assume. I was the only child who’d been born in this house since my father more than fifty years ago.
I squeezed between the boxes, chests, and assorted other abandoned furniture to reach it. It even had the mattress still in it. I ran my finger through the dust, wiping clean the cherry-wood surface. No memories of using it rose up. It’d have been put away before I’d been old enough to remember much. I hadn’t realized it was even still in the house.
“Here. It’s this one,” Evianna announced. When I hustled to rejoin her, she’d nudged a footstool with a purple silk cushion toward the stairs. “I assume you can have someone bring it down?”
Naturally she’d never consider hefting it herself. I debated carrying it just to show her it could be done without paid help but decided that would look too much like a pointed insult. Within a few minutes, I’d gotten one of the staff to deliver it to Evianna’s car outside.
She set the case I’d packed on the front passenger seat and took one last glance at Hallowell Manor. This time, the slant of her mouth looked more unsettled than haughty.
