The Witch's Consorts: The Complete Series, page 50
Pleasure and the sizzling energy that must be feeding her spark. As I thrust harder, fingering her at the same time, that energy seeped deeper into my own skin. Or maybe it was seeping out of me?
A clamping sensation formed around my ribs. Not exactly pleasant, but I could take it. I’d promised I’d give her everything. She’d already given everything for me and the other guys back at the prison.
I was the strongest one here. Better me than anyone else.
Rose’s body started to quiver around me again. I flicked my fingers against her clit, soft and then hard and then soft again. She moaned around Damon’s cock. His breaths were coming as harsh as mine now.
I kissed the back of Rose’s shoulder, driving myself as deep inside her as I could, seeking that sensitive spot I knew could set her off. Bliss radiated through my body, melting the edge off the clamping sensation in my chest. Damon groaned and clutched Rose’s hair, and Rose gave a shaky cry. As her sex contracted around me a second time I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I spilled myself inside her with a rush of pleasure and relief. The pressure around my ribs eased off.
Rose tugged Damon all the way down onto the floor and pulled us both up against her, snuggling between us. I hugged her waist, content just for a moment to lie there in the hazy afterglow. Trying not to think about what she might need all this magic for that still lay ahead of us, and how much she might have to expend all over again to protect us if her Assembly caught us now.
A minute later, the van jerked to a stop. “All right, love birds,” Kyler called cheerfully from up front. “Make yourselves presentable. It’s time to ditch this van.”
Chapter Six
Rose
I woke up at a bump of the tires. Thin dawn light and a stretch of pine trees welcomed me from outside the window of the seven-seater SUV we’d commandeered last night. I lifted my head from the cheap jacket I’d bought during the same quick stop, which I’d been using for a pillow. My neck throbbed from the awkward position it’d been bent in. With a flick of my fingers, I sent a soothingly cool waft of magic through the muscles there.
Over the tops of the seats ahead of me, Seth’s tawny hair showed where he sat at the wheel. Jin had taken over navigating beside him while Kyler slept in the middle seat next to Damon. Gabriel had his head leaned against the window across from me in the back seat, but he straightened up when he noticed I was awake.
“Where are we?” I asked. I’d drifted off not that long after we’d found the car and a hasty meal at a fast food drive through, with instructions that the guys had to wake me up right away if they saw any trouble. They hadn’t woken me, which had better mean trouble had stayed away so far.
“Somewhere around the middle of Montana,” Gabriel said. “Ky figured that was the most isolated route.”
“And I was right,” Ky piped up from the seat in front of us, where I guessed he wasn’t sleeping anymore. “We haven’t seen anything but trees in at least an hour.” He paused. “Where do you think we go from here, Rose?”
I didn’t know. That fact made my stomach ball into one giant knot. All I’d been able to think about before was getting us away from that corrupt faction of the Assembly and the enforcers they’d commandeered to their cause. But I’d gotten the guys into this mess, so now I had to find a way through it.
“We can’t go back to the Hallowell estate,” I said. “Obviously. But I guess… Back before this all blew up, I thought maybe we could run away somewhere. Find a place where nobody would know who I was and just live our lives there. We could still do that. We’d have to be more careful, since obviously the Assembly would be keeping an eye out for us now… But there aren’t that many witches in the world they could have on the look-out for us. It wouldn’t be that hard to keep a low profile. If we’re not hurting anyone, eventually they’ll have bigger problems to focus on.”
“Finding a place to just live our lives doesn’t sound so bad,” Gabriel said, setting his hand on my knee with a reassuring squeeze.
Maybe not to him. He’d spent the last few years rambling all over this continent and South America too. He’d lost his dad to a suicide that was partly my dad’s fault, and he’d told me his mom and her new family had turned him away. I wasn’t sure he had anyone, really, except for us.
But the other guys did.
“It’s not really fair to all of you, though,” I said. “None of you would be able to reach out to your parents or your friends or anyone you know back home, because you can be sure the Assembly would be keeping an eye on them now that they know who you are. Even sending any more messages from a new phone would be risky. You shouldn’t have to give up every bit of contact with those people.”
Damon shifted in his seat. “What’s the alternative?” he said. “Let the bastards hunt us down? I’m sure we can find ways to at least let the people we care about know we’re okay. To get a little money to my mom here and there. Your magic was strong enough to beat these assholes before.”
Maybe I could find a way to let them keep some contact with home without putting us in danger. It was hard to think that far ahead. I rubbed my forehead.
“For now, let’s just find a good spot to hide out, and then we can make longer term plans from there,” Jin said, turning to look back at us. He smiled at me. “One thing at a time.”
“Yeah,” I said, but the knot in my stomach didn’t relax.
What could I have done differently in those months since I’d arrived back home and fallen back in love with the guys who’d always been there for me? I couldn’t really say. Pretty much any other option I could think of would have ended up with me enslaved, in agony if I didn’t perform magic to Dad or his chosen consort’s orders, or one or more of us dead. My stepmother was dead, I had to assume because Dad and his associates hadn’t wanted to risk her revealing her part in the plan.
That meant there had to be a significant portion of the witching community who wasn’t part of that conspiracy, didn’t it? If they felt they needed to resort to murder to cover their tracks… they must be covering them from a lot of people.
I just didn’t know who I could trust. I’d used to think I could trust my father. I’d used to think I could trust the entire Assembly. So much for that.
What did I know about the faction that had supported Dad’s plan? It definitely included Charles Frankford, who was high up in the Assembly—head of the Education division. He was the one who’d been casually chatting with Dad about strategies for controlling my magic. There’d been those dozen or so people in the prison building, but I couldn’t be sure even all of them were in on the plot. I didn’t think more than five or six had been involved in the interrogations at any given time.
“When the investigators came to talk to you in your cells,” I said, “was it always the same people? Or did different ones come each time? What did they look like?”
“It was always the same woman with me,” Gabriel said. “And one time a guy came to talk to her, but he never was part of the questioning. The woman was really small—short and thin—and maybe in her thirties? With a ponytail—blond. I think she was in the group that ‘arrested’ us.”
“I only saw one woman, but not that one,” Damon said. “The one who was badgering me had dark brown hair, shoulder-length I guess, and she was pretty tall. She was in that first bunch too.”
Jin nodded. “I saw one woman and one guy. The same woman as Damon, it sounds like.”
“And I saw the one with the ponytail Gabriel mentioned,” Kyler said.
Seth pitched his voice back toward us, his gaze still on the road. “I saw the one with the blond ponytail a couple times, and another one with long black hair once.”
And then there was the mousy-haired woman and her partner who’d stood by for my interrogation. So definitely at least five witches and a few male interrogators as well. I bit my lip. “And what did they ask you about? Did they say anything about what they wanted, what they were trying to do, that sounded useful?”
“Mostly they just asked about whether I was your consort and which of the other guys was too,” Damon muttered. “I told them they were way too obsessed with other people’s sex lives.”
I bit back a laugh. “Yeah.”
“I got the same line of questioning,” Kyler said. “They didn’t really talk about anything else. I don’t think they figured we could tell them anything else useful.”
The other guys were nodding. “It’s because of the bond, right?” Gabriel said, watching me. “They didn’t want to keep us around, but they were worried about how it’d affect you if they got rid of us.”
Ah. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’d figured that out. Maybe the other guys had too.
“Something like that,” I said. “I mean, as well as I can guess. They didn’t tell me what they wanted either. Other than I have to assume they wanted me alive at least for now.” Or we’d all already be dead. “I have no idea what for.”
“After what they’ve already tried to do to you, I think we can assume it’s nothing good,” Jin said.
“There was something else one of them mentioned to me.” Gabriel frowned, his eyes going distant. “Something about a cliff? The way he said it, it sounded significant. Like that’s the name of some special place: The Cliff.”
“The Cliff,” I repeated. “That doesn’t ring any bells. But there’s clearly a lot I didn’t know about certain parts of witching society.”
“That phone I lifted from the woman in the prison died,” Kyler said, holding it up. “I didn’t even think about buying a charger that’d work with it during our rush at that last stop. But as soon as we go through someplace I could buy one, I’ll do some more digging on it and see what I can find. I might even be able to find a backdoor into their network.”
Damon snorted. “If we ever see anything other than trees again.”
“We could pass through a decent-sized town in about an hour,” Jin said, consulting the paper map we’d bought. “If you think—”
His voice cut off with a hitch of breath. Beside me, Gabriel flinched. A wave of magic hummed through the air around us, thin but obviously potent enough to do some damage.
The enforcers. They’d latched onto us somehow, determined our location—or maybe it’d been a general sweep.
My arms had already started moving before I needed to think. I worked my hands through the protective motions I could now draw with full strength, unchained. A deflective hum of my own magical energy coursed through the bonds between me and my consorts and wrapped around Gabriel. The painful probing spell dissipated.
The rumble of the engine had softened. Seth pulled over to the side of the road. “I’m not sure it’s safe to drive if they’re going to hit us like that.”
“I think it’s over now,” I said. “I pushed them back. They—”
It came again, a wave twice as forceful as before. Hard enough that my own ears rang with the impact. My hands whipped out, but Gabriel had already grunted in pain. Jin had stiffened in his seat. Fuck. No. I wasn’t going to let them hurt my guys any more than they already had.
I wove the protective spell thicker, stronger, and cast it out. Jin’s shoulders sagged. Someone in the middle seat exhaled in relief. Gabriel swiped his hand past his temple as if he’d been left with a residual headache, but when I gave him a questioning look he just shook his head.
I kept moving my arms and weaving with my fingers, spinning a few more layers of the spell so it could settle in place over them. My skin prickled with the sense that another rush of magic had flung itself against my shield, but the guys didn’t show any reaction other than a twitch of Gabriel’s jaw, which might have been just about anything.
“You’re all okay now?” I asked.
“If they’re still throwing stuff at us, I don’t feel anything,” Damon said.
“All good here,” Gabriel added.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll just have to keep working that magic as they wear it down—if they keep at us.”
Seth glanced back at me, his expression even more solemn than usual. “What are the chances they won’t?”
“Not very high,” I had to admit. I brought my hands to my face. “I don’t know how they even found us. There isn’t any spell I know that should reach that far and that accurately across that much distance.” Unless they’d done something to me or the guys back in the prison that I hadn’t realized? I had no idea. This illicit faction of the Assembly might have all kinds of magical strategies they kept to themselves for their malicious purposes.
“I vote we don’t hide out anywhere near here, anyway,” Ky said, somehow managing to sound cheerful even now.
I couldn’t stop a halting laugh from slipping out. “No, I guess not.”
“So, what do we do now?” Seth asked.
“Whatever you need us to do, we’re on it,” Damon said. “Just say the word, angel. You know that.”
I did. I pushed my hands back into my hair and then dropped them to my lap. What could they do? I didn’t even know what I could do. But like Jin had said before, we had to start someplace. One step at a time.
“We keep going,” I said. “Change up our route. Zigzag a little, maybe. Damon, any evasive techniques you’ve got, pass them on. And then…” I sucked my lower lip under my teeth. “If they’re going to come at us with magic I’ve never seen, then I guess I’m just going to have to get creative right back at them.”
Chapter Seven
Jin
The town we’d stopped in was large enough to have a big box store on the outskirts where Kyler found his charger and we all got a couple fresh changes of clothes—but small enough that I got a few stares as I ambled through the grocery store. I’d bet they didn’t see a whole lot of Korean guys with blue-streaked hair passing through here. I just smiled and grabbed the best non-perishables I could find to fuel our stomachs on this little road trip.
Maybe I’d open their minds a little. Or maybe they’d just mutter about that weirdo and his strange grocery shopping habits when I was gone. I was fine with it either way. I’d learned to let other people’s opinions roll off my back a long time ago, growing up in our much smaller town back home.
The cashier seemed totally unfazed, even when I dug out a wad of cash to pay for my stack of groceries. The Assembly people had confiscated our wallets, but Rose had done her magic on a bank machine a while back to get us into our accounts—and to increase our daily limits by a substantial amount. We’d taken out all the cash we had on hand, since we didn’t want to leave an electronic trail any farther than that. For all we knew her witchy enemies could shut those accounts down now that they knew we were on the run.
Rose was waiting by the SUV when Seth and I hauled the bags of groceries back there. She took a couple from me to help us arrange them in the trunk. As soon as my hands were free, I had to restrain myself from pulling her to me and getting lost in a kiss, just for a minute or two. We were trying not to draw too much attention.
But it was hard not to want to touch her, to remind myself how real she was, when just yesterday I hadn’t known for sure whether I’d lost her forever. Whether any of us would see each other again, or anyone else, for that matter.
We were all here—here with her—and every now and then when I remembered that little white room and the chains and the pain in my head, that fact felt like a miracle.
I settled for taking her hand. “Where did the other guys get to?”
“Gabriel’s seeing if he can buy some extra gas so we can fill up on the road if we decide we don’t want to risk even going into a station,” she said. “Damon went with him to help carry. And Kyler spotted a pawn shop with some tech stuff in the window—he ducked in to take a quick look. They should be back in ten or so.”
“Do you think the Assembly’s ‘enforcers’ will be following us on the road as well as with their magic?” Seth asked.
“Probably,” Rose said. “It’ll be a lot harder for them to stop us from a distance. But I didn’t get much sense of them through their magical attack, so I don’t think they can be very close yet.”
My gaze settled on a craft shop farther down the main street. My fingers itched with the familiar urge for a paintbrush or a lump of clay. The impulse brought to mind another use I’d made of my art.
“Hey,” I said. “You said you were going to need to get creative to stop these assholes. Could we put together another merging of art and magic? You had me make that necklace to repel your fiancé. Would something like that work to hold off these attacks?”
Rose’s eyes brightened. “It should. And it couldn’t hurt to add a new strategy into the mix.”
“Well, then, I’ll be right back.” I gave her a grin and a salute, and jogged over to the shop.
Ten minutes later I had myself some leather string, acrylic paint and brushes, and several wooden tokens that weren’t exactly ideal pendants, but would have to do. I’d also grabbed a roll of canvas and a pack of small gesso-coated boards in case we could find some use for those too. When I got back to the car this time, the rest of the crew was already waiting.
“I guess you can’t really paint while the car is on the move, right?” Rose said. “Too many vibrations?”
“Not ideal for fine detail work,” I agreed.
“Let’s get some more distance from the last place they were able to hit us and then find somewhere off the beaten track to stop for a little while,” Gabriel said. “I’m sure we could all use some more rest when we can get it. We’ll all think clearer that way too.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I’ll try to figure out where they are when they send more magic after us,” Rose said. “As long as we stay far enough ahead of them, they can’t hurt us that much anyway.” But her face was drawn as she said it. I had the feeling she was more worried than she wanted to let on.
