Of Wolves and Witches: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (Arcane Arts Academy Book 1)

by Elena Lawson

  “What do you think they meant?” I asked him, setting down the cold tea-cup on a small pedestal table beside the arm of the loveseat. “And why the hell was Godric Montgomerey here?”

  He blew out a breath and scratched at the short hairs at the back of his neck. The glow of the simpering fire in the hearth to our left cast an orange glow over his cheek. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve never seen him here before, but Sterling being on the council… well it may not be uncommon.” He shrugged.

  I squirmed against the soft cushion beneath me, leaning in to rest my elbows against my knees and rub my eyes. A dull ache had formed behind them, alluding to the migraine to come. I was prone to them when I was younger, but I hadn’t had one in years. They were so strong that not even magic could soothe the pain.

  When I looked up again, Elias was studying me, and he quickly looked away.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked and watched his temple twitch with the flexing of his jaw.

  He steeled himself before he turned back to me. “Do what?” he asked, palms up as though he was genuinely confused. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was wrong about the connection I felt between us. A fiery blush sparked up the back of my neck. I shook it off.

  “Nothing,” I replied, biting the inside of my cheek to check my emotions. “Can you,” I started, pausing, unsure whether to ask even more of him—but I had to know. And connection or not, I somehow knew I could trust the man before me. “I mean, could you possibly find out exactly what happened to my dad? I’ve never known how he died,” I laughed nervously. “I’ve never known anything about him actually… I only just learned my last name yesterday.”

  Elias nodded to himself, considering my request with pursed lips and hands clenched tightly together. He cracked his knuckles. “I can tell how much it’s bothering you… and if it matters that much, then I will do my best to find out,” he said, and I sat up straighter, smiling—some of my vigor renewed. “But,” he added, and I deflated. “I believe we have more pressing matters to attend to—like breaking your witch familiar bond with those two Endurans.”

  Right.

  “Have you found anything?” I asked him, noticing how much more filled the small bistro table was with documents and tomes, and how they’d spread like a disease to cover the top of his nightstand and the kitchen countertop. Some were even piled beside his bed, where I saw Fallon, his familiar napping in the shadows.

  “No,” he breathed. “And honestly, I’m starting to think such a spell doesn’t exist.” My blood curdled in my veins. I had only six more days until I became dog chow, and we had nothing. “The only solution I can think of is to create a new spell.”

  But that was crazy. There was a reason new spells hadn’t been created since the Codex was written hundreds of years before. It was dangerous and yielded unpredictable results. The sigils and incantations created almost always ended catastrophically—or more commonly, did absolutely nothing.

  “That’s insane,” I told him, sitting back and throwing my hands up, exasperated. My head throbbed even more than it had been a moment before.

  “It is.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  The cushions rebounded as he sidled up next to me. I dared a peek at him, gritting my teeth against the urge to reach out and run my fingertips along the stubble on his jaw. Elias pulled my hand away from my face, holding it lightly as though it were made of porcelain. He set it down in my lap and sighed. “It may be the only way.”

  That night I tossed and turned in my sleep. Falling in and out of consciousness. The migraine so painful it felt like my skull would split in two. No longer a dull ache behind my eye sockets, the stabbing, throbbing sensation radiated from my forehead over the precipice of my skull and down the back of my head.

  I cried out, but I couldn’t be certain if I was awake or dreaming. Snippets of hallucinatory visions and nightmares danced against my eyelids, interspersed with periods of deep, fathomless blackness that had me questioning my sanity.

  I thought I heard Bianca murmuring an incantation sometime in the night. And at one point a searing yellow glow assaulted my eyes. I didn’t know if it was real, or if it was a vivid nightmare my mind created from the pain. And later, the high-pitched whine of animal cries outside echoed down my ear canals, making my blood run cold.

  Or maybe that was the fever...

  I shook with an intense chill, unable to get warm no matter how tightly I wrapped the blanket around my frail bones.

  My magic roiled within me, stinging at the inside of my flesh and making me spasm and contract with the effort of holding it in. My bed shook beneath me. The migraine stabbed at my brain with each jolted movement. I cried out and a reverberating groan of thunder shook the window pane in the room.... or maybe it had been a growl...

  My throat was so dry, and my heart skipped several beats before it came back with a fury—pounding forcefully as though my blood had thickened and it needed to work twice as hard to pump it through. My eyes flew open at the strength of it, and in a lucid moment I realized I was floating... and moving…

  I caught a glimpse of wavy brown hair with streaks of gold and bronze and worried deep brown eyes. It was Ms. Granger.

  “Will she be alright?” I heard Bianca’s shrill voice call out to Granger as the professor levitated me quickly down the hallway behind her.

  I moaned, clutching at my head—trying to keep it from bursting. I cried out when a lance of pain shot through it from one end to the other, and the hair-raising crackle and crash of lightning resounded all around me. The electricity in the atmosphere sparked in my veins.

  “The new girl’s finally lost it,” I heard Kendra say—her voice trailing behind me through the hallways along with the snicker of her loyal band of followers. I gritted my teeth, and the lighting came down again, hitting some part of the academy with a boom loud and powerful enough to wake the dead.

  The lights flickered, and the girls in the hallways squealed and screamed.

  “Clear the hallways—get back to bed!” Granger shouted and I heard her heeled shoes walking a little faster.

  “It’s alright,” she said more calmly, and I felt the brush of cool fingertips against my sweat-slicked temple. “It’ll be alright.”

  I sealed my eyes back closed against the onslaught of light flashing through the windows from the storm, and my breath caught at the sound of two wolves howling. The sound haunting and beautiful. The twin howls came together to form a tormented harmony that wrapped itself like a vise around my heart.

  And then my pulse slowed...

  Slowed....

  Then there was only darkness and blissful silence.

  12

  When I awoke Saturday morning, peeling my eyelids back slowly in preparation for the pain, I was pleasantly surprised to find there wasn’t any. I blinked into the bright lights in the wide room. Getting my bearings.

  Bianca was asleep in a chair at the end of the bed where I was laying. I was covered in a thin white sheet and still dressed in my smelly night clothes. A grinding sound pulled my attention and I found Ms. Granger standing at a countertop to my right, grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle.

  From the array of jars and bottles, and the bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, I would have to assume this was the academy’s infirmary.

  And then I remembered.

  The storm and the lightning. The other girls in the dormitory watching as Ms. Granger carried me out through the hallways as I writhed in pain and moaned and shouted. Crap.

  Kendra’s voice came back the clearest... the new girl’s finally lost it...

  She might not have been wrong... for a while, I thought I had.

  “Oh, good,” Granger said, turning at the sound of my whining groan. “You’re awake. How do you feel?”

  “Better,” I replied, pushing the hair away from my face. My hands came away oily. My hair feeling like it’d been drenched it in hot soup and then left to dry. “Ugh,�
�� I groaned again. I needed a shower. Bad.

  Ms. Granger tipped the fine powder from the mortar into a small bowl of steaming water, swirling the contents. The scents of lavender and frankincense wafted over to me, along with something bitter and tangy that made me want to plug my nose.

  “Here,” she said. “Drink this. It will help renew your strength,” she said in a whisper-soft voice, glancing at Bianca where she slept with her head tilted back against the high backed chair, mouth agape, and one eye half-open to expose the whites.

  I took the bowl, clasping it between my palms. The warmth seeped into my skin, and I sighed at the release of tension.

  Now that she’d said it, I found I did feel weakened. My bones felt heavy, and my mind was already tired to the point of wanting a nap even though I’d only just woken up. But it was always like this with my migraines. I thought this shit was over, I thought to myself, putting the bowl to my lips to take a small sip.

  Granger sat on the edge of the narrow bed, leveling a motherly stare at me. “Are these... migraines of yours chronic? Do they happen often?”

  I took another swallow of the warm potion mixture, making a face at the bitter aftertaste. “No,” I began, but then amended. “Well, they aren’t anymore. I used to get them all the time, but they stopped a few years ago.”

  “When you came into your powers?”

  My brows furrowed, and I thought back to the last time I’d had a migraine like that. She was right, it’d been only days before I first came into my powers.

  “Yeah.”

  She offered me a warm smile and told me not to worry, taking the now empty bowl from my hands and rising to place it back on the counter.

  “I’ve got to go check on something,” she said, turning back to me for a moment, before making for the hall, pausing in the doorway to give me a look that managed to be reassuring at the same time as it was puzzled. “Try to rest. The revival potion should take effect

  quickly.”

  I nodded, and she was gone.

  “You look better,” Bianca said and I nearly jumped out of my skin, my hand flying to my chest to contain the wild pitter patter of my pulse. “Whoa, didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, holding her hands up in an I’m-not-gonna-eat-you gesture.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be visiting with your brothers?” I asked her after I’d caught my breath, trying to stretch out a kink in my neck.

  Bianca waved off the question with an eye-roll and a tiny smirk. “They can wait a bit. They’ll understand when I tell them my roomie had a catatonic fit and nearly blew up the academy.”

  “What—”

  “Oh,” she said, her brows rising as she leant in. “And your—um—familiars were outside our

  window last night, howling and whining like mad. It was super annoying.”

  So, I hadn’t been dreaming that. But... “Wait, back up. I didn’t start that storm. People can’t honestly think I caused that.”

  Bianca clucked her tongue and gave a slow, exaggerated shrug. “All I know is that the moment you passed out, the storm stopped. The thunder, the lightning, the rain—all of it. Like it was never even there.”

  It had to be a coincidence. There were only a handful of witches in recorded history who could affect the weather, and those bloodlines were long dead. Even Bianca didn’t look like she fully believed it, and she was the one telling me it’d happened.

  I gulped past a large lump in my throat, ready to refute what she’d said when a figure appeared in the doorway and stole the words from my mouth.

  “So, what’s all this fuss about?” Headmaster Sterling asked in his deep baritone, looking from Bianca to me and back again. His deep gray suit brought out the silver running through the black in his beard and hair, and the fluorescent lights made his dark eyes gleam as they

  pierced through me, impatiently waiting for a response.

  “Just a migraine,” I said simply.

  “Is that all?” he replied with a fabricated smile, his tone far from relieved and more toward condescending.

  “I’m—” I began, but he turned to his niece, who was smiling up at him guiltily, as though she were caught playing with something she shouldn’t have.

  “Bianca,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be on your way? I know your brothers are eager to see you.”

  It was the nicest sounding dismissal I’d ever heard.

  Bianca gave me a sheepish grin before rising from her chair. “Yes, uncle. You’re right. Now that I’ve seen Harper is alright, I’ll go to them. May I portal myself?”

  No, I wanted to say, don’t leave me with him!

  “Mmm,” he said with a nod, and Bianca scurried from the room, calling back to me over her shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Harper.”

  Headmaster Sterling knotted his weathered hands behind his back, and lifted his chin to take a long breath, his gaze never leaving me. I cowered under the pressure of his stare. Why

  wasn’t he saying anything? After another beat of silence, he spoke, his voice booming after the momentary silence. “You gave my students and faculty quite a scare.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I hope these disturbances are not a regular occurrence,” he said, grimacing. “If they are, I may be forced to petition the council to have you placed somewhere they are better equipped to deal with those sorts of ailments.”

  The thought of leaving Elias and Bianca... and even my familiars left a sour taste in my mouth and a pit in my stomach.

  Sterling really was the worst sort of asshole. It was just a migraine. It wasn’t as though I’d done anything on purpose.

  What a dick.

  “No, of course not. I—”

  “Good,” he said, cutting me off gain. “Glad to hear it.”

  Granger returned to the room, scowling at the back of Sterling’s head. I wondered if she’d heard what he said.

  “Ah, Granger,” he said by way of greeting.

  She set a breakfast tray down on my bed and my stomach growled audibly. It was filled with fruits, nuts and buttery toast... and coffee? I hadn’t smelled the beautiful aroma of coffee in

  over a week. My mouth watered at the sight of it. All they had laid out for the students was herbal tea in the mornings. I wondered who’s terrible idea it was to leave coffee out of the morning line-up. We were teenagers, not children.

  I snagged it from the tray, chugging it down with barely a care that it was scalding my tongue. And she’d even put two sugars in! As if she’d known exactly how I liked it.

  “I can take it from here,” she said brazenly to the headmaster with a close-lipped smile. “I’m sure you have more pressing matters to attend to.”

  “Hmmm. That I do.” He cast me one last sidelong glance before leaving without another word.” Is he always like that?” I asked when I was certain he was out of hearing range.

  “What? You mean a total ass?” she asked, one thin brow raised and a smirk playing at the corner of mouth.

  Shocked, and pleasantly surprised someone else agreed with me, I burst out laughing. “Yeah. That.”

  Ms. Granger chuckled, trying to keep her lips tightly closed to reign herself in. “Pretty much all the time, yes.”

  I shook my head, relieved.

  Granger popped a grape from my tray into her mouth, one hand on her hip. “Seriously, though, he’s always had a problem with women in power,” she mused, turning to face me once more. “And you, my dear, are very powerful.”

  She couldn’t possibly think the storm was because of me, too… could she? And then a more dangerous thought crossed my mind—what if it was me?

  “I haven’t seen an equal to your power in all the years I’ve taught here—in all my life, really… except maybe Alistair, but even he couldn’t draw lightning down from the sky.”

  I didn’t want to think about what’d happened the night before anymore. It was scary and embarrassing, and I didn’t want to believe it was true. Sure, being powerful was great and all, who
wouldn’t want to be a strong witch? But being that powerful was dangerous. I could hurt someone—or a lot of someone’s, especially with my inherent clumsiness…

  It was impossible for witches like that to fly under the radar. I didn’t want to be noticed, or fought over, or asked to do things I didn’t want to do. I wanted to be left the hell alone.

  But she reminded me of something. “Hey, did you ask Headmaster Sterling about my dad?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at me quizzically. “I inquired because Alistair—I mean, your father had been quite a wealthy man. I wanted to know if anything remained to be transferred to you.”

  “Oh.” He had been wealthy?

  “And,” she continued, looking away with a slight roll of her eyes. “I had also requested to review any files Sterling might have access to in the academy’s files, or in the Arcane Council’s. I wanted to be able to give you more information about him—about what happened to him,” she said, huffing. “But my request was denied.”

  I sat up a little straighter, unable to stop the shiver from rolling up my back. “Why?”

  She gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Something about confidentiality,” she said. “But, he did agree to look into your father’s holdings. You would need to submit to an origin test, of course, to be able to lay claim to Alistair’s properties and financial holdings.”

  I was dumbfounded. Had she said properties? As in, plural? All this time I could’ve been rich. I imagined a younger version of myself, growing up in a grand mansion, never having to want for anything. I wanted to want it. Who wouldn’t want to be rich and have nice things? But… I didn’t. If I’d grown up like that, who was to say I wouldn’t have turned out like Kendra, or one of her minions?

  I felt guilty just thinking it. Remembering Leo laughing as he pulled me along the ice-rink, telling me to push and glide, not stomp and scream. And Lara, gathering my hair into a smooth braid so it wouldn’t tangle while I slept.