Torment: Dark Paranormal Romance (Eclipse Warlocks Book 1)

by Ellie Cassidy

  “If she’s been living here with Arran all this time, then she’s probably Claimed him.”

  “Probably,” Gideon said. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “This isn’t the time to discuss Sage.”

  “It never will be,” he had the decency to admit. “You think you’re in love.”

  Jesus. I looked at him.

  “You can try to leave our world behind, Lex, but it won’t leave you behind and I guarantee it won’t ever leave Sage Daniels behind. She’ll be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life and when it catches up to her, you won’t have the power or the magic to protect her.”

  “You think I don’t fucking know that?” I ground out. “I love her. That’s not going to change. But yeah, I don’t expect you to understand.”

  We speared each other with a glare until he gave a dry laugh.

  “There’s no magic wall to protect us from our feelings, Lex. Nothing in this life comes for free. Build your own damn wall if that’s what it takes, and don’t make assumptions mine.”

  He turned and walked a path between the trees.

  I broke into a jog to reach him as he cut through into the clearing, more than happy to move off the subject of Sage. I would have scouted the outside of the residence first, but Gideon sauntered straight up to the front door and rapped his knuckles.

  Fucking arrogance.

  If Arran Macleod was Claimed, he couldn’t be compelled and he was a big guy. At least the moon was nearing its apex. I had a feeling Gideon was going to need the extra charge.

  The door opened inward and Arran’s muscular frame blocked the entrance. He looked past Gideon to me, a familiar face. He didn’t smile or offer any greeting.

  “Step aside and let us in,” Gideon commanded.

  Arran raised a cocky brow and folded his arms. “I’m a wee bit busy today,” he drawled. “What can I do for you lads?”

  I stepped up. “Arran, hey, we’re just looking in on Jessica. I heard she hasn’t been well.”

  “The lass is on the mend but needs rest and quiet.” He sized me up, then switched that look to Gideon and closed the door on us with, “I’ll let her know you called.”

  Gideon sighed and threw me a look. “We’re doing this the hard way.”

  “Try not to kill him,” I said. It sounded glib, but I was serious.

  He fisted his hands and flung his magic at the door. The wood splintered like it had been hit with a wrecking ball, leaving a gaping hole for us to step through—into a large, rustic living area with timbered floors and exposed beams and Arran Macleod reappearing at the two shallow steps on the other side.

  His features darkened as he took in the destruction and uninvited guests. “I dinna want trouble,” he said, his brogue thickening. “Go now an’ nae harm done.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Gideon strolled deeper, closing in on him. “Not until I’ve seen your wife.”

  “You have nae business with the lass.”

  Gideon didn’t waste another moment. He flung a translucent blue rope at the man’s ankles. Arran skipped out of the circling noose before it could tighten…as if he’d seen it coming.

  Fuck. I looked around for a weapon, ignoring the noises as Gideon attacked with blue lightning—kill shots—and Arran smashed through furniture to evade. There was an iron poker near the fireplace. I made a dash and grab and whirled about to find Arran and Gideon staring each other down from opposite ends of the room.

  “What are you?” Gideon demanded, his palms raised to unleash the next assault.

  “What I am isna important,” Arran said. “I know what you are and I have no wish ta end an Eclipse Warlock. I’ll take care of my wife.”

  “You’re protecting her,” Gideon said softly, almost speaking to himself. “You’re not Claimed.” He laughed. “You know your wife is possessed and you’ve been protecting her from me. What are you?”

  The way he said it, Arran Macleod wasn’t Moon or Sun. Gideon could sense Eclipse magic from a mile away.

  I held my ground, watching to see how this would play out, listening hard for another presence in the house. If the demon was here, we’d be under attack from two fronts. Whatever Arran was, he could see Eclipse magic. He was trained to fight around it.

  I drew his attention to me. “You don’t take care of a demon, you vanquish it.”

  He sent me the briefest glance and dismissed me with a flick of his hand that ripped the poker from my grip and flung it across the room. My jaw sagged, but there was no time to process that trick. Gideon hurled a volley of blue bolts that exploded into a flash of blinding white light and dispersed into thin air without getting anywhere near Arran.

  I lunged forward.

  A force of energy hit my chest, compacted my lungs as my legs swept out from under me. I landed on the stonework by the fireplace with a spine-crunching ache that started somewhere near my coccyx.

  When I looked again, Gideon was warding off some kind of attack with rapid blue bursts from his fingertips that sparked white and fizzled. Arran’s magic wasn’t translucent blue. It wasn’t visible. The only visual evidence was when it touched and diffused our magic.

  Arran brandished a gesture like a backhanded slap and Gideon went sailing through the air.

  I scrambled to my feet. “Gideon!”

  He came down against a leather couch with a grunted curse and rolled onto the floor. I rushed toward him, but he was already pulling himself up.

  “That’s enough,” I hissed under my breath.

  He wasn’t listening. He ran up and over the couch and flung two lightning bolts while he was mid-air, one high, one low. Arran ducked and swerved and Gideon kept it up, shooting off pairs of dissymmetric bolts while Arran was on the defense, blocking and evading.

  I looked around for the poker and found a pedestal table instead. Heavy oak. I aimed for his head and threw with every ounce of strength I could muster. It squared him on the side of the head and knocked him off balance.

  Gideon took advantage and hurled two fistfuls of fury targeted at Arran’s chest. The hit was solid. No white spark or fizzle.

  Arran staggered backward and clutched his chest with a meaty hand. Any one of those bolts should have incinerated him. Would have finished me off. Arran had taken punishment but he was still standing.

  Gideon hit him with another bolt of powerful magic and shouted to me, “Get out of here,” as he jumped the two steps and swung out of sight around a corner.

  He was going after the demon. He’d reached the same conclusion I had. Arran was no mere mortal. He wasn’t a warlock. If he wasn’t invincible, he was about as fucking close to it as a snake was to a viper.

  I couldn’t go after Gideon. I’d do more harm than good if the demon got inside my head. But maybe I could buy him some time.

  I saw the poker and went for it in a crouched run. Arran was bent over, a hand plastered to the wall to support himself. I snatched the poker, appreciating the sturdy weight of solid iron as I turned—the invisible uppercut to my jaw knocked my head back.

  I tasted blood.

  Stars swam before my eyes.

  I blinked and saw Arran on the steps. He was going after Gideon. I launched myself at him and stabbed with a double-handed grip. The poker speared through his shirt to embed deep in his back and sent him sprawling forward. I’d pierced a lung. I was fucking sure of it.

  I couldn’t see Gideon, but the sound of doors blasting open and wood cracking came from around the next corner. He was working his way through the house like a damn supernova.

  Pride and conviction swelled my chest. The moon was full. He had magic to spare. The demon didn’t stand a chance. This was our raison d'être—our reason for being.

  I wish I was surprised when Arran crawled to his knees and reached behind for the poker sticking out of his back. I kicked his hand away, kicked the poker so it’d rip and hopefully shred lung tissue.

  He growled in a language I didn’t know, maybe not a
language, maybe just a howl of barbaric pain. My conscience twitched and my fucking stomach churned. Don’t kick an animal while it’s down.

  He flipped slowly from the crawl into a sitting position on the floor. His face was gaunt, his brow coated in sweat, his eyes bloodshot.

  I wasn’t conceited enough to take any credit.

  Gideon had crippled the beast.

  I was just keeping him tethered…and then I wasn’t. He swatted a hand weakly at me and I went flying backward. My hip smashed the corner of a wall and I bowled down the two short steps head first. Pain exploded bone deep, leeching my breath and any sense of time and place.

  I had no idea how long I lay there before I remembered why I had to find the strength to pluck myself off the floor. Standing upright compounded the throb inside my skull. My hip screamed. Wetness dripped into my left eye. I wiped and my fingers came away wet and bloody.

  Breathing hard, I limped up the steps and cursed.

  Arran was gone.

  I stepped over the bloodied poker, wiped my brow so I could see as I limped toward the sound of voices.

  Another corner.

  The passage was circling back around the house.

  On my left were the ragged chasms left in Gideon’s wake. I didn’t bother peering into the rooms.

  On my right, the inner wall wrapped around the epicenter of the house with no apparent entryways. I wondered if it was dead space. I wondered if it was the beast’s lair. I wondered if it was a fucking portal and if Arran Macleod was Lucifer, the king of hell. In my defense, my head felt like it had been stirred and shaken. I wondered if I had a concussion.

  I shook my head clear—and instantly regretted the motion—when I found them, Gideon and Arran in a bedroom that smelled overbearingly of lavender.

  “You don’t keep a demon in shackles,” Gideon was saying.

  I rested against the wall beside the battered hole that had once been a threshold and took note of the empty shackles chained to the poster bed.

  “They were merely a deterrent,” Arran drawled. The back of his shirt was drenched in blood. If not for that, I might have imagined the poker incident. “You were the incentive that kept her chained. Jessica knows she canna cross paths with you and survive.”

  “Apparently she forgot,” Gideon muttered.

  “Jessica is already dead,” I inserted into the conversation. Were we all friends now? Maybe I really did have a concussion. “What’s left of your wife is a shell.”

  Gideon’s gaze shot to me. His eyes burned at he took in the state of me. His jaw feathered, but he refrained from comment.

  Arran turned a cool, disinterested look on me. All things considered, I welcomed the disinterest. “We don’t know that,” he said. “My lass may be in there yet.”

  Gideon raked a hand through his hair and sighed. “It wouldn’t matter. There’s only one way to vanquish a demon and since you seem to know so much about me, you’ll know what that means.”

  Arran looked at him. “There’s another way.”

  “No.” My body groaned as I pushed away from wall. “In the weeks you’ve kept her prisoner here, one girl has been kidnapped, another threatened at knifepoint and a family of four has been slaughtered. There is no other way.”

  Gideon had told me that. You don’t keep a demon in your basement. I hadn’t listened and I wasn’t a hypocrite, I was just wiser now.

  “I wasna aware.” Arran’s brow troubled. “I never let anyone past the front door.”

  “She escaped her shackles once.” I indicated toward the bed, leaving the question there. How many opportunities had she had to receive visitors herself? I’d seen him at the Shack Hut more than once in the past weeks. “You can’t lock yourself in here with her indefinitely.”

  I thought I was getting through to him, but he went back to, “There’s another way. An Eclipse spell to cast the demon into another body before vanquishing it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Gideon said.

  Neither had I.

  “The spell was banned centuries ago but there are some who know of it,” Arran said. “I have people looking and when they find it, I will cast the demon out myself and vanquish it. Let me be verra clear. You will leave my wife ta me.”

  “You have to find her first,” Gideon pointed out.

  Arran pinned us with a grim look. “If any harm befalls the lass, I will have my vengeance. Now get out of my house and dinna bother coming back.”

  It was a viable threat. At least I thought it was. Gideon’s smirk suggested otherwise. But then he wasn’t the one limping his sore body out the fucking door.

  19

  SAGE

  Tragedy destroys, but it is also a great healer of rifts. The ultimate reminder of how precious the people in our lives were.

  That’s what I told myself every time Kenzie opened her mouth.

  “Did you know, Brendon and I did it once in the back of his mom’s car,” she reminisced with a soft chuckle. “How clichéd is that?”

  “Maybe we could keep this PG rated?” Haley suggested.

  Kenzie snorted. “Have you met Brendon? There’d be nothing to talk about if you take sex off the cards.”

  Grant gave no indication he’d heard or cared. We’d been on the trail for half an hour and he’d kept to himself, walking ahead with his own thoughts. I wasn’t sure if she was throwing out these nuggets to raise a reaction from him or if she was genuinely this callous.

  “He was a pretty good fullback,” I said. He was also a jock and not the nicest guy I’d ever met, but respect for the dead and all that. When my time came, I certainly hoped I’d be remembered without a full cast of all my flaws.

  Kenzie opened her mouth again. “Not good enough for a scholarship.”

  “Kenzie.” My tone begged her to just shut the fuck up.

  “What?” Her eyes rounded innocently on me. “Honesty is the best form of flattery.”

  I bit my tongue. Grant was distant, but he was with us, and Kenzie was actually speaking to me and Haley again even if I wished she wasn’t. There was that.

  A jogger came up from behind and we moved off the path to let her pass. She slowed and turned, jogging in place.

  I recognized the woman beneath the baseball cap. “Jessica.”

  She smiled her warm smile across all of us. “Follow me.”

  I ducked beneath a branch to follow her into the trees. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  We hadn’t seen Arran at the Snack Hut. I’d assumed she was still sick.

  “Much better.”

  I paused for Haley to catch up to me. Grant and Kenzie weren’t far behind.

  “If I’d known we’d be trailblazing,” Kenzie declared, “I wouldn’t have worn shorts.”

  “And miss a chance to show off your legs?” Haley muttered under her breath.

  I nudged her sharply.

  She pulled a face at me. “Honesty is the best form of flattery.”

  I glanced over my shoulder and caught Grant’s eye.

  I’m okay, he mouthed. Aloud, he called out, “Where are we going?”

  “Not far now,” Jessica answered.

  We tramped on, deeper into the press of forest. The undergrowth was soft and mushy from last night’s rain, but the shade was welcome.

  Jessica brought us to a random, halt. We were still in the thick of trees, no clearing or fallen log for the usual rest break.

  Grant leant against a furred trunk and shoved his hands into his pockets. My heart tilted when I saw him share a broken smile with Haley. I had so much love for my friends, and we were going to be okay.

  Even Kenzie, despite whatever crazy she had going on right now. She was in the process of planting her butt on an exposed root when the whispered hiss carried like a command brushed with a breeze.

  “Freeze.”

  My limbs locked down. Who had said that? I couldn’t look to see. My eyeballs were glued to Kenzie in her awkward position, her knees bent as she’d been
about to sit, her butt hovering above the gnarled root.

  My blood rushed into the silence that had folded around us, my heart pumping wildly. This wasn’t natural. There’s that moment when someone shouts ‘Freeze’ or ‘Stop’ and everything in you stills but then the moment passes, it doesn’t trap you.

  A twig cracked to my left.

  I couldn’t look to see.

  I couldn’t look.

  I couldn’t move.

  Not you, slithered inside my head, an unspoken voice that wasn’t me, wasn’t a thought.

  My limbs unlocked. I stumbled back and gasped. Kenzie was still hovering on bent knees. Grant and Haley were stuck in that shared smile, Grant posed against the tree, Haley with a hand forever reaching for her hair.

  They were cardboard cutouts. And they weren’t. I knew exactly what was happening beneath the glaze. Their blood was rushing. Their hearts were thumping. Their thoughts were screaming.

  I looked for Jessica and found her a couple of feet to my left, unfrozen like me. She’d discarded the baseball cap and her ponytail slapped her cheek as she tipped her head, studying the others.

  We’d both been released from...what? Compulsion? This felt different from the memories I’d regained after Gideon released me. His compulsion bent my mind to his will, not my body.

  My gaze flew around, searching shadows. “Did you see anyone?”

  “It’s just you and me, my sweet, delicious Sage.”

  It was her voice, smooth and silky, but that wasn’t something Jessica would say. I brought my gaze in slowly from the shadows to her, dreading what I’d see. It was Jessica, with her cosmetic model beauty and slanted green eyes and ash blonde hair.

  “So pure and naïve and trusting, your soul just bursting with innocent delights.” She smacked her lips, the warmth in her eyes hardening to ice. “It’s putrid, really, but you are going to be such a tasty morsel once the stew is done.”

  It wasn’t Jessica.

  They take possession of the host’s body, mind and soul.

  A tremor rattled through me, shook me to the marrow of my bones.

  I clenched my hands, tight fists to contain the trembling. I wasn’t pure and I wasn’t naïve. I knew what this monster was and I wouldn’t crumble. I damn well wouldn’t.