Demon Sworn: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Witch's Rebels Book 3)

by Sarah Piper

  “He OD’d,” I told Emilio, pure and simple.

  “OD’d? But Darius doesn’t feed on—”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Alvarez. He’s covered in human blood and he’s completely fucked up.”

  Emilio took one more look at Darius, then nodded.

  Leaving the vampire to rest, Emilio and I joined Elena in the kitchen, where she was scraping what looked like chopped weeds from her cutting board into a mug. The teakettle whistled on the stove.

  “How’s your friend?” she asked, turning off the flame and returning to her chopping.

  “Too soon to tell,” Emilio said.

  Elena nodded, but thankfully didn’t press. “And the other… guy?”

  “Liam,” Emilio said.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “It’s… complicated.” This from the man in question, who’d slipped into the kitchen like a damn ghost. I almost preferred his Death form—it was creepy as fuck, but at least with the black robes and mysterious riddle-speak, I knew what I was getting. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to seeing him as a regular guy, no matter how artfully messed his surfer-blond hair was, or how much fucking flannel he wore.

  “I am bound to a witch in their company,” he continued. “She’s Sh—”

  “She’s the one missing,” I said to Elena, then shot Liam a warning glare. As far as Emilio and I were concerned, that was all Elena needed to know about Gray.

  Liam wisely shut his trap.

  Emilio leaned in close to Elena, lowering his voice. “You, ah, may want to send someone over to Seaside Motel to check things out. Darius obviously fed on someone, and he mentioned some kind of attack.”

  Elena slammed her knife down on the cutting board and gave Emilio a look that could’ve turned Hawaii into a frozen wasteland, but she slid the phone from her back pocket and made the call anyway.

  “Yeah, it’s Alvarez,” she said into the phone. “Send a car over to Seaside Motel. Make sure he’s one of us—I don’t want any humans in on this, just in case there’s—” She paused, then sighed. “Are you serious? Alright, cancel that car. Just keep me posted if anything else turns up.”

  She disconnected and looked at Emilio. “Room fourteen?”

  Emilio nodded.

  “Apparently a housekeeper reported a domestic disturbance a couple of hours ago, but when one of ours arrived on the scene, she told him she’d been mistaken—it was just the television. My officer asked around, but no one else heard anything. When he entered the room, everything seemed in order. The television was blaring, but that was it. No one was around.”

  I looked to Emilio. “If something happened at the motel, Darius must’ve called his clean-up crew.”

  “Vampire influence,” he said, shaking his head. “Hell of a drug.”

  “In this case,” Elena snapped, resuming her angry weed-chopping, “a hell of a lucky break for you two. You come back here after twenty years, and this is what you bring to my doorstep?”

  “He was supposed to wait for us at the motel until sundown,” Emilio explained. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Maybe he decided to order in some room service,” she said.

  I shook my head. “That’s not Darius’s style.”

  “He’s a vampire, Ronan. It’s exactly his style.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Emilio folded his arms over his massive chest and leaned back against the counter, his jaw tight. “He doesn’t feed on live humans.”

  Emilio was right. I was pretty sure the only time Beaumont had even tasted human blood recently was the night he and Gray made their pact and he sealed the blood bond. Now he was overdosing?

  Elena picked up the kettle and poured steaming water into the mug full of weeds, then covered it with a saucer. “It needs to steep for a couple of hours.”

  “What is it?”

  “A tincture—just a few herbs from the garden. It should help neutralize the effect of the blood, allowing his body to focus on healing from the sun poisoning.”

  Emilio raised an eyebrow.

  “Shifters and vampires aren’t always good bedfellows,” she explained, “but here in the RC, the freaks stick together.”

  “Better watch yourself, Elena,” he teased. “Someone might start thinking you actually care.”

  For the first time since we woke up in her house this morning, Elena actually laughed. It changed her entire face.

  Emilio’s, too.

  Thirteen

  Ronan

  “I was attacked,” Darius explained, sipping Elena’s concoction. He’d yet to move from the couch, but he was awake and sitting up now, and whatever she’d brewed up seemed to be doing the trick. His blisters had all but healed, the normal color returning to his face, and his eyes had regained their sharp focus.

  His hands still trembled around the mug, though, and his voice was weak and watery.

  “Hunters,” he went on.

  He told us the story of his ambush, then pointed to his inner arm. “Both had brands that matched one of the runes I’d seen on the witches’ bodies in the morgue.”

  “What did it look like?” Emilio asked. As Darius described it, Emilio tapped out a text, presumably to Elena. She’d gone to the station to regroup with her team, and we’d promised to keep her in the loop.

  “I had no choice but to kill them,” Darius said.

  “There is always a choice, vampire,” Liam said, running his finger along one of Elena’s bookshelves.

  “Yes, and my choice was to not die at the hands of hunters. One I’m sure you’d make under similar circumstances.”

  “I wouldn’t find myself in such circumstances.” Liam pulled out an encyclopedia and began flipping through it, turning his back to us as if our conversation was suddenly distracting him from his studies or something.

  Fucking Death.

  “Everything is a bit of a blur after that,” Darius continued, “but I remember feeling a terrible thirst, like nothing I’d ever felt before.” A shadow darkened his eyes, and he closed them as if he didn’t want Emilio or me to see it. “It just… took over. I was utterly consumed; I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d wanted to.”

  I dropped into the chair across from him, shaking my head. “Fucking hell, Beaumont. You could’ve died.”

  “I’m quite aware of that, yes.” He took another sip of Elena’s brew, then set the mug on the side table, nearly dropping it in the process. “But here I am. And worry not; when I came to, I had the wherewithal to call for a clean-up.”

  “But not the wherewithal to stick around, where you were safely out of the sun?”

  “My associates don’t require supervision.”

  “No, but apparently you do,” I said. Anger pulsed through my veins. We could have lost him. Gray could’ve lost him. “What the fuck were you thinking? Why didn’t you call us?”

  “I did. Many times.” His voice had turned cold, but it couldn’t hide the concern in his eyes. “I couldn’t reach either of you.”

  Emilio and I checked our phones. Neither of us showed any missed calls or texts.

  “We’ve been texting you all morning,” Ronan said.

  “I also left voicemails,” Emilio added. “We assumed you were sleeping.”

  Darius pulled out his phone, staring blankly at the screen, jamming his finger into it and growing increasingly frustrated.

  Taking it out of his hands, I read the notifications. “Seventeen missed texts, four missed calls. Yeah, that’s us.” I swiped over to his call and text log, seeing the long list of phone numbers that he’d obviously entered manually—and incorrectly. “I sure as hell hope you didn’t leave anything incriminating in those messages, because you didn’t leave them for us. You really need to learn how to use this thing, Beaumont.”

  I tossed it back to him. He caught it with one hand. At least his reflexes were improving.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “the important thing is that we’re together now and all accounted for, save
for our missing companions. I don’t suppose you have news?”

  “We’ve… got nothing,” I admitted. The words hurt on the way out. After working things out with Elena’s wolf pups, we all decided it was better to wait until dark before Emilio and I made a move. Her men were supposed to be setting up stake-outs on some of the known locations of the hunters who’d recently moved to the Cape, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure we could trust them yet.

  With no sign of the victims and no solid leads, there wasn’t much we could do but wait, anyway. I knew that, logically. I’d agreed to it. But I couldn’t help feeling like we were failing Gray and Ash. They’d been gone nearly two days already. Who knew what kind of fucked-up torments Jonathan had subjected them to?

  My only solace was that my witch and my best friend were in it together. No matter how much they pretended to hate each other, I knew there was a bond forming there. As long as it was within their power to do so, they’d do whatever they could to keep each other safe.

  Darius finished the rest of his brew, then held the cup in his lap, tapping the rim with his fingers. He seemed to be considering his next words.

  “I don’t know how exactly to explain this,” he finally said, “but I picked up on her presence today. Through our blood bond.”

  “And?” I was out of my chair, my heart pumping new blood into my veins.

  “Her magic called to me, in a way. She’s definitely alive, Ronan. But she’s not in the Cape. She’s not even here at all.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Where the fuck is she?”

  “Another realm, perhaps. Maybe her own. Maybe someone else’s.”

  I hated the question that slithered into my head next, but I let the words fall out of my mouth anyway.

  “Then how do you know she’s even alive?”

  I looked into his eyes, everything in me silently begging him. Please convince me. Convince me our girl is okay. That we’re going to find a way to bring her back to us. That we can end her suffering, end this nightmare before it’s too late...

  Darius was soundless. Not just quiet, not just silent, but utterly fucking soundless.

  Until he exploded.

  The mug shattered on the hardwood floor, and he had me against the wall before I could even blink.

  “Bloody hell, demon. I can feel her. She’s very much alive. But if we don’t figure out how to get her out of whatever mess she’s in, she won’t stay that way much longer. That I can promise you.”

  “I’m afraid the vampire is right.” Unperturbed by the whole scuffle, Liam slid Elena’s book back into place on the shelf. Then, with a sigh so heavy I felt it land on my shoulders, he said, “You two... had better sit down.”

  Fourteen

  Liam

  The demon looked more surly and terrible than usual, with bloodshot eyes and a heaviness to his gait that made his boots scuff the floor when he walked.

  The vampire seemed to be recovering, albeit slowly; a slight tremor remained, and the effort of attacking his friend seemed to have taken another toll on him.

  Both men sat on the couch, looking up at me almost like children awaiting news of their punishment.

  To say I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation was a serious understatement, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. I’d already lost hours getting back to the material plane; it was becoming more difficult to transition between my forms, and the human vessel made travel much more challenging. For Gray, it’d likely been days since I’d left her. I hated the thought of her wandering the realm without me, hated knowing some of the horrors she’d likely face.

  Hated knowing that the hunter was still after her, even there.

  “I have connected with Gray,” I finally said. “She sends a message.”

  “What the fuck?” Ronan was on his feet again. “And you’re waiting until now to tell us?”

  “It seemed wise to wait until the female shifter was gone,” I said, though in truth I’d been avoiding it. Despite Gray’s many assurances to the contrary, I’d failed her, utterly and completely. How could I admit to such a gross dereliction of duty? Such a breach of trust and friendship?

  “What… what happened?” Ronan asked, struggling to speak. Emotion had taken hold. “Why… Is she… How is she?”

  How was she? I would not use words like well or alive, for Gray was neither of those things—not by their strictest definitions. But she was present. Relatively whole, though I had no idea how long that would last.

  Sidestepping the question altogether, I said, “She is trapped in the Shadowrealm.”

  “What?” he roared. I sensed he was holding back from attacking me. His arms shook with the effort, his eyes already turning black.

  “How did this happen?” the vampire demanded, his tone even more accusatory than the demon’s, though he hadn’t risen from the couch. “What have you done, reaper?”

  Fresh anger bubbled inside my vessel, filling me with hot rage. “She condemned herself the moment she chose to banish the hunter’s soul. In fact, one might say she condemned herself the moment she refused my invitation for proper training after the first ripple of her power called across the realms to me. No Shadowborn has ever refused the call.”

  From the corner of my eye, I sensed movement—no more than a blur, really—and then the demon was on me, slamming me to the floor.

  Even in human form, I could’ve destroyed him. Snuffed him out with the snap of my fingers and settled up the debt for his soul with the Prince of Hell later. Perhaps it would’ve been worth incurring Sebastian’s notorious wrath.

  But I wouldn’t do it. Gray loved this demon. He was important to me by extension, whether I liked him or not. As were the vampire, the wolf, and the incubus.

  “What is she to you?” the demon demanded, his hands fisting my shirt, his face so close to mine I nearly fell into the bottomless darkness of his black eyes. “What do you want with her?”

  “That is neither relevant nor—”

  “She’s in the fucking Shadowrealm—your domain! I’d say that’s damn relevant!”

  “I was supposed to help her manifest her powers and realize her full potential through rigorous training and education—that’s what I wanted with her. Perhaps you’ll remember that the next time you try to dissuade a Shadowborn from fulfilling her—”

  The force of Ronan’s punch would’ve crushed my vessel’s skull. Fortunately for me, he’d hit the floor next to my head instead, cratering the wood.

  “Shit,” the wolf said, grabbing the back of Ronan’s shirt and hauling him to his feet. “That’s definitely going on our tab.”

  “Along with the mug I broke,” Darius said.

  “And the wainscoting I destroyed this morning,” Emilio said, exasperated. “Guys, what are we doing? Gray’s trapped in that place and we’re here, breaking my sister’s things, taking orders from her pack, and crawling the damn walls. We need to stop arguing and figure this out. Everyone just… just take a deep fucking breath.”

  Whether he’d run out of steam or realized that his violence would not bring his beloved witch back to us, I had no idea. But Ronan did as his friend asked, then offered a hand to help me from the floor.

  I took it as a show of faith. Besides, his attack hadn’t done any real damage.

  If I’d been at my full strength, he wouldn’t have been able to attack me at all, but that was a problem for another time.

  “Every minute I spend here is like days to her,” I said calmly, brushing the dirt from Liam’s—my—clothing. “So like the wolf said, I suggest we put away this petty squabbling and focus on helping her.”

  “Agreed,” Ronan said. “When do we leave?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “I’ll be returning to the Shadowrealm to protect her while she searches for a gateway to her own realm, and you’ll be here awaiting word. I’ve come only to deliver her message.”

  We all sat down, and I told them everything she’d shared about the prison and the hun
ter’s ultimate plans, leaving out the part about how she’d miraculously cured the incubus of his devil’s trap allergy. Recalling the way her cheeks had flamed when she’d mentioned that part of the story earlier made my vessel behave in ways that I didn’t care to reveal. “She wanted to be sure the others were rescued. That was her primary concern. The reason she stole the hunter’s soul in the first place.”

  Ronan offered a brusque nod, but I didn’t think he’d heard a word I’d said about the prison. He was entirely focused on Gray.

  I couldn’t blame him. Perhaps if I’d been more focused, she wouldn’t be in her current predicament.

  “You say she’s fully manifested there,” he said. “How long can she survive like that?”

  “I don’t know. To my knowledge, no one has ever physically manifested there before.”

  “And her idea about the connected realms and her gateway,” the vampire asked. “Is that truly a possibility for escape?”

  “In theory,” I replied, “if Gray could find her rune gate or even another gateway to the black forest, she might be able to get back to her realm, and then back to us. It’s unproven, pure speculation, but—”

  “But when has Gray ever followed the rules?” the wolf asked, affection shining in his eyes. “Even the rules of physics.”

  “She’ll find the damn gateway,” Ronan said. “Or she’ll create a new one. You said it yourself, she’s the most powerful Shadowborn you’ve ever encountered.”

  “She is,” I said. “But you must realize that a working gateway could very well be the equivalent of three thousand miles away from her current location, and distance is the least of her challenges. She’ll have no way of knowing whether the gateway will actually lead her to her intended destination, or merely to another inhospitable landscape.” I stood up and began to pace, my concern for Gray manifesting in a nervous, buzzing energy that made my vessel’s heart palpitate, my hands and feet tingling with pins and needles. “The realm is constantly evolving, constantly reshaping to suit the requirements for each soul passing through. Because Gray isn’t there as a result of her natural death, her situation is completely unstable.