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

by Sarah Piper

  My wolf.

  Emilio shifted into his human form, naked and feverish, his body wracked with pain.

  “Gray?” He blinked up at me, his eyes wide with shock, the arrow lodged deep in his throat. “How could you do it?”

  Tears leaked from my eyes, dripping onto his face. “I didn’t know.”

  He stared at me for a long, agonizing moment before speaking again, his voice as thin as the breeze. “You betrayed me. You betrayed all of us.”

  “I didn’t mean to! I’m so, so sorry. Just… just hang on. We’ll get help. Liam is—”

  “No.” Emilio coughed, his chest heaving with the effort. “It’s over, querida. Just… just let me go.”

  “It isn’t. It isn’t over! You have to be okay,” I said, stroking his face. “You have to come back home with me and make brownies. There’s so much I have to tell you. So much I want to ask you. Please!”

  I leaned over and pressed my lips to his, desperately trying to breathe life back into his broken body, but he’d already gone cold.

  Grief took hold of my heart, squeezing it until it cracked. I couldn’t scream. Couldn’t sob. I couldn’t even breathe. I had nothing left inside.

  We are, all of us, bound for darkness.

  The words rung in the distance, a faint echo a thousand miles away and a million years in the past. At the time I’d said them to Liam, I believed their message was prophetic.

  Now, I saw that message for what it was—a pathetic warning come much too late.

  My broken heart slowed. I could feel the blood thickening inside me, my magic leaking out through my limbs. There was nothing I could do to stop it. To stop any of this.

  The breeze slipped through the orchard, rustling the leaves and gliding over my skin, lifting the hair off my neck. It carried with it a hundred tarot cards, each one turning into a whisper that fluttered against my ears, cruel and cold and true.

  You failed him.

  You failed all of them.

  You are a failure, a death-bringer, a dark pit of despair from which there is no escape.

  You don’t deserve to live.

  I fought off a shiver and closed my eyes, trying to remind myself that I was still human. That I did deserve to live, even though I’d made so many mistakes. So many things I couldn’t repair or take back.

  But truth was the sharpest weapon in any arsenal, relentless in its pursuit. It pried open my chest, sliced my heart into ribbons.

  He would still be alive if not for you.

  They probably wish they never met you.

  Your rebels would be better off without you. The witches would be better off without you. The world would be better off.

  End it.

  End it, Gray Desario.

  End it. End it end it end it end it end it end it end it—

  “No! Leave me alone!” I curled up on the ground in agony, but no matter how bad the pain, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t give up like that. I wouldn’t let my regrets and doubts consume me.

  I would live. I would walk away from this.

  Even if it meant I’d spend the rest of eternity nursing this wound.

  It was mine to carry. Mine to nurture. Mine to remember.

  “You can’t have me!” I screamed at the trees, my cries echoing across the orchard.

  Everywhere my tears soaked into the earth, a pale yellow flower bloomed, then rotted, its cloying scent making the back of my throat itch.

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. “Fuck everything about this place!”

  The touch of a strong, broad hand on the back of my head pulled me from the desperation.

  I sat up again, looking straight into Ronan’s coal-black demon eyes.

  Now, I was naked, and he knelt beside me, running his hand down my bare backside.

  I sighed at his tender touch, wanting to lose myself in it.

  “It’s okay,” he said, stroking my skin. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  Ronan turned to smoke.

  And the torture began anew.

  Endlessly I relived each torment, each regret, each mistake. The scenarios played out differently—sometimes Darius was beheaded instead of incinerated, sometimes my tongue was carved with the devil’s trap that banished Ronan’s soul. I watched Emilio shoot Bean, watched my mother skin Emilio alive, watched Sophie dance on Asher’s bloody corpse—but they always ended the same way.

  Everyone I’d ever cared about was dead. Because of me.

  Each loss hit me all over again, as fresh and sharp as if it’d never happened before. And each time they reappeared, their presence filled my heart with hope, as if this time might finally be the one to end this nightmare.

  As if all of the people I’d so terribly wronged might finally forgive me—might finally live.

  But they never did.

  I spent days in the orchard, lying naked on a blanket of rotten yellow blooms and tattered, ever-changing tarot cards.

  “Let me go,” I whispered, over and over, each time the loop began again.

  But it never worked. No matter how much I begged, the ghosts of my past wouldn’t let me go.

  Eventually, the parade of death and regret blurred, and a thick, billowy fog crept across the orchard, enveloping me in a white haze, slowly dissolving my body until there was nothing left of me but a whisper on the wind.

  In the end, that was silenced, too.

  Breathe, Gray. Just breathe…

  I was suspending in nothingness, a momentary reprieve. And there, in the spaces between, I found my way out of the orchard.

  I had to let them go. It was that simple—and that difficult.

  I opened my eyes and returned to my body, still lying naked in the patch of rotten flowers. The mist had retreated. The ghosts of my past had returned, all of them watching me as if waiting to see what I’d do next.

  Slowly, I got to my feet and took a deep breath.

  Then, without another word, I turned my back on Darius, Ronan, Asher, Sophie, Emilio, Bean, and even the mother I missed more than anything in the world, and I walked away.

  The orchard vanished behind me, and I followed the pull of my magic toward the sound of the ocean, feeling lighter for the first time in a long time.

  One thing had become clear. Alive or dead or somewhere in between, I didn’t belong in the Shadowrealm.

  I didn’t care how impossible and unnatural and unheard of it was. I didn’t care how far away the gateway was, or how many beasts and nightmares I might meet along the way.

  All I knew in that moment was this: I was a goddamn Shadowborn witch. I was going to find some clothes. And then I was getting out of this fucking place.

  Eighteen

  Asher

  In the weak yellow light of a single dim bulb swinging on a chain, the witches on C-block looked like ghosts in a haunted asylum.

  They were all crammed into the cell together—a cold, damp chamber with no bedding or chairs. All of their heads had been shaved, the hair growing back in tufts and patches. Dressed in dirty white hospital gowns, the women were deathly pale, their bones sharp.

  A few of them had bandages on their wrists and ankles. Others had… fucking hell.

  I bit back my rage, shoving it down deep, saving it for the men who’d done this.

  They were carved. Runes, letters, symbols, slashes—angry red lines crisscrossed arms and legs, chests, faces.

  He carved their fucking faces. Faces!

  “Asher?”

  The call was soft and watery, but I recognized her voice, and my throat tightened at the sound of it.

  The last time I’d seen Haley was on the back of my motorcycle in front of her house, just before we’d gotten pinched by hunters.

  “Haley,” I breathed, damn near gasping at the sight of the runes carved into her forehead.

  I am going to kill every last hunter in this place.

  “You’ve got some pretty sweet accommodations here,” I said sarcastically, forcing a smile as she approached the bars. I didn’
t want her to know how truly freaked out I was by her condition—by what Jonathan had done to her. “You must know people in high places. How you holding up?”

  “Fucking great, why do you ask?” She laughed, a genuine smile breaking across her gaunt face. “Shit, Ash. I’ve never been so happy to see a demon in all my life.”

  She’d lost a lot of her curves and all of her hair, but at least she still had her sense of humor.

  “Don’t go throwing me a parade just yet,” I said. “I have no idea how I’m going to get you guys out of here.”

  “Just don’t touch the bars,” she said. “They’re—”

  “Fae-spelled. I got the memo.” Damn things practically hummed with it. “How many of you are there?”

  “Twenty-seven witches. That’s all of us.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Jonathan had us in separate cells at first, but he put us all together to make room for the other prisoners.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Reva has.” Haley glanced over her shoulder at a young witch sitting against the back wall of the cell. I recognized the name—she was the teenager who’d contacted Gray through the fireplace back at the safe house.

  “Reva’s a shadowmancer—she can project her consciousness from one shadow to another,” Haley explained. “So she can see things, spy, sometimes reach out to people if they’re really receptive. The guards haven’t figured it out yet. They barely notice her.”

  “I’ve only been doing it for a little while.” The girl got up and walked toward the bars. Like the others, she was malnourished and pale, but she seemed steady on her feet, and her eyes were bright and alert. As far as I could tell, she’d been spared from Jonathan’s carving knife. “I’ve been traveling all over the caves. Outside, too. I tried to talk to Gray a couple of times.”

  “Oh, she got your message, Reva,” I said. Then, with a wink that made her smile, “Nearly burned down the house in the process.”

  “Sorry about that. Fire’s easy because it always casts shadows.”

  “Don’t apologize. Because of you, my friends know to look for us in Raven’s Cape.”

  “Are the guys all okay?” Haley asked. “Where’s Gray? Reva thought she was here for a little while, but she wasn’t sure.”

  “I can’t get a read on her now,” Reva said.

  “She was here. But she’s… They’re… You know what? It’s a really long story, guys.” I ran my hands along the wall surrounding the bars, looking for a keycard reader or access panel like the ones Fiona and I had found in the other chamber. “And I’ll be more than happy to fill you in later. Like, over shots. In another fucking town. At some sleazy bar where we’ll be singing karaoke and telling war stories about the time we iced a bunch of hunters and burned this whole place to the ground. But until then, we need to concentrate on getting the fuck out of here.”

  “Agreed,” Haley said.

  “Reva,” I said, “what can you tell me about this place and the people running the show?”

  “The cave system itself is massive,” she said, “but the prison part is only about a mile long, and not that deep. There are a few big chambers like this, and cages, but mostly smaller cells where they keep different people and… other things.”

  The memories of what she’d seen haunted her eyes. Poor fucking kid.

  “There’s the medical lab,” she went on. “That’s where they do most of the experiments. A kitchen, a couple of rooms for the guards. That’s about it.”

  “You said you’d been outside—do you know how they come in and out?”

  She nodded. “There’s an old pier on the beach with a fish-and-chips place that looks like it closed down a million years ago. There’s no public beach access, so it’s pretty isolated. The hunters come in and out through a hidden entrance underneath the pier.”

  “In the water?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not really water. It’s just spelled to look that way.”

  “Fae magic,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  She continued to fill me in about what she’d seen on her travels, confirming a lot of what I’d already suspected. Jonathan had a rag-tag crew of hunters and a few supers—mostly mercenaries, just like Fiona had said. They’d been nabbing witches and supers, killing some of them, bringing the others here. Jonathan was trying to create hybrids, along with various magical and biological weapons.

  And now he had help from the fae.

  “Do you guys know anything about a fae prick named Orendiel?” I asked.

  Reva shook her head.

  “Doesn’t sound familiar,” Haley said, “but there have been more fae around lately. I get the sense there’s some kind of power struggle going on.”

  “How so?”

  “At first, it was mostly just Jonathan and a few hunters. But they’ve been talking about someone they call ‘the old man,’ and I think that might be Jonathan’s father. Jonathan gets real twitchy any time someone mentions him.”

  Snippets of the conversation I’d overheard between Shears and Smokey Joe echoed in my skull.

  …the sooner the old man takes control, the better.

  Kid’s a fuck-up, Shears. Always has been.

  Don’t hold your breath waiting on the old man… He won’t make a move as long as Jonathan’s alive. Can’t risk the kid fucking things up with Orendiel…

  This shit had coup written all over it. I didn’t know jack about the old man, but if it was true what they said about apples falling from trees, he was even more dangerous than his fucked-up son.

  Probably smarter than him, too, given that he’d either implanted his own people into Jon’s operation, or gotten Jon’s people to flip.

  “Anyone got any juice left in there?” I asked the witches.

  “Just Reva,” Haley said. “Norah bound our active powers, and this whole place is locked tight with fae magic.”

  “Norah Hanson?” I asked. I’d forgotten about her. “The coven leader?”

  “She’s a fucking traitor,” one of the other witches said, coming to stand at the bars with Haley and Reva. She was a little older—maybe mid-forties, with a husky smoker’s voice and piercing yellow eyes. Her cheek was bandaged, her arms covered in bruises. “Turns out she was working with the hunters the whole time.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  The yellow-eyed woman slung a protective arm around Reva’s shoulders. “We haven’t seen her since she brought in Reva.”

  Norah was probably long gone by now.

  Add that to the list of problems for another day.

  “Is Gray okay, though?” Reva asked.

  “She’s… dealing with Jonathan.”

  “That fucker?” Yellow Eyes said. “Did she kill him? Tell me she killed him.”

  “She’s… working on it,” I said. In truth, I had no idea whether she’d killed him or yanked his soul into another dimension or some other crazy magical possibility I hadn’t even considered. With Gray, you just never fucking knew.

  Haley blew out a breath, pacing the cell. The others sat quietly along the wall or curled up on the floor, some of them comforting each other, others still in shock. Reva went back to her wall in the back and closed her eyes.

  Looking to Yellow Eyes, I lowered my voice and said, “The hunters. Did any of them… Are you guys… Did they…” I shoved a hand through my hair, not sure how to say it—only knowing I was going to cut off every hunter’s dick if I didn’t like the answer to her question.

  “No, they didn’t touch us. Not like that,” the woman said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Jonathan actually forbid it. Said some bullshit about how witches are naturally wonton and indecent, and if he allowed us to give in to our carnal desires, our blood would become tainted and ruin his experiments.”

  “That,” Haley added with a snort, “and McKenna let loose an old wives’ tale about turning certain body parts into certain amphibious creatures.”

  “Ribbit,” someon
e replied from the shadows. McKenna, I was guessing. Several of the witches giggled. A few of them coughed.

  I finally found the hidden access panel on a wall around the corner from the cell, but it wasn’t a keycard reader. It was a damn retina scanner.

  “How often do the guards come down here?” I asked Haley.

  “When Jonathan doesn’t need us as lab rats, they only come by once a day. If that.” She kicked at a moldy heel of bread on the ground. “I haven’t seen anyone yet today.”

  Alright. We needed an eyeball, and we needed it now.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, ladies, but… Which one of you do the guards hate the most?”

  Haley looked over her shoulder, grinning at the witch who’d made the frog sound. “That would be McKenna. Definitely.”

  “McKenna?” I asked. “Think you might be up for a little shit-starting, sweetheart?”

  A smile lit up her face, and she got right to her feet. “I’m your girl.”

  Nineteen

  Gray

  I emerged from the orchard into another world, stepping barefoot onto a sandy shore. No longer nude, I was suddenly dressed in loose cargo shorts and a purple tank top, my hair wrapped in a bandeau. Sunglasses hung from my shirt collar, and a pair of pineapple flip-flops dangled from my fingers.

  This fucking place.

  Still. After everything I’d just seen in the orchard, I wasn’t about to complain about a walk on the beach.

  A blissful turquoise sea lapped gently at my toes. They’d been painted white with pink polka-dots, reminding me of Sophie. Thankfully, the memory made me smile instead of ache.

  It was a postcard-worthy moment, the bright sunshine warm and delicious on my skin, the salty air a perfect balm for my soul.

  When I saw the man jogging along the shore toward me, a smile broke across my face.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Liam said when we met. He looked happy and relaxed, his skin tan, his hair streaked with summer highlights. Dressed in red board shorts and a faded gray T-shirt that hugged his frame, he was truly in his element.

  Swimmer’s build, I thought, admiring the broad shoulders and narrow waist, his muscles much more defined in the tight shirt.