by Jayla Kane
ENCHANT Me
Contents
Title Page
ENCHANT ME
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Author Bio
The Legends of the Ashwood Institute Series
ENCHANT ME
By
Jayla Kane
Book Five
of the
Legends of the Ashwood Institute Series
© 2020 Jayla Kane
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact the author.
Cover from fiverr.com
Note from the author: the following work is a product of fantasy. It is not meant to mimic real-life situations or people and should not be regarded as anything more than entertainment. All acts depicted in this work feature consenting adults and are fictional and should be treated as such; the viewer is responsible for the legal ramifications of engaging with the text in the place where they live. No laws were broken in the country of its origin (US).
Author’s Note
TRIGGER WARNING: This book contains violence. PLEASE DO NOT READ IT IF THIS WILL UPSET YOU. Recovery from sexual violence is a major ongoing theme in this book as one of the characters deals with the aftermath of rape. Please, please please put down this book if this conversation will make you uncomfortable, depressed, or revisit issues better dealt with in a professional sphere. This is a fantasy romance, not a guide to recovery.
I would like to include a warning in the beginning of this book: it is a gritty or ‘dark’ erotic paranormal romance with mature sexual scenarios that include challenging power dynamics and behavior that only belong in the pages of a novel of its kind. It is dark thematically, and contains mature themes. Please do not read it if you find the idea of these things immediately unromantic—you will not enjoy it. There are many fantastic books available to you, and I sincerely hope you put this one down and find another.
And lastly, this book is part of a serial. It is not a stand-alone; the first book in this series is called DARE ME, and I highly recommend you begin reading there. And to once again reiterate: this series is meant for adults, not younger audiences.
Take care, reader—
JK
Prologue
Zelle
I leaned down to glare at my phone again; fucking Charlie. Thanks bunches, I wrote, ignoring the plaintive glance Raven shot my way when I shoved it back in my pocket. No intrusion necessary; she understood from the look on my face I was telling her to stay the fuck out of my head. I guess I should be thankful for that temporary reprieve, too, but it just made me grit my teeth.
Stay out, Rae.
Stay the fuck out.
Fucking Charlie wasn’t coming. My only real ally, the only one who understood, and she was all like, eh, I’ve got to finish making the rest of these zucchini muffins, and besides, my girlfriend’s supposed to call me in like an hour, and also—
All bullshit.
I mean, it wasn’t, not technically; we do need to eat. We don’t have a mortgage, thank god, because we could never afford one, but we have Rae’s school books and the water bill and I’m trying to get Baby a car… And unlike Raven, she will need money for college. If she’s still trying to go. I haven’t had the heart to ask her.
And we have the health insurance. That’s what really kills us, every month. Now that she’s able to heal all our cuts and bruises I guess that makes it a little less dire, but I was really hoping to get her in to therapy.
As far as I know, none of us have a magical ability to unfuck our heads.
But instead of helping with the muffins and the bookstore inventory and the dusty ass house upstairs… Here we are. In the motherfucking Warfield mansion, both of my sisters plunking down on the goddamn velvet settees like we actually belong here. And it makes my fucking blood boil.
Literally.
I realized probably a decade ago that this would be my life, but it didn’t bother me at the time, not like it probably should have. I didn’t mind getting up early to make sure we had enough shit on the shelves for the breakfast crowd, I didn’t mind getting everybody out the door for school and I didn’t mind being here in the afternoons, pretending to play hide-and-seek while Tristan Warfield and I laced our fingers together and snuck downstairs for a snack instead.
What a fucking waste of time.
At least we didn’t have much of a heating bill at our place. At least I can say that I don’t sleep here, pretending these shitheads have my best interests at heart when for years they acted like we’re pariahs or ignored us outright. At least I learned my lesson young.
Tristan is watching me.
I can feel his eyes on me, where-ever I go, it doesn’t matter which room we have these stupid fucking meetings in or how long it’s been since I stepped inside this fucking house, I can feel him. Like some kind of ghost, haunting me.
I don’t forgive you, I think, knowing Raven is otherwise preoccupied, and that he isn’t a damn mindreader anyway. But I know he can hear me. I know he knows, just like she does, without my having to say a word.
I don’t forgive you.
And I never, ever will.
When he stands up and clears his throat, I know he knows what I’m saying, what I’m thinking. I know what he’s thinking too, and I don’t give a fuck.
You can rot, Tris. You can rot in hell.
Alone.
Just like me.
Chapter One
Baby
Five minutes before the damn thing was supposed to start, I looked down at my phone and swiped past the last three notifications to pop up. I felt like turning the stupid gadget completely off, but Rae would notice, and Zelle would get all uptight about it. Since when does Baby Keller, Queen Bee, turn off her phone? But I didn’t want to meet up with Lindsey after cheer tomorrow. Didn’t care what Facebook thought about my new hair color. Didn’t want to read my mom’s latest dumb email about why she wasn’t home yet.
And then the fourth notification made me stop short, my heart beating faster at the sight of his name.
Hunter: Be good to see you, miss
And then I didn’t mind so much that I was going to have to stay up late to study for that stupid geometry quiz covering a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand, or that I was likely to spend the next hour rolling my eyes, over and over, at the convoluted arguing and time-wasting nonsense that was going to happen at the first unofficial meeting of the Ashwood Coven in over three hundred years. I didn’t care that I was technically taking a risk by listing him under his given name. I didn’t mind that I was stuck living in this goddamn madhouse where old ladies popped out of the walls and my stupid sisters fought constantly about everything and nothing and I had to pretend none of it bothered me, ever, or I would crack and fall apart into a million pieces, t
he way the window did when Zelle attacked us two weeks ago. I didn’t mind anything at all, suddenly.
I was going to see Hunter.
I hadn’t seen him since I brought him back from the dead, the day I was raped, the day he died.
He texted me; I texted him. I tried to flirt with him, at first, but it didn’t feel right—nothing did, especially not the first few days. And he’s not much of a talker, besides, so that translates to roughly three or four words at a time when he writes me back, making me feel like a junkie as I stare at my phone, waiting for him to respond. He always does. But it takes forever, and we haven’t spoken a word to each other. I haven’t been ready to talk yet. Not since… Since.
My heart felt like a bird, thrumming against my ribs like it was trapped in a cage.
It made no sense; Hunter kidnapped me, once upon a time. Even before that, I spat in his face and threatened him. And the last time we were together, he cradled my hands in his huge grasp and looked into my eyes and promised me that someone was dead. We were both covered in blood, our palms slick with it as I clung to him, hardly believing that he was still alive.
But I knew I would feel safe for the first time in two weeks when he walked through the door. I would see his face and know no one would dare hurt me, not while he was there. It would be like breaking the surface after a long dive, sucking air into lungs stinging with pain, a body close to drowning. Relief, finally.
I put down my phone and squirmed on the couch. We were in the library at the Warfield mansion, where pretty much our whole faction had settled in together. It wasn’t a comfortable arrangement; Leo was still here, representing the Guild, but he was under house arrest and hadn’t been allowed in this room for the meeting. Tristan did some fancy warding thing to make sure he wouldn’t even hear what we were talking about if he happened to walk by outside. I felt kind of sorry for Leo; he spent a lot of time chewing on his lip and staring around at us with red eyes whenever we happened to be in the same place. He looked terrified most of the time, as if he expected any one of us to spontaneously combust.
Jake and Raven were arguing about something—standard issue behavior for the pair of them, but it worked like foreplay because in another minute they were gazing into each others’ eyes as they telepathically made up. Gross. Zelle watched them with hatred painted all over her face, arms crossed as she leaned against the bookshelf beside where I sat on the couch, as if she were my bodyguard. Fat chance. She’s five feet tall, for one thing… Although, given her ability to create a fire tornado I guess I could find worse, realistically. Charlie wasn’t coming, which was complete bullshit. She’d basically stopped returning my texts once I told her I wasn’t going to therapy last week. Tristan was standing silently by the window until Raven and Jake walked over and they began to argue. Again. Arguing. That’s what everyone did, when they weren’t shouting or glaring or seething silently. Or, in the case of Jake and Raven, making up in a way that made everyone else feel like puking.
It might’ve just been me and Zelle, but whatever.
I waved Molly over to sit beside me when she quietly ducked past the library door and darted inside, her head down and eyes blinking rapidly under the dark curtain of her hair. She wasn’t wearing her glasses today, and it highlighted the fear on her face. The constant bickering freaked her out, which made a lot of sense if you knew how she’d been living her whole life. Hunter was her protector, too, and I knew she’d feel at least as much relief as I did when he finally arrived. Her big brother had been forced to kidnap me when the Rose threatened her life, but Molly and I never talked about what happened. It was too much, and it didn’t matter, all at the same time. There was no way to go back. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the other coven members had some magical time-traveling ability we didn’t know about yet.
There was more than one person in this room who wasn’t supposed to exist already.
Molly seemed to be normal, so far. I knew her from school and she was a little brainiac, but that was about it. She didn’t have any crazy powers, as far as I could tell. Hunter shape-shifted into some kind of wolf-man hybrid, something my worst nightmares would have had a hard time cooking up; he could also… I don’t know how to describe it. Teleport, I suppose, although even allowing the word to float through my mind made me wince. But there was no better way to explain it—he could jump through space, moving hundreds of miles in one step. And Jake had some kind of mutant super-ability to control elements like air and water, Zelle was a Firestarter, Raven read minds, Leo could make it rain, and Tristan…
Well, Tristan and I were opposites. I created life, wove living cells together; he ripped them apart. Dissolved them. Disintegrated the bonds of magic like it was nothing more than air. Tristan Unbinds; I Bind.
Tristan and I didn’t do hugs, hand-shakes, or high-fives. Of everyone in the room—and my sisters, whom I loved more than anything, are definitely still included in this—I knew he understood my magic and the resulting isolation best. We weren’t the same; Tristan had suffered, so much, so obviously that it made me wonder why the hell Zelle kept punishing him without so much as a second glance. I could touch people, if I wanted to. But I was afraid to. I was afraid I would alter them in some bizarre way I couldn’t yet control, make them irreparably different. I didn’t know how to use what I could do, and I would have written it off as utterly useless if I hadn’t been able to bring Hunter back from the dead.
But there ya have it. A collection of freaks.
“I think we’re ready to start,” Raven said finally, slipping her hand out of Jake’s and looking around at us. “Everybody here?”
“Charlie says she’s not coming,” Zelle called; she gave us all a cool eyed stare. “Says this is a waste of time.” Always one to get her digs in, Zella.
“Bullshit,” Jake muttered, and I felt my hackles raise. Raven shot me a warning look, and I gave her one right back. I wished Charlie was here too—and honestly, I thought it was kind of irresponsible for her to pretend she didn’t have any magic in her, since her last name is Keller as well—but fuck Jake. Period.
“That’s her right,” Zelle snapped, and before she could get into it with the two of them Tristan cleared his throat and stepped forward, away from the window. That shut her down, for once. She stared resolutely away from him, her lips white, but I knew she couldn’t help but listen.
“Perhaps we could—”
And then no one said a goddamn word, because Hunter just appeared in the middle of the room.
It was so bizarre—there was nothing there, just the tables, these gorgeous little mahogany tables that were shining in the late afternoon light and the couch where Raven had slumped with relief when Tristan started talking and the chair where—
And then there was Hunter. His hair was a little longer than the last time I saw him, and it moved around his head as he landed in a tiny wave, the dark curls shifting as if he’d taken a small jump, his strong legs tensing beneath his jeans, his hands out to steady himself. Clean shaven. Taller than anyone else in the room, broader in the shoulders, his cheeks a little hollowed out.
Beautiful.
I thought my heart would slow down when I saw him, but it didn’t—it flushed with memories I couldn’t deal with yet, with the way his body looked beneath the soft flannel he wore, the way he touched me. The way he felt.
Our eyes locked as he straightened up, and I felt my heart erupt. It felt like it might fly right out of my mouth.
“Hunter!” I’d never seen Molly so animated. She flew off the couch and he wrapped her up in his arms, a smile brightening his handsome face immediately. Dimples. I’d forgotten about those. Raven grinned as she watched their reunion, and even Zelle warmed up a little bit.
“Y’all,” he said in greeting when he set her down. Molly had a hard time letting him go, but bounced back over to me when he turned towards Tristan with his hand outstretched. Tristan gave Hunter a place to hide from the Guild, somewhere nobody knew about, not even Jake; I guess
that wasn’t too weird though, considering we all thought the oldest Warfield boy was dead until recently. From the way he looked and acted, he may as well have been, but Zelle wasn’t having any of it. Hunter, on the other hand, clearly liked Tristan, and given that he was holed up in one of his hide-aways I guess he might know more about the guy than any of the rest of us.
“So we’re not going to let Leo out for this?” Zelle had a way of cutting to the heart of things, and she could be counted on to say the shit nobody else wanted to say. Jake, Tristan and Hunter murmured something to one another while Raven walked over to her sister.
“No, not yet. I want to be able to either shield his mind from Hunter’s existence or figure out how to pull the information out of his memory before we let him know Hunter’s alive. If we ever do.”
“We don’t,” I said, making sure I sounded bored. Both of my sisters turned towards me, arms crossed, and I kicked my legs out, hopefully a perfect picture of teen-age entitlement. “We don’t ever do that. I thought that was the whole frickin’ point? Isn’t the Guild our enemy now? Why else are we sitting here—”
“Okay, Baby, jeez,” Raven sighed, turning to glance at Hunter over her shoulder. Tristan looked slightly more animated than usual, and Jake had his arm around Hunter’s shoulders. They were best friends, which made no fucking sense to me, but hey. It is what it is. Settle down, she said in my head. I frowned at her. Please don’t give Zelle an excuse to leave, okay?
