Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2)

by Jacqueline Sweet

  The King in Shadow glided closer to her. He smelled sour and rotten.

  One of his knife fingers flicked out and stabbed into her chest.

  Tamsin whimpered. It hurt, but not physically. The King wasn’t solid, he wasn’t real in the way she was. He was a creature of pure magic. When he stabbed her with his finger, her flesh didn’t split open. No blood welled out.

  But her soul was cut.

  It didn’t exactly feel good. In fact, it was torture.

  She collapsed onto the ground and the King in Shadow sat down upon her chest. For a moment he was a black cat with pits for eyes. And a six-pointed crown of stars on his head.

  The King in Shadow stretched and expanded. He slid another finger into her chest. And then another.

  Tamsin wailed. It was agony.

  He dug into her chest with his fingers, snipping and slicing at her insides as if he was picking a bouquet.

  He snipped and the door inside her was wrenched away.

  He snipped and the golden key followed.

  Chunks of her very soul clung to those artifacts of her power.

  As he tore all that was her out of her, a great emptiness opened in Tamsin.

  When the boys found, would they know how she died?

  The King in Shadow swallowed the door.

  The King in Shadow swallowed the key, too, shaking his head to ease it all the way down.

  Tamsin screamed again, but the sound was swallowed by the barrier.

  “I promised you power, yes?” The King in Shadow asked. “A demon must always keep his word. Even a demon prince. Even to a dying girl.”

  The monster chuckled as he opened the door that used to be Tamsin’s. Blue flame poured forth in a gout that burned the walls and ceiling. The King in Shadow took the flame and rolled it in his hands, shaping it like clay until it looked exactly like a human heart.

  The King held up his handiwork, that heart of blue fire. It beat in his fingers, pumping puffs of flame into the air. With one savage motion he plunged it down into Tamsin’s chest. The fire spread through her veins, to every atom of her body. When his hand came away, he had traded the heart of flame for her heart of flesh.

  The King sang loudly. “A trade? A trade. A beautiful trade. A deal is struck and a deal is made.” He tossed her heart into the air and caught it in his mouth. He gulped it down noisily.

  The King grinned down at her with his razor blade smile. “Do you feel as if our bargain is fulfilled? Have I kept up my end of the deal? Such power you have, Tamsin Lee. A gift from a demon prince is an incredible honor. It’s a shame I must consume the rest of you now. You could be such an agent of chaos, but that is what must happen. For your gift to be mine, you must not be alive any more.”

  Tamsin saw only blackness then, as the King in Shadow’s maw opened wider and wider.

  22

  Interlude: What Cash Does During a Full Moon

  It was another damn full moon and the spirits wanted an audience.

  As Cash walked in no particular hurry to the anointed woods, the spirits made their voices known. Car alarms blared as he passed. Trees shook. Squirrels hurled acorns at him.

  The wolf in Cash wanted to shift, to drop to all fours and to go show those stupid spirits why they should respect him. But the man was in charge, not the wolf. Even under the full moon’s call, he kept control.

  This was his duty and he hated it.

  Technically the anointed woods was the place where the barrier between worlds was thinnest. Every town had one place the spirits had claimed. But at Penrose the entire idea was a joke. The barrier leaked all over the place. Too much magic in too small of a place had shredded any idea of separation of spirit and matter.

  Cash was a wolf shifter but he was so much more than that.

  Not that he liked to talk about it.

  He didn’t talk about being a shifter and he damn sure never talked about speaking to spirits.

  Shifters weren’t exactly well thought of in wizarding social circles. They were seen—he was seen—as being one step above an animal, and several steps below a man. They were a minority at Penrose. Few shifters saw the point of school. The ones who attended were gifted, like Cash. Though none of them were like Cash.

  The witches and wizards didn’t know anything about him, and still they sneered. At least the men did. The women—that was a whole different story.

  His Alpha called the witches and wizards the ignorant folk. But it had been his damn idea for Cash to come to Penrose.

  Cash had a gift—it was born of tragedy, but it was a gift nonetheless.

  And his pack needed him to master it.

  They needed a shaman to broker deals with the spirit world, to be a voice for the pack amongst the Great Courts of the Wild. Not many packs had a shaman anymore. At least not a real one. They had men who took on the role and went through the motions, but they couldn’t talk to the spirits.

  Cash could.

  And a pack with a real shaman? A spirit talker? They could not just survive, but thrive. They could grow strong. They could gather blessings from the Wild.

  All it would take was for Cash to give up everything.

  There were strict rules for the spirit talkers. They had tribal duties to perform. They had rites to observe. They were teachers and guardians and priests.

  Rule one for the shamen? They didn’t take mates. They didn’t marry. They didn’t even get to fuck.

  Cash didn’t like that rule.

  But he couldn’t say no to his Alpha. He owed him everything.

  Parker had raised him after he lost his family to hunters and fire. And he was the Alpha. He could command Cash and Cash couldn’t say no. The bonds of pack were strong.

  But in order for Cash to be the shaman his pack needed, he needed to master his gift. His gift that was born of death and fire.

  And to master his gift, Cash attended the Spirit Court on every full moon. From the hours of sundown until midnight, he heard the complaints of the spirits and adjudicated as best he could. He was their judge, attorney and executioner.

  It was training, his advisor said, in the ways of the spirits.

  To Cash it felt more like arguing with heavily armed children.

  Every single thing had a spirit. Every animal, every building, every car. But very few were awake.

  Cash never paid attention to the sleeping spirits. He could wake them up, if he chose to. And yeah, once or twice he’d woken up the spirit in an ATM and sweet talked it into giving him some money. But generally he left spirits alone.

  Not every spirit slept.

  Some very old things woke up. Treasured family heirlooms awoke. Or things that had seen some shit—they were awakened, and they had grudges.

  It was rare though, to meet an awakened spirit in the normal world.

  At Penrose it was worse. All of the magic leaking into the world tended to wake the spirits up. It was a constant problem. There was a small team of spirit talkers employed by the university who patrolled the campus and sang the spirits back to sleep.

  And then there was Cash.

  He sat cross legged in a field, just a few blocks from his dorm in the “anointed forest.” Technically it was someone’s backyard garden, but the spirits had claimed it centuries ago when it had been a forest, and spirits were the most stubborn things in all of creation. So sitting next to a statue of a gnome and a small plot of zucchini, Cash held court.

  The spirits queued up in a circle. The idea of a line made no sense to them. They argued and shoved and jockeyed for position in a hierarchy that was baffling, even to the experts.

  The first argument Cash heard was from two wind spirits who had been fighting each other for decades. One blew westerly and the other southerly, but when they met they battled like mortal enemies. Every month the two zephyrs brought their beefs to the spirit court and every month Cash sent them away without a ruling. He couldn’t banish either wind—the town needed them. But there was no reasoning with the spirits.r />
  Then he heard a case from a squirrel whose nuts had been stolen by a very brave woodpecker. Animal spirits were easier to get through to. Cash worked out a compromise between the critters that neither loved but both thought was fair.

  And then came a ground spirit from outside the ice cream shop on College Avenue who was tired of being sticky all the time. He looked like a walking slab of pavement with a face roughly drawn as if by a child with a stick. Cash made a deal with an unemployed Brownie to clean the pavement in exchange for all of the spare change the pavement collected. They both loved the arrangement? Why did it take Cash to broker it?

  Spirits. They were as dumb as they were ornery.

  The crowd of spirits with cases to be heard felt infinite. He never got through them all. Or even half of the ones who wanted to be heard.

  Was this the future he wanted? Hearing violent threats from belligerent squirrels? Convincing a spirit of the color red to stop leaving its assigned traffic light and wandering about?

  It was madness.

  They were intelligent, to be sure, but also so far from rational. Half the cases he threw out because they made no sense, like a mouse who wanted Cash to remove all the dirt from campus because his tail kept getting dirty.

  In the sky, the moon sang her song of renewal.

  The wolf in his heart howled.

  Cash wanted to run in a field. To chase prey. To be a wolf for the night. But he couldn’t. He had a duty.

  He was about to hear an argument between a car and a flock of pigeons when one of the Bogarts charged into the circled and yanked at Cash’s little finger. Bogarts were amongst the most intelligent and human-like of all spirits.

  “Sire, please, your high majesticness. There is trouble! Back at your home of homes. The girl is about to make a mistake of the worstest kind.” The Bogart looked like a fat man with dog ears and a tail. He was two feet tall at the most and wore a suit and hat made of bits of colorful paper.

  “What’s this?” Cash asked. “What girl?” His wolf snarled. If anything had happened to Tamsin . . .

  The Bogart went stiff as a board and fell over. The fright of being addressed by Cash was too much for it. They worked hard, but were fatally shy.

  He slid his wand out from his boot sheath and cast a warming cantrip over the frightened fairy. The wand still felt awkward in his hands. In seconds the Bogart had regained his color and was talking. “The Opener, my lordliness. The girl next door.”

  The hackles on Cash’s neck rose at once.

  His wolf snarled and thrashed within him, pushing him to shift.

  But not yet. Not yet.

  “What is she doing?”

  “A ritual, my graceful lord. A summoning ritual to bring one of the banished ones to your world.” The Bogart shook with nervousness. He yanked his hat off his head and stuffed it into his mouth.

  “A demon?” Cash scoffed. “Tamsin is way too smart for that.”

  The Bogart swallowed the hat. His belly ballooned outwards. “She has been lied to, my sir-ness. When she is in the home of homes, we watch her as you ask. She has been lied to by many and led to a dangerous place.” The Bogart hopped from one foot to the other and gathered up its fat little belly in its hands and squeezed. The gesture seemed to calm it.

  She was so naive, so trusting. Cash could see her easily following bad advice and blowing herself up on accident.

  That couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  “Sorry, my good and fair folk, court must adjourn early tonight. We have an emergency.” Cash leapt to his feet and pushed his way through the gathered crowd of petitioners.

  The crowd pushed back. Some spirits had been waiting months to be heard and yeah, it was Cash’s fault. He should make more time for them. He should extend the court past the mandated hours. He had that authority.

  But he never did.

  And the spirits were pissed.

  They pulled him and pushed him back into the circle with strong little hands. Gusts of wind and fire slammed into him.

  They weren’t respecting him.

  But then again, he hadn’t respected them.

  His wolf growled. It wanted to rip a few spirits to pieces, to show them who was boss.

  Tamsin was in trouble.

  He could smell a great wrongness on the wind, blowing in from campus.

  “Enough!” Cash growled. The wolf was near the surface now. His eyes shifted, turning the night red and ripping away all shadow.

  “You must hear us out!” shrieked an armored squirrel. “We will not stand for this aggression!”

  Cash could take a lot of bullshit in the name of helping the community, but he would be damned if he let a squirrel talk to him that way.

  He let the wolf out.

  One second he was Cash, restrained and beset on all sides by the awakened spirits of Penrose. And the next, he was a gray and brown wolf, larger than a man and the spirits fled from him as if he were a forest fire.

  The bite of a werwolf was fatal to spirits. It was one of the only things that could kill them. And Cash’s wolf would use it.

  Freed from the crowd, Cash-the-wolf ran as fast as he could for Sixth Bentham.

  23

  Interlude: Cash to the Rescue

  The sky burned a malevolent purple.

  Ultraviolet lightning crackled across the atmosphere. Anyone with a shred of sensitivity to the spirit plane was beset by migraines and hallucinations. For Cash, wolf shifter and gifted spirit talker, it felt like his bones were being crushed in a vice.

  In his wolf form Cash was closer to the spirit world. He could sense the disaster more clearly, but it also made him more vulnerable to attacks from the other side. The epicenter of the violent storm was Bentham Six. Cash ran towards it. And the closer he got, the angrier he got.

  This was his territory. How dare anything encroach on it.

  And how dare anything try to use Tamsin.

  She didn’t know it, but she was his.

  A darkness spread through the space between worlds. It was oily and sticky at the same time and it clung to every spirit Cash passed. The spirits cried out for help, but he couldn’t stop. Tendrils of viscous evil poked into the real world, reaching out for Cash at every turn. It reminded him of an oil spill on a beach.

  Students milled about outside. Few seemed to notice what was going on. Without his enhanced senses, it would be all but invisible to them. But it could still hurt people. He had to stop the infection at the source.

  Cash’s fury propelled him at the dorm like a rocket. He was fast in his wolf form. He leapt up the walls, his clawed feet finding purchase easily on the gothic ornamentation. Cash reached the top floor in a matter of seconds, but even that felt too slow. The very air was heavy with evil. Oozing tentacles reached out of the surface of the building to grab him, but he snapped them off with his teeth.

  The taste of the appendages in his mouth was foul and made every inch of his body itch.

  He could really use a whiskey.

  The window to his room was open. Cash muttered a prayer to the Great Wolf goddess. Without looking he leapt through the window with his teeth bared and hackles raised, ready to fight whatever was inside.

  But the room was empty.

  The couches and chairs had all been pushed to one side, making a large open space in the middle of the room. Had Rye been up to something again? He liked the kid a lot, but he had no idea what he got up to when no one was around.

  There were no tendrils in this room. The toxic energy that spilled across the rest of Penrose wasn't here. His room was the eye of the hurricane.

  Something in his room had started the catastrophe.

  So why couldn't he see it?

  Cash shifted forms again, this time to the halfway point between man and wolf. His father, before he died, had called the form beastmode and the name had stuck. It was the most dangerous of Cash’s forms, both for him and for everyone else. His senses were extended in the spirit realm even more than his wolf
form, but there was a madness that consumed him as a result.

  His mind fell away. He became instinct and need.

  Every nerve was on fire.

  He was rage, pure and unrelenting.

  He wanted to rip man’s world down to the stones and sticks and return balance to Mother Earth.

  His bones screamed from the pressure of whatever thing was pushing its way into the world from the darkness.

  He wanted to rip the thing that was hurting him to pieces.

  But there was nothing to fight.

  The room was empty but not empty. This just made him angrier.

  At the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker for just a moment. A magic circle, drawn on the carpet. It glowed a sickly purple and there were shapes in the middle of it.

  But then it was gone.

  They were hiding from him. Him! He was a wolf and a hunter and a master of spirits. And they hid from him? Cash threw back his head and howled, demanding the spirits show themselves to him.

  Who needed wands when you had your howl?

  The circle flickered again. The ache in Cash’s bones intensified. He let out a whimper. How long could he withstand the pressure?

  For a moment he was with his parents again. It was the night they died. Something horrible was pushing on his mind, forcing him to relive that night. Did they think that would break him? In the memory, he’s playing with his sisters. They’re older than him. They’ve already undergone the pack rites and found their place. Cash was still too young. He’d only just barely begun to shift on command. The memory goes red. Hunters had followed them. They thought they’d killed someone—a girl—but it had been something else. They weren’t responsible. But the hunters didn’t care. They barricaded the door. They blocked the windows. They burned down the house with Cash and his family in it.

  And death had come for Cash. She’d lifted him off the ground and brushed him off. “Not yet,” she’d said to him. “There is work to be done and you cannot die until it is complete.” Was it a curse or a gift? The memory was so cold now. Cash woke up the next day under a pile of his family’s bodies. They’d shielded him. Death had rejected him. And ever since he had lived with one foot in the spirit world and one foot in the real.