Spirited: A Reverse Harem Fantasy Romance (The Academy of Spirits and Shadows Book 1)

by C. M. Stunich

  “You forgot to mention you're a Twice Blessed?!” he choked out, reaching into my belt and pulling out Hellim's dagger. With a spin of his wrist, he ended up holding the flat of the blade against his palm, peering closely at it.

  “You don't have to announce it to the whole world!” I returned, setting my features into a stubborn scowl that I hoped would hide my body's violent reaction to Air's nearness. Planting my hands on my hips, I waited for him to hand back the knife.

  He lifted his gaze to mine, nostrils flared … and then gave me an unexpected smile.

  “This is a huge boost to your status,” he said and I rolled my eyes. I didn't give two flubbing dung beetles what my status in court was. For whatever reason though, Air seemed particularly concerned with it. “So not only can you see and exorcise spirits, but now … you can see and cancel magic, too.”

  Air's face was lit up from within like a morning sunrise.

  Reaching out, he clasped my bleeding hand again and I let power shoot between us. It wasn't hard, really. Whenever I was near him, my magic called out to the prince the same way my heart did.

  Too bad both their shouts had to fall on deaf ears.

  The next morning, I woke to a knock on my door and crawled out of bed to find Elijah on the receiving sofa where we'd left him. Jasinda had barely made it through dinner last night without passing out into her soup. As soon as we'd gotten back to the room, she'd slogged herself into her room, fallen facedown on the bed fully dressed and fell promptly asleep.

  I didn't blame her. While I'd been snoring yesterday, she'd been filling out our application and handing it off to Matz.

  “Speak of Hellim's demon and he will appear,” I mumbled under my breath, the old idiom taking on new meaning with the Dark God's symbol hanging around my neck.

  “Pardon?” Matz asked as I forced a smile. I kind of hated the guy, but I also liked getting special favors from him—such as a thorough and careful read through of both our report for the Grandberg exorcisms and our Royal College application.

  “Nothing,” I said, letting Matz into the room, dressed in his fifth-year uniform and looking sharp with that perfect blue-black Amerin hair, pale skin, and straight nose.

  “Is Jasinda awake?” he asked, and I stifled a small smile.

  “Let me check,” I said, knowing she wasn't but that she'd also freak all the way out if I didn't get her up to look over these documents. She'd make any corrections needed and turn them both in.

  And then she'd pace and fret and chew on her thumbnail until she made it bleed, worrying about the courier in his purple, red, and white livery. We'd applied every semester every year since I turned seventeen and became eligible.

  Seven times we'd applied.

  And seven times we'd been rejected.

  This was our last chance.

  I opened my mouth to warn Matz about Elijah, but it was too late. He was sitting down on the couch, right on top of Eli's pelvis. They both shivered violently, and Elijah floated away to land on his feet beside me.

  “Gods, that's gross. I don't think I'll ever get used to it.”

  “Yeah, well, that's the downside of being dead, I guess.”

  Matz gave me a weird look, but he was well aware of my idiosyncrasies and didn't comment on them. Good for him. I'd hate to have to punch a man so early in the morning.

  “The downside?” Elijah asked, leaning in close to me and putting a hand on the wall next to my head. “Oh, only one of many and most definitely not the worst.” His eyes flicked down my body and then back up to my face. Too bad I was wearing a black nightgown today, one with a loose flowing robe over the top. There was no way Elijah of Haversey could see my nipples now.

  “What is the worst then?” I sniffed, tying the belt of my robe into an even tighter knot. I knew I was inviting innuendo, but hey, Eli was a ghost, right? It wouldn't go any further than this, so what did it matter?

  “I miss sex,” he told me blatantly, but the arrogant expression on his face didn't last long. Instead, there was an abrupt change in his demeanor and I sensed something deeper, heavier coming my way. “I miss being touched,” he whispered, leaning in close enough to me that if he'd had breath, it would've feathered across my forehead. But without purposely putting magic into his movements, Elijah's words were less substantial than air.

  “I should wake Jasinda,” I said, using magic to push forward and through him.

  That same violent shiver took over us both, this sense of heat and cold, like we were exchanging secrets with our souls. I kept walking and went straight into my handler's room without acknowledging the sensation, slamming her door behind me.

  Elijah could theoretically walk right through, but we'd established pretty clearly yesterday that there were boundaries and respecting a person's bedchamber was a sacred Amerin ritual. I doubted he'd risk getting stabbed in the chest with Haversey steel just to overhear our current conversation.

  Before I'd slipped into my own bed last night, I'd forced Elijah out the window, made him back up until his face twisted with pain and I felt an answering twinge inside my own chest. As far as I could tell, we could only be about eighty feet apart without unnecessary suffering.

  So … for the rest of my life, I was going to be tied to Elijah of Haversey? The queen had essentially ordered me not to exorcise him. And the chances of me pulling off this resurrection spell?

  Well, the phrase a snowball's chance in Hell came straight to mind.

  Hmm.

  I wondered how many years Queen Everess would watch me fail to cast this spell before she got sick of it and assigned someone else. Maybe then I could be rid of Elijah? Although in that moment, I was groggy and tired and not thinking clearly … because I didn't actually find his presence to be an annoyance. What the flub was wrong with me? Being bound to some random ghost didn't bug me?

  “Jasinda,” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed and picking a fat, black curl off of her pale forehead. “Time to wake up.”

  She slapped at my hand with the lazy floppiness of a person who's clearly still asleep. Grinning, I climbed up onto the bed on my knees and leaned in close to her ear.

  “Your scribe boyfriend is here,” I murmured, laughing as she jerked awake with a bright-eyed alertness that had nothing to do with Matz and everything to do with the papers in his leather satchel.

  “He's here? Already?” She shoved the blankets back and swung her feet to the floor, dressed in peach colored silk—she must've woken up and changed sometime last night—and grabbed the timekeeper off her bedside table. “Goddess' nipples, it's early,” she groaned, standing up and hunting through towering stacks of books and scrolls for a robe. The whole room smelled of ink and paper, dust and cracked leather covers that belonged to books written in languages I couldn't read. “Did he say anything?” she asked as I stood up and padded across discarded notes—Jasinda didn't have a rug, but her used note pages sure made a fairly thick covering across the stone floor—and snagged a robe that had somehow gotten squashed between two spell books as heavy as I was.

  “Looking for this?” I asked, turning with a smug smile … and knocking over three separate towers of ancient looking tomes with one swing of my black feathered wings. “Oops …”

  Jasinda barely even seemed to notice, taking the robe from me and throwing it over her shoulders. She moved out into the common room with me following along.

  “Tell me what you found,” she said, sitting too close to Matz and making him sweat. She leaned in, pressing her breasts to his arms, her sapphire eyes shining as she stared into his face. Arrogant dickhead—dickheads aren't always bad, sometimes they're just the tips of penises, so no lost feathers for me—that he was, Matz actually looked like his heart was trapped in his throat as he gazed at Jasinda with unbridled affection.

  To tell the truth, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear him blurt, “make me a part of your harem, oh mighty Jasinda of Brynn of Haversey!”

  Sucked that by becoming my handler, my fu
ll name took the place of her given middle and last. Jasinda Makalina Miren was so much prettier. Then again, I'd been born Brynn Rosae Rebane, but that too had been stripped of me and given to the goddess during my initiation ceremony.

  “She'll be there for a while talking academia,” I said to Eli with a loose shrug of my shoulders, pausing next to him as he browsed the common room bookshelf. This, too, was filled with Jasinda's stuff. The only shelf in our entire shared quarters that I got to use was the one next to my bed. I had a small collection of fiction novels. Mostly, though, I just read from the library.

  Because New Akyumen Castle had a blitzing library.

  Nine towering stories worth of shelves, magical artifacts, and windows that overlooked the cliff's edge that the castle was built on. Sitting in a leather wingback chair with a good book in hand, eyes focused on the fog floating over the forested valley below us … heaven. Or as close to Heaven as one got without dying and being taken into Haversey's immortal arms.

  “To market, to market …” I murmured, glancing back at Elijah. He was playing his ghostly fingers along the spines of the books, passing through them instead of touching them. Gathered around his feet … were the ghosts of several dead mice.

  Huh.

  He noticed me looking and glanced back with eyes the color of a summer sky.

  “There's something about me that they like,” he said as he flicked his attention down and then knelt, scooping a small furred body into his hands. “At Grandberg Manor, I just assumed it was because I was the least scary entity in that house. But … these started showing up last night after we came in from dinner.”

  He stood back up and looked into the mouse's blue-white eyes. Unlike Elijah, it had neither the power nor the intelligence to make itself look alive. It was simply a glimmering incorporeal reflection of its former self, like most ghosts.

  “Did I hear you say market …?” he hazarded, and I smiled.

  “Yep. I can't go to the All Haunts' Eve Ball in last year's dress. I need something … fresh.” Something that might get Airmienan to notice me, I added in my head. “Besides, if I have to sit here listening to Jasinda talk shop with Matz all day, I'll go insane.”

  Elijah tucked the mouse in the front pocket of his academy jacket—referring to anything Royal College related with the word academy was just casual, easy slang—and smiled as it poked its tiny head out, whiskers twitched as he smirked in my direction.

  “It's been over a year since I visited a market,” he said, his voice wistful and far away.

  “I'll get dressed and we'll go,” I said, trying not to see the expression of determined hopefulness that flitted across his face. I had a feeling that whatever I felt about this resurrection spell, Elijah felt a different way.

  He thought I could do it, didn't he? He thought he might live again.

  The thought that he might have that hope … and that I'd let him down, was awful.

  Sixth-Year Honor Student Elijah of Haversey might've been able to pull off a spell of this magnitude … but Never Admitted Brynn of Haversey certainly wasn't going to be able to.

  I wondered how long it would take him to figure that out?

  I had a lot of good qualities, and a lot of useful skills, but … acts of big magic weren't one of them.

  To both my extreme surprise and pleasure, the prince volunteered himself to go with us into town.

  “Are you sure you want to go shop for an All Haunts' dress?” I asked, wanting to yank a handful of my own feathers out for being so stupid. Why was I fighting Airmienan when he wanted to go hang out with me? Uh, because he made my stomach twist into knots? My nipples pebble? My heart pound?

  We hadn't been out of the castle five minutes and my armpits were soaked with sweat, an attractive look for a half-angel trying to attract the attention of the prince, I'm sure. I should go find that Vexer guy and take Jasinda up on her advice. I had to imagine I'd be a hell of a lot happier on my back in a temperature controlled Travelers' Guild run inn with the beautiful griffin man above me than standing here with my—literally—bloody hand clasped to Air's.

  Certainly, he could feel how sweaty I was?

  “Don't be silly,” Air said, flashing a grin with those delicately pointed canines of his. Goddess, why does he have to be so hot? Wouldn't it be easier to resist him if he looked like an ogre? But then, I'd been in love with Airmienan of Hekkett long before my body ever responded to his. No, I suspected I'd be hopelessly lost in unrequited love with him even if he were a goblin. The fact that he was a quarter Amerin, a quarter deity, and the rest huldra—a species whose name literally meant secret being—only made my lust for him burn that much hotter. “If I let you go out on your own, you'll come back with some pre-made dress that hides all those beautiful curves of yours.”

  My cheeks turned copperberry red, but I kicked Air in the shin anyway. Passersby gaped at my poor treatment of the crown prince, but I ignored them. Our long and unbreakable friendship was well-known throughout New Akyumen. Hell's bells, it was well-known throughout Amerin.

  “I'm not wearing some scrap that shows my nipples,” I said, not that there was anything wrong with nipples or scraps of fabric, just that I didn't much feel like wearing that sort of dress; it wasn't my style.

  “Shame,” Elijah said from beside me, stroking two fingers over the head of the mouse in his pocket. As we passed by the Royal College entrance, the ghost of a dog joined our parade and trotted right up to Eli as if they'd been companions for years. “I would've liked to see that,” he continued as he reached down and scratched the spirit dog behind the ears. The way it looked now, I imagined the mutt hadn't been much loved or cared for in life. It was a mess of scruffy fur that shimmered with that ghostly blue-white glow.

  As soon as we got back to the castle, I was exorcising it. For now, I was content to let it follow us—follow Elijah—around the city.

  “Don't be crude, cousin,” Air said, his voice much rougher than usual, a slight frown on his face.

  “Like you're one to talk!” I said, yanking on his arm as a crowd passed through Elijah and he grimaced, shivering as the violent warmth of the living washed through him. With our new connection, I could almost feel it, too. “You say things like that all the time. Worse things, actually.”

  “Only out of love,” Air said, showing me a big beautiful grin that made my entire body flush white-hot. Love. Hah. If only. “But first we're buying about a hundred spirit charms. I'd like to spend more time with my cousin.”

  “A hundred spirit charms?” I asked with a scoff and a raised brow. Air was kidding himself if he thought we could find a fraction of that number in town. Spirit charms were expensive and hard to make, and a lot of spirit whisperers were too possessive over the ones they did craft. I didn't blame them considering the amount of blood required. To make a three-day charm like Jassy had just used, I'd have to literally drain my bodyweight in blood and imbue the charm under moonlight.

  Not an easy task.

  “I'm the prince,” Air said, his voice rife with confidence. I rolled my eyes and Elijah smirked.

  “Prince or not, spirit charms aren't easy to come by. But come on, I know where we might be able to get some.” Dragging my childhood friend down the cobblestone street, I headed past the open-air market and the stalls filled with fresh fruit, brightly colored scarves, big blocks of goats' milk soap, shiny metal weapons, jewelry, spices, and—

  “Fruit and jelly rolls,” Elijah groaned, his feet sinking into the cobblestones for a moment before he realized what he was doing and righted himself. He stumbled over to the stall with his small horde of dead creatures swarming around his booted ankles. “Oh, Haversey's tight, wet cunt, I wanted one of these.” I raised both brows, the early spring breeze catching on lingering snow from the mountains and making the hot glare of the sun above our heads burn just a little less. “Buy one and eat it for me, would you?” Eli asked, teasing the row of tightly rolled pancakes with his long fingers. The look he cast me with tho
se angelic eyes … it was impossible to resist.

  With a sigh, I tossed a few gems at the shopkeeper and picked out Air's favorite—a butter-flavored pancake with orange marmalade and mango and pineapple chunks—and then followed Elijah's pale pointing finger to a chocolate pancake with strawberries and blackberries in it.

  After all the scratches they'd given me on my legs, I was going to enjoy crushing them between my teeth.

  “Eat it slow,” he begged, getting close and using his magic to breathe warm breath against my lips. Air made a scoffing sound under his breath which wasn't like him at all and flicked his eyes in the opposite direction.

  As ridiculous as I knew I probably looked, I slowly and sensually slid the phallic-shaped roll between my lips, my gold eyes meeting Elijah's, the warm sun on my black feathers. It was one of those perfect moments, watching Eli run his tongue across his lower lip, gaze dipping from my eyes to my mouth.

  I bit into the pancake and chewed slowly.

  “It's delicious, isn't it?” he asked, sounding pained.

  “It tastes like winter,” I said, because fruit and jelly rolls with chocolate wraps was more of a winter than a spring thing. Although we'd just said goodbye to the season, the scent of snow from the mountains made it seem like an appropriate choice for the morning. “The fruit is sweet, the chocolate a tad bitter.”

  “Fuck a god's erect dick,” Elijah growled, turning away and ruffling up his dark hair with both hands. He winced as he flexed his wings out of impulse and accidentally sent a burst of cold sensation through a few passersby.

  “And where might we find these spirit charms?” Air asked, flipping a gem at another shopkeep and presenting me with a big clear glass of peach-lemonade, a treat that was almost impossible to find in any other city but New Akyumen. Citrus was hard to grow in Amerin—it was never hot enough unless it was too hot and unbearably dry—but the castle grounds sported the country's largest greenhouse and best team of flora whisperers.