Light Up The Night_a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance

by Jacqueline Sweet

  The demon squealed like a pig on fire.

  Tamsin squeezed as hard as she could, even as the demon pushed back and bit and writhed in her grasp.

  She squeezed and it stopped moving.

  She squeezed again and that terrible demon turned into a heap of ash.

  The room shook like thunder.

  “Do you know what you just did, you stupid bitch?” Hannah shrieked.

  “I killed a king,” Tamsin said. “I saved my soul.” Her giant flaming hands hovered in the air above her.

  The portal yawned wider. Grace sobbed with effort to keep it open.

  “Your soul? Your soul?” Hannah said. “What about my crown? My future?”

  Cash tried to leap off the balcony, to get away from crazy ass Hannah and Grace, but Hannah caught him in her magic and lifted him in the air. “You saved her soul, didn’t you? Well, aren’t you a good doggie.” But before Cash could respond, Hannah slashed at his arm with her wand, severing his hand from the rest of him. Blood sprayed across her face.

  Tamsin cried out in anguish.

  Hannah caught Cash’s hand in mid air, looked at it and then tossed it into Grace’s portal, soul gem and all. “Oops,” Hannah said.

  Cash howled in rage and pain and then leapt through the portal to catch her soul.

  “Cash!” Tamsin yelled. And before she could even comprehend what she was doing, she picked up Gray and Rye with her giant flaming fists and followed Cash through the portal.

  Into Erebus.

  But what happened to Tamsin?

  You can find out on July 17th in

  HOLD BACK THE NIGHT.

  Available for pre-order soon.

  Join my mailing list for sneak previews of book two and special giveaways.

  the Lick of Fire series

  Warning: HOT reads ahead.

  Enter this supernatural world of fire and heat, magic and adventure, and get lost in everything DARK, delicious and FIRE.

  The Lick of Fire Series is a collection of 12 bestselling authors brining you a new story every week. With three books per author you’ll have plenty to keep you busy!

  This must-read series is edgier, hungrier and action-packed with tales of Dragons, Phoenixes, Vampires, Berserker Dragons, Pyromancers and Hellhounds that will leave your heart pounding and your pulse racing.

  Join the Lick of Fire reader’s group.

  About the Author

  Jacqueline Sweet is the USA Today bestselling author of the sexy and hilarious Bearfield paranormal romances, and urban fantasies set at the wizarding school of the Penrose University of Magic.

  She lives in Oakland, California with her fated mate and their family.

  Join her mailing list for free books and sneak previews.

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  Please enjoy these bonus stories from the Penrose University of Magic

  School of Ice & Whispers

  a Penrose University of Magic novel by Jacqueline Sweet & Devon March

  A team of misfit witches must stage a heist when an otherworldly creature threatens the sexiest professor on campus.

  1

  “Ten days to go,” Tatiana Sterling reminded herself. “Just ten days. You can stick it out that long.” Her two roommates didn’t hear her. One had her noise canceling headphones firmly in place while she studied and the other had cast a silence charm on her side of the room. She was waving her wand about frantically and crying so hard her face had gone crimson, but there were strict rules they’d set up to make life livable in room 224 and the first and most important was Don’t Go Into Ruby’s Cone of Silence.

  The first time Tiana had witnessed her roommate crying and screaming in absolute silence her heart had leapt into her throat with the urgency of needing to help her. But now—three months and seven days later—it was old hat.

  Apparently Ruby needed some freak out time every day to deal with the stress of her schoolwork. And Connie, the other roomie, kept her grades up with quasi-illegal focusing charms that she drew on her skin every morning with her wand.

  The Penrose University of Magic was a madhouse disguised as a university for witches and Tiana couldn’t wait to leave.

  Tiana checked the time and swore loudly. She was running late for the one bright spot in all of her schedule. One on one counseling with Professor Harrison.

  She grabbed her bag, opened the window and leapt out, falling two stories before uttering the incantation that removed momentum—Bardot’s Feet Like Feathers—and touching the ground soft as a cat. It was one of the first spells her mother had taught her and it was amongst the most useful in her hunter’s arsenal.

  Tiana didn’t see her two roommates glance up from their homework and therapy and roll their eyes at her flamboyant exit. But it wouldn’t have surprised her either. They were witches and she, at heart, was a hunter. How could they possibly get along?

  Other magic schools had stricter policies about on-campus magic use. The Northern California Polyarcane Institute, for example, only allowed spells and charms within designated classrooms or laboratories. Whereas the squamous, undefinable Dunwich College encouraged students to limit magic use to the daylight hours to limit the chances of ancient eldritch beings awakening at night.

  But at Penrose, it was a free-for-all. The administration believed that freedom and competition were the best ways to train a generation of witches and wizards. So anywhere on campus was fair game for magic and at this point in the semester no one even blinked when Tiana traced runes of swiftness on the bottoms of her boots and ran so fast that the last of the autumn leaves whipped up into tiny tornadoes behind her.

  She couldn’t be late to see Professor Harrison. He had a very serious policy of closing his door if a student was more than five minutes tardy for office hours and she needed him to sign off on her directed study. If he didn’t sign off, she didn’t complete the semester. And if she didn’t complete the semester, her mother would keep her at this loony bin of a school for another four months.

  It was the deal she’d struck with her folks. The Deal. Tiana could hear the capital letters when her parents said it.

  Moving as a blur across campus, she checked the time on her phone and knew she wouldn’t make it.

  The admin building loomed ahead of her, black as obsidian and with a profile that made it look like it had been grown more than built, as if enormous insects had secreted the materials at the behest of some mad god. She’d have to run inside, go up seven flights of stairs, and navigate the maze of hallways.

  She shook her head.

  There wasn’t time for that.

  Why did this always happen to her?

  Tiana stopped outside the building and used her wand to scratch the speed-enhancing runes off of her shoes. The glowing characters vanished in puffs of golden smoke and she quickly replaced them with a new set of runes.

  Some students at Penrose didn’t cast their first spell until they were already at the school. Most took up magic in middle school. Tiana had been magically active since she was four.

  The runes she wrote on her shoes and on her palms glowed with a deep purple light. It was advanced stuff, the binding of a spider totem to your soul for a short time. As a child she’d used it to scale the refrigerator to steal cookies. But now, at the age of nineteen, she used it to scale the outside of the administration building. She ran up the walls in a stuttering motion, making sure to never have both feet in the air at the same time. Her boots slapped hard against the black stone walls, clinging to the surface with magical force.

  The windows on the admin building had been enchanted to be invisible from the outside and perfectly clear from within. It helped with the building’s alien-bug-invasion look while also providing lovely views for the staff. But it also meant that Tiana, scaling the building like a spider, had no way of being sure she knew what floor she was on.

  She was pretty sure. Mostly sure.

  She had a really good feeling that she wa
s on the seventh floor.

  With more time she could have prepared with schematics of the building—her father adored schematics and swore they were the key to a good hunt—but she didn’t have time.

  In fact, she was late already. Professor Harrison was closing the door and locking it and preparing to mark her down in his book as Incomplete.

  She only had one chance left and it was not a great one.

  Tiana took a deep breath and drew her wand out from her thigh holster. She hummed a First Nation’s song of passage and drew on the wall of the building a large circle, just big enough for her to squeeze through.

  The Penrose buildings were all enchanted up the wazoo against every kind of magical alteration or misfire. They had to be, otherwise every first year would bring the place tumbling down around them with stray charms and mispronounced words of power. Still, there was a solid subculture of figuring ways around the protections and the one friend Tiana had made in her semester at Penrose, Desdemona Cho, had taught her all she knew.

  The song persuaded the earth to be smoke when it worked right, but only as long as you kept singing and also only for one breath. It made sense when an entire cadre of mages performed it, taking turns with the song and the breathing. But a solo hunter-witch like Tiana? It should have been impossible.

  But what other choice did she have?

  She had to move fast, to throw herself through the side of the building, passing through the stone-that-dreamed-it-was-smoke, before the spell broke. If it broke while she passed through, it would cut her in half. Stone was thick headed and stubborn and merciless, just like her mom. On the other hand, if she’d messed up the song she’d just crack her face hard into a stone building seven stories above the earth and probably plummet to her death.

  But since the alternative was staying at Penrose another semester, she did it.

  Tiana hummed the song, lulling the stones to sleep in the circle she’d drawn and leapt through the walls.

  The stone was as cold as the grave as she swam through it. It fought her, pushed back at her. Stone didn’t want to be smoke. It wanted to be stone.

  The wall was a meter thick and for a tiny shivering moment all was blackness and cold and Tiana’s song was fading.

  What a stupid way to die, she thought. What an absolutely ridiculous way this would be for me to find my end. I always thought I’d go out young, but in a blaze of glory, fighting a dragon or sacrificing myself to save the world. But not like this, not stuck in a wall in a glorified office building.

  But then … light.

  She tumbled into Professor Harrison’s office and tucked into a roll, popped up and landed in one of his threadbare gray chairs. Her momentum tipped it up onto two legs and for the briefest of moments she thought she was going to flip over, but the chair righted itself and came down with a thump.

  “Hey, Mr. H,” Tiana said with a grin.

  Professor Harrison removed his wire framed glasses from his handsome face and pinched the bridge of his handsome nose and said in the most handsome voice imaginable, “You know, Miss Sterling, if you’d only leave your dorm five minutes earlier you wouldn’t always have to do this sort of thing.”

  2

  “This is our final meeting,” Professor Harrison said in a voice that was nothing but professional but which still made Tiana squirm in her chair. It wasn’t magic—she’d checked him out—but something about the particular tone or vibration just made something inside her resonate.

  “Yes, Professor,” Tiana said, trying to sound polite and attentive and like the good student she most certainly wasn’t. She sat up straight in her chair folder her hands in her lap and unobtrusively used her wand to scratch the smoking runes from the soles of her boots.

  “Look,” he began, “I know you have a rather relaxed approach to your education, but as your assigned counselor it’s my job to not just review how you’ve performed in your independent study but also how all of your classes have been going.” The suit he was wearing was a rich cocoa color that her mother always called “grad student brown.” Woven into the fabric were silver threads that caught the light when he moved just right and revealed a constellation of protective spells.

  This was new.

  The professor’s speciality was in empathy magic, not defensive arts. At a glance Tiana could spot five different runes that were incorrectly drawn and seven more that canceled others out. It was beautiful work—but it was also a bomb waiting to go off.

  “Just to keep this formal,” he said, drawing her attention away from his wards, “lets run through your performance.”

  Tiana rolled her eyes. “In every class I achieved a grade that was enough to technically pass the class.”

  Professor Harrison cocked one perfectly handsome eyebrow at her. “Marston says you missed every one of her classes, except for the first day and the final exam.”

  “And I passed it,” Tiana said. The bratty tone in her voice was a surprise. She needed to lock that down. Heightened emotions were a definite side effect of too much magic use and the dismissive way that Harrison spoke to her reminded her so much of her dad. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Professor. I’ve been hunting things and fighting the darkness since before any of my peers even knew what a wand was.”

  “I get it. You’re the Doogie Howser of witches.”

  “The who?”

  “I’m not that old,” Professor Harrison said. “I’m twenty-six, but somehow you students make me feel ancient every time I talk to you.” He flipped open a paper file. “So you never watched tv as a kid?”

  “My mom is a nature witch. Electricity ruins her focus.”

  “And you didn’t have many friends growing up, right?”

  Tiana frowned. What did any of this have to do with passing her classes? “We moved around a lot. My dad was my best friend.” She took a breath. “And I had a dog.”

  The runes surrounding Professor Harrison crackled and sparked. He jerked in his chair, glanced around quickly and then slumped down.

  Tiana waited for him to talk, to address the sparking rune-covered elephant in the room. But when the Professor didn’t stir, she asked in her most gentle voice, “Is everything okay?”

  Harrison’s eyes were far away and unfocused as he spoke. “Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Sterling? Real ghosts, not the illusions or psychic imprints that most people confuse for ghosts.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “They’re rare but I’ve hunted them before.”

  “How do you kill a ghost? How do you kill that which is already dead?” Harrison sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, I haven’t been sleeping well. I shouldn’t unload this on a student.”

  “Don’t think of me as student,” she said. But it was the wrong thing to say and it snapped Harrison out of his reverie.

  “A student. Right.” The professor straightened and thumbed through the papers in his folder. “We’re here to evaluate your performance and to determine if you’re eligible to pass my class.”

  Ghosts. Could that be why he’d covered himself in runes? They were usually harmless, from what she knew, and the events most people blamed on ghosts were really an untrained mage with emotional issues lashing out. There were entities at the school that the students called ghosts, but they weren’t. Not really. They were afterimages, imprinted on a space by trauma, and the residual magic energy that every student leaked brought them out. Technically, she knew, they were spectral resonances or specters. They were utterly harmless. Scary, for sure. But just as harmless as watching a movie.

  They were also her dad’s favorite thing to hunt. When someone called him out to an old spooky house or a deserted midnight road in the hills of California and he saw it was a specter, well that was an easy payday. A little bit of salt and iron to disrupt the flow of magical energy and then his special daughter could channel the magical energy into herself and they’d be gone by morning. It could take decades for the specter to gather enough energy to manifest again. They c
ould do the work in three minutes flat, but her dad knew that clients appreciated a big show to go with their results.

  Showmanship was an oft overlooked part of being a hunter.

  Tiana blinked.

  Professor Harrison had been talking and she’d completely missed it, lost in her own thoughts.

  “What was that last part?” she asked.

  “I’m an empath, Miss Sterling. You know that, yes?” The professor’s voice was stern and pissed all of a sudden. He removed his wire rim glasses and gave her the look and his eyes were such a beautiful molten brown and deep and perfect that it was like he’d punched her. “You’re not paying attention, even now when you’re on the verge of failing everything and remaining here another semester. You’re just not taking this seriously.”

  Shame and anger rose in her, twin flames that assaulted her self control. “You can’t do that! I passed all my classes. I already know everything they’re trying to teach me!” She was standing now. Pointing a finger at her professor. “You just need to sign those papers and you’ll never have to see my face again.”

  Professor Harrison jumped to his feet, planted his fists on the desk and leaned forward. “No, Miss Sterling. I’m not going to do that. You may have convinced your other instructors to let you breeze by doing the bare minimum, but I’m not convinced you’ve done a damn bit of work for my class.” He stabbed one finger at the class description on his desk. It was the description she’d written out and presented to the school, asking for a self-directed study into hunting monsters and stopping dark magic. “You wrote up a plan for an independent study about topics you already had mastery of. That isn’t learning, Miss Sterling. It’s just wasting my time.”

  It would be so easy to slap him. She could seize one of his thumbs, apply pressure, and flip him over so he was face down on the desk. She could kick the desk into his knees and then uppercut him, breaking his jaw. How dare he threaten to fail her? He wasn’t wrong—she had explicitly designed a class to teach herself what she already knew—but that just made it worse. The shame burned hot but her anger was hotter still. And his shockingly deep amber eyes were so angry with her.