Emerge: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance

by Lena Mae Hill

  And what had it all been for?

  She’d told me I was her son. She had lied, and now, she was burning in hell right beside my whoring real mother. She was dead, and I hated her for it because now I couldn’t properly hate her for lying to me. I couldn’t be angry at her the way I was angry at Dad. The way I was angry at Xander for knowing all along and not telling us. We were supposed to tell each other everything.

  I was angry at Eliot for noticing that Zeke wasn’t our brother and not telling me. I was angry at Peyton and Zeke for being real siblings. For being so cheerful about the whole world, when they were going to hell right beside the rest of us—Peyton for loving her girlfriend, Zeke for acting on the love for his girlfriends. I was angry at the Bible for saying something so stupid could make you go to hell.

  Basically, I was just pissed at everyone and everything in the world. I cleaned up the shower, dressed, and headed down to the studio. Checking the hall, I unlocked the door and slipped inside.

  An apocalyptic scene greeted me. An abandoned baby carriage holding an infant, its cheeks sunken and eyes glassy, a fly sitting on its forehead. Conjoined twins stood nearby, stabbing each other with knives. Dead animals lay in the street behind them. Flames licked up from the city on the horizon. In the background, a giant humanoid shape lumbered toward the city.

  Had I done this? Hands shaking, I grabbed a can of white paint, sloshed it into a paint tray, grabbed a roller stiffened with too many coats of paint, and began to slap it over the horrifying scene. How many times had I done this now? They just kept coming back.

  Sometimes, I still had trouble believing this came from my hand, from my mind. If it weren’t for the paint all over my clothes, I might believe someone else had done it just to make me think I was losing my mind. I might believe that if I hadn’t been interrupted by a knock at the door or a phone call on occasion, only to look down and find a pallet beside me and a brush in one hand, poised over a still-wet, half-finished portrait of a screaming woman lying in a doorway, a needle protruding from her arm and feral cats feasting on her innards while a man stood over her watching.

  My fake dad’s words echoed in my head. Giants. Possession. People being stalked and killed, driven mad. Maybe I was the demon they were looking for. Maybe I’d come through the gate that night—the gate to hell. Maybe my real mother was right about me, but no one had listened. If I could do this with no memory of it, in some kind of fugue state, then maybe I could also drive my mother mad and make people hang themselves.

  I’d just finished covering the wall with a sloppy coat of paint when my phone chimed. It was time for dinner with the family. Time to pretend that I was totally fine with the fact that I’d been lied to my whole life. Everyone else seemed okey-dokey with it. If I was the crazy one, how come I was the only one having a normal reaction to that news?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Eliot

  After dinner I called a hot tub meeting. We used to do those a lot when Mom was getting worse toward the end. We’d go out and sit there pretending nothing was happening in the house, so we wouldn’t have to hear her crying. We’d talk about anything but her and Dad. Other times, we’d discuss only them, trying to figure out what to do.

  She and Dad had brought us together by adopting us, but in a sick way, her illness was what kept us close all those years. When it was in the house, her illness had acted as bond between us, a shared secret. Our united front had kept it from prying eyes and inquiring minds. Our family fought it as one, until the end.

  Once she was gone, though, her shadow became a trap, clinging and claustrophobic. We’d each done what we could to escape it. We’d grown apart, each of us grieving in our own way, alone or with other friends. Since she died, we hadn’t met like this. But now we had a reason to.

  Gwen was bringing us back together, whether she knew it or not.

  I climbed in the hot tub and waited. The day had been a little warmer than usual, but the temperature was dropping again now that it was dark. A minute later, Zeke trotted out and hopped in, making a wave roll through the tub.

  “At least there’s not enough water to almost drown one of us,” he said with a grin. “What’s up?”

  “Let’s wait for the others,” I said just as Xander slinked out and slid into the tub.

  I was wary about having all six of us in such close proximity. As each of my siblings arrived, the particles in the air moved faster, growing more and more excited. There had always been a little bit of this when we got together. It made us buoyant, exuberant, reckless. Sometimes, it was hard to remember that we weren’t invincible. But now that we’d been blowing out windows and making waves, I didn’t know what to expect.

  Peyton and Gwen arrived together, clutching robes around them. Peyton tossed hers in a chair and slid into the tub, winding her ponytail into a bun so it wouldn’t get wet. Gwen stood beside the hot tub, looking uncertain but so cute I wanted to reach out and take her hand and pull her into my arms. I had a feeling that telling her all the things I told most girls wouldn’t work on her, though. She probably wouldn’t even know flirting when she saw it.

  “Come on in, water’s great,” Zeke said with an easy grin, leaning back and laying his arms along the rim of the hot tub.

  “Yeah, don’t stand out there, you’ll freeze,” Peyton said, scooting over toward Zeke. The hot tub would have fit a dozen people, though, so there was plenty of room. Steam rose in plumes from the water bubbling gently around us. Gwen stood there for a few seconds longer, like she didn’t know how to get into a hot tub. She probably didn’t. From what I knew of her life so far, she hadn’t been in a lot of hot tubs.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Xander said, standing and stepping from the tub. I glanced sideways at Gwen, observing whether she noticed the way he looked with his tattoos showing and water cascading over his body. She definitely had.

  I was going to have to hit the weights harder if I wanted to keep up.

  Xander scooped Gwen up in his arms and stepped into the hot tub, ignoring her cry of surprise. Releasing her with a smirk, he sat down and leaned back, mirroring Zeke’s casual position. On him, it looked more like gloating.

  Gwen’s robe billowed out around her, floating on top of the water. I swear the temperature in the water went up about ten degrees until it was almost painful.

  I caught Gwen’s bewildered, desperate expression and chose that moment to divert attention from her. “Where’s Finn?”

  Peyton twisted around to check the door, and Zeke leaned over the side of the tub to snag his phone from the glass table nearby. Gwen shot me a quick, relieved smile and struggled out of her robe. I barely caught a glimpse of her slim, feminine form, clad in a loose white T-shirt over one of Peyton’s swimsuits. She quickly slipped under the water’s surface, seating herself halfway between me and Zeke.

  Now that we were all here, I turned my attention to my phone. I’d been so busy waiting for Gwen to peel off her robe that I’d barely realized my scatterbrained twin was absent.

  Not twin, I reminded myself. He wasn’t even biologically my brother, but I knew better than to think that meant anything. The sixteen years we’d spent sharing our every thought with each other mattered. We would always be brothers, even if we didn’t share a single strand of DNA.

  “He’s on his way,” Zeke said, setting down his phone. “What do we do when he gets here?”

  “Don’t get too close?” Peyton asked.

  “I’ve been reading up on Norse mythology,” Gwen said quietly.

  “I don’t know if we can call it mythology if it’s real,” I said. Then I cursed myself for sounding like a pedantic asshat. She didn’t want a lecture. She had information to share. I was all about solving this puzzle, so I shut my mouth and waited for her to go on.

  A minute later, Finn came shuffling out in a pair of swim trunks and slid into the hot tub. The temperature immediately spiked, and the jets began churning the water. I stood, ready to hop out if it got hotter, but after a
minute, I started to adjust to the new heat.

  “So tell us what you found out, Gwen,” Zeke said, turning the dial to shut off the jets. Nothing happened, but none of us moved to do anything more about it. We had bigger concerns tonight.

  Gwen took a breath. “Okay, so there’s this world, the human world, which is called Midgard. And there’s eight other worlds, all connected in this giant tree of life.” She stopped speaking and looked around at us, as if expecting someone to stop her or maybe laugh. I noticed her eyes dropped before meeting Xander’s, and I made sure to offer her my most encouraging smile. I wasn’t sure what had happened between them, but I didn’t like the way she shrank back from him.

  We were all in this together.

  “Go on,” Zeke said, moving closer to her. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought he’d taken her hand. I should have given her support first.

  “According to this, the whole thing will end when this giant wolf named Fenrir breaks free of his chains and destroys the gods in what we’d probably call the apocalypse. They called it Ragnarok.”

  I’d done a little reading myself, and I knew she was giving us the basics, but I didn’t want to stop her. For once she seemed to have found her stride, her uncertainty melting away. When she spoke about what she’d read, her whole face changed, and her body language grew more confident and assertive. It was like watching a bud open, the leaves unfurling from inside and knowing exactly which direction to grow.

  “I don’t know a lot,” Gwen admitted, glancing at the house. “I tried asking my mom, but she just said we had to join together as one.”

  “Like sex?” Zeke blurted out.

  Color washed over Gwen’s cheeks, and she extricated her hand from his. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think our parents would have gotten married if that’s what we were supposed to do. She said she’d done her job by marrying your dad. But I can ask again when she’s more…lucid.”

  “They don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Xander said quietly from his end of the tub. “They told us all they know. It’s up to us to figure it out.”

  Gwen took a breath as if gathering strength to go on. “I think that whatever I saw on the beach was part of it. I think we need to complete her somehow.”

  Zeke opened his mouth, and I just knew he was going to say “like sex” again, so I spoke before he could. “What do you have in mind, Gwen?”

  “She said something about joining to complete a circle. Maybe it’s really that simple. Join hands and make a circle.”

  Xander muttered something about witchy nonsense.

  “We could at least try it,” Gwen said. “If everyone wants to.”

  Peyton perked up. “I used to do stuff like that in middle school,” she said, scooting toward Zeke and reaching for his hand. “I was sure I was a witch. Maybe I am. I’m down to find out.”

  “I’m down for anything,” Zeke said, taking Gwen’s hand again.

  When I saw the discomfort that gave Gwen after his earlier comment, I knew I had to make her feel better in whatever way I could. It was a compulsion beyond my control. Before I knew it, I was sliding along the bench seat and gathering Gwen’s small hand in mine.

  “We’ve never all touched at the same time,” I said. “But after seeing what happened when we were in the same room, it’s got to do something. I just hope we don’t boil ourselves to death.”

  “Yeah, maybe we should get out of the hot tub,” Finn said, his shoulders hunched.

  “Whatever’s going to happen will happen,” Xander said, gliding through the water toward us. “If we don’t boil in here, we’ll be thrown to our deaths or some shit. Let’s just get it over with.”

  He found his spot on Peyton’s other side, and I knew something was going to happen. Even before Finn joined the circle, the vibration in the air was almost painful. Sparks of electricity seemed to cling to the hair on my legs, even though they were submerged in water.

  Looking around at my siblings, I knew we were all in the right place. Somehow, we’d always fallen into this pattern, and Gwen fit perfectly into the circle. Zeke was always the center, and now, between the only two girls, he seemed like a king holding court. Peyton was at his side, Xander there to protect her and Finn when Zeke wasn’t. Finn’s hand waited to connect with mine, twins no matter what. And on my other side, Gwen formed the link that had always been missing between me and Zeke, calming the competitive waters between us.

  “What’ll it hurt to try?” I said, holding out my hand to my cautious brother. In truth, I had no idea if it would hurt one or all of us. But I knew something was going to happen. It was building, brewing like a storm. I could almost smell the ozone in the air.

  “He doesn’t have to,” Gwen said, squeezing my other hand. She turned to Finn. “It was just an idea. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want.”

  “He’s one of us,” Zeke said.

  Finn nodded, his eyes on Gwen. Somehow, she was the catalyst that had set all this off. I didn’t know how, and it was killing me that I couldn’t figure it out. If this gave us answers, it was worth a few scorched leg hairs.

  “Zeke’s right,” Finn said. “Like it or not, we’re all part of whatever’s going on. I guess I’m in. Let’s see what happens.”

  With that, he took hold of my hand, completing the circle.

  Chapter Thirty

  Gwen

  An invisible force gripped me and held me in place, as if I’d been caught in an inescapable current of electricity. A tiny tornado seemed to spiral in the center of the circle we made, pulling up the water. As it spun, it became taller and taller, until a ten-foot water spout whirled in the center of the hot tub. Suddenly, it exploded in a gust of wind that blasted in every direction, whipping our hair back. Hot water blasted into our faces and across the deck.

  Panic flooded through me, but my hands refused to unclench from those of my new family. We were plugged into something beyond us, and it wasn’t ready to release us. The hot water left churning around us went still, the surface flat Kansas corn country, and the air around us fell still. I shot a look around the group, only then realizing they were experiencing the same sensations I was. Their wide eyes mirrored my own surprise and fear.

  Suddenly, from the steam rising from the water, a figure began to form. Our faces turned up as it rose, shining from the center of our circle. The light nearly blinded me, and I had to squint to keep my eyes open. It was the figure of a man with a golden beard that matched his hair. And when I say golden, I don’t mean blonde. I mean it was like twenty-four carat gold that radiated light. He didn’t really have a face, just a blinding white orb as bright as the sun.

  “My pieces are assembling,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a voice we heard with our ears, but one that was felt as truth, that came from around us and inside us. Somehow, we’d made it together by joining hands.

  “You did not make me, silly humans,” the voice said, and I jolted at the realization he’d seen my thoughts. “I fathered many races in your world, but you cannot make a god. I am the son of Odin.”

  “Are you here to destroy us?” Peyton asked.

  “If I destroyed you, I would be destroying myself,” the god said. “For it is I that you have been hosting.”

  “Not demons?” Finn asked. Strangely, I wasn’t sure if he’d spoken either. His voice had the same anchorless effect as the god’s, so I didn’t know if we were all now reading each other’s minds.

  “You have been hosting a god,” the voice said. “I came into the world of Midgard the night you were born. I used to wander this land, but the bridge has weakened, and gods no longer enter this world as freely.”

  “Which one of us is hosting you?” asked Zeke’s voice. “It’s me, right? Because I totally feel like a god sometimes.”

  “All of you,” the god said. “A mere mortal could not withstand the presence of a god, so we have to divide ourselves among several. The more of my pieces join together, the more easily I can s
peak to you. One of you holds the central part of me. You humans might call it…the stomach. The life force.”

  “One of us is god guts,” Zeke said.

  “Perhaps God Essence is a better word. The mortal with my Essence must be present for me to speak to you.”

  “You’re speaking to us now,” I said. “That means she’s here now, right?”

  “That is right, mortal.”

  “Who are you?” Eliot asked.

  “I am Heimdall,” the god answered. “The gatekeeper of the worlds and guardian of Bifrost.”

  “Bifrost?” Eliot asked. The intention behind his question came through to me like a shadow following the words. He wanted to know why this god was here, what it needed.

  “Bifrost is the bridge in the sky,” Heimdall said. “It connects your world with the world of the gods. It is my job to keep giants from crossing the bridge into Asgard.”

  “You want us to stop giants?” I asked.

  “First, you must assemble the rest of my pieces. Only when you are all together am I complete. There are nine human hosts, just as I am born of nine mothers.”

  I wanted to point out two very valid concerns. First of all, there were only six of us, and second of all, you couldn’t actually be born from more than one mother. But hey, maybe the gods had different rules about things like logic and, you know, counting. Who was I to argue?

  Apparently, Zeke had no such reservations.

  “Wait, where’s the nine?” he asked. “Even if you count our parents, it’s only eight. Right?” He looked around the circle at us, as if he might have done the math wrong.

  “My Essence calls to all my parts,” Heimdall said. “She is like the trunk of a tree, and the rest are the branches. She must summon all nine to complete the journey across the bridge.”

  “Who’s the center?” Peyton asked. “It’s not me, right? It’s Gwen.”

  I shrank back. If my weeks on the road were any indication, I sure didn’t have this eau de god. “Me?” I asked. “Why me?”