The Chosen Coven Series Box Set

by D L Blade

“Thanks, Melissa,” I said, pulling my focus back to the room.

  She zipped up the bag and grabbed a notebook off a metal desk in the corner of the room. “My report will state that an ice axe was most likely the weapon. Manner of death: homicide. Cause of death: blood loss.”

  Caleb glanced at me then shook Melissa’s hand as if he had just completed a business meeting. “Thank you.”

  I rolled my eyes, directing my attention away from them so they didn’t see. They were being ridiculous. I wasn’t blind. I knew they had been dating, but he was being so weird about sharing that with me.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Caleb said, and turned back to me. “Let’s go train.”

  Last year, after my mom died, I inherited everything she had, including what was already in my trust. I decided it was best to get my own place, so I didn’t put Lily’s life in danger within our “witches vs. vampire” crossfire. Yes, she had magic to protect herself, but even with her powers, this was too much for her to handle. I didn’t want her involved and risking her life for me anymore, but also, she had someone in her life now who didn’t know about us. That alone could put him in danger.

  Lily had been dating Bradley since last December. He was handsome, but Bradley was the epitome of a stereotypical computer geek. He wore thick glasses, hair parted to one side, and if he wasn’t wearing a Star Wars shirt or his favorite black shirt with yellow, vinyl lettering that read, “I’m Geeky and I Know It,” he wore a white button-up short-sleeve with suspenders and a bow tie. I didn’t judge his lack of fashion sense because he made her laugh, and that was what mattered to her and to me.

  Caleb had helped me find a property in East Greenwich with the rest of the coven. He still had his cabin in Salem, but he and his father mostly slept at Abigail’s mansion in her spare rooms. Her place was big enough, and once I turned Abigail and Desiree human again, they hadn’t been back to the house. Being able to visit tropical locations and seeing a world in the daylight again was the only thing that mattered to them anymore.

  Riley and Amber formed their own pack and resided in Providence so Riley could live in the dorms at Brown University. It didn’t matter that he was a werewolf now. He was going to attend college. His roommate at Brown, Aaron, and his sister, Hannah, became werewolves shortly after their fall semester. Riley explained that no one had forced them into being werewolves, like he had been, but that they had chosen to be bitten.

  Riley informed me at a coffee shop around January that he and Amber were dating, but that they kept the pack a priority. They’d assist us when we needed help tracking down a vampire clan. I, of course, hated getting him involved, but the other four in the coven felt we fought better with a wolf pack by our side.

  Shannon moved up north to attend the University of Connecticut. She had always planned to attend Brown with us, but it was too close to everything that happened last year.

  I got it. I didn’t want my friends involved in this life.

  Ever.

  Shannon was smart to pretend nothing supernatural was going on around her. We spoke a few times a week on the phone, but we kept the conversations brief, and she was careful not to ask questions that could lead to answers she didn’t want to hear.

  And then there was Cami . . .

  I entered Cami’s room quietly and spotted her in the corner of her dark, gloomy bedroom, staring at a canvas painted with black swirls, mist-like, surrounding a grove of trees. “Oh, no. This is all wrong. It needs more black,” she said. She gripped the paint brush next to her and glided the black paint around the edges, circling the brush to the center. “That’s better.” She turned around to face me. “Hi, Mercy.” Her voice was flat and emotionless.

  She had removed all the pastel colors that had covered the walls and furniture of her room the moment they’d released her from the hospital. “The bright colors are blinding me,” she had told me.

  “Hey, Cami.” I stepped further into her room, scanning over the walls covered in paintings like the one she worked on now.

  Always black.

  Always depressing.

  None of her paintings made sense. Black paint covered most of the canvas, usually surrounding a forest or a river. It was unsettling.

  After Cami awoke from her “coma,” she wasn’t Cami anymore. I know she must have seen disturbing images or felt something during her possession that forever changed her, and there wasn’t a spell we could conjure to bring her back from that nightmare. I leaned down next to her and looked up at the painting. “It’s beautiful. Can I have this one? It will look great in our training room.”

  She stared at her feet, avoiding eye contact with me as she nodded.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” She looked up and grabbed my wrist as if she were trying to keep me from leaving. I grabbed her hand and pried her fingers from my wrist. “Caleb and I are going to train for the rest of the day with my coven, but I told him I wanted to stop by to see you. I’ll be back. I promise.”

  I lowered her hand toward the paintbrush.

  “Are you sleeping?” I asked her. She shook her head, keeping her eyes on her feet. “Okay.” I pulled out two sleeping pills from my purse and placed them on her nightstand. I had been supplying them for her a few times a week because every spell we had tried wasn’t working. I grabbed the painting on the easel and replaced the spot with a blank canvas for her. She grabbed the paintbrush and started over.

  Back at my house, I entered the spacious basement where we had been training for the last year. Ezra and Simon shared a room in the far-left corner, sleeping on a bunkbed, like two college roommates, while we used the rest of the space.

  We had lined the walls with steel hooks and racks we could hang our wooden stakes and silver daggers on, and in the center laid a two-inch-thick pad that stretched from one end of the room to the other. Ezra bought a boxing bag that we kept in the corner by the bathroom, and he and I were the only ones who ever really worked out with it.

  Leah descended the stairs with her hair pulled up in a short ponytail, barefoot and wearing a tank top with yoga pants. She was tiny, especially without shoes, but she could do some damage when she fought.

  “Was it a vampire or human?” she asked us.

  “Vampire,” Caleb said as I opened my mouth to answer her.

  “More fun for us.” Ezra beamed, coming over to the pad while he pounded his right fist into his palm.

  “Ezra, be sensitive. Mercy knew him,” Leah snapped.

  “It’s fine. He was a great guy, but we have to focus on our mission. Caleb is having Roland look into The Black Horse clan,” I explained.

  Leah nodded. “Those are good places to start. We’ve been waiting for that clan to start something.”

  The Black Horse had moved to Providence shortly after I went through my Awakening, but they’d agreed to stay out of our way. I hadn’t met any of the vampires from the clan, but Roland had a friend, Marcus, who was part of their “family.” Marcus never reported any mischief that went on within the clan. He promised us they had changed their questionable behavior after my Awakening, and they were trying to change the future of how vampires treated the humans and witches they came across. As much as I wanted to trust Marcus, I wasn’t ready, yet.

  The nightclub they built had broken ground this spring and had opened two weeks ago. Regardless of Marcus’s reports, we still kept an eye on them, and we would especially pay closer attention to the clan now. Their reputation preceded them, and a nightclub would be the perfect hideaway in which to commit shady vampire crimes. It was dark, the windows hidden by shades to keep the vampires safe from the light, and entry to the underground level was by exclusive invitation only.

  “We haven’t had a body in months.” I tossed up a hand. “Then this happens. It’s perfect timing, don’t you think?”

  Simon appeared from the bedroom, carrying a bag in his hand, and tossed it on the floor. “Are we assuming they’re after Mercy again, given that it happened a few minutes from us?”r />
  “It is our hometown.” I faced Caleb. “This looks like something someone may do to get to me. What do you think?”

  Caleb was focused only on his phone.

  “Caleb?” Leah called.

  He looked up and sighed. “Probably, but we still need to investigate before we call them out and demand justice. We don’t want to create a war. I’ll check it out.”

  “Let me do it.” The pitch of my voice went up a notch. “Sarah can come over tonight to help me. I just need to scope the place and leave. Once I see what we’re up against, we can come up with a plan and discuss whether we should be focusing on them or somewhere else,” I explained, but I could already see Caleb shaking his head. He hated when I went undercover without him. “We aren’t making the same mistakes we did last year, Caleb. I can do this.” His mouth formed a straight line and he flared his nostrils. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’d feel safer if I were there.”

  “No way. The last time we investigated inside a bar, a vampire hit on me, and you broke his nose.”

  His jaw muscles tightened. “He healed.”

  I huffed and shook my head as I knelt to unzip the bag Simon had tossed onto the floor, ignoring Caleb’s bitter response. I grabbed five sets of hand wraps, tossed them over to everyone, and put on my own. “We’re sparring today. Leah, I’ll pair up with you. Caleb, you be the attacker this time. Ezra, you’re the victim. Simon, you can help Leah if Caleb gets the upper hand.”

  “I’m always the victim,” Ezra whined. “Let Simon be the bait, and I’ll be the vampire.”

  “You scream like a little girl, Ezra. You’re the perfect target,” I teased.

  Ezra stuck out his tongue, dragged his feet to the center of the mat, and laid down on his back. After a few more seconds of Ezra mumbling obscenities at us, he finally said, “Oh, no. Is that a vampire?” His voice was flat, and he crunched his face at Caleb, who hovered over him.

  Caleb pretended to show his fangs and dashed toward Ezra. Leah quickly leaped in his direction and pounced on his back like a tiger attacking her prey. She wrapped her arm around his neck and her legs around his waist. They struggled for a minute, with Caleb taking a few blows to the face, while she twisted her body and pulled his shoulder to the right. He lost his balance and fell to the floor.

  “Damn, Caleb. That was too easy,” Simon mocked. “I would have jumped in to help you, but she took you down too quickly.”

  “I’m still not going to hit her,” Caleb said, “but great job, Leah.” He looked around at the coven. “We need to be able to fight with our hands and not rely on magic. The amount of training we’ve done this year has helped us more than simply practicing our magic all these years. Our physical strength will sometimes be our saving grace. But we need more training.”

  “You need more training,” Leah mocked and giggled to herself.

  My phone rang and I turned from the group. “Hey, Joel. I was going to call you after we finish training,” I admitted before he started speaking.

  “Lily told me what happened to Tippy. What did you guys find out?”

  I explained to Joel what Melissa had discovered about Tippy’s body and the recent updates on The Black Horse clan, but I was only met with silence on the other end of the line.

  “Joel?”

  “Sorry. I’m just thinking,” he said. I heard Derek in the background saying something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. “I’ll do some digging around on my end, but don’t do anything until I find out more. Okay?”

  “Sure. Got it,” I lied, knowing we were going to that club tonight.

  After hanging up the phone, I turned to Caleb. “I need Sarah if I’m going to go to that club.” I took my gloves off and tossed them back into the bag. “You guys keep practicing. I’ll send her a text now.”

  Caleb turned to the rest of the coven, and they paired up again. Ezra was happy to be the one attacking Leah this time, as he had no problem throwing a punch at her. I respected that. We weren’t fragile girls. We were vampire hunters.

  I typed out a text to Sarah to let her know about our plans tonight.

  Me: Hey, can you make me a blonde tonight?

  I waited a minute before she responded.

  Sarah: Oh, boy, what’s going on?

  How do I put this without freaking her out?

  Me: There’s a new vampire club in Providence. I need to scope them out. We think it might be tied to the murder in East Greenwich.

  Sarah: Yikes, okay. I’ll be there at eight.

  Well, that was easy. Last time we went to a vampire lair undercover, someone had almost kidnapped her again. I hated putting her life in danger, but she was adamant on helping us because she had a power none of us possessed.

  I dried off the remaining water from my legs, then I heard a knock at my bedroom door.

  “Come in. I’m in the bathroom,” I shouted.

  I didn’t need to mess with makeup or do my hair, as we had that one covered. After my Awakening, Joel had performed a spell on me to mask my scent, as it was luring vampires to me left and right. It worked out perfectly to go undercover in the vampire underworld so we could take out the ones that were killing the innocent or had planned to. It also helped me find the vampires who yearned to be human again so I could change them back.

  After a few months, the plan wasn’t working anymore. They knew of my existence, and they knew my face. Every time I’d get close, they’d run like scared little rabbits.

  Sarah always had a plan, and this one was brilliant.

  “Okay, what look are we going for tonight? You said blonde, right?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Blonde, short pixie cut. Give me blue eyes and bring them in slightly. Make them rounder, too . . . oh, and bigger boobs.”

  She and I busted out laughing. “This really is my favorite part of the weekend,” she said.

  Sarah placed her hands on my face and chanted for a minute, and when she removed them, she clapped to herself. “Look at you!” She turned me around to face the bathroom mirror. She really did wonders with her power. Although I could control all the elements, I didn’t have every power there was, but thankfully, we had a nice balance of what we could do between our coven and our fellow witch allies.

  “Now, just like before, you can’t be more than twenty feet from me, or the spell wears off.” She pulled out a sexy, red spaghetti-strap dress from her bag. “Wear this.”

  The dress was stunning. I didn’t dress up much, but the occasional night out when I could put on a little more makeup than usual and wear a cute dress was fun.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked as she pulled out another dress, this one teal blue and strapless with sequins lining the bottom. “Pretty. It matches your eyes.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Now, off to get cute.” She bundled up the dress and padded to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

  Footsteps rounded the corner outside the bedroom walls. I turned around as Caleb entered.

  “Mercy?” he asked as our eyes met. Sarah always made me look different each time she cast a spell on me, so this face was new and unfamiliar to him.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  He sized me up and placed his hand on the top of my head, following the blonde strands down to my chin with his fingertips. “Be careful tonight,” he warned. “From what I’ve heard, this clan is ruthless.” He let go of my hair and looked over toward the bed where the red dress was spread out. “Are you wearing that?” he asked, his tone harsh and judgmental.

  “Yes, Caleb. I’m wearing that.” I rolled my eyes and moved toward the dress. I held it up and smiled to myself. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “You’re supposed to be inconspicuous, remember?”

  “Yes, I know, but I also need vampires to open up to me, so I need to look hot.” I placed the dress on the bed again.

  When I turned back around, he had stepped an inch closer and placed his hand on my cheek, c
aressing my soft skin under the pad of his fingertips. I stiffened and backed up. “Stop, Caleb,” I warned, but he only moved closer, closing the space between us.

  “Still nothing, huh? Just like that.” He snapped his fingers and frowned

  “Are you back to this again?”

  He stared at me, but it was distant. He lowered his brows and closed his eyes. “It was so selfish of you,” he said before opening them again. His hurtful words caused my body to tense.

  I balled my hands into fists as a rush of heat coursed through my body. Just hearing those accusatory words come out of his mouth made my heart pound hard against my chest, and for a moment, I felt my powers tremble inside of me, just begging to come out. “It was the most selfless thing I’ve ever done. I remember feeling something for you,” I admitted, still not relaxing my fists. “I still remember it. All the memories and all the love we once shared. The memory of it all is still there.”

  I finally relaxed when those words left me, as if I had been holding in a deep breath. It calmed me, but only enough for my heartrate to slow down and for my hands to relax. I was still angry that he was bringing this up again, especially now. Did I have to hurt him so badly that he’d finally let it go and leave me alone?

  “I sacrificed my feelings for you and Dorian for the greater good of the coven and everyone who relied on us to protect them,” I said, while trying not to glare so intently into his eyes. Those beautiful eyes that were the most intoxicating sight I had ever seen. Sometimes it was hard to look away, but I had to. I looked down. “I don’t regret it. I don’t regret any of it.” A stabbing pain ached in my chest as those words left my mouth.

  “Mercy—"

  I held up my hand. “I also remember the lies. I remember the deception you showed me over and over again for your own selfish needs. Even if I could reverse this spell and fall in love with you all over again, I wouldn’t. I don’t want to love you!”