Phoenixcry: A Reverse Harem Romance (The Rogue Witch Book 1)

by KT Strange

  Willa wrapped her arms around me in a quick hug. The first few weeks of my internship had whipped by, especially with her help. She hadn’t held my initial quitting against me, and done her best to teach me everything she knew about road management before I left for tour. Still, it wasn’t hard to feel underprepared.

  “You need anything, you text me. My phone’s always on,” she offered.

  “I know. We’ll be okay.”

  “Are you two gonna make out?” Charlie asked as he came up beside us, heaving his own bag into the back of the tour van. Willa made an annoyed noise.

  “If you weren’t so talented,” she left the threat up to his imagination but smiled anyway. Charlie had been working with her closely since the label first took interest in Phoenixcry, and I was pretty sure out of all them, she was closest and fondest of Charlie.

  “Thanks mom,” he teased, and jerked out of the way when she went to punch his shoulder.

  “All right,” Eli shouted from near the front of the van. “Load up, everyone.”

  Willa grabbed me in tight for another hug.

  “Don’t forget to put your tour pass on the driver’s seat at rest-stops if you’re going to the bathroom,” she said. “Or they might leave you behind.”

  “We’d never do that,” Finn said firmly, he walked up to her and wrapped his arms around us both. “Can anybody get in on this, or is it a girl-club thing?”

  I grumbled as his warmth seeped in through my hoodie, and the scent of him overwhelmed my senses. Willa squirmed, and ducked out from under his arm, seemingly unaffected by Finn’s closeness or his scent. The guys all made me go a little trembly though. I needed to work through that before I melted all over myself in the tour van.

  “Don’t be weird, Gunner,” Willa said.

  “Weird’s my brother,” he quipped.

  “I heard that,” Eli called.

  “Good.” Finn winked at me, and bumped his hip against mine. “Wanna sit in the back of the bus and talk business? Chrissy emailed me the actual approved social media plan after she saw my Instagram photo go up.”

  “I told you not to put it up,” I said with dismay, pulling out my phone to check out the feed. Willa watched us for a moment before she walked off. She was talking to Eli about the best route to take to avoid rush-hour when we got to the first tour stop we’d be on. Flicking my thumb through the feed I held my breath as the picture of us came up.

  The caption read:

  Heading out on the road. This girl’s gotta put up with us for over 45 days. Wish her luck.

  “It’s a good picture,” Finn defended.

  “You can’t see my face,” I said, and he laughed, making me realize how silly that was. The fans didn’t need to see my face. I was supposed to be invisible, behind the scenes. Chrissy had given me a big talk about it, how the band needed to appear available and unattached so female fans could envision themselves as attached. But they are unattached, Chrissy, I’d said. She’d given me a look and sighed, And they’re going to seem to stay that way, no matter what. Whatever she meant by that, I had no idea.

  “C’mon, faceless wonder. Let’s go grab our seats before Charlie sprawls out and takes them all with his crap.”

  “That’s not physically possible, and all my stuff is in the back,” Charlie argued mildly as we gave Willa one last hug each and piled into the van.

  “Get in tight everybody,” Ace said, sitting up in front with Eli. Apparently they’d patched up their argument from earlier. Ace held up his phone. “One picture for the road, of all of us in the tour van.” Finn scooped me up and set me in his lap, squishing me forward. I laughed as Ace took the picture; I was nearly falling off Finn’s lap.

  Eli fired up the engine and I sat back, doing my seatbelt. My stomach gave a jolt as the parking brake released, and we rolled forward. Ace let out a sigh of relief as we turned out onto the road. All the guys seemed more relaxed to finally be moving, and I knew that it wasn’t all just the excitement of going on a big tour. Part of it, I was sure, was them thinking of leaving behind the threat of being found by hunters. A shiver rolled down my back at that thought.

  “Say goodbye to the present,” Finn muttered as Willa waved to us and walked back inside the building.

  “Say hello to the future,” I whispered back, looking up at him. He swallowed hard and glanced away.

  “Let’s hope it’s good.”

  Fifteen

  Being on tour was boring. Mostly. Or at least, the first few hours after Finn and I wrapped up our plans for the social media (lots of pictures of the guys goofing off, minimal or nothing of me) that would go out over the next few days. Eli put on Muse, and Finn sang along for a few songs before Charlie told him to save his voice for the show.

  A few middle fingers flashed between the guys but they all settled down. Ace sat up high on his seat, staring at everything as it passed. Eli was steady behind the wheel, talking to Ace quietly as he drove. Charlie was on his phone, although I’d come to realize he spent a lot of time interacting with fans over the Facebook group. Finn was Snapchatting, a lot, and I had to dodge a few of his attempts to rope me into the pictures. Cash glared at him every time I grumbled and ducked out from under Finn’s arm.

  “You do that when we have a car-accident, and you’ll break her neck.” Cash was irritated, and I avoided his eyes. We hadn’t interacted much since he’d grabbed me outside the tour van earlier.

  “You’re just sour you’re not sitting next to her,” Finn replied, his spirits undampened. My phone buzzed and I looked at it.

  A text from Max.

  Have fun, peanut, and don’t forget to text me when you get into Redding!

  “That your boyfriend?” Finn asked, peering over my shoulder. A hand in his face, pushing him away, was all it took to get him to back off. I was getting a lot more comfortable, physically, especially around him. My sister had always been a perfect child and we’d never roughhoused like some of my friends with their siblings, so pushing Finn around, and even doing the same with Ace and Charlie was a little weird at first. One thing I’d noticed about the guys though? They were very physical. Constantly touching each other, punching, running a hand over someone’s shoulder, hair, back. It made me think of the close way that other pack-animals lived, and I couldn’t help, for a moment, to imagine them as wolves, tails up and nudging each other with their wet-cold noses.

  “That’s Max. I told you about her.”

  “Oh yeah. Max Morgan. That’s such a cool name, like a super-hero.”

  “Her first name is actually Mackenzie, and her boyfriend’s name, I mean, her ex-boyfriend’s last name was Mackenzie, and so she always joked that she was gonna be Mackenzie Mackenzie when they got married...” I trailed off. I felt so bad leaving Max behind. I texted her back, a picture out the side window of the van.

  “That’s fucking terrible. Mackenzie Mackenzie? Her boyfriend should take on her last name. That’d be the fair thing to do,” Finn said, stretching his front legs out. The tour van had captain chairs at the front, and another set of two chairs in the middle, then the kitchenette area, and a bench seat where Finn and I sat.

  “I don’t think most guys would be okay with taking their girlfriend’s name,” I said. He rolled his eyes.

  “Then they’re stupid,” he said with a shrug. “We’re, well, I mean, Eli’s top dog or whatever, but we still listen to our women. Women first. We’re mostly about the equality, but when it comes down to a final decision, it’s lady’s choice.” He seemed so relaxed about it and matter-of-fact.

  “You guys?” I asked, pointing at him and the rest of the band. “Lady’s choice?” He grinned, lopsided.

  “Yeah, does that seem weird to you?”

  “Well, yeah.” I sat back in my seat and looked out the window. Modern society still wasn’t equal, but it was nothing compared to how the witching world was. How many times had I seen my father outright cut my mother down in front of us? Tell her she didn’t know anything, and needed to b
e quiet. My sister Eva had told me that when I was born, our father didn’t speak to my mother for a week because she’d committed the crime of having a second girl.

  I should have been a son, after all. They’d ‘procreated’ or whatever on the dark of the moon to bless their future child with male genetics so that they’d have a kid to carry on the Llewellyn name and take on the seat at the council.

  Except it hadn’t worked. The whispered spells my mother had uttered each night of her pregnancy (ultrasounds were forbidden, for reasons I’ll never understand now that I know they even exist) to make sure the babe in her belly was a boy? They hadn’t worked either. I’d come into the world, Darcy Evangeline Llewellyn. Darcy was the name they’d picked out for me before I was born, because my mother was a big Jane Austen fan, but Evangeline was given to me. I was named after my mother since I wasn’t the boy they’d wanted. I would have been Darcy Vail Llewellyn, named for my father, if that had been the case.

  “You gone rabbiting?” Finn’s voice was near my ear and I inhaled sharply, turning.

  “Sorry I got lost in my thoughts. Rabbiting?”

  “When you run after rabbits that don’t exist,” he said, and pitched his voice louder. “Ace does it all the time.”

  “What do I do?” Ace twisted in his seat, looking back at us, confused. His hair was all at odd ends where he’d run his fingers through it, and he’d gotten ink on his face from sticking a pen behind his ear. He held a Sudoku book in one hand. Finn shook his head and relaxed back into the seat, crossing one ankle over his knee.

  “Rabbiting,” he said with another shake of his head.

  “That was mean, calling him out when he can’t hear us.”

  “You think he can’t hear us, sweetheart?” Finn asked, with a slow lilt to his voice that warmed me from the bottom up.

  “I—”

  “He’s got young ears, and he didn’t live through a war,” he snickered. “He can hear better than any of us.”

  “War?”

  Finn’s eyes flicked forward to Cash, then Eli, at my question. The corner of his mouth lifted up.

  “Later,” he said. “While the guys are sound-checking and I’m off preening and saving my voice for the show.”

  The slow rock of the tour van on the road was getting to me anyway, and I closed my eyes.

  A hand on my shoulder woke me, and I sat up with a start.

  “Guh,” was the noise I made. Ace was peering down at me, grinning.

  “You fell asleep, and napped the whole way. Eli made us all shut up so we wouldn’t wake you.”

  “It was annoying,” Charlie said, but he smiled at me in a way that made me think it was more that Eli was annoying than me napping.

  “Are we here?” We were stopped, and I looked outside. We were in the loading dock for the first venue. I recognized it from the picture on Google Maps when I’d looked it up. In person, The Clutch was imposing, rising high up off the ground.

  “Yeah, and there’s already a crowd but they aren’t for us, obviously. I think some people even lined up overnight.” Ace pointed out the window, and I could just see the tail end of a line-up, past a metal barricade that kept them out of the loading-bay. A bored security guard stood by the partition, ready to let more tour busses in, or keep people out.

  “Holy crap.” Not that I hadn’t been that person standing in line. There’d been more than one show I’d lined up over night for, shivering beside Max through the whole cold and miserable event.

  “They’re waiting to get in on floor tickets, for the mosh pit, since it’s not assigned seating they show up early to get right in front,” Charlie said. I didn’t bother telling him I knew. That I’d been one of those girls, pressed up into the security barrier right at the front of a stage before, a few hundred people crowded behind me.

  “Where’s Finn?” Eli was gone too, and Cash. I unbuckled my seat belt and sat up. Thankfully the tour van was werewolf-height (or full grown man-height), so I could stand properly. My back cracked and I rubbed it.

  “He and Eli went to go talk to the stage manager. We’re loading in, then we’re sound-checking last. We’ll get some food before we sound-check. You hungry?”

  I had to laugh when he looked at my backpack, that was on the floor in front of me with a manila envelope sticking out of it.

  “Is that why you woke me up? You’re hungry?”

  “Well, you do have the per-diems,” Ace said with a shrug. Charlie snickered and hopped out of the open side-door of the van.

  “Good luck with her, Ace,” he taunted as he sauntered off to the loading-bay doors. Another, larger, longer tour-bus was parked parallel to ours but further away.

  Ace saw me looking.

  “That’s Glory Revolution’s and Jake’s bus,” he said, and bit his lip. “One day we’re gonna be in one of those. Just you wait, Darce.”

  “When did I give any of you permission to call me ‘Darce’”? I asked, but I thought about him and the guys in a big tour bus like that, maybe with their faces on a wrap plastered across the outside of the bus. Would they be safe then, though, performing in stadiums around the world? They’d have bodyguards, right? That would deter any hunters. If they had a staff of humans meant to keep them away from possible threats in the form of fangirls, that would help.

  “You didn’t say it wasn’t okay?” Ace blinked and brought me out of my daydream. “Do you mind?”

  “Not really, but I thought I’d give you a hard time.”

  Ace eyed me up and down.

  “You think it’s a good idea to give me a hard time, Darce?” he asked, and there was a sudden purr in his voice, turning him from slightly hapless goofball to smouldering, six feet of man. I took a step back, and yelped when I tripped over my bag and nearly went down. “Oh shit!”

  Ace dropped his swagger, and grabbed me, pulling me into his chest.

  “I’m fine,” I mumbled into the front of his shirt.

  “Yeah, but if I killed you, Cash and the rest of the guys would murder me too.” He let me go, setting me on my feet. “You’re not klutzy are you?”

  “Uh, not really. Only when I’m tired. You know, like most people,” I explained. I reached for my bag. “We’ve gotta load in merch, and—”

  “Hold up. We’ve got this. This isn’t our first show,” Ace said, jumping down from the van and holding out a hand for me.

  “How long have you guys been playing anyway?” I asked as I slung my backpack over one shoulder. Ace grabbed one of the guitars and we headed to the loading bay doors into the theater.

  “As soon as I was old enough.” That made me laugh, and he rolled his eyes. “No, seriously. As soon as they knew I wasn’t going to embarrass them anymore, and my playing was good enough. They’d been playing together already for years, writing songs, well, music’s just really in our blood, isn’t it?”

  “Makes sense, yeah.”

  “It kept us together when things were the worst they’d ever been,” his voice grew wistful. “Maybe it was scarier then, when we really weren’t sure if we’d live to see another week, but the music kept us going. It gave me purpose anyway, I don’t know about the rest of the guys.” He smiled at me and shuffled his feet. I was hit with a sense of relief from him. This tour was more than just for their career. It was keeping them alive. My neck prickled. I wanted to take a closer eye on things as kids filtered into the venue. I didn’t know what a hunter would look like, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out, right?

  “Did you bring earplugs?” Ace looked cautiously at me as we stepped into the cool air of the theatre. It was warm outside, but there was a fall of air conditioning pouring down on us from above as soon as we were in. Ace set down the guitar next to the rest of the gear that had already been loaded in.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Well,” Ace shoved his hands in his pockets, “we were thinking that maybe if you could use those, like, protective ear covers that maybe it might stop you from...”

  I felt m
y face turning hot and red. He didn’t need to finish his sentence. I knew what he meant. They wanted to make sure I didn’t end up throwing myself at one of them after the show because of the magic woven into every note of their music.

  “I think I can probably manage,” I said, “now that I know what to expect.” Silence, tense and awkward, hung between and around us.

  “None of us knew it was gonna do that.” Ace broke first, giving me a tentative, hopeful smile. “I mean, we’ve never performed for a witch before, so...”

  “You should know better than to call our road manager a witch, Ace,” Finn said as he strolled up, warning in his voice as a technician trailed along after him. “This is Paul, our gear tech.”

  “We get a gear tech?” Ace asked, eyes wide. I was trying not to panic that Paul had overheard something a mundane shouldn’t. Paul gave him a brief smile before glancing at me with curiosity, and back to Ace again.

  “I’m with the venue, so I’m just with you for this show. Can you show me your instruments for tonight?” he asked. Ace turned to the stack of cases. Finn stepped into my space, talking low as Paul and Ace started to speak about the gear for the night.

  “Want to see the green room?”

  “Is it nice?” I asked.

  “It’s got a couch,” Finn said, and caught my hand in his. My heart skipped a beat as he tugged me along after him like a kite in the breeze.

  “You implying something?” The bad, wrong, naughty, terrible part of me kinda hoped he was. He shot me a mischievous smirk over his shoulder but then smoothed it out until his face was the picture of innocence.

  “Just thought you could use a place to lie down, have another nap. Can’t have you working too hard.”

  “I’m hardly working at all,” I complained.

  “Only you would bitch about that.” He laughed and pushed open a black door, marked Phoenixcry on a piece of masking tape stuck to it. “Here’s home for the next ten hours. Merch is already loaded out to front of house, so you can coordinate with their sales department. They handle it in-house here, which is..” Finn breathed out a huff of air and turned to me. “This is a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”