Consort of Thorns

  Consort of Thorns

  The Witch’s Consorts #2

  Eva Chase

  Ink Spark Press

  Consort of Thorns

  Book 2 in the Witch’s Consorts series

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition, 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Eva Chase

  Cover design: Cover Reveal Designs

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-06-2

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-09-3

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Free Story!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Next in the Witch’s Consorts series

  Dragon’s Guard excerpt

  About the Author

  Free Story!

  Get Rose’s Boys, the prequel story to The Witch’s Consorts, FREE when you sign up for Eva’s newsletter.

  Click here to get your free ebook now!

  Chapter One

  Rose

  We’d locked the door to the small art gallery. Left the shade down over the window. Now the five guys and I were standing in a rough circle under the faint hum of the lights. For the first few seconds, there was no sound except the rumble of a car passing on the road outside.

  One of the paintings on the white gallery walls drew my eyes. A new addition. At the upper right, a beam of golden yellow stood out against the swirls of reds and purples that filled the rest of the canvas. Joyous, and yet… The bits of fabric melded into the oil paints made the swirls look slightly erratic. Uneasy. As if they were still deciding whether to move toward the beam’s warmth or away.

  It was a perfect fit for the atmosphere in the room right now. My gaze came back to my guys. We were standing in a circle, sure, but it was obvious Gabriel was the focus of that circle. Everyone was looking to him.

  He’d been gone for years, back for only a couple minutes, but already the old dynamics of our childhood friendships were falling back into place. He’d always been the leader, the one who bound our little group together. Seeing him standing there with that wry smile and a warm glint in his bright blue eyes, it was hard to imagine how we’d come—and held—together the last month without him.

  A glow of happiness had lit me up from the moment he’d greeted me outside. But it was clear the other guys’ feelings about Gabriel’s arrival were a little more… complicated. I could read their hesitance in their stances, feel it like a faint jitter in the spark inside me that fueled my magic. The connection between me and them was so fresh and sharp right now, less than twenty-four hours after we’d bound ourselves together as consorts.

  All of us except Gabriel, who had no idea what we’d done or been through since he’d been gone.

  His dark red hair slanted across his forehead as he looked down at the torn page in his hand. The page I’d torn from my favorite childhood book and given to him the last time I’d seen him, nearly twelve years ago, when I was thirteen and he fourteen.

  “It just feels like an ordinary piece of paper now,” he said. “But I swear it pulled me here, like something was calling out to me from it.” Gabriel raised his head to meet my eyes. “That was you, wasn’t it, Rose?”

  My voice caught in my throat for a second. The other guys knew all about my magic now, but only as of a couple days ago. Witching folk weren’t meant to talk with the unsparked about what we were or what we could do. I’d never discussed it with the guys when we’d know each other as kids.

  The four men around me had accepted that revelation, though. It hadn’t even been that much of a revelation, with all the murmurs that passed through town about the Hallowell family and our estate. They’d all seen glimpses during our time together all those years ago. Even Gabriel must have had some clue back then. It shouldn’t be hard to admit it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t know exactly how it would work but... A couple weeks ago, I tried to reach out. I actually thought it hadn’t worked.” I didn’t know how to explain why I’d cast the spell. At the time when I’d performed it, in an attempt to call him back to town, our group had felt fragmented, uncertain. I’d thought we needed him to help us tackle the threats I was facing. But we’d found our feet without him, my four consorts and I.

  I didn’t think the guys who’d sworn their love and loyalty to me last night would appreciate hearing me say that I hadn’t been sure they’d be enough.

  Thankfully, Gabriel didn’t ask. He nodded with his easy smile, not looking at all fazed by the idea that I could have drawn him to me through a scrap of paper. “Well, it did work. It just took me a little while getting here.” He glanced around the circle. “And now the gang’s all back together. It’s been a long time.”

  “It has,” Damon said. He stepped closer to me, his hand closing around mine, his gaze still fixed on Gabriel. His expression wasn’t quite a glower, but he clearly had one ready. Which wasn’t really a surprise. My lock-picking, leather-jacket-wearing consort might have agreed to bind himself to me alongside three other guys, but he wasn’t exactly Mr. Amicable at the best of times.

  He’d barely even been friendly to me when I’d moved back last month. The gentleness of his fingers clasping mine, despite the possessiveness of the gesture, reminded me of how far we’d come since then.

  Gabriel didn’t miss the implication of that gesture, of course. His eyebrows lifted. “And some of us are more ‘together’ than others?” he said, his tone light.

  What would he think when he knew the whole truth of it? I wet my lips. “There’s a lot more to it than that… A lot’s happened in the last few weeks.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business necessarily,” Damon put in, his grip on my hand tightening.

  Jin’s lips twitched with a mischievous smile. “We’ve all been fairly… busy,” my artist said, his gallery’s lights glancing off the blue highlights in his black hair as he aimed that smile toward me.

  By my other side, Seth shifted close enough to touch my back. Supporting me like he always did, his tall well-muscled frame and his steady composure making him as much a sentinel as a consort. “Rose has been through a lot,” he said. “Maybe we should stick to other topics for now.”

  “Right!” Kyler said. Seth’s slimmer and more upbeat twin shot a quick but affectionate glance at me and then grinned at Gabriel, his usual enthusiasm dancing in his gray-green eyes even though his posture looked a bit tense. “Where were you getting here from? Where’ve you been since you left town? It’s been, what, four years now?”

  Gabriel took it all in—Jin’s smile, Seth’s touch, Kyler’s glance, Damon’s hand still wrapped around mine—and a flicker of surprise crossed h
is face. Only for an instant, there and then returning to his usual relaxed expression, but I caught it anyway. He eased back half a step, as if he’d sensed he might be more of an intruder in our group than he ever should have been. My heart wrenched.

  I gave Damon’s fingers a squeeze and let go. “Before we get into that,” I said, crossing the middle of our shifting circle, “I don’t think I’ve said hello properly yet.”

  I opened my arms, and Gabriel accepted my embrace. He hugged me back a little more carefully than I would have liked, but I could understand that. Hugging him now was a lot different than hugging the much younger Gabriel who’d tried to comfort me when I’d realized our time was running out all those years ago. Well, he smelled the same as in my memories, somehow sweet and dark like forest moss at the same time, but he’d grown a few inches and put on a fair bit of muscle. There was no mistaking that I was embracing a man, not a boy.

  “I’m glad you’re here, even if it took a little while,” I said, stepping back. “It didn’t feel totally right being back on the estate without you here.”

  Gabriel’s smile went a little crooked. “What really wasn’t right was you not being here. It’s good to see you survived all that time shut away in the city, Sprout.”

  The childhood nickname and the tenderness with which he said it made my pulse flutter. That nickname had stuck as soon as I’d told him my real name, back when he’d first drawn me into the group of boys who’d roamed my family’s estate while their parents worked for mine. Found her sprouting up outside the manor, he’d told the others with a grin. And just like that, I’d been one of them.

  Until six years later, when my new stepmother had discovered how much time I’d been spending with a bunch of unsparked boys and had convinced my father to move us all to Portland to keep me away from them. And left even more chaos in her wake. I’d only found out after we’d moved back that all the guys’ parents had been let go from the staff right after.

  Gabriel’s dad had been the most unforgiveable of those firings. The Lordes had looked after our garage all the way back to when it’d been a stable. Three generations of service thrown away because I’d gone rambling through the woods with his son. And from what the guys had told me, it had hit Mr. Lorde hard. He’d fallen into a depression and then committed suicide.

  Was it any wonder Gabriel had wanted to get away from this place? And now I’d pulled him back here without even asking what he wanted.

  But I couldn’t help wishing he’d been here from the start. Everything would have been so much simpler than it was now.

  “I heard about your dad,” I said, my throat tight. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea about the lay-offs or any of it.”

  Gabriel shrugged with a rough chuckle, but his gaze darted away from me for a second. “Of course you didn’t. I never thought you did. None of that is your fault, Rose. You know that, right?”

  He looked at me again, so directly and insistently then that I knew he meant it.

  “It was still wrong,” I said.

  “Well, it’s done now, and we all made what we could of the hand we were dealt.” He nodded to Kyler. “Since you asked about where I’ve been—I made it all the way to Argentina. Backpacked around South America for a while. Then came back up and spent a few months here and there, trying places on for size. I was in California just before I came back here.”

  “Argentina!” Jin said, interest sparking in his dark brown eyes. He was the only other of the guys who’d spent much time out of town. His dad worked as a back-up bassist for various bands and had taken Jin along on at least one world tour, where he’d picked up the inspiration for a few of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around us. “I haven’t been down that way yet. I hear the atmosphere is amazing.”

  “It got pretty wild,” Gabriel said, any tension that had come into his stance when I’d mentioned his dad melting away. “You’d have been blown away by the public art there. Some of those murals—the whole side of a building—I wish I was more of a photographer so I could show you, not that it’s the same as standing right there in front of the painting.” He glanced around. “Some of the work in here is yours, isn’t it? With stuff like that, you’d fit right in down there.”

  He pointed at the painting I’d been eyeing earlier, and Jin beamed. Trust Gabriel to be able to identify the other guy’s style, even years after they’d last spoken.

  “Hey,” Ky said, snapping his fingers. “Isn’t it Argentina where the political parties have their own beers?”

  Gabriel laughed. “Trust you to remember the most random facts. I tried a couple of those. Can’t say they’re the best I’ve ever had, but I’d hate to see what our politicians would come up with here.”

  Damon let out a snort. “God, can you imagine?” he said. He raked a hand through his jagged coffee-brown hair, his stance still wary as he gave Gabriel a more thoughtful appraisal. “How’d you make ends meet, wandering around like that?”

  “Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that,” Gabriel said. “There’s always some dive looking for an extra server or a mechanic place that’s happy to throw me a few bucks if I lend a hand. It wasn’t the high life, but I wasn’t tied down anywhere.”

  “There’s something to be said for that,” Damon said. He looked a little awed despite himself.

  “I’d take the security of knowing I’ve got someplace to come home to, no matter what,” Seth said mildly.

  Gabriel tipped his head. “It can get a little tiring, always being on the go. I can’t say anywhere ever felt like home—not the way this town does.”

  He paused, and Seth’s mouth slanted in sympathy. And just like that, in the space of a few minutes, Gabriel had drawn us all back in again, as if we couldn’t ever possibly fit together properly without him in our midst.

  Except we had. Last night… Heat rose in my face at the memory. My magic danced in my chest.

  How did he fit in with us now, when the other guys and I were bound, hearts and bodies, in a way completely separate from him?

  “Are you going to stay, then?” I asked. “In town?”

  Gabriel brought his attention back to me. A shadow passed through his eyes. “I was waiting to see what I’d find here before I made any decisions. From what Seth said, it sounds like your homecoming hasn’t been all that smooth. You called out to me; I’m here. If you need me.”

  The last four words held a question. Did I need him?

  I had four consorts, and through them I had my magic. Last night, after the five of us had sealed those bonds, I’d confronted my stepmother about the plot she’d formed with my supposed fiancé to allow him to control my magic. To turn me into all but a slave, wracked with pain unless I followed their demands.

  I’d sent her off, forbidden from saying anything about what had happened there. Her, I no longer had to worry about. But that confrontation should have ended with me bringing both her and Derek to my father, so we could see them brought to justice by the Witching Assembly. The problem was, when I’d threatened to do it, Celestine had laughed and told me my father had arranged the whole plot himself.

  Maybe she’d been lying. Maybe she’d just wanted to make me doubt him. But she’d seemed so sure… and so scared of him finding out she’d failed.

  He’d be back from his business trip today. Soon. And who knew what would happen when he found her gone? I wanted to think I had nothing left to worry about, but I wasn’t sure.

  After everything I’d been through to keep my freedom, I needed to be sure. And if it turned out that my own father was a threat to that freedom too, then yes, I was going to need all the help I could get. Dad didn’t have magic of his own, but he had powerful friends. If he was capable of treating me, his only daughter, like that, I had no idea what else he might be capable of or how far he’d go to ensure my silence.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I… I might.” I turned to the other guys. My consorts. The thought sent a wash of pleased warmth through my
chest despite the bad news I’d come with. I’d hoped to spend an hour or two just enjoying their company—in all sorts of ways—before we came to this part of our reunion. But here we were.

  “Gabriel needs to know at least some of what’s happened,” I said. He’d come. He’d proven he was here for me. The least I could do was trust him. “I can’t ask him to stay and help while keeping him in the dark. And… there’s more that I haven’t had a chance to tell the rest of you yet either.”

  Seth drew his spine even straighter as if he thought he’d have to defend me right this instant. “What happened?” he said, frowning.

  “Well, I guess I’d better start at the beginning.” I took a deep breath and looked at Gabriel. “I could call out to you because I’m a witch. But to properly kindle my magic, I needed a consort before I turned twenty-five…”

  Chapter Two

  Rose

  “This Gabriel fellow seems like a charming addition to your group of suitors,” Philomena said as we ambled along the gravel shoulder of the road between the town and the Hallowell estate. She twirled her little umbrella, which only shaded part of her face from the glaring sun. But then, even in her long-sleeved dress with its multiple layers of skirts, Phil never got hot. That was one benefit to being imaginary.