Consort of Thorns Read online

  I sat down on it, but the history of the apartment still weighed on me. I didn’t want to hang around in here. Might as well figure out a more permanent spot to park my bike and take a look at the current state of the cars. I couldn’t ask for a better distraction than that.

  The first thing I saw after I found a suitable nook for the Triumph was a kid who didn’t look much older than eighteen hunched beneath the open hood of a deep blue Mercedes CLS. His grumbling gave me the impression he wasn’t all that happy with how the work was going. I came up beside him and cocked my head.

  “You want a hand?”

  Ten minutes later, I was wrist-deep in engine grease and feeling not too shabby at all about my recent life decisions. Then a guy about my age, dark blond hair swept back from his high forehead, came strolling over around the side of the garage. He propped himself against the side of the garage next to me. He was a decent height and broad-shouldered, but I could tell at a glance, just from the way he held himself, that he’d never been in a fight in his life.

  “You must be Gabriel Lorde,” he said. “Welcome back to the household.”

  Said the guy who had been part of it for only about a hundredth of the time I had before. I didn’t have to ask to know this was Derek. The dick who somehow thought he deserved Rose. And not just her but control over the most important part of her life too.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m Derek,” he said, straightening up again as if he’d thought better of the whole leaning thing. “Derek Conwyn, Rose’s fiancé.”

  So you think. “Glad to meet you,” I said smoothly, and held up my black-streaked hands. “I’d offer a shake, but…”

  He nodded dismissively. His gaze slid to the car. “Got right to work, did you?”

  “Tyler was having a little trouble with the tune-up. I figured now that I’m here, why wait?”

  “Right.” He gave me an even look. “Just so you know, this one’s mine.”

  I had the feeling he wasn’t just talking about the car, and that he thought he was being pretty smooth the way he was handling this conversation. Damn, if Derek turned out to be the only problem Rose had left, he wasn’t going to be a hard one.

  As much as I’d have liked to reply with an innocent, “Then I’ll be sure to take very good care of her,” I was here to help Rose, not make things worse. So I patted the side of the car and settled on a bland but warm, “Everything’s looking good.”

  Derek’s eyes narrowed slightly as if he were trying to figure out whether I’d missed his double entendre or was making one of my own so subtly insulting he couldn’t quite figure out what I meant. Of course this guy would assume he couldn’t take anything anyone said at face value.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said.

  “If you’re ever interested in upgrading the transmission, just let me know,” I added, keeping the same mildly friendly tone. “Never hurts to have a little extra kick, right? I’ve never worked on a CLS before, but I’ve done a few like it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Derek said. Now he just looked confused. He definitely hadn’t expected generosity. “Well, I hope you settle in here.”

  He hustled off, taking his unsettled expression with him. I rolled my eyes and went back to the engine.

  I’d just finished with the car and was washing my hands when the real man of the estate made his appearance.

  “Gabriel!” Mr. Hallowell’s baritone rang down the garage’s inner hall. He ambled over as I swiped my hands on the towel by the mechanics’ sink. “Or should I call you Mr. Lorde now?”

  I’d known I wasn’t happy about how Rose’s dad had kicked mine to the curb all those years ago, but I wasn’t prepared for the rush of anger that shot through me at those words. I had to pause and swallow before I could say in a steady voice, “Gabriel will do. Mr. Lorde was my dad.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Hallowell said, his voice dropping respectfully.

  That only made me want to punch him more. I slung my hands in my pockets instead. “I hope you don’t mind—I’ve already started getting acquainted with the staff and the cars.”

  “That just makes my job easier,” Mr. Hallowell said. “You always were a gregarious one, weren’t you? By all means, make yourself at home.”

  Was that a jab at my friendship with Rose? Her dad was a hell of a lot harder to read than her supposed fiancé.

  “It’s not hard to do,” I said. “It was my home for longer than I’ve been away.”

  “Well, we’re glad to have you back on staff,” he said, with a slight emphasis on the word staff. “It was good timing that Rose ran into you when she did.”

  I nodded. “Good to see she’s doing well,” I said vaguely, as if it didn’t actually matter to me that much either way. That was what he wanted to hear, I was pretty sure—any indication he could get that I had no interest at all in his daughter beyond the job she’d hooked me up with.

  “Yes,” he said. “She is. Are you finding everything here without a hitch? Did you need any direction?”

  “So far so good,” I said. “I remember the maintenance routines. Just holler for me if there’s anything special you need taken care of, and I’ll be right there.”

  I gave him my best happy employee smile. Mr. Hallowell smiled back, but I couldn’t tell how much he meant it. What the hell was going on behind those muddy hazel eyes?

  If this guy was planning to turn Rose into some kind of slave, how the hell was I going to help her stop him?

  Chapter Seven

  Rose

  The town museum wasn’t much compared to some of the huge ones I’d visited on our occasional family vacations. Once a house, donated to the town’s historical society by its original owners, the main floor had been opened up into one large room with the most interesting old photos, newspaper clippings, and local artifacts. One or two volunteers, usually pretty old themselves, would always be puttering around offering their opinions on whatever you happened to be looking at.

  Down in the basement, where the historical society kept their archives, I could work mostly undisturbed. But calling that dim, dusty-smelling room with its haphazard stacks of unlabeled boxes an “archive” was pushing it. I was trying to be generous, but it was hard not to think it more closely resembled a trash heap.

  And not just because of how it looked.

  “Have you discovered anything in that one?” Philomena asked, leaning over my shoulder. I was sitting on a hard plastic chair at the room’s sole table in the middle of the room. The table was so small there was only really room enough for one of the boxes and a little space in front of it where I could paw through the contents I’d lifted out. This was much to the apparent consternation of the skinny gray-haired man who’d joined me down here about ten minutes ago. He huffed as he peered into one of the boxes by the wall. But hey, I’d gotten here first.

  “Not so far,” I said to Phil—in my head, because if I started talking to my imaginary best friend out loud, I’d really be in trouble. “I don’t even know why they held on to some of this stuff.”

  I rubbed my gritty fingers together, my nose wrinkling. The last stack of papers I’d taken out had included not one but ten copies of a sale announcement from a hat shop, a school notebook that contained nothing but childish handwriting practice of various simple words, and a random piece of old leather so aged it had gotten tiny crumbs all over everything beneath it.

  Phil gave a shudder, her voluminous skirts rustling. “Yes, I’m quite glad I’m incapable of literally digging my hands in—as much as I’d love to offer my aid. What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Any reference to the Hallowells.” I stood up to dig another armful of material out of the box. “Our estate has been here as long as the town’s been around. Maybe one of my long-ago relatives had some kind of, er, relations with one of the unsparked townspeople. Or was reported as having multiple lovers. Or something. If I can give my father—and the Assembly—some proof it was done before, it’ll be
easier to convince them it’s okay that I’m doing it now.”

  But so far I had nothing. I wasn’t even one tiny step closer to making sure witching society accepted my consorts. There had to be something. I couldn’t let them down.

  The room’s other occupant brushed past the table with a mutter under his breath and a jerk of his hand over his chest. The sign of a cross. Oh, so he was one of those. My jaw tightened.

  Philomena frowned at him as he prodded the boxes behind me. “What on earth was that about?”

  I’d only started picturing her in my life while we’d lived in Portland. She hadn’t had much time to see the varying reactions our family got in the place where we were best known.

  “There are always rumors floating around in town about what the Hallowells might get up to on our estate,” I said, turning my attention back to the papers. “Most people dismiss the rumors or find them amusing. A few would rather we weren’t around at all.”

  “Hmm,” Philomena said, her eyes glinting. “And a few are very, very glad to be around you.”

  Footsteps were just thumping down the stairs. I looked up to see Jin ambling in, followed by the twins and then Damon. A smile leapt to my face. This had seemed like a good meeting spot for a talk, since I needed to go through the archives anyway. I’d used trips to the town museum as an excuse to come into town a few times in the last month already. This time I’d actually been truthful.

  The old guy who was definitely not my fan took one look at the new arrivals and grumbled to himself. Thankfully, he must have decided he’d come back some time when he could have the place to himself. With a scowl at my consorts, he marched past them and headed up to the main floor.

  I got up, and immediately my guys were all around me, arms encircling me, heads bent close to mine. I breathed in their mingled scents and felt centered for the first time in days.

  Seth caught my lips with his, the firm pressure of his kiss reminding me of our encounter outside my house a couple nights ago with a flare of my spark. Then Jin was there, his fingertips tracing down the side of my neck as we took our fill of each other’s mouths. Kyler kissed my shoulder and then claimed my lips, swift and eager, when I broke from Jin.

  Damon hung back just slightly, his hand hooking around one of mine, until the other guys had eased away. Then he tugged me to him and kissed me hard, as if he were making some kind of point.

  The only point I cared about was having my consorts here with me.

  But as much as my spark flickered giddily, wanting more, this wasn’t exactly the place for it. They were still counting on me to figure things out so we didn’t have to hide our affection away.

  Kyler poked at the box still open on the table. “Have you come across anything you can use?”

  “Not so far,” I said, suppressing a sigh. I motioned to a couple of clippings I’d set aside. “There’s a photo and a short article about a big wedding celebration for my great-great-grandmother.” She’d let the staff join in the party with their families, so at least that showed friendliness toward the unsparked. “And a spooky story some kid wrote for a contest that used the Hallowell estate. All made up, ghosts and that sort of thing, but I might incorporate it into my modern witching history I’ll get back to working on some day. There’s been nothing that directly helps our case.”

  “Your people must keep records,” Jin said, cocking his head.

  I nodded. “When I’m sure I’m not in danger at home, I could go out to Seattle to the main witching archives… or even to talk to this witch in New York who’s researched the more questionable parts of our history, although they’ve already dismissed her as a crackpot. But I can’t explain away running off on some research project while I’m still supposedly getting married in a few weeks.”

  That crackpot witch had come across a few scraps of evidence, though. She’d claimed someone at the Assembly had disliked her bringing it up so much that she’d been fired. But they hadn’t completely stopped her from talking about it. If I came to the Assembly showing I’d not just found a precedent but actually done what shouldn’t be possible…

  Well, I didn’t really know what would happen. But it was going to have to happen, one way or another, so I’d better be prepared. As soon as I knew how to handle my dad, that was the next step.

  “I guess we’d better get down to work, then,” Seth said, taking in the stacks of boxes. “At least five of us will get through the rest faster than you on your own.”

  A couple hours later, we were all a little dusty and a little rumpled, every box had been sifted through, and I still didn’t have any proof that any Hallowell had ever consorted beyond the current witching rules.

  After setting the lid on the last box, I sagged against the table with a long exhale.

  Kyler rubbed my shoulder. “Hey, it was kind of a long shot anyway, right? I’ll see if I can find anything online to do with witches—I’ll have a much wider reach there.”

  “Most of that is fiction,” I reminded him.

  He grinned. “Well, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the real thing looks like now, so I can make a decent effort of sorting through it. I’ll pass anything I find that looks possibly legit on to you the next time I see you so you can check.”

  So optimistic, even when I was struggling to prove he had a right to be my consort at all. Spark help me, I hoped their actual welcome into my community wouldn’t be half as hard as I was worrying it’d be.

  “And the rest of us will do whatever we can,” Seth said.

  “How’s Gabriel settling in up at the house?” Jin asked, and I felt my consorts’ attention suddenly sharpen, waiting for my answer. A tingle passed over my skin. It wasn’t just because they were so concerned about their old friend, I didn’t think.

  But there wasn’t much to tell them. “It seemed like it was a little hard for him, coming back to the apartment,” I said. “We haven’t had the chance to talk much yet. I didn’t want to, I don’t know, crowd him or anything.”

  Jin laughed. “I don’t think he’ll feel crowded, Briar Rose.”

  “Well, come on,” Damon broke in. “We’d better leave so Rose can get home.”

  The guys came back to me for quick good-bye kisses, and then they headed up one by one. I’d give them five minutes’ head start and then go up myself, as if I hadn’t been part of their group at all.

  Despite his comment to the others, Damon lingered. He waited until the last of the other guys had vanished up the stairs and shut the door again.

  “I got you something,” he said, reaching to his pocket.

  Something he didn’t want the others knowing about?

  He showed me a phone. I blinked at it, not sure what to make of it, until he said, “I lifted it off Cortland.”

  My gaze jerked up to Damon’s face. He gave me a cocky grin, but my heart had hitched. “You stole it from him? Damon, what if he’d caught you?”

  “He didn’t, did he?” He pressed the button to turn it on. “I know a guy who can get past the passcodes on these things in two seconds flat. I didn’t see anything obviously incriminating, but you know what we’re dealing with better than I do.”

  I hesitated, staring at it. Master Cortland, one of my former magic tutors, had only been involved in Celestine’s plot peripherally. She’d gone to him for advice on how to twist the magic of the consort ceremony to her purpose. I knew he’d looked into the subject rather than reporting her for criminal magic, so obviously I couldn’t trust him, but beyond that, I had no idea how much he’d participated. Or how much he might care now that she was gone.

  The answer to that first question came to me quickly enough. Damon scanned through the call history as I watched. Master Cortland had tried to call my stepmother several times two mornings ago. The morning after I’d sent her on her way, after she’d meant to complete the ceremony.

  He’d wanted to know if she’d succeeded, I guessed. Or maybe he hadn’t even known, just been disturbed when he must have arrived home
and discovered someone had messed with his notes. Either way, he’d clearly been worried when she hadn’t answered.

  “What about farther back?” I said. It’d been a few weeks ago that I’d overheard the two of them talking about the “binding” part of the spell. Who had he reached out to since then?

  Damon kept skimming. There was a wide range of numbers, some local, some scattered across the country. A few with the area code I recognized as Seattle. So he’d been chatting with people who worked for the Assembly, maybe, while helping with illegal magic under their noses. I gritted my teeth. I’d make sure they found out about his involvement as well.

  I didn’t recognize any of the numbers, though, and the rest of the phone’s offerings were pretty spartan. Master Cortland, like much of the witching community even in my generation, wasn’t all that keen on modern technology. It didn’t surprise me that he wouldn’t have risked adding any sensitive information to the phone.

  I grabbed a scrap of paper and jotted down the numbers he’d called shortly after his conversation with Celestine, in case one of them led me somewhere. I could try to search them out—and if I got nowhere, Ky’s hacking skills couldn’t be beat. Then I gave Damon a pointed look.

  “You need to get rid of this. Leave it on the street so he’ll think he just dropped it or something.”

  He tucked it back into his pocket with a nod toward my paper. “Are those going to lead anywhere?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I let out my breath. “I know you just wanted to help, Damon, but you really shouldn’t be taking risks like that. Master Cortland has a lot at stake if his association with my stepmother comes out. The new estate manager will be coming tomorrow. I’ll be able to see through my plan to test my dad’s loyalties then. We won’t have to wait much longer.”

  Damon shrugged. He stepped closer, his dark blue eyes holding mine. “I can take care of myself, angel. And I want to take care of you.” His voice dipped as he leaned in. “In every possible way.”