AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 usexceptGabriel, 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 ithadn’tworked.” 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 tomewhen 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 hasbeen througha 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 his 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 wasyounot 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.
