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Chapter One
Rose
Iwoke up on a padded bench in a small white room, and my body immediately jerked upright, tensing to defend myself. Then I realized I couldn’t have managed that even if there’d been anyone in the room to defend myself from.
Fat spongy mittens encased my hands, holding my fingers still—so I couldn’t weave any magic with them. A thin but sturdy chain held my shackled wrists a few inches from each other, and my ankles were bound the same way. The chains clinked when I tugged at them, the cool shackles digging into my skin. All the usual movements I might have made to call forth a spell were closed off to me.
This room was a prison cell.
What had happened to the guys? To my consorts? My heart lurched. Fractured memories of my last moments with the five of them swam through my head.
The Witching Assembly’s enforcers had burst in so suddenly, and so many of them—I couldn’t even remember what the woman who’d been leading them had looked like other than an impression of mousy brown hair. I’d whirled around, snapping my arms up in a quick magicking, but she and the other witches with her had already been hurling paralyzing spells at me. At least three of them had crashed into me at the same time, knocking me to the floor.
Icouldremember her voice, sharp and brisk as she’d informed me of my crime.Rose Hallowell, you are now under arrest by the order of the Assembly for the use of psychoactive magic on parties Conwyn and Hallowell. You will return to the Assembly for justice.
What had the guys been doing while she’d spoken to me? They must have been frozen by magic too. Or… the enforcers might have killed them. That was what at least one sect of the Assembly’s Justice division had done to a witch and her unsparked lover, according to a secret report that Kyler, my computer whiz consort, had uncovered.
Panic washed icy cold through my veins for an instant before another scrap of memory surfaced in my head. Just as my mind had been fading out with a knock-out spell, one of the enforcers had asked,Should we dispose of the others?
And the leader had snapped,Think! Our orders were clear—no irreparable harm to her. We don’t know which of these are her consorts.
I closed my eyes and dragged in a breath, as slowly as my shaky lungs would allow. I shouldn’t need to move to feel the magical bonds between myself and my four consorts. If they were at all nearby…
Relief trickled through me as I touched one and then another of their presences. Kyler’s bright and buoyant spirit was down the hall, maybe a couple rooms from me. Damon, fiercely defiant as ever, was just a little farther. Seth’s unshakeable energy reached me from the floor below us, with the more languid impression of Jin’s right next to him.
And Gabriel? We weren’t magically bonded yet. He’d come back into my life later than the others, and we’d only just confirmed the strength of our feelings for each other. My brow knit as I concentrated on his essence: all that steady confident charm, the glint of his bright blue eyes, the smell of him like forest moss laced with something faintly sweet.
There. I felt him, like a distant shiver, beyond Damon in this row of rooms. Fainter than the others without the consort bond, but present. All five of them, the boys who’d been my dearest friends in childhood, who’d become so much more since I’d returned to my family home a few months ago, were here and still alive. The quiver of life that reached me gave me hope.
No irreparable harm. For whatever reason, the Assembly hadn’t wanted to simply destroy me. Maybe because it would be harder to cover up my death than that of some low-standing witch living away from witching society on an isolated island?
They’d realized I must have taken a consort—or consorts. But they hadn’t known who, at least not then. How much had they already figured out? They’d clearly determined that I’d only formed that bond recently. If my connection to the guys was severed in any way, including death, this early in our consorting, it would wreck me, mentally and magically.
The bigger question was how they’d known about any of that in the first place. What had the lead enforcer said in her accusation?Parties Conwyn and Hallowell.
Hallowell would be my father. They couldn’t know for sure that I’d orchestrated the spell that had made him attack his colleagues with a magic artefact—that spell should have disappeared as its effects wore off—but they must have guessed after getting to Derek. Derek Conwyn, my former fiancé, former consort-to-be. The guy who’d conspired with my stepmother, and through her my father, to trap me in a consorting ceremony that would have put him in control of my magic and made me a virtual slave.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the Assembly’s investigators might track Derek down. The spell I’d put on him to prevent him from sharing what he’d learned about me would still have been active. As soon as they’d detected it, they could have lifted it off him. And then he could have told them straight that he’d seen me casting magic, that I’d told him I’d taken at least two non-witching men as consorts.
Which had brought them straight back to me.
I lowered my head to my covered hands. For just a few hours, I’d thought I’d gotten everything in place. I’d thought the guys and I could live a somewhat normal life, free to be together, even if I had to keep my magic secret from the rest of witching society. Pretending my spark had died with my twenty-fifth birthday, unkindled by any witching man, wouldn’t have mattered to me one bit if we could have had more time like that last afternoon. Our little interlude in the house Seth had fixed up for us to share.
Now I’d be lucky if any of us made it out of this alive. The Assembly, or whatever part of it had been involved in enslaving other young witches like me, might want me living now, but who knew how long that would last? Maybe the investigators just wanted to question me to find out what else I’d done before they snuffed out my spark and my life.
A jitter ran through my body, emanating from the impressions I had of the five guys around me in the building. I straightened up and narrowed all my attention onto that sensation. An uneasy prickling ran down my back.
They were being magically prodded. Kyler and Damon, right now. The investigators would come to talk to the others soon, though. And they obviously didn’t care about any policies around magical coercion when it came to unsparked people.
My fingers twitched inside their imprisoning mitts, but I couldn’t move them enough to cast a spell. I took another deep breath and focused even more intently on those glints of life I held so dear.
There was already a magical connection between four of them and me, and all kinds of emotion if not literal magic between me and the fifth. I shouldn’t need much effort, much motion to send my magic to them as a little shield against the investigators’ influence.
I rolled my shoulders and shifted my head from side to side. The magic condensed around the flare of the brilliantly lit spark in my chest. At my mental push, some of that energy streamed in little threads toward the guys, latching on to them and filling them with a protective glow. It flowed quickly and smoothly to the four who were my consorts, through that tight bond between us. For Gabriel, I tipped my head again, a little extra push, a little extra energy. Maybe not as great an effect, but as much as I could give him.
No one was hurting my guys—not on my watch.
Philomena blinked into being on the bench beside me. Her appearing out of nowhere wasn’t much of a surprise, because she was imaginary. I’d had few enough witching friends that I’d gotten in the habit of picturing the main character from my favorite historical romance as a conversational partner, and after several years she tended to pop up without even asking.
