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Chapter One
Damon
Somehow I could always tell when Rose had come back to Hallowell Manor. While she was gone, doing her research into witching society’s history or working with the young witches who needed support after the conspiracy we’d unraveled last year, the old mansion looked as grand as ever, inside and out. The gardens bloomed just the same, and the cook on staff filled the place with the same rich smells as they prepared meals for the rest of us. But everything felt a little bit dulled, as if a haze hung in the air. When the estate’s lady was here, the atmosphere brightened in a way I could taste like a faint crackle on my tongue.
A quiver of that brightness ran through me the moment I walked past the gate that afternoon, before I even spotted Rose’s preferred car around the side of the garage. The electricity of her arrival might have hit me even more sharply than usual because of the uneasy thoughts that’d been niggling at me lately. I shook off them and the irritations of my day at work with the electrician who’d apprenticed me and hurried to the house to give her the welcome she deserved.
I didn’t get to her first. When I came into the front hall in all its Victorian mahogany glory, Rose was standing there already surrounded by two of her other consorts, Gabriel and Jin, who mostly worked on the estate, and the housekeeper, Meredith. I only had time for a brief flash of jealousy that I hadn’t gotten this first moment with her to myself before her head turned and a brilliant smile crossed her face just for me.
All right, I could be happy with that. I went straight to her and caressed my fingers over her cheek into the silky fall of her black hair as I leaned in for a kiss.
She’d have gotten at least two other welcoming kisses since she’d arrived, but you wouldn’t have known it from the eagerness with which she returned mine. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt, grazing my chest. A deeper wave of desire thrummed through me. When she drew back, her cheeks were flushed, a matching desire gleaming in her dark green eyes.
“Hello to you too,” she said, still smiling.
I had the urge to drag her right upstairs to the master bedroom with its immense bed custom-built to handle her and all five of us consorts, but I could tell from her resigned air as she turned back to the others that she had different business to take care of.
“So, you don’t know where most of Evianna’s things would be?” she asked Meredith.
The housekeeper shook her head. “Your stepmother never seemed to trust me to handle much to do with her side of the family.”
Evianna—the older of Rose’s two stepsisters. I hadn’t seen them in over a decade, since they’d already moved away to start their own families before Rose’s dad and stepmother had returned to this estate, but what I remembered was mostly icy glances and open sneers. My posture tensed as if Rose would need immediate defending. “What are you looking for?”
Gabriel answered for Rose, with the unassuming confidence that had always marked him as the leader of our group even when we were kids. “Rose’s stepsister told her she’s coming by the house to pick up some old things of hers, but she doesn’t know where they’ve been stashed since she moved out—and neither do we.”
Rose’s mouth tightened. “I’ll have to talk to my father. He has at least one storage unit in Portland, and maybe other places too. It’d be easier just asking than spending weeks on a hunt.”
Easier in terms of time. Maybe not for her emotional state. Rose and her dad had been awfully close… until Rose had discovered he was part of a faction of witching men manipulating their daughters’ and wives’ powers for their own ends. Feeding their magical energy to demons, to be exact.
Maybe it sucked watching the women get to perform all the supernatural voodoo while you could only fuel it, but I didn’t have one iota of sympathy for those bastards, Mr. Hallowell least of all. My only regret was that the demon his people had allowed to escape hadn’t eaten him before Rose had managed to seal it and the rest of its kind away. But no, he’d been safely locked up in the Witching Assembly’s jail while the worst of it went down, and he was still there.
A shiver of inspiration shot through me from beneath the more caustic feelings the thought of him stirred up. Since hewassadly still alive… maybe he could bring himself to be useful. If I could tackle the problem that’d been gnawing at me without ever having to disturb Rose’s hard-won peace, it’d be worth having to interact with that asshole for a few minutes.
“Send the girl to dig through it all herself,” Meredith suggested in her no-nonsense way.
Rose grimaced. “She never liked me much, and she likes the family even less since her mother died. I don’t want her having access to all our things—who knows what else she might take or damage. It’ll be a quick call—not worth a face-to-face visit. I’ll speak to the Assembly to arrange it.”
Since they didn’t exactly let him hang onto his phone in that prison cell where he was rotting.
“Let me handle talking to him,” I said, a little too abruptly.
The other guys blinked at me. Rose looked startled too. I clarified as smoothly as I could, holding Rose’s gaze. “You shouldn’t have to put yourself through a conversation with him over something like this. It’s a simple enough question. When you get the Assembly to approve it, I’ll handle the call and write down the answer if he gives one.”
Jin’s eyebrows had arched beneath the fine fringe of his hair, the black currently streaked with purple. Our resident artist found something to be amused by in just about any situation. “Are you sure you’re the best person for that job?” he asked in a teasing tone.
All right, so I wasn’t exactly known for my even temper. I might have let out that temper in not-entirely-legal ways here and there in the past. But thatwasin the past. I’d been on my best behavior the past year, for Rose. For the future I didn’t want to ruin.
I glowered at Jin. “I think I can manage to ask a few straightforward questions without blowing up. And it’s not as if I can do much to the guy over the phone anyway.”
“I’m sure Damon is up to it,” Gabriel said. “Give him credit for volunteering.” He smiled at me, but the warm glint in his bright blue eyes rubbed me the wrong way too. It wasn’t as if I needed his approval. We were all supposed to be on equal footing now.
During the past catastrophe, I’d thought I’d come to peace with where we all stood with Rose and how our lives had played out since the childhood days when I could have said without hesitation that these guys were my best friends. But I could only give them the benefit of the doubt if it went both ways. Lately they’d all been getting on my nerves with comments that suggested they still didn’t see me as a real equal after all.
I held back my annoyance—best behavior—and simply tipped my head. “Thank you. You can get the Assembly people to go for it, can’t you, Rose?”
Even though none of her consorts had been part of the witching world, the Assembly had granted us honorary status and officially recognized our consort bonds with her after everything we’d done to help fend off the demons. That supposed respect had better extend at least to making telephone calls.
Rose hesitated just for a second—I wanted to think because of worries about how her dad would behave, not about my self-control—and then a small, soft smile returned to her lips. “All right. He definitely can’t get any personal leverage over you the way he’d probably try to manipulate me. I’ll tell the Assembly you’ll be handling the conversation and give them your number.”
