Magic of the Void: A Reverse Harem Witch Series (Winslow Witch Chronicles Book 1)

  MAGIC OF THE VOID

  Winslow Witch Chronicles

  Book the First

  Lena Mae Hill

  Copyright © 2017 Lena Mae Hill

  First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in cases of reviewer quoting brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, and events are entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand.

  Published in the United States by Lena Mae Hill and Speak Now.

  www.lenamaehill.com

  Cover Design by Haley Allison of Spellbound Cover Design.

  This edition

  ISBN-10: 1-945780-30-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945780-30-1

  One

  As her roommate chased down the frisbee in the fading twilight, Sagely peeked at the sunset lighting up the sky over the low, lush hills of the Ozark Mountains. It was that perfect time of evening, when the air itself seemed a cool blue, and a gentle breeze rippled over the short grass in the park. While she was busy admiring the view, she almost missed the frisbee flying straight for her head.

  “Look out,” Annie yelled.

  Sagely spun towards the frisbee, her Tae Kwon Do training kicking in as she executed a perfect turn. Unfortunately, martial arts hadn’t taught her to catch a frisbee flying by just out of reach. She dove for it with outstretched fingers. Too late, she caught sight of the figure jogging across her path. She had just enough time to see that he was totally ace before she slammed into him so hard they both went sprawling. Or rather, she went sprawling…right on top of him.

  While she was trying to decide whether to jump up and run away in humiliation or enjoy the moment, he smiled up at her. The corners of his green eyes crinkled.

  Definitely enjoy!

  He had an appealing amount of stubble on his square jaw, and dark blonde hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of his neck. Under her, she could feel the heat of his skin and the hard, solid muscle of his bare chest. She couldn’t believe her tiny frame, which barely cleared five feet, could knock him flat. She was wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut out, knotted at one hip, and it had had ridden up a few inches when she fell. His skin against hers sent a rain of sparkles through her body.

  “Hey there, Little Red,” he said, his voice deep and rich and smooth, without a hint of gravel. His strong hands rested gently on her upper arms, warming her entire body.

  “Hi,” she breathed.

  A teasing curl tugged at the corner of his lips, and she knew he’d caught the appreciation in her voice.

  As their eyes met, a jolt rocked through her, like a quick pulse of electrical current. She gasped.

  The smiled melted from his lips. “I better get back to my run.”

  “Oh, right!” she said, scrambling off him and reaching back to tighten her bright-red side ponytail. “Sorry.”

  She offered a hand to help him up, but he leapt to his feet in one nimble, graceful motion. Before she could say another word—or ask for his number—he sprinted away down the path through the park.

  Well, he was jogging before she bowled him over, she reminded herself. Still, she’d never made a guy literally run in terror.

  “You’ll have to show me that trick,” her roommate said behind her. They’d planned today’s outing to the state park in an attempt to create a bonding experience. They didn’t have much in common, and after a couple weeks of sharing an apartment, she’d almost given up hope of being more than casual friends with her roommate.

  While she’d talked to the guy, she’d forgotten all about Annie and the frisbee. She could still feel the heat of his hands on her skin. Damn, she was getting desperate if she could fantasize about a random guy in the park. For all she knew, he could be a total creep. She probably needed to start thinking about losing her v-card.

  “Oh, bite me,” she said. But she didn’t want Annie to think she was really mad, so she smiled and added, “Trust me, that was not intentional.”

  “It was a little obvious,” Annie admitted. “You ready to go? I hate driving on these curvy roads in the dark.”

  After a fruitless search for the frisbee in the gathering dark, they gave up and headed to their cars. Sagely had come straight from Tae Kwon Do, after changing into the t-shirt, jean shorts, and her beloved red python cowboy boots. She and Annie had driven separately, so she climbed into her teal hatchback Cavalier and slipped Madonna’s new cassette in the tape deck.

  As she pulled out onto the two-lane road that led away from the park, she couldn’t stop going back to the moment her eyes locked with the guy’s, when that weird bolt of electricity passed between them. So, she might’ve been a little distracted as she wound along the steep blacktop road leading back to Fayetteville, the tiny college town where she went to school.

  A pair of headlights coming in the opposite direction blasted her eyes, bringing her full attention. She slammed her foot on the brake, waiting for the truck to pass. Instead, she was rocketed forward. Her head slammed into the steering wheel, and she felt a sickening crunch as her nose broke. The lights from the other vehicle blazed into her eyes, blinding her completely.

  Instead of stopping, the truck pushed forward, forcing her car towards the drop-off at the edge of the road. She grabbed the wheel and wrenched it in the other direction, away from the steep incline. Before she could get off the road, the truck backed up, away from her. Finally.

  Still stunned, she sighed in relief, barely aware of the blood dripping down her face. But then the truck roared straight at her, crushing into the front of her car for the second time. Glass showered across her and the seat.

  Her head bounced off the steering wheel and then slammed back against the headrest. The back end of her car careened into the ditch next to a sheer wall of rock cut into the mountain to make the road. Groping blindly, she found the door handle and kicked open the door, only then feeling the pain in her leg. She tried to stand, but her knee buckled with a screaming pain, and she collapsed onto the blacktop road. Tears blurred her vision, and she only realized she was not alone when strong hands gripped her shoulders and flipped her onto her back.

  She tried to stifle her sobs, fury boiling inside her. She wanted to scream at the asshole who ran head-on into her car—twice. But just as she sucked in a breath to cuss him out, a boot stomped on her abdomen. She wriggled to free herself, but she couldn’t draw a breath.

  The foot seemed to belong to an iron statue, crushing the air and life out of her. She raised her elbow to bring it down on his shin and splinter it just like the boards she broke in Tae Kwon Do competitions, but before she could, an iron grip clamped down on her forearm.

  She just had time to make out the dark shape looming over her, impossibly dark against the twilight behind him, as if he was a man-shaped black hole, absorbing all light and air from the world. Dimly, as she began to pass out from lack of oxygen, she heard the crunching of her bone when he twisted her arm all the way around. She opened her mouth, but she didn’t hear a scream. A scream required breath, and she had none.

  The man leaned over her. She smelled burnt hair, and something damp,
like the smell of a basement. The tall, thin man wore a black hat and cloak. Like the devil in an old movie, she thought crazily as she ebbed away on a tidal wave of pain.

  “Give me what’s mine,” he said in a raspy voice. A light glinted in his hand, and a blade sliced across her throat.

  Just before she passed out, light washed over them. Her last thought was that the police had shown up mere seconds too late to save her.

  Two

  Sagely woke to see a man leaning over her. She jerked to sit up, but he placed a gentle hand on her chest and pushed her back, murmuring kind words in his smooth voice. She knew that voice from…that guy in the park. She couldn’t tell if she was dreaming, or hallucinating, or if she was dead and having an after-life vision.

  She tried to open her mouth, to speak, but a searing pain sliced across her throat. She remembered the blade sliding through her flesh. The memory hurt almost more than the pain now consuming her body.

  She couldn’t formulate a sentence even if she could’ve spoken. The pain turned off everything in her brain, so that all she could do was feel instead of think. Warm, sticky liquid trickled down her neck, and an itching sensation found its way through the pain. She twitched, searching for a word for how ridiculous it was to notice that when she was dying. Or already dead.

  The man spoke again, his words soothing. But his hands came for her throat, a ball of white-blue light cupped between his palms. Sagely tried to turn away, to scream, but she was trapped, paralyzed, as his hands sank to her skin. A bolt of cauterizing heat split open the wound on her throat, and she slipped from consciousness again.

  When she woke next, she could immediately feel that something was different. Something was wrong. She was only halfway conscious, but she could feel something moving inside her. That ball of lightning he touched to her slit throat had somehow crawled inside her. She could feel a foreign and dark presence stirring inside her like a parasite.

  He’d shoved it down her throat, and now she was the host.

  She tried to cough, to choke it out, but her body refused to cooperate. For a second, she wondered if she was still paralyzed. Her limbs were as heavy as the earth itself, and she felt like she was moving through thick mud.

  “Close your eyes,” the blonde guy whispered, and his hand brushed tenderly but firmly over her eyelids, sweeping them closed as if he were closing the eyes of a loved one on her death bed. She was going to die now.

  The next time she woke, the sun was shining in her window. For one split second, she forgot the darkest night of her life. For one split second, she was in her apartment, waking up on a Sunday morning with the sun slanting in through the blinds. Served her right for putting her bed next to the window.

  But then it came rushing back. The previous night.

  More like nightmare.

  She sat up, and her head swam with dizziness. She had to lie back. While she struggled with wooziness, she took in the room. It wasn’t the dorm room she’d left a few weeks ago, but it looked like any dorm room anywhere—cream-colored cinderblock walls, a window with Venetian blinds, generic furniture.

  But there were no decorations, no bulletin boards pinned with shots of sunburned spring-breakers or photos of parents from back home, no Bon Jovi or Richard Marx posters on the wall. No carefully chosen duvet that had to match that of a roommate or cute décor indicating someone else’s personality.

  Am I in jail? she wondered suddenly. A dorm room without personalization looked an awful lot like a jail cell.

  She hung her head over the edge of the bed, and her red hair tumbled forward. Someone had taken out her ponytail, and pulled off her boots. With a flash of panic, she searched the room until she found them setting neatly in a corner. Those boots were her most prized possession, the one indulgence she’d allowed herself…pretty much ever.

  She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that the rest of her clothes were still on, and that the bed was not bolted to the floor. But she winced at the slightly painful tugging sensation when she twisted to see the floor. Throwing back the covers, she gasped when she saw the blood-encrusted tank top clinging to her flesh. Not sure that she actually wanted to see her wounds, she braced herself and pulled the shirt away from her skin. The blood had dried, sealing the cloth to her belly, and the same stinging sensation came when she pulled it away.

  In shock, she stared down at her abdomen. Smears of dried blood streaked her skin. Wherever she was, they had access to one hell of a supply of pain meds if they could completely erase the pain of a slit throat, though. Automatically, her hand flew to her throat when she remembered the black silhouette of the man standing over her, and the slash of his blade through her neck.

  Unable to believe her fingers, she explored the skin of her throat. There was no bandage. No wound at all. Her skin was as smooth as it had been the previous morning. Her arm was not broken, though she’d clearly felt it splinter. And her nose wasn’t even swollen. If it wasn’t for the blood-soaked shirt still hugging her body, she could’ve convinced herself it was a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real.

  A shudder wracked her body when she remembered the blinding, earth-defying pain of the fireball being forced down her throat.

  She’d been dying, practically dead. Then someone shoved a ball of white-hot fire down her spurting windpipe, and it cauterized her wound. Not just cauterized it, but healed it. She had no idea how it could be true, but it was. She was perfectly healthy and healed.

  But whatever he’d put inside her? It was still there.

  Three

  Something was buzzing inside Sagely like a swarm of microscopic bees. Or flies. Or something else that she probably didn’t want inside her.

  But like it or not, it was there, waiting, like some kind of beast that might spring out at any moment. If she was a beast, that buzzing might be the prickle of fur about to sprout all over her body. She was gonna need a serious supply of Nair if that was the case.

  Before she could contemplate whether she needed a shave or an exorcism, a tap sounded at the door and a boy stuck his head in. The tingling inside her ratcheted up a notch. The boy was about five younger than her, somewhere in his mid-teens. He had a fringe of red hair hanging just above his blue eyes, and a spattering of freckles across his turned-up nose.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he said with a grin, stepping into the room when he saw that she was decent. Even though he didn’t look familiar, somehow, he felt familiar. It was like meeting a little brother she’d forgotten since childhood. Except she’d never actually had a little brother. She remembered her childhood all too well, even the parts she’d rather forget.

  “I guess you’re wondering what’s going on,” the boy said.

  Hello, understatement.

  He loped over to the bed, where he sat down beside her. It would’ve been presumptuous for a strange man to waltz in and sit on the bed when she was still in it, but this was a boy, not a man. She could tell it was totally innocent, and that it never crossed his mind that it might be inappropriate.

  “I’m Eli, by the way,” he said before she could speak. “I’m here to welcome you unofficially. The others will welcome you officially later. So. What do you want to know?”

  “I do have a few questions,” she admitted.

  Understatement of the century.

  “Ask away,” he said. “I’ll do my best to fill in the blanks.”

  She swallowed hard. “Was I…abducted?”

  Eli laughed. “Of course not.”

  “Okay, good,” she said, relaxing a little. “Then first off, where are we? And when can I go home? I don’t seem to be injured anymore, so…”

  He dropped his gaze and twisted the wide band he was wearing on his little finger, some kind of dull metal that looked like iron with tiny symbols etched all around it. “Well, I don’t know if Quill and the others would let you just leave,” he said. “That would be dangerous.”

  “Great. I’m a hostage.”

  “It’s only
for your safety that you need to stay.” He paused a long moment, frowning down at his ring. Finally he asked, “Do you remember what happened to you last night?”

  “Oh, I remember, all right,” she said, her heartbeat speeding up at the memory. “How could I forget? Some psycho ran me off the road and tried to kill me.”

  “That’s good. That you remember, I mean, not that someone tried to kill you. Of course that’s bad.” He rushed through the words, his face turning pink under his freckles.

  “Who tried to kill me? You said it was not safe to leave, but I’d never even met that guy, so I don’t think he’ll be looking for me in particular. I’m just lucky enough to chance on a murderous psychopath. Lucky, lucky me.”

  “You are lucky,” Eli said earnestly. “Lucky that Quill got there in time to save your life. When you’ve had some time to clean up, I’ll take you in to meet everyone. Quill sent me in first to answer any questions, because I’m not intimidating like some of the others.” He didn’t say this like it was a bad thing, but like he was stating a simple fact.

  Sagely was a bit offended on his behalf, though it was true. This Quill person had gotten one thing right—this kid was not a bit intimidating. Even if she was still injured, she could fell him with one good roundhouse kick. But everything else he said was wrong. She didn’t see how her life was in danger. And even if it was, she could take care of herself. She was not a woman who needed a man to protect her. She was a blackbelt for a reason.

  Her head swam with questions, though, and she wanted answers before she left. She didn’t know what to ask first. Finally, she settled on the most pressing questions. “Who are the others? And who is Quill?”

  “Quill is our highest-level student, almost fully vested in his magic, and the guy who saved your life. And the others are…the other students of magic,” Eli finished with a shrug.