Witch Darkness Follows (Maeren Series Book 3) Read online

  Witch Darkness Follows

  Mercedes Jade

  Copyright © 2020 by Mercedes Jade

  Updated Version Oct 2020.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1. Mated to Fate

  Elizabeth

  2. Earthly Appetites

  3. Thief of Dragons

  4. Love Like a Rock

  Jaeson

  5. Motherzilla

  Kaila

  6. A Toast

  Jaeson

  7. Sticks and Stones

  Elizabeth

  8. Negotiations at Fang Point

  9. When a Cage becomes a Prison

  10. Demon Witch

  Phillip

  11. Skeletons Unearthed

  12. Dogged Loyalty

  George

  13. Shared Claims

  Daemon

  14. A Spark in the Dark

  Raphael

  15. Field of Regrets

  Jill

  16. Fired Up

  17. Meddlesome Gifts

  Elizabeth

  18. Dragon’s Den

  19. Kiss me until I breathe

  Jill

  20. A Toast to Matchmaking

  Elizabeth

  21. Confessions of a Lover

  22. The Lion’s Share

  Geer

  23. Bed Mates

  Phillip

  24. Daughters of Earth

  Jill

  25. The Challenge

  Alexander

  26. Switching

  Elizabeth

  27. Freedom to Choose

  28. Military Dogs

  29. Tactical Surrender

  30. Shielded Mind

  31. Hold me Tight

  32. Danger Courted

  Jaeson

  33. An Interview

  Kaila

  34. Different Strengths

  Jill

  35. The Triad

  36. Enemies at Hand

  Phillip

  37. Strap in

  Elizabeth

  38. Lashed

  39. Frying Pan to Fire

  Victoria

  40. Sweet Lemons

  Elizabeth

  41. Foxed to Meet You

  42. Burned

  43. Not Alone

  44. A Last Breath

  Phillip

  45. Under Pressure

  George

  46. Soul Beasts

  Elizabeth

  47. Flank Left

  Torsten

  48. Bound Freely

  Elizabeth

  49. Puppy Love

  50. Dogs with a Bone

  51. Fly Away

  Raphael

  52. A Stand

  Geer

  In Witch Hell Reigns

  Elemental Magic Classifications

  Glossary of Terms

  Cast of Characters

  Also by Mercedes Jade

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Mercy. Thank you.

  Author’s Note

  This book is written in Canadian English.

  If you find any typos or have other concerns about formatting or grammar, please forward them directly to me at my email for prompt attention:

  [email protected]

  I would be thrilled to hear from you!

  This is a reverse harem romance, meaning the main female character will find happiness with more than one guy. She doesn’t have to choose only one.

  There is a cast of characters, glossary, and elemental magic classification at the end of the book for your reference.

  Location and narrator changes for each chapter will be denoted in its header. When there is no change, it will be left blank. This one is heavily multi-POV as there are more interwoven storylines.

  Prologue

  Darkness Creeps In

  The Evil Eye

  Jill was proudly named when she reached her one-year milestone.

  It was done with considerably more ceremony than Elizabeth had gotten. All of the attention was frightening to Jill.

  Elizabeth wished she could make them both invisible.

  Alas, Jill was the star attraction. Their father had wanted to introduce his fire princess to everyone.

  That was when Elizabeth met her first demon.

  Uncle Jeremy looked ordinary. He was dressed as noble a vampire as his brother, their father, but Elizabeth knew there was something bad about demons.

  The adults around her feared Jeremy, even their father.

  She was in the heads of all of the adults. A silent observer to each internal conversation. The truths and the cold, hard lies.

  The demon dismissed her mother’s offer of refreshments or a feeder from her husband’s secondary harem.

  He lied about how generous he found their hospitality.

  "The castle was a dump. The harem, chock-full of weaklings, like the eldest, snivelling daughter with pathetic air."

  "Dull blood from harem witches that had no ambition in life but to feed his green-level brother?"

  "He’d rather drink congealed corpse blood."

  Those cold eyes had looked at her and Jill while he spewed his poisonous thoughts.

  Elizabeth called her mother with a wordless cry as her uncle’s eyes lingered on her tiny body.

  His thoughts about the frail sickling their mother had bred, cut her like a knife.

  He looked at Jill even longer and his thoughts made her shake.

  Elizabeth blocked him. She blocked everyone's thoughts in an instant, putting up her arms as if to ward off another physical blow.

  His thoughts battered at her mind’s barrier, but none could penetrate her walls.

  It was the first time Elizabeth stopped listening, instead of merely tuning out other thoughts.

  Fear kept the block up even as her mother bent down and held Elizabeth in her protective arms.

  Uncle’s thoughts frightened Elizabeth, though she didn’t fully understand them.

  Jill’s blast of blue fire toward their uncle caught everyone by surprise.

  Their mother scolded Jill immediately. She bent to pick Jill up, too.

  Their mother was afraid of nothing, but this demon made her strong arms shake.

  “Liz’beth,” Jill said. A stubborn lip stuck out despite their mother’s brief scolding.

  Their mother froze, bent over, as Jill said Elizabeths’s forbidden name out loud.

  Elizabeth shook her head at her sister. She was nobody.

  Their mother hugged them closer. She kissed Jill on the head, whispering a promise that she wouldn't let anyone hurt Elizabeth.

  Her name was a secret no more.

  Their uncle had to accept the apologies from their parents. Regrets were too late.

  The witchlings had drawn the demon’s eye.

  End of Dreams

  When Jill developed anemia at almost two years old, their parents realized something was wrong.

  Two daughters with anemia at such young ages were impossible to ignore.

  The fire princess was too valuable to risk leaving to her fate.

  A wet nurse with fire from their father’s secondary harem was called upon for blood.

  Healers were in and out of the castle daily.

  All others were banished, so Jill might be left to he
r sickbed in peace.

  Only family was permitted to stay. Their demon uncle was given his choice of rooms, from those recently abandoned.

  His bitter complaints about their mother were impossible to avoid when Elizabeth left her sister’s room.

  Elizabeth had kept a wall between her mind and almost everyone else since the night she met the demon, but he spoke his complaints loudly enough, out loud, for everyone to hear.

  She never called him Jeremy, even in her own head.

  The demon.

  Ironically, Elizabeth outgrew her own anemia, while Jill slowly faded. Blocking thoughts had an unexpected effect to plug the flood of Elizabeth’s magic.

  She didn’t understand it then, but it was because she stopped wasting her magic. It was exhausting to be passively reading everyone all at once and all of the time.

  A dripping tap led to surprising amounts of water loss, when added up. Blocking thoughts was tightening her control over the leaky tap of her magic.

  Elizabeth spent the long nights holding Jill’s limp, sweaty hand, while she lay beside her on the bed.

  She imagined. The increased power let her make Jill’s dreams reality, none of them which she could deny.

  It made her cry when the dream was simply that Elizabeth and Jill switched bodies, so Jill could escape her room.

  Months turned into another year.

  Elizabeth’s mind and magic responded to the daily exercise in imagination. With time, her power grew exponentially, compared to her body that spent hours in bed with Jill.

  She began to haunt others like a ghost.

  Elizabeth could be poked and prodded when the healers came.

  She took on Jill’s appearance, so her sister could rest.

  Lightning controlled what others perceived, while Elizabeth possessed minds. Her power was strong enough to slip into multiple minds at once with illusion.

  Jill couldn’t be spared the hauntings.

  Elizabeth would possess her sister’s mind to help Jill drink most of the tonics and the boring gruels.

  She saved dessert for Jill to savour, returning Jill to her senses for those brief moments of pleasure.

  Elizabeth even let the magic change what Jill thought she tasted to get the awful, orange-flavoured iron down. That was the worst, but what were sisters for?

  Still, Jill faded. Her younger sister’s pale skin showed not a drop of the summer that had passed. Her lank hair became thinner every time their mother brushed it, sobbing.

  Jill didn't know she was fading. It was both a gift and a curse from Elizabeth’s imagination that kept her sister from suffering.

  Jill’s body was too often in dreams to sustain itself. Feeding tubes and IV lines twisted around her gangly limbs, with bags of both blood and nutrients dutifully hung by servants.

  One night it all stopped.

  The healers didn’t come.

  Their mother sat down beside Elizabeth on the bed, each of them holding one of Jill’s cold hands.

  Blood red rays of light painted the room along with Elizabeth’s cries of denial.

  It was time for childish games to grow up.

  Mated to Fate

  Maeren

  Elizabeth

  Seeing Daemon again was heaven in the otherwise hellish desert of the Wastes. It was an irony to be remembered.

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure George would agree, but he’d cooperated with bringing his older brother across the realms. It had to count for something when the rest of their family had been so torn apart.

  It was time to heal.

  Daemon arrived in a bolt of godly lightning. George had drawn and modified an amplification circle for transport from the human realm. The chalked glyphs smoked at Daemon’s sizzling arrival.

  He had finally returned to Elizabeth’s side, after she and her family had run from the treachery at the royal castle.

  It turned out that Daemon wasn’t the villain she’d mistaken him for when he’d killed the dragons that had attacked her and then assumed temporary kingship for his poisoned father.

  He had done it to save her. He never gave up on her, despite the dangerous secrets she’d been keeping from him.

  Yep, he was practically a demonic hero.

  Irony, right?

  Even more shocking, the blame for the king’s assassination attempt was instead wrongly being placed upon Elizabeth and her family.

  She’d done what she could to stop the demon apocalypse, to save the damn kingdom from its dark, bloody history of sacrificing innocent witches for power.

  A hidden slayer who had once promised to keep the world safe on both sides of the edge by hunting for a traitor to stake.

  The humans would have called her the hero if they’d even known she existed. Maeren knew her as an outlaw now.

  A lightning witch wasn’t something her family wanted bandied about in either dimension.

  They’d hidden in the human realm since her childhood, disguising Elizabeth’s real power to avoid drawing the attention from the kinds of monsters that humans feared roamed the dark.

  It had been a big mistake to open the closet once more on her past.

  Maeren was hell. She’d known it, even if she’d always hidden being as monstrous as the rest of Maeren’s inhabitants.

  Running back to the human realm when the king and the royal family had been poisoned had only made her family look guilty.

  The Norwoods had been declared ‘persons of interest’ to be brought in for questioning about the crimes—despite only being culpable for the minor poisoning of the princes and princess as a distraction for their escape.

  George found her first. He’d kidnapped Elizabeth to the Wastes due to her dangerous magic, with a plan to bring her back to the castle to face a trial.

  Then, she’d accidentally teleported her soul to Daemon’s bedroom in the castle and faced the second prince, Phillip, in an intimate interrogation.

  Her sister, Jill, and their hostage-turned-friend, Princess Victoria, were separated from her, also prisoners of another vampiric prince. Victoria had barely escaped a dragon that tried to steal her first.

  Dragons were arrogant, bossy assholes. Every single one of them, but most especially ones named Geer, who claimed to be her dragon-mate.

  Her mother had been stuck in the human realm with the king and queen of Maeren. The not-dead king—their family was accused of poisoning—and whom her mother had saved, just like she’d saved the Blue Queen, twenty-two years ago.

  The irony might honestly choke her. Pretty difficult to do with an elemental witch that controlled air as easily as breathing.

  Well, she wasn’t limited to only air anymore. The cover had been pulled back on her power. It was time to let her lightning play.

  Daemon had met his equal.

  This time, he was back for a rematch, and she wouldn’t be needing a handicap.

  For one perfect moment, Elizabeth felt all the excitement and the magnetic pull to Daemon, once more, from when they’d first met at the vampire ball. It was edged by a danger that she knew he could bring as well as handle.

  She smiled through her exhaustion. Daemon was here.

  No longer would she have to try to push alone against George’s rock headed mentality about her magic.

  Phillip’s accusations about her family’s role in the king’s disappearance could be tempered.

  Who better to act as an intermediary with his brothers than Daemon?

  The sight of her erstwhile claimed kneeling in the eye of concentrated power, which rippled through the dimensional circle like a hurricane, was seared into her vision before the magic tried to rip her off of her knees.

  She didn’t have to hold back in front of Daemon any longer.

  Slamming her hands down to draw from the circle’s strength, she tried to hold on. The storm’s currents pulled as she manipulated the air around her, yelling to George for help.

  Her ‘shut it down’ was swallowed by howling winds.

  George’s
response was muffled as well.

  Violent lightning strobed from the outer circle’s barrier and slammed into Daemon’s body, providing the only audible noise above the wind as the bolts crackled on impact.

  The circle wasn’t penetrable to others, like when she and George had used it to amplify her telepathic lightning in order to talk to her separated family.

  Modifying the magic from a communication-amplifier into something that allowed Daemon to transport through dimensions had changed the very nature of the circle.

  A boulder George sent flying from his position outside of the chalked lines bounced off, like hail on a windshield, redirected to crash beside them.

  “Are you crazy?” she shouted to the wind.

  She had tried to mouth the words carefully enough that George should be able to read her lips. That boulder had been many times her size. It would have squashed Daemon if it made it through.

  More like a damn mountain of rock that George had tossed like a tin can at a hurricane.

  George had drawn the circle. He ought to be able to break it, and hopefully, with less violent means than brute earth force.

  She tried sending her thoughts out to George to communicate over the wind. Her gentle lightning telepathy bounced back against the inside of the circle, just as the boulder had from the outside.