Bound by Fate Read online

  Table of Contents

  © 2020 Tegan Maher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Connect with Me

  The Deadly Daiquiri | CHAPTER ONE

  Other Series by Tegan Maher

  About Tegan

  © 2020 Tegan Maher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system currently in use or yet to be devised.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or institutions is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal use and may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for that person. If you did not purchase this book, or it was not purchased for your use, then you have an unauthorized copy. Please go to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work and copyright.

  Chapter 1

  I polished off my breakfast and pushed the tray away. We had a world to save and I wasn’t going to do it from bed. We’d just gotten back from a quasi-successful battle with a coven of witches bent on ridding the world of good magic by destroying the Scepter of Life. With only six days left before we had to present the scepter to the Earth Mother and three of the stones still missing, we didn’t have any time to waste.

  The day before, we’d managed to recover the scepter, but they’d gotten away with the stones. The upside was that they hadn’t managed to destroy them. On the downside, we didn’t know who they were and they were working with a demon of unknown origins, which made the situation unpredictable.

  We didn’t know where they’d gone or even who to look for, though I had faith that Camille, my best friend Emma’s mother and a powerful mind witch, would manage to extract at least some useful information from the witches we’d captured. Seeing as how they’d tried to kill me, I hoped she made it hurt. I’m vindictive like that.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to get up, Shelby?” Oliver, my partner on this mission, asked, worry creasing his tanned face. He looked like he’d aged ten years beyond his early twenties, but that wasn’t too surprising considering he’d been dangling above a pit of hellfire only twelve hours ago.

  “I don’t have much choice,” I replied, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. Spot, the academy’s hellhound, jumped up from his spot on the rug and trotted over to shove his middle head under my hand for an ear-scratching. “We only have six days left, and we have no idea where they disappeared to. Besides, Emma’s healing potion was the bomb. It may have been the grossest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, but I feel like a new woman.”

  It was true. Emma was an earth witch and had assumed the position of potions master at the Celestial Academy, a secret school that trained angel-touched witches to deal with bad creatures most people only thought were myths. It was my job to keep it that way even though I’d been among that blessedly ignorant population just a couple of months ago.

  I gave a tentative stretch and was pleasantly surprised to find that I hadn’t been exaggerating. The injuries I’d sustained when I was battling the coven were gone without so much as a twinge left.

  I smiled at Emma. “Girl, I don’t know what you put in that and I don’t want to know, but you knocked it out of the park. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” she said, her brown eyes crinkling at the corners in a satisfied grin. “Just do me a favor and don’t die. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I replied, brow raised. “Oliver, take yourself on out of here so I can get dressed. I can’t go chasin’ bad guys in my jammies.”

  He didn’t look convinced I’d live through putting on a pair of jeans but moved toward the door anyway. “Okay. I’ll meet you in the healer’s room. We can check in on Breena and see if Camille or Lilith has any info that will point us in the right direction.”

  “That works,” I replied as he stepped into the hall.

  “Mom was pissed when they brought you in,” Emma said after Oliver closed the door behind him. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her that mad. I almost feel sorry for those witches. Almost.”

  I had no doubt they’d had a much rougher night than I had. Camille had been in my head a time or two back when my magic had been blocked, and even though she’d done her level best to be gentle, it wasn’t a process I was eager to repeat. I could only imagine how it would feel if she didn’t particularly care how she extracted the information.

  “Yeah, I might feel bad if they hadn’t tried to kill me and destroy all that I hold dear,” I said, my tone dry as I pulled on a pair of ratty jeans. “As it is, I figure they’re still getting less than they deserve. I just hope she managed to learn something.”

  Emma pulled a blue tank top from my duffle bag and handed it to me. “If it was there, bet your boots she found it.”

  Of that, I had no doubt. Camille was a few hundred years old and hadn’t worked her way to the top of the Witches Council by being a slouch.

  After I brushed my teeth and yanked my unruly red hair into a messy bun, I scanned the room for anything I’d left behind.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Em said when I picked up my duffle. “I have a feeling you’ll be using this room again. It looks like it’s gonna be a long week.”

  She was probably right, so I dropped it back on the bed before following her into the hallway.

  I was surprised to see that this wing of the school was modern, with burnished wood floors and tasteful antique side tables lining the hall to hold the lamps that provided warm light. Paintings of people dressed in clothing from time periods that looked like they went all the way back to the middle ages hung from walls covered in expensive-looking mauve wallpaper.

  Since I hadn’t been conscious when they’d brought me to my room, I walked beside Emma as she guided us toward the medical wing. Spot trotted along beside us, staying tight to my side.

  “I swear,” Emma said, shaking her head and smiling. “You’re the only person I know who can turn a hellhound into a lapdog.”

  I grinned as I glanced down at my newest best friend. He gave a playful hop and wagged his stub of a tail, and I took a second to rub the massive head nearest me. “Aw, he’s a big baby. He just knows I love animals and senses I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “Yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s a three-hundred-pound, three-headed English mastiff who breathes hellfire. I’m sure he’s worried about people hurting him.”

  “Under it all, he’s still a dog,” I insisted. “He doesn’t know he’s a little scary looking.”

  Emma huffed. “I swear, you’d give the devil himself the benefit of the doubt.”

  “If he was an animal, maybe,” I said. “Since he’s not, I’ll take him at face value.” That was typically my policy. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people; it was that I didn’t trust very many of them. Though I was young, I’d had a lot of experience with what can happen if you misplace your trust.

  “I wonder how old this place is,” I mused, pushing the thoughts from my mind and examining a picture of a woman dressed in a riding skirt and holding the reins of a huge black horse.
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  “From what I can gather,” Em replied, “it goes back at least several hundred years. Lilith gave me a little history lesson on previous potions masters so I could make sense of all the brew books, and some of them go back to like the thirteen hundreds. Those were probably brought over, though.”

  I turned to her, mouth agape. “No way!”

  She nodded. “Yep. I don’t know if they used this building or not, but based on how parts of it still have stone walls and floors, I’d lay money they did.”

  That put things in a whole new perspective. I’d thought the program was relatively new, but I’d just assumed. I hadn’t really given it much thought, but it made sense when I did. After all, bad guys had been around just as long as good guys had, so somebody’d had to fight them. Also, from what I’d gathered, recruiting new members was only a small part of the organization. There were a lot of moving pieces: historical record-keeping, over-watching, and networking to coordinate services with various agencies. And those were just the roles I’d seen in action. I had a feeling I’d only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. I still had no idea what role angels played in it all.

  “That’s amazing,” I said, “and a little humbling. Imagine the people who’ve walked these halls. How cool would it be to be able to talk to them?”

  “Pretty cool, I suppose,” a voice said from behind us.

  I whipped around to find a man, or rather the ghost of a man, hovering there, a wry smile curving his handsome lips. He looked to be in his forties, though it was hard to tell since he was translucent.

  My knowledge of period clothing was limited to what I saw on TV, but if I’d had to guess, I’d say he was from the seventeen hundreds or so. He was wearing knee-length breeches, a tan waistcoat that trailed to the back of his knees, and a white frilly shirt. A gold pocket watch was tucked into a watch pocket on his coat, and his long brown hair was tied with a ribbon into a ponytail at the nape of his neck.

  “Sir Richard Clark, at your service,” he said, sweeping the tri-cornered hat he was holding across his middle and bowing low.

  “Shelby Flynn,” I said. “Nice to meet you. This is Emma.” I felt like he probably expected me to curtsy or something, but I wasn’t exactly a curtsying type of girl.

  “It’s a pleasure,” Em said from beside me, then narrowed her eyes. “But who are you and what are you doing here? I’ve never seen you before, and nobody’s mentioned you.”

  “They haven’t?” he asked, looking genuinely confused. “But I’ve lived here for ... what century is this again?”

  “The twenty-first,” I replied, belatedly adopting Emma’s suspicious glance. The last stranger who’d entered the school had put our friend Breena in a coma. I wasn’t sure how to battle a ghost, but I was sure I could think of something if I needed to.

  “Oh, there you two are,” Lilith called from behind us. “I was wondering what happened to you. Oliver’s been in with Breena for a while, and I was starting to get worried. Oh, hello, Richard. I see you’ve met our two newest recruits.”

  “So you know him?” I asked her, relaxing a little.

  “Oh, sure,” Lilith replied, waving a delicate hand then tucking a strand of short platinum hair behind a pointed ear. “He was once a warrior here before he met his end during an unfortunate event involving a jilted demoness wielding a silver candlestick.”

  Lilith was a Fae, though she glamoured herself when she went into the human world. She was also the headmistress of the school. Nobody’d said how old she was, but I was guessing she had at least a few hundred years on me.

  “Madame,” he said, drawing his brows down, “first, it’s SIR Richard. And I would prefer you didn’t share the lurid details of my demise immediately upon introduction.”

  “And I would have preferred you hadn’t gotten yourself killed in such a lurid manner. Or at all, for that matter,” she retorted. “But c’est la vie.” She turned to us. “But to answer the question you girls probably have, Richard is a welcome resident of the Celestial Academy. He can be a bit pompous sometimes, but he was one of the best warriors this organization’s ever had.” She raised a brow at him. “He just had horrible taste in women.”

  He gave us a pained grin. “As much as I’d like to deny it, I cannot. She’s right. I always had a soft spot for tall, commanding women, and it proved my downfall in the end.”

  Lilith sighed and motioned for us to keep moving. “It did, but perhaps that connection will prove useful. There’s a demon involved in our current case, and we don’t know who it is. I don’t know that it matters, but I’d rather have all the information possible.”

  Sir Richard floated along beside us. “What’s the emergency du jour? And what do you know about the demon?”

  Lilith gave him a rundown of the situation. “And we don’t know anything other than that he wants to see the Scepter destroyed.”

  Richard rubbed his chin. “In theory, it’s understandable that any demon would want the scepter destroyed. If there’s no good magic in the world, then they’d be free to run amok. However, it’s a lofty ambition and that’s not a trait many demons possess. What do you know about the coven members? Do any of them have links to the underworld?”

  “Camille would be a better person to ask,” she said. “She’s just finished interrogating the witches we captured last night and is going to brief us all in the library.”

  “We wanted to check on Breena first,” I said. “Have there been any changes?”

  Lilith shook her head. “She’s still unconscious. Camille tried to go into her mind to see if it’s intact, but she encountered some sort of barrier. She thinks it’s a subconscious shield, but she’s never encountered one before. We’re calling in ... somebody we think may be better suited to getting around them than Camille is. They’re meeting us in the library, and you can check on Breena afterwards. As you Southerners like to say, time’s awastin’.”

  With that, she turned and strode toward the library and left us to keep up.

  Chapter 2

  As we followed her through the labyrinth of hallways, I was amazed by how each section differed. Some were modern and warm, some were almost clinical with harsh fluorescent lighting and cold white-tile floors, and then when we made it to the wing that held the library and the potions tower, it transformed into a medieval castle, with stone walls and floors. Tapestries lined the walls, and the only sources of light were wall sconces and candles.

  The library itself was something straight out of a historical novel. A huge cherry desk commanded the space in the center of the room, flanked by two leather wingback chairs. The matching settee squatted in front of the crackling fireplace, and I cringed when I saw the scorch marks and a couple of rips that were the result of the battle we’d had in this room just a couple of days ago. Or had it been only yesterday?

  Between the time variance that existed between the school and the “real” world and the fact that I’d been unconscious for most of the night, I felt a little discombobulated.

  My thoughts drifted to Cody, my long-time boyfriend, and twin fingers of guilt and longing twisted through my gut. He was non-magical, so he had no place in this world. I couldn’t even tell him about it in anything other than the vaguest of terms, though I was second-guessing that rule. I didn’t like hiding things from him, and he was a good guy; he worried about me. The problem there, of course, was that if he knew my secret, he could be captured and used against me.

  I pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind as we entered the library. It was a problem, but one I’d have to deal with once I recovered the rest of the stones. Until then, it was going to have to simmer no matter how much I hated it. The worst part was that if he knew what was going on, he’d be behind me a hundred percent. He always was because he had way more faith in me than I had in myself.

  Ever since this had all started, I’d had to lie to him about where I went, where I got the inevitable bruises that came with training, and why I wasn’t always mentally present when we
were together. That was the worst part for me because he deserved better.

  Stu, a monkey who’d been a familiar to a witch who’d been killed in the thirties, swayed and bobbed over to us in the rolling gait monkeys have. That was pretty much the only monkeyish thing he was doing, though. He had a glass of bourbon in one hand and an e-cigarette in the other. The smell of cinnamon buns from his vape wafted to us and I smiled. It wasn’t ideal, but Devin, my roommate and fellow Academy member, had gotten it for him to replace the clove cigarettes he always smoked in the hopes that he’d give it up altogether.

  “What’s up, Stu?” I asked as I took a seat in one of the wingback chairs and Emma claimed the other. Oliver was already there, stoking the fire. I knew it had to be ninety degrees outside because it was late summer in Georgia, but in here, it was chilly.

  “Same old, same old, toots,” he replied, his voice raspy as he climbed onto the edge of the desk and squatted there, his weird little monkey toes curling around the ornate edge. He’d been involved in the battle the day before, and upon closer inspection, looked a little worse for wear. Some of the hair was singed off around his cheeks, and he had a burn mark on one arm. His eyebrows were almost completely gone. “Glad you’re not dead.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Me too, and ditto.”

  Camille, a tall brunette who had the looks of a runway model and the presence of an Army general, strode into the room, a file folder in her hand. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her forehead was creased with concentration. This was not the laughing woman I’d hung out with a million times. This was the business side of Camille. I hadn’t seen it much, but it was no wonder she was a higher-up at the Witches Council. Power rolled off her.

  “Hey, Mom,” Emma said, and Camille started.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Camille replied with a tired half-smile. “I’m not used to seeing you at work. It’s a little jarring. I hate that you’re involved in this stuff at all.” She cast a glare at Lilith, who had assumed her position behind the desk.