A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Read online

  Cover Design: Jacqueline Sweet Design

  Editing: Picky Cat Proofing

  Proofing: Lion and Raven Editing

  Formatting: Harbinger Press

  Copyright © Harbinger Press 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes only. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The original characters and storylines are created by the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.

  Also by Harbinger Press

  Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts

  A Spell for Death

  A Spell for Shadows

  A Spell for Twilight, October 2019

  A Spell for Dawn, December 2019

  The Gardstone Trilogy

  Magic’s Heart, November 2019

  A special thanks to:

  Scott Palmer

  Michael Robinson

  Marty at Picky Cat Proofing

  Crystal Morse, Kaitlin King, and Reneé Clout

  Much love from

  B.C. Palmer and Marie Robinson

  Contents

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Nathan

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Nathan

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Hunter

  Hunter

  Amelia

  Nathan

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Amelia

  Nathan

  Become a Harbinger

  About Marie Robinson

  About B.C. Palmer

  Amelia

  There was something in the house with me.

  I woke up before dawn to a dark room. I was breathing heavy and loud, and my skin was damp and cold from night sweats. More nightmares, probably. At least I didn’t remember them. I pushed the blanket off my legs and started to throw them over the edge of the bed but had an old irrational fear of my feet being grabbed before I did, and hesitated.

  Well, it wasn’t so irrational anymore, maybe. There really were things that lived in the dark corners of the world. I had almost brought one of them out in the open. After a year at Rosewilde, I could officially call myself a magician, and with knowledge of magic came the knowledge that there was a lot more in the world than I ever imagined.

  Plenty of it was dangerous. Hell—most of it was dangerous.

  I raised my hands for a simple revelation spell to peer into the darkness, but when I looked through the rectangle formed by my thumbs and forefingers there was nothing to see. Just a room. Still, I held my breath and called to mind one of the handful of defensive spells I’d learned over the summer as I checked the opened bathroom door, the ceiling, and then shifted my hands into a more in-depth spell that revealed the lines of protection spells knitted to the door frames and glowing around the windows and beyond.

  I held my breath.

  Which meant that loud, slow panting noise was coming from something else.

  Fear tried to scramble my thoughts. I pushed it away as it clawed at the back of my brain and focused on the words and gestures of a spell. A shield, just to buy time for something more creative, but when my hands moved the gestures were all wrong. They were sharp and primal, instead of the delicate and precise movements I’d learned in school. I tried to speak the words, and they should have been clipped Latin but instead the sound I made was guttural, the tongue harsh and scraping in my throat.

  A set of white teeth spread into a grin in the darkness at the foot of the bed, and the teeth were needle-sharp and long. They opened, and a slender black tongue slipped through them dripping ichor and saliva. The mouth floated forward, like some fucked-up Cheshire cat. There was weight on the bed. I was summoning it. I recognized the cadence of the spell, the nature of the gestures. I was calling this thing and I couldn’t stop myself.

  I screamed, and slammed my hands together flat to stop the casting. Not that it mattered—whatever it was, it was here, and I scrambled away from it on the bed, threw a pillow, and managed to gain control of myself long enough to snap my fingers into place for Koin’s Static Discharge. Electricity crackled around my fingers as I rushed through the Attic Greek and pointed—

  “Amelia!”

  Reality snapped on like someone had thrown a switch.

  Someone had. Lucas was on top of me, holding my wrists, muttering… was that Belmont’s Elemental Suppression? The air smelled like ozone, acrid in my nostrils. Isaac was coming back to the bed from the door, where he’d turned on the overhead light. “Amelia, what’s wrong?”

  My body took a minute to catch up with my mind and continued to struggle against Lucas’s grip until I finally woke up the rest of the way.

  “Lucas,” I muttered, “Isaac?”

  “Shh,” Lucas breathed and let my wrists loose as he sank back down beside me and pulled me to him. “You’re alright. It was a dream. Inhale, exhale. You were casting in your sleep. It’s all right now.”

  Isaac reached up and, with a thumb, wiped moisture from my eyes where I had apparently been crying. Well, that was embarrassing.

  I cleared my throat and reached up to wipe them more thoroughly. “They’re getting worse,” I said as I held an arm out to Isaac, inviting him closer.

  “Probably because school is around the corner,” Isaac said softly as he slipped an arm behind my head and under Lucas’s shoulder. “That can only mean bad memories.”

  “Not all of them,” I murmured, snug between them, my anxiety gradually draining away. “But you’re probably right. It was so real, though. And casting in my sleep? How?”

  Lucas kissed my forehead. “Using your dream body. It’s exactly like this one but exists only on the dream plane. You’ll have your anatomy class this year, in preparation for the advanced casting courses next year. Doctor Ashworth will go over it in painstaking detail. You must have a particularly robust dream-self. Feeling any better?”

  I nodded slowly and nuzzled against Lucas’s chest. He kissed me again over the tangles of my bed-hair, and Isaac pressed closer to comb my hair back and kiss the side of my neck. Between them it was warm—warm enough that at some point in the night we had kicked most of the covers down to the foot of the bed.

  The last of the dream faded, the last bit of anxiety bled away, and what was left was the realization that the two of them were naked and pressed against me.

  I bit my lip as my hand traveled down Lucas’s side, along the smooth lines of his torso and over his hip. He gave an appreciative, somewhat surprised growl, soft and buzzing in his chest. I trailed my fingers over the ridge of his hip and down, until I found him growing hard.

  “Well,” he murmured softly, “good morning to you, too.”

  “I take it we’re waiting on coffee, then,” Isaac breathed as he shifted his hips. His cock pressed against my lower back as he slid a hand around my waist and down, nibbling on my ear.
/>   I had missed them over the summer, and Whispering back and forth over long distances, and occasionally talking on the phone, hadn’t been nearly enough. School was barely two days away now and I had made sure to get full use out of the last two weeks they’d been here with me at Laura’s—my house. I craned my head and found Lucas’s lips and a few whispers of morning breath that I barely noticed as the heat of our mouths drove the rest of my senses to quiet.

  Isaac’s fingers massaged the inside of my hip, finding the ticklish spot that he’d discovered early on and digging in at just the right pressure that, instead of laughing, I gasped, the muscles of my stomach trembling as he ground against me from behind. I tugged at Lucas’s cock, toying with him until he was fully hard as we kissed, and then shifted up a bit to angle him toward my opening.

  He grinned against my lips and took my invitation but not before he gave Isaac a nod. Isaac’s hand left me, and he sat up long enough to flick his fingers through Murthy’s Spectral Sheath. Just the first one. We’d played with some of the others, but at the end of the day nothing was better than the feel of them just as they were. Though, the vibrating version was something different and plenty of fun. Isaac’s fingers finished the spell and he reached between us to wrap his hand around Lucas’s cock, setting the spell properly. Then, leaning down to resume kissing my ear, he guided Lucas into me.

  Lucas’s cock slipped easily between my lips as Isaac’s fingers slipped in briefly with him, my desire coating him so that when he teased my clit his fingers were slick and deft.

  We were wordless beacons of sensation together, writhing in place, my body humming and taut with pleasure that drove every thought out of my head. Lucas’s hands groped and traveled, teasing my nipples one moment and slipping behind my neck the next as he gasped against my lips and groaned as Isaac’s manipulation made the muscles inside me tense and quiver.

  It never took long, when they didn’t want it to, or when I didn’t want it to. Lucas bucked against me, kissed me hard, and reached down to replace Isaac’s hand with his own. “Up,” he told the other man, breathless, “come with us.”

  Isaac complied, got to his knees, and sidled up to the top of the bed as Lucas rolled me onto my back. We’d done this once before, but with a great deal less grace. It went better the second time around. Isaac spread his knees, lowering his cock to my lips. Lucas pulled triple duty, somehow managing to coordinate sharing Isaac with me while he kept his hips moving and his fingers teasing my clit all in a complementary rhythm. Magicians, they had wonderfully talented fingers.

  Isaac buried his hands in our hair and rolled his head back as I kissed along the length of his shaft, suckling and nipping gently while Lucas teased his swollen head with tongue and lips. I wrapped my thighs around Lucas’s waist and held on to him with one hand under his arm and clinging to his shoulder, and slipped my other between Isaac’s legs to grab hold of one of his perfect ass cheeks.

  We moaned and sighed and shivered together like one body split into three places. Magic danced between us, unformed and loose, driven by needs and wants that were perfectly aligned as Lucas’s thrusting became more urgent, and my legs tensed, and Isaac gripped my hair a little tighter as his cock swelled and his balls began to tighten.

  Lucas clamped his lips around the tip of Isaac’s cock. Isaac gave a grunt. Under my lips, his cock pulsed, and he bent forward at the waist. At the same moment, Lucas’s fingers and the pressure of him inside me conspired to set off a thunderstorm that rolled through my body until my fingers dug into his shoulder and Isaac’s ass. Lucas gave a final, shuddering thrust as he swallowed Isaac’s seed down. The lightbulb above us grew brighter, hummed loudly, and burst as the three of us came together, heaving and pawing at one another.

  We collapsed in a heap after that, and nearly fell back to sleep. After a while, however, we managed to collect ourselves between kisses and final, teasing pinches and tickles, and muster ourselves to the bathroom to shower off together. It was a little tight, but that was part of the fun of it, too, and Lucas cleaned up the mess afterward with a bit of magical assistance.

  As I wrapped my hair into a knot and shrugged on a plush robe, the nightmare still troubled me. Not as bad as it had the moment I woke up—not with the afterglow of that still humming under my skin—but still lingering. It meant something. I knew it as clearly as I knew my heart was beating. But these were our last days alone together before school started.

  Isaac went to work in the kitchen, gathering things for breakfast while Lucas started coffee.

  “I was hoping Hunter might show up at the last minute,” I admitted, glancing at the X’s on the calendar by the refrigerator. “I guess he decided not to.”

  “Try not to be too hard on him,” Lucas said as he switched the pot on and turned to lean on the counter. Isaac had put on a shirt to go with his boxers. Lucas sported only a pair of gym shorts that did nothing to hide what was underneath. The man woke up gorgeous. So did Isaac, for that matter. I hated them both just a little bit for that. “He’s taking Nathan’s recovery very personally.”

  “I thought Nathan was recovered?” I glanced between the two of them. “Isn’t that what you said when you got here? You saw him, didn’t you?”

  Isaac pointedly avoided looking at Lucas. I knew what that meant. The two of them knew something that I’d managed to ferret out, and they had been trying to ‘spare’ me something.

  I made a disgusted noise and rolled my eyes. “Get on with it,” I said. “I’m going to see Hunter and Nathan both at Rosewilde; you may as well tell me now. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, per se,” Lucas muttered. “It’s just… the last time we spoke with Hunter, it seemed like Nathan was recovered physically, and even mentally—he’s speaking clearly, sleeping through the night, his memory is functioning properly.”

  “But?” I pressed.

  “But,” Isaac said as he cracked an egg over a warmed pan on the stove, “emotionally, he’s apparently… not himself.”

  I frowned, and folded my arms self-consciously over my chest. The last, and only, time I’d seen Nathan awake had not exactly gone very well. In fact, it had gone terribly. After rescuing him from the Abyss, summoning him back across the inter-dimensional divide while thwarting the former headmaster of Rosewilde, Augustus Sinclaire, Nathan had announced that I had to die. Not a super warm introduction to Isaac, Lucas, and Hunter’s ex. Or… former ex? They hadn’t broken up, and Nathan turned out not to have died so… their status was several paces beyond it’s complicated.

  “Is that going to be a problem?” I asked. “For me, I mean. When I get back. Is he re-enrolling in Rosewilde?”

  “Probably,” Lucas said at the same time that Isaac said, “Doubtful.”

  They shared a tense look.

  “Normally,” Lucas explained slowly, “in a situation like that… anyone else would probably end up at Goldhaven, where the other difficult cases go. But Nathan isn’t just some problem student—he’s a prodigy, and everyone at Rosewilde knows it. He’ll be back to class. Probably with special dispensation to work at his own pace. Which would still be faster than any of us.”

  “You really think they’re just going to put him back into classes?” Isaac asked. “After what he’s been through?”

  Lucas shrugged, checked the level of coffee in the pot, and waved a hand as if none of it mattered. “It’s in the past. Magicians screw themselves and go crazy for a few years all the time. Then they get over it. Or they die. Nathan didn’t, so… as long as he can still cast, they’ll take him.”

  Nathan’s furious, twisted expression flashed in my mind’s eye for the first time in a few weeks. It was every bit as scary as it had been the last time, and the first time. I shuddered.

  Lucas checked the coffee again, seemed satisfied there was enough for a cup and poured one for me. He brought it to the island next to me and set it down before he put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed them slowly. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,
” he promised. “Hunter’s been with him, probably telling him all about you. He was insane when he woke up, Amelia. He didn’t know what he was saying. I promise, everything is going to be fine.”

  I wanted to believe that. I really did. And I started to tell him as much.

  Except, the air in the kitchen grew sharp, and a high-pitched whine dug at my ears. Wind picked up, strong enough to shake the lights over the table and blow over one of the kitchen chairs.

  The venetian doors that led to the backyard darkened, grew wavy as though some tremendous heat was built up in front of them, and then vanished altogether a second later in place of someone’s library. Someone who was standing just on the other side, lowering his hands from a spell. I’d seen a picture just a little while ago.

  Lucas relaxed from where he’d stiffened in front of me, and waved the man through from the elegant library into Laura’s kitchen, where he pulled the man into a hug.

  Percy, Lucas’s older brother, hugged back as his eyes looked me over appreciatively. I pulled my house robe a little more closed, just in case, and tried not to snap at him to keep his eyes to himself. Magicians. No shame, no decency, no boundaries.

  “You’re early,” Lucas said as the two of them parted. “It’s only just nine. What are you doing here?”

  “Got my time zones mixed,” Percy said, still looking at me. “So? This must be her? The beautiful Amelia Cresswin?”