The Bend-Bite-Shift Box Set Read online

  Bend-Bite-Shift the Box Set

  By

  Olivia Hardin

  Bend-Bite-Shift the Box Set

  Copyright © 2013 by Olivia Hardin

  All rights reserve. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  CONTENTS

  Witch Way Bends (Book 1 of the Bend-Bite-Shift Trilogy)

  Bitten Shame (Book 2 Bend-Bite-Shift Trilogy)

  Tell A Soul (A Bend-Bite-Shift Story)

  Shifty Business (Book 3 of the Bend-Bite-Shift Trilogy)

  By Blood & Benevolence (A Bend-Bite-Shift Story)

  Witch Way Bends

  By

  Olivia Hardin

  Witch Way Bends

  Copyright © 2011 by Olivia Hardin

  All rights reserve. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  ~ For Cori Elizabeth ~

  You kept your faith in your heart and

  I will always keep you in mine

  The night air felt thick, as if the very molecules surrounding her were witness to something extraordinary, and the subtle icy feeling coursing through her own body affirmed what she already knew. Slowly dropping her head down, Devan Stowe’s gaze paused on each one of the five lifeless bodies sprawled on the ground around her. This was not a dream, an aberration, or a hallucination. This was death.

  Strange and surreal was her initial analysis of the carnage before her. It was as if they’d all been simultaneously dispatched from exactly where they’d previously stood.

  A door slammed behind her and Devan’s body twitched in reaction. She swung around to the see Kent Crosby stepping out of the Dearmon residence with an assortment of files in his hand. His eyes were on her, and she could feel his stare like thousands of tiny fingers reaching into her head, trying to find some hidden part of her. She fought back, keeping her expression mute.

  He marched past her. “I told you to wait.” The condescending words were directed right at her, though dismissively his eyes were no longer turned towards her but at a packet of papers one of his comrades passed to him.

  “You killed all of them.” The words dropped out of her mouth one by one without emotion.

  “What’re we gonna do about her?” one of them asked, and it took a moment for her to remember his name was Nicky. She didn’t like the snicker in his voice.

  Kent took his time responding, walking away from the scene and back towards their vehicle. The other two men followed him, and Devan too fell into lockstep behind them. She kept her chin high, not allowing herself another look at the bodies.

  “Langston will take care of her,” Kent eventually said as he opened the truck door.

  “No!” The desperation in her voice nearly sickened her. “No, this isn’t finished yet.”

  He flicked a glance at her over his shoulder. Then he turned away again. “You did your job. You set this up. That was the only reason you were in on this. We don’t need you anymore.”

  “I need you. This isn’t over, Kent. The rest of them are still out there! This isn’t over until every last one of them is gone.”

  The stillness of the moment was palpable. The others didn’t seem to know what to do. None of them made a move. They just stared at her, clearly confused.

  Kent turned completely around and approached her. He wasn’t as tall as the other two—especially the behemoth Langston—though his height still towered over her very petite size. Each step, each movement of his body was cohesive, as if all of his muscles worked as one. There was strength evident in the set of his shoulders, and yet he appeared lithe and almost graceful. She might have laughed at her own silly, distracted thoughts if not for the coldness she witnessed behind his eyes. It took every ounce of her control not to flinch as he came to a halt in front of her. Those same blue eyes slowly squinted as he assessed her up and down. He grinned but there was no humor in the expression. “Aren’t you a bloodthirsty one?” He paused a moment. “You’re also one of them.”

  She recoiled at his words, stung to her very core. Still, she recovered quickly, and when he turned and began marching away, she ran after him. She stood in front of him, placing her hands on his chest, and she knew in that moment that, if necessary, she’d get down on her knees to plead with him. “No, dammit. If you really believed that, then you wouldn’t have come here with me. I need to finish this!”

  He pursed his lips. “Just let her go,” he told the others.

  “You don’t understand.” Her cold fingers dug into him, and she whispered in a voice that was suddenly small. “I’m not asking for my life. I’m asking for retribution.”

  The sigh that escaped Kent’s lips seethed with aggravation. When he raised his Beretta and pointed it towards her, she didn’t cry out, or scream, or back away. She just stood there and stared at him. A strength she didn’t know she had welled up in her. It was a force born of necessity and it rippled from her toes, through her legs, and across her abdomen until it flooded her mind. A complete calmness washed over her in an instant. A warmth rushed from behind her eyes, and each muscle in her body reached within itself. All the air lifted around her, and it rustled her short raven curls so they blew across her face.

  Langston took a step towards Devan and began to raise his arm to her. Then he seemed to think better of it and stopped. Kent lowered his hand inch by inch, and she could have sworn she saw his body tremble as he brought his arm to his side. Then, quicker than Devan could have anticipated, Kent took his finger off the trigger, shifted the pistol to his other hand, and held it out to her. Taking it, she tested its weight in her palm before looking back at him.

  Kent nodded his approval then motioned for everyone to get into the truck, including Devan. She followed Langston’s motion that she should take the center front seat.

  As she slid into the cab, she felt strange. Yearning and anticipation burned in her stomach. “Something’s wrong–” she began to say in a whisper, more to herself than anyone else. Langston must have heard her because he locked his black eyes on her with a grim expression. The heat in the pit of her stomach exploded, and just as it did, she peered through the rearview window and saw the flames erupting behind them. The entire Dearmon estate exploded into fire, and she knew there wouldn’t be much left of the bodies for anyone to find later.

  Kent knew who would be on the other side of th
e door when he opened it. His frown deepened when Langston took two quick, long steps into the room. Langston rarely moved with any amount of speed, though he had the capacity when necessary. By all accounts, he was huge, tall, and wide, at almost seven feet and at least three hundred pounds.

  “We must speak about Devan,” the man murmured, his voice just above a whisper, but the force behind it almost a rumble.

  “As long as she’s with us, she can’t drum up trouble. I couldn’t very well get rid of her when she’d been so instrumental in setting things up.” Kent would only ever explain himself to Langston, as the two of them had been working together for a very, very long time.

  “She must come with us. Did you not see it?” Langston’s brow was furrowed deeply, his lips a straight line as he seated his massive form onto one of the double beds in the room.

  “You read her? But you even didn’t touch her.” He paused a moment. “No, surely not–”

  If at all possible, the crevices in the larger man’s forehead deepened as he placed a palm on each knee and raised his chin to impress upon Kent the seriousness of what he was about to ask. “Why did you lower your weapon?”

  Kent didn’t know why. He knew he’d never have hurt her. Even when he’d held the gun to her head it had only been to frighten her away but not to harm. Still, he could have let her go, and Langston could have fixed things so she’d never even remember she’d been there. Something had happened. When she’d looked at him with those big, brown eyes, the fear and desperation in them had been clear, but then something happened. The longer she stared into him, the larger her pupils became until her eyes looked black and fluid like twin pools of dark water. A roaring built in his ears and her will became his own. Without even realizing it, he’d slowly lowered his arm.

  “What did you see?” Kent asked.

  “Her aura disappeared,” Langston said slowly, deliberately. “It dissolved into her and was enveloped by something within her, like light being trapped within a black hole, and the air around her grew as if it were alive. She forced your hand down, my friend. She charmed you somehow. And I don’t believe she even knew she was doing it.”

  Kent shook his head with such exaggeration that his sandy blond hair swept from side to side. “She’s not–she can’t be. I would have felt it if she were a witch. I’ve touched her and I read nothing. And Eden Stowe’s daughter cannot be a witch.”

  Langston sighed as he propelled himself into a standing position. “I can only tell you what I witnessed. I felt something at that moment. And yet, she sat between us on the drive here and there was nothing. Her aura returned to her the second you placed your weapon into her palm, golden and tinged gray, just as it was before it had been absorbed into her. I do not understand and have never witnessed anything such as that, but everything within me tells me she belongs with us, that she has a purpose amongst us.”

  Kent nodded his head in acceptance as Langston headed towards the door, “Let me know when we’re ready.”

  When his comrade was gone, Kent paced the room several times as he mulled over all that Langston had said. Seeing Devan’s aura wasn’t cause for alarm in and of itself. Most people emitted some sort of aura, but non-witches were unable or “unopen” enough to see or feel auras. Langston and Kent both saw auras as colors of mist or light emanating from her head like a halo. Some magical creatures felt or sensed the aura instead of actually seeing it. Whatever the method of detecting auras, what one saw in another’s life-force could reveal a lot about them, such as whether they were sick or healthy, their emotional state, and whether they were truthful or deceitful. Depending on the receiver’s developed ability, an aura could reveal a great deal.

  The problem wasn’t what Langston saw in Devan’s aura; it was that Kent had never seen her aura at all. He continued pacing, stopping every so often to glance at the door adjoining to his room.

  For a mid-range hotel, the place was nice. He let Devan have a room all to herself, but it was connected to his, and he’d ordered her to keep the doors between them unlocked. Just because he’d let her come along didn’t mean he was going to blindly trust her. And now he had to contend with the fact that she possibly possessed some sort of power. This was certainly an unexpected deviation from his carefully prepared plans.

  To make matters worse, she was entirely too damn pretty for her own good. Not classically beautiful, but most definitely pretty. An oval face of pale complexion, clear and smooth, a perfect pallet for those gold-brown eyes of hers. She didn’t need makeup because her cheeks beamed a constant, simple blush. And her lips–wow, those plump, heart-shaped lips–how could he not notice the way they’d turned almost the color of red wine when she’d pleaded with him? And then there were those pixie curls surrounding her face. Her hair was dark brown but the strands contained a multitude of natural highlights, and the hue seemed to have the ability to change from flashing gold to auburn or even darken to midnight.

  “This was a bad idea.” The gruffness of his own voice made him even more frustrated. As he tossed his duffel onto the bed, he couldn’t help but glance at that closed door between his room and hers. The memory of her hands pressed against his chest surfaced out of nowhere. Even with his t-shirt between her skin and his, he’d been able to feel the icy coldness of her fingers biting into him, reaching for his soul. The polarity of cold against hot. She had a way of making him respond, a rarity for him.

  He looked down at his crotch and shook his head as the evidence of his reaction pressed against his jeans even at that very moment. “Yep, bad idea, Kent. Really bad idea.”

  Kent barely had time to change his shirt when his cell rang. He knew it was Langston even before he flipped it open and answered.

  “It’s done.” Langston never was one for words. He murmured an acknowledgment and closed the phone before slipping it into his back pocket.

  He rapped hard against the door between his and Devan’s rooms. He was angry with himself for having these types of thoughts about her, whereas normally he’d have been able to talk himself under control. He figured the anger was good because it provided a necessary diversion to quash the residual evidence of the very inappropriate physical reaction he was still having towards Devan.

  When she didn’t answer, he knocked even harder.

  “Devan, open the door.”

  He gave her what he felt was a reasonable amount of time to answer, but there was only silence from her room. His razor-like focus returned, and a wave of “what-ifs” crashed into him. Instinctively he snatched the doorknob and slammed the door open, banging it against the wall. She was just stepping out of the bathroom as the door burst open, and to her credit, her face registered very little surprise or shock—mostly annoyance. Water was dripping from her hair and nose, leaving little drops on the cups of her bra. She tried to nonchalantly shield herself from his view by bringing the towel up to her chin, but just before she’d covered herself, he dared a glance at her chest. He couldn’t help but notice her breasts straining against the fabric. He turned his head away as he recognized his thoughts had again shifted back to a place he couldn’t afford to explore.

  “Thought maybe you’d bolted when you didn’t answer,” Kent grumbled, defensiveness evident in his tone. That pissed him off almost as much as the wrenching attraction he was feeling for her.

  “You ordered me to leave the door unlocked and I did. I was washing my face and chose not to answer your knock,” she told him, her expression hard.

  He purposefully focused on her face, not needing any further fuel to add to the sexual desire he already had for the woman. He realized they were both concealing a great deal. She worked nearly as hard as he did to not appear weak. Years of training and lessons in a life that would have been unbearable for some had allowed him to create the solid exterior he used to keep the world at bay. But those years had also turned his insides hard, the stoniness leeching into his skin until his heart seemed no longer able to feel like a person’s should, or so he thought
.

  She was young, barely thirty-five. If Devan wasn’t careful, her own soul would whittle away until there was no longer anything soft, womanly, or innocent about her.

  “I wanted to let you know that we’re going to dinner. There’s a restaurant in the hotel. You can come along. It’s safe.” As he said the words, he realized she had no idea what “safe” meant or exactly what it was they had to hide from.

  His dinner request wasn’t exactly inviting, but still she nodded. “Give me a moment to get dressed. I’ll meet you in the hallway.”

  Kent just turned and went back into his room. As he stood for a moment with his hand on the door leading out into the hallway, he thought to himself that Devan probably had a very beautiful, perfect pair of breasts. He pounded the heel of his hand against the wall with a firm thump before stepping outside to wait for her. “Shit.”

  * * *

  Devan didn’t eat much at supper. The food wasn’t bad, but she just couldn’t find her appetite. She did have a drink though, and then another. The wine was strong and it made her head spin. By the time they all headed back to their rooms, her feet were heavy, her steps slow. Kent had to help her put the key in the door.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked as he stepped into the room with her.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I haven’t eaten much, so the wine went straight to my head.”

  “You aren’t cut out for this, you know,” he told her. “This isn’t a game.”

  Her mouth dropped open. Then she lifted a finger and pointed at him much the same way she could recall her father doing when she was in trouble. “I know this isn’t a game, Kent. This is the chance I’ve been waiting years for. Do you know how it was to live like–” She pursed her lips and glared at him. “They have to pay for what they did.”