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    The Forsaken
    The Forsaken
    The Forsaken
    Ebook212 pages2 hours

    The Forsaken

    By Patti Larsen

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    About this ebook

    The Tower
    The biggest problem with being relegated to Hong Kong and the WPC headquarters was the isolation. I was forced to stand above it all, to look down through the slightly blue-tinted glass, to pretend I wasn’t banished across the globe from my family in Wilding Springs and held captive here like some pathetic princess in a fairy tale who really needed to get a life already.
    I stared down at the harbor beneath me, the parallel histories of modern ships chugging beside old school junks while amazing if one thought about it, long past the luster stage. Because if I was going to admit it, there wasn’t a Prince riding to my rescue and this lonely heart in her tower really needed to stop feeling sorry for herself.

    Ethie Hayle’s loss of elemental magic remains a mystery tied to the locket and the girl she finds herself bound to by the transmutation spell cast by Viviana Tepes. Unable to understand or break the control keeping all but her dark sorcery from her, she’s confronted with the truth—that the crazy old woman owns her and can get to her any time she chooses. Ethie must choose the Hayle way and pursue her enemy on her own terms. The trouble is, she has no idea where to look and there are far worse things out in the big, bad world than one clever and hateful sorceress...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPatti Larsen
    Release dateApr 25, 2017
    ISBN9781988700168
    The Forsaken
    Author

    Patti Larsen

    About me, huh? Well, my official bio reads like this: Patti Larsen is a multiple award-winning author with a passion for the voices in her head. But that sounds so freaking formal, doesn’t it? I’m a storyteller who hears character's demands so loudly I have to write them down. I love the idea of sports even though sports hate me. I’ve dabbled in everything from improv theater to film making and writing TV shows, singing in an all girl band to running my own hair salon.But always, always, writing books calls me home.I’ve had my sights set on world literary domination for a while now. Which means getting my books out there, to you, my darling readers. It’s the coolest thing ever, this job of mine, being able to tell stories I love, only to see them all shiny and happy in your hands... thank you for reading.As for the rest of it, I’m short (permanent), slightly round (changeable) and blonde (for ever and ever). I love to talk one on one about the deepest topics and can’t seem to stop seeing the big picture. I happily live on Prince Edward Island, Canada, home to Anne of Green Gables and the most beautiful red beaches in the world, with my pug overlord and overlady, six lazy cats and Gypsy Vanner gelding, Fynn.

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      Book preview

      The Forsaken - Patti Larsen

      The Forsaken

      Book Two: The Hayle Coven Inheritance

      Patti Larsen

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2017 by Patti Larsen

      Find out more about Patti Larsen at

      http://www.pattilarsen.com

      ***

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ***

      Cover art (copyright) by Valerie Bellamy. All rights reserved.

      http://dog-earbookdesign.com

      Edited by Annetta Ribken, freelance Goddess. You can find her at http://www.wordwebbing.com/

      ***

      Chapter One

      I honestly didn’t have anything against Hong Kong as a home base per se. It was a lovely place, truly, a mix of old and new, of culture as ancient as humanity and as fresh as anything you might find on the cutting edge of tech. A dichotomy of everything that had ever been wrapped up in one big, loud, energetic city on the edge of the world.

      The biggest problem was my isolation. I didn’t get to walk those streets and hear the chatter of native speaking Chinese or the dialects of a variety of other cultures come to find their fortunes—or lose them—in this amazing place. Instead, I was forced to stand above it all, to look down through the slightly blue-tinted glass of the World Paranormal Council tower, to pretend I wasn’t banished across the globe from my family in Wilding Springs and held captive here like some pathetic princess in a fairy tale who really needed to get a life already.

      I stared down at the harbor beneath me, the parallel histories of modern ships chugging beside old school junks while amazing if one thought about it, long past the luster stage. Because if I was going to admit it, there wasn’t a Prince riding to my rescue and this lonely heart in her tower really needed to stop feeling sorry for herself.

      I backed away from the glass that made up the full wall at the kitchen end of Dad and Payten’s apartment, the giggling chatter of their twin daughters behind me usually enough to lift my mood a little despite the lingering resentment I clung to. Old news, no longer necessary but somehow now a part of me I couldn’t seem to shake.

      Thing was, at eight years old, finding out your father—who you idolized—and your step-mother—I still struggled with that term—were having new kids to replace you—smarter, stronger, prettier 2.0 versions—was about as big a blow as you could get. Especially when your equally beloved mother had pretty much abandoned you at one point to go live with dragons because her life here with you got to be too much for her or something equally selfish.

      Yes. I knew that wasn’t true. Was fully and completely aware of the fact Mom had no choice. She’d been battered, broken, mistreated and manhandled by witches and other races, by Fate and Creation and the stress that being the Wild Card of Creator had put on her. Not to mention her personal life going to hell after the attack of the Brotherhood, my brother Gabriel being the Gateway and her divorcing Dad.

      And she had far more than that in her past, I knew that, too. How my brother’s father died tragically within days of their marriage, that Gabriel himself was a living carbon copy reminder of Liam. How Mom discovered she and Dad only loved each other because magic cast by Nanna and his horrible adoptive mom made them.

      All perfectly logical and understandable to me at sixteen. Really, if I had to condense it into simplistic form, I’d say my mother was a saint.

      Didn’t change the fact the eight-year-old in my heart still fought against the truth she left me behind and we never got back what we lost.

      Not totally true, I admitted as I turned away from the view of the Hong Kong harbor and watched, trying not to smile, as the twins giggled over a small pile of blocks they played with, magic hovering the pieces in a precise tower that should never have stood if gravity had the chance to become part of the equation. Mom and I had finally reconnected and I’d even found GreatGram had lost her finely honed judging edge since I’d run into more trouble than I really should have been dealing with at my age and coming from the family who raised me.

      Then again, I was a Hayle, so as far as I was concerned trouble was par for the very rough course that needed a lot of help not to be a nightmare.

      Ethie, look. Lily’s pale complexion showed pink points on her round cheeks, her dark hair plastered to her forehead in small curls as the effort it took to hold her sister at bay began to wear. I couldn’t feel it anymore. There was a time I could have sensed what they were doing. For now, thanks to the horrid old sorceress/bitch Viviana Tepes and her nasty ass crow boy, Henry, I was enslaved to the gold locket around my neck and the dark transmutation spell that crushed all of my power but sorcery into the depths of the blackness and devoured it until I couldn’t feel a thing.

      Nice job, Lils, I said, then grinned at her sister. They were identical, these two, in every single way, all but for their hair and eyes. Lily had the depth of Dad’s chocolate eyes and hair while Rose took on her mother’s honey-blonde locks and hazelish gaze. Are you going to let her get away with that, Rosie? Because tweaking the twins against each other always ended in giggles.

      Lily’s eyes flew wide, freckles standing out in a scatter pattern across her upturned nose. "Oh no, you did not," she said to her sister as her side of the tower began to topple, faint pops of blue sparks appearing.

      Rose stuck her tongue out at her sister and winked in my direction. We’ll see about that, she said.

      Eight years old, the same age approximately that I was when Mom left—no, wait. I was only seven, wasn’t I? Right, because that one year made such a difference. Made worse that I seemed to recall missing Gabriel a lot. I sank into a kitchen stool and kept my distance from the twins, letting them occupy each other, chin on my fist as my past caught up with me as it often did since I came to my forced exile in Hong Kong. How lucky they were to have each other. Twins were one of the rare and most precious gifts a family could produce, the combined power of the two often far exceeding everything of which they should have been capable. Mom’s two close friends, Phon and Lula Kennecott, had the impressive ability to heal pretty much anyone of anything and were often called on in the hardest cases, pulling off miracles. The ancient Lawrence twins, Esther and Estelle, were rumored to have been some of the most powerful witches in the entirety of the North American territory once upon a time. While they gave me the creeps, Mom adored them and I did my best not to show them that their matching twinsets and faint odor of cat litter made me want to turn tail and run away.

      It often made me wonder, though, what Dad and Payten’s twins might someday be capable of. And helped loneliness set in while I sighed over their obvious connection as Lily pushed back against her sister, the stalemate something neither of them had been able to break since I started babysitting them daily about a week ago.

      At least it gave me something to do. Because trying to figure out what Viviana did to me and reversing said spell wasn’t getting us very far. The excuse to spend time with Nanna and Poppa, though, that I could get used to.

      I just wished it was under better circumstances and not because the leader of the North American Witch Council asked me to leave and not go home again until this was sorted out. At least Karyn knew I didn’t kill Jagger Santos as I’d been accused of by his family. But my present condition made her nervous, made us all nervous. And the fact I was the only one who seemed to understand even in the most minute way what was going on with the other kids we’d rescued from Viviana’s house—trapped in objects as much as I was—meant it made the most sense for me to be here.

      Logic again. It could piss off at some point. I wanted to feel sorry for myself, didn’t it get that?

      Lily and Rose quit at exactly the same moment, their mutual tower blocks clattering to the floor and making me jump. Their hug over the destruction was punctuated by the expected bout of giggles before they rose as one, hand in hand, and came to grin up at me.

      Ethie, they said together, can we have some juice?

      I guess so. I rolled my eyes at them before grinning down into their sweaty faces. Wash up first and I might even be convinced to make you a snack.

      They bounced away toward their room, whispering to each other though I had no fear there was malice or anything dark in their low conversation. They had their mother’s sweetness to them, the kind of adorable bright and sparkly nature I wasn’t used to in my own family.

      Ha. So there. Because I was well aware I was my mother’s daughter and she her mother’s and so on.

      Except, I wasn’t right about that. Gabriel had that same personality only ten times the wattage, like someone upended a giant bucket of multicolored sparkles into his DNA and stirred it all around before it could get away. My brother seemed to literally glow sometimes and I’m pretty sure if he sprouted wings he’d make a damned good facsimile of an angel.

      I didn’t mean to slam the bottle of peanut butter down on the counter, or to tip the glass of juice I intended for Rose. It was just the unfairness of everything hit me in waves. I did really well for long stretches—a good few hours at a time, which was a record for me, I’m sure of it—before melancholy or anger or sadness just slapped me like how dare I forget I needed to be drowning in my own feelings right about now.

      Hands shaking, I steadied the glass and used a towel to sop up the mess.

      Just use sorcery. I flinched at the sound of her voice in my head. The other occupant of the locket huffed at me, flustered and clearly not fighting the wash of emotion that tipped us over into anger. If I didn’t know I was mercurial enough on my own, I’d have blamed Leah for my mood swings. But nope, just good old Ethie Hayle making a pain in the ass out of herself for herself because who said life was easy, anyway?

      You know I can’t, I sent to her, forcing myself into calm. Dad made that very clear.

      Your father isn’t a nice person, in case you missed it. Leah sniffed in my general direction. We didn’t exactly share a brain, but thanks to the spell of transmutation that had caught her first, she was as wound together with me as I’d ever guessed Mom was with the demon, Sidhe and vampire who occupied her head.

      He’s under a lot of pressure, I sent, hating that I made excuses for him. Because, you know what? He really wasn’t a nice person to me these days. To anyone. I wondered how Payten and the girls put up with his cranky ass. We just need to do our thing and stay out of the way, I sent. And if that means using a sponge to clean up a mess I made instead of power, well, I will.

      You’re too soft on these people who just pretend to care about you. When I’d first met Leah—if you could call it that—she’d felt vulnerable to me, almost humble and happy to have me. But the more familiar I became with her, the more access she had to someone to complain to, the less and less I actually liked her.

      I really had to get her out of my head.

      I’m not sure if it was on purpose or just bad luck or perfect timing or whatever else you could call it, but Leah decided at that moment to show me she couldn’t care less what my opinion of our present arrangement was. While I gaped and grasped for control, she acted, slipping past me with an efficiency that told me she’d been practicing for just an opportunity as this and sent a shiver down my spine.

      But no worse than that which scurried back up a second later. Exactly at the same moment the front door opened and my dad walked in, Leah grasped for the juice droplets left behind by my cleaning attempt and wrapped them in sorcery, delivering them to the sink and me into the scowling thundercloud of doom.

      ***

      Chapter Two

      There was no use in trying to explain to him what happened, that much was obvious. When Dad got that look on his face, the closed down and angry look I’d grown accustomed to over the last eight years, he was an immobile wall of temper that put Mom to shame. No, way worse. Because at least Mom’s temper let her listen even when she was mad.

      Dad? He just attacked everything and didn’t apologize later.

      What do you think you’re doing? He stormed toward me at the same time the girls emerged from their room, their happy giggling shut down the instant they spotted Dad charging in my direction. For the briefest moment they swayed in my direction before I shook my head at them, though the warm feeling in my stomach that they thought to defend me instead of running? At eight years old and against their own father? Fuzzies inside, and love for my little sisters like I’d never experienced before.

      Maybe they weren’t the problem. Uh-huh. Whatever I’d done to earn their loyalty, I appreciated it enough I didn’t lose my crap all over Dad as he lost his if only to minimize the scene they were about to witness. Though it helped I still struggled to understand just how Leah managed to bypass me and use my body when she felt like it. An unhappy precedent we’d be discussing at length just as soon as I was done with Dad.

      I was, frankly, already done, but yeah, whatever.

      It doesn’t matter, does it? I let calm settle over me, chose detached surety instead of anger. Because he expected anger from me, just like he expected it from Mom. Her go-to, her weapon of choice, and used to be mine. Beat the other person into submission with superior power and a flash of anger to back her. However, I didn’t have access to the surety or the magic I used to. My time with Viviana had, admittedly, shaken my confidence I could handle anything that came my way with the Hayle stubbornness I was born with.

      But, in having to face my own vulnerability, I learned a thing or two about manipulation and what made people tick. Not that I was proud of such knowledge or that I resorted to it, case in point this one barreling toward me. Still, what I’m sure Mom didn’t know and what I’d learned quickly and quite by accident a few days ago was if I just gave Dad cold calculation instead of a show of my own temper, he would wind up so tightly in response he’d have to storm off, incoherent, leaving me the victor.

      I really did have to share that understanding with Mom. Once I enjoyed the show just a few more times on my own. Because I didn’t feel like a hero using the new skills I’d acquired, but man it was fun sometimes to see Dad lose his crap.

      I’m not sure if my father knew he’d handed me this weapon against him the first day—the last day, too—he worked with me and the other kids, when he’d tried to force me to break my connection with Leah and the locket, my shock at his anger making things worse and giving me the insight. Whether he figured it out and

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