RECKONING
A Reverse Harem Tale
Mountain Magic
Book Three
by
Dakota Brown
RECKONING
A Reverse Harem Tale
Mountain Magic, book 3
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2020 by Dakota Brown
Cover Design © 2020 by Camila Marques
All rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination and or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Untold Press LLC
114 NE Estia Lane
Port St Lucie, FL 34983
www.untoldpress.com
PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dedication
For Shoshanah
You make all my stories better.
Acknowledgements
I can't even begin to tell you all how excited I am about this series and how well it has been received. Thank you, readers for your kind reviews, for spreading the word, for helping this trilogy do so well.
I want to thank Jen and Sean at Untold for all their hard work helping me get these novels out quickly, their skillful edits, and everything else they do. They really do believe in me and what I'm writing, and I'm humbled and so grateful for everything they do to help make my stories the best they can be.
I also want to give a shout out to my readers group on Facebook. You guys are great! Thank you for your encouragement, support, and all the sexy pictures you post.
There are so many people that help when I need some inspiration, and I appreciate you all. A few stand out time and again for their dedication at helping me through the writing process, the ups and downs, the I can's and the I can't's. Lizzy, Justinn, Shoshanah, and again, Jen and Sean. Without all of you, I wouldn't be half the writer I am today. Thank you.
Chapter 1
Sofia
"Perhaps you should drive faster." Nikolai's voice pulled me out of a light doze. The half Russian-half Tatar mage leaned forward as far as the seatbelt would allow and put his hands on the dash of Doc's pickup.
I was cuddled between my two werewolves, Ed and Allan, in the back seat. Nikolai's alarmed voice woke both of them as well.
"Why?" Doc asked. The dim lights from the dash combined with my currently post-demon enhanced senses, lit up Doc's features enough for me to see him frown tiredly when he glanced over at the mage. His long hair was currently pulled back and I wanted to free it from its restraints and run my fingers through it. That was one of my top priorities when we got back to his cabin in Colorado.
We had left my parents' house in Nebraska the evening after Thanksgiving dinner partially because the longer we were around my parents, the more questions they were going to ask, and partially because now that I was free of the demon that had been forced to possess me, we all wanted to get home and simply spend time together.
It was late in the middle of the night. Nikolai had been keeping Doc company in the front while I slept in the back with Ed and Allan. I put my hand on Allan's arm and squeezed. Ed leaned forward and buried his nose in my hair, inhaling. He had done that at almost every opportunity since the demon had been freed. He liked that I smelled like me again. I did, too.
Allan took my hand and pressed it to his lips, also inhaling before giving me a gentle kiss.
Nikolai sighed and after a long pause, he shook his head. "Maybe it doesn't matter. Someone, probably Ash, is tearing down my wards. Violently."
"Which wards?" The weariness in Doc's voice tugged at my heart. He'd shouldered so much of the responsibility recently.
"The cabin wards."
Doc swore in both Navajo and Nikolai's dialect of Russian.
I understood the Russian, courtesy of Nikolai sharing languages with me when we had first met. Apparently, Doc was picking some of it up, too.
Doc's mother was a Navajo vampire hunter, his father a white preacher. They had traveled together saving souls with word and stake during the turn of the nineteenth century. Doc's mother had been attacked right before she'd given birth. She had not survived, but Doc had, though he wasn't completely human. Sometimes I actually wondered if he wasn't more than half vampire, like he claimed, but maybe no one actually knew for sure how it worked since he was unique.
Ash was sort of a friend of ours, but he was also under the control of our enemy, the Andersons. They were the ones that had forced the greater demon to possess me, hoping to get an even more powerful version of Ash, who was a lesser demon. Fortunately, I was able to avoid being forced out of my body, and Nikolai, who was actually from fourteen fifty or so, had been able to save me.
It looked like the Andersons had figured out we had released the greater demon. Maybe they were retaliating. My mom's words came back to me, about there being ways to hurt people that didn't involve physical violence. She was right.
"What are we going to do?" Ed whispered, but everyone in the car had excellent hearing and even over the diesel engine we could hear the fear in his voice. He and his brother Allan had been turned into werewolves on a family camping trip where they were also orphaned. They ran into Doc a few years later and begged him to get them out of the foster system before their wolfish nature was discovered. They'd already lost everything once. They didn't need to lose it all again.
"Nothing," Doc replied. "There isn't anything we can do. We're still an hour out, even if we drove as fast as I could we wouldn't get there in time to prevent them from doing whatever it is they're doing. All of the
