All Hallows' Satyr (The Cursed Satyroi Book 5) Read online

  All Hallows’ Satyr

  The Cursed Satyroi, Book Five

  Rebekah Lewis

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Coming Soon

  An Excerpt from A Satyr for Christmas

  About the Author

  Books by Rebekah Lewis

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Rebekah Lewis

  Edited by Sandra Sookoo

  Cover Design by Victoria Miller

  Logo Design by Happi Anarky

  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.

  Printed in the United States of America

  www.Rebekah-Lewis.com

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  This book was written during one of the most difficult years I have spent as an adult. While the world suffered under a pandemic, natural disasters, injustice, an incredibly exhausting election year, and yes, even murder hornets—and the year isn't even over yet—many, myself included, fought personal battles with themselves. There were times I didn't think this book would be finished on time. There were days I didn't think I would ever even get out of bed again. The thing 2020 did not realize though is I'm stubborn as hell, and even my own mental health is no match for how stubborn I can be sometimes.

  Depression is never a walk in the park, and you never know when it will rear its ugly head. As circumstances grow dire, mental health is prone to choose those moments to fail you. It's important to remember that even as you are stumbling down a dark tunnel, lost and afraid you'll be stuck there forever, there will eventually be a way out of it. Through loved ones, through doing something you love, through cutting toxic people from your life that feed on your pain, through finding ways to get out of the house, to changing jobs. Don't let it win. Don't be afraid to talk to those who care about you. You can get through it. You WILL get through it.

  This book is for you.

  Persevere.

  1

  A witch must do what a witch must do…

  Sage Graham had never quite fit in with anyone else, and a few weeks after her twenty-second birthday, the day after the sun came back from the strange anomaly that had caused the sky to go dark for, like, an entire day, she'd found out why—she had magical powers. Therefore, the obvious conclusion would be that she was a witch. Honestly, she couldn't come up with any better explanation, but it wasn't like there were a ton of self-help books on gaining supernatural abilities.

  This perplexing, yet exciting, change in her very existence left Sage lost in thought. Powers were amazing, but why her? There had to be a reason, after all. No one in her family had ever had anything other than the absolutely boring and ordinary happen to them. When footsteps echoed down the hallway of the apartment, she blinked rapidly, coming back into the present and out of her jumble of thoughts. Darcy, her roommate, strode into the room, tugging her long, curly blonde hair into a high ponytail. The fullness of her locks made it puff out behind her head like the feathers on a helmet. She rolled her eyes as she turned to the television. "Why are you watching this nonsense?"

  Sage hadn't been paying attention to the news program that had come on while she doodled in the margins of her spiral notebook. She was supposed to be taking notes on a chapter in her college civilizations class she attended on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Something about Ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War. Yawn. Greek mythology she loved. Wars and politics…no thanks. She'd take the wild, romantic, though often problematic sexcapades of the gods over politics of any time period, especially the present.

  "The footage caught from the helicopters was doctored." Darcy gestured wildly at the screen. "There's no such thing as giants. Where would they even live?"

  Ooh, it must be an update to the recent strange events in Greece. Her attention perked up and she shot Darcy a look. "Obviously, they climb a beanstalk and go back home when no one is looking. Duh." Now that she was a witch, she didn't want to discount anything paranormal, but she had to admit giants were a pretty difficult pill to swallow.

  Sage turned the volume up a bit as Darcy sat next to her on the couch. "If the footage is real, and that's a big if, we have three giants, a swarm of formerly extinct, very large snakes, and some kind of flying humanoid with horns, hooves and wings," a reporter droned on, barely concealing enthusiasm. "I'd say it was a trailer for the next poorly made-for-television monster fight movie, but the effects are actually decent for once. I'll be honest, it's really impressive work. Hell, I even want to believe it's real."

  "You have to admit though," Sage said, biting into a piece of licorice and chewing before continuing her thought. Candy helped focus on homework. "What happened with the sun was strange and unexplainable. You can't be surprised that someone would try to do a large-scale hoax like this." But was it a hoax? The rational side of her brain said yes, but how crazy would it be if legit? She had abilities, so what else had yet to be discovered out there? "They did find several snakeskins large enough to belong to Titanoboa near Mount Olympus. The landscape was wrecked too."

  Darcy shrugged, but offered no further debate.

  Back on the television, the reporter introduced a clip of an interview with Dr. Katerina Silverton, a zoologist who'd managed to become widely-known after a successful documentary on the Jersey Devil had been leaked. She'd sued Bach Industries for releasing it without permission, which made people want to believe the footage of her being snatched by the Jersey Devil was true. A creature that looked remarkably similar to the figure seen flying in the footage from Greece. So, naturally, the doctor was being sought for interviews about the coincidence.

  Sage loved cryptid documentaries, so she'd watched the Jersey Devil one the night it aired. And, despite being pulled from the channel, it would live forever on the Internet.

  The reporter on TV leaned forward. "Dr. Silverton, you and your fiancé were in Greece during the solar blackout. Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?"

  When Dr. Silverton looked like she wanted to roll her eyes, Sage felt a kinship to the woman. Her facial expressions were amazing. And she was a ginger too, like her. Of course, Sage had been dying her hair purple for several months now, having decided she liked it. She couldn't do anything about the freckles, but she loved the darker hair color.

  "You are aware that Greece isn't a tiny island, right?" Dr. Silverton said dryly. "I wasn't anywhere near Olympic State Park, but if I was, the only danger would have been from the meteor shower that night."

  "Yes," the reporter agreed. "The meteorites did a lot of damage, but most landed in the water and were small. Sadly, there were twenty-two deaths in Greece and the surrounding islands, and even more injuries caused by meteorites."

  Dr. Silverton nodded solemnly. "A huge loss. And i
t makes it even more important not to sully their deaths with conspiracies and fairy tales." She held up a hand when the reporter tried to interrupt her. "No, you brought me here to say my piece because of the lawsuit against Bach Industries. I'm not a cryptozoologist, which I told Mr. Bach before he hired me, and again after I quit and didn't finish filming. He continued to make the film without my knowledge and used our footage anyway. As for Greece, you are more interested in snakes, meteorites, and giants because all that occurred at Mount Olympus than you are with finding out what happened to the sun. I implore you: seek the answers to what matters to our survival, not imaginary monsters."

  "Damn," Darcy said. "She has a point. I like her. I think I'm a fan."

  "Yeah. Too bad she probably won't do any more documentaries like the Jersey Devil one." Sage clicked off the television and yawned. The clock on the wall read seven-fifteen. "I need to get ready." She could feel Darcy's disapproval washing over her without looking.

  "Seriously?" Her roommate crossed her arms and pouted, stepping into her line of sight. "We were supposed to carve pumpkins and watch old scary movies."

  "We can do that tomorrow. It's a Saturday."

  "I don't like you going out into the middle of nowhere alone." Darcy's blue eyes sparked with concern. "Anything could happen."

  "Exactly." Sage stood and stretched her arms over her head until she felt her spine pop in a satisfying way. "And now that I'm a witch, I want to test my capabilities. I found a spell online, and it sounds so ridiculous that I really want to try it." The only way she could learn what she could do was through trial and error.

  Darcy hadn't seen Sage's powers in action, and so while she humored her, disbelief ran evident in her tone when it was brought up. "Sage..."

  "Nope." She pointed the half-eaten strawberry licorice stick at her. "I'm an adult, and if I want to conjure a sexy mystical lover in the middle of the forest, I damned well will." She barely held in her laughter at Darcy's open-mouthed shock. She'd expected nothing less. The two of them were complete opposites of each other. Sage left a slew of broken hearts behind wherever she went, and Darcy, well, she was pretty sure Darcy was still a virgin at twenty-three. One day she'd find a man she'd throw caution in the wind for. Sage hoped it was soon so she eased up on being such a prude.

  "You meet new guys all the time. Why conjure one?" her roommate finally managed to say and then stuck her hands in her jeans pockets, an intense frown still on her face.

  Sage couldn't not mess with Darcy when she was like this. It was too easy. "Are you calling me a slut?"

  "W-what?" Darcy stammered, cheeks turning pink. The girl was polite to a fault and rarely said a cruel thing to anyone. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

  Don't laugh. Don't laugh. "Do I?" She leapt to her feet, abandoning her candy on top of her notebook, then ambled to the window and leaned against the wall, looking down at the parking lot. "There's a guy over there taking out his trash. Maybe I'll go bang him behind the dumpster. I'll tell him you send your blessing because he's safer than summoning a forest spirit."

  "That is absolutely ridiculous." Annoyance added an edge to Darcy's voice as the joke became clearer.

  Sage couldn't hold it in; she laughed. If it wasn't so easy to get under Darcy's skin, she wouldn't. Nah, I still would.

  Darcy threw a pillow that hit Sage lightly in the chin as she turned around to face her. "I wish you wouldn't tease me like that. I'm seriously worried about you being alone in the woods at night. I know you think you have these magic abilities and stuff, and they may help you escape a bad situation, but wouldn't it be easier to just…not go looking for trouble?"

  Getting into trouble was half the fun, but the trouble she sought was of a different sort. And that was part of the reason Sage needed to go experiment with her powers—she hadn't been able to show Darcy anything yet.

  "I have pepper spray and a Taser, and I know the ancient art of kicking a man in the balls. I don't really think the spell will work anyway since it came off the Internet, but it's almost Halloween and it will amuse me." She clasped her hands together and put on her most innocent of faces. "Don't I deserve a little fun? After doing all this homework, mid-terms, and a long weekend off from class?" And work since she got fired for calling out too many times when scheduled for morning shifts at the mall. A girl needed sleep!

  Honestly, she'd been twitchy for weeks. She had an overactive libido, and at first, she had felt a bit slutty as her sex life became seriously active. It had kicked in after she'd popped her cherry as a high school senior, and since then she hadn't been able to keep a relationship with a dude longer than a few months before she got bored with them and their lack of imagination in the bedroom. It'd been fine until she'd hooked up with some hot guy that worked in a hotel downtown a few months ago. Best. Sex. Ever. But she'd never gone back to look for him. Sometimes she thought about it, but even when she intended to find him again, she got sidetracked by other things. Almost like her brain had been programed to avoid him. She couldn't even remember him much, or what hotel he worked for. One of the small cozy ones. Both his name and the hotel always seemed to hover on the tip of her tongue but refused to manifest into a fully fledged thought.

  So now, she compared every guy she was with to that guy, and they failed. Badly. Witchcraft was her last hope of finding good sex in Savannah. Desperate times…

  "What if you conjure a demon or something?" Darcy asked as she headed into the kitchen and out of view. The refrigerator opened and closed, and a can of soda popped and fizzed.

  Well, if a demon showed up, then Sage would be experimenting in real life monster hentai then. She found that notion strangely erotic. She wouldn't tell Darcy about it though. The poor girl already thought she was weird as hell, and if things got any stranger, she might try to have Sage committed. Or worse…evicted. Until she secured a new job, her school loans were paying her half of the bills. She couldn't get booted right now. "I'll figure something out."

  When she finally escaped the one-woman questioning squad, Sage closed herself up in her bedroom and flipped on the light. Her black satin sheets were wrinkled and in need of a wash. She'd spray-painted all her wooden furniture black or dark purple, and most of her accessories were the same. Maybe she fell into some stereotypes about art students, witches, and whatever, but black and purple were her favorite colors, and it made decorating for Halloween easy because it was a year-round theme.

  As she passed her dresser, Sage ran her fingers over a miniature bronze statue of Persephone. She wasn't sure why she'd chosen the goddess of the Underworld as her goddess, but she felt a bond to her. A daughter meant to be one thing in life, but seduced by another world, by a man everyone else misunderstood. Sure, Hades had kidnapped the goddess and tricked her into eating the pomegranate so she couldn't leave him, but she loved him too.

  Oh, to be the object of affection by a man who had challenged Olympus itself to have her.

  She sighed. The concept of a mysterious and deadly man riding out of the shadows because a woman's beauty and innocence was all that could keep his darkness at bay was utterly romantic to her. Erotic. She wanted it for herself more than she could put into words—well, other than the innocence part. Darcy had that down though. Sighing, she picked a flower off the weeds she'd put in a vase earlier in the week and placed it at the goddess' bronze feet. "You're so lucky, Persephone. Maybe one day I'll find my own Hades."

  Sage went about gathering up the printed spell and her bag of essentials, checking that she had her lighter in the small pocket. Then she changed into the black sheath dress she'd sewn for this very occasion. She frowned at the chipped black polish on her fingernails she had painted only last night—she would have to live with it.

  To finish her appearance, she kept her makeup simple: purple eyeshadow, winged eyeliner, blacker-than-midnight mascara for her light lashes, and dark purple lipstick to match her hair. Though her fashion sense lay somewhere between goth and punk rock chic, black lipstick
never worked out for her, unfortunately. It always stained her teeth.

  "Do I look the part?" she asked as she exited her bedroom, bag in hand, and twirled.

  Darcy set down the book she was reading and grunted. "You're not wearing a bra." It wasn't a question. "Are you at least taking a jacket?"

  "No, Mother. If I'm dancing naked in the moonlight to conjure a lover, I'm not covering my assets with a jacket. I expect to be kept warm by the flames of sexual conquest."

  "Your assets are going to freeze off," her roommate ignored her other statement altogether. "It's dropping into the sixties." It had been seventies and eighties all week even though it was the end of October. Got to love coastal Georgia weather.

  "You're welcome to come with me if you're concerned I'll die of frostbite." Sage was from Connecticut. This weather would be comfortable. "Live a little. Some nature deity might ravish and corrupt you. We'll laugh about it later."

  Darcy picked her book back up but couldn't quite hide her masked laughter. "You're insane."

  "Just in tune with my sexuality is all." She picked up her keys and cell phone and headed for the door. "See you tomorrow. Don't wait up."

  "Can't wait to hear all about it." Darcy didn't sound that thrilled.

  After picking up some dinner to-go, the drive out of Savannah took a good twenty or so minutes with traffic. She found the spot she had been drawn to for some reason she didn't yet understand over the last few weeks. In fact, it was near where her car had blown a tire after the weird event with the sun. She'd been in the grass, in a patch of dandelions, trying to figure out how to change the tire since her dad wasn't nearby to do it for the first time in her life, when it happened.