Witch Master Read online

  Witch Master

  A Fantasy Harem Adventure

  Noah Layton

  Copyright 2019 Noah Layton

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Summary

  Retrieving a prized baseball from the roof of a quiet suburban house, Tom Harrick never expected to end up becoming a warlock.

  Never mind stumbling onto a coven of witches.

  But these aren’t the witches from fairy tales – they’re smoking hot, have one hell of a collective attitude, and possess a penchant for solving mysteries and slaying monsters.

  Now Tom has to help them take down a seemingly unstoppable evil – even if he is just a beginner.

  Warning: This book contains explicit sexuality, broomsticks, magical spells, dream projection, invisibility, feral supernatural creatures, demons, rituals, portals, melee combat, blood magic, unsuspecting sleepwalking roommates, and a 400 year-old fox-familiar. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, steer clear.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter One

  ‘Catch!’

  ‘Are you ever gonna stop throwing that stupid ball around, Tom?’

  ‘Probably not, man.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Even though it was our third year of college, my roommate Joe still hadn’t gotten used to my stupid habit of throwing a baseball back and forth across the quiet streets as we made our way to the campus.

  An age ago it had belonged to my dad. He had passed it down to me a long time ago, back when I was the kind of age that people lose things easily.

  But I never did – I never took it to baseball practice, never played catch with it in the back yard, and damn near never took it out of its glass casing where it had stood on a shelf in my room for years.

  But after my dad passed four years ago, I realised that it was the only real thing that I had to remember him by. It had always been just me and him.

  Now I was 21, about to finish college. It was a big time in my life and he had always been by my side whenever I had been worried about anything.

  So I kept him with me everywhere. It had sat pristine and white inside its case for too long; now it was smudged and stained with dirt and grass marks, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  ‘So are you gonna catch?’

  ‘Will you hurry up if I go long? As in really long?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Joe tightened his bag over his shoulders and hurried ahead as I headed into the middle of the street, watching him go.

  Our town, which we’ll call Ashwater, was a quiet place just on the outskirts of a city that I’ll keep secret for anonymity purposes. All you need to know is that it was famed for supernatural stories. Every other building in a twenty-mile radius claimed to be haunted by some kind of spirit/demon/poltergeist. The stories had become so tiresome that most had become a running joke.

  All I knew was that I had never seen a single thing in my life that would hint at the existence of a supernatural realm.

  Joe ran ahead to the other side of the quiet suburban street that we were in, turning around and jogging backwards. Hawthorne Lane was just one of many seemingly abandoned communities of McMansions in the area that weren’t, in fact, abandoned – there occupants just went to work early and came home late, while housewives stayed at home drinking the days away.

  That was the old cliché, anyway.

  It was the reason I rarely paid attention to what was going on around me during our trips to college – we had almost never seen another person along these streets besides each other, never mind the cyclist that was racing closer to me at that moment as I readied myself to hurl the baseball in Joe’s direction.

  He was racing forwards, head down, really pushing himself for 8 in the morning, and as a result failed to even see me.

  Just as I drew my arm back, positioning my elbow perfectly, he clipped my side with his arm.

  ‘Shit…!’

  ‘Sorry!’ He yelled out, looking over his shoulder before pedalling off.

  I, on the other hand, was having a much worse time. He had regained his balance, and I hadn’t exactly gone toppling over either, but in the midst of the hit my aim had gone completely awry. I turned 80 degrees to the left, hurling the ball in the direction of the houses across the street, instead of Joe’s.

  I watched the ball go flying, not only over the front yard of the house across the street, but completely over the roof. It skimmed the tiles before rolling over the peak and tipping out of sight.

  I still had it even if I hadn’t played a game in ten years, but it had caused me a lot of grief.

  ‘God damn it…’ I muttered.

  ‘Man, it’s just a baseball,’ Joe shouted down the street to me. ‘Leave it!’

  ‘My dad gave me that. I can’t just abandon it.’

  ‘Then we’ll pick it up after classes. We’re already late enough as it is.’

  ‘Just go on without me. I’ll catch up.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Definitely. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Later.’

  Joe set off at a jog down the street and out of sight as I surveyed the McMansion. It was just as big as all of the others, and in the spring sunlight the white panels that lined the house beamed perfectly. It was like a doll’s house in real life, only bigger and better.

  Every one of the blinds and curtains was shut. No car in the drive. No sign of life.

  I was going in.

  Tightening my bag firmly over my shoulders, I hurried across the street and hid behind a tree, checking up and down the road. Nothing.

  I looked out from behind the tree and down the side passage by the house, listening and watching for a few more moments.

  Still nothing.

  Okay, I can do this, I thought. All I’ve gotta do is make it into the back yard, grab the thing and get out.

  I ducked out, hurrying down the side passage and trying the gate. Locked.

  Obviously. But I’m getting that thing back.

  I gripped the top of the wooden panels and pulled myself up, swinging a leg over before the other and dropping down deftly onto the other side, entering the realms of officially trespassing.

  My state had stand-your-ground laws. If somebody saw me, especially some 90 year-old heiress, she would be well within her right to pick me off from a first floor window.

  I could already hear the Desperate Housewives voiceover; Tom Harrick, shot down after dropping the ball for the briefest of moments.

  It wasn’t like me to do anything this stupid. Hell, it could have been my laptop in that back yard and I would have waited around for a few hours for the owner to get back.

  But this wasn’t just anything – t
his was the baseball, and I wasn’t just going to leave it back there.

  Paranoid as all hell, I moved quickly along the path and up to the sun-splashed back yard. High fences surrounded it on all sides, providing no opportunity for any of the occupants of the nearby houses to even have a chance of looking in. The green grass was perfectly trimmed, like you would expect in any one of these well-to-do places, but lining it along the edges was the weirdest array of plants that I had ever seen.

  They were all different colors – red leaves, purple flowers, some small and delicate and others flourishing and looming over the others. But that wasn’t the strangest part; it didn’t appear that they were arranged for decorative purposes, if there was even any point to that in a yard so closed-off. They were set out in co-ordinated rows, as if somebody was intent on farming them.

  ‘Shit…’ I muttered. They all looked well-kept. Somebody was definitely living here.

  I searched the yard before leaning out and checking the windows lining the back of the house. They were all closed and covered, same as the front.

  I had an opportunity to find it… But where the hell was it? Surveying the yard, I realised that I couldn’t see the damn thing anywhere.

  Where the hell is it…? Unless…

  I ventured out into the yard, keeping low as I moved to the far end and looked up to the roof of the house.

  And there it was, ladies and gentlemen, lodged against a skylight window on the sloped roof of the house, unmoving. It may as well have had a mouth and been laughing at me.

  But there was no way that I was giving up yet.

  I scanned my options, eventually bringing my attention to the vines that were held in place along the wall of the house by wooden meshes. I had seen countless scenes in movies where people climbed up vines and gratings to clamber into an upstairs window, but that would never work – they were always made of wood, and way too fragile. They would snap and send me falling on my ass with the first step I took.

  Still, I checked – and found that they weren’t made of wood at all.

  They were wrought iron, bolted into the panels and brickwork that made up the exterior of the house.

  I could climb up them.

  Working my hands between the shrubbery and getting a solid grasp on the metal, I hoisted my weight up and gained some footing. Shaking the structure, it hardly yielded at all.

  Something rustled lightly. My heart raced as I looked about frantically, but saw no one. There was no breeze either.

  Suddenly I felt the leaves press against my skin tightly. I pulled my hand away instinctively, looking back at the vines.

  Did they… Did they just move? No, don’t be stupid. You’re just paranoid.

  I swiftly began the climb, checking my hold on the iron rungs but moving as quickly as I could in the process, especially when I was passing by the windows on the ground and first floor.

  My hands and forearms began to itch a little as they brushed over the shrubbery, and I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping that they weren’t poisonous.

  Although that would be a damn good way to stop people from climbing this thing.

  Finally reaching the roof of the house, I clamped my hand onto the ledge and yanked my weight upwards. Scurrying up the sloped tiles and gaining my balance I crossed carefully to the skylight window.

  The ball was still there, just a few yards off. I could reach it.

  Almost there… Almost…

  I leaned forward, balancing my weight and resting my hand on the leather surface, clenching my fingers tightly around it.

  ‘Got you, you little sucker…’

  I raised the ball to examine it, and that was when the sound rang out.

  RAAWWWRRRRR!!!

  The roar was so loud that I felt the roof vibrate beneath my feet.

  But that wasn’t what sent me off-balance – it was the sheer terror that sound invoked in me. My footing gave out completely, and I spun on my heel, falling backwards like a cartoon character.

  Falling on my ass down by the ground floor was now much a more appealing notion compared to what happened next; I smashed through the skylight window, plummeting several yards before landing heavily on the attic floor.

  I had landed on my side, my whole weight coming down on my left arm. A brutal jolt of pain coursed through it, spiking quickly before falling into a sharp, aching throb as I rolled onto my back, surrounded by smashed glass.

  ‘I hate my life…’ I muttered, groaning in pain before sitting up and checking myself down. A few cuts from the glass, but I didn’t think that my arm had been broken or even fractured, although there was likely to be a hell of a bruise there before too long.

  But the baseball was still in my hand. At least it wasn’t all bad.

  I quickly examined my surroundings. The place was mostly bare save for a rack of objects hung on the nearby wall, numbering six or seven.

  And these weren’t your average stowed away Christmas decorations – they were wooden poles with ornate carvings down their sides.

  No, not poles, but staffs.

  ‘What the fuck…?’

  Whose house was I in?

  Click… Clickclickclickclickclick.

  The sound was both natural and unnatural, too fast to be artificial and too biological to be metallic.

  I pushed up to my feet, looking over my shoulder slowly in the direction of the clicking before laying my eyes on the source.

  It was hiding in the shadows, only now slowly emerging from the cloaked darkness. This wasn’t a cat or a dog. Not even something predatory like a wolf or a bear.

  I didn’t even know the name for what I was looking at. It had the body of a wolf, but it’s head couldn’t have put it further from an animal. It split into four sections, opening up like some forbidden flower from the depths of an unknown rainforest. That terrifying clicking sound burst from its head once again as it opened up, displaying an array of sharp teeth and a snapping pincer where its tongue should have been, the real source of that sound.

  It was looking right at me.

  ‘Woah…’ I muttered, standing and holding a hand up as I backed away. ‘Just stay right there… I’m not gonna hurt you, so long as you don’t hurt me.’

  The creature’s head opened even wider, letting out another brutal roar just like the one that I had heard while stood on the roof.

  But you would hurt me, wouldn’t you?

  Everything moved in slow motion.

  I looked back over my shoulder, seeing the staffs positioned on the rack. There was no time to wonder what this thing was – all I could think about was stopping it from attacking me.

  I dashed for the rack, seeing my hand move forwards and wrapping around one of the leather-bound handles. A burst of light rushed through my hand and into the staff, and a sudden rush of energy coursed through me.

  Still, there was no time to question any of it. Behind me the monster’s bounding footsteps pounded on the floorboards as it hurled itself towards me.

  Ripping the staff free, I turned and swung.

  I had never been in a fight in my entire life, but a burst of adrenaline the likes of which I had never felt washed over my entire body.

  The end of the staff struck the creature square in the side of the face, connecting perfectly, but in a grappling movement its teeth gnashed as it yearned towards me, the jagged edges of a whole row scraping over the back of my hand.

  I yelled out as it struck the ground hard nearby, disgruntled but ready to attack me again. The back of my hand ran warm with fast trickles of blood.

  ‘So that’s how you wanna play it?’ I yelled. ‘Fine, bring it!’

  I had never spoken or acted like this before in my life, but right now my neck was on the line. It was me or the creature, and my survival instinct was running overtime.

  The creature dashed at me again. I tried to jab at it with the end of the staff, missing its head by no more than an inch. The tip of the wood scraped along the creature’s side and I da
shed to the left, it striking me with a vicious headbutt.

  Sharply I struck the ground again on my already painful left arm. The staff went flying from my grasp and into the darkness.

  I sat up, scrambling backward as the creature stared me down. That first and last successful strike had only made it angrier.

  And I couldn’t get up. Some sudden sickening fatigue had hit me like a toppling wall. My arm or the scrapes or the series of falls… It could have been one of them or all of them.

  But one thing was for sure; I was wide open and defenceless.

  The creature charged.

  It leaped through the air at me, its weight crashing down upon my body. A pair of clawed paws scrambled and scraped at me as I pushed back, while its head burst open and again and let out an almighty, stinking scream.

  ‘Hey, beautiful.’

  The creature and I both turned in the direction of the voice on the other side of the room. Man or woman I didn’t know; all I had processed was the possibility that I was saved.

  A blue light swirled up before the shadowy figure, rolling into a wreathing ball of blue flames. In an instant it shot towards us, striking the creature square in the side of its body and sending it flailing to the ground nearby. It attempted to fight back, but the flames continued to crawl over its body like a fast-acting virus, engulfing its failing strength completely before it fell to the ground, unmoving.

  I pushed myself up, my forearms badly scratched and my clothes worn and torn, but not caring about any of it; I was alive.

  Somehow.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ The shadowy figure asked. ‘What are you doing in here?’ It’s voice seemed obscured somehow… But I quickly realised that it wasn’t the voice that was obscured – it was my sense of hearing.

  Nausea suddenly washed over me like a wave. My vision blurred, eyes filling with moisture only making it worse. My entire body felt suddenly much heavier, and without any semblance of control I keeled over and dropped to the floor again, this time on my hands and knees.

  Throwing up was inevitable, the vomit roaring from my body like I was forcing out some kind of demon.

  I rolled over to the side, gasping for breath as my form turned cold.