GUEST POST :: When at War with Witches by Holly Day #GuestPost #Excerpt
✨ GUEST POST ✨
Hello, everyone! Thank you, lovely Addison, for allowing me to swing by your blog today 🥰
I’m Holly Day, and I write MM Romance stories, most often paranormal, but the occasional contemporary story sneaks in there. All my stories, whether they’re paranormal, contemporary, alien romances, dystopian, or whatever, are written for a specific day.
The day we’re celebrating this month is National Lacy Oatmeal Cookie Day, which means there will be lacy oatmeal cookies in the story. Naturally.
Imagine you’re a witch. Witches are powerful creatures. They have a lot of magic, and they use it to kill monsters. Big, growly creatures who have both a human form and an animal form.
Ezra Inaxx Kuxium Enizax has never seen one. He doesn’t have any combat skills, so he’s never on a battlefield. He hardly has any powers at all, which is so embarrassing his mother, the clan leader, no longer claims him as a son. He lost the right to call her mom a long time ago.
He’s useless.
After a large setback in the war against the shifters, their alpha demands a mate from the clan. Ezra doesn’t want to go and live with monsters, but he’s the obvious choice. The weakest member of the clan.
All he can do is bake and cook, after all.
Rourke Flint, the alpha of the werewolf pack, is tired. He’s tired of war, tired of watching his friends die, and tired of never getting anywhere because of the witches. In one last attempt to create peace, he demands a mate in exchange for the land they’ve won.
He doesn’t want to tie himself to a witch for the rest of his life, but if it means no one else has to die from vicious curses, then so be it.
Ezra is not what he expected. He was prepared to hate his mate. He doesn’t trust him, but hate is a strong word. Ezra claims he can’t hex Rourke, but witches always lie. Still, who could believe some witches baked lacy oatmeal cookies?
This is a pretty gory story. The witches really are evil, and while the shifters aren’t nearly as bad as Ezra has been raised to believe, they don’t back down from a fight. They have claws and teeth and strength no witch can compete with.
It’s an arranged mating kind of story, enemies to lovers in the sense that witches hate shifters and shifters hate witches, there is size difference, and a healthy dose of hurt – comfort.
If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, give it a try!
When at War with Witches
by Holly Day
Genre: Gay Paranormal Spicy Romance
Length: Novel / 52,872 Words / 199 Pages
Heat Rating: 4 Flames
🛒 Purchase Links
Blurb
Curses, monsters and arranged matings!
Rourke Flint, alpha of the Flint Pack, is sick of being at war with witches, sick of watching his friends die. So sick of it, he’d traded a piece of land for a witch to take as his mate in hopes of building an alliance. But werewolves mate for life, and now he’ll be forever tied to whichever witch they’re handing over.
Ezra Inaxx Kuxium Enizax is a useless witch and the one the clan decides to sacrifice to the monsters. He’s never met a shifter before, but he’s heard the stories. Deviants. Beasts. Giants. And now he’ll spend the rest of his life with one of them.
Rourke soon realizes the witches don’t want a treaty, and Ezra was sent to him as an insult. Ezra knows his clan never intended for there to be peace, but Rourke isn’t nearly as cruel as he was led to believe, and wouldn’t peace be a pleasant change? What if he could give Rourke enough information to achieve it?
Excerpt
Ezra’s face flamed, and he kept his gaze locked on the floor as he put his socks and shoes on.
“Are you ready?”
Ezra nodded without meeting Flint’s gaze. What was he to be ready for?
“Let’s head out then. The sooner we can get them to leave the better.”
Shixyll and Jiprix. Ezra mentally recoiled. He couldn’t go out there. He sent Flint a pleading look, but he was busy looking at his phone. The other man was watching him, though. He quickly looked away. Was it rude to look at someone in werewolf culture? He didn’t know if they were werewolves. He believed Flint turned into a wolf. Shixyll talked about wolves, dogs, and mutts often enough. Did it mean they were all wolves or could a clan be made up of different species?
Flint went out the door, but the other man lingered. “Rourke.” He spoke in a low voice.
Flint backed until he was blocking the doorway. “What?”
Rourke? Wasn’t his name Flint?
“Maybe you should exit together.”
“Right. Ezra, come along.”
Ezra more or less tripped himself in his haste to move to whatever-the-man-he-was-bonded-to-was-named’s side. They walked the same distance they’d gone to get to the room, but when Ezra came face-to-face with the front door, he took a stumbling step back and bumped into the man behind him. He shrieked and propelled himself forward only to almost collide with the door.
“Jesus.” Flint or whatever grabbed his arm. “Calm down. No one’s gonna eat you.”
No, it was far worse. He was going to walk out there with Flint’s bite on his shoulder, and everyone would know what they’d done mere minutes ago. Jiprix, who was the only one who’d ever had a kind word for him, would be disgusted. Maybe he already was.
“Wait.” The other guy spoke. “Is there a reason you don’t want to go out there?”
Ezra turned to stare at him. Of course there was. The man flashed teeth, and Ezra instantly averted his gaze. Eye contact must be considered rude.
“Will they attack us?”
“Who?” Ezra spoke to the floor.
“The queen witch. Is this some kind of set-up? Will we walk out there and be ambushed?”
Ezra shook his head. He might not know what the clan’s plans were, but right now they were too weak. They’d lost several people in the last battle, and they’d drained all their familiars and other power sources. It would take some time to build it all up again.
A hand grabbed his chin and tilted his face until Flint could look into his eyes. “Will there be an attack?” Magic unlike any he’d ever sensed before was forced upon him, it clung to the words, and it demanded an answer from him.
“They’re too weak right now.”
Flint widened his eyes and glanced at the other man. Ezra didn’t know what it meant, but he had the feeling they were communicating. He didn’t think shifters were telepathic, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Let’s get it over with then.”
Right. It was humiliating for him too, which most likely was Shixyll’s intent. To shame him in front of his pack.
Flint opened the door and ushered Ezra outside. There were a few snickers among the shifters, and Ezra wished the ground would open underneath his feet and swallow him. His face burned as he tucked his chin against his chest.
The sound of a car door opening sounded, and Ezra folded into himself, hunching his shoulders to make him as invisible as possible.
“Is it done?” Shixyll’s voice was bored, and it made Ezra’s eyes burn. She didn’t care. He’d known. Had always known, but this might be the last time he ever saw her, and she was… bored.
Flint grabbed his arm and turned him around, showing off the bite on his shoulder.
“Jiprix, get his bag.”
Something thudded on the ground a few seconds later.
“So the debt is paid?”
“There was no debt. An alliance is formed.”
Shixyll snorted, and Flint’s hold on Ezra’s arm tightened.
“We’re leaving.”
Ezra turned to look at her, his face still aflame with embarrassment, but he wanted to see his mother one last time. She didn’t look at him.
About the Author
According to Holly Day, no day should go by uncelebrated and all of them deserve a story. If she’ll have the time to write them remains to be seen. She lives in rural Sweden with a husband, four children, more pets than most, and wouldn’t last a day without coffee.
Holly gets up at the crack of dawn most days of the week to write gay romance stories. She believes in equality in fiction and in real life. Diversity matters. Representation matters. Visibility matters. We can change the world one story at the time.
