Page 75 of Forged in Twilight: The Complete Series

CHAPTER2

FORTY YEARS LATER

The phone still wouldn’t turn on.

Micah scowled at the piece of tech in his hand. Even with Hilda’s latest spell warding it against his celestial aura, nothing he did could get it to work. He was convinced the phone hated him. With just how weak his aura had become since Lucifer cursed the factions, he shouldn’t even need the warding spell.

Sometimes, when he was more melancholy than frustrated, he thought about trying to learn magic again. He’d had a few lessons four decades ago, but then he’d met his witch, and she’d promised to be the one to cast any and all spells for him. Though she’d been dead and gone just as long, Micah couldn’t bring himself to give it another try.

If it wasn’t for his and his brothers’ business, he wouldn’t even ask Hilda for help. Over the last forty years, the witch had grown in her career. Not only was she the well-known manager of the Twilight Café, owned and operated by her coven, but she had risen up the ranks. Very few witches in the City of Sin were as powerful and as respected as Hilda which was why the angel princes relied on her spells to keep their auras from shorting out the slot machines and neons in their casino.

It had been obvious from the start they’d need some kind of protection against the celestial powers. Their missing talisman made it so neither Raze, Sam, nor Micah was at full strength, but even before Lucifer’s latest curse, their auras didn’t mesh with the casino Raze wanted to create. Hilda’s coven was the nearest, and they had their own business inside of Twilight Sphere. They hired her then, retaining her services over the last seventy years.

If they hadn’t, Micah might’ve met Phoenix before he had—and wasn’t that just a thought he’d tortured himself with over the last four decades?

The nearest coven to Las Vegas was hers, just outside of the city. Like werewolves, witches could be territorial in nature. Hilda’s coven owned the Strip, while Phoenix’s was closer to the desert. There was no need for him to go there—until he decided to learn magic and a busy Hilda suggested he try the other coven.

Over the last four decades, Micah sometimes wondered if Hilda knew. If the hard-working yet good-humored witch knew who Micah’s soulmate was before he did. He never asked, and Hilda never said, but she did offer to teach him a trick to warding his personal tech shortly after Phoenix’s unexpected death.

With a smile that hid his heartache, Micah had declined. He’d either pay or figure it out, but learning magic? Without Phoenix, he’d lost his drive for it.

So what if he was determined to control his tech himself? Back then, it was his expensive Walkman that gobbled up the cassette tape before the batteries exploded. These days, it was a thousand-dollar smartphone that he was sure he could make angel-proof.

He couldn’t, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

Just… not tonight. Tossing the phone onto his desk, Micah leaned into his seat, tilting his head back so that he was looking up at the ceiling.

Phoenix was often on his mind. If he was lucky, he might be distracted a few minutes, few hours, few days before bam! The grief slapped him upside the head. Lately, he’d been missing her more and more. First, because Sam found Polly. Then, because Raze claimed Becca. It was only a matter of time until Sam made Polly his; he was already head over heels for his thief. And while he was happy for his brothers—and he was—Micah couldn’t stop obsessing over his lost soulmate.

Tonight was even worse. After Becca revealed to Raze that Lucifer was responsible for stealing their talisman millennia ago, the brothers had decided they needed it back. That’s when Sam admitted what Micah and Raze already knew: Polly Benson was his soulmate. Not only that, but she was an accomplished thief.

And she was going to get their key back for them.

At least, that was the plan. Sam and Polly were supposed to put it into action today. They weren’t sure how long it would take for Lucifer to answer their summons—another spell put together by Hilda’s coven—and Micah hadn’t heard from his brother yet.

He was worried. Lucifer was dangerous, and Sam had a lot to lose. That was why he picked up the phone to fiddle with it before. While Raze and Becca were touring the casino, he was sitting in the office, praying everything went according to plan.

They’d set out hours ago. There’d been no word from either of them since, and Micah wasn’t so sure how much longer he could sit there.

When another half hour dragged by, he rose up from his chair. As always, Cael was on the casino floor. Raze was out there, too, distracting Becca while Sam and Polly were confronting Lucifer.

They didn’t need Micah. Not really.

And if they did? Well, it wasn’t like they didn’t know where to find him.

Sam rarely ever returned to the hotel. Micah, on the other hand?

He never left.

* * *

When the knock sounded at his door, ripping him from sleep, Micah had been dreaming.

Ever since their fateful meeting—when Phoenix burst into flame to scare off the powerful intruder to her coven, and Micah gawked at her, too stunned by her beauty and her fire to even introduce himself at first—all of his dreams were about her.

Sometimes they were nice: memories of the few short weeks they were together, flashes of what might’ve been, and pleasurable dreams that had his cock hard and his balls aching when he woke up, forced to remember that he was alone.

Even the serious case of blue balls Micah would have was better than the nightmares that usually plagued him.

---