The Ex Hex (Ex Hex #1)(4)

Nodding, Rhys took another handful of peanuts. “Until a couple of days ago. Stag do. Bunch of English guys wanting the full Lord of the Rings experience.”

Rhys’s travel company, Penhallow Tours, had grown from a small, one-man business run out of Rhys’s London flat to a ten-person operation, running multiple trips all over the world. His customers routinely called his trips the best of their lives, and his reviews were full of people gushing over how they never had a single day of bad weather, not one delayed flight, not a solitary case of food poisoning.

Amazing how much the smallest bits of magic could do.

“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Wells said, resuming his cleaning. “Because now you can go talk to Father, and get him out of this mood.”

He nodded at the windows, and Rhys turned, seeing the truly abysmal weather in a new light.

Fuck me.

He’d been right, then. No ordinary storm, but one of his father’s making, which, yes, meant Rhys had undoubtedly irritated him. His brothers had never provoked a storm from his father.

Rhys had caused . . . twenty? Two dozen? Too many to count, really.

Turning back to Wells, Rhys went to reach for the peanuts again only to have his hand swatted at with a damp towel.

“Oi!” he cried, but Wells was already pointing at the door.

“Go up there and talk to him before he floods the main road and I never see a customer again.”

“Am I not a customer?”

“You’re a pain in my arse is what you are,” Wells replied, then sighed, hands on his hips. “Seriously, Rhys, just go talk to him, get it over with. He’s missed you.”

Rhys snorted even as he got up from the barstool. “I appreciate that, Wells, but you’re full of shite, mate.”



An hour later, Rhys was wondering why he hadn’t at least stayed at the pub long enough to have a pint. Possibly three.

He’d decided to walk up to the house rather than antagonize his father with the car—a real show of growth and maturity on his part, he thought—but the closer he got, the worse the weather became, and even the protection spell he’d thrown up over himself was struggling.

For a moment, he considered dropping it, letting his father see him pathetic and bedraggled, but no, that kind of thing would only work on a father who had a heart, and Rhys was fairly certain Simon Penhallow had been born without one of those.

Or maybe he’d removed it himself at some point, some sort of experiment to see just how much of a bastard one man could be.

The wind howled down from the top of the hill, making the trees that lined the road creak and sway, and honestly, Rhys knew his father was an incredibly powerful witch, but he didn’t have to be such a cliché about it.

Also a cliché: the Penhallow family manse, Penhaven Manor.

Rhys sometimes wondered how his family had managed to avoid being murdered over the five hundred years that they’d called the hulking pile of stone and obvious witchcraft home. They might as well have put signs in the front yard, here there be witches, for fuck’s sake.

The house didn’t so much sit on the hill as it crouched on it, only two stories tall, but sprawling, a warren of dark hallways and low ceilings and shadowy corners. One of the first spells Rhys had taught himself had been a basic illumination spell just so he could sodding well see things when trying to get to the breakfast table every morning.

He also sometimes wondered if the place would’ve been a little different, a little . . . lighter, if his mother had lived. She’d hated the house just as much as Rhys did, according to Wells, and had almost talked their father into moving to something smaller, something more modern and homier.

But then she died just a few months after Rhys was born, and any talk of moving out of this monster of a house had been squashed. Penhaven was home.

A terrifying, uncomfortable, medieval wreck of a home.

It always looked slightly crooked on first approach, the heavy wooden doors slouching on their hinges, and as Rhys climbed the front steps, he sighed, smoothing a hand over the air in front of him.

The Henley, jeans and boots he’d been wearing shimmered and rippled, transforming into a black suit with his family crest embroidered on the pocket. His father preferred they all wear robes in the house, but Rhys was only willing to go so far in the name of tradition.

He didn’t bother knocking; his father would’ve known he was there the second he set foot on the hill, possibly even when he’d gone into the pub. There were guardian spells all over the place up here, a source of endless frustration to Rhys and his brothers whenever they’d been even a little bit late for curfew.

As Rhys placed his hand on the door, it swung open, groaning ominously on its hinges, and the wind and rain picked up, gusting strong enough that for just a second, Rhys’s spell slipped.

Icy water slapped him in the face, trickling down the collar of his shirt and plastering his hair back against his head.

“Wonderful,” he muttered. “Bloody wonderful.”

And then he stepped inside.





Chapter 2




No matter what the weather looked like outside, the inside of Penhaven was always dim.

Rhys’s father liked it best that way. Heavy velvet drapes covered most of the windows, and the few windows that were left uncovered were made of thick stained glass in dark shades of green and red, distorting the light that came through them, making strange shapes on the heavy stone table just inside the front door.