And Blake… the way his expression never changed, never altered…
My fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword as I thought of what he’d said yesterday, that’d he’d kept Maeve from seeing part of her dream that might have helped us. And then he and Rowan had gone into her dream without her permission… that had to have been his idea. He probably compelled Rowan to agree. Red spots appeared in my vision and I swung my sword, imagining the tree was Blake fucking Beckett.
My next blow shook the tree with such force my blade sliced halfway through the trunk. Apples dropped from the branch above. One hit my temple, splashing pain into my face.
Not good enough. I deserved so much more.
The red dots swam in my eyes. I swung my sword around and slashed the blade along my arm, wrist to elbow. A line of blood appeared across my skin, splitting my grey tattoos open like Moses parting the Red Sea. Only the red in this case was my blood.
I watched, detached, as a river of blood flow from the wound, drenching my arm.
My body shuddered as I experienced a clarion sense of wrongness, even as a cloudy euphoria settled over my mind. There wasn’t any pain. How could there be no pain when there was so much blood?
So much blood.
The red spots in front of my eyes swelled, bleeding into each other. I collapsed in the grass, wrapping my fingers around my arm, trying to hold the wound closed. My fingers slid over my slick skin, unable to find purchase.
What did you think, you bellend? A voice screamed inside my head. That you’d be able to hold that wound closed?
Too much blood.
My ears rang, a screaming siren that blocked out the voice. The red in my eyes retreated, giving way to a cool grayness that grew in intensity as a white light rushed toward me.
“Oh, shite,” I murmured, as the world spun away from me and I became one with the white light.
16
ROWAN
I didn’t want to let go of Maeve, but I had to search Corbin’s library. Blake and I exchanged a glance, and I slipped away from her as he moved in. Maeve didn’t object as Blake wrapped his arms around her and murmured something secret to her in his deep, melodic voice. Her eyes swiveled to him, caught in his otherworldly magnetism.
With Flynn occupied questioning Greg on every aspect of the rebuild, and Arthur having run away to be angry, I slipped away and crept up the staircase, avoiding the piles of debris and the sparking cable dangling from the ceiling. My stomach churned. I swirled my gaze up to the chandelier to count the wrought-iron leaves, but the chandelier had been torn down. And if I looked down I was going to be sick.
Stop it. I tried to force the anxiety back. You’ve got to do this.
But anxiety never listened to reason, especially not when I stood in the middle of the ruin of my life. Soot clung to every surface. The carpets squelched under my feet. Several of the paintings had been torn from the walls. I paused at the library door. My gaze flicked to the shelf on the right – the one I always counted before I entered the room. Someone had flung all the books on the floor.
If you can’t count, you can’t enter, my body screamed.
My stomach tightened. A sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I gripped the edge of the doorframe, trying to force my feet forward.
A tremor shook my whole body as the familiar scents slammed into me. Parchment and old leather furniture. The whiff of whiskey from the bottles stored in the globe bar. Dust and old things. And beneath it all, Corbin’s unique scent.
“Give me strength,” I whispered. Corbin believed I could do anything. I needed that belief magic now.
I wrote it all down for you.
If Corbin really was somehow still… alive, still able to be brought back, then the answers were in this room. I lifted a shaking foot and placed it on the rug in front of me. My body howled in protest. My mind rebelled, certain that entering the room without finishing my ritual would result in some horrible consequence.
What could be more horrible than losing Corbin?
I dragged my other foot across the rug, my eyes flicking over the shelves. Apart from the books strewn across the floor and the priest hole door swinging free on its hinges, the library had remained remarkably intact.
The desk. Get to the desk.
Another step. Another stab in my heart. My vision wobbled. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to go back.
I balled up my courage and surged forward, grabbing the edge of the desk. I was there! I did it! A swell of triumph momentarily beat back the anxiety, and I held that triumph against my heart, hoping it would last as long as I needed.
I slid into Corbin’s chair, drawing strength from his lingering scent and the familiar shape his body had scooped out of the cushion. As usual, he left his laptop off to one side and piled a wall of books around him, the same way I yanked my hair in front of my face when I didn’t want to face the world.
I pulled the first book on the stack toward me. It was the grimoire Clara brought us, the one that once belonged to the Soho coven. She didn’t seem to be as big a fan of Post-it notes and scribbled margins as Corbin, which meant that the five colored bits of paper sticking out of the leaves had been placed there by my lover in the last couple of days.
I wrote it all down for you.
I flipped the book to the first Post-it note, expecting to see a personal message. I skimmed over the scrawling diary entry from the book’s original owner. On his note, Corbin’s jagged writing noted some features of the belief magic story Clara told us. Nothing about bringing him back from the dead. I flipped to the next note. This marked an alchemical diagram – probably the arrangement of a ritual – that Corbin had redrawn with different letters at the cardinal points. I snapped a picture of the page on my phone and stuffed the note into my pocket, in case it was important.
On the third page, a towering pile of skulls grinned back at me. A demon danced on top of the pile, tossing a skull in the air like some fairground amusement. A crown of bones and horns circled his head.
The spell beneath was in Latin, but Corbin had translated it across three Post-its.
A spell for entering the world of the dead.
My heart hammered against my chest. This is it. This is what he did.
Corbin, you sneaky, lying, glorious, beautiful bastard.
I grabbed the Post-it notes, snapped a picture of the page, and slammed the book shut. The full weight of my discovery soared in my veins. If we could figure out the spell Corbin had performed, we could reverse it and bring him back, the way Maeve brought Aline back from the between-world in the painting.
I swiveled in the chair to look out the window behind the desk. Corbin had a sweet view from here over the grounds, from the topiary maze across to where Flynn’s workshop used to stand, right down the sloping lawn into the orchard. I jumped as a figure moved between the apple trees, spinning and lunging at an invisible foe.
Arthur. His sword caught the light as he moved through his wards. I couldn’t make out his face, but the set of his shoulders and ferocity of his movements betrayed his fury. I glanced away, feeling ashamed to be watching him, like I was intruding on something private.
Corbin could see down into the kitchen gardens. A delicious shiver ran up my spine as I looked down into my walled garden, which miraculously had survived the attack on the castle intact. Corbin could have watched me gardening from up here. If he wanted to see what was going on elsewhere in the castle, he had a tall window on the other side of the library looking into the courtyard.
My eye caught a weird movement in the orchard. I searched the trees for Arthur. At first I couldn’t see him, but then I spotted him lying on the ground, his face to the sky. His sword lay a couple of feet from his body.
Cold fingers clenched my heart.
Even from this distance, I could see the blood pooling from his arm, spreading in a dark puddle across his shirt.
Not Arthur. Not him too.
I rose to my feet, my legs tremb
ling. I used the edge of the desk to support me as I stumbled from the library and lurched toward the staircase. “Maeve? Flynn? Call an ambulance,” I gasped against the rising panic. “Arthur’s in the orchard and he’s bleeding real bad.”
17
MAEVE
My heart hammered against my chest. Rowan pressed a vial into my hand and sank against Flynn, who was on the phone with the ambulance. My fingers closed around the vial and I tore out of the castle, Blake hot on my heels.
No, no, no. I can’t lose another one.
I slammed into the orchard gate, the wood splintering as it crashed against the post. I tore down the row to the spot where the apples trees were spaced wide enough apart for swinging a two-handed sword in a complete circle. Here, Arthur and I had practiced sword-fighting and spilled our secrets to each other. Here, he kissed me for the first time.
At first I didn’t see him, because he towered so tall and large in my mind that I wasn’t looking down, down in the dirt. He slumped across the roots of an apple tree, his head flopped against his shoulder and his arm crossing his chest. Blood saturated the front of his shirt and darkened the grass beneath him.
So much blood.
A long, even cut sliced down the center of Arthur’s arm. Blood flowed freely from the wound, pouring out of him like water from a faucet. Bile rose in my throat, and my body surged with this tremendous sense that something was incorrect, inexact – a feeling usually reserved for looking over Kelly’s physics homework.
All that blood should be inside him. He can’t have much left.
Blake crouched over Arthur’s limp body, slapping his cheeks so his head bounced against the tree. “Hey, Arnold, are you awake in there? Can you hear me?”
More blood poured from the cut. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to hold my stomach inside me.
Blake shook my arm. “Quick, Maeve. The medicine.”
My eyes watering, I fumbled in my pocket for the small vial Rowan had given me. He must’ve grabbed it from the kitchen on his way to us. My fingers slipped on the lid, and it slid from my fingers into the grass.
“Here.” Blake snatched it up and tipped out the paste onto his hand. Arthur’s skin was so slippery with blood it took Blake a couple of tries to hold up his arm and rub the paste around the wound. That done, Blake tore off his shirt, ripped it in half down the middle and wrapped the material around Arthur’s arm to hold the wound together. When he stepped back, his arms and chest were covered with dark blood.
The metallic smell invaded my nostrils. My legs gave way and I collapsed in the grass. I picked up Arthur’s other hand and held it in mine. His fingers hung limp, lifeless. Were we too late? Had my warrior gone where I couldn’t follow?
Footsteps pounded down the hill. Paramedics sat a stretcher down in the grass beside Arthur, and started calling out instructions to each other in medical speak. Blake pulled me back so they could work. “We’ll take good care of him, luv.” A paramedic gave me a reassuring smile.
Panic and sorrow welled up inside me. It’s not your job. It was my job to take care of him, and I failed him. And now he’s done this to himself and it’s all my fault.
“Please, please wake up,” I sobbed into Arthur’s shoulder. The nurses had laid his body out on his back, his hands at his sides and his lids closed over his glassy eyes. He was so big and tall that his feet hung off the end of the hospital bed. Under the fluorescent lights he was all hard corners and pale skin. Behind him, machines beeped and thumped as they breathed for him and pushed fresh blood through his empty veins.
Nothing about him seemed alive at all.
First my parents, then Corbin, now Arthur. How many people will I lose?
A warm arm fell around my shoulder, tugging me back from the bed. “He’ll wake up,” Flynn cooed in my ear, mashing his body against mine. “He’s strong.”
“He did this to get away from me,” I sobbed. “Because of what I did.”
“Maeve, you didn’t do anything.”
“I did! I let the fae into the castle. I trusted Daigh and got Corbin killed and Arthur hates me because—”
“He doesn’t hate you and you’re not responsible. He doesn’t hate Blake, either.”
“Well, then he’s a bloody good actor,” Blake piped up from the back of the room.
“We’re all blaming ourselves for Corbin’s death. He was the one who looked after all of us. He made himself into our protector, all because of his own guilt over Keegan.” Flynn patted Arthur’s bandaged arm. “Arthur did this to himself because he blamed himself for Corbin’s death. Don’t you see? All that time he was yelling at Blake, he was really talking to himself.”
“He might’ve just said that,” Blake said.
“That’s exactly it,” Flynn’s voice cracked. “This guilt’s tearing us apart – it’s seeping in all the cracks and poisoning everything good our coven stands for. We all need to do a little less blaming and a little more forgiveness.”
I shook my head. “I’m the High Priestess. This is my fault.”
“Maeve, I—” Rowan’s face crumpled with pain.
I held up a hand. “You can’t take the responsibility for this away from me. I’m in charge and if I say I’m responsible, then I’m damn well responsible.”
“Maeve,” Rowan’s voice rang high and clear, startling the words out of my mouth. “I only saw Arthur because I… I went upstairs to look at the books in the library. In the dream, Corbin said, ‘I wrote it all down for you,’ and I had this idea that what he wrote down was how we could bring him back from the dead.”
“Don’t start on this again,” I warned. “I’m not—”
“Listen, please. I found this.” Rowan dug in his pocket and pulled out some bright colored paper. Five Post-it notes, scrawled with Corbin’s spiky handwriting.
My heart thudded to see that familiar scrawl. “What are those?”
“I don’t know, but they come from the book Clara stole from the Soho coven. Corbin was making notes on these spells.” Rowan dug his phone out of his pocket. “I got photos of all the pages because the police said we shouldn’t remove anything from the house. Look,” he flicked through photo after photo of demons and skulls and Latin text.
“Rowan, come on—”
Rowan waved his screen in my face. “Just look. He even changed the letters on this alchemical diagram.” He held up one of the notes. Behind him, Blake twisted his head to the side. “All these spells are about resurrection and something called the Mysteries of Lazarus—”
Seeing that writing snapped something in my chest. Rage bubbled up inside me – that Corbin was gone and Rowan wouldn’t accept it. Because when he did finally accept it, his heart would shatter, and my own heart would break all over again watching him go through that.
“I don’t want to hear it!” I yelled.
“Maeve, you’ve got to—”
“No. This isn’t like Aline, who was trapped in what I can only gather is an extra dimension within the painting. Corbin is DEAD. We all saw his body. He was burned and had a stake pushed through his chest. All the wishing on a fucking star isn’t going to bring him back.”
Rowan’s features froze. He slunk out of the room. Instantly, I regretted my anger. I stood up, but Blake stepped in front of me. “Let me talk to him.”
“Don’t put ideas in his head,” I growled. “The sooner he stops denying the truth, the better off we’ll all be.”
Blake’s eyes bore into mine, and the corner of his mouth curled up into his trademark smirk. He spun on his heel and sauntered after Rowan. It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t agreed to what I’d asked of him.
I flopped back down into the hard plastic chair beside Arthur’s bed, burying my face in my hands. “This is a nightmare.”
“Have you considered they might have a point,” Flynn said, his voice soft.
“Of course I have, but it’s impossible.” The things Corbin said to me in the dream flashed through my head. I opened my
mouth to tell Flynn about them, but something bit my tongue. I didn’t want to give him false hope, either. Rowan was carrying around enough for all of us.
“I know you need a logical explanation for everything,” Flynn said. “But maybe this is new scientific ground. Maybe it’s never happened before, and that’s why it can’t be explained. You’ve already released Aline from her prison. You could be a pioneer in resurrecting the dead.”
“Aline didn’t leave behind a body, because her body went to the other dimension with her. Corbin left behind a body, and it’s gone. Even if he is stuck in the underworld and we could somehow bring him back, he doesn’t have a body to go back to.”
Flynn’s face wobbled. Shit. He was close to losing it. I wrapped my arms around him. Something crackled in the pocket of his hoodie. “What’s that?” I asked, feeling a thick envelope inside.
“Oh, that thing.” Flynn pulled out a crumpled envelope and handed it to me. “This was in the mailbox at Briarwood. I was gonna give it to you back at Ryan’s place. It’s from some laboratory in London.”
My DNA results. I glanced down at the envelope without much interest. What did it matter any more?
“Open it. I want to see.” Flynn hopped from foot to foot. “Of course, I’m a wee bit dim, so you’ll have to explain all the squiggly graphs.”
A smile played over my lips. There was something about Flynn’s very presence that made every scary situation bearable. And there was something about him that was different right now. Over the last few days he’d been a real support. Instead of his usual ill-conceived humor, I remembered how he’d tried to hold Arthur back and talk him down when he’d attacked Blake. Now we were in Arthur’s hospital room and Flynn was making speeches about not feeling guilty to try and hold us all together. It might not be working, but he was trying harder than anyone.
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow Page 12
