REEVE OF VEILS
AMELIA FAULKNER
LOVELIGHT PRESS
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Afterword
Reeve of Veils © Amelia Faulkner 2017.
Edited by Ed Davies.
Cover design by Satyr Designs.
All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
The author has asserted his/her rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book.
This book contains sexually explicit content which is suitable only for mature readers.
First LoveLight Press electronic publication: January 2017.
http://lovelightpress.com
Lord of Ravens is set in the USA, and as such uses American English throughout.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This novel contains mature themes and elements which some readers may find upsetting. Of particular note, readers are advised that this book contains graphic child abuse and implied rape.
PROLOGUE
SIX YEARS AGO
This was going to go to ratshit.
Frederick could see it coming, like a storm on the horizon which hung heavy and black with promise. He didn’t need to be able to read thoughts to know what would happen, and the fact that the minds of the major players in this particular drama were closed to him made no difference. He could almost taste the vitriol which heated the air between his father and older brother.
Mother’s funeral was not the best place for that loathing to play out.
Frederick had never worked harder to school his countenance and prevent his features from giving away the slightest hint of his inner workings. With Icky to his left and Nicky to the right he sat stoic in the center, the middle of three boys in a family who never bore daughters, and gazed at the coffin.
She was too young.
He blinked slowly as the stray thought butted up against his defenses. It didn’t belong to him, and he had little interest in tracking down who among the congregation it originated from. The concern was that it had come to him at all when he was on the tightest lockdown he could manage under such circumstances.
Poor boy. The thought carried an image of Icky with it. Finding your own mother’s body. I can’t imagine it!
Frederick closed his eyes briefly and tried to strengthen the border between himself and the rest of the world. He couldn’t go through the entire bloody funeral listening to everyone’s inner workings and worry about trying to keep Icky’s temper in check.
“Do not disappoint, Quentin. Your mother would not wish for you to disrupt her service.”
Frederick swore silently. Their father’s words, hushed though they were, would only serve to aggravate Icky’s rage. He felt the body to his left grow tense.
“Icky,” he whispered as he opened his eyes.
Quentin turned to face him. There was a tinge of desperation in his colorless eyes, intermingled with the fury.
“Just get through this.” Frederick gazed at him, willing him to put a bloody lid on it. “For Nicky’s sake.”
Icky glanced past him to their younger brother, and his gaze softened ever so faintly.
Nicholas was six years behind them. While Frederick and Quentin were twins — though nowhere near identical — Nicky was only thirteen, and his sniffles rang throughout the chapel.
“Just one more hour, Icky,” he whispered as Quentin looked to him again. “That’s all I ask.”
Icky gave the faintest of nods and returned his gaze to the coffin, draped as it was with the duchess’ crest.
The storm hadn’t abated. Frederick could see it in the set of Icky’s jaw, the fire roiling in his fixed stare.
Frederick reached for Nicky’s hand and held it gently. The best he could do was be a bulwark and wait for the tempest to break.
HE GAVE IT HIS ALL, but it wasn’t enough. He sat through religious claptrap and the weeping of a congregation who alternately loved and were bitterly jealous of his mother, and all the while he tried to console Nicky while keeping Icky in check. But when the duke stood to read his eulogy, Frederick knew the end was near.
He squeezed Quentin’s wrist. “Icky,” he whispered. “Hold.”
Quentin’s features were pinched and pale. “I have to go,” he breathed.
“Ten minutes.” Frederick leaned in to hiss into his ear. “Ten bloody minutes.”
A stiff breeze whipped through the chapel, and Frederick glanced over his shoulder to see whether the doors were open.
They weren’t.
“Elizabeth was a dreamer.” Their father’s voice was sonorous, and his gray eyes were fixed at some midpoint in the crowd. “The eldest of three sisters, heir to the Dovecote family’s legacy, and the most beautiful woman that I ever had the good fortune to meet. Mother to three sons of whom we could never have been more proud.” His gaze shifted to Icky before it passed on to Frederick and Nicky.
He stopped listening to the duke. Icky’s body was trembling beneath his hand.
“Icky.” He leaned in urgently and tried to make eye contact. “Quentin, please.”
The breeze whipped at their father’s jacket and Frederick felt it ruffle his own hair, then it tore the cloth free from the coffin and sent it fluttering to the stone floor.
But the doors are shut.
Is there a broken window?
The doors?
Bloody hell it’s cold in here!
In focusing on Quentin, he’d lost his grip on shutting out the thoughts which whirled around him. The disquiet which grew among the assembled fueled his own irritation, and he tried to tamp down on it.
It was all too much. He couldn’t manage Icky and Nicky and the chaos of two hundred people and deal with his own mother’s death all at once. Christ on a bike, he was nineteen years old. He hadn’t had a moment to himself to grieve, and he wasn’t going to g
et one.
“You killed her,” Quentin said.
What did he say?
That’s the eldest, isn’t it? Goodness how am I to keep track of all these children?
Who killed who?
What was that?
I wish the youth of today would stop bloody mumbling.
“Quentin.”
Their father gazed down at Icky from the pulpit, his voice soft with disappointment, but his gaze hard and commanding.
Behind them, something clattered to the floor, and Frederick heard a light squeal of surprise. The wind whipped up into a virtual tornado and it howled around them, trapped by the ancient walls.
There was no way this was natural. Not in the slightest.
“You killed her!” Icky screamed. “You liar! You killed her!”
“Quentin!” Father gripped the podium as the gale threatened to push him off-balance.
If this is someone’s idea of a joke—
I’m scared—
What the hell is going on—
I knew I should have bloody stayed at home—
Frederick shook his head as Icky launched to his feet. The tornado seemed to be leaving him and his twin alone, but it was wrecking the chapel.
The coffin shook.
Frederick had never felt his brain churn so hard, so fast. They were seconds from whatever the hell was happening here scattering their mother’s remains all across the family chapel, and he didn’t think he could bear witness to that. Whatever caused this, whatever the hell was going on, he had to put a stop to it right bloody now.
He could read minds. Hell, he could even nudge people into doing what he wanted them to. He could derail thought, shunt it in a new direction, even disappear from people’s consciousness at a push if he wanted to go unnoticed.
So what if he wasn’t the only one in the family with strange powers?
Icky was his twin.
Frederick had no idea how the hell Quentin could start a cyclone inside a building, but it was as good a theory to run with right this very second, so he grabbed Quentin’s arm. If he could get Icky out of here, maybe everything else would calm down.
Icky tore himself free, but Frederick grabbed him again. Icky was a weedy thing, and Frederick had played rugby all through school.
People behind them were shouting. Yelling. Panic was taking hold.
Frederick could fix that later, but for now Icky had to be his priority.
“You’re a murderer!” Icky screamed at their father.
The duke stared down at Frederick. “Get him out of here,” he snapped.
“Come on.” Frederick dragged Quentin bodily toward the doors.
He hadn’t really realized what a sack of bones Icky was. The man was older than him only by a few hours, and yet the differences between them were thrown into stark relief in this moment: Icky’s lanky, scrawny body writhing and fighting in the far stronger, bulkier form of his younger twin.
And then, as though his strings had been cut, Icky sagged in his arms.
Frederick grit his teeth and tossed his brother over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then strode for the doors with all the dignity he could muster.
Nobody needed to see this, so he turned his attention on projecting a new set of memories outward to those minds he could affect.
Yes, it was strange, he pushed out. Yes, the doors blew open and the weather turned. And the poor children were so overcome that there were tears. The weather was odd. Someone must have left the doors ajar. Funerals are such ghastly things.
Yes, came the echoes of this new reality. The wind broke the doors open.
Those poor boys.
The weather was so strange!
I hate funerals.
He bore Icky out into the sunshine and hurried to the lead car, head of a line of equally black, shiny vehicles. A single, unspoken command pulled their chauffeur from the vehicle and another made him turn his back on the scene. The last thing Frederick needed was the staff getting an eyeful of this disaster as he poured his brother in through the back door.
Icky fell across the back seat like a sack of potatoes.
Frederick left him there, leaped into the driver’s seat, and drove toward the house at breakneck speed.
He hated this. There were too many variables, and far too many unknown quantities. Would Icky recover from whatever brain-dead state he seemed to be in right now? Would their father conclude that his eldest son had been responsible for the outbreak of impossible indoor weather? Were the assembled congregation going to stick with the lies Frederick had insinuated into their thoughts, or could their original memories reassert themselves?
When the hell were they going to bury Mother?
Without data, Frederick couldn’t make any plans. And without plans, anything could happen. Therefore he must stick around until the data made itself available. It was the only decision he could reach right now, and it would have to do.
Ratshit indeed.
1
FREDERICK
Cyberstalking Icky was a thousand times more possible now that the intolerable swine seemed to have begun dating someone — a very pretty someone, if the images Frederick found were to be believed. The shocker was that Quentin had turned out to be gay. No wonder the bumbling fool never managed to get himself caught by the never-ending slew of gold-diggers who threw themselves at his feet. It turned out that each and every one of them had the wrong plumbing.
Frederick scrolled through his Twitter feed to be sure he had as much data as he was able to collect before he went and showed his face. He had already memorized everything in the three different background checks he’d paid to run against this Riley chap, but now that he was here in San Diego he’d look a complete imbecile if it transpired that Quentin had already ditched the florist.
Nothing to that effect that he could find. If anything, the two seemed to be drawing ever closer together. There were even images of Icky jogging along some beach front with a mismatched pair of hounds.
A man didn’t get dogs unless he was ready to settle down.
Satisfied that he hadn’t wasted a trip, Frederick closed his laptop and headed for the door.
FREDERICK EXITED the concierge-sourced limousine half a block from his destination.
He loathed getting involved in anything so hands-on as turning up in person, but who else could do this job? Nobody. And Frederick had a plan, as always: he would read this florist to establish the boy’s intentions, then arrange a meeting with Icky. Those were the bullet points on his agenda, and once those were achieved he could evaluate the new information and lay it alongside his goals to plan his next move. With luck he would be at the airport this time tomorrow and nobody back home would notice that he’d so much as left the country.
The shop was not difficult to locate. Notwithstanding that he had scoured the area thoroughly through Google Streetview prior to so much as setting foot on an aircraft, the frontage all but spewed bright and colorful blooms out onto the pavement. It was a dab of sunshine in the middle of the city which proved that — if nothing else — these Rileys were talented florists.
He fixed a relaxed expression in place and pushed the door, easing into the cool interior as a bell jingled overhead.
His target was in sight. Every bit as beautiful as images online would have one believe, Bambi Laurence Riley was finely sculpted and thoroughly Celtic in his appeal, with wild curls of a darker blond than Frederick’s own hair, and eyes dark with promise.
Frederick wasted no time in turning away. Riley was in conversation with another man, and precious seconds spent feigning interest in the shop’s wares would give him time to skim the pair’s thoughts.
“Hey, welcome to the Jack in the Green. If there’s anything I can help you with, just ask.”
Do I know you? You look familiar. One of Neil Storm’s buddies, maybe? Holy shit, Neil Fucking Storm, right? Or… were you in a movie? Oh, Goddess, have we had sex? Don’t be offended, man, I don’t remember
everyone. Pretty sure I would’ve remembered you. You’re hot. Was it at a bar?
Frederick glanced toward Riley and gave an affable smile. “I believe there may be, yes.”
Goddess, is it raining Brits in San Diego lately?
“Sure thing!” Riley’s smile widened. The boy was good at maintaining a professional façade while his mind spun in circles, that was for sure. “Are you looking for anything specific?”
Frederick took a moment to dig a little more as he turned to wander past a display.
Riley’s mind was an easy thing to sift through. There were no barriers, no blocks, and no trained defenses. Like almost everyone in the world, the chap was not remotely unreadable.
Reeve of Veils (Inheritance Book 4) Page 1
