The Castle of Water and Woe (Briarwood Reverse Harem Book 3)

by Steffanie Holmes

  “Are you sure that’s the best idea?”

  “I’ve been a prisoner in that horrible house for over three weeks. It feels like three years. I want to meet people with things to look forward to. I want to party. I want to talk about stuff that isn’t Jesus or a Woman’s Duty or Eternal Damnation.” she peered up at me with those enormous baby blues. “Didn’t you just say that grieving was a time to do stupid stuff?”

  “That was not what I said at all. And what about the police? Are you going to press charges?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.” A dark sliver of pain passed in front of Kelly’s eyes. “But I will decide soon, I promise.”

  “I’m with you, whatever you choose to do. Either way, I don’t think Uncle Bob will hurt anyone again.”

  She studied my face. “You must’ve lit a fire under him to make him change his ways so easily.”

  I grimaced. “You might say that.”

  ***

  After an enormous breakfast at Happy’s (Kelly had two cheeseburgers and two slices of brownie cake), we rolled ourselves back to the Corvette and dropped Kelly off at a nearby hostel. Groups of young people hung around the entrance, lugging enormous backpacks and chattering in a myriad of languages.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? You don’t have any stuff.”

  “D’uh. That’s why I’m going shopping.” Kelly held up her purse. “I’m not even going back to the farmhouse for my stuff. Uncle Bob threw out all my favourite clothes, anyway. It’s time for a new start.”

  She pushed open the door and stepped out, reached over and wrapping her arms around Arthur’s neck. “It was so nice to meet you. I’d tell you to look after my older sis and make her less uptight and nerdy, but I can see you’re already way ahead of me.”

  Arthur laughed, his whole body rumbling. “You take care of yourself, Kelly. I hope we meet again.”

  Kelly moved around the side of the car, leaned over the door, and embraced me, burying her face into my shoulder. A strand of her golden hair tickled my nose. Weirdly, the warm pillar of spirit magic rose up through my belly as I wrapped my arms around her, and I poured a tiny bit of that spirit through my hands. It flowed into her, bringing with it all my love and fear and hope for her. Kelly’s body sagged a little, and she sighed in contentment.

  Okay, cool. I didn’t know I could do that, either.

  After a decade, I pulled back. “I’m calling you the minute I get home. And I want hourly texts, telling me exactly what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. If I don’t hear from you every hour on the hour I’ll be on the net plane back over here, and then you’ll really find out how this nerd can ruin a party.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Relax, Einstein. I’ll text.”

  “And if you ever need to talk, day or night, you just pick up the phone. I’ll always be there for you.”

  “I know.” Kelly hugged me again. “I know.”

  FORTY-EIGHT: BLAKE

  Without Maeve around, I expected Corbin to turn outright hostile toward me, maybe even try a little torture. I checked all my food for sherds of glass, and made Flynn check the shower first to make sure it wasn’t going to spew out molden honey instead of water. A lifetime of dodging the princes’ delightful pranks had taught me a thing or two about staying on my toes.

  Instead, Corbin acted much the same – mostly ignoring me and any offers to help him translate his books. He seemed to be avoiding everyone, even Rowan, who paced around like a puppy who’d lost his master. Corbin holed up in his study and I didn’t see him outside of meals, which suited me fine. The guy bugged me. He still kept a vigil over my room every night. This morning I caught him sleeping in his chair and drew a giant cock and balls on his cheek. He’d been walking around the castle for three hours and still hadn’t noticed it.

  “I can’t believe he went off to give the morning’s tour and he still hasn’t noticed,” Flynn chortled about it while I held a long length of metal with a pair of tongs so he could solder the end of it onto another metal frame. I’d spent quite a lot of time in Flynn’s workshop over the last couple of days, holding bits of metal together while he heated them with fire and cooled them with water to make them into eldritch shapes. I’d never seen so much metal before. Really, I’d never seen any metal before, since it was poison to the fae. But here on earth they were nuts for metal. They had metal transport skins called cars and metal cooking fires and metal moving picture boxes and even metal artwork.

  Daigh fancied himself a connoisseur of human art. One of his favourite tricks was to copy the paintings of human masters in fae inks, then break into major galleries or private collections and replace the real things with his fakes. I still remember him chortling as he recounted stories of humans scrambling to figure out what went wong as the fae ink started to fade away and leave a different – usually much lewder – image behind.

  Okay, I’d chortled a bit, too. It was a funny hobby.

  Daigh would never have called Flynn’s statues art. To the fae, they were fucking deadly, which meant that even though I thought they were ugly as fuck, I loved them.

  “I know, I’m a genius,” I grinned back. I’d only just learned the word, and I felt it definitely applied to me.

  “If you’re a genius, then I’m a bloody protestant.” Flynn grunted as he waved the soldering iron in my face. “Hold still, I just have to put a bend in the other end.”

  After Maeve, Flynn was the human that fascinated me most. I’d been trying to figure him out, but so far I’d come up a complete blank. Normally humans were so easy, especially when it came to sex. But unlike everyone else, Flynn didn’t seem to be chasing Maeve on his own. He looked pretty damn happy the other day during our little group revel, but I remembered how easily he’d let me take over from him with Maeve at the ritual. And I’d watched him and Corbin take Maeve together on the movie night (Maybe Arnold could sleep through that moaning, but I couldn’t.) He liked sharing her. He loved seeing her happy.

  At first I thought he might just be in it for the sex, nothing deeper than that. But then I’d seen the enormous sculpture he’d made for her bedroom. Nope, Flynn cared about Maeve. He had it bad. So why didn’t he pursue her? Why did he hold back and let Corbin and Arnold and even Rowan deepen their bonds with her?

  One thing I’d learned about human men was that they didn’t talk about their feelings. I’d tried to turn our workshop conversation around to Maeve at least three times, and every time Flynn broke into some bawdy song or started wanking on about the Dublin football team and I got bored and ordered more curry.

  Flynn finished his solder and allowed me to set down the metal sculpture. “That’s all I can do on this piece for now. Want to help me make a mobile for Connor?” He pointed to a workbench in the corner, where he’d set up rows of metal washers that had been soldered together to make shapes. A star. A dragonfly. A weird lumpy shape I assumed was a teddy bear.

  “Another time. I’ve got to take my daily dose of nature. See you later, mate.” The word mate sounded so foreign on my lips. A filial word for a friend who was male. I’d never had one of those before. The only other friend I’d had was Liah, and she and I hadn’t really spoken since we were children. In the last few days it had started to fly off my lips when I spoke to Flynn. I liked it. It made my chest feel twice as wide.

  Speaking of Liah … I hurried across the garden and picked up the package of fruit I’d tossed into the bushes earlier. I circled around behind the topiary maze and ducked into the orchard, glancing around to make sure Rowan wasn’t out doing the pruning. He’d been down here collecting apples for dessert yesterday, and I’d had to quickly hide Liah’s food parcel and pretend I was just admiring his excellent rootstock.

  Also, dessert is an amazing human invention, possibly even greater than curry.

  No Rowan in sight. Good. I hurried through the gate into the wood, calling into the trees. “Liah, I’ve got some food for you. Meat and taste free, just the way you like it!”


  No answer. Only the rustle of branches in the breeze and the lonely chirping of a sparrow greeted me.

  Odd. Liah hadn’t been straying from the wood since she’d discovered all the bad things lurking in the human world. Maybe she’s sleeping.

  “Liah?” I called, louder this time. “Where are you?”

  I made my way through the wood, calling her name. She didn’t show herself. Heart pounding, I realised that if she wasn’t here, there might be one place she would go.

  I sprinted down the slope to the low stone wall marking the edge of Briarwood’s boundary. The three sidhe rose from the centre of the meadow, dotted around by bare, charred patches of earth. I vaulted the wall and crept toward the mounds.

  As I rounded the corner toward the gateway, I noticed Maeve’s scientific equipment scattered across the grass, cords snapped, screens stomped on, metal cases torn open and exposed to the elements.

  At the edge of the largest sidhe, standing on top of the stairs with her arms at her sides and her face to the heavens, was Liah.

  “Yo, Seelie. I brought you some food that didn’t have to die first.” I held up the basket, hoping my words wouldn’t give away the churning in my stomach.

  Liah’s head whipped around, her eyes gazing at me with pure hatred. “Get away from me, Blake.”

  I took a step closer, noticing for the first time a circle of black soot at her feet. As I watched, long, thin tendrils of blackness rose from the circle, encircling Liah’s bare ankles. What in Oberon’s name is that? I’ve seen a lot of fae magic, but I’ve never seen that before. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving.”

  “How?” I lifted my hand to inspect that wards around the gateway. They still held firm. “We have wards in place to—”

  “I’m not going back to the fae realm, Blake. I’m going to another place.”

  Another place? That makes less than no sense. There were no other places. The gateway went between earth and Tir Na Nog, and that was it. The only other place we even knew about was the—

  Oh no. Oh, fuck no.

  “That’s the stupidest fucking idea you’ve ever had, Liah. Even stupider than that time you wanted us to dance on the frozen river, and the ice cracked and we both fell in and I turned blue and got sick for a month. If you think Earth is bad, that place is a thousand times worse.”

  “You don’t know. You’ve never been.” She set me with her firm, don’t-fuck-with-me stare. The black fingers rolled up her calves, trapping her legs in place. “All I know is I can’t stand the ghosts of the forest any longer.”

  “So come with me.” I held out my hand. “We’ll fight Daigh together. Why even consider—”

  “Because Daigh is already there with his entire army. It’s where he’s going to launch his attack. It’s how he plans to get around your wards.”

  What? Shit. That was bad. “How? How do you know this?”

  “Because I am fae. I can lift the veil between the worlds, as long as I pay the price.” Liah held up her stump. A long, jagged cut radiated along the length of her arm, crisscrossed in two places my smaller cuts to form a fairy sigil. I recognised the symbol from Daigh’s personal grimoire, from a chapter on the darkest, most malevolent magic the fae were capable of unleashing.

  My blood turned cold. Liah lifted her other arm, revealing a dark burn running from her blackened fingers right down to her elbow. “It hurts so bad, I almost wish you’d cut this hand off, too. But they asked me to destroy her scientific implements and I did it. All the pain will be worth it if I can get to Daigh.”

  “Why do this? You can’t defeat him on your own. Why not stay here and fight with me?”

  “Because I’m not fighting for that,” Liah spat the word as she jabbed her good hand at the looming cellphone tower. The blackness encircled her hips. I stared at the void that devoured her. It was not a rope that bound her, but the kind of deep, terrifying nothingness of a collapsing star, of a place so devoid of life and light not even gravity escaped. Whispers echoed from the tips of the tendrils. Whispers... and screams.

  I grabbed her arm around her good wrist, ignoring the searing burn where my skin touched the sigil. I frantically searched my memory for some spell or promise that would keep her from doing this. “What about me? Will you fight for me? I saved your life. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be dead right now. You owe me, and I’m calling in my favour.”

  “You already took your favor from me,” Liah snapped, holding up the stump that had once been her arm. I winced. “I’ll never again draw a bow, or plait my hair, or play the lyre. You took me from my Seelie, forced me to abandon my own people, and stuck me in a dead world filled with the lamentations of once-proud trees, all for your own selfish reasons. I owe you nothing. At least I’ll die standing up to Daigh. At least I’d die as a warrior, instead of fading away in a world that’s broken beyond repair.”

  My fingers tightened around her arm. “There has to be a way.”

  But there wasn’t. Thick fingers of inky darkness closed around Liah’s torso, wrapping over her shoulders, enclosing her body in the hollowness of the universe. I tried to yank her toward me, but she held firm, raising her hands to the heavens as the black tendrils consumed her.

  “If you want to save your witches, Blake Beckett, I’d get to that church right now,” Liah’s voice rose from the black cloud, sounding hollow and far-away. “But it won’t make a difference either way. This world is already lost to us. I’m going to try and save the next one.”

  The black cloud consumed her. And she was gone.

  I stared into the inky tendrils as they swallowed the only friend I’d ever had among the fae, gasping back the horror of what she’d just done.

  When I had control of myself again, I turned and raced back toward the castle. My lungs screamed as I hit the hill, but I pumped my arms harder, willing myself to run faster. My black head reeled with the knowledge Liah had given me, my black heart all twisted up.

  Warn the others. Get to Maeve. Before it’s too late.

  FORTY-NINE: MAEVE

  After an uneventful flight filled with tiny packets of peanuts and an ill-conceived attempt to join the mile high club (Arthur’s bulk made manoeuvring around him in the tiny bathroom possible only for a dextrous pint-sized acrobat, of which I was not.) We touched down at Heathrow without incident. Groggy eyed, I followed Arthur through customs and out into the parking lot, where his ridiculous car waited for us.

  I sank into the uncomfortable seat, and all the responsibilities of the coven rushed back to me. America had felt like another world. Now that I was back in England, I remembered what had distracted me from Kelly and my own mourning. The fae, my father, my mother’s painting, Connor’s baptism, the five guys and everything we’d done together, learning about my own magic. It was all so much, too much.

  Arthur turned the key. “You want some music?” he asked.

  “Sure.” It would make the trip go faster, and maybe blast out the maelstrom of thoughts swirling around in my head.

  Arthur put on some band called Iron Maiden. Their galloping riffs and soaring vocals did the trick. I got caught up in the stories of epic battles and things lurking in the darkness that I barely registered when we turned off the M1, heading along the homeward stretch to Crookshollow and Briarwood House.

  Arthur’s phone started to buzz. He paused the discman and hit the speaker button. “What’s up, Corbin?”

  “How far away are you?”

  “I’d say expect us by half two.”

  “Don’t bother going to the castle. We’ll all be at the cathedral in Crooks Worthy. Jane’s finally having Connor’s baptism, and we all need to be there.”

  “Finally, some good news.”

  “Not exactly. That lady Sheryl managed to pull some strings and organise it, but we’ve hit a bit of a snag.”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Blake’s had another one of his dreams. His friend Liah in the fae
realm told us that Daigh is planning to show up at the baptism. We need all of us there if we have any hope of stopping him.”

  “But how? The only gateway in England is behind the castle and that’s blocked off. Did you check it?”

  “Of course I checked it. All your equipment is destroyed, but the wards are still as strong as ever. And before you ask, yes, I’m aware we don’t know if we can trust this fae friend of Blake’s. But we don’t want to take the chance, right?”

  I realised Corbin was asking me. He was trying to remember that I was supposed to be the leader. “Right.” I said. “We can’t let them take Connor again.”

  Arthur put his foot to the floor, but the old car wouldn’t go much faster. In fact, it got the speed wobbles as we bounced down the road, and Arthur had to ease off again. Somehow, we made it into Crookshollow without the car falling apart. We zoomed down the high street, zipping past the pub and all the little shops. My eye caught the Astarte sign, and I felt a pang. I wished that old witch Clara would join us. Something told me she had more power in her pinkie finger than the six of us could conjure in our most epic spell.