Reaper: A raven paranormal romance (Crookshollow ravens Book 2)

by Steffanie Holmes

  “Sure,” I shrugged. “But only for a little while—”

  “Great!” Elinor dragged me towards the door. “Let’s go get trashed and paint the village red.”

  While we went back to our rooms to change into party clothes, Alex commandeered Simon from the kitchen (the place was nearly spotless. I was impressed. I wondered how much he charged to work outside the hall …). All us girls piled into the back of the limo Libby had rented to ferry her to the ceremony tomorrow. Elinor handed around a makeup compact so we could get dolled up, while Bianca found a bottle of bubbly in the limo’s fridge and popped the cork.

  “Hey!” Libby cried. “That’s meant to be for after the wedding tomorrow.”

  “We’ll replace it in the morning,” Bianca pushed Libby’s head back and tipped the bottle into her mouth. “Now drink. Tonight is your last night of freedom.”

  By the time the limo dropped us off at Tir Na Nog, The bottle was already empty, and we were halfway through the second one. Libby was already tipsy. While Elinor and I helped her inside and found a booth near the bar, Bianca whipped across the street to the mini-mart.

  “Make way for shots!” Elinor cried, dumping a tray of multi-coloured thimbles of doom down on the table.

  “We’re going to die horribly,” I moaned, as she shoved one into my hand. I drank so rarely that I was going to be passed out in a matter of minutes.

  “I know. It will be brilliant. Now, drink up.” Elinor clinked glasses with mine, and we all threw our heads back and downed our first shot. The alcohol burned my throat, and a warmth spread across my stomach. I shouldn’t have been doing this. I should have been in bed, trying to sleep before the wedding. If I messed up the food, my catering business would be over before it even began …

  Oh, stop being such a worrywart, a voice inside my head scolded me. You hardly ever get to enjoy yourself. Take this opportunity while you have it. You never know when your next heartbreak is going to hit you.

  “Look what I found.” Bianca cried triumphantly as she dumped a bag down on the table. “No hen night is complete without dirty games!”

  “Let’s do more shots!” Alex reached for her purse.

  “Not for me. I can’t afford—” I started to say, but Alex waved a black card in my face.

  “Don’t worry, Belinda. Ryan gave me his black card. Tonight is on him.”

  We sculpted penises out of the Play-Doh and downed shots at a speed that would have made Lemmy Kilmster baulk. I was so busy laughing at Alex’s ridiculously oversized cock (“Is that why Ryan always looks so smug?” Bianca hooted in her typically crass style) that I didn’t even realise how drunk I was until I got up to go to the toilet and fell over.

  “Ooops,” I tried to get up, but my arms were made out of jelly. I flopped back down on the seat.

  “Come on, you.” Alex slurred. “We’d better get you to the bathroom.” She tried to pull me up by my shoulders, but only succeeded in pitching forward and toppling over on to the floor herself. We lay there together, giggling uncontrollably, until Elinor and Bianca helped us up. Grabbing each other around the neck, we stumbled through the bar and managed to find the ladies’ loo.

  “I love you, you wacky bitch,” Alex cried as she fell through the door of the stall.

  “I love you, too.” I slurred back, suddenly desperate to spill all my feelings to her. “This is the best night ever. I haven’t had a night out in such a long time. I probably will never have one again.”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty head about it,” Alex yelled back over the stall door. “Everything will work out for you, Belinda. Cole will come back, and you’ll find some money, and the shop will be fine. You’ll get everything you want because you’re awesome and you … hic … deserve it.”

  “Awww, thanks.” While I waited for Alex in the stall, I leaned against the wall and looked at myself in the mirror. I was smiling. Looking at my smile made me smile more broadly, and that made me laugh. I was standing in the ladies’ loo cackling like a harpy.

  And all the while, thoughts of Cole tugged at the back of my mind. I was wearing the tight black dress I’d worn the first time I came to the pub with Cole. That seemed like such a long time ago, now. Before I’d been kidnapped. Before Cole had left me. Before he started to appear in my dreams and then randomly stopped. Where was he right now? What was he doing? Did he think about me at all?

  No, mustn’t think about Cole. Bad Belinda. Must obliterate all thoughts of him. It’s over. The sooner you recognise it’s over, the better off you’ll be.

  Alex slammed open her stall door. “I have peeed!” She pumped her fist in triumph. “Now let us drink!”

  I don’t remember arriving back at the table, and I don’t remember what was shoved into my hands, but I drank it, and the fog over my mind moved lower, shouting down more of my thoughts. I laughed as loud as I could, and gripped the edge of the table to keep from falling over. I threw something, smashed my fist into something squishy … Play-Doh, I think. The room spun.

  “Let’s get her home,” someone said, their voice far away. Hands gripped me under my arms, and soft voices called encouraging statements at me, although all their words faded into a blur. I moved along with them, loudly protesting that they were kidnapping me, but actually secretly glad they were preventing me from falling over.

  “I fucking love you guys,” I yelled, trying to make the faraway voices hear me.

  “We know, sweetie.” someone replied. “Hurry, Elinor. Call Simon.”

  I was on the street. A man was walking towards me. His eyes looked up, and met mine. I pitched backward, shock rocketing through my body.

  “Go away!” I screamed. The last thing I needed to see was Ethan. Not here, not now. No no no no no—

  “Belinda!” The figure lurched towards me, grabbing my shoulder and shaking me hard. His face was inches from mine. He looked awful – pale, emaciated, as though he’d given far too much blood and hadn’t got his lollipop. The skin on his cheeks hung in tatters, and vicious cuts crisscrossed his neck, forehead, and arms. His eyes bugged out from his head, wild and crazy. In the three years we’d dated, I never saw Ethan look so crazy.

  “Belinda. You have to help me.”

  I laughed. His whole face fell. He reached out a bleeding hand to me, his eyes pleading.

  “Please. You’re the only one who can save me. He’s going to—”

  “You are serious?” I screeched. “You want me to help you? You took everything from me. You cleaned out my bank accounts, you took all my stuff, you left me with nothing but a broken heart and a mountain of debt.”

  “I already apologised for that. I need—”

  “You apologised?” I clutched the wall behind me as my vision swam. “Oh, that’s rich. I don’t recall ever receiving this heartfelt, sincere apology. Perhaps it was lost in the post? Maybe you wrote it down on the pad by the phone before you packed that up and took it away. By all means, Ethan, carry on with your story of woe, then. I’ll just listen.” Tears pricked at my eyes. I blinked them away, furious at myself of crying. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to yell, to scream, to pummel his stupid face in with my fists.

  “Thank you. That man, Morchard, he’s going to—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I’m not listening, Ethan. I have no desire to hear another word out of your mouth ever again. Did you get a new cat to play on Chairman Meow’s scratching post? Do you put your feet up on my coffee table at the end of a hard day scamming people out of their money? Are you enjoying wearing my favourite jumper, or did you sell it to the Salvation Army to pay for your crack? Don’t answer that, I can’t stand the sight of your lips moving.” The tears won their battle with my rage, and spilled over, pouring down my face. I wiped them away angrily, and laughed.

  He shook my shoulders harder, his mouth hanging open, trying to speak to me. But all my rage tumbled out of me, my words like weapons I lobbed at him, beating him back with their venom. “I can’t believe I wasted three
years of my life on you. You think so little of me that you would dare to come back here after what you did and try to appeal to my sense of kindness? I have nothing left to give you, Ethan. You took it all from me.” Tears streamed down my face. All the alcohol inside me boiled in my veins, becoming white hot rage.

  “Belinda, you don’t understand—”

  “Oh, I understand perfectly. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry over you anymore. I’ve cried enough tears over what you did. But do you know what? This is my gift to you, Ethan. The final piece of me that I give to you freely. Look into my eyes.” Ethan turned his face away. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him roughly. “I said, look at me. This is what you did. This is your legacy. This is the man you are, Ethan, rotten inside and out.”

  “Please …” His voice cracked. This time, when he opened his mouth, a trail of blood dribbled down the side of his chin.

  I spun on my heel, unable to bear the sight of him any longer. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten quite how drunk I was, and the spin sent me pitching forward. Hands grabbed me before I crashed into the concrete, and yanked me towards the kerb. I stumbled through an open car door and slid across a leather seat, sobbing and laughing and snorting all at the same time.

  “Belinda,” it was Bianca’s voice, but she sounded far away, like she was talking to me underwater. “Lean against me, honey.”

  “She’s in a bad way,” Elinor said. “Take it slow, Simon.” I heard something slam in the distance.

  That was the last thing I heard before I passed out.

  17

  Cole

  “Drive faster,” I growled at Ingrid.

  “This is a dual carriageway, not the Nürburgring,” she snapped back, as she switched lanes again to avoid getting stuck behind a line of caravans. “I can’t control the flow of traffic.”

  “We should’ve flown back. We’d be there by now.”

  “Yeah, because that was so much fun the first time,” Byron grumbled from the back seat.

  It was sometime after 10pm, and we’d been on the road since 10am the previous day. The plan was that one of us would sleep in the back seat while the other two took turns at the wheel. What we hadn’t counted on was the fact that Libby’s wedding was occurring over a bank-holiday weekend, and so every Tom, Dick, and Harry in England had packed up their kids and their dogs and their Viking longships, and were heading for the coast or their grandmother’s or the lost city of fucking Atlantis. Even though it was the middle of the night, the roads were clogged with fuckwits, and we had no choice but to roll along at twenty miles an hour with the rest of them.

  To make matters worse, we were all tense and getting on each other’s nerves. Byron claimed it was impossible for him to sleep with me yelling obscenities at the traffic from the front. He wasn’t any better. When I tried to take my turn in the back, he and Ingrid had flirted obnoxiously and got each other off through their jeans. I couldn’t sleep with that disgusting behaviour going on, and I made my annoyance pretty clear to Byron the next time we stopped for petrol. At the rate we were going, we’d kill each other before we got to Crookshollow.

  “Just don’t look at the road,” Ingrid told me, as she pulled off the dual carriageway to try a route through the villages. The GPS beeped angrily at her. “Look at something else, anything else. How are you going with that research?”

  I turned back to my phone screen, scrolling through a scientific paper Morchard had published a year ago on a new strain of bird virus he’d discovered and named after himself. I’d found it by chance on an academic database, and it seemed likely it was talking about the same virus he was planning to unleash on the unsuspecting wedding party. I was no biochemist, and the article contained a lot of complex charts and technical jargon explaining his findings, but it was the only clue we had to what we could expect from Morchard’s birds.

  “I haven’t found out much we didn’t already know. The virus attacks the immune system, weakening it, then it spreads to other organs in the body. If not treated, it will kill within forty-eight hours.”

  “Does it say anything about how to treat it?”

  “It says that some of the current antiviral medicines slow the spread of the virus, but none have been successful at eliminating it. He says his current research is focused around creating a cure and hopefully, one day, a vaccine.”

  “Belinda said there were vials in the fridge in the lab,” Byron said. “Perhaps we could sneak inside and—”

  “If he’s planning something, he’ll have those under lock and key.” Ingrid said, swerving as a campervan pulled out of a petrol station without indicating and nearly sideswiped us. She blasted the horn, her hands gripping the wheel so hard her knuckles were white.

  “I don’t like our chances of getting in and out alive with hundreds of these infected birds around the place,” I added. “I think we’re better to get to the wedding and stop Morchard before he unleashes the birds. Belinda is friendly with the local cops, perhaps we might be able to get their help.”

  “If we get there in time.” Byron grumbled.

  I balled my hands into fists, and stared daggers at the people carrier that pulled in front of us and crawled along the country lane.

  We’re coming, Belinda. We’re coming.

  18

  Belinda

  I awoke in darkness, my head throbbing like an elephant was stampeding around on my grey matter. I rolled over and picked up my mobile phone. The light came on, blinding me. My head surged with pain.

  4:15am. What? I couldn’t be in bed that late. I was supposed to get up forty-five minutes ago to bake the bread and—

  Then everything came flooding back to me. The hen night. The drinking. Seeing Ethan. Passing out. I clutched my throbbing skull. I was deathly hungover, and I had a four-hundred-person wedding to cater.

  Fuck. This was going to be a wonderful day.

  I didn’t have to get up until 5am, but I knew I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. I went into the bathroom and ran myself a bath. The toilet stank of bile. Great, I must have had a really messy night. I didn’t remember anything after yelling at Ethan.

  God, Ethan. Why did he have to come back? He’d been trying to talk to me about something. I rubbed my head as I waited for the water to warm up. What had he said? What did I say to him? I couldn’t remember a thing.

  I stumbled into the bath, sinking down into the hot water and watching the marble tiles spin in circles around my head. Fuck. Why had I drunk so much? Apart from getting together with Ethan, this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

  When I exited the bedroom, Chairman Meow was sitting on the corner of my bed in naked, human form, pulling on some black boxers. “Darling, you look terrible.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” I threw my brush at him. “How messed up was I last night?”

  “Well, on a scale of one to fucked up, I’d say you were off the chart. Elinor and Alex dragged you in here, but you were crying and yelling about Cole. Honey, I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, Meow. Really I am. It’s just going to take me more than two weeks to get over Cole, is all.” I sighed. “And I saw Ethan last night. He accosted me on the street.”

  “Ethan? What the actual fuck? You should’ve taken me out with you. I would’ve scratched his eyes out. Instead I got stuck here with Ryan and Sir Thomas and Eric and a bunch of old guys drinking scotch and talking about art. Dull as turnips.”

  “I think I’m just not meant to have a partner.” I said. “I mean, everything I’ve done in my life I’ve had to do by myself. Why should I ever expect it to be any different? I don’t need Cole or Ethan or any other guy.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Meow pulled me into his shoulder, wrapping his arm around me. “But you want him still, don’t you? You wouldn’t be so upset over a guy if you didn’t still love him?”

  “Yeah,” I sniffed. “I do. I do love him. But he’s never going to feel the same. He doesn’t respect me. He doesn’t tell me what
he’s thinking, or why. He just runs away. I can’t be with someone who runs away when things don’t go his way, someone who can’t tell me when something’s wrong. Cole was great, but he didn’t have any depth – he just saw me as a shag, a convenient place to rest his head while he hid from Morchard.”

  Chairman Meow shook his head. “Not true. For all Cole’s yummy bad-boy exterior, he’s pretty raw and vulnerable, just like you. I saw the way he looked at you, and it seemed to me as if he had fallen for you just as bad as you had for him.”

  “Then why did he leave?” I sniffed.

  Chairman Meow pulled me closer, wrapping both his arms around me. Even in his human form, he radiated warmth and comfort. “I don’t know, sugar.”

  We stayed like that for some time, my trusted friend holding me while I wished more than anything that it was Cole who had his arms wrapped around me instead. Finally, I sat up and wiped the tears from my eyes. “There’s nothing I can do but keep on keeping on. Let’s go down to the kitchen and I’ll rustle you up a saucer of milk.”

  “Now that’s a plan I can get behind.”

  When we got downstairs, Ryan, Simon, and Alex were already awake. Simon had moved aside enough of my boxes and chillers to clear a small section of bench, which he was now using to make the most delicious-smelling breakfast – homemade hash browns, roasted tomatoes, red-wine mushrooms, sausages, scrambled eggs, rashers of streaky bacon.

  “Oh God,” I sank into a stool, inhaling deeply. “That smells heavenly.”

  “The master called down and suggested you might need some hangover food.” Simon didn’t look up from the pan. I realised those were the first words I’d heard him utter in the entire time I’d been stayed at Raynard Hall.