Rowan wrapped his body around me. I lifted my neck so he could slide his torso beneath me like a pillow. My ear rested on his chest and his heartbeat thudded in my head, fast and furious and wrecked with pain. His tears pattered on my hair. He would cry a river for both of us.
I already knew enough about mourning to last a lifetime. I knew I wouldn’t cry. I couldn’t. It had taken a kiss from Arthur to wrest open the floodgates after my parents’ death, but now I wasn’t sure even that would do it.
My fingers groped for Corbin’s reassuring body – the one in my coven I always turned to for an explanation, for leadership. They found only Obelix’s furry body curled up against Arthur’s chest. How can we carry on without him? The idea of our coven still fighting, still existing without Corbin seemed ridiculous. It was like trying to drive a spaceship without arms.
Sleep must have come to me during the night, because I fell into a dream world. I walked down a wide, vaulted hall, the walls made of dark, veined stone that hummed with stored energy. There was magic in this place, wherever I was – built into the very fabric of it. My feet kicked up clouds of dust and sand as I jogged on and on and on, looking for a way out, for a reason why I was there, for another soul to talk to. But there was nothing except locked doors flying by on both sides and endless swirls of dust around my feet.
The hum of the magic drowned out all other sounds. I couldn’t hear my feet hitting the ground, or the pounding of my heart – nothing except that low, discordant hum. Until…
Maeve… a voice rasped. The sound boomed inside my head, driving back the hum and lighting up the dark world.
From behind the doors came such terrifying screams and shrieks that I broke into a full run to escape them. A creeping sense that something followed me spurned me onward. The voice rasped my name.
The voice was coming for me, and if it caught me… I’d be thrown into one of the locked rooms and the screams would be mine. I just knew I had to run.
If I can just find an exit, a way out of this labyrinth, I’d be safe. The hum rose again, and the screams rose with it, the two competing for my attention. My chest heaved, and cramps arced along my leg. Every step was agony, but I had to keep going. I couldn’t let it catch me. I couldn’t…
The hallway turned a corner, but all I could see were more doors. Screams pounded inside my head, driving out rational thought. I slowed to a hobble, dragging my cramping leg behind me, and flung myself at the next door. I’ll take the torture over this horrible chill creeping down my back. Just let me in!
The door didn’t budge. The rasping voice drew closer. The hum roared in my ears. Panic rose in my chest, and I slammed into one wall, then another. The voice loomed over me, closer, closer…
Maeve…
My hands groped in the dim light, tugging at the locks, scratching at the walls, tearing at my own skin. Get me out get me out get me out…
Maeve… the voice boomed between my ears, so loud it made me jump. It was right behind me.
Terror clung to my chest. I had to face it. I had to know.
I spun around. “Go away!” I yelled. The words came out as a tiny whisper. Something slammed into me, its weight knocking the breath from my lungs. My body slammed against the stone wall. A thick, heavy smell invaded my nostrils. Musty books. Ink. Leather. Home.
Corbin.
He grabbed my arms and held me upright so I didn’t fall. He looked exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him alive, his black t-shirt clinging to his tight muscles, his dark hair falling over his right eye. The creeping, itching sensation surged down my spine, and I twisted away from him. His hands gripped my arms like a vise.
“Hi Maeve.” Corbin kissed me on the forehead, his lips brushing my bangs – so warm, so real. He bent down to press his lips to mine, devouring me in a breathless kiss. Fire shot through my body, burning up the last of my doubt. It was Corbin. No one could kiss me like he did. My hands moved of their own accord, wrapping around his strong body. My fingers brushed a bone handle sticking out of the edge of his t-shirt, and the open wound underneath…
The wound that killed him.
It all flooded back, slamming into my body like a cold blast. This isn’t real. It’s a dream. Why did my stupid subconscious have to feed me this dream tonight, of all nights?
I pressed my hands against Corbin’s warm chest, my fingers touching where his heart should have been, but where nothing now beat. I shoved him with all my might, breaking our kiss as he staggered back and slammed into one of the doors.
“Get away from me,” I cried.
“Is that any way for a High Priestess to greet her loyal servant?” Corbin pulled himself up. The knife blade in his side jiggled as he moved.
“You’re dead,” I wailed.
“Damn right I’m dead,” Corbin grinned. He gestured to the walls of doors behind me. “I’m in the underworld, and right now, so are you.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” I moaned. “Why did you have to die?”
“Don’t worry, it was all part of the plan.” Corbin’s grin widened. “And before you get pissed at me for not telling you, I had to do it this way because you wouldn’t have let me do it otherwise. And before you think of blaming yourself or anyone else for my death, remember that even if you’d all held me down or locked me in the priest hole I still would have found a way to get myself here.”
“Why?” I sobbed. Why did my head have to conjure up this image of him? Why did he have to talk like he was still alive, like this was all some clever plan of his?
“Because this is our shot, Maeve. If we play this out right we can stop Daigh and the fae for good.” Corbin ran a hand through his dark hair. “And then you can bring me back.”
5
ROWAN
Someone shook me. I sank into the bed, cowering from the darkness of my dreams. I was back in my last foster home, the one I ran away from. My foster mother held my head against the cold edge of the bath, and he was behind me. The heavy sting of his belt buckle against my back was nothing to the pain I knew was coming, to the pain that was a knife sliding up inside me, splitting my body in two—
“Rowan, wake up.”
My eyes flew open. Sweat streaked my skin. I recognized the voice. Female and kind. Maeve.
She drew me back to the present. I wasn’t in that home any longer. I was at Briarwood, with the coven, and I had her and Corbin and the guys, and everything was finally okay…
It all came flooding back to me. The attack. Briarwood burning. The villagers pulling me and Maeve out of the priest hole and dragging us to the meadow. The fae with the stakes set in the ground. Corbin’s body thrown on the fire and then slid on that stake like a barbecue skewer.
Corbin’s dead.
Since Maeve showed up at Briarwood, since the first time Corbin kissed me, I’d never known it was possible to be so happy. I’d thought I’d live out my days at Briarwood, content with the amazing life Corbin had given me, content to watch him from a distance as he soared like the beautiful avenging angel he was, content to stay behind when he finally went off to a university and got his degree in a gazillion dead languages and married Maeve and started a family of his own. Content just to be a small part of his life. But for a few glorious days he and Maeve had given me a glimpse of another life, a future I couldn’t have dreamed of. And then the fae ripped it away and burned my happiness along with my home.
“Rowan, please. I need to talk to you.”
I dragged my eyes open and looked up at Maeve. I expected to see my own despair reflected there, but what greeted me was even worse. The sparkle had left her eyes. She was cold and dead inside. Tears streaked her cheeks, but I knew they were my tears, because she hadn’t cried. Her eyes took up half her face – wide pools of deep hazel that glinted with no hint of pain, no hint of anything at all.
“I just had a dream,” she said, her voice steady. Her hands stretched across the bed and stroked Obelix’s thick fur. “Corbin was there.”
The words pierced through my grief, battering me around the head with their sweet implausibility. Corbin’s body burned up in the fire, and then that stake plunged through his chest. This wasn’t like Aline whose body was never actually discovered because she somehow took it with her into the painting. Corbin’s body couldn’t just be re-sculpted.
I clung to Maeve, my body trembling. Anxiety prickled at the back of my neck, creeping down my spine and filling my body with ice. The horror of seeing Corbin’s death would never leave me, and for the rest of my life I’d wonder what I could have done to stop it.
“Please…” I moaned into Maeve’s hair. “Don’t make me think…”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Maeve’s eyes grew wider, like a manga girl. Her shoulders slumped, and the first flicker of grief jolted through her irises. Her fingers tightened around Obelix. He yelped in protest and jumped down off the bed. “It’s all my fault.”
“No, it’s not…”
She sighed. “I broke the charms and let the humans inside the castle. Daigh came to me in the mirror and he told me all these things…”
Arthur sat up and narrowed his eyes. “Codswaddle. You told us everything Daigh said and it was nothing about the charms.”
At the end of the bed, Flynn and Blake lifted their heads, their eyes questioning. My skin crawled and badgers gnawed at my stomach. I searched the room for something to count. There wasn’t much. Ryan had very modern, minimal tastes. I settled for our shoes lined up beside the door, each one streaked with dirt and green-tinted blood. One… two… three…
“This was tonight. Daigh said Aline and I had to keep it secret, or the fae would use their compulsion and read your thoughts. I thought we were helping, but I just played right into his hands.”
“This was when you went to the bathroom?” Arthur growled. “What did that bastard say to you?”
“He told us about the secret passage and…” Maeve shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. It was all lies. I should have seen through it. Aline did, and she’s the only reason we’re all still alive. I should have realized that Daigh no longer had his powers.”
Four… five… shite, I ran out of shoes.
“You can’t blame yourself.” Arthur squeezed her shoulder. Maeve stiffened. “No one could have predicted Daigh would bargain away his powers. I think that’s what he was counting on. Besides, this whole bloody thing is my fault. We were fighting the fae and I lost sight of Corbin. I let him get captured. I could have saved him if I hadn’t let my temper get control again.”
“Sorry, Arnold, you don’t get to be the scapegoat.” Blake piped up, reverting back to his pet name for Arthur because he knew it would piss him off. “You were the hero out there, getting Kelly out and Corbin’s body and taking down all those fae. If you want to blame someone, blame me. I didn’t understand what those two voices compelling the villagers meant. If I’d have figured out that Aline was the second voice sooner, we might’ve been able to—”
“It’s my fault,” Flynn added. “I’m Irish.”
“I let Corbin hide us in that priest hole,” I whispered. “I huddled in the dark while he died on his own. I should have been fighting. I would have fought for him.”
I would have died for him, for Maeve, for all of them. It should have been me in Corbin’s place.
“In my dream Corbin said that even if we’d all held him down he’d have found a way to do it anyway,” Maeve said. “That’s so like him.”
“Is it…” I tried to keep the hope from rising in my voice. “Could he be alive still, sending us a message…”
Maeve shook her head. “Premonitions and precognition aren’t real, and tonight proved that. I don’t believe the dreams I had about the stakes were any kind of sign from the future. The stakes were there, just like in the dream, but there was no irradiated earth, no burning sky, no briar bushes as high as the castle walls. And even if it was the same, the fact that we stopped Daigh before all of us ended up on the stakes means that it wasn’t a premonition. Because the future was never set in the first place. It’s all about quantum—”
“If we could skip the quantum lecture for now, Einstein,” Flynn stroked her hair. “Rowan doesn’t look like he can take it.”
Maeve’s hand gripped my shoulder, her fingers tightening around my skin. The anxiety tickled down my back again as she said, “I think Daigh planted this vision of Corbin in my head in order to get me to follow him. It’s just another one of his tortures. He makes me believe Corbin is still alive and then he makes a bargain to bring him back and I fall for it because I’m a complete fucking moron.”
“Daigh gave up his powers,” Blake whispered. “He can’t affect your dreams any more than cheese.”
“Mmmm, cheese,” Flynn pretended to drool.
“Then this dream is just my subconscious reacting to my guilt and grief. We can’t go reading it as a sign that Corbin’s… that he…” Maeve sucked in a breath. “We all saw what happened. This isn’t like Aline. You can’t come back from that.”
Everyone fell silent. I knew we were all picturing Corbin’s body sliding down the stake. I counted the shoes again, my fingernails tearing the expensive cotton sheets.
“All the same, if you have it again,” Flynn said, “try to pull us into it.”
Even though I wasn’t looking at her, I could feel Maeve’s eyes in the back of my head as she said, “I don’t want to hurt you guys. If you see him like that… it’s so real. I hoped for a moment, but then I woke up, and it was horrible. I don’t want you to hope for something that can’t be.”
“Even you have to admit that you don’t understand everything about magic, Einstein. If there’s even a chance something about this dream is Corbin reaching out for us, then we all need to see it.”
Arthur and Blake nodded their agreement. I tore my gaze away to look at Maeve. She shook her head. I took her hand and squeezed it.
“I just want to grieve,” she said, yanking her hand away and pulling the sheets up over her head. “I don’t want to hope. It’s like losing him all over again.”
The four of us exchanged a look. Maeve wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. But it was still the middle of the night. If she wanted to keep sleeping, then that was what we’d do, too. Maybe if I closed my eyes I’d get drawn into her next dream and I could see Corbin for myself.
She said not to hope, but my heart was already soaring with the stuff.
I remembered Corbin’s face when he shut us into the priest hole. He wasn’t afraid. His jaw was set, his eyes bright. He had a plan.
And one thing I knew about Corbin – he’d never, ever failed the people he loved.
Corbin hid Maeve and I away in part to keep us safe, but mainly because he didn’t want us to see what he was about to do. He knew we’d try to talk him out of it, or worse, throw ourselves into it alongside him.
Maeve was wrong. She couldn’t see past her scientific model of the world. She’d had prophetic dreams before, like the ones about all of us being with her, but she couldn’t read them as such.
I knew it with every fiber of my body that Corbin showing up to speak to her tonight wasn’t just her grief-soaked subconscious talking.
Somewhere, somehow, Corbin was still alive.
6
MAEVE
Sunlight streamed through the open curtains, falling across the bed, warm and inviting. I cracked open an eye, reveling in the simple beauty of Rowan’s arm across my waist, his long fingers cupping my breast – dark skin against my milky white. Arthur’s barrel chest rising and falling. Flynn and Blake spooning each other. Corbin’s… Corbin…?
Then I remembered.
Corbin was dead.
The room came into focus – soft cream walls and modern furnishings. A huge picture window overlooking an unfamiliar garden. No sign of the desk piled high with astronomy books and the huge beeswax candle Arthur made me and the giant cosmos made of metal leaves from Flynn. Even the bed under me suddenly felt
foreign.
We weren’t in my tower room at Briarwood because Briarwood was destroyed. We were in Raynard Hall, and I was being haunted by dreams of my dead lover.
“Maeve.” A voice from the door startled me out of my thoughts.
I sat up, pulling the edge of the duvet over my naked breasts. Rowan’s arm flopped off my stomach, and he stirred awake. Arthur was already grabbing for a t-shirt.
Clara leaned her tiny frame against the high doorframe. “Please, don’t mind me. I used to be in the Soho coven – I’ve seen it all before. Good morning, boys. I’m sorry to do this to you all now. I know how badly you are suffering. But we all need to talk.”
I rubbed my eyes. The last thing I wanted to do was get up and face the world, but Clara was right. So much happened last night that we needed to understand, and this was so much bigger than Corbin and Briarwood.
“Wait for us,” I said. My voice echoed in my head, hollow and strange. I shook Flynn awake. Clara waited for us to pull on clothes – someone had left a pile of new jeans and t-shirts at the foot of the bed (and taken away our torn, soot-stained clothes, I noticed) – and we followed her down the hallway. I remembered the hallway from last night; the drab portraits and cluttered, old-fashioned furniture. She led us into a bright, airy drawing room decorated in pale blue and cream. For the first time I realized how stark was the contrast between the modern rooms we’d seen and the dark, gloomy hallway.
Eyes followed me as I entered the room. Faces turned to me, rent with pity and pain. Too many faces. Too many people counting on me.
Ryan stood at the head of the room, one arm leaning against the fireplace. Paint flecks splashed across his black t-shirt and tight blue jeans and stuck to the ends of his red hair, the colors matching the vibrant painting of frolicking foxes on the wall behind him. Gwen and Candice settled into a cream sofa, cups of tea nestled in their laps. Clara bustled over and plopped down beside them. Isadora perched on a wing-backed chair across from Ryan, her elegant legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded in her lap like she was a model in a photoshoot. Absent was Corbin’s mother, but Andrew sat on the floor at Gwen’s feet, his back against the sofa and a hollow look in his typically bright eyes.
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow Page 4