I nodded. I’d seen racks of herbs on the shelves in Ryan’s pantry. It looked as though I’d be able to find everything I needed.
“There’s one other thing,” Blake continued. “You know Corbin better than me; his habits, the way he thinks. When we go back to Briarwood, check his desk and any other little secret places or hidey holes. Look for spells, notes, objects… anything that might tell us what he did. I’ll distract Maeve so you can have as much time as you need to find something useful.”
I thought of Corbin’s desk piled high with books, each one littered with Post-it notes and torn sheets of scribbled translations. How would I find anything in his mess?
“Okay,” I heard myself say.
“If there are answers to be had, they’re in that library. We must keep this quiet from Maeve, you know that? She’s not in any state to accept the possibility that her dreams are actual messages.”
“I know.”
“You okay with lying to her, then?” Blake’s smirk deepened. “I’ve discovered humans have quite an aversion to lying.”
I didn’t want to keep secrets from Maeve, but Blake was right. Maeve wouldn’t accept anything less than scientific evidence of Corbin’s survival, and I needed to follow this. I needed the hope, otherwise…
“And Arthur and Flynn – we can’t tell them, either.” Blake’s eyes darkened at their names, which was weird. It was as though Arthur’s display in the drawing room had actually impacted him. But that wasn’t true. Blake lounged on the couch and met Arthur’s rage with his usual indifference. I was the one cowering from the rage of my friends.
I nodded. Arthur walked the knife edge of his control – another angry outburst and Raynard Hall would join Briarwood in conflagration. And Flynn, as I’d discovered, couldn’t be trusted not to blab to the wrong person.
Blake’s smirk widened. He put out his hand, and I shook it. “I knew you’d agree. Welcome to the Blake Beckett Deception Club. I usually do this sneaking around stuff with Flynn, but you’ll do in a pinch. Be prepared, darling Rowan. Tonight you might be speaking to lover boy again.”
10
FLYNN
Stomach bursting with carrot cake, I moved on to my next mission. Operation have-a-conversation-with-the-famous-artist. Ryan Raynard was in the house, and I’d be a gammy Irish fool if I let this opportunity slip me by because of a little fae chaos.
I needed something to take my mind off everything. Losing Corbin had distorted everything. All the progress we’d made as people undone in a moment because that idiot had got a knife through the guts. Maeve may have been the epicenter of our coven, but Corbin was the glue. Now that he was gone everything was coming unstuck.
I was coming unstuck.
Arthur’s twisted face as he lashed out at Blake flashed in front of my eyes.
When Arthur got in one of his moods, I could usually wrangle a smile out of him and dissipate some of his fiery magic. Corbin was the only one who could talk him down, but I could distract him. That was what I did. I was the funny guy. I made people laugh so they didn’t cry or burn things.
I skipped down the hall, flinging open doors and peering into darkened rooms, searching for Ryan’s studio. He had to have one somewhere. All these ghastly rooms, one of them would make a decent—
Ah hah!
I flung open a pair of double doors, revealing a bright, elaborate ballroom. A marble floor stretched across the enormous space, and a vaulted ceiling rose high above, held up by arched stone pillars hung with industrial lights. Much of the space had been painted white, and the bright walls reflected light from the high mullioned windows and modern skylights, casting interesting shadows on the elaborate plaster detailing.
Bold, detailed paintings were stacked against the walls and along the sides of a white grand piano in the center of the room. Along the far wall at the back ran a mural depicting a wild fox hunt. In front of the mural were shelves of paint cans and brushes and stretched canvases. It was an artist’s paradise.
Ryan sat at an easel near the window. Light from a floor lamp streamed across his canvas, which he painted in deft strokes.
“What are you doing in here?” he growled, kicking the foot of his easel to turn the canvas around so I couldn’t see it.
Shite. I backed toward the door, my hands up. I’d forgotten that Ryan, for all his hospitality, was a recluse. He wasn’t used to other people in his space, let alone in his creative studio. I was trespassing.
“I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I backed toward the door. “I just… wanted to see where you painted.”
Ryan wiped a lock of red hair out of his eye. “I don’t really like other people being in here.”
“It’s fine. I get it. I used to kick the guys out of my studio all the time.” I shrugged. “I guess that doesn’t matter now, since mine burned down.”
Ryan sighed. He set down his brush and swiveled his chair to face me. “Did you want to talk to me about something, Flynn?”
“Yeah.” I scratched my head. “I mean, it’s so stupid because you’re who you are and I’m just some lowly scrubber—”
“I’ve got to finish this painting today so we can release it to the market tomorrow. I don’t have time for your self-flagellation. Just say what you want to say so I can get back to work.”
“I want to be an artist,” I blurted out. “Like you. Well, not like you because you’re amazing and I’m utter shite. But a passable artist who actually makes a living from his work. It’s the only thing in the world I could be good at except for stand-up comedy, and I’m told comedians get paid even less than artists. I want to make a living, but I don’t know where to start.”
“You can start by stopping the Banksy idolatry,” Ryan shot back.
“But he’s a genius!”
“That may be true. But he, or she, or they, can’t stand up and claim their work. Making a living the way Banksy does is hard. And Banksy’s doing it a lot better than you ever could. Don’t try and compete. Don’t be like me, either. I’m a terrible example. Just be yourself.”
“But I don’t know what to do!”
“You just had the most horrific thing happen to you – losing someone you love. I think that should be the subject of your next work. Your grief connects you to your audience, because they’re grieving, too. Everyone in the world is grieving for someone or something.”
“But I don’t want to make people sad.” That wasn’t who I was.
“You don’t have to. Grief isn’t always sad. A lot of the time it’s about celebrating the life of a person you love. You can make the best parts of them live on forever. That’s noble.”
I nodded vigorously.
“And get yourself a website. Use social media. You’re young. You don’t have to be entrenched in the galley world to make a living. You have so many opportunities if you don’t hide yourself away.”
“Like you.”
“Yeah. Don’t be like me. I don’t do this out of choice, Flynn. Don’t think what I do is noble or artistic or romantic. The only person I talk to is Simon. What’s romantic about that?” Ryan gestured out the window, toward Briarwood. “You get hundreds of visitors a week during summer up at the castle. Why don’t you include a gallery space as part of the tour?”
“Fuck, that’s genius.” I could already picture it. There was a large room opposite the ticketing office that had once been servants’ quarters on the bottom floor of the eastern wing. When it was in use it would’ve been divided into several small rooms, but now it was one big open space. Currently we used it to store the signage for the tours and gift shop, as well as a dumping ground for all our random junk (Corbin’s rowing machine, stacks of Rowan’s jams that didn’t fit in the scullery, a tapestry Arthur burned through when his favorite footy team lost the semi-finals). It had large windows looking out over the parterres and the topiary maze, and a high ceiling. There was all this old graffiti on the walls, including amusing caricatures of the house’s noble family.
It would be perfect for a gallery.
Ryan grinned. “I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Thanks, mate. You know, you’re different from what I imagined.”
Ryan raised an eyebrow. “You spend a lot of time imagining me?”
“Don’t get excited. I didn’t mean in a homoerotic way. Just in a general sense. You’re our neighbor, but you never leave the house, and even though you’re famous you don’t let anyone see your face. I thought you must be horribly disfigured or you had a second nose growing out of your forehead or maybe you were a collective pretending to be one person. There are as many theories about you as there are about Banksy, you know.”
“I know. But so far, no one’s even come close.” Ryan’s face was grave.
“Hey, I don’t suppose you have a canvas I could use? I’m feeling a mite inspired. I promise I’ll sit in the corner and not say a word. Not a peep. I just…” I wrung my hands. “I need to do something.”
Ryan grunted, but he got up and dug around in the supplies at the back of the studio. “What size?”
“Big.” I flapped my arms out. “As tall as I am.”
Ryan held out a long canvas, the material expertly stretched and primed. “I was going to use this,” he grumbled.
“I’ll buy you another one, I promise.”
Ryan grunted again and dragged over a chair from under the grand piano, the legs squealing against the marble floor. Next, he moved an easel to a window as far as possible as it was to get from him while still being in the same room. “You sit here. You can use any of the paints and brushes you can find. The only rule is that you can’t bother me again. I need to focus.”
“You’re a star, mate. I promise I’m going to sit right here and not say a peep.”
“You’re still talking,” Ryan growled as he turned his easel back toward him.
“Right. Gotcha. Not a peep, I swear on the Virgin Mary.”
I grabbed up a stack of colors and chose some lovely sable brushes. I thought of the dream Maeve had that she refused to share. I know she would never believe her dreams, but there was far too much of this prophetic stuff going around to dismiss it. Once she realized she couldn’t ignore it, she’d let us in, I knew it. She just needed to deal with her own grief first. We all did.
Arthur needed to stop being angry, and he hated that because anger was far easier for him than what was underneath. Blake needed to fully become part of this world. Rowan needed to grow a pair, which was nothing new. Maeve needed to believe in herself and her power, and let go of the control she wanted to exert over the whole world.
Corbin… Corbin needed to not be dead. Hot tears stung my eyes. I squeezed my eyelids shut, forcing them back. I wasn’t going to cry in Ryan Raynard’s studio. What would my uncle the hardarse mobster say? Hell, what would my ma, god rest her drug-addled soul, say?
But even if Corbin was still alive in some sense, even if he could be restored, his body was gone. Maybe what he needed was a new one.
Whistling an Irish ditty under my breath and calling up a surge of power within me, I dunked my brush into the black paint and made my first strong, dark line.
11
ARTHUR
I paced around the empty drawing room, my fingers itching to destroy something. The magic burned a hole inside me, as if Daigh had thrown me on that fire instead of Corbin. The charred bookshelf leered at me, mocking me for my lack of self-control.
Fuck, what was wrong with me? Ryan was trying to help us, and I burned his stuff.
Blake made me so angry. He’d betrayed all of us by messing with Maeve’s dreams. Who knew what else he’d tinkered with inside her head. If he’d never followed us into the human realm, none of this—
Fresh fire sparked in my fingers. No. I needed to get out of here.
I slammed the drawing room door and made a beeline for the rear of the manor. French doors lined the back wall of an informal dining room. I shoved one open, and a fresh breeze blew across my face. I stepped outside and jogged across a paved patio and down a path between rows of parterres fanning out around a cracked fountain.
Ryan clearly wasn’t much of a green thumb. The back garden was in even worse shape than the front of the Hall. Turgid sludge choked the bottom of the empty fountain, and the formal flower beds were overgrown and choked with weeds. I figured our host wouldn’t mind if I did a little gardening for him, all in the name of burning off steam (literally).
I balled up all the rage inside me and unleashed it through my fingers, aiming a fireball at the nearest parterre. The dry weeds caught fire and smoldered, burning quickly and reducing the garden to embers.
Blake’s stupid face danced in front of my vision. It morphed into Daigh’s, the stupid fae playing games with Maeve like he was the cat and she was his mouse. His games killed Corbin, my oldest friend, my first friend.
Smoke curled toward the heavens. The fires crackled, bringing me back to last night, to the heat rolling off the bonfire as the flames burned Corbin’s skin.
My stomach lurched. Fire slammed from my fingers and consumed another garden, the air crackling with black smoke. My skin didn’t tingle as much, but the pain in my chest hadn’t eased.
A hose reel laid coiled up at the end of the garden path. I unrolled it and doused both of the fires. What a stupid idea. At least I’d managed to burn off some of the rage. I’d be less likely to torch Ryan’s house.
I went back inside to search for Maeve. She was probably still upset with me for confronting Blake. Good. It was time she knew the truth about him. I figured she’d have gone back to our bedroom, but halfway there I took a wrong turn and ended up in an unfamiliar wing. Loud sobs echoed from a bedroom at the end of the hall.
Corbin’s mother.
Of course. I’d seen his dad in the drawing room. He was hard to miss – he looked exactly the way I imagined Corbin would look in a few years, once he cut off all his hair and stopped liking cool music and became the book dork we knew he was inside. It was so weird to know Bree and Andrew were here, now, and Corbin wasn’t. The whole reason he’d searched out me and Flynn and Rowan in the first place was because they’d abandoned him at Briarwood. I hated them for it, the same way I hated my mother for leaving me with her shitty abusive husband. At the same time, my feet moved toward the sobs, drawn by a force I couldn’t describe.
I peered around the edge of the bedroom door. Corbin’s mother slumped in a sofa under the window, her head in her hands. Beside her, his father sat like a stone, his body rigid and his eyes a million miles away.
The grief on their faces tore at me. I didn’t hate them anymore.
I leaned closer. The pommel of my sword banged against the wall. Corbin’s dad glanced up. His eyes widened as he saw me.
“I’m Arthur,” I said, extending a hand. “I was a friend of your son.”
At my words Corbin’s mother – Bree, that was her name – burst into tears again, burying her head in her husband’s shoulder. Andrew patted Bree’s back and extended his other hand toward me. “Professor Andrew Harris. I wish we’d met under more pleasant circumstances. Ryan tells me you were the one who recovered Corbin’s body.”
I nodded. The feeling of his corpse – light and delicate, like a deflated balloon – remained a shadow on my shoulder. The sensation of it would stay with me for the rest of my life.
Andrew’s eyes – Corbin’s eyes – bore into me. “Thank you, Arthur. Thank you for being a friend to our son.”
“He was—” I shook my head. I couldn’t find the words.
“You don’t have to tell me. I know.” Andrew’s eyes darkened. I could see his pain turning inwards, his hatred of himself gnawing away at his flesh. Well, good. I wanted him to hate himself for all the minutes Corbin spent not hating him for abandoning Briarwood, because hatred was beyond Corbin. He was too good for that shit.
But I wasn’t.
“What will you do?” I asked him. I didn’t know what I meant by that, but I needed to fill the si
lence.
Andrew blinked. “We’ll stay here a few more days to organize the funeral. The girls – that’s Corbin’s younger sisters, Tess and Bianca – will join us with their aunt soon. After that, I don’t know. We’ll help Maeve speak with the lawyers, see what to do about Briarwood Castle.”
I nodded. It occurred to me that after everything that happened, Maeve may choose not to keep the castle. She could take the insurance money, walk away from the ruined castle, and start her life over if she wanted to. I didn’t think she’d do that, but the fact she could leave us would dangle over my head like the Sword of Damocles.
Andrew’s hand fell on my shoulder, startling me out of my thoughts. “Tell me, was my son happy?”
I nodded. “He had his books, and his mission, and people to care about who cared about him. Living at Briarwood was a lot of fun. It’s the best home I ever had.”
“Your parents didn’t mind you living in the castle with him? They didn’t mind you putting your life on hold to look after Maeve?”
“My parents are dead,” I said. The one I cared about, anyway.
“Then you’ve known too much of this pain in your life already,” Andrew said, his voice cracking. “There’s the family you’re born with, the family you marry into, and the family you choose. We’re blessed that our son chose his so wisely after his blood abandoned him. Don’t make the mistakes we made, Arthur. Don’t miss out because you’re angry or hurting.”
“Yeah, yeah, hate is just another side of love.” I wished that stupid line I’d given Maeve would stop coming back to bite my arse.
I left them, feeling like shit, but a calmer kind of shit. The fire inside me had faded to a dull roar, one I could ignore as long as I didn’t see Blake again.
I turned a couple of corners and found myself in another guest wing, this one decorated in lurid red Victorian wallpaper. At this rate, I’d starve before I found my way back to my own room. This house should be on Ash Tree Lane; it seemed to grow bigger on the inside with every turn.
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow Page 9