“Maeve, we miss you.” Matthew’s jaw jerked open and shut.
“Come join us.” Louise’s skeletal hand stretched from her dark robe. Cold fingers brushed my cheek, shooting needles of ice into my skin. My body froze, torn between two actions – wrapping my arms around them and accepting their embrace, or running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.
My jaw moved, but I could form no sound. A flicker of magic passed over my palm, and with it a fury, so raw and hard it frightened me. I shouldn’t have to face them like this. I should never have to say goodbye a second time.
“We just want to be a family again,” Matthew cracked, his jaw jerking like a ventriloquist dummy. “You, me, your mother, Kelly—”
“You stay away from Kelly!” I yelled, throwing a blast of spirit magic at him. He reeled for a moment, then urged his horse forward. The animal took another step toward me. Matthew’s hand extended down, the fingers outstretched, tender, ready to scoop up his little girl and make everything okay again.
Matthew froze. His hands flew to his chest.
A green-tipped arrow stuck out of his robes, right where his heart would have been.
Matthew’s mouth hung open in silent terror. The glow in his eyes flickered out and he toppled off his mount. His cloak flapped around his body. Louise screamed as he hit the ground and shattered into a pile of bone and dust.
Her scream cut off as a second arrow punched through her forehead, bending her head back and sending her toppling over the arse of her horse. Louise sprawled across the grass, her dress balled up against her knees. She opened her mouth in a silent cry as her body collapsed to dust.
The two black beasts bolted, heedless to their lost riders. They cantered down the slope, their hooves fading into the woods as they disappeared between the trees, becoming just another secret of the ancient Crookshollow Forest.
I whirled around, searching for the source of the arrows. My heart hammered in my chest as I scanned the trees sheltering the garden. At any moment I expected to feel a barb pierce my chest.
“We meet again, witch,” a cold voice rasped in my ear.
I spun back around so fast I lost my balance and toppled into the statuesque figure standing uncomfortably close to me. A pair of brilliant emerald eyes regarded mine with the wry amusement typical of the fae. She clasped a bow in her good hand, while with the other she unwound the rope that formed her makeshift firing device.
Liah.
“They were my parents,” I said, not certain if I should be hurting her or thanking her.
“Not anymore.” Liah slid the bow up on her back. “I assume you know why I’m here.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Liah peered at me with a quizzical expression. “I thought you were the clever one. It’s obvious.”
“Nothing about this situation is obvious.”
Liah sighed. “Corbin explained it all in your dream. I’ve come to help you defeat Daigh.”
“That’s no good. Daigh escaped. I assume a demon helped him, because the door to Ryan’s safe was blown to pieces. I’d like to have that kind of power.”
Liah rolled her eyes. “It’s hardly impressive. It’s just the right kind of energy applied at a specific pressure point, exactly as you have just done to banish the Slaugh. Even your human metals have their weaknesses.”
A laugh escaped my throat. “You sound like me.”
“Your lover has said as much on many occasions these past days,” Liah said. “It’s not a compliment.”
I laughed again. “It’s hard to believe that all this time, you were on our side. It would’ve been easier if you’d just said something.”
“I was never on your side. I was only ever on the side of the trees.” Liah’s gaze traveled to the forest, where a crisp breeze shook the branches. For the first time ever, warmth flickered in her eyes. She held out her stump to me. “Will you come with me?”
Trust another fae? Not bloody likely.
I slipped my fingers around Liah’s forearm. Thick scars crisscrossed her skin, forming a magical symbol that hummed with residual power as I traced its lines. It reminded me of the deep cut along Arthur’s arm, and I squirmed. Beneath my fingers, the scars split open and black tendrils curled out, creeping up her arm and encircling both of us. They felt like ice where they licked my skin.
Liah brought up her other arm. The moonlight glinted off a bone knife clenched in her fist. In slow motion, I watched her swing her arm around and jam the blade into my chest.
I stared down at the handle protruding from between my ribs. Cold crept through my body, radiating out from the blade. I expected there to be pain, but there was none. Just a pleasant, humming numbness.
I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t work my jaw. I tried to free my hand from Liah’s arm, but found it quite impossible. Messages from my brain didn’t seem to be reaching my body. A dull roar quaked in my ears, like the rumble of the Slaugh approaching, but from inside my head. My own doom marching toward me.
The thought occurred to me that Corbin and now I had a similar appendage. It’s like we’re twins. I burst out laughing. Blood bubbled up in my throat and splattered down my t-shirt as I gasped and chortled at the ludicrous situation.
“Good luck,” Liah said. She placed her hand against my chest and pushed. I toppled backward, and darkness claimed me before my body hit the ground.
27
MAEVE
I woke up coughing, my mouth filled with dust. My stomach lurched and I doubled over, hacking up my lungs.
I rubbed at my stinging eyes, struggling to see through the gloom. For a moment I imagined myself to be back at Briarwood, and the villagers had returned to raze the place to the ground with me inside. Clouds of dust swirled around me, punctuated by flickering lights, like the campfires Andrew and I used to make out in the desert during our astronomy monitoring sessions.
A dark figure moved through the dust, obscuring the light so it was a silhouette in the gloom. A strong hand reached down and hauled me to my feet.
“Maeve?” Corbin’s velvet voice caressed my ears. His hand on mine was warm, living flesh.
“Corbin… I… you…”
He stifled my words with his mouth, claiming me in a deep kiss. I clung to him and drank in the warmth of his embrace, the softness of his tongue against mine, the scent of old leather and parchment rolling off him. Everything about him was exactly as he always was. Alive. But how—
Something tugged against my abdomen, causing a bolt of pain to shoot through me. Corbin’s eyes widened. He pulled away, his mouth dropping open in horror. His hand flew to the knife handle sticking out of his side.
I looked down, shocked to see a similar handle poking out of my own chest. The memories flooded back to me, along with a dull pain in my chest, as though I’d run into the corner of a piece of furniture. I remembered the black tendrils crawled from Liah’s wound and encircling my arm. I remembered Liah holding my hand and thrusting the knife between my ribs.
Corbin’s jaw set. He strode forward and yanked the handle. A knife blade slid out of my chest with a gurgling noise, like water going down the sink. I closed my eyes, expecting blood to gush from the wound and the pain to finally hit, but the dull ache of the wound never changed. I barely felt a thing.
I blinked, staring down at my chest. The knife was back inside me.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this! You weren’t supposed to die to come after me!” Corbin yelled, shaking my shoulders so hard my head jerked back. “Bloody hell, Maeve, why do you have to be so stubborn? Why couldn’t you have just accepted the dreams?”
“Liah brought me here,” I whispered. “You mean the dreams were…”
“You’re a dreamwalker, Maeve. You should know by now you don’t have an ordinary subconscious.” Corbin crushed me against his chest, his knife handle scraping my side while mine bent out to the side. “If I didn’t love you so much I swear I would kill you myself, but it looks like Liah’s done that
for me. I told her to help you find me, but I meant in your dreams. She could have put you to sleep and—”
“Well, I’m here now.” My fingers clasped around the metal object around his neck. “The guys and I have just figured out about the ampulla and the mysteries of Lazarus. They’re putting the pieces together. We defeated the Slaugh, and now they’ll bring us back.”
“They’d better act quickly,” Corbin gestured down the dark hallway, like a guide about to give a tour. “Because if what I’ve seen comes to pass, we could end up stuck here, and the Slaugh are going to be the least of our worries.”
28
FLYNN
“Maeve!” I gazed frantically around, hoping to see her crouched behind one of the gardens or resting against one of the tall oaks lining the drive. Nothing. She was nowhere in sight. But how could we lose her so quickly, unless…
“Where are you?” Rowan’s voice rose with fear.
“Maeve? This isn’t funny.”
The three of us spread out, searching across the lawn. A riderless horse cantered past my head as I bent to check behind a row of parterres. Nothing. No Maeve.
Rowan came running over, his chest heaving as he struggled against his anxiety. “I’ve got Ryan and Simon searching the house,” he said, his hand over his heart like he was gonna catch it before it flew away. “Aline and Kelly are around the back. You don’t think Daigh got to her somehow? That he—”
“Let’s not assume the worst. Come on, I think I saw a couple of riders head around the side of the house.” I tore off across the overgrown lawn, descending the slope of the hill toward the edge of the forest. Hoofprints pocked the ground. Yep, horses had definitely been here. A crumpled shape lay on the grass at the foot of the slope.
“Shite, Maeve!”
My stomach lodged in my throat. Not even when a new whiskey distillery offered free tastings had I moved so fast. I scrambled down the slope and slid next to the lump. It was Maeve all right, splayed out on her back, her pink bangs plastered to her pale face, her chest and arms streaked with blood.
A bone-handled knife stuck out of her chest. The blade had gone in between her ribs, directly into her heart.
The world stopped.
Maeve, no no no no.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her, calling her name again and again. Her head flopped to the side, limp and lifeless. Blake dropped down beside me, pressing his hand to her wound and uttering a string of nonsense. Rowan howled.
“She’s gone,” a cold voice said.
I jerked my head up just as a tall fae stepped out of the forest. Hair like white silk streamed down her back in two braids, each one woven with silver strands and vines that had wilted and blackened into black streaks. She wore the livery of a Seelie fae, although her clothing was torn and stained with dark patches. A bow and quiver of arrows were slung across her back, and her expression was one of calculated indifference.
“Liah, what are you doing here?” Blake’s eyes narrowed.
“Maeve needed to reach your friend in the underworld,” the fae said, tossing a braid over her shoulder. “I helped her.”
“You killed her,” I growled, raising my hand to point my palm at Liah, calling up the scrappy remnants of my magic, drawing what little I had left in me into a big enough blast of water and hoping when I sent it flying that it would drown her where she stood. My veins boiled. My jaw clenched.
If this was how Arthur felt all the time, it was little wonder he hadn’t razed the world.
“Flynn, no.” Blake shoved my hand down just as I loosed a blast. Water shot out of my palm and scoured out a thick channel in the hillside, crashing against the trunk of a thin oak and splitting the wood.
“Why’d you stop me?” I growled at him, my muscles spasming in protest. I was empty. Now I’d need to wait to call up more magic.
“She’s trying to help us,” Blake said, turning to Liah, his expression unreadable. “I think.”
“I have no interest in helping you to send the fae back to their realm,” Liah hissed. “But Daigh cannot be allowed to take up the underworld crown. Your friend also wished to assure that would not happen. He needed help, so I sent she who was most well-placed to help him. In that way, yes, I am helping.”
“Helping doesn’t mean you stab someone in the fecking chest!” I roared.
“If we want Daigh stopped forever,” Liah said, raising her arm to show the stump of her dismemberment and the scar of a sigil that bled darkness over her pale skin, “this is the only way. As soon as he wears that crown, he’ll hold all the demons power over life and death, and he could raise the Slaugh at any time, along with other long-buried horrors that could terrorise earth.”
Blake’s hand tightened around my wrist. I didn’t care. She stabbed Maeve. My heart ached, as if I’d been the one she stabbed.
“You’ve been to the underworld,” Blake said, his voice impossibly calm and even. “Can Maeve come back once she’s stopped Daigh going full demon?”
Liah shrugged her shoulders. “Your friend believes so. I’ve heard rumors of it done before. I was not concerned about their return – only about stopping Daigh.”
“Corbin,” Rowan said, his voice so soft I thought I imagined it. “If there’s a chance to bring him back, and Maeve, too… then I want to do it.”
“If we’re right about the Lazarus thing, we’ve got a day to figure out how to bring them back. But now there are only three of us and I don’t—”
Blake’s phone buzzed in his pocket. To my surprise he drew it out and answered the call. His face brightened as he listened to the voice on the other end.
“As Flynn loves to say, Praise be Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all their carpenter friends.” Blake hung up the call and dropped his phone into his pocket. “We’d better get to the hospital. Arthur’s awake.”
29
MAEVE
Corbin gripped my hand so tight that he’d have cut off circulation if I actually still had circulating blood, which I doubted. As he dragged me down the endless, dust-swept black hallway, the knife handle bobbed on my chest. I barely noticed the familiar wooden doors or the humming stone walls – it fascinated me so much to see this foreign object sticking out of me.
I should be able to feel it inside me, but instead my whole chest is numb, like my mouth after the dentist gives me a shot.
Corbin kept looking over his shoulder at me, as if he expected me to disappear. His fingers tightened around mine, crushing me with his fear. Our feet scuffed at a fine layer of sulphur dust and red-stained sand coating the floor. The humming buzzed in my ears, and it took me a few moments to realize that I couldn’t hear any shrieks of pain from behind any of the doors, like in my dreams. The whole place was eerily quiet.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“At the Slaugh. Or rather, wherever you sent them when you destroyed the Slaugh. The shades ride the horses, but they need all the demons and fae at the rear to poke them with pitchforks or something.” Corbin shrugged. “From what little my books said about the Slaugh, I think when you destroyed them what you actually did was allow those shades to pass over to the next stage of their journey, and you probably took all the demons with them. That might be a good thing, if the tortures I’ve been witness to these past three days are any indication.”
“I saw my parents,” I said. “They were begging me to come with them.”
Corbin shuddered. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice wavering. “That’s part of the Slaugh’s power. They use your loved ones to tempt you into death. Your soul is so much sweeter that way.”
“Liah shot them with her arrows and they disintegrated to dust.” I closed my eyes. “That’s the second time I had to watch them die in front of me.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think they’re now finally at peace.”
“What about the demons? Are they trapped on this other plane with the shades?” I hated the idea of my parents and Blake’s parents being tortured somewhere I couldn’
t help them.
“The demons will eventually find their way back here. Natural order will have to be restored. It just takes some time. All I know is, this place is ours for the moment, but we’re got to move quickly. It’ll start filling up with recently deceased souls soon, and the demons and fae will return. After how you defeated them so thoroughly, it’s best if we’re not here when they do.”
“Where are we going?”
“To stop Daigh. Quickly. We’re close now.”
As we rounded another corner, the ground rolled out from under me. Dust cascaded from the ceiling as an earthquake shook the hallway. I pitched forward. Corbin caught my arm before I smashed into the floor.
“What’s that?” I cried, steadying myself against the humming stone wall.
“Hopefully, it’s the only remaining demon kicking Daigh’s arse before he gets his hands on that crown.”
Corbin gripped my arm and flew down the hall twice as fast as before. My feet slipped and buckled beneath me as I struggled to keep up with him on the uneven ground. Somehow, he pulled me along and I avoided face-planting. Rocks and debris tumbled down around us. My throat closed up with fear.
Would those stone walls hold? This place had the oppressive weight of being deep underground. If the tunnel collapsed, would we be trapped without air? Did we even need air?
Are we even breathing right now?
A huge smoldering rock crashed from the ceiling, blocking our way. A lattice of cracks spiderwebbed out from its base. Black tendrils snaked from the cracks, reaching up toward my ankles. Corbin yanked me around the edge of the stone. On the other side, we faced the wide hallway and the arch made of bones leading into the gloomy chamber beyond.
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow Page 18