The Castle of Fire and Fable

by Steffanie Holmes

  “That’s okay. I want these ones.”

  He grinned as he lifted our bags out of the boot. I clutched the Discman to my chest for dear life as we ran toward the terminal. That music might be the only thing that got me through the next fourteen hours.

  Fourteen hours before I could see Kelly. It was hardly any time at all and yet, it was a whole world away. My stomach squirmed, and I squeezed Arthur’s hand.

  We didn’t have any checked luggage, so we went straight through security and headed to our gate. There was a candy shop opposite the gate (‘lolly shop’, according to Arthur. Have you ever heard such a thing?), and Arthur dragged me inside and helped me fill a huge bag with weird English candy I’d never heard of before. He was being so nice, but every sugary lump he placed on my tongue tasted like coal.

  Our flight was called, and I leapt into the line in front of all the businessmen. Arthur let me have the seat by the window. I watched the plane take off over London and saw the glittering lights of the spinning Eye, which only made me think of the burning Ferris wheel that killed my parents. I started to cry.

  Now that I was on the plane, Briarwood and the guys and magic and the fae seemed like a million miles away. The last two weeks felt like a dream, and now I was waking up to the real, living nightmare.

  The cabin lights went off as we soared over the Atlantic. They served some cardboard food and alcohol that neither of us touched. Arthur watched some dumb action film with lots of explosions. I tried to close my eyes, but all I saw was Kelly’s face, bright and bubbly, and my gut twisted.

  I shoved Arthur’s earbuds into my ears, and blasted Blood Lust all the way into Denver.

  43

  MAEVE

  “I’m here to see Kelly Crawford,” I gasped as I gripped the edge of the nurses’ station counter and struggled to catch my breath.

  We’d driven to the hospital straight from the airport. There was road construction going on right outside the hospital, so the taxi wouldn’t even drop us by the entrance. He’d left us on a street corner a block away, and I’d sprinted all the way here with all the speed and none of the grace of an Olympic athlete. Lucky Arthur was as fit as he was, or I would’ve lost him. As it was, he was only just now puffing down the hall after me.

  The nurse thumbed through a stack of paperwork. “What did you say the name was again? Hospital policy only allows family members to visit—”

  “She’s my sister!” I yelled. I tossed my passport across the table at her. She took her time opening it and checking the image while I drummed my fingers against counter with the rhythm and ferocity of a Blood Lust song. Finally, after an entire Ice Age had passed, she read a room number off her clipboard.

  “Immediate family only,” she wagged a finger at Arthur, who looked ready to argue. I placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, really. I think I need to do this alone.”

  “I’ll be right here.” Arthur settled down in a plastic chair in the waiting room. His bulk spilled out the edges. “Are you going to be okay?”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m going to have to be.”

  He squeezed my hand. “You’ve got this, Maeve Moore.”

  I took a ragged breath and started toward her room. You got this. I really didn’t think I did.

  I found the room. The door looked exactly the same as all the other doors – grey with a thin window of safety glass. A big, clunky metal handle. I felt as though it should look different somehow, more terrifying. Perhaps what was behind it was terrifying enough.

  I sucked in a deep breath and pushed open the door. The first thing that hit me was the smell. Acrid, sterile, bleach. Cold grey walls. Four beds, separated by faded blue curtains, only one of which was drawn.

  My sister had the bed in the far left corner. She lay still, her face turned toward the window, which only showed a view across a tiny courtyard to the cancer ward of the hospital. I swallowed the lump in my throat and managed to croak out her name.

  “Kelly?”

  She jerked her head around. “Maeve? It’s really you?”

  “Of course.” I rushed to her bedside, throwing my arms around her. Her body felt tiny, bony, not like Kelly at all. And she didn’t smell right. The Kelly I’d grown up with always smelled fresh and sweet, like roses. This Kelly smelled of disinfectant. “I heard what happened and I jumped on the very next plane.”

  “It was horrible. They fed this gross stuff down my throat, and I threw up, and now all my poo is black.”

  “It’s charcoal,” I said, remembering something I’d read about feeding patients charcoal to make them throw up.

  She wrinkled her face. “Gross. Why would they do that to a person?”

  “To save your life.” Tears burned in the corners of my eyes. “Kelly, talk to me. What happened? Why did you do this?”

  She turned her head away, and took a breath. “I can’t…”

  “You have to. Kelly, I’m so worried about you.”

  “You aren’t though, not really. And I don’t blame you.” She continued to stare at the ceiling, but her voice took on this high-pitched tone, like she was struggling to keep herself chipper. “You’ve got your castle and your hot guys and a real chance at a future. I know you’re sad about Mom and Dad dying, I’m not saying that. But you did all right out of it, you know? I’m sleeping on a leaking air mattress in a cold bedroom with bars over the windows. I live with a person who makes Mom and Dad look like members of a biker gang. I’m not even allowed to eat refined sugar! Uncle Bob threw out all my makeup the other day and every skirt in my closet cut above my ankles. Every Sunday on the way to church we drive past our old house. And last week, last week…”

  I remembered the dream I had the other night, where I’d huddled in fear while Uncle Bob loomed over me, his face twisted with righteous anger as he raised his hand. “Uncle Bob hit you.”

  She whipped her head around. “How did you…?”

  “I’m your sister. I’ve known you my entire life, and when I think what it might take to make you think about doing something like this, I just draw a complete blank. Except when I remember Uncle Bob’s eyes that Christmas when he yelled at me about evolution and ‘the gays,’ and I wonder what it might be like to live with him.”

  “He’s horrible,” Kelly sobbed. “He wants everything to go back to biblical times, where women raise babies and never raise their voices. I’d only been with them a day when I saw him slap Aunt Florence because she slightly overcooked the steak. He was trying to force me to quit working at Ruby’s, and when I said I needed the money for college he got all smug and said he’d taken care of that for me. That’s when I found out I was going to bible college to learn how to be a good pastor’s wife. It’s one step away from a nunnery.”

  “Oh, Kelly.” Tears streamed down my face. The dream was real. It was real, and I hadn’t helped her.

  “I don’t even know if I really meant it. I just saw Aunt Florence taking those pills and I guess I thought that maybe that’s what got her through. So I stole them, but then they made me go to that stupid camp and it was all about how to glorify God and be the best Christian and I just kept thinking about how Mom and Dad were a hundred times more Christian than Uncle Bob, and they were dead, and everything good about my life died along with them. I just go so angry and so sad, and I wanted to see them again. Why not, right? No one cares.”

  “Oh, Kelly, I care. I wish you’d told me you felt like this. I would’ve…” my words trailed off. I had no idea what I would’ve done. This wasn’t in any of my astronomy textbooks.

  “I tried, Maeve. I didn’t really have the time zones messed up. I called you, but you either didn’t pick up or you were busy. And I know I should have said something anyway, but I just… couldn’t.”

  My heart dropped to my knees. I remembered Kelly’s phone call, how her voice had sounded drawn, strained. I’d put it down to the unreliability of international calls, but she’d been depressed. She needed me and I’d brushed her o
ff.

  Tears streamed down my face. This is all my fault. I should have been there for my sister. I should have seen this coming, but I’d been so wrapped up in everything that was going on at Briarwood that I hadn’t paid attention and I’d almost lost her.

  “I’m here now,” I said. “And I’m not leaving your side.”

  True to my word, I sat by Kelly’s side for hours. We talked about everything – all the things we should have said to each other after Mom and Dad died but didn’t because we were too sad. We cackled with laughter as we remembered Dad’s ugly Christmas sweaters and that time a frog got loose in the church during the middle of his sermon. We sobbed together when we remembered Mom giving us each a silver cross necklace on our thirteenth birthday. Kelly lifted her collar down and showed me hers. I opened up my wallet and showed her mine.

  Kelly told me how much she’d desperately wanted me to stay in Coopersville, but she couldn’t hold me back from my dream. “I always knew you were going to leave to go do amazing things, and I was so torn between being sad and happy when you couldn’t go to MIT. I felt like I could deal with this big gaping hole in my heart if you were there with me. But then you got that letter about Briarwood and I had to lose you all over again. I was so afraid that if we started to talk about it, I’d ask you to come back, and you would have come.” She squeezed my hand. “And I was right. I’m so sorry, Maeve.”

  “You can’t punish yourself for the way you feel or what you do when you’re grieving,” I said. “A wise person told me that you have to give yourself permission to do whatever it takes to get yourself through the pain. And then you have to forgive yourself for all the shit you end up doing because of it. Which means this.”

  I gestured around the hospital room, realizing with a start that I could have been talking to myself.

  Kelly’s doctor came, jolting me out of my thoughts. He checked Kelly’s vitals and reported she’d made excellent progress. “We’re going to move you to the psychiatric ward for an assessment now, and depending on the result of that, you’ll be free to go.”

  Kelly’s body tensed up at the thought. “I’m not crazy,” she said.

  “Of course not,” he beamed down at her. He was quite a young doctor, with sandy blond hair and quarterback good looks – the kind of guy on any other day Kelly would be flirting with. “But we’re legally required to give you a full evaluation before we can release you. We need to be sure you’re going to be okay out there, and we can make a recommendation to a specialist if you need further treatment. Much as your smiling face brightens the ward, we don’t want to see you back here if we can help it.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” Kelly said, smiling her patented cool girl smile. “You’re so sweet.”

  Gag me with a stethoscope. But I grinned from ear to ear. At least my sister was back on form.

  I waited with Kelly for another hour. I kept glancing at the door, expecting to see Uncle Bob barreling through it. I imagined a hundred different scenarios of what I would say or do when he started bossing the doctors around in his booming preacher voice. In some of them I punched him in the face. In others I called the police and they swarmed in and arrested him mid sermon. In another, he “accidentally” fell out a window (I quickly quashed that idea, after the pub incident), and my personal favorite, I ran him through on my sword. It was probably a good thing British Airways didn’t allow medieval weapons in their carry-on.

  The nurse come to take Kelly for her evaluation. Reluctantly, I left her and returned to the nurses’ station. Arthur sat in the same chair, his head tipped back at an awkward angle, his loud snores causing sighs of irritation from the seats around him.

  My heart swelled a tiny bit. I shook Arthur awake. The woman next to him mouthed thank you.

  “Maeve…” his eyes flew open and he sat up straight. “How is she? Is she okay? Are you okay?” He pulled me into his lap, cradling me in his arms the way my Dad had done whenever I was upset about something. In ordinary circumstances the gesture would have felt infantile and a little weird, but right now I sank into him, savoring his steady strength and warmth.

  “She’s going to be okay. They’re moving her to the psych ward for an assessment. Apparently it’s standard procedure when someone self-harms.”

  Arthur nodded. “I know. She could be a while. Did she say why…”

  His body stiffened. I squeezed his arm, around his elbow where the scars crisscrossed his skin. I wondered, but I didn’t ask. “She did.”

  I wondered if Arthur would ask what Kelly said. I wasn’t sure I was ready to voice my Uncle's assault aloud. But Arthur didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Do you need anything?”

  “Yeah, food.” My stomach growled with hunger.

  I led Arthur a few blocks away to Happy’s Diner. We always used to come to Happy’s after family trips into Phoenix. I ordered my usual – a cheeseburger, curly fries, and a slice of brownie cake – but everything tasted like cardboard.

  My phone buzzed. It was Kelly. “They want to keep me here another night!” she wailed. “I’m so sick of this place. Where are you?”

  “Happy’s.”

  “Wait there. I’m going to sneak out. I’ve already asked for an extra sheet, so if I tie them together I’ll be able to—”

  “No jailbreaking. You stay there and listen to your doctors,” I said. “I’ll be back to see you as soon as visiting hours start up again. And I might even sneak you in a piece of brownie cake.”

  “You’re the best sister.”

  “I’m really not, but I’m going to try to improve. I love you, Kelly.”

  “You too, Maeve.”

  I hung up and told Arthur what Kelly said. “So if we’ve got the whole night to kill, should I got find us a hotel?” he said, pulling out his phone. “We could splash out and get something really fancy, with a spa bath and a butler named Jeeves.”

  “No hotel, but we do need to rent a car.”

  “A car?”

  “Yeah.” I pushed the rest of my dinner away and wrapped up my untouched brownie cake into a napkin. “There’s something I have to do.”

  44

  ARTHUR

  I recognized the grim determination on Maeve’s face when she emerged from the diner. It was a mirror of my own emotions when I told Corbin that I’d come live with him at Briarwood and learn how to use my magic. It was the look of total acceptance that you were going to do a scary thing, but it was exactly the thing that needed to happen.

  What I didn’t know was why she looked like that, or what she was going to do.

  But what Maeve wished, I would deliver. I rented us a car (a classic 1962 Corvette, because damned if I was going to drive in America in some shitty Honda), added some cheap blankets and cushions from Target to the boot, plugged my old Discman into the cigarette lighter, rolled down the hood, and with Blood Lust blaring and the sun setting behind us, we left Phoenix and the horrible hospital smell in our dust.

  Maeve laughed as the wind whipped her hair around her face. “I’ve never been in a convertible before!” she yelled over the roar of the music, earning herself a mouthful of hair for her efforts.

  My beard streamed out on either side of my face like some kind of deranged monk. My hair whipped across my eyes. I cursed myself for not remembering to tie my hair back. I wanted to stop and put the hood back up, but no way would I do that when Maeve was smiling like she was.

  I hated the circumstances around our visit, but I loved spending time with Maeve alone, away from Briarwood and all the crazy fae and the sex that made my cock burn with envy. I love that she loved my music, that she got it, the way she seemed to get everything about me. I wished more than anything that she could be mine.

  “Turn off up here,” Maeve yelled over the roar of the music.

  I did. As the Corvette’s headlights illuminated the sign that read WELCOME TO COOPERSVILLE, POPULATION 4,589, I got a stabbing feeling in my gut that this might be a bad idea.

  I’d been here once bef
ore, of course. After Corbin’s parents walked out of Briarwood, we had to take over duties as Maeve’s guardian. I did a year’s stint, watching Maeve from a distance as a janitor at her high school. I bumped into her once in the library and asked to borrow a pencil, but she was so engrossed in the latest Neil Degrasse Tyson book that she barely looked up. It was no surprise she didn’t remember me the way she did Flynn, who was a student in her year and made a million friends and interfered with everything and caused chaos and mayhem as only Flynn could.

  Driving back into the familiar town with her at my side felt surreal, like I was watching a movie of my own life instead of living it. But that determined look hadn’t left her face, and I knew that she was here because of her sister, because something happened here that put Kelly in a position where she felt like there was no way out.

  The fresh scar on my forearm throbbed, shooting a jolt of shame through my body. I was glad Maeve hadn’t asked me to go into that room to see her sister. I would have gone if she wanted me to, but then I’d be forced to confront something I wasn’t ready for.

  Corbin did that to me when he caught me cutting at Briarwood. He took me to meet people at a local self-harm support group, and then he took me to his brother’s grave and told me that he wasn’t going to let another person fade away on his watch. It wasn’t so much the hollow, weakened faces of the people in the group that got to me as it was the searing pain in Corbin’s fierce eyes. Even though I didn’t really want to stop – it was the one thing that seemed to contain the rage inside me – I couldn’t be the source of that pain for him.

  So I stopped. Only I didn’t, not really. I may not have been cutting my skin any longer, but if I felt the rage bubbling inside me I’d punch something hard until my knuckles bled, or burn the skin between my thighs with one of my flames. Anything to jolt me out of the dark place and be in control again.