The Castle of Wind and Whispers (Briarwood Reverse Harem Book 4)

by Steffanie Holmes

  “Their kiss turned deeper as they explored their bodies in joyous reunion,” Aline grinned. “I believe at this point Robert gave a descriptive account of their wild copulating. He even had two of the coven members act out the scene. Oh yes, I remember! It was Andrew and Bree.”

  “Bloody hell,” Corbin covered his ears. “Warn a person before you say stuff like that about his parents.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Please, keep going. I think we can use our imaginations for that bit.”

  “I can’t,” Flynn piped up. “I have no imagination. Tell us more about Corbin’s parents’ wild copulating.”

  “La la la, I’m not listening,” Corbin sang, his hands still plastered over his ears.

  “It’s okay, Corbin, I won’t speak of it any more.” Aline grinned again. “Instead, I can tell Flynn about the time I found his dad in the spa pool with three Californian yoga instructors.”

  “Argh!” Flynn clamped his own hands over his ears.

  “I think we should get back on track here,” Arthur said, although he was smiling, “before we all find out stuff about our parents we’d rather not know.”

  “Yes, of course. So the fae remained inside the man’s head while they made love, and she shared every sensual moment along with him, enjoying the woman’s body as though she herself were the lover. Inside the man’s head, she learned something else – the man and woman had powers of their own. He could manipulate water, so he had held off the snowstorm while he searched the forest for her, and she was an earth user, which is why she’d sought the comfort of the tree when she was lost.

  “The magic of the two lovers sizzled under their skin. The fae felt the power rising and swirling within her as though it were her own magic – but that wasn’t possible, because her magic was back with her body, wasn’t it?

  “As the man and woman basked in the afterglow of their lovemaking, the fae returned to her true from and slipped away into the forest. She returned to her people, but as her days passed in the forest, she noticed that her magic had diminished. She could no longer cast glamour or compel the minds of others. She was convinced the woman had tricked her somehow, so she traveled to the village where the woman and man now lived as husband and wife to get her power back.

  “She discovered the woman had given birth to a child – a son – who carried power that had never been seen before. He commanded the magic of water, of earth, and of the fae world. The fae fell to her knees in reverence before the babe. Her heart opened, for she knew that he was her son.

  “The husband saw her standing over his son, and he chased the fae princess back into the forest. She returned many times to try and see the son, but every time the husband chased her away, fearing she was an evil changeling come to steal him. She could not get close to the house again. As the son grew up, his father’s fear of the fae imprinted itself on him. He used his powers to become the most powerful witch in the land, and he led the covens together to build a new realm for the fae. There was a bloody battle, and he pushed all the fae into that realm, and shut the portal behind it. That was the last time the fae were allowed to roam the vast forests of earth, and the last time the fae princess laid eyes upon her son born of the binding. Separated from the source of her magic, she withered and died.”

  “Well, isn’t that just a story of sunshine and rainbows?” Blake licked cream off his fingers.

  “That’s why the fae forbid the binding,” Corbin nodded. “Because it gives a human power over them.”

  “So that’s it, then. I’m a freak child of a binding.” I’d guessed as much back when we’d met Robert at the institution. But to hear it like this – told in a fairy tale instead of from a scientist at a genetics lab – well, that was just rubbing salt in the wound.

  “You’re so special.” Aline reached for me. I tore myself away and fell into Arthur’s arms. I relaxed into his embrace, seeking comfort in the familiarity of his touch.

  And then I remembered the cuts on his wrist. Not even Arthur was strong enough for what we had to endure right now.

  This is all too much.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting just a few moments respite from this woman who had birthed me. But we needed to know everything we could. “So Robert and Daigh are both my father.”

  “Yes. And if the story is to be believed, when you were conceived, you took some of Daigh’s power. Perhaps enough that when the time of the ritual came he wasn’t strong enough to stop me from crippling his powers. He didn’t know you were alive until recently. Now that he knows, he believes it’s vital you’re by his side. Because if you remain out here…” she trailed off.

  I alone have the power to stop the fae. I’ve got it. I just don’t want it to be true.

  “We’ve talked about this before,” I said. “I’ve never done anything that could remotely be considered fae magic.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not possible,” Corbin said.

  Someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Blake’s emerald gaze. “I think she’s right, Princess.”

  I glared at Blake, but he kept on talking. “All of this, everything that’s been going on, has escalated since Daigh discovered you were alive. I thought it had just taken him this long to build up his power again, and that’s probably true. But what if he’s desperate?”

  In the corner, Corbin was nodding. “All this time we’ve thought this was about the fae reclaiming their territory and Daigh having his revenge on our coven for stopping him last time. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s more personal than that.”

  “And what if none of the other fae knew about the binding?” Aline said, her eyes shining.

  “Liah knows,” Blake said. “That’s how she’s blackmailing him. She knows that Daigh was in love, and that his choice compromised the fae. If they find out, they’ll overthrow him for sure.”

  “Good,” I growled.

  “We could expose him,” Arthur suggested, tightening his grip around my shoulders. “Blake could go to this Liah with what we know. We could lend her the power and muscle she needed to take the throne if she agreed to break the Slaugh.”

  “Liah won’t touch us. Apparently you humans polluted the world or some shit.” Blake frowned. ‘Honestly, I think she’s more of a concern than Daigh. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make him think we’re going to help her overthrow him. If we—”

  “No,” I said.

  “We have to try,” Aline’s eyes blazed.

  “I don’t see what we going to achieve with this chat. Daigh isn’t the problem – the Slaugh are, and this won’t stop them. Aren’t we just giving away our one advantage by revealing that we have Aline?”

  “We’re looking for weaknesses,” Aline said. “Daigh has all the power right now, and he knows it. All he has to do is wait. His weakness is his arrogance. He believes he will win.”

  “Right now, he’s right.”

  “If I go to him, begging him to reconsider and humbling myself before him, it will put him into that power position again. I’ll beg him to spare the human race. He’ll eat it up.”

  “I don’t like this.” I folded my arms. “It’s not precise. There’s no reason he’ll tell us anything.”

  “Remember, we’re witches. We might see something that he does not want us to see.”

  I looked around at the faces of all my guys, waiting for an answer. I thought of Jane and Kelly and Connor, and everything that was at stake here. Finally, my eyes met my mother’s and I forced myself to push aside the swirling emotions inside me and consider her suggestion from a logical, scientific perspective.

  “No,” I said. “We’re not doing it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m High Priestess here,” I said. “I’m not placing any of you in danger unless I can see a valid reason. And I’m sure as hell not doing that just to invite Daigh to come for tea.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “Corbin is going to look for more information about this m
agic of belief,” I said. “Flynn, you’re going to teach me how you imbue objects with your magic. The rest of us are going to find out everything we can about making protective charms against shades. We know the Slaugh are going to come out of the cracks, like the fae in the church. Maybe there’s a way we can use the belief magic to spread some kind of protection over a large area… prevent them from raising local spirits and building their ranks.”

  “Like a fire – starve it of oxygen.” Arthur grinned.

  “Exactly.” I glared at everyone in the room. “And I don’t want anyone trying anything on their own anymore. No more sneaking off to the underworld by yourself,” I glowered at Blake and Flynn, “or keeping secrets because you want to save people’s feelings,” that one was for Arthur and Corbin. “We’re in this together.”

  We finished up the meeting and the others wandered off. Corbin gave me a look like he was hoping for his library back, but a quick flick of my head in my mother’s direction and he left with stack of books under his arms. I settled myself in the wingback chair behind the desk, buoyed up by Corbin’s scent ingrained in the plush leather. My mother ate her way through another plate of scones. Crumbs bounced across the blankets and cream smeared across her chin, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “You must have so many questions,” she said between bites.

  “Actually, no.” I tapped Corbin’s Montblanc pen against the corner of the grimoire. “It’s just another thing on a very long list of shit I don’t have time to deal with until we’ve sorted out how to stop the Slaugh.”

  “You’re the same sign as me, you know. Cancer. We’re sensitive. We have to wait for our feelings to lead the way. Your birthday is ten days before mine. I always thought that was a good omen.”

  “You believe in astrology?” I asked, barely managing to suppress a groan.

  “Oh yes, don’t you?”

  “The stars are burning spheres of gas millions of light years away. They have no bearing on our love lives or career decisions. If you argue for astrology than you’re arguing for predestiny, which is completely opposed to quantum physics unless you subscribe to retrocausation. And even if the stars in the sky when you were born did somehow impact your personality and future, then astrology would still be wrong, because of precession and the earth’s wobble. I’m not actually a Cancer, I’m a Gemini, which doesn’t matter because it’s complete bullshit.”

  She laughed, that tinkling, singsong sound that made my chest ache. “Oh, you are wonderful. You have Robert’s intensity.”

  “You mean Daigh?”

  She shook her head. “Robert, I think. He was so serious about his art. Daigh infused him with talent, but he already had the visual eye. He excelled at figurework because he liked the preciseness of the classical proportions. The problem was, he was too scientific. His paintings didn’t breathe, not the way Daigh’s did. Did he keep painting after Daigh left his body?”

  “He made some weird pictures of the fae.” I debated telling her about the triptych hanging in the National Gallery that mirrored my own dreams, but decided against it. “And one final painting – a portrait, I think. It’s in some private collection now, but apparently it was terrible. The critics were quite mean.”

  Aline shook her head, a tiny laugh escaping from her lips. “He wouldn’t have liked that. He couldn’t handle criticism. Neither of them could. They were alike in so many ways, it was a clever ruse – they fooled me for many months.”

  “I do have a question. Did you love Daigh?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I suppose I did. When I fell in love, I thought Daigh and Robert were one person. I thought the person I loved was broken, intense, passionate. Even when I discovered the truth I couldn’t separate the two of them in my mind or heart.”

  “I get that, in a weird way.” I thought of the guys. They were each a part of me now, a part of the whole. I couldn’t separate my love for them as individuals from my love of the whole. If I lost one of them, it would be like losing them all.

  “Enough about me. I want to know everything about you, my daughter. You came out of me and you were whisked off from the ritual to that dodgy orphanage, and by your accent I presume you ended up in the States. Please, indulge your mother, what happened between then and you tossing my painting on a fire?”

  I told her about the Crawfords finding me on their mission trip and how they’d arranged an illegal adoption and raised me in a tiny, evangelical town in rural Arizona.

  “They were good people?”

  “A little too willing to believe creationism is a science, but yeah,” my throat closed. “They were the best people.”

  “I love that the same religion that reviled me and my kin was the one that saved my daughter,” she smiled.

  The idea that my aversion to Christianity might have been an inherited trait, and that I had this thing in common with the woman who’d birthed me – even though she believed in astrology – made a shiver run down my spine. My spirit magic prickled against my skin, teased to life by the connections Aline and I were making.

  I kept talking, telling her about I’d always felt out of place in Coopersville, that I’d looked to the stars for answers, but not in the way she did. I explained how the Crawfords indulged my fascination with science, how they brought me all the books they didn’t believe in and scrimped and saved to send me to Space Camp, how they drove me out into the mountains for scientific surveys and helped me fill out my scholarship application for MIT. My throat caught as I talked about Kelly, who despite her popularity always ignored her friends’ attempts to exclude me. She always tried to make me feel like a normal teenager, even though I wasn’t.

  And now she hates me. And I hate her. It’s as if she’s forgotten the person she used to be back in Arizona. She’s become so hyper-religious, but then swallowing all the pills… nothing about the way she’s been acting makes any sense.

  Tears streamed down Aline’s face as I spoke. I kept stopping to ask if she was okay, but she’d shake her head and beg me to keep going. I talked until my throat closed up and my own tears rolled down my cheeks.

  “My heart hurts to see you upset. To me, it’s as if you were still that tiny little babe in my arms. The feeling of your soft skin, that amazing baby smell.” Aline sniffed. “And now you’re all grown up and I missed it all. Is it me? Is me being here upsetting you?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, but it’s fine. My whole world is upside down. My parents who’ve looked after me my whole life are dead. You’re supposed to be dead but here you are. And Kelly—”

  A shadow moved along the bookshelf behind the door. I whipped my head up. “Who’s there?”

  “If that’s you, Rowan sweetie, I could do with another plate of those fabulous scones,” Aline held out the empty plate.

  A figure lurched from behind the door, grabbed the plate from Aline, and smashed it on the floor. Aline yelped. Shards of crockery scattered across the room.

  I jumped out of the seat, heart pounding. “Kelly?”

  Kelly’s blonde hair hung over her face as she stared at the broken plate, her chest heaving. She stabbed her arm out, pointing a shaking finger at Aline. “That’s your mother.”

  Kelly heard everything. She knows about Aline being trapped in the painting and about my powers and who my father was. There was no lying my way out of this now.

  I nodded.

  “That’s your mother. And she’s a witch. And you’re a witch, and your father was… a fae. And also some guy named Robert.”

  I nodded again.

  Kelly’s eyes blazed into mine. “And you didn’t think I deserved to hear any of this before I came to live with you? You didn’t think I should know that when I got on that plane I was stepping into the middle of some kind of supernatural war? Or that I’d end up sharing the house with the ghost of your dead mother?”

  “Not a ghost,” Aline piped up. I glared at her.

  “To be fair, I didn’t kn
ow about Aline when I invited you here.”

  “But the witchcraft and the… the fae, you knew about that. You said you were going to look after me, and you just let me walk into this, you let me believe you—”

  “I am still your sister. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid you’d react like this. You’ve been so off lately, so weird about everything. I knew you wouldn’t be able to accept it. Your Bible has all sorts of choice things to say about witches, and I didn’t think you could handle the truth about me.”

  “And you could?” she yelled. “You’re the one who’s railed against any kind of belief your whole life. You’re the one who acted like I was a fool for believing in God and Jesus, and here you are throwing spells around and talking about fairies and rituals.”

  “Kelly, I didn’t mean to—”

  But Kelly had already disappeared.

  6

  FLYNN

  “You fecking bastard,” I grunted, drawing the screw out of the hole. Wrong size. Of course my boxes of screws were on the other side of the workshop, where I couldn’t get to them because I was currently holding two halves of a giant scrap-metal statue that would crash to the ground without my hand or the elusive screw holding them in place.

  I inched my feet across the room, dragging the two halves of the statue after me. The flimsy skeleton groaned in protest as its corrugated iron feet scraped across the concrete. “Look, if I don’t get that screw, you’re going to lose an arm, which is going to really mess with your artistic integrity. It’s your choice,” I groaned as I dragged it forward another foot.

  I wished I’d thought to ask Blake to come out and help, but he’d gone straight to his room after we finished talking with Aline. I had a feeling he wasn’t happy with Maeve’s decision not to speak with Daigh, or maybe he was thinking about his friend Liah, or maybe he was just weirded out by Maeve’s mother coming back from the dead like that. I had to admit, it creeped me out a bit, too.