“I’m hiding somewhere else. Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to get us all out of here. I promise.” Corbin blew us a kiss and slammed the panel shut, plunging Rowan and I into complete darkness.
My heart pounded against my chest. Rowan searched out my hand and squeezed it. Corbin’s footsteps padded out of the library, leaving us with the company of our own breathing and the faint sounds of fighting and shouting from downstairs.
It wasn’t long until the air inside the hole grew stale. My limbs cramped from not moving, from the fear clawing its way down my spine. Rowan’s body shook, and he gasped against the stale air. Is he going to have a panic attack in here? Is he already having one? How can I help him when I can’t even straighten my legs?
I didn’t know what to do.
Desperate for some activities to take my mind off the horror, I felt around the top of the compartment, figuring if the stories Corbin told me were true and priests really had hid inside this cramped space for hours while the castle was searched, they must have thought to put in an air vent. Sure enough, a tiny hole above Rowan’s head emitted the slightest rush of cool air. At least we wouldn’t suffocate.
“Rowan,” I whispered against his trembling cheek. “There’s an air vent. We won’t suffocate. Rowan, we’re going to be okay.”
He trembled harder, his whole body jerking. He let out a strangled sob. I squeezed him as hard as I could, pushing spirit magic into him to try and calm him. I counted silently backwards from a hundred, then from a thousand, then I listed all the elements on the periodic table, and moved on to names of all the different constellations. Bangs and thuds and shouts sounded from outside, closer now but still muffled, like I was listening from underwater. What’s going on? Are we winning? Is Briarwood ours again—
The door flew open. “I’ve found two of them,” an unfamiliar voice called.
I guess we’re not winning.
Terror gripped me. I froze. Rough hands reached inside the priest hole and grabbed my arms, dragging me out into the light. Rowan’s arm was wrenched from mine. He howled and thrashed like a wild animal as they tore him from me.
After being in the dark for so long, the bright light from the library’s chandelier made my eyes water. I blinked, waiting for the white welts to disappear so I could get a look at my attackers. Beside me, Rowan thrashed about, knocking one of them in the teeth so she fell back in pain. I copied him, kicking out with my feet, pooling my terror into fighting against whoever held me.
“Restrain them!” A familiar voice barked. I was pushed to the ground and my hands yanked behind my back and tied with something coarse and rough. A knee jammed into the small of my back, keeping me in place. Beside me, Rowan was getting the same treatment. His eyes had gone dark, feral, and he bucked and thrashed and even made a run for the door before they jumped on him and got his hands tied, too.
The vicar stood over us, his robes torn and filthy, and the light of righteous justice glowing in his eyes. “We got ourselves a couple of witches,” he snarled.
“Better a witch then a murderer,” I shot back. “Isn’t that one of the ten commandments?”
“Silence, witch!” He kicked me in the side. I gasped as my breath left me. “Take them to the meadow with the others. It’s time for them to face God’s final judgement.”
31
ROWAN
They marched Maeve and I downstairs and out the main doors. People swarmed through the castle, taking axes to the beautiful wooden mouldings and smashing the ancient furniture. As we were dragged across the courtyard, someone tossed an end table from one of the upstairs windows, where it smashed against the cobbles with a sickening crack. Panic rose in my chest, settling on me like a familiar weight.
They’re destroying our home.
Everything I’d loved in my life was tied to this house. For all of us, Briarwood was more than stones and wood and windows. It was the place where we’d uncovered our true selves. Corbin had taken five broken people and given them the magic of Briarwood, and this castle wormed its way into all our hearts. I loved it the same way I loved Maeve, and the guys, and Corbin.
Corbin… where is he? I twisted my head around, trying to see him on the ramparts, fighting amongst the crowd. If they found us, did that mean…
And the others, where were they? Was this it – the end of Briarwood coven?
I’m glad I let Obelix go back on the roof. I hoped like hell the little rascal had the sense to hide up there somewhere and that he’d escape unscathed. At least one of us would.
“You can’t do this,” Maeve yelled at the men dragging us down the narrow path toward the meadow. “This is illegal. It’s vandalism and assault and you’ll go to jail for a very long time.”
One of them – I think it was the one named Gus who Flynn fought at the pub – snorted. “That’s unlikely, witch.” He pointed to a figure standing beside the door. I recognized the female officer who’d spoken to us at the church, the one who lost her colleague to the fae. She caught me watching her and made a slicing motion across her throat.
My body jerked as the panic crashed over me. My ears rang. Heat surged through my body, followed by a sharp, stinging pain along my right arm, so intense that tears sprung in my eyes and I looked down to make sure the limb was still there, still attached to my body. It felt like someone had hacked it off. The pain seared down my leg, carrying with it a paralyzing fear that everyone and everything I loved was about to be murdered in front of me.
My weight slumped against my captor. He yelled at me to move, but my body wouldn’t obey. Two other men ran over and they dragged me out the side gate and into the meadow, where an even bigger crowd waited. Torches flickered over the faces, so many faces I recognized from the village. So many people who wanted me dead. They must be right about something.
It looked like the movie set of some hillbilly horror film, only it was sickeningly real.
“I had to knock this one out,” someone called. They dragged Arthur’s body beside mine. Blood pissed from a cut on his head. As they threw him down beside me, I noticed his stomach rising and falling. He was breathing. But for how much longer?
“No!” Maeve reached for Arthur, but her captors tore her away. I lurched toward her, but rough hands pulled me back. Someone threw a black hood over my head and tripped me so I slammed into the earth. The pain from the fall became one with the pain in my arm and leg, surging through my body and driving my panic to the brink. My whole body spasmed. I lost control of motor function. I was a trembling, sobbing ball of uselessness.
Corbin… the thought pricked through my ruined mind. Where’s Corbin?
“Did you get the fire out?” Blake called to Flynn.
“Aye… but they started another one and I—” Flynn’s voice dissolved into a scream that curdled what was left of my mind.
They’re going to kill you all. They’re going to torture Maeve and Corbin and the others in front of you, and it’s all your fault.
The fear completely paralyzed me. Gibbering noise fell on my ears, and it took me several moments to realize I was the one making those horrid, inhuman sounds.
Something hard hit my cheek. I turned my head toward the blow and copped an apple in the eye.
Sweet juice exploded over the front of my hood. The villagers jeered as they pounded us with stones, fruit, even the butts of their wooden torches. I jammed my face into the ground in a vague attempt to protect myself. Hard objects battered my body, followed by the blows of fists and feet.
“Witch!” “Sorcerers!” “You killed my sister!” “You cursed me with cancer!” “Die, you evil creatures!”
“I can’t use my magic!” Blake yelled.
“Me neither,” Flynn called back.
I couldn’t use my magic even if I’d tried, but now I knew it was no use. My mind drew back to a night outside the abandoned building, where a guy had paid for a half hour with me. I’d taken him around the side of the building, to an area we usually used for cu
stomers. We had an old rotting couch there and some supplies for shooting heroin and crack in a tin behind the rubbish bins. As I went around the corner, two other guys came out of the shadows, their teeth glinting, their eyes hungry for violence.
I’d curled up into a ball then. I went to a different place. Their blows slammed into me, their hands tugged down my pants, but I didn’t feel any of it. I was somewhere else. I’d moved into this weird dream world beyond fear.
I went to that same place now. Objects thudded against my skin, knocking my brain around my skull. My friends screamed. But I wasn’t there anymore. I was a ghost, floating above my broken body, watching the horror with detached interest.
Some time later, it might have been minutes or hours, rough hands grabbed my body and hoisted me to my feet. I slumped against them. My legs didn’t support my weight anymore. Maybe they were broken. My hood was ripped off.
My ears buzzed. Dried blood glued my eyelids together. I managed to pry one open, but the sight that greeted me made me wish for the darkness again.
At the front of the crowd stood Daigh, his arms held above his head like Christ at the crucifixion, a look of utter triumph on his face. Beside him, fae stood in neat rows, bows drawn and pointed directly at us. At me.
“Hello, daughter,” he addressed Maeve.
“I knew you were behind this,” she growled from somewhere on my left. “You lied to me again.”
He shrugged. “I’m not the only one who lies. You told a lie to your friends tonight, didn’t you, daughter? You didn’t think to tell them it was you who broke the magic of the protective charms and let the humans into the castle.”
His words made no sense. He might as well have declared Queen Elizabeth was a teapot. No way would Maeve have done this. That wasn’t possible. Even if she’d wanted to, she never would have even had the chance…
I waited for Maeve to deny it, but she didn’t. “Why did you do this?” she cried, her voice high, wavering.
My heart ripped into pieces as the truth of her lack of denial slammed into me. Maeve did this? But why? She loves us. She loves me.
But no, of course she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because no one could love me. I wasn’t worthy of love, I’d been shown that time and time again, but still I refused to believe. She’d let us believe all this time, when really… she’d been under Daigh’s spell the whole time…
“I did it all for the dream,” Daigh said. “Because I finally understood how to get what I want.”
He lifted one arm above his head. The fae behind him parted, revealing a structure that turned my blood to ice.
An open bonfire burned bright, in fragrant disregard for the summer fire ban. The swaying grasses of the meadow had been stomped flat and covered with dirt and splatters of quick-dry concrete that held in place triangular wooden scaffolds. From each scaffold protruded a long, pointed stake.
Six stakes.
My eyes darted between the towering horrors. Aside from the nuclear wasteland, every detail was true to the vision in Maeve’s dream. All except one thing. A figure slumped at the base of the last stake, tied from head to toe in thick rope. Blonde hair matted with blood plastered against her listless face.
Kelly.
Beside me, Maeve howled. It was a sound of such raw terror that it broke what little composure remained inside me. My muscles gave way, and I collapsed forward again. My captors let me fall, and my body slammed into the ground.
The vicar walked out to stand beside Daigh, and raised his own hand to the heavens. In his fingers he clutched a battered bible. “Tonight, we punish those who’ve brought Satan within our midst. We cleanse the village of Crookshollow and restore righteous justice to our land.”
“No, no, no, no,” Flynn kept saying. Arthur bellowed. I guess he’d come to again. Maeve begged and begged Daigh to spare our lives, to spare Kelly’s life. But Corbin… where’s Corbin?
“I told you I would never burn my only child at the stake,” Daigh grinned. “Throw that one in first. He’s already gone.”
The men moved around me, trudging across the meadow toward the stakes, carrying a heavy shape between them. They dumped it down on the ground in front of one of the stakes, dragging it up so the moonlight caught a cold, pale face.
Corbin.
No.
Glassy eyes stared back at me, unseeing. His body hung limp, not responding to their cruel movements. Blood pooled around a knife sticking out of his abdomen.
Corbin was dead.
TO BE CONTINUED
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Excerpt
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow
Corbin’s lifeless head lolled back against the stake, and my heart crumbled to dust.
He can’t be dead. He can’t be.
But my rational mind fought against my protests. Corbin wasn’t moving or crying out. That knife was buried in his side right up to the hilt. It would’ve struck organs. He’d been bleeding internally for Athena knows how long. I hadn’t seen him since he’d locked Rowan and I away in the priest hole.
Blood pounded in my ears. The world around me faded – the angry villagers, the triumphant grin on Daigh’s face, the horrifying stakes rigged up to accept their sacrifices… it all blurred away into white noise as Corbin’s glassy eyes shattered the universe around me.
The remains of my heart sank through my chest cavity, settling over my organs like crystalline tears. My body lost form and function, toppling forward through the void of the world. My head slammed into the ground and bounced, wrenching my neck so hard stars danced in front of my eyes. I didn’t feel any of it.
Corbin’s dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Pain tore at my body as the cold horror settled in. Corbin’s dead and it’s all my fault.
I made the decision to drop the barrier and allow the humans into Briarwood. I trusted Daigh and Aline against all the evidence that warned me otherwise. I kept secret what Aline and I had done and allowed Corbin to walk into that battle unprepared. I’d hidden away in that priest hole like a coward while he sacrificed his life for us. I should have known as soon as he shoved us in there that all was lost. Corbin would never allow us to lose Briarwood without a fight, even if it meant…
… if it meant… I choked on the dust of my shattered heart.
I gulped in a breath, trying to force myself back to the present. But the grief bit into me, holding my gaze on the lifeless body of my friend and lover.
Maeve, can you hear me?
Blake’s voice roared inside my head, snapping me back from my grief. Cold dirt bit my cheek. Fresh grass tickled the back of my neck.
Maeve, I know you’re hurting, but you’ve got to focus. We need to get everyone else away from here before they end up joining Corbin. I think I have a way, but I need your help.
At the mention of Corbin’s name, another wave of pain rocked my body. I reeled, pulling my mind back to the present, to Blake, to Arthur and Flynn and Rowan and Kelly – the people I loved who were still alive but in terrible danger. I was still the High Priestess. I was still responsible for them.
Two of the fae stepped forward, looping their bows over their backs as they grabbed Corbin’s legs and arms and dragged him toward the roaring bonfire. Behind me, I was faintly aware of the villagers yelling. They’re going to get their burning witch tonight.
But they won’t get us all. Briarwood coven will survive. I’ll make sure of it if I die on that fire myself.
I tested my magic, calling up the pillar of power that flared inside me. It sizzled as it slid under my skin, but when I tried to push the energy out of my palms and fingers, it resisted. I was definitely blocked.
I lifted my head
and sent a thought back to Blake. Okay. I’m here. What’s the plan?
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When one of her own is cruelly taken, Maeve Moore must unite witches and humans for a final stand against an unbeatable army of the dead.
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In an epic showdown of fae versus witches, hopes versus desire, death versus immortality, and science versus magic, Maeve will sacrifice everything for the love of five remarkable men. Is it enough to stop the fae?
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The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow is the chilling finale to the Briarwood Reverse Harem series by USA Today bestselling author Steffanie Holmes. This full-length book glitters with love, heartache, hope, grief, dark magic, fairy trickery, steamy scenes, British slang, meat pies, second chances, and the healing powers of a good cup of tea. Read on only if you believe one just isn’t enough.
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The Castle of Wind and Whispers Page 22