The Castle of Water and Woe (Briarwood Reverse Harem Book 3)

by Steffanie Holmes

  Maeve pinched my chin, drawing my gaze back down to her blazing eyes. Her fingers on my chin exuded sizzling magic. My body trembled, the anxiety ripping open my chest. I have to finish the counting. I have to hold it back or … or …

  “There’s a strange look in your eyes,” Maeve said, pressing her naked body against mine. My body went rigid, and so did my cock. My heart thudded in my ears. White lights danced in front of my eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head. I have to get out of here. I was too close … too close to Maeve and too close to Corbin. And with Flynn here, too – he’d already managed to tell Corbin about the dream – my secret hung in the air between us. I had to keep it that way.

  He’ll find out and she’ll find out and they’ll kick you out and you’ll have nowhere else to go.

  I jerked my head up. Twelve… thirteen… fourteen...

  “Rowan,” Maeve whispered in my ear, her voice pounding through my skull. “Do you want to come up to my room?”

  I didn’t answer. My body trembled against hers. She held me while I finished counting the windows. Then Maeve took my hand.

  “Rowan and I are going upstairs,” she said over her shoulder. Flynn said something and Corbin laughed, but I didn’t hear it over the screaming in my ears.

  Maeve led me out of the room and up the stairs. Her naked body gleamed in the moonlight pouring through the covered walkway. The warmth of her magic flowed up my arm, and somehow it loosened the vice around my heart. My heart still beat way too quickly, my mind still screamed that I had to finish my rituals or Corbin would hate me, but I couldn’t bring myself to drop her hand.

  In her tower bedroom Maeve lay face down on the bed. She patted the space beside her. It was just like the other morning when I brought her breakfast. Only now moonlight streamed across the globes of her arse, and a lump formed in my throat that I couldn’t talk around.

  I really need a cup of tea right now.

  “It’s okay if you want to stand over there. I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want. Do you think I’m a bad person, because of what you saw?”

  I couldn’t speak, so I shook my head. The vice on my chest tightened again. I’m the bad person. I’m the evil one.

  “I don’t know why I just did that with Corbin and Flynn,” she said. “The guys didn’t initiate it. I did. I’d never thought that I would want … that. But now that I’ve had it, I want more.”

  If Corbin were here, he’d tell Maeve that it was her power, her spirit abilities that were messing with her head and giving her this insatiable hunger. The power shimmered on her skin, so she appeared luminous, a brilliant crystal under the moonlight.

  Fuck, how I wished Corbin was here.

  I gulped. Maeve patted the bed again, but I couldn’t move.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. Finally, I managed to move my tongue again. “It’s complicated.”

  “I know, Rowan,” she said, and her look confirmed my worst fears. “You and I have something in common. We both care about him. We both see the way he stretches himself too thin trying to keep this coven together. We see the person he is underneath all that bravado,” she paused. Her next words sliced right through my heart. “And I see you, Rowan. I see the secret you hide and how it eats at you. I wish I could give you what you wish, but not even I have that power. But I can give you the next best thing. We can pour our love for him into each other.”

  Her words shot through me like darts of fire, breaking apart the vice, burning away the anxiety that whispered the ugly things. She was right, she loved him as I did, and that made her a part of myself, a part I wished so dearly I could embrace. Bloody hell, how did this girl know exactly what to say to heal me?

  Maeve sat up, swinging her legs underneath her, pushing her face toward me. “Do you want to make love to me?”

  “I already used up my condom.”

  Maeve laughed as she bent forward. I lowered my head, bringing my lips to hers. The kiss lit up every part of my body, bearing down with all my hidden feelings, drawing them to the surface, baring them the way Maeve bared her skin.

  I fancied I could taste a masculine saltiness on her lips. Corbin. My cock grew harder.

  Maeve broke the kiss, gasping. “Look in the top drawer.” She pointed to the tiny chest of drawers beside her bed. A stack of physics volumes and a slim book called Sacred Polyamory were stacked on top.

  I pulled open the drawer. There, nestled on top of a stack of neatly folded underwear, was a box of condoms. A whole box.

  I stared at it, unsure of what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

  Did I really want to do this? Did I want to be with Maeve, knowing how I felt about her, knowing how she felt about … all of us?

  I did. More than anything, I did.

  THIRTY-FOUR: MAEVE

  Rowan wrapped me in his arms, nestling his head against my chest. I kept expecting him to realise where he was, to get up and leave and return to his neat bedroom with everything where it should be. But he cradled me closer, his lips moving as he fell asleep.

  I couldn’t sleep. My mind whirred with a million thoughts and emotions. A hot throbbing in my veins kept my body awake, alive. I’d never felt more alive. Was it the thrill of sleeping with three guys in one night? Of having my first threesome, and liking it? Or was it the hum of magic in my veins?

  After an hour of staring at the wall, I knew sleep was not going to find me. I slid out from under Rowan and padded down the steep tower steps.

  Even though it was supposed to be the middle of summer, a sticky rain fell from the sky, pattering against the roof of the covered walkway and splashing down the gutters into the courtyard below. I walked close to the wall, trying to avoid getting hit by any errant droplets.

  I stopped in front of the picture of my mother, my heart hammering as I looked up at her face. But once again, she stared back at me with those glittering, playful eyes – no hint of the horror I’d seen earlier.

  Had I really imagined it?

  If any other person in the world had told me they’d seen a painting move, I’d be the first one offering alternative explanations. It was the light. It was an underlying image the artist had painted over. It was stress or tiredness. You are going blind. You are going crazy.

  But I’d seen it. And I knew it wasn’t any of those things. Except the going-crazy one. I’d barely been at Briarwood for ten days and already I’d discovered I was a witch, attempted to deal with the murder of my parents, battled the fae king who turned out to be my father, become sexually and emotionally involved with all the castle’s inhabitants, and started to like drinking tea. It might be enough to make anyone start seeing things.

  You’re not crazy, Maeve. A voice, soothing and musical, danced through my head. I pressed my hands to my ears, but the words kept flowing through my consciousness. I’m here. I’m right here.

  Don’t do this to me. Go away.

  I flung myself away from the portrait and rushed down the stairs, my head whirring. I’d always been able to trust the evidence of my eyes and my mind, I’d always known that I could look at the world in a rational way. But now I was hearing voices, and seeing paintings move, and I couldn’t explain it. That terrified me more than Daigh and his fae did.

  A light shone from the library. Of course Corbin’s still awake. I could do with some of his empathy right now. I quickened my pace, peeking around the corner of the door, expecting to see Corbin hunched over his desk, dealing with his insomnia the only way he knew how – by burying himself in his books.

  To my surprise, the figure hunched over the desk wasn’t Corbin, but Blake.

  “Princess,” he grinned, looking up as I hovered in the doorway.

  “How did you know I was here?” I stepped into the room. Something in Blake’s eyes drew me in, moving my feet of my own accord. The ache inside me – the one I thought Flynn and Corbin and Rowan had very much sated – flare
d to life, deeper and more urgent than ever. That seemed to happen whenever Blake was nearby.

  “I smelled you.” Blake placed a bookmark in the open volume in front of him, and snapped it shut. “You have a hot, spicy cent that’s utterly intoxicating. It trails around the castle like a ribbon, and when you’ve been shagging those boys of yours, your musk is unmistakable.”

  “So you’re saying I stink?”

  Blake stood up. I was pleased to see he was no longer wearing the black linen clothes of the fae. He’d borrowed something off Flynn – baggy black cargo pants and a green shirt that made the silver flecks in his eyes glimmer.

  “I’m saying you’re a welcome distraction.” Blake trailed his fingers off the end of the desk, then raised them to my face, trailing a sizzling line along my jaw. “Why are you down here? I thought you were curled up with the weird one.”

  “Rowan? I was but … I couldn’t sleep. What are you doing here?” Something in Blake’s expression when I’d caught him coming back into the kitchen made me wonder if he was up to something. But there wasn’t exactly much he could get up to. He was in just as much danger as the rest of us. If he wanted to save his own skin, he’d have to work with us.

  “I’m researching our powers. Corbin doesn’t seem to want me touching his precious books, so I took the rare opportunity after you finally conked him out to look at some of the more interesting volumes.” Blake withdrew his finger from my chin, sending a sharp pang of disappointment through my stomach. He patted the large volume on the desk. “They have a lot to say about you.”

  “Me? But you’re the anomaly here – the human spirit witch raised by the fae. You can already do so much more than I can.”

  Blake snorted. “Hardly. I have a tenth of the power you have, if that. It’s humming in your veins right now, released by all the shagging you’ve been doing tonight. Can’t you feel it?”

  I stared down at my wrists, turning my attention inwards. He was right. Heat hummed through my veins – tingling along the inside of my skin, like effervescence spreading rising to the surface.

  “You’re one of a kind, Maeve Moore. Daigh created you deliberately. Half spirit witch, half fae. There hasn’t been one like you for centuries.”

  “So there was another like me?”

  Blake nodded. “There’s nothing about her in these books except for shadows and hints, but all the fae told stories of her. She was a mighty warrior. Apparently it was she who led the fae in the ritual to raise the Slaugh.”

  “She ... “ Of all the things I’d expected Blake to say, that was not it. “She helped kill millions of people?”

  Blake shrugged. “If it helps, at least half of them probably deserved it.”

  I rubbed my temple. “I can’t deal with this right now. I just heard a voice inside my head. Out there in the hall.”

  Blake flipped through the pages in the book. “There’s some stuff in here about spirit users hearing voices, but it’s usually in relation to talking with the dead. And trust me, f you could talk to the dead, you’d know about it. The damn things are everywhere and they never shut up—”

  I pressed my lips to his. For the first time ever, Blake looked surprised. He recovered quickly, though, and responded to my kiss, his lips hot and raw against mine, his tongue insistent. Inside me, the power that had been awoken by my other carnal activities roared to life, rushing through my veins to converge on my lips.

  This kiss was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Magic flowed from my mouth into Blake’s, and from his mouth into mine, bringing with it a gasp of pleasure – a massage from the inside out. Flashes of memories that felt like mine but very definitely weren’t burned across my brain. Parts of my body that weren’t actually my own tingled and ached with desire. It was as though I was inside Blake at the same time I was myself, and both of us were aroused, and I got to feel it all at once.

  “Be careful, Princess,” Blake whispered against my lips as he wrapped his body in mine and leaned me back against the sofa. “This hunger will consume us both.”

  THIRTY-FIVE: MAEVE

  Shagging Blake on the sofa definitely drove out my fear, for a short time, at least. But his haunting words and the memory of the singsong voice by the painting came back as soon as I left the library. They pounded against my skull as I climbed back into bed. I wrapped my arms around Rowan, using his warmth to drive out my unease. He didn’t stir, his breathing remained even.

  My thighs ached. The walls of my pussy ached too – a delicious ache from the workout I’d had. If this was how people felt after running, well … no, I still wouldn’t be a runner. But I did want more of what I had last night. More of my guys.

  I could do with a lot less of the freaky voices and veiled warnings and compelling people through windows, though.

  Rowan opened one sleepy eye. “Hey,” he said, his voice husky with sleep. His dreadlocks fanned across the pillow.

  “Hey yourself.” I wrapped my arms around him and drifted off to sleep.

  I dreamed I was at my Uncle Bob’s house. I recognised the living room from the one time I’d visited, before the Crawfords politely suggested I didn’t return with them for subsequent appointments, probably because I’d ended up in a screaming argument with Uncle Bob about homosexuality being “unnatural,” that made his whole body puff up and him stand over Mum with his fist raised like he was ready to hit her.

  Dream me sure wasn’t standing up to him now. I huddled in a corner, my knees against my chest. Uncle Bob loomed over me, his finger waggling right in my face. Spittle streaked from the side of his mouth. Behind him, Aunt Florence sat by the roaring fireplace, her face calm, her eyes vacant as she stared off into space.

  “You’re a vile, evil, rotten creature. If you’d been raised in a proper Christian household, you’d know better than to talk back to the man of the house. I see I have a lot of work to do to straighten you out.”

  Uncle Bob ripped something from my hands and threw it in the fire. A college catalogue. He told me I was rotten and wicked for even thinking about attending a co-ed college, which he described as a pit of debauchery.

  “You’re going to bible college, young lady, and that’s final. It’s time you learned the truth about a woman’s natural place.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him, but terror closed my throat. His face loomed closer, and he raised his hand high and grabbed my hair, pulling my head back so hard tears sprung in my eyes. His other hand curled into a fist. It hovered in the air above me, a silent threat, a deadly beacon.

  I woke with a start to sunlight streaming through the window. Kelly. The dream was obviously my conscience, reminding me that I haven’t called her back. That was why I couldn’t speak in the dream. I glanced at the clock. 8AM. It would be midnight in Arizona. Far too late to call.

  I’ll call today. No matter what happens. I have to find the time to call her.

  I set my phone back on the nightstand. At least Kelly was safe in Arizona. And even though Uncle Bob was a bit of a twat, he was my Dad’s brother. He wasn’t really a brute, that was just my brain imposing my own fears. They loved Kelly, and I knew they’d be looking after her.

  ***

  After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, homemade pork sausages, and three cups of that delicious raspberry and vanilla tea, I helped Jane dress Connor in his baptism gown.

  Flynn joined us in the hall, looking dapper in a dark grey suit – a red tie setting off his flaming hair and the smattering of freckles across his nose. I remembered his cock sliding inside me last night, and had to squeeze my thighs together in an attempt to curb the ache that already began to pulse through me. We were about to go to church. Control yourself, Maeve.

  Flynn held up his phone. “I just called a rideshare. I tried to get Arthur to drive us in, but he’s a big grump.”

  An idea occurred to me. “Hang on, there’s something I need first.”

  I raced into the kitchen. Rowan stood behind the island, counting under his breath as he
chopped carrots into perfectly symmetrical sticks. “Hey, Rowan? I need some kind of glass jar or something. Small enough to fit in my purse.”

  He glanced up. “Jar?”

  “Yeah. We’re going to the church today and it occurs to me that if baptisms are somehow anathema to fae, then holy water might also be poisonous or something. So I thought I might try to sneak some out while the Vicar was in the middle of the Hail Marys.”

  Rowan smiled. “If Flynn was here, he’d have to tell you that Hail Marys are for Catholics, not protestant heathens.”

  “But you’re much cooler than that. So, jars?” I glanced around the huge kitchen. “Where would I find one?”