6. Cove

Chapter 6

Cove

The gardens and manor were precisely as I recalled. The army of servants, cowed and nervous, their heads constantly down, were the same as well, even if it was a different group of people.

Only Florian and Fawn were different from my childhood memories, but it couldn’t be denied just how different they were.

When I had just turned fifteen and newly arrived in Dawnchaser lands, Huxley was turning eighteen, and while the nearly three years between us felt like nothing now, in our teens both of us had thought it a lifetime of an age difference.

He’d been near Fawn’s age now, but they couldn’t have been more different if they’d been trying. She was sweet and kind and protective. She loved her roses and her doll and most of all, her brother. Huxley had been...so distant from everything that it had seemed almost an affectation to me, and from the way he’d constantly watched his father with hungry eyes, it had been clear what the purpose of the act was: he was seeking approval.

My own father, Orion, had truly been rather like my current reputation: cold and distant. He’d been disinterested in anything that wasn’t his first love, mathematics, or his second, power. My mother hadn’t even rated on the list, and Delta and I barely made it by virtue of being his legacy. He’d ruled Moonstriker lands with an iron fist for half his life until dying of an unexpected heart attack at fifty while sitting at the dinner table. It had been shockingly young for a Moonstriker, as we were generally a long-lived lot.

But all of that meant I’d understood even then, to some degree, that desperation for parental attention. The wish that it could be the elusive affection that our fathers had both seemed incapable of.

I’d given up by fifteen, though, and Huxley had still been after it at eighteen.

Meanwhile, in the present, Fawn seemed perfectly at ease with a man who’d said he planned to end her father’s life. I wasn’t sure if she didn’t understand what I meant to do, or if she simply didn’t give a single fuck about Huxley. Florian was clearly more conflicted, biting his lip and often lost in thought, never quite meeting my eye.

But not a single person yet had denied my right to be here. To take over. To order them and the army of servants around. To literally kill a man. It was like a strange dream where the laws of the Summerlands no longer applied.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at all, since that was how Dawnchaser lands had always been.

The vassal, whose name I’d learned was Olivier, left Florian to give me the tour, which he did, thorough if listless in the task. Frost, of course, came along and offered some of the mass of facts he’d learned about the estate in the just over three weeks he’d been there.

“The second level of the library was built by Florian’s great-great-grandfather for his wife, who was a Gloombringer and loved to read,” Frost said while I looked the library’s sturdy ladders over. It was an interesting way to increase the size of your library, adding a level above the first that could only be reached by ladder. It had nearly doubled their space for books merely by using wall space that already existed. Clever.

Unfortunately not useful for Moonstriker Tower’s library, which already had shelves from floor to ceiling, because as a tower, we didn’t have enormous, vaulted ceilings and swathes of unused wall.

Florian stared at Frost like he’d said something bizarre, which I was used to. Frost’s little fact nuggets were often things that stunned the people around him.

“She was?” he finally asked, sounding almost bewildered. “A Gloombringer?”

Frost went hesitant at that, like he wasn’t sure he should have shared. He did that sometimes, overshare, or share things people wished they didn’t know. Like the percentage of rat hairs allowed to be in prepackaged snacks. Or the fact that Huxley had murdered his own distant cousin when he’d killed Oberon.

“The four families used to be close,” I confirmed. “My own mother was a Sunrunner by birth.”

Florian blinked repeatedly, staring at me, then at Frost. I didn’t think we’d started speaking the wrong language, but it could have happened. As much as I didn’t give a single fuck about math or science, unlike most of my family, I was used to being drawn into those conversations that were practically in a different language and might not have even noticed.

“Your mother,” Florian repeated, tone flat and disbelieving. Maybe he thought I’d hatched from an egg or spawned myself from my father’s head like some goddess of legend.

“My mother,” I agreed. “Mira Sunrunner at birth.”

“Mira Moonstriker,” he said, then giggled and quickly slapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. “I don’t...that is, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about?—”

“It’s fine. She laughed at it too. She loved alliteration. Language was more her speed than science. She wrote mystery novels.” I motioned to the shelf where I was sure I’d seen a few of them on my first visit to the library, so many years earlier.

He went over to look at the shelf and sure enough, they must have still been there, because he turned to stare at me, wide-eyed. “Mira Moonstriker.”

I nodded.

There was a cleared throat back in the doorway of the room, and we all turned to look. It was Olivier, looking nervous and awkward. He glanced between myself and Florian repeatedly before focusing on me. “Dinner is ready, whenever you’d like to eat.” When he finished, he turned to look at Florian again.

Poor man, wanting so badly to treat Florian with the respect he should be due as his father’s heir, but there was me, making him nervous. At best, I was a threat, and he couldn’t ignore that.

I looked to Florian as well. “Is this the usual time the household eats dinner?”

He glanced at his watch and then gave a little nod, looking down at the glossy parquet floor rather than at me.

“I see no reason to upset the entire household’s schedule with my presence,” I informed Olivier, nodding to him. “Will you go get Fawn, or shall we?”

Fawn had gone off to put her flowers in her room when we’d gotten inside the house, happily holding the bouquet in one arm and her doll in the other, humming a jaunty tune, and we hadn’t seen her since. I doubted she was the kind of person who watched the clock waiting for meals or other standard scheduled things.

Olivier only blinked at me, rapidly, looking like I’d just asked him if he was “serving man” for dinner.

Florian cleared his throat, but when I looked to him, his eyes were still glued to the floor. “Fawn. She, um, doesn’t eat in the dining room. Father doesn’t want her there.”

I rolled my eyes at that, looking to Frost, who nodded. The disapproval in his expression was unmistakable, though this time I knew it wasn’t aimed at me, but at the fucking disaster the Dawnchasers continued to be.

“Frankly, Florian, I couldn’t give a fuck less what Huxley wants.” I turned back to Olivier. “Would you please ask Fawn if she’d care to join us in the dining room? She doesn’t have to, but we’d love her company.”

For the first time since I’d seen him, Olivier had a tiny smile on his lips as he bowed deep to me. “I would love to, Lord Moonstriker.”

Silent and looking lost in thought, Florian showed us to the dining room. Not that Frost couldn’t have done the same. Hells, not that I couldn’t have found it on my own.

Every inch of this cursed place was etched into my memory, from the ridiculous glossy forty-foot mahogany dining table to that gazebo out in the middle of the lavender field.

That gazebo.

Even now, nearly thirty years later, the scent of lavender made me sick to my stomach.

The table was, like almost everything in Dawnchaser lands, a ridiculous luxury. An affectation. There was no way they regularly had enough people eating at the estate to fill the seats it held. Forty-two. Who had—or even wanted to have—forty-two people at dinner? It was difficult to have conversations with more than one person at a time, let alone over forty.

Okay, no, it was forty-one chairs rather than forty-two now, since only one end of the table had a chair at it. Apparently, there could only be one person at the head of the table in Dawnchaser lands, and the other was permanently empty.

This dinner table, the memory of it, was why I hadn’t even consulted Delta after Father’s death. The week after he died at dinner, I’d gotten rid of the ridiculous, long, shiny black dining room table of our childhood and replaced it with a round one. No one sat at the head of the table in Moonstriker Tower, and no one ever would again as long as I lived there, however important they thought themselves.

I was tempted, in the moment, to demand the same happen here. That they get rid of the table, chop it up for kindling for all I cared, and replace it with a small round one. Except that the room was long and thin, not designed for a round table, but for the ridiculous opulence of this one. The other furniture was all in the same mahogany, with cream and gold linens and other accents. The crown molding was gilded, for fuck’s sake, and I didn’t doubt it was actual gold, not just metallic paint.

Also, doubtless Frost would inform me that the chemically treated, shellacked-to-death table would let off poisonous gasses if burned. That seemed likely, if only because everything in this place was poison.

Florian, head still down, went and sat in the chair to the right of the head of the table. It was impressive he didn’t bump into anything, the way he was refusing to look up. Frost took the chair to the left of the head. A servant was setting up a fourth place setting to Florian’s right, no doubt for Fawn.

No place for Coral, though I doubted she would mind that. She didn’t want to be a part of this place any more than I did, and she had likely encouraged the staff to only set the table for us and eaten in the kitchen.

That left one place setting, at the end of the table.

The last person I’d seen sit in that chair had been Cavan Dawnchaser, as my father had stubbornly sat at the opposite end of the table, glaring at him as they ate in silence. There had at least been a chair there in Cavan’s day. He hadn’t liked it, giving Father that much “power” in his home, but he hadn’t been so weak that he’d felt a need to stack the deck in such a strange, insecure way as to remove the chair entirely.

Besides which, Father would have simply taken a chair from a side of the table and seated himself there anyway.

Father and Cavan had spent the afternoon he arrived to retrieve me arguing, Cavan calling me weak, and Father saying Afton deserved prison time, even as the look in his eye said he agreed with Cavan.

I was weak.

I was a disappointment.

Iri squirmed with discomfort in my head, and I realized that she would only have known Father’s side of the disaster. She must have?—

No , she denied. He’d cut me out of everything by then. Stopped talking to me. Only used my powers when he wanted them. I don’t remember this at all .

He...he did what? I hadn’t even known one could cut their stone out and not let them see what they were doing.

Thank fuck for that , Iri snarked back. You’d have already done it if you knew how. Back when you were fifteen, probably .

And that...well, when I was fifteen, that was probably true. Now? Less so. Iri didn’t usually talk to me all that much, and it had been a lot lately, but even if her sudden chattiness annoyed me sometimes, her advice was always sound. Frankly, I thought it better than Delta’s counsel these days. Delta seemed to forget that emotions mattered as much as facts, and they were slipperier and harder to pin down.

The feel of Iri shivering across the back of my mind dragged me back to the present and conversation. Is everything okay? I asked her.

It’s . . . I don’t know you at all, do I?

And well, honestly, I didn’t have an answer for that. No one seemed to know me. Some days, I wasn’t sure I knew myself. Wasn’t sure if there was even a me to know, or if I was still just the shell of a fifteen-year-old boy, hollowed out and left to drift on the tides of life with no tether to anything. No growth, no personality, no hopes or dreams, just eternally continuing in the path set before me.

Fawn poking her head into the dining room distracted me from the conversation with Iri. Made me realize I’d been standing there glaring at the seat at the head of the table for who knew how long. Florian was staring up at me nervously.

It was what was expected of me, sitting at the head of the table.

Fuck that , Iri said, succinct as ever.

She was right. Fuck that. I snatched the plate up with one hand and the silver with the other and went to put it on the other side of Frost’s table setting.

He didn’t seem particularly surprised to find me on his other side, just grabbed the water and wine glasses from the end of the table and moved them in front of me when I sat down.

“I can come in?” Fawn asked, still in the door, looking suspicious. “It’s not allowed.”

I looked up at her, finishing resetting my silverware by feel so that I could meet her eye. “I’m here to kill your father, remember? His rules are going along with him. You can eat dinner wherever the hells you want.”

Her mouth fell open, but unlike any Dawnchaser—or anyone—that I’d ever met, it wasn’t because she was shocked at my pronouncement or language. No, her eyes lit up with wonder. “Wherever? Does that mean I can eat dinner in the garden? And Florian too? All of us?”

Florian bit his lip, looking nervous, once again clearly concerned for his sister.

Fuck Huxley Dawnchaser so fucking much.

I wasn’t just going to kill him when I found him. I was going to gut him first. I was going to assure him that I would eradicate every sign he’d ever been alive. I was going to erase his entire legacy in his lands, his home, and even his children. Oh, not by getting rid of them. But by giving them the life they deserved: one without him.

I drew myself up and met her eye. “Tonight, let’s eat here, since the food is already finished and here in the dining room.” I tried for earnest, even though I wasn’t terribly good at making my face that expressive. I had no practice. “Tomorrow night, we’ll ask the people who work in the kitchen to bring us our dinner out in the garden. There are tables there, and it’s beautiful. We can eat with the roses.”

She absolutely lit up, dancing her way into the room, spinning and twirling like a ballerina. “With the ro-oses,” she sang. “Winnie will like that.”

She sat at the table, laying her doll on the cloth next to her plate. Florian glanced from the doll, to me, and back, but I ignored it. Who gave a damn about her bringing a doll to the table? It seemed to make her happy, and I cared more about that than “manners.”

Stiff formal dinners had never been a particular love of mine, and seeing Fawn excited over each new dish they served was exactly the opposite of formality. Her table manners were imperfect, as I’d have expected if I’d given it any thought, and Florian kept wincing whenever she reached out to grab something or slurped her soup, clearly expecting some kind of reaction from me. I gave him a placid smile and took a spoonful of my own soup, which was delicious. No surprise the Dawnchaser kitchens were impeccable; they always had been.

This place is a literal hell , I mused to myself and oddly enough, to Iri.

It is , she agreed. You’ve never shared with me about why you hate it so much, but you do hate it. I hate it too. Those two? They grew up here. Imagine if this place was your entire life experience .

I couldn’t help it. I shuddered.

Imagine indeed. I thought of Winter, and . . .

But no. Winter hadn’t lived that. I hadn’t allowed it. It was perhaps the singular success of my young life, saving him from this place even if I’d failed him in every other way.

But now, apparently I had to save Fawn and Florian from this horrible place and the Dawnchaser family at large, including their own father.