Chapter Fifteen: The Wind

Chapter Fifteen

Lincoln

THE WIND

Performed by The Fray

Just like the day before, after dropping Willow off, I returned to the studio and the fantastical art I was knee-deep in creating. I started to fill in the image of Willow in the cemetery but stopped almost immediately because I couldn't quite see her expression yet. Maybe because I'd seen too many on her real face. Terror. Fear. Defiance. Courage. Joy.

Instead, I turned to a sketchbook, trying to capture even a handful of the other ideas that had swept through me during the day. A butterfly darting through the opening of a cave in a forest with a clawed hand reaching out to capture it. A woman blowing a kiss to a gnarled tree stump that morphed into a man. More images than I could keep up with.

When Sienna reappeared, and the floor-to-ceiling circular window behind her turned her translucent form into the fiery colors of the sunset, I started a drawing of her as well.

When she realized what I was sketching, she huffed at me, crossing her arms over her chest as she snarled, This isn't about me, Lincoln. Go back to drawing her.

"Stop haunting me, and I'll stop drawing you," I told her, but I put down the pad and pencil.

Damn it! She stomped, looking so real and alive it was hard to imagine her not actually being there. What will it take for you to really let me go?

How could I truly do so when I'd never paid the price the women in my life had? And yet, I was also tired of living in this shadowy in-between world. Alive and yet not. Moving forward and yet not. In a hopeful moment, I'd reached out to Felicity, the mirage of her beckoning to me before I'd seen the truth—she'd just been another tunnel to hell.

But Willow…she was a true light. Even with her secrets, even with whatever she was running from, she practically glowed with an inner goodness. I wanted to hold it, savor it, make it mine even if I wasn't sure I'd ever earn it.

I made my way down to the bathroom to wash my hands, and my stomach rumbled loudly. After eating a microwave breakfast sandwich this morning, I'd gone all day again without eating. Looking at my image in the wavy, antique glass above the pedestal sink, I saw the wear and tear on my face. The dark bruising under my eyes. The pallor of my skin. I was going down a path that never ended well and needed to be righted.

When I came out of the bathroom, Sienna was furiously pacing the loft. She twirled on me, looking decidedly ghostly as she shrieked, There's nothing for you to earn! No price for you to pay! Stop feeling guilty for surviving!

For the first time, she looked nothing like the girl I'd once loved more than my own life. She was much darker—Gothic and ghoulish almost—and her voice was shrill as she continued to yell. I adored driving, you idiot! You know that. I loved putting my foot to the pedal and feeling the spin of the tires on the ground. The idea of going anywhere enticed me! Being in charge did even more. It felt like freedom to me. Like independence and power. So even if you didn't have the meds in you that night, I still would have taken the keys away. I still would have been in the driver's seat!

My hand went to my brow. She'd said this before. It wasn't new, and deep in my core, I knew there was a truth to her words. From the moment we'd learned to drive, she'd wanted to be the one at the wheel. So why had I held on so tightly to the notion it should have been me who died?

And the nonsense you feel over Lyrica? It makes me furious. She wanted you to be with my parents the night she was shot, she snarled. She knew it was important for you all to be together on the anniversary of my death. She didn't begrudge you that time with them.

Before I could stop myself, I snapped back, "I'm the one who forgot the ice on my way out of town. She wouldn't have been in that damn convenience store if I'd done the one thing she'd asked me to do!"

She doesn't blame you!

I headed for the steps with my anger growing. At her. At myself. At fucking life.

I didn't want to be stuck in this cycle. I didn't want to have darkness always tugging me back into its haze any more than I wanted my insomnia to tug me awake. But sometimes you didn't get what you wanted. Sometimes you just did the best with the cards you were dealt.

You let it go for a while, Sienna said. You let it go and had hope.

After Leya had been kidnapped because some fanatic thought her brown skin didn't mix with my white, I'd had a moment where I'd realized I couldn't control the evil of the world. And the way Leya had found love and goodness while right smack dab in the middle of it all had given me hope that I, too, could find happiness, if I let myself.

Felicity had entered at exactly the right moment. But any peace I'd found had been gone in a flash. She hadn't dealt well with my insomnia, acting as if I had a choice about it and telling me to just take the damn sleeping pills. When I'd told her I couldn't, when I'd told her about the hallucinations and my fear Sienna would return to haunting me, she'd tossed that aside too. "Excuses," she'd said, giving me my first glimpse of the ugliness that existed behind her fa?ade.

When I'd put the brakes on our relationship, she'd insisted on the trip to St. Micah to help us move past it even though she'd known I couldn't go. I'd finally convinced Leya into letting me show her art at the gallery, and the opening had been that week. But choosing Leya and her art over Felicity had simply tipped the scales more. She'd given me an ultimatum. Choose her, all in, a life together, or it was over.

How she'd expected me to show up on the island with an engagement ring in hand after that was beyond me. But it was what she'd leaked to the press—that I was proposing and that we might even elope. She'd made sure I'd seen the articles too, texting them to me with laughing emojis, thinking they'd pressure me into giving her a ring. Instead, it had strengthened my resolve to end it.

And when she came back from St. Micah, pleading for me to reconsider, I'd almost wavered until Hardy had told me what she'd been doing with my phone and my computers and the investigator.

Don't let Felicity's ugliness hold you back, Lincoln. She was never worth it. But Willow, she can be the light guiding you home. She can burn away every dark spot until there are none left, if only you let yourself have it—if you can convince her she needs you as much as you need her.

I whipped around to stare at what was left of the teen girl I'd once adored. The only girl whose finger I'd truly seen myself slipping an engagement ring on.

We glared at each other for a long moment, but I didn't respond.

Instead, I picked up the baseball cap from the window ledge where I'd left it and stepped out of the gallery, locking the door, and leaving Sienna behind.

The sun was gone, the twilight having taken over the town. Time for vampires and night creatures to creep from the shadows. I shook my head. No creatures here. No ghosts. Just my own damn conscience and too many days without food and rest.

Laughter and music spilled out on the street from the bar. Dancing with Willow earlier had lit me up from the inside out, made me crave losing myself in the movement of my feet and hips. But thoughts of entering that bar and dancing with a stranger didn't tempt me. It was only a moonlit-haired baker I wanted in my arms.

I turned the opposite direction, striding down the almost empty street toward the Chinese place and the takeout I'd never gotten the other night after the incident with the guy in the glasses.

My eyes scanned the cars parked nearby. No gray sedan with rusty hubcaps.

The car hadn't had a front license plate when it had zipped by Willow and me this afternoon, and the back plate had been covered in dirt. I had nothing to give Hardy. It had panicked Willow, but I'd told her I didn't believe it had anything to do with her or even with me being Lincoln Matherton. But it didn't mean it wasn't something that could become an issue.

More darkness drawn to me.

Would I forever be the demon in my painting, drawing someone like Willow into my lair, only to have her become the bloody leg sticking out of the bedsheets? Would I destroy her?

As I lifted a hand to open the restaurant door, a chill hit me. Eyes on me. And while I was accustomed to the feeling of being watched by my detail or the paparazzi or some everyday Joe staring at me with curiosity, this felt different. Heavier.

I did another scan of the street and saw nothing.

Maybe it was just Sienna's ghost glaring at me from the window of the gallery.

Fuck it all.

Let the eyes search and find.

Nothing to see here but a man ordering sweet and sour chicken.

If that seemed worthy of a photo, let them take it.

? ? ?

My body woke, itching and scrambling for me to get out of bed when I'd barely been asleep for an hour. Lying there was useless and counterproductive. So, at barely eleven, I headed downstairs to the study. The first thing I did was check the security app I'd left open on the desktop. The front yard was cast deeply in shadows. The lantern-like streetlamps near the cemetery and farther past my neighbor's pushed dim, circular rays through the mist, but the light never quite reached my house.

The Pathfinder was parked out front of Willow's place. No sedan in sight.

I sat in the rolling office chair, hands on top of my head, looking out the multipaned window to the garden that had been shaped and molded by the landscaping company I'd hired. It was too neat. Too tidy. Willow's garden screamed of whimsical creatures dancing with tiny flutes and flitting wings. I wanted that. I wanted the magic of fairies and instead had brought the stiff formality of my family's home with me here.

Wasn't this move to Cherry Bay about finding something more? Something different?

Finding me.

I spun the chair around, taking in the bookshelves. Straight and neat. But the knickknacks peeking from the stacks of books hinted at the fantastic. Smiling Buddhas. A pewter dragon with its wings spread.

I rose, pulling down the art history books I'd kept from my college days and then some of the oversized coffee-table books filled with photography and art. I spread them out on all the available surfaces, flipping through them, stopping whenever an image somehow clicked inside me.

And when I stood back after hours of work and scanned across the open pages, I saw the beginnings of a theme. An extension of what I'd been drawing and painting for the last few days. Sienna's words about Willow's light burning away the dark were taunting me. But maybe we weren't supposed to exist without the dark. Maybe without it, we'd never see the light for what it was. We needed both in order to be whole. The yin and the yang. Just like it was possible that we needed a bit of make-believe, a little bit of magic, to exist alongside the reality so we could understand and appreciate both.

We needed to be reminded that heroism existed as well as evil.

Maybe I was losing my hold.

It was just fanciful thinking to dwell on villains and heroes.

This wasn't a story or a dream. This was real life.

I inhaled sharply, taking a moment to catalog my physical and emotional state in an attempt to center myself. To pull myself back from the dark abyss that sleeplessness could send me spiraling into. The odd prickling sensation that always curved up my neck and scalp after days with little sleep mingled with a haze as real as the mist on the streets. Neither was ever a good sign for rational thinking. Add to it the anxiety that spiked every time I thought about seeing Sienna again and the incompetence I felt in protecting Willow, and the danger of paranoia stood just around the bend.

I'd be grasping for the brushes of reality before long.

And yet, when I looked back at the pages spread out around me, I still saw a fairy tale emerging. I sensed hope. New beginnings. Possibilities.

I forced myself away from the study, focused on the mundane aspects of fixing a tea concoction purported to soothe, and then returned to my bedroom. I took a shower and let the heat work its way into my bones as much as the tea. Only when weariness draped over me like a weighted blanket did I climb back into bed.

A pair of fairies with faces like Sienna and Willow danced into the midnight of my mind. Hair spun from the silk of moonbeams flew about them. Sky-colored eyes in different shades of blue and gray beckoned. One of them was all sassy, snapping, pounding feet, while the other was laughing, smiling, prancing leaps. Their own version of dark and light leading the way in different directions.

I didn't even realize my eyes had drooped, didn't even realize I'd actually slept, until my phone, singing out my sister's ringtone from the pocket of my jeans I'd dropped on the floor, woke me. I didn't have a clock on my bedside table, as it only added to the ants crawling through me when I woke in the middle of the night, but there was some light peeking through the blinds. A gray otherworldliness declaring the early morning.

I'd slept.

The music stopped and then started again, and I finally realized it wasn't Katerina's tone, but Juliette's. And because she rarely called, and especially not this early, I scrambled from bed to retrieve the phone.

"What's wrong?"

"Hey, good morning. Did I wake you?" Her question was soft and hid a hint of worry.

I'd never tell her she had when she hardly ever reached out.

"No," I lied, rubbing my jaw and feeling the hint of stubble I hadn't shaved in a few days. So unlike the neat-and-tidy Lincoln the world was used to seeing. "What's up?"

She hesitated, and that only increased my worry. "Nerdette, talk to me."

We went weeks, even months, without using any of our nicknames, and now I'd used both my sisters' in a matter of days. More things that screamed different since I'd moved. Since I'd let Cherry Bay and Willow slide under my defenses.

Juliette laughed, and it was as low and soft as her voice. She talked so quietly and moved with an almost uncanny stillness that had people missing her stubborn determination, especially when it was in contrast to Katerina's in-your-face energy. "Mom made me call. She says you've been dodging her."

I bit back my quick retort. "I haven't been ignoring her, or anyone else, any more than normal."

"How's the new house? The gallery?"

I frowned, picking up my jeans and heading for the closet.

"Since when are you the one to give me the third degree? Tell me why you really called."

"I do want to know how things are with you, but you're also right. I'm worried about Katerina."

I dropped the jeans in the hamper as the concern I'd felt the last couple of times I'd talked to our sister hit me again.

"She has been acting weird," I said. "She insists she's just working too hard on this new film."

"I don't like the guy she's seeing."

"What? She has a boyfriend?"

Juliette let out an exasperated half-laugh. "I don't know that I'd call him a boyfriend. More like someone she's bang—"

"Stop. Stop right now. I don't want to know about either of your sex lives. I can't handle it. My little sisters will never have sex in my mind. End of story."

She laughed again, but then it died away. "He's creepy."

"Define creepy."

"I don't know how to explain it, Lincoln. That's just what I feel when he looks at me."

"When did you meet him?"

"When I flew out for the movie premiere in February."

"Who is he?"

"Some executive producer. A guy with power who knows he has it and likes to wield it," she said.

"That doesn't sound like someone Katerina would ever be interested in," I said honestly. Silence settled down between us. "Do you want me to have Hardy reach out to her detail? See what's going on?"

"No. She'd be pissed if we went around her like that."

She would. "Okay, then, we tag-team her. We schedule a time and call her together."

A door slammed in the background, and I could hear a voice telling Juliette she was needed. "We just had a three-car pile-up come in. I've gotta go. I'll text you later, and we can set up a time. Make sure you respond."

"I'll respond. I've been making a concerted effort to keep my phone with me." It was the truth, even if it was Willow's entrance into my life that had caused it and not the promises I'd made to my family.

After we hung up and I saw the time on the screen, I realized I'd gotten nearly five hours of sleep. For the first time in days, my body felt energized. Ready. Actually eating a full meal the night before had also helped.

I slid into a pair of basketball shorts and a T-shirt and headed for my home gym for the second day in a row. I'd work out, eat another breakfast sandwich, and then head to the gallery. I'd establish a new routine and shake the hallucinations that had taken hold. I'd throw off the dark trying to drag me down. If part of that routine just so happened to include walking a pale-eyed, moonlit-haired baker to work and back home, so be it.

Two hours later, I pulled up to the curb outside the gallery to find a large canvas wrapped in a tarp propped by the door and a dark-haired, fair-skinned woman pacing in front of it. As I slid out of the Range Rover, she looked over at me with brown eyes hooded by heavy brows.

"Trinity, I take it?"

She nodded. "Thanks again for seeing me."

I unlocked the door and punched in the alarm code while she drifted around, taking in the mostly empty gallery.

"It's a great space for art," she said in that same, oddly broken voice she'd had on the phone.

I nodded, lifting a chin to the painting she'd dragged in with her.

"If you don't mind…" She hesitated. "I'd like to set a couple of the pieces up before you see them."

"Sure. Take your time. I'll head upstairs to the studio. Just holler when you're ready."

"Thank you. Really."

"Don't thank me yet. I only promise to be honest." But I wouldn't be cruel. You didn't have to be cruel to deliver a critique. Some people didn't understand that, using harsh words that often destroyed a person's confidence more than not selling their work did. Although, both were still rejection, a kind of death to us creative types.

I made my way up to the third floor, leaving the door open so I'd hear Trinity when she called. After spending hours looking at the art books last night, I viewed my started pieces with a new, critical eye that could be both a hindrance and a blessing.

All the art I'd started still spoke to me. The play of darkness and lightness that existed in every corner of humanity was displayed on the canvas. The demon painting needed a partner piece. An angel. A hero. The duo would carry the same theme as the cemetery with the sharp shadows and Willow bringing the light. The yin and yang that had haunted my early morning frenzy in the office.

I itched to pick up my brush again but couldn't afford to get lost in it with Trinity downstairs.

When she called out a shaky, "I'm ready," I jogged down the stairs only to freeze once the art came into view. The center piece was larger than Trinity herself. I wasn't even sure how she'd gotten it into the room until I saw a kid with a backpack lingering outside.

All three pieces she'd arranged were…breathtaking.

Real and fantasy combined.

A castle was brushed along the middle canvas. The light from the breaking dawn was reflected in windows shimmering like jewels. The forest crept close. Briar vines and thorns dangled with flowers edging over the ground. The castle itself was stunning, the marble sparkling as if diamonds were embedded in the stones. But the brilliance of the castle wasn't the focus of the painting. Instead, it was the dragon curled around the top turret. I could almost see it breathing. Could almost smell the singed air as smoke drifted like fog from its nostrils. Could almost feel the slice of pain that would come from touching the cold scales gleaming with an iridescent light. It seemed real and yet completely magical at the same time.

The two canvases on either side showed the forest surrounding the castle. Dark trees and bright flowers. Cherry blossoms you could almost smell. And amongst the leaves and branches, peeking out, dancing and leaping toward the castle, was a menagerie of animals, fairies, and gnomes.

As if my thoughts in the middle of the night had made their way onto the canvas.

If Lyrica had told me what the subject of the paintings was when we'd talked, I would have laughed and told her no way. If I'd seen it on a website, I wouldn't have been much more inclined to reach out to the artist. In person, Trinity's art seemed real. As if I could literally step into the forest or reach out and touch the diamond-studded stones of the castle as the dragon roared above me, wings shifting the air as he lifted off, crumbling granite and wood beneath mighty claws.

Except, that didn't fit either because the dragon didn't look as if it was ready to destroy the castle. Instead, it looked like it was protecting it. A lover shielding their partner.

And that was when I saw it—a woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a look of ecstasy on her face reaching from one of the turret windows to stroke scaly skin.

It was exactly what I'd imagined last night.

Reality and magic.

Fantasy and truth.

Humanity. Imagination. Hope.

Love.

Lyrica was right, and so was Sienna.

Trinity was waiting for my reaction, chewing on her nails and pacing off to the side.

"It's perfect," I said with a grin.

Her eyes widened, her fingers dropped from her mouth, and she froze. "What?"

"First, the artistry is incredible. I don't even know how you did it, but the dragon's scales change colors as I move, and I swear I can smell the sulfur of his breath. And, Jesus, the castle itself. It's literally glowing."

"The first time I saw the castle, the painting popped into my head."

"Wait. This is a real castle? Where?"

Trinity laughed, and with her beat-up voice, it sounded weirdly off-kilter. "It's actually just down the road a bit. It's called River Briar, and I work for the catering company the owners use for all their events, so I'm there quite often."

"There's a fairy-tale castle here in Virginia?" I repeated, shock turning me stupid.

"Yep. Some recluse built it, and no one even knew it was there for a long time. But after his daughter inherited it, they started using it for weddings and charity events, that sort of thing."

"Do all your pieces have the castle in them?"

"No." She shook her head and tugged on her turtleneck. It was then that I saw the scars. Long streaks down her throat. She'd been hurt. Somehow. Someway. Another woman with wounds. I almost let out a dark laugh. Leave it to Sienna and Lyrica to bring me another person who'd suffered and needed looking after. Needed good in their lives.

It only made me think of Willow and whatever it was she was hiding from—whomever she was hiding from. My eyes darted out the window, but I couldn't see the café from this angle. She wasn't supposed to be there today. She was supposed to be tucked away in the cottage with her own bit of fairy-tale magic out front.

Trinity bent to a backpack that she'd left by the door and brought out a tablet. "It's not the same. I swear they look better in person, but…"

She handed me the device. It was open to a seascape with a mermaid peering over a modern-day sailor's shoulder as he drank from a mug that read, Life is more than coffee, but coffee is life . I swiped to the next image and saw a frog chasing after a little girl as if caught in a game of tag. The girl wore jeans and a Watery Reflection band T-shirt. Modern and yet a fairy tale. Another painting had a person with a backpack and sneakers walking along the forest floor while, in the treetops above, little lights waved, and I swore I could hear wee-folk pipes playing.

They weren't the same on the screen as they would be in real life, but if the paintings in front of me were anything to go by, the light would shimmer from all of them. The scents and sounds would almost twirl through the air. Trinity captured and used life and light in such a vivid way it was tantalizing.

It firmed up the ideas that had started to form last night. Her paintings were real life and fantasy twined together. Just like my own. Fairy tales in our modern world. Good and bad. The best and the worst. And in the end, the magic winning out.

"I definitely want to do a show," I told her.

Her eyes lit up, a brightness seeping through the dark clothes and the shadows that clung to her. "Really?"

"Really."

She squealed and jumped and spun around. She came at me, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tight before dropping back and looking at me with startled eyes. "I'm so sorry. I don't know why—"

I waved her off. "Don't worry about it." I pointed down at the screen, which appeared to be just a normal beach. Water and sand and early morning dawn. "What's this one?"

She stepped closer, and we were head to head when I caught movement out of the side of my eye. When I lifted my gaze, I saw Willow framed in the doorway. Happiness instantly wove through me, and a sudden rush of air filled my lungs as if I'd been holding it ever since I'd last seen her.

I stepped toward her just as her eyes darted between Trinity and me. A look of surprise, and resignation, and maybe even sadness drifted over her, as if she thought there might be something between Trinity and me that didn't exist. The hug I'd shared with Trinity had been a connection born purely of art, whereas the strings binding me to Willow felt like a permanent part of my soul. And in that moment, I knew Sienna had been right. Willow was the light guiding me home. She'd be the beam that ensured I was never lost in the dark again.