12. Conor

12

CONOR

T he following day, Conor gritted his teeth as he finished his second loop of the mansion. There was no sign of Rowan as he made his way back to the great room, the click of his boots echoing off the green marble floors.

He forbade her from going outside alone, but after one day of good behavior, she seemed determined to test the boundaries of his patience. He pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out into the gray morning. The air was cool and humid, and smelled faintly of Rowan. He crossed the courtyard, dried grass crunching beneath his boots.

A soft melody floated over the courtyard wall. Conor darted around the corner of the mansion, following the sound. Spirits huddled outside the garden walls. Several of them swayed from side to side at the haunting, lovely melody that floated on the breeze. One leaned against the wall, her ghostly white hands crossed over her heart, her eyes squeezed shut in rapture. She looked like she might cry.

The last thing he needed was the servant spirits acting up and wandering about when they had things to do. He cleared his throat, and all five of them jumped and then scattered in different directions.

He walked to the opening in the stone wall where the iron gate hung open, creaking gently in the breeze. Rowan stood in the center of the garden in profile. Her auburn hair was braided, but wisps of curls slipped free and blew in the breeze. She wore a charcoal-gray dress that was slightly too large for her. Conor made a note to have his seamstress see that she had some proper clothes made in case she needed to change.

Rowan's eyes were closed, her whole body swaying with the melody. Conor was unsettled by how at home she seemed in his world. She stopped her song periodically and brought her hands down to the soil beneath the brown, dilapidated flower beds. She was about to sing again when he stepped into the garden and she noticed him.

"Hi," she said with a smile.

"Good morning," he said. "I thought I asked you not to come outside alone."

"I thought that was more of a suggestion. I'm still within the garden walls." She smiled guiltily, and he shook his head as he tasted burnt sugar on his tongue. Bold little liar . She reached her hand up to brush the hair from her eyes, and in doing so, smeared mud on her cheek.

He stepped closer and Rowan froze, her lips parting in surprise as he rubbed the smudge away with his thumb.

He jerked his hands away. "You had some mud."

"What is this place?" she asked, climbing to her feet and brushing the dirt off the knees of her dress. She sighed heavily at the mud-stained fabric.

Conor swallowed hard. "The Dark Garden. It used to be that most of the grounds were gardens, but this section was particularly lovely, beautiful flowers of deep purples and scarlets, so dark they were nearly black. As you can see, they've all died off. It's looked like this for many years."

He didn't say that this part of the garden had been tended to by someone he cared for many years before. Someone he'd hurt with his monstrosity—a loss that still haunted him and served as a warning not to let his guard down.

Rowan looked around. "Maybe it just needs some love. That's why I was singing. Sometimes when I—" She stopped short, as if she caught herself sharing too much. "Plants like music."

Conor looked around at the dried-up, browned plants. She certainly had her work cut out for her, but he supposed it didn't hurt.

"You should be careful about singing like that. You had an audience of spirits outside of the garden wall that I had to chase back to their jobs," he said.

"I did?" Rowan's eyes were wide as saucers. "Wait, you have spirit slaves ?"

"They aren't slaves. They chose to serve. Some spirits aren't quite ready to cross, or they have some sort of debt that they want to work off, or they simply want to be of service to me and the souls crossing over."

"Am I allowed to watch?" Rowan asked.

"Watch?"

"When you cross the souls?"

Conor nodded. "There's nothing to forbid it, although I expect you won't find it quite as exciting as you expect. The most interesting part is beyond the portal that opens and you cannot cross it because you're alive, Rowan."

She chewed her lower lip, looking contemplative.

Conor was about to say more when his gaze snagged on something bright green. He stepped closer to the rosebush. Sure enough, there was one green branch shooting up from the tangle of brown dead ones, and at the end of it, a cluster of buds, one of which bloomed into a dark scarlet rose.

"Mother slay me," Conor murmured.

"What is it?" Rowan asked. She stepped up next to him, looking at the bush.

"Nothing has bloomed here for years. I don't know how—" He stopped when he saw the look on her face. "What?"

She shook her head. "I swear it was like that when I came in."

He licked his lips and tasted burnt sugar. She'd lied twice in one conversation. Rowan was turning out to be a careless liar.

"Are you lying, little Red?" Conor asked.

She bit her lip and looked back at the rose. "Does it matter? I think we've established that we are friends—that we need each other right now to figure out a new bargain."

So that was what she was hoping to do—manipulate him.

Conor grabbed her by the shoulders. "It would be a mistake to look at me and see anything other than a monster."

"For you or me?" she asked, jutting her chin out defiantly. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, and he couldn't tell if it was calculated or accidental. It concerned him that he cared.

He smiled involuntarily, then immediately frowned. He couldn't remember a time he'd smiled so much. It was yet another sign of his lack of control.

"Is this the version of you that everyone fears?" Rowan asked, her fingers grazing the front of his tunic.

Conor almost laughed. She either had no fear or no sense of self-preservation, and he wasn't sure which was worse. "So eager to meet the Wolf everyone cowers for?"

"No." She bit her lip. "More like I've seen pretty faces that hide common monstrosity my whole life. I'm starting to doubt everything I've ever believed. I think maybe you're not as scary as you think."

That decided it. Rowan had no survival instinct at all. He could not have her being fearless when he'd spent every moment since meeting her thinking about ruining her. Her recklessness stoked his own, like a match to tinder.

It was a risk. Changing form made Conor wilder, and she was already irresistible. Still, she needed to understand who he truly was. She needed to understand the danger in thinking of him as anything other than the deadly menace he was. He could handle it. He'd taken the tincture that morning.

So he let the darkness in. He let it wash through him with its familiar heat. His power helped him take the form of whatever the observer expected and, if he dove deeper, their worst fear.

Her eyes went wide, and he waited for fear that never came. When Conor looked down, his hands were claws, his arms dusted in dark hair. It was what most people expected of him.

Rowan didn't cower. She reached up and brushed her hand over his cheek with tenderness so startling that he flinched.

No one had ever reacted that way. She welcomed the dark like it was her only friend.

He caught her hand in one of his clawed fists and wrenched it away. It wasn't safe to be so close when she smelled so good—when her heart kicked up and he heard the way the blood rushed through her veins like a symphony of life.

"I'm not the hero of this story, Rowan," Conor growled.

"I know," she said, jerking her hand away, careful not to cut herself on his claws. "I am."

Conor froze. What did she know? If she knew her true power, he needed to stay far away from her. "Now why would you say that, lass?" he challenged, brushing her cheek with his claw.

She held his gaze with a fierceness that sent a fever through him. "I'm the one who holds it all together. The hero is the one who has courage when they're scared but does the scary thing anyway. As far as I can tell, everyone else gets to stay safe while I do the brave work. That's what heroes do."

Conor studied her, looking for a lie, but her heart gave no false beat. Her breath was even, if a little shallow, and there was no hint of burnt sugar in his mouth. In this form, his sense of smell was even more powerful. She smelled like honesty, freedom, absolution. He leaned closer. If he could just taste her lips, he could?—

He stopped himself and backed away. Years of cultivating self-control, and somehow he couldn't even think straight when he was this close to Rowan. How quickly he forgot when she stood there looking so small and vulnerable that she could just as easily hurt him as he could her.

"You need to learn how to defend yourself," Conor said.

"I know how to defend myself. Finn taught me."

Conor clenched his teeth so hard it hurt. Again, there was that hint of someone else in her life. "Who is Finn?"

Her courage suddenly gone, Rowan blushed, trying to hide behind wisps of hair that fell in front of her pinked cheeks. "My friend."

"You don't have any friends."

She flinched and he knew immediately it was much too harsh. He'd never worried about being too harsh with Orla, but Rowan was something else entirely. Though she had the same hard outer shell as her predecessor, it was clear she hadn't steeled her heart quite as effectively. Conor didn't like how easy it was to hurt her. He didn't like the way she looked when she was trying not to cry, her full bottom lip jutting out, her green eyes glassy with unshed tears.

"I know that, but what else do you want me to call him?" Rowan snapped. "He's a person who treats me like a human being, and he taught me how to navigate forests and throw a punch."

"And I suppose he did this out of the kindness of his own heart?" Conor asked. The way the men of Ballybrine gravitated toward the forbidden fruit that was the Red Maidens was one of the most enduring things through time.

"Actually, I think he did it because he's in love with me."

Conor almost laughed.

"Or, rather, he's in love with an idea of me," she corrected herself.

She really did understand the way the world around her worked, and any bit of humor or disbelief that tugged at Conor evaporated. He'd done exactly what everyone in Ballybrine did; he'd treated her as an object instead of a person.

He'd wanted her to see the truth, but now that she did, he could suddenly sense the potency of that fear in her—that she'd disappear and be nothing to anyone. She was achingly aware of how temporary she was without his reminding her.

Her eccentric behavior suddenly clicked—the way she scrubbed and scrubbed at her dress so she wouldn't leave a mark. The way she treated every library book as if it were an ancient document. The way she touched the whole world with the delicacy of a spring breeze, afraid to disturb the beauty around her with her very existence.

She'd bought into the belief that she was only worth what she could sacrifice, and so she actively participated in erasing her presence from the world on instinct.

Conor felt furious with her, with Ballybrine, with the Mother—mostly with himself. He'd fallen into the same trap as everyone else. He treated her with an impermanence that made her believe her value was inconsequential. Perhaps he'd been going about this all wrong. He was so afraid to get close, sure he'd lose control, but what had helped him numb away Orla and Evelyn before her, was taking the time to know them. In small ways, he'd let them in.

Somehow, he wasn't confident that caring about Rowan would help. He needed objectivity. She was a puzzle he needed to solve as soon as possible.

Instead, Conor tapped back into his power, pushing deeper into Rowan's fears. His form shifted again, and her eyes went wide in genuine fear. She wasn't seeing him as a monster. She was seeing something much worse. His power was both physical and psychological, so it could cause lucid hallucinations.

He closed his eyes, and he saw a family—he assumed hers—living happily as if she'd never been born, never died for their safety, never loved them even while they couldn't love her back. He saw a young woman with gray eyes and dark braids peacefully pruning her herb garden alone. He saw a handsome huntsman marrying a lovely blonde lady. He saw a happy, healthy, Rowan-less world.

When he opened his eyes, Conor expected she would be a helpless mess, sobbing on the dry grass like most of his victims after he showed them such things. Instead, she stood there blinking at him with just a few rogue tears on her cheeks.

"You think I don't know my own fear?" Rowan rasped. "You think I haven't looked at it every day? That I haven't known since I was dragged to that tower on the edge of the Dark Wood at five years old? Maybe I didn't understand fully then, but I've had a long time to befriend it. I know exactly what awaits me."

Conor opened his mouth to speak, but she just held up a hand.

"Fear is a worthless emotion because it won't save me. Fear is poison. If you take it all at once—if you let it surprise you—you're done for. But if you take a little bit every day, it loses its potency. Sure, it takes the light out of everything, but at some point, it's the only way to survive," she said. "There are only things I don't fear any longer and things I don't know to be afraid of yet."

Conor swallowed hard. The words were a knife slicing through his chest. He stared at her, stunned, speechless, as his magic dissipated. He'd been painfully wrong about her. She wasn't as delicate as she appeared to be. She was strong. It took courage to live with fear as a constant companion and still hold to the hope that she could outwit her fate. He felt ashamed for missing it.

"Rowan—"

"Don't. I don't want an apology," she huffed, turning back to look at him, the sun shining bright on her auburn hair. "You knew what you were doing, and you meant to do it. Don't apologize because you found out you were wrong. Don't apologize to assuage your own guilt. You're not sorry yet."

"I am," he said. He took her hand in his. "I'm sorry."

"You're not," Rowan snapped, wrenching her hand away. She pulled too hard, stumbling into the rosebush. She let out a soft curse as she pulled back.

The scent of lavender, vanilla, and spun sugar filled the air so strongly it nearly choked Conor. It mingled with a strange, coppery scent that took him too long to recognize.

Rowan held up her trembling hand. Blood dripped from the thorn pricks into the lines on her palm in a tiny river.

Conor met her wide eyes.

"Run," he growled. He tried to hold himself back, but he already felt powerless to the magic that demanded he devour her.

Recognition lit her eyes, and she turned and tore out of the garden.

Conor leaped to follow and was tackled to the ground by Charlie.

"Woah there, lad!" Charlie grunted. "You're losing it. I need you to settle down now."

"How did you know?" Conor gritted out. He didn't know why he asked. All of his reapers could sense his moods. It was their job to reap souls but also to protect the Wolf. He growled, half-fighting Charlie, half-fighting himself for control.

He couldn't lose Rowan the moment he realized how much he truly liked her. She might be the first woman in years strong enough to withstand what needed to be done to revive the Dark Wood and restore the balance between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.

Charlie wrestled with him. "Fight it, Conor. I see the way you look at her, and you'll never forgive yourself if you?—"

Conor tried with everything in him, but the pull to her was undeniable and so powerful it snapped what was left of his control. He threw Charlie across the garden and took off into the Dark Wood to hunt.