27. Corbin

Maeve took the letter and went to her room, slamming the door behind her. I cringed as the sound echoed around the castle.

Arthur probably shouldn’t have said the High Priestess thing.

One by one, the guys all disappeared off to their various activities – Arthur to practice his sword fighting, Flynn to bang around in his workshop, and Rowan to pick herbs in the garden.

I stayed hunched over the desk, the Briarwood coven’s grimoire open in front of me. But every time I tried to focus on the scrawled words and vivid drawings, the ink blurred in front of my eyes. My thoughts wouldn’t focus on anything but the horrible, twisted expression on Maeve’s face when she found out her adoptive parents had been murdered.

Murdered…and I hadn’t been able to save them. I’d been so distracted by seeing Maeve on her twenty-first birthday and knowing that soon she’d be coming into her power. I thought we’d made it – twenty-one years without the fae finding her and trying to kill her. When Kalen grabbed hold of her, I didn’t take the time to think, to assess the situation. I acted on impulse, and my impulse got Maeve’s parents killed.

More innocent lives I couldn’t protect.

I buried my face in my hands. Across the room, the grandfather clock ticked down the seconds. If I didn’t figure out what spell the fae were trying to pull off, I’d soon be adding a lot more innocent lives to my already impressive tally.

“Corbin.”

I jerked my head up.

Maeve stood in the doorway, her hip jutting out in a confident stance. She wore a simple black sundress covered in a pattern of cherry blossoms. The swoop of the skirt drew my eye to her long legs and those incredible hips. She crossed her arms and stared at me with an expression that was half rage, half curiosity.

I gulped, rubbing my eyes. Had I been asleep? I’d barely managed a couple of hours the last few nights. This was a particularly bad bout of insomnia. I’d been so distracted with the books, I hadn’t even noticed before how tired I felt, how my head throbbed under the strain of the dim lamp that lit my desk. The light from the windows had faded, and I had to squint to make out Maeve’s features from across the room.

Books and languages always had that effect on me. Time stood still while I patiently caressed them into giving up their secrets.

“You didn’t come down for dinner,” Maeve said. She held up a plate. “Flynn was showing off his face. It’s nearly healed, which is pretty amazing. For not-doctors, you guys sure have the magic touch.”

“We do our best.” I rubbed the spot on my shoulder where the fae’s claws and blade cut me. Even though the wounds had healed, the skin still itched a little.

Maeve waited for me to elaborate, but I didn’t. I really didn’t think Maeve was in a place yet where she could deal with the idea of healing spells, especially not since I’d already used one on her.

“I called and called for you,” she said. “You didn’t answer, so I brought you up some leftovers. It’s this weird pie that’s filled with meat, which makes no sense to me but it was delicious, so what do I know?”

“I… I didn’t hear you.” I glanced at the clock – it was half eight. How is it half eight already? I only sat down a few moments ago.

“I know. I’ve been watching you for ages.” Maeve sashayed across the room, placing the plate on the corner of the desk. “You look exhausted. What are you doing?”

I’m still trying to figure out what spell the fae are trying to perform,” I explained, pointing to the pictures in the book. “It’s hard because their magic is very different from ours. I’m hunting for references to spells they performed in the past. This is our coven’s grimoire. Or rather, one of them – we’ve filled up a few volumes over the centuries. The fae have made magical assaults on our realm before, and the coven managed to hold them back. I figure if they’ve tried anything like this in the past, our ancestors would’ve explained how to defeat it.”

“Grimoire?”

“It’s a spell book passed down through the generations. Each coven writes down their own studies, magical workings, incantations…” I turned a page, and showed her an entry written in my own chicken scratch. “Each coven appoints one member to act as historian. I wasn’t going to trust Flynn to do it for us.”

Maeve bent over the page, staring at the boxes and branches I’d drawn across the page. “This is some kind of family tree?”

“Sort of. It’s tracing the lineage of the coven, and helps us figure out which descendants might carry particular magical genes.” I pointed to the boxes. “Here’s me and my parents, and my other siblings. My mum is an Earth witch, and Dad’s an Air witch – so we have a range of different elements. Arthur’s mother is Fire, which is a dominant gene, so I always knew he’d have the fire ability. That’s why I started searching for him first.”

“Who are these people?” Maeve pointed at five other names written alongside our parents’. I noticed she didn’t mention the big blank space next to her mother’s image.

“Other members of the last Briarwood coven. I was trying to trace them all, find out if they had children who exhibited elemental powers. The last coven was quite large – fifteen members at its height – but many of them were killed in the last battle with the fae. Those who were left either couldn’t or didn’t want to perform magic again, so they all lost touch.”

“Except your parents.”

“Yeah.”

I pointed to two of the names I’d joined with a dotted line. I needed to distract Maeve so she wouldn’t ask me more about my family. “Colleen and Darren Beckett. They were the second people I tried to track down. The more spirit users a coven has, the stronger it becomes. Colleen and Darren were both spirit users, and according to the coven records, they had a child the same year my parents had me. Spirit is a recessive gene, so?—”

“So any child they had would also be a spirit user?”

“You really are brilliant, you know that?” I grinned at Maeve, who beamed back at me. Her scent invaded my nostrils – sweet and fresh, like the first summer blueberries picked straight off the bush. Just having her so close to me wiped away my exhaustion. “Colleen and Darren weren’t recorded among the dead after the fae attack, and I managed to track them to a house in Wiltshire. Unfortunately, they don’t live there anymore. No one does – the house is condemned. No one would buy it because of the gruesome murder-suicide that happened inside, so now it’s a mess, and it’s probably been torn down now?—”

“Back up a second – what murder suicide?” Maeve’s mouth hung open, her lips curling back. For a horrifying moment, I imagined what it would be like to slide my cock between those lips, to feel her tongue run down the length of my shaft…

The air between us heated up, and I became painfully aware that the edge of her breast grazed my arm. From the sparkle in her eyes, it looked like she did, too…

I cleared my throat, tried to force myself to pull back from her, because it wasn’t her fault that being close to her made me into a beast. “Shortly after they moved into the house, Darren shot Colleen in the head and then killed himself with the same gun. But the weird thing is, the police records never mention a child.”

“That is weird.” Maeve’s words came out hushed, breathy. Her eyes smoldered. My cock pressed urgently against the fly of my jeans.

“Maeve…” Danger, Will Robinson.

She draped herself over the arm of my chair, her bangs flopping across my shoulder, brushing my skin, making all sorts of filthy visions dance across my conscience.

Don’t make a move you can’t take back. Never forget what you are guilty of.

“Corbin, I’ve been thinking…” Maeve drew a pattern on my knee with the tip of her finger, tracing a line of fire across my skin that shot straight into my cock.

“That sounds dangerous.”

This is dangerous.

Maeve had that look in her eyes, the look that said she was ready to act on her urges. And as much as I wanted her, as much as I thought I’d be the best candidate for magister, she absolutely should not choose until she knew everything.

“This spirit power I supposedly inherited from my mother, would it have anything to do with how I’ve been able to control everyone’s dreams?”

I swallowed.

“I don’t know. Spirit does occasionally manifest as dreamwalking and dream powers. So, ah, what happened in this dream of yours?”

The flush on her cheeks told me all I needed to know. “You were all in them. You all kept saying I had to choose, and I…I didn’t want to.”

Oh sweet bollocks.

My cock strained at the idea that Maeve wanted something so explicit, so kinky as what the guys had hinted at happened in those dreams. It hadn’t been done in so many generations, but?—

I wish like hell I’d fallen asleep the other night. I want to see every filthy corner of Maeve’s mind.

It was time she knew the rest, before the strain in my cock tore my whole body apart.

“I want to show you something.”

I flicked back through the pages in the grimoire, flipping between herbal recipes and birthing rituals. I located the page I was hunting for and let the book fall open.

Maeve’s lips pursed as she took in the drawing. It was a highly detailed scene, drawn by one of the grimoire’s earliest owners – a witch named Agnes from the Middle Ages. It showed a troupe of witches – mostly men, but a few women – all naked and writhing against each other in a great, heaving orgy. In the center of the image was a voluptuous woman reclining on a sofa, her head thrown back in ecstasy as five men pleasured her body. Her hands were wrapped around two hard shafts, and a third was being held out for her waiting mouth to accept, while the other two men penetrated both her holes.

Usually, seeing that picture had no affect on me – it was just an historical curiosity from a time when the church’s puritanical ideas about sex hadn’t quite penetrated pagan society. But now, I couldn’t help but seeing Maeve’s long neck bent back, her body writhing in ecstasy as the members of our coven worshipped her body.

And her expression didn’t help. Maeve stared at the picture with wide eyes, her lips rounding with an O of understanding as she took in the details of the erotic scene. My gaze darted down to her cleavage spilling out of her thin dress. A dark nipple – hard and round – jutted out from the fabric. Maeve’s hand gripped my knee hard, her fingers brushing within inches of my?—

Be strong, Corbin.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and continued, reminding myself that it was my responsibility as our coven’s scribe to give Maeve this information. “Unlike Judean religions, where the male desire for progeny dictates all carnal activity, in pagan rituals like ours, a woman’s pleasure is vital to the success of all magic. The High Priestess is the center of a coven’s power, and therefore, her orgasm is the height of the ritual. Does this look like your dream?”

Maeve nodded, biting her lip in this way that drove me totally crazy.

“In the old days of the coven, everyone participated…like this image. It’s the best way to raise the power needed for complex rituals. But as Christian ideas became more ingrained, covens stopped practicing polyamory. In order to be truly strong, the High Priestess chooses a Magister.“ I glanced at Maeve, but she was still staring at the erotic drawing. Something flickered across her face. “The magister is like the second-in-command – a trusted council and powerful witch in his own right who pairs with her in the rituals. Most high priestesses in the last two centuries opted to make their magisters their chief consort and draw their power that way.”

Maeve’s fingers trailed across the high priestess, tracing the line of her ecstasy. “So is this why I’m dreaming so… so…”

“So filthy?” I laughed, but the sound came out more high-pitched than I expected. “Ever since you got here, this whole house has been in a constant state of arousal. Your power has already begun to grow now that you’re back inside Briarwood’s walls. All the members of the coven can feel it, and we’re drawn to you. That’s why there’s this tension in the air.”

She gave a throaty laugh. “I thought that was just me.”

“It’s definitely not just you.”

I placed a hand in my pocket and withdrew the condom, setting it down on the table in front of her. “I made sure all the guys had some,” I said. “So that if you decided to choose one of us as a consort, we’d be ready.”

“What if I don’t want any of you as a consort?” Maeve’s words were angry, but the look in her eyes was pure hunger. “What if I’m still angry with all of you for lying to me, and I want to shag some random dude I meet at the pub?”

“You can do that, of course.” I tried not to let my face show how much the idea of her being with someone who wasn’t one of us appalled me. “Whoever you sleep with – whether they be mortal or witch – will increase your powers. The important thing is that you orgasm, and the more times the better.”

I let that little nugget of information sit in her mind. Maeve blinked, her face bone still, but her eyes exploring all the possibilities of what I’d just said.

“How do I choose?” she asked, her voice tight.

“By creating a blood bond. I can show you the ritual if you like—” I grabbed for the grimoire.

Maeve wrapped her hand around my thigh, snaking her fingers closer to my throbbing cock. I groaned as her fingers scraped along my bulge, sending arcs of fire into my skin. I dropped the book.

When she spoke, her voice was choked with desire. “I’m no Christian, Corbin, and I don’t want to choose any of you. Right now, what I want is for you to fuck me senseless.”