29. Maeve

“Me?” My stomach churned. It can’t be true. I didn’t do this. I wouldn’t even know how to do this.

“Oh, sorry – not you specifically. I mean the human race.” Blake tossed back his head and laughed, the sound hollow. “Although as High Priestess, you definitely contributed.” He pointed to the glow along the horizon. “I think that might’ve been your handiwork.”

“What is it? Why does it grow like that?”

“Duh, because it’s radioactive.” Blake grabbed my hand and yanked me forward. I let him drag me off in a different direction. In front of us, a towering hedge of briar and brambles jutted out of the field. “If you want to know why the Unseelie King is making his move now, it’s because he too has seen this vision. Although I saved this next bit just for you.”

We pushed through an arch cut into the brambles. On the other side stood a sight so gruesome it sucked the air from my lungs.

The smell hit me first. A familiar scent like BBQ pork invaded my nostrils, all the more horrifying because it reminded me of Arizona summers when my parents were alive and not the grisly sight before me.

Set into the ground were six long, pointed wooden stakes, pointing up toward Briarwood and propped up with small frames. Skewered on four of the stakes were four charred, broken bodies, their limbs bent and twisted. One had their hands cut off and strung around their neck. Black patches on the earth beneath the stakes revealed they had been burned in situ, while still alive, their faces frozen in open-mouth, bug-eyed terror.

I stood in front of the first – a man – choking back bile as I searched his face for some sign that this was an illusion. Blake’s idea of a twisted joke.

What I found instead turned my heart to ice.

The eyes that stared back at me – their lids burned away – were the same vibrant blue that had laughed at me from the other side of a croquet hoop. How those eyes survived what had been done to him, I could not guess. Probably it was for my benefit. A faint covering of fire-red hair still covered his burned and disfigured skull.

Flynn.

The other faces swirled around me and I recognized them all – Corbin, his beautiful vivid eyes poked out, Arthur, with his hands swinging from a rope in an invisible breeze. And Rowan, my beautiful Rowan, his ears lopped off, his body twisted where the stake pierced his chest.

My boys. My precious guys.

Bile rose in the back of my throat. I tried to turn away, but my body froze. Every grisly detail etched itself on my memory. My head throbbed, my chest tightened.

I choked as the contents of my stomach sprayed themselves all over the dead ground.

Blake pointed to two stakes at the end of the line. “I bet you can’t guess who they’re for?” He grinned.

No. This is just a dream, just a…

But it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt…important. Vital. It was a truth I already knew but didn’t want to see.

And now I was being forced to see it in all its grisly glory.

I fell to my knees. Only instead of hitting the cold, charred earth, I kept falling through it, toppling over myself into the darkness. The world spun around me, and though the stakes and their bodies disappeared from view, the tortured faces of my guys never left me…

I woke with a start, sweat pouring down my body. A hand stretched across my stomach. Corbin. His body cupped mine, his soft lips grazing my shoulder, the sheets tangled around us, cool against our warm skin.

He’s safe.

I stroked his cheek, relishing the smoothness of his flesh, trying to unsee the horror of his ruined face under my eyelids.

I took several deep breaths, trying to get my heart to return to normal.

I stared at the ceiling for a time, wanting to wake Corbin up and tell him about the dream. But his face was so peaceful, I couldn’t bear it. There was not a trace of that dark pain in his expression. So rarely was Corbin granted quiet of mind in this house, I didn’t want to bring him back to reality.

But that didn’t help me. The dream haunted me, and I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep any time soon.

I slipped myself out from under Corbin’s arm, pulled on my silky robe, grabbed the empty water glass from my bedside table, and tiptoed down my spiral staircase and into the upper corridor.

Getting anywhere in this huge castle took time, and I was wide awake by the time I descended the secret staircase to the kitchen. I was surprised to see the lights on and Rowan hunched over the bench, shirtless, his sinewy muscles rippling as he worked an enormous ball of dough. Flour dusted the surface of his skin, the particles glimmering in the light like a fine layer of glitter.

“Rowan.”

He jumped when I spoke, but his face broke into a smile as he looked up and saw me.

“I didn’t hear you come down. I hope I didn’t wake you up, with the lights and… and…” Rowan swiped a few of his dreadlocks over his shoulder, leaving a trail of white flour across his dark cheek.

“I couldn’t sleep. I…I had another dream.” I paused.

His face was impossible to read. “Like the others?”

I shook my head. “No. This one was a nightmare. I’m still a little shaken up.”

He patted the stool at the island beside him. I sank into it, watching as he continued to knead the bread with rhythmic thrusts. His lips moved as he counted each push and pull of the dough, the way he counted many things. I wondered if he always counted while kneading bread, or if it was something he was doing because I was here.

I was just about to ask him about the counting when Rowan mumbled into his chest. “You were with Corbin?”

“Yeah…I…” I didn’t know how much to say.

Rowan’s face twisted, a weird mix of happiness and pain. “That’s fine. That’s okay.” He stopped kneading and pulled out a stool on the other side of the island. He sank into it, clasping his hands in front of him, still staring at his chest.

Something twisted in my gut as I took in his hunched shoulders. I’ve hurt him.

“Are you upset about me and Corbin?” I reached across the table to take his hand, but as soon as my skin touched his, Rowan drew away.

He shook his head. “It’s as it should be. Corbin’s the leader. He should be the magister. He’s the one people always fall for.”

“People?”

“Girls,” Rowan whispered, wrapping a floury arm around himself. With a sinking heart, I remembered the way Emily flirted with Corbin, and how he and Neale bantered back and forth. ”Corbin has a lot of girls because he can just talk to them. He wants to protect people, and lots of girls love being protected.”

“Not me.” I jabbed my chest, although I think it was a little bit of a lie. “I’m pretty good at protecting myself these days, as long as I have my trusty spade.”

Rowan snorted. I hoped it was the start of a laugh, and not directed at me.

“Corbin told me a lot of stuff tonight, about being the High Priestess, and how I gain my powers. I’m not saying I fully understand it, but…it fits, you know?” I reached for his hand again, and this time he didn’t pull away. My fingers stroked his knuckles, and even the light touch sent another tingle of desire through my body. “I’ve been feeling weird since I arrived at Briarwood. I came because my life in Arizona was taken away from me, and I thought maybe going somewhere completely different would help me move on. But now…let’s just say Briarwood is starting to work its magic on me. I think you know a little about what that’s like.”

“This castle is built on the embers of our pain,” Rowan said. “But when you mix those embers with fresh earth, seeds of new life can grow.”

“That’s beautiful.” I turned Rowan’s hand over, slipping my fingers between his. Rowan’s arm jerked a little, but he still didn’t pull away. I stared at his face and for a moment he looked up, and his green eyes darted about in panic. I wanted so badly to peel away the layers of him, to see the person that lurked beneath the ticks and counting, the person who’d been so deeply scarred that Briarwood wasn’t even enough to heal him, that he had to withdraw within himself, to a world of his own order.

“Maeve…” Rowan’s voice shook. He tugged on my hand. I tightened my grip, wanting to keep the mesmerizing connection of our bodies as long as possible.

“I’ve seen the way you look at me, Rowan. I wouldn’t say no. You don’t think you’re worthy of me because you think I’m this High Priestess, but I’m telling you as Maeve Moore, fellow weirdo, that even without this coven magic acting on us, I would shag you in a heartbeat.”

Rowan gulped. He yanked his hand away, his eyes wild with panic. “That’s not true. Don’t say things like that.”

“Look into my eyes, Rowan.” He shook his head, staring at the lump of dough on the counter. “It is true. I didn’t choose Corbin. We slept together, but I didn’t choose him. There might be other options and right now…I’m not ready to choose anybody.”

I reached for Rowan’s hand again, but he shoved both his hands into his lap and closed his knees over them.

“Tell me about the dream,” he said, taking a shaking breath.

It took me a moment to calm my racing heart enough to recall it. “Blake was there, but it was just the two of us this time. He said it was his turn to show me something, so I think I might have been in his dream and he was controlling it. We were standing in the meadow, looking up at the castle. Only, nothing was right. Everything was charred and burned and dead, Briarwood buried beneath walls of thorns. The ground was parched, the sky poisoned with radiation. Even the air tasted different, thick and gross.”

Rowan didn’t say anything, but he did look up at me, his blue eyes flashing.

I continued. “Blake said it was our fault – humans were responsible. He said the fae were coming for us because the king had seen this vision. Then he showed me these stakes in the ground and on them were—” I gulped as Rowan’s beautiful face was replaced by the charred image – his ears gone, his skin burned away, revealing bone and muscle. I gulped again, feeling the bile rise in my throat. “—you guys. The four of you. You had been pierced through the chest on stakes and burned alive.”

“No, Maeve…” Rowan leaned across the table. He still didn’t touch me, but his eyes were wide with concern. “That must’ve been horrible. What do you need?”

What do you need…

If I’d been talking to Corbin or Arthur, they’d be flipping to solution-mode, trying to figure out what the dream meant. Flynn would be making some kind of joke to distract me from the memory. But Rowan knew that laughter couldn’t erase the horror. He only wanted to help me find a way to cope.

Rowan had been through something so terrible, so utterly horrific, it had shaped him into a person who instantly recognized the slivers of that same pain in others, and he tried to give them what he’d never been given. But right now, I didn’t need anything… except Rowan.

I wanted to give him a little of what he needed right back.

I slid out of my chair and walked around the island. Rowan stared up at me, his eyes large, almost frightened, but desperate to help take away the burden I carried.

“I need you,” I said, and pressed my lips to his.

I expected Rowan to jerk away, but he didn’t. At first, he completely froze, his body stiffening as the warmth of his lips flowed into me. His fear made me bold. I wrapped my arms around his neck, sinking against him, parting his lips and sliding my tongue inside.

He moaned against me as piece by piece the tension in his body unraveled, and he sank into the kiss. His own tongue wound around mine – tentatively at first, and then he became exploratory, softly probing deeper.

So different from Corbin, so gentle and kind. I breathed in Rowan’s unique scent – fresh bread and bright herbs, smells of home and hearth, of earth and embers.

I tangled my fingers in Rowan’s dreadlocks, fanning them out around us, letting them become a curtain that hid our pain. I watched his face as he deepened this kiss and his own eyes flickered open. They saw me watching and the panic leapt into his body, stiffening him, clamping his lips shut.

But I wasn’t going to let Rowan off that easy. I kept kissing him, stroking his face, playing with his hair, pouring everything I had into convincing him that I did want to be with him.

Slowly, the tension eased from Rowan’s shoulders. He shuddered against me as he raised a shaking hand to my cheek, his fingers lightly tracing my skin, filled with wonder and awe. Heat rose up in my body, responding to his tenderness, eager and waiting for Rowan to unwrap me like a birthday present he’d waited all year for.

I shuffled forward, straddling Rowan’s chair, pinning him between the chair and the island. Panic flashed in Rowan’s eyes, but it turned to desire as I reached down and placed my hand over his crotch. Under his jeans he was hard, and even without seeing him I could tell that the naked dream I’d had about him was anatomically accurate. Rowan made Corbin look like a woodpecker.

The ache crept across my stomach again, pulsing between my legs, begging for release. I worked my fingers along Rowan’s belt, pulling out the loop, popping the button of his jeans, and tugging on the zipper.

I want to feel him in my hand, stroke him until he loses control, until he stops believing that he isn’t worthy of this.

My heart raced as my fingers grazed the side of his cock, and Rowan shuddered. “Please, Maeve, you can’t, we shouldn’t, if you’ve chosen Corbin…”

“I’m not making a decisions about the coven tonight,” I whisper back. “But right now, Rowan, I choose you. Not for your powers, but because of your heart.”

What the hell am I doing?

I’d literally just come from sleeping with another guy and here I was, making out with Rowan, trailing my fingers over his flour-dusted torso, ripping his pants off so he could take me in a manly fashion.

What I’m doing is driving it out.

All the grief. All the fear.

This was exactly why I came to Briarwood. All I needed to do drive out the grief was this beautiful boy with pain in his eyes and his enormous, glorious cock.

Rowan’s fingers walked up my spine, leaving a trail of shivers across my skin. He buried his face into the side of my neck, nibbling and groaning into my collarbone as I pulled his cock out halfway and wrapped my hand around it.

I stroked him slowly, using the pre-cum on his head as lubrication as I slid my hand along his shaft, feeling the slight curve of it. Rowan’s eyes burned into mine, open the whole time as though he wanted to commit every second we had together to memory.

His hands slid down my shoulders, pushing away the silky robe. It glided down my arms, revealing the tops of my breasts. Rowan reached for them, drawing them out one at a time, his face revenant, worshipful.

He bent down and placed his lips over my nipple, his touch so soft, so light.

A moan escaped my throat and I leaned back and tightened my fingers around his cock. Rowan’s tongue glided across my bud, which was already hard as a pebble. He suckled lightly, sending shivers through my chest.

He moved his lips to the other nipple, licking and sucking with the same aching gentleness, while using his fingers to play with the first. A trail of white flour granules extended across my chest, a swirl of glistening stars in the Milky Way. I dropped Rowan’s cock, unable to keep my grip on it when my body hummed with so much electricity.

Rowan lifted me with surprising ease. I let my arms hang limp and the robe slid completely off me, pooling on the floor at our feet. Rowan’s mouth formed a silent O as his eyes swept over me.

Never in my life had I felt more like a goddess.

He sat me down on another stool and knelt in front of me, his eyes never leaving mine. His hands caressed my body – soft and reverent – as though I were a nymph he couldn’t believe was real. He trailed kisses along my thighs, his dreadlocks teasing and tickling my skin. I arched my back, bringing myself closer to him. Rowan dipped his head, tasting me with a long stroke of his tongue.

His lips lit me on fire, sending flames straight to the ache in my stomach. He drew his tongue back and stroked me again, his eyes trained on my face, watching and reveling in my reaction. The raw sensuality of watching him as he licked me in my most intimate spot nearly sent me over the edge.

He licked with rhythmic strokes. Of course he did. This was Rowan. He kept meticulous time, never altering his steady pace until I could anticipate each glide of his tongue, and the knowledge of it drove me closer… closer…

When my orgasm came, it crept along my veins like a hot flush, slow and languid before bursting forth and consuming me – a thousand stars dying in a cosmic blaze inside my body.

Behind Rowan’s head, I could see a row of bread loaves all lined up along the windowsill, each one on its proofing cycle. Rowan, the Earth-user, made the garden grow and the food delicious and who would move the earth itself to protect the people he cared about.

My body rocked and shuddered, the fire retreating into a warm glow. Rowan wrapped his arms around my middle, resting his head on my thighs and staring up at me with eyes heavy with want. “Should I stop, beautiful?” he whispered.

I shook my head. “I want you inside me.”

Rowan leapt to his feet and embraced me, his body warm against mine. Our skin warmed each other as our limbs twisted around together. Rowan’s lips met mine, urgent and yielding, but still so soft, so kind, so different from anything else I’d ever known. His hand stretched out across the table, grabbing his wallet – the surface also dusted with flour, like every other part of him.

Inside, he drew out a condom.

“Corbin gave this to me. I never expected I’d need it,” he said, a laugh in his voice.

I took it from him and tore it open while he shuffled out of his jeans and boxers, folding them neatly and adding them to the pile of clothes on the floor. I stifled a gasp as I took in his body – not because his thin frame was more muscled than I expected, but because of the scars that traced over his dark skin. Thick welts arced across the fronts of his thighs, their surface lighter and slightly raised. Faded splodges that might have been burn marks splattered across his lower torso.

It looked like someone had tortured him.

I traced a line across one of the scars and Rowan shuddered, his eyes filling with pain.

“I know I’m ugly,” he whispered. “If you don’t want?—”

“You’re not ugly.” I grabbed his cock and rolled the condom over the tip, my fingers dancing down his glorious shaft. He was so long the condom wouldn’t even go down the whole way. “You’re perfect, just the way you are.”

“And you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” Rowan whispered.

I fell against him, my legs fitting over him. I held his cock while I got myself into position, then sank down against him. We both moaned as his thickness entered me, sliding in halfway as I closed around him, my body not yet prepared for something so big and thick.

Rowan kissed me, his tongue seeking mine. His eyes burned into me. I used my heels against the kitchen island to rock back, driving him deeper. With each inch I managed to take inside me, the intensity of the sensation grew.

So much… so much of him, and all for me.

With a final thrust, I took in the last inch, my muscles contracting around his length. The slight curve in his shaft touched me in places that had never been touched. The ache built again from the sheer excitement of having him completely inside me.

Rowan’s fingers trailed up my spine, and I gripped his flour-dusted shoulders as I drove up with my feet, sliding up his shaft and then grinding my hips back down against him, pushing him deep inside me.

Sitting together like this felt so intimate, wrapped up in our own cocoon of bodies. Rowan gripped my ass with his hands and thrust up to meet me each time I slammed down.

I felt every shudder of his cock, every inch of it caressing me inside.

My second orgasm came quickly, a total shock. The pressure rose like a tornado out of nowhere to consume me utterly. I slammed down on Rowan’s pelvic bone, tossing my head back as my walls convulsed around his thickness, my own body pulsing with release.

Rowan pressed his hand against my stomach, as if he hoped to feed on the ache through my skin.

Rowan’s mouth fell open in a silent gasp as his body shuddered against mine and his huge cock jerked out his own orgasm. Even with the condom, I’d never felt a guy come with such intensity before.

We collapsed against each other, gasping aloud as our bodies flooded with warmth. Rowan stroked my back, his fingers leaving tingling trails as his touch set my hairs on end. He nuzzled against my cheek. To my complete surprise, he looked down at our bodies, still pressed together, and burst out laughing.

“What?” I glanced down. There, across my stomach, was a perfect impression of Rowan’s hand, fingers splayed, rendered in white flour. Like the mark of Saruman on my pale skin.

I laughed too, wrapping my arms around Rowan and kissing his soft cheek. “Some people just give hickeys, but you have to be different.”

We slid apart. Rowan disposed of the condom while I pulled on my robe and tied it around my waist. I watched his wiry frame bent over the trash, and the reality of what just happened hit me.

Two guys.

I slept with two different guys in the same night.

Two of my tenants.

Two members of my coven.

I rubbed my eyes, unable to believe that it was real, that I’d really done that. What would Mom and Dad say if they knew? I may not have shared their views on religion, but I’d always thought I was with them about not being a wanton slut. And yet, here I was, standing in the kitchen, where the food was prepared, having just had my fifth orgasm of the day. If this is being a wanton slut, then I am all for it.

What would they?—

They can’t say anything, because they’re dead.

And there it was, the pain that drew me back to the present.

They’re dead and I’m in pieces, every part of me scattered across the cosmos. I am ash and dust and I wish I could put myself back together again but I don’t know how and when I’m with these guys, it feels as though being broken is okay, it’s allowed.

But it will never bring the Crawfords back. It will never heal me. I’ll never be whole again.

Rowan straightened up. When he saw my face, his own features crumpled. “Maeve, are you okay?”

“No, I mean, yes. I mean, I—” My words choked on a sob. My pain reflected in Rowan’s eyes, and I couldn’t bear it. My gaze fell to the scars along his thighs.

I can’t do this. This was a mistake. I can’t bear his pain as well as mine.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed. I turned on my heel and fled for the stairs, tears streaming down my cheeks.