30. Maeve

Everyone grieves differently, Arthur said. You have to give yourself permission to do whatever it takes to get yourself through the pain.

And then you have to forgive yourself for all the shit you end up doing.

Arthur’s grief had driven him to hurt someone. Rowan’s pain had given him the furious need to control.

And me?

The loss of my pastor father and god-fearing housewife mother had driven me into the arms of two of my new housemates.

In the same night.

Was that slutty? I had no idea. I didn’t have a moral barometer, but I’m pretty sure by my parents’ standards, it was. I could call Kelly and ask her, and I knew I would soon. But for the moment, my head was too messed up.

Corbin was still sleeping in my bed, so I padded through the empty great hall and slipped outside into the courtyard. The night air brushed my body, fanning the robe across my bare skin. A thin line of red snaked across the corner of the sky – sunrise was not far away.

I slumped into one of the overstuffed bean bags and stared up at the sky, mapping the constellations I recognized. Even the sky was different here. I wondered if I would be able to find a local astronomy club.

But why?I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. I’m not going to MIT. I won’t be getting into the space program. My parents won’t be watching me graduate with honors.

Nothing in my life was turning out the way I hoped. Now what was I? A slutty witch living in a castle in a foreign land, trying to protect the world from a fae invasion.

I laughed as fat tears rolled down my cheeks. This time, I let them fall. The whole thing sounded completely ridiculous. Because it was. I could barely even think about what I’d learned and seen over the last week without wanting to commit myself. Maybe I should?

I wasn’t sure what I believed any more. I didn’t really think I was a witch, but I couldn’t deny that I’d definitely been feeling the heightened sex drive Corbin had referred to. The fact my pussy still ached from having two different guys inside me spoke to that.

The fae were real enough, and the portal, too. I’d seen them go inside that sidhe and disappear. They absolutely had stolen two children.

The dreams…those I couldn’t explain. The memory of what Blake had shown me plagued my mind – the gaping, horrified faces of my guys, the charred earth, the broken sky, the two empty stakes waiting for their next victims…

If what Corbin told me was true – if all this was true – and I do nothing, then that vision was our future. Even if all this was some hallucination I invented in my grief, then fighting the fae may help me heal. Either way, Jane needed her son back. There was everything to gain by fighting, and nothing to gain by closing my eyes and pretending this wasn’t happening.

The red streaks across the sky turned golden in hue, and light crept across the courtyard, bringing clarity to the darkened corners and cracked stones. I wished it would bring the same clarity to my life.

“Maeve?” A voice called to me from above.

I glanced up. Corbin’s head hung out of the tiny tower window, the breeze ruffling his dark hair. “You’ve got a text.”

“Throw it down!” I yelled, leaping to my feet and holding out my hands.

Corbin flung my phone into the air, and in a display of skill and dexterity I’d never before displayed in gym class I managed to catch it. The screen showed a number I didn’t recognize. I read the text:

It’s Jane. The police called off the search yesterday. I don’t know what to do, and if I stay in this house a moment longer I’m going to get very brassed off. You said I could come to the castle? I’d probably better wait until the sun has actually come up.

I texted her back.

Come anytime you want. I’m awake.

A moment later, my phone beeped again.

Good. Expect me in twenty minutes.

“Maeve, come back to bed,” Corbin called down.

“Or stop yelling across the courtyard,” Flynn’s head appeared over the side of the second-floor walkway. “Some of us are trying to get our beauty sleep.”

“An extra hour isn’t gonna help you,” Arthur called down, sticking his head out from the other side. “Hi, Maeve. Why are you up so bloody early?”

“She was helping me with the bread,” Rowan called up. I whirled around. Rowan stood in the doorway to the great hall, properly dressed now in jeans and a t-shirt, a familiar dusting of flour along his forearms obscuring his intricate tattoos. He glanced at me with a concerned look, but his eyes didn’t linger.

“Now that we’re all here…” I waved my phone. “Jane’s coming over. The police called off the search for Connor. I told her she could look at our books.”

“Do I have to put on pants?” Flynn called back.

“Yes,” the other three guys chorused.

“It’s really your decision,” I added.

Flynn huffed. “Fine. But there better be a dram of Irish whiskey waiting with my breakfast for this. The nerve of it – forcing an Irishman out of bed before noon.” His head disappeared over the rampart.

Corbin and I exchanged a look and I burst out laughing.

“And you think this is what took my son?” Jane frowned at the book open in front of her.

I nodded, smoothing down the page of the yellowed folklore book. Different types of fae were depicted on the page, each one with a description of their traits and whether they were Seelie or Unseelie. “I know it sounds crazy, but I saw them with my own eyes. They took your son through a sidhe – that’s a doorway into their own realm. I tried to stop them, but it didn’t work.”

Behind me, Corbin clambered down the ladder with another stack of books in his hands. His expression said he thought showing these to Jane was a bad idea, but I admired the fact that he didn’t try to challenge me. Corbin believed so strongly that I was supposed to lead this coven that he was casting aside his years of leadership without a thought. Or maybe it was the fact that no one who saw the bags under Jane’s eyes and the fury etched across her face would be able to withhold anything from her.

Jane turned the page, peering down at a woodcut of fairies stealing a human child in the night and replacing it with one of their own. Her expression was unreadable. “I’ve seen pictures like these before. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the fae. She believed in all sorts of superstitions.”

“You had sprigs of rowan at your front door,” Corbin said, kindly. Jane’s face flushed briefly.

“Yeah, and horseshoes in most all the rooms. Those were my grandmother’s traditions. I kept them up even though I think they’re ridiculous. According to her, fairies don’t like rowan or iron. It’s actually her cottage I’m living in. She left it to me when she died a couple of years ago, as well as all the furniture and gardens. I had no idea she’d done that until a lawyer came to see me, but it kind of made sense. She and my mother don’t exactly get along. No surprise, because my mother is a cow, but Grandma always had a soft spot for me. I just wish she’d been able to meet Connor…” Jane trailed off. “I’m rambling.”

“Rowan’s making some of his amazing hot chocolate,” Corbin said. “Nothing seems as bad after a glass of hot chocolate.”

“Anyone who says that hasn’t had their baby taken by fairies,” Jane snapped back, but her eyes were a little warmer.

Something occurred to me. “There was a horseshoe over Connor’s bed.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “How did you know that?”

Guilt flushed my skin as I remembered that I’d been snooping in Jane’s house. Before I could confess, Corbin piped up. “An iron horseshoe should have deterred the fae. Climbing into the room and taking Connor would have been extremely painful to them. So why did they do it?”

Jane slammed the book shut and dug for the next one. “You guys are the experts. You tell me.”

“You said they seemed listless,” I remembered. I pulled a book from Corbin’s stack and settled into the corner of the sofa. “That might have been the effect of the iron.”

“And what was with that pumpkin?” Jane wrinkled her nose. “With the scrawled-on face?”

“Fae leave behind an object that they charmed with glamour to look just like the child,” Corbin said, flipping through another folklore book. “There’s stories from Ireland of mothers realizing their children had been taken only when their baby suddenly turned into a vegetable and by then it was too late. I wonder if you distracted them before they could finish the glamour spell and they decided just to take Connor and run for it.”

“Why choose Connor, though?” I asked. “Surely there would have been other children without horseshoes who’d be easier to kidnap? Do you think there was a reason they specifically wanted Connor?—”

“That’s them,” Jane said suddenly. She jabbed her finger at an image in Corbin’s book. “That’s the creatures who took Connor.”

“Spriggens,” Corbin read. “I’ve never seen these guys before. Something as small and delicate would usually not be able to penetrate the doorway between our worlds.”

“These are Seelie,” I said, pointing to the description. “I guess that confirms it. The Seelie and Unseelie are working together, just like Blake said.”

“Say I believe this is true,” Jane said. “Say I’m shit out of options and all the wild fae talk is starting to sound like the only reasonable explanation of what happened. How does this help us get Connor back?”

In response, Corbin dumped a bunch of books in Jane’s arms. “That’s what we’re doing here,” he said. “Somewhere in these books and diaries is a clue to the spell the fae are trying to perform with these children. If we can find it, we can figure out a way to stop it.”

“So I’m going to save my son by reading?” Jane asked, raising an eyebrow incredulously.

“Well…” Corbin shrugged. “Yeah. You don’t have to help if you don’t want?—”

“No.” Jane dropped down into Corbin’s wingback chair behind the desk and opened the first book on the stack. “I’m a fast reader.”

Corbin looked like he was about to say something about his chair, but he snapped his mouth shut and plonked down on the other end of the sofa.

Silence prevailed, the only sounds in the room the rustle of pages and the slurp of hot chocolate. I skimmed through two folklore volumes written by previous residents of Briarwood and a dull-as-dishwater herbal manual before my hand fell upon a small book.

Principles of Spirit Magic, the title declared in faded gothic script.

My heart thudded in my chest. The guys said I was a spirit user like my mother. But I knew very little about what that actually meant. Apart from the dreams, I hadn’t really done anything particularly magical. Not that I really believed any of this. But maybe the book would have something useful.

I opened it up, flipping through the pages until I came to a section called DREAMWALKING.

The power of dream walking manifests itself in different ways, depending on the witch and how he/she chooses to wield it. It is one of the rarest types of spirit magic and is not well understood.

A witch may use her powers to enter the dreams of another, to bring people into her own dreams, or to transport her body through the dream-realm to other places, times, or spiritual planes.

“Guys,” I cried excitedly, leaping up so fast that Obelix, who’d settled himself between Corbin and I on the sofa, shot me a filthy look and returned to licking his bollocks.

Bollocks. Such a multi-faceted word.

“Watch out!” Corbin steadied his mug of hot chocolate. “Did you find something?”

I grinned. “I think I know a way we could get Jane’s baby back.”