22. Twenty-Three Maeve

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE: MAEVE

" T he fuck?" Arthur growled, touching the sword at his side. He must've grabbed it on his way out to see what I was yelling about. Thank God…I mean, thank Athena , Arthur was never too far from a sword.

"How did the fae get behind the wards?" Aline asked.

"It wasn't the fae," I whispered, my stomach clenching as understanding dawned. "It's the villagers."

"How do you know if you didn't get a proper look at them?"

"They wouldn't have come here by car if they were fae."

"It could have been a human compelled by the fae," Blake pointed out. "Like Robert or Dora."

Clara shook her head. "The fae believe they've already won. They don't need to skulk around the castle hoping to scare us. But angry villagers who think we're raising the dead would do this."

Rowan touched his finger to the message and sniffed. "This isn't paint," he whispered. "It's blood."

"A warning." Corbin glanced around us.

"But whose blood is it?" I whispered.

I dug my phone out of my pocket, my heart beating. If they've got to Kelly, I'll never forgive myself. As I dialled Jane's number, I noticed Corbin punching something into his phone.

Jane picked up on the second ring.

"Jane. Thank Athena, you're okay. Is Kelly there?"

Jane's voice was stern. "She doesn't want to talk to you."

"But she's there? No one hurt her?"

Jane sighed. "Yeah, she's here. Maeve, what happened?"

"Someone wrote on the door at Briarwood. Die witches . But it's written in blood. I thought…" I sank against the stone wall, holding my chest as if I might be able to shove my heart back inside.

"Well, it's not us."

The phone clicked off. Jane hung up on me.

Rowan sank down beside me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, his eyes questioning.

"Kelly's fine," I breathed. "It's not her."

"I'll have Ryan's butler check the grounds for anything unusual," Clara said, fishing her mobile phone out of her purse.

Rowan's face crumpled. "What if they hurt Obelix?"

Flynn gripped his knife. "I'll cut those wankers."

"Obelix!" Rowan cupped his hands over his mouth. "Come here, boy!"

"Obelix, you wanker. Show yourself. Obelix?" Flynn joined in the call.

Something rustled in the flower garden under the ticket office. Rowan bent down and pushed aside the hydrangeas. "Obelix?"

The tubby cat waddled out with his nose in the air and plopped down on top of one of the beanbags. "Meorrrw?"

"Some guard cat you are," I scolded, picking him up and rocking him in my arms. Rowan came over and tickled his belly.

Flynn grabbed Obelix from my arms and rocked him like a baby. "Whose blood is it, then?"

"It's probably sheep blood," Corbin said. "The farmers around here would have easy access to that."

"They're just trying to scare us."

"It fucking worked," Rowan said, nuzzling Obelix's fur.

"What do we do now?" Flynn asked.

"From now on, no one goes into the village," I said. "We know these people are capable of violence. Corbin, is there anything we can do to magically propel them away from the house?"

"I know some protective charms we could make," Aline piped up. "Rowan can help me with the ingredients."

"Get it done," I said. "We've got something else we need to focus on. I just spoke to Daigh."

"You…what?" Corbin looked horrified. "But how?"

"He was in the mirror in the bathroom. That's where I was when I saw a shadow in the window." As quickly as I could, I explained how Daigh had appeared in the mirror and what he agreed to. Everyone listened with rapt attention, but their response wasn't what I expected.

"How is he communicating via the mirror inside the wards?" Aline asked, her brown furrowing.

"It wasn't really him – it was just a projection in the mirror."

"Last time we spoke with him, it was also a projection, but we still had to go outside of the walls to call him," Aline said.

"Maybe it only works if he calls us, but not the other way around?"

"Maybe," she said, but she didn't look convinced.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but we don't have time to worry about the mechanics of Daigh's appearance." The rules of magic didn't seem to follow any logic I understood. If they did, Aline would be in a box in the ground and not standing in front of me arguing about this exact point. "The fact is, we have a chance to stop the Slaugh before they walk. Even though we have the belief power, it's completely untested. We have to take the chance to stop fae before they're able to hurt anyone else, especially if it means a permanent solution."

"I agree," Corbin said. "But I don't like the idea of you and Blake meeting him alone."

"Me neither," Arthur growled, touching his hand to his sword again.

"I knew you'd say that. That's why I told Daigh you'd be hiding in the trees, watching the whole thing. He knows he can't pull one over on us. What's the worst he can do?" I said. "We're all baptised now. He can't drag us down to the underworld with him."

Corbin didn't look convinced, but he wasn't in charge, I was, and I needed to believe that we could solve this without getting the souls of the dead involved. I looked around our little group. With the exception of Clara and Ryan – because I didn't really know them – every one of us had lost someone special to us, someone who we didn't want to see resurrected as a ghoul to terrorise and scour the earth. We had to take the chance that Daigh was at least considering the plan.

Back in the house, Flynn, Ryan, Arthur, and Corbin went back to work on the statue. Rowan grilled sausages and made a salad and fries (chips, in the English vernacular), while Aline chopped herbs and made small pouches out of some old velvet curtains. She filled the pouches with herbs and stones, and waved her hands and chanted over them like a fairground fortune teller. I hoped like hell she knew what she was doing.

Aline added a drop of blood from each of us into the charms and sealed the bags. "No human will be able to pass through these charms except for those whose blood has touched them," she explained. "They will work alongside the wards that protect you from the fae entering, and will also stop most magic – fae or witch – from penetrating the walls. There is a catch."

"Spill it," I said, holding my head in my hands. Great, one more thing to worry about.

"You'll still be able to use your magic inside the castle grounds, but you cannot send magic over the boundary. Any spell you cast or attempt to will come up against an invisible barrier. The barrier won't last forever. Enough power or muscle thrown at it and it will crumble, same as any wall. But I've made it as strong as I dare."

"I just know this is going to bite us in the arse," Corbin said, gathering up an armful of the pouches. "But we'll take what we can get."

Arthur and Corbin went to place the charms at the corners of the estate. When they returned and reported no other villagers nearby, we sat down for a tense dinner, punctuated by a long stream of Flynn nonsense as he tried to impress his new artistic hero.

After dinner, Clara and Ryan left to return to Raynard Hall, and the boys decided to teach Aline how to play video games. Since the last time she saw a computer game the graphics were still in two dimensions, she was awestruck as soon as Flynn handed her a controller. I laughed along with them watching her die three times in quick succession, when I noticed Corbin had disappeared from the Great Hall.

"I'll be right back," I told Flynn and headed up to my room to grab something I wanted to show Corbin, which I folded up and hid under my shirt. Back on the first floor I found him – of course – behind his desk in the library, poring over Clara's ancient book.

"Find anything important?" I asked. Corbin set down his magnifying glass.

"Not important, just interesting. I knew the history of the Soho coven was sordid, but it turns out I don't even know the meaning of the word."

"Oh yeah?" I raised an eyebrow as I slid onto the arm of his wingback chair. My leg brushed his, and a shiver ran through my body as I remembered the first time we'd been in the library alone together, when we'd ended up shagging on top of the Briarwood grimoire.

"Look at this." Corbin turned the book around. "This was a drawing from one of the coven members, who was a relatively well-known London artist."

I glanced at the sketch, which looked pretty similar to the orgy pictures in our own grimoire, except... woah. Some of the men in the picture weren't really men. "Those are?—"

"Werewolves and vulpines – fox shapeshifters," Corbin grinned. "It seems humans and witches aren't the only races with peculiar tastes."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if shapeshifters existed, but I decided it wasn't something I wanted to know at this point. "Are you worried about the villagers?" I asked.

"Not as much as I'm worried about Daigh. You know he's up to something with this meeting tonight, don't you?"

"Of course. But what's the alternative? Even if we did stop the Slaugh and send the fae back to their realm, we'd take casualties. I think we can all agree enough people have died."

"More than enough," he agreed, his voice grim.

"All we do, if we win, is banish the fae back to their realm, where they'll fester their resentment for years and come to attack us again. Only next time they might not have Daigh's desire for his family to temper their rage. And for all the evil Daigh and Liah have done, they have a point. Humans treat the earth like crap. We burn fossil fuels, poison the oceans, and bulldoze the forests to make way for more cities when we can't even feed all the people we have now. We were the ones who invaded the fae lands first, and we haven't exactly been the best caretakers."

"Are you agreeing with the fae?" Corbin asked with a smirk.

"If we can make this alliance work, it's the best for everyone. I'm just trying to see the good in both sides, the way a good leader should," I flicked a strand of hair from his eye. "Like someone taught me."

"I've been thinking about what you said yesterday," Corbin ran a hand through his dark hair. "About going to university."

I waited. It was something I noticed Corbin did – instead of asking questions or giving his opinion, he waited out the silence until people opened up and said the things that were burning in their minds. It was time someone turned that trick back on him.

Corbin stared at the wall of books – the one Rowan always counted before he sat down. He stared for a long time, not saying anything. I was just about to give up and ask him if he was serious when he said, "I think…I would like to go to university. Maybe to Oxford, if I can even get in. It's not a guarantee, even though my Dad teaches there. You have to be good at writing essays and shit, and I haven't done that stuff since high school, which was a long time ago."

"You'll get in." I reached my hands around his waist, kissing his smooth lips. "You're amazing. You can do anything if you set your mind to it."

"I don't think so," he scoffed.

"You brought all of us together, didn't you?" I thumped my hand on the stack of books on the desk. Bad idea. A column of dust kicked up and tickled my nose. "You put all the pieces together from all these old books and followed the clues all the way across the country – across the world, in my case. You're like that famous detective whose picture was in all the Oxford pubs. Detective Semaphore?—"

"Inspector Morse?" Corbin's lips curled back.

I waved my hand. "Whatever. You should write about him in your application essay."

Corbin laughed. Then his face turned serious. "It would mean I would have to live in Oxford, at least for the first year. It's only ninety minutes on the train, but I don't like the idea of leaving Briarwood, and you?—"

"Maybe you don't have to. I've been thinking about Oxford ever since we visited, too. We'll go together."

Saying that out loud was worth it 100 times over just for the shocked expression on Corbin's face.

"You…but…" His eyes widened. "What about MIT?"

"Oxford is just as fancy and prestigious as MIT." I pulled the folded papers from under my shirt and tossed them down on the desk, revealing the Department of Physics prospectus I'd taken from the Ashmolean. "I've been doing some research into their astrophysics program, and I think I'd learn just as much here as I could in America. And, as you say, it's only ninety minutes by train from Crookshollow. Think about it, Corbin. We could get a room in one of the colleges together, and come back to Briarwood on the weekends. The guys could visit us whenever they wanted."

"Rowan could send us care packages of biscuits and scones," he grinned.

"So you like the idea?"

"Are you kidding?" He wrapped his huge arms around me, his lips meeting mine for a searing kiss. "I love it. But you'd better not make me sign up for any more theoretical physics papers. That one you did at community college nearly did my head in."

"You of all people should know a good education is a well-rounded one," I grinned back.

"Fine. If I'm doing theoretical physics, you're studying Farsi."

"What in Athena's name is Farsi?" I was enjoying swearing by my new patron goddess, even though I didn't believe in her.

"The language of countries that historically identify as part of Persian society."

"Great." I rolled my eyes. "That sounds really useful."

"You never know – maybe one day we'll all be speaking Farsi on Mars."

My stomach fluttered with sudden nerves. "Do you think we can do this? Leave Briarwood to study?"

"I think it's worth a try." Corbin smiled, but his smile was tinged with sadness. "I know I need to let go of this idea that I have to look after everyone, that Briarwood is my sole responsibility. The other guys have more than proven they're capable of managing any problems while we're away, and as you said, we'll be back on weekends. It might just be possible to be a Briarwood witch and have a life. That is, if we can stop the Slaugh and survive the next week."

I sighed. "We just made plans to study astrophysics and obscure languages next year. It's going to be hard to do that if the university becomes a fairy grotto. We've got no choice now."

Corbin glanced over my shoulder at the grandfather clock. "It's nine o'clock. You're meeting Daigh at midnight. How do you propose to pass the time?"

I slipped my hands down the front of his shirt, popping open the buttons one by one. "I dunno… maybe we should bone up on our Farsi…"