Chapter 3 Faith in Us
Casimir Cimmerian
The sunset bled amber through the windows of Evermere as my phone vibrated with Foster’s text. Another delivery at the gates.
Moving through the house, I considered what Arabesque might have sent this time.
We’d intercepted three packages already.
Painful artifacts from Seri’s past wrapped in bubble mailers and false concern.
Each item a calculated strike designed to keep our beloved off-balance, to remind her that her stepmother still lurked in the shadows of her life.
July heat clung to my skin as I jogged down the paved driveway toward Evermere’s front gate. Even with twilight settling, the humidity remained outrageous. Still, I’d rather run, burn off energy, than drive.
Through the iron bars, I spotted Foster’s hulking silhouette engaged in what appeared to be a staring contest with one of our gargoyles as his truck idled behind him, diesel fumes mingling with the scent of sun-baked blacktop.
Fang-rotted alphas. Everything’s always a dominance contest.
“Still trying to stare down sentry statues?” I punched in the security code on my side of the gates. “You know they eat wolves for breakfast.”
“Just admiring the craftsmanship. Thought these ugly bastards might appreciate a real predator’s company.”
The left gargoyle twitched, limestone joints grinding, and I sighed. Foster’s idea of “appreciation” usually ended in property damage and bloodstains.
“You do realize it’s made of stone,” I said as I strode out to meet him, and he broke his glare-off with a grunt.
“Never trust anything that watches you while pretending to be an object.” His frame dwarfed mine, despite my own considerable height. The wolf shifter’s dark skin gleamed with a light sheen of sweat, his long hair pulled up in a bun as a concession to the heat, just as mine was.
“What do you have this time?”
“Fairly sure it’s the last of Seri’s parents’ mementoes.” He handed over another mailer. “Arabesque whined about it. Said she was going to level up the intimidation tactics after she gets back from Europe next week.”
“Scouting the fae kingdom?” My brain began calculating angles at warp speed.
“Shopping spree, but we both knew she ain’t hitting up Harrods or Le Bon Marché.”
“And that obscenely enormous bounty on Austin Cho’s head will most likely foot the bill.” I turned the package over in my hands, looking for any signs of tampering or magical residue. Standard protocol. “Anything I should know?”
“She might have done something to one of the items. Can’t be sure.”
“Can’t be sure or can’t detect it?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Four months in that house, Cas,” he grumbled with disgust, his nostrils flaring. “Fucking Dark witch rot has corrupted my nose. I’ll be sneezing charcoal briquettes til Christmas.”
The gargoyle behind us laughed, stone chips pattering on asphalt. Foster flipped it off without looking.
“Anything else?” I tucked the package under my arm.
He reported the rest of the intel he’d gathered, and I made a mental note to ask Seri about the Hollowing Rite. Maybe Kaori, too, if our beloved hadn’t heard of the ritual before.
“Aight, Cas, I need to get back before midnight.” Foster shook his head. “Me riding herd on a thousand rogues. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“The night, you mean,” I made a rare jest. He was a friend and ally, and even I could see the toll this was taking on him.
“Channelling your inner Zane? Tell him I said he owes me my weight in Goblin Moonshine when this is over.”
“I threw away his entire stash.”
“Twenty says he still has at least one bottle tucked away somewhere.” Smirking, he climbed into his truck and drove off, throwing up a hand in mock salute.
By then, the sky had deepened to indigo, stars emerging like pinpricks through dark fabric, and I ran back toward the manor, sweat trickling down my spine despite the oncoming night, but the exercise felt good.
By the time I reached our security room, my shirt clung to my skin. I submitted to the retinal scan, waited for the soft hydraulic hiss, then entered when the hermetically sealed door slid open.
Koa was bent over his workbench in the corner, and Zane sprawled in a chair nearby as he regaled our brother with an unnecessarily detailed account of yesterday’s hunt.
“—and then the stupid bastard actually tried to bargain with me. Like I don’t know what harpy venom fetches on the black market. So I told him—” Z caught sight of me and straightened. “What’s Fosterfly got for us this time?”
“Not sure yet.” I set the package on the central table. “Arabesque update. She’s off to Europe until next week.”
“Probably spending Cho’s bounty money,” Koa said without looking up from his project. His voice had that distant quality it took on when he was deep in concentration. “Run it through the protocols?”
“About to.”
“Remember rule number seventeen!” Zane produced a magi-wand from somewhere, neon beam dancing across the package.
“Assume everything’s cursed until proven otherwise,” Koa and I chorused, only he didn’t look up.
Curious, I moved behind him and peered over his shoulder. Ah. He’d finally finished repairing Jonathan Bell’s fishing reel case and was attaching it to a new pole.
He’d spent hours on it, hunched over his workbench, his powerful hands suddenly delicate, my mountain of a brother handling a broken reel with reverence. Koa always understood the importance of objects that carried memories. I was still learning.
“Some things shouldn’t be erased,” he’d explained when I asked why he hadn’t just replaced the damaged casing. “The crack tells part of its story. How it broke, how it was fixed. Hiding that would be like pretending the hard parts never happened.”
Sometimes, his soul was too deep for me, but that was Ko. He felt everything, and so much deeper than anyone else. I wondered if it was because he was half human.
Our father certainly thought so. Lucian had always viewed Koa’s emotional depth as a weakness, a regrettable inheritance from his human mother.
I’d long ago realized it was his greatest strength.
He understood people in ways I never could, saw straight to the heart of them while I was still analyzing surface behaviors and calculating probabilities and Zane was spinning off into chaos.
“She’s going to love that,” I told him with a nod of approval.
“Hope so.” He set down his tools and rolled his chair toward the package. “Let’s see what the stepmonster has sent today.”
“You think it’s something cursed this time?” Zane stood, energy rolling off him in waves. He was always like this after a successful hunt, buzzing with residual adrenaline, unable to sit still. “Maybe one of those creepy dolls with the eyes that follow you?”
“Let’s find out.” I pulled on a pair of protective gloves and breached the seal following our established protocols: Silver shears, containment orb, and what Zane called ‘The Works’: A spray bottle that held the magical equivalent of a fire extinguisher.
Inside lay two items. The first was a gold-tone clapper bell with a dog tag attached at the bail.
“Rasputin,” Zane read the tarnished metal heart. His usual smirk faltered. “Bat’s bones. We really doing this?”
“Damnation,” I muttered.
We knew the pet goat was dead. Zane had seen as much in Eluned’s memories when he used telepathy to “interrogate” her after the lake incident with the monster crayfish.
Arabesque had lied to Seri, however, saying she’d sold the old goat.
We hadn’t had the balls to tell Seri the truth yet, although we knew we needed to confess soon.
“That’s going to break her heart,” Koa sighed as he stared at the dinged and dented bell.
“Add it to the list of reasons Arabesque deserves what she’s gonna get,” Zane growled. “What kind of monster keeps a dead goat’s bell? Like, is there a villain checklist? ‘Step one: Be fundamentally disturbing in every possible way’?”
“She kept it because it could be used to hurt,” Ko murmured. “Priority one for any villain.”
The second item was a book made of plain linen fabric, each page filled with a number of different embroidery patterns and designs. I studied the precise stitches, curiosity building about the woman who’d created them.
“Look.” I turned the page to show them the outline of a wolf embroidered in brown thread. Beneath it, in delicate script, was the name Feather.
“Her mama’s wolf,” Ko whispered.
I nodded, remembering Seri’s stories, her voice wistful as she talked about her parents and Feather.
The final page featured an apple, embroidered so realistically, it looked like a painting rendered in thread. Jocelyn Bell must have used some kind of specialty floss for the red color because it caught the light and glittered like rubies.
“She needs to know.” Ko touched his fingers to the edge of the cloth. “This book alone will be precious to her.”
“Lemme check it first.” Zane passed the magi-wand over each page, revealing nothing.
No hidden sigils. No protection spells. No warning symbols.
No blood oaths woven between cross-stitch flowers.
Just thread and cloth. Regardless, we followed protocol and ran both the bell and the book through every supernatural detector we had.
Despite Foster’s concerns, nothing registered as dangerous or cursed.
“We tell her tomorrow.” I sealed the two items in a containment orb, just to be safe. “After breakfast.”
“Yeah, because waffles make these kinds of announcements digestible,” Zane snorted.
“After we do, we can add these to the display in the library,” Koa voiced my own thoughts.
“The pudding stone and that ribbon from the county fair?” Zane asked. “Oh, and the big shell you can hear the ocean in?”
“Conch shell. Yes.”
“She’s gonna cry,” Z muttered with a miserable look in his cognac eyes. “Buckets and buckets of snot and tears.”