Chapter 15 #2
“He was a revolutionary. An industrialist with an affinity for the wilds. Only the closed-minded see a man newly freed from the prison of his own thoughts and declare him a fanatic.”
“Or a cult leader.”
His father set down his fork and one of the maids immediately came in to sweep away the dishes. Nadine stared straight ahead as they replaced the stemware with small snifters for port, and his mother’s custom scalloped china painted with black hellebore motifs.
“Our festival saved this place,” his father said, warming to a beloved subject, though his eyes remained hard as flint in response to his sparrow’s challenge.
“So many old mining towns peter out along with the ore. But tourists arrive yearly for the festival, and when they do, they come in droves; and that new blood keeps the heart of the town pumping. Without Ravensgate, Nadine, there would be no Argentum.”
“And Sheriff Crocker keeps them all in line,” Ben said, with no small amount of satisfaction.
“Or he will, as soon as he unblocks that damned road.” His father picked up his snifter, waving off the maid with the dessert tray. “Though in a county like this, you get what you pay for.”
“Father hates tourists,” Odessa said. “He considers them a necessary evil. I’ve personally always thought that we ought to rent out rooms here at Ravensgate.”
“You think we should put a price tag on history?” his father asked.
“Isn’t that what the festival is?” Odessa retorted brashly. “I think—”
“You’re a Cullraven. You don’t need to think. You act. The only thing that separates us from them, my dear, is that lack of hesitation. Conviction overrides the lesser faculties.”
Cal had been watching the dwindling level of his father’s glass, and listening to his growing bluster. When he reached over for a refill, Cal got to his feet, nudging Nadine to hers.
“Leaving so soon?” his father remarked.
“History won’t price itself,” Cal said easily, though he tightened his grip on Nadine’s arm. “And luckily for me, neither will my clients.” He tugged firmly, in unspoken command.
She followed him meekly from the room under the study of three pairs of eyes. Cal considered returning to their rooms but his baser appetites were sated for now, and even after all that wine, he was too agitated to retire. It felt too much like hiding.
His feet carried him determinedly through one of the galleries, into the parlor.
A familiar path, taken many times when he was a boy.
The trophy cabinets and mounted heads should have been off-putting to one so small, but he had been raised in the midst of it, and found the gamey smell of old, dusty fur a strange comfort.
When he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that they were breathing once more, surrounded by the pine planks taken from the ghosts of a decimated forest.
“I used to hide in here as a child,” he said, looking at the head of a grizzly. Not sure why he was telling her this, he continued awkwardly, “Odessa used to tell me that the animals would come alive when no one was looking. I wanted to see them. Catch them.”
“Dead things don’t come back to life when they’re dead,” Nadine said bitterly.
“Yes, I know that now. My father is a diligent teacher in that regard.”
“He doesn’t like me.” Nadine was looking at the picture of Evangeline and Cal noticed, with a flash of unease, that she bore more than a passing resemblance to Caledon’s second wife.
“Oh, I’m afraid he likes you well enough. Although perhaps not in the way you’d think.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“It means he’d like to fuck you before he kills you,” Cal said bluntly, driven by the various discomforts bubbling up inside him to wound in return.
“And my brother is the same way. That’s why I bit you.
That’s why I marked you. My father was going to give you to Ben to play with—right up to the moment he shot you after the festival. ”
She stared at him in horror. “And your mother . . . is okay with that?”
“She’s a sparrow. She made her choice. She knows full well what we are. Believe me.”
Did she, though? A nagging voice whispered. He recalled his mother’s expression as his father forced her to recount the night of their courtship, the trembling of her hand as she kept up a brave face for the benefit of his father’s captive audience.
“And that’s what you do?” Nadine was asking. “You just run around—fucking and killing and hurting everyone, and the people you drag into this mess just have to sit there and watch?”
She thinks you’re a monster. A bitter satisfaction steeped into his bones as he straightened.
“It’s tradition, Nadine. The past follows us wherever we go.
It dictates the fucking future thanks to that will and its codicils.
Everything that happens outside of these walls, is, ultimately, meaningless.
” He grabbed her hand before she could back from him, pressing it to his cheek.
“Look at me. I’m my great-great-grandfather’s spitting image. Everybody says so.”
Her hand made a fist against his jaw. “That doesn’t mean you have to be him!”
“My brother’s right for once. You do have a tender heart. It almost makes me want to spare you, just so I don’t have to watch it break.”
“Then let me go. Help me get out of here.”
Cal was tempted. He’d been tempted before at the restaurant in Arboreus, too. Part of him had considered leaving her there at one of the weathered old inns. It wasn’t escape, but at least it would have been out of Argentum, and this fucking place.
But that was the thing about his family: they were hunters, all of them. Even if he released her, it would still be open season. Some of them would even relish the challenge. And now that he had marked her, he could not quite bring himself to let her go.
“Maybe I’ll marry you,” he mused. “Do you think you could satisfy me, Nadine? I’m willing to let you try.”
“You said you would show me what happened to Noelle.”
“Yes. I also said you would have to give me something in return.”
“What do you want?” She was trying to be brave but her strength was flagging. The girl who had marched in here determined to drag her sister out of hell, like Orpheus with his poor doomed Eurydice, was turning into a shade of herself. “I’ll do it.”
“You’d sign yourself away to me so easily? What if I asked you to be my sparrow?”
“Even that.” She sounded resigned.
He could imagine it, too. Nadine laid out before him like a feast as he plundered what little innocence that remained to her.
But he had spent too many years in this house to feel any trust when what he wanted most was offered to him, and he could not take her while she was looking at him like that.
“How brave of you,” he said. “I’ll be generous, then. Come to the woods with me, and I will.”
Her eyes flew to the shadowy windows. “Now?”
“Not now. Later. When I ask.”
When I feel like tormenting us both.
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“No more than I already have.” Cal straightened the pictures in their frames, looking at all those unsmiling faces frozen into what might as well have been a death’s mask. It was strange, he thought. The animals looked more alive than the people did.
“Okay,” she said shakily. “F-fine. Deal.”
“Good. I look forward to it.”
She shot him an uneasy glance. It was clear from her expression that she’d thought he planned to throw her up against one of the walls right here. “Tell me about Noelle.”
“Are you quite sure you want to know the truth, Nadine?” He recaptured her hand, giving it a light squeeze. “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”
“I have to know. It’s why I came here.”
“Very well. Come with me—don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Nadine trailed after him as he exited the parlor. The sun was setting, even though it felt much later. The days lasted forever up here in the summer—until they didn’t, and the sun spilled out the last remnants of its viscous light like a runny yolk over the horizon.
“My favorite time of day,” he said impulsively. “Who dare say the sun false? He and no other warns us when dark uprising threaten, when treachery and hidden wars are gathering strength.”
“What?”
“Just more pagan nonsense, little sparrow.” He pivoted her towards the kitchen. “You went to college. Didn’t you ever study the classics?”
“I took a medieval lit class.”
He almost grinned, but then his eyes caught on the scratched and pitted door to the basement and his amusement was leached from him. A cold draft of air blew out like a breath as he pulled open the door.
Nadine stared wordlessly into the darkness, her arm stiffening beneath his hand, and Cal felt a wave of apprehension at what he was about to show her.
He hadn’t been in here since that night.
“Hold on to me. It’s dark down here and you’ve had far too much wine.”
“No such thing in this place.”
“My mother and brother would agree with you,” he said grimly.
Nadine grabbed his arm, twining hers through his, and the feel of her pressing up against him for reassurance gave him pause.
He hadn’t been prepared for this, or how much he wanted it.
He turned on his phone’s flashlight to illuminate their path, the stone steps glowing faintly in the wash of silvery-blue light.
“Why is it so cold down here?” she whispered.
“To keep things from decomposing.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Animal flesh.”
It was true what he had told her a year ago: his family did prepare and cure their own meat down here.
Fine salts and spices were stored against the far wall in barrels, and there were stainless steel implements for sawing through tissue and bone.
A ferric tang clung to the draft, filling his mouth with the shallow echoes of blood.
Nadine’s eyes landed on a box, which had been prized open. It had less dust than some of the other things stored down here and her eyes widened as she read the label.
“Are those explosives?”
Goddamn it, Ben.
“Did your family cause that landslide to keep me here?”