Chapter 21 #2
I intended to get myself the hells out of here well before my twentieth birthday.
Standing here wallowing in self-pity wasn’t about to help me either. I needed to move on and be smarter.
My bare feet sank into the pebbles as I spun around and strode off, following the path with Sage ahead and Graysen right behind me.
I had many questions I’d been hoarding and, while we walked along the garden path, I thought now was the time to ask.
Whirling around, I walked slowly backward. “Master Sirro told me your family saved the life of a Horned God, and that’s how you gained the Alverac.”
Surprise flashed across his features. His pace faltered, and sparkly boots scuffed slowly through stones until he came to a complete standstill. “He told you that?”
I nodded, stopping as well. I reached over to pinch a waxy leaf and stroked my thumb and fingers down the long blade. “He said, ‘They saved the life of a Horned God.’” I carefully monitored his reaction beneath my lashes.
“They is rather a broad term. Sirro meant my mother.”
“Your mother?” My eyebrows almost shot up to my hairline. “Your mother saved the life of a Horned God?”
His gaze swept over the white roses that rambled unchecked everywhere within the garden.
“Apparently so. Sirro gifted us the Boon five years ago.” I almost flinched.
That’s exactly when the Crowthers had claimed me.
“He explained that what my mother had asked for as compensation that night never sat right with him. It wasn’t enough for what she’d done.
And he bestowed the Alverac to balance the scales. ”
“When did she save the Horned God’s life?”
“When she was a servant. Before she married my father.”
“At my grandparents?” Lower House Deniaud. Had my mother known? She’d kept Tabitha’s secret that she was other; why not this one too?
Graysen nodded before breaking into a walk again. I let him catch up, and I strolled beside him. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Tabitha Crowther, a servant, saved a Horned God’s life. “Who did she save?”
He glanced sidelong, and shadows and sunlight brightened and dulled his warm complexion. “My father doesn’t know. He didn’t know any of it. She kept it secret, even from him.”
I hated to admit it, but I was starting to like Tabitha more and more. I tipped my head back to look at him better as we strode along the pathway. Excitement colored my voice. “Sirro? Do you think she saved Sirro’s life?”
“Perhaps… Fuck, I don’t know,” he said, slapping away a biting insect that landed on his forearm.
“How did she do it? You said she was an other.”
“Not anything special, not anything that could save a Horned God’s life.”
“What is she?”
“She can steal pain.”
“How can she steal pain?” How does one do that? I’d never heard of anyone stealing pain. I knew there were others that could influence the way you felt, but nothing like that.
“Hells, I don’t know,” he said, accompanied by a shrug. He shared the knowledge casually, but there was also an underlying note of pride in his voice and a hint of sadness in talking about his mother. “She’s just able to draw it from you.”
I whistled, impressed, the sound floating away in the murky recesses of the undergrowth. “Can she do anything else?”
He shook his head, flicking the stray locks of hair from his forehead. “She can detect others, but that’s it. It’s not in-your-face like setting things on fucking fire or making the earth tremble,” he replied, his eyes sliding to mine, sparkling with amusement.
“Don’t forget I can spin squalls too,” I added with a cocky wink.
We fell into a comfortable silence, and after a couple of minutes of following the trail, while I was busy thinking on the impossibility of what had happened—Tabitha Crowther, a servant no less, saving a Horned God’s life, and discovering what kind of other she was, and what it meant—the path opened up into a large lawn.
Graysen jutted his chin at the expanse of lush grass. “This is where we share our space with our staff. We mingle, all of us, and here everyone can contribute to the garden and do anything they like.”
“One of your mother’s ideas?”
“Yep.”
A couple of young children were biking around the lawn where a few families lounged on tartan rugs, reading or sharing a picnic.
The edge of the lawn had flowerbeds and vegetable patches.
Toddlers were digging in a sandpit, flinging sand around, while an older child pushed a younger one on a brightly colored swing.
Sage prowled along the treeline, sniffing and pouncing on a dried leaf that rolled over the grass, caught up in a gusty breeze.
Graysen murmured a greeting to an older man, kneeling down and pulling out weeds, his shoulders slightly hunched and dirt lining the creases in his fingers. His dark-blond hair had streaks of silver through it, and the messy mop of curls bobbed as he nodded politely in return.
Sunlight reflected off the worn metal of a barbecue, where picnic tables were set up, and there was even a small wooden fort for children.
And roses—white rambling roses—were everywhere. They smothered trees and bushes and wound along the park benches set beneath the leafy boughs of oak trees.
It seemed like the gardens were tended to, except for the roses.
When Graysen first brought me onto the estate, I noticed them clambering up the ivy on the stone walls of the Keep.
He saw me eyeing them and answered my silent question.
“My mother has a green thumb. She loved…loves,” he corrected himself, scratching the back of his head, nose scrunching as he glanced away for a moment.
He cleared his throat before returning his gaze to mine, his eyes a little brighter and silver-lined.
“She loves white climbing roses. My father won’t let anyone tend to them until she comes back home,” he said, his voice a bit hoarse.
My brows slanted upward, and even though I wanted to shred his family to pieces, something like sorrow twisted inside my chest to think of Varen’s pain.
Graysen followed as I strode around a small pond and slipped beneath a weeping willow, its curtain of leafy branches giving us privacy.
I looked about the garden with a new perspective and, despite everything, how Graysen had scared the hells out of me in the Great Hall, it seeped in that Tabitha was everywhere.
All morning he’d guided me around the Keep, and everywhere we’d been had been influenced by her.
Tabitha’s family was living in this place, this fortress and estate where her memory resonated in every single detail.
She was kept alive by everyone, not only by her sons and daughter, but by their servants as well.
I tried to remember her when I was a child. I had vague memories of Tabitha. Golden hair and sun-kissed freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks, and an unrestrained grin with a dimple. However, I couldn’t recall her coming to visit our House.
What would I do if it were my mother?
How could one not do something? The Crowthers were surrounded by her memory. Tabitha’s rules were still maintained, and her thoughtfulness, the stamp she’d made as a servant, then as Matriarch of a ruling House, was imposed by everyone.
“What you’re doing is wrong,” I said quietly, fiddling with the end of my braid.
Graysen’s gaze snapped to mine, his body following to face me fully. He knew what I was referring to. Me.
I frowned petulantly and scratched my bare arm hard enough to hurt. For twelve long years, he and his brothers had been molded to do exactly what they’d done: capture me to sell. And yet here, this home of theirs, was at odds with the cruelty they’d displayed.
Though their actions were brutal and they might have a warped agenda, there was life here. Seemingly a normal life, too.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Of them.
I didn’t know how I might use it to twist them and bend them to my will.
I didn’t know if I could show them that what they were doing was wrong. That they were doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
I sighed.
They must love her immensely.
Graysen had his thumbs tucked into his jeans side pockets, weight on one leg, gazing downward. He lifted his head, the wayward locks of hair sliding across his forehead. “Oh, for sure, we’re going to Nine Hells for all of this…”
Lifting a hand, I gestured toward myself. “Your brothers think they’re right about what they’re doing. But it’s more than that. They think I deserve whatever comes my way at the Witches Ball. But I’m innocent in all of this. Why can’t they see that?”
“Why?” He straightened and took a step closer. His voice was soft, and his gaze edged with something else I wasn’t sure about. “You’re smart and clever and that brilliant mind of yours—”
“They’re deranged! You’re all vicious bastards!” I snapped, scuffing the grass with a toe, interrupting him not because of his compliment but because I didn’t like how he was looking at me, with an earnest hope that I’d listen.
A muscle in his jaw ticked while his gaze hardened and became shadowed with disappointment.
“Exactly. That’s all we’ll ever be to you because it’s easy to see what you want to see.
Take a closer look, little bird, and ask yourself, why.
” He wandered off, turning back to say, “And while you think on that, or maybe not, because there is no one else I know more stubborn than you, why don’t you answer this. Who is Silas Boon?”
The mysterious Silas Boon. I hadn’t mentioned that Silas had arrived at the cottage soon after I’d swifted us there.
I’d only spoken of what had happened in the limousine as I’d wept within Graysen’s arms in the small bedroom flooded with moonlight and lit with candles, with its chipboard walls and mismatched blankets.
A gentle current of air coursed across the lawns and brought with its innocence a hint of molasses that turned sour and toxic as soon as I inhaled. An ugly miasma.
Danne Pellan…