Chapter Six
“Sorry, sorry,” Bram said, pulling back and wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Just never thought I’d see you again. You are the spitting image of your mother, that you are.”
“She was beautiful,” Kierse whispered.
“That she was,” he said solemnly. “You’re lucky you take after her and not Adair.”
Kierse laughed softly as her heart ached for this knowledge of her father that she could only find in her memories. “He seemed great, too.”
“Best man I knew.”
“As much as I enjoy this reunion, we should move this dead body,” Graves interrupted.
“Right. Right,” Bram said, shaking his head. “Glad to be of help.”
“Walter, go with George,” Graves said.
George leaned against the hood of the black car in his driver’s suit. His dark hair was tousled, and he looked for a moment like the thrill seeker he was and not the punctual driver who ran Graves’s errands. “Want me to follow or make sure we’re not being followed, boss?”
Graves grinned. “You know what you’re paid for.”
George tipped his head at him and said to Walter, “Put your seatbelt on.”
Walter hurried into the black car while Kierse and Graves entered Bram’s van. They took off out of the heart of Edinburgh and out into the hillside.
“So how did this happen?” Kierse asked.
Graves shrugged. “I saw the name in your memories, and I went looking for your father’s monster-hunting clan. I knew that some of them still lived in Scotland and figured if we were in town I could take you after we finished our business.”
Kierse melted. She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Never thought I’d see Adair McKenna’s daughter running with a warlock,” Bram said with a disbelieving shake. “But then again, never expected him to marry a Fae, either.”
“I have so many questions about them,” Kierse admitted. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Why don’t we start with how you’re still alive?” Bram shot her a questioning look. “Last I heard, Adair and Shannon passed and all the Fae were gone.”
“That’s…right,” she said reluctantly. “They were killed by the Fae Killer. I assume you’ve heard of him?”
“Aye,” he agreed. “Between that and the Fae Council disapproving of their marriage, we were trying to keep you lot safe.”
Kierse’s hand went to the necklace between her breasts and remembered once again that it was missing.
She’d worn a wren necklace her entire life.
She had believed it was the only thing her parents had left her.
It survived years on the streets and all of her thieving but not this binding with Lorcan. She missed it every day.
Her hand dropped into her lap. “So you were part of his hunting clan then?”
Bram swallowed hard. “I was more than that. My parents died when I was young, and the McKennas brought me into their house. I was his best friend, practically his brother. We grew up together and entered the monster-hunting business. I was his right hand. Felt like I broke in two the day I heard that he’d died. ”
Kierse’s own heart shattered at the news. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t have to apologize to me. It was your parents, kiddo,” he said and they all lapsed into silence.
The collective heartbreak was almost too much.
It felt like she’d gained a family member and all the what-ifs about regaining her memory hit her fresh.
For so long the spell that Jason—may she put a second knife through his back, the bastard—used to keep her magic contained had also disrupted her knowledge of the Fae so she didn’t remember her parents.
She’d thought her mom died in childbirth and her father abandoned her as a kid.
When the spell came down, those echoes pressed in on her.
She’d needed Graves’s help to access them.
Twenty years of bottled memories came like sludge to the surface of her mind, and she’d discovered their ultimate fate.
Now she wondered what it would have been like to have grown up here in Edinburgh with Bram as her father’s best friend. With two parents. With friends and family. It almost hurt too much to consider.
Another half hour and they were out of the city at some old cemetery in the middle of the night. Kierse dangled her feet from the headstone as she watched the boys digging a grave.
Graves digging a grave.
“This might be a little too on the nose for you,” she teased.
He grunted in acknowledgment as he put his back into the shovel. “Not my first time.”
She tilted her head to the side to admire the way he strained.
He’d discarded his suit coat and rolled his sleeves up, and she could see his forearm with the long stretch of his holly vine tattoo.
The lines of the tattoo still mesmerized her.
The thorns dug into his skin as if pain was a penance for his actions.
As if he deserved his moniker as the Holly King.
He certainly believed that he did. Kierse wasn’t so sure.
George groaned next to him. “When I said that I wanted adventure, I didn’t think grave digging was on the list.”
Walter huffed. “I didn’t even say I wanted adventure.”
George chuckled and elbowed him. “You could do with a little sense of fun at least.”
“I’ll take my computer and the warm library back home any day.”
Graves dug his shovel into the earth again. “Clearly neither of you have experienced the subtle art of grave robbing.”
Kierse snorted. “Even I don’t appreciate that art.”
“We don’t want to know what you’ve dug up in your time, boss,” George said with a glint in his eyes.
Walter grumbled something under his breath that sounded distinctly like disgusting.
“That’s all I have in me,” Bram said as he climbed out of the grave and rested on his shovel with a huff. He was a middle-aged monster hunter, and while still in shape for his age, he was definitely suffering for the late-night activities.
“This brings me right back to your dad,” Bram said.
“Not you, too!” She chuckled.
“Aye. Done it a few times with him. Monster hunters usually have short life spans. We’ve lost a lot of good people.”
“Are you all still monster hunting now that the monsters are out in the public eye?”
He sighed. “We’re on one right now actually. Some blood sucker has been working his way across town. We lost his trail yesterday, but I’m the best in the business. I can find anyone.”
“Are we taking you away?”
“No. No,” Bram said quickly. “We just continue to do the hard work. There are always monsters out of line that slip under the law’s notice. Hunting monsters has kept people alive for hundreds of years.” He gestured to the dead body.
“Fighting the good fight,” she agreed. There were more times than she could count that she’d bypassed the Monster Treaty, and she wished she could have done something to stop the monsters who circumvented it more.
“So, should I even ask why we’re burying the Edinburgh warlock?” Bram asked.
“Probably not.”
“All right. Well, it’s probably going to get out that something happened. He’s well liked. He was part of the Scottish independence movement for years. He even helped some guys in the fifties steal the Stone of Scone from Westminster. That was hugely popular.”
“He was responsible for that?”
That had come up a couple times in her research on the Stone of Fal, that when they’d hauled the stone out of Westminster, it had cracked in two pieces from some earlier bombing during the Women’s Suffrage movement. There were still thirty missing pieces from the time it had cracked.
“Well, they say his father did it, but those of us who deal with monsters know that business was always just one person.”
“Are you telling us to get out of the country?”
He shrugged. “What if I asked you to stay? I could introduce you to the rest of the clan. We could go to the McKenna ancestral lands. I could show you where you came from.”
Kierse wanted that badly. It was so agonizing that she couldn’t even look at Graves. She had to consider it without his interference. It was probably why he hadn’t said anything, because he clearly could hear them even so deep in his digging.
“I…can’t,” she said finally. “I want to, but…” She gestured to the dead body.
“Yeah, you’re on your own hunt. I understand.”
“I still want to find who killed my parents.”
Bram rubbed his calloused hands together. “The only hunt that I never completed. It still haunts me.”
“I can’t give up.”
“Nor should you,” he said, clapping her on the back affectionately. “And if you ever need an old monster hunter again, I’m right here.”
Kierse nodded, holding back tears. “I’ll give you a call if we’re in the market.”
“Well, that looks deep enough,” Graves said as he crawled out of the pit. “Shall we?”
Walter gestured to Archie’s dead body. “After you, George.”
The driver rolled his eyes. “So generous.”
He bent down and hefted Archie’s feet while Graves grabbed his shoulders, and with a heave, they tossed the body into the empty hole. The three men refilled the site the best they could, and at the end, Graves added a ward to the gravestone that would hopefully keep people from investigating.
“What do you think?” he asked Walter.
“Yours are stronger than mine,” Walter observed. “But if I put up a force field, then I could keep anyone from finding this for much longer.”
“Could you sustain a force field from a continent away?”
Walter mused over the question. This was how Graves’s training always went. A lot of questions and stumbling through the clues he left for you to walk into. “Probably not.”
“No,” Graves agreed.
“But you can keep the ward up that far?” Kierse interrupted.
Graves shrugged. “I’m holding up the ones on my property.”
She marveled once again at the breadth of his ability. That he could hold things like that at such a distance. Sure, the carved wards were stronger and took less energy to maintain, but she wasn’t sure she could do it across an ocean, either.
Walter shrugged, unconcerned. “I could force field until we leave and let it drop when we’re out of the country. That’d buy us a few hours.”
Graves’s nod was neutral, but Kierse knew him well enough to know it was laced with affection. That was where his lesson led Walter without telling him.
So the force field went up, and then they were all back into the cars driving across town.
Bram pulled onto a darkened cobbled street in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh.
The walkup cottage was around the corner from a lush green park and cute independent boutiques.
Kierse would have loved to wander the area if they’d had time and hadn’t been there to steal.
“Nice place,” Bram muttered.
“Mmm,” Graves said noncommittally. “I’ve had it for a while.”
“Do you have houses everywhere?” she asked.
“Mostly when I needed to get away from Kingston.”
Bram’s eyebrows shot up. “Warlock of London?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s a scary one,” Bram admitted. “Wouldn’t want to tangle with him. Then again, I don’t run with monsters. Magic or otherwise.” Then he seemed to think better of it as Graves stepped out of the van. “Present company excluded.”
She nodded. “He’s not that bad. Promise. If you come to New York, you’ll see what I mean.”
He grasped her hand and squeezed. “I look forward to it.”
“I’ll see you soon,” she promised.
Then she was out of the van with Graves, George, and Walter at the front door. Bram pulled away into the night.
“Go easy on him, boss,” George said with a laugh as he leaned against the frame.
“He needs to practice his warding,” Graves argued.
George ran a hand back through his hair. “And we all need to get some rest.”
Kierse crossed to the door. “He’s not going to get your wards down. Just let him in, Graves.”
“After all that time he kept me out of Third Floor?” Graves asked.
Walter chuckled. “You had that coming.”
Graves waved his hand and adjusted the wards. “There. Consider yourself lucky.”
Then they were inside the little cottage-style townhouse. It was actually charming with hardwood flooring, recessed windows, and bookshelves covering half of the available space. The books were old and musty, bound in leather, and smelled of Graves’s magic.
Walter and George were staying in the downstairs bedrooms while Kierse and Graves shared the room upstairs.
She took the old creaky stairs to the top floor, replacing the Spear of Lugh in its sealed carrying case, and then shed her leather jacket.
She hissed as she found the injury the conjured demon had left across her wrist.
“What’s this?” Graves asked, taking her hand in his.
“Nothing.”
He walked her to the bathroom and made her sit on the toilet as he fetched supplies. He cleaned and bandaged the wound to his liking, and for a moment, staring up at his beautiful face this close to hers, she forgot the rest of the night entirely.
Her heart thudded in her chest, and she longed for that ease they had managed to find between them. She longed for the ability to open herself up to his magic. The connection that brought.
They were closer than ever, and sometimes he was as far away as he’d ever been.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“Feels fine,” she said, circling her wrist to show him.
“About Bram?” he asked.
“That you don’t give yourself enough credit.”
His eyes were a light winter storm as he searched her expression. “You thought I was going to let it go that you had family here?”
“We had other things to deal with.”
“They can wait,” he said, caressing her cheek and placing a kiss to her mouth.
Kierse tried to revel in it, but it was too hard. If they didn’t get the real stone soon, she felt like peeling her skin off to get away from Lorcan.
She pulled back on a sigh. “They can’t wait.”
“I know,” he said slowly. “I was in your head. I could feel what you were feeling.”
Left unsaid: that pull to Lorcan, the way it felt to magic share, the bond thrumming against her chest. All the things they both hated and couldn’t escape.
“I want that back,” she whispered. “Not this.” She pointed to the east and could pinpoint his exact location with barely a brush against the bond. “Lorcan’s there. Still in the city.”
“I know,” he said, offering her a hand to stand. “We’ll figure it out.”
She took it and let him lead her back into the bedroom, pulling back the covers and letting her get in bed. She thought for certain that it would be hard to go to sleep despite the early morning hour and the adrenaline-fueled night, but she was out almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.
And awoken too early to someone knocking on the door.
She cracked her bleary eyes open and found Graves getting to his feet.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll get it,” he said.
“Who could it be?”
“I don’t know. Walter sleeps through anything, though.”
Kierse didn’t like this. She stuffed her feet back into her boots and followed Graves down to the first floor with a yawn.
Graves pulled the door open, and a cheery face stared back at them. Behind him was a portal that led into a museum.
“Hello, old friend,” Kingston said with his typical cheer.