Chapter Twenty
The return to New York was less exciting than the way to Vegas. They’d all thought the answers were one step away, but instead, they were met with defeat once more. No closer to the stone. No closer to the Fae Killer. Two dead warlocks in their wake.
Kierse yawned as she reached for the tea that Isolde poured for her. “You are a literal life saver.”
Isolde smiled. “Having people who enjoy my food in the house is its own reward.”
“I like your tea, too,” Walter mused, glancing up at her over the top of the kitchen counter and his computer screen.
“Yes, you do, darling. And I love you for it.”
Kierse stretched out like she’d seen Anne Boleyn do a hundred times. “Do you ever want to go back to London?”
She shrugged, setting the pot down. “Sometimes. New York is home now, though.”
“I get that.”
“What would we do without you?” Graves asked, appearing out of the stacks.
“Starve,” Isolde said pointedly. “You haven’t been eating enough as it is. Nor have you rested.”
He waved her off but took an offered biscuit. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
“You’re not going to die,” Isolde said with an eye roll.
Kierse glanced up at him over the rim of her tea. He hadn’t been sleeping or eating much since they’d gotten back from Edinburgh. She kept waking up to an empty bed in the middle of the night as if he was pantomiming rest for her and instead holing himself up in his library to research.
“Any update, Walter?” Kierse asked.
Walter glanced up from his computer screen again. “No. I’m still going through the contents of Dallas’s computer.”
“And how long will that take?”
Another blank look. “Uh…days, weeks, or years. Eventually, I’ll get back to training.”
“You will,” Graves said with no doubt in his voice. “Laz and Schwartz have taken on the video footage from the hotel as well. It’s a process.”
She nodded. They’d taken all of their evidence back to New York with them, and the boys had been hard at work trying to figure out what had happened to Dallas and if there were any patterns for her visitors.
Kierse didn’t know how it was going to help them in the long run.
Dallas was dead. And with her, the information they needed on the Fae Killer.
After finishing her breakfast, she wandered the library, stumbling upon Anne Boleyn sleeping in a rare ray of sunlight.
“I thought you’d enjoy the gloom and doom,” she told her. “Not searching for the sun.”
Anne hissed, but Kierse just laughed. She’d keep working on her.
She walked around the cat and ran her hands along the well-worn leather books.
She’d read a ton of Irish folklore and fairy tales in the intervening year.
Part of it had been required by Graves when he was trying to show her that he was the Holly King without outright telling her the truth.
She’d continued reading the tales of the Fae as if they were a tradition passed down to her by her people.
But that wasn’t what she was looking for today.
“Lost?” Graves asked. He came around the stack she was currently perusing, deeper in his library than she had ever been.
“I know you’ve probably read everything in here, but I was hoping to find something to spark about the Ash Door,” she admitted.
She had plans to go see Niamh in the afternoon. She’d been nursing the connection snapping back into place all morning with Lorcan. He was in south Manhattan, and as soon as she’d woken up, she’d felt their connection like an ever-growing tumor.
“I have books on trees,” he said, leading her a few rows over. He gestured to a section before sliding out a slim green volume. “This might interest you.”
She read the title Irish Trees and the Sacred History. The pages were old, worn, and thin, as if he’d read it frequently. “You think this one will help?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a good place to start. What I think we’re dealing with is more magical than tree related, but since you only have access to half your magic, you might need to make do with the trees first.”
“Right. Maybe I need to figure out how to break free of Lorcan’s hold on my magic,” she grumbled.
“If I could do it for you, I would,” he confessed.
She met his gray gaze, wanting nothing more than to let him enter her mind and break Lorcan’s hold on her. There was so much that neither of them said in that moment. He didn’t just want to break Lorcan’s hold on the magic, he wanted to fracture the bond. The very thing Lorcan feared.
But he could do nothing to help her here, which was the crux of the problem.
“I just need to be stronger, I guess.” A thought came to her, and she hated to voice it. “What if I let the cauldron burn away my humanity?”
Graves didn’t balk. He’d done and thought worse than something like that. He’d given up part of his existence to get the sword. The tarot reading had said as much about his future if he didn’t recover it.
“What would that make you if you went through with it?”
“Fae,” she offered.
“In here.”
His fingers brushed the spot where Lorcan’s bond continued to snap against her like rubber bands against her skin. She jerked back at the touch even as light as it was.
He let his hand drop with a frown. The hurt etched in his gorgeous face, there and then gone. It was the connection with Lorcan he’d just touched. The pained look on his face said that he hated that something that simple could trigger it. She hated that, too.
“Bad,” she said finally. About Lorcan, about the bond, about her humanity. “It’d be bad. I don’t know if I could stomach it.”
“Then it’s not the right solution. You can only go for something like that when nothing else is available.” He seemed to be speaking from experience. “All magic comes with a price. There are unintended consequences to choosing to lose yourself in it.”
“Graves, about the tarot cards…”
He waved it off and headed out of the stacks. “That wasn’t real. Don’t worry about it.”
“It felt pretty real.”
“What’s real is this party that’s fast approaching,” he said, smoothly changing the subject. “I’ve reached out to a few contacts, but it appears to be an exclusive event.”
“Then why did I get one? He knows that I’m not on his side.”
“Because Amberdash wants you,” Graves said. “He’s always wanted you.”
Kierse sighed. “I’m going to ask around to see if anyone else I know got one. In the meantime, we should find another way inside.”
“I’m already on it. We’ll see if some old acquaintances will work with me again.”
Kierse snorted, running her hands back through her hair. “What did you do? Blackmail them?”
“Not exactly,” he said slowly. “But I had them do something they desperately wanted to do, and they were not pleased for it.”
“What did they do?”
His eyes lifted to hers. “Give in to their nature.”
There was heat in them. He had given in to his nature one too many times with her as well. Something she found that she very much liked.
Let the monster off the leash.
Graves pulled her toward him and pressed a kiss to her mouth. “I’ll call if there’s any developments.”
She wanted to dive right into him and let him devour her.
But the rubber bands snapped against her chest, reminding her of the widening chasm where Lorcan could get access to her.
The pull that said walk straight south and don’t stop until she was directly in front of him.
A yearning that came across the bond like he was physically hurting without her.
She shut it down. She shut it down hard. Tried to lock the vault around it and throw away the key. But it was like throwing her weight against a brick wall.
“I’ll see you later,” Kierse said, stepping out of his embrace.
A knowing look crossed Graves’s face before he turned back to his books. “Be safe, my wren.”
…
She was on the subway heading toward Brooklyn when she got off the train an exit early.
The subway was too terrifying right now for her to zone out.
She’d had to bypass a handful of humans openly eating goblin fruit from a goblin supplier in one subway car and been confronted with a handful of monsters proudly wearing Men of Valor pins on their clothes.
They’d sneered at her as she bypassed them—thinking her human.
That was not the sort of circumstances to go blank for twenty blocks.
She had no recollection of what she’d passed or why she would get off on 23rd Street instead of 14th to cross over to the Williamsburg Bridge. That place in her chest was pounding like a GPS beacon blasting ever nearer to her location.
“Lorcan,” she realized with a huff.
That was what had distracted her. What had felt like she needed to get off.
“Get out of my head,” she snarled down the bond.
“I’m not in your head,” he responded.
“I don’t remember the last twenty blocks, and then I got off on fucking 23rd. Why would I get off on 23rd?”
Lorcan was silent a moment. “Because I’m at the Flatiron building.”
Kierse closed her eyes. She didn’t need that information. She didn’t want to pinpoint where he was now.
Lorcan continued, “I promised that I would only reach out if you’re in immediate danger. Or you initiate like right now.”
“If you’re not influencing me, then what is this?”
“That’s just how the bond works.”
Kierse wanted to scream. Because if Lorcan was being honest—a big if—and he hadn’t influenced her to get off the train, then that meant that she had been going to him of her own accord. An even more disturbing thought.
She got on the next train that headed into Brooklyn and tapped her fingers against the Irish tree book for the rest of the ride, too afraid to open it and read its pages and lose her sense of self again.
The stop in Brooklyn was empty—thank the Druids for keeping this part of the city safe even as Manhattan fell apart again—as she headed off the platform and to Niamh’s office. She got chills as she knocked and opened the door. It still felt like Lorcan’s office even though it belonged to Niamh.
“Hey, babe,” Niamh said, looking up from a stack of paperwork. “You don’t look so well.”
Kierse closed the door behind her, sinking into a cushioned chair before the desk. “I got off the train on 23rd.”
“Oh,” Niamh said. “You were drawn to Lorcan?”
“I’m losing my mind,” Kierse said. “I’m losing my mind, and I can’t figure out how to get it back. I have to get around this bond. I have to, Niamh.”
“Okay. Okay. This is going to kill my whole day, but we could try a spell.”
Kierse perked up. “A spell?”
“Yes. There’s a purifying energy spell that might work. I looked into it while you were gone. It’s not going to break the bond or anything, but it could clear the pathways enough for you to get under the lock he has on your magic.
“We’d need a strong group of High Priestesses, and we’d need to do it by the light of the moon. It’d be stronger on a full moon, but we just had one. So we can make do.”
“When can we do it? Tonight?”
“At least a week,” Niamh said. “I’d need that long to prepare.”
Kierse groaned. “That’s right before Amberdash’s party. Did you get an invite to that, by the way?”
“No chance. He hates Druids.”
“I got one, and Graves didn’t,” Kierse explained. “He’s trying to find a way inside if we can’t scrounge up a second invite.”
Niamh nodded. “I’ll ask around.”
“Thank you.” Kierse stood and ran a hand down her face. “And thank you for the spell. I really appreciate it.”
“Anything for you, babe.”
Kierse swallowed. It was only another week. What was the worst that could happen?