Kelly thought for a moment. “Can we stay in a youth hostel instead? I want to talk to some people who have exciting lives and passionate dreams.”
“Are you sure that’s the best idea?”
“I’ve been a prisoner in that horrible house for over three weeks. It feels like threeyears. I want to be around people with things to look forward to. I want to party. I want to talk about stuff that isn’t Jesus or a Woman’s Duty or Eternal Damnation.” She peered up at me with those enormous baby blues. “Didn’t you just say that grieving was a time to do stupid stuff?”
“That was not what I said at all. And what about going to the police?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” A dark sliver of pain passed in front of Kelly’s eyes. “But I will decide soon, I promise.”
“I’m with you, whatever you choose to do. Either way, I don’t think Uncle Bob will hurt anyone again.”
She studied my face. “You must’ve lit a fire under him to make him change his ways so easily.”
Arthur winced.
I grimaced. “You might say that.”
After an enormous breakfast at Happy’s (Kelly had two cheeseburgersandtwo slices of brownie cake), we rolled ourselves downtown and made an appointment with a family lawyer about Kelly’s emancipation. The appointment wasn’t for a couple of days, which would give us time to put together evidence to demonstrate Kelly could look after herself and would be financially secure at Briarwood.
As per Kelly’s request, we got a private room at a nearby hostel. Groups of young people hung around the entrance, lugging enormous backpacks and chattering in a myriad of languages. Kelly’s eyes lit up as she flirted with the young German guy behind the counter.
I squeezed Arthur’s hand as I watched her. “She fits. She’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
“Oh sure,” he whispered back, his breath tickling my ear. “You’ve just invited your sister to live on the very edge of a future supernatural battlefield, and you’re going to have to hide the fact you’re a witch with a harem of guys trying to stop the fae from taking over the world, but everything’s going to be fine.”
I gulped. When he put it like that, what thehellhad I got myself in for?
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
BLAKE
Without Maeve around, I expected Corbin to turn outright hostile toward me, maybe even get stuck into a little torture. I checked all my food for shards of glass and made Flynn shower first to make sure it wasn’t going to spew out molten honey instead of water. A lifetime of dodging the princes’ delightful pranks had taught me a thing or two about staying on my toes.
Instead, Corbin acted much the same – mostly ignoring me and any offers to help him translate his books. He seemed to be avoiding everyone, even Rowan, who paced around like a puppy who’d lost his master. Corbin holed up in his study and I didn’t see him outside of meals, which suited me fine. The guy bugged me.
He still kept his vigil over my room every night. This morning I caught him sleeping in his chair and drew a giant cock and balls on his cheek. He’d been walking around the castle for three hours and still hadn’t noticed it.
“I can’t believe he went off to give the morning’s English Heritage tour and hestillhasn’t noticed your artwork,” Flynnchortled while I held a long length of metal with a pair of tongs so he could weld the end of it onto another metal frame.
“I know, I’m a genius,” I grinned back. I’d only just learned the word, and I felt it applied to me.
“If you’re a genius, then I’m a bloody protestant,” Flynn grunted as he waved the soldering iron in my face. “Hold still, I just have to put a bend in the other end.”
I’d spent quite a lot of time in Flynn’s workshop over the last couple of days, holding bits of metal together while he heated them with fire and cooled them with water to make them into eldritch shapes. I’d never seen so much metal before. Really, I’d never seenanymetal before I came here, since it was poison to the fae. But here on earth, they were nuts for metal. They had metal transport skins called cars, metal cooking fires, and metal moving picture boxes and even metalartwork.
Daigh fancied himself a connoisseur of human art. One of his favourite tricks was to copy the paintings of human masters in fae inks, then break into major galleries or private collections and replace the real things with his fakes. I still remember him chortling as he recounted stories of humans scrambling to figure out what went wrong as the fae ink started to fade away and leave a different – usually much lewder – image behind.
Okay, I’d chortled a bit, too. Daigh could be amusing when he wasn’t terrifying.
Daigh would never have called Flynn’s statuesart. To the fae, they were fuckingdeadly,which meant that even though I thought they were ugly as fuck, I loved them.
After Maeve, Flynn was the human that fascinated me most. I’d been trying to figure him out, but so far I’d come up with a complete blank. Normally humans were so easy, especially when it came to sex. Unlike everyone else, Flynn didn’t seem to be chasing Maeve on his own. He looked pretty damn happy the other day during our little group revel, but I remembered howeasily he’d let me take over from him with Maeve at the ritual. And I’d watched him and Corbin take Maeve together on the movie night (Maybe Arthur could sleep through that moaning, but I couldn’t). He liked sharing her. He loved seeing her happy.
At first, I thought he might just be in it for the sex, nothing deeper than that. But then I saw the enormous sculpture he’d made for her bedroom. Nope, Flynn cared about Maeve. So why didn’t he pursue her? Why did he hold back and let Corbin and Arnold and evenRowandeepen their bonds with her?
One thing I’d learned about human men was that they didn’t talk about their feelings. I’d tried to turn our workshop conversation around to Maeve at least three times, and every time Flynn broke into some bawdy song or started going on about the Dublin football team and I got bored and ordered more curry.
Flynn finished his weld and allowed me to set down the metal sculpture. “That’s all I can do on this piece for now. Want to help me make a mobile for Connor?” He pointed to a workbench in the corner where he’d set up rows of metal washers that had been soldered together to make shapes. A star. A dragonfly. A weird lumpy shape that had a vague resemblance to a bear.
