He couldn’t give her one, because he didn’t know. The covenants that existed between his father and his siblings were a mystery; he only knew what his father had promisedhim.
His father was waiting for them at the top of the staircase as they walked over the threshold of Ravensgate. Backlit by the upstairs lights, he looked down at them in shadow like a gargoyle carved from black stone, holding an antique pistol which he tapped against the banister in an uneven, staccato cadence.
“So you couldn’t do it,” he said, as if he were passing judgement right out of the old testament, where Brother killed Brother, and innocent blood was slain. “Just like the last one.”
Cal held Nadine tighter. “She’s my sparrow,” he said. “I’m keeping her.”
His father laughed nastily. “Is that true?” he asked Nadine. “Do you think you’re a sparrow now, my deer? Do you want to fly with the ravens?”
He rotated the chamber of his gun with a click that echoed like a gunshot in the hall.
“Then let him shield you with his wings.”
C H A P T E R
N I N E T E E N
the last master of ravensgate
When Cal had been about seven years old, he had broken one of the glass curio domes that had belonged to his great-grandfather. The preserved bird inside had burst, unfurling yellowed stuffing and musty old feathers that had scattered amongst the dried moss and glass fragments, likely releasing lead-tainted dust.
The servants had wordlessly cleaned up the mess, as they cleaned upallmesses in the Cullraven household, but Cal had sensed from the hardness in their faces and the tension in their shoulders that he had done something wrong. And when his father came home, and Ben had immediately ratted him out, he had only to look at Cal to send a bolt of dread piercing through him like black lightning.
He felt that now, turning on his heel and veering towards the portrait hall. Caught in the crosshairs. But he was not a boy any longer and now he had something to protect.
“You’re going to run, boy?” Footsteps pounded down the stairs, loud and heavy.He’s still wearing his boots. “Are you a raven—or a coward?”
I’m hers, Cal thought.
He threw open the doors to the portrait hall, which stretched long and tortuously, the shadows flawed open to reveal bone-white strips of moonlight. Photos of ancestors long-departed lined both sides of the walls, their glass covers flashing in knife-like bursts of light as he hurtled past them.
“I won’t let him have you,” he said to Nadine, his voice loud and breathless.
She shivered against him, the way she had in the wood when he had taken her to his place between the trees while she was trembling with the fear of being sacrificed.
“I’ve wanted you ever since I learned the feel of you in my arms and got that first, lingering taste of your sweetness,” he confessed. “I’ve waited a year to have you come to me, my sparrow—and I amnotletting him take you.”
His father crashed through the doors behind them, shaking the portraits in their frames with an osseous rattling sound. His sparrow leaned over his arm with a pained hiss and grabbed one of the pictures off the wall, ripping the nail and with it, the wallpaper. She threw it over his shoulder with surprisingly good aim—his father had to duck as it smashed into the wainscotting behind him, glass exploding in a way that reminded him of that broken dome from his childhood.
The mazelike halls loomed before them. His arms were beginning to shake with the strain of holding the woman in his arms. He let out a harsh breath.Just a little further . . .
“You, with your romantic notions,” his father snarled. “Do you think this heroic display is going to make the girl fall in love with you? With this life? No. Just look at your mother, Cal. She hates it here. Despises it. The only thing that keeps her with me now is fear.”
Hearing what he had long-suspected confirmed aloud—by the man determined to protect the myth—was jarring. He nearly stumbled, then caught himself. For so many years, his father had preached thenecessityof finding the perfect woman and he hadn’t even believed it himself.
Had he ever?
“That’s the truth of it! Your mother thinks we’re all monsters. Where do you think she is right now? Hiding in her room, like the craven little bird that she is. Waiting for all this to be over, to be fucked and then put back on her shelf. Until the next year, when it happens all over again. I see blood on you, boy. Tell me, who did you kill?”
Your precious heir.
His father laughed cruelly, obliviously. “Did the girl see you do it? That’s what it means to be a raven: to make the little sparrows cower beneath your circling shadow. To make them wonder if their flesh will satisfy what blood will not.”
Cal sucked in a harsh breath, hearing a perverted form of his earlier words thrown back at him. This was more than legacy; this was punishment. Dedalus, coming for Icarus, determined to rip out his wings before even the wax could melt, condemning him for daring to fly.
Nadine ripped a family portrait off the wall, struggling with its weight, and threw that, too. There was a meaty thud followed by a loud clatter as the glass smashed in his father’s face and scattered to the floor, crunching beneath his booted feet as he stumbled, blinded. Cal heard him smack the frame aside, heard it collide with the wall so that the glass crumbled further, just like their family’s fucking rotten legacy.
“Sparrow,” he said viciously. “When I rip you apart, I’ll be starting with your wings.”
