Page 17 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)
CHAPTER TEN
Nicola
Nicola was soaked by the time they got back to the house. Her teeth chattered as she ducked through the door, and she shed her sweater immediately. It hit the hardwood floor with a wet slap as Adam ducked in behind her.
Finley and Eileen lagged behind, moving agonizingly slow up the path as Eileen struggled to breathe.
The lord was leaning heavily on her groundskeeper, and in the end, Finley had to carry her bridal-style the last fifty feet and over the threshold.
Eileen protested loudly, trying her damnedest to twist out of his grasp.
“Put me down. I don’t need to be toted around like a toddler.”
Nicola locked the door behind them, breathing a little easier with solid wood between her and whatever was out there on the grounds. It wasn’t that she had no sense of what she had just encountered. It was that she had a very good idea of what had just happened, and that scared her even more.
Fairy stories were fun when they were pressed between the pages of a book, just cultural memory and dead ink. They weren’t supposed to come to life.
“You’re embarrassing me,” Eileen snapped, swatting at Finley. She looked dangerously pale in the warm lighting of Craigmar’s chandeliers, with tendrils of hair sticking to her neck like the tentacles of an octopus. There wasn’t a drop of color in her lips.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Finley grunted. “Now stop struggling or I’ll sling you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.”
“To hell with you,” Eileen spat.
“You pushed yourself too hard. You need rest.”
“I can do as I please in my own house, on my own land. Are you lord now or am I?”
“I’m the only one with common sense; you figure out the rest.”
Adam and Nicola stood dripping mud onto the expensive rugs underfoot, sharing an awkward glance. Nicola’s heart was still pounding. She would be hearing those tiny golden bells in her dreams for days to come.
Eileen and Finley bickered for a moment more before he put her down with a huff.
Adam shook the water from his hair like a dog and Finley looked every inch a bedraggled cat who had fallen into a tub. Eileen began to fastidiously pin back her hair and wipe the stray droplets from her face. It reminded Nicola of a war-rumpled lioness cleaning blood from her claws.
“Well,” Eileen said, stomping down the hallway towards the kitchen, “I hope you’re very happy with yourself, Adam. Now they’ve got a taste for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Adam demanded, all but tearing down the hallway after Eileen. Nicola followed close after while Finley trudged behind, sulky.
In the kitchen, Eileen swatted on the tap and filled up the gooseneck kettle.
Once that was boiling, she tossed open a cupboard and retrieved a first-aid kit, which she then threw down on the small wooden table in the kitchen.
The table was an ancient, banged-up thing, probably used more for preparing food than entertaining.
“Sit,” Eileen ordered. “All of you. Adam, let’s have a look at that hand.”
“I’ll do it,” Nicola said as she took the seat nearest to Adam. She didn’t think Eileen would hurt Adam, but she trusted herself with him more.
“Have it your way,” Eileen said. “He doesn’t want my help, anyway.”
Nicola scrubbed her hands clean with goat milk soap in the large farmhouse sink, then gingerly took Adam’s wounded hand.
There was a semicircle of puncture wounds on the top of his hand, and a few to match on the palm underneath.
They were real and undeniable, inflamed and red, still weeping water and blood.
They didn’t look quite like animal bite marks, nor quite like the indentation of human teeth.
It was more like Adam had been bitten by a human mouth full of very sharp animal teeth, but Nicola tried not to dwell on that too much.
“It was the iron that kept them away, wasn’t it?
” Nicola asked as she ripped open an alcohol cloth and retrieved some bandages.
She watched Eileen warily, trying to play this right.
Perhaps Nicola had been too naive earlier, too swept up in the beauty and romance of a Scottish whirlwind vacation to notice all the warning signs.
Eileen knew more than she was telling, and there was something dark just beneath the surface of this place, like rot beneath floorboards.
And while it probably would have sounded crazy to most other people, Nicola was willing to make an educated guess about what kind of sickness might be in the bones of Craigmar.
“That brooch you wear. And they didn’t bother Finley because of his earrings. ”
“Clever,” Eileen said, giving Nicola one of those hot, sharp glances that felt like a piercer’s needle puncturing skin. “You’ve known from the start what you were dealing with.”
“I thought you two believed in it,” Nicola said, swabbing Adam’s palm with alcohol no matter how he hissed. “But that’s not the same as believing in it myself. Although now I’m not so sure.”
“What are you all talking about?” Adam demanded.
“Faeries,” Eileen said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. Nicola’s heart fluttered at the word, the word she had been turning over in her overexcitable brain.
“Be serious, Eileen,” Adam groaned.
“I’m being dead serious,” Eileen replied. “You wanted to know Craigmar’s secrets? We can start with this one: this place is lousy with faeries.”
“I’ve been willing to put up with a lot from you,” Adam said, and now he was angry, genuinely angry. He tried to clench his hand in Nicola’s grasp but she pried it back open. The wound wept afresh. “This is too much. Don’t insult my intelligence, please.”
“Any other explanation you have, I’ll be happy to hear it.”
Adam fell silent at that, glowering down at his bleeding hand. Finley, who had looked like a dam ready to break from the moment he set foot in the house, finally crumbled.
“Tell him, Eileen. The whole of it. Or I will.”
Even steadfast Finley, it appeared, had his limits. Eileen glared at him, mean enough to shame the sun for shining, and he stared right back, unbothered.
There was something very sexy about him when he looked at her like that, like she had no power over him whatsoever.
It was so compelling that Nicola still noticed how beautiful it made him look, even through the haze of fear and the air of confusion in the room and the fact that she was waterlogged and cold.
“You mean little nude people with butterfly wings?” Adam cut in. “That’s what you’re asking me to believe grabbed me, a fully grown man, and bit me hard enough to draw blood?”
“That isn’t what a faery is,” Nicola said, tossing the dirty alcohol wipe aside as she carefully peeled open a band-aid. “That image in your head is a Victorian invention.”
Now every eye in the room was on Nicola. Adam was looking at her like she was speaking Greek, Eileen was looking at her like she was Christmas Day come early, and Finley was looking at her with frightened awe. Nicola blushed, turning back to her work patching up Adam.
“Go on, sparrow,” Eileen said, “you know the stories. Tell him.”
“In the oldest stories the faeries are ancient, powerful beings, the size of humans,” Nicola said carefully.
She wasn’t sure how her mental Rolodex of folklore could help right now, but if there was ever a situation that called for it, it was this one.
“They have their own society and culture, and they play by their own rules. Humans are entertainment to them, or a nuisance. They enjoy playing tricks on us. But humans can keep themselves safe from faery interference through certain rituals, like turning clothes inside out or wearing iron jewelry.”
“Very good,” Eileen said. She took a deep breath, as though bracing herself. “Nicola knows part of this story, so I suppose I ought to tell you the rest, shouldn’t I?”
Eileen plucked up the steaming kettle and poured four mugs of chamomile tea to steady their nerves. Then she sat down at the fourth seat at the round kitchen table, creating a perfect unbroken circle, and began her tale.
“Before this land belonged to the Kirkfoyles, before it belonged to any man, it belonged to the fae. Human expansion and industrialization drove them underground, into the secret chambers of the earth, but they didn’t die.
They’re still out there, waiting for their chance to reclaim the land.
They emerge occasionally, for reasons only they know.
Nicola saw one when she was out hiking with Finley.
Adam, you just met another one out at the cave.
Sorry for the pageantry. I’ll admit I like my dramatics, but I didn’t know how else to get you to understand.
I’m of the mind that magic is something you can only know in the biblical sense, through experience.
No one can make you believe in it with words.
You have to feel it pull at your bones.”
Adam opened his mouth to protest, but something about that last sentence made words die on his lips. For a moment, at least. Then he blinked and shook his head.
“That’s a bedtime story,” he pushed back. “It has to be.”
“Then what do you think took a bite out of you?” Eileen asked, eyes flashing. “What do you think drowned my parents, all those years ago?”
“Isla,” Finley said gently. Eileen took another deep breath, then quieted. She was gripping her mug so tight her knuckles were white.
“The Kirkfoyles have lived on this land since the fifteenth century,” she said, staring at the table.
It sounded like every word pained her, like she wasn’t used to saying any of this out loud.
“We outlasted rebellions and invasions and transfers of power, and we managed to keep our holdings in the process mostly through canny marriage, and keeping to ourselves. But there was another foe out there in the hills, besides the English.”
“The fae,” Nicola supplied, urging Eileen on. Eileen’s knee brushed hers under the table as she leaned a little closer, as though borrowing some of Nicola’s nerve.