Page 45 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Robert

“Arabella, wait!” Robert called. “You’re going too fast!”

Robert dashed after Arabella through the overgrown grass, following the sound of her pealing laughter.

They had begged off their lessons with an excuse about Arabella having food poisoning, and the moment the tutor had disappeared down the drive, Arabella had sprung the locks on the parlor window and wiggled out into the grounds.

Robert had followed, just like always.

Where wouldn’t he follow, if Arabella led?

“Keep up if you can!” Arabella called over her shoulder, her dark curls and red hair ribbon streaming in the wind.

Robert did his best, slowing only enough to prevent himself from stumbling and cracking his skull on a rock.

At fifteen, Arabella was a long-legged gazelle, but thirteen-year-old Robbie had yet to grow into himself.

“Where are you going?” he demanded breathlessly, pulling up alongside her as she slowed. They had cleared the green and were in the woods now, having crossed that liminal threshold into the uncultivated part of Craigmar.

Arabella grinned at him. A bright, wild smile, more creature than child.

“Where do you think?”

“Arabella, no,” Robert said, making his voice as serious as possible. It was a difficult task, as it had begun to crack in recent months. “Father will kill us.”

“Father doesn’t have to know, unless you tattle,” she said, giving her brother a sharp pinch on the fleshy part of his upper arm. “Come on, I want to see what’s out there.”

Robert didn’t need to ask where “there” was.

He had only been to the cave twice, both times to place offerings of sweets and cream with the rest of his family.

The atmosphere of the place had felt… wrong.

Robert had gotten the strong inkling that he shouldn’t be there.

He had been raised like any other Kirkfoyle child, taught to give the cave a wide berth and not to trust his eyes and ears when he traveled out there.

Robert knew their strange neighbors were not to be provoked under any circumstances.

He knew they were to blame for the curious lights he sometimes saw out his bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning, and for the way his father sometimes paced the hallways at night, muttering to himself until his wife coaxed him back into bed, but that was all Robert knew.

He kept a healthy distance from the cave at all times, and he maintained a healthy fear of the fae, even though he had never seen one of them himself.

Arabella had, though, or at least she liked to pretend she had in order to frighten him.

She said they came to her in dreams, to whisper secrets in her ear and sing her sweet songs.

Robert opened his mouth to protest further, but Arabella had already taken his hand and started pulling him deeper into the forest. Just about the time he had formulated his argument for why they should turn back, they cleared a hill and found themselves face to face with the cave.

It loomed before them, flanked by bare trees with twisted branches covered with moist lichen.

“I don’t like this,” Robert said weakly. “Come on, let’s go back. It’s so cold out, and Father will be home from town soon. If he finds out we’re gone, I’ll be the one in trouble, you know that.”

“I won’t let anybody get you in trouble,” Arabella replied, already taking a few steps towards the cave in her soaked ballet flats.

She had been obsessed with Swan Lake recently and practiced her pirouettes at all hours of the day, and she hadn’t bothered to pull on her boots before scurrying out onto the grounds.

“Don’t you want to see it for yourself? Nobody has to find out. ”

Robert had to admit, grudgingly, that part of him was curious.

But a bigger part of him was scared, both of the cave and of his father’s discipline.

He pulled his hand out of Arabella’s grasp, but she didn’t turn back with him.

Instead, she lifted her chin and took a few determined steps into the cave.

It was alarming, how fast the darkness swallowed her up. In one moment, she was totally visible; in another, she was gone. Robert’s heart battered against his ribs. He couldn’t lose Arabella. He couldn’t.

Swallowing the last of his pride and his good sense, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and walked into the cave.

At first he blindly navigated by feeling along the damp rock walls and following the sounds of Arabella’s footsteps ahead.

The air inside the cave was wet and thick with the scent of rotting leaves and the musk of small animals, but as he pushed further into the mountainside, there was another smell as well, like the fluffy hot cross buns his mother baked every Easter.

It might have been appetizing if it wasn’t so sickly sweet.

“Arabella,” Robert hissed into the dark. He put a hand out to grasp his sister, but all he clutched was empty air. “Arabella, where are you?”

“Come on,” Arabella whispered back, her voice seeming to come from every direction. It was impossible to tell how far away she was.

Robert took a gulping breath, and tried not to panic. If he panicked, he might suck down all the oxygen in the small space and suffocate, and then Arabella would have to drag his body out, if she could even find her own way back, and then…

His anxious thoughts trailed off as the ground began to slope downwards, moving further underground.

And then, there was a faint glow of light up ahead.

Robert scurried towards the light, hoping that they had somehow turned around and were resurfacing into the sun. But the air was getting colder, not warmer, and that saccharine scent was as strong as ever.

Robert hurried forward, and emerged in an underground chamber. Overhead, the ceiling was low and adorned with stalactites, and the mica in the walls sparkled and winked at him as though it was in on some joke. But how? There shouldn’t be any light down here at all.

Robert looked to his left, and his heart nearly gave out at what he saw.

A wooden table sat in the middle of the cavern, heavy-laden with out-of-season fruits and a whole suckling pig with an apple in its mouth and buns that looked like his mother’s.

No, Robert realized as he took a few stunned step forwards, they were his mother’s, down to the uneven criss-cross on top.

Robert knew with a crushing dread that they had most certainly made a mistake in coming here. But Arabella seemed delighted. She was standing at the table with her hands clasped together, as though the entire spread had been arranged for her pleasure alone.

“Look, Robbie,” she breathed. “Isn’t it so pretty? And everything smells delicious.”

“Look at the lights,” he whispered, too terrified to move a muscle.

There were fat, dripping candlesticks on the table, smelling of beeswax and sweet chamomile, but the flames dancing on the wicks weren’t the cheery gold of mortal fire. They were an eerie blue, pale as a robin’s egg, and they cast a cool light around the room.

“Let’s leave,” Robert said, finally finding enough courage to reach out and clutch Arabella’s arm. Her skin was cold beneath her thin sweater. “Before anybody realizes we’re here.”

“Not on your life. This is what our family has been hiding from us this whole time? Kindness and goodwill?” Robert desperately wanted to convince Arabella that this felt more like a trap than anything, but she was a thousand miles away already, swept up in one of her wild fancies.

“I feel like a princess at a banquet. Just look at those gooseberries, and plums too, as big as my fist!”

“I’m not hungry,” he said miserably.

“You know,” Arabella said, trailing curious fingers across the edge of the table, “I heard Mother say once that the fae used to be allies with our family. What if this whole time they’ve been trying to be friendly, and we’re the ones who have been rude?”

Robert felt like tearing his hair out. He had been roped into hare-brained schemes by his sister countless times before, and he had often been the one to take the fall for them, but he had never felt as though they were in real danger before.

He had never fretted, deep in his gut, that the consequences of their actions might be anything worse than a few licks of the switch or an evening locked in his room without supper.

He should never have come here. He should never have listened to Arabella.

“Please,” he said, on the verge of tears. “I’m cold and I’m frightened and I want to go home.”

“Then go!” she said with a blithe little laugh.

“Not without you. I won’t leave you, Arabella. Not ever.”

His pleas fell on deaf ears. Arabella was entranced by the bounty before her, and her face was lit up with delight in the blue glow of the candles. She stretched out one of her hands, plucked up a plum, and brought it to her lips.

“Don’t,” Robert hissed, at the very moment Arabella’s teeth tore through the flesh of the fruit.

Juice dribbled down her chin as she swallowed, and her eyes flashed with triumph.

When Arabella smiled at him, all plum-stained teeth and mischief, Robert felt like he was looking at a stranger.

He felt something fracture between him and his sister then, something he, in his youth, did not have a name for and wouldn’t be able to put into words for a long time.

Arabella held the fruit out to him, ripe and bloody and so perfectly bitten.

He was tempted, for a hot, strange moment, to slot his mouth over the place where her lips had been and taste what she had tasted.

Something about the thin air going to his head or how pretty Arabella looked with her curls askew garbled his emotions, insisting there would be no harm in one small bite.

But then he remembered how angry he was with Arabella, and he knocked the plum out of her hand and into the dirt.

“Robbie!” Arabella shrieked indignantly, suddenly a child no better than him, no matter how much she liked to pretend that being older made her so much more mature. “You beast!”

Robert never got the chance to defend himself, because all the candles in the room sputtered out. The room was plunged into total darkness. For a long instant, there was no sound except the scrape of Robert’s breath against his lungs.

Then, in the distance, there was a faint sound. Rhythmic, like drumming.

“Shh!” Robert whispered. “Do you hear that?”

The pounding of drums grew louder, along with a high whine that sounded like viola strings, and the jangling of bells. A strange music, with instruments Robert couldn’t place, sifting through the very rock of the walls and growing ever closer.

“We should go,” he said again, edging towards the path back home.

This time, Arabella didn’t fight him. The realization that they weren’t alone down there must have spooked her, because she jostled against him and started pushing him towards the exit.

They walked quickly at first, but when the music got louder, joined with the distant hiss and chatter of high-pitched, indistinguishable voices, they clasped their hands together and ran.

Robert had been right in his assumption that he would receive the blame.

When he and his sister tumbled back inside the house, dew-wet and wide-eyed and stinking of the cave, they had very little to say for themselves.

Their mother shouted at them for a full ten minutes before their father hauled them both upstairs by the wrists, locked Arabella in her room, and paddled Robert’s hide with a hairbrush.

He was too old to be spanked any more, but that didn’t take the sting out of his father’s blows, and it didn’t stop him from blubbering like a baby, either.

He and Arabella never talked about that day again, and Arabella never confessed to her parents that she had eaten faery fruit.

But Robert sometimes caught his sister sitting at her window at night, gazing out in the direction of the cave as though drawn by a compulsion Robert could never understand.

As though it was calling to her.