Page 57 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Eileen

Eileen could still taste Nicola’s strawberry lip oil as she frantically locked the windows and drew the shades, her heart pounding in her chest. It was a jarring thing, the taste of summer and girlish sweetness on her mouth while fear-soaked bile rose up in her throat.

The drums were closer now, along with the sound of those discordant bells that she heard in her dreams. Only this time, there was no waking up from the nightmare.

This had only ever happened once to her parents, she had been told, on a midwinter’s night when the moon was full.

Eileen had been an infant, and she had blessedly slept through the racket.

Her parents said the faeries had them surrounded for hours, rattling the roof with the sounds of merriment without ever becoming visible through the windows.

The assault had only ceased with the rising of the sun, just as James was threatening to walk right into the yard with his rifle and end it for good, whatever that meant.

Eileen wanted to be brave. She wanted to scoop Nicola up like a dashing hero out of one of Finley’s adventure books and lock her away in her room for safekeeping.

But Eileen was rooted to the spot with fear, dread crawling down her spine as the sound of high-pitched laughter filtered in through the roof, through the windows. Even up through the floorboards.

Eileen didn’t care if this was a trick of the fae, or a trick of this old house, or a trick of her mind. She knew in the deepest pit of her stomach that they were surrounded, entirely at the mercy of whatever creatures had come to call on them.

This is it, Eileen thought. They’ve finally come to get me.

She scurried out into the hall long enough to lock the front door, as though that would do anything to help, then retreated back into the library, feeling feverish and more ill than she had in a long time.

She had thought perhaps that she would be the one to break, in the end.

That she would surrender to the whispers in her dreams and march out in her nightclothes into the woods, to be so disoriented by old magic that she walked in circles until she starved, or maybe make it all the way into the cave just to hurl herself inside, right into the hungry mouth of her family’s oldest enemy.

But she had held out, all this time, and now the faeries had grown impatient. Now, they had come to her.

She didn’t know whether to be proud of herself or not.

The music was deafening now, discordant chiming joined by screeching strings that rang through the library.

The roof creaked, and dust and plaster drifted down onto Nicola’s shoulders and dusted her hair.

There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, but Nicola didn’t know that.

Nicola just looked confused and frightened, so Eileen did the only thing she could think to do.

She pulled Nicola down with her onto the floor, where they curled up between the couch and the bookshelves to wait it out, or wait for death.

“What’s happening?” Nicola whispered, touching Eileen’s face with searching hands.

“I don’t know,” Eileen muttered. “I think—”

There was a deafening bang on the front door. Eileen nearly jumped out of her skin, nauseous with terror. God, she wanted to throw up.

All her planning, all her lies and schemes and careful patience, were all going to come to nothing.

She was going to die, and Nicola was going to die with her, and Finley would find their bodies clutched together just like this.

Maybe Adam would take up the Kirkfoyle mantle and care for whatever was left of the house, or maybe, the story would finally end here, a legacy engulfed in decay.

There was another bang, louder this time. Nicola gasped, burying her face in Eileen’s shoulder.

Eileen ignored the cold sweat of terror breaking out all over her body, and she fixed her eyes on the library door.

Bang!

Bang!

The knocking grew until it sounded like someone was assailing the door with a battering ram. The floorboards shook with every strike.

Eileen slowly rose to her feet, her fingertips shaking.

“No,” she said, as though flat-out refusal could somehow save them both from the inevitable.

Bang!

“No!” she shouted, her voice drowned out by the clamor.

There was one more thundering crash, and the front doors gave way with a weary creak. At that moment, the raucous music from outside ceased, plunging the house into silence.

Footsteps echoed from the foyer, growing clearer as they approached.

Finley pushed his way into the library, and then Adam. They looked confused, but not at all concerned.

“What are you doing in here with all the windows shut?” Finley asked. “And why did you lock the front door? I didn’t have my keys.”

“We knocked,” Adam said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb towards the door. “A couple of times. Are you guys all right? Nikki, why are you on the ground?”

“Adam,” Nicola gasped, clambering to her feet. She rushed into his arms. “Oh my God, it was horrible. You didn’t hear that, not any of it? You didn’t see anything outside?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Adam said, hands coming up instinctively to pet her hair. God, but he was good. Good in a way Eileen could never be, good without having to try. “Just slow down. What happened?”

Something about watching Adam soothe Nicola made Eileen’s mind up for her.

She had reached the absolute limits of her patience with this situation, and dragging her feet about getting it over and done with wasn’t going to help anyone.

Adam may desire her, Adam may even harbor a fondness for her on some days, but he would never look at her like that.

He would never trust her, not entirely, and he would be right not to.

No matter what Eileen did, no matter how she measured her words or tried to be patient or tried to share herself and Finley nicely, Adam would never enter into this of his own free will.

It was time to apply pressure.

Eileen stalked out of the library, brushing past Finley and ignoring the way he said her name over and over again. Her Christian name, and her pet name, the one that had taken form when he was just a child and couldn’t pronounce Eileen and so had called her Eye-la, which then became—

“Isla,” Finley snapped as she hauled herself up the stairs. “Where are you going?”

The longer she waited, the more likely Adam was to wander off and get himself snatched away, or Eileen was to go utterly mad from all of her nightmares and drown herself in the bathtub.

The journal was right where she’d left it, stowed at the foot of her bed beneath the same floorboard Arabella had wedged lose all those years ago.

Of course Eileen had found it. She was her grandmother’s progeny, wasn’t she?

Just as curious, and just as hungry for everything forbidden.

Of course she had found it, and of course she had read it. Every last word.

If Arabella’s parents had known about this journal, they would have surely destroyed it. But Arabella, like Eileen, had been as clever as she was paranoid. She knew how to hide the darkest secrets of her heart from those who would hate her for them.

Eileen stomped down the stairs, feeling wrung out and on the verge of collapse with a headache spiking in her temple. She strode back into the library, and everyone fell silent as she slammed the journal down on her father’s desk.

“No more games,” she said, voice nearly breaking. “I’m tired of games. I just want to tally the points and have it over and done with, now.”

“What are you talking about?” Adam asked, appraising her warily.

Finley was already putting plenty of distance between himself and Adam, clearing the blast radius as he braced for explosion.

Of all the ways they had talked about this going, they hadn’t imagined this.

Eileen had braced for seduction or coercion or force or some blend of all three, but she hadn’t accounted for losing her composure She hadn’t accounted for the fae finally breaking her mind.

“You asked me how my grandmother disappeared,” Eileen said, flipping open the book to the right page.

She had read through the journal so many times that she could find it based on feel alone, the weight of the paper between her fingers guiding her.

“Here’s the long and the short of it. One night, some time after she had been married to a man of her parents’ choosing and two years after the birth of my father, she ran.

Out into the night, into a rainstorm, right towards the cave.

She went inside, and she never came out again. ”

“When Adam asked you about that, you said you didn’t know. Why?” Nicola asked, face dark with fury. Moments ago, she had been clinging to Eileen. Now, Nicola looked like she might like to hit her. “I knew you were lying about something. I should have trusted myself. I should have—”

“Your grandfather left Craigmar before my grandmother ran,” Eileen went on.

As much as she liked Nicola, there was no time left for arguments.

She kept her eyes trained on Adam. Looking at Nicola’s wounded expression hurt too much.

“Right before her wedding, in fact. And perhaps because he was adopted or just the strength of his own will, he managed to stay away. I’m happy to give more details with time.

But for now, time is exactly what we’re out of. ”

“Eileen,” Finley said, warningly. What could he possibly be warning her about?

That she was coming on too strong and would put Adam off his appetite for her?

That she was having an unflattering response to nearly having the roof of her house ripped off by a band of roving faeries who delighted in nothing more than trying to scare her to death?

Surely he couldn’t be asking her to back out. It was too late for that now.

“Hush, Finley,” Eileen snapped. She felt worn thin enough that she was sure if you held her up to a window, you could see light through her body. She couldn’t handle a word of dissent from him right now. “Adam, I want to ask you—”

“I don’t care what you want,” Adam said.

For the first time since he arrived, Eileen saw the coldness within him.

The mean, imperious streak, the total disregard for human feeling that emerged only when he was pushed to his absolute limit.

The expression on his face was breathtakingly cruel.

It was like looking into a mirror. “I don’t want to hear another word out of you unless it’s explaining that whole story to me, slowly, in a straight line, so it makes goddamn sense.

One minute you’re talking about your grandmother; the next minute you’re talking about my grandfather… Why did he leave this place?”

Eileen glanced to Finley, more out of instinct than anything else.

He had always been her reprieve, her safe place to be as ugly or as selfish as she wanted without any real consequence.

But now, despite the part he had played in all this, he couldn’t even look at her.

He just stared into the fire, like a holy man averting his eyes from a sin so terrible he couldn’t bear to witness it.

He hadn’t said a word, and yet she had never felt so abandoned by him in her entire life.

“Fine,” she said, kicking the chair out from under her father’s desk and gesturing for Adam to sit down in it. Adam didn’t obey her, standing in defiance. She balled her hands into impotent fists at her sides and seethed. “Fine. Let’s have it all out in the open and over and done with, shall we?”

Eileen flipped through her grandmother’s journal, back to the page where the writing was jagged and the paper was stained with tears, and she began to read.