Page 60

“T here are several things to note.” Atta had a pen sticking out of her mouth, distorting her words.

He hadn’t let her out of his sight for the last few days. It felt like she was sand about to slip through his fingers if he looked away.

They’d had six more successful exorcisms since Mr Whelan, and they were riding high. He knew he needed to make an appearance at Achilles House—that Lynch would expect him to autopsy at least one of the bodies and that there was no way he hadn’t begun to put together his absence with the cures all over the news. . . but Atta.

There were jagged cuts on her arms, healing now. She’d told him they were from falling in the grove, and it felt like a half-truth.

She’d seemed fine. Happy, glowing, eating. She’d even crawled on top of him the night before and again that morning. She’d felt glorious in his hands then, alive and real and his . They’d lain there in the wintery morning light discussing their findings of the live faerie sitting in the cellar, and she’d had an idea, left his bed stark nude and returned with a towering stack of books against her breasts and climbed back into bed with him. He’d decided that would be the painting he made of her, standing there nude with her books.

Still, something wasn’t sitting right. Like a stone in his gut. Achilles awaiting the downfall of his Patroclus. Could he have stopped it if he’d known?

“Are you even listening to me, Professor Murdoch?”

Her face was contorted with ire. Even her smart mouth was there in typical fashion, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. She’d spoken in a strange language that day at Whelan’s. Trembled and looked terrified of what she saw that he couldn’t.

“No,” he said, pushing away all the darkness. “Tell me again.”

She rolled her eyes and straightened behind his desk. He’d offered it to her and taken the coffee table so her back wouldn't hurt being hunched over.

“The Dryad Faeries seem to be the ones with the highest rate of success, which makes a great deal of sense. They’re quite close to a successful Inhabitation, and they’re also the ones choosing their hosts more selectively.”

Intellect finally closed the door on his worry and cataclysmic thinking. “I’m listening.” leaned forward, elbows on his knees, brow furrowed.

Her face lit up like it always did when she was lost to her academia. “From what I saw when I touched them, some of the Inhabited were selfish, yes, but some were beyond kind. Self less . Protective. In ways that were potentially detrimental to themselves.”

“Go on.” The professor in him never could be turned off. It was best to draw out a person’s thoughts, not interject one’s own.

“The faeries possessing people are all under the same umbrella of Fae, though different variations. Unless we can recruit more people to help us, our focus needs to be on Stage 3 Inhabitations because those all seem to be Dryads, and they’re bordering on the success of Stage 4. I’m not sure there’s another stage after that, and if there is?—”

“Then they’ve won.”

“Possibly, yes. I keep seeing their world vibrant, then dying or completely burnt. They’re desperate.”

“Your view into their world is astonishing,” he mused.

Atta tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looking self-conscious. This astounded him considering he’d seen, touched, tasted every part of her. He worried there was a corner of her mind she’d shut him out of, and he wasn’t certain why .

“We have a good list of symptoms here to possibly catch early possessions, but we can’t catch everything on our own and shut down the source, too.”

nodded, looking at his own notes and drawings, at the sleeping faerie on the coffee table at his knees. “There is definitely a source. A place they’re coming in from.”

“We have to figure out where,” Atta agreed, her voice far off as she put the pen back between her teeth and was lost again to her books.

returned to his own work, wondering how Atta would feel about him cutting open one of the faeries. He needed to see inside it.

The sun was rising on the other side of the world, his eyelids heavy when he leaned back in his chair with a glass of whiskey, his third of the long night. Atta was on her stomach, feet up and ankles crossed in front of the fire, flipping through the pages of his mother’s book she’d found in the Hawthorn Grove. In the Hawthorn Grove of all places. Why had his mother placed it there?

“Anything of note?” he asked, breaking the comfortable silence that had stretched on the last hour or so.

She turned and sat up, tucking a leg beneath her. “No. It’s still just fairytales that I can tell.” Her face was drawn in disappointment.

“Come here.”

She gave him a coy smile, but her eyes glinted with mischief, and she ultimately obeyed.

He looked up at her as she approached and ran one finger down the line of his jaw. The stubble had grown out further than he usually let it, but Atta seemed to like it. Perhaps he’d leave it that way. She pulled her plaid skirt up enough to straddle his lap, just as he’d desperately hoped she would. He set his glass down on the side table and took her arse in his hands as she fiddled with the ends of his undone tie.

pulled her toward him enough to make her squeal and topple forward so he could catch her mouth with his, but it was her that deepened the kiss.

“Mmm,” he said against her hair as she moved her lips to his neck. “Don’t we have work to do?”

“You’re the one who called me over here,” she murmured in his ear.

“And what if I only wanted to discuss fairytales?”

She laughed huskily and shifted her hips. He groaned and she laughed again. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“You know”—he tugged at the hem of her jumper and she raised her arms so he could slip it over her head—“these skirts of yours drive me out of my mind.” He watched the firelight dance along the curves of her breasts, perfect in that sheer lace bra, as she left him just long enough to slip off her tights and throw them over the faerie enclosure.

When she returned to his lap, he slid his hands up her thighs to feel her silk panties.

“Perhaps the skirt should stay on, then.”

“Perhaps it should.”

She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned his trousers, all the while driving him mad with her tongue colliding with his. No woman had ever made him feel so alive. So desperate for her. So madly in love. He knew the moment he’d fallen. It was standing there in The Old Library, holding a book in his hand as she told him she’d watched him years ago, stand the same way in the same library. When she’d laughed and said it was annoying, when he had that first laugh, he knew then and there he'd set the world on fire for her. Slay a thousand beasts, cure any Plague, fight to the death. For her. His Patroclus.

He deftly pulled her panties to the side and slid within her, relishing that he could make her tip her head back like that. Breathe like that, the ends of her hair tickling the back of his hands as he gripped her hips.

When they were spent and she lay curled in his lap, this beautiful window into another world, he lifted her chin with his fingers and gently kissed her lips. She looked up at him with those eyes he adored and his heart squeezed. “Do you know that I’m in love with you?”

She smiled, the sleepy, blissful smile he knew was his. “I thought that might be the case, yeah.”

“You’ve tangled yourself up in my soul like a vine, a stór. ” He dragged his thumb across her bottom lip and she smiled against his touch.

“I’m terrified of this world, . But I don’t fear facing it with you.”

He kissed her forehead and she fell asleep, everything he cared about there in his arms.