Page 25

CHAPTER 25

Cherry Wine

T he Ford’s heater belched engine breath into my shivering hands, but my vigorous rubbing did more to warm them than the car.

Ireland’s favorite game had not been spared from the endless rain. Even the wind had sided with the opposing team when it ripped my umbrella from my frozen hands and tossed it to them.

“I liked hurling, but it’s really nothing like baseball,” I decided, plucking my soaked jacket away from my breasts.

“Darlin’, that’s ‘cause ain’t nothin’ like baseball.” Tye grinned from the driver’s seat, offering a smile with teeth whiter than the Irish players’ thighs. I eyed his dry hoodie enviously. “But I’m glad to get ya away from Naruka for a bit. James has got even me on edge tryin’ to reach all the triplets.” Tye turned up the volume on the radio’s sports recap. “Ya know he’s got a hundred bucks on this game? That man must get some thrill out of losin’ his money.”

I chuckled as we swung through Capolinn. Strung between pubs, rows of red-and-white triangles for the local team fluttered in the wind. “Tye, what if the Inquitate come after you in L’Ardoise?” I angled toward the cracked window, hoping the icy cold would dispel the reek of cigarettes I’d unleashed with the heater—the car’s cruel revenge for not fixing its spark plugs yet.

Tye scratched his eyebrow with the hand holding his cigarette. “I’m only worried ‘bout you, hun.”

Yet I still hadn’t told him about what happened in Oslo. “Why do you think we came through the Gate together?”

“Since I can’t see Stornoway and I bein’ all that friendly, I gotta imagine we were forced into it.” Frosted green eyes slid sideways at me. “ You and Stornoway are lookin’ pretty friendly right now though.”

So I was staring after Bryn so obviously even Tye picked it up.

“He’s been easier to talk to since we figured out the Inquitate pattern,” I said carefully.

Tye just shook his head as we bumped up a narrow road leading away from Capolinn. The overgrown brambles that should have been brilliant green during the day were now sharp silhouettes guarding the curving corners.

“Look,” Tye said as he slowed around one. “I gotta tell ya somethin’ about him, since I do feel like you’re getting close, and ‘cause that guy would throw ya over quicker than a cat on a hot tin roof.”

My stomach lurched. “What is it?”

Tye twisted the steering wheel between tanned hands. “Ya know how he was exiled before?”

“He didn’t say why, and neither did James.”

“That’s ‘cause they don’t want ya to know. Don’t want ya to know just what the Gate can do to ya.” He went quiet for a moment, letting the spluttering engine fill the silence. “But me? I think you should know the realities of what we’re doin’ here, you get me?”

I chewed on my lip. “Yeah. Yeah, I get you, Tye.”

He sighed, lifted his ball cap, let it flatten his hair again. “Did Stornoway ever tell ya how James recruited him?”

I frowned into the side mirror, where rain dissolved my face into a thousand reflections. “James said he offered him a commission for painting portraits. How does that relate to his exile?”

Tye turned down the radio. “Everything relates, Roe. Because Naruka, Ruhaven, it’s about takin’ who ya were and breakin’ it. The people who leave? Like Lana? Those are the ones that didn’t wanna break.”

That was a strange way of putting it. “I don’t think I’m breaking.”

“No, but ya will. That’s what the question of the Fall does to ya, and why James don’t like tellin’ folks too early. But anyway…” He stared hard at the windshield, then banged his fist on the dashboard when the wipers stuck. “You may not think it, but Stornoway actually had a life before all of this. A struggling artist—and there ain’t no other kind, way I see it—but he had this college sweetheart, too, nice lookin’ woman. He ever tell ya about her?”

I didn’t want to know that. Didn’t want to ever think of him like that. “No.”

“Well, when Stornoway moved here, he kept the girlfriend for a while, even after Ruhaven. A lot of folks think they can keep both lives—before Ruhaven and after—but ya can’t. That’s what Ruhaven steals from ya.

“Now, ya know Stornoway’s got a mate, and I suppose you know what that means for Ruhavens too. That girlfriend didn’t stand a chance. After a few good romps with his Ruhaven lady, Stornoway was waving goodbye to that sweet Norwegian.”

I could picture the kind of woman waiting for him in Norway, someone who’d look at his picture every day and think how lucky she was. Wondering, hoping he’d come back soon.

Tye swirled his cigarette at me. “Nothin’ is ever good enough for Stornoway. He’s like a stallion whinin’ for the mare in the next farm. Got a nice girl here, but he had to find his Ruhaven love, his mate. So he started recruitin’, lookin’ for her in the Ledger .”

“Like James,” I murmured.

“Like James,” Tye agreed, tapping his cigarette on the steering wheel. “And Bryn found her.”

My heart sunk—a stupid, foolish reaction. “He found her here,” I said hollowly, knowing what that would mean to him, to find someone here he obviously loved in the Gate. How would she feel? Would she know how lucky she was to have Bryn look at her? Want her? The idea made me sick.

“He did,” Tye said. “He found her in the Ledger , but they ain’t ever met. She was killed by the Inquitate.”

The words dangled between us in the car, mingled with the radio in some weird parody, and everything in me turned to ice. His mate was dead. The one I’d just—just envied. Here I was, posing as someone in the Ledger , and I was jealous of a dead woman. As if I had any right.

I sucked in my cheeks and stared hard out the window. I’d wondered, before, why Bryn had been researching the Inquitate before he’d been infected. This was why. Not for him, not for the other Ruhavens, but for her. Because she’d been one of those victims.

“Who was she?” I asked quietly. And which of the lives that I’d read, that he’d so carefully assembled notes for, had belonged to his mate? Had I asked him about her? Had I cared?

“Dunno, but you think James took it bad with Essie?” Tye shook his head. “That ain’t nothin’ compared to Stornoway. Guy was a fuckin’ mess. Stopped goin’ to the Gate for a while, then we couldn’t get him away from the damn thing. He’s goin’ in there, livin’, talkin’, fuckin’ this woman that don’t even exist, won’t ever be here.”

How could anyone live like that? Knowing every interaction you had—every kiss, every touch—was with a woman who died twice over—in the memories, and again here. “What happened?”

Tye sucked in his cheeks on an inhale, blew it out. “I remember it was early April, ‘cause the sheep had just finished lambing. The place is waterlogged—ya know how it is—fog everywhere, mist as thick as the smoke off this cigarette. James, Kazie, and me, we’re all goin’ about our business ‘round Naruka. Ya know someone used to keep this place maintained before ya.” He jabbed a thumb at his chest. “And I suppose none of us really noticed that Stornoway was missin’.”

The warm lanterns of Naruka flickered through the dark trees.

“Kazie came ‘round first, askin’ ‘bout Stornoway. Well, I wasn’t keepin’ tabs on the man, told her to check his room. She says no, he ain’t there. I tell her check the woods then, probably paintin’. So she went lookin’ for him.

“But he wasn’t paintin’, he wasn’t in the woods, wasn’t researchin’. Now Kazie, ya know how sensitive she is, she starts gettin’ worried, and when James comes back from the market, she gets him in a state. Pretty soon, we realize no one’s seen him since last evening when he gone and left for the Gate. That wasn’t unusual, ya know, ‘cause he could anchor himself.”

Someone had left the wrought iron gate open, the lantern beside it lit, so Tye drove through without pause.

“Once we figured it out, where he likely was, well, I ain’t ever seen James scale that mountain so fast. He flew up, Kaz on his tail, and me followin’. All I could think was that it was just like Stornoway—selfish. That man never thought of anythin’ but himself.”

I rolled down the window, needing the sharp ping of rain on my face.

“The mud slowed us some, Kazie kept trippin’, but eventually, we made it to the Gate.” He squeezed his knuckles on the wheel. “Kazie screamed. Ear-splittin’, like a chicken under an axe. First I thought, maybe, thought the Inquitate had shown up. Then I saw him.”

Tye let the image of Bryn at the Gate conjure itself before words ever could. I’d been sick and gaunt after a few hours—he’d have been in the Gate for nearly twenty-four.

“His clothes were soaked. I remember that first,” Tye intoned, and his eyes had that glassy, faraway look of someone caught in the hooks of a memory. “And his hair was…” he wiped at his forehead, “soaked. It was longer then, nearly as long as yours, so he looked like a mermaid yanked up from the river. You ever smelled death, Roe?”

I dug my fingernails into the seat. “Willow didn’t— I don’t—”

“Then ya haven’t,” Tye cut me off. “Sweet, burnin’ rubber. That’s what it smells like. That’s what the Gate does to ya. Kazie was sick, threw up in the bushes while James tried to hold it together,” he said, voice as flat as his eyes. “Stornoway—he didn’t look right at all. Skin all waxy, lips so gray ya can barely see ‘em, and rain had pooled in his mouth like one of those bird fountains James has.”

Sick dread spread like oil in my chest.

“When I saw Stornoway that day…” Tye rubbed his jaw. “Well, it changed things for me. James hauled him up, screamin’ at the guy to come back. I ain’t ever seen anythin’ like it. We couldn’t wake him up.

“It took both of us—Kaz was too distraught—to drag his limp body out of the Gate. But finally, when we got him ‘bout thirty feet away, he came ‘round. James started weepin’. I ain’t seen a grown man cry since my daddy found out my sister was movin’ to New York. But Stornoway, he don’t apologize for what he’s done, for bein’ so damn foolish. Instead, he starts screamin ’ at us. Blamin’ us for tearin’ him away from his mate, ‘cause she’s alive in the Gate and he was gonna join her. Sick fuck.”

How could he want someone that much? Even James wouldn’t offer himself to the Gate like that. Did it make Bryn crazy, or in love? Was there a difference?

“That’s what the Gate does to ya. Ya forget what’s real, what matters. Stornoway had no intention of wakin’ from the Gate. He went in to die that day.”

I squeezed my lips together. He’d done that, for his mate, because he’d cared more for her, more for Ruhaven, than I had for anything. Even for Willow, I wouldn’t have had the courage to waste away in the Gate, to offer everything I was to Ruhaven.

But Bryn would have sacrificed his life and friends in Norway, his years studying for a PhD in art history, his hobbies like glacier walking and painting boats in the port.

God, I’d been stupid, selfish. Only thinking about what Ruhaven meant to me, instead of realizing what it might mean to Bryn. What it’d done to him, what it must have been like to face the memories of a mate he knew was as lost as James’s.

“So that’s why you exiled Bryn,” I said hollowly, “because of what he tried to do.”

Tye grunted and switched to the stick, clunking the Granada into park. “That’s right, Roe, for his own damn good.”

What if Bryn tried to remain in the Gate again? He had been so busy watching me when I should have been protecting him .

Shaking, I climbed out of the car, following Tye’s flashlight as it danced over the weeds and raspberry bushes picked clean by birds.

“Ya won’t say anythin’?” Tye confirmed.

I shook my head as I stepped into the tack room that still smelled of saddle cleaner and toed off my soaked boots. Though everything in me screamed to go to Bryn, to tell him—I don’t know— something that showed I understood some minuscule part of why he’d done it. That I wasn’t just some selfish woman, that I understood the gift he’d given me by forcing me to see Ruhaven.

I’d thought he’d done it to punish me at first, to make me witness a life that didn’t belong to me. But maybe it hadn’t been a punishment at all, but a gift—a chance to live a different life, a chance to be someone again, a chance to matter. Bryn had given me that, even after what he’d lost.

The sound of ticking clocks floating in from the kitchen, as steadying as Bryn’s own presence.

“Roe?”

Tye stepped under the light. His warm cheeks glowed, his dark hair looking soft as butterscotch. “The Gate, well, it means different things for different people, ya know? Made me realize how important life is here, how all those dreams and fantasies only make this more real.” He ran a hand down my wet braid. “That’s why I brought ya here, ‘cause ya didn’t see that. You were so broken after Willow. I knew this place could put ya together again.” His eyes crinkled. “Wasn’t I right?”

Right? Maybe. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bryn. “I guess I never thanked you.”

He stepped closer, ducking the lightbulb. “Guess I didn’t always go about things the right way either, huh?” His tone was light, teasing, but those green eyes darkened to smoky rings.

I braced a stiff hand on his shoulder. “No, probably kissing me at the Gate wasn’t the right way.”

His lips parted, the bottom one pink under the light. “I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout that,” he said, voice dropping an octave. “Thinkin’ I’d like to make up for it.” A faint dimple popped under a scruff of beard.

My heart hammered a sharp tune. I hadn’t thought of Tye like that in months. “Oh. Well. I—I think we’re even.”

“Naw,” Tye said softly, pulling me into him, “‘cause, hun, I never did really kiss ya back then.”

Everything played out in slow motion—the intent in his eyes, the hand tightening in my jacket, the feel of the leftover rain sliding down my neck. But all I could think about was the image of Bryn up in the Gate, lying in the rain alone. Waiting for Ruhaven to claim him for a mate he’d never see.

I shouldn’t do this.

Even if I’d wanted Tye since that first hot dog he bought me at the park, and now here he was, his full lips a hair’s breadth away.

Our mouths met before I could decide—firm, soft, a question. He tasted like sunny warmth and ball games, of comfort and home and cinnamon, exactly like I’d always imagined. And I’d imagined a lot .

To hell with it.

I opened under him, exploring his mouth as the lightbulb hummed above us and the moths beat their last breaths against it. When had I last kissed anyone? There was that awkward mess outside the bar, then there was…

Sahn. That was who I’d kissed last.

Tye murmured against my lips, his mouth and hands far more skilled than mine, drawing out every latent desire the Azekiel had burned into me over the past months before I’d woken on the cusp of them about to “ make love ”—as Bryn had said. Each smoldering look Sahn had thrown at Nereida that punched me in the gut. The feel of Sahn’s broad muscles that I imagined were Tye’s now as I gripped him.

The dim lightbulb swung overhead, revealing the heat in Tye’s eyes with every pass, like a wolf’s orbs flickering in the woods. We slapped into the kitchen door, pulling at each other’s clothes. Tye cursed my soaked jacket under his breath.

If I didn’t release all the burning tension Sahn had built up, I’d implode. What if Tye wanted to go back to his room? I’d have to creep past James to get upstairs, and Kazie’s budgies would be squawking across the hall, and then Bryn shared a wall with…

Slipping on rolling onions, I grabbed on to Tye.

Mistaking it for enthusiasm, he shoved my jacket off, inched his hot fingers under my sweater, and I nearly sighed from their warmth alone. Then they were sliding over my flat belly, heating a path up my torso, undoing my bra.

I groaned as he kneaded my breasts. Yes, this was what I needed. To be touched again, finally, to be—

A gasp flew from me when a sharp pain pinched my heart, like a fine needle had slipped between my ribs and scored bone. I jerked hard enough to wrench Tye’s fingers away.

“What—what was that?” I panted, bra hanging loose.

Tye’s eyebrows pulled together. “Roe, darlin’? What’s wrong?”

I grabbed at my shirt, still feeling the phantom pain. Some side effect of Ruhaven? Or another illusion?

“I—I don’t know.”

The pain began to abate, smoothing out like an ironed wrinkle, but it’d been a bucket of cold water on my arousal.

When Tye reached for me again, I gripped his wrist, stopped him. “Tye, we’re in the tack room.”

“So? You wanna go to mine?”

Yes. No. Yes. Maybe.

Tye’s heavy breathing filled the dark. “This is ‘bout Stornoway, ain’t it?” He zipped up his jacket abruptly. “He’s got you twisted around him, takin’ ya to the Gate, gettin’ ya obsessed about the Inquitate.”

Wait, what? “It’s not about him.” It might be about him.

Tye held out his hands. “Then what do ya want, Roe? I thought you liked that day in the Gate, before, well ya know. I knew it wasn’t the time after, so I gave ya some space. I’ve been givin’ ya space.”

I rubbed my forehead. Hell. This conversation was probably long overdue. “Tye, I—I did. Want this, before, I mean. But now?” I kicked the bag of onions. “I think, not now,” I admitted.

Tye let out a gusty sigh. “Guess the Gate complicates everythin’, huh?”

I peeked at him from under my loose bangs. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it does.”

He fixed my shirt, tugged lightly on my braid. “That’s alright, darlin’. I tried. Probably, I should’ve tried back in L’Ardoise, but that’s how things go.” He tipped up my chin, pressed his lips softly to mine. “Let’s go on inside.” Hot light flooded the tack room as Tye stepped into the kitchen, likely illuminating my heated cheeks. “Comin’, hun?” He held open the door.

“I’ll join you in a minute.”

“Suit yourself,” Tye replied, and, whistling, strode through the kitchen.

When I was sure he was gone, I stepped inside the house, closed the door behind me.

I was in trouble.

Because only an idiot turned down a sweaty round with Tye Cannon.

I stared at the portrait of Bryn hanging on a yellow wall, knowing full well that my indecision was his fault, had been from the first day I’d set eyes on that Polaroid in guest room three.

I peeled off my wet jacket and tossed it over the clothesline.

Bryn had a woman in the Gate— Female ? A ball of light?—one he’d tried to die for, and I needed to start respecting that. Maybe he’d kind of flirted—and that was a big maybe—but no one worshipped the Gate and its rules like Bryn. A mate in Ruhaven meant no woman here. Period. End of story.

I blew out a breath, eyeing the warm, peanut-brown sweater slung on the kitchen chair where I normally sat. Bryn’s.

Before I could think better of it, I was sliding into its soft, buttery heat. It smelled like him, like spiced snow and a very faint whiff of paint thinner. I needed to talk to him, needed to explain that I understood what he lived through every day—memories of a dead mate, like James.

I hugged the sweater to my chest as I strode into the lounge with all the confidence of someone who’d been getting undressed on a bag of onions five minutes ago.

The scent of buttered popcorn hit me first.

Kazie and James lay on opposite ends of the sofa, their feet overlapping, a cup of tea in their hands. Her hair was a massive beehive poking from under the blanket. Tye claimed a couch, spreading his knees and arms wide.

On the TV, a black-and-white ship thundered through stormy seas— Mutiny on the Bounty. I forced worries of Bryn, of what he’d done and might do again, to the back of my mind.

“How far are you?” I asked roughly.

Kazie pounded the remote three times before the men froze mid-oar. “Too far,” she stated, so abruptly I scrunched my eyes at her. Something wrong?

Tye patted the space beside him. “I’ll fill ya in. They’re out at sea, there’s a mutiny. There ya go.”

As I sat next to Tye, Kazie avoided my gaze, sliding further under the blanket and smashing at the remote until roaring men filled the lounge again.

James sighed and kept his eyes glued to the television.

“James,” I said, “is everything okay with—”

A sharp wrenching tore through the hallway.

Twisting, I glanced down the carpeted corridor where lanterns set the portraits aglow and light spilled from under the washroom door.

Was Bryn sick? Food poisoning? Too long in the Gate? “What’s wrong with him?”

Kazie grumbled into the blanket.

“He’s fine,” James said, and cranked up the volume until a volley of shouts drowned out the next round of heaving.

“I didn’t accidentally cook chicken again, did I?”

Popcorn kernels crunched between Tye’s teeth. “It ain’t the damn food, Roe. Stornoway’s in the Gate too often. Obsessed, that’s what he is.”

So my embarrassment at being caught with the Azekiel had caused this, put stress on him pulling both of us out. Or was it that he wanted to be with his woman in the Gate as often as possible?

I started to get up when the bathroom door creaked open. Light spread onto the checkered carpet, blasting a rectangle on the opposing wall.

Bryn limped out, hand shaking on his cane, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, cheeks as sharp as glass under the lanterns.

“Bryn?” I whispered.

His hollow gaze snapped to mine, and the air between us wavered like two wrong notes trying to synchronize.

“Tye, yer playing a dangerous game like,” James warned under his breath. “Even I wouldn’t be placing no bets on ye.”

What game?

Clunk.

Bryn emerged from the shadows, his flushed nose the only dash of color in a face gone bone white. Dark markings decorated his taut forearm and disappeared under the bunched fabric.

Tattoos ?

I tried to catch his eye, to see if he’d make light of something that obviously didn’t suit him, but he hastily yanked down both sleeves like I’d annoyed him by looking.

Clunk.

His cane echoed on the hardwood floor until the rug deadened it. He came around the pool table, trailing a finger on the felt and polished wood as he approached. Sweat glistened in the dip of his collarbone.

James paused the TV.

“Are you okay?” I asked, but there was a look on his face, one I hadn’t seen since Norway, that had my hand shaking on the sofa.

Saying nothing, Bryn approached our huddle of couches until his breath was a winter’s gasp away. Firelight flickered in the shallows of his cheeks. Shadows swam in irises as dark and still as a lake. He didn’t look so much like an art major from Norway but something sucked out of Ruhaven.

I pinched the sweater I wore, his sweater. “Sorry, I borrowed this.”

“I know. I left it for you,” he said curtly.

Accusation weighed heavily in those eyes of searing blue, and the guilt that had settled in my gut since I kissed Tye now became a stone around my neck. It didn’t make sense. This didn’t make sense.

Tye kicked his boots on the coffee table and asked, “Get a little indigestion there, Stornoway?”

James groaned softly.

Kazie cursed.

“Have you no respect at all?” Bryn addressed Tye in a voice like rough ice.

“Maybe you oughta remember which world we’re livin’ in,” Tye warned when Bryn’s nostrils flared. “And in which one ya only have one leg.”

“What’s gotten into you?” I demanded of Tye.

“I’m just statin’ facts to your boyfriend here.”

As my cheeks burned, Bryn finally looked at me, then down, his searing gaze narrowing on my breasts with a force somehow more physical than Tye’s fingers. Heat flashed through me, quick and hot and ripe.

His eyes flickered, met mine.

I gulped air, hardly able to breathe when he was staring at me like that. But then he just turned.

And walked away.