Page 35 of Wolfsbane Hall #1
On the way to Dean’s Study
Her hand fell limp at her side as Dean cradled her into his chest and walked her to his private study. Consciousness was a tango. Quick turns, sharp edges, and a sensual seduction.
No, that wasn’t right.
Perhaps the smell of rosewood, musk, and oranges wafting into her nostrils was confusing her, because Dean’s scent was pure debauchery.
Decorative wallpaper, golden wall sconces, and a smattering of ancient mirrors, paintings, and sculptures blurred together as a kaleidoscope of color. Pain swarmed all over her body. She’d thought that if she’d only been choked, only her neck and upper body would hurt.
Nope.
Everything. Her muscles, her bones, even her sinews. Everything.
Celestine’s heart banged hard in her chest, overworking. Boom. Boom. Boom. It was both fast and lethargic at the same time.
“Do you only touch me when I’m passed out?” Her head drooped against his chest, and she tried to hold it up. “That’s very inappropriate, you know?”
“Yes.”
A fog of sleep rolled over her mind, and she yawned. “Disappointing.”
“Do you want me to touch you other times?” His voice was a low rumble.
I want you to touch me all the time , Celestine thought, or at least she hoped it was a thought. Begged it to be only a thought.
“You’re hurt and not thinking clearly.” It was more of a grunt than words.
If only I didn’t think it all the time. Sleep’s talons sank into her skull, and she completely passed out.
Celestine clutched her throat as she jerked awake, rising up on an obscenely comfortable couch. A piano played the song “Poor Wandering One” from the operetta Pirates of Penzance .
Dean’s strong fingers moved over the keys with beautiful efficiency, hitting every note like he was worshiping them. Celestine wanted those fingers to worship her, too. And that would not do. She couldn’t like that.
“You don’t have to just watch. You could sing along. After all, you are an angel of music.”
She could. She was a soprano and often sang in the Specter’s shows. But Celestine didn’t want to. Not to mention, her throat was formed from hot coals.
“And are you my Phantom?” she croaked.
A grin crawled up his face. “Maybe don’t try to sing right now.”
“Why are you playing the piano?”
Dean didn’t even falter as he spoke. Every note was perfect. “Don’t you love the piano, or is the Specter a liar?”
“He told you.” It was more of a painful breath than words.
“Yes.”
As always, Dean was frustratingly vague. One-word answers were starting to drive her crazy.
“Right, and why the song?” she asked.
Dean shrugged. “It felt fitting.”
The movement of his shrug didn’t hurt his playing; his fingers were still perfectly stroking the keys. Her core pulsed. For the love of God, Celine, stop using the word “stroking” to describe it.
Celestine gulped and tried to distract herself and her body by continuing the conversation. “Am I the poor Wandering One, or are you?”
Dean flashed a dimple. “It is a good question.” He paused his words as he played the last notes. “I think it may be both of us. I am cursed to wander the world forever, never getting what I want, and you wander these halls with no true goals, following the mad whims of a ghost.”
Anger twisted inside her, but the problem was that Dean wasn’t wrong.
At one time, Celestine would have done anything for the Specter.
That’s what the female members of the cast did.
That’s why they were given a spot at Wolfsbane.
The Specter wanted loyalty above all else, and Celestine was forged from one thing: loyalty.
Always trying to prove her love, doing anything to feel worthy.
Everything Dean said was correct. But she hated it.
“And what is it that you want?” Her lips fell into a hard line, and she curled her fingers into the leather of his couch.
Dean closed the piano’s lid and walked over to the couch. “How are you? Not just your neck, but you ?” He slid in next to her.
Celestine’s brow furrowed; she was caught off guard by the question. “You’re the only person to ask me that. Ever.” Besides Frances. But Frances mothered everyone. That was her thing. That was why the Specter wanted her.
“Well, my brothers are. . .” Dean ran a hand through his raven locks. “Sometimes single-minded.”
“What are you?”
He raised a well-manicured eyebrow, a gesture that said, Oh, wouldn’t you want to know, little bird?
Celestine rubbed her face. “I don’t know you at all. Tonight is the first time you’ve tolerated being in a room with me, the first night you’ve truly spoken to me.”
“Ah…” His eyes went icy, although there was always a little ice in them. “I can also be single-minded. Avoiding you could be considered evidence of that.”
“Why do you hate me?” Celestine’s breath caught in her throat, and she wrung her hands, hating that she cared about the answer.
“I very much don’t hate you.” His words were charged, dark.
Celestine bit her lower lip. “I don’t understand.”
“You need to stay away from me, Celestine. Everyone around me dies.” He glanced at the bruises forming on her neck and the charred marks still on the bottoms of her shoes.
The gaze made it clear that he didn’t have high hopes for her living.
“You should get as far away from this place and us as possible. Everyone in my family is a villain. Especially the Specter. When this is all over, you should pack your things and leave.”
Celestine’s brows flicked together. “It’s always the same thing with you. You’re always trying to get rid of me.” Except even as she said it, she didn’t truly believe it this time.
“You saw what my mother did.” His voice was a velvet snare. “You felt what she did to you. She’ll never stop. And I’ll never be free of her. It’s our curse for what we did.”
“We?”
“Play the game. I am sure you’ll find out. You’ve already uncovered many of our secrets,” he said. “The Phantom isn’t letting anyone get away with their secrets tonight.”
Acid crawled up her already raw throat. “Or you could simply answer my questions.”
“Now, where is the fun in that?” he asked, but he clearly didn’t mean it. Dean was the only Ashbrook who didn’t enjoy the show.
“You could help me.”
Dean shrugged.
“What the hell is your mother? That wasn’t human. What are the Specter and the Phantom? Are you all that way? Are you immortal?” Celestine rushed the questions out, as if saying them quicker might mean he’d answer one of them.
“I can’t tell you precisely what we are, but I assume the game will provide the answers,” Dean said. “And yes, we . Every member of my family is a powerful immortal capable of using magic similar to that of the Specter and Phantom.”
He demonstrated this by causing trees to sprout out of the wooden floor. Orange trees.
Blood rushed into her ears. “Are you the Specter?”
“You know I cannot tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Because the magic binds us.”
An anchor dropped into Celestine’s stomach.
She would never get a straight answer out of him if he were the Specter.
But perhaps she could figure it out through different questions.
He played the piano and had played one of her favorite Gilbert and Sullivan shows.
He demonstrated an intimate knowledge of her.
“What’s your favorite book, Dean?”
His head cocked at the abrupt change in subject. “I don’t read much.”
“Why?”
Silence cascaded through the room. Dean’s gaze fused to hers, and inside the depths of his eyes were swirling emotions—indecipherable ones. “The truth?”
“Yes.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Because reading makes me feel stupid. It’s challenging and draining.”
Celestine bit the inside of her cheek and waited for him to continue. In her experience, if one person stayed silent, the other would usually fill the silence. It was a dangerous game to play with Dean, because he could stay quiet for days.
“I don’t speak much in general, because I am not good with words,” he said.
“I am not eloquent, and I often mix things up. It’s hard to be the one brother who is such a major disappointment to my family.
Everett is everything that I am not. He’s smooth, brilliant, and academic; James is the engineer.
He builds things, tests them, and understands how people and things work. I am just…me. Quiet, dangerous, and—”
“Mysterious?” Celestine couldn’t help herself; she cut in, and her gaze caught on his hunter-green suit jacket.
“Yes, I guess that.” He ran another hand through his hair.
“I am the protector. The fixer. I step in when my brothers get in trouble, which they inevitably do.” He paused for a long moment in thought, but Celestine was exceedingly patient.
He had to be the Specter. “But you never answered my question. How are you feeling?”
Her cheeks tingled and pinched. It was like he cared, refusing to let the question drop.
The problem was that Celestine didn’t know the answer, not really.
No one ever cared about her or her emotions, so she had learned to suppress them deep down into the abyss of her chest. But she thought on it for a moment and slowly said, pulling the words out like taffy, “I’m…
so angry. All my life, I have been abandoned, first by my father walking out on us when I was five and then by the brutal murders of my mother and older sister.
” She didn’t know why she was sharing all this with him.
“No one stays. No one fights for me. I am just an object to be used. And I don’t want that anymore. ”