Page 76 of Savage Blooms
“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 timesbefore, 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, strangemoment, 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 realizationthat 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Nicola
Adam hadn’t wanted to say much to Nicola right after his fight with Eileen but now, freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, sitting by the glow of the library fireplace, he was much more forthcoming.
“I should have listened to you,” Adam muttered. “She’s impossible. We’re the houseguests of a crazy person.”
