“Seriously, though,” Declan said, dropping his chin and looking at Bowen from underneath a curtain of that floppy hair. “I can’t go myself. That house is magicked to hell and back, and anything that feels off to it gets spit right back out. Don’t ask me how I know. Okay,” he went on, holding up a hand. “I know because I’ve been trying to haunt the damn place for the last decade, and every time I get within a few feet of the house, I’m poofed right out to somewhere miles away. The Merediths apparently don’t fuck around.”
Bowen nodded, but his mind was already moving.
“Meredith,” he echoed, and then he walked past Dec to the bookcase at the back of the room, the biggest one just by the door to his bedroom. Reaching up, Bowen pulled down a book that was so heavy he actually winced as the full weight of it landed in his arms.
It was a massive tome, the cover a cracked and fading black leather, the gilding starting to peel from the edges of its pages. It was the sort of thing that, had it been a prop in a movie, he would’ve had to blow dust off so that the audience knew just how ancient it was, but no books ever gathered dust in Bowen Penhallow’s home. He’d looked something up in this one just the other day, as a matter of fact, thanks to a late-night phone call from Rhys, who had suddenly worried that Taran’s middle name, “Emyr,” had belonged to one of their less savory ancestors.
It hadn’t, thankfully, and Bowen flipped backward, past the section on the Penhallows, the Parrys, the Owens, the Neagles, until he finally came to the elaborate script proclaiming “MEREDITH.”
He could feel a cold breeze at his back and knew Declan had stepped closer, reading over Bowen’s shoulder.
“I knew her family were Posh Witches, but I didn’t know they were posh enough to be in your book,” he said, his breath icy on Bowen’s neck.
“Not just posh,” Bowen told him, his eyes scanning the names. “Powerful. This Meredith right here? Powys in 1283?” Bowen tapped the name. “Hanged, disemboweled, burned, then decapitated.”
“And he didn’t die?” Declan asked.
Bowen shook his head. “No, all those things killed him. Well, I suppose just one of them killed him. The others probably just hurt a lot.”
“And this . . . denotes ‘powerful’ . . . how, exactly?”
Bowen reached over Declan’s ghostly arm to pull his notebook and pen closer, inadvertently dragging them through Declan, who yelped with offense.
“Sorry,” Bowen said, distracted, and as he began to write, Declan snorted.
“No, you’re not,” he replied, and if Bowen hadn’t already been absorbed in his work, he might’ve smiled.
“Doesn’t hurt you anyway,” he reminded Declan, who lifted his chin and floated to the other side of the table.
“Right, but it’s rude. Now explain to me what you meant about Carys’s great-great-times-a-bloody-million-grandfather being powerful.”
“The English did all those things to him because he was dabbling in dark magic,” Bowen said, still taking down names, dates. He could remember things he’d read pretty easily, but if he wrote it down, he never forgot it.
“Okay, but it was 1283,” Declan said. “‘Dark magic’ could’ve meant . . . I don’t know. Taking a bath. Not wanting a leech applied to his cock.”
“That’s ignorance speaking, Declan. The Middle Ages were not nearly as filthy and backward as people think. In fact, did you know that entire idea about them having bad teeth is false? They didn’t have sugar, so—”
“Mate,” Declan said, holding up one hand, and Bowen scowled but tucked that particular diatribe away for another time.
People always gave him so much shit for not talking that much, but then when he did want to talk about something he was interested in, it was all glazed eyes and “mate.”
“To the point, dark magic in this case was truly dark magic. Necromancy, that sort of thing.”
Declan perked up a bit, and the hope in his eyes was enough to make Bowen’s stomach churn. “Necromancy. Like bringing the dead back to life.”
“You’re not dead, Dec,” Bowen reminded him, his voice as gentle as he could make it. “Not really.”
The sound Declan made was too dark to be called a laugh, but it was close. “Not dead, not alive, a ghost, but no body moldering away anywhere . . . Yes, Bowen, we’ve been over this. And I wasn’t asking you to go because I hoped it was the answer to”—Declan looked down at his wavering form and gestured to it—“whatever the hell this is.”
Turning to face Bowen more fully, Declan reached out, laying his hands on Bowen’s shoulders. Bowen could feel the cold, but there was no weight there, no real touch.
“If I’d married Carys, you would’ve been my best man, right? Now, I can’t watch the woman I love get married, but you can. For me. It’s the closest thing I can think of to being there myself.”
It had been a while since Bowen had felt like this. The tight throat, the sudden stinging in his eyes. Not since that last night he’d talked to Da, probably, that cold evening last year when Bowen had made sure Simon Penhallow knew that all three of his sons were done with him and his scheming for good.
It had been the right thing to do, but fuck, it had been hard. Almost as hard as staring into Declan’s pleading face now.
“Dec,” Bowen said softly, “I can’t just . . . invitation or no, pretty sure they’ll remember they didn’t invite me.”
“Your family is ancient and powerful,” Declan reminded him. “Just as much as the Merediths. No one is going to question you showing up with an invite. Carys will probably assume This David’s family invited you. And This David will think it was Carys’s terrifying grandmother. But not a one of them is going to tell a Penhallow he can’t be there.”
Declan had a point. Welsh witch families were strange in that way, a tangled mess of marriages and blood feuds and ancient treaties, and Bowen’s family was one of the most influential there was. He could just channel Wells a bit, be an imperious dickhead, and everyone would assume he belonged there.
In a remote castle for a whole bloody weekend with a bunch of witches he didn’t know.
At Yule.
Again, Tamsyn’s face came to mind. They were supposed to meet in London on the twenty-fourth. The pub, the Reindeer Rosé.
The mistletoe.
“Please, Bo,” Declan implored again. “I know I’ve lost her and that she’s gone, but if you could watch the wedding, if you could just tell me about it . . . if I could know you were there and that there was at least one person in that room who was thinking of me, maybe it wouldn’t hurt this much.”
And that was a bloody knife to the heart, wasn’t it?
He had taken so much from Declan, still hadn’t figured out the way to make it right, and here was this one thing—a small favor in light of it all—that Declan was asking him to do.
“Look,” Dec said, flashing him that grin again. “It’s going to be cold and uncomfortable, and you’ll probably be miserable, but—”
