Reaper: A raven paranormal romance (Crookshollow ravens Book 2) (20 page)

“Please …” His voice cracked. This time, when he opened his mouth, a trail of blood dribbled down the side of his chin.

I spun on my heel, unable to bear the sight of him any longer. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten quite how drunk I was, and the spin sent me pitching forward. Hands grabbed me before I crashed into the concrete, and yanked me towards the kerb. I stumbled through an open car door and slid across a leather seat, sobbing and laughing and snorting all at the same time.

“Belinda,” it was Bianca’s voice, but she sounded far away, like she was talking to me underwater. “Lean against me, honey.”

“She’s in a bad way,” Elinor said. “Take it slow, Simon.” I heard something slam in the distance.

That was the last thing I heard before I passed out.

“
D
rive faster
,” I growled at Ingrid.

“This is a dual carriageway, not the Nürburgring,” she snapped back, as she switched lanes again to avoid getting stuck behind a line of caravans. “I can’t control the flow of traffic.”

“We should’ve flown back. We’d be there by now.”

“Yeah, because that was so much fun the first time,” Byron grumbled from the back seat.

It was sometime after 10pm, and we’d been on the road since 10am the previous day. The plan was that one of us would sleep in the back seat while the other two took turns at the wheel. What we hadn’t counted on was the fact that Libby’s wedding was occurring over a bank-holiday weekend, and so every Tom, Dick, and Harry in England had packed up their kids and their dogs and their Viking longships, and were heading for the coast or their grandmother’s or the lost city of fucking Atlantis. Even though it was the middle of the night, the roads were clogged with fuckwits, and we had no choice but to roll along at twenty miles an hour with the rest of them.

To make matters worse, we were all tense and getting on each other’s nerves. Byron claimed it was impossible for him to sleep with me yelling obscenities at the traffic from the front. He wasn’t any better. When I tried to take my turn in the back, he and Ingrid had flirted obnoxiously and got each other off through their jeans. I couldn’t sleep with that disgusting behaviour going on, and I made my annoyance pretty clear to Byron the next time we stopped for petrol. At the rate we were going, we’d kill each other before we got to Crookshollow.

“Just don’t look at the road,” Ingrid told me, as she pulled off the dual carriageway to try a route through the villages. The GPS beeped angrily at her. “Look at something else, anything else. How are you going with that research?”

I turned back to my phone screen, scrolling through a scientific paper Morchard had published a year ago on a new strain of bird virus he’d discovered and named after himself. I’d found it by chance on an academic database, and it seemed likely it was talking about the same virus he was planning to unleash on the unsuspecting wedding party. I was no biochemist, and the article contained a lot of complex charts and technical jargon explaining his findings, but it was the only clue we had to what we could expect from Morchard’s birds.

“I haven’t found out much we didn’t already know. The virus attacks the immune system, weakening it, then it spreads to other organs in the body. If not treated, it will kill within forty-eight hours.”

“Does it say anything about how to treat it?”

“It says that some of the current antiviral medicines slow the spread of the virus, but none have been successful at eliminating it. He says his current research is focused around creating a cure and hopefully, one day, a vaccine.”

“Belinda said there were vials in the fridge in the lab,” Byron said. “Perhaps we could sneak inside and—”

“If he’s planning something, he’ll have those under lock and key.” Ingrid said, swerving as a campervan pulled out of a petrol station without indicating and nearly sideswiped us. She blasted the horn, her hands gripping the wheel so hard her knuckles were white.

“I don’t like our chances of getting in and out alive with hundreds of these infected birds around the place,” I added. “I think we’re better to get to the wedding and stop Morchard before he unleashes the birds. Belinda is friendly with the local cops, perhaps we might be able to get their help.”

“If we get there in time.” Byron grumbled.

I balled my hands into fists, and stared daggers at the people carrier that pulled in front of us and crawled along the country lane.

We’re coming, Belinda. We’re coming.

I
awoke in darkness
, my head throbbing like an elephant was stampeding around on my grey matter. I rolled over and picked up my mobile phone. The light came on, blinding me. My head surged with pain.

4:15am. What? I couldn’t be in bed that late. I was supposed to get up forty-five minutes ago to bake the bread and—

Then everything came flooding back to me. The hen night. The drinking. Seeing Ethan. Passing out. I clutched my throbbing skull. I was deathly hungover, and I had a four-hundred-person wedding to cater.

Fuck.
This was going to be a wonderful day.

I didn’t have to get up until 5am, but I knew I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. I went into the bathroom and ran myself a bath. The toilet stank of bile. Great, I must have had a really messy night. I didn’t remember anything after yelling at Ethan.

God, Ethan. Why did he have to come back? He’d been trying to talk to me about something. I rubbed my head as I waited for the water to warm up. What had he said? What did I say to him? I couldn’t remember a thing.

I stumbled into the bath, sinking down into the hot water and watching the marble tiles spin in circles around my head.
Fuck.
Why had I drunk so much? Apart from getting together with Ethan, this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

When I exited the bedroom, Chairman Meow was sitting on the corner of my bed in naked, human form, pulling on some black boxers. “Darling, you look terrible.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I threw my brush at him. “How messed up was I last night?”

“Well, on a scale of one to fucked up, I’d say you were off the chart. Elinor and Alex dragged you in here, but you were crying and yelling about Cole. Honey, I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine, Meow. Really I am. It’s just going to take me more than two weeks to get over Cole, is all.” I sighed. “And I saw Ethan last night. He accosted me on the street.”

“Ethan? What the actual fuck? You should’ve taken me out with you. I would’ve scratched his eyes out. Instead I got stuck here with Ryan and Sir Thomas and Eric and a bunch of old guys drinking scotch and talking about art. Dull as turnips.”

“I think I’m just not meant to have a partner.” I said. “I mean, everything I’ve done in my life I’ve had to do by myself. Why should I ever expect it to be any different? I don’t need Cole or Ethan or any other guy.”

“Of course you don’t,” Meow pulled me into his shoulder, wrapping his arm around me. “But you want him still, don’t you? You wouldn’t be so upset over a guy if you didn’t still love him?”

“Yeah,” I sniffed. “I do. I do love him. But he’s never going to feel the same. He doesn’t respect me. He doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking, or why. He just runs away. I can’t be with someone who runs away when things don’t go his way, someone who can’t tell me when something’s wrong. Cole was great, but he didn’t have any depth – he just saw me as a shag, a convenient place to rest his head while he hid from Morchard.”

Chairman Meow shook his head. “Not true. For all Cole’s yummy bad-boy exterior, he’s pretty raw and vulnerable, just like you. I saw the way he looked at you, and it seemed to me as if he had fallen for you just as bad as you had for him.”

“Then why did he leave?” I sniffed.

Chairman Meow pulled me closer, wrapping both his arms around me. Even in his human form, he radiated warmth and comfort. “I don’t know, sugar.”

We stayed like that for some time, my trusted friend holding me while I wished more than anything that it was Cole who had his arms wrapped around me instead. Finally, I sat up and wiped the tears from my eyes. “There’s nothing I can do but keep on keeping on. Let’s go down to the kitchen and I’ll rustle you up a saucer of milk.”

“Now that’s a plan I can get behind.”

When we got downstairs, Ryan, Simon, and Alex were already awake. Simon had moved aside enough of my boxes and chillers to clear a small section of bench, which he was now using to make the most delicious-smelling breakfast – homemade hash browns, roasted tomatoes, red-wine mushrooms, sausages, scrambled eggs, rashers of streaky bacon.

“Oh God,” I sank into a stool, inhaling deeply. “That smells heavenly.”

“The master called down and suggested you might need some hangover food.” Simon didn’t look up from the pan. I realised those were the first words I’d heard him utter in the entire time I’d been stayed at Raynard Hall.

“You are a saviour, Simon.” I wanted to give him a hug, but moving from my chair didn’t seem like a great idea at this time.

“Are you OK, honey?” Alex asked.

“I’ve been better.” I gripped the edge of the table to keep myself upright. “But I’ll be fine after some food. Perhaps a hen night on the night before the wedding wasn’t one of our best ideas.”

“Libby definitely agrees,” Alex grinned. “I heard her in her bathroom this morning, praying to the porcelain god.”

One by one the other girls trooped downstairs, drawn from their caves by the smell of breakfast. Libby emerged last, her eyes glassy, her hair a matted mess. After we’d all had our fill, I kicked everyone out of the kitchen, pulled open the chiller boxes where I kept the sections of cake I’d made the day before, and started the hard work of assembling and decorating the layers.

I downed four painkillers in two glasses of water, but I still felt awful. My head throbbed and my eyes felt as though they were about to roll out of their sockets. My balance was off. I looked over at the list I’d made of everything I had to get done, and my stomach twisted. How was I going to do this?

You just have to do it. There’s no other way.

I pulled myself together, and turned back to the cake. My hands shook as I tried to balance the second layer on top of the first. I stood back and admired the result – it looked a little lopsided, but I could probably hide that with icing. I picked up the third layer and settled that on top. As I moved forward, I bumped the edge of the table. The cake slid out of my hands, and broke into pieces against the counter.

“Oh shit!” I wailed.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help?” Alex called out.

“No, I’m fine!” I called back, my stomach clenching. I didn’t want anyone to come in and see what a mess I’d made.

It’s OK, I can fix this I just had to focus, is all
. The cake wasn’t completely destroyed, it had broken into three large pieces and a lot of crumbs. I dusted off the cake pieces and arranged them on top of the second layer. There were lots of gaps between, but I could fill them with a chocolate whisky ganache ...

See? Everything’s fine.

I mixed the ingredients for ganache into a heavy saucepan, and went searching in the liquor cabinet for some whisky. The only bottle I could find was a seventy-five-year-old Scotch that probably cost more money than I made in an entire year, but desperate times called for expensive whisky. I poured a generous lug into the ganache and took it off the heat, the smell of the alcohol making my head squirm. When it was cool enough to spread, I filled in the gaps and created a layer over the top.
Crisis averted.

I managed to get on the fourth and fifth layers without any trouble. Next, I mixed my first batch of buttercream icing. Only when I started spooning it on the cake did I remember it was supposed to be left white, not coloured pink as I had done it. I scraped off the icing as best I could and made another batch, leaving out the colouring this time.

As I spread the icing over the cake, I glanced up at the clock. An hour had gone by. But how? I hadn’t got anything done. Tears sprang in the corners of my eyes. How was I going to get anything done?

Your friends offered to help. You could ask them to—

No.
I shook my head vigorously.
They’ve done so much already. You’ve been doing things on your own for months. It’s no problem. I just have to concentrate and stop making mistakes—

You’ve been doing it on your own for so long, and how has that been working for you? Maybe it’s time you let people help.

I poked my head out into the living room, where everyone was lounging around, drinking champagne. Elinor was holding up different dresses to get approval, twirling around to see how each one settled on her buxom frame.

“That red one, definitely.” Eric declared from the couch. I couldn’t help but agree. The flared skirt and bold corset were like a dress from a fairy tale.

“Um, guys?” I called tentatively, my heart hammering against my chest. “I really hate to ask this, and if you’re all busy, don’t worry about it, but I wondered if a couple of you could give me a hand—”

“Count me in,” Alex skulled the rest of her glass of champagne and jumped from the couch.

“I will!” Ryan leapt up and raced to the kitchen.

“You really don’t have to—”

“Are you kidding? That lot have been talking about dresses for
hours.”
Ryan grinned. “What can I do?”

Ryan was surprisingly helpful. I’d assumed that since he had a butler and enough money to buy a small Pacific island he didn’t have much in the way of domestic skills, but after showing him how to use his own mixer, he was kneading and shaping pastry for the tartlets like a pro.

Alex, however, was less useful. I tasked her with cutting mushrooms for the polenta. But ten seconds of watching her wield a knife was about all I could handle. Instead, I got her to mix the filling for the stuffed peppers, which turned out to be an even worse idea, with more filling ending up on the front of her apron, the floor, the ceiling, and Ryan’s head then in the bowl. Finally, I told her to go sit down.

“I want to help,” Alex said firmly, folding her arms. “There must be something I can do. I could help decorate the cake, maybe? I am an artist, after all—”

“No!” I held out my hands to protect the cake. Behind me, Ryan cracked up. I had an idea. “You can decorate the salted caramel tarts, once Ryan’s finished cutting and filling them. You take that pan of warm chocolate and drizzle it over the top.” Ryan handed me a tart and I demonstrated the technique for Alex. She elbowed me out of the way and drizzled with gusto.

“Fun, this is like an abstract painting! Can I made Mondrian swirls?”

“Do whatever you like, just as long as most of the chocolate actually ends up
on
the tarts.”

“Where’s Elinor? She’d love to help make Mondrian swirls.” Alex dribbled a huge blob of chocolate on the floor.

“Didn’t you know? Eric got a bit excited after seeing her in that red dress. He’s dragged her off to their room.”

“Ah, so she’ll be occupied for at least another three hours.” Alex grinned.

“I’d say so.” I said. “I walked past before on the way to the bathroom and things sounded pretty heated in there.”

“After everything you and Cole have forced us to endure when he was here, you have no right to look so scandalised.”

I felt my cheeks going red.

“Don’t look like that,” Alex laughed. “It sounded like you were having a
lot
of fun.”

“The whole neighbourhood would agree,” Ryan added. “And probably the residents of the next town over. They were treated to quite a performance.”

The burn in my cheeks intensified. The last thing I needed to think about now was making love to Cole. I turned back to the stove and busied myself with melting more chocolate, feeling Alex’s caring eyes boring into my back.

The only way to start again was one step at a time.