She shook her head and didn’t speak. Tears began quietly streaming down her face now.
“You know I love you, no matter what,” Bran said, his voice tight and nervous. “Whatever happens, I’ll always love you, Freya. Always.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I love you, too.”
She hung up the phone, her heart beating in her chest. Would Bran still love her, truly, if he knew what she was doing? What she had done? Would he love her the way she was? Could she ever be true to him? Monogamy was not in her nature, and she wondered why she had even agreed to this wedding, to this marriage.
The phone rang again and she picked it up, thinking it was Bran again to reassure her of his love.
“Freya.” Killian’s voice was husky and low. They had not spoken since their wild weekend together. “Did I do something wrong? You never return my calls. I miss you.” Hearing his voice was like a balm to her broken heart. Maybe she was meant to be with Killian, but she would never know unless she did something about it. The thing was, she missed him, too.
Freya wiped her tears. “All right. I’ll be right over.”
She was tired of feeling guilty. Bran was far away. She knew he had work to do but she couldn’t help holding it against him. Maybe things happened for a reason. Maybe they were already broken, even before Killian came onto the scene.
Because like everything that took place this summer with Bran and Killian, she felt as if she were part of a larger story, and the curious, reckless part of Freya—the one who drank too much and played with matches and broke a million hearts before breakfast—wanted to see how it would all play out in the end.
chapter twenty-eight
The Hidden Door
Ingrid looked around the empty ballroom at Fair Haven and shook out her legs. Flying always gave her cramps, especially when she took Oscar’s form. Like Freya with Siegfried, and Joanna with Gilly, Oscar was part of her, and she could turn into his shape at will. She did not do it often, only on occasions that demanded it. During Freya’s engagement party she had noticed that the top windows to the ballroom were always left open. Now Ingrid had flown in through one of them before dawn, when everyone in the household was sure to be asleep. She could have taken a broom, but since Joanna had been spotted the other day Ingrid thought it would be more prudent if she assumed an animal-like shape. There were many ways for witches to travel, and like her brethren Ingrid preferred the more natural one: lifting into the air and rising to the heavens as her magic lessened gravity’s hold on her core. They used the brooms to ground and center themselves, an anchor to the earth that no longer held them when they were flying.
She texted to her source.
<<i’m inside>>
<<good. you have the blueprints with you?>>
<<yes.>>
<<excellent, go to the ballroom. center tag. something’s different about it.>>
He was right. There was something a little off about the center tag in the ballroom floor plan; the little diamond that pointed toward the walls in the room she was standing in was surrounded by that strange calligraphy of symbols. And one of the points on the diamond was just a little askew. It may have been the careless hand of the draftsman, but the whole tag seemed to cant slightly toward the right-hand corner of the room. The tip of the diamond on that corner was just a bit longer than the others’, as if it were reaching toward that far corner, pulling the eye toward that part of the room. She scanned the room and found that corner. It was an exhilarating feeling, understanding an abstract drawing of a space and its relationship to the real world.
<<ok i’ve found the wall,>> she texted.
<<knock on it, what does it sound like?>>
As directed, she knocked on the wall, making a dull heavy thud.
<<heavy, like there’s something behind it>> Ingrid knew that a standard wall would have a hollow sound, sharp and round.
<<what do you want me to do?>>
<<see what’s underneath.>>
Ingrid left the room and returned a few minutes later with a crowbar that she had found in the garage. She took the sharp end and dug it into the corner of the wall. The blade slid forward, splitting the paint as it bit into the wall. Ingrid decided she would just have to try one of Joanna’s restoration spells to fix it after she found out what was behind it. No time to think of the damage she was doing now. She was on to something here.
She pushed the blade deeper into the wall, but it stopped after half an inch. She wedged the end of the crowbar sideways and a chunk of the wall the size of a baseball fell off and landed on the floor. She picked up the piece of plaster and examined it. A renovated house like Fair Haven should have walls made from cement plaster spread in layers on a wire mesh. The cement would be coarse and sandlike, but Ingrid was holding a chunk of Sheetrock that was much older. She tossed it back to the floor and knelt below the hole she had made. Along the break she saw the paint chipped by the blade of the crowbar. The outer paint layer was a thick, glossy emulsion. It had the dark, rich sheen of lead-based paints. But underneath the paint, where the crowbar had cracked the finish, there was something else. She kept chipping at it until all the new paint was gone and she could see what was behind it.
It was a door. It did not have hinges or knobs but Ingrid recognized the shape right away. The cracked wood gave off a faint scent of pine. As she inhaled its bright, clean smell, she was transported into her deep past.
She thought of a place long forgotten, which had become more myth and legend than any truth, a dream. She remembered what she had told that young vampire. You’re a myth yourself. They all were, they who lived and breathed and walked in mid-world like and unlike the humans surrounding them.
She touched the pine gently and turned back to the drawing of the wall she had broken. It showed a wood door stretching from floor to ceiling, an elaborate design sketched on the surface. They were instructions for the artisan, who no doubt would have to spend years carving the elaborate panels. The designs, she saw now, were the same as the small decorative scrolls around each of the key tags.
She took several pictures with her cell phone and zapped them over to her source.
<<do you see what i see?>>
<<yes. just as i suspected>>
<<what is it?>>
<<not now. will tell u later. get out of there first.>>
Ingrid waved her wand and muttered an incantation that restored the wall to its former state. It was a shoddy spell; she wasn’t as good as her mother at restoration, but having the wand helped. She was almost done when she heard footsteps in the great hall, coming closer. Ingrid quickly took Oscar’s form and flew out the window, just as Killian Gardiner walked into the empty ballroom.
“Is anyone here?” he called. “I heard someone in the house. Show yourself!”
Ingrid flew away, her heart thudding in her chest. That was a close one. What was that door and where did it lead? She left the island, thinking of the sentence her family had endured for millennia. The broken bridge, her lost younger brother. What was behind that door? Her source knew. She would find out soon enough.
chapter twenty-nine
Husbands and Wives