My heart hammered against my chest. Rowan pressed a vial into my hand and sank against Flynn, who was on the phone with the ambulance. My fingers closed around the vial and I tore out of the castle, Blake hot on my heels.

No, no, no. I can’t lose another one.

I slammed into the orchard gate, the wood splintering as it crashed against the post. I tore down the row to the spot where the apples trees were spaced wide enough apart for swinging a two-handed sword in a complete circle. Here, Arthur and I had practiced sword-fighting and spilled our secrets to each other. Here, he kissed me for the first time.

At first I didn’t see him, because he towered so tall and large in my mind that I wasn’t looking down, down in the dirt. He slumped across the roots of an apple tree, his head flopped against his shoulder and his arm crossing his chest. Blood saturated the front of his shirt and darkened the grass beneath him.

So much blood.

A long, even cut sliced down the center of Arthur’s arm. Blood flowed freely from the wound, pouring out of him like water from a faucet. Bile rose in my throat, and my body surged with this tremendous sense that something was incorrect, inexact – a feeling usually reserved for looking over Kelly’s physics homework.

All that blood should be inside him. He can’t have much left.

Blake crouched over Arthur’s limp body, slapping his cheeks so his head bounced against the tree. “Hey, Arnold, are you awake in there? Can you hear me?”

More blood poured from the cut. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to hold my stomach inside me.

Blake shook my arm. “Quick, Maeve. The medicine.”

My eyes watering, I fumbled in my pocket for the small vial Rowan had given me. He must’ve grabbed it from the kitchen on his way to us. My fingers slipped on the lid, and it slid from my fingers into the grass.

“Here.” Blake snatched it up and tipped out the paste onto his hand. Arthur’s skin was so slippery with blood it took Blake a couple of tries to hold up his arm and rub the paste around the wound. That done, Blake tore off his shirt, ripped it in half down the middle and wrapped the material around Arthur’s arm to hold the wound together. When he stepped back, his arms and chest were covered with dark blood.

The metallic smell invaded my nostrils. My legs gave way and I collapsed in the grass. I picked up Arthur’s other hand and held it in mine. His fingers hung limp, lifeless. Were we too late? Had my warrior gone where I couldn’t follow?

Footsteps pounded down the hill. Paramedics sat a stretcher down in the grass beside Arthur, and started calling out instructions to each other in medical speak. Blake pulled me back so they could work. “We’ll take good care of him, luv.” A paramedic gave me a reassuring smile.

Panic and sorrow welled up inside me. It’s not your job. It was my job to take care of him, and I failed him. And now he’s done this to himself and it’s all my fault.

“Please, please wake up,” I sobbed into Arthur’s shoulder. The nurses had laid his body out on his back, his hands at his sides and his lids closed over his glassy eyes. He was so big and tall that his feet hung off the end of the hospital bed. Under the fluorescent lights he was all hard corners and pale skin. Behind him, machines beeped and thumped as they breathed for him and pushed fresh blood through his empty veins.

Nothing about him seemed alive at all.

First my parents, then Corbin, now Arthur. How many people will I lose?

A warm arm fell around my shoulder, tugging me back from the bed. “He’ll wake up,” Flynn cooed in my ear, mashing his body against mine. “He’s strong.”

“He did this to get away from me,” I sobbed. “Because of what I did.”

“Maeve, you didn’t do anything.”

“I did! I let the fae into the castle. I trusted Daigh and got Corbin killed and Arthur hates me because—”

“He doesn’t hate you and you’re not responsible. He doesn’t hate Blake, either.”

“Well, then he’s a bloody good actor,” Blake piped up from the back of the room.

“We’re all blaming ourselves for Corbin’s death. He was the one who looked after all of us. He made himself into our protector, all because of his own guilt over Keegan.” Flynn patted Arthur’s bandaged arm. “Arthur did this to himself because he blamed himself for Corbin’s death. Don’t you see? All that time he was yelling at Blake, he was really talking to himself.”

“He might’ve just said that,” Blake said.

“That’s exactly it,” Flynn’s voice cracked. “This guilt’s tearing us apart – it’s seeping in all the cracks and poisoning everything good our coven stands for. We all need to do a little less blaming and a little more forgiveness.”

I shook my head. “I’m the High Priestess. This is my fault.”

“Maeve, I—” Rowan’s face crumpled with pain.

I held up a hand. “You can’t take the responsibility for this away from me. I’m in charge and if I say I’m responsible, then I’m damn well responsible.”

“Maeve,” Rowan’s voice rang high and clear, startling the words out of my mouth. “I only saw Arthur because I… I went upstairs to look at the books in the library. In the dream, Corbin said, ‘I wrote it all down for you,’ and I had this idea that what he wrote down was how we could bring him back from the dead.”

“Don’t start on this again,” I warned. “I’m not—”

“Listen, please. I found this.” Rowan dug in his pocket and pulled out some bright colored paper. Five Post-it notes, scrawled with Corbin’s spiky handwriting.

My heart thudded to see that familiar scrawl. “What are those?”

“I don’t know, but they come from the book Clara stole from the Soho coven. Corbin was making notes on these spells.” Rowan dug his phone out of his pocket. “I got photos of all the pages because the police said we shouldn’t remove anything from the house. Look,” he flicked through photo after photo of demons and skulls and Latin text.

“Rowan, come on—”

Rowan waved his screen in my face. “Just look. He even changed the letters on this alchemical diagram.” He held up one of the notes. Behind him, Blake twisted his head to the side. “All these spells are about resurrection and something called the Mysteries of Lazarus—”

Seeing that writing snapped something in my chest. Rage bubbled up inside me – that Corbin was gone and Rowan wouldn’t accept it. Because when he did finally accept it, his heart would shatter, and my own heart would break all over again watching him go through that.

“I don’t want to hear it!” I yelled.

“Maeve, you’ve got to—”

“No. This isn’t like Aline, who was trapped in what I can only gather is an extra dimension within the painting. Corbin is DEAD. We all saw his body. He was burned and had a stake pushed through his chest. All the wishing on a fucking star isn’t going to bring him back.”

Rowan’s features froze. He slunk out of the room. Instantly, I regretted my anger. I stood up, but Blake stepped in front of me. “Let me talk to him.”

“Don’t put ideas in his head,” I growled. “The sooner he stops denying the truth, the better off we’ll all be.”

Blake’s eyes bore into mine, and the corner of his mouth curled up into his trademark smirk. He spun on his heel and sauntered after Rowan. It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t agreed to what I’d asked of him.

I flopped back down into the hard plastic chair beside Arthur’s bed, burying my face in my hands. “This is a nightmare.”

“Have you considered they might have a point,” Flynn said, his voice soft.

“Of course I have, but it’s impossible.” The things Corbin said to me in the dream flashed through my head. I opened my mouth to tell Flynn about them, but something bit my tongue. I didn’t want to give him false hope, either. Rowan was carrying around enough for all of us.

“I know you need a logical explanation for everything,” Flynn said. “But maybe this is new scientific ground. Maybe it’s never happened before, and that’s why it can’t be explained. You’ve already released Aline from her prison. You could be a pioneer in resurrecting the dead.”

“Aline didn’t leave behind a body, because her body went to the other dimension with her. Corbin left behind a body, and it’s gone. Even if he is stuck in the underworld and we could somehow bring him back, he doesn’t have a body to go back to.”

Flynn’s face wobbled. Shit. He was close to losing it. I wrapped my arms around him. Something crackled in the pocket of his hoodie. “What’s that?” I asked, feeling a thick envelope inside.

“Oh, that thing.” Flynn pulled out a crumpled envelope and handed it to me. “This was in the mailbox at Briarwood. I was gonna give it to you back at Ryan’s place. It’s from some laboratory in London.”

My DNA results. I glanced down at the envelope without much interest. What did it matter any more?

“Open it. I want to see.” Flynn hopped from foot to foot. “Of course, I’m a wee bit dim, so you’ll have to explain all the squiggly graphs.”

A smile played over my lips. There was something about Flynn’s very presence that made every scary situation bearable. And there was something about him that was different right now. Over the last few days he’d been a real support. Instead of his usual ill-conceived humor, I remembered how he’d tried to hold Arthur back and talk him down when he’d attacked Blake. Now we were in Arthur’s hospital room and Flynn was making speeches about not feeling guilty to try and hold us all together. It might not be working, but he was trying harder than anyone.

I didn’t care about the DNA results, but maybe Flynn needed the distraction.

I flipped the envelope over and slid my finger along the seal. My mind flashed back to the last time I opened a letter – standing in the library at Briarwood, sliding Corbin’s sword-shaped letter opener under the wax seal of my mother’s letter, a letter he’d saved and guarded for me since he took over the castle from his parents.

Ten sheets of A4 paper fell out into my hands. I scanned the first page. I expected to read a form letter about decoding my history and unlocking the secrets of the past, but instead I had a personal letter from the laboratory’s director, inviting me in person for further study. “Inconclusive results… never seen anything like it before… almost appears as if you have two fathers, which is of course completely impossible… please contact the lab immediately…”

My hands trembled. The letter slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground.

“Maeve?” Flynn waved his hand in front of my eyes.

My head spun. In my lap, graphs fanned out, dotted with anomalies marked in vivid red ink, as red as Arthur’s blood.

It was irrefutable scientific proof – I had two fathers.

I was part fae. I carried inside of me some of Daigh’s magic.