Lullaby (The Fable Series, Book 2)

Chapter Twenty Seven

Three days have passed since the night of the storm.

The boys and I have slipped back into our normal routine – songwriting and recording from early morning to late at night, suppers around the kitchen counter, Alastaire and Ben drinking their body weight in champagne while Felix and Elliot look on disapprovingly, Lyall nagging me (sweetly) to sing for him.

No one seems to know about me sneaking out of the cabin three nights ago to visit Mia's grave, or my too-close-for-comfort experience with Alastaire on the living room floor.

Even the puzzling events earlier that evening – Kitty and Felix and I getting stuck in an infinite loop between my house and the forest, the empty, darkened streets, the mysterious way that the trees seemed to open up before us as we walked through the storm – all of that feels so distant and irrelevant now that it might as well have been forgotten.

And that frightens me.

Kitty told the rest of the guys about it all the very next day. At first they thought she was joking – but when Felix and I both insisted that it really happened, Elliot suggested, in his usual sensible, levelheaded way, that we must have gotten disorientated in the storm.

After all, what we experienced is technically impossible, so I don't blame them for not believing us. 

I almost don't believe it myself.

Neither Kitty nor Felix has mentioned it again since then, and everything seems to have returned to normal.

Almost everything.

Felix's typical day-to-day mood, which can only really be described as bad, has iced-over into a restrained, cold indifference – towards everyone and everything, myself included.

I'm certain it's related to the way he lost control in my bedroom when he saw my bleeding foot the other night.

We haven't spoken directly to each other since then, except when he's asking me to slow down a guitar riff or try a new chord.

"I said C minor after the chorus Ash, not D minor," Felix snaps. "And Ben, cool it on the drums. You're giving me a headache. Let's try again. From the top."

Case in point.

We've been practicing all day, and I'm starting to feel like I'll be happy once the boys and Kitty are on the plane back to England and I can stop torturing my fingers with non-stop guitar-strumming.

That might be sooner rather than later. We're finally working on the album's final track. The seventh song. After it's recorded, they'll be gone.

Which is for the best. Right?

I'm in my usual spot on a black velvet piano stool near the back, my gran's acoustic guitar resting across my knee as I strum out the tune for the hundredth time in the past hour.

Lyall is on my right behind his electronic keyboard. Ben, with his drum kit, is on my left. Alastaire's up front with his electric guitar, flanked by Elliot and his bass guitar. And as usual, Felix is at the centre of it all, his mic firmly in hand, his undeniably amazing voice holding the music together.

As he sings, I think back to Mia's words on the night of the storm, when I went to the graveyard to meet her.

She was trying to warn me about someone, and I have a pretty good idea who.

Felix's knuckles go white as he clutches the mic, screwing up his face as he hits a high note at the start of the second verse.

Even now, his face twisted in that special sort of bliss and elation only music can bring, he looks amazingly beautiful, controlled, powerful. Perfect.