Eagle in the Hawthorn (The Rowan Harbor Cycle Book 8) by Sam Burns

Author:Sam Burns [Burns, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

The shop was silent for a while after everyone left, until Jesse let his head fall back and groaned. “Your mom hasn’t changed much.”

Devon let his head fall against the loveseat behind him. “She broke that guy, Jess. He’s . . . wrong.”

“Sure, he’s a creep, but—”

“No,” Devon sat up, shaking his head. “He’s broken. She’s torn up his insides and made him into a puppet who follows orders and not much else.”

Jesse stared at him, blinking repeatedly.

It was then that what should have been obvious all along crystallized in Devon’s mind. His mother had broken Burt. She was why he was twisted up inside and angry with all things supernatural, and not just because they’d had a bad breakup. Because she’d done to Burt what she’d done to Alexis—reprogrammed his whole head to suit her—and when the relationship had exploded, she’d left him floundering and broken inside.

Gran’s words came back to haunt him again. Gran couldn’t affect things she didn’t understand. Maybe, though, maybe she chose not to affect things she didn’t understand. Eileen O’Meara didn’t know she was doing anything at all, let alone how, so why would she worry about whether she was doing it in a way that didn’t hurt the subject?

“D?” Jesse said softly, as though he was nervous about disturbing him.

He turned to look at his best friend. “Mom is the one who broke Burt.”

Jesse raised an eyebrow and looked dubious. “What, she dumped him, so he’s justified acting like a monster because he’s alone now?”

“No! Be serious,” he said, and then thought better of his volume. He glanced around like there was anyone in the shop to have overheard him, and then lowered his voice. “It’s not that. Remember how I told you about that art teacher who thought she was in love with me? Unconscious fae powers combined with loneliness. Or, I guess in Mom’s case, the need to be adored.”

Jesse’s whole body went slack, and he fell out of his crouch, sitting there on his ass in front of the loveseat, staring into space. “But why would she attack us?”

“What?” It took Devon a moment to connect what Jesse was implying. He smacked his friend’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “No, not that. She started it. She’s the one who met him, broke his brain, opened him up to the supernatural. She’s not the one who’s attacking us. I still don’t know who that is.”

After he said it, a tightness in Devon’s chest loosened. If he’d said it, it had to be true. He hadn’t even realized it, but he’d been worried about that. After all, his mother had known Hector MacKenzie too, hadn’t she?

He shuddered. He was capable of thinking many negative things about his mother, but he could never imagine her complicit in his father’s death.

Throughout his childhood, after every divorce, Eileen lamented that Joseph Murphy had been the only man who ever truly loved her. It was the one tiny, bright reminder of his parents’ love for each other that he had.

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