Haunting Beauty (12 page)

He nodded, knowing exactly how sharp the ring of grief could be. A long moment passed and then she asked, “What about the silver comb? What was that?”

“Do you know anything about the Irish, Danni?”

“You’re supposed to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day and never let a leprechaun go if you want his pot of gold.”

“Well, there’s a bit more to us than that.”

“I figured there might be.”

Her voice had dipped huskily at those words and she looked away. Sean wondered what she was thinking.

“You think of leprechauns, and isn’t it true we think all Americans ride horses and shoot each other in saloons? Sure and the Irish are nothing if they’re not superstitious. The leprechauns my grandmother would tell you of were cruel little bastards, though. I’m not after saying most people still believe in the lore, but there are those like my nana who do. My point is, if Cinderella were an Irish tale, the Fairy Godmother would not have done her good. She’d have given her three heads or spirited her away to some dark cave where she’d be kept until the tide came in and drowned her.”

“And what does she say of the white ghost?”

Sean rubbed her hand while he considered his answer. His grandmother had seen her twice and both times had brought disaster. Sean had never believed in the spirit, but he had a healthy respect for her fear of it.

“When I was a boy,” Sean began carefully, “my nana used to say that I should be careful of the fairies. ‘Never be too good a boy, Sean,’ she would tell me.”

Danni’s brow’s rose at his impression of his grandmother and the briefest of smiles flitted across her face. “Why?”

“Well, see, she thought that if I was too good, the fairies would come and snatch me away. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was
never
that good. But the point I’m trying to make is that the fairies of Ireland do things like hide the money jar from a mother with six hungry children just so they can snatch the best of them and make it their own while she’s out begging for food.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Aye, well, Irish history hasn’t ever been sweet and lovely.”

“But what does that have to do with the comb?”

“Don’t you know better than to rush an Irishman telling a tale, woman?”

Another smile—this one almost made it to her eyes.

“The comb would be something they’d thought of as a lure.”

Danni grew very still and he paused, watching her. She pulled her hand from his grip and began fidgeting with her glass again. Her next words lit the kindling beneath his foreboding, and it flared up into something greater, more menacing.

“It did lure me,” she said. “I wanted to touch it. I wanted to touch it very badly.” Her lips tightened, her face paled. “Go on,” she told him.

“It’s nothing really. The truth of it is, the tale is probably stolen from mermaid mythology—the siren, tempting sailors with her beautiful hair and sparkly combs, then trapping them in the cold sea. Just don’t take it if she offers it again.”

“I won’t,” Danni said softly, and the seriousness of her tone was telling. She believed it could happen.

“What else was in this
dream
?” he asked.

Danni looked into her glass and didn’t answer. He’d known there was more from the minute she’d begun to speak. She’d started in a choppy, staccato manner that implied she was editing as she went. Now his curiosity had an edge to it. Danni was scared. He could feel her anxious tension, and it triggered a primeval protectiveness in him that caught him like a hooked blade.

Danni took a deep breath and said, “I saw my mother.”

“Your mother, was it?”

“In the dream,” she added. “She pulled me out of the grave.”

“And what grave would that be?”

“The one I saw you standing beside,” Danni said softly.

Sean swallowed hard, not liking her tone. Liking the words she spoke even less.

“That was some dream you had.”

She nodded. “I’ve always been a vivid dreamer.”

He let it go, wanting to know what else she’d seen.

“This grave, it’s in a valley, and I see a steep cliff. It’s covered in rocks that seem like they’re going to tumble right into the sea. It’s very harsh. Very beautiful.”

Very much Ballyfionúir.

“In the distance, there’s a weird stone thing. . . . I’m not sure how to describe it, but it looks like a doorway and it has something on it that reflects the sun. Like gold.”

She cocked her head and watched his face. It felt as if he’d been plunged into an arctic pool. He was suddenly very cold.

“Do you know where I’m talking about?”

He knew. He knew it well. It was a place that drew him, a place he often found himself, sometimes with no recollection of how he’d come to be there.

“What is it? The stone thing I see?”

“It’s a dolmen. They’re ancient and as common as castles in Ireland.”

“But what is it?”

“Depends on the myth you believe. But most likely they mark burial chambers. Doorways to beyond.”

She paled and nodded. “Is there one in Ballyfionúir?”

“Yes.”

“I had the sense—the feeling—that there was something behind me when I was looking at it, but you know how dreams are. I couldn’t look back, so I don’t know. I think, maybe it’s a house or . . . I don’t know, something bigger, but I can’t say what.”

“It’s the ruins,” he said softly, feeling the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. “It used to be a castle and stronghold, perched up on a cliff overlooking the sea. It was built centuries ago and has stood all this time. My grandmother remembers stories of when it was whole. Your ancestors lived there before one of the walls caved in and crumbled right down to the ocean. It took the kitchen and the oldest son of the time with it.”

“Oh ...”

The breathed word shivered between them. He had a feeling of something momentous, something hovering just above them. It seemed the room dimmed, the lighting changed, became softer, though he couldn’t explain it. The walls of her kitchen flickered—there was no other way to describe it. It was like seeing a home movie projected over the paint and cabinets. Distorted, out of place, but undeniably
there
.

“Now it’s only ruins?” Danni said, her voice a cool breeze that blew through him.

He nodded. “There’s a house just in front of it now. I’ve never thought it looked natural, the house standing in the shadows of the ruined castle. But they didn’t ask me when they built it.”

Danni stared at him, her gray eyes looking deeply into his own. The pull of her was tangible, the need for her so great he couldn’t stop the hand that finally bridged the gap between them. The silk of her cheek felt hot against his fingertips. He stroked down the line of her jaw to her throat, trying to see nothing but her. Trying to lose himself in the stormy seas of her eyes. But the walls seemed to fade in and out, mocking his attempt to ignore them.

What was causing it? Did she see it, too? But he didn’t ask. Asking would have made the gnawing worry in his gut too real or too ridiculous. He wasn’t sure which.

“I’ve brought you something,” he said, not realizing he’d intended to speak of it—to give it—until he heard his own words. But in the swirling mix of his confusion, he felt a pressure build. An urging that forced his hand in the same way it had from the start.

He thought, not for the first time, that somehow he’d become a pawn in his own life. A shell of the man he should be, moving mindlessly to an objective he didn’t understand.

The walls around him took on a strange translucence, and for a moment he was looking out on the view Danni had just described. For just an instant, he felt the bite of the sea breeze, the salty spray of the surf. And then his fingers closed over the green box he’d brought from Ireland, and the walls were just what they should be. Staid and confining, locking him into decisions that weren’t his own.

Chapter Nine

D
ANNI felt the push of the air around them. It was heavy and thick, filled as if by sediments. She thought of an erupting volcano, spewing out ash so dense it masked the sky. The pressure of the air trying to turn was made foreign and gritty by the strange fluttering pieces of the bigger picture she couldn’t yet see. Knowing it was pointless, she fought the turning, focusing just on the man beside her.

From his pocket, Sean pulled a small green box. It was what he’d been holding this morning when he’d watched her from the window of the store. It was embossed with knotted gold loops and spirals that joined in a symbol she’d never seen before . . . and yet, there was something familiar about it. It took a moment and then she realized—she’d seen similar shapes in the fanning pages of the Book of Fennore. Icy cold seeped from her scalp to her feet as she considered that.

With a brooding glance at her face, Sean thrust the tiny box at her. Again she was hit with his mixed messages. He gave it, but not willingly.

Her fingers shook slightly as she took the box and opened the lid. Inside, on a bed of white cotton, was a necklace with a fine chain of woven silver and gold. A pendant the size of an old coin hung from it. The mixture of silver and gold made an intricate weave around concentric spirals spun together without beginning or end. Again, she had that sense of familiarity and recognition. In her mind, she saw the lock on the Book, turning and spiraling endlessly. The pendant was the same.

A constellation of jewels glittered in between the strands of gold and silver. An emerald centered the piece, with sparkling diamonds, glowing opals, and bloodred rubies surrounding it. But there was no malice emanating from the necklace as there had been from the Book, only a strange jarring energy.

The walls of the kitchen continued to expand and thin around her like encapsulating lungs sucking in deep breaths. It felt like they shivered with anticipation as she stared at the necklace. They were waiting, but she didn’t know why or for what. She fought the urge to look at them, struggled against the shadows moving just on the other side of the membrane.

She touched the knotted center of the pendant with the tip of her finger, and a stinging jolt seemed to race up her arm. It frightened and conversely soothed at the same time. “What is this?” she whispered.

“It’s a charm,” he answered in that smoky baritone, making the words seem much more than they were. “To bring you luck and keep you safe.”

“Safe? Safe from what?”

He stared at her in silence, and she sensed he was sifting and filtering a myriad of responses. That he felt there were many things she needed to be kept safe from. So many things she should be fearing. Did he have knowledge of the Book of Fennore? Had he ever seen it himself?

The walls pulled and pushed at the thick air. Waiting . . . waiting.

“Just safe,” he said, looking away. “It’s a family heirloom. It’s yours now.”

“Mine?” she said, and the wall sucked in a gasp of pleasure.

“Yes. Put it on. It belongs to you.”

“But where did it come from? How did you—”

“Do you want me to take it back, then?”

“No,” she said quickly. “No.”

The sighing walls pressed close as Sean gently lifted the fine chain, moved behind her, and clasped it around her neck. His fingers were warm against the sensitive skin of her nape, and the brush of them was as intimate as a kiss.

The walls pulsed with a dark need that terrified her.

When Sean returned to his seat, his brows were drawn, his eyes a strange golden green, a choppy pool of disquiet. He glanced past her as if something behind her had distracted him. She had the unsettling sense that he could see, that he could hear the insistent grating as the walls thinned and expanded. But that was impossible. She’d never broadcasted a vision to anyone else.

“I don’t know when it was made,” Sean was saying about the spiraled and knotted pendant. “I’m not sure it’s ever been dated. But it’s old. Very old.”

It felt heavy around her neck, much more weighted than its appearance led her to believe. She lifted it with tremulous fingers, half expecting the precious piece to disappear like an illusion. But the moment she touched it another shocking bolt cut through her. Images rushed with it in a whoosh of jumbled impressions that stole her very breath. She didn’t have time to make sense of any of it as it vandalized her senses.

“Are you all right?” Sean asked, taking her hand, bringing her back.

The walls warbled, and she felt that they would suck her into their swirling mass. She felt sick with the pull of it. Horrified by the lure behind it.

“Danni, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

Sean’s voice came from a great distance. She felt it as much as she heard it. She tried to answer him but managed only an incoherent sound that escalated her rising panic. Since the morning Sean had appeared in her kitchen, the visions had been hovering, just waiting to take her into their frightening embrace. And now this—this feeling that they would punch right through her walls and overtake life as she knew it.

Sean was standing now, pulling her to her feet. She was aware of him, the solid mass, the height and breadth of him, the seduction in those not quite green, not quite gray eyes. She wanted him to be real. Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted him to be something more than a sick twist of fate. She wanted to lean into him, have his arms around her, comforting, holding on to her. Holding back the frightening swirl of the air.

It wasn’t fair
, she thought. It wasn’t fair that he’d come into her life this way. One more person she yearned for but couldn’t have. Because even though he was a stranger, she did yearn to know more about him. To feel connected to him. She wished it could be different. Why did it always seem that everything she wanted hovered just out of her reach?

A sound echoed through her mind—a pulsating rush, a distressed groan. Destiny’s train chugging up a forbidding slope. It grew louder, stronger. The air became thick and cloying, sucking at her sanity as it solidified over reality.

“Danni?”

She couldn’t hear him speak, but she saw his lips move, his eyes fill with concern. He pulled her into his arms, staring at their surroundings with an expression that mirrored the fear inside her. She didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed to happen to them both. Bean began to bark frantically. She circled Danni’s feet and jumped to rest her paws on Danni’s legs. She knew it, but couldn’t make her body respond and offer comfort.