Haunting Beauty (24 page)

“That wouldn’t be wise,” he said.

“Especially when we have so many other choices.”

“Even if we have
no
other choices.”

His tone was so serious she glanced at him and stumbled. He caught her arm, keeping her from falling. When she tried to pull away, he kept his hand on her, holding her still.

“For every tale told about the Book of Fennore, there is a lesson of doom surrounding it. For every voice that says it’s just a myth, there is the fear that it’s real. Do I believe it exists? Yes. Does it scare me to say it? More than you know. Can you understand that, Danni?”

She nodded.

“It cannot be used.”

She knew that, too. She’d seen it, hadn’t she? The black seeping into Edel’s eyes, turning them into sparkling pits of pitch. Whatever had happened to her when she’d touched the Book, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t right. And it most certainly wasn’t natural.

“What if it’s been used already, Sean? What if it brought us here?”

He didn’t answer, but his face paled and his grip on her arm tightened.

“I get that it’s not a good thing, Sean. But if you’re thinking we should just sit around and wait to see if it plans to send us back, then I have to tell you, I’m not thrilled with that plan.”

“It cannot be used,” he repeated, stoically. He took a deep breath, released her arm. The chilly air rushed in where his warmth had been, and goose bumps traveled over her skin.

“We could argue about it all day,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter, does it, when neither of us knows where it is anyway. The only way we’d find it is if it wanted us to. That’s what the legends say. It chooses you, not the other way around. You can look for it all you want, but I for one would rather be a living
paradox
than a tool for the Book of Fennore.”

The hard cold tone made Danni shiver. She rubbed her arms and nodded. Taking this as agreement, Sean started walking again. Slowly Danni followed.

“My fa—Niall tells me there’s a cottage that Nana has rented for us,” he said, shortening his stride to hers.

“How do you think she knew we were coming?” Danni asked.

“The woman is a mystery. She always has been. Better to ask the sun why it rises.”

“My necklace,” Danni said. “Where did she get it?”

He gave her another sideways glance. “Why?”

“My . . . father said it was old.”

“I told you it was a family heirloom. That generally means old.”

“You said it was a charm. To keep me safe. Safe from what, Sean? That one you didn’t answer.”

And he didn’t answer now. Looking straight ahead, he kept walking.

“Okay, how about this one. If it’s a family heirloom meant for me, why did your grandmother have it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

She watched him, looking for a sign of another lie, but he was either a great actor, or he really didn’t know. “Do you know what it is, this charm?”

He glanced at where it rested against her chest and then away. “The Spiral of Life,” he said.

Perhaps it was the bland tone of his deep and smoky voice or maybe it was the chill breeze, but the words hit her with a physical force. Her father had said life, death, and rebirth, and she’d thought it interesting. But walking beside Sean,
Spiral of Life
took on a whole new meaning. She swallowed hard. “Colleen knew we were coming,” she said, returning to the topic.

“Aye.”

“Do you think she knows more than that? Like what happens next?”

“Do you?” he asked, looking at her from the corner of his eye.

She shrugged, but she felt guilt crowding in. She’d blasted him for lying, yet wasn’t she doing the same? Withholding information because she was scared of being left alone?

“I don’t know the first thing about what your grandmother does or doesn’t know.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” he responded flatly. He stopped, pulling her to a halt as well. “I’m asking, do
you
know what happens next?”

“How could I?” she asked.

She felt his gaze on her, but kept her face averted, refusing to let him see deeper than the surface. He’d asked her the same question last night, in her kitchen, before . . . before they’d fallen through a hole in time. But she didn’t know what happened next, only that it ended with Sean and his father dead and Danni’s family shattered.

She lifted her chin and steeled herself to meet his eyes, presented a blank expression she could only hope hid the turmoil behind it. Sean continued to stare, and she saw something move in his steady look. A doubt, a suspicion.

“Why did your grandmother send you to get me?” Danni asked softly, deflecting those prying sea green eyes with a counterattack.

He let out a deep, harsh breath. “I can’t tell you the why of it, Danni. I don’t know it myself.”

“Does it have to do with Niall? With your father?”

It was a shot in the dark, but it hit. Sean shoved his hands back in his pockets and scowled.

“Does it, Sean?”

“Why should it?”

“I don’t know . . . it’s just a feeling. You—I mean, Michael—I see how you used to act around your father. When you were young, you looked at him like you hated him and it seems . . . more serious than just teenage angst. Like you had a reason. I know what you said about how you were treated after Niall killed himself, but that hasn’t happened yet—I mean, not in this time we’re in now.”

Sean didn’t say anything, but he held himself stiff and away.

“Talk to me, Sean. Help me understand what’s going on here.”

He let out a pent-up breath, shook his head as if trying to deny what needed to be said. Then, finally, he spoke. “Do you know why—when your mother disappeared with you and your brother—do you know why the people of Ballyfionúir were so quick to say it was murder and so eager to condemn my father, a fisherman who’d lived here peacefully his entire life?”

“I thought it was because my father saw him do it. . . .”

“Sure and they’d believe a man who’s never done an honest day’s work over one of their own?”

“But the evidence . . .”

“Not enough to convict him, dead or no. They’d have done it if they could.”

“Then why?”

“Because they all thought he’d gotten away with it once before—when he killed
my
mother. He’d already taken the life of his own wife. It was barely a stretch to think of him taking another man’s.”

“Your father killed . . . ?”

“Yes, it’s what I’m telling you.” In his anger, in his grief, emotion dragged out his lilting words into a long, painful softening of consonants and sharpening of vowels. “You want to know why I hated him at fourteen? Well, there is your answer. He killed my mother when I was nine. I saw him do it with my own eyes, though even now I can’t tell you how it happened. They called it an accident. Maybe it was—I don’t fucking know. But who do you think suffers for a thing Danni? Not just him who did the deed. Not just him. If my grandmother brought us here—which I don’t know to be the way of it—but if she did her reason wouldn’t have been my father.”

Danni stared into Sean’s eyes, looked into a sea of churning and conflicting hurts and rages, confused memories and blurred facts. She saw in that tempest the young child who wanted to believe in his father, and she saw the grown Sean, who’d lived his life as a ghost because of the same man. It was tearing him apart, the warring emotions.

“I don’t know what the fucking hell we’re doing here Danni. You think it’s for a reason? Well, I can’t see it that way. I can’t see how we’ll make a damned bit of difference no matter what we do. The past can’t be changed. Surely you know it’s the truth?”

And with that, he walked away from her.

Chapter Twenty

S
EAN and Danni arrived at Colleen’s front door in a strained silence. His jaw was set and his lips tight, his expression as closed as a bolted door. With his tormented words still ringing in her ears, Danni didn’t dare ask him any more questions. But she had many.

Colleen cast a curious glance between them when she opened the door and ushered them in, but she saw the tension in Sean’s bearing and she refrained from questions, too. Bean sat at her feet, watching nervously. Michael looked up from his plate at the table and stared at them with guarded interest.

“Sure and it’s exhaustion I see on your faces. I knew you’d be worn out by the time they were through of you. I’ve packed up yer supper, and Michael will be taking you on to yer new home. The good Father has managed to gather some more donations, seeing how your things are lost. I’ve left them for ye inside.”

Like obedient children, they thanked Colleen for her trouble. Sean hefted the box she’d packed for them and followed Michael to the door. Danni paused and called to Bean, but the little dog yawned and put her head between her paws with a sheepish expression on her face.

Colleen blushed as she hurried to explain. “I fear I might have spoiled her a bit. It was such a comfort having her with me that I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s okay,” Danni said.

“Sure and tomorrow she’ll be sick of me and ready to go back to her master.”

Danni nodded, trying not to show her hurt. It felt like betrayal. Dejected, she followed Sean out the door.

“I knew the little rodent was possessed,” he muttered.

They took the same road Sean had walked that morning, snaking down the hillside toward the sea, weaving around enormous boulders and fragrant heather. As they descended, she could hear the beat of waves against the rocky shoreline and smell the spiced sea air as it cloaked the dusk with its pungent perfume of fish and tar and storm.

The path split then, with one side leading down to the beach and the other running parallel to the embankment. Michael led them on the second.

“The pier is just down there. It’s where our boat is docked. It’s a fecking pile of shite, if you want to know the truth. I wish it would sink.”

Danni bit back a question about how, then, would his father put food on the table. After hearing Sean’s story, her heart could only go out to the young boy who’d seen his father kill his mother.

After another few moments, Michael pointed behind them and said, “You can see the castle from here.”

Danni turned and caught her breath as she gazed at the steep and rocky plateau and the ruins perched atop like a cornice on a spire. From this distance, she could get a better sense of what it had looked like whole. The crumbling walls had been anchored by four round towers with another set of walls inside the stronghold. Gray in the twilight, the stone glowed like something from another world, representing a life so long gone it could barely be imagined. The picture of it stayed seared in her memory long after she’d turned away.

The cottage was more a thatched shed than a house. A bright purple front door gleamed with fresh paint against the faded yellow walls. Two windows made eyes into the deep darkness on either side of it and a small porch confined them to crossing the threshold one at a time.

Michael opened the door without a key and flipped on a switch. A single lamp on a single table cast a dull and clouded glow on a single room divided by two curtains into a kitchen, sitting area, and bedroom. The bathroom had a door, but it was so tiny that Danni thought it would take maneuvering to close it while standing inside.

“Used to be Court O’Heaney’s,” Michael told them. “But he died a month back. Stranger things I’ve never seen. His dog died on the very same night. Both of them, gone. He was sitting in a chair by the fire and the dog was at his feet. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Danni and Sean had not. Michael waited for their exclamations of amazement with a hopeful expression, but the pair were too tired, too confused to give it.

“Well now, I’ll be taking my leave. I’ll see you in the morning, cousin,” he said. “There’ll be a need for fresh salmon and Da will be trying to catch it.”

“You work on your father’s boat?” Danni asked.

“Aye, and isn’t it a crime. Child labor, I say. But it does no good. He’ll have me out of bed and swabbing the decks by dawn. A waste of a day.”

“It’s an honest day’s work,” Sean said, eyeing the teenaged version of himself with a combination of humor and impatience. “And what else would you be doing with yourself but looking for trouble?”

“I’m man enough to spend my time without reporting to the likes of you,” he said with defensive pride and a pointed look at Danni. His gaze was at once pleading and sexual, begging her to see beyond the boy to the man he would become. It disconcerted her, staring at this young echo of the man beside her. Worse than double vision, it made her dizzy and slightly nauseous.

Sean, apparently, had no such confusion when it came to Michael. He put himself directly in front of her, blocking Michael’s line of sight.
Jealous of himself
, she thought with insanely dark humor.

“We’ll be seeing you in the morning, then,” Sean said as he ushered the boy to the door.

“Michael,” Danni asked before Sean shut him out, “have you ever heard of the Book of Fennore?”

Michael paused and looked back at her. His expression was shocked.

“Aye, everyone has. Do they talk of it in America, then?”

“No,” she said, trying for a casual tone, a natural smile. “I just read about it. Do you think it’s real?”

“Why wouldn’t I? No one can say it isn’t, can they now? Nana has seen it with her own eyes, she has.”

“I thought no one had ever seen it before?”

“No one has,” Sean said firmly. “Your nana is filling your head with tales, she is. She’ll tell you she’s seen purple elephants in Dublin next.”

A dark flush stained Michael’s face as he glared at Sean. “I’m not some fecking imbecile.”

“Of course not,” Danni said, shooting Sean a warning look.

“Thank you, Michael, for showing us the way here.”

Mollified, Michael nodded and said good-bye. When the door finally closed behind him, the air inside felt thick and damp. There was a musty scent and a chill that only intensified her weariness. Danni needed some space. She needed to be alone. She needed to cleanse herself of the day’s grime and her mind’s confusion.