Haunting Beauty (30 page)

“So Sean has no MacGrath in him?”

“Well sure, somewhere in his family tree there’d be a MacGrath. But Sean is perhaps the purest of blooded Ballaghs in centuries.”

“And does he, I mean, has he had visions?”

“He’s never shared them with me if he has. But visions aren’t the only thing the Ballaghs are known for. Oh, the list is long of the powers a Ballagh might possess. They say once upon a time there was a Ballagh who could stop the curse of death from stealing the dying.”

Danni’s mouth went dry. “Stop it how?”

“Well now, if I knew that I’d be a millionaire, wouldn’t I? But that’s not what you mean, is it? What is it you’re wanting to know, girl?”

“Does Sean have . . . powers?” She felt ridiculous even asking the question, but it was even more absurd to ignore what was happening all around her. Ballyfionúir was a place of magic, of the unbelievable.

“Oh aye. He’s a great sorcerer. Do you not see how he’s enthralled you?”

Danni looked up at that and saw humor in Colleen’s eyes. But behind it there was something else. Something more. The look sent a shudder through Danni’s body.

“I watched the Gardai dig up that grave and pull Michael’s body out of it. And yours, I saw that, too. But wasn’t it the very next morning Michael was at my table waiting for his breakfast?”

Michael’s spirit, anyway, but Colleen didn’t have to spell it out for Danni. Did his appearing to them both qualify as a
power
? Danni thought of how he’d seemed to her the night he’d shown up on her doorstep. She hadn’t thought him a ghost. Even after she knew, when he’d touched her, kissed her . . . it had felt real. Not as real as last night, but real enough that she’d believed it.

“He’s not the only ghost on this island, though, is he?” Danni said. “What about the white ghost?”

“What do you know of the white ghost?” Colleen asked sharply.

“I’ve seen her.”

“And what business was she about? Did she offer you a thing? Anything?”

“Her comb.”

Colleen sucked her breath in through her teeth.

“I didn’t take it. Sean told me to never take it.”

“Aye, he’s a good boy. So he knows of your sight?” she asked, curious.

“I told him it was a dream, but he guessed the truth.”

“Lies are never the answer, child. If you’re to save one another, there can be no secrets.”

“And is that what I’m here for? To save Sean?”

“And he, you.”

“With the Book? Is that it? I’m supposed to use it?”

Colleen shook her head. “And how would you be doing that? To use it you must have it. To have it, you must know where to find it.”

“You’ve looked for it, haven’t you?” Danni asked suddenly. “You’ve seen it, too, and you tried to take it.”

“I’ve only seen it once,” Colleen told her. “In the hands of my son, just before he destroyed all that I loved.”

“You saw it in real time? Not a vision?”

Colleen nodded, her eyes on Danni’s face. “And you?”

“Only visions. Twice, now.”

The smile that curved Colleen’s lips held too much satisfaction for Danni not to know she’d been led to this point. Inexplicably, but inerrantly led.

“And what have you seen?”

“Enough to wipe that satisfied smile off your face.”

“’Tis not satisfaction,” she said.

“What, then?” Danni demanded. “The Book of Fennore is evil. I could feel that, and I wasn’t even there. Not really.”

“True enough. It can give you everything you wish for, but what it takes . . . It steals the part of you that makes you a person, that makes you human.”

“But you would have me try to use it anyway?” Danni asked, hurt, wounded to her soul by having to ask the question.

“I cannot tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. Can you not hear my words?”

“I hear just fine.” And Danni’s tone said that she did. Colleen was willing to sacrifice Danni if it meant saving everyone else. Suddenly she was tired, tired to the core of her being. She stood and took a step toward the cottage.

“I’m just the messenger here, Danni,” Colleen said softly.

“Funny, Sean told me the same thing. But you know what? That doesn’t make it any better. I hear the Grim Reaper is just a messenger, too.”

Colleen’s eyes narrowed. “Do not use that tone with me, Dáirinn. I am still your grandmother, and I will have the respect I am due.”

“My grandmother?” Danni repeated incredulously. “That’s a technicality, Colleen. The reality is you are a stranger. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And whose fault would that be?”

Speechless, Danni stared at her.
Whose fault?
Was she nuts?

But Colleen’s eyes were blazing now, and she stepped up to Danni and pointed a finger at her. “I’ll tell you since you seem to have lost your tongue so suddenly. The fault is yours, Dáirinn MacGrath. And yours alone.”

The breath came out of her lungs with a whoosh. “How can you say that? Do you know what life has been like for me? Do—”

“Ach, spare me the sad tale. What has life been for Sean? For Niall? Your mother? What of them?”

Danni was shaking her head, trying to grasp how Colleen could lay fault at Danni’s feet. “I was a child when all this happened.”

“And even then you could have stopped it. But instead you put it all behind you and never thought of it again. You
forgot
,” she spat.

“You think I did that on purpose? My God, Colleen, you think I
chose
to live that way?”

“What I think is not important.”

“But you’re accusing me—”

“By the end of the day, everything I love will be taken from me. I’ve not the time to woo you round to the truth. Ye can stop it.”

“You can’t be serious?” Danni said, feeling helpless under the weight of Colleen’s censure. “Look at me. I’m not some omnipotent being who can just snap her fingers and change the world. I can’t even get my own dog to follow me home.”

“And yet here you stand.”

“Because of you.
You
brought us here.”

“No, child. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Sean. Look inside to see how you came to be here.” She turned then and walked away.

“Wait,” Danni said. “What else . . . How am I supposed to . . . What do I do?”

“And what answer would you have me give? You can do whatever it is you set your mind to. Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

“But I don’t even know where to start.”

“Then I’d be setting my mind to find out, wouldn’t I now?”

And with a curt nod of her chin, she started down the path without looking back. The fog rolling off the sea gobbled her up and left Danni alone in a white and black world with no place to hide.

Chapter Twenty-four

A
S Danni went back inside the one-room cottage, she could still hear the waves beating against the rocks, demanding submission, eroding the shore and pummeling it into silken sand. That’s how Danni felt inside, like something that had been rendered into particles that no longer resembled their origin.

She sat on the couch and curled her legs beneath her. The house was silent but for the soft and steady sound of Sean breathing just a few feet away in the makeshift bedroom. She’d left the curtain open and she could see the shadowy shape of him in the bed. She listened, feeling out of place even in her own skin as her conversation with Colleen repeated in her head.

Even then you could have stopped it.

Her entire life she’d been trying to pretend that she was just like everyone else. But she’d never fooled anyone, had she? No matter how good she became at hiding who and what she was, others had always sensed there was something about her. Something not quite right, not quite normal. From foster families to the men she’d known, they’d sent her back.

Now, here she was. Living an impossibility. Having conversations in the middle of the night with a stranger claiming to be her grandmother. Someone who thought she had the power to change her world.

She closed her eyes, hearing Colleen’s words in her head, repeating like a mantra. Was it Danni who had brought them here? Or was it the Book?

She’d accepted that it wasn’t a dream or a vision that had thrown her twenty years into the past. She even remembered thinking in those moments before the air had turned and she’d felt herself falling—thinking how unfair it was that Sean had come into her life this way. How she wished she could make it different.

This was real, however impossible, and maybe she
was
responsible for it. So what did it matter if she took another giant leap into the dark side. What could it hurt to push out, to see if there was more that she could do?

She pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Closing her eyes, she focused on Niall, trying to follow him with her mind. She could see him clearly in her head—the way he’d stood inside the cavern, watching her mother swim like she was a mystical sea creature spewed into his world by powers of enchantment. He’d looked like a dying man, faced suddenly with the chance of life. She honed in on that, on his desperation. Concentrated on the push-pull of his conflicted emotions.

She felt the familiar gathering, the tension in the air. It pressed in, swirling around her as she reached for it. Close, so close. She could see it all, but she couldn’t wrap her mind around it, couldn’t find a way to reel in the lines that held the turning at bay. And then it ebbed and began to fade.

No.

She clenched her eyes tight, throwing her mind out and into the fray, but the turning was too thin to catch, too elusive to grasp. She couldn’t force it.

It had been stupid to think she could.

She let out a breath of defeat, frustration, remorse. Colleen was wrong. Danni was different, but she wasn’t special. Things happened to her, not the other way around, not because she caused them to happen. Resting her chin on her knees, she stared at the outline of Sean on the bed. The vibration of air hovered just above, just out of reach. Teasing her. Taunting her.

“What are you doing?” Sean’s voice rumbled across the room and startled her.

“I thought you were asleep,” she said, hand over her heart.

He sat up, and she felt his gaze moving over her, though she couldn’t see his face or make out his features.

“I woke up and you were gone. Where were you?” he asked.

“Outside. I needed some fresh air.”

“Alone?”

No, I was just chatting about the impossible with your grandmother—wait, actually it was my grandmother.

“Yes.”

He seemed to be waiting for her to say something else. To do something more. But she could only stare at him, drinking in the sight of the pale moonlight against his muscled chest, gleaming over the strong arms. Remembering the things they’d done last night made her face feel hot and her stomach jittery. But what she’d learned this morning knotted her insides and made it hard to catch her breath. She felt inadequate. Stupid. Numb.

He climbed out of the bed and pulled his jeans on, carelessly buttoning the fly as he crossed to where she stood. His eyes were searching as they traveled over her stiff posture. The air above her suddenly surged down, and she knew, suddenly, that it was within her reach. Like a door flung open, she could see the way in.

“Are you okay?” he asked, stopping beside the couch. When she didn’t answer, he tilted her chin up and looked into her eyes. “Talk to me, Danni?” he said.

The feel of his warm fingers against her skin, the caring in his deep, smoky voice seemed to ignite other things around them. She felt the hiss and hum of the air as it rushed at her like a burning wind, and she faced it. In her mind, she opened her eyes to the vision and she called it.

She felt herself falling, falling into the depths of it and then the air, the room, Sean, all of it began spinning even as the air gathered tight like a blanket. Then it spread out, thinning, pulling and reaching like a net with an open weave and sticky threads. Instinct had her fighting before reason could make her embrace it.

Sean felt it, too. She saw it in his face, saw the surprise, the shock of it. His hand moved from her chin but only so he could grasp her fingers, hold on as the world twisted sickeningly. She thought of how he’d described the walls like glass, changing what was on the other side into something unrecognizable and watched as it happened again.

And then, with a grinding wail the walls vanished completely.

Chapter Twenty-five

D
ANNI was standing in the familiar valley, drenched in the shadow of the ruins. At her feet was the place where the grave had been before, but now the telltale hump of dirt was flat and covered with grass and flowers. The ocean roared and crashed, fishy and heavy with brine and numbing cold. The sheep in the distance grazed mindlessly, moving as one in a slow, methodical dance.

She looked down to the hand clasped with her own. Sean—barefoot, shirtless, clad only in his blue jeans—stood at her side. He’d been with her before—the first time when he’d guided her. But this was different. She frowned as she stared at their clasped hands. His palm felt warm against her own. He was solid. Real. Like Danni, he was
in
it, not merely a part of it. A small distinction with an enormous implication.

He tightened his grip, drawing her gaze to his face. He was pale, his eyes wide and troubled.

“What is this?” he asked her.

She fought the layers of disbelief pressing down on her like thick, binding ropes. “A vision,” she said.

And she had called it, willed it to happen. Sitting on the couch with arms around her knees, she’d reached into the depths of herself and summoned it.

No. Impossible.

But it wasn’t impossible, only unprecedented. She had called it, followed it like a kite on a string as it hovered around her and then reeled it in.

Again
, a voice inside her taunted. The first time she’d brought him with her hadn’t been a vision, it had been through time. She didn’t understand how she’d done it, but something inside was urging her to take responsibility.