Haunting Desire (13 page)

Reyes looked between the two men with an unhappy expression. Obviously, he didn’t want to take sides, but all of them could see he wouldn’t have a choice. Not this time.

“I’m in,” he said. “Tiarnan’s right, no matter how we look at it. Her father is the one and only ticket out, and from my perspective it’s either us on the train or its Cathán. I’m voting for us.”

Jamie let out a deep breath. It defied his ability to grasp that in the space of one morning he’d fought three-headed creatures and had his authority challenged by subordinates who’d never questioned him before.

Tiarnan said, “Going after her father will be dangerous, and I do not ask y’ to come. I only ask that y’ don’t try to stop me. The time has come for me to face my enemy once and for all. It is my battle. I will face it alone.”

Jamie snorted. “Fuck you, T. That ain’t happening.” He looked at Reyes and Zac, shook his head again, and then put his hand out. Without hesitation, the other two men placed theirs on top of his. Liam moved from where he sat and added the weight of his hand to the pile.

It had been a long time since any man had offered to fight Tiarnan’s battles. A long time since he’d felt man enough to take on his own demons. That simple gesture of trust that Jamie made filled Tiarnan with dread and hope in equal but warring doses. If ever there’d been a God to pray to, he prayed now that he did not fail them.

Feeling something hard swell in his chest, Tiarnan stepped forward. As he placed his hand over the others, he sensed the weight of Shealy’s gaze on his face. He stared into her stormy eyes and felt as if she’d bared his soul. There in the clouded depths he saw compassion, understanding, commitment. And then, with a deep breath and a look of utter determination, Shealy O’Leary put her hand on top of them all.

“To Oz,” she said softly.

Jamie laughed. “Yeah. Follow the fucking yellow brick road.”

Tiarnan didn’t know what that meant, but he saw the journey snake out ahead of them, twisted and dark with the unknown. And despite the years of failure that had scored his life to this point, despite the defeat that ate at him like a disease, he felt a glimmer of optimism. Maybe, just maybe this time he would succeed.

Maybe it was time for hope.

A
FRAID
couldn’t come close to describing what Meaghan Ballagh felt.

She had no idea where she was, how she’d come to be there, or, more importantly, how the hell to find her way home. She’d been walking for about an hour, hoping something would look familiar, but the forest in which she’d found herself grew darker, more alien.

She paused, looked around hopelessly for a clue—a flashing neon sign that said “This Way, Meaghan” or bread crumbs—
anything
. But all she saw was more of the same cloistered shadows, thick with menace.

She pushed on, moving faster now. Branches tore at her clothes and whipped her face and bare arms, but now that she’d sped up, she couldn’t bring herself to slow down. It was the kind of thing stupid teenagers did in the movies—running through unknown territory in blind terror. She’d never understood the rationale before.

Now she got it loud and clear.

Running gave the fear purpose.

She was glad for her jeans, thankful for the rubber-soled shoes on her feet. If she hadn’t changed at the last minute, she’d be doing this sprint of terror in shorts and sandals. The forest thinned and ahead the trees ended abruptly. Beyond was open meadow stretching out as far as she could see. It was light out there, and her survival instincts warred at the beckoning sunshine. The darkness under the canopy of trees whispered with malevolence, playing on her fear of the dark that had plagued her since she was little. Sly and insidious, it tracked her fleeing footsteps.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to break from cover, couldn’t convince her adrenaline-drenched system to slow down and think. She veered right, panic in the driver’s seat. She didn’t want to be caught out in the open.

The terrain grew rocky as she ran parallel to that taunting meadow, forcing the trees to grow at angles, slowing Meaghan despite the fear screaming
faster
in her head. Weaving between boulders and trunks, she strained to hear beyond the terror. Was she running from shadows? From the feeling of threat inside her own head? Or was something real out there?

She didn’t know. Only her own labored breathing and pounding feet filled her ears, but beneath it she felt that malicious murmur that vibrated through the disturbed air and sent dread of a different kind through her.

The ground sloped, and soon she was climbing with her lungs on fire and her legs shaking from exertion. By degrees she rose, breaking from the confined grasp of the woods. Relief made her shudder. She didn’t let herself look back as she hefted herself up another level. Only a scattering of trees managed to thrive in the stony foundation—enough to make her feel less exposed but not so many that they obstructed the view.

She crawled over a huge boulder, then the next and the next, each rise making her feel a little safer, convincing her that the terrifying presence she’d sensed hovering in the gloom of the trees had been her imagination kicked into overdrive.

At last the feeling of being tracked by unseen eyes eased. Finally she paused and glanced back. From her new vantage, she could see for miles in every direction. The tree line was a looming fortress behind her, fiendishly shadowed and tense with anticipation. The open meadow below and to her left spread out sparse and still in the distance.

With a gasp she leaned against a boulder, trying to catch her breath. Trying to understand where she was and how she’d gotten there. One minute she’d been in Ballyfionúir, combing the cavern beneath the restored castle where her family lived, searching for her half brother, Rory. It had taken a hefty shot of whiskey to talk herself into going down there. The cavern encapsulated every fear of darkness she’d ever had.

Even with the afternoon sun bathing it in gold, the cavern maintained an air of dank gloom and thick menace not unlike the forest from which she’d just emerged. Bad things had happened in that cavern, and Meaghan felt the shocked shiver of them suspended in the primeval air.

But the last time she’d seen Rory, he’d been headed for the cavern. He’d come home for Nana Colleen’s funeral only to leave in the middle of the service, racing toward the cliffs that led down to it like something had called to him.

He needed to be alone
, the other mourners whispered amongst themselves.
Overcome by emotion
, they agreed with sage nods.

She’d thought so, too, but that had been a week ago.

On the outside, Rory looked invincible, but she remembered when he was a teenager—even then haunted by his own personal nightmares. She’d worshiped him as a child and resented him when he’d gone off to America, leaving her behind. But she was grown up now and she knew that her half brother had a good heart and more than his share of pain.

She also knew that Rory was somehow connected to the mysteries surrounding the Book of Fennore. Talk of the Book and its elusive tie to her family had followed Meaghan her entire life. Ask any one of the MacGraths or the Ballaghs if it was fact or fantasy and they’d become fecking doorposts, acting like they didn’t know what she meant. Meander down to the pub, though, and she’d get an earful of lore and fancy. For a girl like Meaghan whose curiosity had gotten her in trouble more times than not, the Book of Fennore became an irresistible lure.

After her grandmother’s funeral service, when the mourners had turned to celebrating Nana’s life by the pint, the family had searched for Rory. He wasn’t in the cavern as they’d expected. Nor was he in the castle, or any of the pubs, or anywhere else for that matter. Not a soul had seen him since he’d run from the funeral. It was as if he’d simply vanished into thin air. Just vanished.

There’d been rumors about Rory’s father—her mother’s first husband, Cathán MacGrath—vanishing from the cavern beneath the ruins many years before. When she was little, Meaghan had asked her mother about it, but she’d only laughed and said it was a lie. Her first husband had disappeared all right, but not by any mystifying way. Meaghan’s mother said he’d run off with another woman or been shot by an angry father who’d caught him dallying with his daughter. Nothing unsolved about that.

But with Rory gone, the story of Cathán seemed much more than rumor.

The Gardai had investigated, but found nothing to indicate foul play, no signs of struggle or illegal activity. Rory’s duffel bag sat in his room, just as he’d left it, filled with nothing more lethal than his fresh and citrusy aftershave. He hadn’t left the island by ferry and no one had taken him to the mainland in their boat. Garda Walsh had hinted that Rory might have fallen and been washed out to sea. It was a possibility that had also been assigned to his father, years ago.

Left with little choice, Meaghan and her family had begun to mourn yet another tragedy in their lives.

And then, a few days later, Meaghan had been cleaning up at the children’s center that she and her half sister Danni operated and she’d seen the book of fairy tales lying open on the floor. There’d been a picture on one of the pages and across the top in big letters it read, “Ruairi of Fennore Commands the Sea.”

The larger-than-life man poised atop the choppy waves in the picture, hands raised with power, was her half brother. Rory’s face stared out at her from the portrait captured there—not his likeness, not someone similar. Impossible though it was, the depicted man was Rory, and Meaghan knew it down to her bones.

That very afternoon she’d gone to the cavern, swallowing her own monstrous fears, convinced she would find answers. In the alternating light made by the tide swelling at the mouth of the cave, blocking the sun then releasing it in steady surges, she’d felt the eerie stillness and the oppressive shadows. She’d sensed a tension, stretching tight, filling the void and vanquishing the steady roar of the sea. It had taken every ounce of grit she had not to turn and run.

The cave had gone black and silent and then light and sound exploded like a wartime detonation. For an instant, she thought she saw Rory with another man, right there in front of her. But the light had grown so bright, the rumble so loud that she’d closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears. The ground had shook, bringing rocks tumbling down around her. Her brother-in-law, who’d rebuilt the castle, always warned against going into the cavern. He’d said it wasn’t safe. She thought how angry he’d be when they found her body in the rubble later.

And then just as suddenly as the shaking had begun, it stopped. Meaghan opened her eyes to find she was no longer in that cavern. She was in a thick forest, alive with buzzing insects and the dark, swaying branches of unfamiliar trees. She couldn’t recall the steps that had taken her from the cave to this wooded area. All she remembered was the cavern and then . . . this.

She wiped her brow and then looked around again. The rocky hills couldn’t be called mountains, but they rose in a choppy range that played sentry to the soaring peaks behind them. There were gaping grottos speckled amongst the boulders that led into alcoves or tunnels. Casting a nervous glance at the sun, which seemed to have slipped across the sky at an alarming speed, Meaghan warily approached one of the shadowed depressions. The last thing she wanted was to go from the fire to the frying pan and startle some big, fast creature in its lair, but the thought of being caught out in the open when twilight leached the color from the sky terrified her more than the idea of entering one of the depressions of her own free will. With one last glance over her shoulder, she crept into the yawning black mouth and paused, ears straining for the slightest shift or shuffle.

A wide tunnel, long and curved, sloped down in front of her. Cautiously she followed it, monitoring the stretch of light spilling from the entrance, careful not to exceed its reach. She caught a whiff of smoke as she drew deeper in. It made no sense that a natural fire would be burning inside a tunnel, so that meant that someone had started it. Bolstered by the idea that she’d find someone else, refusing to let herself consider that someone being dangerous, she crept on. The farther she went, the darker it became, and now her fear grew with the shadows, making her want to cower and run with the same bipolar force.

She inched around a blind corner and found herself in a rounded, wide chamber lit by a small fire in the center. The flames flickered, dancing on the walls and animating shadows on the ceiling. There was an old man sitting beside the fire, and he looked up in surprise and stared at her. The sight of him was so unexpected, so out of place that Meaghan froze for a moment, certain he was an illusion.

“Who are you?” she asked, and her voice felt very loud in the silence.

She’d startled him, and he gave a muffled yelp as he jumped to his feet, staring at her like she might be an apparition that would vanish with a gust of wind. In a flashing instant she saw relief and then disappointment move across his face, like he’d been expecting,
hoping for
, someone else. Who he expected to meet in this godforsaken place, she had no idea. His lip was split and a nasty black eye gave him a piratical look, but he didn’t seem aggressive or hostile in any way, nor did he seem disoriented or delusional.

“I am Donnell O’Leary,” he answered in a tired voice. “Recently of the United States.”

“Meaghan. Meaghan Ballagh, Ballyfionúir,” she said softly.

“Ballagh,” he repeated in a tone that made the hairs at her nape stand on end. “Of course. You’ve the look of your mother.”

He couldn’t have shocked her more if he’d sprouted horns and a pelt. “You know my mother?”

“No. But I’ve seen pictures.”

“Where?” she demanded as images of an obsessed stalker flashed in her mind.