Haunting Embrace (38 page)

Watching her, Meaghan said, “When you’re older, you’ll be better at discerning fact from fiction. You always seemed to know what was to come.”

“Lucky me,” Colleen answered bitterly. “When I discovered I was with child, I had a vision of my future. I saw myself with Brion, wedded to him. And then my vision turned dark, and I realized that the only way for me to be his wife was for Marga to be gone.”

“Gone?” Meaghan repeated.

Colleen nodded. “He might have gotten an annulment. She’d never conceived and any number of people could testify that she is colder than a winter’s wind. But that’s not what I saw. I saw death and I knew that my Brion had killed her.”

“You didn’t see him do it, though?”

“No, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. I saw only the deed, done. She was dead and I was the new Mrs. MacGrath. He killed her for me. I knew this in my vision, and I could not suffer it. I’d sinned by lying with him. I’d sinned against God and against myself by being his mistress. I’d acted the filthy whore that Mickey always accused me of being.”

“That’s fecking bullshit, Colleen. You live in a backward time. It’ll be a long time before divorce is legal again, but it will be because it
should
be. Because sometimes people marry the wrong one, and they should be able to walk away without violence. I’m not saying marriage vows shouldn’t be sacred, but sometimes people make mistakes.”

“The time you come from sounds so different from now. It’s hard for me to picture it.”

Meaghan sighed. “How did Marga end up playing your matchmaker?”

“She knew I was pregnant. Or at least she knew that I stood the chance of becoming so. She came to me with a deal. She’d tried time and again to have a child. Had faked pregnancy and miscarriage twice. And she saw me as a means to an end. I’d only just learned that I was pregnant, only just realized what my future held when she approached me. ‘Are you with child yet?’ she asked me, and she knew the answer by the expression on my face. And so she arranged for me to wed Mickey, whose wife had died and left him with wee Niall to care for. He couldn’t do it on his own, as you saw for yourself. He needed a wife and . . . and . . .”

Meaghan clapped a hand over her mouth. “And she’s going to
steal your baby
and pretend it’s
hers
.”

Colleen nodded miserably. “’Tis why Mickey hated me so. Before we . . . before me, he was a good man. An honest, hardworking man who loved his wife. He never stopped mourning her.”

Meaghan didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t think of the violent Mickey Ballagh as a
good
man. But she could hear the sincerity in Colleen’s voice.

“Marga has a midwife who will lie for her. She will deliver my baby and pretend it was born dead. We’ve been telling everyone that I’m only a few months along when I’m near due, so the miscarriage won’t cause such a stir. They won’t even expect a funeral at that stage. And on the same night I ‘lose’ my baby, Marga will give birth to a healthy child, binding Brion to her forever.”

“Oh my God,” Meaghan breathed. “The
bitch
.”

“She is the wronged party in all of this, Meaghan. It was I who dared to make her husband mine. You cannot pretend that it’s otherwise.”

“Yes . . . and no. You slept with her husband. It was wrong. I’ll admit that. But what she did . . . what she plans. Jesus in heaven, Colleen. It’s trafficking babies is what it is.”

Colleen gave her a perplexed look.

“You need to tell Brion the truth. He deserves to know.”

“I cannot,” she said. “If I dare speak against her, she’ll bring charges of adultery and robbery against me. She’ll say I came into her house and stole from her. She’ll see to it that I go to prison and I will lose my baby anyway. At least now he’ll be raised with his father.”

“Who doesn’t believe the child is his. I heard what he said, Colleen.”

“Aye, but the babe will resemble Brion. He is the true father.”

“Or maybe it will resemble your great-uncle Fred.”

“Who?”

“I’m saying, the baby might look like any one of
your
relatives and none of his own. Did you ever consider that?”

Colleen shook her head. “He will not. He’ll have eyes as blue as the sky and he’ll be named for Brion’s great-great-grandfather. You heard Marga yesterday. His name will be—”

“Cathán,” they both said together.

Cathán MacGrath. Wife beater, murderer, monster.

“Yeah,” Meaghan said. “I know exactly who he’ll be.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Á
EDÁN had the net out again, but his mind was locked so tight in the knot of impossibilities that he’d only been staring at it. He’d wandered in frustrated anger for the past hour. He’d been trying to clear his head, to banish the scent of Meaghan from his senses.

He’d failed on all accounts.

He didn’t notice the man approach until he had one foot on the deck, the other still firmly anchored on the dock. The man leaned his arms on his bent knee and stared at Áedán in silence. Cathán MacGrath’s father could have been a mirror image of the man Cathán would grow to be.

“What do you want?” Áedán asked.

“I want to know what game you think you’re playing,” Brion said. “I know who you are.”

“I doubt that.”

“Oh yes, I know. It told me.”

“It?” Áedán asked with raised brows. “And what is this
it
that speaks to you?”

“The Book of Fennore,” he said without hesitation.

Áedán winced. He didn’t like to even hear the name. It had taken all his control not to clamp a hand over her sweet mouth when Meaghan had spoken it. He swallowed hard, anger and hurt rushing at him from opposing sides as he thought of Meaghan. The look in her eyes as she’d listened to Kyle’s accusations still felt like a thousand blades flaying the flesh from his bones.

He’d never meant to let her get so close. Never dreamed she would become so important.

“It told me you have power over it,” Brion said.

Surprised, Áedán just managed to keep his voice level, but inside churned fear and anger. “I have no power,” he said coldly. “I’m just a fisherman.”

“My arse. You’re no fisherman, Áedán Brady.”

He didn’t bother to argue the point. Obviously he wasn’t fooling Brion MacGrath. Instead he eyed the other man, noting his pallor, the tension in his shoulders. Áedán didn’t sense the Book hovering about him, but he noted that flat glitter that marked its victim’s eyes. He didn’t think Brion had been near the Book yet. He hadn’t touched it. But if it spoke to him, it was only a matter of time.

“It promises you things, doesn’t it?” Áedán said softly. “It tells you whatever you want to hear. It promises to make you so powerful that no woman could say no to you. Not even another man’s wife.”

For a moment, confusion clouded Brion’s face, and he swayed. Then he scowled at Áedán, and once more those eyes were as hard as the seawater slapping against the boat.

“How would you know what it does and doesn’t promise?” Brion asked.

“Because it promised me things, too. That’s what it does. Do you know the story of the genie in the bottle, Brion MacGrath?”

Brion swallowed thickly. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The legends say that you rub the bottle and the genie appears for your wishes. That’s what the Book wants you to believe. That it’s there for your command. It tells you,
Come closer, make your wish
.”

Brion said nothing, but he was listening.

“But the genie always warns you to be careful what you wish for. The genie cautions you to choose wisely and think first. Think long and hard. Do you know why?”

Brion narrowed his eyes. “Get to the point.”

Áedán smiled grimly. “It warns you because what you ask for is exactly what you get. It doesn’t listen to the nuance of your request and deliver what you want. It gives only what you ask for. Ask for happiness, and you will get it along with poverty and helplessness. Ask for wealth, and you will abound with it, but you will be alone and desolate. There is no way to outsmart it, to trick it, to be more astute than it is. In the end, you will trade away the very things about yourself that make you who you are. You will barter your soul to get the love of a woman only to discover that she no longer loves you because you have changed too much. In the end, you will take your life because your life is worth nothing. That is what the Book of Fennore does.”

“How do you know so much?”

“How is unimportant. I know.” He watched Brion digest this. After a moment, he asked in a deceptively soft voice, “Did you kill Mickey Ballagh?”

“No.”

Áedán raised his brows doubtfully even though he’d already decided that Hoyt had committed that crime. “But you considered it, didn’t you? You thought about it. It made you weigh the pros and cons. Tell me it didn’t. It made you think it was your idea to hunt him down, to kill him. It made you think it was the right thing to do.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Maybe. Or maybe if Hoyt O’Shea hadn’t killed him first, you would have done it.”

“Hoyt O’Shea?”

Something in the tone of his voice made Áedán pause. He’d expected surprise, but what he heard ran deeper. Disbelief based on something stronger than simple denial.

Brion said, “Mickey Ballagh was killed sometime after two in the morning. Hoyt O’Shea was at home with his wife.”

“So she says.”

“Not just her. One of their boys was sick and had them up taking care of him. About one o’clock in the morning, Hoyt’s wife sent him to get Dr. Fitzgerald to come see to him. He was there until after dawn.”

“Then who killed Mickey?” Áedán muttered, not meaning to ask the question aloud but too stunned to keep it in.

“I thought it was you. I would’ve bet the bank on it. But if Colleen’s cousin says you were there, and Colleen believes her, then so do I.”

Áedán was only half listening. He’d been certain Hoyt had murdered Mickey. But now . . . “It has to be you.”

Brion’s head snapped back, as if he couldn’t decide if he’d been insulted or commended.

“I did not kill Mickey Ballagh.”

Áedán heard the truth in his voice, though it made no sense. He shook his head, assessing Brion MacGrath. Áedán suspected that Brion had been close to answering the call of the Book. But his instincts told him that he had not yet caved in, and it had not pulled him into its spell. A grudging respect formed for the other man.

“What’s inside the Book, Brion . . . it doesn’t care about you. It should, though. It’s the epitome of arrogance that it doesn’t.”

“Why should it care about me?”

“Tell me, does it sound familiar, the voice you hear?”

“From the bleeding Book? Why should it?”

“Because it’s your son’s voice, Brion MacGrath.”

Brion scowled. “I have no son.”

“Yet. But your wife is heavy with child, is she not?”

Brion licked his lips and nodded.

“And until this voice began talking to you, you were willing to be the husband you should be. Weren’t you?”

“Perhaps.” He gave a disgusted shake of his head and muttered, “But the child isn’t mine.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Who are you to say what I do and don’t know as truth? Who are you to tell me what is and isn’t mine?”

“The child is yours. He will be named Cathán, and he will look just like you.”

Brion pulled his foot from the deck of
The Angel
and took a step back. “How would you be knowing that?”

“There was a time when I knew much. I have met your son, Brion. He is not worth any of what you do now.”

Brion was shaking his head. “You don’t know—”

“I know that he will lead you to do things that blacken your soul. And then when you’ve made such a mess you can’t see the way out, he will offer you one. But the price. The price is everything you hold dear.”

“It told me you would try trickery.”

“Did it?” Áedán stared at him with clear eyes. “What power do you want that you do not already have?”

Brion swallowed again and looked out over the sea. “I am married to the wrong woman. God help me, I pray that I will lose her somehow.”

“Lose her?”

He looked down. “In childbirth perhaps. Disease. I don’t even care.”

“You want her dead?”

Shamed, he nodded. “I don’t even care if she gives me the child first.”

The callousness of his statement hung between them, and there was nothing that could unsay the words. But the look on Brion MacGrath’s face was tortured. At his core, he might have weaknesses. A wandering eye, roving hands. But he was not a murderer, and he was not the kind of man who wished death on his own.

“The child will be evil?” he said.

“No. He will be made into evil,” Áedán answered. “Or not.”

“What riddles do you speak?”

“You have choices laid out in front of you, Brion. They are your choices. I can see that you still have them to make. But soon they will vanish like the tide retreating. Listen to the voice you hear, obey it, and there will be nothing left of yourself that you recognize. You may end up with Colleen in your bed, but you will have condemned her to a man who does not even know himself. A man who hates what has become of him.”

“Then what do I do?”

Ah, wasn’t that the question. And Áedán didn’t have the answer. He remembered others, many others who’d chosen to take their own lives rather than face what they’d brought on themselves. Now they haunted him, voices pleading in the darkness of his prison, coming to him for help. Oma, begging for her children. Saraid, willing to give anything to save her precious Ruairi. And so many more. Even the entreaties of Cathán, desperate and alone, pinged against his conscience now. Their pain felt like tiny barbs ripping at his flesh. He’d given each of them what they’d asked for and taken more than they could bear in exchange.

“Do you know where the Book is?” he asked Brion.

“No. It talks to me, but I’ve yet to find it.”

“It waits until it owns you. It sends out its signal, always searching for someone who can hear it. Then it draws them in, promising what they want. Do not touch it, should you be unfortunate enough to find it.”