Haunting Warrior (3 page)

He suspected she might be right, but he liked Martina too much to answer the invitation in her eyes. Besides, since the dream-woman had begun haunting him, he thought he might already be ruined for any other female. And that was just nuts.

Martina gave a derisive snort of laughter. “Don’t worry, Irish, I won’t want a wedding ring and three kids in the morning.”

He took her keys from her hand and unlocked the driver’s door, handing them back when she slid in.

“Drive safely, Martina.”

“One of these days you’re going to say yes, Irish.”

“And that will surely be the day you change your mind to spite me.”

She laughed at that.
“Sí.”

Her motor sputtered pathetically and then gave a half-hearted roar as she gassed it out to the deserted street. After her engine faded away, the crunch of his shoes against the loose parking lot gravel was the only sound in the night. Usually he liked the quiet, but tonight it played on his nerves. Made him jumpy.

There were a few other cars left in the lot. The cops cruised the three-mile area around the bar from ten to close, and those who still had licenses had learned to walk home after getting loaded. Most of them didn’t have a pot to piss in, let alone a vehicle to worry about in the first place. Who knew where they went when their last buck was spent.

He crossed to his ’81 Camaro, admiring the new paint job he’d had done. After driving around in gray primer for three years, he’d finally finished the restoration of the old car. The new black high-gloss was the crowning touch. He’d parked under the light where he could see it from the club’s door while he checked IDs and bounced the stray unruly and obnoxious drunk. He probably put more care into the Camaro than he did anything else in his life. A fucking car.

The overhead light cast the inside in darkness, and it wasn’t until he opened the door that he saw the old woman inside. Stunned, he stared, his brain stuttering and stalling as it tried and failed to put some kind of framework around what he saw.

The woman was Colleen Ballagh, his grandmother, and she sat in the passenger seat as if she had every right to be there. She’d seemed ninety when Rory was a kid, and she looked the same now that he was thirty. She sat calmly waiting, hands folded demurely in her lap, eyes sparkling like hell’s fires burned within them.

In that one swift glance, he’d known, though there was no logical explanation for it. No sign, no telltale warning. But his gut knew what his eyes denied.

She was dead. A ghost, waiting in his Camaro. His certainty was ancient and superstitious, and it was complete.

Even as he acknowledged it, the concrete wall of reality fought to keep her out. If she was dead, then she couldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be seeing her. Ghost or not, she looked as solid and as real as the black leather of his seats and the shining chrome knobs on the dash.

“Boo,” she said.

Rory staggered back a step and would have fallen on his ass if he hadn’t been holding on to the rim of the door. She laughed at that. Laughed, like it was a game.

He’d heard of it happening to other people, seeing the dead. Christ, where he came from people saw crazy shit all the time. That was Ballyfionúir—a town so small it could fit neatly inside any one of Los Angeles’ mini-malls. It sprawled lazily on the Isle of Fennore just off the southern coast of Ireland. On the other side of the planet. May as well have been the other side of the universe.

The Isle of Fennore was more than an isolated community, “the last bastion of traditional Ireland” as the mainlanders liked to call it. It was shut off from the rest of the world, a satellite that had slipped its orbit and now ran counterclockwise to the expected flow of things.

His own family claimed they could trace their history back to the line of Heber, the same as Brian Boru, one of the greatest Irish kings of them all. But there was more than royalty in his family tree. Like many others on Fennore, Rory’s family had special
gifts
. That’s what they called it.
Gifts.
Whether it was seeing a visitor before he made it to the front door, or knowing a son or daughter had skipped school without being told, or having tea and a chat with a deceased relative on a bright sunny day—the gifts ran through Fennore like the rivers and the streams.

What people from the outside might consider supernatural powers, Fennorians viewed as normal. As expected as the flow of the tide and the rise of the moon—parts of the same great cycle. On Fennore, people knew things they shouldn’t, saw things they couldn’t, and did things ordinary people wouldn’t.

But Rory wasn’t on Fennore anymore—hadn’t been since his mother sent him away to live with her sister in California when he was twelve. And if he’d ever had any of the
gifts
, it was so long ago he didn’t remember. Didn’t
want
to remember. It was why he’d never go back.

But here was his grandmother, smiling wickedly at him from the front seat of his Camaro in a deserted parking lot in southeast LA looking exactly as she had when he was a teenager and saying goodbye. Still, he had no doubt at all that she was dead.

“Are you going to stand there like a gobshite or are you going to say hello?” she demanded, and the sound of her voice washed over him in a wave of memory and pain.

Rory looked down, ignoring her. Hoping his disregard would send her back to where she’d come from. This was why he’d left Ballyfionúir and never returned—he liked his reality served up in inflexible, unconditional terms. He’d never been able to embrace the freak of nature that was his heritage.

“Is it afraid you are?” she quipped. “And you the size of Hercules. I’d never have guessed it.”

His mouth was dry, and he knew she was taunting him. Nana had always known his weaknesses, what buttons to push, what switches to flip. She knew exactly what Rory MacGrath feared and how hard he’d fight to keep anyone else from finding out.

“What do you want?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel like he wasn’t shaking inside. She was
fucking dead
and he was talking to her.

She smelled of lilac and scones, and the familiar fragrance made him want to scramble right back out and take off running—who cared what she thought.
Christ, ghosts shouldn’t have a scent.
She wore a silky white flowered blouse and pale blue slacks that ended in bright white sneakers.
Go, Granny, go
, he thought.

“I’ve come to bring you home, Rory,” she said, and it seemed she’d taken pity on him, because the fiery glee dimmed from her eyes.

“I am home.”

“Oh aye, I can see that.” She looked out the window. “And who wouldn’t want to live here with all the lovely smog and asphalt?”

“It grows on you.”

“Sure and it eats at you, too. Tell me it doesn’t.”

He didn’t say anything. It was true and they both knew it.

“And that’s not all that eats away at you, is it, Rory?”

“I like it here,” he insisted, refusing to bite at the bait she dangled. Colleen Ballagh was a master at the lure and trap. It did no good to lie to her, and it was just as pointless to evade.

“Well,” she said with a meaningful sigh, “you’ve always been a strange boy. Even before.”

Even before what?
Before he was sent away? Or before his father disappeared that night so long ago when he’d been five? He forced himself not to ask. If Nana planned to tell him, she would. If she didn’t, no amount of pressure would get it out of her.

“Oh, and don’t you think you’re the smart one?” she said with a chortling laugh. “I used to tell your mother that you could outfox a fox. Of course, all she could see was the trouble you courted wherever you went. It’s a mother’s job, I suppose.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“Watch that mouth with me, Rory MacGrath. I’m still your grandmother, dead or no.”

That was funny, but he didn’t laugh.

“Do you never wonder what happened to you?” she said softly.

He turned in his seat, wanting to see her face despite the way it made him feel. Or maybe because of it. Maybe he just needed to prove to them both that he wasn’t afraid.

“Nothing happened to me,” he said.

“Stubborn,” she muttered beneath her breath.

She was one to talk.

“I’ve not time to argue it all out with you. I’m not on my own schedule anymore, as you might have guessed. And believe it or not, it’s more than yourself I’ll be needing to see.”

“Who else are you going to haunt?” he asked.

“Haunting is it? Well I suppose I’ve been accused of worse. It’s not your concern who else I’ll be visiting. You’ll find out when the time comes, if that’s the way of it. For now it’s enough to know that you’ll be going home.”

“I am—”

“Ach, and don’t say it. You’re far and away from home, boy. Far from your people and your purpose. You think all it takes to be a man is big muscles and a heart of stone? Living is about feeling. It’s about risk and loss and having your soul torn out.”

“Sounds like a great time,” he said.

“You think I don’t see how afraid you are?”

He clenched his jaw, staring at her coldly. “I’m talking to my dead grandmother and I’m not even drunk. I’m entitled to a little fear.”

“It’s not me that frightens you,” she said, her tone so harsh it wiped any smartass reply right out of his head. “It’s yourself, isn’t it, Rory? You lost a part of yourself when you lost your father, and you’re scared that it was the better part. I dare you to deny it.”

For a moment, he could do nothing but stare. How did she know that? Her brows raised in challenge. How could he imagine she
wouldn’t
know all his secrets, her look said.

“So, what?” he demanded. “You’re here to give it back? Restore all my shattered little pieces?”

“Sure and hand over the world on a golden platter while I’m at it.” Nana looked away in disgust, and despite himself, he felt ashamed. “I’m here to tell you that it’s time to quit hiding like a child afraid of the dark. It’s time to go back to Ballyfionúir and put things to right.”

“Some wrongs can’t be made right,” he said softly. “It’s too late for that.”

She laid a pale and wrinkled hand over his where it clenched the steering wheel. The touch had no warmth and no weight, but the hand was so familiar, even after all these years, that it comforted him.

“No, child, it’s not too late. But this is not a calling you can pretend not to hear. The night in the cavern, Rory, beneath the ruins of the old castle. The night your father vanished . . . You changed something.”

Her words came at him like the tolling of a great bell. “What?” he asked softly, his mouth suddenly dry. “What did I change?”

She hesitated and for the first time since he’d opened the door, she looked uncertain. “You changed fate, Rory. And not just your own.”

He stared at her, confounded. Torn between releasing a bark of incredulous laughter or a gasp of bone-deep fear. But the look in her eyes was too steady, too serious, too much of a contradiction to the bizarre words she’d spoken for him to do either. He changed fate, she’d said. What kind of bullshit was that?

“I cannot tell you all that I want to,” Nana went on. “Oh, I know you think I’m enjoying myself, but that’s not the way of it. I should have a fistful of years left to enjoy, but here I am as dead as this place you call home. The fault is my own, of course, because wasn’t it me who toyed with fate from the beginning?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rory finally demanded.

His harsh tone stiffened her sagging shoulders and brought her chin up. The fierce sparkle was back in her eyes. “Sure and I’m a fool to think you’ll understand what I say to you, but it is what it is. You
will
return to the land of your birth. And you
will
do what is asked of you. There’s no choice. Should you deny your destiny, you will find that destiny is a whip with a backlash of fury. It will flay the skin from your bones.”

“Christ,” he muttered under his breath. She was not only dead, but she was crazy, too. “Well thanks for the warning, Nana.”

He’d pissed her off now. She narrowed those eyes and pointed at him. “This is not a game. People will die, Rory MacGrath. People you care about, whether you’ll admit it or not.”

He stared at her. Again that conflicting need to either laugh or moan caught him in its grip. She meant what she said. She believed every single word of it, no matter how crazy it sounded. How could his going home now be connected to that night when his father disappeared or to the fate of his loved ones?

“When you get there, you’ll find I’ve left something for you. Take it and keep it safe. You’ll need it.”

“What is it?” he asked, though he had no intention of going anywhere near Ballyfionúir.

She smoothed an imagined wrinkle from her pants and ignored his question.

“You’re asking me to go someplace I don’t want to go. I’m going to need a little more than ‘destiny’ to work with.”

She looked at him for a moment, gauging the sincerity in his tone, and against his will he found a part of him rising up with earnestness. He could try to deny it, but some part of him wanted answers, wanted to know what he was supposed to do. Needed to know. Because somewhere in her crazy declarations, he’d felt that chill of truth.

He’d always suspected that he was somehow responsible for what happened that night his father vanished. But he’d never known how or why or even
what
he’d done. The idea that the answers to a riddle that had plagued him for twenty-five years were just on the other side of a page he couldn’t figure out how to turn was a torment in itself.

“What do you remember about that night beneath the ruins?” Nana asked at last.

“Not much, just a few bits and pieces.”

“But you haven’t forgotten the Book, now have you?”

“The Book of Fennore? Is that what this is about?”