Haunting Warrior (8 page)

“Bean loved Nana at first sight,” Danni mused, watching the dog. “It was the strangest thing the way they took to one another.”

The news didn’t surprise Rory in the least. She’d been as prickly as the little dog.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, afraid they might shake as they had last night. “She came to see me,” he said softly.

Danni gave him a sharp look. “When?”

“Night before last.” A part of him couldn’t believe he was saying it out loud. A part of him wanted to laugh even as he remembered how it felt when he’d realized who was sitting in his car. “When I got off work, she was waiting for me.”

Danni made a sharp sound of amusement. “Bet that scared you out of your knickers.”

He forced a stiff smile.

“And what did she say?” Danni went on as if they were discussing the price of milk and eggs. “I’ve died, so come home?”

“Something like that.”

“She wanted something, didn’t she? She called you home to find the Book. Is that the way of it?”

He shouldn’t have been surprised she’d know that detail, too, but he was. Reluctantly, he nodded.

“I can see there’s no point in telling you not to do it, but it’s dangerous seeking something that shouldn’t be found. What did Aunt Edel say when you told her?”

“I didn’t tell her. Why would I?”

Danni looked at him in shock. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Edel has used the Book, Rory. Did you never notice her eyes? How queer they are?”

Rory stared at his sister, open-mouthed. Edel had used the Book? Edel, who he’d lived with until he was old enough to move out on his own?

Suddenly it made so much sense. Suddenly he understood why his parents had sent him to his crazy aunt with her flat, dark eyes. Why she alone had been able to put fear into Rory’s heart. They were kindred in more ways than blood.

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” he asked, angry.

She shook her head, clearly as surprised as he by this giant hole in his education.

“Who told
you
?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. I’ve just always known.”

If he hadn’t hidden himself so far from home, perhaps he would have known, too.

“Rory,” Danni said, and something in her voice had changed. He looked at her, found himself staring into those luminous eyes of hers—gray and stormy, like the Irish Sea itself. For one weak moment he’d wanted nothing more than to embrace his sister and tell her how much he’d missed her. How much she meant to him. How sorry he was for hurting her along the way to his liberation. But he didn’t move and he didn’t speak.

“I have something for you,” she said. “In case I don’t get the chance to talk to you alone later.”

She pulled a small green box from her pocket. He stared at it curiously but made no move to take it.

“Nana wanted you to have this, and she knew Mum would keep it from you if she could, so she made me promise that I would give it to you.”

She thrust the box out to him with a reluctance he couldn’t miss. And suddenly he knew what was inside before he even opened the lid, knew what it meant that Nana had gone to so much trouble to make certain he received it. Knew this was what she’d told him he would need. Slowly he took it from his sister, his big hands dwarfing the tiny box. He hesitated, and then finally he lifted the lid.

Inside, nestled on a piece of cotton, was the pendant. The size of an old coin, the pendant glittered like something alive. A starburst of jewels fanned out from an emerald nucleus, sparkling diamonds, opals and rubies, woven silver and gold twined seamlessly into concentric spirals that had no beginning, no end.

“I know it’s connected to the Book of Fennore, Rory, but I don’t know how or why.” She bit her lip and then blurted, “I’m afraid it’s a key—a way to find it, use it. If it is, you mustn’t do it. I beg you.”

“Use it?” he repeated with a short bark of laughter. “How would I? Christ, I don’t even know what
it
is.”

“Not yet, but you will.”

This simple statement hung between them. For a moment, Rory couldn’t even breathe. He stared at her, unable to pluck even one question from the traffic jam of disbelief and confusion clogging his thoughts.

“That’s bullshit, Danni.”

But beneath his sarcasm, doubt lifted like smoke from a snuffed candle. He thought of the markings on his chest, just over his heart. A symbol he’d not just inked into his skin, but burned. Branded, because a tattoo wasn’t permanent enough. He’d been fifteen, and he’d done it with a Bic lighter and the end of a metal hanger. He hadn’t been drunk or high or even delusional. He’d been compelled, driven to desperation. His friends thought him a pain freak looking to get off on the self-mutilation. They’d only been half wrong.

He didn’t know what the Book of Fennore was, but it had marked him in ways he still didn’t understand. Now he realized that he’d been trying to make it a part of himself, wear it on the outside as he bore it on the inside.

Similar spirals marked the cover and spine of the Book of Fennore. And the lock that held the Book closed . . . the pendant was an exact duplicate. It wasn’t a key in the traditional sense, but Rory was certain it was instrumental in unlocking the secrets hidden within the ancient Book. They were parts of a whole—the Book, the lock, and the pendant—a trinity in the same way a husband, wife, and ring were intrinsic parts of a marriage. But there was no power emanating from the necklace as there’d been from the Book, only a strange seductive light.

“If the Book is calling to you, there’s a reason,” Danni said softly. “And it’s not your own, make no mistake about it.”

He shook his head and took a step away. “Do you know why I left Ballyfionúir?” he asked her.

“Trevor,” Danni said softly, without hesitation.

Just hearing his stepbrother’s name made Rory’s gut tighten. She was right. Trevor was at the heart of his leaving, but he wasn’t the cause.

“I hated it here,” he said. “I hated living in a world where nothing was ever what it seemed. I hated the superstition and the . . . the . . .”

“Magic?”

Angry, he gave a terse nod. “Dead people shouldn’t show up in your car. Your sister shouldn’t be able to see what’s going to happen in the future.”

Danni’s eyes darkened with hurt, and he felt bad, but it was the truth and it needed to be said.

“Before she died,” Danni said, her voice low, “Nana told me the past is only a version of what might have happened. She said life is like the spiral of that pendant. No beginning, no middle, no end.”

“She liked to say things like that.”

“ ’Tis a certainty. I know it. And yet that doesn’t make what she said any less true, now does it? I think it’s what she meant about Trevor. She said to me once that he’d died when he was only four or five.”

Rory’s gaze snapped up from the box. “He was fifteen when he died.”

“But that’s what she meant, when she said we were lucky to have him those extra years. That he wasn’t intended for this world. Maybe she knew of another past where he didn’t live so long. I don’t understand it any more than you do, but somewhere in there is a kind of sense. I think the point is, what has happened in the past is not set in stone. It can be changed by the Book of Fennore. But you’ve no way of knowing what the change will bring. It may only postpone the inevitable. Do you see what I’m saying?”

He didn’t answer, but inside him something dark and insidious slithered through his thoughts. A sibilant whisper hissed from the deep caverns of his mind, urging him to come closer, look deeper.

Was Trevor what Nana had been talking about when she said he’d changed destiny? Possibly, but he wasn’t sure.

“The Book of Fennore, it’s not to be trusted, Rory. You may think you want to find it to destroy it, but the truth is, if you’re thinking of the Book, it’s because the Book is thinking of you. Don’t ever forget that.”

“I remember . . .” He started and then paused, not sure if he should, if he could, share this piece of memory. “I remember touching it that night.”

She gave a jerky nod, letting him know she remembered, too.

“I was scared. Ready to piss my pants I was so scared. But . . . but as soon as I touched it, all that went away. I felt, I don’t know, at peace. I could see life ahead of me, and it looked like something out of a movie, you know? Grassy fields swaying in the breeze, laughter. Sunshine. It all came at me in this rush. And I wanted it.”

He looked at his sister and shook his head, feeling foolish but unable to stop the words. “We’d been living on the wire for so long, what with Mom and Dad dancing around each other like boxers. We knew something was coming and it was going to be bad. And so that peace I felt—it was like a warm sun on my frozen face. It felt like heaven, and I never wanted to leave. I don’t know what the me who was holding that Book was doing, but up here—” He tapped his head. “Up here, I was happy. I had no worries, no troubled past, no dismal future. I had everything I wanted.”

“It was messing with you, Rory.”

“I hear you, Danni. But it doesn’t change a damn thing. This Book has fucked with my life long enough. First it was Dad, then . . .” He stopped before he finished the sentence. Then it was himself, feeling like he didn’t belong. Filled with a fear he hated but could never quite escape. “Dad took it with him, wherever he went. Maybe if I find the Book, I’ll find Dad, too.” He gave his sister a quick glance, not confessing the other reason why he was determined to locate the Book. Not mentioning the dream-woman and Colleen’s assurance that the Book would lead him to her. The need to find her had been building until now; he felt it like a weight on his shoulders. He didn’t just
want
to know if she was real, he
needed
to know. Thoughts of her had begun to consume him.

“You haven’t seen the Book lying around anywhere, have you?” he said in a poor attempt at humor that neither one of them found funny.

Danni looked at him for a long, drawn moment. Then she lowered her eyes and shook her head. “Finding it won’t be the problem, Rory. It’s looking for you, too.”

T
HE two kids awoke as the Volvo rounded the last corner. His niece did it quietly with a yawn and a stretch and a shy “Hullo.” She was cute, with eyes like Danni’s and rosy cheeks. His nephew chose to wake with an earsplitting howl and instantaneous tears.

“What’s up with that?” Rory asked, looking back at the sobbing kid. The toddler’s plump face was an alarming shade of red, his uvula waggling with distress.

“I think Raegan has nightmares,” Danni said, reaching back to touch a flailing foot. “Dig around in my bag there and hand him that bottle, would you?”

Rory did as she asked, and Raegan took it with obvious suspicion, but then he jammed the nipple in his mouth and began to suck furiously. The dog gave Rory a warning growl as he pulled his hand back.

“There are crackers in the other pocket for Clodaugh,” Danni said.

“Your dog’s going to go piranha on me if I reach back one more time.”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared of a harmless little thing like Bean?”

Okay, he wouldn’t tell her. Nervously, Rory rummaged for the crackers and then reached over the snarling dog’s head to hand them to his niece. She dimpled with delight and scolded the dog. “No no!”

Grinning, Rory sat back in his seat just in time for his first glimpse of home. Shocked, he stared for a long, silent moment.

It came in sight all at once, like a masterpiece painting suddenly unveiled. There was the sea, harsh and unrelenting in the background, the violent green of never-ending fields and hillside. Trees, seeped and soaked with the oils of the earth, trunks brown, black, and yellow, leaves spanning the spectrum from emerald to army. Yews and alders, oak and pine. The colors and scents assaulted him, welcomed him.

At the far edge of a cliff that scarred the horizon, a castle now stood where once only ruins had lain in decay. The collapsed spires and tumbled bastions had been the playground of his youth. Before he’d turned his attention to the demons inside him, he’d slain many a dragon in the ruins of the stone keep.

Danni had mentioned that she and her husband, Sean, had renovated the castle on the cliffs of Ballyfionúir, but she hadn’t prepared him for this. Where there’d been only crumbling stones to hint at a fortress that was surely grand in its day, now a towering structure stood whole and breathtaking, as austere and formidable as his imagination had always pictured it. Restored in a way Rory never would be, never could be.

This was no Cinderella’s castle; this was a stronghold, built to defend people against their enemies. Built to protect all the secrets behind its walls.

Danni steered the car over the cobblestoned drive and parked. Rory took a deep breath before he opened his door and stepped out. Once there’d been a house perched in the shadows of the ruins like a boil on the face of perfection. It had always looked like the afterthought it was, built where it didn’t belong, destroying the mysticism that lurked in the air here. Now the house was gone, bulldozed and cleared away. Not even a foundation lingered to hint that it had ever stood in that awkward place. He’d lived in that house when he was a boy. His family had moved somewhere new, apparently. He hadn’t even known.

Before he could assimilate this information, a strangely small door at the side of the castle opened and a man stepped out. Rory swallowed hard as he recognized his stepfather, Niall Ballagh.

“And didn’t our Danni tell us you were coming?” he boomed, striding up to Rory and pulling him into a smothering bear hug. Niall smelled of ocean and the salty tang of fish and fresh air. During the years Rory’d been gone, Niall’s dark hair had silvered and the squint lines at his eyes had deepened to grooves in a face turned copper by years on the deck of a fishing boat. But the bright eyes hadn’t changed nor had the welcoming smile. It brought an unexpected lump of emotion to Rory’s throat. Somewhere in his plans, he’d thought to remain aloof during this visit. He realized now that—as usual—he’d been a fool.