Reunion (23 page)

Logan shrugged. "You're itching to get back, Pete, for no reason I can imagine. But I like it here. You go. Save Darragh from whatever terrible fate has befallen him in our reality as the coddled only child of a major movie star. " He smiled and turned to Ren. "Have you considered that your brother might not want to come back with you?"

"Trust me, he wants out," Ren said, with such utter certainty that Pete knew there was something else going on.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

Ren hesitated, glanced around, and then stood up. He unlaced the ties at his waist and pushed his trousers down a short way. His abdomen was wrapped in a crude bandage and there was a little blood seeping through, which was very strange because Ren had the power to heal himself with a thought. Pete grimaced as Ren pulled the ragged end out and slowly unwound the bloody bandage. Once it was off, he moved his hand so they could see the wound.

Pete and Logan both gasped. Carved into his flesh in painstaking letters in were the words,
get me out
.

"Please, can I just call my dad?" Hayley wasn't feeling well. She wasn't physically ill, but there was a knot forming in her stomach; a sense of something terribly wrong and being stuck here in the Gardaí station was only making it worse.

It felt like she'd been here for hours. They'd loaned her some clothes that didn't fit very well and offered her a greasy breakfast from McDonalds, but they wouldn't let her call anyone and they'd fingerprinted her like a common criminal.

It was mid-morning now, and nothing much had changed. She was still stuck here. Nobody would call her father. And nobody believed her when she claimed she didn't know where she'd been, only that she'd woken up on the golf course and was able to see. It was a stupid story. Hayley could hear how ridiculous it sounded every time she repeated it. And she could tell they knew she was lying.

What they couldn't understand was why.

The woman on the other side of the desk looked up from her computer. She was a brusque woman in her fifties, Hayley guessed, and pretty high up the chain of command in the Gardaí because she had her own office. The name on the door said Superintendent Brendá Duggan.

Hayley didn't know why someone so important was taking her statement, or even why she needed to make one. She just wanted to phone her dad so he could take her home.

"We still have some details to sort out yet," Duggan said. "There are a few ... inconsistencies in your statement."

"Like what?"

Duggan glared at her over the rim of her glasses. "Let's start with the fact you're claiming to be Hayley Boyle."

Oh God, we're back to that again.
"It's the truth."

They'd been denying who she was all morning.

You can't be Hayley Boyle.

She's blind.

She's a grown woman.

Hayley felt as if she'd been sent back to the wrong world, but there was nobody she could explain that to, because if she tried, she'd never get out of here. "Please, I just want to go home."

"All in good time," the superintendent said. "We'll get your fingerprints back soon enough. Then we'll know who you really are, where
home
actually is and we can be rid of this Hayley Boyle nonsense. Whatever your name, I'm guessing you'll be in the system. What brought this on? A foster home you didn't like? Or did you think this way you'll get to meet a movie star?" The superintendent smiled and adopted a much more sympathetic tone. "I can help you if you're in trouble, lass, but not if you keep lying to me."

Hayley wanted to scream with frustration. "I'm not lying to anyone!"

It didn't seem to matter how many times she said it. Surely her photo was around here somewhere? After all, she'd been missing for days. She pulled up the sleeves of her borrowed shirt and crossed her arms belligerently. "I am Hayley Boyle."

"Really?" Brendá Duggan leaned back in her chair. "If that's true, where have you been all this time, Hayley Boyle?"

Hayley opened her mouth and then clammed it shut, unable to bring herself to say "In
Tír Na nÓg
with the Faeries".
I'll sound like a lunatic if I say that.

Duggan smiled at her obvious reluctance to answer. "There ... you see, that's my problem. Right there. That bit where you open your mouth to speak and nothing comes out."

Hayley shook her head. "I'd like to tell you where I've been, I truly would, but you wouldn't believe me."

"Try me," the superintendent said. "I've been doing this job a long time, my girl. I've pretty much heard it all."

A knock on the door saved Hayley from having to prove her wrong on that point. "Come."

"A moment, ma'am?" the clean-cut young man at the door asked. He was another one of her detectives, she supposed. Or some sort of clerk. He wasn't wearing a uniform so it was hard to say. He was holding a manila folder, but he didn't offer it to his boss.

Brendá let out a sigh and pushed herself up. She walked to the door and pulled it closed until there was a sliver left open for her to keep an eye on her guest. Hayley glanced around the office wondering where the Gardaí got the money for expensive flat-screen computers. Kiva had been talking of buying one for Ren before the accident, but even she had balked at the cost. Every desk in this place had one, and everybody she'd seen using them also seemed to have one of those neat little cell phones.

Hayley watched the superintendent and the detective talk. Eventually, the young man showed the superintendent the file and spoke to her in a low but urgent voice. Duggan turned and glanced at Hayley thoughtfully for a few seconds and then ordered the detective to do something Hayley couldn't quite catch. Then she opened the door and came back into the room.

"So ... we have your prints back," the superintendent said, as she resumed her seat, placing the manila folder unopened on the desk. She studied Hayley for a long time before she took a deep breath and said, "According to your fingerprints, you are Hayley Boyle."

Relief flooded through Hayley, although why they hadn't just taken her word for it hours ago and let her call her father, she couldn't figure out. "So can I
please
go home now?"

"I have someone calling your dad as we speak, sweetie. Can I get you anything?"

Hayley shook her head. With confirmation of her identity, funny how she'd gone from
What are you playing at, you horrible delinquent?
to
Can I get you anything, sweetie?
"I just want to go home."

"I'm sure you do," Duggan said, "but we need to get you checked over first."

"Checked over? Why?"

"You've been missing quite a while, Hayley. It's routine procedure when someone is kidnapped to give them a thorough medical and given the miraculous return of your eyesight, it's doubly important. I've arranged to have your parents meet us at the hospital."

"Fine," Hayley said, jumping to her feet, glad this would soon be over and she could get back to her real life - the life she had before Ren met Trása, before she was wiped out by Murray Symes's car. Before she lost her sight.

Before she spent a week in
Tír Na nÓg
with the Faeries. "Let's go, then."

Brendá Duggan didn't get up immediately. She was watching Hayley like she was some sort of alien creature just unearthed from under a rock in the back garden. It was quite unnerving.

"Do you know the date, Hayley?"

The question was alarmingly similar to the ludicrous suggestion the retired cop and his brother-in-law were making on the golf course about her disappearing ten years ago. She'd not seen anything with the date on it, since she got to the Balbriggan Gardaí Station on Drogheda Road, to confirm or dispel that alarming notion.

"I don't know. I'm not even sure what day it is. It's September something, isn't it? I've kind of lost track of the exact date."

"It's February, actually."

"No way," Hayley said, shaking her head. "I was gone a week, tops."

"Is that what you
really
think?

"Of course it's what I really think."

Was that their problem? She'd been gone for months? That would explain a few things about the odd looks and their attitude. She couldn't image how it could be. She could have sworn she'd been in
Tír Na nÓg
little more than a week. "Are we going to the hospital, or what?"

Brendá nodded and rose to her feet. "Sure we are. Ever ridden in a squad car?"

"No."

"Well, perhaps, if we ask nicely," she said, coming around the desk to open the door for Hayley, "I can get the driver to turn the siren on for you."

"I'm not a child."

"No, you're most definitely not," Brendá agreed. "Shall we?"

Hayley followed the superintendent out into the hall, past several glass-walled offices where the occupants stopped and stared at her as she passed, leaning across to say something to their workmates, undoubtedly about her.

They're wondering what happened to me
, she realized.
They think Ren abducted me and that I've been raped or something. God, they're not going to give me an internal examination, are they, to see if they can prove that?

Hayley had seen enough police TV shows to figure it must be a fairly routine test on all kidnap victims.

But I wasn't kidnapped. I went willingly. And nobody hurt me.

Quite the opposite.
I had a ball and they gave me my sight back.

Her protests remained silent ones, however. She followed Brendá and kept her gaze fixed on the back of the superintendent's tweed jacket, certain she knew what the owners of all those curious eyes were thinking, resigned to the fact that she could say nothing to correct them.

It didn't matter, anyway. She'd be home soon and then she could put this craziness behind her.

Twelve years ago, a good two years before Delphine stepped through the rift into this reality with Logan and Pete, bound and unconscious - intending to dispose of them now that one of them had fathered a child - the
Matrarchaí
doyen had signed a lease on a building in London, one not even built yet. Designed by Italian architect Rienzo Piano, when completed it would be the European Union's tallest building. Piano's vision was for a new concept for the twenty-first century: a "vertical city" in the heart of a great metropolis, and even before the foundations were dug, people were calling it the Shard.

The elongated glass pyramid, built over a train station in a less than salubrious neighbourhood near the Thames on London Bridge Street, would tower over London. Construction had been scheduled to start in 2009 and with 87 floors, it was funded by the insanely wealthy royal family of Qatar, making it almost immune from whatever economic turmoil might befall the world in the time it took to complete. Delphine was well pleased with her arrangements. The
Matrarchaí
planned to use it as their European headquarters.

Although they had had an office in New York, in the now-destroyed World Trade Centre, and a backup stone circle located at the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago, as well as another circle in Asia's tallest building in Taipei, they had hankered for one closer to Delphine's base in Dublin. The Shard was ideal and Delphine had secured the very top floors while the building was still nothing but blueprints and a grand idea, even prevailing upon the architect to mark the floors she was leasing as "plant rooms". There were 44 lifts in the Shard; nobody would question why, out of the 87 floors of the building, only 72 were habitable.

Ren knew this because he'd taken Delphine's memories from her as she died. He also knew the reason she'd gone to such trouble and expense: the Shard's upper floors pierced the Enchanted Sphere, that thin layer of magic which accumulated at around 280 metres above sea level on depleted worlds, like a wisp of fog rising off a damp moor. The Shard would comfortably pierce the layer, making it possible to open rifts in this depleted realm. The
Matrarchaí
could use this reality without any magic to speak of as their headquarters, while they planned their assault on the magical realms still populated by Faerie.

There will be no stumbling about on golf courses in the dark and getting shot at on this trip
, Ren thought determinedly. They had originally had no choice but to arrive at the same stone circle in Dublin, but now that they knew of the Enchanted Sphere and had Delphine's memories of how to access it, they could use the Shard. There was no need to rely on someone to open a rift for them from the other side. That was assuming, of course, they could leave the same way they arrived. If they couldn't get back to London to leave through the Shard, they would have to use one of the countless stone circles that dotted the other reality. That required someone to open it from the other side.

Ren was hoping that wouldn't be necessary. All they had to do was collect Darragh and Sorcha, make their way to back to London (which is where the
Leipreachán
came into the planning) and return home through the stone circle built into the Shard. Chances were good they wouldn't have to confront the
Matrarchaí
, because the building wasn't due to be opened to the public for another year and the magical stones that would enable the portal between realities to be opened were built into the walls and the floor.

Ren hadn't given Pete and Logan much time to think about this trip. On the surface the Doherty twins appeared to have adjusted quite well to their new circumstances, but Ren suspected that given half a chance Pete certainly, and possibly Logan, despite his stating otherwise, would be very tempted to try to regain their old lives.

That wasn't possible, Ren knew from experience, but he wasn't sure Pete had quite come to grips with it yet.

It didn't surprise him Logan had elected to stay behind and open the rift for them. He'd adapted a lot quicker than his twin brother.

Ren wasn't sure he even needed Logan - assuming the Shard performed as expected, Ren should be able to open a rift himself with Marcroy's jewel provided the stone circle was intact and pierced the Enchanted Sphere. He couldn't be sure, however, that he could get back to the Shard once he'd located Darragh ... or that when he took the jewel out of the Enchanted Sphere, the magic wouldn't leach from it, making it impossible to get home. Even searching Delphine's memories hadn't helped there. In some things, she was extremely knowledgeable. In others, it seemed she either didn't know, or the knowledge was buried behind a trigger Ren couldn't find and therefore out of his reach.