Reunion (39 page)

"I'm almost afraid to."

Logan spoke up before Pete had a chance. "Ren and Darragh can make injuries appear on each other using
airgead sídhe.
"

That made Annad smile faintly. "Faerie silver. Really?"

"Its equivalent in this reality is titanium," Pete told him, not smiling at all.

Annad's amusement faded. "Titanium?"

"Don't know why," Pete said with a shrug, "but it seems to have similar properties."

Annad paused, took a deep breath and then swallowed the remainder of his whiskey in a gulp. "A few days ago," he said, "Darragh prevailed upon me to send him a Remington Titanium 700 electric razor."

"And the next thing you know he's carving messages into his belly."

Annad nodded. "It makes sense, now. If Darragh believes the only way to contact his twin is with titanium ... I mean, he could have carved the same message into his skin with any number of sharp implements before now if it was merely the injury he thought initiated the contact."

"It's not just that he believes titanium will connect him with his brother, Annad," Pete tried to explain. "It's true. We saw the message written on Ren."

Annad was suddenly very still. "You've seen Ren Kavanaugh recently?"

"We've both seen 'get me out' carved backward across his belly," Logan told him.

"How long has he been in contact with his brother?"

"He hasn't. We weren't here, Annad. We were in a pub in a town that doesn't even exist in this reality."

"This reality?" Annad asked, his composure rattled for the first time since Pete had known him. "You too, Pete? Christ, is this alternate reality delusion contagious?"

"It's not a delusion."

"Of course not," Annad said, a little impatiently. "There are alternate realities and magic, and Faeries that keep popping in and out of this world, just to frustrate me."

"I wish there was a way to prove what we're telling you is true," Pete said, not unsympathetic to Annad's frustration.

"Show me," Annad said. "Open a door to one of these other realities. Do some real magic. Show me a real Faerie."

Pete opened his mouth to offer an another hollow reassurance which he knew would sound fake, even to him, when out of nowhere, Echo, Trása's annoying pet pixie popped into existence buzzing about in front of his face. She zipped frantically about the room in a panic, screeching, "Trása's in trouble! Trása's in trouble! Trása's in trouble!"

Annad leapt out of his chair. "What the hell?"

Now
that's
what I call timing
, Pete thought as he ducked to avoid Echo smacking into his head.

Logan was on his feet, trying to catch the pixie. He finally caught her in his cupped hands and shushed her gently, while Annad stared at them like they were mad.

Pete smiled. Whatever reason Echo had for being in this realm - and it was likely to be trouble if what she was chanting was even remotely true - she could not have found a better time to appear out of thin air.

Logan, Echo carefully trapped between is palms, walked to over to where Annad was standing, his eyes as wide as saucers. "It's a pixie. Want to say hello?"

"This is some sort of joke ..."

"You wanted proof, Annad," Pete said. The look on Annad's face was something to behold. "Show him, Logan."

His brother opened his hands a fraction and peered inside. "Are you going to be good?"

"I'll be good. I'll be good. I'll be good," Echo responded in her tiny, high-pitched voice.

Ever so gently, Logan removed his right hand and opened his fingers to reveal the little pixie standing on his palm. She smiled up at Pete when she saw him and then spied Annad and immediately took off and began buzzing around the room again in a frenzy, squealing, "Humans! Look out! Humans! Look out! Humans! Look out!"

Logan shrugged and looked at Pete apologetically. "I tried." He turned to the pixie. "Echo! Cut it out! Come here and stop that flapping about!"

"Is that really ...?" Annad mumbled, as - wide-eyed and bewildered - he watched Logan trying to bring Echo to heel. "It is actually ...?" Despite the fact there was a pixie whizzing around his living room, Annad apparently couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence.

Pete nodded. "In the flesh. Annoying little critters they are, as a rule. You don't have any left that are indigenous to this reality."

"Then where did ...?" Annad took a deep breath. "It didn't come from here, did it? It came from ... somewhere else."

"Take a deep breath and say the words," Pete suggested. "It gets easier after a while."

Annad shook his head. "I doubt that. What is it ... she ... doing here?"

"That's a very good question," Logan said, still trying to calm Echo down enough to make sense. She had stopped buzzing around the room and was clinging to the top of the curtain pelmet, glaring at Annad like he was a gargoyle. "I'm sure Echo is going to tell us why she's here. Aren't you, little one? Come on ... there's nothing to be afraid of." Logan glanced over his shoulder and smiled at Annad. "They're very friendly, normally."

"Kill the bad human! Kill the bad human! Kill the bad human!"

"Obviously," Annad remarked, still staring at the pixie like he was hallucinating.

"He's not a bad human," Logan coaxed, "He's one of the good ones. Now come down here and talk to me. What's the matter with Trása?"

"Nika killed her! Brought her back. Nika killed her! Brought her back. Nika killed her! Brought her back," Echo chanted from the pelmet, but she seemed to be a tad less frenetic than when she had arrived.

"Is Nika here in this realm?" Pete asked in shock. It wouldn't surprise him to learn Trása had found a way into this reality. She'd spent a lot of time here in the past. But Nika ... what the hell was
she
doing here?

Logan must have read his mind. He looked over his shoulder at Pete, his brow furrowed with concern. "She must have gotten away from Marcroy and come here."

"Nika's here, too."

His brother grinned at the very idea. "Oh, that's going to be fine holiday fun for all."

"What's he talking about?" Annad asked. They were having a conversation he couldn't follow and he was still trying to get his head around the whole idea of pixies. "Who is Nika?"

"The pixie has come here with some friends of ours," Pete explained. He looked up at Echo. "Are they okay?"

"Nika's fine. Nika's fine. Trása's turning inside out. Nika's fine. Nika's fine. Trása's turning inside out. Nika's fine. Nika's fine. Trása's turning inside out."

Pete looked to Logan for a translation but he just shrugged. He had no idea what she was babbling about either.

"We should tell them to come here," Logan suggested.

Pete turned to Annad. "Would that be okay?"

Annad shrugged, shaking his head in complete bafflement. "Why not? Fairies, pixies, strange women ... I'm sure Stella will understand."

Stella, Pete realized, must be Annad's wife. He didn't want to think about what they were going to say to her when she got home.

"Echo, I need you to take a message to Trása and Nika," Pete said, stepping between the window and Annad so she couldn't fixate on him quite so obsessively.

"She won't remember a message," Logan warned.

He was right. Pixies had abysmal memories. "Can she carry a note?"

Logan nodded. "A very small one."

"It only needs to be an address and a phone number." He looked back at Annad. "Do you have a pen and a bit of paper I could use?"

"What," Annad said, "no magic?"

"Please."

He pointed to the sideboard where the bottle of whiskey stood. "In the drawer."

Pete hurried across the room and opened the drawer to find a clutter of odds and ends, including a number of pens and the remains of a pack of post-it notes. He scrawled the address of Annad's house on the note, asked him for his phone number and wrote that down, too, then folded the note and handed it to Logan, who seemed to be having some success with handling Echo and her mercurial moods.

Logan held the folded note toward the pixie. "If you take this to Trása, I'll give you a treat."

"Treat? Treat?" Echo asked, suddenly attentive. "What kind of treat? What kind of treat?"

"Take this note to Trása and Nika, first. No treats until I know they've got the note."

Almost before he'd finished speaking, Echo dived toward his hand, snatched the folded post-it note from his outstretched fingers and vanished.

Logan turned to Annad. "Do you have any Christmas decorations left?"

"Why?" Annad asked. "Are we expecting Santa Claus next?"

"Echo likes tinsel. It'll keep her happy when she gets back."

"By all means, we must keep the pixie happy."

"Annad! What's going on?"

They turned to find a woman in her early forties standing in the doorway. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a warm, puffy, down jacket over a set of dark blue scrubs.

This, Pete guessed, was Stella Semaj.

"Stella!"

"It's almost three in the morning. Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"Ah ..." Annad said, behaving exactly like a man caught doing something he shouldn't have been doing. "This is Pete ... and his brother, Logan. They're ... they're old friends of mine from university."

"Hello," she said as she eyed them curiously. "Identical twins, aren't you? I don't remember Annad being friends with identical twins."

"That's because he didn't want us meeting you, Stella," Logan said, as smooth as he ever was when dazzling a woman with his charm. "He knew we'd fight you for him."

She smiled, not immune to Logan's winning smile, but not falling for it, either. "That's sweet of you, but neither of you look old enough to have been at university with Annad."

"We were freshmen," Pete explained, not realizing until now that their
Tuatha Dé Danann
heritage meant they'd not aged since they'd left this realm. "Was it a boy or a girl?"

"Excuse me?"

"You're an obstetrician, aren't you? Annad said you were called out to an emergency. I was just wondering how it went. Was it a boy or a girl?"

"Girls," Stella said. "Plural. It was twins."

"I didn't know you had any patients with twins due," Annad said, obviously glad for the change of subject that had, for the moment, taken the focus off him.

"Wasn't my patient," Stella said. "Will you boys be leaving soon?" she added, looking pointedly at the clock on the wall.

"Annad kindly offered us a bed for the night," Pete said, before she could ever so politely kick them out. He'd just given Nika this address. They couldn't leave now.

"Well, that was nice of him, wasn't it?" she said, throwing her husband a look that spoke of a brewing "discussion' to come when they didn't have guests. "Then he can make up the kid's bedrooms for you. You know where the sheets are, don't you, dear?"

"We'll be no trouble, Doctor Semaj," Logan promised.

"Actually, I'm Doctor Delaney," she said. "I kept my maiden name after we married." She glared at Annad and said, "I think I'm beginning to realize why." With that, Stella turned on her heel and left.

They waited until they heard her footsteps on the stairs and the door closing upstairs before they dared utter another word.

"Sorry if we got you into trouble," Pete said.

Annad shrugged. "She's not really mad. She just doesn't like surprises."

"That could be awkward," Logan said.

"Why?" Pete asked."

"If she doesn't like surprises, what's she going to do when a half-
beansídhe
, a Merlin and a pixie turn up for breakfast?"

Ciarán stood in the center of the exercise yard of Portlaoise Prison, looking up at the windows overlooking the yard, trying to figure which one was the room currently occupied by Darragh. It was raining gently and most of the prisoners were standing in small groups, hunkered down inside their jackets. It was cold, but a chance to be outside, even in this soulless place, was not to be scoffed at because of a bit of water falling out of the sky.

He'd not seen Darragh since the Warden sent for him several days ago, and subsequently ordered him to the prison nurse for a checkup and discovered the words "get me out" scrawled across his belly in bloody, four-inch-tall letters.

Since then, Darragh had been confined to the psych ward for self-harming and Ciarán hadn't been allowed to speak to him.

Ciarán was desperately worried about what they might be doing to him up there. They had doctors who could mess with a man's mind in this realm. They fed you drugs that made a man doubt himself; counseled men into believing their own reality was wrong and the reality the prison authorities preferred was the right one.

Ciarán couldn't protect Darragh in there.

He'd done his best to protect him since coming to this realm, but Ciarán wasn't sure if he'd done all he could. Since he'd decided - as they led him from the courtroom after condemning him to life in prison a decade ago - that rather than return to his own reality, he should stay to protect Darragh, things had not really gone to plan. He remembered optimistically believing Rónán would arrive any day to rescue his brother. It was a given, he'd believed back then. All he had to do was wait for the inevitable return of Darragh's brother, who would use his knowledge of this realm to free Darragh, and they would all go home.

I need his knowledge of this world,
Ciarán remembered thinking with a naivety he now considered breathtaking.

What a stupid, optimistic and utterly useless plan that turned out to be,
Ciarán thought as he stared up at the razor wire encircling the grey, oppressive walls of Portlaoise.

Rónán and Darragh may be strong enough to survive the transfer,
Marcroy had warned him, before sending him to this realm to find Darragh and his brother.
If that happens you must bring them home. Protect them both. As you are sworn to do.

Marcroy had proved to be right about that - Darragh had survived the transfer - but what good had it done any of them? Rónán had not been seen in a decade. The coward had probably hunkered down somewhere, safe and sound, and left his brother to rot.