The Shadows (8 page)

“I don’t doubt you.”

“Finn does.”

“Well. Aye.” Oscar chuckled. “Can you blame him? When it comes to you and the lasses—you’ve the softest heart of all of us. But I guess that’s what comes of being fostered by Aengus Og.”

“I won’t give Finn another reason to doubt my loyalty.”

Oscar sobered. “It’s been a long time since Grainne, Derry.”

“He’ll never forget it.”

“He regretted it. Letting you die. He won’t risk losing you a second time.”

“I wish I had your faith. But I promise you: if something comes between us this time, it won’t be some lass.”

Oscar nodded. “Speaking of which, how about the two of us go out and find one or two? The others won’t miss us for a while.”

Diarmid smiled. “You never learn.”

“Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t long for a soft breast to lie your head upon. It’s been what . . . two thousand years, give or take?”

“There are ten saloons at least on this block alone,” Diarmid pointed out. “Take your pick. I’m sure you’ll find a lass or two among them.”

“I haven’t time for wooing. ’Twould be easier if you were along to flash that lovespot.”

Diarmid’s hand went to the spot on his forehead, the
ball seirce
a fairy had bestowed upon him because he’d been the only one of them to recognize her magic. It felt as it always did—a raised scar like a burn. He kept his hair long, falling in his eyes, to cover it. He’d enjoyed it at first—any lass who saw it fell in love with him, and he’d liked having anyone he wanted. And then he began to feel . . . empty. Now it was more a curse than a gift. He’d stopped being able to tell—was it really he those girls had loved, or was it just the spell? Even with Grainne—especially with Grainne. He swept his thick, dark hair forward again to cover the spot.

“Excess, if you ask me,” Oscar grumbled, as he had a hundred times before. “You’re handsome enough already.”

“The
ball seirce
wouldn’t help you anyway. It’s me they’d want, and I don’t want to have to fight you over jealousy.”

“Ah, but what kind of a friend would you be if you didn’t throw one my way?”

“I don’t even know if it works in this world.”

“Why not try it out? What can it hurt?” Oscar asked.

“We’ve trouble enough without courting more.”

Oscar sighed. “Aye. I suppose you’re right. But any bed would be a sight better than that pile of straw.”

“Ask Conan to borrow his sheepskin.”

“By the gods, I swear I’ll throw that thing from the window before the week is done. If it gets much hotter, the smell of it will make us all sick.”

Diarmid laughed.

“That’s better,” Oscar said. “All right then, no lasses. But how about we go on down to the Bowery and see the sights? I’ve a wish to be out and about tonight instead of locked up in that flat with a bunch of sweaty soldiers.”

The Bowery was a street of theaters and pleasure houses, saloons and dance halls and shops, lined with gaslights of colored glass globes unlike anything Diarmid had ever seen. Gang boys roaming and drinking, girls sashaying, pickpockets and thieves and very rich men with top hats and polished boots and everyone having a good time. Tonight it sounded fun, something to lift his mood, to ease the dread that had settled in his chest and didn’t seem to want to let go.

He smiled and rose. “To the Bowery it is.”

FOUR

Patrick

T
he streetlamps cast a soothing yellow glow through the haze of dust as Patrick Devlin walked up Broadway. The chaos and congestion that usually clogged the street during the day had given way to one or two wagons making night deliveries, carriages heading to the opera or the theater or a supper party, men going to their clubs. There were couples walking and tired newsboys and vendors making their way home, but no tramps and vagrants—not in this part of town. Here the rich were still rich. Here there were no empty shop windows and warehouses given over to auction marts selling off the goods of those who had gone bankrupt. When he was in this part of town, Patrick believed all things must still be possible.

He reached for the bag looped over his shoulder, patting it as he had many times since he’d left the house, reassuring himself that the stone was still there. Tonight would be
different from the last time. Tonight they would not fail. He knew it.

He’d chosen to walk instead of call for the carriage because he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going, not so late. Lucy and his mother were used to his comings and goings. As long as he kept the world right for them, they hardly cared what he did. The thought irritated him. They had never embraced the cause that he and his father lived for. For them, Ireland was far away, a place to come from but never to return to. And perhaps once he’d felt the same way. Before he’d spent three years there and seen such poverty and despair. Though he supposed even that would make no difference to Lucy, who was as self-absorbed as she’d been when he’d left.

Not like Grace.

The way she’d said
yes
when he’d asked her if she wanted to know him. That breathy and yearning sigh. He had dreamed about that voice, about her face, for three years. It was his father’s wish that one day the Devlin and Knox businesses would be combined, but Patrick had never cared about that. She’d always been around, throughout his childhood, a little sister for him and Aidan to tease. But then, one day, only months before he’d left for Ireland, she had come to the house to see Lucy, and he had been . . . struck. Grace had been just fourteen, thoughtful and clever and romantic. He’d realized then that he wanted her in his world.

But she was too young, and Ireland was waiting. He’d assumed he would forget her. There were too many other things to think about: keeping the business afloat after his
father’s death, reassuring their suppliers, tending to his mother and sister. But he’d been unable to stop thinking of Grace. Even when things had settled and he’d got involved in the Irish side of the Fenian Brotherhood and it had taken over everything, thoughts of her haunted him. He saw her in a dark-haired girl on a Dublin street, in a pile of dusty books, in a pretty ribbon dangling from a vendor’s cart. When his mother had written to him of her father’s death, he’d wanted to return home, but it was impossible. And then he’d heard of the Knoxes’ troubles, and Grace’s likely early debut, and he had rushed home as soon as he could. The rebellion he’d helped organize had failed, and he was depressed and angry. He’d wanted someone to care.

Yes,
she’d said.

Now, finally, it looked as if he might have everything he’d ever dreamed of.

The brick clubhouse of the Fenian Brotherhood loomed before him. Patrick clutched the bag more tightly and climbed the stairs. Before he reached the door, it was opened by Rory Nolan, a solid and craggy-faced man with graying temples.

“Patrick,” he said, ushering him inside, closing the door behind them. “The others are already here.”

Patrick’s pulse raced as he followed Rory past the second-floor offices and club room decorated in greens and golds, to the meeting room on the top floor. There was a table in the center of the room, but all the chairs had been cleared away. A lamp stood on the table. A long, slender piece of wood, carved with what looked like runes, rested on a cloth of green velvet.
The men around the table were haloed in the lamplight, the rest of the room shrouded in darkness. All of them were older than Patrick. Only Jonathan Olwen was close in age. They had been in Ireland together, and had returned together too. Now, as Patrick approached the table, Jonathan shoved a nervous hand through his thinning brown hair. His smile of welcome was strained. Jonathan had argued against what they were doing tonight, but in the end he’d reluctantly agreed.

Gray-haired Simon MacRonan came forward. His blue eyes glittered as he reached out a hand.

Patrick offered the bag to Simon, who opened it eagerly, taking out the flat piece of stone called an ogham stick because it was etched with the ancient Druid writing, ogham. Simon looked reverently down at the stone, and then he made a noise like a yelp and dropped it to the table.

“What is it?” Patrick asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It burned,” said Simon. Then he smiled. “And that’s good, lad. That means it’s real.”

“It didn’t burn me.”

“There’s no Druid blood in your family, as we’ve learned already, much to our dismay.”

Patrick flushed. He tried not to think of that night three weeks ago, the certainty he’d felt as he’d dripped Lucy’s blood from the little vial onto the horn. It had cost her a pinprick—nothing more, and he’d done it while she’d slept. The blood of the
veleda
, he’d hoped, as they all had. It was his heritage—his father had often said that the Devlins were descended from the Druids at Allen, the seat of the Fianna. And when
the horn had come to Patrick and they’d discovered it was the
dord fiann
of the prophecy, Patrick had known the spell already—it had been in a story passed down through his family. The
dord fiann
, the blood of the
veleda
, the incantation, and then the blowing of the horn three times. They’d done it all in this very room.

But something had gone wrong. The Fianna had not appeared.

“Your sister’s no veleda,”
Simon had snapped.
“Has your family
any
Druid blood?”

A lifetime of believing, of knowing he was special, gone in a moment. Patrick couldn’t help hating Simon for it, though he also needed him. They all needed him. Only Simon could read ogham, and he was descended from Druid priests and had the Sight too—another thing that should have been in Patrick’s family and wasn’t. Just looking at Lucy should’ve told Patrick she wasn’t the
veleda.
She was too vain and silly. He wondered why those stories had been in his family at all.

Simon hovered over the ogham stick, pushing at it quickly with his fingers, as if it were burning hot, moving it into place beside the rowan wand.

“Are you sure we want to do this?” Jonathan asked quietly. “It’s not too late to stop.”

Patrick glanced up, frowning.

Rory Nolan said, “The rebellion failed. There’s no money coming in. We need something to convince people a new rebellion will succeed.”

“Perhaps we should wait a little longer,” Jonathan insisted. “
It’s only been a few days. Perhaps the Fianna will still come.”

“It’s been three weeks,” Patrick said. “How long should we wait? People are dying over there. Families starving. You saw it too. Will you be the one to explain to them that we were waiting for a spell we already knew didn’t work?”

Jonathan looked wary. “But the Fomori . . . surely there’s someone else—”

“Who else? These things fell into our hands for a reason. We need an army that won’t fail. We were meant to use them.”

“And we can’t delay further,” said Rory. “It could take years to stumble upon another spell.”

“The Fomori enslaved the Irish once before,” Jonathan noted. “Our ancestors went to war
against
them. Then we had the old gods on our side. That’s who we need: the Tuatha de Dannan.”

“If you can find a spell to summon them, by all means do so,” Rory said. “Thus far there doesn’t appear to be such a thing. But there
is
a spell to summon the Fomori.”

“The world has changed, Jon,” Patrick said as reassuringly as he could. “Do you really think we can’t control the Fomori now? We’re civilized men—”

“We’ve weapons, money, and politicians in our pocket,” added Rory. “We’ll make them do as we bid instead of the other way around.”

“And there’s no other way. We need them,” said Patrick.

He believed it too. His disappointment over the Fianna failure tormented him. Then Simon had found the rowan wand, half of the Fomori spell—they only needed the ogham
stick—and Patrick had remembered the relic his father had brought from Ireland ten years before, which was in a display case in his study. That it had been
the
ogham stick they needed seemed a sign. The Fomori, the Children of the goddess Domnu, who had fought the old gods, the Tuatha de Dannan, and their allies, the Fianna, for the rule of Ireland—battles that had been fought over and over again throughout history. The stories said that the Fomori were the gods of chaos, but history was written by the victors. It was in the interest of the Fianna and the old gods to depict the Fomori as evil. Enemies were always so.
Thus are legends made,
thought Patrick.

Simon glanced up. “Well? Shall we continue?”

There was a murmur of ayes, Patrick’s among them. Jonathan hesitated, but then nodded.

Simon bent over the items again. He began murmuring, and then his voice grew louder, words in Gaelic that Patrick translated in his head: “Darkness and thunder, blood and fire. The eye of one who slays. As one is bid, so come the rest. The rowan wand and virtue gone. A blood price paid. Now come the Children of Domnu.”

Simon said them once, and then again. The third time, he picked up the rowan wand, grasping it high above his head, and strode counterclockwise around the table.

Patrick watched, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, the magic in the room growing and pulsing. The wand brightened as if the lamp shone on it, and then he realized that no, it wasn’t the lamplight at all—the wand was
glowing
. Glowing ever brighter, brighter and brighter until its light pierced the
room, and he had to close his eyes and look away because it was like staring at the sun. Simon’s voice rose into a high and keening wail, a near scream, as he said in Gaelic, “And now the Erne shall rise in rude torrents, hills shall be rent. The sea shall roll in red waves. Now come the Children of Domnu!”