The Undivided (42 page)

‘I have no idea,’ Sorcha told him in a low voice, white spots dancing in front of her own eyes. ‘I’ve never seen a rift close like that before.’

‘Do you suppose they got through safely?’

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to arrange another time for Ciarán to open the rift, perhaps even another place. Do you think you can make the connection to our realm without the residual magic of Rónán’s tattoo to aid you?’

Darragh smiled briefly. ‘Using the puddle-phone?’

‘That’s a stupid name for it,’ she said, annoyed he had adopted Rónán’s infantile term for the magical link between realms.

‘Accurate, though.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Darragh said, settling back against the trunk of the tree. ‘And we’re not going to find out tonight, I suspect.’ He rubbed his upper arms against the chill and moved his leg so it was stretched out along the branch. Even in the dark Sorcha could see how swollen his ankle was. Darragh was bedraggled, in pain, and in danger but he seemed in good spirits. ‘How long do you think the cops will be down there poking about?’

‘All night, I would imagine,’ Sorcha said, glancing down at the milling Gardaí. ‘Do you think you can stay up here that long?’

Darragh smiled. ‘Ciarán taught me to hunt, Sorcha.’

She nodded in approval. If Ciarán had taught Darragh, he had been well instructed on how to remain in a blind, quiet and still, for days if necessary.

‘Then we wait,’ she said, squirming around to get as comfortable as she could on her perch. There really wasn’t anything else they could do.

Pushed through a crackling curtain of light so bright even Hayley could sense it, she landed hard on her hands and knees, surprised to find the ground bone dry. Grunting with the pain of the impact, she turned in confusion, calling out to Ren, not sure what was happening. Until the explosion of light that blew her to the ground, Trása was yelling, Ren was urging her to go through … whatever it was she was supposed to go through, and there had been gunshots. Several of them.

Hayley had a bad feeling they were shooting at her. Or at least shooting at Ren — who had been right beside her — which was, essentially, the same thing.

Angry rather than frightened, the abrupt silence worried Hayley almost as much as the vanished rain. She pushed herself up, wincing at her skinned knees, wondering where she was. She was still in the open — the cool gentle breeze on her face warned her of that much — but there were no sirens, no shouting, no voices other than someone softly groaning in pain nearby.

‘Ren? Ren, where are you?’ She turned in a circle, her arms outstretched, but there was nothing within reach. ‘Where am
I
?’

‘
Trása?
’

She turned in the direction of the voice. It was a male voice, and it wasn’t the one who was groaning. Nor was it Ren. Or his
brother whom she’d met briefly before they shoved her in the car with that maniac, Trása, because Darragh had sounded exactly like Ren. ‘My name is Hayley Boyle,’ she said. ‘I’m not Trása. Why would you think I was Trása?’

The man who spoke was silent for a time, and then he brushed past her and said something she didn’t understand, although if she had to guess, it sounded something like the Gaelige she learned at school.

‘What?’ she said.

‘You only speak English?’

‘Obviously.’

‘I said come here. We have to help Marcroy.’

Hayley turned, following the voice. ‘Marcroy? Who the hell is Marcroy? What happened to Ren? And Trása? And his brother? And the cops? And the rain, come to think of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘Please come over here.’

‘Come where?’ she asked. ‘I can’t see you. I’m blind.’

‘Oh.’ A moment later, she felt a cool hand on her forehead and a sharp spear of pain behind her eyes. Hayley jerked back from the sting, blinking furiously.

‘There. Now come and help me. Please. Something is seriously wrong with Marcroy. He seems to be dying and I’m not sure if I have the power to heal one of the
Tuatha Dé Danann
.’

Hayley opened her eyes. Before her lay a moonlit vista of gently rolling hills dotted with hedgerows under a clear, starry sky. She was standing on a rise inside a stone circle that looked as if it had been constructed a few days ago, not thousands of years in the past. There was no sign of Ren, his brother, the cops, or anybody else … nor the city of Dublin.

But more importantly, Hayley could
see
. ‘What the
hell
…?’

‘Please, I need your help.’

Still trying to come to grips with the sudden return of her sight, Hayley turned to find a young man dressed in a brown
robe kneeling over another young man wearing a cloak so fine it looked spun from spider webs. He was the one moaning. His skin was deathly pale, his chest covered in blood.

‘Oh my God!’ she said, hurrying over to them. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

‘I’ve tried to stem the blood flow,’ said the young man who had so casually cured her blindness. ‘But I think his heart is wounded. Although I’m not even sure if
sídhe
have hearts, and that’s certainly a valid question in Marcroy’s case. But still, he shouldn’t be like this. He should be able to heal himself. I don’t understand why …’

‘He’s been shot, that’s why … what’s your name?’

‘Brógán.’

‘Then, Brógán, you need a phone,’ she told the distraught young man. ‘This boy needs paramedics and an ambulance and major surgery, right now. Do you have a phone? I’ll call them if you want, but you need to stop that bleeding. Put some pressure on it.’ Even with nothing more than her rudimentary Girl Guide first-aid training, she could see this was beyond the scope of anything she could do. And probably beyond the scope of anything this young man could do, either.

He looked up at her in confusion. ‘What do you mean “shot”?’

‘I mean
shot
,’ she said, looking at him oddly. ‘You know … bang, bang, you’re dead.’ When Brógán continued to stare at her blankly, she formed her hand into a gun with her thumb and forefinger and repeated the words.

‘Oh, you mean he has a bullet in him?’

‘Well …
duh
… ’

Brógán slapped his forehead as if he’d just had an epiphany. ‘Of course! The bullet comes from the other realm. It’ll be sucking the magic out of him! That’s why he’s dying.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘
That’s
the reason.’

‘We need to get it out!’

‘Hence the aforementioned paramedics, ambulance and major surgery,’ Hayley said, squatting down beside him. ‘Are you sure you don’t have a phone?’ She was beginning to wonder if she’d fallen back into her coma. This bizarre scene had all the hallmarks of an insane dream world brought about by a blow to the head.

‘How deep would it be?’ Brógán asked, tearing open the wounded young man’s shirt to expose the bloody hole in his chest. He was so pale it seemed all his blood had been drained from his body already. Hayley had no idea who he was but his pointed features were inhumanly pretty, even when contorted in pain. He had impossibly long, straight blond hair and oddly pointed ears. He reminded her, inexplicably, of Trása, and looked to be not much older.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The bullet?’ Brógán asked, gingerly feeling around the edges of the bullet wound. ‘How deeply would it have penetrated, do you think?’

‘I don’t know … Oh God … oh no!’ Hayley exclaimed, jumping to her feet and taking a step back. ‘You’re not seriously going to …’

But he did. Without so much as stopping to think about it, Brógán plunged the fingers of his right hand into the hole in Marcroy’s chest and began fishing around for the bullet. Hayley backed away from them, gasping in horror, fearing she was going to vomit, as the wounded youth’s back arched with the pain. Brógán — bloody to the wrist — felt about for the lead pellet that had torn Marcroy’s chest asunder.

‘Stop it! You’re killing him!’ she cried, hoping this really
was
a nightmare. It had to be. On the face of it, there was no other reasonable conclusion.

‘Not as fast as this bullet is killing him,’ Brógán replied, closing his eyes to concentrate on feeling for it. ‘I’ll not be the
one made to answer to Queen Orlagh when she asks how her envoy died.’

Hayley cast about for a weapon. Maybe there was a branch or a rock nearby she could use to disable this madman before he killed this poor dying boy and then probably her, straight afterward. Before she could find a weapon, however, Brógán let out a yelp of triumph and pulled his fingers out of Marcroy’s chest, clutching the bloody bullet that had almost killed him — and likely would kill him yet, given the brutal way Brógán had removed it.

‘You’re insane!’ she cried, backing away from him even further.

The young man who’d been shot cried out in agony, and then, inexplicably, almost as soon as Brógán’s fingers cleared his chest, the bleeding seemed to stop of its own accord. Hayley watched in astonishment as the jagged bullet hole began to shrink.

Within moments, it was completely gone.

‘No freaking way.’

Marcroy blinked a few times, as if trying to remember where he was. He stared at Hayley. ‘
Trása?
’

‘Why does everybody keep asking me that?’ she said. ‘My name is Hayley.’

The young man pushed himself up on his elbows and glanced around before looking at Brógán with a concerned expression. ‘Where are they?’

He asked the question in the language that sounded like Gaelige, but this time, she understood it. Perhaps she really was in a coma. She’d heard of people who went into a coma speaking one language and came out speaking another. It was the only explanation that made sense. Unlike Ren, who had been known to speak a language like a native after only a couple of weeks of hearing it spoken consistently, Hayley struggled with them. But she understood every word of what Marcroy was saying, as though it was her native tongue.

Brógán was shaking his head, looking very worried. ‘I don’t know,
tiarna
,’ he said in his own language. ‘There was a great deal of confusion. This girl came through the rift first. Rónán and Trása were stepping through when you were wounded by one of the weapons from the other realm.’ He opened his palm to show Marcroy the bloody bullet he’d just pulled from his chest. Marcroy reached for it but snatched his hand back when Brógán added, ‘Be careful. It’s of the magicless realm.’

‘Did the Undivided make it back?’

Brógán shrugged uncertainly. ‘When you collapsed, the rift imploded. I don’t know what happened to them. Or your niece.’

The young man was silent for a moment, pondering the news. Hayley had a million questions, but couldn’t figure out which one to ask first.

‘You are Rónán’s friend?’ Marcroy asked her, climbing to his feet as if nothing was wrong with him. Were it not for his bloodied shirt, and the fact that Hayley had witnessed his injury for herself, she would never have believed that this young man with the strangely pointed ears had lain dying on the ground only minutes ago. ‘You are the one he and Darragh returned to the other realm to find?’

Hayley nodded, a little apprehensively, trying to process what her eyes were telling her. Nowhere could she find an explanation for his disconcerting eyes or his small, sharply pointed teeth.

‘Where is Ren?’ She asked it in English and then realised she knew the words in his language, so she repeated them. ‘
Cá bhfuil
Ren?’

‘That’s an interesting question,’ Marcroy said, cocking his head to one side. ‘You are the daughter of one Patrick Boyle, are you not?’

Hayley wasn’t expecting that. ‘You
know
my father?’ she asked, replying in the same language, a part of her fascinated by the fact that she could.

‘I know of him,’ Marcroy said with a shrug. He studied her curiously for a moment and then smiled. ‘Trása’s
eileféin.
How fascinating. You certainly bear a resemblance to her, although one has to be looking for it. Perhaps it’s the hair.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ Hayley said, feeling uncomfortable with the way he was staring at her. ‘What happened to Ren and his brother?’

‘They’re still alive,’ Brógán assured her.

‘How can you be sure about that?’

‘I healed you,’ he told her. ‘If the Undivided were dead, the magic would stop flowing to the Druids and you would still be blind and unable to comprehend us.’

Although she understood his words, for Hayley, not a single thing about that sentence made sense. She glanced at Brógán, trying to get her head around everything she’d witnessed in the past few moments. ‘How did you do that, by the way? Some of the best specialists in Europe said my brain damage was likely to be permanent. You slapped me on the forehead like some crazy TV evangelist and I was cured.’

Marcroy smiled at her, stepping a little closer. ‘You have no idea where you are, do you?’

‘Stuck in a bizarre hallucination brought on by falling back into a coma, I suspect.’ Even as she said it, Hayley knew if this was a coma, she probably wouldn’t be dreaming she was in it. This place was real. Improbable, but real.

‘You have crossed into another realm,’ Marcroy explained. ‘Realities, you might call them. Here you are in the realm of the
Tuatha Dé Danann
.’

Hayley smiled at that, certain she must be delusional. ‘The land of the Faerie?’

‘You don’t believe it?’ he asked. ‘How curious. Look about you, Hayley Boyle. The world you know has vanished in an instant, replaced by this world, where nothing is as it was. You stand here after stepping through a veil in the very fabric of
the universe itself, having witnessed several miracles in as many minutes and yet you deny the evidence of your own eyes? Eyes that can now see as a result of one of those miracles.’ He stepped so close to her she could see his alien eyes with their vertical, cat-like irises. ‘Tell me, Trása’s
eileféin.
Do I look human to you?’

Hayley shook her head mutely.

‘Do you see anything of your world here?’

Again, Hayley shook her head, mesmerised by his hypnotic gaze.

‘Do you believe in magic?’

‘No … maybe …’

Marcroy smiled, and took Hayley’s hands in his. His touch was electric.

‘Then you have a treat in store, my sweet. Let me take you to
Tír Na nÓg.
I will show you magic, the likes of which you cannot imagine. And given you are Trása’s
eileféin
, who knows? Perhaps you have the same ability to wield it.’

‘My lord?’ Brógán said nervously.

Marcroy glanced over his shoulder at the young man. ‘You dare question me?’

‘No … I mean … it’s just … well … I agreed to help you because you said that if we aided the Undivided in bringing Trása’s
eileféin
back, then the treaty would be destroyed.’

‘And I was right.’

‘You said you could help stop a catastrophe.’ He sounded very upset.

‘And I have stopped it,’ Marcroy said, smiling at Hayley. ‘Trása’s
eileféin
is only Trása’s
eileféin
if Trása is here with her. She has not returned, so we have no conflict.’

‘But you gave me your word!’ Brógán cried. ‘I betrayed the Druids for you! I betrayed Ciarán! You said you would preserve the treaty.’

‘And have I not done exactly that? The Treaty of
Tír Na nÓg
remains intact. The Undivided live on and the Druids still have their power. How have I not kept my word?’

Brógán looked on the verge of tears. ‘But they’re missing! The rift collapsed. We have to find them. We have to get the Undivided back!’

‘Well why don’t you speak to Ciarán about that?’ Marcroy suggested, raising Hayley’s hand to his lips. Her fears, her doubts, even her inhibitions fell away at the touch of his magical lips on her fingers. She found herself utterly enchanted by the
Tuatha
lord; so enchanted the unsettling conversation he was having with Brógán faded to a minor irritation.