Ashes on the Waves (29 page)

“It’s just Ronan being a bitch,” she said, pushing to her feet.

“No. It’s more than that. The Selkie couldn’t tell me who sent her or why, but she said her objective was to help us stay together. Why would an Otherworlder be compelled to protect us?”

She paced the room again. “Wow. I feel like I’ve ODed on eggnog again.”

“I know it’s hard to grasp, but it makes sense.”

Throwing her arms over her head, she made a frustrated groan. “None of this makes sense. I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.”

“Here’s what I know.” I stepped in front of her and pulled her to me. “The
only
thing I know is that I love you and want to spend every moment with you if you’ll allow it.”

“That’s why I’m here. We’re getting out of here together with Deirdre and Megan as soon as the big chopper is available to fly us away from this awful place. We’re going to be together away from demons and funeral pyres and creepy blue guys and screaming invisible women and starving children and all the other twisted, screwed-up things on this island. Just you and me.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “I love you, Liam MacGregor, and all of the creepies in the world can’t change that.”

A scratching sound from behind me sent a tremor of terror down my spine. “Shhh. Listen,” I said. “Did you hear that?”

Anna held her breath.

There it was again: a light tapping sounded from the other side of the secret panel.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, backing away toward the door.

I crossed to the panel and put my ear against it. “Hello?” I said.

“Liam?” was the response from the other side.

I shoved the dresser I had placed in front of the panel aside and pulled the picture from the peg next to it. I pushed up on the peg and the panel clicked. I ran my fingers in the opening and released the second catch. “Anna, I’d like you to meet the Selkie I told you about.” I swung the panel open to find Muireann drenching wet and shivering in my T-shirt.

“Hi, Liam’s female!” Muireann entered the room without invitation. Anna took a step back. “I’m glad you returned.”

Anna stood still, jaw open.

“How did you know about the passage, Muireann?” I asked.

“I went in the cave Brigid Ronan uses to talk to the Na Fir Ghorm. I used my human ears to hear you. Oooh. This is so pretty. It’s like a sunrise, a sunset, and a rainbow all in one place.” She ran her fingers over the stained glass.

“She’s in your shirt,” Anna muttered, still stunned.

“Yes. Liam gets all nervous when I only wear my human skin. He covers me up,” Muireann said, wandering the room. “He made me wear this last time, so I wore it again.”

I needed to get her to focus. “Muireann, why are you here?”

“Oh, well. I came to warn you and give you a trick.”

Anna slumped down onto the bed, eyes still trained on Muireann.

“Warn us against what?” I asked.

“Well, I can’t really say because I’m not allowed, but you need to be really careful.” She picked up a vase from the table at the end of the chaise lounge and held it to the colored light coming through the stained-glass window. “You are only in danger for a few weeks more, so we have devised a trick to undo it.”

I took a step closer to her. “Undo what?”

She clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Okay, what trick, then?” I asked.

Almost too quickly, she trotted over to Anna, who stiffened. “Do you love him? I mean really love him like I do?”

Anna shot startled looks from me to Muireann. “I love him
more
than you do.”

“Great. And I know he loves you because he refused to mate with me.”

Anna jumped to her feet. “He . . . what?”

“So, here’s what you need to do. You need to become bonded for a moon cycle and a day so that they will leave you alone so they don’t hurt or kill you and you can be together.”

I took her by the shoulder. “Who?”

She covered her mouth with her hands. “Oops.”

I turned her shoulder loose. “What do you mean by bonded?”

“I really like lamps.” She skipped to the nightstand and switched the lamp on and off and on and off. “I got to play with one when I spent the night here.”

Her attention was so scattered it was hard to keep up. “Muireann, please focus. What do you mean by bonded?”

She moved away from the lamp and the lampran her fingers over the bedcover. “Well, it’s like your ancestors’ handfasting ceremony but better because it works soul deep and into the Otherworld too. You can choose the amount of time you wish to be bonded from a moon cycle to eternity. We’re not really supposed to share it with humans, but this is a special case and I got it okayed from higher up.”

“Who is higher up?”

“Well, the Bean Sidhes said it was okay.” She covered her mouth. “Oops.”

“You can talk to Bean Sidhes?” Anna said.

Hands still over her mouth, Muireann nodded. She pulled her hands from her mouth and studied them, wiggling her fingers, smiling. “I need to go now before I make more mistakes. If you want to do this, meet us on the beach outside the tunnel just after sunset. Bye!”

After she slipped out the panel and pushed it shut, I slid the dresser back in place.

“This is worse than eggnog-induced delirium.” Anna shook her head. “Wow, that was weird.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes. This was not simply Muireann being whimsical. Something wanted to hurt or kill us to keep us apart and she was trying to help us.

Anna chuckled. I opened my eyes to find her still staring at the hidden panel. “You refused to ‘mate’ with her?”

I nodded.

She laughed. “Even when you thought I was home screwing around with Nicky?”

Her laughter unnerved me slightly. “There is no one else for me. Only you.”

“She’s very pretty. Striking, really. If she weren’t some freaky paranormal creature, she could be a model.”

“That’s irrelevant. I love you.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“The bonding thing she talked about.” She ran her hands down my back and up again, causing my breath to catch.

“Anna, it’s serious. It’s mar
riage, only into the next world as well.”

She dropped her hands. “So, you don’t really love me
that
much?”

“My God. It’s . . . Yes. Yes, I do. It’s you I’m thinking of.”

She plopped down on the bed. “I sat through my brother’s wedding, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to be with you. How superficial everything seemed compared to my feelings for you.” She stared right into my eyes. “Let’s do it.”

I couldn’t believe she would even consider this. “There’s no backing out once it’s done until the specified time is up.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you anticipate remorse?”

“Yes. You could have anyone.”

“But I want you.” She stood and moved directly in front of me—so close that if she had leaned forward, we would have touched. “Do you think you’re going to want to back out?”

“No.”

“Then you think for you, and I’ll think for me.” She ran her hands under my shirt and up the skin of my back. “Right now, I don’t want to think at all. I just want you to kiss me.”

If you will have faith in me,
I
can and will
satisfy your wildest desires.

—Edgar Allan Poe,
from a letter to Helen Whitman, 1848

M
uireann waited at the water’s edge, never taking her eyes off the cave entrance. She kept still and low, only the top of her head, eyes, and nose above water. She didn’t want to be seen by the Na Fir Ghorm or even her pod mates, for that matter.

In the faint light from the setting sun, she could see Liam’s shirt draped over the rock where she had left it. An involuntary shudder rolled through her. She dreaded shedding her pelt and being cold again. She never felt cold in her seal form, but the water made her human form numb and achy.

Maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe she had said something wrong when she spoke with them. The human world was confusing. They spoke in riddles and hid themselves. Her stomach turned over. Maybe his female didn’t love him enough to commit her soul to his.

Finally, movement came from within the cave. They had decided to go through with it after all.

Muireann’s heart stopped when Brigid Ronan emerged from the opening.

* * *

I locked Anna’s door after returning with two more candles from her uncle’s room. Miss Ronan hadn’t interrupted us, which was surprising since the sun had set and I was forbidden to be in the house after dark.

“We’re in a hurry, Anna,” I said. “We let time get away. It’s already past sundown, which is when we were supposed to meet Muireann.”

Anna appeared in the doorway of her bathroom, and I was spellbound. She wore the silver dress from Bealtaine and her hair was piled up on her head, exposing her lovely neck. “Muireann will wait.” She smiled. “I have something for you. I got it from my uncle’s closet while you showered.”

She reached into her closet and produced a black suit jacket. “There’s also a shirt, pants, and a tie.” After pitching the jacket onto her bed, she produced the other items and laid them out beside it. “We should dress up, don’t you think?”

We would only be bound for a month and a day, but I still wasn’t certain Anna understood the seriousness of it. “You’re sure about this.”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” She unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off, replacing it with the white, stiff shirt from her bed. Deftly, she buttoned it all the way down in the time it would have taken me to manage one button. “I’ll leave you to the rest,” she said, disappearing back into her bathroom.

I pulled on the pants and jacket. The pants were a bit loose, but they stayed up. The tie was another issue entirely. I’d seen plenty of them in the newspapers and tabloids, but I’d never laid eyes on one myself. After draping it around my neck, I tapped on the door frame of her open bathroom door. She put the top on her lipstick and smiled at me in the mirror. “You look so handsome. Like James Bond.”

I wondered if we lived to be old, would she always have this effect on me? Would I forever be held breathless when she smiled? Yes. Undoubtedly I would, I decided, as she tied the necktieÀd the ne while standing so close I could feel the heat radiating from her skin warm my own. Part of me felt unworthy of her, yet I also knew that no one would ever love and treasure her the way I did. Perhaps that part of me outweighed my deficits adequately enough to make me deserving. I would certainly endeavor to spend the rest of my days proving not only to myself, but to her, that I was worthy of her.

We found the trapdoor leading to the lower level of hidden passageways easily, and Anna descended first. “How do we know which way to go to find the way out to the sea?” she asked. “There are three directions we could take from here.”

I watched my candle flutter, the flame leaning toward me and slightly to the left. Any breeze or air movement had to come from the tunnel leading to the outside. “It’s this way,” I said, taking the tunnel ahead of me to the right.

“Man. I get all turned around down here. I’m glad you know where you’re going.”

“James Bond always knows where he’s going.”

As we proceeded, the salty smell increased, confirming I was correct. The tunnel curved slightly to the left and took a sharp left turn around a large boulder. Before we made it all the way around the boulder, a golden cloud appeared in front of us. It materialized into a beautiful, shimmering woman.

“Oh, crap,” Anna said. “Not this again.”

The figure held a finger to her lips, then blew out our candles. As quickly as she had appeared, she was gone, leaving us in total darkness.

Anna stomped her foot in the dirt. “What the h—”

I put my candle in my teeth and covered her mouth. She immediately fell silent. I peeked around the boulder. From farther down the tunnel the round beam of a flashlight swung to and fro. Someone was coming our way. I crammed the candle in my pocket and pulled Anna back in the direction from which we had come. After wedging into a crag in the wall that I had noticed behind the boulder, I pulled her in tight against me.

There was no sound other than our breathing and no light for what seemed like forever. Just as I decided the person had gone back the other way, the light arced across the stone on the other side of the tunnel. The person was close, probably just on the other side of the boulder. I felt Anna take a big breath and hold it. I did the same.

With a slight crunching underfoot, the person passed us, light trained on the ground. The shape was unmistakable.

Anna let her breath out soundlessly once Miss Ronan had passed around the curve out of view. I nudged Anna, and she stepped from the crag. I pulled her with me around the large boulder and leaned against it until my heart stopped pounding. I removed the candle and the lighter from my pocket and lit it. “We only need one,” I whispered.

Almost running, we proceeded through the tunnel until a light appeared ahead of us. Moonlight. I blew out my candle and enjoyed the cool wind on my face. My relief ended abruptly when we stepped outside.

“Oh, my God,” Anna said, staring at the whirling golden clouds over our heads.

“You should tone it down a bit so the Na Fir Ghorm d-don’t see you,” Muireann said from our right. She wore my shirt and was shivering.

“Tone what down?” I asked.

“Oh, hi, Liam, and Liam’s female.” She gave us an awkward, closed-fingered wave. “I wasn’t t-talking to you. I was talking to thÀtalking e B-Bean Sidhes.”

The clouds reduced in size to small puffs the size of my outstretched hand.

“I was afraid you weren’t c-c-coming. Then I
was
afraid you w-were coming. Brigid Ronan was wandering around out here and it c-could have been bad.” Her body shuddered. “How do you stand b-b-being c-cold all the time?”

“We’re not cold. You’re cold because you’re wearing a wet shirt,” I said.

“Oh.” She ripped the shirt off over her head. “Now I’m not.”

I cast my eyes down and Anna gasped.

“I’m still c-c-c-cold. You were wr-r-r-ong.”

I slipped off the jacket and passed it to Anna.

“Here, put this on,” Anna said quietly. When I looked up, she had buttoned the jacket, which hung halfway down Muireann’s thighs, and was rolling up the sleeves for the trembling Selkie.

“When I sh-sh-shed my pelt the first time, I g-g-got really cold and Francine had Liam lie s-skin to skin with me. It worked very well.”

Anna finished the second sleeve and smiled over her shoulder at me. “I bet it did.”

The cliff rose straight up from the beach in a sheer wall of stone. The tunnel was clearly man-made, judging from the perfectly round opening, as opposed to some others in various places around the island that had been carved over time by the tide. The small beach was cut off from the rest of the shoreline by dense vegetation butting up to the enormous boulders on either end of it. The only way to reach it would be by boat or through the tunnel.

“I feel much better now.” Muireann reached out and touched Anna’s dress. “Pretty,” she said.

The Bean Sidhes began making noise that sounded more like a chant than a scream, though it was still uncomfortable.

“Okay,” Muireann said. “I’ve never seen a human handfasting ceremony or an Otherworld bonding, so they are going to tell me what to do.”

“You can understand them?” Anna asked, sliding her candle into the pocket of the coat Muireann wore.

“Yes. They speak an ancient language known only to the Otherworld.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of the jacket and stared up at the chanting puffs of gold. “They want to be sure you understand what you are about to do.”

“Only in general principle,” I said. “Handfasting vows are terminable and sometimes used on a trial basis among my people. How does this differ?”

Anna slipped her hand into mine.

The chanting increased in volume, as if they were speaking in unison. Muireann nodded.

“Well, it’s pretty much the same, except it’s deeper. Instead of it just being a promise made with words, it’s a comingling of your spirits. See, even if you split up in human terms, your souls are mixed together, so the bond will carry over into the Otherworld.” She paused and listened again. “They want me to give you a way to understand it that will make sense.”

The chanting continued and Muireann appeared agitated. “Okay, I’ll tell them, but we need to get this done before we are discovered.” She gestured to the golden forms swirling overhead. “They say your soul is like water. Formless. It conforms to whatever shape it is in. So imagine you have two cups and a pitcher. The cups are full of water. YouÀof water pour them both into the pitcher and then pour from the pitcher back into the cups. The water from each cup, once unique, has been mixed. It is impossible to sort it back out again. That is what will happen with your souls. You will be part of each other until the end of the term.”

She stared up at the Bean Sidhes. “Okay, okay. They also want you to know that since you are
anam cara,
you have already experienced what it will feel like to some degree.” She stomped her foot. “Enough already. They get it.” She stared from me to Anna. “So are you good with this? A bonding of the minimum month and a day will be sufficient.”

Anna squeezed my hand and smiled when our eyes met. The fact that she would even consider such a proposition nearly drove me to my knees. “I’m in,” she said.

Unable to form words, I simply nodded.

Muireann grinned. “Great.” She tipped her face up to the golden wisps. “Now what?” She covered her mouth. “Oops. I forgot.” She turned in a circle, searching the beach for something. “I was supposed to tell you to bring a cord. Something to bind your hands with.” She huffed. “I guess the pretty window and the lamp distracted me.”

Anna slipped the tie off from around my neck. “How about this?”

Muireann grinned and clapped. “Oooh. Perfect!” She snatched it from Anna and held it up in the air. “Now what?” She nodded. “Okay. Now this is the part where you face each other and clasp right hand to right hand and left to left, crossed over . . . yes. Just like that.” She skipped around us like an excited child. The Bean Sidhes chanted louder and took the forms of women. Muireann put her fingers in her ears. “Oh, this is great. I can’t do this in my seal form,” she yelled. “Here’s the good part. We are going to keep it really simple and short.” She put the ends of the tie together and put it folded in half over our hands. “Now, you humans do this differently. You do a lot of stuff for show. All I need is for you to tell me why you are here. You first, Liam.”

I stared at the bloodred tie draped over our clasped hands. “I am here to be bonded to Annabel Leighton.”

Muireann drew one end of the tie through the loop hanging across the other side and stared at Anna. “And?”

“I’m here to be bonded to Liam MacGregor.” Anna too was staring at our hands.

Muireann pulled the other end of the tie through the loop and pulled down on both ends, tightening it. “Why?”

I had expected to repeat phrases and answer yes-and-no questions like in the handfasting ceremonies I’d attended in the village. The why of this was far too complex to put into words.

“Liam. This is the part where you state why you want to bonded to her body and soul. It’s a requirement,” Muireann said, stomping her foot. “You can’t just stand there.”

Anna’s smiling flawless face in the moonlight gave me words. “I want to be bonded to her because I love her. I’ve always loved her and I always will. And the very fact that she would stand here and agree to be bonded to me makes me the happiest person on earth.”

Anna lowered her eyes to our hands while Muireann tied a knot in the ends of the tie under the loop, then ran the ends up and over the loop again. Muireann grinned and bounced up and down, then looked expectantly at Anna.

When she raised her eyes, my heart stopped. She took a shuddering breath, never taking her eyes frÀg her eyom mine, addressing me directly. “I want this because when we’re apart, I can’t breathe. You’re like oxygen. You love me for who I am and you let me be who I am, which no one has ever done before. I can’t imagine life without you. I don’t want a life without you. And I will do everything in my power to never be without you again.”