Haunting Desire (11 page)

“Yer alive,” he said softly.

Her lashes were spiky and blood splattered her face and body. A child lay sprawled across her with arms tight around her neck. He recognized the little girl who’d been born on this islet. Her name was Ellie. She had a thumb stuck between her lips and she sucked furiously, eyes clenched tight.

Shealy sat up unsteadily and Tiarnan reached out to help her, but she flinched away, and her reaction stung him more than he wanted to admit. She hadn’t flinched from him last night. He started to pull back, but then she threw her arm around his neck, curling herself into the hard planes of his body, and he found himself embracing both woman and child as a feeling of unbelievable wholeness washed over him.

Clearly, he’d lost his mind.

She was soft and pliant beneath his touch, and gently he soothed her, running his fingers through her hair, rubbing small circles against her back, remembering the way she’d arched into him last night. The way she’d welcomed him into her body, making him feel alive for the first time in what seemed a hundred years. He felt the damp heat of tears on his bare chest and he wished he wasn’t covered in blood. He didn’t want any part of the vile
ellén trechend
touching her. Yet the creatures had come for her. He knew it with a certainty that shook him. He’d seen how they fixed their black eyes on her and followed her across the islet.

Why?
Why?

Had the monsters come to kill her or take her away? Were they sent or had they merely been stalking human prey? Yesterday Jamie said they’d been seen watching, spying. Tiarnan hadn’t thought it possible that a creature so ghastly could possess enough intelligence for that, but this morning he’d seen it with his own eyes.

“T,” Jamie said, standing behind him.

Tiarnan looked back to see the dark-skinned man bathed in the gold of sunrise and the blackened blood of their enemy. He was as torn and battered as Tiarnan, half dressed as if he, too, had been ripped from slumber by the beasts. But his eyes blazed with battle lust that had yet to dim. Behind him stood Zac—a big man who wore the look of a Northman—and Reyes, who had the dark eyes of the Spaniards, both wounded but alive. Liam leaned against a boulder not far behind. Tiarnan took a deep breath as relief washed over him at the sight of his brother. Then he scanned the devastation of their settlement for signs of life. Not a single dwelling remained erect. Nothing and no one moved in the soft breeze that seemed to mock the violence it rustled.

“Are there others?” Tiarnan asked, his throat hoarse from shouting, his voice raw.

Jamie shook his head. “Not even bodies to bury. Whatever it sprayed, it just ate them away. Nothing’s left. We’ll go downriver and see if anybody made it over Endless Falls, but I doubt it. There’s no surviving that.”

“What the fuck were those things?” Reyes said, horror and fear in his tone.

“
Ellén trechend
,” Tiarnan replied softly. “They are creatures of the Gods.”

“Creatures of hell, maybe,” Jamie muttered.

“Fuck me,” Zac said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think we were going to win this one.” His legs gave a suspicious wobble, and he sat suddenly, putting his head between his knees. “I couldn’t get a shot at any of them. It was like they were wearing armor.”

Jamie nodded in agreement. “I had a few clean blows, but my blade just bounced.”

“How’d you get through it?” Reyes demanded, staring at Tiarnan. They all stared at Tiarnan.

He glanced down at Shealy, still confused about what had happened. He hadn’t been able to pierce those ironlike feathers either. His sword had chinks in it from the effort. But Shealy, child in her arms, had stood in front of them as they bore down on her. She’d held out that useless arrow, as if that could stop a creature of that size and weight. But then he’d felt a shift—like a wave washing over him. Only there was no water, no dampness, and not a whisper of breeze. Still the air had shimmered, like sheer silk flapping between him and Shealy and the
ellén trechend
. When it was done, he’d sensed a change, sensed the creatures hesitate as if they, too, had felt it. He’d swung his sword and the creatures had bled.

“They wanted her,” Jamie said, nodding at Shealy, who’d gone very still in Tiarnan’s arms. “Why?”

Shealy pulled back a little and looked at Jamie with those big drenched eyes. But her head was up and her back straight. She shifted the child she held, putting a protective hand over the girl’s white blonde hair and dipping her chin so that her own hair fell forward in that practiced gesture he’d seen last night. The silky puckers of her scars were barely noticeable, but she didn’t like others to see them. That much was clear.

She caught him staring and lifted her chin higher, her eyes shuttered. She hadn’t moved and yet he felt the chill of her withdrawal, just as he had last night when she’d turned away from him. Tiarnan had let it happen then, but now he tightened his arms, keeping her in place, refusing to let her move away.

“Who is she?” Zac asked.

“My name is Shealy O’Leary.”

“I know who you are,” Reyes said. “I’ve seen you on TV.”

She nodded, but Tiarnan was confused. He didn’t know what
TV
was, but he didn’t like that Reyes had seen her there. Disconcerted by the power of his possessive feelings, he said nothing.

Zac and Jamie looked as if they’d suddenly solved a perplexing puzzle. “That’s why you looked familiar last night,” Jamie muttered. “Just when you think it can’t get any fucking weirder.” All three men wore an expression of awe and a bit of
knowing
that was far too personal
.
They all spoke in the same manner, shared a cadence in their language that struck him as similar. They could easily be from the same time and place. They might even have met one another there. For all Tiarnan knew,
TV
was a way of saying neighbors, friends . . . lovers.

Irritated at the anger that stirred, he glanced at Shealy again. Her expression had smoothed and not a flicker of emotion showed on it. She might have been cast from stone the way she stared back without actually focusing on any one of them. Tiarnan sensed self-preservation in her every breath.

He didn’t like being on the ground with the others towering over him. Without a word he stood, pulling Shealy and the child up with him and keeping her close to his side when she tried to move away.

In her arms, the child sniffled, and Shealy asked, “Do you know who this little girl is?”

“Ellie,” Tiarnan said.

“Who is her mother?”

The men looked from one to another, none of them wanting to say it. What did it matter who her mother had been when now she was almost certainly dead?

Tiarnan cleared his throat. “Maggie. Her mother was Maggie.”

“Maggie who?”

Tiarnan glanced around the circle again, looking for a sign that one of them knew. They shook their heads.

Jamie said, “Last names don’t get used too much around here. I don’t think anyone ever knew hers.”

Shealy frowned, but went on with her questions. “When was Ellie born?”

“Not long after we came,” Zac said, blue eyes framed with sorrow. “Maggie was pregnant when she got here. I had some field training in the service and that made me the closest thing to a doctor around. I helped deliver Ellie.”

“Why do y’ ask, Shealy?” Tiarnan said softly.

“My mother’s name was Margret O’Leary. Everyone called her Maggie.”

The silence that followed that statement was thick and uncomfortable. None of them knew quite what to say to that. It seemed irrelevant, her mother’s name, given the devastation they’d only just survived that morning. But something in Shealy’s stillness, in the intent way she looked at the child in her arms, made Tiarnan pause. Eyes narrowed, he glanced between Ellie and Shealy, suddenly noticing similarities in their features that he’d missed before.

Then Ellie looked up from Shealy’s arms and pinned him with storm-cloud eyes.

“Maggie,” he began, still too uncertain to voice the bigger question. “Y’ knew her?”

Shealy’s face was tight, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. When she released it to speak, Tiarnan noted that it trembled.

“My mom was killed—we
thought
she was killed—in a car accident seven years ago. She was pregnant when it happened.” She looked back at Ellie, took a breath. “I saw Maggie right before the m-monster . . .” A painful pause, another deep breath. “Before the monster killed her. Maggie was my mother. I’m almost certain.”

By Tiarnan’s estimation, Ellie was not yet three years old, but time on Inis Brandubh didn’t pass in the same way it did in the real world. Seven years out there might be a minute on Inis Brandubh. Seven years here might be eternity on the other side. There was no rhyme or reason to how it flowed and no way to measure it.

“This car accident you thought killed her?” Jamie asked, his usually gruff tone gentle. “It happened on the Isle of Fennore?”

“Yes. Our car went off the cliffs and into the sea. My father was able to escape and save me, but my mom was never found.”

The men exchanged another weighted glance. As Tiarnan had told Shealy last night, all of the people who lived on this tiny islet could trace their coming to Inis Brandubh directly back to the Isle of Fennore. They’d each been there when the white light had blinded them, then sucked them in and spewed them out here.

Jamie looked at Tiarnan. “You found Shealy yesterday?”

Tiarnan nodded.

“Where?”

Before Tiarnan could answer, Shealy said, “In a parking lot outside of a restaurant in Arizona.”

The shocked silence echoed like a great clap of thunder. Tiarnan counted one, two, three . . . and then everyone started talking at once. Tiarnan didn’t know what a
parking lot
or
restaurant
or
Arizona
was, but he understood that the words were synonymous with Shealy’s world, a world the other men had once shared.

“Wait a minute. Wait a goddamned minute,” Jamie said, quieting the rumble. “Let me make sure I’m getting this straight. You”—he pointed at Tiarnan—“saw her”—the finger moved to Shealy—“
outside
of Inis Brandubh?”

Tiarnan glanced at Shealy, at her pale face and clouded eyes, and once more that unwelcome urge to protect her gripped him. He’d trusted these men with his life many times over and yet he didn’t want to share with them anything about Shealy O’Leary. And that bothered him, greatly. In a short amount of time, Shealy had managed to alter his perception of his own world in more ways than he could believe.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I was pulled through. Into her world.”

Once again, the voices erupted, demanding, exclaiming, disbelieving.

Tiarnan held up his hand. “As was Cathán.”

“Cathán?” Jamie shouted. “
Cathán
? How? And why the fuck would you come back if you were out?”

“I cannot tell y’ how it happened. It was done in an instant. As for coming back, it was not my choice, but even if it was, I would not have left my brother and I would not have walked away from any of y’ either.”

Jamie laughed. “You really mean that, don’t you, T?”

Frowning, Tiarnan nodded. Of course he meant it.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jamie said, “I want out of here as bad as anyone, but if you get the chance again, you take it. All of you. This isn’t the kind of place where you can afford to be a hero.”

The truth of that settled heavily around them, and yet Tiarnan knew that Jamie would not have left any of them behind either, if there was a chance of them all getting out. In his arms, Shealy shifted, and he moved his hand to help support the weight of the child. Ellie was a wee thing, but then so was Shealy.

“So how did you get pulled through?” Zac asked.

“Shealy’s father. He opened a doorway and released both me and Cathán from Inis Brandubh. I do not know how and I do not know why.”

When they would have peppered Shealy with questions next, Tiarnan held up his hand again. “Shealy does not know either. She’d never heard of this place before she came.”

“Well, where is her dad?” Jamie demanded.

“I do not know if Cathán pulled him into Inis Brandubh or if Shealy’s father let Cathán loose in the real world. I only know that the door opened and I went through. When it closed again, both Shealy and I were back on this side and her father was gone.”

Jamie shook his head. “But she said her mother . . . She said Maggie was her mother.”

Tiarnan nodded, looking at the child whose resemblance to Shealy seemed more pronounced by the moment. “Perhaps it was why her father opened the door. To find her and the child.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Shealy said. “We thought my mom was dead and the baby—” Her voice cracked and she took a moment to steady it. “The baby wasn’t even born when she . . . We had a funeral for them and everything.”

Tiarnan pulled Shealy closer, trying to still the shivers that wracked her body. Shivers that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with shock. The child in her arms watched him with solemn eyes.

“What do y’ remember about this day when yer . . .” He paused, trying to recall the words she’d used.

“Car. She was in a car accident, T,” Jamie said. “Carts on wheels that go really fast.”

Ah.
He nodded. “When yer cart went over the cliffs. Did y’ see the door open then?”

Shealy shook her head. “No, but I don’t remember anything about it. I was hurt pretty bad in the accident. I almost died. I have memories of the moments just before but nothing during. Nothing until a few weeks after when I woke up in the hospital.”

Zac shook his head, his eyes filled with sympathy. “I saw pictures of you on the news after it happened,” he said. “You were in bad shape. They put you back together good as new, though, didn’t they?”

She made a sound in her throat that wasn’t quite laughter and certainly held little humor. It had a bitter note to it that confused Tiarnan even more. He wished he understood the strange undercurrents of her reactions, but there were too many unknowns for him. They used unfamiliar words and he knew he was missing the significance of those he did comprehend.