Haunting Desire (30 page)

“What is it then?” she whispered.

“Power. Freed, that power would know no limits. It is all-controlling, all-conceiving, all-mighty.”

“You’re talking about God.”

His smile was like ice shards, shoved beneath her skin. “Yes.”

“No,” Áedán said, his breath a hot burst against her temple.

“All of that power was trapped within the Book of Fennore. But now the lock has been sprung, and the power is within me.”

That did it. That chilling statement tipped the balances, and Meaghan careened over into a calmness that was as much a façade as the monster’s eyes that stared from the human face.

“You’re no God.”

“Not yet. But once I step from this world back to my own . . .”

He paused, waiting for her to follow that sticky trail. “Back to your own?”

“I will return, Meaghan Ballagh, and I will have justice. I will see your mother begging for mercy. I will feed your father to the fish he so loves. I will bathe in my children’s blood. And you, lovely Meaghan, will help me. You will take me to my destiny and I will reward you.”

“I don’t want your fecking reward.”

“Which will make it all the sweeter. I will be worshiped. I will be obeyed.”

The dark tone reverberated like a gong echoing in her soul. Áedán had gone very still, but she could feel the hard beat of his heart against her spine.

“Ask him about the Druid,” he said softly. “Ask him.”

“What about the Druid?”

Cathán’s eyes narrowed, and once again, he seemed to scan the cell for something he felt sure he’d find.

“He is weakened. I will take his power and leave him bound to wither and die in his own nightmares.”

Áedán released her arms and stepped back. The cold that washed down her spine made her want to cry out. She felt abandoned, though it was foolish. She focused on remaining erect, keeping her chin up and her eyes dry.

Cathán turned to his guard. “Have her cleaned up and brought to the hall. And for the love of God, be careful. Death will seem a blessing if she escapes.”

Without another word, he left, climbing the stairs alone while his guard moved to the cell.

“T
ELL me now,” Tiarnan repeated, his eyes narrowed, his expression tense. “What is it y’ can do? What is it y’ think y’ve done?”

Shealy shook her head, not wanting to speak it. But Tiarnan deserved to know. He had saved her from the wolves, from monsters. He’d come for her when Eamonn had taken her captive. More than that, he’d touched her heart. He’d cracked the shell she’d built around herself and he’d filled her with warmth. With passion . . . with love. Tiarnan deserved so much more than she’d given him. He’d be hurt when he found out she’d kept the truth from him, but that was no excuse to continue to do so. Taking a deep breath, she told him what happened yesterday by the river, detailing the surprise, the shock, the speed with which it had taken place.

“I saw my dad and Kyle in the study—Ellie and I did.”

“
You
did this?
You
opened the door.”

She nodded, noting that in his shock, he drew out the vowels, pronouncing them instead of clipping them as he usually did.

“I guess it runs in the family. My dad’s not the only one who can do it. I can, too. I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you’d change your mind about helping me find my dad.”

His mouth opened and he cocked his head, as if maybe he’d misunderstood. But his eyes darkened and his brows pulled low. He’d heard her all right.

“It was stupid of me, Tiarnan,” she said in a rush. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Y’ were thinking y’ couldn’t trust me,” he said, and in his tone she heard how much that wounded him. “Y’ were thinking I wouldn’t care enough to help y’. That I’d just use y’. Is that the right of it?”

Miserable, she nodded. “I was afraid. You have to understand that.”

“Do I?” he said. Then he lowered his lashes, shielding those beautiful eyes from her. “Go on. What happened next?”

Throat aching with the emotions she refused to let loose, she said, “I just realized as we were talking that seven years ago my dad saw me in his study. I mean, of course I realized it then, but I didn’t get the importance. It was yesterday for me, but for him”—she cast a betrayed look at her father—“for him it was right after the accident. I told him about Ellie—I told him he had another daughter. He would have known that my mother had to be alive—would be alive long enough to give birth and raise Ellie to a toddler. He would have known that if he’d opened the door right then he could save her. Don’t you see? He could have come for her before . . . before the monster killed her.”

She couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. They spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks, hot and salty, and filled with her agony. She wanted to throw herself in Tiarnan’s arms. She’d come to think of them as her haven. She’d come to think of him as the one person who would always be there for her. And yet she hadn’t trusted him with the simple truth.

She brushed her tears away with an angry swipe and glared at her father.

“Why, Daddy? Why did you leave her here?”

Donnell stared at his feet, slowly shaking his head. “I didn’t,” he said sadly. “I couldn’t go back for her.”

“Why not?”

“Because I had you to think of, Shealy. You were in the hospital, barely hanging on to life.”

“So you traded mine for hers? You could have saved her. The doctors were taking care of me, but you
left her
. Alone. Here. Pregnant. She had her baby, Daddy. She had Ellie
here
.”

“Try to understand,” he begged in a broken voice.

“No,
you
try to understand. I’ve been carrying this weight around with me for all this time. I thought it was my fault that she died.
Mine.
If I hadn’t brought up the Book of Fennore, she wouldn’t have snapped at you about being obsessed, you two wouldn’t have fought, and you wouldn’t have driven off that cliff. But now I know that you sent her here. You opened the door and then you didn’t come back for her.”

“That’s not how it happened,” her dad insisted, anger flaring in his eyes.

“No?” she cried. “It’s not? Then why don’t you set the record straight. Tell me what
really
happened. Tell me why you lied to me for
SEVEN YEARS
!”

Her voice echoed in the chamber. She had a moment to worry that someone might hear it, but she didn’t care. Not anymore. Her whole world had fallen apart. She wanted answers. She wanted reasons. Beside her, Tiarnan took an automatic step, his hands outstretched, but he stopped before he touched her. Her tears fell faster.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth,” her father said, tears in his eyes, too.

“Why? Because you were afraid I would hate you?”

“No. Not because I thought you would hate me. I didn’t tell you, Shealy, because I was afraid you would hate
you
.”

His words settled around her, alien, incomprehensible. She shook her head, trying to make sense of them, but she couldn’t. What did he mean? Tiarnan moved again and this time his hand settled on her shoulder, moved beneath the length of her hair and curled around her neck. Gently he pulled her to him.

“I cannot open the door between this world and Fennore, Shealy. I don’t have that power. I never have.”

“What do you mean? I saw you do it the night Cathán attacked us. I
saw it
.”

“It wasn’t me, Shealy. You did it. Only you can open the passage between the two worlds.”

“Me?” she asked softly.

He nodded, eyes so filled with desolation that she knew he spoke the truth. “I didn’t know you could do it before the accident. I only knew that you had a sensitivity to the Book, and even that I discovered by chance.”

“What do y’ mean?” Tiarnan asked.

“Maggie, Shealy’s mother, she didn’t believe, so I had to be sneaky about my search for it. It was a bone of contention between us, the Book was. So I would tell little fibs when I went out and I would take Shealy with me. We’d visit places where rumors abounded. And when we did, Shealy would tell me things. Like if it had been there or where it had gone.”

Shealy listened, her head resting against Tiarnan’s strong chest, his scent soothing her. Bringing her comfort she didn’t deserve. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and pulled him closer, and he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“She knew where the Book was?” he asked her father.

“Only if it had used where we were as its jumping point. She could say, ‘From here it went south, Daddy. With a woman.’ And so I could narrow my search to the south and look for tales of women who’d suddenly become wealthy but then gone mad. Or children healed from fatal diseases only to have their mommy shoot herself later. Miracles followed by tragedies. That is the wake of the Book of Fennore.”

“I remember,” Shealy whispered. “I remember us doing that. It was our secret.”

“Yes. But then you started growing up and you weren’t so interested in day trips with your crazy dad. You started thinking like your mum. That I was obsessed.”

He sighed, glanced at Kyle and then away. “I thought I was being quite clever taking the two of you to the Isle of Fennore for the day. Maggie, she loved the quiet towns, the little pubs. She never took to Dublin, you know. I told her I’d looked from shore to shore on the island long ago and never caught a hint of the Book that was named for it, and I suppose she believed me because surely if the Book had been on that island I would have found it long ago. It was the only reason she agreed to go that day—because she thought I’d eliminated it from my . . . quest.”

“But then I brought up how we used to search for it and I asked if that’s why you’d brought me to the place named for it,” Shealy murmured, her voice cracking.

“Don’t blame yourself for the fight, sweetheart. She planned to leave me no matter what. I loved her like I’ve never loved another woman, and she loved me, too, but not enough to believe in my mission.”

Tiarnan asked, “So Shealy opened the door while y’ were driving on the island?”

“I don’t know exactly,” her dad answered, eyeing the tender way he held Shealy. “We saw a blinding white light and it was like we fell through. Not like the other night at all.”

“Ah,” Tiarnan said. He reached down, took Shealy’s chin in his hand, and tilted her face up so he could look in her eyes. “It was not yer fault, then. It was mine. For each of the persons who came to Inis Brandubh the story is the same. Y’ were in yer cart when I was trying to destroy the Book. I brought yer mother here. Not y’, lass.”

She stared deeply into his eyes, expecting to see pity. Expecting that he said it only to make her feel better, not because it was the truth. But what she saw there told her what she should have known. Tiarnan was not a man of deception. Not ever.

“I concur with that,” her dad said. “The experience was not the same.”

Shealy looked at him. “What do you mean? How could you know?”

“We went with her, Shealy. All of us. But you and I landed together. There was a creature—I can’t even describe it. It saw us and charged. You screamed and I wrapped myself around you to protect you. The next thing I knew, we were back in the car, sailing over the cliff. I thought for certain that thing had killed your mother right then. I didn’t know where we’d gone or how we’d gotten there and back. I didn’t know it had anything to do with you, Shealy, until the day you appeared in the study with the child.”

“Ellie.”

He nodded. “It was then I realized the danger you were in. I thought it was the proximity to the Book that had caused the accident. My only thought was to get you away from it all. I sold everything and moved us to Arizona—a place as opposite and as far from Ireland as I could get.”

“But if you’d told me, I could have gone back. I could have saved her.”

“Or you could have died just as she did. I didn’t dare risk the daughter I loved more than life itself for ‘could haves.’ ”

Shealy shook her head sadly, seeing the twisted dilemma her father had faced, knowing that it wasn’t fair to judge him for the choices he’d made.

Tiarnan lowered his head and said softly in her ear, “A wise woman once told me that if I’d made some wrong decisions, probably there weren’t any right ones.”

“She’s not so wise,” Shealy whispered back.

Before Tiarnan could answer her, that feeling of gathering, of the air thickening around her, began to fill up the wretched spaces of hollowness that ached deep inside.

“I think we’re out of time,” she murmured, her voice strained by the feeling, the words hard to form. But Kyle spoke over her and no one heard.

“What triggered this
door
opening in Arizona?” he asked.

“I don’t know for certain,” her dad said. “But it seemed like Cathán was searching for something. For Shealy. He came after her.”

“That’s right,” Tiarnan said, frowning. “It was like he knew that she could pull him out. But how would he know?”

“The prophecy,” her dad and Kyle said at once.

“What prophecy?”

Kyle and Donnell exchanged a solemn glance, and then Kyle pulled his shoulder bag open. He lifted a bundle wrapped in oilcloth from inside, held it for a moment, and then carefully unwrapped it. Inside was a small, thin book.

Donnell let out his breath in a rush as soon as he saw it. “I thought it lost,” he murmured. He glanced at Shealy. “Kyle was holding it the night he vanished and it went with him.”

“Is that the Book of Fennore, then?” she asked with a combination of fear and anticlimax. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but this seemed too mild, too
ordinary
to be the Book of Fennore.

“No,” Donnell said with a grim smile. “Not the Book of Fennore. But a very old journal. Old, Shealy. Older than either you or I can even imagine. It belonged to our ancestors’ ancestors, and it plots the journey of the Book of Fennore. It tells the history of when it was created, who has used it, where it has been. It has been passed from generation to generation, from Keeper to Keeper. It came to me from my father and to him from his father.”