Haunting Warrior (7 page)

He hesitated, briefly toying with the idea of pretending he hadn’t heard. Of jumping in the first cab and racing away—answering his own question of what he would do if someone he knew did appear.
Run.
He gritted his teeth against that disturbing insight.

“Rory,” the voice called again, and he forced himself to turn, realizing that it was his sister’s face he’d been searching for all along. He’d known—somewhere deep down, buried beneath denial—he’d known she’d be here. Returning home had opened the door to that other world, the one steeped in the mystery that was Ireland.

Bracing himself, he turned.

Danni MacGrath—
Ballagh now
, he reminded himself—stood next to a tan Volvo, her hair caught back in a ponytail, her gray eyes clear and insistent. No smile, he noted, but that wasn’t a surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, not taking the step that would bring him closer.

“I could ask you the same,” Danni said, still unsmiling. “But we both know you’ll lie, so where’s the point in it?”

She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head in a gesture that reminded Rory of their mother. Slowly her gaze took in the whole of him, from sun-bleached hair to faded, worn jeans. He didn’t know what she thought of him. He didn’t want to care. They were twins, he and Danni, and at one time in their lives they’d been so close they could read each other’s thoughts. Rory had destroyed that tie over the years—at first out of anger and hurt. Then, later, out of necessity. He couldn’t keep the barriers between himself and Fennore whole when his sister was around. He couldn’t protect that core, that one true kernel of who he was, when she could look right into his soul. It was too painful playing nice with Danni, and so he played not at all.

But she’d still known he was coming.

She hit a button on her key fob and the boot popped open. Without a word, she yanked his bag from his hand, shoved it into the immaculate space, and slammed the door. “Get in,” she ordered.

Irritated, he did as he was told and slid into the passenger seat, feeling strange and displaced on the wrong side of the vehicle. The wrong side of the world.

Two car seats were strapped in the back with two kids sleeping in them. One was his niece, Clodaugh—she’d be two or three years old now. The other was his nephew, Raegan, who’d been born just last February. He’d never met either one of them before and felt a wash of guilt as he stared at their sweet faces. On the seat between them a weird and ugly little dog sat straight and vigilant, watching Rory with cold eyes and a curled lip. It gave him an impressive growl.

“Easy, Bean,” Danni said, sliding behind the wheel. “It’s just Rory.”

“Bean?”

Danni gave the mutt an indulgent glance. “Long story. She doesn’t warm to strangers right away.”

In response, the dog
gurred
at him again. Cautiously, Rory turned his back on the little beast.

“Does anyone else know I’m here?” he asked when Danni started the engine.

She shrugged. “Do you mean to ask if Mum is still by the telephone praying for you to call? No. I thought it best they prepare.” She shot him a dark sideways look that was as full of reproach as it was apology. It caught Rory like a punch. He’d wounded his family in ways he couldn’t even begin to imagine, that look said. He stared back, unblinking. Stoic. Finally she glanced away and pulled into traffic. When she spoke again after a few minutes, her tone was conciliatory.

“California has been treating you well, then,” she said, and he wanted to smile at the familiar cadence of her speech, the dialect of the Isle of Fennore unique among Ireland. “Isn’t it a movie star you look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen teeth so white.”

She was one to talk. She’d gone to Columbia University in New York and picked up enough of the American ways to sport her own brilliant smile. The rest of her beauty was inborn. Their mother could have rivaled any movie star of her time.

Danni had made contact with him several times in the first year she’d been at school, but every meeting only seemed to magnify what he already knew. Rory didn’t belong in her world anymore, and it hurt them both to face that monumental fact. In the later years, Rory had dodged her attempts to see him like an artist. By then it was shame, not remorse, keeping him away. Those were dark years, when he’d gone a little crazy, and even his Aunt Edel had wiped her hands of him.

“Uncle Frank had a go at me,” Rory said now, answering her raised brows but ignoring the bitter question in her tone. “Thought to polish me up and make me respectable.”

She gave a small snort of disbelief and mumbled something he didn’t catch. When he’d been sent to live with Uncle Frank and Aunt Edel, the hope had been that they would straighten him out. What his aunt and uncle had done to deserve such a punishment, he’d never known.

He’d come to them with belligerence and rebellion. Aunt Edel had matched it with a darkness of her own that had cowed him when nothing else would. But Uncle Frank was an orthodontist from a long line of dentists and was considered a rebel by his own father for daring to branch out of the traditional field. Nothing in Uncle Frank’s sheltered life had prepared him for Rory, and he’d been helpless in the face of his nephew’s rage and resentment—an inept lion tamer with a broken chair and frayed whip he’d never had the heart to use. He’d long given up on Rory’s black soul, but Uncle Frank had managed to triumph over his nephew’s teeth. Rory’s smile was perfect.

His sister stopped at a traffic light and looked at him. He could feel her gaze lingering on his nose. It hadn’t been set straight the first time it was broken and was hopelessly crooked by the third. She seemed to be memorizing his face, reliving all the scrapes she knew about and seeking explanations for the ones she didn’t.

A ragged scar nicked in over his brow from a knife fight in Compton that he was lucky to have survived, but he doubted she’d want to hear that tale. Or how he got the scar that caught his jaw low and near his ear. Of the two, the latter looked the most fearsome, but it had come from a game he’d played when he was seventeen and still trying to prove that he was the baddest badass of them all. That time he hadn’t been in danger from anything but himself. Her gaze moved to his shoulders and chest as if she could see the scars there, too. Who knew, maybe she could.

“Nana said you still blame yourself for Trevor. Is it true?”

The question caught Rory off guard, and he looked away, not wanting Danni to see his expression. His stepbrother, Trevor, had been dead for seventeen years, but the sound of his name still made Rory want to wince. Yes, he blamed himself for Trevor’s death. Everyone did. Why else had they sent Rory away?

“Nana was crazy.”

“To her last breath,” Danni agreed. “But that didn’t make her any less right. His dying wasn’t your fault, Rory.”

“If you say so.”

The truth was, Rory hadn’t been shipped off to California without cause. For years he’d been a walking time bomb, and everyone around him had been listening to the steady, ever-louder ticking coming from inside him. Finally they’d decided it would be best to be finished with Rory MacGrath before he decided to be finished with all of them.

“It’s the truth,” Danni insisted. “No one ever blamed you.”

“Look, do me a favor. Let’s just skip over the bullshit, okay?”

“It was a terrible accident, his fall. No one denies it. But not your fault.”

He said nothing. These were platitudes he’d heard before. Trevor had been following Rory as he’d played amongst the castle ruins. It was a dangerous place, but Rory had grown up navigating the treacherous wall on the cliffs. He’d been showing off, making leaps he shouldn’t have, taunting Trevor to keep up. . . .

“And you know,” Danni went on, “Nana always said Trevor wasn’t meant for this world and that we were lucky to have him the extra years we did.”

And what was that supposed to mean? He’d had just about all he could take of Nana and her cryptic sayings. “Well thanks for clearing that up, Danni. It all makes sense now.”

With a shake of his head, Rory turned back to the window. But he could picture Nana sitting at her kitchen table sipping cold tea from her favorite mug, the words
Que sera, sera
written on one side and the image of a saggy old lady about to be flattened by a speeding bus on the other.

Until his grandmother had shown up in his car, he hadn’t spoken to her since he was twelve, when he left Ballyfionúir. But that didn’t mean
she
hadn’t managed to communicate with
him
. Notes would come, typically enigmatic messages that told him she knew what he was doing, though there was no way she could. For a while, he’d dropped off the radar so completely even Edel didn’t know where to find him. He’d spent some time behind bars, but Nana had still tracked him down. She’d sent a packet of his favorite biscuits, which had arrived in crumbs with a note that simply said:
You are more than this
.

Danni’s voice jerked him from the memory of clanging bars to the quiet hum of tires on pavement.

“How long will you stay, Rory?”

He didn’t answer at first, thinking of Martina’s expression when he’d left the Low Down last night, handing her the keys to both the Camaro and his apartment on his way out. He’d told her if he wasn’t back in a month, sell everything—pocket the cash but keep the car. Nana’s warning about Martina’s Toyota breaking down and it ending badly had rung in his ears.

“Are you in trouble, Irish?” Martina asked, staring at the keys like they were poisoned.

He’d laughed. “Yeah. A helluva lot of trouble. Take care of my car. I’d hate to think of it stripped.”

He said to Danni, “I haven’t decided how long I’m staying. Depends on how things go.”

“And how might they go?”

“Bad.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

Disturbed by his own thoughts, by his own reluctant belief that Danni could see into the chaos of his psyche, he closed his eyes and tried to focus on the here and now. A crisp wind blew through the open windows, mixing with the purr of the Volvo’s engine and the stilted silence in the car. Gradually his thoughts loosened and drifted.

He’d forgotten how the air felt here, how it smelled. How it tasted. The tight fist of nostalgia gripping his chest surprised him. He had no fond memories of home. After the night when his father had disappeared, life became a living hell for Rory. When he recalled the Isle of Fennore where he’d been born and raised, he did so reluctantly.

Yet here he was, drinking it in like a man dying of thirst.

Danni crossed over the River Liffey then out of the city limits and through pastures of emerald and soft rolling hills. In the distance he saw the Rock of Cashel standing stark against the green. The Volvo ate up the miles, bringing them through the wide-open thoroughbred grazing of Kildare. A few tiny towns still cropped up here and there, sporting bright doors and
Open
signs. This was a land of lore and it pulsed and breathed like a being of flesh and bone.

Danni remained silent the rest of the way and the kids in the backseat slept peacefully as they caught the ferry from the mainland at Youghal. While Danni waited in the car, Rory got out and moved to the railing, silently watching the sea of his childhood as it frothed and foamed beneath the boat. The shadow of a lone gull swayed across the undulating waves before swooping down for a fish.

Breathing in the scent of salt and brine, oil and burning fuel from the ferry’s motor, Rory stared into the sea and pictured
her
. He still didn’t know her name, but her scent, the velvet darkness of her eyes, the satin fall of her hair . . . it was all imprinted in his memory.

Who was she? And had Nana been telling the truth. Would he find her?

V
ERY little was different in Ballyfionúir since Rory had left. He wasn’t surprised by it. He’d grown up thinking nothing ever changed here and resenting the fact. Now he was curiously grateful that it had not been transformed into something he no longer recognized. There was a comfort in that, and it caught him off guard.

“It’s not all the same,” Danni said, still reading his mind with annoying ease. “Lisa Ballagh married a Sicilian man and they’ve opened an Italian restaurant where Pete’s Fish and Chips used to be.”

“What happened to Pete’s?” Rory asked, in spite of himself. He remembered the hot grease and crunch, the steaming white fish and chips so crisp and sizzling they seared his mouth.

“Pete went to Chicago to live with his daughter. I hear he opened up a business there.”

Rory kept his face impassive, not letting her see how strangely betrayed he felt by this news. It wasn’t right that a staple of Ballyfionúir like Pete’s could suddenly pull up and move away—to Chicago no less.

The road took a wide turn and he stared out his window as the cliffs and the pounding sea danced just beyond. Farther south was the bay where his stepfather and the other fisherman anchored their boats. And up the hill from that was the street where his grandmother had lived. Something heavy pushed at his chest.

“Do you want to go by her house?” Danni asked.

Rory started to shake his head and then he stopped. “Maybe just for a minute.”

She pulled up to the small cottage, and they both got out, but neither made a move for the front door. It would be unlocked, he knew. That much couldn’t have changed. But he didn’t have the heart to cross that threshold. As bizarre as the visit had been, it had awakened other memories inside Rory. His grandmother—step-grandmother, technically—had been the only person who’d ever known who the hell he really was. Himself included. And he’d loved her unconditionally.

The children continued to nap in their car seats, heads padded by soft doughnut-shaped wedges, but the weird dog bounded out and raced to Nana’s porch, where it curled up on the
Welcome
mat with sad eyes and a sorrowful groan.