Just Believe (4 page)

Chapter Three

"Of all the inconsiderate, arrogant,
downright sassenach things to do!" His footsteps and angry words
echoed off the stone walls, reverberating through the hand-hewn
hallway descending beneath the New Jersey countryside.

Gaelen didn't care. The Council had to
know this was a bad time to call a convocation. His paper was due
next week at the editorial offices of Celtic Review, and he still
had exams to grade from last semester.

"But we can't take the time to check
people's calendars. Oh, no. Just-" He raised his hand and snapped
his fingers in front of his face. "And we're supposed to come
flyin'!"

Rounding the corner, he headed for the
chamber at the end of the corridor. The reddish glow from the
doorway froze him for a moment, giving him a chill of uncertainty.
Had he missed something in Eochy's terse summons? No matter. Gaelen
swept his uneasiness aside. So the better acoustics in this section
of the tunnel could warn Eochy and the others of his sour mood,
Gaelen raised his voice. Let them know what to expect before he
entered.

"I've got a life, unlike some people!"
He shouted toward the open door.

"Hurry up, Gaelen," came the reply from
the chamber. "We've got lives, too, and they're wastin' away
waitin' on you."

A rumble of male laughter and a few
well thought-out curses accompanied Eochy's words.

Gaelen's mood soured.

It didn't get any better when he
entered the Council chamber.

His feet froze on the stone floor of
the cave. His voice froze in his throat.

The circular table, nearly forty feet
across, a cross-section cut from a single tree--no one knew how
long ago--occupied the middle of the chamber. Seated around the
table were ninety-nine members of the Council of One
Hundred.

"Take your seat, Gaelen."

Though he heard the leader of the
Council very clearly, Gaelen was still rooted to the spot where
he'd stopped, staring until his eyes hurt.

"Gaelen?" Eochy stood and came toward
him with his bandy strut. "Why aren't you prepared?"

"No one told me."

"You've lost track of time out there in
the Otherworld. You should call home more often." Eochy grabbed his
elbow and pulled him to the only empty chair at the table. "Now,
get 'em out."

"No."

"What?"

"I'm not going to parade my private
parts for the entire assembly," Gaelen insisted.

"We've all got ours out," Eochy
said.

They did, indeed. Each and every person
at the table had them out and the iridescence caught the light from
the stones mounted in the smooth chiseled walls of the
sidhe.

"Gaelen, we can't begin the convocation
until you get your wings out."

There, somebody said the W-word. Damn.
Damn.

"Look," he pleaded, "I haven't had them
out in years. They'll be all wrinkled and..."

Eochy waved to the doorkeepers. Two
strapping lads, selected for their brawn and lack of humor, came up
behind Gaelen, each one taking a sleeve of his heather tweed
jacket.

R-r-r-i-i-i-i-p-p-p-p-p!

"Hey! That's my favorite jacket,"
Gaelen protested.

"It's ugly," one of the brutes
muttered, with what might have been a smile on a less stony
face.

Then off came his shirt. His one
hundred dollar, hand-made dress shirt. It wasn't fairy-tailored, so
they had to pull harder, but off it came.

Gaelen sat, humiliation bubbling with
the stomach acid, and waited. It would only get worse.

The chill of the room and the prickly
feeling of all eyes on him made his wings pucker and swell. He
thought he could control himself until...

Oh, no. Not Carly. Anybody but
her.

Carly O'Malley smiled at him from the
gallery, and her wings--Oh, Bridget, what wings the woman
had--shimmered three shades each of red and gold. The snickering
around the table had Gaelen's already rough temper near to
boiling.

"Ah, Gaelen, me boyo, you've a lass
interested in seeing your wings."

"I've seen 'em," Carly said, "and a
sight worth waitin' for they are."

Women tittered at Carly's
words.

A sharp snapping pain twisted in his
shoulders. Biting his tongue, he winced as the thin skin unfolded,
first on the left, then on the right.

Not good to keep them packed away like
that, his ol' da had said. Gotta shake 'em out and stretch 'em once
in a while, boy.

The men on the Council and in the
audience grimaced in amused compassion. The women were not so
kind.

They watched, eyes widening, tongues
flicking out to moisten their lips, their anticipation
palpable.

Gaelen was a tall man and he'd been
told by women--most recently the exquisite Carly O'Malley--he was
extremely well-formed. In all his parts. Of course, he'd kept his
wings folded as he always did unless he'd had warning of some
ceremonial occasion like this one, but everybody knew that a man's
wing-span was precisely equitable to the size of his...

"Ohhhh," he moaned, unable to control
them as they spurted faster, fuller, taller.

"Oooooh." The women echoed his moans
with their own.

"Just look at the coloring!"

"Wouldn't you just love to see those
things sprout over your head in the dark?"

Sprout.

"Aren't you finished yet?" Eochy asked.
His own wings wagged impatiently, the fairy equivalent of a tapping
toe.

And just as irritating.

Gaelen tried to relax, but he couldn't
resist a quick comment. He was ticked and hoped Eochy knew
it.

"If you'd give people some notice,
Eochy, and not spring these things."

Eochy smiled. That was always a bad
sign.

"If you'd check your e-mail once in
awhile you'd be better informed. I sent a reminder just a week ago,
Otherworld time."

Gaelen shook out his wings and tried to
make himself comfortable with their unfamiliar weight on his
shoulders.

"E-mail? You sent it by e-mail?" He
looked around then, scanning the crowd. "Where's Lucas?" When he
didn't spot his little brother, he settled back in the chair and
smirked at Eochy. "There, see? You must have left us off your
e-mail alias, Eochy. Lucas checks the e-mail, and he isn't here
either."

Eochy smiled again.

Double-damn.

"That's right. And if you'll look at
your agenda, you'll see Lucas is item number three."

His mouth snapped shut and Gaelen
jerked his eyes down to the single sheet of paper lying on the
table in front of him. Spotting number three, he decided he'd keep
his mouth shut for a bit longer.

The ritual preliminaries passed without
Gaelen even hearing them. He'd responded by rote, ignoring the
meaning and depth of the words. Still seething, shoulder blades
sore, deadlines and unfinished work weighing on his mind--it was
all giving him a splitting headache.

Not to mention having his brother
waiting for him at number three.

"Now," Eochy intoned, settling his
spectacles on the tip of his nose. "Item one, the 'Fairy
Controversy.' Without objection, since this relates to the matter
of item three, we'll pass on to item two, 'Reclaiming Ireland for
Her Indigenous Peoples.'" Eochy pulled off his specs and leaned on
the table. "Phelan, I know you mean well," Eochy said, his eyes
meeting those of the man on Gaelen's left, "but we made a deal with
them. We can't back out after three thousand years."

"But it was a bad deal. That Iberian
con man took us, and we all know it."

Eochy squashed a smile. Gaelen felt his
own lips move with unwelcome amusement.

"Well, Phelan, we can all agree that
agreeing to splitting Ireland in half and accepting the half
underground was not the most shrewd land transaction in the history
of the world, but what's done is done. This Council has had this
debate at least once a year for three thousand years, and I'm sure
everyone is getting tired of it."

"I make a motion to table the issue,"
one of the Hundred said.

"I second," another said.

Gaelen could predict the
process.

Phelan wasn't to be deterred. "I demand
a recorded vote." He sneered at the assembly. "Just so we know who
the weak-kneed fairies are."

The chamber rocked with moans and
expletives in various languages, some of them very interesting to a
linguist like Gaelen in their imagination, and a variety of
suggestions as to what Phelan could do with himself, various
barnyard beasts, and sundry of his own female relatives.

"Give him his vote, Eochy," Gaelen
muttered, just wanting the whole thing over with. He glanced down
again at the agenda and Lucas's name there. How long had it been
since he'd seen his younger brother? He started to
worry.

Eochy grimaced. "All right, the motion
has been made."

Gaelen blocked out the droning voices
and voting. He focused his mind and tried to find his
brother.

* * * *

"Holy Bridget!" Lucas Riley struggled
through the open window of Erin's house. His shirt stuck to the
trickle of blood oozing from his torn wings.

How could I have been so stupid? Acting
like an untried schoolboy on his first outing, forgetting himself
to the point of....

Lucas scrambled over the sill and set
one foot down on the floor inside the Tinkers' sprawling ranch
house. It was dark still, but it would be daylight soon and he had
to be gone before Mrs. Tinker was up and around.

He had to check on Erin. The terror on
her face just as he popped out was imprinted on his memory and made
him heartsick that he'd caused her such anguish. Worse, he'd not
been able to stop himself until somewhere near the Great Pyramid.
When he'd gotten back to where they'd been parked, Erin was
gone.

"Oh, Bridget! What must she think?" A
twisting, mangled ripping mutilated him deep inside. He laughed at
himself as he recognized the signs of fairie sorrow. "Aye, boyo,
and you've got it pretty bad, ha' you not?"

Aye, I do, he admitted to himself as he
struggled to his feet and headed down the long hallway between the
bedrooms at the end of the house, peeking around the doorways, not
making a sound, not even breathing. The last thing he needed was
for Mrs. Tinker to hear him. He didn't think he could face her
yet.

But no danger was terrifying enough to
keep him from his love's side.

"This one, I think," he whispered, his
voice inaudible even to his own ears. He eased around the doorframe
and adjusted to the darkness inside the room. "Erin."

The gray outline of a bed faced
him.

She isn't here. "Erin," he whispered
more loudly.

There was no answer, no uneasy shifting
of a sleeping body on the bed.

"Erin!" he said aloud. "Where are
you?"

* * * *

There you are, you little
punk!

"Have you located him,
Gaelen?"

Gaelen jerked his eyes from the
polished surface of the table to meet Eochy's.

So, the old bantam was watching me.
Gaelen smiled, but didn't answer.

Eochy studied him for a moment, then
bent his gray head over his papers.

"All right, now that Phelan's nonsense
is over for another year, can we please move on to item three?" He
perched his specs on the edge of his nose and peered over them at
Gaelen. "This is the most egregious case of miscegenation we've
ever had to deal with."

Gaelen hated that
word--miscegenation--and wondered how his people had chosen it to
describe relations between fairies and others. To him, it smacked
of evil hiding beneath white sheets, a word born of fear and
irrational hatred.

"Lucas Riley has taken up with a
non-fairy woman," Eochy announced.

There was no exhaled gasp of surprise.
This was really not a big deal.

"So what, Eochy? Lots of us take up
with non-fairies," Gaelen put in.

"Of course, but we're not talking about
pixies or sprites or the unfortunate attraction some of us have
for..." Eochy pulled off his specs and grimaced. "Trolls. I, for
one, could never understand that, but to each his own, I
say."

"So, Lucas's own is a non-fairy,"
Gaelen repeated.

"She is a human."

The gasp of surprise finally rolled
over the assembly.

"Human?" Gaelen sat forward and stared.
"I don't believe it. Lucas isn't stupid. He knows the
laws."

"Know the laws he may, still, he is
consorting with a human and he has had relations with her. Not only
that, Gaelen, but he allowed her to see his true nature, and she's
going to spread the news around that college town like pixie dust
at Christmas." Eochy tossed a tabloid newspaper across the table.
It slid the last two feet and stopped right in front of
Gaelen.