Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (26 page)

It is the middle of the night in India, so it would be sometime in the middle of the day back in Kansas. Orlaith and I shift to Tír na nÓg, and then I have to spend some time figuring out how to shift home. Wellington is fairly flat and devoid of proper forests, and there aren’t many tethers in the area. I settle for something down near the border with Oklahoma, the northern range of the Osage Hills, about forty miles away from Wellington. I could do with more running. This time I would let the earth help me, though, and Orlaith too.

Much of the run is spent trying to remember events from my youth to prove to my mother that I am who I say I am, because I suspect she won’t believe me at first. The police never found my body, of course, but she had to believe I was truly dead after such a long time with no contact.

I had checked up on her periodically through intermediaries, and once, about halfway through my training, Atticus and I visited in person, only to find she was out of the country at the time.

As for my stepfather, I intended to say very little to him. I still despised him and wished to take apart his oil business, as I’d always planned, but that could wait until I’d seen Mom and let her know about Dad. And me.

It’s midafternoon when Wellington appears on the horizon. I slow down to a normal jog once I’m in sight of windows, and, after some thought, I decide to cloak my passage through the city. Though some of my old acquaintances might not recognize me right away, people would surely remember the tattooed redhead with a giant hound running alongside and a strange staff in her hand and would ask around until they discovered who I was. Returning to my mother was one thing, but returning to the rest of the world was quite another in legal terms. I would have a lot of official questions to answer and perhaps a bit of trouble if I tried to resurrect Granuaile MacTiernan. Better that the world thought of me as Nessa Thornton.

Mom lives on a gigantic estate, thanks to my stepdad. I lived there for a year myself before I left for college. It’s walled and gated and tricked out with a passive security system and a real live dude manning the gate; a golf cart waits next to his booth so he can drive to the house and back if he needs to do so.

I decide to play it straight and see if I can talk my way in, and if that fails, I’ll go ninja. Dropping my invisibility and Orlaith’s camouflage but adding camouflage to the whirling blade, I approach the booth and steel myself for the confrontation.

The security guard is older and carrying the weight of too many beers and wings on game days. That doesn’t stop him
from looking me over as if I’d be lucky to have him. He ignores Orlaith and thereby confirms that he’s an idiot.

“Can I help you?” he drawls, voice syrupy with condescension. I can almost hear him tack on
little missy
to the end of his sentence.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Thatcher.”

He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, just sucks his teeth with a wet squidgy sound, letting me know what he thinks about someone like me visiting someone like Mrs. Thatcher. “Do you have an appointment?”

I don’t know why, but that question stops me. Of course I don’t have an appointment. I haven’t made an appointment of any kind since I began my training. Appointments are something from another time—another life. Now that I’m here, confronted by the prospect of explaining everything to her, I can’t see how it ends well. People who live in a world with appointments aren’t prepared to acknowledge that the world is sentient, that magic is real, or that they have created gods by the power of their faith. The world slid into the paradigm of science and skepticism centuries ago, and shaking my mother loose from that would frighten her more than anything. Even if she accepted that I was Granuaile—an uncertain outcome—she’d think me insane when I told her I was a Druid.

And then what would I do to prove it? Shape-shift in front of her? Ask the elemental to grow a rosebush in her backyard inside a minute? She would think it all a hoax or a dream before she would accept the truth of my binding to the earth. The conflict would cast a pall over my homecoming and choke off any chance of me saying what needed to be said and her hearing it.

The impulse, the raw need to see her, is still pure, though, and will bring me a small sense of harmony, but it should not go beyond that. Seeing her, and being seen in turn, is the thing itself. I must accept that a storybook homecoming is impossible. So I do not need to deal with this round man and his teeth-sucking. There is a better, simpler solution. Imperfect, and not what I truly want, but better than risking the dangers of the truth.

I turn and jog back into town without answering the guard, leaving him to his condescension and casual misogyny.

In one of those soulless big box stores, I find a black jacket and gloves to cover up my tattoos and pick up a flower arrangement in a white vase, oranges and yellows and dark-green leaves with tiny white blossoms like snowflakes sprinkled on top of it. The walk back to the estate is slower, because it’s difficult to jog with a flower arrangement, but once I reach the wall, I make sure I’m unobserved and cast camouflage on my hound and myself. Then I unbind a portion of the cement block, which allows us to slip through.

The land of the Thatcher estate is expansive, with gentle sloping flats of tall grass punctuated by stands of timber planted purposefully long ago. In the distance, the white house rests on the light-brown plain like a dollop of cream on caramel. Orlaith and I might trip some motion detectors on the way to the house, but cameras won’t pick us up until I drop the camouflage, and the guard won’t alert the house until he sees something. My mother won’t think anything of me suddenly arriving at the door—deliveries were always waved through without comment by the guard.

I ask Orlaith to wait for me at the edge of a small copse perhaps a hundred yards from the house. I leave my weapons with her and promise to return soon. As the sun hovers low over the horizon, I dispel camouflage, stride up to the house, and ring the bell.

My mother opens the door, and I cannot help but catch my breath when I see her hair, dyed red now, presumably because she’d gone to gray recently. She’s smaller than me, kind of petite; I got my height from Dad. She wears jeans and a salmon tank top with a white button-up shirt hanging open on top of it, and her eyes—green like mine—do a quick scan before locking on my face. Then she gasps as her jaw drops. She still has her freckles, and when I see them, the tears start to well in my eyes. I think hers are filling, too, and a stillness stretches as we absorb the shock of seeing each other—until I remember that I’m not supposed to be her daughter and I’m missing my cue.

“Delivery for you, Mrs. Thatcher,” I say, and thrust the flowers toward her.

“Oh. Thank you,” she replies, and wipes at her cheek before reaching out to take the vase. Her fingers lightly brush against my gloves, and now I wish I hadn’t worn them; I would have cherished the contact forever. She cradles the vase in her hands and gives a tiny embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry to seem so surprised,” she says, “and I hope you’ll forgive me. It’s just that you look like the spitting image of my daughter.”

“Yeah? That’s a funny coincidence,” I say, sniffling and sweeping a hand across my eyes to clear them of tears. It’s only a temporary fix, I’m sure, but I try to hold myself together. “You remind me so very much of my mom. Probably because of this red-hair thing we have going.” I wag a finger between us, pointing at our heads. “I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry to hear that. And I know how you must feel. It’s the same for my daughter and me.” She takes a deep breath and tilts her head to one side, studying me, her bottom lip quivering a bit before she speaks again. “You know, she’d be in her thirties now, but I swear you look just the way she did the last time I saw her.”

My throat tightens, and I struggle to get the words out before I lose all remaining vestiges of self-control. “Would you mind—I mean, I haven’t spoken to her in forever, it seems like, and I’m never going to get to now, but there’s something I’ve always wanted to say to her. Would you let me say it to you instead? As a favor? Would you mind?”

“No, honey, of course, you go right ahead.” And she stands there, waiting, holding the flowers but unconscious of them.

Through a blur of fresh tears I manage to say, “I miss you so much. And I love you.” I sob once, and so does she, and my throat is so constricted with emotion that I have to whisper the last. “Goodbye, Mom.”

Something shifts in her expression, perhaps a recognition that I am more than someone who merely resembles the daughter she thought long dead, and she reaches out to me, the forgotten vase
of flowers slipping from her hands and shattering on the threshold. “Granuaile?”

I want nothing so much as to be held again, but I can’t rush into those arms. It would lead to all the questions I cannot answer. No, I had said what I’d come to say, so I choke on another sob, back away three paces, spin on my heel, and run from the house, except it’s more of an awkward, loping stagger. My chest is heaving and I can barely see, because I’m crying so ugly—ragged whimpers alternating with convulsive shudders of grief.

The door clicks shut behind me, dimly heard, my mother no more able to step forward into my world than I am able to step back into hers. Atticus had warned me of this, when I first began my training; he’d said that becoming a Druid would mean giving up my family, so abandon all ties, ye who enter here—but I didn’t fully understand then. To achieve my goal at the time, I had blithely traded some pain in the distant future, unable to fathom how much it would hurt when it came time to pay that particular bill. I thought it would be like homesickness tempered with the wistful hope that someday you could go home again—intense, to be sure, but endurable so long as you knew it would end one day. But now I see that it’s terrible and irrevocable. As large and wondrous as my world is now, it will forever be a world without my parents. And it stings especially that I consciously chose this fate—it isn’t something that happened to me. I made it happen. Now Dad is gone and Mom lives in a headspace with no room for magic in it. No room for me.

When I approach the stand of timber, reeling and weaving, Orlaith hears me long before I hear her, and her voice enters my head before I spy her narrow body scissoring through the tall grass toward me.

She comes to me, ears up, and I fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her neck, bawling.

Yes. I miss my mom
.

I can’t talk to her. Can’t tell her the truth
.

It’s like there’s a giant river of time and circumstance between us and I can’t figure out how to cross it safely. It’s too dangerous for both of us
.

I’m sorry to be such a downer, Orlaith, but I need to cry for a while
.

I hold her hard and cry for my lost mother and father until the setting sun, conspiring with my exhaustion and the wind sighing through the treetops, sends me adrift into a dreamless sleep, the two of us sprawled out of sight in the tall grass.

Brighid doesn’t want to talk in the Court, where anyone can hear us, so she leads me to her own private residence and a room she calls the Iron Hall. It’s a grand name for a very small chamber, not much more than a closet, but it has a beautiful round table, a pair of stools, a cask of dark beer, and two glasses waiting inside. The walls, door, floor, and ceiling are all covered in solid black iron.

“Casting a binding to keep our conversation private can conceivably be countered,” she explains, “but iron cannot. We will not be overheard here, and we can speak in comfort for as long as we wish. I needn’t be so formal either, where no one can see me. Would you like a beer?”

“That would be grand.”

She pours for us both and we clink glasses.
“Sláinte.”

It’s wonderful stuff, something Goibhniu probably brewed, and I praise it before we return to business.

“Tell me of the Morrigan,” Brighid says.

“Right. It was more than two thousand years ago when the
Morrigan approached me with a deal. I was seventy-two and had no nuts left in me sack. There is nothing worse than being old and miserable and hurting everywhere. I don’t recommend it. It was a cold-ass day in the darkest part of winter and she drops down from the sky, all naked and sexy, and I get annoyed that she’s blocking me view of the sunset—that’s how bad it was. Ye can die now, she says to me, or I can put ye on a Time Island, where ye might get to continue your life in some distant future. A far distant future, she says. And in that future, ye might get to be young again. All I had to do was deliver a message. I took the deal, o’ course, and here I am.”

“And the message?”

“It made no sense when she made me memorize it, because I didn’t know anything about these other pantheons, but here’s what I’m supposed to say, from the Morrigan’s own lips to your ears: ‘Brighid, I am dead now, either at the hands of the Olympians or by Vedic demons, and a great danger gathers among the Norse. I have seen terrible futures, and I tell you three times, the difference between life and death lies with the Svartálfar. Recruit them to our side at any cost.’ ”