The Fallen Stars (A Star Child Novel) (32 page)

Tai raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, okay
.
”
Setting down my tea on the hearth, I slowly opened the book and began to read. The author seemed incredibly well-informed for a mortal—
if
he or she was mortal. No author name had been imprinted on the pages or the spine, which had been left blank.

The book began by outlining the history of the Children Of Danu all the way back to the great wars. It painstakingly plotted biographies for every one of Cali’s family members, including Cali herself. I ached as I read her name.
Calienta.

I put the book down on my lap for a minute, bothered by the feeling that I’d wasted too much time. The worry that she had ended up alone and in trouble wrapped around my neck like a noose. I just wanted to be with Cali.

Though my mind kept trying to wander back to Cali, I needed to understand all of this in order to protect her. With an audible sigh, I picked up the book again and continued to read. When I got to the passage on the prophecies, I held my breath and focused.

As to the topic of the Great Prophecy, the prophecy appeared in a sea cave on the coast of Western Ireland as a series of paintings. Before we dissect the prophecy in detail, let us review the events decreed within it.

Cabhan, god and Star Child, will turn against the light

Cabhan will attempt to destroy his father, Lugh

Cabhan will be stopped by a young, unknown boy

The boy will be offered high kingship

The boy will marry the goddess and Star Child, Calienta

Each item had been displayed horizontally, across two pages, with sketches of the exact images that Calienta had shown me appearing above each point.

Not much is known about this young boy, with the exception that he will be born in the twentieth century, on the eighteenth day of May. It is also believed that he will defeat Cabhan.

My birthday was May eighteenth. That information came as a slap in the face. I’d been told the prophecy had been about me, so that information wasn’t new. However, reading the story like this, seeing my birthday in the book, made it seem even more real.

Swallowing, I took a deep breath and looked at Tai for a moment. “It’s a bit odd reading about yourself in a book, in the third person.”

Tai smiled kindly and gestured to the book again. Sighing, I focused my eyes on the page once more and proceeded to read the remainder of it.

In 1920, during an expedition to discover Western Ireland’s history as it relates to the Mesolithic period, explorers from theDepartment of Archaeology, National University of Ireland,
found a cliff cave. Upon entering the cave, they came upon a large cavernous room, which seemed to be lit from the inside.

It is believed that this location and the original one discovered in the 1800s (exact date of origin unknown) are linked. This conclusion is drawn based on location…

Skipping a little ahead, I read:

When the group entered the cavern, they found a small painting and words written in blood that decreed the following: The one who refuses immortality in light will receive it in darkness.

My fingers flipped through the pages again, stopping on the title page. There, in neat print read the name of the owner,
Stephen St. James
.

Looking up at Tai, I found that I couldn’t hear him, though his lips were moving. My life and Cali’s life in a textbook, written as if it were an historical event…If Tai was a Child of Danu, then he could conjure such a thing in the bat of an eye, but this book…

The rushing in my ears subsided and I looked at him for an explanation. “Where did this book come from?”

“A rummage sale.”

Running my fingers over the aged, rust-colored cover and binding, I stared at it. Then it hit me. I’d seen the book before. “This didn’t come from a rummage sale.”

“This is your journey, Kellen. Not mine,” Tai said.

I continued to stare at the book, trying to remember where I had seen it.

Opening my eyes, I looked at Tai. “This book belonged to my father, Stephen St. James.” Swallowing, I set the volume down on the table. “How did you get it? Do you know my father?”

“Never mind that,” came Tai’s gruff reply.

“Tai…”

“Forget about it!” His voice seemed to have a steel edge. Many would have taken it as a warning, but if he had information about my family, then it was probably valuable.

“Do you know about
your
father’s past?” I asked, changing course.

Thinking this over for a moment, Tai smiled. “He was quite a character.” Sipping his tea again, he said nothing more.

“At least you know,” I said. “My father just went bad. He started trying to kill people. It was like something just happened to him to turn him the wrong way. He committed my mother to a mental institution and she was just as sane as you or I. She died there.”

Pain squeezed my heart as my mind fed me imagined images of my mother in that institution. She’d found peace; she’d told me so in Faerie. At that moment, sitting in Tai’s house, I could recall meeting her again in vivid detail.

“My mother is dead. How can you be her?” I’d asked. Traveling through Faerie had been beyond overwhelming. I wanted to believe what I was seeing, but I didn’t know if I could trust it.

“Kellen, I’m dead in a sense. But in Ireland, many believe that when you die, you go to the faeries. That’s where I am now. We are in the realm of Contentment, but I call it Heaven,” my mother had said. She’d opened her arms wide then, letting me step into them. “Shh.” She’d held me close, rubbing my back the way I remembered from my childhood.

Tai reached over and touched my shoulder, pulling me out of my reverie, then came over to sit next to me. I pulled my mind back to the present, to the more pressing nightmare.

Tai had brought with him a small teapot that I hadn’t noticed before and poured me a fresh cup. Picking the cup up off the hearth, he handed it to me. The tea scalded my tongue as I drank it. Tai set the teapot down and placed a colorful rooster tea cozy on top of it.

“I’ve never run into anyone that had known Stephen before that I trusted…but I trust you,” I said.

“Why would you go and do something like that?” Tai’s voice held a note of humor, and I had the feeling he was messing with me.

Should I ask him again? Leaning forward, I opened my mouth to begin again, trying to imagine what I could do to convince him. Would I need to rehash the entire story of my mother and Faerie? Tai’s voice startled me from my thoughts and I turned to look at him.

“We were from the same village, your da and me. We didn’t have the same friends, but we knew each other, sometimes went at one another’s throats.”

“You knew my Gran? My Grandda?”

“Aye. I knew your Grandda a bit better, but your Gran…ah, she was a looker,” he said, nostalgia in his voice. Clearing my throat, I shifted uncomfortably, waiting. “Anyway, when Stephen was young—”

“How young?” I asked.

“About eight, maybe? Anyway, he disappeared. We’d been talking and walking together on the lane after church, and I was telling him about the wee folk that I’d heard the night before. It was a full moon and I could hear their flutes from my window, see. Your Da, he kept telling me that he didn’t believe, that he wasn’t sure they were real. Your Gran, bless her, kept trying to tell him, but he would not listen to a word of it. He bragged that he was going out to climb into a rath that very night.”

A rath was a faerie fort, sort of a gateway to their world. They were supposedly all over Ireland. You didn’t go looking for them unless you were looking for trouble. Swallowing another gulp of tea, I found that it had cooled slightly and I could now drink it comfortably.

“He wanted me to walk up to the thing with him. He’d found it when he was playing with his friends. I would not go, though. I could feel the evil from the thing, the badness of it. He made fun, of course, but I still wouldn’t go near it. I told him not to, either. I went home. The next day he was missing. His parents were mad with worry, just mad with it. I knew that he went and climbed into the rath at night. His poor parents.”

“He sounds…normal.”

“Oh sure, he was a nice lad. He was always helping others out. Very kind. Just a little too adventurous for his own good, he was. Oh, and his mother…he would have done anything for her, even as he got older. He just adored her.”

“So what happened? He got out, of the rath, I mean, so everything must have turned out all right.”

“No.
Something
got out. But it wasn’t young Stephen, I can tell you that.”

Tai’s words floated around in my mind as I tried to process this.

“He wasn’t ever the same afterwards. He was…different.”

Was that why Stephen had been so rude, so condescending to my Gran? He went to Faerie? If that was the case, why hadn’t that happened to me when I went down there? Had I changed? Was I like that to others but the same to myself?

“Tai, I’m sorry to bother you with all of these questions about my father when I should have been learning about the second part of the prophecy.”

Clearing his throat again, Tai stood up, his tea gone. “This all has a lot more to do with the second part of the prophecy than you think.”

A feeling of dread settled in the pit of my stomach. How much more was there to know? More important, what would I find out?

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CALI—
ATTACK

“
Okay, you were a goddess for years, Cali. Surely you can figure out how to run a steel beast,” I said aloud as I sat inside the vehicle that I was borrowing at Walter’s urging. The frigid interior of the car did little to protect me from the wind and I shook violently, afraid that Cana might appear beside the car at any moment and kill me. Sure, I could burn her if I needed to. Yet something told me that I needed to keep the element of surprise on my side until the last possible moment.

Something about the car jogged my memory and I remembered Kellen telling me to look for instructions in the air-o-plane bathroom. Maybe this thing came with instructions? Searching around inside the car, I looked everywhere, in every possible niche.

“Ridiculous.” Surely, people forgot how to drive from time to time and needed to be reminded? But no, there were no instructions. “Ahh!” Screaming in frustration, I put my head down on the round part coming out of the front of my seat. Kellen was alive, but possibly not for long.
There isn’t time! This isn’t fair! Why did this have to happen to us?

Closing my eyes, I imagined that I held Kellen in my arms, breathing in his scent, rubbing my cheek against the rough wool of the sweater he’d worn that day. Wrapping my arms around myself, I hugged my body tightly, trying to remember and trying not to fall apart. I couldn’t fall apart, not yet. Not until Kellen was safe.

A rapping at the window caught my attention and a scream nearly escaped my lips. A man stood there, making an odd downward motion.

“What are you trying to tell me?” My brow furrowed as I tried to understand, but the man just shook his head and kept pointing down. Resigned, I tried to get out, but I found I didn’t know how to open the door. Putting my head down on the wheel in frustration, I whispered, “I don’t know what to do!”

The click of the door alerted me that the gentleman at the window was either now going to help me or possibly kill me. A gentleman with a kind face had opened the door and now crouched down beside me. Lifting my head, I met his eye. “Are you going to kill me?”

Though his face was barely visible in the light of the full moon that shown against his tall frame from the back, the whites of his eyes stood out in relief in the darkness. “Um…no. It’s just that you seemed a little confused.”

“Who are you?” I asked. I stared hard at this man, trying to affix him with a mean glare in the event that he’d lied about wanting to kill me. He shrank back a bit as though afraid of me.

“I’m…I’m Fred. I live in this house and this is my car that you’re trying to…um…borrow.” Swallowing, he stepped back a bit more.

“I left a note.” My voice had an irritated tone to it that I hadn’t intended.

“Thanks for that note that you left me. That was a very nice note. I’ve never seen handwriting that pretty before,” he said.

My temper interfered with my brain, causing it not to function. Kellen was in danger and this man, no matter how polite, blocked my way. At least he would have if I had any idea about how to run the car.

“Walter told me that I could borrow this car, that you wouldn’t mind.”

His eyes seemed to widen again. “Oh, you’re one of
them…
”

I wasn’t sure what he met by one of
them
. Maybe one of the faeries? Either way, he seemed to fear the group that he referred to as
them
. It made sense to use that to my advantage.

“You refer to the fey, the faeries?” I asked. “You know about us, then?”

“I know nothing. I don’t want to be…uh…I don’t want to be involved.” He bounced uneasily, rolling on the balls of his feet as though he felt too cold to stand still.

“Yes, I am, then,” I said.

His emotions seemed to be warring with one another—probably his need to protect his car versus  his need to protect himself. “Would you like me to help you?” Fred asked, making some sort of odd hand motion.

Considering my newfound power, I thought about speeding things up by scaring him just a bit. Maybe I’d set fire to something small…Then I chided myself that no matter how I intended it, it would be an abuse of power.

Pushing the idea to the back of my mind, I decided to try for a different approach. Letting the tears fall, I watched this man’s eyes widen yet again and his hands come up in front of him. “Now, now. It can’t be that bad. What can I do to help you?”