Haunting Embrace (36 page)

“What was that about?” Jamie asked.

“Eamonn has never known peace,” Áedán said. “Not from within or from without.”

Meaghan narrowed her eyes. It was a nonanswer, a talent Áedán wielded with great skill. She’d grown used to the avoidance tactics, but Jamie wasn’t having any of it.

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him trying to change history could bring disasters worse than those we have endured. He did not agree.”

Before Jamie could question Áedán further, the door slammed once more and rapid steps flew up the stairway. Kyle burst into the room out of breath and red-faced.

“Get away from her,” he said in a low, angry voice.

Áedán, Jamie, and Meaghan all stared at Kyle in surprise. His rage gave him a wild-eyed appearance that reminded her of the flat glitter she’d seen in Cathán’s cold gaze. But there was nothing cold about Kyle. He looked like an inferno ready to incinerate anything in its path.

“Kyle, what—”

“Get away from him, Meaghan. He’s not who he says.”

“I know who he is.”

“Do you know
what
he is?”

“He said he’s the Druid, Kyle,” Jamie answered, obviously taken aback by the passion and wrath he read in his friend. “I think we need him if we’re going—”

“Need him?” Kyle repeated, spinning to face Jamie. “
Need
him? Did he tell you he killed Mickey Ballagh last night? In cold blood?”

“No, you’re wrong—” Meaghan said, but once more, Kyle cut her off.

“I
saw
him do it. I saw him stab Mickey to death. Without provocation. Without remorse. And then he came after me.”

Stunned, Meaghan tried to grasp what he said. He was wrong. Of course he was wrong.

She said, “Áedán was with me last night.”

“I saw him leave the Pier House,” Kyle went on. “I was worried for you, Meaghan, so I followed him. He waited for Mickey in the shadows and then he killed him. He stabbed him until he was nothing more than a bloody hunk of flesh.”

“No,” Meaghan insisted. “He was with me.”

“After he killed Mickey, Meaghan,” Kyle insisted. “He came to you after.”

She shook her head, but Kyle looked so certain. So intense.

“I followed him to your door,” he finished in a low, certain voice.

Áedán was watching her, and when she jerked her gaze from the space between them to meet his eyes, he saw the doubt that she didn’t want to feel but couldn’t seem to hold back. It crowded in for a fleeting second, but that’s all it took. She felt his awareness of it in the wash of cold that iced his emotions. Suddenly he stood and took a step away from her.

“You thought you could get away with it,” Kyle said. “But I see what you are. You were evil when you were trapped in the Book, and you are evil now. Evil to the core. She’s too good to see it in you, but I see. I know what you are.”

“Son of a bitch,” Jamie said under his breath. He stood as well and moved to box in Áedán between them.

“You’re wrong,” Meaghan said, but Áedán took another step back.

She felt she stood at the epicenter of a giant quake that had yet to do more than rumble beneath the surface. Soon it would begin to rattle the foundations of everything she knew, everything she loved.

Áedán’s eyes looked like a glacial pond, filled with pale greens and frozen gold beneath a layer of grime. Jamie reached out and Áedán spun around, backing to the stairs as Kyle and Jamie closed in. Kyle lunged and grabbed at the same time that Jamie charged and struck. Meaghan felt a pull of energy swirl through the room, knew it was Áedán gathering power from the air, from the rumbling storm that hovered around the lighthouse, from her. And then he fired it back with a string of words that sounded more ancient than the pyramids and more lethal than gunfire.

Jamie and Kyle both flew across the room, knocked off their feet by the blast. Meaghan felt a hot wind whisk against her skin. It lifted her hair and blew it away from her face. Dry and blistering, it singed her eyes and made her close them in defense.

When she opened them again, Áedán was gone.

Chapter Twenty-five

K
YLE didn’t want Meaghan to leave the lighthouse after Áedán vanished, but she refused to stay hidden like some cursed fairytale princess in a round tower. Kyle’s impassioned accusations had shaken her, had made her doubt for just an instant, but almost at once, she’d realized how foolish her misgivings about Áedán had been. She didn’t know what Kyle had seen or thought he’d seen, but she did know she trusted Áedán. She needed to find him.

Even if Kyle had told the truth and Áedán
had
killed Mickey, he hadn’t done it in cold blood no matter how it had appeared to Kyle. Meaghan knew this in her soul, and she berated herself for letting Kyle’s accusation spin her into doubt. Whether Hoyt or Áedán had ended Mickey’s life, the fundamental fact remained that she
knew
Áedán, and he was not evil.

And if Áedán had lied about the killing . . . well, look where the truth had gotten him so far in his life. He was the Druid Brandubh. He had enough baggage for ten people. Her uncertainties had only confirmed his fears that history was repeating itself. His fear that Meaghan, like Elan, would have too little faith in him to see them through.

Dejected, Meaghan left the lighthouse as Jamie and Kyle argued over what they should do next. She hurried to the docks, thinking Áedán would return to
The Angel
. The storm overhead churned with a gusting wind that bit to the bone.

As she crested the last rise that led down to the docks, Meaghan paused. The harbor below swarmed with people moving to and fro. The Pier House doors stood open and overflowing. She knew the murder of Mickey Ballagh had stirred up the small town, but it looked like every soul who lived there had ventured out beneath the brooding storm. Slowly she approached, feeling like an alien in a world that no longer made sense. People turned and watched her with hard eyes that glittered flatly.
Cathán’s eyes,
she thought with panic, but it seemed that everyone had them, and the sheer impossibility of that made her certain she must be wrong.

She veered away from the masses to the dock where
The Angel
berthed.

“Áedán,” she called, climbing aboard. But the ship was still, the door to the cabin shut. She peered in, seeing the rumpled sheets, remembering how it had felt to lie there in his arms. Frustrated she turned back and almost ran smack into Jamie. The black man stood in shadow, the storm above giving his skin a greenish tint. He must have followed her when she left the lighthouse without her realizing.

“Jamie, you startled me. I didn’t hear—”

Before she could finish, the boat swayed, the shadows shifted, and a glimpse of his face silenced her.

A long, bloody gash extended from his forehead to his brow, gaping and oozing as if his skull had been pounded until it cracked open. His right eye was shot with blood, sightless. The other shifted wildly back and forth. Deep cuts and bloody abrasions covered the skin of his face and throat. One arm hung at an awkward angle from his shoulder to flop uselessly at his side. She could see bone shards poking from the ripped and ghastly skin of the other. He tried to take a step forward, but his legs gave and he crumpled in front of her.

Meaghan screamed as his body hit the deck with a sickly splattering sound, and she fell back against the cabin door, trying to think past the terror and panic that shot through her blood.

In the next instant, he disappeared.

For a moment, she could only stare at the spot on the floor where he’d fallen, hiccupping with hysterics and an insane need to laugh and cry at the same time. Then she stumbled forward, foolishly taking a wide step over his nonexistent form before she raced across the deck and off the boat. Once her feet hit solid ground, she turned, backing away, still expecting Jamie to lurch over the railing like a zombie in a movie.

A man disembarked from a small fishing boat a few slips down and caught her eye. She didn’t know his name, but it didn’t matter because as she turned to face him, she saw the front of his shirt dripped red, and a blackened stain spread from a fist-sized hole in his chest. He reached a bloody hand out to her. Stifling her scream, she turned and saw that beyond him, others staggered toward her, reaching out, beseeching with glazed eyes.

She struggled to catch her breath, heard a wheezing sound and knew it came from her constricted chest and overinflated lungs. In another moment, she’d be hyperventilating or simply suffocating as her fear tightened like a noose around her throat. It took extreme effort to move her head and scan the bustle she’d mistaken for busy, gossiping people.

Now she saw the truth. They were dead. Every last one of them.

She heard Áedán’s voice, dark and smoky.
It began to incite that which we’d created it to prevent.

“God no,” she breathed.

Meaghan ran.

Her feet flew over the uneven terrain as she raced away from the docks toward her grandmother’s house. Her heart beat so fast it hurt, and her lungs burned, but she didn’t slow. She could feel
them
behind her, following, begging for something she couldn’t give. She stumbled but managed to stay on her feet as her terror closed tight around her. She wanted to look over her shoulder but was too afraid until at last Colleen’s house was in sight. Only then did she glance back.

The dirt road behind her was empty. No one chased her; no corpses lurked in the gray green dusk. Nothing but the sour tang of her own fear hung in the air.

“Feck,” she breathed, bending over and bracing her hands on her knees. She pulled in deep, painful breaths as she tried to slow her racing pulse. What the hell had just happened? It had seemed like the whole town had been stumbling after her with that disjointed gait of the dead.

Overhead a great clap of thunder reverberated, and with it came the echoing memory of Áedán’s words.

It drove the people of the village mad. Blood spilled between friends and family. Husbands turned on wives. Mothers murdered their children.

Was the Book doing that now? And was Meaghan, like Elan before her, destined to be the witness who could not change it?

Shaking, Meaghan went to Colleen’s, stopping before she entered to put the pendant in her hiding place to keep it safe until they needed to use it. By the time she opened the back door, her breathing had returned to normal, but her heart still pounded with fear and the need to
do
something. Where was Áedán? How would she cope if the next specter she saw belonged to him?

She refused to consider it.

The house was still and quiet when Meaghan moved through the kitchen, and only the uncanny silence and the lingering scent of despair waited in the air of the front room. Worried about her grandmother and the baby, she hurried upstairs, praying she’d find them sleeping peacefully. When she opened the bedroom door, she saw that both the crib and Colleen’s bed were empty.

The apprehension that had settled around her bones now sliced into the heart of her with the speed of a lightning strike.

“Colleen?” she called out, knowing it was pointless. No one was home. But she couldn’t help herself. “Nana?”

She didn’t hear an answer. The shadows seemed to crowd in with glee at her anxiety while the thunder added a dramatic boom that shook the windows. For a moment, Meaghan didn’t know what to do. She hurried back to the kitchen, looking for a note and finding none. Trying to quell her unease, she went out the front door and hesitated on the porch, unsure which way to turn. Where would Colleen go?

And where was Áedán? She felt his absence in the very heart of her. Since she’d opened her eyes here, Áedán had been with her, helping her navigate the treacherous waters of their new reality. Now he’d abandoned her, and she could blame only herself. She needed him. She’d come to rely on his calm strength, on his quiet wisdom. On the way he made her feel alive just by standing near.

The afternoon had taken on a sickly glow as the sun hid behind thick gray clouds and the storm swirled overhead without erupting. A wind blew with a forbidding howl that promised mayhem and disaster.

She went to Enid’s and knocked on the front door. Enid answered with a look of surprise.

“Meaghan, what is it?”

“Do you know where Colleen is?”

“You mean she’s not home?”

Meaghan shook her head, feeling her stomach plummet.

Enid hurried to reassure her. “I don’t know where she would have gone. Perhaps she needed some time alone, away from the house. People kept stopping by. . . .”

It was as good a reason as any, and yet Meaghan couldn’t quite believe it. “Thank you, Enid. I’ll let you know if I see her.”

With a worried nod, Enid closed her door and Meaghan returned to Colleen’s, but she didn’t go inside. She felt too keyed up and worried about her grandmother to simply wait for her return.

Even if Colleen had wanted to be alone, Meaghan couldn’t believe she would have left the house without at least scribbling a note. There was something not right about her being gone—something much deeper than just her absence, and no amount of rationalizing could convince Meaghan’s gut otherwise. She knew Colleen would not have headed into the small market where, at this time of day, people would be gathered, talking about the murder. Gossiping about the new widow. But where else would she have gone?

To Brion, perhaps? Maybe to plead Áedán’s case?

Pulling her borrowed coat around her, Meaghan headed toward the castle ruins and the house where Brion MacGrath lived, taking the path she’d walked just yesterday with Colleen and Áedán. The road seemed as desolate and barren as it had been the day before, and though no visions of Ballyfionúir’s dead residents visited her, she wished for Áedán’s company. She needed him. And she knew he needed her.

Where do you go, little witch?

The question boomed in her head and made her stumble. It was not Áedán who spoke, but the voice used the same seductive tone, murmuring
little witch
in a way that made it sound alluring and sexual. The way Áedán said it.