Authors: Jennifer Fallon
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘She likes me.’
Pete shook his head at his brother’s eternal optimism wondering, if they were so much alike to look at, how they could be so different in so many ways. ‘She smiled at you at last year’s Christmas party, idiot. That doesn’t mean she likes you. It just means she was hitting the eggnog a bit too hard.’
‘Hey … if the eggnog gets me an exclusive …’
‘You have absolutely no morals or integrity, Logan.’
‘Takes one to know one, Pete.’ His brother grinned at him, punching his arm playfully. ‘
Identical
twins, remember?’
Pete stared at Logan for a moment and then shook his head as the hazy memory of what had happened to him last night began to coalesce into some semblance of a useful recollection.
Jesus wept! There’s two of you!
His driver had just said that when Logan — Pete’s twin brother — stepped in front of the patrol car. Pete remembered saying exactly the same thing driving away from St Christopher’s last night, just before some dark-eyed apparition appeared in the front seat and cold-cocked him into unconsciousness.
That’s it! There’s two of them.
Impulsively, he hugged his brother, suddenly grinning. ‘Thanks, bro.’
‘For what?’ Logan asked, immediately suspicious of Pete’s smile.
‘Can’t explain. I’ll see you later.’ He turned for the car, anxious to be gone. He had some checking to do. He’d find something to prove it to Inspector Duggan. Something to prove it to himself. ‘You gonna be at Mamó’s birthday on the weekend?’
‘Of course,’ Logan said. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Should be,’ Pete said, climbing back into the car. ‘I’ll see you Saturday night.’
He slammed the car door before Logan had a chance to ask him anything further, and told the constable to drive off. Logan stared at him suspiciously for a moment through the windscreen and then stepped back to let the patrol car pass, moving George out of the way, as the cameraman concentrated on filming as much as he could of the investigation across the fairways.
Pete leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He already had a headache, but couldn’t imagine going home yet. Even if he wanted to, he knew he’d never sleep. Not now.
Logan had nailed it.
Jesus wept! There’s two of you!
Chelan Aquarius Kavanaugh — adopted son of the famous actress, Kiva Kavanaugh, spoiled brat and escaped fugitive on the run from a charge of murder and now kidnapping — had an identical twin brother, and Pete Doherty, one way or another, was going to find him and prove he wasn’t seeing double.
Trása’s escape from the samurai compound had come at a cost. She’d lost some tail feathers to that beast of a dog and one of the arrows loosed in her direction had grazed her wing. Unsteady and shaken, she flew on in agony, grateful, nonetheless, that the injuries had not damaged her flight feathers. If that had happened, she might as well have stayed with Rónán, let them slit her throat and feed her remains to the mastiff.
It would have been a quicker and much less painful way to die.
She flew far from the torch-lit compound, deep into the
kozo
forest, before she felt safe enough to land, despite the injury to her wing. At least her avian eyesight gave her an advantage. Trása needed to find somewhere to transform, something she couldn’t do if she simply landed high in the branches of a tree and tried to change there. Turning back into a human might break the branch she’d landed on and send her plummeting to the ground.
Not much point in escaping one death — so it had been drilled into her in
Tír Na nÓg
— simply to find another by being careless.
Of course, that was assuming she
could
resume her true form. Trása might be trapped as a bird here just as easily as she was in
her own realm. The magic in this reality was strong. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if Marcroy’s curse held power here too.
Trása wouldn’t know, however, until she tried to change. If she could change without a problem, then it would be safe to change back into a bird again, and see if she could help Rónán.
Exhausted and in agony from her wounded wing, she spied a clearing in the vast forest that seemed far enough away from any signs of human habitation to make it safe to land on the ground. There was no telling what animal dangers lurked beneath the forest canopy. Her owlish eyesight was excellent, but she couldn’t see through the leaves to know if a fox or a vole lurked beneath, waiting for an owl foolish enough to land on the forest floor. Trása would need to transform as soon as she landed. Before anything big enough to view her as edible came along and decided it was time for breakfast.
The clearing was small and shadowed as Trása swooped toward it, the rising sun yet to find the forest floor. She circled it a few times to ensure it was clear of predators, before coming in to land on the leaf-strewn ground. As soon as her claws touched the moist carpet of rotting vegetation, Trása imagined herself as human again.
A moment later she was standing in the clearing, naked, shivering, bleeding from a flesh wound on the underside of her upper arm, but filled with a relief so intense she wanted to cry. Gasping, she checked herself over, thrilled to discover the only injury was the arrow-nick. Unharmed, but cold and filled with an insatiable hunger — common for shifters changing from a form that needed much less food than another.
Trása healed the arrow wound with a thought. It had been intensely painful when she was trying to fly with a wounded wing, but it was barely noticeable now she was human again. She was freezing. It was just on dawn and she had nothing to wear until she could steal some clothes.
That meant finding a human settlement of some kind.
That in itself was a straightforward exercise. She merely had to fly around until she spotted a village or a farmhouse from the air. There would be a washing line somewhere, with clothes she could appropriate without being seen. Of course, the problem she would have then was carrying those clothes back to where they were holding Rónán prisoner, so she didn’t have to rescue him while stark naked.
What she needed was a
Leipreachán
. A lesser
sídhe
who could vanish and reappear at will. Then she could make him carry her clothes wherever she needed them.
The thought made her hesitate, as it occurred to Trása she was standing in the middle of a vast forest in a realm steeped in magic, and yet there was no sign of a single
sídhe
— lesser or otherwise. In Trása’s realm, if a magical creature had landed in a forest and transformed from animal into human form, there’d be curious lesser
sídhe
come to investigate. They couldn’t help themselves. Faerie were curious beyond reason, and instinctively drawn to others of their kind.
Were they too terrified to approach? Was she so strange to these foreign
sídhe
that she frightened them? Had the rift implosion that brought Trása and Rónán here blown them across the world, as well as across realities? Had they landed in this realm’s version of Japan? Were they in a place where her long blonde hair and pale skin marked her, not as Faerie, but as an alien creature they didn’t know or recognise?
Shivering, Trása cocked her head, straining to hear the tell-tale signs of
sídhe
in the undergrowth — but there was nothing. The first rays of the sun were kissing the leaves in the upper reaches of the forest canopy. How could that be? This world was drenched with magic. Trása breathed it in with every breath. It oozed out of her every pore. How could it not be swarming with every kind of
sídhe
?
Her forehead creased with concern. That heartless bitch in the gorgeous kimono, who so casually ordered her samurai to slit Trása’s throat, had called Trása
Youkai
in a voice fairly dripping with contempt. The
Youkai
were the Faerie of Japan and the Korean peninsula in Trása’s realm. She’d met a few of them back in her own reality, when they had come to
Sí an Bhrú
to pay their respects to what was left of the Undivided. They had seemed proud and exotic creatures, not unlike her own kind, and somewhat disdainful of humans.
Their contempt had seemed odd at the time, but now — with this apparent lack of any other
sídhe
— it was positively frightening. Where were the
Youkai
? They had to be here somewhere, Trása reasoned, because there was too much magic for them to be extinct. She had visited worlds where the
sídhe
had been annihilated … the reality Rónán had been sent to by her father was one. Here, though, she could taste magic on the very air. There ought to be
Youkai
giggling behind every bush, hiding in every tree and lurking under every blade of grass.
‘It’s okay,’ she called out, turning a slow circle to see if she could coax someone out of the forest. Things would be easier for her and Rónán too, if she could enlist the help of her own kind to set about rescuing him. ‘I won’t hurt you! Look! I’m
Youkai
, too.’
She repeated her call in the rusty Japanese she’d been imprinted with months ago but never had reason to use until now. It was greeted with the same eerie silence as the call in her native tongue. Trása waited for some time, knowing that shyness sometimes overrode the curiosity of the lesser
sídhe
, but there was no answer. The forest was silent. In the distance she could hear the birds who made their homes among the
kozo
trees chattering among themselves, but it was the chatter of real birds greeting the rising sun, not magical creatures hiding in bird form.
Trása was at a loss about what to do next. She had never visited a magical world where there were no Faerie. Even in
Ren’s reality, where the magic was almost non-existent, she’d had a
Leipreachán
to help her, although until now she’d never really considered Plunkett O’Bannon’s annoying presence to be actually helpful. She was a little shocked to think she was missing him now.
Where could the
Youkai
be? Had the humans imprisoned them? The woman in the red kimono hadn’t used magic the way Trása was accustomed to, but had folded a piece of paper into a shape first, and the magic seemed to have been released when it disintegrated into dust at her command. That made less sense to Trása than the missing
Youkai
.
Trása’s stomach rumbled. She felt hollow inside, but she wasn’t convinced it was just because she was hungry. Filled with uncertainty, she shivered again. Despite the rising sun, it was chilly in the clearing and she still had nothing to wear. She needed to get out of here. Now she was sure she could change shape at will, Trása had one less thing to worry about, and she would be warmer in bird form with feathers to protect her and much less body mass to heat than she would as a human. With her arm now healed, she should be able to fly safely enough, but with daylight approaching, and the samurai on the lookout for a large white owl, she decided it wasn’t a good idea to change back into the bird form she favoured.
She closed her eyes for a moment, wondering if she could recognise the call of any of the other birds in the forest. She would be much less conspicuous in daylight if she could blend with the local bird population. Trása wasn’t even sure if she was still in Eire, although some aerial surveillance would tell her soon enough. Sailing around the skies in the middle of the day disguised as a common barn owl might draw unwanted attention if they weren’t indigenous to the area.
At the sound of a raucous call Trása would have recognised anywhere, she smiled. It was a seagull. They must be close to
the sea here. Gulls were easy to emulate: they could fly long distances, were sociable, unafraid of humans and likely to go unremarked when hanging around a human settlement. The samurai would think her nothing but a precocious scavenger if she assumed the form of a gull and flew back to the compound where they were holding Rónán.
And maybe, if she were lucky, someone would toss her some food.
Trása closed her eyes again and formed the image of a seagull in her mind. A moment later, plump, white and grey, she launched herself upward toward the rising sun to search out Rónán, her delicately grey-tinted wings flexing in the faint breeze.
It was time to see what she could do to save the only man in this reality capable of saving her.
Riding around in the trunk of a car, even one as roomy as a Bentley, Darragh was starting to feel as if the world was closing in on him, a feeling in no way helped by the fact that Sorcha — who should have been protecting Rónán, wherever he was — lay curled up beside him like a spooning lover, muttering to herself in her native tongue about the indignity of it all.
Darragh had no way of knowing how long they’d been trapped in the back of Rónán’s mother’s car. He didn’t know if it was day or night. He had no way of knowing how similar her chauffeur, Patrick Boyle, was to his alternate reality version — Amergin. Would Patrick betray them in the same way Amergin had so heinously in their own realm? The police here wanted his twin brother, Rónán, and for all Darragh knew, Patrick was helping them. He and Sorcha might well be on their way to the nearest Gardaí station.
When Patrick opened the trunk to let them out, Darragh and Sorcha might be safe. Or they might be arrested.
‘This was a foolish idea,’ Sorcha growled, as they hit another bump that forced an involuntary grunt from both of them. She shifted a little, trying to get comfortable. ‘This man you have placed your trust in is Amergin’s
eileféin
. He will betray you as surely as Amergin did.’
Darragh shook his head in the darkness, refusing to believe it. The trunk smelt of carpet and petrol fumes. ‘Patrick is like a father to Rónán,’ he whispered, not sure if their voices would carry to the passengers in the car, who had no idea — Darragh hoped — there were stowaways aboard.