Not sure if he should chance answering her, he nodded. When Mildred turned to look at him, he nodded faster. She called him a dolt, a name that he himself had told her about just this day. Not saying a word, not so’s she could hear, he sat at the table and asked if he could have a sampling of the bread there. To him it was a right shame that a man had to ask for a sampling of bread in his own home, but wisely he didn’t comment on that either.
“Charlie, she’s got some trouble coming her way soon. I saw it in the tea.” He asked her about that, knowing that she’d pound him for it. But all she did was turn and look at him, fear in her eyes. “I don’t know what will be coming, but it will surely be the death of me if she doesn’t come through it.”
“All of us, love.” O’Reilly pulled her into his arms, sneaking a bit of butter from the crock for his bread as he did so. “But, as you said, Dominic is there with her now. Perhaps they’ll work together and figure this out. I’d surely hate to have to tangle with her on her best days. Are you sure you shouldn’t be worrying about whatever is coming for her?”
O’Reilly had forgotten to swallow before speaking, and he’d nearly had to die with a hunk of buttered bread in his gullet when Mildred shoved him to the floor. She was powerfully mad, and he grabbed the first thought in his head before he died right where he laid.
“He’s not a human. Dominic is a wolf. Just like you are, my love,” She was in mid stance to pour the rest of the butter from the warmed crock on his head. “He reminded me that he was a wolf the other morn. Since you can’t shift when you’re here with me, I guess I plum forgot about it. And that in his family they have all sorts of shifters. One of them is the Death Watcher.”
“Death Watcher? My goodness, O’Reilly. What will that mean for the two of them? They’ll surely need it all, I’m thinking.” He asked her again who was coming for them. “Her mother and father. They’ve found out, you see.”
“No. No, we never told a soul. You and I, we’re the onlyest ones that know, Mildred. Who told them?” She shook her head, telling him that she’d not a clue. “Does she know, you think? Does Charlie have an idea?”
“Nay, I would have been known that too. She would have asked me why I’d not told her.” That was true. Charlie would have come first thing she knew to find out the particulars. “I have all her things here too. The things that we found with her.”
It had been a lie about finding her in the water swept crib. She’d been in a bed, but not in the one that she’d been laid in that night. Nay, a witch had found her, a dying witch that had given Charlie all that she was.
Charlie had been too young to take it all, but had been getting it, a great deal of it, over the years. Now she was set to get the last of it, plus the knowledge of what had really happened that night. And when she found out, it was going to be just horrible. Not for her—the younger woman would handle it—but for her parents. They’d be in for it, for sure.
The rain and storm had been conjured up by them when the witch, holding onto little Charlie, had been found. Both he and his misses had a lot of magic, and between the two of them, they’d made the storm pass through the town to hide what they could. The cleaning up had sort of led them to find Charlie, and the place where they’d put her after the witch had gone to ground to heal. But it was all a lie, all of it.
“Do we tell her? And Dominic? He’ll need to know, don’t you be believing that? I mean, he’ll have to know what sort of people that he’d be dealing with.” Mildred told him that she’d not a clue. “Me either, love. Me either.”
The night that they’d been out hunting for night shade to dry, it had been nearing the witching hour when they heard the calls of the babe, then that of the witch. Hurrying to the sound, they found Charlie in the witch’s bed, the witch’s body a bloodied mess. The witch had suffered worse, and they both knew her to only be hanging onto life until they came to find them. She told them the story of how she’d come to have the child and what had happened to them both. Charlie had been as near to death as the witch.
“They were set to kill her. Dropped her in the waters just like she was nothing more than a stone, skipping across the water.” O’Reilly had tried his best to stop the bleeding, but it had been much too late for the woman. As she continued to talk, telling them the tale, blood poured from her ears, nose, and mouth. “When I happened upon them, they were binding her in a rope, the one there. And when the man swung the child into the quick moving water, I jumped in to get the poor babe.”
“Why would they do such a thing? Was it their child?” The witch told Mildred that it was. She could smell the smell of new birth on the mother. The father too, but not as strong. “And they wished to kill their child? For what reason?”
“I know not.” She coughed more and laid very still. Thinking that she had passed, Mildred had reached for the child when the witch grabbed her hand and looked right at his wife. “You must keep her safe. I have given her all that I am to save her. She must live. They know not what they have tossed away. She is special.”
For the rest of the night the witch had told them about how they’d come to be hurt like they were. The father of the child had taken a long blade to them both, cutting them to ribbons because he wished for his child not to be saved. The mother, the child’s blood still upon her body, had tried to strangle it when she tore it from the witch’s arms.
It was a tale that O’Reilly knew he’d think about for the rest of his life, and that he’d tell no one. Not that nary a sole would believe him. To their kind, children were the blessings that a family hoped for. A part of their lives that would live on long after they had gone to ground in a faerie garden made just for them.
Stitching the child up, they were both sure that she’d die soon after, and quietly made arrangements to bury her in their own little cemetery so that no one would know the horrible people that had lived among them.
They stayed with the witch for the rest of the dark night. When it was nearing the sun to rise up, she told them what to do. They had to save the child. The witch gave them the magic that they’d need to make it look as if the babe had been found near the waters.
The storm blew up quickly and harshly. The home of the witch, along with the home of Charlie’s parents, had blown away in it. The sticks and stones of both homes were gathered up when it was over, and pieces of it, small ones that had the mark on them, were stashed away as well. They had no idea why that was important, but did as they’d been told.
Then they took the broken baby bed and threw it in the waterway, and as carefully as they could, put the child in the tree high enough that nothing would harm her. The smell of blood, they knew, would attract all sorts of animals. And that was when Bear came to be friends with the infant Charlie.
“We have to tell Dominic about all this. If Charlie’s parents find out that she lives, then they will come for her. I don’t know the reasons for it, but the witch told us that should they find out, we were to keep them from her at all costs.” Mildred said that she knew that. “Honey, I’m a feared for them both. I don’t know the why of it as yet, but I feel it’s going to be powerful bad when they come for her.”
They packed their bag and decided that first thing in the morn, they’d go to the mountain and see to this thing with Charlie and her new mate. O’Reilly was a feared, more so than he’d let his wife know. The O’Farrells, they weren’t people to mess with. He thought less about them than the O’Farrells did about Charlie.
Will and Dorcus O’Farrell had been bad when they arrived to their clan about a thousand years ago. He’d heard over the years that several such children as Charlie had been born to them. All had perished in one way or the other—all of them girls, and all of them with the fiery red hair of their kind. It had taken him until recently to figure out what the red hair had been a sign of.
The children had been scarified to a god, a god that Will and Dorcus seemed to think was real. Each of their children prior to Charlie had been killed just as they’d
been trying to do to Charlie. Held by their hand with a rope of magic, and then killed in one of the four elements—their offering, O’Reilly had figured out. Water was what Charlie had been about to die by. The other gods that they worshiped—earth, wind, and fire—had taken their payment in the form of their children, and it was only by the grace of the witch that Charlie had been saved. And when she had been, the payment to the water god had gone unpaid.
After two hundred years, Charlie didn’t have to choose between one world or the other; she would rule them both if she lived. But the god would demand his payment, his offering from her parents, in one form or the other. O’Reilly wasn’t sure what that was to mean either. Charlie had only one form as far as he knew, but he had been terrified that it meant something more. And that the god would come for her.
But the only thing that he’d been about to find that had been good news was that her own parents, Will and Dorcus, would have to try once again to offer their child. And so long as they had had no knowledge of her to be alive, then she’d be safe. But they knew now and there was a reckoning coming, and Dominic was going to be in the middle of it.
“I brought the rope with me, and the pieces. You think she’ll know what to do with it?” O’Reilly said that he didn’t know. “I hope she does. I surely do. But leaving it at our home when we was away, I feared that they’d find it. And the witch, she told us, they canna have it.”
“No, you be right in that. They canna have it.”
He shivered when they got to the dark trees that surrounded the mountain. He wasn’t chilled, but he could feel the evilness coming. Perhaps it was only his fear making him feel it, but O’Reilly knew that it would be coming, and both worlds would suffer unduly.
Before You Go…
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Kathi Barton, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement award as well as a best-selling author on Amazon and All Romance books, lives in Nashport, Ohio with her husband Paul. When not creating new worlds and romance, Kathi and her husband enjoy camping and going to auctions. She can also be seen at county fairs with her husband who is an artist and potter.
Her muse, a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Hugh Jackman, brings her stories to life for her readers in a way that has them coming back time and again for more. Her favorite genre is paranormal romance with a great deal of spice. You can visit Kathi online and drop her an email if you’d like. She loves hearing from her fans. [email protected].
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