Shine

by Jeri Smith-Ready

Zachary leaned in, and I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead he pressed his cheek to mine and held it there. It felt more intimate than a kiss.

  “What did you say to me before?” I asked him. “In bed. In Gaelic.”

  He sat back and looked away. “Oh. That. There’s no exact translation.”

  “But roughly?”

  Zachary rubbed his lips, as if to keep them closed. “Naw, you’ll think it’s too much.”

  “Not possible.”

  His gaze came at an angle, slightly guarded but full of hope. “It means ‘soul mate.’ ”

  His words made my world spin faster. We weren’t the type to believe in destiny or soul mates or anything that took away our choices. But sitting here, seeing the gazebo’s glistening white lights dance in his eyes, I could believe in our magic.

  “It’s not too much,” I said. “It’s perfect. What were the words?”

  “Mo anam caraid,” he said slowly, pronouncing it mo AN-am CAR-idge.

  I repeated it after him. “I’m glad it’s something short. Can you write it down for me?” I pulled a felt-tip pen from my purse, then offered him the inside of my arm.

  He spoke as he scratched out the letters in neat script along the palest part of my skin. “Dunno if there are words in any language to properly explain how . . . together I feel, now I’m with you again.”

  I stared at him, flustered by his unusual openness. “Together?”

  “Like I was a pane of shattered glass, and you’re the only glue that’ll stick.” Zachary began to draw the final word, caraid. “It’s just started, this gluing, but it’s started.”

  He put the cap back on the pen and held it out. When I grasped it, he didn’t let go, but used it to pull me toward him into a lingering kiss.

  “Here we are,” the waitress said as she approached, shoes clomping the rough hardwood. We separated, attempting to look embarrassed. She gave us our pints, then took our meal orders, her eyes glinting with amusement.

  The live music started then, a traditional band with fiddle, accordion, and a dynamic acoustic guitar. Zachary and I sat shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, our heels tapping the floor.

  I was thirsty, so I drank the ale quickly. It went straight to my head, turning my contentment to fatigue—and soul-crushing sadness. It opened my ears and my heart to the fiddler’s mournful strains as he played a lament for those who’d passed on.

  My eyes burned, and my chest felt leaden. Guilt swamped me for thinking of Logan at a time like this.

  Zachary put his arm around my shoulder and spoke low in my ear. “It reminds you of him.”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  “This was his music.”

  I swallowed. “But I’m with you.”

  “You can’t fight memories. They come whether you look for them or not.” He kept his eyes on the musicians. “You’ve never asked about my meeting Logan.”

  The name hung heavy in the air between us. “He only told me that you’d talked. No details.”

  “He said he was going to find you, then leave this world with just you there. It was good of him.”

  I waited for Zachary to say more, which after a moment, he did.

  “He told me I was stupid, that if I really loved you, I should’ve tried harder to steal you away from him, and that I definitely shouldn’t have gone to the prom with Becca. I told him he was one hundred percent right.”

  “Did he know how rare it is for you to admit you’re wrong?”

  “Ha. He asked if I knew about your father. I said aye, I was there when she found out. I said I’d die before I told anyone your secret.” Zachary rubbed his chin and took a long sip of ale. “And then he apologized.”

  “For what?” I asked softly.

  “For not letting you go when he should have.”

  My throat closed up as I wondered what would’ve happened if Logan had passed on right after dying, or even within a few weeks.

  Would I have loved Zachary sooner? Would it have been too soon? Would we have broken up quickly because my heart hadn’t mended yet? Would we be here right now?

  “What else did he say?”

  A sly smile graced Zachary’s face. “He made me promise to do something for him.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a secret between us lads.”

  “Have you already done it?”

  “No.”

  “Is it something to do with me?”

  “A bit. Mostly him, though.”

  I wanted to ask Zachary what had happened next at the airport, about his capture and detainment. But he looked so serene, as if the peace inhabiting Logan on that last day had passed to him, a peace that returned at the mere memory of their conversation.

  “I’m glad he came to you,” I said, “and not just because it saved your life.”

  Zachary’s gaze dropped to my left hand resting on my lap. He laid his own on top of it, aligning our wedding bands. “Last summer, there were times when I almost . . . in any case, I kept going because I couldn’t let that happen to you again.”

  “Let what happen?”

  He didn’t look up. “Your heart broke when you lost Logan. If I didn’t make it—not that I thought I meant as much to you as he had—”

  “You did. You do.”

  “—and not that I don’t think you’re strong. But the thought of you crying over my . . .” He stopped short of the word “death” and shook his head forcefully. “No.”

  I folded my thumb tight over his. “Can you tell me what happened? Now that we’re together?”

  He lowered his chin, brushing his hair against my forehead. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Someday, I promise, if everything works out the way I hope.”

  “What can I do to make that happen? Please tell me. I’ll do anything.”

  “I can’t ask it of you. Not yet.” He took a deep breath, collecting himself, then sat back against the booth. “We’re here now, let’s enjoy that, a’right? It’s all that matters.”

  I wished it were true. I wished that all that mattered was us, here. Together. Free.

  Yet the damage done had become part of the fabric of Zachary’s soul. There would be no forgetting or avoiding. Only a journey through.

  But it was a journey he wouldn’t travel alone. His soul’s fabric was weaving itself with mine. I loved the frayed ends where it came unraveled, and I loved the strength at its firm, solid center.

  I loved every thread.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  By the time we got back to our room at the castle (where no one had broken in and gone through our stuff), I was almost too tired to walk. I took out my contacts and collapsed into bed in a T-shirt and sweatpants. Hotness personified.

  When Zachary slipped under the covers beside me, he said, “It’s midnight plus one minute. Happy birthday.”

  “Hay burray,” was my drowsy reply. Knowing touch would be more coherent than speech, I dug my fingers into his soft T-shirt and slid my feet against his flannel pajama pants.

  He drew me close and kissed my forehead. “Tha gaol agam ort.”

  I recognized the Gaelic for “I love you” he’d taught me on one of our chats. I made my tongue wake up enough to say it back, managing not to mangle the pronunciation, Ha gowl AKam orsht. As the last syllable faded, so did I, fast asleep.

  Jet lag and exhaustion had scrambled my brain-clock, so I woke up at four thirty a.m., even though that would’ve been my bedtime at home.

  I lay there, listening to Zachary’s deep, even, quiet breaths. Eventually I turned to watch him sleep, marveling at the smoothness of his brow, the stillness of his limbs, so different from the way Martin had described and the way I’d seen that night when Zachary had fallen asleep during our video chat.

  Suddenly a violet light seeped through our translucent balcony curtains, casting a glow into the living room area.

  I sat up in bed, excitement banishing exhaustion. This was the first ghost I’d seen in Ireland, thanks to Zachary’s n
ear-constant presence. By now it’d been hours since we’d kissed, so I’d returned to my normal, 100 percent post-Shifter state.

  Maybe this ghost would know something about Newgrange. Maybe it’d be old enough to remember what’d happened during the Shine.

  I slipped out of bed, grabbed my sweater, and hurried to the balcony door. The ghost had probably tried to come into the room itself and had been repelled by Zachary. From outside there was no direct view of the bed, so I parted the curtain in the middle to get a better look.

  The ghost was a middle-aged man in a classic Irish cap, like the ones worn by the older guys in the pub. His trousers were a bit baggy, as was his tweed coat. He could’ve been from any time, in the distant or recent past.

  I opened the door. “Hi.”

  He beamed and said something I couldn’t understand.

  “Uh, do you speak English?” I asked him.

  He scowled and began to rant, gesturing wildly.

  “Hang on.” I closed the door, then ran to the bed and almost pounced on Zachary, but stopped myself in time.

  Instead I crawled in next to him, snuggling close. “Zach, wake up.”

  “Can’t. Sleeping.”

  I pressed my mouth to his in a full, deep kiss.

  “Second thought, not sleeping.” He rolled me atop his body and kissed me hard, one hand full of my hair and the other sneaking up underneath my shirt.

  Though it tore my heart, I pulled away far enough to speak. “There’s a Gaelic ghost on the balcony.”

  Zachary blinked hard. “Heh?”

  “I think he speaks Gaelic. Obviously I don’t, so this is your interview.”

  His hands dropped to the bed with twin thuds. “That’s why you’re kissing me? Taking my red so I can have a chat with a ghost?”

  “Hurry.” I hopped off the bed, pulling his arm. “Ask him about Newgrange, ask him how long he’s been haunting this place, since before or after the Shift. Ask him anything.”

  “The dialect’s different here.” Zachary picked up his sweater from the back of the sofa, and the notepad and pen next to the room phone. He shuffled to the balcony doors, smoothing his pillow-tousled hair. “But I’ll try.”

  I sat cross-legged on the bed, listening to Zachary’s muffled foreign words through the door. At one point, he repeated the same phrase three times, slower with each pass. Either he had run up against a Scottish-Irish language barrier, or he couldn’t believe his ears and had to confirm what the ghost was telling him.

  Finally the violet glow disappeared. Zachary came back inside.

  I bounced off the bed. “Anything interesting?”

  “Aye.” He wiped his feet on the woven rug, and I realized he hadn’t put shoes on to go outside.

  “You must be freezing.” I handed him the green wool throw-blanket from the back of the chair. He took it from me, a dazed look on his face.

  “Must be hard to get used to,” I said. “Talking to ghosts?”

  “Aura, that wasn’t just any ghost.” He moved stiffly to sit on the love seat. “It was Padraig Murphy.”

  I sat down hard on the ottoman across from him. “Brigit Murphy’s son? The one my mom and dad said tried to raise the ancient gods on the day of the Shine?”

  “That Padraig Murphy.”

  “How did he know where to find us? How did he even know who we were?”

  “He said he had connections in the living world. Also, remember, my real name was on the original reservation for Ballyrock.” He shook his head. “Stupid of me, but back in March I didn’t know—”

  “So what did Padraig want?” I grabbed for the notepad, but Zachary pulled it out of reach.

  “Give me a moment tae think, lass.” He switched on the lamp and squinted at his notes. I knocked my knees together in my impatience. “Some of this could be wrong,” he said. “His accent was brutal, and the Gaelic around here is so different from Scottish.”

  “But . . .”

  “But he said a mistake was made. His mother did a ritual the morning of the Shine, trying to make the Tuatha Dé Danann—the ancient gods—rise again. They thought whoever was in the light at the moment of the solstice would give birth a year later to an incarnation of the day-god Óengus.”

  I gasped. “Just like we guessed! What’d he say about the mistake?”

  “He said the ritual awoke an even older power within Newgrange.”

  “Older than the Tuatha Dé Danann?” I tried to remember who had supposedly lived in Ireland before those legendary folks. “More superheroes?”

  “Not people. A gateway, between the living and the dead. A gateway that wasn’t meant to be opened.”

  “Whoa. That makes it sound like since the Shine, more people are becoming ghosts.” It fit with a theory we’d discussed after first reading my mother’s journal: that the Shine opened up the world of the living to those who’d died suddenly. Then the Shift gave those wandering dead a better chance at peace by giving them people to talk to—all us post-Shifters.

  “That wasn’t the only mistake. The power from the solstice sunrise was supposed to go into only one person.” He lowered the notepad into his lap. “But it split in two. It went into your mother and my father. Padraig saw it happen.”

  “He was there at the Shine, when they were filled with light? When Eowyn saw it?”

  “He worked as a guide at Newgrange. It was his idea to have visitors walk through the light. Some guides still do it, some don’t.”

  So Padraig Murphy had engineered the Shine, but instead of freeing the ancient gods, it had freed the dead—or at least some of them—in the form of ghosts.

  “That’s amazing!” I jumped to my feet, wishing I could tell the world what we’d just figured out. Except, I wasn’t totally sure what that was. “Hang on. What exactly got split between your dad and my mom?”

  Zachary paused, maybe translating in his head, and when he spoke, the words came slow. “Remember what Eowyn said about Newgrange being built for two purposes? To serve the dead, but also to separate them from the living.”

  “Right.” I hopped on my toes. “Oh! If the Newgrange power split between your dad and my mom, then each of us has one, I don’t know, manifestation of it? I help ghosts, and you scare them off.”

  “Usually.”

  “Did you tell Padraig we can trade powers when we kiss?”

  “Of course not,” Zachary said. “He seemed confused that we could both talk to him, but I distracted him with questions.”

  I paced behind the armchair, sliding my hand over its dark wooden frame. “So how do we know he’s not making it up?”

  “We don’t. We only know that he believes it, because ghosts can’t lie. There is a way to test it, though.”

  “How?”

  “He said we need to go to the Dowth passage tomb for the solstice sunset. Not this afternoon, because the twenty-first is the one day during the year Dowth is open to the public. Tomorrow, when we can go alone.”

  “Cool.” I’d wanted to go to Dowth, anyway. It was basically a mini Newgrange, but with two passages instead of one, and since it hadn’t been restored, it looked the way Newgrange had for thousands of years. “If it’s not open to the public, how do we get in?”

  “Padraig says the gate’s got just a padlock. Bolt cutters would do the job.”

  A thrill snaked up my spine at the thought of breaking into a historic monument. “Hey, the solstice is technically on the twenty-second, anyway, at like two a.m., so it’ll be the right day. But I still don’t understand why we need to go to Dowth.”

  Zachary hesitated, running his finger along the notepad’s spiral spine. “I asked him to repeat himself, because I wanted to make sure. He said, if we both go to Dowth at solstice sunset, we could shut the gate between the living and the dead.” He looked at me. “Aura, we could end the Shift.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Obviously, we didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Instead, we built another fire and sat together on the love seat
, sometimes speaking, sometimes silent, turning this mystery over in our minds.

  Could we really end the Shift? we wondered. Did we even want to? My lifelong dream was to make the ghosts go away—until Logan had died, haunting me and the others he loved. As painful as that had been for all of us, it had given him a chance at peace and closure he otherwise wouldn’t have had.

  “But don’t forget,” Zachary said, “before the Shift, some people still became ghosts. And a few others could see them.”

  I couldn’t forget that, not when my own father had haunted Aunt Gina, one of the few people who could see ghosts before the Shift (and who had lost the ability afterward).

  “It would be like turning the world back to normal,” I said. “But this is normal for me, for all post-Shifters.”

  “And how’s that working out for ya?” His voice held a bitter edge.

  I put my head on his shoulder, hoping it would comfort him. He’d probably suffered worse than any post-Shifter had. So far, at least.

  “The DMP draft starts today,” he pointed out. “Things are going to get really bad there in the States. Probably everywhere else, too.”

  “And we could stop it. Make it all go away.” We’d be doing the world a huge favor by ending the Shift.

  I checked the clock on the mantel: five thirty. Though sunrise wasn’t until almost nine, we had to arrive at Newgrange by seven thirty, and we’d probably get lost on the way.

  Time to get ready for the biggest day of our lives.

  I stood, then froze as a new thought hit me. “Zach, what if Padraig Murphy isn’t exactly right? What if it’s not the sunset at Dowth we need to be at to stop the Shift? What if it’s Newgrange at sunrise?”

  Zachary rubbed the faint stubble on his chin. “Maybe. That is where it all started, with your mum and my dad.” He gazed up at me. “Maybe it’ll end there, too.”

  We didn’t get lost on the way to Newgrange, and I decided to take this miracle as a sign that Zachary and I were meant to be there. (Even though it was his father’s connections that got us VIP tickets, so we wouldn’t have to go through the usual lottery.)

  Like in an enchanted gateway, frost-speckled lanterns lit our way down the arched arbor connecting the parking lot to the visitor center. Inside, the greeters gave us special solstice pins and offered us hot drinks while we waited for the bus that would take us to Newgrange itself. Zachary, of course, dragged me straight toward the visitor center exhibit, where I paced, overcome with excitement, while he absorbed facts he probably already knew.