“MacKayla,” he said gently. “How lovely you are. But I knew you would be. Letting you go was the hardest thing we ever did.”
“Who the hell are you?” I didn’t like him. Not one bit.
He extended a hand toward the person on the sofa.
She rose and stepped into the light.
I gaped.
Although time had worked delicate changes on her face, softening the jaw, brushing creases at the corners of the eyes and mouth, and her hair was much shorter now, barely brushing her shoulders, there was no doubt who she was.
Blond hair, blue eyes, beautiful. I’d seen her, twenty years younger, standing guard in a warded corridor at the abbey. She’d said: You do not belong here. You are not one of us.
I was looking at the last known leader of the Haven, Alina’s mother.
Isla O’Connor.
“How—what—” I stammered.
“Please forgive me.” The plea was soft in her words, anguished in her eyes. “You must know it was necessary. I had no choice.”
Barrons said, “You died. I saw you. You were in a coma. I went to your funeral.”
I jerked. He’d just confirmed it. She was Isla O’Connor. I didn’t know why I cared. She wasn’t my mother. Alina had been her only child. I was the Unseelie King.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
Barrons shook his head. “And one we’re not listening to.”
“But you must. Or you’ll make a terrible mistake,” Pieter said grimly. “And MacKayla will pay for it.”
“He’s right. We need to talk now, before it’s too late.” Isla didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off me. “You want to hear it, don’t you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t trust myself to speak. How did I keep getting so brutally blindsided by life? When we’d walked into the Silver, I’d fully expected to walk out the other side, get in a car, and go driving around, hunting for the Sinsar Dubh.
Not for one moment had I entertained the possibility that Isla O’Connor might be waiting for us in the bookstore, long black limousine parked out front, a wide-shouldered chauffeur by the passenger doors, scanning the street up and down. I was willing to bet that beneath that dark uniform I’d find a gun or two. What was the Triton Group, besides the company that owned the abbey? Why did Barrons dislike them so much? What was Isla—one more person who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t—doing here?
Her fine-boned features crumpled and tears spilled down her cheeks. “Oh, darling, giving you up was the hardest thing I ever did. If you will hear nothing else from me, hear that. You were my baby. My sweet, helpless baby, and they said you were going to doom the world. They would have killed you if they’d known about you! Both my daughters were in danger. We all knew about the prophecy. Knew it had been foretold that sisters would be born to one of the most potent bloodlines. Rowena was watching me. She’d hated me since the day my talents began to manifest. She wanted her daughter, Kayleigh, to become Haven Mistress, wanted the O’Reillys to run the abbey forever. She never forgave Nana for turning her back on the order. She would have done anything to get rid of me. If she’d known I was pregnant again … I had no choice. I had to give you up and go away, pretend to be dead.”
“You weren’t pregnant when I helped you leave the abbey,” Barrons said coolly.
“Nearly five months. I carried well and dressed to hide it. It was a miracle my baby wasn’t injured when I escaped. I was so afraid I would lose her.” More tears spilled.
I was still shaking my head. I didn’t seem to be able to stop.
“Oh, MacKayla! It was torture every day, knowing you were out there, being raised by someone else, knowing that I could never see you or Alina again without putting you in danger. But you’re here now, and you’re about to do something that would have terrible consequences. It’s time for the lies to stop. You need to know the truth.”
I shoved my fists in my pockets and turned away.
“Don’t turn your back on me,” she cried. “I’m your mother!”
“Rainey Lane is my mother.”
“Unkind and unfair,” Pieter said. “You aren’t even giving her a chance.”
“Why do you care?” I said irritably.
“Because I’m her husband, MacKayla. And your father.”
46
I had brothers: Pieter, Jr., who was nineteen, and Michael—everyone called him Mick—who was sixteen. They showed me pictures. We looked alike. Even Barrons seemed rattled.
“We staged your mother’s death, cremated a Jane Doe, and smuggled the two of you from the country. Took you to the States and did our best to find you a good home far from danger.” Pieter took Isla’s hand and clasped it between his own. “Your mother nearly didn’t survive it. She didn’t speak for months afterward.”
“Oh, Pieter, I knew it had to be done. It was just—”
“Hell,” he said flatly. “It was absolute hell giving them up.”
I jerked. They were saying all the things I wanted to hear. It was breaking my heart. I had parents. Brothers. I’d been born. I belonged. I only wished Alina had lived to see this day. It would have been perfect.
“You said you had something important to tell her. Say it and get out,” Barrons ordered.
I looked at Barrons, torn. Part of me wanted to tell him to be quiet so I could hear more, and part of me wanted them to go away and never come back. I’d just gotten my head wrapped around one reality. Now they wanted me to abandon that reality and embrace a new one. How many times was I supposed to decide who I knew and what I was, only to learn I was wrong? I was no longer feeling bipolar, I was feeling schizophrenic, with multiple personalities.
“If I’m your daughter, then why do I have memories that belong to the Unseelie King?”
Isla gasped. “You do?”
I nodded.
“I told you she might do it,” Pieter reminded.
“Who?” I demanded. “Do what?”
“The Seelie Queen came to see us shortly after the Book escaped, before we left Dublin. She said she would do everything in her power to help recover it,” Pieter said.
“She was very interested in you,” Isla said grimly. “You were barely three months old. I remember like it was yesterday. You had on a pink dress with tiny flowers and a rainbow hair ribbon. You couldn’t stop looking at her. You kept cooing and reaching for her. The two of you seemed fascinated by each other.”
“We were afraid then that the queen had meddled with you. She’s notorious for that. She looks to the future and tries to adjust minuscule events, nudging here and there to achieve her ends,” Pieter said. “A few times I was almost certain someone had been in your nursery moments before I walked in.”
“And you think she planted memories of the Unseelie King? How would she have any to plant? I thought she drank from the cauldron. It would have erased everything she knew.”
“Who could say with her?” Isla shrugged. “Perhaps they were false memories, cleverly crafted, or lifted from another. Perhaps she never truly drank from cauldron. Some say she pretends.”
“Who gives a fuck? What did you come here for?” Barrons said impatiently.
Isla looked at him as if he must be crazy. “You’ve been taking care of her, and for that we can’t thank you enough, but we’ve come to take her home.”
“She is home. And she’s got a world to save.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Pieter said. “It’s what we do.”
“Bang-up job you’ve been doing so far.”
Pieter gave him a look of rebuke. “Not as if you’ve been doing any better. We’ve been directing the majority of our efforts to hunting the amulet. The true one.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why?”
“The Triton Group has been searching for it for centuries for various reasons. But recently it became critical that we find it, because we’ve discovered it’s the only way to re-inter the Book,” Pieter said. “A representative from our company heard—too la
te—about the auction where it was sold. We arrived at the Welshman’s castle shortly after Johnstone’s massacre. But the Goth punk seemed to vanish into thin air.”
“Thick rock,” I muttered. I would never forget my hellish incarceration beneath the Burren.
“We had no idea where it was for months. We suspected Darroc had it but couldn’t get any of our people close enough. He had no tolerance for humans. Then we received reports that MacKayla had infiltrated his camp and was at his right hand.” His gaze glowed with pride. “Well done, darling! You are as brilliant and resourceful as your mother.”
“You said ‘the true one,’ ” I said.
“According to legend, the king made many amulets,” Isla replied. “All capable of sustaining varying degrees of illusion. Used together, they are formidable. But only the last one he made can deceive the king himself. The Book has grown too powerful to be stopped by any other means. Illusion is the only weapon that will work against it.”
“We were right!” I exclaimed, looking at Barrons.
“The prophecy is clear. The one who was inhabited must use the amulet to seal it away.”
“Already on it,” Barrons said coolly.
“It’s not your fight,” Pieter said gently. “We started this. We will end it.”
I sat forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees. “What are you saying?”
“Your mother is the one who has to do it. Although if you’re anything like her, darling, you think it’s your problem. That’s what we were worried about, why we rushed here tonight. Isla is ‘the inhabited.’ Twenty-three years ago, when the Book escaped, it possessed her, inhabited her. She knows it. She has been it. She understands it. And she’s the only one who can lay it to rest.”
“It never leaves a human alive,” Barrons said flatly.
“It left Fiona alive,” I reminded.
“She’d been eating Unseelie. She was different.”
“Isla was able to wrest it from her body,” Pieter said. “She is the only one we know of that has ever been able to resist to the point where it jumped from her while she was still alive and took another, more complacent host.”
Barrons didn’t look remotely convinced. “But not before it made her kill most of the Haven.”
“I never said it was easy,” Isla said softly, eyes dark with remembered grief. “I despise what it made me do. I live with it every day.”
“But it’s been tracking me,” I protested.
“Sensing your bloodline, looking for me,” Isla said.
“But I’m epic,” I said numbly. Wasn’t I? I was so tired of not knowing my place in things.
Was I going to doom the world? Was I the concubine? Was I the Unseelie King? Was I even human? Was I the person who was supposed to re-inter the Book?
The answer was no to all of the above. I was just Mac Lane, bumbling around, getting in the way a lot, and making stupid decisions.
“You are, darling,” Isla said. “But this isn’t your battle.”
“Your destiny is another day,” Pieter said. “This is only the first of many battles we’ll be called upon to fight. There are dark times ahead. Even with the Book contained, there’s still the matter of the walls between realms. They can’t be rebuilt without the Song of Making. We have our work cut out for us.” He smiled. “Your brothers have their talents, too. They can’t wait to meet you.”
“Oh, MacKayla, we’ll be a family again!” Isla said, and began to cry. “It’s all I ever wanted.”
I looked at Barrons. He wore a grim expression. I looked back at Pieter and Isla. It was all I’d ever wanted, too. I wasn’t the king. I’d been born. I was a person with a family. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But my heart was already trying.
Family reconciliations aside, Barrons didn’t like the change in the game plan, and neither did I.
We’d spent months building to this moment, and now, on the eve of battle, in walked my biological parents, telling us we were no longer necessary. They would fight the war and finish it.
It chafed.
“Can you track it?” Barrons demanded.
Pieter answered. “Isla can. But it can sense her, as well, which made it too dangerous for her to be in Dublin until we were certain MacKayla had the amulet.”
“How did you know I had it?” I said.
“Your mother said she felt you connect with it tonight. We came at once.”
“I thought I felt you connect with it once before, at the beginning of October last year,” Isla said, “but the feeling was gone almost as suddenly as it came.”
I blinked. “I did touch it last October. How did you know that?”
“I have no idea,” she said simply. “I felt the joining of two great powers. Both times I felt you, MacKayla. I felt my daughter!” Her face crumpled. “I felt Alina once, too.” She looked away, stared into the cold fireplace for a long moment, then shivered. “She was dying. Could we please have a fire?”
“Of course,” Pieter said immediately. He rose and moved to the fireplace, but Barrons beat him there.
He glared at Pieter. You may be trying to claim the woman, his eyes said, but make no mistake, she and the fucking fireplace are mine.
After a long moment, Pieter shrugged and moved back to the sofa.
“We’ll sleep on it,” Barrons said. “Leave now. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.”
Pieter snorted. “We can’t leave, Barrons. This has to end here, tonight, one way or another. There’s no time to waste.”
I couldn’t stop looking at Isla. There was something about her face. Looking at her made me think of Rowena. I guess because the old woman had persecuted us for so long. “Why does it have to end tonight?”
Isla gave me an odd look. “MacKayla, don’t you feel it?”
“Feel wh—” I broke off. I hadn’t been trying to feel it. I’d been keeping my sidhe-seer volume all the way down for so long it had become instinct. “Oh, God, the Sinsar Dubh is heading straight for us.” I opened my senses as far as I could. “It’s … different.” I looked at Isla, who nodded. “It’s more intense. Like it’s all pumped up and ready. It’s been waiting for this.” My eyes widened. “It’s got a suicide bomber again, and it’s going to blow us all to hell if we don’t stop it!”
“It knows I’m here,” Isla said. Her face was pale, but her eyes were narrowed with determination that I recognized. I’d seen it in my own face. “It’s all right,” she said with a tight smile. “I’m ready, too. It may have stolen my children and torn my family apart twenty-three years ago, but tonight we’re putting it back together.”
Pieter and Isla excused themselves for a moment and stepped away, talking in hushed, urgent tones.
I sat on the chesterfield with Barrons, watching them. This was all so surreal. I felt as if I’d stepped through the Silver into an alternate reality, one with a happily-ever-after. This was exactly what I’d wanted: a family, a safe haven, no responsibility to save the day.
Then why did I feel so deflated and off kilter?
Out there in the night, I could feel the Book coming. It had slowed for some reason, nearly stopped. I wondered if it was swapping “rides.” Maybe it had found a better one.
In spite of myself, despite my love for Jack and Rainey, looking at my biological parents was doing something funny to me. Knowing that they hadn’t wanted to give me up had released a knot of tension I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying. I guess some part of me had felt like the devil-child that everyone was afraid of, who’d been banished only because no one had wanted to kill a baby. But all these years my real parents had been out there, missing Alina and me, longing for us. They’d hated giving us up and had done so only for our own safety. We were connected by a mother–daughter bond. We were going to be a family again. I had so many questions!
“I don’t trust a bloody thing about them,” Barrons said. “This is bullshit.”
Barrons was perfectly paranoid. Perfect awareness, he called it. It was exa
ctly what I expected him to say. “It is hard to believe,” I murmured.
“Then don’t.”
“Look at her, Barrons. She’s the woman that warded me out at the abbey, the last leader of the Haven. The woman you picked up that night. For heaven’s sake, we look alike!” When I’d first arrived in Dublin, we hadn’t. I’d been soft and curvy and still holding on to a smidge of baby fat in my face. Now I was like her, older, leaner, my face less round, my features more distinct.
He glanced between us. “She could be a cousin.”
“She could also be my mother,” I said drily. “And if she is, I’m not the Unseelie King.” There went the weight of countless sins from my shoulders. Believing I was the ultimate villain, responsible for so many twisted births and billions of deaths, had been a crushing load to carry. “Maybe they’re right, Barrons. Maybe this never was my battle. Maybe Alina and I just got caught in the crossfire. The Book sensed us as part of her bloodline and harassed us, screwed up our lives.”
“Dani killed Alina,” he reminded sharply.
Why did he have to remind me of that now? I turned to scowl at him.
Face contorted, he was staring at me, dark eyes wild, roaring Rowena’s name so loud I was surprised the windows didn’t shatter.
I blinked. He was just Barrons again. Looking at me strangely.
“Are you okay?”
“What did you just say?”
“I said, are you okay?”
“No, what did you say before that?”
“I said Dani killed Alina because of Rowena, never doubt it. What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet.”
I shook my head, embarrassed. Then I jerked and my head whipped toward the window. “Oh, no!” The Sinsar Dubh had begun moving again, rapidly.
“It’s coming!” Isla cried at the same moment.
“How long?” Pieter demanded.
“Three minutes, maybe less. It’s in a car,” Isla said.
I needed to know we were both sensing it in the same general vicinity. With two of us, we would be harder to deceive. I’d be damned if what had happened the last time we’d tried to corner it was happening again. “Where do you sense it?”
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 168
