Legends Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “No Irishman would ever jest about faeries.”

  “Surely you don’t believe in them?”

  “Now, I’m not saying I do. And I’m not saying I don’t. But having an open mind, I tend to avoid the subject. The trouble is,” he explained as they grew close enough to hear the sound of a male voice raised in obvious frustration, “Kate not only believes in their presence, she’s elected herself their champion.”

  Okay. That was it. If he had a lick of sense, he’d have Joyce take him straight back to the airport, get on that plane and return to the States.

  “She’s fighting for faeries?” a young female voice asked behind them.

  Alec glanced back over his shoulder and saw Zoe struggling to catch up with them, which was not all that easy since her boots, with platform soles that had to be at least three inches high, kept sinking into the damp meadow.

  “Aye, that she is,” Michael said.

  “By standing in front of a bulldozer?” Alec asked.

  “The county government has decided to move this road closer to the cliff.” Michael lifted the camera and snapped a few photographs of the standoff taking place. “The thought being that it’d bring more tourists in to take the drive, you see, like the Ring of Kerry.”

  “So?”

  “So, if they keep to the original survey, they’ll have to cut down that hawthorn tree.”

  “She’s making a stand for one damn tree?”

  “Not just any tree. You see, Mr. MacKenna, in these parts, this particular hawthorn tree is considered by many to be an exceedingly special tree.”

  The motor drive of the camera whirred as he shot more photographs. Even as frustrated as he was, Alec couldn’t help noting that the giant handled the camera with the same ease Alec himself felt when dealing with a bridle and reins.

  “A tree where faeries dwell,” Michael continued. “So, naturally, following the druid path as she does—”

  “Are you telling me that Kate O’Sullivan is some sort of witch?” Alec cut him off abruptly.

  “Cool,” Zoe said.

  Alec shot her a warning glower that suggested that he, for one, found nothing cool about this news flash. Uncowed, the teenager folded her arms across the front of her black coat and glared right back at him.

  Shaking his head in mute frustration, and biting back a string of curses, Alec marched away from the group and approached the woman he’d begun to hope might help him solve Legends Lake’s mental problem. Instead, he was discovering that Winnie’s crazy bargain horse had been bred by a mad, reckless witch.

  “It goddamn figures,” he muttered. So far, everything about the colt was turning out to be as screwy as hell.

  “You do realize that you’re outnumbered, don’t you?” he asked, forgoing any conventional opening conversational gambit.

  She didn’t so much as bother to glance his way. “Now isn’t that a matter of opinion?”

  “Actually, it’s a matter of size. If the driver of that bulldozer—which, in case you haven’t noticed, outweighs you by several tons—gets tired of this fool standoff, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

  “If I allow these men to cut down this tree, far more people will be harmed, Mr. MacKenna.”

  “You know who I am. So I guess I’m supposed to believe that you’re psychic as well as being a druid Irish witch?” Frustrated and jet-lagged, Alec didn’t bother to conceal his sarcasm.

  “As a matter of fact, I am fey.” She shot him a quick glance. “But that wouldn’t be how I know your name. Didn’t you get out of Michael’s lorry? And didn’t I, myself, send him to fetch you from the airport?”

  “I was expecting you to meet us.”

  “I was expecting to do exactly that.” She turned back to facing down the bulldozer driver. “Until I learned that the roadway commission had chosen today to commit infamy.”

  “And here I thought you Irish were supposed to be masters of understatement. I fail to see how cutting down a single tree can be construed as infamy.”

  “What if it were your home?” Eyes as deep and blue as a mountain lake, fringed with a silky jet crescent of lashes so thick he wondered how she could keep her eyes open, bore into his. “Would you, perhaps, take matters a bit more seriously?”

  “Well, of course, but—”

  “There’s no but about it, Mr. MacKenna. Whether you choose to believe me or not, this is no ordinary tree. It’s home to beings far older than all of our ages combined multiplied several times over. And I’ll not stand by and allow some foolish government agency to destroy it and send all those dispossessed spirits out into our world to seek their revenge by creating mischief and mayhem upon the innocent people of this county.”

  The man atop the bulldozer roared with laughter at her heated pronouncement. “You’re not only fey, you’re daft, Kate O’Sullivan.”

  She spun back toward him, hands splayed on her hips. “There are those who’d be thinking that,” she allowed. “And isn’t it one of the kinder things some of the good, supposedly pious people of this county might say about me.

  “But daft or not, that doesn’t stop you from being in the wrong, Brian Doyle. You yourself grew up in this selfsame county. Would you be forgetting how the American owners of that auto factory in the North were so arrogant as to think they could cut down a hawthorn to make room for their factory? I suppose you’d be trying to tell me that it was only a coincidence that very same factory collapsed? Surely you’d be knowing that what you’re wanting to do is foolhardy.”

  His ruddy complexion deepened. “I’m only doing me job.”

  “If that’s the case, perhaps you should be seeking a different line of work.”

  “God Almighty!” He literally threw up his hands. “I’m beginning to understand why Cadel was always so vexed with you.”

  Her eyes flashed sparks. The fire in her cheeks heightened, though watching her carefully as he was, Alec thought that she paled a bit at the man’s remark.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised, you standing up for your own cousin that way, but you have no business bringing my husband into this discussion, Brian.” Black hair swirled out as she tossed her head. “What’s happening here today is a matter between the two of us—”

  “And the entire fecking Irish roadway department,” he reminded her.

  “Fine.” She tossed her chin exactly the way Winifred Tarlington had, when Alec had suggested gelding Legends Lake. “Why don’t you turn that big yellow machine around, drive back into town, ring up whatever eejit planned this roadway in the first place and tell him to stop hiding behind his big wide desk and come out here in person so I can explain why this ill-conceived enterprise is fated to failure.”

  “Jaysus!” He yanked off his hard hat in order to drag his hand through his copper bright hair. He shot a hard look at Alec. “Would you be talking some sense into this woman?”

  “Since we just met, I doubt if anything I might have to say would make a difference.”

  The one thing Alec didn’t need was to get into a battle with some government agency. He’d bought enough Irish-bred horses for clients to have learned that Ireland’s bureaucracy could have as many twists and turns as a Celtic knot. Nothing in this country, including its people, was straightforward, which had always been part of its appeal.

  Until now.

  Brian’s curse was harsh and suggested that he’d just reached the end of his rope. “I’m giving you one last chance, Kate.”

  “You can give me a million chances, Brian. Then a million more after that. And still I won’t be moving.”

  “We’ll see about that.” His glower darkened as he switched the key, bringing the bulldozer to roaring life, causing it to belch like a fire-breathing dragon.

  “Aye, we will indeed,” Alec heard Kate murmur over the deafening engine.

  She lifted her white arms—which, while slender, were well-muscled from a lifetime of managing horses—toward a sky that, with the exception of a few scattered clouds hover
ing out over the sea near the horizon, was as clear as pale blue glass.

  Then closed her eyes and began to chant in a language Alec took to be Irish.

  The bulldozer inched forward.

  She paid no attention as she stood her ground, moving uplifted arms in wider and wider circles.

  Alec watched the standoff, unable to believe that one of the hardheaded individuals wouldn’t back off. He hadn’t seen such a foolhardy display of recklessness since the time he was five years old and a passenger in the car when his drunken father had played chicken on a suicidally narrow curving mountain road with a truck carrying huge pink slabs of Tennessee marble.

  Brian Doyle kept advancing with the bulldozer.

  Kate O’Sullivan kept chanting.

  The temperature dropped a bit as first one cloud, then two, trailed across the sky like a veil draped across the morning sun. When a deep shadow fell over the rolling landscape, Alec glanced up, watching in disbelief as, impossible as it had to be, Castlelough’s witch appeared to be gathering up the clouds in her graceful, beringed hands.

  The other men began to mutter to one another and shake their heads. Afew stepped back. One older man, whose face had been weathered by years and a lifetime spent outdoors in the elements, made a sign of the cross and began murmuring a Hail Mary.

  Still Brian moved forward.

  Still Kate gathered her clouds.

  A day that had been bright and sunny when Alec had arrived turned cold. A brisk wind picked up, coming in from the sea, tinged with salt and something else.

  Magic? Alec wondered. Then castigated himself for even considering such an impossible thing.

  This was Ireland, after all. Rainy, wet Ireland. If you didn’t like the weather, all you had to do was wait ten minutes and it would change. Which was all that was happening now, he assured himself.

  “That’s so awesome,” Zoe breathed, obviously enchanted.

  Alec would have been pleased that she’d finally found something to capture her interest, were it not for the fact that the idea of Zoe as would-be witch was even worse than her current teenage temptress persona.

  “It’s meteorology.”

  “I never saw any TV weatherman do that,” she retorted.

  Even as he resisted accepting the possibility that it had anything to do with Kate O’Sullivan, Alec couldn’t help noticing that the temperature was now a good twenty degrees colder than it had been when he’d first walked out of the terminal at Shannon airport. And dropping.

  The clouds, which only minutes earlier had resembled the fluffy white sheep grazing on hillsides, turned first silver, then darker yet, as if being tarnished by the elements. The sun became more and more obscured until it finally disappeared altogether. All that was left was a faint, stuttering glow edging those threatening gray clouds.

  Time seemed suspended.

  Brian’s square, pugilist’s jaw was clenched.

  As were Kate’s fists.

  Indeed, every muscle and tendon in her body seemed to be straining, reaching for something. But her expression remained strikingly, eerily calm. And, Alec noted, supremely confident.

  He felt it first. A prickling that had the hair on the back of his neck and his arms standing on end.

  Then he tasted it: a faintly sulfurous flavor on his tongue.

  He heard it next: an unmistakable hum and crackling overhead like the sound the heavy power lines back home made when dampened by morning fog.

  And then, although in upcoming days he’d try to convince himself that what happened next was only his imagination, Alec saw it: a jagged bolt of lightning shot out of the center of the amassed clouds, striking the ground mere inches from the front of the bulldozer with a force that made the earth tremble.

  The construction crew scattered, running back to their cars and trucks parked at the edge of the field as if chased by the hounds of hell. Cursing, Brian leapt from the seat of the bulldozer, falling onto his knees as he hit the ground.

  “Keep your fecking tree, then,” he shouted, scrambling to his feet and following the other men in their dash to safety. “It makes no bloody difference to me.”

  “Tell the highway planners what you saw here today,” Kate called after him. “Warn them that worse will occur if they’re so foolish as to defile sacred lands.”

  That little matter taken care of, she turned back to Alec, with an odd serenity that suggested that what he’d just witnessed was nothing more than a dream. Only the heightened color in her cheeks and the bright sapphire gleam in her eyes remained as proof that it had been all too real.

  That and, Alec noted with stark surprise, the small burned circle of blackened turf directly in front of the still idling bulldozer.

  8

  “WELL, NOW THAT THAT LITTLE MATTER has been taken care of, I suppose it’s time for me to mind my manners and apologize for not meeting you at the airfield, Mr. MacKenna,” she said. “As you could see, a bit of an emergency came up. However, since Brian and his boys have gone, we can be getting on to the farm and—”

  “I’m not certain that’s such a good idea.”

  “Alec!” Zoe wailed.

  “Don’t tell me that a little demonstration of Mother Nature’s powers can have you risking Legends Lake’s well-being?” Kate asked mildly.

  The question was softly issued through voluptuous lips that appeared to come by their deep rose color naturally, but there was nothing seductive in her tone. Alec could recognize a challenge—a dare—when he heard one.

  “As important as the horse is to me, my daughter is more important.”

  “Dammit, Alec!” Zoe wailed again. Michael Joyce put a calming hand on her arm. She furiously shook it off. “I keep telling you, I’m not your daughter. And I’m not your fucking responsibility!”

  Kate moved her gaze from Alec to the teenager. Her smooth expression showed neither shock nor disapproval of Zoe’s language.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” she said, as if they were meeting at a Junior League tea party rather than on the edge of an Irish cliff where a possible display of black magic had just taken place. She extended her hand. “I’m Kate O’Sullivan. And you’d be—”

  “Zoe Poullain.”

  “Ah. What a lovely name.” Kate’s smile was warm. Alec could have ceased to exist. Every atom of her being was directed toward Zoe in much the same way as she’d concentrated on gathering the clouds earlier.

  “My first name is Greek,” Zoe divulged with a sudden shyness at odds with the angry, profane teenage shoplifter who’d gotten onto the plane in Atlanta. “It means life. My last name is French. My father was a famous Formula One race-car driver. He died before I was born. In a race in Brazil.”

  “Well, now, isn’t that a shame,” Kate said. “Would you be knowing what your father’s family name means?”

  “No.”

  “As it happens, I do. It means a horse breeder. So, it appears you and I have something in common, Zoe Poullain.”

  “I don’t know anything about breeding horses.”

  “Perhaps not consciously. But bloodlines are magical things, Zoe. The secrets of all the people who’ve come before you are buried deep within your bones. Why, I’ve no doubt that a deep and abiding knowledge of horses is just lying there, waiting for an opportunity to come out.

  “Which is why it’s so wonderful that your—that Mr. MacKenna,” she corrected, deftly avoiding a conflict by referring to him as Zoe’s father, “has brought you here. Do you believe in fate, Zoe? Destiny?”

  “I don’t know.” But Alec could tell that she was fascinated.

  “Well, as it happens, I’m a firm believer in the concept,” Kate said cheerfully. “I also believe that it’s obvious that your personal destiny has brought you here to Castlelough.” She turned back to Alec. “As your destiny has you bringing Legends Lake back home again.”

  “The only reason I’m here in Ireland is because you bred the horse. I figured you might have a handle on how
to cure him of his problem. If he’s not overbred, that is,” Alec couldn’t help tacking on.

  “The horse is not overbred,” she responded, with a serenity that seemed designed to mock any attempt he might have been making to raise her ire. “As for solving his problem, I’ll have to be seeing him to do that, now won’t I? Why don’t we postpone any further discussion until we get to my farm?

  “My sister-in-law, Nora—who was once married to my late brother”—she elaborated—“stopped by this morning with some spice cake for our tea. Nora’s a marvelous cook. You’re in for a treat.”

  As they walked back to the parked truck, Alec watched Zoe hanging onto Kate O’Sullivan’s every word and decided that perhaps she was truly a witch, after all. Because she certainly appeared to have cast a spell over his stepdaughter.

  Although Kate would fling herself off the cliff before admitting it, especially to such an ill-tempered man, the first sight of Alec MacKenna had unsettled her. The Yank was as lean as a winter wolf and looked as if he could be just as dangerous. His hair was the color of midnight over the Burren, his flint gray eyes as chilly as the clouds she’d gathered to send Brian and the others on their way. His jaw was firm and square and echoed the hard stubbornness of his openly disapproving gaze and the hard line of his mouth. She suspected if those firmly cut lips did ever curve upward, his smile would be distinctly predatory.

  The air around him was every bit as charged as the lightning bolt she’d drawn from the clouds. It took no imagination to picture him clad in the MacKenna tartan swinging a claymore in the heat of battle. He would not be an easy man to work with. Nor an easy man to know. He’d especially not be an easy man to love.

  That errant thought, appearing from out of the sky that had turned a wide clear blue again, struck a startling note in her mind and caused a chill in her heart. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at his broad back.

  He’d continued on approximately three meters when he apparently realized that she was no longer with them. He turned and pinned her with a look that she hoped would not see too much.