“What is his will?” Keely asked simply.
“To escape his destiny.”
“And what is that?”
“You are his destiny, as he is yours. And if you accept it, you’ll suffer for it. Mark my words.”
“Leave off the girl, witch,” Owein barked. “She’s nothing to do with what is between the two of us.”
“Is she threatening you, Keely?” Colin asked softly, closing the small distance between them and grasping her arm as though he could protect her from the unseen danger.
Keely didn’t answer, her eyes on Fiona. Color suffused the fairie’s perfect features, and her eyes spit fire at Owein. “Nothing to do with it, you say? Liar! She’s everything to do with it, and why you’ve spent young Quinn’s entire life, pressing him to take her, and do his duty.”
Shock had Keely holding her breath at Fiona’s assertion. His entire life? Take her? Duty? Mortification replaced shock and had Keely stepping away from Colin, tugging her arm free until his fingers slipped their grasp.
Thunder rumbled as shards of lightning crackled within the ring.
Fiona scoffed. “Your little sparks of anger don’t impress me, Owein.” She turned on Keely, pointing an accusing finger at Colin. “Like his ancestor before him, that greedy, cheating Fitzgerald Quinn, building his fortune is your lover’s only concern.”
Keely blinked at the erratic swing of subject. “What does Fitzgerald Quinn have to do with any of this? According to legend, he won your heart, but your father wouldn’t approve the match, so you laid your fortune at his feet in place of your heart. Why would you do that if he was a greedy, cheating man as you claim?”
Fiona’s eyes blazed and the ground beneath her feet rumbled. “I wouldn’t, and I didn’t! And he didn’t win my heart. He stole it. Then he sold it back to my father for baubles and riches. All men lie and manipulate, whispering love words and toying with a woman’s softer heart to get what they want. Ask your bonny Colin,” she purred. “See if he denies he’s known all along how to break the curse. Owein too. They’ve been playing you for a fool, Halfling!”
Keely blanched and her gaze jerked to Colin. He’d known all along how to break the curse and stop the dreams?
“What is it, Keely?” Concern cooled the impotent anger in Colin’s eyes as he took a step toward her.
She took a step back.
“That’s not the way of it, lass,” Owein intervened, speaking to Keely for the first time. Sympathy and guilt competed in the green eyes that met hers. “In her bitterness, Fiona attributes the shabby behavior of one man to all of us.”
Electricity crackled in the air as Fiona spun on Owein. “Not one. All! Fairie and human alike, men deceive, taking what they want until there is nothing left for a woman but bitterness.”
“What the hell is she saying, Keely?” Colin demanded. His growing frustration was evident in his raised voice.
Keely ignored both Colin and Owein to ask Fiona, “What did they know? How is the curse broken?”
“Your lover has only to accept his destiny, and give his heart to his one true mate. Two Halflings joined in love can stand against any power, human or fairie. Once heart and soul join, the curse would be broken. You need only stand together as one unit for your will to be done.”
Pity, tinged with smugness, filled her blue eyes. “Your mate knows this, and yet he searches for some other way to break the curse. He means to deny you your destiny, Halfling. He’ll take his pleasure with you, to be sure, and leave you broken when he’s had his fill. The heart you’ve given so freely will be trampled beneath the heel of his fleeing boots!”
Keely clamped down on the spiral of hurt and disappointment threatening to buckle her knees. Fiona’s prediction was nothing she hadn’t expected all along. But hearing her fears spoken so plainly, and of Colin’s omission of the facts for his own agenda, it felt it was as if the process had already begun. She could almost feel that first crushing pressure of Colin’s heel on her compressing heart.
“Pay her cruel words no mind, lass,” Owein persisted, gently. “She cares nothing of your destiny, or that of Saraid. If she did, she wouldn’t deny an innocent woman her fate by holding her captive.”
“Not captive,” Fiona hissed, “guest.”
“Guest?” Owein bellowed. “When you’ve held her locked in your raft for three hundred years?”
Fiona glanced at the rosebush at her feet, and her eyes were blue ice when they lifted to meet Keely’s gaze once more. “Though they would have you believe differently, ’tis an act of kindness I’ve done you this day, as I’ve done for Saraid. My actions have saved you both from the deceit of a man.”
As Keely watched, the fairie princess scored both Owein and Colin with a slicing glance, then closed her eyes and flung her arms out at her sides. “Baile,” she said softly, and was gone.
Frustration shimmered around Owein in visible, ice blue waves as he stared at the rosebush. Keely watched, fascinated, as his hand reached out—and passed through the bloom as if it were an apparition.
Keely’s eyes stung at the overt despondency of the fairie king’s stance as his shoulders slumped and his head fell forward to hang between his shoulders. As a child, she’d witnessed his heart-wrenching search for his soul in her dreams. Now, she knew Saraid was his soul, stolen from him by a fairie princess’s twisted bitterness.
Her gaze flicked to Colin who was also watching Owein with interest. Like her, Colin had been caught up in a battle that had begun long before he’d been born. But unlike her, he chose to reject his role in their epic drama. That choice was his to make, but he wouldn’t be the only one affected by his denial of their mutual destiny. His eventual rejection would break her, as Fiona had said.
And Saraid and Owein...
Colin may deny her his heart, and she would have to find a way to live with the loss, but she couldn’t tolerate knowing Saraid and Owein continued to suffer. She’d have to find some other way to break the curse.
“You’ll be thinking now I planned for the girl to learn the solution of the curse,” Owein said to Colin, and drew her attention. “I didn’t. Not this way.” He turned to Keely and reached out a hand.
Unearthly heat raced through Keely’s cheek as he brushed it with a long finger. “’Tis sorry I am, lass. Baile,” he said quietly, and repeating the same process as Fiona, he disappeared.
Keely wished she could disappear as well, especially when Colin grabbed her arm to spin her toward him.
“Damn it, Keely,” he snarled and gave her a jolting shake. “What just happened? Tell me what Fiona had to say.”
Her own anger grew as she beheld the fury in his eyes. If anyone had the right to be furious, it was she.
Okay, fine, so he had no interest in anything more than a temporary fling. She’d known that going in. But she’d spent her entire life feeling like a freak. He could have saved her a whole lot of self-recrimination by simply explaining what he’d known all along.
She tore her gaze from his to stare at the empty spot where Owein and Fiona had stood.
What the hell, she thought, it couldn’t hurt to try.
She jerked her arms free of Colin’s gripping fingers and stepped back. Flinging out her arms, she closed her eyes and shouted, “Baile!”
A moment later, her legs buckled beneath her, and she slid to the floor in a numbed heap.
Three feet away, a quivering Donovan stood wide-eyed in the center of her kitchen. Her one hundred and fifty pound, ferocious looking dog promptly peed on the aged linoleum.
Chapter Fourteen
“Oh. My. God. It worked!”
Donovan scrambled to squeeze himself beneath a kitchen chair like a puppy attempting to avoid a rolled-up newspaper. The result of his attempt was disastrous. The table scraped across the floor, knocking over the vase of wildflowers it held, and the crack of the chair toppling to the floor sent Keely into a slightly hysterical round of laughter.
“Come here, baby,” she giggled. Com
bat crawling, he inched his way toward her until she could wrap an arm around his neck. She gave him a jubilant squeeze. “Did I scare you? I scared the crap out of myself.” Soulful brown eyes blinked up at her and she sobered. “I’m a Halfling, Donovan,” she whispered, unsure how she felt about acknowledging her heritage.
On the one hand, she could forget all about her lifelong desire to be like everyone else. She was pretty sure being a Halfling didn’t fall into the category of normal. And she knew, even if she found a way to break the curse and managed to put an end to the dreams at last, she would still be an oddball freak, her fairie blood setting her apart from the normal world the way the dreams always had.
On the other hand, she’d just managed to zap herself more than a mile by doing nothing more than speaking a word. How cool was that?
“Baile,” she whispered considering the word. Shoving Donovan aside, she scrambled to her feet and raced to the den and Gran’s copy of the Gaelic dictionary. Baile, it appeared, translated into home, and she realized what a chance she’d taken, following the fairies’ example without having the slightest clue of what she was doing. She was lucky she hadn’t ended up somewhere uninhabitable to human life—like the center of the earth.
Still, it appeared, in addition to the dreams, she had at least one more of those gifts Kathleen and Colin had mentioned. And as gifts went...wow! Who needed to fly when they could zap themselves wherever they wanted to go? Okay, flying would be awesome too, and who knew? Maybe she could do that as well!
She rifled through the dictionary, searching for the words for all the rooms of the house. Bedroom first. She repeated the action she’d taken in the ring, and zap, she found herself standing beside her bed. She zapped herself back to the kitchen, then back to the bedroom again. Back and forth, up and down, she zapped throughout the house without taking a single step. Other than the noodle-like quality of her legs upon each arrival, she was having a blast.
Donovan, on the other hand, was apoplectic.
She let him outside and shut the back door, then zapped herself to the garden, laughing when he gave a doggie yelp as she appeared by his side. The coarse hairs on his back stood on end, and taking pity, she dropped to her knees to hug him tight.
“Oh, Donovan,” she laughed, “I’m sorry. But can you believe this?” Donovan whined. Whether he believed it or not, his lowered brows and pitiful whine said he didn’t like having her pop in and out of his sight.
“I wonder if there’s a limit to how far away I can go?” she mused aloud. She’d have to test that. Being able to zap herself anywhere she wanted to go would be a handy tool. Of course, she’d have to be careful not to pop in anywhere someone might see her. That type of thing would be a little hard to explain. She laughed out loud.
“Keely!”
Startled from her musings, her head spun around to find Colin several feet away. Immediately, she closed her eyes, and stuck out her arms. She’d lock herself inside the cottage. Her brow puckered as she tried to think of the word for kitchen. Unfortunately, his hands were on her before she managed the exercise.
“Oh, no you don’t.”
“Cistin,” she muttered as the translation popped into her mind. When she opened her eyes, her kitchen was nowhere in sight. Instead, Colin crouched in front of her, his angry face inches from hers.
“Cut it out,” he demanded. “You’re not going anywhere until we’ve talked.”
“Then let go of me,” she demanded right back. Surprising her, he did. She closed her eyes and repeated the process, with the same results. Opening them again, she shot him a withering glare. “Why didn’t it work?”
“You’re not the only one with gifts, Keely.”
He straightened and she attempted to rise to her feet, but found she couldn’t move. Not an inch. Frozen in place, her knees remained on the ground and her arms hung out like a scarecrow’s, refusing to answer her brain’s demands.
“Hey!”
Hip cocked, he crossed his arms over his chest and stood looking down at her.
“What did you do to me?”
His smile was smug.
“Let me loose, you jerk.”
“Not until I have your word that you won’t be disappearing again.”
She wanted to tell him to go to hell. She growled her assent instead. Her arms immediately dropped to her sides like stones.
“Don’t do that again,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I don’t like it.”
“And I didn’t like being left behind, not knowing where you’d disappeared to.”
“Too bad.”
His sigh was deep and long. “Tell me what was said, Keely.”
“Why don’t you ask your good friend, Owein?” she sneered.
“Because I’m asking you!” he roared.
“You’ve known about the curse all along, and how to break it,” she shouted. Bristling with resentment, she took a step toward him and poked him in the chest with a stiffened finger. He reached for her hand and she jerked it away. “All this time, you’ve been talking to Owein, you’ve known about Saraid. For ten years, I lived believing I was some kind of nut job, and you said nothing. You sat with me and watched me go through your mother’s papers like some kind of second rate detective, and all along you knew the solution.”
“I was told of one possible solution, Keely—an unacceptable solution. And before you fry me with those sorceress eyes, that was not meant as an insult. You know damn well I’m attracted to you. If ever I were going to accept a woman as my destiny, you’d be the one. But I’ve seen the wreckage blindly accepting one’s destiny can leave behind. My mother never recovered from Michael Sterling’s fateful choices, and I’ve battled the bitterness of having been denied by my own blood my entire life.”
His reluctant admission succeeded where his arrogant bullying failed. Her anger and disappointment were no match for the wounded pride shining in his eyes. Keely may have suffered embarrassment and self-doubt because of the dreams, her oddball life shaped by Fiona’s bitter machinations, but Colin’s family had been ripped apart, as had Owein’s.
She reached out a hand to rest it against his chest in sympathy. “Your father was as much a victim in all of this as the rest of us, Colin.” He stiffened, and she let her hand drop away.
“My father made his choice,” he said cynically.
“With a little added incentive from a pissed-off fairie princess. Fiona admitted to using enchantment on him. He didn’t abandon you and your mother, Colin. He was sent away.”
“The results are the same,” he said stiffly.
Not quite, but she didn’t argue his point. He’d have to come to grips with the reality of Michael Sterling’s actions on his own. She had her own future to consider. A future that wouldn’t include the man she loved.
“This all goes back to Fitzgerald Quinn. It seems our colorful ancestor used Fiona to gain his fortune by making a deal with her fairie father. He broke her heart in the process. She should have just turned him into a jackass and been done with it. Instead, she embarked on a mission to save Fitzgerald’s daughter, and now me, from the deceit of men.”
Noting the stubborn tilt of his chin, she grumbled, “At the moment, I’m not sure I disagree with her twisted logic.”
Though she knew it wasn’t smart, she didn’t step away when his palm cupped her cheek. Regret softened his eyes and was in his voice as well when he spoke.
“I didn’t set out to deceive you, Keely. I’m simply not capable of what Owein’s solution requires. We’ll break the curse, and free you from the dreams, but there has to be some other way. We need only find it.”
Sorrow filled her heart as he dipped his head and his mouth claimed hers. The rush of life she’d come to associate with his touch flooded her, and she let herself be drawn into his arms. If she were to be denied his heart, and her destiny, she’d take what she could of him now and rejoice in it.
Hours later, sated and surrounded by his warmth, she slipped into sleep, knowi
ng she’d soon face the same pain of loss responsible for souring Fiona’s soul, and setting them all on this tragic course.
****
“You’ve traveled beyond the mound to join the fairies in their realm, Keely.”
The echo of Kathleen’s claim dragged Keely from a dreamless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered open to stare sightlessly at the moonlit ceiling of her bedroom.
Some time during the night, as they’d shared quiet conversation between bouts of lovemaking, the realization had come to her. She’d traveled beyond the mound. She had the ability to enter the realm on her own!
Colin hadn’t been interested when she’d mentioned her idea of using the ability to get to Saraid. At the time, he’d been doing his best to make her forget about everything but him. She had to admit he’d done a fine job of it, too. She hadn’t given it another thought. Until now.
She’d been to the realm many times albeit in her dreams, it was true. But she’d been to the very place where Saraid was confined. If she could find a way to travel there in truth, could she free Saraid and, in doing so, break the curse? Or would she simply be putting herself in the same position as Saraid? After all, Fiona had no qualm confining a human woman in her convoluted attempt to protect her from the deceit of men.
Keely wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t at least try.
Rolling her head on the pillow, she cataloged the details of Colin’s face next to hers. Sleep diminished the charm he wielded so effortlessly when he was awake, hiding the dimpled smile, he used so effectively to disguise his true nature. But the strength and determination of his personality were still evident in the sharp bones of his beloved profile. He was a man who charted his own course, and though he obviously regretted the wounding his denial of their shared destiny caused her, she knew Fiona was right. Colin wouldn’t be swayed, not by human plea nor fairie enchantment. Going into the realm on her own was her only choice.
Gift of the Realm Page 9
