by Lily Velez
The Connelly Boys
Celtic Witches, Book 1
Lily Velez
The Connelly Boys (Celtic Witches, Book 1)
Copyright © 2018 by Lily Velez
www.lilyvelezbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any semblance of characters or names to actual people, alive or deceased, is completely coincidental.
The verses used in the circle casting ritual featured in Chapter 41 are an adaptation of The Witches’ Rune by Doreen Valiente and Gerald Gardner. No copyright infringement is intended.
Cover Art by Covers by Juan, www.coversbyjuan.com
ISBN 13: 978-0-692-18387-8
ISBN 10: 0-692-18387-6
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
About the Author
1
Massive heart failure shouldn’t have been possible at seventeen.
And yet here I was, navigating the hair-thin line between a normal heart rate and cardiac arrest.
Over two dozen boys stared at me, their intent gazes impaling me like enemy spears. My eyes slid to the only escape in the room, which was the very door I’d willingly walked through only seconds ago. I guessed that meant I only had myself to blame.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and bracketed my hands onto the straps of my backpack, knuckles white. Beside me, Professor Foley droned on to his pre-calculus class. Preoccupied as I was with ensuring my heart didn’t burst from my chest, I only caught fragments.
“Remember what the headmaster said…
“…is to be treated with the utmost respect…”
“…will not tolerate…”
“…father is a much loved member of our faculty…”
Father. Right. The reason I was here at all. St. Andrew’s Prep was a traditional all-boys Catholic boarding school in Ireland, the elite kind where students came from old money and were vying for spots at places like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale. The only other school in this God-forsaken town had closed years ago for lack of funding. So every year, in a show of charity, St. Andrew’s opened its doors to a handful of locals, boys and girls alike, who wished to take advantage of its world-class education. This school year’s scholarship students had already been selected, but lucky for me (and I used the word ‘lucky’ with no shortage of sarcasm), my dad, hotshot professor that he was here, had been able to pull some strings on my behalf.
“Miss Monroe, if you would…” Professor Foley cleared his throat. “Scarlet?”
I snapped out of my thoughts. The man was gesturing for me to assume a seat. I took a hesitant step forward.
As I did, a trident of lightning split the charcoal sky in two in an ear-splitting crack, the classroom windows momentarily glowing white. The sound sent my heart somersaulting. While the fluorescent lights above flickered, I quickly gathered my bearings. Breathe. Though I couldn’t deny the raging storm outside was the perfect backdrop for my present state of misery.
Once the power righted itself, I surveyed the classroom to see what seats were vacant. Now that I was actually looking at them full-on, I saw there were all kinds of boys before me. Boys with wiry frames and boys built like oxen. Boys with flawless skin, boys with acne scars, boys with ruddy cheeks, boys with handsome, dark tans. And like me, they were all wearing the school’s signature navy blue blazer with the crimson and gold insignia over the heart, which featured a lion over a shield and the school motto: fiat lux, let there be light.
Each desk sat two students, and I noticed more than one boy elbow his neighbor with a smirk and then glance in the direction of a desk at the room’s dead center. I read the message loud and clear. Apparently this was the desk they’d all betted on me picking.
I could see why. Its single occupant was movie-star gorgeous. The only problem was he knew it. He knew it all too well. You could spot that kind of arrogance from a mile away. It was any wonder he sat alone at all, though maybe he’d forced his neighbor to sit elsewhere on today of all days, just for this opportunity.
I schooled my expression to keep the grimace off my face. No thanks. A guy like that would feel like he’d won something if a girl sat next to him, would view her choice like an invitation. While some girls might’ve counted it a fantasy to be one of only a few females at an all-boys school—and I’ll admit, once upon a time, I would’ve counted myself among them—I’d made the decision long before arriving on Irish soil that I wouldn’t give any amorous attentions the time of day. Because as soon as I finished my prison sentence here and graduated, I was heading straight back to the United States.
There were only two other vacant seats in the classroom. One was beside a red-faced boy who was sweating so much dark stains were developing at his armpits. I looked toward my last hope. It was a desk by the window, and its sole occupant was the only boy who wasn’t paying me an iota of attention. Instead, with the side of his face at rest against a loose fist, he stared boredly at the wretched grayness outside. It seemed he couldn’t care less whether the new student at school was a boy, a girl, or a polka-dotted extraterrestrial.
As such, and with great relief, I made my way toward him. There were snickers as I walked right past Mr. Movie Star, who tried to appear unfazed by the rejection and shot venomous looks at his classmates. I feigned obliviousness and continued on.
I pulled out my chosen chair, the slightly rusted feet scraping against the tile, and it was only then that my new neighbor finally regarded me.
My heart stalled. I was momentarily stunned by the look of him. There was a loveliness about his face, the kind you saw in paintings of angels. His brown hair was still wet, presumably from that morning’s shower, and was styled in disarray as if mussed by the storm winds outside. But it was his eyes that most gave me pause. They were the lightest blue eyes I’d ever seen, like two clear lakes on a summer day.
He was clearly taken aback by my company, as if I’d yanked him out of a daydream. I offered him a tight but somewhat friendly and mildly apologetic smile as I sat. He stared back, his face completely devoid of expression. Then, without a single word, he went right back to looking out the window.
I blinked, feeling as if I’d come right up against a wall. Okay… So much for a warm reception. Maybe he preferred having a table all to himself, but would it have killed him to be slightly less rude? Whatever. I’d survive. I decided to ignore him right back and faced forward as Professor Foley began today’s lecture.
Soft clicking filled the room, and I was surprised to find several boys recording notes on netbooks or tablets. As far as technology went, my laptop back at my dad’s house was the same one I’d been using for the past six years. My mom and I hadn’t been poor by any means back in Colorado, but annually upgrading to the latest gadgets hadn’t exactly been in the budget either.
Mom…
A spark of pain stabbed my heart like a thorn, and all at once the flashes of memory came: the pink, paisley scarf wrapped around my mom’s head, the incessant beep of hospital machines, the seemingly endless tables of bouquets and sympathy cards.
I pushed it all down immediately. Not here.
Desperate for distraction, I went old-school and pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of my backpack to copy down the equations Professor Foley was writing on the dry-erase board up front, his marker squeaking against the white surface. He was teaching from a particular chapter in the class textbook, but he’d clearly forgotten he hadn’t issued me a textbook of my own, and I wasn’t about to raise my hand to request one. I’d just look off my neighbor’s book for the time being.
Except that when I bothered to look, I realized his textbook remained unopened in front of him. Even now, he still stared out the window. Either he was having a killer of a bad day, or I was sitting beside the class slacker, who couldn’t care less about impeccable grades.
I studied him more closely. He had pale, almost milky white skin. Nearly every square inch of him was covered in freckles, which gave him an especially boyish look. The backs of his hands, his neck, his jawline, his cheeks—freckles everywhere. I also realized his hair was more so a reddish-brown, closer to auburn. I tried to place his cologne. Strangely, he smelled like petrichor, that sweet, earthy fragrance that filled the air after a rainfall.
He was so engrossed in whatever he was looking at that I followed his line of sight. The storm was growing angrier still, lightning whipping across the dark skies. Rosalyn Bay had only three weather conditions: rainy, rainier, and rainiest. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen the sun since arriving here a few days ago.
Rivulets of water streaked across the windowpanes, miniature comets with long, crooked tails. In the shrieking wind, a tree’s sinewy branch continuously tapped against the window beside us. It sounded like Morse code. Maybe I could send an S.O.S signal back.
A thick vine was wrapped around the branch. St. Andrew’s was covered in ivy, so I didn’t think much of it and was about to return my attention back to the lecture. And then it happened. I blinked, certain it was a trick of the lightning flashes, but no. As sure as I was sitting in a classroom filled with Catholic schoolboys, my eyes weren’t deceiving me. The vine was moving.
Like a serpent slithering along its way, the vine inched across the length of the tree branch. My jaw unhinged as I gawked at the sight. What on earth…? The vine’s leaves, already beginning to take on the rich gold and pumpkin hues of October, were moving too, but not in a way that was congruent with the wind speeds outside. As the other leaves in the tree canopy rattled violently from the assault of rain, the vine’s leaves moved in a sort of floating way, like a fish’s fins in water.
My eyes swung to my neighbor. Was he seeing this? I wasn’t losing my mind, was I? Judging by the direction of his gaze, I wasn’t. He was also focused on the vine. The only difference was he didn’t look alarmed. On the contrary, he was as cool and composed as ever. Bored even, as if vines moving of their own volition was hardly a blip on his radar for strange and unlikely occurrences.
His left hand, the one closest to the window, was flat against the desk. Except for his index finger, which he’d lifted ever so slightly, eyes still trained on the vine like he was following its course. His finger drifted higher still, almost reaching a forty-five degree angle, and like a snake dancing for its charmer, the vine stopped at a fork in the branch and slowly began to rise, rearing back as if preparing to strike an unseen enemy.
“Oh my God.” The words flew right out of my mouth.
When they did, the vine suddenly became inanimate, collapsing onto the branch as if the life had been instantly sucked out of it, and my neighbor, startled, quickly looked my way. As did two dozen other boys, whose heads snapped in my direction in a move that made me think of dogs coming to attention at the crackling sound of a bag of treats opening.
“Miss Monroe,” said Professor Foley. “Is everything all right?”
My face burned. “Yes,” I managed, nodding. “Sorry.”
After a few, awkward moments, the lecture resumed and the other students slowly faced forward again. My neighbor, however, was still looking at me, but his expression had gone from startled to shuttered, revealing none of his thoughts.
I opened my mouth to whisper something, something to the effect of: ‘Did you see that? How on earth did that happen? Is there something in the water here?’ But before I could, he reached for his textbook, flipping to the page written on the board up front, and buried himself in pre-calculus. Clearly the subject of the vine wasn’t on the table for discussion.
I couldn’t so easily dismiss what I’d witnessed, though. After all, I knew a thing or two about plants. Back home, I’d helped to start a community garden as part of a service project. I’d enjoyed it so much I’d pursued all things botanical in the years that followed: making terrariums, pressing flowers, decorating the windowsills of my home with potted perennials, and more. All that to say I’d never met a vine that behaved the way the one outside had. There was just no rational explanation for it.
For the rest of the class period, my neighbor didn’t engage me in the least bit. He didn’t even share his textbook. He simply proceeded to act as if I weren’t there beside him. So when Professor Foley distributed quizzes for the final fifteen minutes of class (he excused me from taking one), I rehearsed how I would broach the subject.
From watching the boy write his name on his quiz in small script, I gathered his first name was Rory. It was all I gathered because, perhaps feeling watched, he threw a quick glance in my direction and I had to feign sudden interest in the composition of my gel pen.
I flipped to the last page in my notebook and started doodling to let my mind wander, trying not to get distracted by the raindrops pummeling the roof and how they sounded more like paintball pellets. I risked a glance toward that unruly vine, but it still hung limp across the branch, as if it’d done so all along. I hadn’t imagined the entire ordeal, had I?
Finally, the bell signaling the end of class sang out. It wasn’t the electronic bell over an intercom like at my previous school. It was a traditional, round, silver bell with a small hammer beside it. It was loud and shrill and startled me out of my thoughts.
All around me, binders snapped close and boys zipped up backpacks as they prepared to head to their next class. Beside me, Rory completed his own quiz and slowly stood as he reviewed his answers. Perfect. Now I could ask him about the vine. I angled my body toward him. The movement caught his attention, and his gaze casually drifted my way, landing on my open notebook. Except when he saw my doodles, his entire body went rigid.
At his reaction, I looked down at them. There were a few simple daisies here and there with fat bumblebees and big-winged butterflies, but the majority of the page was taken up by a design I’d been drawing for as long as I could remember. It featured three spirals which sprouted from a shared center. I’d always liked it because it reminded me a little of a flower head.
For some reason, it was that very design that made Rory look stricken.
I started to ask him what was wrong, but before I could even get a word out, he yanked his backpack from the floor, handed in his
quiz, and rushed out of the room, as if he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.
2
“How has your first day been so far?”
When lunch time came, I opted to take my meal in my dad’s empty classroom, preferring the awkwardness of his company over braving the gawking of hundreds of boys. Back at my old school, I hadn’t exactly been completely invisible, but I definitely had spent most days flying under the radar, largely unknown by the majority of my peers. Here at St. Andrew’s, the simple fact that I was of the fairer sex made me about as rare as a four-leaf clover.
As such, the attention around campus had been inescapable thus far. As I’d walked from class to class amidst all the locker slamming, horsing around, and cacophonous chatter, everyone would look up from what they were doing at some point or another to watch me. It was, needless to say, unsettling.
Especially when I’d learned there were probably less than a dozen girls currently attending the school, none of whom were in any of my classes so far. Apparently, most students had gone the online learning route after their school had closed. It was an option I would’ve loved to pursue myself, but my dad didn’t feel comfortable leaving me home alone for eight hours a day, so that was that.
“Do they serve food like this every day?” I asked, deciding it best to avoid his question. Because the truth was my first day here had only magnified my homesickness. I moved around the Bolognese sauce covering my pasta. It looked like something a Michelin-starred chef might’ve prepared.
