by Massey,M. D.
“Thank you for escorting our guest to me, Siobhán. You may be excused.”
Siobhán curtsied slightly before leaving the room. She didn’t even spare me a parting glance. Huh, must be losing my touch. I waited until she was out of hearing range.
“Siobhán was involved, somehow. I can’t prove it, but I’m certain of it.”
Maeve nodded as she turned to face me. “I already knew as much.” She gestured to an easy chair nearby. “Have a seat, Colin.”
I sat as she swiveled her work chair to face me, steepling her fingers and gazing at me long enough to make me nervous. Finally, she spoke.
“It seems we have a problem, Colin. You’ve recovered the stone, correct?”
I tilted my head and squinted. “Eh, what was left of it, anyway.”
“And yet, you are unable to return it to me. Is that also correct?”
I shook my head. “No, not at the moment, I’m afraid.”
She studied me again over her fingers, and then spread her hands and laid them on her thighs, leaning forward and smiling slightly as she did so.
“Well, I can’t say that I’m not disappointed, but I knew that this might happen. However, the fact remains that you failed to come through on your end of our bargain.”
I did a double-take. “Wait a minute—you knew that the Eye might decide to embed itself in my head?”
Her mouth turned up slightly, and her eyes crinkled around the edges. “I knew it was a possibility, and I considered it to be a calculated risk. But, no harm done, and you don’t seem any worse for the wear.”
“Maeve, I have a sentient magical artifact residing inside my head—that’s hardly something I care to classify as ‘no harm done.’ What if this thing decides to go off and level a city block?”
She shrugged. “Doubtful. It didn’t exactly choose you as its bearer, did it? No, it chose that other you, the one it found to be most suited to its purposes. So, unless you decide to let that side of you out, you have nothing to worry about.”
I gripped the edges of the easy chair in an effort to keep from raising my voice to the Queen of the Austin Fae. “With all due respect, I fail to see how this is a worry-free situation.”
She clucked like a mother comforting her son after a scraped knee. “Now, now, these things happen. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it until it shows up again, and then I’ll figure out a way to get the Eye back, and safely in my hands.
“But until that time, I’ll consider you to have an unfulfilled debt. And, should I require your services, I’ll expect you to continue to perform certain duties for me, until such time as I retrieve my property and release you from my service.”
I sighed softly. “Somehow, I feel like this may have been your plan all along.”
“Nonsense. No one could have foretold that this would happen. My own seers thought it a mere 2.69 percent possibility that the Eye would choose to bond with your other self. Those are hardly odds that I would stake all our futures upon.”
I cocked my head and narrowed my gaze. “What do you mean, ‘all our futures’?”
She tittered and covered her mouth with one hand, back once more to playing the charming hostess. “Oh, now, don’t worry that handsome little head of yours over things that are above your pay grade.”
She turned back to her desk and laid a hand on the book. “Now, I have things to which I must attend. If I have need of you, I’ll send word. Siobhán will show you out.”
And with that, I was dismissed.
Bells ended up in deep shit with her higher ups in the Cold Iron Circle. Those pricks worked her day and night, sending her on shitty-ass details like chasing down a semi-sentient sewer slime that had been eating cats and dogs near the Drag. It was too small to be of any threat to humans, but they’d had her stalking the public drainage tunnels every night since the fight at Crowley’s farm. So, I hadn’t seen much of her since then.
Crowley fell off the face of the earth. Belladonna said they hadn’t found a single trace of him anywhere on the property, except for some blood on a mound of dirt and gravel that matched his DNA and magical signature. Rumor had it there was evidence of a spatial disturbance nearby, which might have indicated that he or someone else had opened a portal out of there that night. If so, apparently they took the fachen’s corpse with them. It was all very, very suspicious, and it smacked of there being serious players involved. Maybe Crowley hadn’t been blowing smoke about his mentor being a super-badass wizard… but who knew? I was just glad the prick was out of my hair.
Hemi ended up with a concussion, but otherwise he was fine. Turns out his people had some serious battle juju, and because of all that skin art he was hella hard to kill. I felt like I owed him, though, for sticking his neck out for me like that. So, I agreed to treat him to some brews and barbecue and help him hunt down some body parts for his new ride. He was stoked about it, which was alright by me. Hemi was a good person, and I sure didn’t mind having a six-foot-five-inch Maori warrior watching my back.
Samson was happy that I’d stopped Crowley before he killed any more of the Pack—or, for that matter, any more fae. He said Crowley had probably used his magic to briefly paralyze them while the Dullahan did the dirty work. It sounded like a horrible way to die to me. Samson agreed. Unfortunately, they never recovered the heads. They moved the bodies to an underground vault until such time as the Pack could give them a proper burial. The official story was that the ’thropes who died were on loan to another Pack.
Finn stayed true to his word, and had been clean since the night we fought the Dullahan in the junkyard. I had a chat with the red caps when I returned Sal’s car, and we came to an understanding that included them supplying Finn with Suboxone until he was completely off the junk. I also got him hooked up with a drug addiction counselor through Dr. Larsen’s office. He wasn’t quite as obnoxious as he had been, but still wasn’t the same old pipe-smoking college professor I remembered from my youth. Maureen said it was common for mortals who lived an excessively long time to go through personality changes every several decades. She claimed it was the only way a mortal mind could deal with immortality.
And Sabine? She was a glaistig with multiple neuroses, so it was hard to say with her. That being said, she seemed to be have come through her experience relatively unscathed. However, I noticed that she’d been turning up the juice on her glamour and see-me-not spell, which really bummed me out considering all the progress she’d made.
Currently, she and I were sitting in Luther’s place enjoying a cup of coffee and playing checkers like a couple of old people. She was kicking my ass, and had crowned three of her black pieces to just one of my red, and had a stack of red checkers on her side of the board. I was basically just stalling to delay the inevitable at this point.
She waggled her eyebrows at me. “So, are you ready to admit defeat?”
“Alright, you win.” I cleared the board and began setting up my pieces again. I got a few weird looks from the other patrons, so I pointed to my earpiece.
“I’m playing with my friend in virtual reality.” That got me off the hook and everyone went back to what they were doing. Never mind that I wasn’t even wearing VR glasses. People always believed what they wanted to believe.
“So, what do you think Maeve has in store for you?” she asked as she neatly centered each of her pieces on a square.
“I’m not sure, but I have a feeling there’s a much bigger game at play, and I’m just being used as a pawn.” I picked up a red game piece and flipped it back and forth between my fingers.
“One thing’s for sure, though: Maeve and Finn have both hinted that something really bad is on the horizon. That means we need to be ready for it when it comes.”
I thought back to what Samson had said about helping me learn to control the ríastrad, and what that might mean. Right now I couldn’t even think about losing control, for fear that I might hurt Sabine, or Belladonna, or who knew who else. I sure couldn’t go through lif
e wondering if I was going to lose it and kill one of my friends, and it certainly didn’t look like I was going to be rid of this curse any time in the near future. Which meant I’d need to go see Samson to discuss his offer—very, very soon.
I flicked the game piece up in the air, and watched as it landed perfectly on top of one of Sabine’s black pieces with a satisfying click. Two opposites, perfectly matched. I wondered whether that could be a metaphor for my split personality, or for where things might be headed on the relationship front. Who knew? Honestly, the way things had turned out I felt a small bit of hope for the first time since Jesse died. Anything was possible.
I felt the tiniest breeze on my neck and shivered slightly. I looked around to see if someone was standing behind me, or if there was a door or window open, but the room was buttoned up tight and no one was there but us.
Sabine looked up from the board and stared at me quizzically. “Everything okay, Colin?”
I nodded. “Everything’s fine, Sabine. Game on.”
Epilogue
The McCool Home—In the Space Between This World and the Next, 9 Months, 26 Days A.J.
“Hey there, slugger.”
I opened my eyes, and I was still in my old room in Mom’s basement, but somehow I wasn’t there. Everything was the same, but ethereal and semi-solid looking.
And Jesse was standing there in front of me.
“It’s you, isn’t it? It’s really you?”
She nodded. “It’s me, one hundred percent. I’ve been here since the fight with the Caoránach.”
I began crying, although I wasn’t sure how that worked here. The last thing I remembered was drinking Finn’s magical mystery potion and lying down in bed. I started blubbering like a fool.
“I’m sorry, Jesse—I’m so, so sorry.” Then she was there, holding me in her arms.
“Shhh, it’s alright. I’ve heard your apologies a thousand times already, and I forgave you the moment it happened. When I saw the transformation come over you, I figured it was the Caoránach’s magic, and I knew it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was Fúamnach. She sent a messenger to your funeral to gloat.”
Jesse nodded. “We don’t have much time. We can spend it rehashing the past, or we can have one last perfect night together. Which do you prefer?”
“I just want to stay here with you, forever and ever.”
Her eyes softened and she touched my cheek. “You can’t, Colin. Your time’s not done yet. In fact, our time isn’t done yet, either. We were supposed to do something important together, something pivotal. But when Fúamnach’s curse happened, it threw everything out of whack. That’s why I’m still here.”
“But what could we possibly have to do that’s so important? I’ve tried to end my life a dozen times so I could be with you, and there’s no escape for me. Now you’re stuck in between worlds because we have some cosmic duty? That’s bullshit, Jesse. No one should have to suffer this much.”
“It is what it is, slugger. We didn’t have to volunteer to fight the forces of evil. That was our choice. If we hadn’t accepted that mantle, someone else would have taken our places. But we did, and what’s done is done. Now, we can only deal with the consequences.”
I was torn, because a part of me wanted to rail against fate and another just wanted to cherish what little time I had to be with her. “It’s not fair.”
“Of course it’s not, silly. That’s life. Just know that I’m not going anywhere, and I’ll be there when the time comes for us to do what we need to do.”
“Like a guardian angel?”
“Just like that.”
I nodded. “Okay. But you have to stop trying to communicate with me. Otherwise you’ll fade away into nothing, and then we’ll never be together.”
She laughed, and it sounded like wind chimes at night. “I know the rules, silly. They told me before I came back. It’ll be okay.”
“Alright, I can accept that.” I looked around the room and back at her. “What now?”
She grinned a crooked little grin that said she was up to no good. “Now, we spend what little time we have making up for all the time we’ve been apart.”
I took her in my arms, and it was just like the first time, all over again.
– – –
This concludes the first volume in the Junkyard Druid series… but there’s more Colin waiting for you at my website! Go to MDMassey.com now to download your FREE novel, Druid Blood: A Junkyard Druid Prequel. When you do, you’ll be subscribed to my newsletter, and you’ll be the first to find out when the next Colin McCool novel, Graveyard Druid, hits bookstore shelves.
