Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  She took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over at him. “Is that all I was wrong about?”

  He let his bitter silence speak for itself, earning him another of her robust laughs.

  “I so have you pegged.”

  Her words echoed his own frustration that she thought she totally understood who he was without even knowing him, and he challenged her back. “Fine, I’ll tell you about you now. How about that?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You’re Irish,” he said, starting slow. “I could tell by the nameplate on your desk, because the spelling looks nothing like the name you said when you introduced yourself to me.”

  “That’s how Irish people spell Chevonne,” she said, nodding. “Right so far.”

  She was so sure that she knew him, so he decided to be blunt with her as well. “You like to be tough. And you are tough, probably. But you’re always proving it with these adventures you go on. The pictures are up all over your office—sky diving, swimming with sharks, cliff diving. You wrap your identity up in being this tough, adventuresome girl. But there’s rarely anyone else in the pictures, which means that, even though I think you have some close friends, you tend to go off on your own a lot. It’s almost like you have a wall up, and that wall is this blunt, abrasive persona that’s keeping you protected. I think maybe you’re kind of lonely. How am I doing so far?”

  Siobhan didn’t answer immediately, her hands tightening on their ten-and-two position on the wheel. “I predicted your college experience and how you decorated your apartment,” she said, her voice sounding different than it had a moment ago. “I didn’t make it personal.”

  He felt a twinge of guilt, but Julian didn’t let her off the hook just yet. “Really? Because from the moment I walked in, you’ve acted like I’m some sort of fuddy-duddy.”

  “Fuddy-duddy is something only a fuddy-duddy would say.”

  “There you go again.”

  “Well, I’m a lonely person with a wall up, covering my emotions with meaningless adventures. What do you expect?”

  “You’re right. I would expect you to be able to dish it but not be able to take it,” Julian retorted. “Listen, I don’t know if you’re the right person to help me with what’s been happening to me. I’m not even sure I know what’s happening to me. I think we just need to take a step back. Maybe I can have a more reasonable conversation with someone else in your agency.”

  She didn’t look over at him as she pulled off the interstate, taking an exit that led to a more suburban area of Boston. “I think your visions are real, and that means a woman’s life is on the line. Let’s you and I just talk as little as possible and focus on making sure that we do our due diligence to help her. If my friend says your visions aren’t predictive, then we’ll go our separate ways.”

  “Fine,” Julian said, shrugging a shoulder. “No need for us to be friends.”

  “Oh, we’re not friends.”

  He bit his tongue, not wanting to make the conflict between them any worse than it already was. He just needed to get through meeting this supposed psychic, even though he wasn’t even sure he believed in such things, and see if she had any insight into the terrible scenes that played out in his mind every few weeks. Best-case scenario, she could tell him what was happening to him.

  Worst-case scenario …she could tell him what was happening to him.

  Chapter Seven

  Siobhan

  She was absolutely seething inside as she drove, silence filling the car. They were still a good ten minutes from Ophelia’s house, and neither Siobhan nor Julian had said a word in five minutes. When she had initiated small talk, she had done so to fill the time as they drove. She had never expected that it would launch their semi-tense interactions into a full-blown conflict. Maybe she hadn’t been the kindest when she was assessing him, but he had hit below the belt, presuming to know so much about her after a mere hour in her company.

  The worst part of it all was that he had been relatively on target. She was lonely, and she did have a wall up, and though Siobhan loved her fellow Dragon Clan members more than anything, she was the only one of them who tended to fly off on her own and have her own experiences. She was independent to a fault, and she knew that she was brusque, in part, to keep people at a distance.

  And damn him for calling her on all of it.

  The man was drop-dead gorgeous to look at, but there was no way they were coming out of this even as friends, much less as potential romantic partners. He was definitely not her fated mate, and if she was lucky, he wouldn’t even be her client. If Ophelia said that his visions were predictive, then she had every intention of roping Kean or Moira into working with him instead of her. They just weren’t going to mesh.

  Silence had a way of growing so loud that she couldn’t hear anything else, and by the time Siobhan pulled up to Ophelia’s house and turned the engine off, the silence was so noisy that it was ringing in her ears. She unbuckled and opened her door, stepping back out into the late-August heat.

  “Did you tell her we were coming?” Julian asked, speaking for the first time in fifteen minutes. “Are we just dropping in on her? Oh, she’s psychic. I guess she already knows.”

  Siobhan gave him a withering look. “That’s not how psychics work. And Ophelia doesn’t require a heads-up. She’s always here.”

  “Still. There’s etiquette.”

  “Would you like to instruct me on that as well?” Siobhan asked with mock sweetness, leading him up to the front porch of the log-cabin-styled house that was out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and a river running nearby. Without waiting for him to answer, she knocked on the door, and a few seconds later, there was a shuffling sound moving toward them.

  The door creaked open, and Ophelia’s lined face greeted her with a smile. “Siobhan. How lovely for you to visit. I thought that I might get a pleasant surprise today. Come in, come in. Your aura is so dark now. Something awful must be happening. Oh, look! You have a friend with you.”

  “Ophelia, this is my client, Julian Giordano. Julian, this is Ophelia.”

  They all stepped inside, and Ophelia closed the door, her gaze trained firmly on Julian as he greeted her, holding his hand out politely to shake hers. Ophelia slid her palm against his, gripping his hand tightly and closing her eyes.

  “Oh my.”

  “What?” Julian asked. “What does that mean?”

  “You have a terrible burden,” Ophelia whispered, her other hand lifting to press against the back of his hand. “And a deep attraction to…” The old woman’s eyes opened, and she smiled. “Oh, to Siobhan. Isn’t that nice?”

  Julian jerked his hand away and began to stutter a response, but Siobhan didn’t give him a chance to complete the thought. She was no stranger to men being attracted to her, and she knew that the male mind didn’t have to feel any kind of emotional connection to a woman to be able to appreciate and enjoy her body. Pushing aside the response her own body inexplicably had to the announcement that Julian found her physically desirable, she addressed Ophelia directly. “Julian has a bit of a problem that we’re hoping you can help us with, Ophelia. Can you work with him now?”

  “Well, I was going to watch my stories,” Ophelia said, looking toward her TV set placed near to the couch. “But Jackson is going to break off his engagement to Penelope today, and it will be too crushing to see in person, so it’s just as well.”

  “Doesn’t it ruin the experience if you know what’s going to happen before you watch?” Siobhan asked, mildly amused by the sweet old woman.

  “Yes, but I couldn’t resist a peek.” Ophelia ushered them further in. “Now, now, now. Tell me what it is you need help with. Julian, you go first. You’ve hardly said a word. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  Siobhan sat down with Julian and Ophelia at the table, gesturing for him to answer her question when he glanced sideways at her.

  Julian cleared his throat, shifting in his seat for a moment be
fore beginning. He explained to Ophelia exactly what he had told Siobhan in her office, delivering a rather shocking story in clear, concise, calm tones. Siobhan had to give him credit, if she was being fair, because a lot of people in Julian’s position would be in a state of panic after witnessing the things he claimed to have witnessed, but he was handling himself with a certain amount of poise.

  Of course, it was that constant poise that irked her so much. But she still reluctantly admired his calm.

  When Julian had finished his explanation, he sat with his hands folded in front of him, his eyes trained firmly on his interlaced fingers, as though he was awaiting Ophelia’s judgement.

  But the older woman simply clucked her tongue. “Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear. What a difficult thing for you, Julian. There are many who think that our gifts are blessings, but they are a curse too. We have the weight of knowledge placed unwillingly on our shoulders, and we have to learn to accept what we cannot change as well as commit to changing what we can.”

  “So you think his visions are predictive too,” Siobhan said, cutting to the chase. “You think he’s seeing things that will happen.”

  “Or that have happened,” Ophelia mused. “It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. We don’t always know.”

  “Well, how do we find out? We need to know if this woman that Julian saw is going to be hurt, because if there’s time to stop it, then we have to do whatever we can, right?”

  Ophelia turned her wide, open gaze toward her. “Do we?”

  Surprised, Siobhan frowned at the woman. “Of course. Why would we not stop something like that from happening?”

  The old woman lifted a shoulder, turning to look out the window. “There is balance in the universe, and everything happens for a reason, dear. It’s good to help others, yes, but sometimes our best efforts to help them only lead to their destruction.” Her eyes glazed over, as though she wasn’t really there with them anymore. “I remember it like it was yesterday. The vision was so clear, and I could feel his despair so strongly. It was a man—a nice man. A good-looking man. He was being fired by his boss for an unintentional act of negligence. He dealt with sensitive material, and he had forgotten to lock the files up one night. Now he was pleading to keep his job. He had three little children at home and another on the way, and his wife couldn’t work. They had no savings to speak of, because life doesn’t often provide for such things when you have three children. He was a good man—I could sense that. There was a nameplate on the desk, and I found the offices where he worked by looking up that name. He hadn’t been fired yet. The negligence incident hadn’t occurred.”

  “And you saved his job,” Siobhan said, hurrying the story along so that Ophelia would get to the point. She was fond of the older woman and had been ever since they had met several years ago on a different case, but Siobhan was painfully aware of the seconds that ticked by, reducing the amount of time they had to find the woman in Julian’s vision.

  “I did,” Ophelia said, not talking any faster or looking away from the window. “I convinced the office manager to hire me as a cleaning lady, and every night, for weeks, I stayed there at the office, cleaning, waiting to make sure that his files were locked up on whatever night he finally forgot. It took weeks and weeks, and I began to doubt the vision, but one night, sure enough, he was on the phone with his wife, and he forgot to properly secure the paperwork on his desk. By that time, I knew just what to do, and I locked it all up for him. I worked just a few days more—long enough to make sure that I had averted his crisis, and then I quit my job, satisfied that I had changed a family’s fate and done well by them.”

  Siobhan waited a beat, but Ophelia seemed done talking, still lost in her trance. “That’s great, Ophelia. That’s what we want to do for this woman. We just need help. Can you—?”

  “Two weeks after I quit, the whole building burned down, killing almost thirty people,” Ophelia said, as though Siobhan had never spoken. “He was in there. Burned to death. He never would have been, had I not interfered.”

  Stunned, Siobhan glanced over at Julian, who seemed equally shocked by the turn the story had taken as they sat there at Ophelia’s oak table, surrounded by her flowered curtains and walls covered in displays of china.

  “Ophelia, you didn’t know,” Siobhan said quietly. “You couldn’t have known. You were trying to help.”

  Finally, Ophelia looked back at her, eyes clearer now. “Yes, my intentions were good, dear. But I got to know that man over the weeks, and then my efforts to help his family resulted in his death. He would have found a new job. They would have found the money. Those problems can be fixed. Nothing I could do could bring him back from the dead—and I’d had no vision, warning me of the fire. That’s when I learned that I couldn’t always trust my own mind. Our visions are not always sent to us so that we can right a problem. They are just sent to us, and we have to be careful how we react to them.”

  Siobhan bit her lip, working to take the time to think through her response before simply delivering it. “Ophelia…I do understand what you’re saying,” Siobhan began. “And I don’t pretend to understand all that goes into dealing with a psychic gift. I just…I’m pretty sure that whatever is waiting for this woman in her life, it’s better than being murdered. I think this vision is pretty safe to act on.”

  “Yes, you would think,” Ophelia murmured. “You would think so.” Then the woman turned to Julian, tilting her head as she studied him carefully. “What do you think, Julian? After all, you are the one with the gift. Only you can know what you feel from the vision. Only you can know what level of responsibility you want to take for what you see. You must guide us before I can guide you to greater understanding. Are you ready to take on this destiny?”

  Chapter Eight

  Julian

  “No,” Julian replied, reacting instinctively to the question. “I mean—I don’t know. I mean—I need a minute. Just…a minute.”

  He got up from the table, walking back over to the living space and sitting down on the couch, his head in his hands. Listening to Ophelia brought home what he had known instinctively—that if his visions were predictive, his life was changed forever. These visions came to him without warning, without explanation, and without cause. Was he going to stop what he was doing every single time, track down the person in his vision, and change their fate? Was he going to take the risk and save them from one disaster only to have them face a far worse one down the line? And what if he couldn’t find the person? What if he couldn’t stop what happened to them? What if he found them, but only just too late?

  Was he responsible for that now? Was the blonde woman’s life now his responsibility to protect?

  This wasn’t how he lived—he was an accountant. He had a cubicle. He met with clients who didn’t know how to input receipts into newfangled computer programs designed to keep track of their income and expenses. The most exciting thing in his life involved writing a column about food for an online newspaper and getting recognized on the street sometimes as “that funny food guy.”

  Now, because of his near-death experience and the visions, he felt he was being thrust into some sort of pseudo-superhero role, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready to handle it at all. Who was he, after all, to interfere with fate? Terrible things happened to people all the time, and they couldn’t all be stopped. Maybe, in the overall cosmic pattern, they shouldn’t be stopped. Who was to say that if Julian saved this woman, some other woman might not be hurt instead? Was it his right to pick who lived and who died?

  His chest was tight with pressure, his hands clenched together, and he leaned over on the couch, resting his forehead on his thumbs. When a hand touched his shoulder, he nearly leapt to his feet, but caught himself in time, only jerking back instead.

  When he looked up, it was Siobhan standing there. Siobhan, with her impatient, slightly-aggressive, all-in type of personality. Siobhan with her gorgeous face and perfect body. Siobhan who, over the course of the
past two hours, had frustrated him and provoked him more than any of his coworkers had over the past few years.

  She sat down beside him, without speaking at first. Then, after a beat, she sighed. “Maybe I moved you too fast.”

  He let out a sharp laugh. “Who, you? Never.”

  “I got caught up on the fact that there was a woman in danger,” Siobhan said, ignoring his jab, though her voice was slightly tight. “And that’s still a pretty big factor here. But I forgot about the fact that this is a lot for you.”

  It was an honest attempt at a concession, and Julian nodded in acknowledgment. “It is. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Sometimes we get things we don’t ask for. We have to make the best of them and use those things for good.”

  “And how do I do that? Become a superhero without the cape?” he asked, looking over at her. “I didn’t even believe in psychics before all this, Siobhan. Now, apparently, I am one.”

  She pursed her lips. “Not technically. You have uncontrollable psychic visions, right now. We would have to work to develop your gift for you to become a psychic.”

  He leveled her with a look. “Is that the point right now?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “The point right now is, what am I supposed to do about this vision?” He leaned back against the couch, really asking her opinion. “You’re right that it’s a fairly clear-cut situation, where this woman is clearly in need of help, and whatever consequences there are to the change in her fate, they’re probably a lot better than being beaten to death while chained to a pole.”

  “I mean, you would think.”

  He looked at her, not really seeing her face, but looking straight through her as he considered all of his options. “So if I decide to pursue this one and see what happens and we’re able to save her, then for the rest of my life, I’m going to feel an obligation to pursue every vision I have. And then what if some of them I shouldn’t pursue? Or what if I can’t? Who pays you to follow up on psychic visions? How do I have a career? A life? A relationship? How will I be able to go through life, knowing that at any moment, this horrible knowledge—incomplete, horrible knowledge—will be dropped in my lap?” When he was done with his rant, he focused on her again, looking into her unblinking blue gaze and waiting for an answer. “Well?”