Stone of Destiny (The Danaan Trilogy)

by Laura Howard

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Pronunciation Guide

  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

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Stone of Destiny

  Book Two of The Danaan Trilogy

  Copyright © 2014 by Laura Howard

  Formatting by Self Publishing Editing Service

  Publishing by Finding Bliss Publishing

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  For Kevin, Erin, Colleen, Ryan and Owen. You are my heart.

  Pronunciation Guide

  Liam {Lee-um}

  Niamh {Neev}

  Aoife {Ay-fuh}

  Breanh {Bran}

  Diarmuid {Der-mott}

  Niall {Neal}

  Bláithín {Blaw-heen}

  Eithne {En-ya}

  Aodhan {Ay-den}

  Saoirse {Sare-shuh}

  Deaghlan {Deck-lun}

  Ciarán {Kee-run}

  Maire {Mah-ree}

  Tír na n’Óg {Tur-na-nog}

  Bruidhean {Brood-ian}

  Fháillan {Fah-lan}

  “Aoife has escaped.”

  My jaw dropped at Liam’s words. I’d known this already, but now the others knew that Aoife was no longer imprisoned in the fey globe. I kept quiet as I tried to gauge my father’s reaction. He didn’t sound frightened or nervous. He sounded tired. Like he’d been expecting this to happen for some time now.

  I glanced at Aodhan who leaned against my SUV, arms folded across his massive chest. He didn’t meet my eyes right away, but glowered off into the distance. When he eventually looked at me, his expression was carefully blank. I didn’t need to be able to read body language to know how he felt about Aoife’s escape. Aodhan despised all the Danaan. Like Liam, he was once a human living in Ireland. When a British soldier shot him and left him to die in 1600 Niamh, a Danaan princess brought him home with her to Tír na n’Óg.

  A Danaan is what most people refer to as a member of the Fair Folk or, as much as I hate the term, a faerie. They look almost human but are so flawless that it gives them an ethereal appearance. That’s where the similarities end. They don’t have human feelings or consciences. They do what pleases them with no regard for who gets hurt along the way.

  The ultimate example of their race stood in my personal space as my father spoke.

  Deaghlan, king of the Danaans, was inhumanly beautiful. His black hair was long enough to touch the collar of his tight gray T-shirt. His face was the perfect combination of hard lines and smooth skin. But more than any of his features combined, his eyes were the most captivating. Bright blue and hypnotic. I’d been trapped in his gaze way more than I’d care to admit. Humans rarely resist the Danaans charm. And they delighted in toying with us.

  Deaghlan studied my face. His dark eyebrows furrowed as he watched my reaction. Aoife was his daughter, although since Danaans are immortal he didn’t look much older than me, twenty-five at most. A smirk lingered on his lips and I knew he was enjoying himself. Human concerns amused him. For the king of such a powerful race, I found it strange that everything was always a joke to him.

  Liam cleared his throat and I cursed under my breath. Once again I had been completely mesmerized by Deaghlan. No matter how many times I told myself not to look into his eyes, I always fell into the same trap whenever he was near me — wide-eyed and staring like one of those vacant dolls in the toy store. Warmth burned in my chest, spreading quickly to my throat as I wrenched my gaze away.

  When humans looked into Danaans' eyes, they became enraptured, turned into mindless slaves who would walk through fire just to be close to them. The Danaans didn't always do it on purpose, but it probably came in handy when they were looking to score. And once a human had a physical relationship with a Danaan, all hope of regaining free will was gone. Since the Danaans didn't normally stick around, those humans were driven crazy, like addicts waiting for their next fix. One that would never come.

  “Do you know where she is now?” I asked.

  Liam frowned and paused before answering. “Not yet. We came straight here to check on your mother. She’s okay, I take it?”

  I looked up at my grandparents’ house where I’d lived my entire life. I hadn’t met Liam until a few months ago when he showed up on our doorstep with his stories of Danaans and magic. My grandparents raised me because my mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia shortly after I was born.

  I inhaled. “I just got home from orientation, but I think she’s fine.” Surely my grandparents would’ve called my cell if anything were wrong.

  I started walking toward the house. “Wait here. I’ll only be a second.”

  I climbed the wooden stairs that led onto the porch of the big farmhouse. Feeling all three pairs of eyes on my back, I reached for the handle of the screen door. When I swung it open, I jumped and stifled a yelp. My mother stood directly in front of me, staring over my shoulder to where Liam and the others waited.

  “Mom,” I said, running a hand over my mouth. “What are you doing? Where’s Gram?”

  My mother’s green eyes flitted from Liam to me and back again, but she didn’t answer.

  What the doctor’s believed was schizophrenia was actually the supernatural addiction my mother held for my father. Before they met, my mom was normal and healthy. She went to college and traveled to Ireland during her final semester to study music at Trinity. They met at the Music in the Street Festival. They fell in love almost immediately despite my father’s complicated relationship with Deaghlan’s other daughter, Aoife.

  Aoife didn’t just get jealous when she found out my father was in love with someone else. Oh no, that would be what a human would do. Aoife cast a magical enchantment, called a geis, on my father. The geis prevented my father from touching my mother. My mother would be driven mad without his touch, and eventually die of a broken heart. Not only that, but Aoife forbade my father from leaving Tír na n’Óg.

  Just months ago Aoife’s sister Niamh had helped my father escape by trapping Aoife in a magical glass prison called a fey globe. He came to America to find my mother and met me instead. He didn’t know anything about me, so he was pretty surprised his daughter answered the door when he came calling. In his defense, time passed in a completely different way in Tír na n’Óg. Each year there was the equivalent of about twenty years here.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t excited to welcome him into our lives. I hadn’t even told my grandparents about him yet. I had many reasons for that, but the most important was that since my father spent so much time in their real
m, he became mostly Danaan himself. He became immortal, and like the fully grown Danaan, he looked about twenty-five.

  I hadn’t figured out a way to explain that my father looked like he could be my brother. Because of her relationship with my father, my mom hadn’t aged much either. But her behavior was so unpredictable and sometimes frightening that people don’t ask about how she looks.

  I pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind me and locked the deadbolt. I hoped having Liam out of sight might keep my mother from breaking down.

  “Gram,” I called as I walked past the staircase and down the hallway to the kitchen in the back of the house.

  “Hello sweetheart,” my grandmother said, looking up at me with a smile. She sat at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and her checkbook.

  “How was orientation?” Gram asked.

  “It was fine,” I said. “How’s Mom?” The sound of fiddle music floated out to the kitchen from the den.

  Gram straightened her pile of papers and looked at me over her reading glasses. “She seems fine today. Why do you ask?”

  I grabbed a plum out of the fruit bowl and shrugged. “Oh, no reason. I was just thinking about her on my ride home.”

  “All right then,” Gram said, focusing back on her bills.

  “I’m going to take a walk. I won’t be gone long,” I called over my shoulder as I hurried past the den and headed back out to the driveway.

  I froze on the bottom step when I realized what I’d forgotten.

  Before Liam had shared the news about Aoife, I’d stopped next door at my cousin Nicole’s house. I’d walked into the pool area to find not only Nicole and her boyfriend Jeff, but Jeff’s brother, Ethan, and some blonde girl I didn’t know. I’d just decided to admit my feelings to Ethan after years of pushing him away. But the way the blonde was attached to Ethan stopped me cold. I’d fled feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.

  Ethan had followed me out of the pool area and that’s when I came face to face with the Danaans in my driveway. Sometime between Liam’s news and me checking on my mother, Ethan had disappeared.

  Hurt swelled just beneath my skin as I headed down the walk toward my car. Even though we weren’t together, every time I saw Ethan with another girl it felt like the world stopped spinning.

  He could have been yours. My subconscious taunted me. Ethan told me he wanted me many times over the years. And I’d come so close to admitting my feelings to him. But things were so complicated before that I didn’t want to drag him into the rabbit hole with me. And now…

  “Allison,” Liam said.

  I frowned and followed the sound of his voice to the sidewalk where he waited with Aodhan and Deaghlan.

  “I haven’t had a chance to show you the house,” Liam said, motioning for me to follow him.

  Shortly after I met my father, he bought the vacant lot beside my grandparents’ house. It was creepy at first, but it was convenient to have a place to speak in private about Aoife.

  The house was built by Magliaro Construction, Ethan’s father’s company. It was one level and appeared small from outside, but the vaulted ceilings and shiny hardwoods inside made it seem much bigger.

  The house was pretty empty. The only furniture was a large oak table in the dining room. Aodhan marched right into the kitchen that joined the dining room. His eyes scanned every surface, like he was expecting the boogeyman to jump out from behind the door. Satisfied for the moment, he leaned back against the countertop and folded his arms.

  I sat at the table, trying to ignore how closely Deaghlan followed me. He slid into the chair next to mine and stretched out his legs. From the corner of my eye I could see he was watching me, but I wouldn’t look directly at him.

  “The most important thing is that Elizabeth is safe for the moment,” Liam said. He leaned on the back of a chair and met my eyes.

  I nodded, but no matter how much I wanted to tell them I’d known all along Aoife wasn’t still trapped in the fey globe, it was impossible to say it out loud. Aoife told me I couldn’t t say a word about it to anyone. She’d used mind control before she disappeared in Tír na n’Óg and I literally couldn’t speak of it.

  “We need to figure out who set her free,” Aodhan said, clearly agitated. His Irish brogue became thicker and harder to understand when he was alarmed.

  Deaghlan laughed beside me. “That isn’t hard to figure out, is it?”

  The three of us turned to Deaghlan expectantly. He shook his head and chuckled. “My bet is on Saoirse. I would’ve done it myself if I had a chance.”

  Saoirse was the queen of Tír na n’Óg, Aoife and Niamh’s mother. In Danaan society, the queen was the most powerful member of the race. But when I’d met her, she’d seemed very interested in restoring order after all the chaos Aoife created.

  “No, it couldn’t be.” Liam swallowed and rubbed his palms over his face. “Saoirse knows what Aoife has done. She wouldn’t let her out of her sight.”

  Deaghlan wrapped the end of my ponytail around his finger and laughed when I cringed. “We’ll see.”

  Aodhan’s eyes narrowed and the muscles in his jaw tensed. I could tell he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet. Once Deaghlan was gone I hoped to hear what he really thought. Since Aodhan came back to the human realm in 1888, he spent his days as a self-imposed vigilante. Every time one of the Danaans stepped out of line, Aodhan knew about it and put an end to it immediately. Danaans were sometimes to blame for stories on the news, usually just pranks or cases of unexplained amnesia.

  But recently in Canada, a group of Danaans started siphoning human blood for some forbidden magic that Aoife was involved in. Liam told me this ancient magic was forbidden by Saoirse because it made the Danaans do terrible things, such as draining their victims and tossing their bodies in the gutter. Liam and I found Aodhan by going to Thunder Bay in Ontario where the reports of a blood-thirsty serial killer were all over the news. I’d gotten a glimpse of what this forbidden magic did to the Danaans. The one I saw looked like a strung-out heroin addict.

  “Well, if there isn’t anything we can do for now, I have to get ready for work,” I said, moving away from the table and Deaghlan’s maddening faerie mojo.

  I’ve worked three or four days a week at my grandfather’s hardware store since I was a junior in high school. O’Malley’s Hardware is only about a mile and a half from our house in Stoneville. I left the house about ten minutes before the start of my shift at three.

  As I rolled up to the stop sign at the end of our road, my little SUV started making an odd thumping noise. I glanced at the dashboard, but none of the warning lights were on. Once I was sure there were no oncoming cars, I turned onto Main Street. The thump grew louder as I sped up and I figured I better pull over at Murphy’s Convenience Store.

  It was coming from the front passenger side and sure enough when I walked around the hood, my tire was flat. I cursed internally at not renewing my membership to AAA this year. I never had to change a tire and wasn’t sure how.

  I pulled out my phone to call my grandfather just as the door to Murphy’s jangled behind me.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I recognized a slightly familiar blonde holding the door for someone behind her. Ethan walked out and stopped when he saw me.

  All the blood drained from my face at seeing them together again. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I focused on my flat tire, hoping they’d be on their way.

  “Allison,” Ethan said, his voice apathetic.

  I fought to make my expression equally cool before turning to face him “Oh, hey Ethan.”

  “Having a little trouble?” he asked, nodding at my tire.

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Ethan took two steps toward me and froze. I looked up at his face and he seemed confused for a second. Then his expression shifted back and he laughed. It wasn’t like he was laughing at a joke, not a playful laugh. It was cruel, like he was laughing at me. My heart turned to icy lead in my chest and I turned away.r />
  “Well, that sucks,” he said as he dropped his arm over the blonde’s shoulder and walked toward the gas pumps where his truck was parked.

  I chewed my lip as I stared at the tire. Ethan’s behavior was so at odds with the guy I knew. I guess I didn’t deserve his help after the way I’d ended things. I mean, we’d only hung out a few times and then there were those kisses. I’d told him none of it meant anything to me, but only because I didn’t want him mixed up in any of the strange stuff that had been happening to me. But for him to walk away laughing at me was just plain mean.

  I needed to figure out how to fix this, no matter how humiliated I felt. I’d seen plenty of tire changes in my life. It was time I took care of myself for once.

  I popped open the rear door and pulled out my jack and lug wrench. After laying them out next to my flat, I discreetly searched for directions to change a tire on my phone. I found a quick tutorial online and followed each step. Unscrewing the bolts was the hardest part, but I stomped on the wrench and managed to get them off. It probably took three times as long as it should have, but when I tightened the final bolt on the spare and hauled the flat into the back, I dusted off my hands and smiled in satisfaction.

  I arrived at work almost forty-five minutes late. Even still, my grandfather insisted on taking my car to have a new tire installed. I relented, knowing I wouldn’t win this argument. My only concession was that he had to let me pay him back.

  After Pop left, I spent the entire evening placing the orders he’d left for me. He always said he had no interest in learning how to do it over the computer, so I took it on since it was so much faster than trying to do it all over the phone.

  Between that and the few customers that came in, I replayed the scene with Ethan over and over in my mind.

  Tonight called for an Extra Large Peanut Butter Cup Sundae and a Persuasion reread.

  I’m walking in a grassy field at night, searching for something, and somehow I know it’s important. Someone tugs on my hand, and I turn to see Ethan smile at me. His face is pinched in worry, but I can tell he’s trying to reassure me.