Eoin stuck out his hand. “Mind if we shake?”
Patrick was tentative at first, but then he reached out across the bed and shook Eoin’s hand. Eoin nodded, and he smiled. “Interesting,” he said. “I imagine we all have a lot to discuss.”
Strange words from an odd man, Patrick decided. But the way he spoke and how he assessed Patrick made him wonder how much he really knew. Cyril’s words came back to him, the weird story of his lineage and the woman named Sadhbh. But that was the least of his worries.
Liam told Patrick about going out for a drink and the run in with the winged creature. He didn’t question it. He’d seen his own share of crazy shit, so he wasn’t so quick to judge.
Then Liam mentioned Cyril. That caused Patrick to perk up. He didn’t tell them about his run in with Cyril, but he took a particular interest when he learned these three were working against him. That was a good thing, a serendipitous turn of events. The whole way back to the motel room, Patrick worried how he could even get to a guy who could throw around some sort of image of himself wherever he pleased. But now, there was hope with this group. Even if one of that group he wanted to kick in the nuts. Patrick coughed and rubbed his throat again.
Patrick put an arm around Liam’s shoulders. “Excuse us for a minute,” Patrick said. “I’d like to have a conversation with Liam.”
“Of course,” Eoin said. “But please hurry. I’d like to be on the road soon.”
On the road? Patrick stared at Eoin a little harder, then he moved Liam toward the bathroom where he shut the door.
Once inside the bathroom, he turned to Liam. He stared directly into his blue eyes, and Patrick hugged him. “I was worried,” Patrick said.
“I’m okay,” Liam said into his ear. He returned Patrick’s hug, Patrick enjoying the feeling of Liam’s hands rubbing his back.
“I hurried back as fast as I could.” He pulled back and looked at Liam again. “You should have waited here in the room.”
“Yeah. Hindsight and all that,” Liam said. He turned and leaned up against the scuffed and pockmarked bathroom counter.
“Do you really trust these people?”
Liam lifted a hand like he wasn’t sure. “Eoin saved my life. I know that much.”
“About that. How do you know it wasn’t like some hallucinogenic trip or maybe they drugged you?”
The way Liam looked at Patrick quieted that notion. It was written in the look of horror in Liam’s eyes. Liam shook his head. One thing was for sure, Liam believed whatever he saw.
“I don’t know about going with them. Where are they taking us?”
“Wilmette,” Liam said. “It’s just north of Evanston.”
Patrick was only cursorily familiar with Chicago. He wasn’t sure where either of those places were, exactly.
“They said they have a safe house up there.”
Calling it a safe house set off alarm bells in Patrick’s head. He’d been in plenty of them to know they weren’t places for people to lounge around and watch television all day by the pool. A safe house implied these were people who routinely had something they needed to be kept safe from. And while that certainly described the situation that he and Liam were in, it didn’t instill a lot of confidence in Patrick about the three people waiting out in the motel room.
Patrick shook his head and paced in the small space of the bathroom. “I don’t like it,” he said.
“Patrick, if you’d seen what I saw tonight, you would probably be ready to go like I am.”
“Something about this doesn’t feel right.”
“I know,” Liam said. “But what other options do we have right now? This place isn’t safe anymore.”
He was right. Cyril hammered that point home all too well.
Liam held up his hand. “They said I have a tracker on my hand.”
Patrick froze for a quick second as he stared down at the mark on Liam’s hand. But he recovered quickly. “What do you mean?”
Liam shrugged. “I don’t know how it got there, but they can remove it.”
Okay, that was something. With a sigh, Patrick put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “If you’re willing to trust them in this, then we’ll go. As soon as whatever this tracker thing is comes off, we can go somewhere else.”
“Eoin said he has answers. He said he can explain more about the stone.”
Patrick pulled Liam into an embrace again. “Like I said, we’ll get what we need, then we can make a decision. Good?”
Liam lay his head on Patrick’s shoulder, his face buried into Patrick’s neck. “Good,” Liam said.
Twenty
Chicago, IL - On the road
On the way up to Wilmette, Brodie, drove. Katina sat in the front passenger seat. They were in a spacious black SUV that reminded Liam of a government vehicle, the kind you always see agents pulling up in and spilling out of with their weapons blazing on television shows.
Eoin sat in the back with Liam and Patrick with Liam in the middle. And Eoin started talking. He told them a story.
There was a time when magic ruled the world, when many of the beings spoken of in fairy tales truly existed and walked upon this very earth, the one we call home now.
The earliest recorded histories of humanity are said to have begun in 3500 B.C.E. For a certain number of us—for ten families, at least, and other lineages around the world, most of them lost—it began some time before that.
Scientists have it wrong in a lot of ways. They say we evolved from apes and a race of Neanderthals, that we split off and became what is known today as Homo Sapien sapiens. Not all of their findings are in dispute, but what we know—what the ten families know as truth—is that we were once slaves to what many think of as gods of a dead religion. They were the Fae. The Morrigan was their queen. Their king was The Dagda. She came to be known as the goddess of fate, and he, the god of life and death. In reality, they were ruthless Fae rulers who demanded respect from all who served them, their fae counterparts and those they deemed worthy of rule.
The Fae are a beautiful people. Physically attractive in every way, and they possess an intelligence that is unparalleled. They also wield forces beyond what simple science can explain. Magic is the best way to describe it.
The Fae are also a savage race, heartless and narcissistic. They were unmatched in this world, an apex race. Anyone associated with them they deemed lesser were subjected to their sadistic whims. Humanity, that from which we come, were the lesser beings. We were once slaves to these Fae people.
For thousands of years, humans were the playthings of the Fae. Many lives were shaped—were misshapen—at their ruthless hands. The Unseelie Court ruled during this dark period in human history, and it is where many of the legends of hell originate. It was a time of hell for humanity, and suffering was merely a way of life.
The Fae were not without their own rules, of course. It was forbidden, for instance, for a Fae to mate with a human slave. But it happened. It happened more than the Fae rulers were willing to admit. The Fae are a people accustomed to getting what they want and taking it whenever the whim struck them. Human slaves were often subjected to assaults, both physical and mental, and that extended just as much to sexual assault too. It wasn’t unheard of that these human slaves—the women, of course, even as men were just as often subjected to these same assaults—would bear the children of these incidents. Usually the children were slaughtered upon birth or the children were removed magically from the wombs of the woman unfortunate enough to become with child at the hands of a Fae master. But, over the course of these thousands of years, many escape with their children and fled the Fae kingdoms.
These refugees of Fae rulership settled to the north. The Fae were known to keep a temperate kingdom that they referred to as Tir na Nog. For all their magic, they were incapable of permanently influencing the weather. Some things were beyond even their reach. They preferred the comfortable, arid regions of what is now known as southern Europe and the Middle East. This is wh
y so many legends of gods and goddesses center upon those regions.
The refugees of the Fae settled in the northern regions. Norway and the British Isles. Over the course of those thousands of years, as more and more slaves of the Fae escaped, many of them bearing the offspring of the Fae themselves, a society rose.
Some of the Fae themselves even left the Fae lands. It’s widely known that there are two courts of the Fae, the Unseelie, who were the sadistic rulers of the south, and the Seelie Court, who, though they were still capable of a barbarism all their own, they were not as terrible as their Unseelie counterparts. Some of these Seelie Fae settled in the northern regions along with those who escaped the reach of the Unseelie Fae. And still more of these Seelie Fae fought a battle within the Fae kingdom, working against the Unseelie King and Queen in power as spies and insurgents. The Seelie Fae wanted power of their own, but they were often put down by the Unseelie leaders and their grip on power in Tir na Nog.
From those northern settlers grew kingdoms. A human kingdom led by ten prominent families, each of them the product of human-Fae bonds. These were a people capable of all the good that humanity had to offer while also finding themselves able to control many of the same forces as the Fae. These ten families formed a capital in the land that is known today as Ireland, and they raised an army. This army was led by one man, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and his solders were known as the Fianna. Of the Fianna, there were nine generals, each taken from members of the ten crossbreed families, each general able to wield magic on a level that many saw as comparable to that of the Fae.
Fionn mac Cumhaill and his nine generals devised a plan to fight the Fae. They wanted to free humanity from Fae rule. And they were aided by a number of Seelie Court Fae who joined with them. They determined through many centuries of study that it could be possible to separate the worlds. A Veil could be erected using magic and kept in place by power injected into stones to act as a battery to keep the Veil in place indefinitely. Nine stones were crafted by the stone masons of the Fianna, creating nine vessels of power. And a tenth was created as a failsafe. Nine stones would keep the Veil constantly in place while the tenth would ensure that the nine stones were suitably powered for, they hoped, eternity.
The Fianna trained intensely for this battle against the Fae. No doubt, it would lead to many casualties, but the cause was more than enough of a reason to continue the fight: That cause being, to free humanity from the barbaric rule of the Fae.
That battle raged for nearly a century. Many were lost on both sides, but the nine generals, led by Fionn mac Cumhaill continued the fight. The Fae blood that mixed with their human side allowed them to live for just as long as some Fae, who were often seen as immortal. Though, as they proved time and again, the Fae could be killed by human hands.
The humans still kept as slaves were encouraged to join the fight too. The shadowy Seelie leadership that worked within Tir na Nog armed and trained these slaves for what would become known as the Final Battle, the fall of Tir na Nog and the erecting of the Veil between the Worlds. We call this battle the Battle of Eridu. Fionn mac Cumhaill led his Fianna on a direct assault of the center of the kingdom, coming face to face with The Morrigun and The Dagda.
And they were victorious.
The Veil was raised, and the Fae were removed from our world. It’s rumored that the Fae king, The Dagda was slain. Fionn mac Cumhaill, according to the legends, ran him through with his sword and worked a ritual to ensure that The Dagda was surely and truly dead. The Morrigun, who many referred to as Morgauna, survived and was exiled, along with her people, and confined to a separate land, ejected from our world. We still refer to their side of the Veil as Tir na Nog, a land that is wholly separate from our own world but that also sits upon the same space as this world. No one has seen Tir na Nog since it fell, and the goal is to ensure that it remains that way.
After Eoin finished his story, Liam found himself staring at the stone he held in his hand. He lifted it up and looked at it in the passing street lamps.
“This stone,” he said, staring at Eoin.
Eoin nodded an affirmation. “That stone is believed to be the very one Fionn mac Cumhaill carried on his person as the battle raged and he held in his hand as the Veil was raised.”
Liam still couldn’t believe it. “You’re saying that I’m holding a stone supposedly created by some magical king long before humans actually started recording history?”
“Something like that,” Eoin said. “Yes.”
“Why does it feel sometimes like the stone is trying to get into my head,” Liam asked.
Patrick turned and stared at Liam after he finished. Liam could only shrug as a response, but the guilt was there. He should have told Patrick everything.
Eoin took in a breath and blew it out. “My guess is that it’s because you’re the last known living member of the Coyle family.”
Liam squint. “You mentioned that before, but what does that mean? Exactly?”
“It means you’re the last person known to have been directly descended from Fionn mac Cumhaill himself.”
Eoin’s statement carried a suitable weight that settled on Liam’s shoulders. If he was hearing Eoin correctly, it meant he was the descendent of a magical king. After everything that happened to him over the course of the past couple of days, this one ranked right up there with difficult things to wrap his brain around.
“The Coyle family,” Eoin continued, “or the tenth family has been a part of our Council for centuries. The Council itself was formed of the nine generals and Fionn mac Cumhaill himself, and it has ruled ever since. The Council works behind the scenes, beneath what the majority of humanity believes is real. We’re capable—” Eoin paused and took a breath— “we were capable of controlling many of the same forces as our ancestors, and it was our duty to ensure the safety of the lockstones, those stones that power the Veil between the worlds.”
Liam was getting it. “The nine stones I saw when I was kidnapped,” he said.
“Precisely,” Eoin said. “It started only a few days ago. Our Moscow chapter house was attacked, and everyone inside it was murdered. Their heads—”
“Were cut off,” Liam said. He knew how this story went.
“Yes. The head is the center of the intellect and that which has the ability to control the power of the Fae blood running through our veins.”
“Our veins?” Liam asked.
“That includes you,” Eoin said.
He was part fantasy creature. One more to chalk up to weird.
Eoin continued: “It’s rumored through legends that, to unlock a lockstone, the blood of the nine generals must be infused into each of the nine stones. Then, the blood of nine must enter into the tenth lockstone along with the blood of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s line. Once that happens, legend suggests the stone would unlock.”
Liam’s brow furrowed. “So, if I’m the last one of this Fionn mac Cumhaill’s blood line, why do I still have my head?”
Eoin opened his mouth to speak, but then he stopped. “Honestly?” he began. “I really don’t know. Everything we’ve ever read in our own legends, our own books passed down through the ages, indicates that when the blood of the tenth is spilled on the final stone, the Veil will open.”
“Maybe they missed that part in the book,” Liam said.
Eoin shook his head. “Hardly. There’s something we’re missing.”
“Well I can tell you one thing I’m glad I’m not missing,” Liam said. He turned to look out the front window at the road they were traveling down. Then he turned back to Eoin. “You said you knew my mother.”
Eoin nodded. “Elena Coyle.”
That name still meant nothing to him, even though he figured it should, especially in light of all he’d learned just tonight. Most of it, he still wasn’t sure he believed. He wasn’t sure if he should believe any of it. Believing this was a pure act of faith, and he didn’t know if he was ready to give that kind of faith to Eoin or anyone just yet.
>
Except Patrick. Patrick had earned at least some of his faith. Not once but twice now Patrick had come back for him.
“I don’t even know my real mother,” Liam said. “Dad never talked about her.” His dad never talked about a lot of things, apparently. If he had, maybe there would’ve been some signs leading up to why he decided to take a gun to his entire family that fateful night in March of 2010. Then he remembered what Eoin said, the thing he hadn’t quite processed yet. “You said Yates was the name of the man I was ‘given’ to. What did you mean by that?”
Eoin took a deep breath. “The last night you were with your mother, she called me. She hadn’t spoken to me or anyone from the Council in almost two years. There was a faction within the ten families that wanted your mother dead, and she was on the run.”
“Who wanted her dead?”
“A group known as the Gaea Initiative. Cyril Holder is their leader, and they were very interested, both in you and in your mother.”
“But you said they wanted her dead.”
“They did, or so the story goes. Others speculated there might be more to it. Some even suggested that your father might be one of the Fae.”
“You said all the Fae were driven from this world.”
“All the Fae in Tir na Nog,” Eoin said. “Some of the Fae who had fled Tir na Nog and settled in with the northern refugees were left behind. Fae are immortal, so presumably they’re still here, though no one can say with certainty that they’ve seen any of them. It was believed that they all were either killed off over the millennia by one another or they simply suffered a bad stroke of fate. Or separating the worlds made it impossible for them to thrive as they once did. At any rate, if they still exist on our side of the Veil, they’ve gone into hiding.”
“So, these Seelie Fae.” Liam stared hard at Eoin. “You’re telling me my father could be Fae.”
“If the rumors are to be believed. Elena never confided in me about the identity of your father. She only said she was taking extreme measures to make sure you were never found by the Gaea Initiative or anyone that would do you harm.” A look of regret passed over Eoin’s face. “I never knew what her plan was until it was too late.”
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 26
