I turned and watched her run, across the yard through the thicket of trees and overgrown thorny bushes, toward the cliff. The same path she took seven years ago.
The night she killed my sister and then threw her tiny body in the ocean.
The very same night that my mother killed herself.
I didn’t see the hawthorn branches until the next morning, arcing across every window and lintel that led to the outside. Tiny drops of blood spattered the woodwork, stained the Irish lace curtains. My grandmother cursed beneath her breath as she made breakfast—a sizzle of bacon, the fragrance of burned toast—the Gaelic words draíochta and mallacht dropping like hot stones. My father sat at the table, his eyes downcast and his face the color of a rainy day. But it wasn’t anger in his heart, not like Gram; no, I could tell that sorrow kept his eyes from meeting mine that morning.
I longed to tell him that I had seen her. She’s alive! I wanted to say, but that just wasn’t true. She was haunting us. She had almost spoken to me last night. Almost broke all the rules of heaven and hell and earth, and if we had talked to each other—
I glanced up at Gram, hoping that she couldn’t read my mind—I wondered about that at times.
If my mother and I had talked to each other, well, then I would be damned to a watery grave too. Just like her.
And so on that morning we all sat in the same heavy silence as the evening before. The only sounds, the bright song of the purple finch in the willow tree and Gram’s Gaelic curses.
One strange thing I will always remember about that day.
None of us took any of those hawthorn branches down. Nor did we wipe away any of the blood.
Every year after that, on Midsummer’s Eve, my father put the hawthorn branches up himself. He draped every window and door with rugged greenery, while Gram watched him with her hands on her hips, grumbling. She’d shake her head and tsk, saying he was going to wreck all the trees in the yard with his terrible pruning. And then, when he’d had enough of her complaining, he’d go off in a sulk and spend the evening at the local tavern.
While he was gone, Gram would get out her Irish whiskey.
She’d start by pouring a draft into her cup of coffee, but soon enough, it would be whiskey in her cup and she’d be adding a drop or two of coffee for flavor.
Songs would ring throughout the house, from floor to rafter. And then the stories would come. That was when I would slip out of my room, when the yard was full of green trees and dusky sky and the fairy light of a full moon. I would curl on the sofa with our cat and a book on my lap, pretending to read, but really I was just waiting for the stories to begin.
When my grandmother’s voice rose and fell, her tongue thick from liquor, I imagined that I saw my sister and my mother standing just outside the circle of light cast by our windows onto the lawn. They couldn’t come too close, I knew, not when the hawthorn boughs protected us. I imagined that they danced to Gram’s songs and that they wept at her stories.
Unfortunately, all the Irish legends end poorly. Someone falls in love with a vampiric Leanan Sidhe, or a banshee comes singing tales of woe, or a fairy steals your child, leaving a changeling in its place. Whichever way you looked at it, a human could never win the battle against the legendary creatures from my homeland.
Sometimes, when I curled beneath a blanket and stared out at a star-drenched sky, I wondered if that was why my ancestors left Ireland and came here, this small town on the California coast.
Maybe they all wanted to escape the danger. But it didn’t matter. Because, in the end, dark magic and twisted fate can catch up with you, no matter how far you move away.
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About the Author
Merrie Destefano left a 9-to-5 desk job as a magazine editor to become a full-time novelist and freelance editor. With twenty years' experience in publishing, her background includes editor of Victorian Homes magazine, Zombies magazine, and Haunted: Mysteries and Legends magazine. Her books, novellas, and anthologies include Afterlife, Feast, Fathom, Lost Girls, The Plague Carrier, Waiting for Midnight, A Dark And Twisted Heart, A Long And Wild Hunt, Fairytale Christmas, and Cursed. She lives in Southern California with her husband, their two German shepherds, a Siamese cat, and the occasional wandering possum.
For more information:
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Also by Merrie Destefano
Fathom
Turning 16 should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. That was when Kira Callahan found out all her family secrets—and one of those secrets had already killed two people in her family. Now she’s next on the list. And everything seems to hinge on the ancient Celtic legends her mother used to tell Kira as a child.
Read more!
COMING SOON: Fury
This sequel to Fathom tells how Riley ran away to the Shiant Islands when she was fifteen years old. There she meets the legendary Na Fir Ghorm, blue-skinned mermen, who offer to help her—for a price.
Get release dates for this by visiting Merrie’s website.
COMING SOON: Outrun the Devil
A deadly virus has killed half the people in L.A., and the other half are now cannibals, drug dealers, human traffickers or worse. In the midst of all this, 17-year-old Morgan Murphy's parents have gone missing. She’s the only one left to protect her little brother and her half-crazed cousin.
Then she stumbles on evidence that her mom might still be alive. To save her mother, Morgan will have to partner with someone who truly terrifies her—but not because of the bad things he’s done. She’s afraid because she’s done things just as bad. And she’s willing to do even more. Can she save her mom before it's too late—before Morgan herself becomes unredeemable?
Welcome to the Outrunner Series...where no one survives unscathed.
Get release updates by visiting Merrie’s website
A Dark And Twisted Heart
Book 1: Dark Heart Chronicles
Katrina only has two flaws. She’s possessive. And she’s dead. William would much rather have a live girlfriend, than a dead one. But Katrina has other plans.
Read more!
A Long And Wild Hunt
Book 2: Dark Heart Chronicles
Trapped in a cursed forest with the boyfriend who murdered her wasn’t how Katrina planned to spend the Afterlife. She might be a ghoul and hell-bent on revenge, but that doesn’t mean she has to be miserable. Or does it?
Read more!
Lost Girls
Yesterday, Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised, and missing a year of her life.
She’s not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls.
But the more she remembers, the more she realizes—there’s something out there that still might get her killed…
Read more!
The Plague Carrier
Condemned as a runaway, fifteen-year-old Anna now spends her days searching for valuables in a field of dead warriors. Things go from bad to worse, however, when she stumbles on a plague carrier—a boy her age who could kill her entire camp with a single drop from the flask he carries around his neck.
Read more!
Afterlife: The Resurrection Chronicles:
Bladerunner meets Jim Butcher in Afterlife, a thrilling urban fantasy set in a near-future New Orleans. Chaz Domingue is a professional Babysitter who guides the recently deceased into their new and improved lives. Nine lives are all a person can get—still a powerful group of desperate, high-level Nine-Timers will stop at nothing to possess the keys to
true immortality...
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Waiting for Midnight
Written to keep you reading all night long, this combination of short stories and flash fiction contains a ghost story, a werewolf story, and a science fiction story, as well as two stories that feature characters from her novels, AFTERLIFE and FEAST.
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Feast: Harvest of Dreams:
Madeline MacFadden has no recollection of Ash, the strange and magnificent creature who once saved her life as a child, even though it’s the destiny of his kind to prey upon humanity. And soon it will be the Harvest—the time to feast again…
Read more!
Cursed:
In a desperate quest for survival, Ash and Lily—a husband and wife team of shape-shifting Darklings—break the rules and hunt in an uncharted, backwoods, mountain community. This novella is a prequel to Feast and is only available only as a FREE gift to Merrie’s newsletter subscribers. Subscribe here.
Read more!
Fairytale Christmas Page 7
